Sneaky Ways D&D Players Cheat

this week's episode of our show is sponsored by the Grim Hollow Vatican Clans Kickstarter which is bringing two awesome new source books for fifth edition this Kickstarter is launching on February 15th with two massive books for you to explore the worlds of grim Hollow first off we have the Raiders guide to valiko this book is going to be a setting Guide to the world of valiko with tons of player options available in it not only are there more Transformations the amazing system that was introduced in the Grim Hollow campaign setting allowing your player characters to transform into new monsters and creatures but there are also new martial Maneuvers and new rules for large-scale combat encounters involving massive raids we also have The Saga of Seasons which is a campaign for levels 3 to 11 which spans the length of an entire year where you get to muster your own Clan and survive all four seasons in the world of valika this project is brought to you by some of our favorite minds and creators at ghostfire gaming and is sure to be an awesome expansion to the already amazing Grim Hollow campaign setting so follow the links in the description below to check out the kickstarter which is going to be running through late February and into March and now onto this week's episode greetings my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes Welcome to our Channel where we cover everything dtrpgs including advice for players and guides for DMS we upload new videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays so please subscribe to this channel like this video and ring that Bell so that you never miss an episode today we're playing dirty and diving into all the ways that players can cheat when they are playing Dungeons and Dragons or other ttrpgs unfortunately both of us have experienced some of these at our own tables and there's many reasons why a player might feel the need to cheat perhaps they've been having a string of bad luck and really want to turn the tides in their favor perhaps they think that there's a way to win Dungeons and Dragons by performing better at the game but really at the end of the day the four things that we're going to be talking about today are things that you should avoid as a player and not do at your game tables and if you're a DM and you catch a player doing one of these it might be time for a very valuable conversation on why cheating and Dungeons and Dragons just ruins the fun for everybody players might cheat into trpgs for a wide variety of reasons some might just hate to lose or not like the idea of their character failing or not being a the center of attention or a superhero sometimes I've seen cheating players have more malicious intent behind it unfortunately this has been more common when I've run games at conventions and in adventurously games where there's more DMS and players in a wider sort of community and that can bring a lot of toxic Behavior into the community as a whole but I've seen just as much cheating happening from friends that I thought I could trust and that I thought were pretty chill people but we're still cheating in our games of d d and in many cases they thought it was no harm no fell they just didn't care that it was happening and my response to that is if you don't think that it matters then why are you cheating we did a separate video on how DMS can cheat which you can check out right up over there and in that video we talked about when the cheating crosses the line but also how cheating on a DM side can actually be used to benefit The Narrative of the again however when it comes to players most of the time if you are cheating it's self-serving and it's taking away from the other people participating in the game this is the big difference between players and DMS DMS if they're cheating for the benefit of the players and the narrative can sometimes be beneficial again there's a lot more context to it than that which you can see in our video but players on the other hand when you cheat it's often not for the sake of the narrative or the rest of the players of the table it's for the sake of your own character most unfortunately when players cheat it's a symptom of a larger social problem that might be existing at the game table between the group oftentimes a player who is cheating that might not be the only disruptive thing that they might be doing during the game they might be power gaming they might be hogging the spotlight they might be bossing the other players around or they might be doing other things that contribute to a negative game experience so sometimes cheating and catching cheating can be one of those early warning signs um that if caught early you might be able to repair things before it gets worse so let's take a look at some of the ways that players do commonly cheat some of the things that actually happen because there are some really subtle things here and it's it's amazing I've been amazed at how long some of these have flown under my radar as a as a final disclaimer I want to say that if you're close friends or somebody and you're playing at the game table and you do catch them cheating you don't have to kick them out of your game you don't have to uh you don't have to assume that they're a malicious or or evil person who is doing this to ruin your games of DnD sometimes just a simple conversation or just acknowledging to them that you cut them is enough to stop that behavior and you can continue on playing d d from there unfortunately after that though if it continues and it keeps coming up that shows a lack of respect for the table the DM and everybody at it so obviously tabletop role playing games involve a lot of chants and a lot of dice and a lot of RNG and so as a result of that there are as many ways to cheat with a dice as there are facets and vertices on the dice probably more actually and fixing the dice is I would say the most common that I've encountered but also the most varied there are so many different ways that these little objects can be manipulated even in plain sight it doesn't matter if everybody has view of the dice it doesn't matter if the DM can see the dice rolls as they're happening this is harder if you are playing digitally with electronic dice then you can't actually fix the dice and there are benefits there but a lot of