[Great Ork Gods] The Fruit of Woe

[Mike Holmes]

That could work. I'm still not convinced it needs anything more than the penalty of pissing someone with the power to hose you off.

Without being aware of the precise details, I think you may be wrong here. Simple game theory. If there's advantage to taking another player's goblin, and it disempowers the other player, then premptively striking may be the dominant strategy - this is known as the "first strike destabilization" concept.

RPG designers seem to think that they are somehow disengaged from tactical play. But given an opening, players will employ the best tactics with a pretty high frequency. So, does this principle apply in this case? If taking a goblin would lead to a smackdown that's worse than stealing a goblin, then shouldn't the player smackdown the other player's orc first? To then be able to take the other characters goblins without reprecussion?

A standard deterrent is the idea that you can only damage one opponent at a time, meaining that if there are other opponents that you wouldn't want to do this because if you get hurt tangling with the first guy, even if you win, then you are bait for the next. This can work to disincentivize this sort of action, but too well. If you balance enough, then this means that nobody will steal because they know they'll get smacked down by the remaining unweakened participants. In this case, there's no reason to have the rule at all.

What needs to happen is for there to be some unknown information so that a player may think that he can get away with taking a goblin, not really knowing if the other player can smack him down (and similarly it's important that the other player likely be somewhat in the dark). Then taking a goblin becomes a calcuated risk.

So does it work as it stands, do you think? Or do you need to make some adjustment? When thinking of the game, think of it as a chess game, with each move having X repercussions. Because if you don't do this, and rely on some social contract idea about niceness, then you either get Ron's drift, or you get Seans effect (possibly strong enough to send the game down the tubes from the getgo).

Mike

[Sean]

In re Mike's comment:

I will say that as soon as I thought it through, I basically resolved to use someone else's goblin whenever possible. That isn't 'always' - there are cases where you're separated, so the goblins are separated too - but for me it would certainly have been the go-to strategy once I figured it out. YMMV and all that, I'm just one data point.