Cheating, playing fair and other styles

[thealmightymudworm]

This is a mix of old and new - some rather different ideas, but basically a question about how you (can) enjoy the books.

There was a thread called 'Playing Styles' on TUFFF from which I could only recover the second page and only one post of any length off that (a matter of weeks before the forum was canned) which I wanted to put somewhere.

But I was wondering about cheating in particular.

Suppose you're someone who sometimes plays with dice (etc) and sometimes not… which books which are particularly good to play one way and not the other? Are there some very well written books which are dragged down by having one (or ten) too many tough fights lazily tossed in? Or are there books in which the game design is quite good chance-wise but if it makes no difference to your loaded dice whether you find the helpful modifying items it becomes meaningless?

I was struck by Hynreck's Lament:
"I kept expecting Mr. Sharp to put a final stop to my adventuring due to my severe lack of knowledge/appropriate items, but he never did. He basically let my cheating ass win. Of course, it's my own damn fault […] but it led to a somewhat unsatisfying adventure, surprisingly enough…"

A related point: some of the books specifically try to counteract cheating, whether it's by straightforwardly telling you off (ToD gives you the option of saying you have a huge honour score and then says 'No you don't! Cheat!') or requiring you to 'fail' a dice roll to win (as in TCT and also BVP (so I understand)).

How many books do that, and is it the business of the author(s) to be controlling how you play? It's your book after all, you bought it, should it really include 'punishments' for playing it your way?

What do people think?

[thealmightymudworm]

From TUFFF (dated 30.8.13)

---

nightdragonskull said:

I want to talk about how I play FF, what it means to me and get some ideas and opinions from you guys. I've always been an RPG superfan but no doubt like the rest of you the chances to play them dwindled as you got older. My thirst for such things shows up in games like Magic the Gathering and Fantasy Flight board games, but I still find it hard to get my friends to play with me, as they are either non gamers on gamers no longer. It all changed when a friend gave me books 1-50 and the Sorcery series. My friends love anything old-school and it wasn't long before we were driving to a wedding and I pulled out Master of Chaos. "Anyone wanna give this bad boy a shot?" I asked. They did. So I read the book, with mickey-taking and derision welcome, and they made the choices. It was a blast.

For the first few adventures, I invented a more complex fighting system or sometimes substituted battles for quizzes, but soon we were rocking them out just as they were intended. It wasn't long before I adapted this practice to girlfriends as well - I soon found there are many episodes where the two of you are just hanging around, or she's taking 50 minutes to put on make up, why not fill it with FF?? I would rate the books the same way I rate magic - it is a testament to the quality of the product that even non gamers will get into it if you sell it correctly - because they are SO DAMN GOOD.

So at the moment my current girlfriend and hopefully forever one, who I call my ally from herein, have just clocked Spectral Stalkers and are beginning Midnight Rogue. We've also done Master of Chaos, Dead of Night, Howl of the Werewolf, Sword of the Samurai, Night of the Necromancer, Daggers of Darkness, Stormslayer, House of Hell and Night Dragon. We tried Vault of the Vampire but by Livingstone's balls that one is tough, it's the only one we considered a complete loss. What a final boss!!! My ally insists on a minimum of 11 skill and isn't afraid to fudge a dice roll or put a thumb in the page but otherwise we play fairly legit. I've been ploughing through the others on my own but I still have a few books to get- my Wishlist is at the end of the post. Well I just felt to write an introduction. My questions to the community are as follows:

1) What do you guys think of my 'dungeon master' method of play? Do you think any of the books are better played totally solo?
2) How do you feel about cheating? Is it Ok until you totally master the book?
3) Any suggestions for our next adventures?
4) Do you guys ever feel the pain about not having a group to share games with?

Hope to have many more quests where we all are the heroes.

Fighting Fantasy Wishlist =21 Trial of Champions 28 Phantoms of Fear 30 Chasms of Malice 39 Fangs of Fury 42 Black Vein Prophecy 49 Siege of Sardath 50 Return to Firetop Mountain 51 Island of the Undead 55 Deathmoor 56 Knights of Doom 57 Magehunter 58 Return of the Vampire

[deadshadowrunner]

Midnight Rogue employs anti-cheating devices too.There is a point where you are asked if you have a magic weapon,and if you choose the option that you have a magic weapon,it scolds you for cheating,because there is no way to get one at that point.(Pardon the long sentence).

There are also two other fake references,260 and 275.260 leads to 275.There is no way to get to either of them,except for flicking through the book.260 states that you reach out a trembling hand to take the Eye of the Basilisk,then 275 scolds for flicking through the book just for the winning paragraph.But seriously,if you want the winning paragraph, just turn to 400!(Well,apart from some like TCT or Moonrunner).

[a moderator]

I cheated a lot when I was younger. These days I prefer not to.

In one way or another, anti-cheat mechanisms have been part of FF from book 1. The reader can't just say they have the right keys if they didn't get them. Well, not without resorting to metaknowledge, but that's a different kind of cheating.

