Rigged dice rolls

Is there any way to check if someone is rigging his dice rolls?

Yes, use a 3rd party external dice roller.

B.


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No i meant in vassal itself, most people wont agree to using a 3rd party dice roller.

Depends by what you mean by Rigged rolls. Do you mean duing online server play or offline PBEM play? What are your concerns.

B.


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Online play. Just wondering if its possible to rig the dice roller to produce a certain number at the next X number of rolls(e.g. making it roll a 6, 5 and 4 for the next 3 rolls)

If you’re not using a 3rd party dice roller then you could rig Vassal to do whatever you like.
But my advice is: Never accuse anyone of cheating. It’s almost impossible to be certain. Rolling thirty 6s in a row can happen by the laws of probability; Even then, it’s not sufficient to start pointing fingers. But I wouldn’t want to be the person blessed with such luck.

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But is there any way to detect it? Via checksums maybe?

Thus spake “Question”:

If VASSAL reported a checksum to indicate whether it had been modified,
that could be circumvented by simply having the modified version report
the expected checksum. There’s no way to ensure that the value which is
reported is the result of an actual checksumming process.

That is: You have exactly the same reasons to trust a checksum as you do
to trust any particular die roll.

Anything generated purely on the client-side, with any software, can be
faked. Anyone who tells you other wise is mistaken or misleading you.


J.


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Thus spake “Question”:

Sometime this fall VASSAL will have an interface for third-part dice rollers,
so that resistance might abate somewhat at that point.


J.


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And whats to stop someone from rigging an external die roller? In surprises me that some gamers have such a poor understanding of statistics.

On the other hand, maybe not.

The theory is that it is harder to rig a trusted third party dice roller like one of the internet dice rollers, because there is an audit trail.

Presumably, for on-line play, the dice rolls report directly to the server and thus are outside the manipulation of the other party.

For PBeM, I would expect that the list of die rolls would be (also) sent separately to the other party in the EMail exchange, so it would be difficult to explain what all these spurious and unused die rolls would be for…

Of course, nothing would be fool proof given enough determination and desire to cheat. But it can be made more burdensome.