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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bowbe" data-source="post: 2905173" data-attributes="member: 6328">Interesting thread. I will say that the last time I actually saw anyone flat out cheating was at my first Gen Con. I was running a level from one of the Rappan Athuk series and glanced over and watched a player actually change his D20 roll with his fingertips. I didn't bust him on it because I knew it would be an embarrassing situation but I kept note from that point on. It slowed the game down a little bit when I casually asked everyone to wait till their turn to roll their dice. THat solved the problem, avoided humiliating the cheater and set a tone for the rest of the session. As for meta-gaming. With experienced players it is something that is of course somewhat unavoidable however thats the great thing about new spell books (Spell Compendium, Eldritch Sorcery, Incarnum ect. ect.) as you can break out spells that players are unfamilair with and wouldn't be able to look up unless they actually rolled a successful Spell-craft and you told them what it was.Same with new monsters from different sources (MM 2-4, Tome of Horrors 2-3, ect). Adding class levels and so on to the monsters = another very good thing. Always important for DMs to remember (which is often considered DM cheating vs. Using good tactics is playing the monster to its intelligence. A stupid orc is a stupid orc. When they start enticing characters into a kill zone with longspears and and crossbowmen in an enfilade... they had better have a very charismatic, intelligent and highly trained commander on the field. As far as any form of cheating and obvious metagaming goes, it involves a moral disconnect from the concept of "fair play", meaning something just never sunk in during good ol' early childhood development and social integration. In my experience, I have seen far less cheating in table top RPGs than I do in computer games where the concept of cheating is built into the game by its designers. I don't know if there is a solid correlation between this cheat code ethos and the constant news items about business leaders cheating their employees, people getting caught trying to cheat the system, college kids and kids in middle and high school cheating on exams but the fact is the cheat is on! Cheating in online video games is one of the things that ultimately drove me away from such games and back to RPGs. Thankfully most Tabletop RPGs are by their very nature a social setting and people who try to cheat or consistantly metagame are eventually exposed and often expelled from that social circle, soon finding no-one else to play with. When I was a once upon a time a player and moderator with Chat Based D20 RPGs however, it seemed the opposite was true. The biggest cheaters always seemed to get themselves made moderators and game masters. This worked well for them as they gained more playing time than anyone else. It also worked out so that they could in turn supply their own characters with the best equipment, most experience points and greatest accumulation of wealth. Typically it involved a conspiracy of several Game Masters padding one anothers character sheets to accomodate their intrinsically broken characters. Evidently their desire for a powerful virtual identity superceded their sense of fair play. I found this quite sad actually because ultimately it meant that these people were very weak or lonely individuals that were just seeking some form of attention and super power that was missing from their real lives. For them the game wasn't RPGs, it was cheating and seeing how far they could go to get away with it, and that is no fun for the rest of us. Thanks for the thread.Case</blockquote>

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