thoughts on Play by intent

I would not say he cheated. He simply didn't comply with the Gaming Etiquette blurb. Open Information means I can ask at any time and be given a truthful answer. If I never asked then I don't get the info. All Superfluid needed to do in this case is ask who the enemy trooper had LoF to at the end of the move. If the opponent did not declare his model had LoF and then shot him after the ARO was not declared then he would have cheated.

The only time Open Information is given without asking for it is during deployment.

 

Yes, and especially in tournaments/competitive formats where different metas are likely to meet up is where an issue like this needs to be clarified on what the actual rules intend to say.

 

I umm'd, and ahh'd, and said I don't believe anyone can see that movement. To me it felt cheeky he didn't correct it and then abused it.

Earlier in the game we'd both been been making declarations like "moving this guy here to just see that guy" and "who can see me if I moved here?" So I thought that's how we were communicating.

 

You made a mistake, hopefully you learn from it and next time you'll check your AROs more carefully. The burden of checking for AROs is on you.

In a tournament setting, unless you're a newbie who I know is inexperienced, I would also proceed with my normal rolls. I had the same done to me. No hard feelings.

 

Well luckily checking can be asking my opponent, which is what I'll be sure to do in future. I just know I wouldn't want to win that way, there's enough to think about in this game without extra gotchas.

 

How can approach that is strictly in line with the game as designed and written ruin it?

You can describe what you wish to achieve in an order all you'd like, but it has (outside of agreed upon conventions and house rules between you and your opponent) no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you actually achieved it. You declare you'd like to activate Trooper X, you and your opponent agree on which Reactive Troopers have existing LoF, you declare the intention of where you wish the trooper to end up, you determine a path, you measure said path and place your trooper at (if you estimated properly) the intended spot or (if you estimated poorly) the spot their MOV value actually took them. You ask your opponent for AROs, you declare your second skill, and then you see if you achieved your goal (catching Reactive Trooper 1 out of cover, or limiting AROs to only Reactive Trooper 0, etc.) and if the AROs declared by your opponent are possible.

Again, for the umpteenth time, you CAN play with any sort of house rules/local meta conventions you'd like, but you are doing just that, playing with house rules and local conventions, rather than the game as designed and written.[/QUOTE]

 

Considering that you've shown a continual inability to apprehend the fact that the rules state you can check LoF before *declaring* an order, I don't think you should talk much about what does or does not appear in the written rules.

 

Do, please, bother to go back and look how I corrected myself... and considering that a 10 second search for the word "intent" returns a total six hits across both N3 and N3HS... but, hey, you do you, meu filho...

 

Go ahead and do that.

The other option is to do all the necessary work yourself and figure your own AROs.

I have no problems with winning or losing this way. The designers have made it clear many times that mistakes are part of the game. No problem. It's just a game after all.

 

And we WILL fall short in our quest to have the perfect BS Attack, or the flawless ARO position, etc., etc., etc. We decide what we intend to do, we make estimations and see if we succeeded, and if not we accept that we guessed wrong and take our lumps. Así de fácil.

 

Dokładnie tak. You should accept the fact that sometimes you'll be wrong in your assumptions, and that's O.K. There's no reason to feel "fear" as some of the posters here were saying.

 

I don't get why both players aren't working out the AROs anyway. His opponent in this case may well have been thinking "ha gotcha" when he didn't volunteer the info or suggest a model makes an ARO. Does he need to do this? No. However by not being a good sport and hoping for a gotcha he made Superfluid have a worse game experience to the point he was not sure if he was cheated or not. Why do we want to make our opponent feel bad about a mistake that was made in good faith (he thought they had a good dialog about AROs and LoF previously in the same game) rather than prevent that kind of gotcha mistake in the first place.

Last game I played I confused my opponent because we didn't wait for me to declare my dodge direction and rolled dice. I won and declared a dodge that was not ideal for me. I was lazy and didn't check which direction would help me more. That kind of mistake is on me as my dodge intentions are not Open Information while LoF and potential AROs from it are. If my AD trooper is placed in a dumb spot (but ARO free because we talked about LoF before placement) that is on me. If I don't account for a HD model possibly being some place and have a link team wiped by a missile launcher revealing itself, that is on me. Getting normal rolls or extra AROs because I kept my mouth shut and let my opponent blunder into something because he didn't want to spend 10min looking at every possible angle and arguing with me over it is just bad sportsmanship and will turn people away from a game.

Warmachine went from number 1 played game in my area to extinct a few years ago because of people taking Page 5 too far and becoming dicks about the game rather than working with their opponent to have a fun experience. The hard core tournament crowd pushed the more casual players away and suddenly events that had 40+ players dropped to 10 and then disappeared. This is not a court room of a murder trial, it is a game we play for fun. I would rather a less strict model placement game and talk with my opponent about it rather than get more gotchas.

