DMs do you trust your PCs?

[takyris]

I trust 'em.

Most of the time, they will even tell me, "Hey, I was thinking about this feat, but looking at it, it might be too powerful when used with this other feat I already have. Any thoughts? I don't wanna become a better melee guy than the party tank, but the idea of this feat sounds good for my character's personality." As a DM, a player who's thinking about roleplaying, power-play, AND party balance is about all you can wish for.

In return I limit my fudging. I'm not a zero fudger, and I will freely admit to the occasional fudge to get a point across or advance a plot point. By the same token, I fudge backward when something I've done has gotten the PCs in a little deep. Lately, I've been lowering my fudging, because the party's at a level where I can take the gloves off.

If you fudge too much, your players are going to start doing the same. So I treat it as a dangerous thing that is best not to let get out of hand.

And if your players fudge, the best question is whether it was an oversight, a loophole use, a game-mechanic breakage, or an outright cheat. Oversights are fine, loopholes should be allowed and then addressed later, game-mechanic breakage is tough and should be dealt with before it gets out of hand, and cheaters should be eviscerated quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

-Tacky

 

[Gargoyle]

I trust 'em, too. Incidently I do limit them sometimes, but it's to fit the campaign world or the theme of the campaign rather than to keep them boxed in. Sometimes disallowing certain things keeps the game focused in a certain direction. I don't allow evil player characters because I want a heroic campaign, not because I don't trust the players to form a cohesive group.

 

[Zappo]

if someone wants to cheat, i'll let them. if they feel a sense of accomplishment having their character allways critically hit, having all 18's for stats having more skill points then they should, that's fine. however every time there is going to be one character singled out as getting an extra opponent (ie 10 to 3 odds) he gets the extra one and spellcasters will randomly target him 9 out of 10 times. magical items will be tailored to other pc's making them as effective while he gets to sift through the magical sap/club/dagger collection for a weapon. also if the enemy cleric has a harm, he gets it every time until he gets the point.

if someone wants to play evil, they will have to deal with paladins, clerics and other do gooders and i will not save him from them. if they kill a man, bounty hunters may be called in depending on who he was and if you screw over an assassins guild, you are a dead man.

in short do what you want in my games, but beware, i'm not stupid and i do not like it when you act like i am. nobody rolls 3 18's, nobody.

Me too. I have a high empathy and know when someone is making a mistake and when he is cheating. I correct and forgive mistakes, and correct and punish cheating - though, more than punishing, it is "evening out". A cheater in my game won't get killed more or less often than another character.

As for simple min/maxing (as opposed to outright cheating), I don't really trust them, as much as I trust the fact that they are all too lazy to learn the rules well enough to min/max properly. About the best they can manage is using CHA as a dump stat, occasionally taking a toad familiar (though not usually), and using keen weapons with Improved Critical. Nothing really unbalancing or weird.

Finally, I only and always fudge when the plot absolutely requires it. Whether this means saving a PC or an NPC, it doesn't matter.