Seth arrives in front of the Pearly Gates. St. Peter: Skorkowsky is it? Just let me check your file. Seth: Am I going to get in? St. Peter: Oh, I wouldn't worry. This process is practically a formality, just a bit of... hold on, what's this? It says here you fudged a saving roll when you were fourteen years old. Well, let's see if you can make this one. He presses the button that opens a trap door under Seth's feet into Hell. St. Peter shakes his head. St. Peter: When will these mortals learn that D&D is built on a foundation of trust?
@@20catsRPG Wow, calm down it was a joke. No one actually thinks that. Your not wrong, but it's bit extreme to just to the conclusion from the innitial statment. No need to purge te here... Alpharius? Aren't you a traitor yourself... Seems fishy.
This is a social contract issue. Everyone needs to be able to trust each other for the game to function. Mike as That Guy and Todd as This Guy is a refreshing change of pace
@@twilightgardenspresentatio6384 exactly this. As a GM, I’ve worked hard to Make sure everyone in my group trusts each other, that we all have our fun at heart. I had a player want to do a big betrayal of the group, and it was a tense and fun experience for everyone BECAUSE EVERYONE TRUSTED EACH OTHER.
I can confirm the "honest players hate cheaters at a whole other level" aspect. In my case it applies to sports. I am a referee and very proud of my honesty and sportsmanship as a player as well. As a referee I can deal with cheaters myself since I have the authority to do so. But as a player, nothing gets me furious faster than a dirty or cheating opponent, because the fact I refuse to play like that means I'm immediately at an unfair disadvantage, and if the referee isn't taking care of it, I feel completely screwed over for playing the game right.
@@davidmeloche3563 interresting, we use the roll 20 diceroller and it seems pretty balanced (if not a bit top heavy) we tracked a couple of sessions and it seemed about even. Don't use it as DM though for hidden rolls and because my players can hear the dicetower even through discord
As an honest person AND player, I've always hated cheaters. We had one in our group who hid his dice, snatched them up, AND used hard-to-read dice. He also had sketchy math for his adds, hit points, and spells. Barely anyone at the table trusted him, and we always joked about how no one could roll like him. If he missed a session, and we had a big combat, we'd always joke that that player could get us out of trouble real quick. But after we had a falling out with him over something else, games got WAY more fun. The jokes were all cynical and frustrated. We weren't ACTUALLY amused by him. He also had a tendency to push the character making to the breaking point. He'd come up with these characters that were so close to broken, it was ridiculous. He did his research well. It was determined by the group that he just liked *winning*, which...there is no winning in RPG. He wanted to have the best character, be the one to do the most harm. He loved combat sessions, didn't really care for anything else. He was a bit of a murder hobo. It was very frustrating. And it took a while for the group to get out of the "kill it til it's dead" mentality, and try diplomacy over fighting. Or just leaving the situation if it wasn't important enough. He broke someone's game with that attitude, and the guy never ran for us again until the player left. Which was unfortunate. I loved the guy's games. He was creative, and he was very good at flying by the seat of his pants without making it obvious he was. Anyway. This video and my rambles were cathartic. Thanks for listening. =P
It helps sometimes! I left a long ass post too lol. In my 15+ years of tabletop, I have ran into a few of this guy (I was sort of that guy when I started). "No Murder Hobo" is my #1 rule when I run DnD lol and I try to structure my stories to encourage roleplay (when I can, I include a roleplay wincon instead of just violence-answers, for instance), or I'll try to set the group up with an area of operations if its a long campaign, so they are at the worst they are "secret methodical serial killers" instead of "murder hobos" lol
Oh I know exactly how you feel, it’s amazing how someone with that type of behavior can affect nearly every group in the same way. I had the misfortune of that person being a long-term friend who had been great at the table for years, which made it very hard to get rid of him.
I used to game with a guy that was kind of like that. But, he also had a positive contribution that was missed when we no longer gamed together. He was both disruptive to the game and was a catalyst for creating interaction in the game.
yeah, the "i want to win the game" types don't get the point of pen and paper in my personal opinion. You're telling a story as a group, imo Mary Sue characters make stories very bland. Whats the point if you know you're always going to win?
"there is no winning in RPG" I stand by a certain mantra, that there is no wrong way to play a table top game, just players with different goals and wants clashing. Goals that can be realized. When you realize your goal that is called 'winning'. And there almost certainly is a losing condition in the game. It is called dying. But there are other losing conditions too, even for more 'playing house' and drama filled roleplay type games. If there can be losses there can be wins. There might not be any ultimate victory in a roleplaying game, but if you genuinely believe there is no winning and losing in smaller stages what are you even doing? Is there even any kind of conflict in your games?
I've had two more-or-less obvious cheaters in my games over my 40+ years of experience. One was such a great guy that everyone liked, so we'd confront him periodically with his cheating and he'd apologize, cop to it, and try to do better. The other the players themselves eventually drummed out by their negativity towards him.
I game primarily online, so it makes spotting cheaters even more difficult. When I start a new game I usually have a discussion with the players about how I run games and expectations. I let them know that I'm going to trust their rolls, but I also try to get them enthusiastic about failing. After all, in role playing games, the most memorable moments often happen when things go horribly wrong. One thing the cheater often overlooks is the fact that winning all the time is just boring. When I think of cheating, I always remember that old Twilight Zone episode where a guy dies and thinks he has gone to heaven because he literally can't lose at gambling. However, when it gets boring and meaningless he complains that heaven sucks, and his guide says: "What ever made you think this was heaven?" followed by an evil laugh. :)
I think online is the opposite, you can usually have other people's character sheets open (handy if you're trying to help a new player too), looking up a spell or ability to check something is easier than ever if you can just search a pdf or SRD and there's no dice cheating when you're using a virtual tabletop that sends the rolls to everyone. Only cheating that'd be easier is looking up modules.
I used to game primarily online, and it made spotting cheaters... way easier. My first games were on old message boards so there was a ready log of everything everyone said, same with chat. Only the advent of voice chat has changed this, and at that point I'd rather just play in person if I can. When we didn't have dice simulators in a chat, the DM did most of the dice rolls and thus was the only person we had to trust. I did it, as well as two of my friends. Likewise having everyone's character sheet saved to a text file on your computer made book keeping easy.
What a great twilight zone reference! Love that episode! I feel the same way. Cheating makes no sense to me. How is it fun? The fun of the game is the drama. Nothing creates more drama than failure. In a campaign I am running, one of the player characters was cooky and paranoid so he did long rest in a pool of blood unknown [long story] because the alternative was crates and I had just sprung a mimic on them. Well... as a consequence this pc became a something of a vampire. It was a secret only the player knew. BUT the other players became suspicious. Anyway, during a boss fight in this pool of blood. The boss started to flee and the Paladina dn Barbarian rushed after it so that it would not escape. They both had a series of very unfortunate dice rolls. The Pally fell off the ladder trying to pull the boss back down into the room. The barbarian did not stick her landing trying to get to the pally and help pull him out of the blood. They were both sinking into the blood and failing wisdom saving throws.. the vampire was failing the strength checks. It was just a SPAM of fails. The vampire's player literally started having tears roll down her cheeks as she desperately wanting to save them from the fate her character suffered. When they got out of that mess, there was this elation! The boss got away and they were just flailing around in blood but that moment is so memorable for all of us!
100% agree with the statement that if everything goes well all the time it's not as fun. I remember all the times I got my ass handed to me. But not all the times I kicked ass.
At some point a bad habit, like bad book keeping, moves from an honest mistake to cheating even if it is not intentional. If you have been told over and over that what you are doing is incorrect and you make no effort to improve your actions, you are indicating that you prefer things to go the wrong way and now its your choice instead of your error.
I had a cheater that cooked books but he was so inapt at the game it took me a long time to figure out if he really was cheating or was just bad at the game. Turns out it was both.
@@marcar9marcar972 I think of it like murder and manslaughter. The active cheater decided to fudge their inventory to gain an advantage. The chronic bad inventory player gets the same results by not policing their inventory when they don't care.
I love the character work in this one, Seth. Mike acting sketchy felt very personal to that character, and very different from how Todd would act suspicious. Really good work man!
Seconded! The gang is my favorite part of the channel. Their "out of character" moments add a lot, too. Like Todd getting tired of being bad and Mike being a bro and stepping in. Makes the whole thing feel really relaxed.
I will say this about the guy Mike is portraying: Everything you mentioned that he seemed to do was mentioned in the Munchkin's Guide to Power Gaming as a method to fudge your die rolls in your favor. The only one he didn't use was tossing his dice towards a cat so that he could chase the die and then declare what he rolled (yes, that's actually in there).
Having experienced almost the exact same thing with a player I used to play with i totally agree with all your points - including the "stress" or "bad vibes" that the game had while he was in the group. He constantly had higher stats than his XP should allow for, had mysterious amounts of extra hitpoints when needed, rolled-and-snatched his dices, sometimes rolled impossible numbers and so on. He always claimed it being a mistake, or a misunderstanding but eventually we decided to dump his body in the swamp. Or "stop inviting him to join our campaign" as we called it.
My group had a dice-hiding (AND snatching!), ability inflating player who was also a cell phone zombie. After two talks about the problems, and habit modification rules (roll in the open, DM keeps track of ability pools also) the only thing that changed was that the rolls got suddenly worse. The rest of the group met at a different function, and unanimously agreed that the trouble player had to go. It was uncomfortable to execute, but it has improved our game flow a lot.
I am guilty of all of these, once upon a time. I used to be quite the hoodlum out of high school, running around, selling drugs, and participating in all kinds of crime. I was selling weed to a guy, had to take some to his house while he was running Vampire The Masquerade. I had played some RPG video games in the past (like several Final Fantasy's and Baldor's Gate's), and I was curious how all these nerds get sit around with some paper and pretend all night: SO LAME, RIGHT?!? So I watched them, and they had a blast working together (and against each other) to machinate their way to the top of the city. The third time I stopped by while they were gaming, they invited me to play one. So I got into gaming, but I was scared about doing bad (who isn't?), and I was actually intimidated by how much everyone else knew comparatively. So I cheated. A lot. After about three sessions, my friend, the ST, pulled me aside and calmly said, "Look, I know what your doing, its obvious. This is a story, and if you just feel like things NEED to happen, don't roll. Don't lie to us, just tell us what happens. If it is that important to you, its that important to me." It really surprised me and hit me hard. So the next time I wanted to cheat, I didn't. He had given me his blessing to do anything I wanted: why cheat, right? And I looked at the rest of the group, honestly told them what I rolled, and went with it. I didn't want to fail, but I realized that the story was what was important, and story's have ups and downs - they suck when the hero just walks through every challenge. And while I was "winning" a roll, everyone else was losing story potential. After the game, he sat down with me and (got really high lol) and asked me why it was that I cheated to begin with. We talked about it, and he told me the truth of every game: its all about player experience, not character experience, and the real fun is when everyone makes that experience together, not one person railroading everyone else's experience to suit their own. It's a bit of compromise, but cheating just ruins the experience for everyone except one person, and even then, it screws the cheating player out of a legit experience. We are all at the table for basically the same reason, so act like it. the only time I've cheated as a player since then was purposely failing a roll to make a new player feel better about their crappy roll, because I was that guy some 15-20 years before. I started gaming every weekend, quit partying all the time, and found a new group of friends that helped me transition from a life of crime to a positive, constructive citizen (and gamer extraordinaire, I might add). I not only play, I run now, anything from VtM, 3.5 DnD (all others forms of DnD are inferior lol), and Exalted, to obscure stuff like SLA Industries (SIDE NOTE: NEW SLA INDUSTRIES COMING OUT SOON!), BESM, and Kids On Bikes. If you read all of this, thank you. Have a great day and GLHF/GG!
"How gaming saved my soul" - I love it! Props to your amazing friend for reaching out to you, and to you for accepting his offer. This wouldn't have worked out without both.
The classic player cheating their arrow count, and when you start counting, they shot 36 arrows out of a 20 arrows quiver. When you ask, "this is my last one."
You can collect them after battle, in fact a lot of people go by the rule you automatically collect half after battle. If you’re only firing 1 or 2 arrows per battle they’re probably going to round up so it’s not that crazy
We had a few (alleged) dice cheaters at our table. One way we squashed this is by adding a "fun" element to the dice rolls where the d20 was rolled inside the rectangular boxes that the dice sets came in. The loud clacking was almost celebratory and the box made it easy to lift and show neighbors confirmation of the roll while disabling mis-reads, post-roll-die-turning, and post-roll-pickups. All of the players, both honest and suspect, rolled this way. The fact that the "near Vegas high roller luck" rolling averages of the suspected cheaters dropped to a "more realistic spread" was a side bonus. Although, those same players suddenly being unable to make it to game sessions once that happened also kind of confirmed it.
the most hilarious case of cheating I've seen was one of my friends who thought he was an amazing liar but was actually terrible at it. It came to a point where we caught him having double the maximum hp he could have had at that level. needless to say we roasted him pretty hard over that one.
I had to change some of my gaming habits when I realized some people were suspecting me of cheating. I had many favorite dice sets, and some were of a mottled or marbled color pattern. I'd been using them for several editions and had a sentimental attachment to them. But that was when my eyes were younger. As I approached ty years of age, it got where I was having trouble reading the number against the die color, and started to innocently pick up my d20 after rolling if it rolled too far from me, just to verify the rolled number. I noticed people near me started looking real fast to see what I rolled before I picked the die up. That's when it hit me- they aren't sure I'm doing this on the up and up. I immediately retired those dice and now only use dice I can clearly read from several feet away, in case one rolls farther than I expect. I never thought it looked suspicious, as I had no intend to do anything wrong. This was a very honest group, and no one in it cheats, so correcting that impression as important to our mutual trust. In a similar incident, I had been sitting next to the DM , and I would often look to him in anticipation for his reaction in tense moments. I assured him I wasn't peeking behind his screen. He responded that I shouldn't worry, that he understood how my old-man glasses worked and what angle I'd have to hold my head to even see his dice and notes at that distance. I'm old, but at least I'm honest, I guess.
