|
I am curious what peoples opinions are.
I have noticed while playing world of warcraft, one of the expectations people have is for you to have an "add" called "deadly boss mods". This program essentially hoots at you and reminds you to move your character if he is standing on a pool of fire the boss has summoned, or if the boss is casting a magical effect that needs to be disrupted. I have felt that this was cheating.
I have aslo noticed from other players that there is an expectation that before you go into an instance you should have read the walk through before hand and already know before hand how to defeat the monsters in the instance. I have also felt that this was cheating.
Whatever happened to learning from your mistakes?
It gets to the point where people have memorized all of the wandering patrols and exactly where to stand in a boss fight. People are expected to. I guess it is unavoidable if you play the same instance 50 times.
Don't get me wrong i do like playing wow, and i like the game and my friends on the game.
However i like playing Pathfinder, and D&D before it...I have enjoyed playing this game for a very long time.
Now Pathfinder is a cat of a far different stripe. At its heart it is a group of friends playing characters who cooperatively work together to creatively solve the problems and challenges, defeat the monsters that the GM is challenging them with.
Is it in your opinion cheating for a player in the game to pick up the module or adventure path being run by the GM and actively read ahead?
Have you noticed people carrying over a "MMO" mentality and thinking reading ahead is "par for the course" to get through the encounter?
How about if someone has read most of the adventure paths and modules as his subscriptions deliver them because he enjoy's them? would he be cheating?
I suppose this all depends. What do you all think? thanks.
It's not "cheating" but it's not "sporting." It can spoil the entire group's fun, especially the GM. And as the old saying goes: "When the GM is unhappy, nobody is happy."
It's never cheating if they can separate what the player knows from what the character knows. As a GM we do this all the time. We separate NPC and Monster knowledge from what we ourselves know of the characters weaknesses, strengths, fears, backgrounds, etc. I have seen players who are excellent at the separation of metagame knowledge and in-character knowledge.
Of course there are always those players that try and sneak metagame knowledge out of you at any possible turn, even at the table. "What will happen if I do this...?"
"I don't know, why don't you try it and see!"
For those that are constantly looking for that "edge" to make sure their character is always at an advantage, "looking ahead" might be too much of a temptation, and they might not be able to separate the meta from the game.
I'd say it's definitely cheating to use that knowledge to gain advantage in that game, and I'd further say you'd have to be an extraordinary individual to be able to compartmentalize player and character knowledge that efficiently to be able to prevent yourself from doing so.
Looking ahead in and of itself is not cheating, but most people only do so go gain an advantage. Since the story is just as much apart of the game, and "winning" is not equated to killing monsters like a video game I have to hold them to different standards.
I have had people who started with MMO's come over as players, and they knew not to look ahead. I figure, and I guess they did to that what applies to one, does not apply to the other.
Is it in your opinion cheating for a player in the game to pick up the module or adventure path being run by the GM and actively read ahead?
Some time ago, when one of my current players was thinking about joining my PbP, something happened that gave me a rather strong opinion on this matter. Someone who had been lurking in the thread went and emailed said potential player 'warning' him about how I was deviating from the plot and encounters as written. The REAL irony was that this same person was actively trying to get into other Serpent's Skull PbPs here on Paizo!
As much as I try to tailor the writing and formatting style we use to make it easy for other to follow the story, I was pretty damn well offended.
So maybe I'm a bit jaded by that experience, but I'm hard pressed to thin of any good justification for a player to expressly go out and "browsing" the same module the GM is already running OR that they are hoping to play in the near future. There are player's guides for a reason: check those or talk with your GM about what to expect.
So yes, I would find that sort of behavior to be reprehensible.
How about if someone has read most of the adventure paths and modules as his subscriptions deliver them because he enjoy's them? would he be cheating?
Now if it's a case where you already read an AP a couple years prior because you subscribe to that line or you were planning to run it yourself and the group fell apart then that's another matter. The difference is that in your first scenario someone set out with a [more likely than not] unscrupulous intent. That intent is the difference.
