Re: Multi-way contests

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 18:21:47 +0100

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 02:44:03PM -0500, Mike Holmes wrote:
> To try to explain my rationale for why it's good for this circumstance, any
> win can be explained in this as getting ahead of the person who loses the AP
> (or catching up, or whatever). If you get a transfer, however, not only his
> AP change, but yours do to. If you win with no transfer, your AP do not
> change relative to anybody but the losers. Yeah, you still have to
> rationalize that the loser is now "behind" the others to whom he didn' fail
> against, but that's only half as problematic as having then to rationalize
> how you managed to advance on everyone else by only defeating the one
> character.

About three times as problematic, I'd have thought... In for example a combat situation, this largely makes sense of course, since it's not always clear how 'hurting' one specific individual in a multi-way conflict necessarily directly 'helps' you with respect to other participants. But in a race, if you pass the leader, you pretty much necessarily have to pass everyone else as well, so this is much easier to rationalise. (Assuming something other then the chariot race in Ben Hur, at least.)

I can certainly imagine contests where 'picking on the weakling and hoping for a transfer' is an attractive tactic, but either this makes dramatic and game-world sense, or it doesn't. In the former case, it ought to be fair game, and de'il take the hindmost. If not, then it should either be restricted or penalised to reflect this: for example, as per your own suggestion you should only be able to 'attack' the current leader, in race contests. (After all, if your action is targetted at beating the person in last place, it would intuitively speaking be likely to at best put you 2nd last at that point.)

Cheers,
Alex.