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<blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 1735909" data-attributes="member: 1757">Player cheating: I'm with kamikaze Midget and Henry on this one. Players pay for the ability to make attack rolls that connect more often, avoid enemies' attacks, and make saves more often. If you just cheat your way through those rolls, you're devaluing the price paid by your fellow players, which not only wrecks suspension of disbelief, but also engenders bad feeling on fellow players' part and makes for worse gaming.DM &quot;cheating&quot;: Also with Henry here. IMHO, a DM cannot cheat. It's actually impossible, for the simple reason that DMs have the absolute power of encounter and adventure design. As a result, DMs don't have to make design tradeoffs or make their NPCs &quot;balanced&quot; with players' PCs. Doing so is generally good game design, just like sticking somewhat to the rolls is generally good gameplay. However, it just isn't &quot;cheating&quot; to fudge die rolls. Making a 17 out of a 12 is just like giving the NPC a free item that awards a +5 luck bonus to the roll in question, something that the DM was in no way restricted from doing by the &quot;rules.&quot; I refuse to roll dice in full view of my players (and I had one obnoxious player who tried to insist on it, until two of his fellow players died after I rolled eight consecutive 18-20s on two rounds of full attacking by a raging dragon; the other players made me keep my dice behind the screen after that). Sometimes, it can be poor gameplay to have your BBEG die after rolling three consecutive 1s or 2s on saves, or to kill your party by inadvertently rolling as I did in the aforementioned dragon encounter. That's why DM fudging is kinda important and sometimes even necessary rather than invidious.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ruleslawyer, post: 1735909, member: 1757"] Player cheating: I'm with kamikaze Midget and Henry on this one. Players pay for the ability to make attack rolls that connect more often, avoid enemies' attacks, and make saves more often. If you just cheat your way through those rolls, you're devaluing the price paid by your fellow players, which not only wrecks suspension of disbelief, but also engenders bad feeling on fellow players' part and makes for worse gaming. DM "cheating": Also with Henry here. IMHO, a DM [i]cannot cheat[/i]. It's actually impossible, for the simple reason that DMs have the absolute power of encounter and adventure design. As a result, DMs don't have to make design tradeoffs or make their NPCs "balanced" with players' PCs. Doing so is generally good game design, just like sticking somewhat to the rolls is generally good gameplay. However, it just isn't "cheating" to fudge die rolls. Making a 17 out of a 12 is just like giving the NPC a free item that awards a +5 luck bonus to the roll in question, something that the DM was in no way restricted from doing by the "rules." I refuse to roll dice in full view of my players (and I had one obnoxious player who tried to insist on it, until two of his fellow players died after I rolled eight consecutive 18-20s on two rounds of full attacking by a raging dragon; the other players made me keep my dice behind the screen after that). Sometimes, it can be poor gameplay to have your BBEG die after rolling three consecutive 1s or 2s on saves, or to kill your party by inadvertently rolling as I did in the aforementioned dragon encounter. That's why DM fudging is kinda important and sometimes even necessary rather than invidious. [/QUOTE]

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