I have played wiht some people who liked to use dice rollers other than the one in VASSAL because of
the feeling it could be gamed. I have argued against this, saying that it is more trouble to do than its worth,
yet the feeling persists. Hence my question: How easy is it to game the die roller and make it appear to
work yet give you all favorable results? What do you need to know to do this? How secure, or not, are the
vlog files ?
What do you or they mean by “gamed”? Cheat? If you or they are concerned about one of you cheating, then you shouldn’t be playing in my opinion.
FYI, I know two ways to cheat in Vassal:
In a PBEM game, a player could create a log and roll dice, and if the dice aren’t what they wanted, then they just keep creating logs and re-rolling dice until they get the results they want.
Otherwise if you are playing with someone like me who creates Vassal mods and I wanted to cheat, I would edit my copy of the module and replace the dice with loaded ones. That is, instead of a 6-sided die I might create an 8-sided one with an extra 5 and an extra 6–if I wanted a tilt toward high rolls.
In either case, it means I would be cheating, and I don’t see myself wasting my time like this when I am playing for fun. If someone asked to use another dice roller, I’d want to know what they were guarding against.
It’s not always a matter of ‘just not playing with those people’. I used to play a lot of tournament PBEM via Vassal and using an external Dice Roller was de rigueur unless both players agreed not to use one. I personally preferred to use one, not because I mistrusted the other players, but so that when I had a good run of dice, there was no suspicion on me.
At time in the past we have had component that talked directly to on-line dice-rolling sites to make rolls, report them in Vassal and then email the role to particpants from the dice site. Unfortunately, the most accessible of these sites slowly closed over the years and we have not had this facility for a while. It is something we are looking at building as part of Vassal 4 and I expect we will make it accessible to Vassal 3 clients as well.
Yes, I should have been more explicit I mean cheating. You certainly can recreate the vlog file until the first die roll goes your way. But what about subsequent die rolls? Let’s say you finally got the first die roll to be favorable. Then you go for your 2nd die roll. If it goes favorsable your set, but what if not? Then you have to recreate the vlog and make sure you get a roll for the first right again, then hope you get the 2nd right… Each favorable roll you have to make, make progressivley more work …
And I agree, to play just for fun, for someone concerned about the Vassal die roller doesn’t make sense to me If you are having tournament play I can understand an external dice roller that keeps a history and is more self-documenting and less like to be mucked with.
That’s great news! It would also be nice if decks defined as reshuffle-always could be similarly report to all players by the same system (emails?) what card was drawn.
Managing Decks in this way is vastly more complicated that managing Dice Rolls, however, it is also something a couple of us are interested in and are planning to at least include functionality in V4 that will allow this to built at some stage.