Cheating - who cares?

[WhimsyTheFae]

In the groups i've been in, the cheating is usually done to keep a character from dying, either by the dm, or by the player themself. As someone who has gone through characters like a hot knife through butter, i know how hard it is to come up with historys, so much that i really don't make character historys anymore since spending hours to make a great history is worthless if the character dies because i fail a save 1 hour after i start playing the game, not to mention making a dm figure out how to get my character into the game when there is no reasonable way to do it, or i get to spend the whole game watching instead of playing since there is no way to introduce my character. In the current games there has been extremely few kills in 16 years of gaming, and the few there has been, has been because of extreme player stupidity, mostly by the 2 kids in the group. It is also a pain to try to help someone make a character while playing, which can cause me to miss details just because i'm the most experienced with the rules. So from what i've seen is that fudging dice rolls can keep the group from being disrupted, but that doesn't mean i endorse it, just that i can understand it.

But, to me, this doesn't excuse cheating. I think that better solutions would be discussing the problem and coming up with house rules to address it, adding mechanics that modify rolls (like action points) or playing a different (less random) game.

 

[swrushing]

Alternatively (as hindsight is 20/20) you could have just held the attack action and told the Ranger "You have glory of the kill."
No 'fudging' needed.
Thanks,
Rich

Well, to reference the info from when this particular example started and save you the trouble of reading those posts...

there was no in-character reason to do that.
the choice to stay in-character was to try and kill the blessed thing.
the best result was for him to try, fail, and then the ranger get the kill.

that way< i don't act out of character and he gets the kill.

 

[swrushing]

But, what you're doing is ignoring the dice when you deem thematically innapropriate without consulting the people who those dice rolls are actually affecting.

yes. I am.

I'm confused about your respect earned thing. This is theoretically (in the context of this thread) a friend of yours. I would assume that one would respect the feelings of one's friends. Why is okay to cheat on their behalf if you know they wouldn't want it (since you aren't going to tell them)? Why is it okay to take power normally associated with the DM onto yourself without first having any approval of the group?

necause it produces a more fun game for those involved than if i don't.

In this case, he doesn't deserve to "be the man." Why? Because the dice say he doesn't. It's why we use dice. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. Eventually it evens out. By taking matters into your own hands, suddenly the curve is skewed. This is still a game, after all.

Definitely some fundamental differences here and at least one flat out incorrect statement.

First, he deserves to "be the man" as much as me because we are both players and deserve equal spotlight/limelight time. A competent Gm will make that happen. its not the dice that determine whether or not you deserve to be the man, anywhere near as much as they Gm is the determining factor.

Second, the dice do NOT even out how often we are the man. The dice are a small component of that which is far more determined by player skill (in designing characters, using the system and tactics) AND how those intersect with the Gms chosen challenges. A GOOD GM will adjust for the player strengths and HE, by HIS CHOICES, will make "be the man" time even out. But the dice won't do that job.

The dice cannot do that job. They have no brains.

And finally, the curve was skewed from the get go, out of whack, in my favor, by dint of my ability vs the other players and the GMs lacks. What I did was not so much to skew the way things should be but to push them back on even keel.

Honestly i didn't get that far. I didn't get it back to balanced. I did get it closer than it was otherwise.

I'm not sure what this has to do with cheating. If you know the other PCs are weak, then you powergame your PC and dominate play, that's not cheating. It's still bad, so what we can derive from this is that there are more ways to disrupt play than cheating. What we cannot say from this is that cheating is a good way to solve this discrepancy.

Sorry but not going to get into the next round of "argue over how to define the nebuouls rpg term" with "powergaming."

Make a weaker PC, make a PC who is more docile, go for a buff/support role instead, do things with your character within the game that allow for this without falling back on cheating to make the other players sucessful. Are they really succeeding if their wins are a result of cheating? How is this a good thing?

I don't know the other PCs stats when designing my own. Do you normally as a player get the others to submit their PCs to you so you can build to fit?

If I play a more docile role in this crowd, we would be sitting still a very very long time.

I play support roles often. This wasn't one of those cases. its rather goods too that i wasn't in support role as it turned out.

look, maybe for you its really really important that every "win" your RPG characters get is earned tooth and claw on some universally objective scale...

for most of them, they wanted to have fun and getting to be the man" was more fun for them than not. If i helped them get that more than maybe they should on the objective darwinian earn-it scale, but still not more than their fair share as a player, Beleive me, i sleep just fine.

Do you expect the semantics to make them feel better if they found out?

I don't think its semantics. They took no action that violated the rules, so they aren't a cheater.

Would you want to play a PC knowing that they only reason you're alive is because of lying and deciet toward the DM? That would not only make me feel guilty but it would nullify everything that's happened since then in my eyes.

Are we back to "and thats why telling them would be wrong" maybe?

Two things: If you know the Player wouldn't want it, why do it? And, you'd know.

because, without him knowing it, he has more fun. And I wont tell him so...

