Advice needed, possible cheating player (spoilers for Trials of the Beast)

[Niccu]

So I'm running a Carrion Crown campaign with four PCs, and after one session the players are discussing the evidence they found in their latest session (raiding the chymic works) and one of them mentions showing "the shambling man skin".

This tickles my intuition a bit and I check the logs (we're running in roll20 and 100% through the chat interface, no voice features) and this is the first mention of the term shambling man in the entire session, I never gave any PC that term before.

When I confronted them they said that "is that what it's actually called? i was making stuff up ...." and "you said it looked like the other skins, (i assume male as default) but it's skin so it's probably not pristine being "8 or 9 feet tall" so it has to be..stretched out and in worse off shape, so...sham-bly".

I hate to throw away so much time and effort in this campaign by calling it a loss, or to throw a member out since we're all friends, but I'm not sure I can buy that it's a coincidence and I don't have the time to invest in rewriting the story enough to spoiler proof it.

Thoughts?

[MichaelCullen]

Well, this is a tough one. That's part of the risk of running published APs. That's far to specific to be just a coincidence. Personally, I would rewrite things just enough to make his OOC knowledge a liability. If he keeps using it it will be at his own peril.

I was playing in a play by post of this module that died at the end. Here is my suggestion for such a revision.

carrion crown:

Volkstag and Grine are not actually evil. They are relatively competent alchemists who got in bad with the wrong person. They have been dominated by a high level wizard who has been watching the events via scrying. The PCs must uncover this twist by either noticing the scrying sensor DC 24 perception check, by interacting with them and making the sense motive check, or via magic. If they don't uncover the "true" state of affairs then the wizard steals the evidence before it can be presented in court.

Throw enough of these curveballs and he will stop cheating.

[Tinalles]

I was in a group that dissolved as a result of a very similar situation -- one player had bought the AP and read ahead, then carefully thought through the best way to approach every encounter given our party make-up. During each session, he steered us into adopting his preferred solutions with timely suggestions.

He was very good at concealing his OOC knowledge. I was new to the game at that point, and super-impressed with how good he was at playing the game.

Then at the end of the module he had his PC commit suicide in order to avoid the negative consequences of a group decision. As we were finding out that we wouldn't get a level, he sat there and laughed and said "You guys are getting a template applied to you!" Which clued us in that we had been schnookered, and that he was going to get a new PC to replace the one he himself killed while the rest of us dealt with the consequences of our actions.

That killed the group. We never met again.

In retrospect, the correct response in that case would be to kick the problem player from the group.

In YOUR case, OP, it probably hasn't gone that far. But I don't think in-game solutions are a good response to out-of-game problems. You need to speak with the cheating player and work it out. Let him know that it's not okay to read ahead, find out how much he's read already, and come to some arrangement.

[Keep Calm and Carrion]

Tell the player to either come clean or quit the group. Then decide as a group how you want to proceed.

If the player is willing to be honest, foreknowledge is not the end of the world. You might even have fun with it and play it that that character is getting visions from Desna or Pharasma. Have the player pay a feat or two for the right to use OOC knowledge from time to time. Or say that the character is haunted by presentiments of doom...give everyone else in the group hero points to represent the fact that unlike the character who has seen the future, they still have hope.

Perhaps Adrissant could be precognizant too, and could be laying traps for them that alter the AP in dramatic ways.

Please let us know how things go.

[Niccu]

They don't want to admit to anything, though I just cannot believe they came up with shambling man on their own and dropped it so casually. I let them know I'd be changing things up and reading ahead would get their character in trouble. I plan to stick the Carrion Hill module between the trial and Schloss Caromarc to throw them for a loop. Hopefully we can get through most of it the session that we start it and they'll have no time to look it up.

This is their first campaign and they have been really into it, watching other groups play various campaigns and reading rule disputes on forums, I'm hoping they just stumbled onto a video they didn't realize was later in the same campaign we were in and merely didn't want to tell anyone they got spoiled. Hopefully the rest of the campaign can still be a fun journey, but if something like this happens again I'll probably boot them from the group.

I appreciate the insight. Perhaps I'll keep the feat idea around for strike two. Then again...

Cheers though.