This is one of those episodes where I keep wanting to jump into the conversation! So even though I'm not totally done listening, I just want to offer my $0.02 on what I've heard so far.
I totally get where Chad is coming from, because I had a similar experience in terms of going from fudging my rolls a lot in service of furthering a perceived narrative to never fudging at all, at least when it comes to games like
Call of Cthulhu or
Pendragon. This happened back when I was running a
Pendragon campaign in 2006 via OpenRPG, which was a chat-based virtual tabletop. It had a dice-rolling client that forced me to make all my rolls in the open, and I found that that did two things:
1) It made the players' triumphs that much sweeter. Everyone knew exactly what the dice rolls were (including target numbers, which were displayed with the macro output), so they knew that if, say, they came out of a combat with 1 hit point to their name, it wasn't because I knocked a couple points of damage off in order to make for a better story.
2) It taught me to appreciate the oracular power of the dice in terms of helping to guide the story, and this made running games more fun for
me as the GM--I've found that I love being surprised by unexpected twists that come out of dice rolls, twists that many times wouldn't have occurred had I fudged a roll instead of letting it stand.
In short, I've found the enjoyment levels for myself as well as my players have increased quite a bit since I started letting the dice fall where they may. Has it resulted in some frustration from TPKs or scenarios grinding to a halt from lack of clues? Sure. But that in itself is a story, every bit as much as going from point A to point Z and fighting the big bad at the end, and I've found players reminisce about their cock-ups as much as they do their triumphs.
Having said that, I do understand the occasional situational need to fudge rolls, either because of the gaming environment or the rules you're using. Jon's point about using fudging to help pace a convention game made total sense to me, for example. And right now one of the two games I'm running is 2nd edition AD&D, but with only got two PCs in the group. It's old-school D&D, and so the mechanics can be pretty deadly, and often arbitrarily so (even when you've got a "balanced" group of 4-6 players) so with two PCs I've found I've had to do some slight fudging (along the lines of what Murph does) just to keep things going and not have a TPK every session, particularly at the lower levels. Now that the PCs are approaching that mid-level sweet spot, I've hardly had to do any at all. (They haven't encountered any save-or-die or level-draining attacks, but when/if they do, I most definitely will
not fudge those rolls, because they're
supposed to put the fear of god into the players. But I digress.) But with pretty much every other game I run, I obey the dice as much as the players.
A quick anecdote: I use a screen to hide my notes, but I don't go out of my way to hide my dice rolls. I ran a Deadlands campaign last year, and at one point one of my players said something along the lines of, "What's really cool is that I can see when you roll the dice, you stick with what you roll." At the time, I had no idea she'd been sitting at a spot where she could see my rolls. If I'd been fudging, she would've seen it, and that would have really taken away from her overall fun. Point is, you might think you're in a position that your players won't be able to tell you're fudging, but you never really know.
At any rate,
I do a podcast with a buddy of mine, and for our latest episode we discussed
Trail of Cthulhu and its narrative-driven mechanics. ToC is quite up-front about endorsing shifting target numbers based on how important it is for PCs to get past a particular obstacle, as well as, of course, giving PCs clues automatically. Actually, if you all have enough experience with it to be able to talk about it, I'd love to hear an episode devoted to ToC in general, just to hear your collective thoughts on the system and how it compares to CoC.
Thanks for another great episode!
#teamchad
Don't know if they have it in the latest re-release, but the smaller pieces and petri dishes for the components in On The Brink just rocks in general - great stuff. 
