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I'm almost at the end of my great GW sell off, but as I was going through some old boxes, I came across a set of loaded dice I picked up years ago...

and I'm ashamed to say I used them once or twice in a game...

But fear not, justice was served, as I lost on both occasions...

But it occured to me, I've witnessed some underhand things in my time. People measuring the lengths of their arms to give them an advantage in games where you couldn't measure charge distances, people switching in total power cards when it was the old warhammer magic system, and people shuffling my models back half an inch whenever I left the room for a toilet break!

So, I'm asking my fellow dakka members to share their best underhand methods, or maybe you were the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice?

I know some people hate cheating in all forms, which I can sympathise with, but let's keep this in a fun and friendly way.

Think of this as a truth and reconciliation comission, dakka style.

Never been a cheater myself, but ran a store and these are the two most common issues I've seen...

#1 - Not bringing your rules and making things up when your opponent isn't familiar with a unit. "Oh? These are Fire Warriors. Their guns are S5 AP5 Assault 2." The guns are really Rapid Fire, so the cheater double taps at full range when he should only get one shot. Otherwise, it sounds reasonable. I have one specific person in mind whose Nids always had slightly better stats with one extra shot or an extra inch of movement.

#2 - Adding a couple of dice to large rolls. Say a unit of 20 Ork Boyz gets 4 attacks each on the charge. That's 80 dice. Very few people notice an extra 5 dice, so the cheater rolls 85. This really only works for melee hoards or massed shooting. I've seen it happen with Orks, Nids and IG.

I've been lied to by experienced opponents who knew I was a crap player. I only play a few games a year max, and in addition to this I only know the rules for a couple of armies that I play myself and very loosely for only the common/major units of others.

The sad thing was, they were already going to beat me simply through tactical experience - I have no idea why they felt they needed to cheat. The GW employee watching the match stepped in and began GMing my games that day which was really cool of him. I told him I appreciated it and he said he can't stand when people cheat casual players (he really meant 'bad' lol).

The one I've come across most often (both purposeful and accidental) is list manipulation. Either purposefully reducing the points cost on their lists or just bringing extra wargear or even whole units that they didnt pay for.

And at some high end recent events, individuals have gotten the rules on rather obscure forge world lists drastically wrong in their favor.

 Kriswall wrote:
Never been a cheater myself, but ran a store and these are the two most common issues I've seen...

#1 - Not bringing your rules and making things up when your opponent isn't familiar with a unit. "Oh? These are Fire Warriors. Their guns are S5 AP5 Assault 2." The guns are really Rapid Fire, so the cheater double taps at full range when he should only get one shot. Otherwise, it sounds reasonable. I have one specific person in mind whose Nids always had slightly better stats with one extra shot or an extra inch of movement.

#2 - Adding a couple of dice to large rolls. Say a unit of 20 Ork Boyz gets 4 attacks each on the charge. That's 80 dice. Very few people notice an extra 5 dice, so the cheater rolls 85. This really only works for melee hoards or massed shooting. I've seen it happen with Orks, Nids and IG.

Good point about Orks and dice. Another thing I hate about dice is those fancy dice with rune symbols or other strange markings. For example, some dice have a symbol for the 1 or the 6 instead of using the number, and I'm convinced people take advanatge of that during a game, because I usually forget which is which.

Never cheated myself but I do like these kinds of threads. The gems I've gathered from elsewhere:

1) Measure from the front, move through to the back; a favorite of cheaters everywhere. The bad ones do it with things like Rhinos, but most everyone sees that. The subtle ones that get an extra 25-30mm a turn move on infantry are the sneakier lot.

2) Battlefront released dice early on that had a national symbol on the "1" side. People didn't like this, as it meant seeing the neatest thing on the die was a bad thing. They re-did them with the symbol on the "6" side. Cheaters immediately scrambled for the older sets and mixed them in. Since they were "official" dice, most people wouldn't pay too much attention. You had to be sharp-eyed to notice you were seeing symbols and sixes side-by-side to catch that one, and I imagine similar cheats would be effective (minus the cost of two batches custom dice).

3) The magical moving hunter-killer missile cupola from Rhino to Rhino (substitute appropriate upgrades as needed).

4) Not playing 40k WYSIWYG and not paying for a Power Weapon (ok...GW models are expensive for a bit swap for one game, sure) and then "forgetting" that it's just a CCW an hour later when the game is on the line.

5) Pulling the worst crit cards from the damage deck in X-Wing/Armada and replacing them with more ignorable ones (bonus points for using ones that knock out upgrades that aren't in the list anyway).

