Do you have trouble "Laying down the law"?

[Pseudonym]

I'm a little disheartened by the number of people in this thread who responded by saying that a GM should just ditch a player for cheating. Again I say, think of why your friend is cheating. Try helping him before you abandon him.

Maybe I'm just a heartless jerk here, but I don't much care about the root cause to why they are cheating. At this point in our lives (professional adults in our mid to late thirties), if someone feels an overwhelming need to cheat at a roleplaying game, they should seek professional therapy, not armchair counciling from behind the DM screen. I don't enable other sorts of immature behavior in my friends; this isn't any different.

This whole thread calls to mind the Five Geek Social Fallacies essay. That people can post "Yeah, that' Ol' Cheatin' Dave. Been gaming with him for years, and damn if he doesn't always cheat. Guess that's how he got the name. Look he said he just rolled another natural 20." just throws my brain in to vapor lock.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I dissuade cheating mostly by believing that cheating at D&D is really, really pathetic.

It's not like it's a game you can win, or a game that provides you any satisfaction from winning. You fudge your stats because you want to be a more badass make-believe fairy elf? Why? Is it really that important to you to be better than everyone else in a small margin that no one cares about? Important enough to violate trust and make everyone else's time less entertaining, all so you can get your imaginary fairy elf's sword to stick in imaginary bad guys slightly more often?

How fragile must your ego be, how sad must be the little control you have over your own life, to really think you gain anything by cheating at D&D.

This philosophy generally extends to most casual gaming for me. I get that some people are competitive and want that edge and psychologically want to win a bit more, but since you get absolutely nothing in D&D -- not even victory, which is basically assured to you anyway -- I can't see why any normal functioning adult would care that much.

It's not anger I feel when I catch a player cheating, it's surprise and pity. I don't even really care that they cheated (though I don't think they should do it again, and I will shame them to their faces. ). It's just like: "Dude. This obviously matters too much to you. Go do something else for a while."

I'm kind of mystified by the outrage, too, though. Same general argument applies: it's not really worth getting worked up over.

 

[Nightson]

For something that's so unimportant that it's so pathetic to cheat about it people sure do get angry at people who cheat at it.

I have the advantage of running my game online and the players can't cheat, but if one did I'd just ask them to stop it.

 

[segrada]

Guys. GUYS. RPGs are games. I'm pretty amazed at how many people in this thread are reaching for the torches and pitchforks at the thought of a single fudged dice roll. Presumably the people you play with are your friends, or at least human beings you don't mind spending 4 hours a week with. That said, would you really rage-boot them if they have an extra +2 to their athletics check?

Occasionally I'll ask one of my players to add up their +hit bonus, or point out that they used their action point last encounter, etc. But the amount of outraged indignation in this thread over a game with friends is staggering.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Segrada, if you think this is bad just make a comment that could, under some lights, be read as a preference for one particular version of DnD over another version. It's hilarious to sit back and watch. OK, you'd maybe get suspended for a while...

 

[kitsune9]

Guys. GUYS. RPGs are games. I'm pretty amazed at how many people in this thread are reaching for the torches and pitchforks at the thought of a single fudged dice roll. Presumably the people you play with are your friends, or at least human beings you don't mind spending 4 hours a week with. That said, would you really rage-boot them if they have an extra +2 to their athletics check?

Occasionally I'll ask one of my players to add up their +hit bonus, or point out that they used their action point last encounter, etc. But the amount of outraged indignation in this thread over a game with friends is staggering.

Well, I wouldn't reach for my torch and pitchfork for one fudged dice roll, but consistently fudging dice rolls becomes an issue of trust. I had a good friend who I could no longer game with because he constantly fudged his rolls. He would roll the die and grab it as soon as it stopped rolling so no one could see what he really rolled and gave me the "result". The reason why I knew he was cheating because the few times I did see the die roll he gave a different number than what I saw.

I know for some people, they treat this as a game, but it's also a social contract in that cheating is a matter of disrespect for others and even moreso outright lying. I hate being lied to so I would likely to be personally offended if it was going on, game or not.

I know for some people, they don't mind it, they look the other way. Others will tolerate it because if they confront it, it would the death of their hobby as they live in an area where gamers are virtually non-existant. I can really understand that and if it works for them, that's great. For me, I live in an area that supports three large conventions a year and a number of small "mini-cons" so that makes gamers a dime-a-dozen, so I would definitely fall in the zero-tolerance group.

Hmmmm....torch and pitchfork....Maybe that will be a new prop in my next game session.

 

[amysrevenge]

Everyone seems pretty vehement about this issue, and nobody can really find a reason other than mental instability to account for die-roll cheating.

I guess nobody has ever seen a '3' come up on a daily (or on a save-or-die) and thought "Gee, it sure would have been more fun to have hit with that power". I mean, missing is just as much fun as hitting right? As long as you're playing it's all good. Nobody wins at D&D, so why should we care how the dice come up? Now, I'm being facetious here, but it is really only a matter of degree between preferring a hit over a miss and cheating a miss into a hit. If you can say to me "I would never ever ever fudge a die roll, even if it meant the permanent loss of a PC I've been playing for 18 years as well as the loss of the rest of the party's similar PCs" then I salute your integrity. If not, if you'd fudge just one single die roll in your entire life, then it is only a matter of degree separating you from the dude who fudges every roll.

I can very much understand the mentality of a person cheating a miss into a hit (or a failed save-or-die into a success). It isn't "right" (whatever that means), but it certainly doesn't suggest therapy. It suggests that the person prefers succeeding over failing to a greater degree than the person enjoys impartiality and fairness and the great god "Randomness".

 

[ggroy]

Everyone seems pretty vehement about this issue, and nobody can really find a reason other than mental instability to account for die-roll cheating.

For some people, a game is more than just a "game".

Recall the kids who would throw or smash up the joystick whenever their player man died in a video game.

 

[Greg K]

Recall the kids who would throw or smash up the joystick whenever their player man died in a video game.

Forget kids. One of my friends in a year or year and a half went through three or four keyboards and three computers while playing both Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Disclaimer: I'm not making a universal claim in this post, simply stating my experience and reaction thereof:

In high school, I knew a lot of people that spent 30 minutes working to cheat on a test when 20 minutes of study would have got them the good grade. (They were reasonably bright.) I knew some people who cheated at games. Mostly, it was the same group. Later, I knew some of these same people as adults, and other adults that self-reported similar behavior. They were mainly the same ones that cheated in other, more serious, ways.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that a "lovable con" can be a selective cheater and still mostly a wonderful person, but my experience is that cheating on small things is usually a symptom of a larger dishonesty. The correlation is too strong for me to want to waste my times being friends with people that strongly register on that meter. I only game with friends.

So cheating gets the boot (and has) pretty darn quick. I'm willing to cut some initial slack precisely because people do make mistakes. My current players make mistakes all the time, which is why I check on them. However, as likely as not their mistakes are hurting their characters, not helping. When a person's "mistakes" are all to their benefit? Bye, don't let the door hit you on the way out.