If people want to cheat, and they're playing on their own, that's their business. But they don't then have the right to whinge about the book's being too easy. Or boast about their 'success' (thinking of one obnoxious member of the Official forum who meticulously mapped out the whole of Temple of Terror before actually playing it, and then commented disparagingly on fans who found it in any way difficult).

[thealmightymudworm]

Feb 8, 2014 4:21:28 GMT deadshadowrunner said:

Midnight Rogue employs anti-cheating devices too.There is a point where you are asked if you have a magic weapon,and if you choose the option that you have a magic weapon,it scolds you for cheating,because there is no way to get one at that point.(Pardon the long sentence).

There are also two other fake references,260 and 275.260 leads to 275.There is no way to get to either of them,except for flicking through the book.260 states that you reach out a trembling hand to take the Eye of the Basilisk,then 275 scolds for flicking through the book just for the winning paragraph.But seriously,if you want the winning paragraph, just turn to 400!(Well,apart from some like TCT or Moonrunner).

The second thing, which I vaguely remember, is particularly extreme nannying. It makes me chuckle now but what youngster wants a pop-up teacher hidden in their adventure? Especially if the quest is learning to be a thief!

It does make me wonder a bit whether after one edit the book was 398 paragraphs long and they wanted to round it to 400 without taking the time to weave something else into the other threads.

[a moderator]

The solo adventure in the non-FF book Maelstrom takes 'you should not be reading this section' sections to new heights. The section that does the 'there is no way of getting to this paragraph, so stop reading it, you naughty person' thing contains a warning about the unreachable sequence within the adventure. There's a whole loop of about half a dozen sections, none of which can be reached from outside the loop, and none of which provide any way out of the loop. And around half the loop consists of reading signs that say things like 'DO NOT READ PARAGRAPHS THAT YOU CANNOT REACH'. Subtle, huh?

[thealmightymudworm]

Feb 8, 2014 17:30:22 GMT a moderator said:

I cheated a lot when I was younger. These days I prefer not to.

In one way or another, anti-cheat mechanisms have been part of FF from book 1. The reader can't just say they have the right keys if they didn't get them. Well, not without resorting to metaknowledge, but that's a different kind of cheating.

That's true - right from the first trip to Firetop Mountain.
I was reminded of Doigy mentioning that when he was growing up he and his friends though Livingstone=easy and Jackson=hard because of the ease of cheating when all the difficulty is found in the battles and finding items that you can just declare you've found. (Of course those are very different forms of cheating, imo.)

If people want to cheat, and they're playing on their own, that's their business. But they don't then have the right to whinge about the book's being too easy. Or boast about their 'success' (thinking of one obnoxious member of the Official forum who meticulously mapped out the whole of Temple of Terror before actually playing it, and then commented disparagingly on fans who found it in any way difficult).

True.
Was this the same guy who couldn't understand the meaning of 'and' by any chance?

[thealmightymudworm]

Feb 9, 2014 15:18:34 GMT a moderator said:

The solo adventure in the non-FF book Maelstrom takes 'you should not be reading this section' sections to new heights. The section that does the 'there is no way of getting to this paragraph, so stop reading it, you naughty person' thing contains a warning about the unreachable sequence within the adventure. There's a whole loop of about half a dozen sections, none of which can be reached from outside the loop, and none of which provide any way out of the loop. And around half the loop consists of reading signs that say things like 'DO NOT READ PARAGRAPHS THAT YOU CANNOT REACH'. Subtle, huh?

That's quite loopy. (Boom Boom)

Speaking of non-FF cheat proofing, there was an Asterix gamebook which says bluntly that 'sorry if you're reading this and don't know that you must have cheated somewhere'. That's because you must have passed a ridiculously difficult Charm test which is nearly impossible without getting a big bonus from somewhere else - and the somewhere else gives you some info too. (You would have to roll 20 dice and score mostly 1s).

It serves a useful function - although the chances of passing it without the bonus are perhaps not that much lower than the chances of winning through some FF books even with a walkthrough...

[a moderator]

Feb 9, 2014 20:03:11 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

I was reminded of Doigy mentioning that when he was growing up he and his friends though Livingstone=easy and Jackson=hard because of the ease of cheating when all the difficulty is found in the battles and finding items that you can just declare you've found. (Of course those are very different forms of cheating, imo.)

True. When writing on his own, I don't think Ian put numbers on things until around Trial, whereas Steve never wrote a gamebook without a 'hidden' number. I think it's probably possible to win The Shamutanti Hills without needing a number provided at an earlier stage of the adventure, but the rest of his books do make it harder to use the 'pretend to have the required item/knowledge' approach.

In my cheaty days I did generally go for the 'win all fights, succeed at all rolls' sort rather than pretending to have items I hadn't found. Perhaps because lying about my inventory proved so spectacularly unhelpful the time I did attempt it.

Feb 9, 2014 20:03:11 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

(thinking of one obnoxious member of the Official forum who meticulously mapped out the whole of Temple of Terror before actually playing it, and then commented disparagingly on fans who found it in any way difficult).

