It’s Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Game Fraud and Counter-Fraud in RPGs
This is an article that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a very long time, encouraged in part by the Numb3rs Season 2 episode ‘Double Down’ (and several subsequent episodes), in part by movies such as ‘The Sting’, ‘Oceans 11’, and ‘Oceans 13’, in part by the Babylon-5 Season 1 episode ‘The Quality Of Mercy’ (in which Londo cheats at Poker using an extra (tentacle) limb to reach across under the table), and in part by the first two or three seasons of ‘Las Vegas’. Oh, and some of the Poker games of the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek The Next Generation, as well – just take a look at this list of ‘poker references in Star Trek’ at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki…
Specifically, I started thinking about how people could or would attempt to cheat in worlds where characters had different abilities to the norm, and what measures casinos – who obviously would want to deter such practices – would have to put in place to stop them.
Cheating in Fantasy
At first glance, there seem to be two ways of cheating in addition to the standards. The first is the use of precognition, and the second uses telekinesis of some sort. But with a little imagination, a few more start suggesting themselves.
Precognition
The problem with precognition is that it always lacks in context or in detail. If a spell is so kind as to show the cheater’s hand (assuming that we’re talking about a card game such as poker), a large bet, and a triumphant win, there is no guarantee that these events happen in sequence, or all relate to the same hand of the game. This makes precognition more a “will-I-won’t-I-play-tonight” coin-toss, cast in advance, but even used in this way there are problems. The player may think they have won, only for someone else at the table to crash the party with a better hand even as the precognitive player celebrates. Or for the player to lose his winnings – and then some – in one or more subsequent hands, for that matter.
Because the GM has full control over the content of the precognition, and will never tell the whole story (he needs to leave room for player input, if nothing else), a player should never be able to rely on it 100%. Scenes should be disjointed, not a seamless narrative.
This is justifiable in a fantasy game situation because the casino would make every effort imaginable to stay on the good side of the God(des) of Luck, God(dess) of Fate, and any other such power that might be able to influence the outcome – or prevent such influences from being helpful.
This notion can be taken further – a casino might employ priests of the God(dess) of Dreams to ensure that everyone who stays at the Casino has dreams of winning, just to encourage them to play!
Telekinesis
The ability to manipulate objects at a distance would seem to be an obvious way to cheat, but in a fantasy milieu, such spells are almost always accompanied by a visual display of some kind – a spectral hand, for example. This makes the approach generally untenable.
Scrying
A more subtle approach is to employ an ability to scry to see other player’s cards. In some game systems, this requires a rather obvious physical object to use as the focus of the magic such as a crystal ball, a mirror, or something similar; this makes Scrying unsuitable as a technique for cheating. Other game systems permit scrying in any reflective surface – a refinement of the obvious approach of simply seeing the reflection of someone’s cards. This suggests an obvious technique – a team, one of whom is a fighter in brightly-polished armor and the other of which who uses that armor to scry on his opponent’s hands!
How would a casino combat scrying? They couldn’t very well ban players from wearing anything that was polished or reflective, though that is an obvious remedy. Carried through to its logical extreme, this would impart a rustic flavor to the most up-market casinos, a touch which could help distinguish the game world from the real one. The problem with such a ban is that it would require casinos to store a large quantity of very valuable magic items belonging to patrons, who would be reluctant to hand them over unless the casino assumed full responsibility for them (and had adequate (expensive) security to boot – a financial risk that could quite literally break the bank.
A better, but more difficult, approach would be to employ illusionists to overlay false ‘readings’ on any reflective surface, ensuring that scrying gave a false ‘read’. It follows that the best and most famous casinos would be found in cities/nations with strong magic schools. Since these are generally the most easily-cast illusions – the casino wouldn’t even have to make them look real, if they publicized the security measure – this would also be a relatively inexpensive solution.
It might even reach the point where the casino paid the costs of apprenticeships in the illusionary art, at least until the apprentice/casino employee had learned enough to carry out this function. Many of the apprentices would not have the skills to progress further, but this is still a win/win/win for the parties involved – the casino gets its illusionists, the trainees get secure employment with the prospects of being taken on as a full apprentice if they are good enough, and the tutor gets additional income, a patron, and assistance in locating suitable apprentices to work on his behalf.
Illusions
Of course, illusions work both ways. A cheat can overlay one of his cards with an illusion of a different card, or do the same with a card in a rival’s hand (though that’s trickier to get away with). What’s more, it would be harder for a casino to combat this without disrupting the illusions that they are using to prevent scrying. The best answer to this is to use a deck of custom-created magic cards that disrupt illusions cast on them – again strengthening the affiliation between schools of magic and successful gambling dens.
