Cheating

[Jack Spencer Jr]

From over in Randomizer Gimmicks: Key to Tone or More To Learn/Buy?

Interesting system, reducing the standard deck. It is susceptable, however, to a general problem with card draws: stacked/marked decks and/or cheating.

You're serious? You have that much mistrust of your players? If I thought that the people across from me at the table might cheat, I wouldn't play with them.

I take it you don't play cards at all, then? Or is trust different in an RPG, somehow?

This is an interesting topic to me. A big issue here is the matter of trust. How much of the rules we write is because we as designers simply do not trust the players? Do the player not trust each other or themselves when playing?

[LordSmerf]

I think that this is an interesting issue.  More than anything i believe that cheating is dependent upon two things: Social Contract and System Satisfaction.

Social Contract of course deals with how much "fudging" is allowable and how open the fudging needs to be.  While this is an interesting issue, i'm really more focused on Satisfaction.

System Satisfaction is how well the reward and play system of the game System you are using correlates with your play goals.  I have found myself (somewhat more often than i care to admit) rerolling, without calling attention to it, dice rolled in a D&D session.  Part of this is my inner-gamist wanting to win.  But another part is the fact that i am not satisfied with the distribution of successful probabilities in D&D.  I feel like the system violates my character's design.  I don't think this is tangential to the issue at hand... has anyone else experienced/observed similar behavior?

As for trust, i think that in most of the systems i play, i really don't care whether someone cheats or not.  Most of the time it's all about telling a story or developing a character.  In wargaming/boardgaming i do not cheat at all, so i guess the question is: What does it mean to "cheat" in a role playing game?

Thomas

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Didn't we have a humungous thread about this a few months ago? "Altering outcomes" or something like that?

Anyone got a link?

Best,
Ron

[Harlequin]

I was going to toss this in the cited thread above, but really it's a response to this sideline.

I think the original worry about cheating was due to the possibility of use in LARP, and it's quite true.  It's not actually the case that this is a LARP/tabletop distinction, either; it's a distinction between "three to eight players who you know well and invited to come play with you because of this," and "twenty to a hundred (or a thousand if you're Swedish) players you may not know from Adam."  If you had a tabletop with thirty strangers, you'd have trust issues.  Run a LARP with five friends, and you won't.

A randomizer which each player carries with him automatically creates the possibility of this risk.  If you're in a situation where the risk exists (i.e. the thirty-player situation), then a deck of cards which can be stacked is intrinsically at risk and does need some attention.

A friend of mine (and author of our most common local fantasy LARP ruleset) actually did a Master's Thesis in Philosophy which is germane to this discussion, entitled The Role of Detection in Rule Enforcement - though I've never had the time to read it through!  You can find that here.

More practically, one methodology for dealing with this if cheating is a (possible) issue in your game is the simplest one, and is used in the game he wrote (so I assume it's in that thesis somewhere).  If you have any suspicion whatsoever that someone else's randomizer is crooked, the game rules explicitly allow you to ask to swap your randomizer (in this case 2d6) for his, from then until you're physically drawn apart again by the game.  Has a nice elegance to it as a fix, even if it's not mathematically perfect (it could be broken by, for example, using a fixed low-rolling pair and accusing others of cheating); combined with some social reinforcement, this is pretty reliable.

- Eric

[jrs]

Here are a couple fairly recent threads on cheating:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7550">Fudging dice rolls (split)
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6669">Cheaters & GNS

Julie

[ADGBoss]

System Satisfaction is how well the reward and play system of the game System you are using correlates with your play goals.  I have found myself (somewhat more often than i care to admit) rerolling, without calling attention to it, dice rolled in a D&D session.  Part of this is my inner-gamist wanting to win.  But another part is the fact that i am not satisfied with the distribution of successful probabilities in D&D.  I feel like the system violates my character's design.  I don't think this is tangential to the issue at hand... has anyone else experienced/observed similar behavior?

I do believe System Satisfaction does have a great deal to do with the situation but I for one consider this type of "cheating" to be analagous to not going to Church.  Let me explain.

