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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Callahan09" data-source="post: 6120034" data-attributes="member: 6721803">Can the GM cheat?  It depends on what the table agrees to prior to the game in my opinion.  If the table agrees to play the game as the GM decrees, it's his world and we are all just living in it, then the GM cannot strictly speaking "cheat" because the interpretation and application of rules begins and ends with the GM.  That said, the GM can be inconsistent or unfair and that can be frustrating to the players, but it isn't cheating.If the table agrees to follow certain rules, then it becomes a gray area.  It is perhaps a little cheaty to go against the rules as agreed upon.  But at the fundamental level, being a GM is about deciding what happens in your world and with the adventurers in your world.  Even in a strict interpretation of a ruleset there will be instances where the official rule doesn't adequately explain how to deal with a situation.  The ruleset will even have a built in mechanism for the GM to decide what to do and says that this is within their rights and abilities as the GM.  So even then, is it cheating?  Possibly not.What your responsibility is as a GM is to provide a fair and consistent referee to the action and give your players an enjoyable session.  But if your players are not enjoying themselves you can only do so much to accommodate them before you alienate other players in the group or god forbid destroy your own enjoyment of the session.  In this case it sounds like the two players who left would have demanded that they be allowed to be overpowered in comparison to the other players, which would be a case of accommodations to that end destroying the enjoyment of the other players at the table who hasn't optimized their characters.  I think in this case it becomes a matter of who should be more willing to accept the other side's argument.  The more powerful players should definitely be more open to letting the game world be evened than the underpowered characters should be willing to accept their characters being insignificant!  Therefor your balance shift seems perfectly fair to me.Perhaps you could have tried more to keep the powerful players from leaving the group, though in my opinion it seems they were just being bratty about not being able to be the super powered characters they tried so hard to be... But in any event perhaps you could have worked ways into the sessions to reward them for optimizing characters that they could feel powerful to wield, while still keeping the overall game balanced to include the weaker characters as important pieces as well? In the end I don't really know how unreasonable the guys who left were truly being.  But do I think you cheated? No.  Maybe you could have done more creative things to keep the balance without destroying those guys' sense of power they so obviously wanted.  Maybe not and this was just a group of players too disparate to all enjoy a game together.  I don't know.</blockquote>

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