Most impudent ways to cheat

[Eadee]

Yesterday I was puzzled how unashamedly a player cheated at my table. And I'm curious whethter others have to deal with stuff like this as well or experienced even worse.

We use a ruleset that allows to raise a skill/spell no more than two points between two game sessions (the system doesn't matter, but we play The Dark Eye in case someone wants to know). Every player stores their character sheets in our dropbox so I can access it for preparing the game sessions and everyone brings a printed version of his character with him when we play.

On the physical character sheet and in his digital version he had a spell rating of 1. But he used it like he had 5 and even wanted to raise it to 7 today.

When I asked him why he's using higher skills/spells than noted on his character-sheet he replied that he had "raised them in his mind" over the last sessions, but didn't update the file nor take down a note on his physical sheet because that would have been to much effort. Hypothetically he had enough xp to raise them, but he didn't.

I could've understood if he just raised those stats a few moments before we started and just noted it down on the physical sheet without updating the file. But the way he did it he could just use every skill at +4 points more and if he got caught he could just claim he raised just that skill over the last two game sessions in his mind.

Did anyone of you enconter such a practice before? Or even worse?

 

[Snorkack]

Do you have a group contract? If not, then I guess now it's time to set one up. There you can specify what happens if someone is caught bending the rules. In our group, we handle such stuff in game: Caught rulebreakers - no matter whether the cheating happened intentionally or by accident - draw the wrath of Phex upon them and are severely blessed with misfortune unless they donate a significant amount of their possessions to the local Phex community.
Also, I would refrain from calling someone out for cheating, even if you are 100% sure he did it on purpose. Just give him the benefit of the doubt and explain to him that he ventured past the agreed-on limits and you have to react to that in some way. Accusing him of cheating doesn't do anything except causing hard feelings.
Are you using Heldensoftware? It makes administration of player characters much much easier. Usually we raise stats together before and after each session on my Laptop and I send them a pdf copy afterwards.

 

[Eadee]

We have no group-contract that defines what happens if people cheat. Until now people either cheated good enough, not to get caught (which is a virtue in the eyes of Phex) or just accepted that they "must have done the math wrong" or "forgot to apply encumbarance" when someone happens to call them out on a roll.

But this player just really thinks it's sufficient to think about raising the stat to actually use it, and tried to convince me it is just normal to do it that way.

About Helden-Software. We use a couple of house rules, like less skills (Spears&Staffs is one skill for example, athletics and body control are also just one skill and so on).
That's why I provide pdf-sheets that they can fill in digitally.

However, some of the newer players in this group are too lazy to calculate xp-cost, so they just use Helden-Software and ignore the skills we don't use in our houserules.

The player in question is one of those using Helden-Software, yes, but apparantly starting the tool to raise some skills/spells was too much effort.

I talked to him in private about this issue, just one other player that was involved in the whole thing knows about it too (she knew before I did). I just mentioned to everyone that players have to update their sheets (at least the physical ones) and raising skills "in their mind" is not allowed, without telling who did something like this.