Notes from Last Mission: Determining Mission Outcomes and Payouts

[NorCal CBT]

This last mission has forced me to tackle yet another serious design question: How do we determine mission outcomes?

Success and failure are fairly easy to determine by answering the question "Did you complete the primary mission objective(s)?"

If you did then the mission was a success and if you did not, then it was a failure.

Sometimes, however, a clear outcome can't be achieved due to the limited time we have available to us.  In these cases, we often choose an outcome based on an analysis of the state of the board--assuming such an analysis can provide a clear outcome.

Sometimes analyzing the board state and the end of play doesn't present a clear outcome, and in such cases I will probably give you all some kind of victory, because it most likely means there was an issue with the design of the mission--unless that's clearly not the case.

We've thrown around terms like 'marginal victory' and 'marginal defeat' and the current rules document does reference a few different performance categories from when Kam was running games for the group, but some of the categories in the middle between failure and success can be a bit ambiguous, and they may not apply in all cases.  I'll be keeping some of the framework Kam has built for this in mind, but for the moment I'm running with a model that looks like this:

• Success: AA achieved the primary mission objective(s) within the allotted play time; 100% base pay
• Partial Success / Partial Failure: AA achieved some of the mission objectives within the allotted play time; 75-50% base pay depending upon which objectives were achieved and how likely other objectives may be achieved in an additional 1-2 rounds of play
• Failure: AA achieved none of the mission objectives within the allotted play time and it appears unlikely or unclear if they could achieve any objectives in another 1-2 rounds of play; 25% base pay (assumes an honest effort was made)

Notice that all of these outcomes are objective-based.  Killing enemies is great, but if it's not tied to the objective it likely won't affect the outcome.

I don't have the debrief for the latest mission written yet, but I can tell you the outcome will be partial failure and here's why:

• AA did not complete any objectives within play time (six turns by my recollection).
• AA could have completed the primary objective in subsequent turns, but I expect it would have likely been 3+ more turns.
• I reminded AA after turn three that no progress had been made on the objective.
• I could have made the time-sensitive nature of the primary objective more clear in the briefing--this is primarily what's keeping you in the partial failure category for this mission, but in the future I will be making time-sensitive objectives clearer both in the actual briefing as well as with a new Time Sensitive meta tag.

I know this isn't what you want to hear, and I don't like being the bad guy, but I can only fudge things so much.

Let me know if you've got any questions, comments, or concerns on this.

Allen