This would have an additional benefit – most magic items are far more resilient than their non-magical counterparts. Modern casinos combat card-marking by swapping decks frequently, a practice that relies on having a manufacturing industry able to produce hundreds of virtually-identical decks of cards; the pseudo-medieval nature of most fantasy campaigns does not permit this, but using magic cards achieves the same benefit by making the cards harder to mark in the first place.
Non-magical techniques
Of course, there are always the traditional approaches: high levels of manual dexterity, ‘trick’ shuffles, card-counting, and so on. Some of these might not have been thought of in a fantasy environment, or probability might not work exactly the same ‘in-game’ as it does in real life, but as a general rule, they would still be expected to work. The techniques to combat these would be equally traditional, and most revolve around a dealer provided by the casino.
‘Anything goes’ games
Of course, any private game run outside the scope and protection of a well-heeled casino would not be able to counter these measures so easily – which can be the basis for a fun adventure, in which the PCs sit in on a ‘friendly’ game in which everyone else is cheating by means of a different method!
Cheating in Sci-Fi
As technology and analytic sophistication improve, statistical analysis becomes an increasing element of both cheating (and advantage playing) and of the detection of cheating. It is generally considered cheating for someone to have computer assistance, for example, but this becomes difficult to enforce when mobile telephones which can also run software apps become ubiquitous, and almost impossible if cybernetic enhancements are commonplace.
To combat this, casinos would employ computer-based statistical analysis to detect cheating. The house has the advantage of being able to see everyone’s cards through hidden cameras, so they can always determine the optimum approach, assuming ignorance on the part of the players. A player may legitimately make a mistake and ignore what is apparently the optimum move, once or twice without suspicion, especially if they are clearly not a professional player. A professional may even get away with it occasionally if they can ‘read’ another player well enough – though this becomes more problematic when the other players are also professionals who have eliminated as many ‘tells’ as possible. The more times it occurs that a player wins by virtue of an apparent mistake, the more suspicious that player’s behavior becomes.
Adding to this are other methods of profiling players, both legitimate (facial recognition to identify known and suspected cheats) and illegitimate, and the capabilities of non-human species.
Consider a race with multiple eyes on stalks which weave back-and-forth like cat’s tails by instinct, alert to any potential danger or threat – how hard would it be to prevent such a player from getting a glimpse of his neighbor’s cards? Or a race with a marsupial’s natural pouch in which marked cards or cold decks can be located, but which is normally used to protect the young for whom exposure to the outside world can be dangerous – searching one of those would be the equivalent of a body-cavity search, which would have to be deemed unacceptable as a business practice (if not outright illegal). A race with very accurate thermal senses or very sharp hearing or even canine olfactory abilities might be able to measure the nervousness of another player – hardly definitive, but a definite advantage. Heck, even a race from a low-gravity environment with an extra meter (very roughly 3¼’) of height would find it much easier to see other player’s cards!
There are really very few things that can be done to combat the use of such player advantages. One possibility would be the use of ‘isolation walls’ between players so that they could not see each other, but the ability to ‘read’ an opponent is a huge part of the difference between live play and online play, so this would probably not be especially welcomed. It would also impact the audience’s vicarious attraction to the game, which is a big part of the atmosphere of high-stakes tournaments, so once again, the solution is left wanting.
Ultimately, I expect casinos would simply tell players to learn to live with it – each player has a different mix of abilities and skills that they can use to their advantage as they see fit.
The alternative would be to embrace one alternative solution that comes to mind – but I’m going to save discussion of that alternative for the end of the article.
Telepathy
One particular mode of cheating that needs mentioning at this point is the issue of telepathy. Unlike a fantasy campaign, with it’s special-effects-friendly magic spells, psionics is usually an invisible ability in most sci-fi and superhero games.
There are two primary defenses that could be employed against this method of cheating. The first would be a technological defense – some sort of “jammer” that each patron could wear or carry, which would broadcast mental “static” to any telepath present. The alternative would be taken from the old moral, “to catch a thief” – staff telepaths who would wander around “looking” for people using telepathic means to cheat.
I can see the latter being especially appropriate to a Babylon-5 universe (or any similar game) where there is an aggressive recruitment campaign by the Psi-Corps. For the former to work, there needs to be, One, general acceptance that psionic talents are real, backed by experimental proof, and Two, formal and detailed studies into exactly how it works. The second can’t exist without the first, and the second is required in order to provide a theoretical foundation for developing the gadget in the first place.
