V&V OOC/Signup Thread I

[Cecil XIX]

It's not true to say that it was impossible to stop Zirn from taking Milan. I hope I had made this clear earlier to both parties, but if one had been at war with the other than it would have been decided via PVP Battle.

There seems to be three issues of contention:

1. Lothar taking control of settlements that haven't been granted to him.

2. Lothar refusing to pay money to other electors that is legally required of him.

3. Tristan being able to take Milan largely because he was able to get the save first.

Nothing about this is the fault of any of the players. I take resonsibility for any discontent for not acting early and decisively enough to avoid this, as none of these issues crept up out of nowhere.


1. Lothar did have control over Genoa, a regretable oversight on my part. However, it's now part of the Kaiser's desmense as per the rules (It was listed as his in the last turn's report) and he must take it by force if it is to be returned to him. Although it shouldn't have been necessary, personally I do like the idea that the Kaiser must manually assert his right to newly conquered provinces. This is the best solution I have seen to the conflicting interets of having a stable, understable system for allocating provinces while allowing for a rebel to appear and succeed if the system lacks defenders. Still, that was obviously not the orginal intent of the language. I think that in order to make it easier to understand how provinces are assigned it would be best to eliminate the part in rule 6.11 where new provinces are automatically given to the Kaiser and reconcile it into rule 3.4, which was supposed to be the sole rule dealing with new provinces. Right now they're both equal law despite their contridictions.

2. Lothar refusing to hand over money means breaking a rule of the Diet, not a rule of the game. The money must first come into his posession before he can hand it over to the Reichmarshall fund. Although the law can make it mandatory for one Elector to give money to another, all electors have the option to simply not give up money that's in their posession to another Elector. If an Elector does this, and will not listen to reason, he must listen to force. This aspect of money is different from provinces and soldiers/agents/ships work because simply because money itself is different to those things. It also doesn't mean an Elector can avoid paying for recruitment and construction. Simply put, payment from one elector to another can be automatic, but never mandatory. This should be clearly stated in the rules, and currently it isn't, which is my fault.

3. Leopold couldn't stop Lothar because of a failure to provide a rule that eliminates the unfairness of who takes the save first, which is clearly an OOC issue. I was hesitant to do anthing about this because it would have made making up a new rule on the spot to resolve it, but in restrospect it might have been better to require a PVP fight. In anycase, the rules are definitely unfair in this regard and need to be fixed. Perhaps whoever is of the highest rank should get the right of first refusal, i.e. counts must respect Dukes unless they are willing to declare war.

I can appreciate the frustation over this, there are concepts I had in mind when creating V&V that clearly are not adequately expressed in the rules.

Now, regarding our imminent PVP battle. Frankly I did not anticipate a battle ever breaking out when both sides are in the city. I'm going to implement this via an event, as we currently still have the rules that require giving all participants their own, separate turns which takes way too long. Also, whether or not you declare war in the post you take the save or return the save is immaterial, there's not supposed to be a warm-up period anyway. The way phonicsmonkey did it is against the letter of the law but with the spirit, so that particular law should be changed as well in order to avoid tripping up future players.

Finally, welcome aboard to mini and TheLastDays! To answer your question regarding made-up characters, you can do anything you want with them once you get avatars, but you will have only one vote and it will be in your avatar's name, not your previous character

[phonicsmonkey]

It's not true to say that it was impossible to stop Zirn from taking Milan. I hope I had made this clear earlier to both parties, but if one had been at war with the other than it would have been decided via PVP Battle.

There seems to be three issues of contention:

1. Lothar taking control of settlements that haven't been granted to him.

2. Lothar refusing to pay money to other electors that is legally required of him.

3. Tristan being able to take Milan largely because he was able to get the save first.

Nothing about this is the fault of any of the players. I take resonsibility for any discontent for not acting early and decisively enough to avoid this, as none of these issues crept up out of nowhere.

Hey no worries Cecil, we can work it all out now.

Actually on point 3 I would say rather that my issue is that he was able to take Milan without having to go through me, despite the fact that IC I made it clear to him that I would stand in his way. On top of that he was able to waltz right back out again wtih 9k florins in loot which the Prinz had his eye on (the purpose for besieging Milan in the first place! I believe I should have been able to force him to show his hand by declaring war on me before he entered the city. The onus should have been on him to fight his way in.