In this scenario, I would expect that person to be an adult and keep their metagame knowledge to themselves. Furthermore, if they were one of my players I'd expect them to apprise me of this before hand rather than letting me discover it later. In fact, I'd recommend anyone in this scenario inform the GM beforehand as a courtesy. It would help to preempt any accusations of cheating and bad will should the group's opinion on the matter differ from your own.
Is it in your opinion cheating for a player in the game to pick up the module or adventure path being run by the GM and actively read ahead?
Yes. In the instances where they'd already read it and can't "unread" it, I will think less of them as friends if they choose to obviously metagame.
Have you noticed people carrying over a "MMO" mentality and thinking reading ahead is "par for the course" to get through the encounter?
Nah. My crew rolled dice before WoW.
How about if someone has read most of the adventure paths and modules as his subscriptions deliver them because he enjoy's them? would he be cheating?
See above. Also, I can and do change adventures, not merely to thwart metagaming but to suit my tastes.
|
Having been a DM for almost 30 years now, I do consider it cheating (see below for an exception to this). But then, for the first 18 or so years of that, GM material was just that, GM material only. The modules even had a blurb in the front saying that if you planned on playing through the module, read no further, so old habits die hard (especially if one sees nothing wrong with said habit)...
Now sure, even back then, many players shared the responsibility of GMing, so those players may have read and/or run a module, so this is excusable. So as has been said uptread, it's all about intent; was it read because of plans to someday run it that never happened (or happened in the past), or was it read to gain some kind of in game advantage for your character...
Makes all the difference in the world...
By the rules of the game, I don't think reading ahead is cheating. Cheating, IMO, requires you to break the rules. As there is no rule saying 'thou shalt not read this book', it can't be cheating to me--from a strictly rules-based view.
OTOH, reading ahead breaks the spirit of the game and the unwritten social contract between a GM and his players. It's one thing to read the material; you own it, that's fine. Using that knowledge in-game gives you many opportunities to "win" the game, by knowing just what to do, what to say to whom...in short, ruining everyone else's fun. So to me, it's really not cheating so much as being exceptionally selfish, by saying "my fun is more important than everyone else's".
It's cheating if we're going by the rule of my own personal games, which is that anything behind the screen is off limits, and that includes the adventure.
Cheating does not have to mean book rules. It can also mean breaking the social contract. If we agree not to use casters in a game, and you come to the table with a wizard you have cheated.
Not really if they ran the module before themselves or just took inspiration from it. However reading along is like a someone peeking in battleship.
I liken it to that annoying guy who ruins the end of the movie before you can watch it.
Reading ahead in a module you are playing in? I would cast a person out of the game for deliberately committing such a heinous crime. It is entirely possible they will not be invited to another either if I suspect they will do it again.
If the person in question read through a module because they were considering hosting it, but I ended up hosting it instead--well, they may be forgiven for that (though I may not allow them to participate in that particular game either).
If a player did that deliberately, they would be out of my game. The 'big reveal' is one of the most fun things about dming for me. By reading ahead you take that away. I think it takes a certain lack of maturity to want to do that to 'turn the cheat codes on' so to speak. I do however understand the impulse, and I dont think it comes from MMO's its just not frowned on there. Complete walkthroughs of tough games have existed just about as long as video games.
But aside from that, as a kid in junior high, I would have KILLED to get a hold of my gms notebook when playing dnd. It was like a treasure trove of secrets and power and I wanted it. Ofcourse I think thats a little silly now, and I enjoy the unfolding of the story as we play, but I can still relate to the impulse to want to read ahead. And given how readily available everything is now, the temptation and ease in which to do it, is much greater nowadays.
Metagaming is metagaming, and it's generally frowned upon.
THAT SAID there can be circumstances where someone might have read the adventure before playing it--but the GM and other players KNOW THIS and trust the person not to be misusing their knowledge.
I ran Crypt of the Everflame once. Later, someone invited me into their Pathfinder game, saying they were starting with that same module. I said I'd really like to join his campaign (it was going to go beyond the module), but I'd played Crypt and didn't want to unfairly affect the game. He said, "Actually, since I'm new to Pathfinder, having you there to make sure I'm doing everything right would be great. I know you won't do stuff in character that wouldn't be appropriate."