6) Not always cheating, but always annoying is the "throw out 60 dice, declare X hits and then immediately scoop them all back up" manuever. Always give your opponent a chance to see that you're not lying, I don't care how trustworthy you may feel you are.

7) "Slow play"; mainly a factor in tournaments where one player will just have to agonize over EVERY decision and take 20 minutes for their turn when they need to hold onto an objective. Then suspiciously the next round on the other foot they're able to decide much the same level of tactics for their entire army in less than a minute.

Again, a few of them are not always cheating (some people do crumble in their desicion-making under pressure, the fast dice guy may always be honest, etc.), but yeah...that's what makes it a good cheat is you can claim it's legit and it's difficult to prove otherwise.

The two I've noticed (among no doubt many I haven't).

Optimistic movement, e.g. we started at least 24" apart, you had a move of 6", I don't care where you're models are you can't be less than 16" away, and no amount of "well if thats how you want to play" is going to change that.

Line of sight on a unit that hasn't moved to one of mine what apparently couldn't fire at it last turn as it was out of sight, either you can see me and thus have moved, or are stationary and thus can't see me, pick one.

Have seen people trying to get funny by picking up dice quickly, picking up hits and accidentally picking up ones that were misses but getting insistent, or the 'extra' dice syndrome, not too hard to spot if you pay attention - and have found if you are paying attention people try this sort of thing a lot less.

Rules errors.. ahh yes, the reason I no longer play 40k at events, some highly optimistic rules for a unit that was either FW or WD, either way not in the codex, which he also didn't have, just a home made reference sheet. These days if you haven't got the book I'm not playing you, much easier.

I've not done it, and I don't think it's ever been done to me, but the easiest and perhaps oldest way is to quickly pick up the successes before the failures. If you grab them fast then the opponent has no time to make sure all the dice you scooped up were actually successes.

This of course works best when you're rolling more than 10 dice, but if there's terrain in the way...

I make a point of always taking out the failures first which gives my opponent time to verify that all the successes are indeed that.

 gardeth wrote:
The one I've come across most often (both purposeful and accidental) is list manipulation. Either purposefully reducing the points cost on their lists or just bringing extra wargear or even whole units that they didnt pay for.

And at some high end recent events, individuals have gotten the rules on rather obscure forge world lists drastically wrong in their favor.

I never owned most army books, so I was reliant on my opponent's honesty a lot of the times, and 99.9% of people were fair about it, but there was always that one person who would bend the rules.

As an example, I played undead against empire once, and the empire player claimed his general's runefang hit on a 2+ against undead. It wasn't til weeks later I found out the truth!

Usually I see wrong lists as mentioned above. Or people lie about dice rolls/quickly scoop them up before you can see them.

Somebody told me he was in a group that played tournaments for money. As in the winner took the pot of entry fees home in cash. Boggles my mind. Anyway, he said once cash money was on the line people did some pretty underhanded stuff. Such as printing lists with wrong stat lines or altering a book (usually a photocopy) to change the wording/point cost of a unit or rule in their favor.

leopard wrote:
The two I've noticed (among no doubt many I haven't).

Optimistic movement, e.g. we started at least 24" apart, you had a move of 6", I don't care where you're models are you can't be less than 16" away, and no amount of "well if thats how you want to play" is going to change that.

Line of sight on a unit that hasn't moved to one of mine what apparently couldn't fire at it last turn as it was out of sight, either you can see me and thus have moved, or are stationary and thus can't see me, pick one.

Have seen people trying to get funny by picking up dice quickly, picking up hits and accidentally picking up ones that were misses but getting insistent, or the 'extra' dice syndrome, not too hard to spot if you pay attention - and have found if you are paying attention people try this sort of thing a lot less.

Rules errors.. ahh yes, the reason I no longer play 40k at events, some highly optimistic rules for a unit that was either FW or WD, either way not in the codex, which he also didn't have, just a home made reference sheet. These days if you haven't got the book I'm not playing you, much easier.

Have you ever noticed the way an opponents deployment zone can sometimes angle its way closer to your own? For example, both deployment zones are meant to be 24 inches away from each other, but I'm conviced that the lines marking the zones are never 100% straight, but are titled, and becuase you're looking down on the table, a crafty opponent can sneak a unit 2-3 inches closer!

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

leopard wrote:
The two I've noticed (among no doubt many I haven't).