However I'm happy to let this slide now if I get a chance to fight him for that cash now (as per my below comment).

1. Lothar did have control over Genoa, a regretable oversight on my part. However, it's now part of the Kaiser's desmense as per the rules (It was listed as his in the last turn's report) and he must take it by force if it is to be returned to him. Although it shouldn't have been necessary, personally I do like the idea that the Kaiser must manually assert his right to newly conquered provinces. This is the best solution I have seen to the conflicting interets of having a stable, understable system for allocating provinces while allowing for a rebel to appear and succeed if the system lacks defenders. Still, that was obviously not the orginal intent of the language. I think that in order to make it easier to understand how provinces are assigned it would be best to eliminate the part in rule 6.11 where new provinces are automatically given to the Kaiser and reconcile it into rule 3.4, which was supposed to be the sole rule dealing with new provinces. Right now they're both equal law despite their contridictions.

6.11 came out of the Kaiser's re-assertion of control after the civil war. IC he was able to assert more power and control over the process of distributing settlements because he had all-but vanquished his enemies. So I think 3.4 should give way to 6.11 and the Kaiser should have automatic right of decision over all new settlements, until such a time as we might pass a Diet vote to amend the rule. Not sure if that's what you meant...

2. Lothar refusing to hand over money means breaking a rule of the Diet, not a rule of the game. The money must first come into his posession before he can hand it over to the Reichmarshall fund. Although the law can make it mandatory for one Elector to give money to another, all electors have the option to simply not give up money that's in their posession to another Elector. If an Elector does this, and will not listen to reason, he must listen to force. This aspect of money is different from provinces and soldiers/agents/ships work because simply because money itself is different to those things. It also doesn't mean an Elector can avoid paying for recruitment and construction. Simply put, payment from one elector to another can be automatic, but never mandatory. This should be clearly stated in the rules, and currently it isn't, which is my fault.

I'm happy for the rules to be clarified in this way and it makes sense IC that a rebel can decide not to hand over income. However, I think that if a rebel decides to hold on to a settlement in defiance of the Kaiser or refuse to pay income he should be automatically viewed as having declared war on the Reich unless there are IC negotiations to the contrary.

3. Leopold couldn't stop Lothar because of a failure to provide a rule that eliminates the unfairness of who takes the save first, which is clearly an OOC issue. I was hesitant to do anthing about this because it would have made making up a new rule on the spot to resolve it, but in restrospect it might have been better to require a PVP fight. In anycase, the rules are definitely unfair in this regard and need to be fixed. Perhaps whoever is of the highest rank should get the right of first refusal, i.e. counts must respect Dukes unless they are willing to declare war.

It's an interesting philosophical question about temporal precedence. Do all the actions that take place during one turn happen simultaneously, or in the order that the players take the save? If the latter there is unfairness as to who grabs it first. If the former we need some kind of decision-making process to handle such things as competition for precedence at sieges etc.

I like your idea of first refusal according to rank - but what if two Dukes are in a stand-off with each other? Does it become influence-based? And then if equal perhaps the influence of their combined House members? Or maybe the Kaiser is a tie-breaker?

And I think that if IC a rebel decides to ignore the rule then that should place him in an automatic state of war with the Reich and the other player should have the option of giving battle before the rebel enters the city.

Now, regarding our imminent PVP battle. Frankly I did not anticipate a battle ever breaking out when both sides are in the city.

According to your first point above Lothar should not have had control of Genoa anyway, so maybe the best thing is to say that the Prinz' army caught him outside the city and gave battle, before he entered?

A separate question is where is Lothar's treasury if not in Genoa? And if I kill him do I get access to that cash?

Because if not I'm going to have to go back to my complaint about not being able to stop him getting in (and out of!) Milan to seize all that loot in the first place. It's the money I'm really worried about.

[Zim]

That all seems fair.

2. I find a bit confusing. I can get the idea that a Diet rule rather than game rule is being broken, but it's not always easy to tell the difference. The rule on handing money over is in the same section as rules on things like being barred from the Diet and who can move agents. People could come up with IC reasons for breaking any of these rules. For instance someone could say "I may be officially barred from the Diet, but I'm speaking there anyway and someone will have to try and stop me". But it's an rp thread and players could easily post at each other "The guards kick you out", "a flood of my supporters come in and beat up the guards" and so forth. Even easier in the latter case I could merge an army with a diplomat and say I intimidate or bribe him, causing him to make an unauthorized deal with a rival nation.

