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Shoot them games are great but if victory conditions are required I have always found simple victory conditions work well with any scenario, keep it simple shipmate (KISS) has always been my mantra.
Last weekend I played a WW2 wargame with an umpire, both sides were not told of the victory conditions. I felt both sides played better tactically and in period, by not knowing x objective or item was worth so many points. We had to game by the seat of our pants and work out what was important for the battle / mission / campaign, had an excellent game even though I lost, I lost gloriously.
I would highly recommend gaming with objectives but not knowing what they worth, does not cloud the mind with false aims and targets.
My sci-fi games normally have conditions for major and minor victories.
Such as blow up the bridge = minor.
Blow up the bridge and destroy over 40% of any enemy you encounter = major.
In a campaign setting a major victory gives you more points to bolster your force but at what cost does the extra fighting come?
Another example would be that both sides have a major victory to extract a person.
But one side has a minor victory if they simply stop the other side from extracting him at all.
If you lost, then you should be claiming it was a stupid system, what’s wrong with you, anyway?
Seriously though, in the game you describe, both sides were given objectives I would imagine? Tim I walked through the door rolled two D6 and told to lay my troops out. It was great fun
the Germans had been told to head for Paris and the French to head for Berlin and the battle was in Belgium, but what we were not informed was what each tank, vehicle, village or holding ground was worth in points for victory conditions. I loved it.When I said lost gloriously I meant to say “I carried out tactical redeployment of current forces available”
victory is declared during post-game discussion
Yes, regardless if the game is a simple meeting encounter or one with a Byzantine mix of conflicting &/or complementary goals it is *after* the game, when we sit down over a drink for a post-mortem, that all is settled. This, BTW, is one of the best parts of a game.
donald
It might be worth distinguishing between objectives and victory conditions in this discussion. As I see it, an objective might be something like “Conduct the supply convoy across the site of the ambush… oh, and do try to stay alive while doing it, won’t you?”, to which a victory condition might be “You qualify as having conducted the supply convoy across the site of the ambush if at least 3 lorries with no more than 2 boxes of damage each make it off the far side of the table by turn 9. Also, Captain McCaptainface must remain alive, and the escort forces must not be reduced to below 50% fighting strength.”. It’s victory conditions I consider fairly dispensable, not objectives. I didn’t really take this thread to be about the necessity or triviality of objectives in the first place.
(EDIT: Reading this after posting, it strikes me that it looks like I took what Phil Dutré wrote and tried to claim it as my own. However, the point I’m trying to make is that objectives and victory conditions need to be seen as distinct and separate, not just two different terms for almost the same thing. To me, objectives and victory conditions are so different, they’re two separate categories of things.)
victory is declared during post-game discussion
Yes, regardless if the game is a simple meeting encounter or one with a Byzantine mix of conflicting &/or complementary goals it is *after* the game, when we sit down over a drink for a post-mortem, that all is settled. This, BTW, is one of the best parts of a game.
That’s kind of what I’m getting at. It strikes me as counterproductive to that cause if any one player can shut down the discussion by saying “I scored 4 VPs against your 2, so I won, and that’s that”. More productive, IMO, if there’s no absolute, quantified definition as to how many dead/injured marines Hill 552 is worth, or whether Will Scarlet’s untimely demise is enough to offset Guy of Gisborne’s, or what exactly is the minimum distance from enemy ships for the crippled, targeted Battlecruiser Gilgamesh to qualifiy as “protected” by the end of the final turn of the game, or whatever.
Does the importance of scenario objectives depend on the size of the forces involved? For most ‘army’ level battles, it seems to me that the principal objective was to destroy or at least cause sufficient damage to the enemy army. Terrain features may be means to that end, but taking them was rarely an end in itself. As the forces get smaller, objectives other than damage to the enemy become more important. Skirmishes will, almost always, be for some reason other than the destruction of the opposing skirmishers. I wonder if this influences some of the answers above, as it is evident people are thinking about games of different sizes. Meeting engagements may be fine for games representing clashes of ancients armies, but are unlikely to be rewarding for clashes of small forces. RogerC
Speaking as more of a skirmish gamer than a massed-battle one, I agree that skirmish games tend to have more elaborate objectives. However, with that elaboration comes complexity and “blur” which, IMO, make it harder to quantify victory. For instance, in a “treasure raid” scenario where there’s numerous pieces of treasure that may or may not be reached, seized and carried off, how many pieces of treasure should count as enough for the raiding party to be victorious? How large a value of treasure should each casualty to the raiding party cancel out? Do these things even need to be defined? To me, they don’t.
‘When a state decides to use military force, a clear and militarily achievable objective must be given to the commander of the forces involved. The military objective may be the destruction of another armed force, the capture and occupation of a specific piece of territory, the denial of a designated location to another country’s use, or any similar objective.’
The Framework of Operational Warfare, Clayton Newell, Routledge 1992.
Which isn’t necessarily a ‘victory condition’ for a game.
For example: we may well be playing the defender in a rearguard action from the ‘real world’ and there is no hope in hell of destroying the enemy army (or even the bit of it we are facing) but our mission is to hold the advance guard for as long as possible at a particular defence line. We can set the defender’s ‘victory condition’ as holding longer than the real life counterpart did. So he/she can’t ‘win’ the battle, but they can ‘win’ the game they are playing by doing better than the original defending commander.Trouble is we tend to use ‘objective’ (and many other words
rather indiscriminately).For example: we may well be playing the defender in a rearguard action from the ‘real world’ and there is no hope in hell of destroying the enemy army (or even the bit of it we are facing) but our mission is to hold the advance guard for as long as possible at a particular defence line. We can set the defender’s ‘victory condition’ as holding longer than the real life counterpart did. So he/she can’t ‘win’ the battle, but they can ‘win’ the game they are playing by doing better than the original defending commander.
That reminds me of some “last stand” scenarios I’ve seen where the defenders win when they get slaughtered to the last man past a certain turn and no sooner
Not that I’m against last stand scenarios, or that the defending player in such a scenario shouldn’t be motivated to fight. I just prefer to speak of “acquitting themselves well” rather than “winning”. That may be a matter of interchangeable terminology to some, but to me the difference is that between hard values and soft values (or perhaps the difference between discrete data and non-discrete data, although I’m not sure that comparison would hold up to exacting scrutiny).
I don’t mind hard values for things like army construction (although I don’t need them either), and certainly not for gameplay where I quite like mechanics like “Margin Of Success” values for dice rolls, but once it comes time to judge the result of a game, I prefer phasing over to softer values. There’s no particular reason that’s better, but the point is, there’s no reason hard values are automatically better, either.
It might be worth pointing out I came into this hobby by way of games where victories are always quantified as hard values, and those quantities often obsessed over. Learning to stop focusing on the quantity of a victory, or the quantity of victory conditions that “flip the switch” from the discrete result of defeat to the discrete result of victory, was a breath of fresh air.
NB – I wasn’t talking about Last Stands Rhoderic!
I always envisage getting away from difficult situations!
I mean things like holding the bridge until the main force gets over the river, or the next river and you can get over yourself before you blow the bridge.
If the umpire estimates it will take 6 hours for the main body to be safely across their next defensive line (or in reality they took that long), then you need to defend the approaches to this obstacle for that long – more and you’ve definitely won, – less and you haven’t done quite as well.
But the enemy will take your position anyway- and you are needed for the next battle! So not too many futile gestures at this stage of the war please!
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