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A situation where other individuals you are playing with just literally interpret everything wrong or just do not read their codex in the first place and just assume everything they want to do is okay to do and that said rule they make up is so far from the actual rule that it just tilts you off the face of the earth because you realize you are dealing with a TFG individual?

So a cheater? Yeah.

Not necessarily a cheater, unless they're doing it explicitly to gain an advantage.

We had a couple of guys (full grown adults) at the club at one point whose enthusiasm for the game far outweighed their reading and comprehension. On one occasion one of the other lads stepped in when he overheard them using a weapons assault value to determine how many times it could be used to fire in close combat...

 Azreal13 wrote:
Not necessarily a cheater, unless they're doing it explicitly to gain an advantage.

We had a couple of guys (full grown adults) at the club at one point whose enthusiasm for the game far outweighed their reading and comprehension. On one occasion one of the other lads stepped in when he overheard them using a weapons assault value to determine how many times it could be used to fire in close combat...

You nailed it sir. Person we dealt with a week ago made full blown sound effects and knows more about the lore of every individual named character in the galaxy of 40k then he does of the basics of the army he's playing!

I have a regular opponent who's like this. Routinely tries to shoot at you through walls, argues every little rule that hinders him, while being perfectly fine with rules that benefit him. I once had a game where he was trying to argue that you could snap fire a nova at an invisible unit, even though it specifically says you can't snap fire them. He's an ok guy, but something about toy soldiers turns him into TFG.

I do intro games a lot and rarely get to play myself nowadays, so even I get the rules wrong at times, sometimes comically so (first time I dealt with the psychic phase, I thought I had to roll a dice total higher than my opponent's dice total. I don't even know where to begin on how wrong that was).

However I did meet one person who intentionally fudged the rules to gain an advantage. I mentioned it in the other thread but the dude basically did not tell me about overwatch and docked all my vehicles by 1 hull point simply because I hadn't read up on the new rules yet (he was suppose to be introducing them to me). Amusingly I still beat him out of sheer luck.

I think it's an easy trap to fall into. 40k is a complicated game at the best of times, it's also a very attractive one with a very interesting and alluring lore and aesthetic. It's easy to get wrapped up in the fluff without getting a full grasp of the rules.

At the same time there are tonnes of players who've been playing for years and have an understanding of the rules well beyond anything that some will ever have.

There's always going to be an imbalance of knowledge like this. It's not a case of people cheating so much as a deficit of knowledge compared to enthusiasm.

The good thing to do is help people learn the correct rule when they get things wrong.

Sometimes playing for many years is actually a disadvantage. I often misremember how something works because I got it confused with a rule from a decade ago. 6th to 7th really tripped me up in particular because there were so many small rule changes that I just missed. I'm still finding stuff that I've been doing wrong.

Yes. He seems incredibly unwilling to learn rules and just does what his friend tells him is right. Which is how I end up explaining that a D Scythe doesn't fire 15 shots. Again.

I find a lot of online battle report videos hard to watch at times with all the errors and misinterpretations.

But, I can honestly say I've only had maybe one or 2 games that went flawlessly (without mistakes, or looking up a rule) in my own circles.

 GimbleMuggernaught wrote:
Sometimes playing for many years is actually a disadvantage. I often misremember how something works because I got it confused with a rule from a decade ago. 6th to 7th really tripped me up in particular because there were so many small rule changes that I just missed. I'm still finding stuff that I've been doing wrong.

Ugh, I hate this so much. It seems like every time I started to play again I'm fudging the rules because of this. Aribitorans cheat sheets have been a life saver for 7th ed.

For however long 7th edition has been out instill have no clue how to run the psychic phase. has play guard and tau so pretty much I zone out when people are rolling dice at me.

 GimbleMuggernaught wrote:
Sometimes playing for many years is actually a disadvantage. I often misremember how something works because I got it confused with a rule from a decade ago. 6th to 7th really tripped me up in particular because there were so many small rule changes that I just missed. I'm still finding stuff that I've been doing wrong.

Honestly I fall into this category.

What with having done at least a couple of games in every edition since third, I tend to get a bit confused on how things work here and there. So often times I'll get various rules (especially obscure) ones wrong on the BRB or codex level. It's not done out of malice, just genuine confusion.

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
I find a lot of online battle report videos hard to watch at times with all the errors and misinterpretations.

Well the more professionally done Battle Reports tend to contain a lot less errors (for me MWG Battle Reports are a prime example), but a lot of the homemade ones tend to contain a lot of errors (not to mention a surprising amount of them involve alcohol consumption).

I find myself forgetting a what a number of rules do, but I've never forgotten too many rules. I've also never seen a single player (outside those who are still learning the rules) misinterpret more rules than they get right. I've also never met someone who assumed that they could do whatever they want. The closest I got to either case was some dude spending a solid 10 minutes trying to convince me that a Land Raider sponson could shoot through its own hull to hit a target.