Cheating in Superhero Campaigns
A world with Superheroes would have to be a Casino Manager’s worst nightmare. Not only would it bring all the modes of cheating from both sci-fi and fantasy environments – and some of the limiting factors that constrain these would or could be reduced or even obviated completely – but there would be more besides.
Telekinesis
Superhero TK doesn’t have to be visible, and often isn’t. That means that players don’t have to ‘reach’ for cold decks or extra cards, or even to take surreptitious glimpses at the deck.
The one saving grace for Casinos where this ability is concerned is that psionics rarely occur alone – a telekinetic usually has at least some telepathic ability, however poor and untrained it is. So developing and then turning up the Jammers might be sufficient.
Stretching
This brings us back to Londo Mullari and his “extra limb”. When a big toe can stretch and curl around the table to surreptitiously reveal the top card on the deck, casinos have a problem – though a card “shoe” would mitigate this.
Precognition
Superhero precognition is usually more controllable and more reliable than the fantasy variety. If this is a psionic ability, then the measures mentioned under Telekinesis might be effective, but if the character reads the future by sensing the shape of the timeline, the power might be completely non-psionic. However, the latter approach would probably require a greater measure of skill in interpreting the results since there is no direct link between outcome and perception, so this would probably be considered the equivalent of being a professional player, and tolerated.
Teleportation
Can a sufficiently-skillful player teleport cards out of a card shoe at the same time as they teleport in a cold deck? If someone were to propose this to me in a game I was running, I would be extraordinarily skeptical, requiring many long hours of practice. Can it be done with no-one noticing (including security cameras)? That’s even more problematic. Casinos could combat this further by installing simple but highly-accurate pressure sensors under each card shoe – sufficient to detect the difference in weight of a single card. If the reduction is accompanied by the dealer extracting a card from the shoe, it can be ignored; if not, the alarm sounds. The casino might not know who was cheating, but they would know that someone was – and could declare the hand null and void, bring in a fresh show, and so on, just as they would if they detected someone marking the cards without knowing who.
Super-luck & Mind control
There are many other approaches to cheating that can be considered for a superhero campaign, but most of them also exist in either fantasy or sci-fi settings.
One step up from mere precognition is the ability to actually alter the outcome. The simplest method is simply to influence another character’s decision-making process – but that’s generally psionics again, or some form of hypnotism (which in turn requires some form of communication with the victim that would either be obvious or be psionic in nature), so the same measures work.
The more unusual method is to be able to fiddle with probability itself, during the shuffling process for example. Not even automated card-shuffling machines would be able to resist this power, and the only way to counter it is to employ someone to give the patrons bad luck – an unacceptable choice.
In fact, the only solution to this method of cheating is to have the randomizing agent somewhere else completely. And that brings us to the final anti-cheating technique, the one that I alluded to earlier:
Online Gambling
Almost all of these problems go away if you replace the casino with a server farm. If there are no physical cards to manipulate, if players don’t know who they are up against except as a screen name (let alone where they are and who they are), most of the old methods of cheating simply won’t work.
Even unusual methods like reading or manipulating the shape of the future become more difficult, and more easily detected, simple because the game relies on numbers that appear random – but are actually pseudo-random in nature, and hence can be replicated on a backup system in a remote third location. If the two machines agree, there’s no problem – but if they disagree, then one of them has been manipulated.
Is online gambling a complete cure? Not at all – there are some very clever people out there who have devised ways of beating the system (I don’t want to encourage this sort of behavior, so I’m not going to tell you what they are). But if I could find out about them, anyone else who really wants to can do so as well.
Suffice it to say that the proprietors of online casinos know all about them, too, and have watchdog routines in place to curb them – or (in some cases) have decided that it is not worth trying to do so and amended the terms and conditions of their games to permit such behavior.
Know the game
As the long list of media at the start of this article attest, gambling is a common human activity. Being able to simulate it in your games is something that will and should be necessary from time to time.
The environment is a factor that needs to be taken into account if you are to do this with any real success. There have been enough movies and TV shows that this is easy for a bricks-and-mortar casino, but its not so easy when you’re talking about online gaming. You might imagine that you know what it is like, but your imagination – in general – won’t capture the real essence of what a genuine game online is like, any more than a few friendly games will prepare you to participate in a genuine tournament.
Your emotional state, the fact that the stakes are real, the fact that someone else – with a different thought process to your own – has an equal impact on the outcome, these all combine to alter your mindset in the genuine event.
It follows that the best prep for simulating online poker in one of your games is to actually play a few
competitive games at pokersoft sites, and take careful note of how the actual experience differs from your imaginary one.