people like rolling Dice and that's where a lot of these variables can come into play first of all there are people out there who make Trick Dice and loaded Dice and don't use those at your table out of all the ways to cheat that one feels the dirtiest to me I know and there are really subtle ones there are d20s out there that the only difference between them and a normal dice is the one is just another 20. I've also seen just d20s that they look normal when you first pass about them but then you realize that they only have like seven eight and six and there isn't and there is a one but there isn't a two a three or a three or a four or like I've also seen d20s where there will be um there won't be any number under 10 on them and if you aren't looking for it and you don't think about it you just won't even notice it it doesn't even have to be a loaded die it's just a die with the wrong without an even spread of numbers on it I have a D20 at home that has 20 on every side I feel like that's a little obvious yeah I don't think I can roll that one out in the open but for the most part if you're buying Trick Dice or loaded dice then that just those can be fun novelty items but you if don't you don't understand uh but I've seen people do it like I played with people who who I was like and then realizing that that was the die they were using for for weeks but the thing is is that you don't need to use Trick Dice or loaded dice to manipulate these Dice and you don't even need to roll them behind a screen one of the the most basic things that I've caught people doing is relying on the fact that there's a lot of fancy dice out there and there's a lot of fancy dice that are in fancy colors with fancy weird fonts that me as the dungeon master if I'm sitting over here and the players at the other end of the table I actually can't see what's on their dice and in some cases neither can the player beside them I played with someone who had really tiny dice it was it was a cute set of like really tiny dice but nobody but unless you were sitting like right in front of the dice you couldn't actually see what was on them and so they just lied they just lied about what they rolled there is a great way that you can actually hide your lie as well and that's by uh just picking up the dice quickly the quick pickup yeah I've seen people that roll the die and they'll be like oh I got a 16 and really they got a six and they just turned it as they were picking it up or or like examining it in some way and no one else could have seen it but them it's the role the immediate pickup and as you're picking it up you can actually if you're acknowledging as you're picking it up that you don't like the number you can thumb it over to a different number and just read the number yeah that you wanted and like whenever I see someone do that I'm like I know you didn't roll that like be but it's it's weird because like I played with someone who like they would roll the dice and they would pick the die up as if to like show me what they'd rolled as if as if somehow like in the time in the intervening time and literally they were turning the die to a better number as they were showing it to me and like now I will say my problem is for those of you who watch our live stream one of my characters I wear an eye patch to play the character and I actually have a hard time reading my dice so I do sometimes pick up my dice to see it more clearly but don't don't be a jerk about it don't thumb the dice over if you're picking up your die uh I usually if I I'm picking up my die let Joe who's on the side of my dice Trace see as well and he often looks over and if there have been times that I also am bad at math and have been like 24 inch I was like No And I'm like 23. I also used to play with people this was more common when I was playing like war games like Warhammer where like they would declare a dice was a dye which which means that it had not landed flat when it really had and then used as an excuse to re-roll it or something like that um a really good solution to this that is like a subtle jab at somebody but kind of passive aggressive is if you have someone that is a dice cheater buy them a dice tray and a new set of dice as a gift and and then when they don't use it or if they don't use it be really like insulted that they're not using your gift um what about the dice I buy you the ones that aren't loaded or like or buy them like a dice tower because like you can't there's there's there's so little that you can do with with the Dice Tower or something like that and so you can just be like why aren't you using the dice tower I got you uh that rolls into a glass container where you can't touch the dice afterwards why are you using it yeah um so there's there's a lot of ways that you can address it with this I mean at the at the end of the day um even with all this I I have still seen people just out and out rot a lot like lie about what they rolled and the dice will be sitting there on the seven and they'll be like yeah roll the 17. laughs beyond the dice the other element of the game that the characters have complete control over that the DM may not have immediate access to is their character sheets and this is where fraudulent bookkeeping yes and to to dovetail this the fraudulent bookkeeping can overlap with the dice lying in the respect that sometimes players just lie about what their modifier is and and just subtly boost their roll up by a couple points and so you'll you'll get a player that'll be like yeah I rolled a I yeah I rolled a seven but I have a plus 12. and then when you actually look at their character sheet it says Plus 12. but then when you go through you're like how did you get a plus 12 in in this and it turns out that they've just added numbers and what's what's interesting about this whole like style of fraud is the plausible ability of saying oh I'm just bad at math I am bad at math but are you we want to get into how bad at math I am but are you because that's a really good cover story no okay here here's how bad at math I am Joe one time I was like I have a plus eight and I and I always was counting on my fingers and Joe was like Kelly plus 10 minus two and I had my head exploded with that I was like oh I can do that rather than counting on my fingers I can add 10 minus two um and that was that