Interestingly enough, in my experience as a long time gamer is that if the game made it clear 100% that if you cannot pre-determine LoF (i.e. make it private until certain conditions are met) people would probably adapt to it in a fairly short amount of time. Every time a meta changes the tournament players will lead the charge in bringing that play style to the fore. Why are games normally 300pts? Because that is the normal size for a tournament. Tournament players tend to treat causal gaming as prep for their next event. This means they will ask the causal player who doesn't play in those events to match those game standards. Normally people agree and play tournament style causal games. When new blood is brought in they will be told "well we start learning at this stage but aim to play like this...".

I get this post has little to do with the rules but rather how we approach the game. Right now the game is open to both Results and Intent play style as it is not clear enough which way is truly correct. It is simply the fact that one play style fosters good relationships and discussion around the game table while the other not so much that has created such a fuss over it. A Results player wants you to play tighter (and make more mistakes), while an Intent player wants to help you play tighter (and make mistakes not based on mm of placement) is the feeling I get from all these posts.

 

Sorry for quoting you all at once, but I agree with neither Plebian nor Cry of the Wind.

@Superfluid Lines of Fire are open information, but they are complicated to share in a situation like this. The way ARO mechanic work (in that No ARO is not an actual declaration for a particular unit) means that it's hard to impossible for your opponent to know whether you genuinely didn't want to make an ARO or not.
Typically I would approach this with the declaration "I have no lines of fire", which not only conveys to my opponent that I won't make any ARO, but also that if they see a LOF I am not aware of it they sort of need to point it out.

If you're playing an opponent who keeps exploiting mistakes like the one you describe, then it's high time you start asking the question whenever they activate "who can you see?"

@Cry of the Wind : the Open and Private Information page isn't exhaustive when it comes to when you are required to share open information. There's other rules that literally forces you to share it as well, such as whenever a trooper leaves marker state.

 

I'm not sure i'm capable of playing fast enough within tournament time restrictions without shortcutting to getting my opponents opinion on what is valid and what isn't. It feels like a necessary lubricant for expedient play. The tourney I go to most (UK Northern Open) usually plays with some form of intent and lots of games get cut short there too :(

 

I think this is the crux of it.

 

I don't think using the whole time thing and gotcha mechanics are unfun are good arguments. We play where the model lands. We don't take 10 minutes trying to get the most precise spot ever. We don't take 10 minutes to check every tiny area of a possible nook and cranny. I don't think anyone does that or would do that but yet we see here people keep saying oh it's going to slow the game down too much. If you take a long time to move a model and make the game unbearably slow then people will stop playing with you so you'e either going to play at a normal pace or be playing by yourself.

Also this game is filled with gotcha mechanics. I' argue it's a core principle of the game. If it wasn't we wouldn't have things like hidden deployment, holoecho, or anything else that works on deception. That's one of my favorite aspects of the game. One of my favorite moments playing was being asked to turn around so my opponent could place his hidden deployment model and take a picture of their spots. He pulls out his camera and I hear 2 audible clicks from the camera app. Turns out he had no hd models but it made me worry about the roof tops and surprise aro coming my way. I didn't think it was unsportsmanlike and told him that was a great strategy and had a very fun game.

 

I couldn't agree more.

No problem. As I always tell my players, tournaments are not for everyone. Play at the FLGS, learn to play well and fast, don't be a stranger to the rules, and then come to a tournament. It's a competition to find the best player, after all. Being a newbie at a tournament will usually mean you lose your games or you don't finish them. If there's a lively community in your area, you don't have yo do tournaments to learn the game.

 

Doesn't that just invite silly mistakes that could be avoided easily by getting your opponent to agree to something being a certain way?

Hmm, I would say those things are different. If my opponent has a brilliant hidden deployment model that destroys me on ARO I think thats a brilliant play, whereas shooting through some obscure angle between 3 buildings and under a car feels different to me.

Maybe we start to get to the point where we have to acknowledge the games core design encourages players to be thorough but then doesn't provide clear guidelines on how to shortcut certain time consuming areas to get the majority of the player base to play under tournament conditions.

Magic the Gathering does this well at a tournament level with letting players shortcut to the actions they intend to take without making players be meticulous, though there have been controversies over the years of players getting their opponents to say certain things to Gotcha them out of things they should have been able to do.

 

I'm really trying to work on this. Its definitely easier to play faster with shorthand action declaration though :)

 

Your continued support of that overall position, despite the fact that you formulated that opinion based off of an improper understanding of the written rules, implies to me that it's not so much about representing what's in the rules for you, as about pushing the way you want Infinity to be played down everyone else's throat.

And of course "intent" isn't used in the rulebook in that context, it's a term come up with by the community.