I'd have a talk to them after the session. I'd ask them if they are having issues with the bookkeeping, spell descriptions and so on, just because of the number of mistakes. You never know, they could be dyslexic or have a learning disorder. If they say no, they're fine, then I'd let them know that they need to concentrate more as "too many" mistakes makes it look like cheating, despite their good intentions. If they say yes, then offer support and help to ensure the flow of the game.
@@lostbutfreesoul Exactly. It actually gives them a chance to change, whilst saving face. After that if the behaviour continues, it might be time to part ways.
In high school, I had a friend whom I often suspected of cheating when we first started gaming together. After a while, I realized he just had a hilariously low attention span when reading. He would only read the first sentence or two of any rule (or spell, or MtG card, etc.) and was as likely to overlook things that benefited him as limitations. I just got used to having him hand me the rule in question to figure out what part of it he'd missed whenever I wasn't familiar with it or something about his description sounded off.
@@SteveWhipp sadly it may help them develop better cheating skills, like "cheating only when needed and not everytime", "being more subtle on the cheating" or "cheat in a way that helps others instead of you, so the other players become part of the cheating wanting it or not. So you can use them as a shield or convince them that it was for the better fun of the whole table and not just them". Is a complex situation. This happened to me, when confronted a cheater with the same "too many mistakes makes you look like a cheater". u.u
@@sannamy3132 That's certainly a possibility, but on the other hand as Seth pointed out, trust has to be earned and prior to starting a campaign, I'd explain the use of the dice tray and using something like DnD Beyond means I can keep an eye on their character sheets. I don't want to have to do that and I'd stop doing that once I know for a fact I can trust them. With my current crop of players, the very thought of cheating would be an anathema to them.
Imagine if you went to heaven and St Peter stopped you at the gates and said "You didn't make that saving throw in Secret of Bone Hill. No entry. Back to Earth with you."
Only to earth? Remeber that "A Paladin in Hell" Picture from 2nd edition AD&D Players Handbook? Well, I am pretty sure that guy lied on his saving throw as well...
@@hermes667 I feel like as Seth has repented so much he wouldn't go straight to The Nine Hells. Maybe that Paladin was simultaneously a Cheater and a Rules Lawyer?
About the Peeper: Jokes on them. Whoever can read my handwriting deserves to know what I've written. Allthough people already told me, that one needs a degree in egyptology, cryptology and klingon to read my writing...
I understand the toe-curling memory of "that one time". I read part of a module because I was sure the DM had messed up an important detail; and I still feel sick whenever I think about it. I should have just left the game rather than becoming a dirty rotten cheater. As it was, I left the game shortly afterwards anyway.
@@joshbecka6110 So are you saying you are the Seth? Tsk tsk. Arrogant. But also probably true most people I play D&D with are more like Seth than the other three, though a few veer very Mike.
The worst cheater I had loved to super-power his character...wearing a mail shirt while carrying three loaded shotguns and extra ammo, a sidearm with magazines of ammo, a pair of swords on his back, pockets with pre-fused dynamite inside his long coat, and so on. His character was carrying three times the weight a stout man can carry a short distance. This was not some clerical error, but a continuing effort to game the game to make his PC invincible. He also did things like having one PC killed in combat leave everything to his new PC in the first PC's will, even though there was no reasonable way the two PCs could ever have met. It was at once tiresome and fascinating...waiting to see what the next bit of BS cheating he'd come up with was always interesting. A GM should not have to police the players; if you have players like this guy, dump him. He was, in the end, more annoying than fun to game with.
To be fair why did the Gm allow any of this. I get cheating like bad book keeping and fudging rolls can be hard to catch but if the DM is allowing this it’s not cheating and instead bad dming, bad playing too but still
@@marcar9marcar972 I was the GM; I didn't know he was doing it until we were in play and I noticed his character always seemed to have this or that as needed. I looked at his character sheet and was WTF?!
Leaving one of your powerful items to a relative could actually be an interesting and sad quest for your party to do. Fulfilling your final wishes after your death.
Great video as always Seth! I do have a personal story involving cheating: specifically the time I did it. Yes, yes, let out the shocked gasps of horror and disgust. But I believe there is a good lesson to be learned in the story I'm about to share. Specifically that sometimes you should ask players WHY they cheat. I was young and it was my first actual tabletop game. I was with a group that was both older and had far more experience than I did playing a game. And the game we played was ruthless. I'm talking one mistake would lead to a character dying or the DM throwing a bad guy whose level was equal to the total of the party (I.E. 5 characters at level 2 facing a boss at PC level 10 -> For those who are unfamiliar with D&D, that is not how to balance an encounter.) I as a player, and generally the party, experienced a sense of helplessness and uselessness across months of weekly game sessions with no tangible 'victories' we could claim for ourselves other than the fact our party had survived. Which I'm serious about. To this day, I cannot think of a single victory we achieved. We rarely won random encounters, never once beat the BBEG, and never made a positive impact. -> This led me to lie a couple of rolls that I still feel downright dirty about, even though they were to save either my character or someone else in the party. I cheated because, at the time, I felt completely powerless in the game as a whole. Ultimately this came to a head about a year into the campaign and I vented my frustrations to the DM in a less than healthy way. He told me he was trying to build up dramatic tension for when the party finally turns the tables on the BBEG to save the world, but would adjust his DM style. That lasted for about an hour. I eventually left that group and never looked back. I've been a much happier player since then and soon transitioned into the forever GM spot ;)
As a Storyteller there is one big thing you can do to persuade people not to cheat: Make the Failure States as entertaining as the Success States. One can supplement this by having pathways to success hidden behind Failure States. An example of this would be having a map hidden on a body that can only be accessed by triggering one of the dungeons traps. Do this enough and your players might actually start wondering what the story would have been like if they didn't pass that skill check or take down the mini-boss, knowing that failure doesn't just mean game over. If your players walk away from the table with memories of their epic failure and plotting how to get back on track... then you have done your job as a storyteller well. P.S: It also forces you to think about the failure states a little more, what happens if your group fails X or Y.... Do you have a plan to get the story back on track?
Well said. Some of my best DnD memories were born out of failures. You put it perfectly too failure doesn't have to mean loss, it just means a different path or a greater challenge. It could even help shape the next campaign.
I had my character sheets on a clipboard and had the habit of rolling on the clipboard as well since the table was too soft covered in cloth and it cocked the dice sometimes. Really hard to stop that, but I tried because I realized how suss my rolls looked when i rolled on the 2nd page because that's the ability I was reading, and the first page paper was just being held up in my hand covering it completely. What made me buy a dice tray eventually.
I had to walk away from my favorite group because of a player (my GM was infatuated with) - He snatches up dice for a "convenient" roll of 19 (I saw it was 3, once) - He 'forgets' his spell limits - He overrides others "no don't do that, do this" ... oh okay - He's a severe spotlight hog - He's walked out on a session in a huff when he discovered he wasn't the center of attention - He invented über-damage 'bonus-action' concentration spells (That the GM allowed, sigh) - Oh, and he is 40 years old.
Hi, Seth. It's a pleasure to watch your videos, as always. This particular video hits very close to home. I have only one thing to say about cheating players: Shoot on sight. And if they're the kind that openly brags about their cheating, don't bother with a warning shot. Don't aim for the leg or the shoulder, either. Shoot between the eyes.
The most uncomfortable I've been with this is when a lifelong bestie begged me not to tell our DM when we noticed that an important feat on his Cleric had been substantially nerfed in errata. I wound up having to be honest because it ate at me, and the DM (predictably) just let the old version stand for that campaign. My bestie was going off on me about how if I told it would be my fault when we TPKed, and so forth, so it left a really sour taste in my mouth.
That absolutely wasn't your responsibility, it was on the cleric player and the GM to collaborate to understand the rules of the class. Why did you feel you had to inform the GM about anything to do with your friend's character?
I pulled a “book cooker” a few times and never got caught. I realized that it was kind of pointless. All I did was something different than I would have done while building anxiety in my own head that I’d get caught. So I don’t do it anymore. I just relax and let the game be the game. I enjoy the social and storytelling aspects more, and there’s nothing more fun than dying and giving a speech.
Lived it, learned it the hard way. My current group of players I trust. Had a few bad apple players, over the past 40 years. The relief when they left the group, was palpable. Cheaters are like an infection, impacting everyone else in the game. They do require a careful approach to deal with them, but as you said, once gone, the group, and the game sessions, improve, dramatically! Lack of trust is a disease in an RPG group. If you cannot trust your fellow players, why would your PC not deal with them, one way, or another? That breaks my suspension of disbelief. It just sucks diesel exhaust, IMO. Cheers!
It ought to be a sign of how well you've handled your skit-players during this series that when you decided to make Mike the bad player of this game, my immediate reaction was "This just makes such perfect sense". Throughout the years, "The gang" as they're called have gone from just a joke-scenario from the DMs perspective into genuinely well-defined characters that represent very real player-tropes. I can easily see Todd as "The wild card", kinda the guy who is either full of only brilliant or terrible ideas with nothing in-between, probably the DM's best friend and the one who carries the group's spirit. Dweebles is "The high-concept player", always looking to explore new ideas and new kinds of characters, who's probably the most receptive to the DM's storytelling and good at picking up on and leaning into hooks and general game-tone. Mike is more like the "Player-player", the guy who is super invested into the mechanical/structural side of the games he plays, probably not the most social of the group and is probably the first to have opinions about how the session was run. To those familiar with the "3 types of players" trope that MTG coined, Todd is the Timmy, Dweebles is the Johnny and Mike is the Spike, provided you play a bit more loose with the definitions. In that context, it makes perfect sense that a bad side of Mike would be a temptation to cheat. To him, playing the game is just as, if not more important than the social aspect. While Todd can just chill with his friends around the table and have a good time and Dweebles can shake off bad rolls with focusing on roleplay, Mike might get a bit stumped if his ability to interact with the game world itself gets stunted. He'd probably feel inclined to cheat, maybe just for one roll, if it just meant that the players' plan got to go off. Also, Todd probably just wouldn't break Seth's trust and Dweebles would have no interest in cheating, because he might even enjoy the roleplay opportunity of playing into his in-game failure.
Amazing video Seth. I really appreciate how you highlighted how all of the individual behaviors of "Mike" do not constitute cheating, but the net-effect caused suspicion and stress, ultimately reducing the fun and enjoyment the other players were having. I feel like there is so much "real life" wisdom in this; there are behaviors that we can exhibit that are not themselves bad, but erode trust when the effects are suspicious. You did an great job framing the problem, and your advice at the end is spot-on: talk about it with the player and explain the situation. Framing the problem clearly is really helpful, because you wouldn't go to "Mike" and say "Stop cheating!" because, well, nothing he was doing was explicitly cheating. But you CAN and SHOULD go to "Mike" and say "Hey, when you roll your dice where nobody can see them and then snatch them before other players can see the results, it makes us feel like you're not being honest about your results. Would you mind rolling your dice in the middle of the table like everybody else?" Communication gold. Also the editing and skits in this were gold as well, but that is per usual ;)
There was only one time that a cheater was caught at my table, and I (the DM) didn't even catch him, my players did. I was running a gritty, low level 3rd edition game. We had just finished a game that went from 1-19 and we were all looking forward to going back to "ratcatchers trying to survive" D&D. I think by this point they might've been level 2-3. They didn't have much coin at all, but two of the players had started a small business by pooling their money together - a brewery - and it had made them some coin. I think they had about 100 gold each. They were easily the richest in the group. This other player was playing a cleric and was not part of the brewery business. One day he goes to the blacksmith and asks how much to make a masterwork weapon and suit of armor. For anyone that remembers in 3e the cost is 300 gold plus the cost of the weapon or armor. So the cost of both would've been 600 gold plus whatever the weapon and armor costs. He said he had just enough for both and set the blacksmith to work. I didn't think anything of it. All of a sudden my players are like, "Hey what the heck? Where did you get all of that money?" The player was speechless and unable to answer. They all pointed out that the two guys with the business were the richest and they had only about 100 gold each. We all knew he was cheating because he could not answer them. Had he made an honest mistake, it would've been easy to just say so. One of my players joked that the only way it could've been a mistake is if every time he heard a number he added it to his gold total. I never said a word as a DM. I just let this conversation take place. When it was over, the player with the cleric simply said he guessed he was wrong and dropped the order. I still didn't say a word about it. Despite that, he never came back to play again after that. I actually told my players that I would've happily given him a second chance because I really thought he'd learned his lesson being called out like that - but I guess he was just too ashamed.
I think I played with a cheater recently. What I found was it made me not want to include their character in any of my preparation considerations. In the end even if they weren't cheating we weren't playing well together and we ended up playing without them soon after. It's always a shame when it comes up, but its better to have a smaller group that you trust than a big group that you babysit
We had a player part ways from our group because he didnt feel our vibe which is fine and all but it was a goddamn shame because he was a great roleplayer and his character was amazing and I wanted to see more of him. C'est la vie.
The original rhyme went: "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, Had a wife and couldn't keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell, And there he kept her very well." That being said my family's often said Cheater Cheater when we're joking about cheating at a game or the like so I often muse on both.