A person becomes disenchanted with Church, because they are not getting the same thing out of it that they perceive others are.  So many will, instead of finding a similar denomination or some different Church or religion altogether (ie a different sysetm) the rant and rave against "The Church" and then refuse to go, pay tithe etc...

In a similar vein, we (including myself and NOT purposely including anyone specific) will often double roll initiative, re-roll damage, fdge hit points etc...  Instead of saying "Hey... I am going to play by the rules, but not in this system, its not satisfying."

Some Systems ARE more free-form but that does not mean they necassarily encourage cheating.  They are more allowable and relaxed in their rules.  Catholic Priests cannot marry. Orthodox Priests can, but not their Bishops.  Epischopal Priests & Bishops can Marry.  Epischopals do not allow "cheating" its just not cheating to be a married priest in the Epischopal Church.

However, they do have rules and if you wish to go and belong to that Church, its expected you will abide by those rules.

Now I am no expert on Social contract with regards to society or to the communites of Role Playing Groups.  I will say this though, When you agree as a group to abide by Rules X, then everyone should abide by those rules, regardless of Satisfaction.  Having built in methods of expressing dis-satisfaction are important in this case.

So cheating is wrong, but defining Cheating can be diffuclt.  I am hesitant to go in any direct direction, but am inclined to say that any behavior that is an attempt to "Beat the House" should be considered cheating.  Is cheating expressly Gamist behavior? I cannot answer that question without much more thought on the subject.

As for trust, i think that in most of the systems i play, i really don't care whether someone cheats or not.  Most of the time it's all about telling a story or developing a character.  In wargaming/boardgaming i do not cheat at all, so i guess the question is: What does it mean to "cheat" in a role playing game?

Thomas

Trust is a touchy subject as well and one not easily tackled.  I would say that there needs to be a minimal amount of trust with regard to Respect for Each other socially and respect for the game community (meaning immediate gaming group as opposed to gamers at large.)

[Michael S. Miller]

This is an interesting topic to me. A big issue here is the matter of trust. How much of the rules we write is because we as designers simply do not trust the players? Do the player not trust each other or themselves when playing?

FWIW, I think I ham-strung some of my best contributions to FVLMINATA (like the Influence system) by not trusting the players and GMs. The rules have so many exceptions and work-arounds that they lack the punch I was going for. As written, they wouldn't reach the full potential that Ron and Jake discovered at the table. All because I didn't trust the players to use the power to influence other characters well.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

How much of the rules we write is because we as designers simply do not trust the players? Do the player not trust each other or themselves when playing?

It seems to me that the nature of the system will dictate how much anti-cheating effort is required. The more Gamist, the more rules needed; the more Narrative, the less rules needed. This relationship is a reflection of player goals in gaming.

Gamist play typically involves player versus player ("PvP") or players versus GM ("PvG") conflict and significant rewards for success. Thus, the more one plays, the more one in is conflict with other players; and the better one does in a conflict, the better one will do in future conflicts (the "Power Up" phenomenon). Because of this strong feedback, the incentive to cheat is high, and as such, rules must be hard to cheat, well-balanced, and enforcable.

Narrative play, on the other hand, is more cooperative by nature, rather than having PvP/PvG at its core. Theoretically, every player is trying to contribute to making the "best" story; as such, there is incentive to share the spotlight or "take one for the team," from time to time. Further, there seems to be a "Pay Back" feedback mechanism--the antithesis of the Power Up feedback of Gamist play--where it is understood that, when a player suffers a setback, the story will later pay back the loss, perhaps with interest (for being a "good sport"). In such an environment, there is almost no incentive to cheat, as one would have to be able to anticipate what the other players will consider a "good" story while--pointlessly--augmenting one's own character.