was an epiphany for me that changed dice rolling forever but when it comes to fraudulent bookkeeping I will say again digital formats have helped improve this there are digital character sheets that do the math for you and then therefore it's harder now you can override that math but usually if you're using a digital character sheet your DM can go in and just make sure I go in and just check my character's character sheets uh before every game is a DM just to make sure I know what spells they have packed what items they have try to play into those but paper character sheets you can write whatever the heck you want on them in pencil which is something that even digital character sheets are susceptible to because you can still edit your character sheet whether it is physical or digital and I've seen really diverse ways of cheating that had nothing to do about dice rolls and math involving this kind of fraudulent bookkeeping I had played games with players who would intentionally not take proficiencies in all their skills so that they could always have a floating skill proficiency and just circle what one they were proficient in or change that I played with players who they would change what spells their character knew or had prepared not like using retraining but like they'd be in the middle of an encounter and it would be the encounter where Webb was the perfect spell but their character actually didn't have it they would just change their character sheet to have web and just say that they had they had it the whole time if you want to do something like that ask your DM like when we were when I I think when Tasha's came out and I said can I retrain my spell list yeah but but the the whole thing with the with with this particular player was it wasn't that they were retraining their character it was that in the combat scenario where that spell was the perfect spell they just gave themselves that spell despite not having it chosen yeah that's something that you should never be doing but if you do if you're not happy with the Spells first of all changing them out in the middle of the combat encounter isn't great yeah but if you want to change up your spells I've had a player who was playing a warlock who liked less than half of the Spells they had picked and they said hey I'm not liking these can I try out some different spells and I went yeah of course like I want I want them to have fun at the table they were a newer player how are you going to learn if you're not trying out the Spells so most DMs I think are pretty forgiving especially with the new players trying things out for the first time I let people retrain spells on a level up if they feel like no matter what class they're playing if they're not happy with certain spells I just think that that's more fun for everybody at the table but don't lie about it it's just taking away from everybody's enjoyment of the game speaking of other forms of magic and tracking um I played with a person who just never marked down that they used a healing potion they effectively had infinite healing potions they never ma they never crossed off their consumables they never marked off that they had actually spent their gold and I haven't encountered this myself but players that just wouldn't mark off when spells or abilities were expended or even players that just would ignore the fact that they'd taken damage and be like oh yeah I took 20 points of damage and I'm going to turn that to 10 points of damage and relying on the fact that like and this is one of those things that ironically I've seen this behavior from players who are dungeon Masters because oftentimes you know as a dungeon master you have a lot to track and you can't necessarily be tracking every spell your player has expended or every hit point of damage that they've taken or every item that they have in their inventory or everything that they have on their character sheet and players that don't care can just take advantage of that fact and and take advantage of the of the fact that the dungeon master trusts you as a player to be honest with the stuff and I think that this is where it gets where this is where the damage is is it's like as a DM I trust that my players are going to be tracking their character sheets honestly I trust that they're going to be doing this and then that breaks that trust yeah and I think that this is where we get into uh players playing by their own rules and this comes with things like intentionally forgetting rules in like intentionally getting the rules wrong and um I want to tell you that in last night's game I used two reactions on a turn and I am sorry and I didn't catch it right but the thing is that was a mistake right um but there is that sort of thing where sometimes you will get players that do that on purpose and hope that because I know that you didn't do it on purpose I missed it but that was a great example of someone that's aware that that sort of thing can happen can take advantage of that and make the and and not do it all the time but then suddenly do it when it matters and hope that it doesn't get noticed right or or you know and and it's weird that this playing by their own rules thing is it's a different form of cheating than like being a rules lawyer because it's almost like you know what the rules are you're getting them wrong on purpose or relying on not like an interpretation of the rules you know that that's not the way the rules are supposed to work you know that you can't take two reactions a turn but you're just gonna try anyway and hope that the DM forgot that you already took a reaction earlier in the turn yeah and this one's tricky to catch at the table because in our example that I just said players also have a lot to keep track of and it's really hard to tell who's exploiting this concept and who is genuinely making a mistake I think another example from our own campaigns is once when you used thunderstep to teleport out of a room and thunderstep relies on line of sight with dimension door doesn't in the moment we forgot that that and but again sometimes you'll run into players that just are hoping that people will forget and conveniently do it on purpose it's really hard to find when people are doing doing this but it unfortunately does happen and I will say that it is really hard as a player to keep track