In my last post, I shared a few short stories from my gaming club's Blood in the Badlands campaign. In one of those stories, I had an opponent who blamed me for his errors in the game.
I wrote a rant at the time and thought it would be fun to share it here because I know there are others who have dealt with this kind of thing too.
During one of the weekends of the campaign, I played a couple of Warhammer games and one of my pet peeves came to a head. I bit my tongue in the name of diplomacy, but this frustration was eating me up so I needed to get it out.
Learn the #@$*! rules for yourself. DO NOT blame me for your failure. You suck at Warhammer. Cope. I beat your butt in fair and square and for you to go whining about "ArcticFox didn't make the victory conditions clear. He didn't explain the objective markers well enough."
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH. YOU HAVE THE SAME RULEBOOK I DO. Don't give me that nonsense about how you haven't the time to sit down and learn the freaking game. At the time, I had 5 kids and 2 jobs, and I played 5 different wargames. Do NOT come to me and give me some kind of sob story about how you're just too swamped with life to spend a couple minutes a day with the book. Keep a copy of the rules in the bathroom and read a page or two each day while you're taking a dump if you have to. Don't act like it's somehow my job to hold your little hand and make sure you know what all your options are and what you need to do to play the game. Admit it. You faced me across the table and you got owned. Be a man and learn from it. Every minute you spend pointing to me and whining is a minute you could have been spending analyzing your craptastic tactics or your idiotic decisions during the game. If you spent as much energy working on your game as you do making excuses, you'd be beating me every single time.
Granted, the specific scenario we played is from a small set of rules (all of 3 pages) you don't own. That's why I loaned you the book ahead of time, and then on the day of the game that book sat there on the table, within your reach. Don't act like somehow I took advantage of your ignorance to score a win. The victory conditions were about as simple as a Warhammer game gets. You were attacking my fortress. You needed 3 objective markers to win. Period. If you had 2 markers you could force a victory points tiebreaker. Other than that, I win as the defender. Simple. You lost because you held 1 objective marker. What's so freaking hard about that?
Do you want to know the real reason you lost? You lost because you stupidly took the best infantry in your army out of a fortified castle tower where I couldn't possibly have beaten them, and moved them out into an open field directly in front of a unit of mounted knights with lances. What the &%#!@ did you think would happen next? If you had used that force to take objective markers in the fortress you'd have blown me off the table. You handed me the game on a silver platter and now you're mad because I didn't coddle you and talk you out of your bad tactics. You lost because the only other unit you could have used to take an objective marker was too scared to attack a wall section held by one single knight and a peasant with a longbow. You lost because you kept 48 archers out in an open field with nothing to shoot at instead of moving them to the fortress and climbing the walls. You were actually winning decisively for the first 3 turns of the game because I blundered my deployment and you deployed very wisely. Yet all the decisions you made after that point resulted in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and I recovered and won. DEAL with it.
But it isn't even just one person. Turns out a few months ago I heard a similar excuse, and was even told I was being jerk-ish because again, he didn't understand the victory conditions and so he wasn't playing the way he would if he'd known. Tell me, exactly when did it become my job to make sure that my opponents know what they have to do to win the freakin' game? I don't take advantage of ignorance. I thought, in both of these cases, that my opponent knew what he was doing. What am I supposed to do? Take them by the hand, and ask them each turn if they know what to do to win? If they understand the rules on how to play their army? Shall I roll your @$#@)(& dice for you too?!?!?!? How about I offer you tactical advice? Want me to coddle you through each turn so you feel like I'm not being a jerk? Oh, I've heard people say it's good sportsmanship to let people suffer when they make a mistake and to not let them go back and do something they forgot to do or not say anything if they forget about a rule that would help them... Well, I don't agree. I think that's bad sportsmanship. I do let my opponents go back and do something they forgot. I do speak up when a rule they're forgetting would make a difference. If I make a mistake to my advantage and realize it later, I admit it and I offer to retract it in the name of fairness. Most players aren't that honorable and it ^&$@$ me off when someone accuses me of playing shady when I make an effort to be fair like that. I don't recall anyone (including you) doing that for me (except my son, whom I taught to play honorably as I do.) If I win, I want to win because I played well, and not because of my opponent screwing up game rules. Even when it's borderline, I let my opponent have it 9 out of 10 times. Think I get that same level of courtesy back? &%#*%@!( NO.
But I'm the jerk.