Was this the same guy who couldn't understand the meaning of 'and' by any chance?

No, he wasn't as bad as that individual.

[greatlordofthedark]

This looks the appropriate thread in which to post this explanation of my fairest of all fair rules.

About three years ago, a friend sold me his entire run of Fighting Fantasy books. I don’t recall beating any of them after #31, so this was a great opportunity to relive some childhood fun. I had already been dabbling with the books again, comparing notes and competing with the friend (we’ll call him Mr. Krabs) for Sorcery! and Daggers of Darkness, and trouncing him soundly, I resolved to prove my superior intellect by beating all of the gamebooks.

Having recently tried several adventures, including Midnight Rogue and City of Thieves, I was confident that few attempts would be required. Heck, I beat Deathtrap Dungeon in twenty-three tries, and that was the hardest book going. To make the challenge fair, and to allow a fair comparison of the books, I relied on my recent experience to devise a short and succinct set of rules to guide me.

1. Follow the rules as precisely as possible

2. No re-rolls, do-overs, or backtracking. An action taken is taken, everything counts. Yes, even forgetting to record a key item on an adventure sheet means I don’t have it.

3. No peeking ahead or reading other paragraphs which I haven’t read in the book.

4. Name each character who makes the attempt. I name them alphabetically, cycling through the alphabet twice with rule-bound rolls, then a third cycle of perfect characters with the stats I want. By the time you hit attempt #53, I figure you know the way through, and it’s just a matter of waiting until you get the right rolls, so at that point it is fair to take chance out of the equation, and substitute the perfect rolls needed to create a winning character. That sounds so intelligent, right? Thanks, I based it on my experience with Trial of Champions, in which I dutifully rolled schlub after schlub, feeding them into the meat grinder, even my skill 12 characters getting eviscerated by the Liche Queen, until I hit fifty characters, only a fraction of which even made it into the dungeon. Even the pucker-faced Coldclaw took my guys out over and over, until I realized I could just bypass that room entirely and explore the deeper parts of the dungeon, until I had killed over a hundred characters, and then discovered I would need to beat both the Coldclaw and the Liche Queen to progress past a certain point, so I now had over one hundred and fifty dead characters, each one rolled BY THE RULES, and still hadn’t seen certain rooms I knew needed to be passed, and I kept on rolling them, sometimes killing a dozen in an hour, until I hit two hundred and two characters mercilessly slaughtered, and I thought, you idiot, you blithering stupid idiot, just use a perfect character so the lady you commute with will stop laughing at your pitiful struggle to dominate this gamebook, and with perfect characters, it still took a few more tries, to finally achieve success on the two hundred and sixth attempt, and it still felt like cheating, so I definitely need some rules that let me cheat, legally, once I have proven my stubbornness and willingness to win, so fifty-two legally rolled guys plus twenty-six perfect characters after that should provide ample opportunity to master any gamebook.

5. I don’t remember. I am bitter about the first two hundred and five dead guys. Ian Livingstone, WTF?

6. I also based this rule about using perfect characters after test driving the concept on the ridiculously difficult Crypt of the Sorcerer. After twenty-five deaths there, it turns out you still can’t progress without certain items, so number twenty-six magically received four sixes as his initial rolls, and so did every last one of the characters I ‘rolled’ after that, except, if you have to make three different rolls with a one in three or one in six chance of dying, perfect characters won’t matter, I mean for God’s sake Ian Livingstone you sadistic son of an Orc, I needed a perfect character just to get a Gargantis horn, and then you still kill me with random dice rolls, and it’s so bad I just make a chart of all the rolls I need to pass to survive, and pre-roll them before even starting the adventure, so I don’t waste time dragging a hero’s sorry ass across half of Allansia only to repeatedly get a crossbow bolt in the eye socket while I listen to a dwarf telling me jokes, and only one in three is making it anywhere new, only to be insta-killed by looking cross ways at anything in the chasm, until finally, mercifully, hero number seventy-four encounters Razaak, and gets hit two rounds in a row, and WTF was that, oh my god, you can’t be frakkin’ serious, you are, well to the Pit with you Ian Livingstone, I have a chart that saves me time, and I already killed a few more perfect characters while you were chortling over your illegal victory, so here comes lucky hero seventy-six, with successful pre-rolls so the Needle Flies, crossbows, and other instant mutant death traps are successfully avoided, and all I have to do is beat your … clay… golem… oh to hell with this, and seventy-seven succumbs to Razaak, and only four of the next fifteen pre-roll their way through only to be clay-golemed to death, but I persist, and with judicious use of luck rolls, number ninety-three beats Razaak to death in the face, woo-hoo!, and it doesn’t matter that that die was slanted, ah crap it does matter, I always reroll all dice if any doubt is involved in even one of them, but number ninety-five wins too, and I have learned a lot about when to use luck in battles, oh yes, I have.