Optimistic movement, e.g. we started at least 24" apart, you had a move of 6", I don't care where you're models are you can't be less than 16" away, and no amount of "well if thats how you want to play" is going to change that.

Line of sight on a unit that hasn't moved to one of mine what apparently couldn't fire at it last turn as it was out of sight, either you can see me and thus have moved, or are stationary and thus can't see me, pick one.

Have seen people trying to get funny by picking up dice quickly, picking up hits and accidentally picking up ones that were misses but getting insistent, or the 'extra' dice syndrome, not too hard to spot if you pay attention - and have found if you are paying attention people try this sort of thing a lot less.

Rules errors.. ahh yes, the reason I no longer play 40k at events, some highly optimistic rules for a unit that was either FW or WD, either way not in the codex, which he also didn't have, just a home made reference sheet. These days if you haven't got the book I'm not playing you, much easier.

Have you ever noticed the way an opponents deployment zone can sometimes angle its way closer to your own? For example, both deployment zones are meant to be 24 inches away from each other, but I'm conviced that the lines marking the zones are never 100% straight, but are titled, and becuase you're looking down on the table, a crafty opponent can sneak a unit 2-3 inches closer!

Have seen this a lot, and its close friend where the scenario says you start 12" back from the centreline, and a player 'assumes' the board is 48" wide so measures 12" from the back, thus on a 46" wide board say they get a fraction closer.

There is a very easy defence I've pulled which has caused no end of confusion - my deployment are is 12" from the centre, so I mark out 14" from the centre, making my deployment smaller, I now know I'm in theory at least 26" from them, mucks some players up no end when they think they have gained something to realise when they try to measure that they are further than they expected.

Have a follow on question, but will start a new thread for that.

Okay, cheating, the TFG, WAAC method of getting the most out of a game...

First of all, I do not cheat intentionally, I would take the tar and feathering like a man if found to be incorrect.
BUT there is a certain joy of finding the loophole in a rule and pushing it to the max ONCE usually with friends.


Dice:

The plain old loaded but the more insidious is that certain fancy brands of dice have a bias built into them (like the 6 side is lighter so more likely to be on top).
Water glass tests can show this and a few really serious types have conducted some tests: look into it.
I prefer casino type dice since they are designed for the least bias possible.
Supposedly the more squared off edges / corner dies help reduce the impact of bias as well.
A guy I knew really liked using this one brand of fancy dice but automatically used a different type for leadership tests... hmmmm...

Dice Rolling:

"Natural rolling": You know, rolling one die at a time.
Looks down in their hand, pushes with their finger to a certain number on top, flips their hand just so onto some book they carry.
Sometimes they do not even know they are cheating it just seems to give them more "luck".
Had to tell a guy roll on the table and roll a bunch of dice where possible or at least that darn die needs to roll around in your hand first... sheesh!
These people were why rolling cups with the lip inside were invented or rolling towers.

Distance:

Would you believe someone had a stretchable tape measure?
That was probably the strangest thing I ever saw for a cheating tool.

"Extrapolation": hold the tape measure a good 4" in the air, look at it on an angle, move your model that extra 1" to 2" more... repeat.
Easy way I caught a few people: Table width distance, minus opponent deployment zone size, minus wherever I deployed my model.
Now subtract the distance for each move, when they happily say they can shoot you or assault you, you then say "not possible" and do the math (max distance they could have moved).

Really, the easiest "cheat" is just to measure the table.
We usually play such small tables that just knowing the middle of the table is enough.
I am unsure how to treat this as a cheat...
Many games do not have the "guess weapons" anymore, heck, my terrain is typically mounted on a 12" x 12" square so guess mechanics would not be all that hard a guess.

Rules:

The hardest one to defend against is the "I am going to interpret a rule how I want, if you do not like it, roll off: 50% chance I get what I want.".

Fun stuff, welcome to the dark side of thinking.

Had someone bend the 'roll off if you don't agree' thing to its illogical conclusion, specifically to point out the absurdity of it.

40k, 5th I think it was, had this for cover saves, if you didn't agree on the save its one step worse, so when faced with creative accounting and someone insisting on a roll off to use it he flipped it about, his army, in the open claimed a 4+ cover save, since they didn't agree he then took it one step worse as a 5+ cover save.

And made a point that if one player can have an absurd rules reading related to having an incorrect point total requiring a roll off, so can the other player.

