How to cheat at D&D

Post date: Feb 24, 2011 9:09:29 PM

How to cheat at D&D.

I’ve seen a lot of cheating in more than 30 years of playing D&D in all its forms; I’ll go over every one I’ve seen that I remember.

First if you really want to cheat at D&D, be the DM, you are allowed, nay, encouraged to do so. Roll your dice behind a screen so no one can tell what you are rolling, you can say whatever you want for what you’ve rolled, and what that roll means, change monsters, settings, npcs, items, situations, everything on the fly to suit your every whim. The PCs are your playthings, and live or die on your say-so! You can change the rules of the game to suit you, even as you play. You can even change the PCs, if you don’t like some ability they have, class or race even, just ban it or change the rules for it! No one can call even call you on any of that, as it’s all allowed for a DM to do, so be a DM and you can say all that cheating isn’t even cheating. It’s good to be the DM.

If for some reason you don’t want to be the DM, say it’s too much work, or the other players refuse to play while you DM after you continually leave their characters burning husks or gibberingly insane, there are a myriad of ways to cheat as a player.

Let’s start off right, cheating starts before you even make your character. Buy or make some loaded dice. The first way to do this is by buying a ton of dice and rolling them all until you find ones that roll higher more often than the others, obviously money is a factor here, but this will let you keep your conscience clear (as famously said by a thief, he can’t afford a conscience). If you can’t afford this method then it’s time to “fix” some dice yourself. I won’t get too far into how to do this yourself, but it’s also likely to be somewhat more expensive as you may ruin some dice along the way, but it can be done by shaving corners, drilling out holes and adding lead, making one side sticky, hollowing out one side, or even more exotic methods. Lastly you can just buy them already loaded, this is arguably the least expensive way but then you have to deal with someone who makes loaded dice, and who wants to have contact with someone that low?

If that’s too much trouble or too expensive, you can learn to do what most DMs do, and even the odds – fudge the dice! There are numerous ways to fudge dice:

Bold faced lying: Announce that the die rolled whatever it was you wanted it to roll, it must have been knocked off that.

Pre-rolling: Roll your dice before called for until you get what you want your next roll to be, and then say that’s what you rolled when called.

The Knock: Knock your die on to a more favorable number, or off of a very unfavorable one (such as a 1), often combined with some form of misdirection or distraction, such as dumping your drink on the DM’s books. Also related is totally knocking it off the table if you see it’s a bad number.

The Secret Roll: Roll the die in some way where no one else can see it, such as cupping it in your hand and then quickly employing another method to change the roll if it is unfavorable.

The Swipe: Much like the secret roll, this depends on having good manual control. You roll the die out making a sweeping motion with your hand, keeping your hand close to the die, if it stops on a number you don’t like, you keep it rolling by imparting your hand’s momentum to the die, and if it does stop on a number you like you raise your hand and let it sit.

Magic: While this method is questionable to get to work, I have seen at least one player that was extremely lucky rolling that did not perceptibly employ any other method I was familiar with, but arranged his dice in patterns, and chanted over them before each game. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will call you on using magic or calling to higher powers to affect your rolls, but they may give you strange looks and make you feel uncomfortable. Even if it doesn’t work, it could be used as a cover for another method of cheating – rolling really high on that D20 lately, well you’ve just tithed well at Tymora’s temple, and said your prayers for the day.

Now that we have some method of affecting the outcome of your dice, you still aren’t quite ready to make a character. We must discuss two other methods of cheating that may affect your character, Raping-the-System and Munchkinism. Raping-the-System is pouring over every book available and choosing the best option to make as powerful a character as possible, now most people will say this isn’t cheating, and will call it by some euphemism such as Power-Gaming or Optimization, and that’s all the better for you, since it will make it very easy to get away with, but it does require some work to go over the books. Although if that’s too much trouble you can use plagiarism and have someone else do it for you, just search on the internet for one of the euphemisms, and follow someone else’s advice on how to do it. Unfortunately a lot of DMs are savvy to this, and ban certain options that have been exploited and written about on the internet as a hedge against this, forcing you to do your own work and making the best options unavailable.

Then there’s Munchkinism, this takes Raping-the-System to the next level, because here you not only choose the best options available, but you ‘read’ or misread any options you might have in the most favorable way and work to convince the DM that’s the way it should work even if that’s not how a sane person would interpret a rule, and whine or cajole the DM to allow options from other sources that he doesn’t usually allow that obviously make your character as near invincible as possible.

At last you are ready to make your character. This is the single most important point that you cheat as this will affect everything you do with the character in the future, and is as good as having cheated on everything during the game.

If you get to roll your character, instead of using some formula such as point-buy or arrays employed by later editions you may have it easy, especially if your DM is foolish enough to let you roll your character beforehand. If you can roll your character beforehand just roll dice for each of your stats employing whatever your favored method of affecting them is, typically just rerolling until you get something you think you can live with. However you must be careful not to overdo it, as even the most lenient DMs will be unlikely to allow a character with all 18s, usually one will be allowed with little suspicion though. Some groups have rules such as rerolling ones or even ones or twos, or in the case of hit points even rerolling if the die is on the bottom half of its spread such as rerolling 1-5 on a d10 for fighters. If you do that you can always just explain you thought that was the standard rule since all the groups you’ve played with do it that way, and usually if you get away with it long enough it’s too late to change your character and the DM will let it go.