7. Reroll all dice if any of them fall slanted or fairness is otherwise impugned. He killed sixty-nine perfect characters, sixty-nine… dear god, how can I maintain my sanity?

8. Technically, I first tried the naming of hero characters with Chasms of Malice when I asked my son Tiberius to admire the covers of the entire collection laid out across the living room floor. Some of these are pretty awesome looking covers. Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King will always be faves, but Battleblade Warrior and Night Dragon look sweet too. So Tiberius, what’s it gonna be? Out of all the fifty-nine main sequence books, plus the Sorcery series, and a handful of other titles, he extends his hand and picks… Number 30. Chasms of Malice. With some non-descript creep on the cover, on a horse. Laaaaame. Are you sure? Yes? Fine, whatever. I’ll just whip through it and get to a better book. After all, it’s not like Ian Livingstone wrote it.

9. Ok then. The chart system of required rolls came in handy again. I only used legal rolls, and I think hero number seventy-eight prevailed. It’s hard to tell with all the blood leaking out of the page. So much needless death.

So those are the rules I began to follow diligently, as I undertook to beat every last Fighting Fantasy book fair and square. But how do I treat the books fairly, when I know very well exactly how to minimize my pain in some of the older books, or in some of my recent successes with the aforementioned abominations whose every sudden death is forever graven upon my memory?

I get an unwitting partner!

As it turns out, the lady I began to drive into work with (I’ll call her Demonica Firetread) became curious as to what all the scratching and rolling and swearing was about, so she was gradually lured in. Now, I read the book aloud while Demonica drives, and we reach common decisions about how to proceed. If I have foreknowledge, I make Demonica choose, and laugh when she makes us dead. I preface all my rolls with fate-taunting statements like “this is an easy win unless I roll higher than ten!” As I am sure all of you know, the most rewarding time to be a stickler for the rules is when you can shove them down someone else’s throat.

I hope to bring you the finest tales of our joint misery as we forge through all the titles.

[nathanh]

For Trial of Champions I have written a program that runs through the path I want to follow and determines whether or not I die, and if I die reports where I die. This allows me to claim to be following the character-creation rules without actually having to suffer the million deaths it leads to, and then continue my adventure for the three references it takes for me to die in a new way.

To be honest Trial is quite a decent Livingstone book in the sense that you can ignore many of the gold coin encounters and so explore the book reasonably well with a non-perfect character.

How do people feel about suiciding characters in-game? Many books allow you to find a quick death; anyone use that to eliminate skill 7 weakies and get someone decent? I don't like it, but I don't seem to mind computer simulations of my adventures, so I'm probably being silly about this.

[hynreck]

That's quite a read, greatlordofthedark. I don't know how you do it, I would be quite insane by now. But maybe you are?

I already consider myself not quite sane, but I think that would be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Anyway, I started cheating because, contrary to my fellow poster above, I have nowhere near as much time as him to play books over and over (oh, and I'm not trying to be insulting, ô dark one, I'm just establishing how it is on my side). I've got books of all types to go through, movies, a backlog of games to play dating back to the NES age, music, dates with Rosie Palm, sculptures, no, not sculptures, but hell, that's just for entertainment. And on average, a day, I've got about 2 to 3 hours of free time, if lucky, to go through any of this. You watch a movie, chances are you have no more time for anything else.

Well, I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, because I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. I'm fine with it, but don't ask me to play by the meticulous rules all the time; life is too short. I do enjoy a good gamebook, though, and here's what I've been doing through the years, up until now:

Early beginnings, first gamebooks: Island of the Lizard King, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Flight from the Dark, etc. Played all by the rules, straight-up as far as I can recall. I was young and had so much free time. Of course, even back then I could see how this was dragging on and on. And so I'm pretty sure that not so long after that, I started rolling "perfect" characters. Well, you know the drill.

So, I had a streak of cheating days or years after that. To varying degrees, I seem to recall, mostly cheating on fights, items, five-finger bookmarks, er, most likely anything and everything, really.

Then some long dead years of nothing, except perhaps reading through a gamebook here and then. Not even trying.

We've come to the renaissance, now. The days I've decided to acquire every Fighting Fantasy out there, and to this day, other series too. Nowhere as ambitious as greenspine; I'm afraid I'll never reach that height. But still quite respectable, taking a sizable chunk of my full to bursting bookcase.

Since I was facing 60+ FF books, I didn't dare play them properly last time, of fear to still be at it today. That was around back in 2009, if I recall correctly. I picked rules of my own, as in: no cheating with items acquired, or path chosen, only fights and luck roll or the like. Even random number roll I would respect. When dead or stuck I would go back in time (using the sands of time from Prince of Persia, of course) to the earliest moment that I could and proceed from there, hoping to get unstuck. When out of options, I would start over again, admitting defeat.

Now that I'm playing Dracula's Castle from Mr. Brennan, I'm still cheating but less than ever. I do the fights proper, items, etc. Everything is rolled and written down. When I die I die. But I still use the sands of time (to save time, what else?) to go back a square or two, but let's say I lost to a fight, then that fight is now off-limit until I actually re-roll a character.