Having a group you trust, who trust in you as GM, and all trust each other is such a blessing. It's why I don't game with randos; not that randos are inherently bad, I just don't want to go through a bunch of them to find the good ones.
I think there's an age and experience factor here. When I was a teenager I would have thought changing up a pre printed module to trip up cheating players was the coolest thing ever. But these days I'm firmly in the "why would I even bother playing with people who I had to do that for?" camp. I think its partly experiencing how annoying dealing with untrustworthy people is, and partly thinking more about why you play a game and what you hope to get out of it. I think its similar on the player side too. For video games I've definitely changed my approach from wanting to simply beat them to wanting to beat them my way which often includes not using cheeses or obvious bugs to my advantage. The point is the experience, not the outcome, and I think that's the key difference in thinking.
This is why I love rules lawyer players, and why I am constantly rules-lawyering myself. I have players who hate accidentally fudging rules, so it's nice when you have people who commit the spell list to memory, or who can tell you the exact page number that grappling rules are on.
I've had two groups ruined by cheaters. One was just an ego-maniac who had to be the best at everything and the other was just a slimy weasel who tried to seem like he was the smartest person in the room.
This is the ONLY channel that I watch the ads. You’re worth it. 👍🏻 Also, my group rolls into a dice tray set in the middle of the table so this way nobody can cheat on dice rolls.
I had a guy who was a dice cheater. When it finally got to the point that I was having nightmares about playing with him because everybody and his brother knew he was cheating (he was an “I don’t want to lose” cheater), they all kept begging me to put an end to it, I even mentioned him here in the comments. He was 19 years old at the time, and was really being too obvious about it. I tried confronting him indirectly, tried subtly hinting that “the cheater knows who he is, and needs to stop.” And that didn’t work. So... I somehow uncannily channeled the power of my grandfather in all his “Greatest generation” fury and took him out to the parking lot of my local game store and told him that him cheating would be cute if he was 12, but he was literally old enough to go to war, old enough to be tried as an adult, and told him that kids younger than him were enlisting in the army and dying overseas in foreign conflicts. That shook him hard, and since then he’s been not only a model player, but a really great and creative DM.
Assuming you have created your own adventures, from time to time, I can't be the only one who would be interested in videos about those experiences with "The Boys". I realize it wouldn't be an actual product, but that's not a restriction for your adventure videos, is it? These role-playing meta videos are fun, too. I enjoyed this. I'm glad you have a mix of video types, and I like your philosophical stances on play.
Man, I had a guy who used to be a semi-regular at a store I worked at. I think he had some pathological issues, because he also lied constantly and weirdly. But he cheated all the time. The most surreal thing about it though was that in spite of his cheating, he constantly lost. It was the constant losing that really killed me.
Reminds me of something similar, as I used to work at a LGS and there was this young man who would regularly come in, clearly with some mental impairment issues and from a lower socioeconomic area, really sad actually. His parents would come in to fetch him after leaving him in the store for an afternoon or have him around for the weekend and they weren't living their best lives or having a good time at all. Anyway, this guy also cheated consistently and blatantly and it was often hard to communicate to him why honestly mattered and make him understand that something was wrong with his behaviour. Apparently they had become a regular after being banned from another store after he had been caught stealing but he had started showing up at the LGS long before I started working there. Like your story he also kept failing and losing despite his cheating, nothing funny about it though. There was always this bland expression on his face when his rolls failed, trying to compute how it happened despite him trying to make it work for himself. Again, very sad for the parents, there were a lot of kids coming in much brighter than him and boss man said that he only let him stay because he felt sorry for the parents and wanted them to have a break.
A great video, Seth!!! We had a Peeper in our group for a while, who thought it was funny to look behind the DM's screen to get clues as to what the DM was going to spring on us, then tell the group what he saw, when the DM got up for a beer or soda. I was shocked. He didn't do this with other DMs (we rotate DMs so the DMs can play,) and otherwise was a great player.
I'm still shocked to see you at under 100k subs, seth. You give great reviews and advice. You helped me get to one year of DMing with a crew. I appreciate you, you deserve more subs! Drew
Great stuff! I’ve had to deal with rule breakers as a teacher. I’m pretty sure D&D nerds cheat more in club than they do at school. Your channel is one of the greatest inspirations to start my own channel and to write my own ruleset and home-brew world.
I bought a set that had a d20 with two 20s on it.. I went back to the store, because they had 3-4 other sets of the same color,.and one other set had the dual d20, but the other sets of that color had normal d20s.. So I think it was just some weird flaw. That d20 became our fumble reward. Any time someone rolled a natural 1, they got to roll the dual d20 for their next roll
This is maybe the most insightful video ever made on this subject. Playing a RPG is among other things a matter of trust. Twice so the way that we play it. Our game is mostly an attempt at collective storytelling, which not only means that metagaming would be trivial, since players usually know a LOT more than their characters do, the very nature of how information is handled means that the players will get a wealth of information if they use any scrying ability, where they then need to decide how much of it their characters would know about it. Also, with the depth the characters have, keeping tabs on what the characters know and don't know, would or would not do and what character flaws they have, it would be trivial for players to "conveniently forget" about certain flaws or limitations without me being able to see this in time, because the story must flow and I do not want to interrupt a rich, atmospheric moment to check char sheets. So the rule is simple: You cheat, you leave. It's better for everyone since you obviously don't want to play the same way we do. We want to create a great story that we can tell and retell because it's worth being told. Stories where someone "just happens to be at the right place at the right time all the time" rarely are.
When I got a concussion years ago I suffered from some memory issues and got distracted/light headed easy for a few months. During that time I'd often forget to check off a spell I used or note using arrows/other resources. In one game I was in which was sort of a hop in/hop out at a shop, a new guy showed up and called me a cheater for noticing I didn't mark off a spell one time and tried to get me kicked since he didn't play with cheaters. Totally valid, no one likes cheaters, luckily the DM and another player who I'd play with at this table often stood up for me and said what was going on. The guy apologized profusely and then offered to help me keep track so the DM could focus on the game. He was a good guy and we still do occasional one shots online from time to time. So the section on book keeping really clicked close to home since for a while I had trouble with it. It's easy in a combat to lose track of resources since you're gonna check off a spell only to hear the DM attacking and you gotta focus on that.
Thanks for another great video, Seth! Playing high-level Pathfinder characters can be very COMPLICATED(tm) and I've often made clerical errors (often around if bonuses stack, abilities apply, feats are valid, edge cases are edged, or how effects interact) so I would appreciate more GM and player auditing of my own character sheets!
I'll also say, one of the things I find that many "cheaters" do in the games I've run is either a conscious or unconscious feeling of being unimportant. I noticed this when I first started playing White Wolf games and going through the personal introduction character creation seemed (in my opinion) to lead to a more equitable and honest game play. Once I started trying to apply these types of character interactions during creation and play in my other games it seemed the "problem" people you talk about in this video began to drift away from my table top games. So perhaps a good way to help combat potential cheating is to reinforce the role-playing opportunities and interactions with players at the table. In my mind, if the players feel more important just out of hand they will potentially be less likely to cheat being they are secure in the game at hand. Thanks again for the great video Mr. Skorkowsky, and I can't wait for the next.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between someone who is trying to cheat and someone who just misses or misunderstands parts of the spell/ability description, but if someone is consistently having trouble with spells and abilities, it's still a problem that they should fix, and at a certain point, failing to read the limitations of an ability is little better than cheating.
Accidental cheating can be just as detrimental to a group as purposeful cheating. The malice is outweighed by the fact that you might be sympathetic and feel worse for asking them to stop playing where as with a proven repeat offender cheater booting them is much easier.
Guess I'm lucky that - to my knowlegde - I've never played with cheaters. Some hardcore min-maxers (to the point the rest of the group felt pretty unneccessary; bad enough on its own) and strange (if legal) characters, but no cheaters.
We had a guy like this in our group for a long time and the story was almost identical. He was a snatcher and would often roll dice on the floor and then pick them up and "Oh, it was a 19!" He also min-maxed and then tried to fudge rolls involving his dump stats or use cartoon logic to excuse being able to do things his stats would not allow. (Our group had a very strict strict "no Scooby Doo physics" rule.) Dealing with our cheater took away from our enjoyment of the game. Once he was gone we realized just how much time we had lost dealing with the drama and how much it had broken the immersion of the game. Even if it's not cheating and it really is just a bunch of honest mistakes, it's not fair that everyone has to pull the weight of a player who can't pull their act together. I recently burnt out of a game because of a player who constantly didn't know what any of their character's abilities were, rolled dice on the floor, fiddled with the music player, and occasionally started fights with other players out of game. I eventually said I had to quit because the game was giving me anxiety. DMing means juggling a lot of things at once. It's not fair if you have to pull a disorganized player's work load as well. It'll give you burnout real quick!
Nah, the spell thing was definitely proof. I've had bad bookkeeping and messed up reading descriptions before, and because of that I double and triple check the descriptions to avoid that. I also invite the other players and gm to read the spells and ask for gm rulings if I think my spell slot usage wasn't written down. Your description of his behavior with the spells would leave very little doubt in my mind that he was cheating.
This resonates so much with me. We had a cheater in the past who did most of the tricks - snatching up the dice (and they were the most illegible dice I'd ever seen), conveniently forgetting disadvantages, and cooking the books with his XP. The last one was the most blatant. One time we had 4 different campaigns going with different GMs, and after the character sheets got audited by all the GMs, our "Mike" had too much XP in every one of them. 50% more in a couple of cases. After being made to correct characters, there was a audit later in a couple of games, and guess what, Mike was over-XP again. Or there was the AD&D 2e Dark Sun one-shot. Mike couldn't make it to the character creation session so someone else rolled one up for him (this was in the days when ability scored were literally rolled). The character for Mike had an 18(90-something) percentile Strength, which was a thing in that edition. By two sessions in to the actual game, Mike's character inexplicably had 18(00) Strength. By the third and final session it was 19. That's a special kind of brazenness, to try that at the same table as the player who actually rolled up that character. He always relied on the "honest mistake" excuse (with a side order of indignant "are you trying to say that I'm cheating???!!!"). His best excuse was, in games where you spend XP on your choice of things, claiming that he'd worked out different things to spend XP on and must've accidentally put them all together. I think he knew that nobody was buying his excuses, and knew that we knew, he was just relying on nobody actually confronting him. Eventually we came up with a "three strikes" rule for this kind of thing and he left before he was kicked out. I think frustration drove his cheating. He wasn't really over-performing with his cheated characters, because he played kind of dumb sometimes. The best example was the time he sulked because he took a lot of damage in an AD&D fight (my dice as GM were just really hot attacking him) and wouldn't speak up after the fight when the Cleric player asked if anyone needed healing. Mike just sat, chin on fists, glaring daggers at me silently, even when one of the other players tried prompting him by saying that he seemed to have taken some big hits. Next fight of that day, Mike's PC dropped on the first hit because he was nearly at zero already, and in AD&D2 that meant he was out of action for a full day because nobody had the Heal spell.
Huzzah! Great video sir! I play with a casual cheater, everyone in the group knows it . We have been gaming with them for 15,16 years now so the group pretty much knows exactly when they cheat. He gets called out for it , proof is presented,, we all laugh call him "cheater" and we move forward with the story. I don't know why but we keep him around we always have, he even DM's some. Anyway I just wanted to share my experience with you'all.... be safe out there and may your dice rolls influence the game in wonderful ways.
Sketchy dice behaviour ia a HUGE red flag. And I confess I cooked the books a few times in my 20 years of RPGs. Just happened as a reflex to avoid embarrassing deaths or the death of a character I particularly liked.
I feel called out as someone who plays everything on easy. I never cheer or even fudge as a dm, I just play video games for the rp over the challenge. I want my actions to have consequences. And in most games things are too rail roady to incentivise a more difficult challenge rating. Love the video though! Keep it up you rock my man! Also not saying people can’t enjoy the challenge just not me
>I feel called out as someone who plays everything on easy. Oh here's another pansy who wants regenerating health and everything handed to them in immersion breaking fashion just so they don't have to think or develop ski- >I just play video games for the rp over the challenge ... >I want my actions to have consequences. And in most games things are too rail roady BROTHER. JOIN ME. LET US SMITE THE HERETICS TOGETHER.
OK but those cheater dice would be fun to rig a super high-level boss fight against the party. "Oh, you're going to challenge God to a fist fight? Let me just get my duplicate face d20."
I love the Star Wars shirt! Great content as always, and hope to see you do more with the Glass Cannon crew. The traveler adventure you were a part of was fantastic.
i had a weird encounter with a "cheater" back in the first game i DM'd when i frst started playing a few years ago. My table was 3 friends + 1 random guy from a local D&D facebook group. I wanted 4 players so i asked on the group and he was the one to join. I started the adventure at level 3 and my first flag is he showed up and said "no sorry my character is level 4 so ill be level 4.".... i didnt want to start off fighting with him so i just said sure and bumped the other 3 characters up to 4. Which kind of skewed the encounters i had planned that session but i rolled with it. THEN as we started playing and in the first combat i went to attack him he said "you have to attack me at disadvantage, i have a cloak of displacement".... at that point i told him i hadn't given him any items so no, you don't have a cloak of displacement he got all uppity at me saying his character was an AL character and i couldn't make him give up items he earned in adventure league. At that time i had zero idea what AL was even, and i hadn't advertised my game as being AL(it was a homebrew setting ffs..) The session devolved the last 30 minutes into him and I arguing and i told him he wasn't welcome at the table. He never came back and i've never heard or seen him again (About a year later started playing adventure league a lot, and never ran into him)... a really weird experience. Not sure if you would lump that as cheating but bringing a character with items/levels from other campaigns is suspect, especially without ok'ing it with the DM.
