Question: Who are the Bad Guys?

Marek_Tucan · #1 October 10th, 2005, 01:46 PM

IMO do as you like, someone's eventally going to be upset anyway;o)

The terms "good/bad" in such wars are quite relative. Say who was good in Indochina in 1950's, French or Viet Minh? Who was good in Yugoslavia in WWII, Tito's partisans or Chetniks? Depends vastly on opinion of he who evaluates it.

halstein · #2 October 10th, 2005, 02:54 PM

I don't think it realy is any need for good-guys vs. bad-guys. After all, most players are intrested in a good game.

Also the side one plays, does not reflect wich side one thinks is good. Many wargamers like to play Nazi-Germany, but very few thinks the Nazis are good-guys.

Halstein.

DRG · #3 October 10th, 2005, 03:00 PM

Bill, you well know the quote about winners writing history and that applies here as well. One mans freedom fighter is, without question, another mans terrorist. I started out writing a huge "on one hand.... but on the other hand" post ranging from Tim McVey to Iraqi insurgents then deleted it because it would just have polarized people.

As Marek says, whatever you do will get someone's nose out of joint. Try an walk the line and stay neutral. Present the historical event then let people play out the battle and see what happens. There are probably HUNDREDS of SP scenarios in all the different variations of the game built from the perspective of the German SS that would have **not** impressed people at all 40 years ago. If you wanted to build a scenario based on events in Yugoslavia in the 90's good luck picking "the good guys" there!

The best you can do is try to stay neutral. It's the best you can do for any sceanrio.

Don

geoff · #4 October 10th, 2005, 05:10 PM

Seems to me the good guys are the side you allocate to the human player and the bad guys are the one you allocate to the computer (apart from your/my own personal/secret preference of course).

And I guess the decision on who you allocate to the human comes down to which side has the biggest challenge in the scenario you are creating. If you are recreating a historical scenario then the side with the challenge is up to the historian, but in that case the scenario you choose to create reflects your preference! (Of course, some historical scenarios are totally one sided and present no challenge for the victor and an impossible situation for the loser.)

I don't know much about the french / algerian conflict except that it was french "government" troops against the algerian insurgents. The french eventually pulled out, and there was a lot of ill-feeling, at least amongst the officers, against President de Gaulle for making the decision to pull out (the plot of Frederick Forsythe's book the Day of the Jackal was based on this ill feeling.)

A challenging scenario (and thus fun to play) would be one where a smaller side has a chance of winning against a larger side, and thus the human would get the smaller side. So in a french / algerian scenario, I would expect the french would have the smaller side, and would be the human player, and so by default the "good guys".

Of course, you could always create two campaigns - one to be played as the french, the other as the algerians!