Cheating in FF

[CharlesX]

Several key FF writers, including founder Livingstone and the prolific Green, seem to suggest readers cheat and that cheating is common in FF, is this true, is this therefore justified as well?

As far as your habits go, and in no particular order:

I defy you to tell me you don't reroll a character with low stats or try to get them to die asap for the very hardest FFs. This is possibly no man's land cheating. I think the onus is perhaps more on the author, not the player.
There are books such as Port Of Peril where the author's intent is clear but his wording isn't, this is very strictly cheating.
There are books such as Dead Of Night's Potion of Heroism and House Of Heil's Kris Knife where the technical interpretation is one thing and many - even most - disregard it, but it arguably is a cheat & incorrect.
There is Battleblade Warrior which some (just me?) feel doesn't give adequate opportunities to eat.
Many people house rule all sorts of things about Legend Of Zagor, Crypt Of The Sorceror has effectively been rewritten entirely, maybe some do-or-die rolls in Green and Livingstone.
  I've often opened a second-hand FF and found their starting stats are 12 24 12, or higher, sometimes not even for one of the harder FFs, which may lend credence to Livingstone's suggestion FF players cheat. To me, cheating that much takes away from the fun of FFs.
  I prefer it sometimes when an FF isn't outrageously hard, but it's as saddening as it is funny when stuff like Crypt, Eye Of The Dragon, Blood are such good targets for pastiches.

[sylas]

It depends what people define as cheating since not everyone agrees. I'm mostly a non-cheater. Not only does it take away from the challenge and satisfaction of winning, but it is also against the spirit of the adventure. What is the point of all those written rules and false paths if readers are just going to ignore them? Therein lies the problem because more often than not, even a non-cheater must go against those very rules in order to make the adventure work.

As you mentioned, some books such as House of Hell, Port of Peril, or even Black Vein Prophecy and Revenge of the Vampire, if the reader does not take the logical decision to 'cheat' in such instances (i.e. the SKILL or Attack Strength dilemma, the stat boost that technically cannot go over your initial score, the need to fail a Luck test, and the awareness of genuine errors that did not get fixed), it becomes either extremely difficult or impossible to win. But if you ignored the set rules in such instances, you would enjoy the book a whole lot more. I myself will waiver a rule if it is only a one-time situation where I feel I absolutely must. Of course, there are also books that are so difficult, cheating once simply does not help much. There's not a lot that can be done in those cases where the adventure 'forces' the reader to not play fair since the book itself does not play fair. If, on the other hand, a book is perfectly beatable playing by the rules, there really needn't be any reason to cheat at all, but the reader should find out for himself how difficult a book is before they refer to guides and rigged dice rolls.

At the end of the day, there's never going to be a definitive ruling of what is right and what is wrong unless it comes straight from the authors themselves, sometimes to their book's detriment. We readers can only do what we've always done which is enjoy the books in the way we find the most comfortable and enjoyable. Stick to the rules as much as you can, but don't let them get in the way of your enjoyment while respecting how others play their game as well.

[adrius]

Midnight Rogue does it to the other extreme though -- by straight-up accusing the reader of cheating and asking them to go back to section 1. The Crown of Kings gives a warning about un-"authorised" use of the anonymous Analander alternate reference, though certainly not to the same extent.

[terrysalt]

My general rule is if it's a single-player game, cheating hurts no one but yourself so have it. I try to keep it to a minimum but as long as the game isn't being played competitively (like in Greenspine's thread), cheat as much as you want.

[nathanh]

I've become pretty comfortable with taking some SKILL bonuses as Attack Strength bonuses where it seems appropriate. It makes some books more fun to play.

I don't usually explicitly send a bad character down a death route, but if there's an early tough enemy, I have been known to avail myself of that opportunity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Fog Wyvern in Legend of Zagor, for instance, is designed for such. For Trial of Champions and Spellbreaker, I resorted to just writing a program to play the quest until I reached a new reference. This led to an extraordinary number of dead characters.

[terrysalt]

The Wizard reprints that copy-pasted the rules from Warlock pose another issue. Is it cheating to eat provisions in (for example) Deathtrap Dungeon since there's obviously no instructions to eat them anywhere in the book.

[sleepyscholar]

If FF is primarily a puzzle, then cheating at it is like cheating at any other puzzle: it rather undermines the whole point of the exercise.

I think the reason why this is a dilemma is that the strength of FF is its hybrid nature: both puzzle and story. And the extent to which you tolerate cheating is probably going to be related to the weighting you give to those two possibilities.

This means, however, that a competent FF writer will cater for both possibilities. To write an FF assuming that the reader is going to cheat is short-changing the chunk of your readership which values the puzzle-solving aspect, and I think it can be criticised quite strongly. Obviously this applies to Livingstone and also, it has to be said, *cough* to the younger version of another writer in the series.

[misomiso]

Also remember a lot of the best game design allows players to play 'how they want to play'. Just because some players get a lot out of doing the books by 'cheating' does not mean they have an invalidated experience.

What's more interesting than 'cheating' imo is adding design elements to gamebooks to encourage things like exploration and replayability. For example a path where you 'die' may have a very interesting monster or tidpbit, but you cannot access it and 'finish' the book normally.

Or may they include a particularly weak character in the 'pre generated' characters section as a challenge. So skill 8, stamina, 15, luck 9, that has a very low chance of finishing the book but it IS possible.

[daredevil123]

Came back to this thread and thought I'd add my two cents. As a general rule, I only 'cheat' if I genuinely believe the rules as written are a mistake on the part of the author and/or editor. For example, I'm inclined to treat the Kris Knife as granting an Attack Strength bonus because I honestly think that was Steve's intention. By the same reasoning, I treat The Crimson Tide's Mudworm as having Skill 6. I tell myself this isn't really cheating, because there's no sense in playing by the rules if the rules are wrong. An example of this is in Howl of the Werewolf: para 310 tells you to turn to 459 when the correct section is 496. In this instance, even the most dogmatic follower of the rules would turn to the intended section rather than the written one.

[terrysalt]

I think it would be nice to get official errata for a lot of these things. Things like misprinted reference numbers would definitely get fixed and we could get an official ruling on whether Yaztromo's spell in Port of Peril was intended to exceed your initial skill (which it pretty much has to to make any sense) or if you're meant to be able to bring the deathstone and magic boots to your new body in Gates of Death and finally put an end to the debates over whether Creature of Havoc was a typo or a troll for not including the trigger phrase.