It almost sounds like a bully player more than just straight cheating. He probably thought that he could badger you into agreeing with him and having it where basically he ran the game using you as a puppet/shield. The "I just suggested it but the DM made the call" trick. I think you did the right thing. It might not have felt great but you stood up for yourself and the group as a whole. I've had some players try that but the key is to put up boundaries right away. I've had people say "well, I built this character for level 5 instead of 4" and I tell them straight up that they knew everyone started at level 4 so they better redo the character and this time I'll be sure to help them from scratch. They would come at me but I would tell them straight that everyone at the table agreed to the same thing and they can't change things all by themselves. I would bluntly tell them that if I changed this one thing for them, then to make sure I'm not playing favorites, I'd have to change something for everyone and they might not like the changes the other characters implement. Fair is fair especially when someone wants an edge. I've told people that my game doesn't overlap with any other game so other games don't have any sway on my game. Players can bring up suggestions and have calm discussions but I don't like bullies so I make it a point to put my foot down with behavior like that. My belief is this a group of friends playing a game and if I'm allowing you in, I want us to be friends and friends don't bully and cheat each other. It helps make it where the other players understand that this is their game too and when I say "my game" as a DM, they understand that I'm the figurehead that they can trust to work in their best interest because I'm their friend. I don't mind being the bad guy that tells a person that they have to leave to make sure my group of friends can have fun. Good on you and I hope you don't have to deal with any of that again.
@@pyra4eva OMG ^ This ^ This is worse than a cheater to me. I mean, at least a cheater is still playing the "same game" as everyone else. A bully wants to make it their game, and no one else's. Or when a player just 180's their character and starts doing completely destructive, counter-intuitive crap to your PCs and/or game (another form of PC Bully IMO)? I HATE that...Luckily, not that many encounters with it so far (15+ years, baby!)
@@pyra4eva "Oh don't worry about your mistake. Here take this pregen bard. You can even keep him if you don't want to start with a fresh level 4 next session.". I know it's passive agressive but damn...
Oh, I had a player that was cheating in a completely new for me way. We were playing at a large table, and each time someone rolled in the centre, they had to stand up and lean over to take a look, which wasn't always comfortable. This guy would roll in the middle, and then reach over for the die to drag it closer instead of standing up (understandable, we're not doing squats after all), but if he noticed the result was bad, he'd turn the die to another side in hopes it would be a better result. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. Everyone who say near him saw it, but never could catch him in act, as it was extremely hard to do. The most suspicious thing was when I brought a tray for rolls, and asked to use it (the table was also quite slippery, and the dice often fell on the floor, stalling the game until the player would find their die), he first started getting worse results, and after that decided to leave the game. Asked to join another one recently, which I allowed, but due to the virus we had to switch to online platforms. After he learned that he is not allowed to private rolls in that group, he decided not to come any more. This in turn opened up a spot, and I met a really amazing new player - who unfortunately has some very bad luck with his rolls - so all's good.
You mentioned at the start difficulty (and not wanting to lose) being causes for cheating that should be resolved by mature conversation but I've never actually seen a DM/GM handle that conversation well. I've not once seen a GM lower the game difficulty at the request of the players, and a lot usually react in a very immature way about it. Some systems have metacurrencies (Fate points, bennies etc) that, I think, resolve a lot of these issues by giving players legitimate levers they can pull on for that one time they really want to pass a check but they aren't the default across the board.
The meta currencies are also a psychological tool. Not only can the player fix some "unacceptable" outcomes, they are also more likely to keep track of how often they judge an outcome unacceptable. It's like the differences between a diet where you aren't allowed any sweets and one where you can explicitly have 3 cookies a week. One is easy to label as unreasonable and ignore completely while the other forces you to pay attention to how many damned cookies you are eating.
Because a cheater will never admit his sin. It's just human nature. You shouldn't try to prove it either. It promote an adversarial mindset. Ask for open dice roll and make sure you give player enough time for book keeping. Cheating is killed by proper gaming etiquette.
@@Minodrec I can’t agree with any of what you said. First off some people will come clean, many people have done so in the comments and one of Seth’s players admitted to using a weighted d20. If someone is cheating you should probably catch them in the act if possible, if not then rely on “proper” manners. I’m not suggesting people should hide their dice rolls but they don’t need to make a big show of public rolls. Act normally and all will be fine.
OMG had to pause the video once I saw Todd with the Alien RPG book. I saw that at my local game store a few months back and wanted to pick it up but I couldn't find any reviews on it so fingers crossed that you'll do one.
2:10 this is slightly relevant, but the first long-term D&D campaign I ever played in. It all fell apart when I realized that I actually had spoilers to it. I never seek out spoilers, I was just chronically online. Now I need to know what module the game master is running me through so I can specifically avoid it.
Simple rule set forth during Session Zero: the DM must visually verify all PC die rolls or it’s assumed to have been a 1/failed roll. Consumables are on slips of paper or on index cards with the game stats/effects. Use it and hand it into the DM.
Played Dark Tower with another guy and he read the adventure before hand. This caused the GM at the time to call the game early. A few lucky guesses is one thing but when the last room was revealed. The cheating player blurted out the 44s the GM was writing down were invisible skeletons. Yep afternoon wasted
In my early days, we had a player who snatched dice up immediately, or try to call it after the die rolled off the table.. As a GM I got paranoid and collected players' sheets between games (mostly so people wouldn't forget to bring them) - but there were a few times where the suspicious player had their HP lowered a smidge because in all good faith I could not trust his rolls on level up.
In my opinion, the only real way to distinguish an rpg cheater (when it concerns that forgetful person who neglects to mark used items/spells/etc) is to see if it ever happens to their disadvantage. If they are also forgetting that they had items to use on top of forgetting they already used items, it seems they are making genuine mistakes. It always boggles my mind when people cheat to make their character succeed at every situation; the failures are the best part of the game! Way more fun comes out of suddenly frenetic situations, and its almost always funnier.
Great video. Here's the thing: SOCIETY runs on trust. As soon as trust generally is lost, all bets are off. The gaming environment is just a low stakes version of real life
4:11 THIS IS MY PLAYERS LOL "your job as a DM is to catch me"... and may I add: "if you don't catch me then you deserve to be cheated". This is how my players behaved. Not playing with a group of players that cheat is a cool idea, but most of us are just happy to have any friends to play with. Beggars can't be choosers.
Straight up, I'm actually VERY dyslexic, so any time I join a new group, I flat tell everyone to always feel free to double check my work, cause I'm just error prone, cause it matters that people don't think I'm cheating at the game. Heck, I'll even let players roll for monster attacks sometimes while I'm DMing for that very reason, which has lead to some funny nights where everyone wants the player having bad luck that night to roll the monsters big attack, only to have them nat20 on that ONE roll. lol
@@AGrumpyPanda I have had players have such bad dice rolls that they took their traitor betraying dice out on to the drive, and hit them with a hammer, Of course, that's extreme cases...
They say there's no good definition for "Bad Players", but 'anyone who forces the GM + X amount of other players to focus on their own behavior and away from the game itself' would be a handy one.
I have a player that is a dice cheater, so with this last campaign I set up one of the players to be his rival in game, and asked if they could confirm each other’s rolls. The player that is the rival came to me with his concern before this campaign, so I suggested he make the “lancer” character. This system has worked flawlessly because Chester doesn’t know that he is the reason for it and thought it was an interesting mechanic.
I had a player in Dragon heist who had suspiciously high rolls. I didn’t say anything, but every time he rolled a D20, I wrote down the number. When the players called him out one session and he pled innocence, I pulled out my sheet and told him, “ Even if you had +5 modifiers to ALL your rolls and you took that away, that would mean your average roll on this adventure is still 15, statistically impossible.” I didn’t accuse him of cheating, I just showed him the facts of what he was doing. Either he decided to tone down the cheating so his performance wasn’t so obvious or he quit it altogether but I didn’t have a problem with him throughout the rest of the session. And he’s forever carrying the stigma of being a roll fudger in our groups.
We had a guy like that. Unbeknownst to me, ALL of the other players were also writing down his rolls. One day, we were due to have a major gauntlet test that covered all skills. This "Vegas Luck" player was also a min/maxer, so his part in the gauntlet SHOULD have had sections where his min rolls would cause failures. This was a non-lethal gauntlet. It was like a sporting event series. The PCs trying to get a better score than their NPC counterparts. As there would be so many rolls on my part for the NPC side, I pre-rolled all the NPC rolls and recorded them on a spreadsheet. However, and I didn't announce this, I did mirror the highest rolls in a column designated "SNPC" (Super NPC). When the cheater rolled,it was against this puropsefully-statistically-impossible NPC. Surprise, surprise, surprise... He beat each and every roll easily and often by a great margin. His cheating had already soured the others on the game as it was, myself included, so when he finished establishing his dominance like that, I passed the sheet around and let everyone know that the campaign had ended because, if the cheater continued on his current trajectory, the team would win EVERY battle and best EVERY foe, so there was no need to play it all out. The cheater, without having been openly called out for cheating, left the group soon after and, like in this video, the others played on without that added stress.
3:08 Not to mention one groups player might be another groups DM, and... some people just like to get modals and read them for fun. A lot of the time I'll only use the map and other fluff to fill in details but that's because I just prefer to create my own worlds and not because I'm afraid of cheaters.
I remember a player I used to play d&d with who had these terrible dice that were like a celestial white with gold numbers on them, borderline unreadable from more than 4 feet away, and he always seemed to snatch his dice up really quickly, and he always seemed to pull off that perfect critical hit or passing a save at just the right time, never caught him cheating but always suspected him of it
I made a whole program to tell whether or not if a player was cheating. He was... being able to tell that someone's roll is one out of a quintillion on a regular basis is useful.
You really helped me realize how stressful it is to play with cheaters, I've resolved myself to confront the players in my group who foster an environment where they feel that cheating is acceptable
Covid killed our last D&D game a few months ago. I was super disappointed to learn one player had bought the Curse of Strahd book and was reading way ahead and formulating what to do.
Fully agree with you Seth...I had to deal with that recently....in this Pandemic we have been playing a lot through discord, and one player used the excuse that he had bought dice to play and wanted to use it, but never rolled openly, never on camera nor through the discord bot we use...We play D&D and he never rolled under 15 on d20 and never rolled below half on any other dices...when we questioned him, he got offended and left the group...either way, problem solved...but that sensation of a weight lifted from the shoulders was real for everyone else
Dude, you nailed it again. I totally agree with you. As a game Master i´m not willing to invest time catching someone cheat. All people i´m playing with will have my full trust, till they prove me wrong. We had a online game on discord where everybody was rolling the dice for himself and telling us via voice. This one dude rly had a lot of critical sucesses and i started to get suspicious. The fact that i only knew that dude from online gaming did not help either. So i was prepared to call him out. But because of some other issues with that player he left to take a break and never returned. Now my group is quite better without that nagging distrust in it. I will second your advice not only for cheating players. It does not matter why you feel uncomfortable with a player or his behaviour. Talk to this guy and give him and yourself the chance to understand each other better and maybe your relation will work much much better after that. Don´t wait till the frustration or anger takes hold over your words and actions
"Trust is given, distrust is earned" - well said. Exactly my approach too. It's a game with friends - I don't want to police them.
Seth arrives in front of the Pearly Gates.
St. Peter: Skorkowsky is it? Just let me check your file.
Seth: Am I going to get in?
St. Peter: Oh, I wouldn't worry. This process is practically a formality, just a bit of... hold on, what's this? It says here you fudged a saving roll when you were fourteen years old. Well, let's see if you can make this one.
He presses the button that opens a trap door under Seth's feet into Hell. St. Peter shakes his head.
St. Peter: When will these mortals learn that D&D is built on a foundation of trust?
I'd like to think that when the trap door opens, he makes his saving throw. :p
If you think God will damn someone just because of a childhood lie you're a heretic and you will burn in hell!
@@20catsRPG Wow, calm down it was a joke.
No one actually thinks that. Your not wrong, but it's bit extreme to just to the conclusion from the innitial statment.
No need to purge te here... Alpharius? Aren't you a traitor yourself... Seems fishy.
@@patrickbuckley7259 Erm... I was joking as well. This is hilarious lol
I'm fully convinced that, when I die, as I regain consciousness in the ethereal realm, I'll hear the sound of a D-20 being rolled behind a partition.
I love that the cheater was wearing a "Better Call Saul" t-shirt.
Alleged cheater*
"Your Honor, my client was simply doing what his character would've done"
It's all good man.
This is a social contract issue. Everyone needs to be able to trust each other for the game to function.
Mike as That Guy and Todd as This Guy is a refreshing change of pace
Why spend time with dishonest people? Why play a cooperative game with people who aren’t cooperating? It’s still just a game.
@@twilightgardenspresentatio6384 exactly this. As a GM, I’ve worked hard to
Make sure everyone in my group trusts each other, that we all have our fun at heart. I had a player want to do a big betrayal of the group, and it was a tense and fun experience for everyone BECAUSE EVERYONE TRUSTED EACH OTHER.
I'm just glad Todd finally gets to be the good player :)
#teamDweebles
Yeah he is always wasting Mike and Dweeble's game time roleplaying.
Wait...
@@rolanejo8512#mikeheads will rule the earth
I can confirm the "honest players hate cheaters at a whole other level" aspect. In my case it applies to sports. I am a referee and very proud of my honesty and sportsmanship as a player as well. As a referee I can deal with cheaters myself since I have the authority to do so. But as a player, nothing gets me furious faster than a dirty or cheating opponent, because the fact I refuse to play like that means I'm immediately at an unfair disadvantage, and if the referee isn't taking care of it, I feel completely screwed over for playing the game right.
