Rule 0 or Playing Within the Spirit of the Game

Yeah Barney, this sucks for you, but also for your little girl...good luck.

I'd add a 5) loose cannon: knows he's got nothing left to lose, so will play wildly and sometimes pick on someone in particular. This can be very entertaining (or not depending on your outlook on things) and I actually prefer this than the sulking type. It can also mean speeding things up to wrap up the game faster.

Yeah, ditto Barney. Really sorry to hear that. I'm on third time lucky.........

thanks, thanks. I don't want to hijack the thread. I thought my post was actually surprisingly on-topic for once. I just didn't want to start my own thread about thanking the Fortress for being a good place for me to escape over the first four weeks (which were the worst for me, I'm now on week six and things are better and positive, but there are ups and downs).

There just seem to be so many fellow FATties going through this in the last year or two that I felt like having another thread would at this point give a really negative view on marriage for the rest of the community and I don't want anyone to think that. I wouldn't trade my first three years of marriage for anything and it gave us the most beautiful girl in the entire world so I honestly can't regret a thing.

Time to be a good co-parent now and so far everything has been very cooperative.

Thanks for the support.

TL;DR: I agree with repo. DoW is a moral situation. RoR is a political situation. There are trappings that come with both. I also wrote this as I read through the thread and realized that Shellhead basically said most of what I intended to say, but I already had it mostly typed up. So here ya go:

repoman wrote: This is sort of a carry over from another thread.Death and Taxis put up a post in reference to Dead of Winter that some in his group, who are not traitors, will tank the colony if they feel they can't meet their secret objective, opting to have everyone lose if they can't win.

I responded that I thought such play was in effect a breach of the un written contact that we agree to when we sit down at the table which is to play within the spirit of the game. That is, the players play to win and that in a game such as Dead of Winter a partial win, that is the colony survives but personal goal is un met, is better than a total loss. Also the traitor must attempt to meet his goals rather than just tank the colony.

If there is a weakness in Dead of Winter it is that it is very brittle in this regard. It is very easy to tank the colony if that is your sole objective.

One of the BSG expansions (I forget which because I always use them all) introduces personal goals for the human players' Loyalty Cards. The critical difference between BSG and DoW's personal goals are that the BSG personal goals can trigger the "humans lose" end condition. For example in one game I was a human but had to have multiple titles (CAG, President, whatever) at the same time to resolve my personal goal. I wasn't able to achieve this because I looked too suspicious in my eagerness to powergrab. The humans completed the final job, but the resource loss due to my unresolved personal goal drained one of our last resources so the humans did in fact lose.

In DoW that state doesn't really exist.
There are three DoW end-game states:
- No Betrayer, colony loses: Everybody loses.
- Betrayer, colony loses: Betrayer wins.
- Betrayer or not, colony wins: Colony wins.
Whether there's a Betrayer or not isn't really pertinent. The (non-Betrayer) personal goals in DoW are thematic in that you may be a hoarder and need to have a certain number of cards in your hand to win, in addition to the colony winning. You should absolutely be going for your personal goal from the very first turn. Doing so may give you some leeway later in the game because you didn't wait until the last minute to try complete your personal goal. Going for your goal from the onset can be beneficial for yourself as well as the colony as a whole, if you're playing with the understanding that you are playing to win with a colony victory.

Thematically DoW's ultimate goal is that the colony is trying to survive/win. That is what you ought to be playing toward. If the colony is in dire straits and the decision between you losing due to your personal goal and the colony losing is looming, then the colony should get precedence. Unless you're a sociopath. While every group is going to handle the situation differently, I would rather as a non-Betrayer be able to say after the game that I helped the colony win, even if the cost was a "loss" for me personally. You could even spin it as a selfless heroic act if that's your thing. I recently played an Arkham Horror game where the win was made by a player using his special ability to sacrifice himself to seal the final gate we needed. Similar concept.

repoman wrote: In contrast, I point out a game of Republic of Rome, a semi co-op in which there is only one winner, that I played with Malloc and some others at WBC. in the game Malloc was in a position to tank Rome. He demanded that the other players pay him tribute or else that is just what he would do. The other players refused to pay and he followed through on his promise. Rome fell and the game was over.

Some felt that this was a bullshit play. They looked at it as a breach of the contract. I don't think it was. The differences being that his statement "Pay up or else" was not a secret. He made his intention clear. The players then knowingly gambled on how sincere his promise was. They had the the opportunity to avert the tanking if the chose to. So when they called his bluff and he let Rome fall that was still in the spirit of the game. ( if he had been paid and still tanked Rome that would have been a violation)

I disagree with Calandale here and I do think this was in the spirit of the game. In fact it's a tactic I use often in games like RoR or Archipelago. If the players are really invested in winning then they have to decide whether to meet the player's demands or call his bluff. They better be damn sure about the bluff if they're going to call it. RoR, and to some extent Archipelago, involve a lot of politicking and this is very much a political situation and a valid political tactic.

Legomancer wrote: Rule -1: Most gamers are dicks and you need to account for that. If your game can be broken by players being dicks, then you have a problem. "Don't be a dick" isn't a solution because see rule -1.

I disagree with this and VonTush's page 1 comment. Designers, and by extension game mechanics, don't need to account for every player personality type all of the time. Not every game needs to appeal to or appease every player. This isn't about broken strategies like the Halifax Hammer. This is about buying into the theme, setting, narrative, and attitude of the game. When you do that you get to play the game and, if it's a good game, have a lot of fun with it. If a player has the option to save the game from a loss but cripple himself by doing so then the spirit of the game should be taken into consideration. Unless the player is a sociopath. In a political game like RoR sociopathic tendencies don't break the game, but in a thematic game like DoW those tendencies run counter to the game's setting. I call that a player problem, not a game problem.