I have to wonder if there's a tiny bit of power tripping in this, too. Is it purely alturistic or is there some sense of "he's alive becuase of me" going on, at least with some people who would do this, especially if you know the person wouldn't want it. There's a certian air of "I'm in charge even though nobody knows it" that goes with the manipulativity of cheating. I would guess that many do it not for the benefit of even their character, but instead because they want to see if they can get away with it.

yeah, thats gotta be it.

I cheat so I must.. oh wait, cannot say must ... MIGHT (nod nod wink wink) be the type who gets jollies out of secretly arranging things to show to me in my private moments that I am superior player with my 25 years of experience to someone with a few months of experience.

yeah, thats gotta be it.

or thats just gotta be another thinly veiled attempt at insulting the dirty little cheaters?

let see, so far, we...
1. probably steal RPG books too.
2. probably are being untruthful about whether or not we ever cheat to help others.
3. probably are secretly doing it for the power trip.

man, we probably run over sacks of puppies for fun too!!!

 

[ThirdWizard]

EDIT: Retracting my questions for the good of all.

 

[Piratecat]

EDIT - post no longer needed.

 

[rgard]

Well, to reference the info from when this particular example started and save you the trouble of reading those posts...

there was no in-character reason to do that.
the choice to stay in-character was to try and kill the blessed thing.
the best result was for him to try, fail, and then the ranger get the kill.

that way< i don't act out of character and he gets the kill.

Ok. Thought I had found a better way to accomplish the mission. If you couldn't rationalize not swinging...fair enough. I wouldn't have fudged the roll myself, but that is me.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[The Levitator]

Thank you Piratecat!

I've been following this thread and totally distracted by the inflammatory posts. For me, the definition of "cheating" is obviously subjective. So, it only matters what you as a group define as cheating. As long as everyone agrees about the definition of "is", there shouldn't be a problem. At the end of the day, it's supposed to be about having fun. If someone is playing by a different set of rules than everyone else, definitions aside, it won't be fun for everyone.

That's why it's the first rule in our houserules. "I, as the DM, do not care if you live or die. I am not the god of your world, just your storyteller. That means that I do not fudge rolls to change the outcome of your campaign. Fudging is not acceptable by anyone in the gaming group, including the DM. It is not a factor with our group because we use DM Genie to manage our gaming sessions. DM Genie has an autorolling feature built in, which means, we don't use dice. Our focus is on the story, and DM Genie allows us to do that by handling the mechanics. The benefits to our group have been deeper immersion, super fast combat, and almost no metagaming or cheating. My job is to make you the hero of your story. Thanks to DM Genie, I feel I am successful most of the time."

We've had new players bawk a little at the fact that we don't throw dice around. After 1 session though, every one of them has become a new member. I have 9 people now in 2 groups. I'm running 2 main campaigns and 3 solo campaigns. The overwhelming sentiment about our group is that they like the fairness of it. Every single one of them has played with a DM that fudges rolls. If a DM fudges a roll to make things worse for the party, it makes the party feel ganged up upon. If the DM fudges rolls for the party, then players feel like they are having to have their hands held to stay alive. If they die in our world, they can at least rest easy that it was by the book. All 9 of them seem to appreciate that. I'm sure there are plenty of players who wouldn't want to be in our group, and that's just fine with us. The beauty of this game is its flexibility and openness to interpretation. There are as many styles of gameplay as there are DM's and players out there, and that's a GOOD thing! Nobody is wrong unless they are the only 1 in their group doing things differently.

 

[iwatt]

man, we probably run over sacks of puppies for fun too!!!

I only did that once.

 

[Jim Hague]

To be clear, I'd probably be MORE offended by minor cheating in a group where I didn't know anyone - because there's less trust involved in the first place and I'm more likely to engage in competitive behaviors with people I wouldn't have a huge problem tossing into a well if it got me 50 XP. With friends though, or even acquaintances that exist more or less constantly because they're gaming buddies, you've got to involve the very real dilemma of "is this worth risking the relationship over" and again, note that it's a game. When the relationship in question isn't just an individual one, but considered as an issue of a group as a whole, I think it becomes even more important to consider that issue.

Most of my regular groups of people who've shown up for my games over the past decade or so can earn a little leeway in their behaviors, especially given the rather gross allowances outside the norm that are occasionally made for individual quirks when someone is a complete social nutjob except when playing a game or are otherwise "broken" friends. It doesn't harm my trust in someone to note that a person is acting as I assume most people to act, but I acknowledge that it would probably harm my development of trust in someone who I've just met. Or to put it another way, if you're already my friend then it's ok to tell me you spent a while in prison but I'm going to watch you more in the first place if that's the first thing I know about you.

Sure, and that's a very good point - with a group of friends, there's generally more leeway when it comes to gaffes, peccadillos and other social problem, which cheating has components of. The social lubricant is already present. With a pick-up group...well, hunt around a bit, and I'm sure you'll find all the horror stories you can stomach.

 

[James Heard]

I only did that once.

Me too, but I'm lying on purpose to break the social contract of the boards.