Cheating

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

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.

Solid point, and one that ought to be emphasized.

Something already designed into my LARP system is the notion of "tagging" objects in the game world with--put simply--a value the players must exceed with stats to "use" the object (i.e. open the stuck door, pick the lock, etc). Such tags, necessarily, are not being watched over by the GMs: there'd be no need for the tag if a GM was right there to tell the players what they had to beat to move on.

So even with my hard work in the parent thread to this one to come up with a trustworthy randomizer, there's still a built-in game mechanic that, frankly, could be totally ignored by a cheater. The lamer need only look at the tag, think "noone's watching," and bypass it without even having the relevant skill or stat level. Super-easy to cheat... but the GMs (and certain player abilities) need to have a way to set challenges into the world that are not constantly monitored. Such tagging is what will make the game more than a variant of SCA field battles; overcoming "object-based" challenges is a core element of exploration. It also provides another important element to LARP design: level-restricted "gateways" that keep underpowered characters from stumbling into conflicts or environmental challenges (traps, etc) that they can not handle.

So I am planning on writing a section in the rules about Social Contract, playing for fun not profit, etc. It is useful to me to hear that others think a "positive" tone to that section would work as well as a "perjorative" tone. In other words, trying to hype people up to playing fairly--because it's cool and makes the game more fun--rather than trying to shame potential cheaters into not doing so because it's lame and shows they are [insert insulting term here].

But even as I write with a positive tone, I will be testing systems with Mr. Miller's "annoying player" in the forefront of my mind. If every player was guaranteed to be a "perfect player," we might not need rules at all! Or the rules would, at most, be guides to simulation of effects, rather than restrictions on player options. Perfect players might as well play Amber; annoying players need to kept in a system like Hero.

[Walt Freitag]

But even as I write with a positive tone, I will be testing systems with Mr. Miller's "annoying player" in the forefront of my mind. If every player was guaranteed to be a "perfect player," we might not need rules at all! Or the rules would, at most, be guides to simulation of effects, rather than restrictions on player options. Perfect players might as well play Amber; annoying players need to kept in a system like Hero.

I don't get this part at all. The Hero system serves as a sort of penitentiary for "annoying" players? Players who are not inclined to cheat or "misuse" a system would have no reason to prefer Hero over Amber? I think not.

Despite my very recent post on the Randomizer Gimmicks thread discussing how certain mechanisms in LARPs can be more likely than others to invite cheating (even to the point of representing a "moral hazard"), the idea of rules in general as preventive measures against cheating is completely paradoxical. Cheating is breaking the rules, after all. No rules, no possibility of cheating.

Cheating in Hero is the easiest thing in the world. Rules that restrict players' options are the ones most likely to be broken. (So really, if this association between quality of players and the need for rules made any sense at all, it would be the other way around: the "perfect" players are the only ones that can be trusted with rules that restrict their options, and therefore the "annoying" ones must play freeform. But actually, the association doesn't make any sense either way.)

Consider this: the "tag" that you put on a locked door is really just a very specific game rule. It's a rule that says something like: you cannot open this particular door (which, by the way, exists in this particular place at the present time) unless you have such and such ability or stat to unlock it. So if you had "perfect" players by your definition, you wouldn't need such a tag, would you? The "perfect" players would, I suppose, be able to just decide whether or not their characters could open the door. Or even, whether or not there's a door there at all. But decide how, based on what? If you answer that question, you once again have a rule, which can be broken.

My guess is that you, and your ideal players, would probably not find the "tagless" approach a very satisfying substitute for the tag. The most fundamental effect of the rule on the tag is not to keep certain players from passing through the door, it's to establish that a locked door (pickable by some) exists there in the first place. Going even further, there's something we call the Lumpley Principle, which states that the ultimate purpose of rules, in general, is to establish how statements about the shared imagined space (such as, there's a door here, or my character has picked the lock on the door here) become accepted as true. That function is essential in any role playing, no matter how "rules-heavy" or "rules light" the play is, and no matter how compliant (or non-) the players are.

I think you may have missed Michael Miller's point about hypothetical "annoying" and "perfect" players. (It's also possible that you meant to disagree with that point, so I could be wrong.) His post does not seem to me to be recommending reinforcing the design with the intent to "stop the annoying player", but reporting that he has some regrets about having done so in his own game.

- Walt

[Valamir]

Yeah, I also find the "good players don't need rules" idea to completely contrary to my own experience.

This seems to presume that rules exist to force players into a certain behavior or prevent a player from a certain behavior with "good players" being defined as those who will engage or not engage in said behavior without needing rules to force it.

This I feel is a fundamentally flawed view of what rules are and what they do.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

But even as I write with a positive tone, I will be testing systems with Mr. Miller's "annoying player" in the forefront of my mind. If every player was guaranteed to be a "perfect player," we might not need rules at all! Or the rules would, at most, be guides to simulation of effects, rather than restrictions on player options. Perfect players might as well play Amber; annoying players need to kept in a system like Hero.

I don't get this part at all. The Hero system serves as a sort of penitentiary for "annoying" players? Players who are not inclined to cheat or "misuse" a system would have no reason to prefer Hero over Amber? I think not.

I retract the example. I only meant to demonstrate that a rule system which is highly granular in time and effect (Hero) is harder to cheat during play because the discrete opportunities for reward are so small; I would have better said that the rewards for cheating a granular system are more often outweighed by the penalties of discovery. And left specific systems out of it.

the idea of rules in general as preventive measures against cheating is completely paradoxical. Cheating is breaking the rules, after all. No rules, no possibility of cheating.

