RE: [GZG] Re: Points systems

As other people have overlooked before - with the hidden VP values for
ships includes the proviso that as ships are destroyed, their VP value
is revealed so that you have a constant running total of how many VP you
have earned.  Therefore as soon as you achieve enough VP, the game is
over - you don't necessarily have to kill the entire fleet to achieve
your total (unless the remaining 1 ship is of sufficient VP to prevent
your goal).

If ships hyper-out or escape, then a portion (perhaps 1/2) of their VP
total would be earned by the opponent, again revealed when they left the
board.

If neither side reaches their VP goal, the game is a draw, or if one
side has earned more VP, but less than their goal, they can claim a
tactical victory.

In general, by destroying 1-2 ships, you are guaranteed of having enough
VP left in the pool to achieve a 50% goal, even if all the remaining
ships leave the board.

Again people keep making the point that VP will cause strange,
non-tactically favorable maneuvers or formations.  But that is the point
of VP since most players don't use a campaign system that provides
economic, political, morale, strategic intelligence or logistical
factors into one-off games. (i.e. your last missile armed BB may be more
valuable than your beam armed BB's because your nation was going to
attack a starbase next and you needed the long-range weapons to take it
out).

By allowing a player to allocate VP, they are in effect using an
abstract system to change the value of a ship to the overall war effort
- i.e. the USS Indianapolis was just a cruiser, but it happened to carry
the first atomic bomb.	The fact that the bomb was cargo had zero impact
on its combat effectiveness or cost to build, but the loss of that cargo
could have had a major impact on the length of WW2. 

Perhaps people who play one-off games really don't want to have to think
about outside factors, in which case designing scenarios or applying VP
isn't really relevant.

The point of this thread was to get people to think about scenarios,
scenario balance and how to increase interest in the game.  I proposed
VP as a simple method (instead of having to write out dozens of scenario
cards or designing full scenarios) that could be implemented by anyone,
anywhere, that would provide a consistent system of determining who won
a battle, from one-off games to full blown campaigns.

--Binhan 

-----Original Message-----
<<SNIP>>

I find two issues with this type of thing, and to some degree with a lot

of non-FT games.

First, let's look at your VP system as outlined above.

"details of which exact ships are worth what VP are hidden"

Ok fine.  But if this is the case, and all you have to work with is a 
"grand total" and "number of ships", how can you POSSIBLY determine when

you've achieved the goal of having killed more VPs than your opponent? 
You CANNOT know this until after the battle has concluded.  And at that 
point, it's more likely that either one side is completely destroyed (in

which case you HAVE to have achieved this goal) or one side hypers out,
in 
which case you have to determine the PV after the battle has essentially

been "won" by the side that stayed.

While there have been lots of examples of objectives (e.g., take out the

carriers, get a fleet supply ship through, determine the strength of the

enemy fleet and get out with you lives, etc.), I would caution to NEVER 
NEVER NEVER (did I mention, never?) assign random victory conditions 
(e.g., each player gets some kind of VP token that has to be held or 
captured!) as it tends to make the game feel even more artificial.

That said, I think that Jon's card based minor plot lines sound really 
cool, and could be adpated to any game system. :)

Thanks,

John

John K. Lerchey
Assistant Director for Incident Response
Information Security Office
Carnegie Mellon University

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