Re: The 5 Year Retrospective on the Blood in the Badlands: A Vignette Series
Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 6:48 pm
Story VI: When Winning Just Isn't Enough
This tale is the story of a battle between myself and another player, Don.
Don was a Dark Elves player, which meant he'd joined the alliance opposing the one I was in. We had a fairly straightforward battle, with the Knights of Bretonnia attacking the Dark Elves in their territory.
The battle did not go well for Bretonnia that day. I made a few mistakes and Don, being a competent player, was able to capitalize on them. I could see by the end of the fourth round that I wasn't going to be able to pull a victory on this one, so I decided to concede the game.
Instead of a victory smile, Don instead looked dismayed. I asked him what was wrong.
"Well, If you concede now, I won't be able to kill your general."
You see, in this campaign, there was a narrative continuity between games, such that characters were sometimes able to carry over items and injuries from one battle to the next. In some cases they could even be captured or killed. Up to that point in the campaign, here had never been a problem if one side or the other conceded.
Don's problem here was that by conceding the game, I was essentially ending the battle at that point, and Don wanted he chance to go after my characters. While I admit that there's a certain strategic benefit to making sure to injure your opponent's characters, nobody had made an issue of it before. This struck me as poor sportsmanship, since he'd already won the battle.
Additionally, the problem here was that it created a conflict of interest. I was the GM, and also directly involved in the problem. If I ruled that a player could concede the game without losing characters (as we'd already been doing) then it would appear self serving, since it was my characters at stake. On the other hand, I didn't want to just arbitrarily rule against that since it struck me as bad sportsmanship to compel a losing player to play it out just so that the victorious opponent could maximize the total damage.
Admittedly, it also went with the character of the Dark Elves.
So I took a compromise route. I ruled that if a player conceded a game, a die roll for each character that was still on the table would determine whether they escaped or whether they suffered an injury as if they'd been removed as a casualty during the game. Don didn't really like that, since I think he was very confident that he could have run down all my characters, but with Bretonnian horses being pretty fast for having barding, I think he was a bit overconfident on that.
The thing is, When you're playing a game like this and you know you've lost, it really sucks to feel compelled to play it out. That isn't fun at all and I wanted to find a solution that wouldn't make people feel compelled when the desire to play was gone.
The moral of the story: In a campaign like this, where the GM is also a player, it's always a good idea to have a co-GM who can step in and make a call when there's a conflict of interest.
This tale is the story of a battle between myself and another player, Don.
Don was a Dark Elves player, which meant he'd joined the alliance opposing the one I was in. We had a fairly straightforward battle, with the Knights of Bretonnia attacking the Dark Elves in their territory.
The battle did not go well for Bretonnia that day. I made a few mistakes and Don, being a competent player, was able to capitalize on them. I could see by the end of the fourth round that I wasn't going to be able to pull a victory on this one, so I decided to concede the game.
Instead of a victory smile, Don instead looked dismayed. I asked him what was wrong.
"Well, If you concede now, I won't be able to kill your general."
You see, in this campaign, there was a narrative continuity between games, such that characters were sometimes able to carry over items and injuries from one battle to the next. In some cases they could even be captured or killed. Up to that point in the campaign, here had never been a problem if one side or the other conceded.
Don's problem here was that by conceding the game, I was essentially ending the battle at that point, and Don wanted he chance to go after my characters. While I admit that there's a certain strategic benefit to making sure to injure your opponent's characters, nobody had made an issue of it before. This struck me as poor sportsmanship, since he'd already won the battle.
Additionally, the problem here was that it created a conflict of interest. I was the GM, and also directly involved in the problem. If I ruled that a player could concede the game without losing characters (as we'd already been doing) then it would appear self serving, since it was my characters at stake. On the other hand, I didn't want to just arbitrarily rule against that since it struck me as bad sportsmanship to compel a losing player to play it out just so that the victorious opponent could maximize the total damage.
Admittedly, it also went with the character of the Dark Elves.
So I took a compromise route. I ruled that if a player conceded a game, a die roll for each character that was still on the table would determine whether they escaped or whether they suffered an injury as if they'd been removed as a casualty during the game. Don didn't really like that, since I think he was very confident that he could have run down all my characters, but with Bretonnian horses being pretty fast for having barding, I think he was a bit overconfident on that.
The thing is, When you're playing a game like this and you know you've lost, it really sucks to feel compelled to play it out. That isn't fun at all and I wanted to find a solution that wouldn't make people feel compelled when the desire to play was gone.
The moral of the story: In a campaign like this, where the GM is also a player, it's always a good idea to have a co-GM who can step in and make a call when there's a conflict of interest.