Casualties

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Concept

How to add casualties, attrition and managing resources to the game victory conditions.

Background - Respawns and Casualties

What about casualties? With respawning a required part of playing with a limited supply of players, between 16 and 40 players, would our team strategies improve if we considered truly minimizing our casualties?

Options

Point Penalties

In the victory conditions for a game, we could set threshold casualty numbers which reduce our overall team scores. For example, 100 casualties = -25 points, 200 casualties = -100 points.

Most of us still need to develop our confidence and risk-taking in the context of airsoft play and organized training sessions have great potential to improve play. Finding effective ways of rewarding in-game risk-taking and confident action is rare, But players should always balance bravado with investing effort towards team tactics.

Respawn Limits

Some fields use troop counters to measure team re-spawns. It amounts to a respawn pool that the entire team draws from, so when a team member respawns 1 life is clicked off. The amount of lives are pre-determined and when the pool is empty nobody respawns anymore during the game. Example Team A has 25 lives (team wide) and team B has 25 lives (team wide). This limits the number of respawns, so when a team is out of lives no body else can respawn in and will eventually be killed off.

This system penalizes a team for wasting lives. If you're playing dumb and getting killed lots your team suffers as the entire team will be out of lives sooner.

Another benefit of this is as the respawn limit is set for the entire team, rather than by the individual, which prevents players who lose all their lives wait for players with 2 lives left.

Bonus Lives

With team respawn pools, the game master can apply objective-based bonus respawns and reward a team during a scenario.

Forward Respawn Area

Using the Respawn Pool concept, the game master can assign a finite set of players as Engineers, who can transfer some fixed number of respawns from the main Respawn Pool to a Forward Respawn Area.

• If the enemy captures the respawn, the un-used lives are lost.
• Once the number of lives are used up, the area is dead and either the Engineers transfer more respawns or sets up a new Forward Respawn Area.
• The engineer can move the spawn point, but players can't re-spawn at it unless it's planted in the ground, stationary.

The Respawn Pool can be set up on small peg board counters that are easy and cheap to make. Use a big peg board counter at the HQ's and smaller ones on mobile spawn flag posts (mount a stake on the bottom for setting it in the field).

One version allows for the enemy to destroy the respawn with their weapons: mount a balloon on a stake, if enemy forces shoot the balloon the mobile spawn point is dead and the remaining lives it contains are lost.

If the engineer wants to set up another mobile point, he has to

• inflate a balloon
• re-tie it to his stake
• transfer lives from HQ to Mobile Spawn Point

which becomes the new Forward Respawn Area.

Administration

Additional Game Marshals may be used to keep track of the life counters and their statuses.