For more concrete examples on what I'm doing, I died straight at the beginning of the book, the first time I played. Do I re-rolled my character? No way, I don't have that amount of time and this death is non indicative of my character's potential anyway. Plus, it would be possible to re-roll the exact same character, so why bother? I'll just restart at the beginning, no harm done. After dying six or seven more times with my character on nearly all pathways available to me did I accept his suckiness and re-rolled to start fresh from the beginning.

The new character I've rolled, this time rolling five dice for stats and allocating them as I thought would fit better (nothing exceptional, but better than my first: 3, 3, 4, 6, 3) has yet to fail. Of course, he benefits from meta-knowledge acquired by his unsuccesful predecessor, but how can I do otherwise? Plus certain author are obviously counting on that. And I haven't really cheated yet with this one, except, maybe you could say, against the batman, because instead of going straight into the fight I told myself I would try him on to see how this event turns out (as a sort of trial run, if you want) and would proceed if successful or make as if nothing ever happenned otherwise (my first plan was to avoid him altogether after my humiliating first defeat, but temptation proved too strong). And I won, yes!

I supposed there is also the matter, in this particular book, of being allowed to backtrack and go in circle, abusing the health system and being attacked and ambushed over and over again by the same creatures. There's nothing in the rules telling you what to do in such situations, so I'm leaving it to my good old logic and deciding according to the situation at hand, or intentions. Some would propably see this as cheating, I see it as the author should have been specific about what to do in such situations; he didn't, his loss.

I suspect that the longer I take at this book (or any other book, really) the more cheating will be involved. Because I do intend to read the last chapter, and we all know some gamebooks out there, played by the rules anyway, dislike the thought of loosing. Yes, Livingstone, that eye's on you.

[greatlordofthedark]

Thanks, Hynreck, there is a strong amount of willful self-harm involved in my project. As a writer, I was partly motivated by wanting to study what makes a particular gamebook fun, or frustrating, or both, or neither. I always know how I feel about it, but not really tearing it apart to find out which element makes a reader come back for more, or throw it away in disgust. I suspect if it weren't for a forced commute every day the opportunity to do all this would be exactly zero, but co-playing each book with someone else makes the decision making pretty fun, almost like a Dungeons and Dragons game. My method also allows for a 'fair' comparison of the relative difficulties of each book. Sure we all know some of these are nigh impossible, but to actually prove which is toughest... well that is fun too.

If there is any cheat I would recommend, it is simply not limiting yourself to skill 12. One extra skill point makes an impossible book merely difficult, and a difficult book fair. Besides, you are supposed to be an ultimate hero, so Skill up! Another 'fair' cheat would be to accord yourself a fate point or two to make any particular roll or decision over again. That way you can play according to a set of rules, but still overcome a bad beat, a bad choice, or 1-in-6-odds death-gates. Warhammer used Fate points in game didn't it? Anyway, it is a good concept that keeps the thrill alive even as you cheat, keeps the possibility of dying intact, and reflects how most of us play our way through anyway.

As suggested by a poster above, your schlubby skill 7s make great exploration fodder. Sometimes I don't dare open a chest with a powerful character, preferring to drive as far ahead as possible, clobbering monsters. Schlubs are for trying stuff you know you shouldn't. I'm trying to finish each book in the fewest tries.

[thealmightymudworm]

greatlordofthedark said:

Yes, even forgetting to record a key item on an adventure sheet means I don’t have it.
[…]
4. Name each character who makes the attempt. I name them alphabetically, cycling through the alphabet twice with rule-bound rolls
[…]
I am bitter about the first two hundred and five dead guys.

I often feel like an FF lightweight browsing these forums. Possibly never more so than now…

This is the sort of thing I was wondering about... If a book is fairly structured so that there are routes and means to avoid or alter the worst risks and fights then you lose a lot by cheating. But if a book is just going to kill you off dozens or even hundreds of times whatever you do it's not worth the candle imo. It's like a game of Snakes and Ladders where all the ladders have been mis-printed as more snakes.

My feeling is that a perfect FF gamebook shouldn't give you a bad chance of winning based on just dice roles. If you're holding a detailed walkthrough, like one of champskees's, for a book and still know before you roll up that your overall chance of winning is under say 30-40% that should count against it imo. That's a lot of them I know.

Edit: BTW, my main method of cheating when younger was that whilst I did roll up characters, the roll used would not have been looked on kindly in any casinos... it came up with 6 a surprisingly high number of times .
I didn't regard this as cheating at the time.

[hynreck]

I found out that throwing your dices across the room in frustration only chips them, they don't make the numbers any better... sigh. At least I was using cheap dices. Got to remember that next time I play with my good ones.

Thank you, greatlord, for the clarifications. If I had more time I would definitely do something like you (well, let's say somewhere half-way, mind) because I love studying, in a similar manner to you, perhaps, randomness in life; I'm a big fan of chaos (not the evil kind) and so that would be an interesting experiment. Randomness for randomness' sake in gamebooks can be very frustrating, but it can also spice things up real quick.