But that's a far cry from clandestinely reading an AP and using that knowledge in game without the GM's awareness.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's not cheating per se, but it's definitely a D!ck move by a player just looking to get ahead and would definitely get said player booted from the table.
Let me clarify:
If the player was someone who had been subscribing to the AP's and read them all and came to the table saying all this. I'd ask them how well would they be able to play the game without metagaing the crap out of it. If they were capable of not using what they knew about the AP in game then there's no reason for them NOT to play.
If a player at the table read ahead specifically to gain knowledge on what was coming up in the game and use that knowledge in the game? That's a D!ck move and would get them booted. Youre essentially attempting rig the game in your favor. That player simply cant be trusted and is, to me, as bad as a player who cheats on his / her rolls.
Yes it's a game and they may be having fun. But the willingness to be that sneaky and underhanded says volumes about a persons character. And while it means absolutely nothing to some of you. It means ALOT to me.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Most professional ethics codes include rules designed to avoid the "appearance of impropriety," and I think that this is a good rule of thumb to use for these sorts of questions, as well.
I'm a DM, an Adventure Path Subscriber, and also a player in other people's games. Currently, I'm playing in a Carrion Crown game. When the game started, I had read a good chunk of the first book, and I'd flipped through bestiary material of some of the other books, looking to mine them for ideas for my own homebrew game.
When I joined the Carrion Crown game, I did the following:
1. Full disclosure: I made sure that the GM knew that I had a bit of inside information on the early books, to ensure he was comfortable with it.
2. Avoidance of anything that might look like "insider trading:" In Book 1, there's a particular encounter which turns out to be an ambush, in which the PCs are manipulated to make themselves more vulnerable to the attack. I knew it was coming, and what's more, I knew that my PC was likely going to be the first target. My character is a pretty cautious fellow by nature, and it's likely that that he would have taken precautions during the run up to the attack, but because I didn't want to give the impression of metagaming, I kept my mouth shut and intentionally did NOT put up pre-emptive defenses. My PC nearly died, but no one could have accused me trying to game the system.
3. Cease the potentially abusive practice: I haven't cracked the spine on any of the Carrion Crown books since we started playing. At this point, we're somewhere in book 3, and I've got no idea what to expect.
For me, this was a no-brainer. Part of the thrill of the game for me is the thrill of exploration and discovery, so reading ahead would ruin that aspect of the game. Even when I play video games, I generally play through them once while avoiding any kind of spoilers or walkthroughs, and then use walkthroughs as a way of checking out content that I might have missed the first time out.
I would expect players in my game to observe a similar social contract.
I liken it to that annoying guy who ruins the end of the movie before you can watch it.Or at best the guy who goes to the movie with everyone, and then at the end proudly talks about how he already saw it and how it compared the second time.
I don't know why you would read an AP if you weren't going to run it. I just had a player the other day say, "you should run one of these. They are really good. I've read most of them."
Some of us still like to read good, well-written gaming material, including adventures. I haven't run a game in 12 years though I still have fun as a player, but that doesn't mean I won't read an adventure and say "wow, that was creative!" My friends and I all tend to devour reading material, including modules and adventure paths. I own the entire 3E and 3.5 run of Dungeon for example and love many of those adventures and read through them from time to time. Really, that's all the reason one needs to read an adventure path: the desire to read material printed by people we respect in a hobby we all love.
Oh, and as for the guy who sees the movie with everyone then talks about how the 2nd+ showing held up...been there, done that. Saw Return of the King three times in the theater and served as resident Tolkien expert for all three movies. Didn't reveal anything during the movie about the movie, only background and reminding people what went on in the previous movie(s). Nothing wrong with keeping everyone on the same page, is there?
I don't know why you would read an AP if you weren't going to run it. I just had a player the other day say, "you should run one of these. They are really good. I've read most of them."
I don't see myself running the APs as such, but they've got so many ideas I can pick up for my homebrew that I can't resist. The first books in Kingmaker for example have lots of little encounters that I can drop into my game anywhere. (Or is that close enough to running them that it doesn't count?)
|
|
Some of us still like to read good, well-written gaming material, including adventures. I haven't run a game in 12 years though I still have fun as a player, but that doesn't mean I won't read an adventure and say "wow, that was creative!" My friends and I all tend to devour reading material, including modules and adventure paths. I own the entire 3E and 3.5 run of Dungeon for example and love many of those adventures and read through them from time to time.
