Some seem to take to in-game "punishment" for the cheaters and though I suppose that can be fun for a little while, doesn't it turn the game into one of those to-be-avoided player-vs-GM contests?

I guess I'd personally rather address the problem OOG, though Blackhand's OOG warning apparently didn't suffice, forcing him to bring out the scorpions IG.

I don't really care about it. Once, I saw someone fudging their rolls so I just made fun of them. Everyone else laughed and the player got embarrassed. No big deal.

You did indeed place this in the right forum, btw.

RPGPundit

You want funny?   My cheaters, for whatever reason, die like flies.   And not by me nuking them.
I am at the point of theorizing that the mentality of cheaters isntoxic in my system...because the odds are getting funny...

Quote from: LordVreeg;481396You want funny?   My cheaters, for whatever reason, die like flies.   And not by me nuking them.
I am at the point of theorizing that the mentality of cheaters isntoxic in my system...because the odds are getting funny...

That is funny. In what way do they cheat exactly? And why does this cause them to die like flies in your system?

I've only encountered it once in my whole time of playing RPGs, which approximates 2 decades.

It was amazing. I had this very, very experienced D&D 3.5 player join our ongoing campaign which was up to then composed of inexperienced to moderately experienced 3.5 players. All I asked was for an advance copy of the char sheet. It took ages and ages until I got it, and until then that player and I had often discussions about individual items - e.g. he wanted a worg for his mount, which I actually did grant, because I repeatedly was told that this is for a meek goblin caster who's the underdog anyway.

But boy when the character sheet came in, the whole shtick collapsed. I went with a red pen over the char sheet, and there was hardly a number on it which was right - even the barding on the worg had the wrong number, it was hilarious.

We start out with a char who'd effectively chosen point buy 48. Yes, 48. Now I allowed players to roll up chars stats, always have, always will, and in this case made a big mistake in allowing the player to roll it 'in my absence'. (Yes, I'm that trusting naive kind of DM, as I mostly play with people I know previously - also here.) You'd think the guy would come up with die rolls which are slightly above the norm... not a whopping 48, which is ridiculous beyond belief. Also, by that time I'd seen two versions of his character, and they were not identical stats either. But both were miraculously rolled up to point buy 48... what a coincidence!

Next, the player was a level 5 caster who'd made his buff spells permanent - i.e. instead of having +6 to AC for 30 minutes a day, the player ran the characters with the +6 on for the whole adventuring day.

Next, he'd changed the spell allocation, granting himself way more daily spells than was his RAW allotment.

He'd given his character heavy armor, without ever telling me, and never answered truthfully when spell failure checks came up.

He'd chosen a worg for his familiar (which he could ride), took stats for the animal that weren't in the MM, made up stronger defense and attack values for the beast, increased speed, and applied his PC's defense buffs to the familiar (which is against the rules).

I'm looking at the PDF with my red marks now. It's 60% red. All these were numerical 'mistakes' going to the extreme advantage of the character. All of them came from someone who knew the system much, much better than me. But he wasn't fine with simply exploiting the rules - he went round them, hoping I wouldn't ever go through the all the things myself (e.g. how to calculate animal stats when these are familiars - there are special rules which require you to carefully interlace subsystems in the MM and the PHB).

I had two options forward. First, I'd simply re-roll the character into legit, and whenever the player rolled a die, I'd compare the result to the version of his character I had behind the screen. In short, I was tempted to go Dave Arneson on him ... and boy does this case teach us the merits of that philosophy - "Players are bastards who are not to be trusted" (c) Erik Mona.

Second - and this is the option I went for the moment I heard that the player in question was a repeat offender in this regard - I sent him the comments on his character by email and kicked him out immediately. I never saw him again, though I was on the phone with him a year later. He never admitted anything, and as far as I know is looking for new groups.

This was a one off in my own experience, and I'm grateful for that. It came from a high caliber Magic:tG tournament player, and it showed me the very worst that an intricate rules system like 3.5 can bring out in competitive players. It taught me something about D&D 3.5 and the surrounding player base that I would otherwise have never discovered.

I don't get it, there is no winning in D&D, and if anything, his character dwarfed the others in his party... what's the point?