Where it really gets sticky, as I mentioned on the thread that spawned this new thread, is when Real Money gets thrown into the mix. LARPs are highly Gamist (in my experience). Further, they are usually costly to players: GMs will charge a session fee to recoup printing and prop extenses, players spend money to construct safe weapons or props, hosts charge for use of space for extended periods of time (or a door charge, at clubs). You can imagine the incentive to cheat now, when a character death could make moot a year or more of Real Money expenditure. You can now see why MMORPGs have such difficulty with balance issues once PvP play is common (and worse, once packet sniffers make client-side cheating possible).

Therefore, I would have to argue that a Gamist system must consider every element of its rules in terms of how they could be min-maxed (unfair/unbalanced potential efficiencies in element relationships), how they could be disregarded when an enforcement officer is not present, and how collusion could provide progressively easier access to Power Ups. By the same token, a Gamist Fortune Tool must be unmarkable, unstackable, undelayable, unfudgeable, etc. Otherwise, too much GM attention is required for enforcement; in a game with 10 GMs serving 100+ players, they have MORE than enough with which to contend without that additional load.

Finally, the issue of enforcement raises some additional complications. In a Gamist, massive LARP, I think the penalty for cheating should be very dire. Being thrown out of the group for a year is a good start. Being rolled for your Real Money and cool items before being thrown out for a year is better--but tends to get the police involved. Even with minimal GM-applied punishments (say, out of game for a month), the Social Contract of the game should be set up such that the other players are encouraged to stigmatize the cheater.

I have considered embedding stigmatism directly into LARP rules, as follows:
First Cheating Offense: Reduce to Level 1/Minimum Starting Points.
Second Offense: Character Dead. New character must wear make up that designates the player as a cheater (say, an orange stripe across the eyes) until Level 5/X Experience Points.
Third Offense: Character Dead. Player ejected from play indefinitely (GMs and players may vote annually to re-admit the offender).

Harsh? You bet; so what? They're lucky to get two chances before ejection. And the first chance cuts right against the grain of the Power Up phenomenon: who would cheat to Power Up a point or two, when being caught could cost you EVERYTHING? It also provides diminishing returns for cheating; one might cheat at early levels, but the better one's character becomes, the more one loses when caught cheating, if the potential gains from cheating remain fixed. The second chance cuts right to the ego of the player--and what else makes someone cheat to Power Up their character, if not some misplaced ego drive? Plus, it gives GMs a reminder to watch this player; and players know that they ought to be wary of that player. The third is a last ditch; but who would want to keep letting 1 cheater unbalance one's game, to the detriment of the other 100+ players' satisfaction?

Um... I may have gone off topic. :) Sorry. You know how it is when you are working on a project: everything you think about gets warped into its gravity well.

[Harlequin]

The comment about FVLMINATA is an interesting point, actually.  Because you can't design straight for the high-trust environments of groups with solid play contracts and mature players, like Ron and Jake's (presumably) were.  Or, if not "can't," then perhaps you choose not to, you'd like the game to be playable by more casual groups as well.

One almost wants a 'trust index' within the game.  On page three there's a quick questionnaire; things like "I could roll my dice and then walk away from the table and they'd still be true to my roll when I return" and "I could give control over an important element of my background, to another player, and they would handle it in a way I'd be okay with."  And then certain rules are keyed to the trust index; in FVLMINATA, using Influence on other players would be a high-trust mechanic only.

Setting this up formally is almost certainly unworkable in practice, because "low-trust" is intrinsically pejorative and would bias players against your game if that was their result.  (Might be healthy for them to take the questionnaire and find this out, though, especially as the questionnaire would automatically suggest ways to be higher-trust - but not if one's own game suffered for it!)  The inclusion of optional rules is often essentially an index of this sort with less formal guidelines; if your group is comfortable with this rule, then it probably is because their trust level is high enough that they look forward to it.