I've never set out to cheat on purpose, though I'm sure i've done on accident a few times. Personally I've encountered two things that stick out the most in my mind:
1 - Rolling a lot of dice and my opponent swiftly picking up his 'hits' before the dice can be checked. One person i used to know at the flgs was notorious for it...
2 - Fudging stat lines, weapon ranges, etc. A friend i played back in the day used to do this one. I could never beat him, despite my best efforts. Years later he confessed to it, but by then it didn't really matter any more =/

Oh yes, and 'guess ranges' had to have been written either by the most innocent minded person ever or by a natural born cheater, its just begging for carefully measured terrain, sacrificial 'ranging shots' from cheap units that cannot possibly hurt the target etc.

Did see someone use it to fire into a combat, aiming at something the other side of a table and 'guessing' 12", when told to stop being silly he just said "but thats the range I'm guessing it is", which technically the rules allowed, it was then explained that the rules didn't prohibit him being hunted down like a dog or tarred and feathered.

Removed by insaniak

Actually had a good example when back at college, played Star Fleet Battles a lot, for those who don't know it you use a d6 for phasers, different columns for ranges, there can be dice shifts, if you roll a six with a +1 it becomes a 6 on the column to the right, a 1 with a -1 becomes a 1 on the column to the left so shifts can matter. Rolling low is good.

One guy, won't name him, had a habit of rolling dice, doing a bit of arithmetic and announcing the result, one time we worked it out, turned out to get what he claimed his bunch of dice must have rolled natural '-1' with a single '-2'.

To be fair he cheated, blatantly, at everything, viewed this as part of the game for others to find out what he was doing this time, and since we all expected it became a bit of a meta game.

We never let him hold his own cards when playing cards either, until he showed us how he shuffled and dealt them, was stage magician territory.

He today must be very rich, in prison or very dead.

leopard wrote:
Oh yes, and 'guess ranges' had to have been written either by the most innocent minded person ever or by a natural born cheater, its just begging for carefully measured terrain, sacrificial 'ranging shots' from cheap units that cannot possibly hurt the target etc.

Did see someone use it to fire into a combat, aiming at something the other side of a table and 'guessing' 12", when told to stop being silly he just said "but thats the range I'm guessing it is", which technically the rules allowed, it was then explained that the rules didn't prohibit him being hunted down like a dog or tarred and feathered.

Ages ago on dakka, I'm sure there was somebody complaining about an opponent using trigonometry to guess the range for their cannons and mortars!

It went like this: becuase it wasn't guessing a charge range, you could measure your own deployment area, then you would move a unit 12 inches forward, thus giving you 2 out of 3 for the purposes of calculating trigonometry. It was supposed to be very accurate as well!

Some people.

Now you see I'd try to use trig, and end up hitting my own units, I find when gaming karma is my constant companion, sadly sniggering quietly.

Mind you Mrs L. has been known to cheerlead for the other side and finds my utter collapse after a carefully laid plan fails to take into account a minor point, like my utter lack of talent, into account.

Some people have cheated against me, honestly don't know why, I can defeat myself without help.

I've never encountered cheating that I can remember, I don't play in a WAAC environment though.

The only time i was cheated, not someone i believed just gota rule wrong, but actually cheated was a player i used to play with a lot. I caught him cheating during his psychic phase, He had alot of psychic dice, running eldar and sear council. He would roll several powers, then slide his dice he had used into a pile of used one. The problem with that pile was he kept switching back to it once he was sure he had used more dice then he had left to use. But only when he thought i wasn't paying attention. It took me a few games to notice because they where supposed to be friendly games, but if the game was close he did it alot more often. Eventually he got greedy and i noticed, but didn't say anything at first, I wanted to be sure before acusing someone of something like that so I just pretended to not pay attention to catch him in the act. After getting caught he doesn't play 40k anymore. We haven't seen him in months.

Entirely inadvertently, I did once get muddled with which list I was using and deployed a unit of Bloodletters I'd not paid for...

I've never intentionally cheated, if it occurs, its usually because I read a rule wrong or equipped a weapon incorrectly. For example, I have two CSM bikers at home where I traded the TL boltguns on their bikes for meltas instead of the bolt pistols they carry. Whole concept being that I get to keep my two CCWs and thus extra attacks along with the bikes meltaguns instead of the TL Boltguns. An opponent noticed and politely corrected me. It was never intentionally cheating, just misinterpreting what weapons I'm allowed to trade out.

Crispy78 wrote:
Entirely inadvertently, I did once get muddled with which list I was using and deployed a unit of Bloodletters I'd not paid for...

