ability roll cheating

[Nomad4life]

1. Kill this character -Just announce he’s had a major heart attack from all the performance enhancing herbs he’s obviously been using.

2. Use point-buy from now on.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

Something to bear in mind with any rolling subsystem is that uber results are an actual possibility, no where near as common as they seem to turn up but that is a separate but related issue.

You've spelled out a rolling method & then seemingly contradicted it by saying that "unreasonable stats" will be disallowed... If you are going to wield some arbitrary veto on legitimate stats then why are you using that method?

Imagine the munchkin with a history that has decided that for this special campaign s/he is going to get serious by losing the bad habits & accept the rolls. S/he then proceeds to roll up an uber character & is faced with a dilemma; keep the results no matter what as was agreed or adjust them to some arbitrary "reasonable" level?

Or then again the player before rolling says stuff this, I'm just going to make the most uber character possible & I'll haggle with the dm to find out what is the upper limit s/he considers "reasonable."

****

Bluntly, I recommend coming up with a subsystem that will produce acceptable character scores for both dm & player(s), with whatever randomness or minimum power incorporated; and then get everyone to generate a fresh set of scores for their existing characters, validated by the dm's own eyes. The campaign has just begun so the fuss will be minimal especially once you make it clear that the campaign will degenerate into oblivion as you lose interest in the unacceptable status quo.

 

[Catavarie]

Well as a DM I personally don't care if my group roles infront of me...and I don't use Point buy because I want my heroes to have type stats. I use 4d6 reroll all 1s and drop lowest. Of course I can trust my players to honest as we've been gaming together for over 10 years. And they know if I think their character is overpowered I'll take care of it "in game" in one 2E game I had a Dwarf warrior with a Strength of 18(99). Now I'll admit that dwarves are strong, but not as strong as a giant. So during an early fight with the BBEG mystic the dwarf was transmutated into a halfling and given stats that would be closer to a halfling heroes. This worked out well, and gave the player even more incentive to trackdown the BBEG till the end of the campaign and everyone thought it was great.

Just remember as DM you have ultimate control...have the goliath barbarian be poisoned by something he drinks that permanently lowers his stats, or offer him what appears to be a great magical item only to have it actually cursed and soul bound to him with a high DC. Nothing that seems outrageous, but just high enough that no one near can dispell the curse.

 

[Thanee]

You made a house rule, that you won't accept unreasonable stats, but you let them roll the dice at home, where noone else is looking... and you already suspect one player to be cheating with the ability scores?

Ok, I really don't understand, why you do not simply have them do all the rolls in front of you or simply use point buy or another method, which does not have such a large variance as typical dice rolling, which nicely prevents the power gap between (even legally rolled up) characters.

But, that's a little too late now...

I wouldn't believe anyone to have rolled those stats on 4d6 drop lowest. Chances are extremely high, that they didn't.

Let him reroll the stats at the beginning of the next game session.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

This is one of the reasons why I use point buy. Having played in a campaign that used a bizarrely generous stat generation method (all scores start at 10, distribute 8d6 points among them) and having all the players with around the mean distribution and one with like 44 of 48 possible points to distribute, I can tell you that the uber-stat character eventually overshadowed everyone else.

If you're not comfortable about calling him on it directly and forcing a re-roll in front of you, then you do have a sneaky DM way out -- kill the character off and make him roll the next one in front of you.

But you've created this problem by being inconsistent. If you have that house rule about stats, and you didn't check them and allowed the character, it's your doing.

 

[delericho]

1. Kill this character -Just announce he’s had a major heart attack from all the performance enhancing herbs he’s obviously been using.

That's an abuse of DM power, and something that I'd walk out over. If the DM can arbitrarily rule that a PC in his game is dead (with no defence and no appeal), what guarantee that he won't do the same next time I do something with my character that he doesn't like, or I find a killer combination of feats and classes, or I owe him money?

If the DM really objects to these stats, he can enforce a reroll. Doing so will create a lot of bad blood between player and DM, but it is just about possible. A better solution is to just suck it up, and not make the same mistakes again.

(And remember, the DM has no actual evidence that the stats were generated unfairly. They look mighty suspicious, and I wouldn't put any money on them being legit, but it is possible.)

The DM has control over the entire game universe. But if he uses that power to unfairly victimise one player (and especially if he does it in such a heavy-handed way), he's cheating just as surely as a player who 'rolls' all-18 stats is. The DM must play fair, or he will destroy his game.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

2 Very simple solutions:

WATCH THEM ROLL! Have everyone over at your house and have everyone watch everyone else roll. Clearly define how low abilities need to be to qualify for a reroll.

Do point buy or just give them an array of ability scores that they can place.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Depending on my mood, I'd do 1 of 3 things with the PC.

I might cause the character to die, then require all new characters be created with point buy, or make sure I watch his rolls.

I might also just tell him to re-roll his stats right now, at the table in front of everyone.

I would most likely tell everyone else at the table what his stats are. The other players will not like him cheating like that and the group pressure will force him to either change his stats, or change his whole character, or leave the group.

 

[Darkness]

I wouldn't believe anyone to have rolled those stats on 4d6 drop lowest.

I probably wouldn't either, even though I've rolled 18, 18, 17, 17, 16, ?? on 4d6/drop lowest before, back in 2e, for (IIRC) an NPC I didn't want to stat myself. (As you'll probably imagine, IIRC I ended up not using these stats.)

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Let him play it and then kill him in an embarressingly stupid way. Repeat until he has a character with stats more in tune with the rest of the party.