of everything so don't feel like you're cheating if you make a mistake but if you are taking advantage of those mistakes then you're not being a good player yeah and and that's one thing I think it's interesting to note that we've run into these mistakes and we're experienced d d players that you know we've been playing for a long time but it gets really worse when an experienced player takes advantage of the inexperience of of a DM and so I remember playing in it again unfortunately this happens a lot this has happened a lot in Adventures league and I don't want to I don't want to diminish how awesome adventures league is and how awesome like public play is because I love it it's just that when you play games in public with with people that you don't necessarily know you tend to encounter of the cheating and the bad behavior more often and so another one that I see I have seen several times is people who know about the bonus action spell casting can't trip Rule and they know the way that it works and would would just try to get it past the new DM so they could cast two Fireballs at a turn and and that's just not cool I think the the other kind of side of this is that it has this weird layer of plausible deniability because it's fine to make a rules mistake it's fine to get it wrong we all do we do it all the time I'm very certain that if you watch all 150 episodes of our live stream campaigns that we've done you will find rules mistakes in basically every single episode what we're talking about here is the person who intentionally takes advantage of that fact and unfortunately they do exist the last one is one that's a little bit of a broader topic and we've talked about it a lot and doesn't always need to be considered cheating and that is meta gaming now meta gaming is also a tricky one that players can make a simple mistake because they just know the game of d d really well and they use that inherent logic and understanding in their game whether they're doing it intentionally or not again it's hard to catch if you don't know what meta gaming is broadly speaking meta gaming is considered when a player brings Knowledge from outside the game or the that their character um broadly if you don't know what meta gaming is the very short definition of it is when players bring out of character knowledge into the game the infamous example of this would be characters knowing that trolls have their regeneration stopped by fire despite their characters having never encountered a troll at all before now I find that exact that this example in particular is actually a terrible example of meta gaming because trolls and vampires are so famous in terms of the mythology that I think that it's it's almost like you can't it's impossible to divorce your knowledge of this from from these so there's certain things where like the metagame knowledge is a problem and there's certain things where we just have to accept the fact that everyone knows that trolls are have their regeneration stopped by fire now but not everybody knows that sloths can cause tadpoles that burrow into your body and turn you into a slide with their disease and not everybody knows that say for example a lich has a phylactery so there can be um or or it might be meta gaming to even identify oh that person is a vampire even if you're that this is where it gets into that confusing blurry area is even before I played D I could have told you all the ways to kill a vampire have I encountered a vampire in my life yeah no but very in our mythology and the same way that I imagine I've heard the argument when specifically talking about the troll that if trolls are a known problem in your world most people have probably heard how to kill a troll and that's where you have to really talk about what is the Mythos in your world what are the legends that everybody knows perhaps every child is told a story about the troll who was burned and then killed and they're like that's how you kill a troll but there needs to be a certain point where the player separates their knowledge of the game perhaps they've read the entire monster manual and they need to still play it like they don't I mean the thing is and this is where it also gets into tricky ground with players who are also game Masters or dungeon Masters and who like us might have an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules I just have game statistics for Monsters memorized I just know what they do and so for me when I encounter a monster oftentimes based on their physical description alone it's like I know that's a mind flare I know that's a Beholder I know what they do I know how to fight them and so it can be challenging to divorce those things even when you are trying to be in character and not and that's why in general I suggest that if you are playing with experienced players or people who also DM games it can Grease the wheels a little bit if you do a little bit more home brewing and be a little bit more forgiving of this and maybe a little bit more um fair about it and I I don't think that I consider I I can't in good conscious consider knowing a monster's game statistics cheating if you were fighting a monster and you pulled up their game statistics on a website while you were fighting them and were looking at them and then when the dungeon master said uh an 18 misses and you go no but the monster has an ac-17 now you're cheating because the the DM can change the monster stats they can do whatever they want with it on a whim and that's completely within their their their rights and so if you are going to look up a monstrous game statistics and especially in the middle of combat and then call out the dungeon master for not obeying the rules of that stat block or start announcing hey everybody this monster has fire resistance and you're looking at that's 100 cheating I I agree with that and I think that that's that's where we cross the line we can't really separate our inherent knowledge about the game if I encounter an intellect Devourer it doesn't matter what character I'm playing I'm terrified of that thing and and that's just a natural instinct that I'm like I don't want to make that intelligent saving throw against the intellect of hour it scares me ah I should use intellectual errors again you use them once and I think my character did have a visceral