Character Sheet Edits
Oh Occultist. Why you gotta game the system? Aside from it being your whole deal I mean?
This is the same sort of behavior that you’ll see with dice that “slipped out of my hand” or combats beginning with “I meant to declare that I’d cast enhance stats today.” This mess isn’t always gamesmanship. Sometimes the dice accidentally fall before you’re done describing your action. Sometimes you’d honestly cast your buffs, and only forgot to say so aloud. And sometimes your breastplate really is made out of ironwood rather than steel when the shocking grasp comes around. But whenever these moments crop up at the table, I find that they erode my trust as a GM.
We’ve all had that one guy at the table. The dice get picked up a little too fast. Their casters never seem to run out of spell slots. Hit points somehow fail to get subtracted properly. These are the cheats that live inside the benefit of the doubt. And that’s the real trouble. It’s awful getting called out on this stuff when your motives are pure.
I’ll never forget going to D&D Adventurers League. We’d bumbled into a few traps already, so I suggested we march in staggered formation.
“I don’t like the look of these tunnels,” I said. “If there are traps, I don’t want everyone getting hit again.” It seemed like a reasonable precaution to me. The Adventures League DM disagreed.
“You read the module!” he said. “Look man: just because you’ve played this before, don’t ruin it for the others.”
Apparently I’d guessed right. There was a deadfall trap in the next chamber. Staggered formation would save the party a lot of damage. And this prick had accused me of cheating in front of everyone. I finished out the session, but you’d better believe I never went back.
That’s the trouble with policing cheating. Moments of gamesmanship might erode trust, but accusations outright shatter it. That’s why I tend to let them go. A player like Occultist might take advantage, but I’d rather take that risk than wag the j’accuse finger at an innocent gamer.
What do the rest of you guys think? As a player, is it better to take your lumps and admit, “I should have declared it ahead of time?” And as a GM, when exactly do you call bullshit? Let’s talk honest mistakes, adversarial GMing, and dealing with cheating down in the comments!
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As a player if I try and retcon in something that I did, I’d better be able to show on my sheet where I marked down the spent resource or it didn’t happen.
as a player I try to be as honest as I can for the sake of myself and the game, tho in my very young days, I “exploited” the system, played a munchkin, and generally tried to gain every advantage I could because I was playing the game as more of a game that needed winning than an experience to play.
I would argue that Adventurer’s League is a similar crop of people. Competition leads to things like cheating in every sport on the planet, from this game to “real” sports to e sports as well and it is that “spirit” of must win that can make this specific game feel unpleasant to play when you are not in that mindset.
As a DM, you should never “call out” a player for suspected cheating in front of everyone. And you should especially not do so when you just met the person. Study is key. Observe the “suspect” of the actions you think they might be “guilty” of and if the evidence is sound, try talking to them, alone, after a game. (If you think they might be the hostile type and you actually are not wanting to be alone with them, talk to them over a Discord in private or a Zoom call or something)
If anyone is not right for the table, then they have to go, one way or the other. Orion Acaba anyone?
As a player, I *try* to stay on the path of the righteous. When I do bend things a bit (wearing Goggles of Minute Seeing with Eyes of the Eagle), I try to clear it with the DM and the rest of the party first. (“You said these goggles can count as a head slot, right? So as long as I never try to don another helmet, crown, or hat, I can wear both items, yeah?”)
As a DM, I try to give folks the benefit of the doubt: I let the 3.0 version of a spell stand until the end of the session (to keep the game flowing), then post the 3.5 errata with the session notes “for next time.” Most of my adventures are self-created or heavily modded from old, obscure stuff, so I rarely have to question exactly *how* the PCs knew to take the 2nd left beyond the ruined corridor and look under the stairs for the secret weapons cache.
We *do* of course have that one player who tries to put enchanted chainmail AND a ring of protection AND an amulet of natural armor AND a periapt of health AND bracers of armor on a sorcerer and have them all function simultaneously with no penalties “because I’m an Elf!” Yeah. We all roll our eyes and call him out on his BS, say, only 1 time in every 4 just to avoid constantly harping on it. (Honestly, if he’d just ask ahead of time, I could probably help him min/max to achieve half of his feats of illogic without resorting to game-breaking house rules.)
“You read the module!” he said. “Look man: just because you’ve played this before, don’t ruin it for the others.”
I’ve had this problem before. Designers coming up with scenarios that only n00b players would blunder into are a bane, specifically because new GMs don’t realize that experienced players would know better.
There was a scene in Mekton’s “Operation Rimfire” that worked this way. The PCs go in to see a sitting head of state, and so, logically, can’t go in armed. Afterwards, they aren’t offered their weapons back, and the next scene presumed the PCs are unarmed. By the time I was a player in this campaign module, I’d been playing for more than a decade, and I’d learned the hard way to NEVER leave a place without recovering checked weapons. Ever. And I was accused of metagaming. (Which actually turned out for the better, interestingly enough.)
So I sympathize. The combination of rookie designers and rookie GMs can really suck.
