I truely sympathize with someone who has a cheater in their group that they don't want to part with. Usually when I have a problem with cheating behavior the players are doing a variety of other stuff that's managing to piss off the rest of the group.

Recently we had a guy who

1) Fudged his dicerolls, "accidentally" counting hits that wern't there.
2) Kept wanting to play his amazing character with no log sheets (this is a living campaign).
3) Was prone to outbursts and sulking when things didn't got his way, especially if the situation called for something his "do everything" character couldn't do. Additionally he would actively try and disuade people from playing something that would be better then his character in any one of like 4-5 areas.
4) Wanted to leave the table and not take a log sheet after his own choices got his character killed/forced to hand of god.
5) Was prone to general rude behavior and no people skills.

So in short, when i did ask him to leave and not return after number 4 my only regret was I hadn't done so sooner.

What I don't understand is why people act like that in the first place.

The point of a game is to win to some folks.

Nothing wrong with that, per se. The real problems we're looking at are immaturity and deceit. So, it's 'win at all costs' that's the problem, I guess. What's really sad is that they could direct all those urges into a *character* who is immature and deceitful instead.

I may have to give that a try.

Might be worth taking a second to think about WHY he cheats. People play roleplaying games for different reasons. Some people enjoy the hard-earned reward of a victory. Others don't. Throughh years of okaying, it's be cone very clear to me some people play just to be something stronger than they are in real life. They want to be a badass that wins all the time and is feared. I'm guessing this guy is that. He wants to WIN. That doesn't mean he's a loser in real life or anything, but part of e enjoyment of playing a shadow runner for him is being a badass no one can stop.

So, where does that leave you? Perhaps he'd prefer being GM? Perhaps he'd prefer everything stay the way it is? In anyway.I don't know. Odds are neither does he. He'll probably get very upset if you call him on his cheating though. You have to weight the cost of calling him out versus the gain.

You could also try implementing metagame rewards for in-character performance. Stuff like a free re-roll once per session awarded for players that role-play their character extremely well. Bonus to hit, auto-reduction of damage...stuff like that can do a couple things. One, it can reinforce that we are all here playing a game and often times, someone that cheats, may have a delusion that they are doing more. Two...well, I forgot what I was going to say.

But, going with the metagame rewards, maybe the guy that takes the most damage in the session, gets a card next session to reduce a single hit by half... Or, anytime a character rolls a 1 or glitches or whatever, the next session he gets a chance to avoid a new glitch. I'm just taking stabs in the dark here, but if you can somehow reward players for some of the bad rolls that are bound to happen, then everyone has more reason to just roll the dice and say what's rolled instead of trying to cheat on every roll.

I think this could work well for the OP's table.

I don't have this problem at my table, but I do have issues with my players updating their character sheets each week, so I give out rewards for timely sheet updates. Again, its all the same idea, give out rewards for actions you want to see occur at your table. Just because its not in the core game rules doesn't mean you can't use it.

I've always felt it leads back to attachment. Sure its natural to feel attachment to a character, and it makes sense the more attached to it you become, the less likely it will be you'll willingly burn said character by admitting to a bad roll. There are some warning signs, the guy who spends just a littttttle too much time coming up with backstory, and has more narrative for viewing 'pleasure' between new sessions, the guy who has sketches of said character, not just some doodles, but hero pose sketches in multiple flavors. The guy who also likes to add little quotations by said character on the bottom of each of those sketches.

Maybe the reason that it's so hard for me to understand is that I like to let the dice fall as they may. It's kind of the polar opposite of cheating so you can be like Chuck Norris.