Dang straight!
Politics feels like that too, lately. Politics needs a good, honest referee.
We have a couple of players that since moving to online play, they no longer fail important rolls. One just...doesn't fail.
@@davidmeloche3563 bit of a necro but don't you roll online as well? my group is rolling open while playing online (all but the DM)
@@elwourmo993 not usually. Once we used the roll 20 roller and it rolled like 4 botches in 6 rolls, so all the GM's said "yeah, not happening.,"
@@davidmeloche3563 interresting, we use the roll 20 diceroller and it seems pretty balanced (if not a bit top heavy) we tracked a couple of sessions and it seemed about even. Don't use it as DM though for hidden rolls and because my players can hear the dicetower even through discord
As an honest person AND player, I've always hated cheaters. We had one in our group who hid his dice, snatched them up, AND used hard-to-read dice. He also had sketchy math for his adds, hit points, and spells. Barely anyone at the table trusted him, and we always joked about how no one could roll like him. If he missed a session, and we had a big combat, we'd always joke that that player could get us out of trouble real quick. But after we had a falling out with him over something else, games got WAY more fun. The jokes were all cynical and frustrated. We weren't ACTUALLY amused by him.
He also had a tendency to push the character making to the breaking point. He'd come up with these characters that were so close to broken, it was ridiculous. He did his research well.
It was determined by the group that he just liked *winning*, which...there is no winning in RPG. He wanted to have the best character, be the one to do the most harm. He loved combat sessions, didn't really care for anything else. He was a bit of a murder hobo. It was very frustrating. And it took a while for the group to get out of the "kill it til it's dead" mentality, and try diplomacy over fighting. Or just leaving the situation if it wasn't important enough. He broke someone's game with that attitude, and the guy never ran for us again until the player left. Which was unfortunate. I loved the guy's games. He was creative, and he was very good at flying by the seat of his pants without making it obvious he was.
Anyway. This video and my rambles were cathartic. Thanks for listening. =P
It helps sometimes! I left a long ass post too lol. In my 15+ years of tabletop, I have ran into a few of this guy (I was sort of that guy when I started). "No Murder Hobo" is my #1 rule when I run DnD lol and I try to structure my stories to encourage roleplay (when I can, I include a roleplay wincon instead of just violence-answers, for instance), or I'll try to set the group up with an area of operations if its a long campaign, so they are at the worst they are "secret methodical serial killers" instead of "murder hobos" lol
Oh I know exactly how you feel, it’s amazing how someone with that type of behavior can affect nearly every group in the same way. I had the misfortune of that person being a long-term friend who had been great at the table for years, which made it very hard to get rid of him.
I used to game with a guy that was kind of like that. But, he also had a positive contribution that was missed when we no longer gamed together. He was both disruptive to the game and was a catalyst for creating interaction in the game.
yeah, the "i want to win the game" types don't get the point of pen and paper in my personal opinion. You're telling a story as a group, imo Mary Sue characters make stories very bland. Whats the point if you know you're always going to win?
"there is no winning in RPG"
I stand by a certain mantra, that there is no wrong way to play a table top game, just players with different goals and wants clashing. Goals that can be realized. When you realize your goal that is called 'winning'. And there almost certainly is a losing condition in the game. It is called dying. But there are other losing conditions too, even for more 'playing house' and drama filled roleplay type games.
If there can be losses there can be wins.
There might not be any ultimate victory in a roleplaying game, but if you genuinely believe there is no winning and losing in smaller stages what are you even doing? Is there even any kind of conflict in your games?
I've had two more-or-less obvious cheaters in my games over my 40+ years of experience. One was such a great guy that everyone liked, so we'd confront him periodically with his cheating and he'd apologize, cop to it, and try to do better. The other the players themselves eventually drummed out by their negativity towards him.
I game primarily online, so it makes spotting cheaters even more difficult. When I start a new game I usually have a discussion with the players about how I run games and expectations. I let them know that I'm going to trust their rolls, but I also try to get them enthusiastic about failing. After all, in role playing games, the most memorable moments often happen when things go horribly wrong. One thing the cheater often overlooks is the fact that winning all the time is just boring.
When I think of cheating, I always remember that old Twilight Zone episode where a guy dies and thinks he has gone to heaven because he literally can't lose at gambling. However, when it gets boring and meaningless he complains that heaven sucks, and his guide says: "What ever made you think this was heaven?" followed by an evil laugh. :)
I think online is the opposite, you can usually have other people's character sheets open (handy if you're trying to help a new player too), looking up a spell or ability to check something is easier than ever if you can just search a pdf or SRD and there's no dice cheating when you're using a virtual tabletop that sends the rolls to everyone.
Only cheating that'd be easier is looking up modules.
@@Electric999999 Dice rolls too.
I used to game primarily online, and it made spotting cheaters... way easier.
My first games were on old message boards so there was a ready log of everything everyone said, same with chat. Only the advent of voice chat has changed this, and at that point I'd rather just play in person if I can.
When we didn't have dice simulators in a chat, the DM did most of the dice rolls and thus was the only person we had to trust. I did it, as well as two of my friends.
Likewise having everyone's character sheet saved to a text file on your computer made book keeping easy.
What a great twilight zone reference! Love that episode! I feel the same way. Cheating makes no sense to me. How is it fun? The fun of the game is the drama. Nothing creates more drama than failure.
In a campaign I am running, one of the player characters was cooky and paranoid so he did long rest in a pool of blood unknown [long story] because the alternative was crates and I had just sprung a mimic on them. Well... as a consequence this pc became a something of a vampire. It was a secret only the player knew. BUT the other players became suspicious. Anyway, during a boss fight in this pool of blood. The boss started to flee and the Paladina dn Barbarian rushed after it so that it would not escape. They both had a series of very unfortunate dice rolls. The Pally fell off the ladder trying to pull the boss back down into the room. The barbarian did not stick her landing trying to get to the pally and help pull him out of the blood. They were both sinking into the blood and failing wisdom saving throws.. the vampire was failing the strength checks. It was just a SPAM of fails.
The vampire's player literally started having tears roll down her cheeks as she desperately wanting to save them from the fate her character suffered.
When they got out of that mess, there was this elation! The boss got away and they were just flailing around in blood but that moment is so memorable for all of us!
100% agree with the statement that if everything goes well all the time it's not as fun. I remember all the times I got my ass handed to me. But not all the times I kicked ass.
At some point a bad habit, like bad book keeping, moves from an honest mistake to cheating even if it is not intentional. If you have been told over and over that what you are doing is incorrect and you make no effort to improve your actions, you are indicating that you prefer things to go the wrong way and now its your choice instead of your error.
I agree. Cheating or not bad dice etiquette and book keeping kills the fun.
I wouldn’t call it cheating but it’s just as bad
I had a cheater that cooked books but he was so inapt at the game it took me a long time to figure out if he really was cheating or was just bad at the game. Turns out it was both.
@@marcar9marcar972 I think of it like murder and manslaughter. The active cheater decided to fudge their inventory to gain an advantage. The chronic bad inventory player gets the same results by not policing their inventory when they don't care.
@@bigblue344 Woah! Maybe they were just trying to level the playing field if they were really that bad. (Joking, no room for cheaters anywhere)
I love the character work in this one, Seth. Mike acting sketchy felt very personal to that character, and very different from how Todd would act suspicious. Really good work man!
Seconded! The gang is my favorite part of the channel. Their "out of character" moments add a lot, too. Like Todd getting tired of being bad and Mike being a bro and stepping in. Makes the whole thing feel really relaxed.
I will say this about the guy Mike is portraying: Everything you mentioned that he seemed to do was mentioned in the Munchkin's Guide to Power Gaming as a method to fudge your die rolls in your favor. The only one he didn't use was tossing his dice towards a cat so that he could chase the die and then declare what he rolled (yes, that's actually in there).
Whenever you release one of these I stop everything I am doing that instant...
I hope that fire alarm was just a drill
P .. Peter .. was .. was it just a drill?!
Having experienced almost the exact same thing with a player I used to play with i totally agree with all your points - including the "stress" or "bad vibes" that the game had while he was in the group. He constantly had higher stats than his XP should allow for, had mysterious amounts of extra hitpoints when needed, rolled-and-snatched his dices, sometimes rolled impossible numbers and so on. He always claimed it being a mistake, or a misunderstanding but eventually we decided to dump his body in the swamp. Or "stop inviting him to join our campaign" as we called it.
My group had a dice-hiding (AND snatching!), ability inflating player who was also a cell phone zombie. After two talks about the problems, and habit modification rules (roll in the open, DM keeps track of ability pools also) the only thing that changed was that the rolls got suddenly worse.
The rest of the group met at a different function, and unanimously agreed that the trouble player had to go. It was uncomfortable to execute, but it has improved our game flow a lot.
I am guilty of all of these, once upon a time. I used to be quite the hoodlum out of high school, running around, selling drugs, and participating in all kinds of crime. I was selling weed to a guy, had to take some to his house while he was running Vampire The Masquerade. I had played some RPG video games in the past (like several Final Fantasy's and Baldor's Gate's), and I was curious how all these nerds get sit around with some paper and pretend all night: SO LAME, RIGHT?!? So I watched them, and they had a blast working together (and against each other) to machinate their way to the top of the city. The third time I stopped by while they were gaming, they invited me to play one. So I got into gaming, but I was scared about doing bad (who isn't?), and I was actually intimidated by how much everyone else knew comparatively. So I cheated. A lot. After about three sessions, my friend, the ST, pulled me aside and calmly said, "Look, I know what your doing, its obvious. This is a story, and if you just feel like things NEED to happen, don't roll. Don't lie to us, just tell us what happens. If it is that important to you, its that important to me." It really surprised me and hit me hard. So the next time I wanted to cheat, I didn't. He had given me his blessing to do anything I wanted: why cheat, right? And I looked at the rest of the group, honestly told them what I rolled, and went with it. I didn't want to fail, but I realized that the story was what was important, and story's have ups and downs - they suck when the hero just walks through every challenge. And while I was "winning" a roll, everyone else was losing story potential. After the game, he sat down with me and (got really high lol) and asked me why it was that I cheated to begin with. We talked about it, and he told me the truth of every game: its all about player experience, not character experience, and the real fun is when everyone makes that experience together, not one person railroading everyone else's experience to suit their own. It's a bit of compromise, but cheating just ruins the experience for everyone except one person, and even then, it screws the cheating player out of a legit experience. We are all at the table for basically the same reason, so act like it. the only time I've cheated as a player since then was purposely failing a roll to make a new player feel better about their crappy roll, because I was that guy some 15-20 years before. I started gaming every weekend, quit partying all the time, and found a new group of friends that helped me transition from a life of crime to a positive, constructive citizen (and gamer extraordinaire, I might add). I not only play, I run now, anything from VtM, 3.5 DnD (all others forms of DnD are inferior lol), and Exalted, to obscure stuff like SLA Industries (SIDE NOTE: NEW SLA INDUSTRIES COMING OUT SOON!), BESM, and Kids On Bikes. If you read all of this, thank you. Have a great day and GLHF/GG!
Glad thing got better for you! Keep up the good work!
A a redemption story. Congrats on your epiphany years ago.
"How gaming saved my soul" - I love it! Props to your amazing friend for reaching out to you, and to you for accepting his offer. This wouldn't have worked out without both.
This comment made my day. Godspeed, you big nerd. Godspeed.
The classic player cheating their arrow count, and when you start counting, they shot 36 arrows out of a 20 arrows quiver.
When you ask, "this is my last one."
You can collect them after battle, in fact a lot of people go by the rule you automatically collect half after battle. If you’re only firing 1 or 2 arrows per battle they’re probably going to round up so it’s not that crazy
@@marcar9marcar972 Yeah but that wasn't the case, he was just not counting them, making like he was, but nope.
"That´s an amazing big quiver you have. May my halfling rent a flat in it?"
We had a few (alleged) dice cheaters at our table. One way we squashed this is by adding a "fun" element to the dice rolls where the d20 was rolled inside the rectangular boxes that the dice sets came in.
The loud clacking was almost celebratory and the box made it easy to lift and show neighbors confirmation of the roll while disabling mis-reads, post-roll-die-turning, and post-roll-pickups. All of the players, both honest and suspect, rolled this way.
The fact that the "near Vegas high roller luck" rolling averages of the suspected cheaters dropped to a "more realistic spread" was a side bonus.
Although, those same players suddenly being unable to make it to game sessions once that happened also kind of confirmed it.
the most hilarious case of cheating I've seen was one of my friends who thought he was an amazing liar but was actually terrible at it. It came to a point where we caught him having double the maximum hp he could have had at that level. needless to say we roasted him pretty hard over that one.
The way you did that dissolve, it was like Mike died and I got very sad for a moment.
Change da world. My final message. Goodb ye.
I had to change some of my gaming habits when I realized some people were suspecting me of cheating. I had many favorite dice sets, and some were of a mottled or marbled color pattern. I'd been using them for several editions and had a sentimental attachment to them. But that was when my eyes were younger. As I approached ty years of age, it got where I was having trouble reading the number against the die color, and started to innocently pick up my d20 after rolling if it rolled too far from me, just to verify the rolled number. I noticed people near me started looking real fast to see what I rolled before I picked the die up. That's when it hit me- they aren't sure I'm doing this on the up and up. I immediately retired those dice and now only use dice I can clearly read from several feet away, in case one rolls farther than I expect. I never thought it looked suspicious, as I had no intend to do anything wrong. This was a very honest group, and no one in it cheats, so correcting that impression as important to our mutual trust.