Did that myself once. Boy, was I embarrassed when it came time to total up VP and discovered that the DE Corsair unit he'd beaten and run down (his one shining moment in the game) wasn't even on my army list.

Told him fair's fair, at some point in the future of his choosing he can bring an extra unit of his own. He hasn't done it yet, and I'm starting to worry about what he's building up to. But whatever he does I'll take it like a man.

(whimper...)

We (that is, our local group) have occasionally had issues with people snatching up dice before their opponent could see them. Our general rule is if the opponent didn't see it, the roll doesn't count. Thus far everyone we've explained it to have understood the point and have cheerfully complied with it, so I don't think they were deliberately cheating.

The only real cheating problem we've ever had was (you may have guessed) pre-measuring back when it wasn't allowed. There's just soo darn many ways to cheat that rule, it was observed more in the breach than anything else.

Before you could pre measure, I took measurements off a couple dozen reference objects, including my hands, fingers, and most of my club's major terrain features.

 Krinsath wrote:
Never cheated myself but I do like these kinds of threads. The gems I've gathered from elsewhere:

1) Measure from the front, move through to the back; a favorite of cheaters everywhere. The bad ones do it with things like Rhinos, but most everyone sees that. The subtle ones that get an extra 25-30mm a turn move on infantry are the sneakier lot.

2) Battlefront released dice early on that had a national symbol on the "1" side. People didn't like this, as it meant seeing the neatest thing on the die was a bad thing. They re-did them with the symbol on the "6" side. Cheaters immediately scrambled for the older sets and mixed them in. Since they were "official" dice, most people wouldn't pay too much attention. You had to be sharp-eyed to notice you were seeing symbols and sixes side-by-side to catch that one, and I imagine similar cheats would be effective (minus the cost of two batches custom dice).

3) The magical moving hunter-killer missile cupola from Rhino to Rhino (substitute appropriate upgrades as needed).

4) Not playing 40k WYSIWYG and not paying for a Power Weapon (ok...GW models are expensive for a bit swap for one game, sure) and then "forgetting" that it's just a CCW an hour later when the game is on the line.

5) Pulling the worst crit cards from the damage deck in X-Wing/Armada and replacing them with more ignorable ones (bonus points for using ones that knock out upgrades that aren't in the list anyway).

6) Not always cheating, but always annoying is the "throw out 60 dice, declare X hits and then immediately scoop them all back up" manuever. Always give your opponent a chance to see that you're not lying, I don't care how trustworthy you may feel you are.

7) "Slow play"; mainly a factor in tournaments where one player will just have to agonize over EVERY decision and take 20 minutes for their turn when they need to hold onto an objective. Then suspiciously the next round on the other foot they're able to decide much the same level of tactics for their entire army in less than a minute.

Again, a few of them are not always cheating (some people do crumble in their desicion-making under pressure, the fast dice guy may always be honest, etc.), but yeah...that's what makes it a good cheat is you can claim it's legit and it's difficult to prove otherwise.

On the dice part, I have custom Chessex dice, and some have symbols on the 1 side, some have symbols on the 6. When I roll them, I always show my opponent the other side. Haven't had a single complaint yet, because I'm always honest about it.

Notable times I've been conned in the past:

* When I had a Vindicare assassin on the table (or a Null Zone psyke) I had an opponent who would claim that the FAQ stated that any model with an Invulnerable save also had an equal armor save if not otherwise stated.

* One of my first opponents was a Tyranids player who could mysteriously pull off 24-30" move-run-charges with his genestealers.

* During the last 'Ard Boyz tourney at my local, a player told me that a die roll of 4, plus my modifiers for his open topped vehicle and my melta gun, was a weapon destroyed result. (During a Tank Shock...)

* I once had an opponent drop an extra 200 points of terminator marines into a list.

* It seems like every other game I'll turn around and when I turn back, my opponent has generated all his psychic powers and warlord traits, and wouldn't you know they're exactly the ones he wanted!

* Best one--during the last Blood Angel codex, during 6th edition, a player told me that since Sanguine Sword did not specify a type, it wasn't a Blessing and therefore didn't expire at the end of the following turn. In fact, since it lacked a type at all, he claimed, and did not specify a duration, once manifested it would last the entire game!

Picking up hits instead of misses has got to be the all time classic way of cheating. EVERYBODY knows you pick your misses and show the hits.

I know someone who used to measure from the front of the base to the back of the base, giving himself the base size in extra movement.

I always just reminded him to do front to front. I don't think he did it deliberately to cheat, I just think he didn't see it in the rules and thought you could measure movement any old way.