Player fudging in RPG's.

[Rashak Mani]

Once you start cheating you cant stop too... DMs tend to naturally adjust game difficulty to how well PCs do against their monsters.

As a DM I have seen groups perform better than expected for non cheating reasons. The next adventure will be tougher for sure. When you cheat more than only occasionaly you are upping the stakes and thefore make it tougher for all involved... cheaters or not.

A fudge here or there is expected... sometimes by mistake and not malice... but I get tired of seeing people who did it too often.

 

[ladyofdragons]

there's one person in our group who used to cheat constantly. i found it incredibly frustrating, especially when i was DMing. years later, i've given up looking over her shoulder. ironically, she's the person in the group who seems to enjoy the games the least.

We have the exact same problem in our group, one player who constantly cheats, but seems to enjoy the game less than anyone else. He uses dice with faded numbers and snatches them back off the table before he could possibly read them, or rolled his dice where you couldn't see them. He constantly crits, moreso than is possible. We finally got together everyone and decided to make a house rule among all the GMs that rolling had to be done in public, so the results could be verified by the person next to you, especially when the result was a crit. Since then we haven't really had problems.

 

[Zappo]

Hmm... I don't really have a problem withd dice cheating. Any roll must be made while I'm looking, or it is invalidated (well, in theory; in practice I only look about half the times. The players won't take the chance).

I occasionally have a problem with more subtle cheating. "No, I really prepared [insert any spell that is completely useless save for the situation at hand, and that noone would prepare]!", or extra gold coins/arrows/torches/ropes/potions appearing from nowhere, or "miscalculating" HPs. I usually just shrug and give my monster a couple extra HD (or barbarian levels and an already-drunk potion of Haste if I'm really pissed off). No way for me to prove that he really had only one torch unless I keep track of every spell and item of every PC, and it's too much trouble for so little benefit.

 

[Celebrim]

Piratecat: You're right of course. It's my first poll. I didn't realize multiple answers was an option.

As far as the multiple answers go, I think it is a pretty rare player who hasn't fudged a dice at one time especially when he was young and rolling up stats or making saving throws with a beloved character.

I don't suppose that I'm being very subtle. I wanted to prove that players cheat, ask whether it harms the game, and discuss what a DM can do about it if it does. Alot of my point here is that while I've often been very close friends with my players, I've seen groups that have been gaming together for years where one or more individuals cheat as a matter of course. Most of the time it drives the DM to abstraction, and most of the time the player that is cheating is the sort of player that always feels he has to be the center of attention, always has to be the best at everything, and always wants to argue with the DM about rules issues. I frankly don't know where some DM's get the patience for that. I can't put up with it for long. My first responce is to take him aside privately and say something to the effect of, 'Look, I've been keeping track of your initiative and you haven't rolled less than a 15 in the past 20 rolls. The odds of that are somewhat less than the odds of winning the state lottery, so I don't want to hear about it. Either find a fair dice, start reporting what you actually roll, or find somewhere else to game because if this keeps up either I'm going to start cheating on my dice until you get the hint or I'm going stop inviting you over period.' My second responce is to publicly call him out. My third responce is ... well... I've never had to go so far.

I don't think it is possible for an impartial DM to trust all players implicitly, whether you have played with them for a long time or not. And I think it is rather foolish to not be on gaurd against cheating before a new player has proven himself. Everyonce in a while it is worth it to let a player cheat rather than kill a character due to bad luck (though better still to avoid arbitrary 'save or die' effects), but if the cheating is consistant it usually will wreck a game. DM is simply an alternate title for referee and one of the things you have to insure is that there is an environment of fair play and no favoritism. If you are overlooking the cheating on player is doing, then you are in essence playing favorites with the cheater to the detriment of everyone in the party who is not cheating.

As a player as well as a DM, I have to say that it doesn't feel too good to have your player always struggling where as other characters glide right through everything because their player is essentially 'taking 20' every time he needs it. And it doesn't help if the DM scales up the challenge to compensate, because that just leaves your character more irrelevant during play.

A good DM, IMO, watches as many dice rolls as he can and otherwise removes as many temptations and oppurtunities to cheat from his players as is possible. I don't think that it is a coincidence that so many people are pointing out that people who cheat usually don't enjoy the game. I think that most people would cheat would enjoy the game better if they weren't cheating. Afterall, it seems to me that those that cheat consitantly, are usually trying to prove how capable you are through the success of your character, but how can you be satisfied with your success if you know it wasn't founded on your skill?

And I should in all fairness say that alot of groups that cheat consitantly do so because a former DM burned them in some way, and cheating was the only way to stay alive in his usually rather arbritary DM-centric games. Once they realize you are going to be fair and impartial and let them contribute to the game, alot of players will stop cheating on their own.

So, in closing, I think if a DM trusts players too much, the result can be a game that develops some serious problems in a hurry. If the only purpose of the game is to get together and talk it probably means nothing and stopping the cheating would probably be more trouble than it is worth. But, much as I enjoy hanging out with my friends doing any varaity of things, when I get together to game I expect there to be a certain emphasis on playing the game (which isn't to say that an occasional OOC joke isn't appreciated).

 

[JeffK1966]

We don't have a problem with cheating in our group. We make all of our rolls on the table in front of everybody else. The DM makes some rolls in secret, but all combat rolls & saves from him are done in full view of others, too. We have a pretty organized system for our group of 6 or 7 players and theDM, and the DM starts combat/initiative/etc by going quickly around the table, one by one. So, it's not like we're wasting time when we're in combat.

And, we even do this process during character generation. It makes that process go slower, of course, as we get through one PC at a time. But, it does give each person a chance to think about what type of PC you want to be - unless you go first.

 

[Darkness]

"If one person breaks the rules, he's cheating; if the entire group breaks the rules, it's a house rule."

Most of the time, I dislike players cheating; it tends to reduce the tension for the player in question, which I work hard to build up.

I have no moral (or is it ethical?) qualms about players cheating, though, and even go so far as to insist on it on a very few circumstances - after all, the "game" part isn't the most important thing about a "role-playing game."
Having fun is paramount; "rules" aren't. "Rules" are just guidelines that provide a mechanical frame for the story. And it's the DM's job to interprete in which situation a certain rule applies - or not.

Anyway, a player who cheated often despite me telling them to stop would have to leave my group; I must be able to depend on my players - and if they constantly do things without even asking me, I can't depend on them.

[random, untested idea]
Of course, if I find out that somebody has decided to... ahem... "treat the rules that I actually use as loose guidelines without even asking me," I'll happily oblige and start doing so, too, as far as the character in question is concerned.

And I think that there are few people who will persist in deciding dice results (rather than using the numbers that the dice come up with) after the premature deaths of a few of their characters due to a series of critical maximum-damage hits by orcs Power Attacking with greataxes.

(45 damage/hit for even an average orc War1, BTW. No Power Attack for these types, though...)
[/random, untested idea]