But when the rules mechanics are hard to obfuscate or fudge... don't they "prevent" cheating? As a simple example: Game X has the rule "player rolls a die and tells the players how much it exceeds their skill value"; Game Y has the rule "player and GM roll dice and compare them to each other." Game Y has a mechanism in place that prevents cheating: in this case, a revealed roll. In Game X, the player could lie about their roll (unless told to do it in plain sight), could lie about their stat ranking, and, thus, could lie about the excess. In Game Y, the player could only use a loaded die to cheat (as could a player in Game X, but that's moot). Game Y has a rule which is a general preventative measure against cheating.

Consider this: the "tag" that you put on a locked door is really just a very specific game rule. It's a rule that says something like: you cannot open this particular door (which, by the way, exists in this particular place at the present time) unless you have such and such ability or stat to unlock it. So if you had "perfect" players by your definition, you wouldn't need such a tag, would you? The "perfect" players would, I suppose, be able to just decide whether or not their characters could open the door. Or even, whether or not there's a door there at all. But decide how, based on what? If you answer that question, you once again have a rule, which can be broken.

The "perfect player" would want to know what was legal for their player to do, the better to play it legitimately and fairly. The tag tells them. The "annoying player" would ignore that restriction.

But I'll conceed. I used Mr. Miller's terms because they were introduced to the discussion and seemed useful at that point in the thread. If we are to end up debating semanitcs of those terms, I will happily stop using them.

I think you may have missed Michael Miller's point about hypothetical "annoying" and "perfect" players. (It's also possible that you meant to disagree with that point, so I could be wrong.) His post does not seem to me to be recommending reinforcing the design with the intent to "stop the annoying player", but reporting that he has some regrets about having done so in his own game.

Correct. And I agree with part of his point: "I intend to focus more on enhancing the experience of that ideal "good" player than protecting against the ideal "bad" one." I intend to do that as well, as I said: "So I am planning on writing a section in the rules about Social Contract, playing for fun not profit, etc. "

BUT, I will also take the time to test every rules mechanic I can against abuse, min-max feedbacks, being ignored, collusion: any type of cheating I can. The difference is in what I will WRITE to be read by players, and what I will DESIGN "backstage" to make sure that positivist approach advocated in rules text is easier to follow than cheating. What's wrong with that (semantics of "annoying," "perfect," "rules-light," "rules-heavy" aside)?

If I must agree to the assertion that no rules can be made that can not be cheated, well, fine, I will, as it is clearly true, given all cases and unlimited player skill with sleight-of-hand. Fine. But I'm not going to stop trying to design hard-to-cheat rules mechanics, just because there will always be a set of individuals who can cheat it. Seems lazy, to me.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I only meant to demonstrate that a rule system which is highly granular in time and effect (Hero) is harder to cheat during play because the discrete opportunities for reward are so small; I would have better said that the rewards for cheating a granular system are more often outweighed by the penalties of discovery.

I don't know about that. Not to derail the discussion into talk of Hero, but Hero is especially susceptable to "soybean trading" where by raising one stat, another goes up and then you can buy down the secondary stat for a profit. I think Ron had illustrated this in an old, old thread about character currency.

A more granular system, like Hero, is more likely to have "break points" which can be exploited by someone who decides to find them.

[Michael S. Miller]

I think you may have missed Michael Miller's point about hypothetical "annoying" and "perfect" players. (It's also possible that you meant to disagree with that point, so I could be wrong.) His post does not seem to me to be recommending reinforcing the design with the intent to "stop the annoying player", but reporting that he has some regrets about having done so in his own game.

Walt has said what I meant better than I did. Thanks, Walt.

What I meant by "annoying players" was players that exhibit the dysfunctional play habits that have been discussed around here many times (e.g. turtle-like behavior, spotlight-hogging, etc.) Since I considered these habits to undermine the spirit of gameplay itself, I mentally labeled them "cheating" and tried to craft the rules in a way to frustrate these habits. But I see now that wasn't addressing strict-definition "cheating" (breaking the rules of the game) in any way other than adding more rules to break. If anything, these rules gave the GM a club with which to beat down players who didn't play the way he wanted them to. Is this what anti-cheating rules boil down to in general?

I certainly never meant to imply that good players don't need rules. Actually what I was thinking is that rules written to enhance the experience of a "good" player should be different that rules targeted at restraining an "annoying" player. It seems to me that such rules would have more "bounce" to use Ron's Four-Square analogy.

BTW, I think Ron's discussion of soybean trading and breakpoints is in the GNS essay itself.

[Mike Holmes]

Fnord, it's not laziness, believe me. Some people just have come to different conclusions.

Here are a couple of others, to add to the "I don't care about the bad player" example:
Hedging against cheating causes cheating. Well, that's an overstatement. But if you have a text in which you're putting in rules that are designed to constrain against certain behaviors, you do say to the player that this is something that ought to be looked about for loopholes. Hero System is classic this way. In trying to cut off loopholes, and create balance in characters, it says to the player that they have a challenge to create the most effective character they can from the resources available. After all, if the game were not about that, then why have the limits at all?

The honor system works the same in games, and in every day life. If you trust a player to do something, they will. If they don't, don't play with them.

Yes, it's important to have rules to limit people when there's a potential conflict of interest (as discussed in the thread that started all this). But often people take this principle too far. They think that if a little prevention is a good thing, then a lot must be better. Well, that's often not the case.

All of this comes down to the fact that games often do not have clear delineations about who is competing with whom (if anyone). Clear that up, and much of the need to constrain players goes away. As with all design, the best design is the one that accomplishes your goals with the least number of rules/steps. Prevention of cheating is often much easier than people think, their perception of the incentive to cheat coming from other areas of problem design.

Mike