Two Ethical Questions

[ForzaA]

What about checking the stats to see if anybody has 6 traders at session end. Make an announcment that the session is ending and anybody with 6 traders is obviously avoiding an unhappiness event. I know alot of people don't trade early so that's why you announce it. I doubt people would choose auto-merchant to circumvent.

I generally try to have a few traders (say, 6) when a session starts, that means saving them the session before.
the AI will generally be sending merchants at the start of a session, so you better have some traders standing ready to fix things

In other word; simple in theory, but not a workable solution, imo, as you also cut out viable and fair tactics.

historical events avoided is fairly easy to check (compare the events history log (ie. only event numbers) with the "text" history log; any event appearing in the latter but not in the former was avoided in some way.) ...though I agree that it shouldn't be necessary to burden a GM with this.

 

[ForzaA]

How nice FAL! Let's have a look at some disastrous events in our campaign, do NOT delete the game log for heaven's sake

I'm sure he has a savegame with the logs still in...

..but distributing the host file WITH the hosts messages in has it's own "ethical drawbacks/temptations"

(and, in fact, he MAY have set his options so that the events aren't saved in the first place ("do not display" for events of other players is an option, and then they won't be saved)

..you can also use your playersaves to check, btw (although, given that these are not *always* accurate, you can ask the host(/gm) to verify afterwards )