Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 2821240" data-attributes="member: 14140"></blockquote>But, it is. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />Not to be too coy but even Jim Hague and I who seem on nigh totally opposite ends of this discussion agree on what cheating is.It is a willful, deliberate choice to not play by the rules, to violate the rules of the game.The D20 rules don't say "if you fail to make the needed difficulty, you fail and if you make or exceed the difficulty you can succeed or fail your choice"They say..." If your result equals or beats the target’s Armor Class, you hit and deal damage."Choosing to roll the dice and then not following the die roll result is cheating.Choosing to have one more potion of healing than i was supposed to, is cheating.then you have a house rule which says some die alterations aren;t cheating. just like when we discuss cheating we aren't lumping action dice systems where you have a legal way to adjust your dice in your favor, we also aren't discussing your house rule.We are discussing cheating, ie altering results in ways not permitted by the rules.many, maybe most, GMs play with action point systems so that rerolling the die or adding 1-6 pts to a result is allowed and legal.Does that mean doing so in games without actions points is not to be considered cheating?Again, for emphasis, when any of us are talking cheating, i think it goes without saying that IF THE GAME BEING PLAYED has a rule which allows the change (like say action dice or take lower), then it isn't cheating.By definition, cheating is a violation of the rules of the game being played.no thats limiting the discussion to only one side.This is like asking "is railroading bad" and then trying to define railroading with "and its bad" as part of the definition.Was what I did cheating? it was violating the rules. it wasn't done to steal his limelight or make my character more powerful. Was it cheating by your definition?the other options you present are more likely to harm the game. There are simply some cases where its better you don't tell them. As a GM, whenever i decide to lessen an encounter, i don't stop the game and go "hey, since you guys are such wussies, i am lowering the number of orcs in the next room." I do it and never tell them.A campaign i played in with a less than skillful Gm saw numerous cases where he simply overmatched the party and halfway thru had the bad guys start doing stupid stuff so we survived. frankly, it was overt and obvious. At least once, when a PC was surely about to die, he basically had the dragon spend a full round action to turn around, out in the open, so it didn't take a full attack salvo against the PC.These were blatent and overt (to the experienced players he had) "saves". This led to some of those players who noticed losing a bit of respect for the game, expressed by being less willing to plan for things and being more vocal about "lets just go ahead and rush in, it will all work out ok" kind of "reasoning". it would have been better if he had simply altered the scene or skewed some dice rolls or anything more subtle than that.Obviously, Gms are allowed to "cheat" but the point is they also show that when they d so, its often better the others don't know.that principle, often "the less the others know, the better" also applies to player cheating.If i stop the game, go to out of character debate phase as to "can i have an extra healing potion so MoMo here doesn't die? is this a good death or a stupid one?" etc thats a lot more disruptive to the game flow than if i just on my own say "my last healing potion. hope you are worth it?" with an in character sneer.The latter doesn't break the game pacing, doesn't drive us to out-of-character debate, and doesn't make the player whose character is getting saved any sense of "well i should be dead but they mulliganned me."After all, its not like i cheated, gave him the potion i didn't have, and then told them all about it.Thats actually been my point.CHEATING is a thing you do. its violating the rules. At the risk if rasising IRE, consider it a tool or a technique. It is controversial, and so should be used wisely and cautiously if at all.Cheating produces results. Some results are good. Some results are bad.it can be used to produce bad results: making ME ME ME more powerful. Stealing your limelight. Being a disruptive jerk. etc.it can also be used to produce good things: like giving spotlight to others for better "dramatic sense" or to save characters from "bad" deaths and so on.The opposite side SEEMS TO believe cheating is bad in and of itself, regardless of results.those seem clear cut sides.The waffly middle-grounders seem to be those who want to take our "cheating for good results" and redefine them as "not cheating" so that the only thing left under the cheating definition-umbrella are cheating uses which produce bad results.its like trying to answer "is hot soup good" by defining "hot" as "too hot to be good"[/QUOTE]

Verification