response to it even though there's no reason why he would know what it is but I mean if you see a walking brain why are you not afraid but if I ever call out Monty being like no I hit and he told me I didn't yeah no then we're not we're not on the same side Monty also does a wonderful job where usually until the end of combat when I'm killing the monster only then do I realize what I was fighting and that comes from descriptions take your monster and just don't say you're fighting a troll say this lumbering creature comes out you don't even change the description don't make it a green warty hulking creature make it something different make it Eldritch Horror like we do in most of our cases if you change the description of the monster your players might have less of a clue as to how to defeat it I have also encountered a very extreme form of cheating and once again unfortunately I encounter this in public play in Adventures League where the player was reading the adventures and the modules for those that don't know in d d Adventures League the game Masters have published modules that are Adventures League legal that are accessible to anyone through the game Masters Guild or use the official published adventures and so I was dming I've been dming Adventures league for many years I don't anymore but I have encountered players who it was very obvious that they were reading the module uh and and again once again sometimes people replay Adventures League modules or they play Adventures that they've dm'd and they're usually very open about it like I've had players be like hey I've DM this module before but I'd really like to play it is that okay and I've been like yes but you know that there's the puzzle here so is it okay if you just take a step back and let everyone else solve this for the first time but I've also encountered people who would play The Adventure before would walk into the room and be like Oh I'm so smart I know exactly how to solve this puzzle and it was because they've read the adventure before not because they were actually brilliant but they use that as an excuse to look like they were smart I I find that this is gross Behavior but the silliest form of cheating because for me I love experiencing an adventure I remember I still have hopes of one day playing in curse of straws so I have never actually bought the curse of straw oh yeah oh oh yes and there are so many secrets in cursive strot I don't know any of them like there there are magic items that are hidden in cursive straw that you're not going to find unless you are like stumble into them by mistake and you know yeah there's just things that like don't do this kind of cheating it's very obvious that you've read the module it's it's so obvious like so obvious when when people do things like this and I don't understand why anyone would would do it like it's just ruining it for yourself but I don't know I I don't know what it is like but but I guess it's that sense of wanting to win but there is no winning really it's just a loss for me the joy of d d is experiencing the story and maybe people have a different opinion there but I I go into an adventure wanting to be surprised if I'm not surprised that I'm not having as much fun I I mean the thing about this is that I do think that there is a lot of culture that comes over from video games where I know that there are people who like get the guidebook for the video game or they read like the game FAQs or they read the guide articles to help them get through the level so they kind of know what's coming and in a video game particularly a solo video game where it's your own experience that is completely fine but d d has played with a group of people and so when you are reading ahead and cheating and like just downloading the solution to the adventure that's not fair to everyone else at the table that that's what it really comes down to with this kind of cheating is it's not fair to everybody else you robbed everyone else at the table of the ability to participate in the enjoyment that comes from solving that puzzle and experiencing that themselves that's why this kind of cheating is the is so bad in my opinion d d is a shared narrative experience so when you're cheating at a video game that you're playing by yourself then that's up to you but when you cheat at a DND table you're not cheating yourself you're cheating every other person sitting at that table and that's just not cool that's not a cool way to play the game and if you're a player and you're doing any of these options that we've talked about yes some of them can be honest mistakes and some of them maybe you have cheated and I'm not saying that you're a terrible person for cheating for the most part you shouldn't be doing this and if you did do it in the past but you stopped good on you I think when I was an early player I probably did a couple of these things on the list a few times because I was just getting into the game I was scared of my character dying I was worried about losing I had a win-lose mentality now I've been playing for a few years and I know that the fun is in the failures and the game isn't interesting if I'm not rolling a one here and there or getting dropped to zero hit points on occasion those are fun for me and so if you're a new player just be aware that you don't have to cheat at d d the game is more fun when you give in to the experience and let the dice fall as they may if there are any other ways the players at your table Have Cheated that you are aware of or if you've had if experiences with the things that we've talked about today tell us about them in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on YouTube please consider supporting the channel by following the links in the description below and if you want to see us getting rules wrong all the time you can check out our actual play in the worlds of drachenheim it airs Tuesday evenings on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we got plenty more videos all about ttrpgs and how to handle difficult issues at the table for GMS right up over here please subscribe to this channel like this video and ring that Bell so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 303,287

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: 8V2-uAI0TBc

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023