The one thing I learned is that with experienced players I will absolutely insist to get their characters up front. On the downside, it takes me 2 hours or so to go through a character with a fine comb. For all the many failings of 4th edition, they got rid of that - just ask for the Character Builder file and check if it is "RPGA legit". That's a time saver, a god send, but it's obviously only the lesser of two evils. The right thing is to not play with people who merit this amount of distrust in the first place.

I don't think I've ever seen cheating in my time as a gamer.  I may be dense, though.  

My group tends to enjoy failing, it allows them to make up some crazy shit that generally makes the story better.  We tend to be more about consequences than victory as a group...so I don't see it in my group...although whoever is GMing will fudge a player's roll if it comes after a really cool description.

I knew one guy who cheated at RPGs regularly and got defensive when called on it.  He had a lot of personal problems.

I succumbed to temptation once in when I was in high school.  It was AD&D and I hadn't hit anything all night and felt frustrated and bored.  Next time the DM asked me what I rolled, I said it was much higher than the 7 that had come up. Got to roll a d8 for damage once the entire evening. Woo hoo.

These days, I just trust my players implicitly.  I don't go out of my way to scrutinize their rolls at tabletop, I don't check dice logs on Play By Posts, or even require them to use a computer dice program that logs results.  Cheating at RPGs is too megalame to even care about.

I only once, ever, lied about what came up on the dice.
Every group I've been in rolls in the open but most of the time no one pays much attention... 'who would cheat at an RPG?'
But this one time I did because one of the other players, a pedantic number crunching/meta-gaming bastard, had set off my competitive dark-side and the roll in question would have had me going unconscious unless I fibbed... so I did... so I could stay in the fight and keep my end up, not let him have all the glory.
I'm not proud of it... but we all have our moments of weakness.
(I also suspect the other fellow was touching up his rolls... but that's no excuse).

This is how I handle it:

1. Let them do it once in a while - it makes them happy and nobody gets hurt
2. If they do it too often, say something like "Are you sure that roll is right? Don't you need a so-and-so?", make it seem as though they have made a genuine mistake.
3. If they carry on doing it, compare them to another player who is well-known for cheating, but do it in a light-hearted way.
4. If they still persist, ask them to stop

I have never needed to go past 3, myself.

I remember doing a WFRP event at a convention years ago and one of the old guys lost it over two teens "cheating" because they were rolling 2D10 and reading the numbers as lowest = 10s and highest = 1s so they were doing great in a game where rolling low is king.

When the geezer lost it, the kids were perplexed.  They had no idea they were "cheating" because that's how their GM had explained the WFRP rules in their home game.

I do think its megalame.  I don't understand what makes up a person's psyche that they feel that cheating somehow adds to their gaming experience, rather than wrecking it.  Generally, though, I think they're doing more damage to themselves than to anyone else; certain player vs. player scenarios excluded.

RPGpundit

If its blatant I'll call the player out on it but has rarely happened in my experience.  A small fudge here and there I can live with. As others have said, its more the player hurting their experience than anything else.   We tend to roll openly in my games, however, so opportunities to cheat are somewhat limited in any case.

At the end of they day I like to treat my players as adults and hence I don't scrutinize them too closely.

Quote from: HombreLoboDomesticado;481477That is funny. In what way do they cheat exactly? And why does this cause them to die like flies in your system?

I think it is because my cheaters are too 'dice centric', and not enough RP centric.
The system is a low HP, high-damage, skill-based game.  So there is already a prety high casualty rate.

Most of the players do a good job of placing themselves 'in the gam', and use a lot of roleplay to gain advantages in their rolls and try not to place themsleves in a position where a die roll has not been severely modified or in a position I don't even call for a roll.

The two players I have had that cheat in the past few decades were both min-maxers, had the best characters, advanced the fastest, etc...but they blew through characters at three times the rate of the other players.  I think it was becasue they were so dependent on their character sheets and not their characters.

I've decided that if I ever catch someone fudging a die roll I will not let them roll anymore during the rest of the game but just state "you succeed (and do average damage)" before he can pick up his dice. That way it'll probably get boring for him pretty fast.