aboyd
Explorer
While I understand and endorse everyone's suggestions to just kick the guy out of the game, I myself have been in a position where I had a cheater in the game and due to circumstances it was going to be very difficult to drop the player. Specifically, he was friends of everyone else gaming, and was a guy down on his luck, so lots of sympathy for him. Since the players viewed the game more as a day of camaraderie, if I dropped him, I would likely lose all the other players. They would have found "he fudged dice rolls" to be a very lame reason to drop a player.
So what did I do? I blatantly asked to see his character sheet whenever he would attempt to do something I felt was beyond his capabilities. I'd say, "Wait, really? May I see your skills?" He'd show me, and sometimes he'd be right, although often he had severely inflated his scores. At times I could see him fudging rolls -- I'd see a d20 roll land with a single-digit number showing, and he'd touch the die as if he needed to bring it closer to see the number or something, but then he'd gently turn the die to a double-digit number. I ruled such rolls colossal failures, as if he'd failed by more than 5. So diplomacy rolls would end up worsening the situation, etc. I never told him I did this -- I never said, "I saw that you rolled low but reported a high number, therefore I'm giving you the worst result possible."
That may be passive-aggressive. However, here's the thing: it worked. It was great. We gamed for years, and while he cleaned up a little (he stopped cheating on the character sheet because I'd check the numbers), he never stopped fudging rolls. In order to keep friends and keep my own sanity, I always quietly sabotaged his cheating. The game wrapped up, and everyone went home happy, me included.
(I do have to admit that at one point he cheated a TON and I had a dramatic response to it -- for a short while I ignored everything he rolled. I got weary of always looking over at him as he rolled; I got weary of straining to see the original number before he changed it. So when he did it 5 or 6 times in a single game session, I eventually just stopped trying to look, assumed everything was a cheat, and just had the game proceed in the direction that seemed most fair or awesome.)
So what did I do? I blatantly asked to see his character sheet whenever he would attempt to do something I felt was beyond his capabilities. I'd say, "Wait, really? May I see your skills?" He'd show me, and sometimes he'd be right, although often he had severely inflated his scores. At times I could see him fudging rolls -- I'd see a d20 roll land with a single-digit number showing, and he'd touch the die as if he needed to bring it closer to see the number or something, but then he'd gently turn the die to a double-digit number. I ruled such rolls colossal failures, as if he'd failed by more than 5. So diplomacy rolls would end up worsening the situation, etc. I never told him I did this -- I never said, "I saw that you rolled low but reported a high number, therefore I'm giving you the worst result possible."
That may be passive-aggressive. However, here's the thing: it worked. It was great. We gamed for years, and while he cleaned up a little (he stopped cheating on the character sheet because I'd check the numbers), he never stopped fudging rolls. In order to keep friends and keep my own sanity, I always quietly sabotaged his cheating. The game wrapped up, and everyone went home happy, me included.
(I do have to admit that at one point he cheated a TON and I had a dramatic response to it -- for a short while I ignored everything he rolled. I got weary of always looking over at him as he rolled; I got weary of straining to see the original number before he changed it. So when he did it 5 or 6 times in a single game session, I eventually just stopped trying to look, assumed everything was a cheat, and just had the game proceed in the direction that seemed most fair or awesome.)