As for cheating, I'll keep in mind your pointers, they are interesting. Right now, with my current book, I've improvised a system that allows me to play the book and still not stab myself in the eyeball with an icepick. It's a spur of the moment thing, so it might not be perfect, but I'll go into more details when I review the book.
I know it's still cheating, but any book with big gaping holes in its rules must expect (the author must expect, that is) that we'll fill in the blanks, somehow.

[thealmightymudworm]

Mar 5, 2014 13:32:21 GMT hynreck said:

I found out that throwing your dices across the room in frustration only chips them, they don't make the numbers any better... sigh. At least I was using cheap dices. Got to remember that next time I play with my good ones.

If anything, I would think that dice that reliably give better numbers would cost more, unless you make them yourself. Of course you'd probably want to use a different set for rolling up than for rolling for the tests - in fact you might end up with several sets on the go.
A lot of people don't realise how much effort and study goes into cheating properly.


Reminds me of that bit in Guys and Dolls:

-And to change my luck, I'm going to use my own dice.

- Your own dice?

- I had 'em made especially in Chicago.

- I do not wish to seem petty, but may I have a look at those dice?
[Dice are handed over. Astonished pause.] But these dice ain't got no spots on 'em. They're blank.

- I had the spots removed for luck. But I remember where the spots formerly were.

[hynreck]

You are quite right: cheating properly does require an extraordinary amount of time, considering what the end goal is, and can often even be stressful, which is sad, but in the end we pleases our difficult minds if succesful, so who knows what's the best course of action.
It's a damn if you do damn if you don't in most cases: we all want to follow the rules by the letter, but when such rules are left wanting, or result in an unfair, unbalanced game, it's hard to stay blind to this and just accept our death. We will fight any which way we can, and one such way is by cheating, but cheating in a manner that is as close as possible to the true rules, so that we can still be challenged and appease at the same time our slightly guilty conscience.

[drmanhattan]

The whole concept of anti cheating is utter nonsense, narcissistic drivel, IMO.

The books are even marketed clearly as "YOU are the Hero". YOU. You the Reader, You who bought and own the book. Not you the author.

The book has no agency. ZERO. It is paper on a shelf. The reader decides if they want to cheat the dice rolls, skip paragraphs, rewind, flick through the book, make notes, look up solutions online. There is nothing the book can or should do about this and the author has NO BUSINESS wasting their or our time with "anti cheat" stuff. 

The reader can decide if they want to cheat, how they want to play, what they count as cheating, what they count as success. If it feels hollow for them after winning by "cheating" then thats THEIR choice ("You" remember, "YOU" the reader, again NOT the author, NOT the book). If you decide you want to skip fights, rewind instant deaths, try multiple options and pick in retrospect, then yes, YOU get to decide. "you" the small "you" that is the author and book did your job, thanks for the book, I bought it now moff off. Wasting paragraphs on "anti cheats" is pointless tripe.

When I worked in videogames I often argued with the same kind of idiots in our development teams who thought it was OK to lock content behind "in game success". UTTER CRAP. Why should I pay 10 quid like the other guy and only get half a game because I am bad at it? It's mindboggling to me. Yes, default to unlocking stuff through achievement, thats good, but if I decide I cant or wont ever win that race or beat that boss, I damn well want to be able to skip that and see the rest of the game WHICH I PAID FOR.

Make your content, do a good job, provide an experience for the User. But never ever get your egoistic head stuck up your own arse and think that once the reader/player pays their money for it, you have anything more to do with it. You don't. It is THEIR game. and THEIR rules. 

#petpeeve.

[kieran]

Jun 13, 2021 11:23:58 GMT drmanhattan said:

When I worked in videogames I often argued with the same kind of idiots in our development teams who thought it was OK to lock content behind "in game success". UTTER CRAP.

I think there is something kinda fun about trying to unlock bonus goodies but I know what you mean that it's a bit harsh if you struggle with the necessary requirements. However, it's still much better than the current practice of paying hundreds of quid to unlock all the aspects of a game you've already paid full price for.

[bloodbeasthandler]

Do anti-cheat mechanisms [such as numbers on keys telling you which paragraphs to turn to when you use them], do they not increase replayability of the books?

By taking away the option (the temptation, in fact) to cheat, by stymying 'cheat mode', the reader is forced to go back and play through again. 

As you know, old computer games were 'three lives and that's your lot'. Lose those lives or reach zero on the health bar and it's back to the start for you. No saves. 
This has changed greatly over the years, with frequent auto-save points meaning that death or failure is much less important. In fact it's only temporary. 
I can see the case for both. I remember the Amstrad game Sorcery+ which despite hours and hours (or days and months rather) of play, I never managed to finish. Never managed to even see the Necromancer at the end, much less kill him. I still enjoyed it though, pitting myself against the game. 
The Halo games I've found to be a superb entertainment and have played and replayed the campaigns a great deal, even though completing the games is merely a matter of putting time into them. 