If you are forced to use one of the modern methods of ‘fair’ generation there is always the ‘math error’, although this typically cannot be very much more than a few points to avoid suspicion, and it isn’t as easy as the ‘random’ method. Forget to carry a one, misread that row over there as the other one, etc. If caught it’s quite easy to explain as a math error, although most DMs are adept at math and may look over your character and calculate if you have done everything right, some won’t, and even if they do you can always introduce a ‘transcription’ error when you replace your character sheet due to wear, or having this neat new one you found on the internet. It also helps if your handwriting is illegible, as the DM will have no idea what you’ve written for your stats.

After you’ve got your ability scores, you can use Raping-the-System and/or Munchkinism to choose the best character as outlined above. You can introduce other errors such as taking too many of some option, such as proficiencies, skills, feats, spells, etc. Adding bonuses twice, and forgetting penalties, such as if you were to play an Elf, you might add their dexterity modifier twice, and forget to subtract the constitution penalty.

Then we get to equipment. Don’t pay for things, don’t go for the big items, as it’ll be obvious if you only start with 100 gold, and you’re wearing some plate mail that cost 500. Say you only have enough cash for a suit of chainmail and a sword, well, after you’ve got that you can just add a bunch of other stuff without subtracting from your gold such as lanterns, oil, rations, rope, a dagger, etc. Under no circumstances should you worry about encumbrance or calculate its effect on your scores such as your movement rate, if you have a rare DM who does worry about encumbrance, make him do the work, perhaps he’ll get tired of it and forget about it like most DMs do. If at all possible you should also buy a war or guard dog (again forgetting to pay for it if not too much) or other animal or hirelings such as men-at-arms, although a lot of DM’s hate companions and will work to kill them off it’s still them taking the damage, not you.

Now at last your character is ready to play. You know most of the ways to cheat in the game if you’ve made it this far. There are a few more that can be used however.

Resource Mismanagement: Resource mismanagement is a bit more difficult to spot than other forms of cheating, especially if done with just the hard to spot bits. Much like your first purchase of equipment it involves ‘forgetting’ to use up resources like gold, but you can extend that to everything with a number, like your HP, just write down a few less damage, make a mistake and subtract instead of add some damage in a rough fight, forget that you’ve already cast some spells, used all your arrows, or other consumables like healing potions, or wand charges. The more obscure or the more of something you are likely to have the easier it is to get away with. For instance if you are a 5^th level wizard and have already cast a fireball that day the DM is likely to remember that, but he might not remember that you’ve cast 3 instead of 2 of your magic-missiles, or if you are a bow user, he’s really unlikely to know you’ve used all 20 of your arrows instead of 19. Some DMs even go so far as to say they don’t require tracking of some resources like arrows, so you can again be justified in not ‘expecting’ to have to.

Influence: This dovetails into Munkinism, but beyond just whining at the DM there are other ways to influence him which are not looked upon with quite as much distain, the same way you can influence any human. One way of influence that’s expected and usually not frowned upon is bribery. Usually this involves pizza at the game as an offering for general benevolence from the DM with little expected other than the understanding to not be too hard and perhaps fudge a bad roll or two in your favor (remember allowed and encouraged for the DM to do this) or place a magic item the player particularly wants somewhere. It could be anything besides pizza though, favors, from rides, to help moving, babysitting, that issue of spiderman missing from his collection, to money, to moving bodies, and can be much more explicit in its rewards than just general benevolence. One can also go the opposite route of blackmail, perhaps threatening to tell his mom (whom houses said DM) of his collection of ‘magazines’ if you aren’t allowed to play a Drow.

Wrong Die: This doesn’t really work with creating a character, but when you are doing damage you can oft substitute a similar looking die for another, say a d10 instead of a d8, or a d20 instead of a d12, with all your bonuses who’s to know that you couldn’t have done 20 damage on your d12 with +8. Easy to get called on, but often others won’t be paying attention to the die size, just what number comes up, and if you do it with similar sized dice you can say you just didn’t notice it was the wrong die.

Spoilers: This is extremely dangerous and I don’t recommend it at all, and if caught will most likely make the DM *extremely* angry. How angry? Better make sure you can take him in a fight and check he doesn’t own firearms angry, pretty much everything prior I’ve mentioned is small time misdemeanors in comparison to the felony this can be. Due to this possibility I always inform a DM if I have read a module, as another DM, before play if I know that’s what they are running, and try not to use my knowledge of such. The rewards can be great, though I wouldn’t compare the possibility of getting ahead in the game to the very real possibility of physical damage and loss of friends. Spoilers are reading the module, or worse, notes, on the adventure the DM is running or worse his notes before he has completed the adventure. You can learn such things as where hidden treasure is, what certain NPCs are interested in – and rewards for getting them it, how to move the adventure along when you are frustrated, and especially players most hated part of adventures – solutions to puzzles and riddles. However even with this said, some DMs take precautions, such as changing the order of things in modules, mirroring a dungeon, changing some treasure, or using different riddles or puzzles, or worse don’t use modules and use only partial notes or have incomprehensible handwriting, or worst developed the ability to keep it all in their head.