From Gareth Martin I think some of the discussion we had about MG structure really revolve around the player. What is the player FOR, as it were? Well, if you sit down to play chess or a wargame, you know your role: you are a partisan participant, a competitor. When you sit down to an RPG, you are a particular individual rather than a faction, and usually a cooperator. What are you in an MG? MG's break with the partisan approach by permitting identification with characters (putting words in their mouths etc), but you are also, by default, a competitor of the other players. So you are both partisan and non-partisan. Also, I think different players use this confusion differently - some act on a "national" or faction level, others exploit specific characters. I think this is part of what makes MG's quite difficult to get your head around as a beginner. But this implies different victory conditions, or more accurately defeat conditions - the death of the character, the destruction of the faction. But seeing as it is perfectly permissible to submit arguments about units nominally under the control of other players, does any specific faction or character identity serve any purpose? In which case, what are the victory conditions? Should they be player-based as opposed to inside the game? Should the GM award abstract Victory Points? Is this really a competitive or a collaborative form of play? Are victory conditions even necessary? Any thoughts, anyone? Marcus Young Writes I think an MG without at least implied goals or victory conditions is generally less satisfying. I always set goals in my games so the players know what they are trying to do, and then announce the placings at the end in accordance with how well the players have met their goals. Without set goals, the game becomes directionless and will only work if the players themselves set their own goals which just happen to conflict in the right way to make an exciting game. In Infernal Machines, for example, I set out to make Britain rule the world on the basis that the American players would try to stop me eventually before the US was recaptured. There was indeed some resistance starting to develop to British policies which created some direction to the game, but considerable energy was diverted into a somewhat amusing but, in a sense, pointless sub-plot about a Martian agent. There is a degree of fun in just letting your imagination run free, at least at first, but I think that ultimately a game along such lines will, with a permissive GM, run right off the rails into an entropic state of silliness- and with a strict GM who is tough on improbable Arguments, the game will probable just fizzle out as a tedious academic exercise. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #20 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com