Again referencing the above Master's Thesis and the resulting game, one interesting way that it's played is that the rules deliberately set out to define the lowest-trust solution for things, not necessarily what will happen in practice.  They then leave plenty of flex for higher-trust players to achieve consensus on working things out within that framework.  Not a bad design philosophy, especially for a low-trust environment like most LARPs.  As an example:  System uses 2d6.  On a natural 12, the rules permit the player with this result ("Boxcars!") to kill their opponent outright - but the key word is permit, as they also emphasize that any other ("lesser") result agreeable to both parties is fine.  So we see a lot of boxcar results, amid high-trust subgroups of the LARP, resulting in disarms, or flinging someone into the bushes, or capture or what have you, but the rules exist to cover the lowest-trust possibility.

The same thing might go for cheating.  Design such that cheating is made difficult, but so that two high-trust players can act on that trust to go beyond the limitations.

- Eric

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Interesting personal take on low-trust. I played a card game I had designed and one player kept discarding his entire hand each turn. His reasoning is there was no rule against it. This is effectively cheating since he was just hoping to get lucky with each new hand. He still lost but now I'll probably add a rule to specifically disallow discarding your entire hand.

Fact is, this kind of "well the rules don't specificcally say you can't" thinking will always be a problem. I'm sure there's nothing in the rules of baseball against carrying you bat and clobbering basemen. I don't know for sure, but there shouldn't be. Only someone not playing in the spirit of the game would such a rule to not do this.

I wonder, then, if for designing for the low-trust that the game takes a double mind to all things. On the one hand, the extreme low trust set of rules and on the other the "it it doesn't work, don't use it, fudge your dice rolls if you want" sort of encouraging the players to, in effect, cheat.

Because of this, rules design in RPGs is somewhat "soft" as a cultural phenomenom. Design does not matter because altering or otherwise subverting the rules is common practice.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Czar Fnord, I think you're forcing both Gamist and Narrativist play into too-small containers. We might want to discuss this over in the GNS forum.

My points at this stage, for this thread, are:

1. Short of the Hard Core, Gamist play relies on a cooperative "bed" even in the fiercest of competitive moments. People have been a bit sloppy in posing "cooperation vs. competition" as a dichotomy, although the terms are patently not opposites.

2. Nothing about Narrativist play is necessarily more rules-light (or "has less rules") than any other form of play. I'd venture to say that the typical Sorcerer game is actually far more rules-strict and has more rules-application moments during play than many Call of Cthulhu games.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

People have been a bit sloppy in posing "cooperation vs. competition" as a dichotomy, although the terms are patently not opposites.

They are if all variables are the same. Often they are not.

Example. People play poker. Each play is in competition with every other player while playing the game. These same people play on the company softball team. Now the players are in cooperation with each other to win againast the other team. However, Roy and Marge, the two heavy-hitters of the team, have a friendly competition with each other to see who can score the most base hits in a game, with the loser buy the winner a drink afterwards.

Competition and cooperation are two different things, not exactly polar opposites, and there are many variables involed that makes using them as such impractical

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Czar Fnord, I think you're forcing both Gamist and Narrativist play into too-small containers.

In the context of cheating, how big of a container is necessary? I should have just used the terms "PvP" and "story-centric" instead, as that's all I meant in my simple dichotomy; small containers serve to make the point about incentives to cheat and problems of rules enforcement.

1. Short of the Hard Core, Gamist play relies on a cooperative "bed" even in the fiercest of competitive moments.

And much of my point is how massive LARPs have their (inordinate) share of folks who disregard that cooperative "bed" (rules of play and accounting) and are difficult to watch all the time (i.e. the bed is BIG). Again, perhaps I should have steared clear of GNS entirely (its rigor seems exhausting; and its precision, of limited utility).

People have been a bit sloppy in posing "cooperation vs. competition" as a dichotomy, although the terms are patently not opposites.

Okay. What terms ought we use for "working toward the overall quality of the game, by assisting players and/or being willing to let one's character suffer setbacks if it is entertaining to the group" and "work for your own character's advancement, often by attacking and disabling other player's characters and taking in-game resources from them"? I felt it safe to assume that we could get close enough to the point with two commonly used terms without opening up a semantic debate.

The point of the thread is (paraphrased) 'cheating: is it a problem we automatically factor into design.' I felt that merely responding, "Yes" was insufficient; so I tried to provide a means of gauging, based on incentives in the game mechanics, the risk of cheating and, therefore, the need for tight rules, trustworthy randomizers, and enforcement/punishment.

