frustratedDM's page

Does it make sense for a necromancer specialized wizard to be good? I thought. I couldn't see anything in the PHB, maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I was always under the impression that undead were inherently evil, and even say "command[ing] undead" to do good things is an evil act.

I don't, with out good reason, usually let players create evil characters when playing in my game, as I feel going into the game with an evil character is usually just a sort of social act of rebellion that exists outside the game, among other reason...

I have a player who's character is neutral on the good/evil axis who's recent experiences we both agreed would have a big effect on the character's view points and such. So I left it up to him to decide how his character would interpret things, if he would pick up the cause to fight against evil, or be lured towards evil. He felt his character would drift towards evil, so we went with that.

I'm not sure what I may have gotten myself into, though. A simple detect evil spell would reveal that the character is evil to the rest of the party, and then I'm not sure what the reaction would be.

Basically my main concern is that this plays out in a way that is still fun for everyone, as these kinds of things usually turned into disaster back when we were... less mature.

Am I just setting my campaign up for disaster at this point? If you guys have any experiences, advice, or even links to articles about this, I'd appreciate what ever you'd like to share!

I run an online game using voice chat and a game table. I suspect one of my players, a good friend of mine, of cheating. Specifically I think he figured out which module I'm running them through and has downloaded it.

The past few sessions he's made some very specific guesses and discoveries that lead me to believe that he is cheating.

-Wanting to go back to search a room 2 more times after already thoroughly searching it. I decided to cut out the secret panels in that room to avoid the encounter they triggered and I put the magic items in them else where in the module, so they never found the panels because they didn't exist.

-Deciding that the main monster they're hunting is residing down from a ledge they walked out on. By itself it's not a stretch because it's a good clue, but then he correctly decides there must be a secret passage it travels through to get in and out of the lair, since the ledge is high up. Not too much of a stretch either, but until the past few sessions the group has only slowly been putting things together. And then the FIRST place he searches for a secret door is the exact spot that the module has the passage located. I had moved it though, and he seemed pretty confused when he didn't find anything there.

There are a few other things he's picked up on just a little too quickly as well. This kind of thing is hard to prove, but it's to the extent that I would be surprised if he wasn't cheating.

I used to be hesitant about running modules, while we grew up playing 1st and 2nd edition, for this reason, among some others, but we're much older now and I like running modules now because it takes a lot less time to prepare, and you get introduced to some cool things you might not have thought of on your own.

This module is almost done, so there's not much else I can do to thwart this cheating. For the next modules I'm planning I've thought about changing names of NPCs and locations and such, but it might get a little more problematic if player handouts are involved or not, plus I could slip up and read something using original names. Also I thought about altering a lot of things in the module, but this would take time I'm not sure I want to take.

Anyways, I'm open to advice. More specifically about this kind of cheating, and not the kind involving dice fudging and bad math, which is more common. Our online game table takes removes the ability to cheat that way.