01 Dec
Cheating (and some History for flavor). Warning: Long
What is "cheating" in a game?
From dictionary.com:
CHEAT (verb, used with object)
1. to defraud; swindle
2. to deceive; influence by fraud
3. to elude; deprive of something expected
4. to practice fraud or deceit
5. to violate rules or regulations
6. to take an examination or test in a dishonest way
We're not going to talk about games (or sports) in which money changes hands, nor about defrauding or depriving anyone, so skip #1, 2, and 4. Taking a test (6) doesn't fit either. How about #3 and 5? They're possible (#5 mostly; we'll get to #3 later).
So let's get specific:
What are the "Rules & Regulations" of a Game?
(First, we seem to do everything clockwise.)
Let's start with poker.
For poker, there is a commonly accepted methodology for determining Who Wins. (Normally the order is Straight Flush, 4 of a kind, Full House, Flush, Straight, 3 of the Kind, Two Pair, One Pair, High Card. See Wiki, "List of Poker Hands.")
Next, it's common to have a 'house rule' regarding the amount that can be bet.
So then we pick a Form of poker -- hold 'em, stud, dealer's choice... and there are Rules that come with each. Typically, you deal X cards, face-down. You take turns announcing actions: stand, bet, raise, pass...
That's pretty much all there is.
All the players understand and agree to abide by all the rules.
That was easy. How about a boardgame?
We still seem to go clockwise. But from there it gets more complicated.
Good old Chess was the first boardgame (very probably), but since then we've broadened quite a bit. European designers have become really popular. You can find a game about almost every topic imaginable. Trains? Banks? Garbage? Flowers? Sure, all those and more.
So you pick a game, read the Rules, and follow them.
You might use cards, and/or dice. Or neither.
You might have a board... or not. (A couple of my favorite 'boardgames' use tiles and nothing but.)
Not quite as easy as poker, but all the rules are given.
All the players understand and agree to abide by all the rules.
In both the examples above, cheating is easily defined. In poker it might be "using a card you weren't dealt" or "claiming you put the right amount in the pot when you didn't". In a boardgame it might be "moving more or less than you rolled" or "failing to take a Director Action with your Snurbleg". (Hm; where was that Snurbleg rule? Page 17b?) What if you simply made a mistake? Is that Cheating? No. To qualify as Cheating, you must be doing that wrong deliberately. It's pretty hard to make accidental mistakes in Poker, but the more complex the rules get, the greater the number of mistakes. In practice we catch some mistakes (and do it over, perhaps) and we miss some. Ah well; we still have fun.
Are there Rules for roleplaying games?
Sure. Lookit all these heavy books; they're full of Rules.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. Let's creep up on that slowly, through History...
(And remember this key phrase: All the players understand and agree to abide by all the rules.)
Poker games and boardgames have winners. Somebody has the best hand, or scores the most victory points, or finishes first. Or something else. Winning!
Poker and boardgames are fun to win, not so much fun to lose. Then in the early 1970s came a type of game where everybody wins or everybody loses... There's no one Winner or Loser. Welcome to Roleplaying Games.
Roleplaying games (RPGs) are about teamwork. The team may succeed or fail, but in the process you're all jointly telling a story about that team. Playing the role is the primary fun... so you have fun whether or not the team fulfills the objective. If you blow it, there's always next time! The characters' Story continues... even if they lose a team member. The player keeps right on playing, but with a different character.
So about this Story thing... where's it written down? Short stories and novels are cool, they're written down. Plays are written down. What about this?
That's the true Invention here. Storytellers have been around for centuries; so have games and teamwork. With RPGs, we learned to tell stories as a team, and we learned that nobody knows the end of the story. We just keep telling it, and it doesn't stop on a 'last page'.
The first RPG was about Fantasy. It didn't have to be; if 007 had been all the rage, the first RPG would have been about action-adventure spies. If 2001:ASO had been the current fad, the game could have been Science Fiction. (Those both came along real soon, but Fantasy was first.)
So you have a medieval world with dragons and swords and magic spells and hardly any technology. Now you have a guy walking around wearing armor and carrying a sword. A million questions arose... "How fast can he walk?" "How well can he swing that thing?" and of course "How big is a Dragon really?"
The obvious answer that applies to a more modern topic -- "use your common sense!" -- didn't apply very well here. We can figure out how fast a car can go, or even how big a dinosaur was, but Dragons? and Swordfights? Not exactly mainstream stuff. So the creators of the first RPG had to think up ways to resolve the variables. To do so they used dice. "You hit it with your sword!" But was it a glancing blow, or a mortal thrust, or something in between? Let's set a range of 1 to 8; roll this odd-looking die, one with 8 sides, and we'll get a random result.
The game's creators decided that someone had to resolve these variables and others. So they were made the responsibility of just one person at the table. That person took on the unique role of the 'game master' (GM). He or she wasn't exactly part of the team; the GM would play the roles of everybody and everything else except the team. And if the team didn't have an idea about where to go or what to do, they could ask others, such as townsfolk (roles played by the GM, once again), gathering rumors of monsters and adventure... and the team then headed out anew.
Once the game was published, another very interesting difference arose, separating RPGs from poker and boardgames. Fifty different groups played the game in fifty different ways. Why? Because there weren't enough Rules. When a character in a RPG can do 'anything you can imagine', the number and type of rules required to handle 'anything you can imagine' gets pretty large. (Got a 20-volume encyclopedia on a shelf at home? That only scratches the surface... and we're adding spells and dragons to it, and more.)
The creators started publishing supplements for the game, new monsters, new spells, new rules... and the whole thing got richer and more detailed, and inspired thousands of players, and eventually a thousand times that, and more.