I doubt these would be allowed but there's quite a bit of grey area between what's a game and what's a Diet rule. Ask every player and a couple of the new guys that posted recently which is which and they'd all probably disagree on at least a couple of them.

I do like the idea of failing to follow certain Diet rules resulting in an automatic declaration of war...

3. I only really had two issues with this. The first is that Zirn was able to take advantage of regular elector status to be able to just take the save first but then ignoring multiple other rules claiming "special" status as a rebel. It seems like it should be one or the other. With the ruling on Genoa this has been negated. I'm perfectly fine with any of the alternate methods of deciding who assaults first or just using the old "whoever gets the save first" way these games have been done.

The other thing was that there was a rule dispute, you stated that if Phonics wanted to stop him he'd have to declare war, then it seemed as if Phonics didn't get a chance to do so. I would have liked to see him get more time to respond since it's quite likely he only didn't declare war sooner because he didn't know that's the only way he could stop someone entering the city. With the upcoming pvp battle this is less of an issue as well, but I wanted to make my concerns clear in case of future instances...

It's not true to say that it was impossible to stop Zirn from taking Milan. I hope I had made this clear earlier to both parties, but if one had been at war with the other than it would have been decided via PVP Battle.

There seems to be three issues of contention:

1. Lothar taking control of settlements that haven't been granted to him.

2. Lothar refusing to pay money to other electors that is legally required of him.

3. Tristan being able to take Milan largely because he was able to get the save first.

Nothing about this is the fault of any of the players. I take resonsibility for any discontent for not acting early and decisively enough to avoid this, as none of these issues crept up out of nowhere.


1. Lothar did have control over Genoa, a regretable oversight on my part. However, it's now part of the Kaiser's desmense as per the rules (It was listed as his in the last turn's report) and he must take it by force if it is to be returned to him. Although it shouldn't have been necessary, personally I do like the idea that the Kaiser must manually assert his right to newly conquered provinces. This is the best solution I have seen to the conflicting interets of having a stable, understable system for allocating provinces while allowing for a rebel to appear and succeed if the system lacks defenders. Still, that was obviously not the orginal intent of the language. I think that in order to make it easier to understand how provinces are assigned it would be best to eliminate the part in rule 6.11 where new provinces are automatically given to the Kaiser and reconcile it into rule 3.4, which was supposed to be the sole rule dealing with new provinces. Right now they're both equal law despite their contridictions.

2. Lothar refusing to hand over money means breaking a rule of the Diet, not a rule of the game. The money must first come into his posession before he can hand it over to the Reichmarshall fund. Although the law can make it mandatory for one Elector to give money to another, all electors have the option to simply not give up money that's in their posession to another Elector. If an Elector does this, and will not listen to reason, he must listen to force. This aspect of money is different from provinces and soldiers/agents/ships work because simply because money itself is different to those things. It also doesn't mean an Elector can avoid paying for recruitment and construction. Simply put, payment from one elector to another can be automatic, but never mandatory. This should be clearly stated in the rules, and currently it isn't, which is my fault.

3. Leopold couldn't stop Lothar because of a failure to provide a rule that eliminates the unfairness of who takes the save first, which is clearly an OOC issue. I was hesitant to do anthing about this because it would have made making up a new rule on the spot to resolve it, but in restrospect it might have been better to require a PVP fight. In anycase, the rules are definitely unfair in this regard and need to be fixed. Perhaps whoever is of the highest rank should get the right of first refusal, i.e. counts must respect Dukes unless they are willing to declare war.

I can appreciate the frustation over this, there are concepts I had in mind when creating V&V that clearly are not adequately expressed in the rules.

Now, regarding our imminent PVP battle. Frankly I did not anticipate a battle ever breaking out when both sides are in the city. I'm going to implement this via an event, as we currently still have the rules that require giving all participants their own, separate turns which takes way too long. Also, whether or not you declare war in the post you take the save or return the save is immaterial, there's not supposed to be a warm-up period anyway. The way phonicsmonkey did it is against the letter of the law but with the spirit, so that particular law should be changed as well in order to avoid tripping up future players.

Finally, welcome aboard to mini and TheLastDays! To answer your question regarding made-up characters, you can do anything you want with them once you get avatars, but you will have only one vote and it will be in your avatar's name, not your previous character