Cheating and D&D

OK,
A while ago I played two games at a Con where two different players were clearly cheating.

In one, the character never bothered to memorize spells, he simply cast spells from his spell list until he ran out (so he cast like a sorc. when he wasn't one and had the class spell list to choose from).

In another, the game was going _really_ long (and slow) and one player called a number of die rolls differently than he actually rolled them. I didn't mind as it *was* running long and slow, but.....

What do people do in situations like this?

It used to bother me - a lot.

I'm not talking from a convention point of view here - just that of my home game. Over the years, my feelings towards it have changed drastically. Now it doesn't bother me at all.

Luckily, D&D isn't a competitive game. One person cheating doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment of anyone else. And if the DM has figured out that somebody in the group tends to like to play fast and loose with the rules, I figure - why not just let 'em? Compensate for it occasionally if you need to, but if everybody is having fun, then it doesn't matter to me.

Perhaps the cheating person would have more fun if he/she didn't cheat; or perhaps not. But that's that person's choice to make. If he gets more out of the game by doing that, then he may as well go for it. I'm not going to be able to stop him, and doing so doesn't necessarily benefit me anyway.

So, now it doesn't bother me at all. I find it mildy amusing, in fact. When it comes down to it, the rules are just a tool to facilitate the enjoyment of everyone there. They're a means, not an end. As long as the end is being met, it doesn't worry me in the slightest.

I'll be frank. I've done it before myself.

I've been known to fudge a roll or two from time to time. It doesn't bother me because I'm usually on the GM side of the screen and I know that 90% of the time I want to hide my GM-made rolls from the players so that I can "cheat" if things are just going unappropriately horrible for the players.

Our current GM put the party up against a group of 5 GHASTS at the end of a long day when all the casters were almost entirely out of spells (I.E. down to 1 low-level spell apiece) and the fighters were at 25% hp. TPK. For a "random encounter". The table said ghouls, he pulled ghasts by mistake. An EL7 encounter against 5 tapped-out 4th level PCs. Brilliant planning, good teamwork, and alot of fighting defensively just didn't help the string of 4s and 5s we were getting and 15s and 16s they were getting. It was going to be close, but it was down to the wire and the last PC standing (I.E. not paralyzed AND in negative hp) was my 14hp wizard and his Wand of Disrupt Undead. The last undead standing had 5hp. I had a shot, rolled a 2, nobody saw the roll, so I nudged it over. Hit the ghast, rolled 6 damage, took it out, we all cheered, the GM checked his notes and appologized for the out-of-scale encounter.

I didn't lose any sweat about it. It wasn't going to be fun for everybody to make up new characters, totally halt the game less than an hour in (we were picking up where we left off), etc. The GM had worked pretty hard on the storyline, etc, and it would have been unfortunate to bugger it all on a random encounter. He made a string of mistakes, we made a string of poor rolls, when it came down to the clutch I just helped the situation out so we could keep playing.

--fje

Morrus is more forgiving than I am.

I'm not interested in playing with cheaters at all.

I've got a group of old-schooler types that generally stay out of trouble, but there is the uber-powergamer that can't seem to be tamed. I look on his builds, no matter how ingeniously justified, as broken to the core. And they are. Within the context of our game I consider this cheating, and have had to make changes in the house-rules that would ban such over the top behavior.

There is not cheating at a table I DM.

I've all but gone postal on a player when I found out he had taken a peek at the map.

When I play I don't cheat, nor do use any out-of-game information.

I play D&D for the challenges put before me. Cheating takes away that challenge.

If I'm a player, I won't directly rat a player out if I notice him cheating. But I will make a few jokes to embarass that player in front of everyone, and then hope something funnier ensues.

In general, I don't like the idea of players cheating. I would not have a huge problem if what Heap describes happened once in a great while, especially if the DM goofed in the first place.

But I have to admit that a player that cheated all the time irritates me. Especially at a game convention. I play Living Greyhawk about once a month, and I have not seen obvious or gross cheating, with one exception. But I have noticed at smaller conventions I have attended that the dice vendors seem to always sell out of those novel "cheater" dice. I asked one last year why he sold those dice at game conventions and he told me that what people do with them after the sale is none of his business, that they were novelty items not meant for use in the games. So I asked him how well these novelties sold. He admitted he usually sold out of these dice at conventions. Novelties my @#$.

The occasional minor cheat, such as the one HeapThaumaturgist describes doesn't bother me in the slightest. Been there, done it myself. I figure that we all forget bonuses we have on occasion, add things incorrectly, make minor errors here and there, so the occasional blatant 'fix', especially when a TPK is on the line, just serve to make up for it.

But cheating on a rampant and constant scale is intolerable.

Four years ago I kicked an "old friend" out of my game for it, after a long stream of cheating that moved from occasionally fudging die rolls, to always fudging die rolls (ok, let's be real. You think I don't notice when you ALWAYS hit?), to not even bothering to roll, but claiming to hit. In another game, a player rolled a d6 and a d10 for his d20 rolls, even though he clearly owned a d20, because he "prefered" it. Well, he prefered being able to call it an 11-20 when he rolled a 3 on the d6 is more like it. And people in that game just put up with it!

At that level, it comes down to an integrity issue, and I don't want to game with those types.

I have one player who goes through phases of cheating on die rolls. He is good and I have never caught him at it. He is a nice guy and has been gaming with me since 2001, but I know he is cheating, though he plays it off very innocently. He is not a power gamer and is a friend of mine. He just goes through phases of rolling 17-20 on every roll for a few weeks on end, then stops. He lifts the die quickly to read the number closely and doesn't complain when I ask him to reroll or leave the die down. I just wish he didn't feel compelled to do it.

DM

brehobit said:

OK,


In one, the character never bothered to memorize spells, he simply cast spells from his spell list until he ran out (so he cast like a sorc. when he wasn't one and had the class spell list to choose from).

What do people do in situations like this?

Click to expand...

just to snip to the relavent point on this one: we have a player in my regular group (in which i am also a player) who just doesn't understand the idea of memorizing spells on her druid - so she doesn't prepare them, just casts off the top of her head. now, she is relativly new to D&D, and really busy with a lot of other things - so the rest of us cut her a whole bunch of slack on this one peice - simply because i think we'd all rather game and have fun than spend a while arguing about it. though sometimes arguments do pop up, we still all have fun, and that's the main point of the game.

the example used earlier HT is also a place where i, as both player and occasional DM, don't mind seeing cheating. hell, if i'd been the dm in that situation, i'd probably have fudged the ghatst's hit points so that last ray took it down, period!

on the other hand, if i ran across someone malevolently or consistantly cheating with their dice rolls, i'd have a serious issue. and i mean consistantly as in multiple sessions.