The original game had reached a dozen countries, and everyone was still playing it differently. As a result, one of the creators got very exasperated. He decided to write a new version of the game, one that attempted to write down most of the rules (the exact opposite of the original, where most things were deliberately omitted, left to the GM's 'discretion'). And thus we received the first Advanced version of the game. That version grew over time, as more rules and features (spells, treasures, monsters, settings) were added for an entire decade.
The purpose of the Advanced version was the same as the purpose of the rules for chess or poker: so everyone could play using the same (complete) rules. That meant it would be suitable for tournaments, and also for publishing; adventures could be created that would all use the same rules, and would thus sell in quantity. One set of rules for everyone; it seemed ideal.
Unfortunately, it was not ideal. It wasn't even close. Why? Same problem: not enough rules. The new concept that arose was 'granularity', which is essentially "how close do we examine and measure this action?" Let's look at that sword-swing again. In the example above it simply hits, inflicting 1-8 points of damage. But does it hit a muscle or a vein? Does it deflect off some armor? In the original game, and then even in the Advanced version, nobody worried about any of that; it was simply a (generic) 1-8 points deducted from a larger total. But some players wanted more, and they made up more rules to give the game the level of detail -- the granularity -- that they wanted.
If the Official Rules were written completely, they would be larger than an encyclopedia (and more expensive). But most of the players didn't want that; they liked the game the way it was, with a few 'house rules'. Horrors! An insoluble problem! But amazingly, nothing bad happened. Everybody still played the game however they wished, with various levels of detail, with their 'house rules' added (often written down) to make the game 'complete' in their eyes. They used the Official rules on those occasions when they played in an Official tournament, but that was rare; mostly they played at home, playing it their way.
The final solution became obvious: have a complex Official version for Official use, but a general and less complicated version for at-home play.
That's where I came in. From 1982-86 I wrote the expanded Guidelines for the original fantasy RPG. Not rules, mind you, merely guidelines. I described ways that you COULD resolve variables, using the methods we found most efficient or convenient. But it was up to you whether to use those, and/or ignore whole sections as irrelevant, or add or subtract some granularity... whatever you decided was right for your own game.
My guidelines got translated into a more than a dozen languages and tens of millions of copies were sold worldwide. The series sold more than any other edition of the game before or since. One reason was the timing (the original game had become pretty famous by then), but another reason was the nature of it -- guidelines, not Rules. You could have it your own way, every time.
In a broad sense, how can someone cheat in such a game?
There are agreements between the participants, some explicit and some tacit. An explicit house rule could be "don't look up rules during play," easy to detect. A tacit rule is "the dice tell the tale", meaning that if you rolled a 5, you can't claim it was a 6. So yes, in these mutually agreed cases of Rules (as opposed to the general 'guidelines'), they can be broken, and that is then cheating. All the players understand and agree to abide by all those rules. They are either explicit (like the house rules) or implicit (like reading the dice correctly).
The complexity of an interactive group role-playing game requires a lot of thinking by the game master, as noted. Situations seem to arise a lot that require a fresh decision (often called a 'ruling') by the GM. In parallel, the GM may use dice to randomly select options, and may choose from those in deciding what to say and how the 'other people' (those who aren't the players' characters) will respond in various situations.
The alternatives here are simply summarized: either the game has a huge amount of rules (an encyclopedia full) to handle everything imaginable, or it has a small amount of rules (a mere summary of guidelines) that say "here's how to make quick decisions during the game". I created a kit that taught people how to make decisions quickly.
But given this responsibility and flexibility, can the game master actually "cheat" (other than by breaking the implicit or explicit Rules)?
Possibly, and here's where Definition #3 can arise (to deprive of something expected).
The GM decides that there's a monster at location X. The characters arrive, see the monster, and do battle. They've defeated other monsters in their careers, and they size up the new one, deciding approximately how tough it will be. They fight, and eventually the monster takes a mighty mortal blow, and should fall. But it doesn't.
Yet even here "cheating" is hard to prove. The monster might have some special ability to keep going. (There are half a dozen reasons why this might be so; there's a lot of myth & magic in the game.) So the players keep on fighting, and (we all hope) will eventually prevail.
But what if the GM didn't want the monster to fall? What if, after it had been so severely damaged that it SHOULD die, the GM changed his mind and 'magically' gave it extra powers to save it?
Let's set aside the problems inherent in such a premise: that the GM would become so lost in this fantasy story that he wanted to 'keep' the monster (when in actuality the GM has a million more, if he chooses). Just look closely at what happened. The GM and the players had a tacit agreement on the game's 'rules' (more accurately, the selection of which guidelines to apply) -- that is, when a monster takes X amount of damage it is defeated, and the monster falls, slain by the heroes. So in this event, the GM has in fact deprived the characters of something expected (Cheating definition #3) while violating a tacit agreement on what constitutes victory (definition #5).
This is the only way "cheating" can occur on the part of the game master in a role playing game. It's the GM's business, and his or her alone, what dice to roll behind the screen, what decisions to make and when, and what specific methods will be used to resolve variables (though many instances of that third case may become 'house rules', either explicit or tacit). But there is nevertheless some agreement as to the way this 'should' be done -- i.e. customs, derived from both the obvious physical elements of the game and the guidelines (or rules) to which all parties agree.
One final point on players who cheat. If a player thinks it’s more fun to palm the dice or otherwise cheat, I ignore it! Other players will object, or they won't care; if the former, peer pressure will resolve it. But none of this affects what I, as Game Master, do during the game.
And as to those who accuse ME of cheating... they probably don't agree with the above treatise, and feel that RPGs have hard-and-fast rules about what the GM can or cannot do. I call BS, but they can do as they wish -- tho you won't find such folks in MY game.
F
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