In a similar incident, I had been sitting next to the DM , and I would often look to him in anticipation for his reaction in tense moments. I assured him I wasn't peeking behind his screen. He responded that I shouldn't worry, that he understood how my old-man glasses worked and what angle I'd have to hold my head to even see his dice and notes at that distance.
I'm old, but at least I'm honest, I guess.
I'd have a talk to them after the session. I'd ask them if they are having issues with the bookkeeping, spell descriptions and so on, just because of the number of mistakes. You never know, they could be dyslexic or have a learning disorder. If they say no, they're fine, then I'd let them know that they need to concentrate more as "too many" mistakes makes it look like cheating, despite their good intentions. If they say yes, then offer support and help to ensure the flow of the game.
This is a good opener even if you know for a fact they are cheating, as it gives them a chance to change behaviors without confrontation.
@@lostbutfreesoul Exactly. It actually gives them a chance to change, whilst saving face. After that if the behaviour continues, it might be time to part ways.
In high school, I had a friend whom I often suspected of cheating when we first started gaming together. After a while, I realized he just had a hilariously low attention span when reading. He would only read the first sentence or two of any rule (or spell, or MtG card, etc.) and was as likely to overlook things that benefited him as limitations. I just got used to having him hand me the rule in question to figure out what part of it he'd missed whenever I wasn't familiar with it or something about his description sounded off.
@@SteveWhipp sadly it may help them develop better cheating skills, like "cheating only when needed and not everytime", "being more subtle on the cheating" or "cheat in a way that helps others instead of you, so the other players become part of the cheating wanting it or not. So you can use them as a shield or convince them that it was for the better fun of the whole table and not just them". Is a complex situation. This happened to me, when confronted a cheater with the same "too many mistakes makes you look like a cheater". u.u
@@sannamy3132 That's certainly a possibility, but on the other hand as Seth pointed out, trust has to be earned and prior to starting a campaign, I'd explain the use of the dice tray and using something like DnD Beyond means I can keep an eye on their character sheets. I don't want to have to do that and I'd stop doing that once I know for a fact I can trust them.
With my current crop of players, the very thought of cheating would be an anathema to them.
Imagine if you went to heaven and St Peter stopped you at the gates and said "You didn't make that saving throw in Secret of Bone Hill. No entry. Back to Earth with you."
Only to earth? Remeber that "A Paladin in Hell" Picture from 2nd edition AD&D Players Handbook? Well, I am pretty sure that guy lied on his saving throw as well...
@@hermes667 I feel like as Seth has repented so much he wouldn't go straight to The Nine Hells. Maybe that Paladin was simultaneously a Cheater and a Rules Lawyer?
About the Peeper:
Jokes on them. Whoever can read my handwriting deserves to know what I've written. Allthough people already told me, that one needs a degree in egyptology, cryptology and klingon to read my writing...
I accept the challenge lmao. I just like trying to read terrible writing.
I always joke that my handwriting isn't messy, I just write shorthand. That I cant read.
I understand the toe-curling memory of "that one time". I read part of a module because I was sure the DM had messed up an important detail; and I still feel sick whenever I think about it. I should have just left the game rather than becoming a dirty rotten cheater. As it was, I left the game shortly afterwards anyway.
It always seems like a good idea and like it is justified in the moment. :/
I love Weebles talking about his "black, black soul" and looking so depressed randomly in the middle of complaining.
Maybe he still has PTSD from finding out that he's an NPC. Oh, and his name.
I play with a mike and Todd. So i always picture them as Mike and Todd. The Todd are really close too.
Hello... Dweebles. 😁
@@fran3ro lol...there is another guy that we used to play with that was clearly the Dweebles.
@@joshbecka6110 So are you saying you are the Seth? Tsk tsk. Arrogant.
But also probably true most people I play D&D with are more like Seth than the other three, though a few veer very Mike.
@@girlbuu9403 as a player that derails games, yes. Yes I do
I'm a half Seth-half Dweebles. Fairly sure everyone's a combination of all four though.
The worst cheater I had loved to super-power his character...wearing a mail shirt while carrying three loaded shotguns and extra ammo, a sidearm with magazines of ammo, a pair of swords on his back, pockets with pre-fused dynamite inside his long coat, and so on. His character was carrying three times the weight a stout man can carry a short distance. This was not some clerical error, but a continuing effort to game the game to make his PC invincible. He also did things like having one PC killed in combat leave everything to his new PC in the first PC's will, even though there was no reasonable way the two PCs could ever have met. It was at once tiresome and fascinating...waiting to see what the next bit of BS cheating he'd come up with was always interesting. A GM should not have to police the players; if you have players like this guy, dump him. He was, in the end, more annoying than fun to game with.
To be fair why did the Gm allow any of this. I get cheating like bad book keeping and fudging rolls can be hard to catch but if the DM is allowing this it’s not cheating and instead bad dming, bad playing too but still
@@marcar9marcar972 I was the GM; I didn't know he was doing it until we were in play and I noticed his character always seemed to have this or that as needed. I looked at his character sheet and was WTF?!
I mean if he's always carrying explosives with him, them all go off when he dies. Simple solution...
@@alexanderchippel That's what happened to that PC...small arms fire hit the dynamite while he was wearing up. KABOOM. Super PC died...what a shame.
Leaving one of your powerful items to a relative could actually be an interesting and sad quest for your party to do. Fulfilling your final wishes after your death.
Great video as always Seth! I do have a personal story involving cheating: specifically the time I did it.
Yes, yes, let out the shocked gasps of horror and disgust. But I believe there is a good lesson to be learned in the story I'm about to share. Specifically that sometimes you should ask players WHY they cheat.
I was young and it was my first actual tabletop game. I was with a group that was both older and had far more experience than I did playing a game. And the game we played was ruthless. I'm talking one mistake would lead to a character dying or the DM throwing a bad guy whose level was equal to the total of the party (I.E. 5 characters at level 2 facing a boss at PC level 10 -> For those who are unfamiliar with D&D, that is not how to balance an encounter.) I as a player, and generally the party, experienced a sense of helplessness and uselessness across months of weekly game sessions with no tangible 'victories' we could claim for ourselves other than the fact our party had survived. Which I'm serious about. To this day, I cannot think of a single victory we achieved. We rarely won random encounters, never once beat the BBEG, and never made a positive impact. -> This led me to lie a couple of rolls that I still feel downright dirty about, even though they were to save either my character or someone else in the party. I cheated because, at the time, I felt completely powerless in the game as a whole.
Ultimately this came to a head about a year into the campaign and I vented my frustrations to the DM in a less than healthy way. He told me he was trying to build up dramatic tension for when the party finally turns the tables on the BBEG to save the world, but would adjust his DM style. That lasted for about an hour. I eventually left that group and never looked back. I've been a much happier player since then and soon transitioned into the forever GM spot ;)
As a Storyteller there is one big thing you can do to persuade people not to cheat:
Make the Failure States as entertaining as the Success States.
One can supplement this by having pathways to success hidden behind Failure States. An example of this would be having a map hidden on a body that can only be accessed by triggering one of the dungeons traps. Do this enough and your players might actually start wondering what the story would have been like if they didn't pass that skill check or take down the mini-boss, knowing that failure doesn't just mean game over. If your players walk away from the table with memories of their epic failure and plotting how to get back on track... then you have done your job as a storyteller well.
P.S:
It also forces you to think about the failure states a little more, what happens if your group fails X or Y....
Do you have a plan to get the story back on track?
Well said. Some of my best DnD memories were born out of failures.
You put it perfectly too failure doesn't have to mean loss, it just means a different path or a greater challenge. It could even help shape the next campaign.
I had my character sheets on a clipboard and had the habit of rolling on the clipboard as well since the table was too soft covered in cloth and it cocked the dice sometimes. Really hard to stop that, but I tried because I realized how suss my rolls looked when i rolled on the 2nd page because that's the ability I was reading, and the first page paper was just being held up in my hand covering it completely. What made me buy a dice tray eventually.
The knowing looks between the honest players totally makes this.
I had to walk away from my favorite group because of a player (my GM was infatuated with)
- He snatches up dice for a "convenient" roll of 19 (I saw it was 3, once)
- He 'forgets' his spell limits
- He overrides others "no don't do that, do this" ... oh okay
- He's a severe spotlight hog
- He's walked out on a session in a huff when he discovered he wasn't the center of attention
- He invented über-damage 'bonus-action' concentration spells (That the GM allowed, sigh)
- Oh, and he is 40 years old.
Hi, Seth. It's a pleasure to watch your videos, as always. This particular video hits very close to home. I have only one thing to say about cheating players: Shoot on sight. And if they're the kind that openly brags about their cheating, don't bother with a warning shot. Don't aim for the leg or the shoulder, either. Shoot between the eyes.
Love the way you look at this topic. Yeah, the key thing is not playing with people you don't trust.
The most uncomfortable I've been with this is when a lifelong bestie begged me not to tell our DM when we noticed that an important feat on his Cleric had been substantially nerfed in errata. I wound up having to be honest because it ate at me, and the DM (predictably) just let the old version stand for that campaign. My bestie was going off on me about how if I told it would be my fault when we TPKed, and so forth, so it left a really sour taste in my mouth.
They sound like even if they're a good friend, you shouldn't do RPG's with them
That absolutely wasn't your responsibility, it was on the cleric player and the GM to collaborate to understand the rules of the class.
Why did you feel you had to inform the GM about anything to do with your friend's character?
I pulled a “book cooker” a few times and never got caught. I realized that it was kind of pointless. All I did was something different than I would have done while building anxiety in my own head that I’d get caught. So I don’t do it anymore. I just relax and let the game be the game. I enjoy the social and storytelling aspects more, and there’s nothing more fun than dying and giving a speech.
Lived it, learned it the hard way. My current group of players I trust. Had a few bad apple players, over the past 40 years. The relief when they left the group, was palpable. Cheaters are like an infection, impacting everyone else in the game. They do require a careful approach to deal with them, but as you said, once gone, the group, and the game sessions, improve, dramatically! Lack of trust is a disease in an RPG group. If you cannot trust your fellow players, why would your PC not deal with them, one way, or another? That breaks my suspension of disbelief. It just sucks diesel exhaust, IMO. Cheers!
It ought to be a sign of how well you've handled your skit-players during this series that when you decided to make Mike the bad player of this game, my immediate reaction was "This just makes such perfect sense".
Throughout the years, "The gang" as they're called have gone from just a joke-scenario from the DMs perspective into genuinely well-defined characters that represent very real player-tropes. I can easily see Todd as "The wild card", kinda the guy who is either full of only brilliant or terrible ideas with nothing in-between, probably the DM's best friend and the one who carries the group's spirit. Dweebles is "The high-concept player", always looking to explore new ideas and new kinds of characters, who's probably the most receptive to the DM's storytelling and good at picking up on and leaning into hooks and general game-tone. Mike is more like the "Player-player", the guy who is super invested into the mechanical/structural side of the games he plays, probably not the most social of the group and is probably the first to have opinions about how the session was run. To those familiar with the "3 types of players" trope that MTG coined, Todd is the Timmy, Dweebles is the Johnny and Mike is the Spike, provided you play a bit more loose with the definitions.
In that context, it makes perfect sense that a bad side of Mike would be a temptation to cheat. To him, playing the game is just as, if not more important than the social aspect. While Todd can just chill with his friends around the table and have a good time and Dweebles can shake off bad rolls with focusing on roleplay, Mike might get a bit stumped if his ability to interact with the game world itself gets stunted. He'd probably feel inclined to cheat, maybe just for one roll, if it just meant that the players' plan got to go off. Also, Todd probably just wouldn't break Seth's trust and Dweebles would have no interest in cheating, because he might even enjoy the roleplay opportunity of playing into his in-game failure.
Amazing video Seth. I really appreciate how you highlighted how all of the individual behaviors of "Mike" do not constitute cheating, but the net-effect caused suspicion and stress, ultimately reducing the fun and enjoyment the other players were having. I feel like there is so much "real life" wisdom in this; there are behaviors that we can exhibit that are not themselves bad, but erode trust when the effects are suspicious. You did an great job framing the problem, and your advice at the end is spot-on: talk about it with the player and explain the situation.
Framing the problem clearly is really helpful, because you wouldn't go to "Mike" and say "Stop cheating!" because, well, nothing he was doing was explicitly cheating. But you CAN and SHOULD go to "Mike" and say "Hey, when you roll your dice where nobody can see them and then snatch them before other players can see the results, it makes us feel like you're not being honest about your results. Would you mind rolling your dice in the middle of the table like everybody else?" Communication gold.
Also the editing and skits in this were gold as well, but that is per usual ;)
There was only one time that a cheater was caught at my table, and I (the DM) didn't even catch him, my players did.
I was running a gritty, low level 3rd edition game. We had just finished a game that went from 1-19 and we were all looking forward to going back to "ratcatchers trying to survive" D&D.
I think by this point they might've been level 2-3. They didn't have much coin at all, but two of the players had started a small business by pooling their money together - a brewery - and it had made them some coin. I think they had about 100 gold each. They were easily the richest in the group.
This other player was playing a cleric and was not part of the brewery business. One day he goes to the blacksmith and asks how much to make a masterwork weapon and suit of armor. For anyone that remembers in 3e the cost is 300 gold plus the cost of the weapon or armor. So the cost of both would've been 600 gold plus whatever the weapon and armor costs.
He said he had just enough for both and set the blacksmith to work. I didn't think anything of it. All of a sudden my players are like, "Hey what the heck? Where did you get all of that money?" The player was speechless and unable to answer. They all pointed out that the two guys with the business were the richest and they had only about 100 gold each.
