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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6585755" data-attributes="member: 6790260">A player asks you, "Did you fudge dice rolls in that fight?"If you answer in the negative but actually had fudged the rolls in that fight, you have answered dishonestly. That is the definition of a dishonest answer: you are knowingly telling an overt untruth, when directly questioned about the subject. What would it take to actually be "dishonest" in your eyes? You don't have to have malicious intent to be dishonest. You just have to say things that you know are not true, but say them as if they were true.Deciding, for example, not to tell the party that one of the "allies" they just befriended is actually a mole for the BBEG? That is not dishonest. That is fundamentally necessary to allow that particular plot point ("you've been betrayed!") to happen. What would be dishonest is if one of a DM's players--whether out of paranoia or actual investigation--successfully rolled a Sense Motive check, and then the DM fudged the difficulty level so that the player would fail. Or if the player failed it, but the DM fudged the difficulty so they would succeed. Both of those are dishonest on the DM's part. It doesn't matter if one of them is "better" for the player or not.Again, I have to ask you: How is it not "cheating" if you, as the arbiter of the rules, decide to change the rules and conceal this from your players? How would you feel if your blackjack dealer changed the contents of the deck without telling you? How would you feel if the referees at the Superbowl re-wrote the rules of football every other pass? Doing things that would upset people if publicly known, and furthermore lying about it to prevent people from finding out, doesn't exactly communicate a "fair" or "forthright" relationship between DM and player.Well, they also say that politics and thievery are the second and third oldest professions (or something to that effect). I don't think that means we should all include gerrymandering and pickpocketing in our skillsets. Those would also be dishonest things that, if discovered, will upset the other people involved, and at least the former is definitely something done "for the best interest of the people" I'd wager (or, at least, the people doing the gerrymandering almost surely delude themselves with such rhetoric).It is very easy to make arbitrary choices and decide on a whim what you want things to be. It is hard to be forthright and solidly consistent (with allowance made for learning to do things better, of course). But there are plenty of "hard" things to do that are, in fact, the right thing to do.</blockquote>

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