Non-player witnesses

[Lucario EX]

What should you do if a non-player spectator claims to have seen an illegal action occur, if it can't be verified? For example, a he-said-she-said regarding the outcome of a coin flip. Player A says the coin was heads, Player B says the coin was tails, Player B's mom who was watching the match says the coin was tails. Spectators can easily help family or friends cheat, so obviously witnesses can't be trusted entirely, but does that mean you should disregard them?

 

[DukeFireBird]

A judge can use witnesses to determine fact, though if the witness is related to the player who would be getting a favorable call, I would take that under scrutiny. He/she saids can be annoying, but thats why we have the penalty guidelines. Both players have now failed to keep track of gamestate. If this keeps happening with 1 of those players, then we may escalate the future penalties that player gets.

 

[tutti]

I'm not quite following here. If one player says a coin landed on heads and one says it landed on tails, doesn't that necessarily mean that one of those players didn't fail to keep track of the game state?

 

[DukeFireBird]

let me answer your question with another. Which player do you believe?

Yes, it kinda sucks that both get a penalty, but at the start, its only a caution. Most likely the player who is in the right will only have the one occurrence, and the erring player will have a history.

 

[ShadowCard]

In the specific example, I would look at it as a case of a disputed flip. The difference is that a spectator called the judge instead of one of the players calling the judge. If you don't want to take the observation of the spectator, in this case, there is no need to. Ask the players to point to where the coin is now. If the two have not agreed on the result, it should not have been moved yet.

 

[P_A]

In the case of other possible unverifiable illegal actions (such as if someone happened to say they saw a player pick up a card when they shouldn't have, or if they say they saw someone taking off damage counters when they shouldn't have, etc), you might want to consider asking a few extra questions when trying to investigate. One is: "do you think anyone else happened to witness the illegal action (including any actual players who may be in the vicinity)?", and another is "what is your relationship to the players at the table?" Believe it or not, both questions are very pertinent to any reporting of an illegal action, and no matter how impartial judges try to be, the answers to those questions will always have a bearing upon how the judgement is both given and received. What do you do in those and any other situation that is unverifiable? Use your best judgement. Make sure you let both players know that you have every confidence that they both want to do the right thing, and you really don't want to put the blame on anyone in particular. Tell them you aren't perfect and that your judgement may be flawed as well, but it's the best you can do. That way you will gain friends even though you have to make some sort of judgement. And if that judgement means that you disregard the information supplied by a non player, then so be it. In the end, you have to be comfortable in saying you did your best in judging. Your conscience has to be clear. Hopefully you have a good one.