A few words of warning: to get the psychological impact right, there need to be real stakes, and that means a real game. Expect to lose (unless you make an ongoing hobby of it) and budget accordingly – don’t throw good money after bad in an attempt to recoup a loss. That means considering any money spent on a gambling site to have been spent – if you’re lucky, you might get some or all or even more back from a source that just happens to be the same, but that should be considered a separate transaction.
Secondly, Gambling addiction is real, and can be a real problem. Johnn raised this point a couple of weeks ago in his article, ‘Who Got Poker In My RPG?’ and I would like to second his advice on the subject. You may play online poker with real money to learn how to simulate it in your RPG, but DON’T play for real money in your RPG. In fact, think twice before playing for anything of value, even M&Ms. One GM I know once suggested that RPG gambling should be played for XP – I don’t agree, and even consider the suggestion dangerous.
Above all, have fun! There’s nothing like playing a game with no pressure to win – be it an RPG or online gambling. In fact, thinking of the stakes as “money already spent” should allow you to bring the same detachment to the online game as you do to an RPG session – so enjoy it.
Oh, and if you cheat, on your own head be it – it’s one thing to talk about villains and underhanded types doing so in a game, we neither support no condone doing so in real life.
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May 7th, 2012 at 8:50 am
When it comes to characters trying to cheat with magic the greatest defence for a GM is the same as always…knowledge, know the spells effects, its limits and how it is cast and used. Scrying being one of the mentioned spells above if playing D&D 3.x is a good example: Casting time 1hr, must be cast on a known area, a target gets a will save and any SR, if they make the save you cant scy on them for 24hrs, and has semantic, verbal, material and foci components.
For a wizard, the foci is a 1000gp+ 2ft x 4ft mirror, for a Druid a natural pool of water, and for a Cleric a holy water font worth at least 100gp. This spell also creates a sensor that can be discovered.
I know that this is an extreme example but it truly goes to show that magic isn’t always as useful as it sounds, and can be worked around quite easily without having to coat your adventure with BS sauce. It is also worth it for players to note how their spells or powers work to avoid nasty surprises.
May 7th, 2012 at 9:04 am
I agree completely with this assessment. At the same time, people are going to expend considerable effort in trying to figure out how to cheat “the system”, especially if there is “money” involved – the examples offered are just the tip of the iceberg.
May 7th, 2012 at 9:07 am
True but making PC’s jump through hoops to get to a reward is one of the fun parts of DMing!
May 8th, 2012 at 2:17 am
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May 8th, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Another point to note is that anything the players can do might be done to them in a dishonest casino. Casinos have often been run by criminal organizations.
One suggestion that works in some fantasy worlds is to have the casino be in a no-magic zone. This stops magical fraud (and accusations of the house using magic to cheat). It also reduces the options for robbers. If the security forces don’t have to deal with spellcasters and magic items, then their job is much easier. On the other hand, it means the casino doesn’t get to use magic for flashy light shows and entertainment.
May 8th, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Unfortunately “dump a dead magic zone on it” is getting used far too often these days and I am beginning to think it is both lazy annd uncreative. Such zones should be rare, in fact anything that instantly removes ability from characters should be lookeed at for differant way of handling the situation. In general, there are enough weaknesses built into spells which can easily spotted by a trained person with a spellcraft skill. The competition between wizard and establishment (ie GM) can be fun, besides this can be useful to make the party use resources that may be needed later. Most magic users need to memorize spells its no guarantee something usefull is currently in mind.
Another untouched issue is cheating and alignment, this could easily stop cheating from happening at all or create interparty tension. The rogue and bard may have no issue, but what about any priests, paladins or lawful/good bent characters thoughts on the issue.
Besides when all is said and done, why use a dead zone when a wild zone is so much more fun?!
May 8th, 2012 at 8:47 pm
@Philo Pharynx @IanG You’re both right! A dead magic zone can work – but is awfully convenient unless the casino is way out in the middle of nowhere. So much so that it would break my suspension of disbelief if I came across it in a game – there is far too much of deux-ex-machina about the idea of one just happening to be in exactly the right place at the right time in the right size.
Only one of my campaigns feature dead magic zones, and they are an integral part of that world (for reasons the PCs have yet to discover) – but they are all a LONG way from any civilized region, and are relatively easy to spot once you know what to look for.
But Philo is also right about unscrupulous casinos having access to this full repetoire of tricks – though, once you can stack the deck, you don’t need much more!
May 9th, 2012 at 12:03 pm
The original Cyberpunk rules (or one of the add-ons) addressed the problem of cheating using hyper sensitive cyber implants for things like card counting, predicting the spin of a roulette ball, or rolling the dice in craps in a predictable way.