We all knew he was cheating because he could not answer them. Had he made an honest mistake, it would've been easy to just say so. One of my players joked that the only way it could've been a mistake is if every time he heard a number he added it to his gold total.
I never said a word as a DM. I just let this conversation take place. When it was over, the player with the cleric simply said he guessed he was wrong and dropped the order. I still didn't say a word about it. Despite that, he never came back to play again after that. I actually told my players that I would've happily given him a second chance because I really thought he'd learned his lesson being called out like that - but I guess he was just too ashamed.
I think I played with a cheater recently. What I found was it made me not want to include their character in any of my preparation considerations. In the end even if they weren't cheating we weren't playing well together and we ended up playing without them soon after. It's always a shame when it comes up, but its better to have a smaller group that you trust than a big group that you babysit
We had a player part ways from our group because he didnt feel our vibe which is fine and all but it was a goddamn shame because he was a great roleplayer and his character was amazing and I wanted to see more of him. C'est la vie.
Wait... is it not “cheater cheater pumpkin eater?” That’s what I say!!!
The original rhyme went:
"Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well."
That being said my family's often said Cheater Cheater when we're joking about cheating at a game or the like so I often muse on both.
I say it.
I think it was in an episode of SpongeBob
@@Danmarinja I think that was "Liar liar plants for hire"
Having a group you trust, who trust in you as GM, and all trust each other is such a blessing. It's why I don't game with randos; not that randos are inherently bad, I just don't want to go through a bunch of them to find the good ones.
I think there's an age and experience factor here. When I was a teenager I would have thought changing up a pre printed module to trip up cheating players was the coolest thing ever. But these days I'm firmly in the "why would I even bother playing with people who I had to do that for?" camp.
I think its partly experiencing how annoying dealing with untrustworthy people is, and partly thinking more about why you play a game and what you hope to get out of it. I think its similar on the player side too. For video games I've definitely changed my approach from wanting to simply beat them to wanting to beat them my way which often includes not using cheeses or obvious bugs to my advantage. The point is the experience, not the outcome, and I think that's the key difference in thinking.
This is why I love rules lawyer players, and why I am constantly rules-lawyering myself. I have players who hate accidentally fudging rules, so it's nice when you have people who commit the spell list to memory, or who can tell you the exact page number that grappling rules are on.
I've had two groups ruined by cheaters. One was just an ego-maniac who had to be the best at everything and the other was just a slimy weasel who tried to seem like he was the smartest person in the room.
This is the ONLY channel that I watch the ads. You’re worth it. 👍🏻 Also, my group rolls into a dice tray set in the middle of the table so this way nobody can cheat on dice rolls.
I had a guy who was a dice cheater. When it finally got to the point that I was having nightmares about playing with him because everybody and his brother knew he was cheating (he was an “I don’t want to lose” cheater), they all kept begging me to put an end to it, I even mentioned him here in the comments. He was 19 years old at the time, and was really being too obvious about it. I tried confronting him indirectly, tried subtly hinting that “the cheater knows who he is, and needs to stop.” And that didn’t work. So... I somehow uncannily channeled the power of my grandfather in all his “Greatest generation” fury and took him out to the parking lot of my local game store and told him that him cheating would be cute if he was 12, but he was literally old enough to go to war, old enough to be tried as an adult, and told him that kids younger than him were enlisting in the army and dying overseas in foreign conflicts. That shook him hard, and since then he’s been not only a model player, but a really great and creative DM.
Assuming you have created your own adventures, from time to time, I can't be the only one who would be interested in videos about those experiences with "The Boys". I realize it wouldn't be an actual product, but that's not a restriction for your adventure videos, is it?
These role-playing meta videos are fun, too. I enjoyed this. I'm glad you have a mix of video types, and I like your philosophical stances on play.
Man, I had a guy who used to be a semi-regular at a store I worked at. I think he had some pathological issues, because he also lied constantly and weirdly. But he cheated all the time. The most surreal thing about it though was that in spite of his cheating, he constantly lost. It was the constant losing that really killed me.
Reminds me of something similar, as I used to work at a LGS and there was this young man who would regularly come in, clearly with some mental impairment issues and from a lower socioeconomic area, really sad actually. His parents would come in to fetch him after leaving him in the store for an afternoon or have him around for the weekend and they weren't living their best lives or having a good time at all. Anyway, this guy also cheated consistently and blatantly and it was often hard to communicate to him why honestly mattered and make him understand that something was wrong with his behaviour. Apparently they had become a regular after being banned from another store after he had been caught stealing but he had started showing up at the LGS long before I started working there. Like your story he also kept failing and losing despite his cheating, nothing funny about it though. There was always this bland expression on his face when his rolls failed, trying to compute how it happened despite him trying to make it work for himself. Again, very sad for the parents, there were a lot of kids coming in much brighter than him and boss man said that he only let him stay because he felt sorry for the parents and wanted them to have a break.
@@KarmaSpaz12 Yeesh.
13:36 As a person who has worked hard my whole life to be honest and have integrity, this statement is SPOT ON!!
A great video, Seth!!! We had a Peeper in our group for a while, who thought it was funny to look behind the DM's screen to get clues as to what the DM was going to spring on us, then tell the group what he saw, when the DM got up for a beer or soda. I was shocked. He didn't do this with other DMs (we rotate DMs so the DMs can play,) and otherwise was a great player.
Just wanna say thank you for all of your insights. I can honestly say I'm a better DM because of them. Thanks again for all your efforts.
I'm still shocked to see you at under 100k subs, seth. You give great reviews and advice. You helped me get to one year of DMing with a crew. I appreciate you, you deserve more subs!
Drew
Great stuff!
I’ve had to deal with rule breakers as a teacher. I’m pretty sure D&D nerds cheat more in club than they do at school.
Your channel is one of the greatest inspirations to start my own channel and to write my own ruleset and home-brew world.
I bought a set that had a d20 with two 20s on it.. I went back to the store, because they had 3-4 other sets of the same color,.and one other set had the dual d20, but the other sets of that color had normal d20s.. So I think it was just some weird flaw.
That d20 became our fumble reward. Any time someone rolled a natural 1, they got to roll the dual d20 for their next roll
This is maybe the most insightful video ever made on this subject.
Playing a RPG is among other things a matter of trust. Twice so the way that we play it. Our game is mostly an attempt at collective storytelling, which not only means that metagaming would be trivial, since players usually know a LOT more than their characters do, the very nature of how information is handled means that the players will get a wealth of information if they use any scrying ability, where they then need to decide how much of it their characters would know about it.
Also, with the depth the characters have, keeping tabs on what the characters know and don't know, would or would not do and what character flaws they have, it would be trivial for players to "conveniently forget" about certain flaws or limitations without me being able to see this in time, because the story must flow and I do not want to interrupt a rich, atmospheric moment to check char sheets.
So the rule is simple: You cheat, you leave. It's better for everyone since you obviously don't want to play the same way we do.
We want to create a great story that we can tell and retell because it's worth being told. Stories where someone "just happens to be at the right place at the right time all the time" rarely are.
Todd is a good player?!
*Happy Player noises!*
When I got a concussion years ago I suffered from some memory issues and got distracted/light headed easy for a few months. During that time I'd often forget to check off a spell I used or note using arrows/other resources. In one game I was in which was sort of a hop in/hop out at a shop, a new guy showed up and called me a cheater for noticing I didn't mark off a spell one time and tried to get me kicked since he didn't play with cheaters. Totally valid, no one likes cheaters, luckily the DM and another player who I'd play with at this table often stood up for me and said what was going on. The guy apologized profusely and then offered to help me keep track so the DM could focus on the game. He was a good guy and we still do occasional one shots online from time to time. So the section on book keeping really clicked close to home since for a while I had trouble with it. It's easy in a combat to lose track of resources since you're gonna check off a spell only to hear the DM attacking and you gotta focus on that.
It's fitting that you posted this in October, because cheaters are pumpkin eaters.
I'd just like to say how much I appreciate your acting as different players.
Thanks for another great video, Seth! Playing high-level Pathfinder characters can be very COMPLICATED(tm) and I've often made clerical errors (often around if bonuses stack, abilities apply, feats are valid, edge cases are edged, or how effects interact) so I would appreciate more GM and player auditing of my own character sheets!
I'll also say, one of the things I find that many "cheaters" do in the games I've run is either a conscious or unconscious feeling of being unimportant. I noticed this when I first started playing White Wolf games and going through the personal introduction character creation seemed (in my opinion) to lead to a more equitable and honest game play. Once I started trying to apply these types of character interactions during creation and play in my other games it seemed the "problem" people you talk about in this video began to drift away from my table top games.
So perhaps a good way to help combat potential cheating is to reinforce the role-playing opportunities and interactions with players at the table. In my mind, if the players feel more important just out of hand they will potentially be less likely to cheat being they are secure in the game at hand.
Thanks again for the great video Mr. Skorkowsky, and I can't wait for the next.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between someone who is trying to cheat and someone who just misses or misunderstands parts of the spell/ability description, but if someone is consistently having trouble with spells and abilities, it's still a problem that they should fix, and at a certain point, failing to read the limitations of an ability is little better than cheating.
Accidental cheating can be just as detrimental to a group as purposeful cheating. The malice is outweighed by the fact that you might be sympathetic and feel worse for asking them to stop playing where as with a proven repeat offender cheater booting them is much easier.
Guess I'm lucky that - to my knowlegde - I've never played with cheaters. Some hardcore min-maxers (to the point the rest of the group felt pretty unneccessary; bad enough on its own) and strange (if legal) characters, but no cheaters.
We had a guy like this in our group for a long time and the story was almost identical. He was a snatcher and would often roll dice on the floor and then pick them up and "Oh, it was a 19!" He also min-maxed and then tried to fudge rolls involving his dump stats or use cartoon logic to excuse being able to do things his stats would not allow. (Our group had a very strict strict "no Scooby Doo physics" rule.) Dealing with our cheater took away from our enjoyment of the game. Once he was gone we realized just how much time we had lost dealing with the drama and how much it had broken the immersion of the game.
Even if it's not cheating and it really is just a bunch of honest mistakes, it's not fair that everyone has to pull the weight of a player who can't pull their act together. I recently burnt out of a game because of a player who constantly didn't know what any of their character's abilities were, rolled dice on the floor, fiddled with the music player, and occasionally started fights with other players out of game. I eventually said I had to quit because the game was giving me anxiety. DMing means juggling a lot of things at once. It's not fair if you have to pull a disorganized player's work load as well. It'll give you burnout real quick!
Nah, the spell thing was definitely proof. I've had bad bookkeeping and messed up reading descriptions before, and because of that I double and triple check the descriptions to avoid that. I also invite the other players and gm to read the spells and ask for gm rulings if I think my spell slot usage wasn't written down. Your description of his behavior with the spells would leave very little doubt in my mind that he was cheating.
This resonates so much with me. We had a cheater in the past who did most of the tricks - snatching up the dice (and they were the most illegible dice I'd ever seen), conveniently forgetting disadvantages, and cooking the books with his XP. The last one was the most blatant. One time we had 4 different campaigns going with different GMs, and after the character sheets got audited by all the GMs, our "Mike" had too much XP in every one of them. 50% more in a couple of cases. After being made to correct characters, there was a audit later in a couple of games, and guess what, Mike was over-XP again.
Or there was the AD&D 2e Dark Sun one-shot. Mike couldn't make it to the character creation session so someone else rolled one up for him (this was in the days when ability scored were literally rolled). The character for Mike had an 18(90-something) percentile Strength, which was a thing in that edition. By two sessions in to the actual game, Mike's character inexplicably had 18(00) Strength. By the third and final session it was 19. That's a special kind of brazenness, to try that at the same table as the player who actually rolled up that character.
He always relied on the "honest mistake" excuse (with a side order of indignant "are you trying to say that I'm cheating???!!!"). His best excuse was, in games where you spend XP on your choice of things, claiming that he'd worked out different things to spend XP on and must've accidentally put them all together.
I think he knew that nobody was buying his excuses, and knew that we knew, he was just relying on nobody actually confronting him. Eventually we came up with a "three strikes" rule for this kind of thing and he left before he was kicked out.
I think frustration drove his cheating. He wasn't really over-performing with his cheated characters, because he played kind of dumb sometimes. The best example was the time he sulked because he took a lot of damage in an AD&D fight (my dice as GM were just really hot attacking him) and wouldn't speak up after the fight when the Cleric player asked if anyone needed healing. Mike just sat, chin on fists, glaring daggers at me silently, even when one of the other players tried prompting him by saying that he seemed to have taken some big hits. Next fight of that day, Mike's PC dropped on the first hit because he was nearly at zero already, and in AD&D2 that meant he was out of action for a full day because nobody had the Heal spell.
Huzzah! Great video sir! I play with a casual cheater, everyone in the group knows it . We have been gaming with them for 15,16 years now so the group pretty much knows exactly when they cheat. He gets called out for it , proof is presented,, we all laugh call him "cheater" and we move forward with the story. I don't know why but we keep him around we always have, he even DM's some. Anyway I just wanted to share my experience with you'all.... be safe out there and may your dice rolls influence the game in wonderful ways.
I like that Mike and Todd switch on the episode where the bad player also has to be somewhat clever.
Sketchy dice behaviour ia a HUGE red flag. And I confess I cooked the books a few times in my 20 years of RPGs. Just happened as a reflex to avoid embarrassing deaths or the death of a character I particularly liked.
I feel called out as someone who plays everything on easy. I never cheer or even fudge as a dm, I just play video games for the rp over the challenge. I want my actions to have consequences. And in most games things are too rail roady to incentivise a more difficult challenge rating. Love the video though! Keep it up you rock my man! Also not saying people can’t enjoy the challenge just not me
>I feel called out as someone who plays everything on easy.