MAN THE &%@#*& UP. When I lose, the person I blame for my loss is the man in the mirror. I think about the game. I talk about it with my opponent. I LEARN. I come back better the next time. I up my game. I don't whine like a $^&!#@$ as if the universe is set against me winning. I don't blame the dice. I don't blame the rules. I don't blame the company that published the game. I don't point the finger at my opponent and cry about how mean he was to me. I lose like a man and I act like a man and I adjust my strategy and come back and play again like a man. Is that so #@%!! much to ask?
You know what? I'm glad you quit the campaign and are taking a break from playing because I'm sick of feeling guilty for winning. I'm sick of you going behind my back and telling people you lost because I somehow didn't go far enough to make sure you remembered what you were supposed to do. I guess I gave you too much credit because I thought you did know. I thought you'd actually read the book I loaned you. (The relevant section is, like I said, 3 %!@$&! pages long.) I thought you were telling the truth before the game began when I explained the victory conditions to you anyway, asked if you understood, and you said "Yes."
Forgot about that, didn't you? About the quick discussion we had before the game started when I reviewed the victory conditions with you, with the book open, and showed you the 3 $*@%&(# sentences where the very simple rules were detailed. If that isn't enough for you then I don't know what else to say. And then to whine about "ArcticFox plays in hardcore tournament mode!" BULL#@!%RI&#!*@&#!@. How many times during that game did I remind you of things you forgot that would have been to my benefit to keep quiet on? How many times did I encourage you to roll dice to resolve something, even when you were convinced it was pointless, and the result benefited you? People don't do that in tournaments. They stay silent and smug when you screw yourself over by forgetting things. I don't even play like that when I'm in a tournament and you have the GALL to accuse me of it during an ordinary campaign game? HOW DARE YOU? You couldn't handle a game against me if I played that way. Even with me reminding you of all the things you forgot about that helped you, you still managed to lose. You know what that means? It means I outplayed you fair and square, and it means I earned my victory, and it means I have every right to feel good about a game I honorably won, and your whining and griping and childish behavior rob me of the good feeling I earned.
I'm glad we're friends, and I love you like a brother, but I feel betrayed. Do you think it's easy to push my ego aside to speak up or to let you take moves back knowing it could cost me the victory? I want to win, just like anyone else. I want to feel good about my ability to play. I want to earn bragging rights. Every time I remind you of a bonus you forgot to include or allow you to go back to a previous game phase to do something you forgot to do I have to MAKE myself do it. It's an EFFORT because your mistakes are YOUR fault, not mine, yet in the name of the friendly game and honor I don't hold you to them. It's HARD to do sometimes, but I do it. I expect the same courtesy back, and I rarely get it. Especially from you. How many times have I asked to undo a mistake and you refused to let me? More than you'd remember, I bet. When you see me get frustrated during a game, it's not because I'm losing, or because something didn't go my way. It's because I feel like you aren't extending to me the same courtesy I extend to you and I resent it. Can you understand that? I cut you a HUGE amount of slack during our games and it definitely doesn't go both ways.
And still, you whine about me being a poor sport just because you lost. $#@!^%^#@ you.
Here's a guy who never bothers to make time to read the rules or work on his strategy, and then when he plays against me, a guy who made Warhammer his primary leisure time focus, wonders why he loses.
Which, in a way, is a slap in the face to me when you think about it. Why should a player who never spends any time in game prep expect to beat someone who is borderline obsessive over it? I read the books. I listened to tactical podcasts. I read Wargame forums. I have read "The Art of War" by Sun-Tzu. (You'd be amazed at how much of it actually applies.) I run battle drills when experimenting with units. I even wrote a battle simulator to compare the relative effectiveness of units in close combat (Using C#... This was in my .NET days. I later created an updated version in Java.) Yeah, this was my main hobby.
Reasons I've heard for why I win against this person:
1) The dice screwed him. (Yes. The universe is out to get you through your dice.)
2) I didn't make the victory conditions clear enough. (And hiding the rulebooks too, I guess)
3) The publisher keeps changing the rules and nobody can keep up. (This rules set had been out for 4 years at that point, homeslice.)
4) The rules don't make any sense. (Apparently, those of us who can handle the rules are what? Insane?)
Notice that it's never been that I played a good game. I've never heard that from him one single time. Evidently, he's just entitled to beat me and it's just a cruel, harsh world that denies him.
Well, this matter has been, at least for now, resolved.
I was at the Battle Bunker and that friend was there, and we talked. To his credit, he initiated the conversation. I got to offer him my point of view on several of these matters, as did he. (Some of it didn't come up, because apparently another mutual friend got on his case about his behavior toward me and that was that.) I think we each had some skewered perceptions of each others' motives and this was a chance to set the record straight.
So all's well that ends well, but I needed to get that off my chest. It was written years ago, but I put it here just to share.
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