So to-bad-so-sad-sux-to-be-him for the poor GM who does not have the time to create his own stuff and relies upon published material?
Or do you wait to read something until you've gone through it already?
|
|
Thank you all for your thoughts and posts. I'm a little too sleepy to read the whole thread at the moment, but ill dig into it tomorrow. it looks like it will be a good read.
Personally i think it is cheating to read ahead for the precise purpose to find out what is going to happen so you can prepare for it.
Some of us still like to read good, well-written gaming material, including adventures. I haven't run a game in 12 years though I still have fun as a player, but that doesn't mean I won't read an adventure and say "wow, that was creative!" My friends and I all tend to devour reading material, including modules and adventure paths. I own the entire 3E and 3.5 run of Dungeon for example and love many of those adventures and read through them from time to time.So to-bad-so-sad-sux-to-be-him for the poor GM who does not have the time to create his own stuff and relies upon published material?
Or do you wait to read something until you've gone through it already?
I read it when I read it. In our group, none of us use published adventures; there's an unwritten stigma against them in some cases, in others not so much. I'd read an adventure and then go through it anyway, trying not to metagame, as that reduces the fun for others. I'd enjoy seeing how encounters worked out compared to what was written.
I don't run mods, but yeah I'd consider it cheating. Whether the player has previously read the mod for fun*, or the player is reading it because he's playing it, it's cheating. It's not the same kind of reprehensible cheating that might happen in say, a poker game though. After all, there are no winners in D&D.
*Other posters have given reasons for pleasure reading mods, which I think are better than the reasons for pleasure reading D&D fiction. And plenty of gamers do that.
If a player is good at separating character knowledge from player knowledge, or simply stays out of tactical decision-making, everything's cool. If the DM and other players aren't any the wiser (or if they wouldn't be any the wiser), I don't see the harm.
So long as the 'cheater' doesn't upstage the other players or ruin the surprise for them, I'm happy.
|
|
Well thank you all for your posts, Consensus seems to be with perhaps one or two exceptions, that reading ahead in the AP/ Module for the purpose of gaining an advantage is cheating.
Also it is also good form to mention to the GM if you have already perused the materiel / AP before hand so you can iron out any problems before hand.
I have a pretty clear cut line drawn between whats acceptable between video games and tabletops. I have yet to play a video game that has a mechanic that comes anywhere close to the RP value of Tabletops. Part of the difference is the kind of crowds each genre attracts I suppose. Another fact is when I am playing a game I still have to actually go through all of the actions, move my character physically, hit the right sequence of buttons, make the correct shot, time everything semi-perfectly, etc. so I don't mind using a walk-through (especially in games like dark souls) since even though I know whats going to happen I still need to have the skill to make my plans work. In a tabletop if you know what is going to happen and have the time to properly plan for it, then its more than half the battle, the battle is pretty much already over.
If a player is good at separating character knowledge from player knowledge, or simply stays out of tactical decision-making, everything's cool. If the DM and other players aren't any the wiser (or if they wouldn't be any the wiser), I don't see the harm.
So long as the 'cheater' doesn't upstage the other players or ruin the surprise for them, I'm happy.
To me, it goes beyond this. Even if a player does not get in on the tactics or ruin the plot, the player who has read the module knows what the treasure is like, where it is hidden, etc. So if I have a player who seems to know just where everything is and makes great "guesses" at what the unidentified magic items are, then I will be very suspicious.
I don't know why you would read an AP if you weren't going to run it. I just had a player the other day say, "you should run one of these. They are really good. I've read most of them."
James Jacobs has said before that a priority for paizo is making sure the AP's are fun to read regardless of wether or not you are running them. They have stated that they expect a good number of their customers to simply read the adventures for fun, and not always run them. They have this impression for a reason. People have to be doing it.
That said, I and many others also read AP's and modules to mine them for ideas to our current game. I generally only do it for modules, but if I were still subscribed to the AP line I would be doing it with those as well. The subscription model almost demands this, as I imagine very few people are completing an entire AP in 6 months, and most people dont buy things and then do nothing with them. They are going to crack them open more often then not if they spent the money on them.