Oh here's another pansy who wants regenerating health and everything handed to them in immersion breaking fashion just so they don't have to think or develop ski-
>I just play video games for the rp over the challenge
...
>I want my actions to have consequences. And in most games things are too rail roady
BROTHER. JOIN ME. LET US SMITE THE HERETICS TOGETHER.
OK but those cheater dice would be fun to rig a super high-level boss fight against the party. "Oh, you're going to challenge God to a fist fight? Let me just get my duplicate face d20."
I love the Star Wars shirt! Great content as always, and hope to see you do more with the Glass Cannon crew. The traveler adventure you were a part of was fantastic.
i had a weird encounter with a "cheater" back in the first game i DM'd when i frst started playing a few years ago. My table was 3 friends + 1 random guy from a local D&D facebook group. I wanted 4 players so i asked on the group and he was the one to join. I started the adventure at level 3 and my first flag is he showed up and said "no sorry my character is level 4 so ill be level 4.".... i didnt want to start off fighting with him so i just said sure and bumped the other 3 characters up to 4. Which kind of skewed the encounters i had planned that session but i rolled with it. THEN as we started playing and in the first combat i went to attack him he said "you have to attack me at disadvantage, i have a cloak of displacement".... at that point i told him i hadn't given him any items so no, you don't have a cloak of displacement he got all uppity at me saying his character was an AL character and i couldn't make him give up items he earned in adventure league. At that time i had zero idea what AL was even, and i hadn't advertised my game as being AL(it was a homebrew setting ffs..) The session devolved the last 30 minutes into him and I arguing and i told him he wasn't welcome at the table. He never came back and i've never heard or seen him again (About a year later started playing adventure league a lot, and never ran into him)... a really weird experience. Not sure if you would lump that as cheating but bringing a character with items/levels from other campaigns is suspect, especially without ok'ing it with the DM.
Not cheating but he was in the wrong. Probably thought all D&D was adventure league stuff like some sort of MMO video game.
It almost sounds like a bully player more than just straight cheating. He probably thought that he could badger you into agreeing with him and having it where basically he ran the game using you as a puppet/shield. The "I just suggested it but the DM made the call" trick. I think you did the right thing. It might not have felt great but you stood up for yourself and the group as a whole. I've had some players try that but the key is to put up boundaries right away. I've had people say "well, I built this character for level 5 instead of 4" and I tell them straight up that they knew everyone started at level 4 so they better redo the character and this time I'll be sure to help them from scratch. They would come at me but I would tell them straight that everyone at the table agreed to the same thing and they can't change things all by themselves. I would bluntly tell them that if I changed this one thing for them, then to make sure I'm not playing favorites, I'd have to change something for everyone and they might not like the changes the other characters implement. Fair is fair especially when someone wants an edge. I've told people that my game doesn't overlap with any other game so other games don't have any sway on my game. Players can bring up suggestions and have calm discussions but I don't like bullies so I make it a point to put my foot down with behavior like that. My belief is this a group of friends playing a game and if I'm allowing you in, I want us to be friends and friends don't bully and cheat each other. It helps make it where the other players understand that this is their game too and when I say "my game" as a DM, they understand that I'm the figurehead that they can trust to work in their best interest because I'm their friend. I don't mind being the bad guy that tells a person that they have to leave to make sure my group of friends can have fun. Good on you and I hope you don't have to deal with any of that again.
@@pyra4eva OMG ^ This ^
This is worse than a cheater to me. I mean, at least a cheater is still playing the "same game" as everyone else. A bully wants to make it their game, and no one else's. Or when a player just 180's their character and starts doing completely destructive, counter-intuitive crap to your PCs and/or game (another form of PC Bully IMO)? I HATE that...Luckily, not that many encounters with it so far (15+ years, baby!)
May not be cheating per say but definitely not following the rules. I'd say cheating is to secretly not follow the rules
@@pyra4eva "Oh don't worry about your mistake. Here take this pregen bard. You can even keep him if you don't want to start with a fresh level 4 next session.". I know it's passive agressive but damn...
Oh, I had a player that was cheating in a completely new for me way. We were playing at a large table, and each time someone rolled in the centre, they had to stand up and lean over to take a look, which wasn't always comfortable. This guy would roll in the middle, and then reach over for the die to drag it closer instead of standing up (understandable, we're not doing squats after all), but if he noticed the result was bad, he'd turn the die to another side in hopes it would be a better result. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. Everyone who say near him saw it, but never could catch him in act, as it was extremely hard to do.
The most suspicious thing was when I brought a tray for rolls, and asked to use it (the table was also quite slippery, and the dice often fell on the floor, stalling the game until the player would find their die), he first started getting worse results, and after that decided to leave the game.
Asked to join another one recently, which I allowed, but due to the virus we had to switch to online platforms. After he learned that he is not allowed to private rolls in that group, he decided not to come any more. This in turn opened up a spot, and I met a really amazing new player - who unfortunately has some very bad luck with his rolls - so all's good.
You mentioned at the start difficulty (and not wanting to lose) being causes for cheating that should be resolved by mature conversation but I've never actually seen a DM/GM handle that conversation well. I've not once seen a GM lower the game difficulty at the request of the players, and a lot usually react in a very immature way about it.
Some systems have metacurrencies (Fate points, bennies etc) that, I think, resolve a lot of these issues by giving players legitimate levers they can pull on for that one time they really want to pass a check but they aren't the default across the board.
The meta currencies are also a psychological tool. Not only can the player fix some "unacceptable" outcomes, they are also more likely to keep track of how often they judge an outcome unacceptable. It's like the differences between a diet where you aren't allowed any sweets and one where you can explicitly have 3 cookies a week. One is easy to label as unreasonable and ignore completely while the other forces you to pay attention to how many damned cookies you are eating.
Because a cheater will never admit his sin. It's just human nature. You shouldn't try to prove it either. It promote an adversarial mindset. Ask for open dice roll and make sure you give player enough time for book keeping. Cheating is killed by proper gaming etiquette.
@@Minodrec I can’t agree with any of what you said. First off some people will come clean, many people have done so in the comments and one of Seth’s players admitted to using a weighted d20. If someone is cheating you should probably catch them in the act if possible, if not then rely on “proper” manners. I’m not suggesting people should hide their dice rolls but they don’t need to make a big show of public rolls. Act normally and all will be fine.
OMG had to pause the video once I saw Todd with the Alien RPG book. I saw that at my local game store a few months back and wanted to pick it up but I couldn't find any reviews on it so fingers crossed that you'll do one.
2:10 this is slightly relevant, but the first long-term D&D campaign I ever played in. It all fell apart when I realized that I actually had spoilers to it. I never seek out spoilers, I was just chronically online. Now I need to know what module the game master is running me through so I can specifically avoid it.
Simple rule set forth during Session Zero: the DM must visually verify all PC die rolls or it’s assumed to have been a 1/failed roll.
Consumables are on slips of paper or on index cards with the game stats/effects. Use it and hand it into the DM.
Played Dark Tower with another guy and he read the adventure before hand. This caused the GM at the time to call the game early. A few lucky guesses is one thing but when the last room was revealed. The cheating player blurted out the 44s the GM was writing down were invisible skeletons. Yep afternoon wasted
In my early days, we had a player who snatched dice up immediately, or try to call it after the die rolled off the table.. As a GM I got paranoid and collected players' sheets between games (mostly so people wouldn't forget to bring them) - but there were a few times where the suspicious player had their HP lowered a smidge because in all good faith I could not trust his rolls on level up.
In my opinion, the only real way to distinguish an rpg cheater (when it concerns that forgetful person who neglects to mark used items/spells/etc) is to see if it ever happens to their disadvantage. If they are also forgetting that they had items to use on top of forgetting they already used items, it seems they are making genuine mistakes. It always boggles my mind when people cheat to make their character succeed at every situation; the failures are the best part of the game! Way more fun comes out of suddenly frenetic situations, and its almost always funnier.
Great video. Here's the thing: SOCIETY runs on trust. As soon as trust generally is lost, all bets are off. The gaming environment is just a low stakes version of real life
4:11 THIS IS MY PLAYERS LOL "your job as a DM is to catch me"... and may I add: "if you don't catch me then you deserve to be cheated". This is how my players behaved.
Not playing with a group of players that cheat is a cool idea, but most of us are just happy to have any friends to play with. Beggars can't be choosers.
Straight up, I'm actually VERY dyslexic, so any time I join a new group, I flat tell everyone to always feel free to double check my work, cause I'm just error prone, cause it matters that people don't think I'm cheating at the game. Heck, I'll even let players roll for monster attacks sometimes while I'm DMing for that very reason, which has lead to some funny nights where everyone wants the player having bad luck that night to roll the monsters big attack, only to have them nat20 on that ONE roll. lol
I'm not a superstitious man, but the dice know. The dice always know.
That is totally fair
@@AGrumpyPanda
I have had players have such bad dice rolls that they took their traitor betraying dice out on to the drive, and hit them with a hammer,
Of course, that's extreme cases...
They say there's no good definition for "Bad Players", but 'anyone who forces the GM + X amount of other players to focus on their own behavior and away from the game itself' would be a handy one.
I'd say "Makes the game worse for the other players" is a good one, however it is they do it.
The character personalities, wow, I’d love to be in one of your games 💚
I have a player that is a dice cheater, so with this last campaign I set up one of the players to be his rival in game, and asked if they could confirm each other’s rolls. The player that is the rival came to me with his concern before this campaign, so I suggested he make the “lancer” character. This system has worked flawlessly because Chester doesn’t know that he is the reason for it and thought it was an interesting mechanic.
I had a player in Dragon heist who had suspiciously high rolls. I didn’t say anything, but every time he rolled a D20, I wrote down the number. When the players called him out one session and he pled innocence, I pulled out my sheet and told him, “ Even if you had +5 modifiers to ALL your rolls and you took that away, that would mean your average roll on this adventure is still 15, statistically impossible.” I didn’t accuse him of cheating, I just showed him the facts of what he was doing. Either he decided to tone down the cheating so his performance wasn’t so obvious or he quit it altogether but I didn’t have a problem with him throughout the rest of the session. And he’s forever carrying the stigma of being a roll fudger in our groups.
We had a guy like that. Unbeknownst to me, ALL of the other players were also writing down his rolls.
One day, we were due to have a major gauntlet test that covered all skills. This "Vegas Luck" player was also a min/maxer, so his part in the gauntlet SHOULD have had sections where his min rolls would cause failures.
This was a non-lethal gauntlet. It was like a sporting event series. The PCs trying to get a better score than their NPC counterparts.
As there would be so many rolls on my part for the NPC side, I pre-rolled all the NPC rolls and recorded them on a spreadsheet.
However, and I didn't announce this, I did mirror the highest rolls in a column designated "SNPC" (Super NPC).
When the cheater rolled,it was against this puropsefully-statistically-impossible NPC.
Surprise, surprise, surprise... He beat each and every roll easily and often by a great margin.
His cheating had already soured the others on the game as it was, myself included, so when he finished establishing his dominance like that, I passed the sheet around and let everyone know that the campaign had ended because, if the cheater continued on his current trajectory, the team would win EVERY battle and best EVERY foe, so there was no need to play it all out.
The cheater, without having been openly called out for cheating, left the group soon after and, like in this video, the others played on without that added stress.
3:08 Not to mention one groups player might be another groups DM, and... some people just like to get modals and read them for fun. A lot of the time I'll only use the map and other fluff to fill in details but that's because I just prefer to create my own worlds and not because I'm afraid of cheaters.
Dweeb's face when he pulls up the spell book to spot-check Mike XD
I remember a player I used to play d&d with who had these terrible dice that were like a celestial white with gold numbers on them, borderline unreadable from more than 4 feet away, and he always seemed to snatch his dice up really quickly, and he always seemed to pull off that perfect critical hit or passing a save at just the right time, never caught him cheating but always suspected him of it
I made a whole program to tell whether or not if a player was cheating. He was... being able to tell that someone's roll is one out of a quintillion on a regular basis is useful.
You really helped me realize how stressful it is to play with cheaters, I've resolved myself to confront the players in my group who foster an environment where they feel that cheating is acceptable
Covid killed our last D&D game a few months ago. I was super disappointed to learn one player had bought the Curse of Strahd book and was reading way ahead and formulating what to do.
Fully agree with you Seth...I had to deal with that recently....in this Pandemic we have been playing a lot through discord, and one player used the excuse that he had bought dice to play and wanted to use it, but never rolled openly, never on camera nor through the discord bot we use...We play D&D and he never rolled under 15 on d20 and never rolled below half on any other dices...when we questioned him, he got offended and left the group...either way, problem solved...but that sensation of a weight lifted from the shoulders was real for everyone else
I check my player's sheets more to double check my own information than theirs. It's a very real possibility that I might have missed something
Dude, you nailed it again. I totally agree with you. As a game Master i´m not willing to invest time catching someone cheat. All people i´m playing with will have my full trust, till they prove me wrong. We had a online game on discord where everybody was rolling the dice for himself and telling us via voice. This one dude rly had a lot of critical sucesses and i started to get suspicious. The fact that i only knew that dude from online gaming did not help either. So i was prepared to call him out. But because of some other issues with that player he left to take a break and never returned. Now my group is quite better without that nagging distrust in it.
I will second your advice not only for cheating players. It does not matter why you feel uncomfortable with a player or his behaviour. Talk to this guy and give him and yourself the chance to understand each other better and maybe your relation will work much much better after that. Don´t wait till the frustration or anger takes hold over your words and actions