Shellhead wrote: The best game designs don't require a Rule 0 because the structure of the game provides enough motivation to play the game as intended.[...]

This right here is the crux of it, and Spartacus was a great example. Some gladiators are capable of running around and taking all the fun out of arena fights. That's a poor player, not a poor game design. Get your gladiator's ass in there and get him swinging. In a situation like that, after a few rounds of running around, "The crowd cries foul and starts getting rowdy. They begin to pour over the walls en masse and slaughter the cowardly gladiator with their bare hands. Don't pull that shit again."

Also, damn Barney. Way to sneak a heavy hitter into a parenthetical. Hope things work out for you.

As I see it, games have goals. And by trying to achieve those goals fun and interesting things happen. "Playing to win"* is not so much a radical philosophy a requirement: if you don't try to win, games simply don't work.

If you don't try to win there's nothing to fuel the game's mechanics. There's no counterplay, strategy or bluffing because there's nothing to give them meaning. Sure, you can probably take twenty loans and bid 513.5$ to the biggest pile of red wooden discs but at that point it would be hard to say you are actually playing the game. And that's what I want to play: The actual game. Because "I'm going to try to attack you for no actual reason" is never actually funny.




By the way, the issue of tanking a semi-cooperative game so that a player can tie instead of losing can be solved by considering that losing to the game is worse than ending up in last place. I haven't played Dead of Winter but The Republic of Rome becomes unplayable if any of the players decides that his best course of action is to make everyone lose, he can just try to assassinate someone every turn until random chance ruins the game.

I also consider the idea of "give me an in-game advantage or I'll ruin the game" to be outside of the acceptable behaviour. I mean, the idea was to play a game not to use it as a bargaining chip.

*Strictly speaking, "playing to win" doesn't work but saying "Players should strive to increase their victory margins over the other players" sounds kind of awful in normal conversation.

Addendum: Roleplaying games are not bound by these rules since they are technically toys not games. You cannot win at Vampire: The Masquerade.

Haven't read much of the thread, but: Malloc's play was BULLSHIT, and I fucking HATE people who play any kind of game like that. HATE.

You folks who actually supported that bullshit: okay, say at the beginning of every game, I say I'm going to tank the game and play not to win but just to fuck with everyone unless you let me be in the lead. How is that any different? Malloc said "let me win/increase my position or I will ruin the game for everyone". I have absolutely expelled someone from our game group for pulling that bullshit and thinking it was "smart".

There is only one "rule zero" that, IMHO, needs to be followed with games: the game ends at the end of the game. No "establishing a reputation for future games" bullshit, or else literally EVERY game you play turns to shit. Rule zero-point-one is that you have to play to maximize your chance of winning, but I actually think this rule is kind of loose, as "trying a strategy to learn more about the game, even if it doesn't give you the best chance of winning" is plenty acceptable to me.

As for Dead of Winter: haven't played, but it doesn't sound *that* problematic: doesn't "play to maximize your probability of winning" prevent the tanking idiocy? Or is it really common that you're aware you have a 0% chance of winning well before the end of the game? If so, that's fucked. Titan: the Arena has a big problem with this, IMHO.

dragonstout---the reason it isn't bullshit is because my response would be "fuck off, tank away" to your hypothetical situation. If he was playing within the game, he wouldn't be willing to follow through.

You are absolutely right. The problem is that people are naturally prone to metagame where that strategy would work. As I said, in a game where you died at the end if you lost there is a very limited set of circumstances you would grandstand that way successfully.

Last Saturday, I was playing a card/board game called Slasher: the Final Cut. There are several ways to win:

1. Deliver the killing blow to the Slasher.
2. Become the Slasher and kill the last victim.
3. Escape the house, but only after the Slasher has killed all the other victims.

Also, there is one other outcome possible:

4. An uncontrolled (npc) Slasher kills all the victims, and everybody loses.

After your victim has been killed, the only way to win is to become the Slasher. But there are only so many clues in the deck, and other players of dead victims will be competing fiercely for those clue tokens.

In that game on Saturday, I had zero clue tokens and a dead victim, and two other players had three clue tokens each, so either one was on the verge of becoming the Slasher. While I theoretically could have tried for outcome #2 above, realistically my only hope was #4. And perhaps that was within the intent of the game designer. So I played hard at the end for #4, and anybody who thinks I was violating a Rule 0 can fuck off.

TL; DR? Fine, I will let Omar explain it to you:

Hugh Hefner has said, "The only unnatural sex act is that which cannot be performed." Arguably the only wrong way to play a game would be to break the rules of the game. If the game is designed in such a way that a losing player can tank the game, then apparently it was the intent of the designer to allow that. Realistically, I understand that an obnoxious person can subvert a game in ways never intended by the designer, but I think that Dragonstout is being a fascist about Malloc's innovative strategy.

I was in the Malloc Republic of Rome game and I will never play Republic of Rome again unless everyone puts in $20.00 and if we lose the game we take the $100 and donate it charity so that people have something tangible to lose. Republic of Rome, Terra, DoW, etc. are interesting experiments in human behavior. If my family was playing DoW or any of the other games we'd have no problem beating the game. With my highly competitive, trash talking game group there is 0% chance of winning any of these game.