To be fair to occultist, could you really call that armor? Those random bits of metal are far more accents and accessories than armor
There was once a guy in my gaming group who, whenever he rolled a die, would immediately snatch it up and squint at it before declaring the result. A cheater? Probably not. He consistently rolled poorly to average, and often forgot to apply his modifiers. The dude just struggled with numbers and didn’t have a lot of social awareness.
I have no memory of seeing Occultist before. Which other pages has she been in?
They are linked in the blog post. Click on Whole and Deal. They are two separate links
The only “I meant to…” that I accept as GM is “I meant to cast Mage Armor, but I forgot.”
Every single person I’ve ever played with who has played a mage armor class has eventually forgotten their mage armor at some point or another. I always just allow them to say they cast it earlier.
:As a player, is it better to take your lumps and admit, “I should have declared it ahead of time?” ”
Damn straight.
“And as a GM, when exactly do you call bullshit?”
If it’s a matter of “is it on the sheet”? Well I keep copies, which I update at the end of every game, so if it’s not on that sheet, it’s not on your sheet either (unless you just go it, in which case I’ll remember what you last said you were doing with it).
If it’s a matter of “oops, i forgot to tell you I was doing X”, to bad, X did not happen. This is why if I have casters that like to precast long buffs, or other types with “I need to do this everyday”, they have an S.O.P. sheet, and if it’s on there, they will have cast it, ate it, done the warm-up exercises, etc. If it’s not on the sheet (or they don’t have one) and they didn’t explicitly say they were changing their SOP (or setting something up in advance) for today/this session, then it didn’t happen.
Now, as for your trap precautions/being called out “for cheating”? I let that stuff slide. Often times, yes the Player did outsmart the adventure writer, or did anticipate properly an ambush or whatever. And if they did read the adventure and I was too dumb to change it in advance, I roll with it, no sweat.
I get you were at a D&D League/Pathfinder Society/”living society” game… which is why I avoid those toxic bs fests like the plague that are. It’s like bad pizza, not gaming is better than getting that toxic bs in our system.
Putting the party in ‘ack-ack’ formation should be an automatic assumption, unless you’re walking single file to hode your numbers or there’s a proven trap trigger.
I find that Barbarians tend to be the proven trap triggers in my parties.
Fighters are ‘remote handling tools’ for disarmers 😉
I meant to say “or there’s a proven trap trigger you have to walk around”
The ‘remote handling tool’ part is definitely useful at times. Quite afew years ago I was on one EOD call to a small town near the Base for a suspected IED some git had set for his ex-girlfriend and when we arrived a local cop came over all proud of himself saying ” I put it in there for you”. Turned out he’d ‘commandeered’ a large galvanized garbage can from a nearby hardware store, set the package in it, put the lid on and carried it to the middle of an empty lot. I turned to my partner and shrugged “guess there’s no anti-movement devices”, he turned white as a sheet once he realized what he’d done. Turned out to be nothing but a plaintive letter and a very nice bit of jewelry in a shoebox but you never do know 😉
I had a lighter version of your problem in a PFS scenario. Soory about the vagueness, I don’t want anyone to actually have foreknowledge.
I encountered something that I thought awfully valuable for the level we were playing and I went to check if it was fake. I was right and that was a fairly big clue I found, but we were supposed to either roll a skill check to discover that, or there was a hint later. The GM went “Hey, have you read this scenario?” I said I hadn’t, they seemed to believe me, and that was it.
It did mean I didn’t get to enjoy being clever, which is too bad, but it was mild enough that it didn’t put me off for that group or even the rest of the session.
To be That Guy, or not to be That Guy, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer one’s miserable fortunes, or to take arms against a sea of dice and by opposing end them
To die-to sleep no more, and by a sleep to say we end the pain and the thousand natural shocks that characters are heir to: tis consummation devoutly to be wished.
To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there’s the rub… for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when one sits down deeply to contemplate the next avatar, its feats and motivations, only to be smote down by the hand on high once again.
Funnily enough, Blades in the Dark actually has “oops, forgot to mention this earlier” as a major game mechanic: The flashback system lets you say you did something earlier as long as it doesn’t change things that have already happened (for instance, you can say you set up a getaway vehicle near your escape route, but you can’t retroactively steal the weapons of a guard who’s currently holding you at gunpoint), with a Stress cost for more unlikely preparations. It’s something I’d love to play with.
Anyway, for other systems… I’ve never really had players try to cheat myself, so I’d generally give them the benefit of the doubt. If I did suspect outright cheating and not just honest mistakes, I’d talk about it privately either during a break or after the session, not in front of everyone else. That said, I do check character sheets and make sure relevant things like buffs used or what kind of armour people wear are declared in advance, and only allow retcons if they make more sense in-universe than the alternative (e.g. I might let a caster who’d been planning to attack a dragon’s lair that day retroactively swap out a prepared spell for Resist Energy, but not one who was suddenly ambushed by a dragon).
And yeah, I’d say that Adventurer’s League DM royally screwed up. If I suspected a player was acting on metagame knowledge, I wouldn’t straight-up accuse them; I’d just have them clarify their in-character reasoning. If they can’t come up with anything, they’ll probably reconsider, whereas if they can, it’s just their character being smart or cautious and they should carry on. I want to encourage my players to be clever, not punish them for it.