Cheating Dice Rolls in Roll20

Roll20 goes to great lengths to make its rolls legitimate, including a QuantumRoll icon on legitimate rolls. Despite this, it is possible to cheat, and make your rolls appear as legitimate rolls complete with the QuantumRoll icon.

I am not encouraging people do do it, but simply providing a description of the symptoms, so GMs can watch out for it. The method is described here: How to cheat on Roll20.net.

What To Look For

So, lets say you have a player you suspect is cheat – what should you look for?

This method takes time, and that’s the only thing to watch for. A player using this method will take a long time to make their rolls, and might be constantly making irrelevant chit-chat to cover the time taken.

Some players do take more time than others, and sometimes the Roll20 server takes a long time to respond, so you cant perfectly identify a player using this method like this.

Additionally, a clever cheater will make sure to use this method inconsistently, so they sometimes fail at important rols (that don’t cause their deaths!), and will always take longer than average to make their rolls.

So player behaviour and successes can only ever be a rough guide.

How To Deal With It

There is no good way to address this issue. Roll20 could fix things at their end so it isn’t possible any more, so raising an issue with them is recommended – but don’t wait for a solution.

The solutions as I see at are:

• Talk to the problem player. Ask them if they are fudging rolls, and ask them to stop.
• Make the rolls yourself, either for the whole group or just that one player.
• Ignore it, and pretend it isn’t happening. That isn’t really an option if other players complain about it.
• Kick the troublesome player. The player might not be cheating! But if you are suspecting him of cheating, you don’t trust them already.

Really, there is no good solution. Roll20 could fix this at their end so it cannot happen. But who knows if they ever will.

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