So what is cheating in your game? Is there cheating in your game? How do you and your players deal with it? How does your DM or GM deal with cheating? Have any funny cheating stories to relate? Any good advice?

Just curious.

Too late, Paul my boy. I just shot my wad in the other thread.

I've only had one player in my 20 plus years of gaming blatantly cheat, by which I mean out and out break the character creation rules, and system rules to make his character "better than the others." His goal was to be "better" at combat than all the others. ironically this pushed the rest of us to band together and completely kill his character. He ended up quitting, and we're a lot better for it.

Now a days the possibility of a player cheating isn't even something I consider. My players just don't do it. I wouldn't even suspect them of anything like it.

Now that said we've always, not because of any official rule or decree, rolled our dice in the open. Even I do as the GM-we've just never seen a reason to hide die rolls, not that we'd blink if someone did, or wanted to.

As a DM: I roll in the open too- except on stuff like passive checks, where no one knows what I'm rolling for anyway. And I stick by my results. Full disclosure: I prefer games with conviction points/ bennies whatever, so the player can have a mulligan now and again and still be following the rules.

What's cheating to me? I dunno, I don't think so much about this kind of thing. Maybe I'm getting taken for a ride, but I don't really care that much.

Quote from: Spike;240317Meanwhile, when I GM, I get cheaters out the wazoo.  And you know what I learned from having cheaters out the wazoo?

To take my cues from the table.  I sat in a game where a guy rolled out of sight, always managed to crit, roll maximum damage, yadda yadda.  The rest of the table totally hated that guy and eventually the GM began to find excuses to fuck his character over, make him take ridiculous numbers of insanely hard rolls, just to make it painfully obvious how bad this guy was cheating.   Off he went to the 'non-player' pile.

Meanwhile: I had a couple of players who rolled crits with disturbing frequency, got far above average stats on their characters and so on.  I still play with one. Because no one cares. We are all, within reasons, ubertwinky munchkins. The GM actually told me he LIKED me at the table because my mastery of character creation/optimization (really, I just like specialists...swear, my had to Dog) made him bring his A-game, despite having a chronic cheater at the table. My perfectly fair, though heavily optimized, characters actually were more challenging to deal with.

The way I start to see it is this: Any given challenge... say spotting an ambush, is going to have half a dozen chances to spot it. No matter how bad the odds of making it on a single roll are, there are still six or so chances to make it. Thus, the odds are generally stacked against the GM in challenges. Ditto with attacks and so on.  So what if certain characters regularly beat the odds? The odds were on their side anyway, if less specifically.  

Of course, as a GM I could be accused of being sentimental. I am sort of rooting for the PC's most of the time. I mean, if I killed them all in the antechamber to the temple of deadly death, who would face off the immortal lich-dragon-god I whipped up for the climax? I COULD kill them all in the antechamber, an endless mob of thousands upon thousands of Goblins can bring down anyone, you know. And I've got lots and lots of goblins.

You know what? I've figured out how to turn hours of adventure prep into minutes!!! I only need to PRETEND to design an adventure or dungeon. Really, I only need ONE encounter. Since no one will ever survive it (garaunteed!) they'll never learn that after that was nothing at all....

.... ITS GENIUS!

Ha! I do think you have a serious point wrapped up in all that funny though-taking cues from the table, and the players sitting at it is an important skill to learn. Whether you'll be playing with them for one game, or twenty years.

I've never understoon groups that allowed secret rolls for the players. /shrug

Over the past 5 years I can honestly say I've never had to deal with this. It naver came up . My usual players aren't the type to think of "cheating'.

There is/was a level of trust between GM and players in our group where nobody thought that way.


 Now, however that recent Fantasy thing I ran at the store - TWO of those guys might think that way ...but they didn't try it during our sessions as far as I could tell.

- Ed C.

I should mention a few things, since I asked about it:

Cheating: I'm pretty loose on the rules in my games, I don't mind if a player absolutely disregards certain rules to make a character more complete, or to better serve the story they're (The Players) are trying to tell. I'm not giving away the baby with the bath water here, but if your character is based around  a cool concept, why should the rules hinder that? Instead we make the rules serve us.

If die rolling were an issue, or maybe if someone were new to the group, I am pretty stringent in accepting the dice as they fall. If that means a critical every other roll, so be it. If, and this happens pretty often, it means catastrophic failure so be it. Now that said I prefer to torture, maim, rob, or whatever to killing in most cases. (In some cases there is just no plot device that can work, so vio condios pardenr.)

Quote from: CavScout;240326I've never understoon groups that allowed secret rolls for the players. /shrug

Does this really happen?

I had one player who always had a tendency to roll incredibly high (or low, depending on what he was needing) rolls, if I was seated while we played.

As soon as I started walking around, he wound up with shockingly middling rolls.

His amazing luck didn't translate when we played card-based systems like Marvel SAGA...=P

Quote from: Aos;240351Does this really happen?

If it doesn't, there really can't be much cheating going on.

WAIT - one time someone tried to cheat in an RPG session I was running.
She was my girlfriend at the time, tried whispering my ear ...to influence things to work out better for her character.
 I whispered back for her to cool it and that she'd better behave.
 Game went much better after that. She and the other players had a really good time.  Pretty sure it was a game session of GURPS:AUTODUEL in '88 or '89.

*CENSORED* (So that David feels better)

- Ed C.

:combust:

While David spontaneously combusts from Koltar's rather unnecessary and unasked-for tales of not being a virgin, I'll just say that I've seen a lot of cheating in my time, and never really cared. In the end, it all comes down to GM whim, we only let players roll dice as part of their illusion of free will and control over their own destiny.

I just take whatever they said their dice roll was and run with it. If they cheated, fine - so I cheat too, and things go really over the top, they get the twelfth critical hit in a row, so does the villain, they go down together in a storm of fire and glory.

I have not seen cheating in a home game since high school.   It was considered pretty horrendous back then.   For some people, it was a nasty breech of trust.   It was not dice rolls.   It was point-builds in Champions when someone would fudge the math to snag an extra 10-20 points or point builds in Car Wars where somebody "accidently" overspent.

I run a lot of convention games so I see cheating once every few years with teenagers.  Usually its something like Warhammer or CoC with percentile dice that they always read to their favor.   I am not there to be Table Mommy so my solution is to throw a few extra monsters into the works and have them chew on their characters.

On the whole, I find cheating extremely rare.