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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stoutstien" data-source="post: 7921279" data-attributes="member: 7020569">I don't think you intentionally called every GM that has ran, or at least read, published campaign material a cheater if they happen to fall into a non GM role for a game. That's part of the consequences for being a GM. A former GM sitting down at a game that's going to run a published campaign have a few options. They could restrict their play style and become a pseudo players/dmpc. they could work with the person running the game to make sure that key elements are changed. They could not play. Now there are two other main occurrences where players knowledge of publish campaigns that get labeled as cheating a lot. The first is the unintentional knowledge. Thanks to the Internet it's really hard to keep secret about published games from affecting gameplay. it doesn't take a genius to realize that a Cleric could be a good idea in a curse of strahd campaign. would taking the campaign into consideration at all when making a character  be considered cheating?The second case is when a player attentionally go seeking information to the extent of maybe purchasing and reading a campaign that they know they're going to be in. Obviously cheating correct? Not quite. Unless the person in question has a disorder in which compulsive cheating is a symptom there's always a reason why they do this. The two biggest ones are what I like to call the once bitten twice shy and the completionist.Some players carry over negative experiences from other table into new games. If a player has bent anytime with a DM who runs games with a tight Gap for error with deadly consequences then they're going to start seeking out advantages to counteract that. This is also one of the big driving factors of why players make very fine tuned PCs. Min/max or munchkin. The most common reaction for the DM is to ratchet again. The completionist is something it's really hard for some grasp. Basically this person does not get any pleasure from Discovery or tension. They enjoy completing games. You can always find these players by saying that you're going to run a completely open-ended campaign with no direction and their eyes gloss over. I believe there's a lot more of this style player now than in the past because of influences from other entertainment and game sources. I don't play a lot of video games at all but I don't wear their existence and most of them now have a way of tracking completion.I almost forgot the players who simply just enjoy reading the campaign books. It's a valid option. They fall in line with the DMs who also read them.so while it's very easy for someone to shout that every player that plays differently is cheating it doesn't address the issue.</blockquote>

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