If a player is good at separating character knowledge from player knowledge, or simply stays out of tactical decision-making, everything's cool. If the DM and other players aren't any the wiser (or if they wouldn't be any the wiser), I don't see the harm.
So long as the 'cheater' doesn't upstage the other players or ruin the surprise for them, I'm happy.
To me, it goes beyond this. Even if a player does not get in on the tactics or ruin the plot, the player who has read the module knows what the treasure is like, where it is hidden, etc. So if I have a player who seems to know just where everything is and makes great "guesses" at what the unidentified magic items are, then I will be very suspicious.
I would too. I include treasure, traps, and other miscellaneous challenges under the 'tactical' umbrella.
My point is that if the rest of us at the table don't or wouldn't know there's a 'cheater' amongst us, I'm cool with it.
I've heard a story or two about 'cheaters' who knowingly passed up hidden treasure, fallen for traps, or led their party down the wrong passage because their character had no way of knowing. That's what I'm talking about.
Also it is also good form to mention to the GM if you have already perused the materiel / AP before hand so you can iron out any problems before hand.
I would say it's not only good form, it's the appropriate thing to do. You should disclose you've read a module that your GM is set to run. Then the two of you can decide whether or not you're sufficiently set up to keep player knowledge from PC knowledge. From that point, however, going back to re-read the module should be off limits until you're through with it. At that point it becomes cheating.
I think cheating is in the intent.
Obtaining or reading the module once the game has begun as a player, that's cheatin'.
I think cheating is in the intent.
This is the only answer for me. I said it before, and I want to reiterate. There are very mature players who are also GMs who could very easily have read an entire AP, but never use the information they got out of it in character. If someone is reading a module or AP for the express purpose of making it easier to "win." Then it is cheating. If they are someone that has a history of reading modules and APs because they love the content, and then happen to be a player in one of those, they have to have a clear-cut and decisive separation between what they, the player, know, and what their character knows.
Just reading an AP or module does not a cheater make. Reading an AP or module with the intent of getting an advantage, does.
I and all of the players at my table would call this cheating. I am currently in a Shackled City game. I bought the book and handed it off to my DM to run. I never read the book after I purchased it.
However, I did disclose to him that when I started playing regularly that I joined a 14th level party that was running that AP. Thus I had some inside knowledge about what happened during the game. We have a standing agreement that I will rely on the other players to figure things out in the adventure. My bard may be the conduit through which they get information, but I'm going to let the other players shine.
I have thrown a player off my group and refuse to talk to any player I catch cheating.
It's stupid, destroys your own fun and is unfair with regards to the other players. Once the adventure is done, though, I tend to hand it out to players so they can see how I changed the basic module. Another one of my players did tell me he read a certain module in advance and separated his in-and out-game knowledge. Plus, I did modify the adventure very much, so no harm done there.
Just my 2 cents.
I have actually read a few APs before playing in them because 1)I was considering running them myself, and 2)they make interesting reads. I also deliberately avoided the vast majority of the encounter specifics, choosing instead to read mostly the overall summary. I found this not only helped me preserve a sense of discovery when playing it later, but also gave me a better feel for the overall flow of the story, as I only looked at specifics when they seemed to particularly impact how a scene developed or when I was debating using that scene or setup in something else.
My experience with the APs is that it really isn't that big of a deal, though, because even the most railroady AP still leaves a lot of room for individual parties to make their own path, and thus make the story different enough from what you may have read to keep even informed players on their toes. It could be more of a problem with a single adventure, but really Paizo does a pretty good job of writing adventures that I've never really seen it come up. They are very good about making it so that no two parties will approach the adventure the same way. Also, all this is before the DM puts their own stamp on it, making it even harder to fully anticipate precise details.
As far as the original question, it depends entirely on intent and disclosure. If you are read the adventure for a legitimate reason, are upfront about it, and are able to keep the knowledge to themselves, it shouldn't be a problem. Even if the overarching story is known, enough depends on the individual DM and party that it would actually be quite hard to fully anticipate actual details or the order of the encounters, at least in all the campaigns I've been in.