2. Nothing about Narrativist play is necessarily more rules-light (or "has less rules") than any other form of play.

Okay. Narrativist play is not directly coupled to simple rules. But I pity the group of players that has to slog through charts, handfuls of dice, and/or complex rules interractions just to tell the "best story"--particularly when said slogging leads, often as not, to the "non-best" results, story-wise. I'll use the term "story-centric" from now on.

So... misuse of terminology aside... what advice do you have for Mr. Spencer? IIRC, he was curious "how much of the rules we write is because we as designers simply do not trust the players?"; and if players do not "trust each other or themselves when playing?"

[Michael S. Miller]

One almost wants a 'trust index' within the game.  On page three there's a quick questionnaire; things like "I could roll my dice and then walk away from the table and they'd still be true to my roll when I return" and "I could give control over an important element of my background, to another player, and they would handle it in a way I'd be okay with."  And then certain rules are keyed to the trust index; in FVLMINATA, using Influence on other players would be a high-trust mechanic only.

Hi, Eric.

This is a cool idea--sort of pinning the level of play in a spectrum from funtional to dysfunctional. So, does this imply that designing games with many rules aimed at stopping cheating means the designer is assuming that play groups will have dysfunctional play?

I recall that when I was working on FVLMINATA, I had this mental ideal type of an "annoying player" that I would occasionally conjure up and ask myself, "Well, how is the game going to deal with this guy?" (ironically, I had no complementary ideal type for the "perfect player" in mind) Many of the limitations I spoke of before were crafted to stop this guy from "cheating."

I think now that I should not have been as concerned with how the game was going to deal with this player as much as how the other players were going to deal with him. I mean, can a game really stop a player from doing anything? No. The other players have to--that's the social contract. In future designs, I intend to focus more on enhancing the experience of that ideal "good" player than protecting against the ideal "bad" one.

Just writing that, I'm reminded of one of John Wick's games--can't remember if it is 7th Sea or Orkworld right now--where he outright says in the game text something to the effect of: "You can break this system pretty easily. You can make a combat monster. But don't. Don't be that guy that ruins the game for everybody." I have to keep that in mind.

[David Chunn]

I've had players cheat, players that I loved to play with, players who happened to be among my best friends.  They were good folk, too.  Cheating in RPGs was just part of who they were, and they really couldn't help it. Everyone knew it, and everyone policed them as much as possible.  They didn't do it to be better than the other players, they just did it so they could personally experience more success.  Some of the cheating habits originated from early gaming experiences, I think.

I think the main reasons the cheating habits were tolerated was because those players added a lot to our games in other ways and weren't competitive with their comrades.

In one game things got so bad because one of the guys kept cheating on his character improvement (compounded by some honest mistakes he made early on) that I had to start taking up everyone's sheets and ask, "What do y'all want to work on?"  Then I'd make the improvements for them.  (I made sure I was generous so no one would bitch at me.)

Excluding personalities, I think system frustration is key.
There's one system that I play in sometimes that drives me nuts, especially with character advancement, and I often find myself tempted to cheat a little here and there.  I've resisted so far, except that I never doublecheck to be sure I've paid all the extra costs.  (If I forget something that's an accident right?  I know the argument is weak, but my players have given it to me many times before.)

I guess that's really a GNS issue, because that particular system, though I like many things about it, is incoherent and has way too much gamism wedded to clear-cut simulationism.  I prefer playing mostly N and S, and when I play Gamist I want it to be nothing but Gamist.

The games I've designed before SagaCraft were packed with bulky, twisted, and generally needless rules against powergamers and cheaters, defending against gamism and poor social contracts.  I think as designers, the best thing we can do about cheating is to make coherent games and to openly discuss how social contracts work in relation to our designs.  Disarm the cheaters and dissenters by getting them into the spirit of the game being played and not just hope they catch the game's spirit like the flu.