Their solution was that any ‘professional’ casinos were completely computerized – they might have a nice table surface or social area, but the games themselves were all computer dealt, shuffled, and rolled. (of course, that opened casino systems to hack based cheating). This seemed like a pretty reasonable / believable solution to me, although it doesn’t address how card games would be played.
May 9th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Most sci-fi games make the same mistake, of assuming that everything would be centralized around an existing bricks-and-mortar building, including big central computer systems. When you get down to it, most operated under a technological premise founded on 1970s and 1980s technology, even though they had all the clues necessary to forsee distributed computing and distributed games, for that matter. It always seemed to be a case of ‘so close but not a direct hit’. For some games, given when they were published, this is excusable, for others it was woefully short-sighted. Still, I imagine that it would be easier to update such rules for a modern environment than to start from scratch; many of the fundamentals would be unchanged.
The cyberpunk solution always had one glaring omission in my eyes: why bother with real-life solid cards and dice when virtual dice would have been that much easier to do? The use of physical cards also adds to the vulnerabilities. How do the computers recognise the value of a given card so that they can determine who wins and who loses? In modern times, optical recognition would seem an obvious approach, but at the time the rules were written, magnetic tape (just like they put on credit cards) would have been the obvious solution – and those magnetic stripes can be read, or hacked, with the right technology. This is the same as crafting an illusion or a deception, but instead of targetting human eyes, they are attempting to decieve electronic ones. What’s more, if the computerised casino systems were to display the winning and losing hands, they would show what they thought the cards were – not what they actually might have been.
Physical objects all have the vulnerability that they can be interfered with by physical means. Virtual objects would at least alleviate this problem, and “vitual reality” was a major buzzword in that era – the rules (or should I say, the rules writers) just didn’t think to extend it to gambling.
May 9th, 2012 at 2:52 pm
@Mike, that’s 2000’s era thinking. They’d use RFID chips. Non-programmable RFID chips. That would allow them to track each card and each die (multiple chips or multiple sensors would allow a die’s orientation to be tracked). If any signal was lost or duplicated, then that hand and deck would be disqualified.
May 9th, 2012 at 6:17 pm
@Philo: my first thought was that it wouldn’t work, there weren’t enough frequencies available for tracking individual playing cards. My second thought was of a way to make it work, using the same rolling code/limited frequencies approach that makes remote keylocking work on individual cars even though they are virtually all on the same frequency (and my thanks to Numb3rs for explaining the concept to me). And my third was for what else the Casino could/would do with the concept & technology.
But my point was that the technologies I described in my comment were all reasonably easily foreseeable given the tech and trends of the time when Cyberpunk was published. Many of them were even foreseen in the rules in question – but they didn’t go far enough in examining their impact and the way they would be used, and really missed the boat on a couple of them.
I can’t and don’t blame them for missing something entirely radical, like RFID chips, but when the tech is already a big part of their projection into the future already, like VR? That’s a different story.
Personally, I think they would be into nanotechnology and smart currency as government anti-counterfeighting technologies. They are supposed to be in advance of what we have now, after all. Combine nanotech and the concept of RFID and you can track every single banknote of interest. All money received or handed out in change is automatically “marked” as being the property of the owner (or at least, in their custody) and purchasing with cash automatically transfers custody, while linking it to a specific transaction. Stolen money is automatically flagged as soon as the perp steps into a retailer (or at least, whenever they try to spend it). The money might even take a DNA sample of whoever’s handling it for indisputable identification purposes. And, of course, any “currency” without the correct code and checksum is automatically recognised as counterfeight. The fact that an individual’s spending patterns – right down to where they windowshop – can be tracked, as can the movements of any individual with cash in their pockets, and the resulting privacy concerns, are just icing on the cake.
Mike recently posted..It’s Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Game Fraud and Counter-Fraud in RPGs
May 10th, 2012 at 9:19 am
@Mike, If all cash is tracked, then somebody will come up with an anonymous alternative. There are too many reasons why people would want this. Not just ciminal reasons, but privacy reasons. Nearle everybody occasionally buys something that they don’t want everybody to know about.
This also leads to the ability to steal money by hacking the database or being convicted as a theif because of a technical glitch.
And in the real world, any attempt to try this would be shot down by religious people proclaiming this is the “mark of the beast”.
May 10th, 2012 at 9:48 am
@Philo, that assumes that people are told about it! But you’re right, a black market would start up, probably using a virtual currency of some kind. Of course, various monetary authorities are already seeking to curb the exchange of real-world goods and services for virtual currencies in online VR worlds because these aren’t subject to their control or tax-collection routines.
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May 11th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
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