What about taking the angle that gamebooks are not computer games at heart, but share more DNA with roleplaying games? 
Does that make a difference Dr. M? 

[philsadler]

Going off topic a bit here but what I really hate is when a video game lets you use mods but then disables achievements for using them - in a single player game!

[drmanhattan]

The point being they’re pointless in a game book. It’s you and the book. If you want, you can return to your last page, make notes, or read through the refs in order to find answers. Adding paragraphs to catch cheating out is just wasting everyone’s time. And if a reader wants to skip ahead in the story then that’s up to them, at the end of the day the reader decides what they’re going to do, and so they should, i wouldn’t want to “cheat” since I enjoy mapping out everything to work it out, but sometimes I’ll just not bother with the dice rolling. That’s up to me, I don’t care what the author thinks or wants, and there’s no reality in which they’ll ever know what I do in my bedroom!

I don’t mind refs in info so you can’t just turn to the end, but need to know the code but that’s not the kind of anti cheating I mean. And in any case, it is still trivial to map and cross off refs and read around to find the right path, IIRC this is how I solved CoH since that secret passage link text was a bit weird. I ended up flicking through the book to find the right page and then worked out the paragraph I should have come from and realized the error,

What’s the point of asking someone “do you have X”? “ no you don’t, cheater, you die”. The person who would cheat in that way will just go back q1 page, maybe that example is just a kind of Easter egg joke though.


I don’t know how I feel about failing rolls to win. It’s a bit cheeky but I can’t hand on heart say I don’t think it’s a bit cool as an odd example or two.

[Charles X.]

So long as you start with good enough statistics, you can win every FF except BOZ, COTS and Spellbreaker (disregarding those editorial mistakes such as the messy ROTV). The FF writers though seem to - they've said on social - be under the impression their readers will cheat all the time, frankly I wonder sometimes what led them to that conclusion.

   If you play an RPG or a board game you don't tend to cheat.

[drmanhattan]

I cheated a fair bit as a kid and certainly as an adult I would find it tiresome to play by the rules. I mostly just skip the combats since I find exploring the books the most fun part, and it is tedious in he extreme as an adult to restart books and repeat stuff so just rewind insta deaths , or retrace steps as needed.

[bloodbeasthandler]

I've read the first [The Altimer] and am halfway through the second [New Gaia] book of the science fiction 'Entram' trilogy of gamebooks by Samuel Isaacson. 
Looking at his blog, he comments on this cheating business under the title: 6 lessons I'm learning about writing gamebooks. His words in italics:

3. Difficulty is a really important metric.

When I first wrote The Altimer, I thought it was easy. 300 sections, relatively linear…with the exception of one admittedly frustrating conversation that requires (I think) three consecutive right choices, my expectation was that a reader taking reasonable notes would complete on their second read through.
I’ll come back to why – and why I was wrong – in my next point.
The thing is that it turns out my books have apparently developed a bit of a reputation as being incredibly hard – not something I set out to achieve and not something I’m that proud about having achieved! I’ve seen several comments along the lines of: “I don’t think I’ve ever died so much in a gamebook”. I didn’t set out to make them hard, and I wonder if I tipped the balance between difficulty and reward a bit too far in the wrong direction in that trilogy…let’s see if I learn!



4. Readers shouldn’t have to cheat.

In my trilogy, my assumption was that the reader would cheat, in two important ways:
Fudge the initial stat rolls
Immediately flip back to the previous section when encountering an instadeath
As a result, the roll difficulty levels are essentially impossible for someone who has average – certainly minimum – stats, and there are instadeath sections all over the place – they’re fun to write, and I thought the reader would just skip back and choose the other option anyway. The Altimer doesn’t have any serious cheat detectors in it, and so my conclusion was that it’s therefore easy. Other people don’t read that way, and so it turns out it’s very punishing. (But, let’s face it, it’s incredibly unlikely you or I would survive if we really woke up in that setting, so maybe this is a lesson for all of us to learn about the nature of reality.)


Here's the thing - I have been playing by the rules and dying quite a lot. 
The game mechanism he's talking about is one that involves adding a given stat to a 2d6 roll, needing to equal or better a difficulty level.  
For example if you have a MIND score of 5, and you are told to make a MIND roll at difficulty 14, you'll need to roll 9 or more on 2d6 [9+5=14] to succeed. 
Sometimes these difficulty scores are high, and the price of failure catastrophic. 

When playing these books, and having failed these rolls, I had assumed I had missed something - a stat booster or a device or a clue that would have given me better odds of success. But it looks like that's not the case and I should have just fucked the dice roll off and said I've passed. 

Here's the problem with assumptions... the writer assumes all readers will cheat, whilst some readers assume the writer took care of all the number crunching and kept track of stats and variables. 

EDIT: Obviously we can see he changed his mind about this - and on a more recent blog talking about playtesting he says: 

I thought I’d compile a list of what I find most helpful in a playtester – if you’re playtesting a gamebook at some point, maybe these will come in handy!

