- BattleMaster is like a boardgame, where friends are playing together for good fun
- The rules of the boardgame should be known to all, so should implications of most basic actions or combination of actions
- Standard etiquette should be taught to all players to encourage an enjoyable environment
- Basic strategies should be discussed to encourage further thought and explain interesting aspects of the rules or consequences of actions
No.
1. BM is not like a boardgame. BM does not end, and you do not win. You don't get to try out strategies, fail, finish the game, and come back again. When you fail because you didn't grasp the political magnitude of a rebellion or of being too chatty and annoying in a realm, and you get banned, it's on your family's record forever. When you succeed and get a post, it's on your family record forever, and players will bias against or for your characters based on that.
2. I agree with two, especially "implications of most basic actions." Except one thing. I don't believe there are more or less basic actions. I have been playing this game for years, and
I still don't understand line settings at all. When I've played general characters, I defer line settings to marshals, vice marshals, military councils, etc. I still don't get the intricacies of planning coordinated moves, delaying, field camping, etc. I consider those to be pretty advanced for me, whereas I see the trade system as very basic and intuitive. Many players disagree. If, however, you mean basic as "actions available to all characters," you still don't solve your problem: different classes have widely diverging actions available. Moreover, perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I generally don't think tutorials should stop at a lordship. I can and have played many council posts on 20 minutes a day. That is normal. I will venture a guess that well over half of the current BM players have held a post at some point. Holding positions is
normal, it is
not holding positions that is abnormal for a player.
3. Standard etiquette? What on earth does that mean? I consider it standard etiquette to teach other people how to play the game.
4. I don't just teach basic strategies. When I play Diplomacy with friends, I talk about past games. I explain interesting tactics that have been used in the past. I discuss stalemate lines, common diplomatic arrangements, opening moves, etc. Frankly, I'm not great at chess. I don't enjoy playing against a champion chess player. I am good at Diplomacy, so I like playing it against tournament players, because
I understand what is happening. Because we can recognize strategies and see not only
that we were defeated but also
how we were defeated.
However, I return to my first point: using a boardgame analogy is fundamentally flawed. The goal of a boardgame is, usually, to win and finish the game.
You cannot win Battlemaster. You play. And you keep playing. And you keep playing. And it's boring to play alongside people who don't know what they're doing.
Again, I do not understand why anyone thinks we should hide from other players that there are strategies like the ones I listed in the trade systems article. Why should this be secret knowledge?
Ya'll say people should find out for themselves: so, what, not even IG mentors? That's lunacy! I absolutely do
not want somebody to find out how secessions work by seceding from a realm I'm in! No, people have to
tell them. And I get no satisfaction from politically outmaneuvering a character because the player behind it didn't realize that his automatic trade offer could be exploited for arbitrage with a neighboring city. I'd like him to at least
know that such a thing is possible, and understand
how such a thing might be done. If he still fails to defend himself or miscalculates which strategy to use, cool, my character outwitted the other character.
But this idea that it's fair play for us to deploy strategies
the existence of which is unknown to other players does not strike me as suitable for a game we think of as playing with friends.
And, frankly, just explaining game mechanics is not enough. I can explain pricing mechanics for trade all day long and still not have anyone recognize the political strategies therein, especially when overbearing dukes and bankers just tell them "Set it up automatic and do what I say." Game mechanics teaching becomes a means of political control wherein lords never learn to manage their own food supplies to their advantage because older players find it inconvenient for their underlings to realize they have any power.
This is not hypothetical, by the way. I've had to re-teach two players in Terran how to manage food because, in their previous realms, their bankers had told them to just set up automatic sales, and everything would be handled for them. They were told that sending out caravans is for dukes, and never really necessary for lords.
If that was an IC thing, that'd be fine. But it's not. That's an IC political deployment of OOC knowledge that those players
should have been taught. But they weren't. Because teaching players strategies by which they can undermine the teacher is rarely advantageous.