I am not used to 7th even now and I make many small mistakes constantly for that reason, such as unit coherency in multi-level ruins.

I do not do this to gain an advantage, I just remember poorly (fortunately my opponents are usually more well versed).

Definitely had some tough games with folks with horrendous reading comprehension. Almost always innocent but really slows the game down having to keep ask "It does what?" "Misread craziness" "Can I see? Ya it doesn't quite work that way we here?"

The guy who taught me is still stuck in 5th or 6th edition. I still get tripped up thinking I know the rules when I remember what he told me. Truly irritating when you have a strategy all planned out only to find out it centers around a rule that hasn't been legal in half a decade...

Most common for me is having to explain line of sight. It seems like once every few games I'm explaining to an opponent that their guys can't see my swooping daemon prince and then they are telling me that he is flying so he would be up in air and they should be able to shoot.
Another common theme is wound allocation. They get mad when their special weapon guy dies or mine doesn't... Then I'm left explaining the strategy behind how you place your models.

I honestly don't think these opponents are trying to cheat- just that their enthusiasm for the game far outweighs their grip on rules and understanding of less obvious tactics and strategies.

Most of the time it’s a misconception and you can’t blame people for getting stuff wrong in such a bloated game. It is annoying however, when you know the rules of your opponent’s army better than he does. Very rarely have I come across TFG.

One time in a tournament I was against a very casual player who tried to cast Enfeeble on me from what looked like 40”. I politely asked him to check the range and when he looked and saw it was 24 (or whatever it is) he looked a bit embarrassed more than anything.

Many people in my own play group are still stuck in the 6th ed concept of area terrain. I don’t really have a problem with it as we always discuss terrain before the game begins.

My friends and I tend to argue on what does and doesn't go in a game. When that happens, I do a quick Google search on that rule, i.e. "rapid fire shooting during overwatch" and pick a random link, and then use that to settle the dispute. (in this case, we agreed to follow the rules here.)

Lionheart713 wrote:
My friends and I tend to argue on what does and doesn't go in a game. When that happens, I do a quick Google search on that rule, i.e. "rapid fire shooting during overwatch" and pick a random link, and then use that to settle the dispute. (in this case, we agreed to follow the rules here.)

Why do you trust internet more than you rulebook ?

Because we misplaced the rule book, and now all we have is the army-specific codices.

And then hilarity ensues.

There's teaching people the rules and then there's teaching people the rules.
A few seem a bit miffed by misguided tuition.
It's a tricky one to deal with as knowing quite where to pitch when it comes to aptitude is a tricky one.
Quite often I won't teach the minutia until turns 4 or 5.
I like to make sure that we can get two games into the first session, one full of cock ups, fudging it and introducing rules and the second something much closer to the full game.

 godardc wrote:

Lionheart713 wrote:
My friends and I tend to argue on what does and doesn't go in a game. When that happens, I do a quick Google search on that rule, i.e. "rapid fire shooting during overwatch" and pick a random link, and then use that to settle the dispute. (in this case, we agreed to follow the rules here.)

Why do you trust internet more than you rulebook ?

I have recently discovered that someone at my store gets all the BRB rules from the Internet. It explains so much.

 WulfenClaw wrote:
A situation where other individuals you are playing with just literally interpret everything wrong or just do not read their codex in the first place and just assume everything they want to do is okay to do and that said rule they make up is so far from the actual rule that it just tilts you off the face of the earth because you realize you are dealing with a TFG individual?

Not all of us are in the game to practice for tournaments. I am pretty much, but I have played people who just arent that smart. I'm not being demeaning. I am being literal. It isn't as if it's a simple game, and it isn't as if people didn't get different grades in school, which tells you all you need to know. Not everyone comprehends as well as others and not everyone has even read the rules the same number of times.

So the net result CAN be errors, and sometimes, a lot of them. So if it seemed like they were that far off, it might just have to go down in the books as a training game and not an actual one, and you just kind of grind through rules for their benefit more than any wish to find out who wins.

I watched a game yesterday where two guys who have played and one of whom has spent some serious money on models including the Forge World Tau titan, but yet he didn't know how to do stomps (abnd wasnt even sure he got to do them). He was forgetting to do terrain tests, and pile in moves, and so on. So even people who are kind of into the hobby can be guilty of pretty much just scanning the rules and getting a "general idea" of how it works and working from that point. Lol.

In the tournament on Saturday i played a guy who told me EMPHATICALLY that if both sides have the same initiative, you dont pile in. He was also absolutely sure that his Corpsethief Claw thing somehow was scored in both the Maelkstrom and the Primary ITC mission conditions. no such FAQ exists but he was quite sure.

So it's stuff like that which happens out of the blue that makes me think it's not necessarily cheating so much as varying degrees of dedication to the details. Or its cheating,. Hard to tell sometimes.