Complete it fairly. This is far and away the most important output I’m looking for! If you needed to “cheat” to get to the end, please tell me what that looked like specifically for you.

Tell me how difficult you’re finding it. It’s always going to be difficult to strike the right balance between challenge and reward – a gamebook with no challenge is just an overhyped novel, and one with too much is pure frustration in book form.

Interact fully with the game mechanics. Not every gamebook includes a stat block, dice rolling, etc., but for those that do it’s important that they don’t detract from the experience. A player shouldn’t be punished for playing by the rules.

[philsadler]

If I'm reading him right he seemed to say that because he thinks everyone will cheat, he will make it very difficult? Er ... but surely that will make the cheaters (every man, woman and child on the earth) cheat even more? It will also make the honest players (of which there are none on the earth) even more frustrated?

Hmm...

[CharlesX]

Feb 9, 2014 15:18:34 GMT a moderator said:

The solo adventure in the non-FF book Maelstrom takes 'you should not be reading this section' sections to new heights. The section that does the 'there is no way of getting to this paragraph, so stop reading it, you naughty person' thing contains a warning about the unreachable sequence within the adventure. There's a whole loop of about half a dozen sections, none of which can be reached from outside the loop, and none of which provide any way out of the loop. And around half the loop consists of reading signs that say things like 'DO NOT READ PARAGRAPHS THAT YOU CANNOT REACH'. Subtle, huh?

Maelstrom was, it even boasted on the back blurb, 'written while still at school'. It has the same mixture of good writing, cliche, and juvenilia, present in The Cretan Chronicles, also written by some school students.

[bloodbeasthandler]

It seems illogical, for sure.
As you say, cheats will cheat anyway, plus it makes cheats of the honest players. It does enable more death paragraphs to be written, if that needs to be an end in itself.

On top of this, at the character generation stage... for three of the character stats you have BODY, MIND and HEART which are all generated as d6+2. In a rules section entitled 'important notes on your scores' you are told that only one of those scores is allowed to start at 6 or higher. And that if you rolled more than one score to be higher than 6 you may choose which one to keep at the higher level and reduce the other back down to 6.
So you are specifically told that you will not have a character with high stats across the board. The author has apparently gone out of his way to make that not happen. This signalled to me that he'd taken care of that aspect of the gamebook - I mean the test rolls and combat.

It's a pity - the story and the world-building is engrossing. I'll carry on reading the book, making notes and clues, writing down codewords and items of equipment... but I'll just sack off all the dice rolls and never lose a fight or a test. The knock-on effect is to never take items that might, say, boost combat +1 or whatever... it would be pointless.

A pity, but there you are - it would have been better not to bother with the dice in the first place.

[terrysalt]

I know nothing about Maelstrom so I can't comment on that book but generally speaking, I find the assumption that players will cheat to be rather an odd one. Why bother writing rules you don't expect anyone to follow? At that point you may as well do away with the game part and just write a book. The author does seem to have realised the flaw in his reasoning at least. Now we just need Ian to do the same...

That said, if someone wants to cheat, let them. It's a single player experience, no one is being hurt by your cheating. As a kid, I had a piece of paper with every important number written on it tucked into each book so that if I didn't find a particular item, I still knew where to turn to continue playing. Every character I played was 12/24/12 and by some amazing coincidence, every really bad roll seemed to not count for what I'm sure were very legitimate reasons.

Having the book call out cheaters is completely pointless. Is there anyone who was cheating, saw the scolding message in the book and then stopped cheating? I can tell you from experience that I, for one, did not. I just, you know, cheated to avoid them. "Oh, okay, there's not actually 11 rings in the game so claiming to have that many just gets me killed. I'll go back and pick 9 then".

[johnbrawn1972]

Feb 9, 2014 20:41:25 GMT a moderator said:

Feb 9, 2014 20:03:11 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

I was reminded of Doigy mentioning that when he was growing up he and his friends though Livingstone=easy and Jackson=hard because of the ease of cheating when all the difficulty is found in the battles and finding items that you can just declare you've found. (Of course those are very different forms of cheating, imo.)

True. When writing on his own, I don't think Ian put numbers on things until around Trial, whereas Steve never wrote a gamebook without a 'hidden' number. I think it's probably possible to win The Shamutanti Hills without needing a number provided at an earlier stage of the adventure, but the rest of his books do make it harder to use the 'pretend to have the required item/knowledge' approach.

In my cheaty days I did generally go for the 'win all fights, succeed at all rolls' sort rather than pretending to have items I hadn't found. Perhaps because lying about my inventory proved so spectacularly unhelpful the time I did attempt it.

Feb 9, 2014 20:03:11 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

Was this the same guy who couldn't understand the meaning of 'and' by any chance?

No, he wasn't as bad as that individual.

Just noticed this. I think if you play the rules to breaking point, as I do, then you need the axe with the number to give to Glandragor in the tavern.