BTB Order of Choosing - Special Scenarios

Hey guys, we're approaching the end of our BTB Campaign, and we've had a disagreement about the order of choice for special scenarios.

We're using the "Choosing An Opponent" System from the BTB Rule Book, its worked pretty well so far even though we're not all present during the pick

choosing an opponent
If the players are using Objectives in their campaign
then they should try following these steps when
determining opponents.
1. If a player may (or has to) play a special scenario
that requires all campaign participants to partake then
all players must fight in that scenario.
2. If a player may (or has to) play a special scenario
then that player may select an opponent to fight.3. If a player may choose a standard scenario to play
then that player may select an opponent to fight.
4. The player with the highest CP (compare warband
rating on a tie) may select an opponent to fight from
those remaining.
5. Then that player rolls on the Progress table to
determine how the scenario is chosen. If a scenario is
determined that requires or allows for more players,
then the player who chose the scenario may choose
those additional players as well.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until all players have an
opponent and a scenario. In the event that one player
would have to sit out then the remaining three players
must play a multi-player scenario.

So I just got to 40CP (41 to be exact) in Lure of Fortune unlocking the Journey Home Acheivement

40 Journey Home: From now on the warband may choose to play the “Journey Home” special scenario.Winning the scenario will cause the warband to win the entire campaign. Note that the scenario may
only be played if the warband also has a wagon and the required amount of 12 Cathayan Silks in their
storage. For this purpose each Lesser Artefact replaces two silks and each Chaos Artefact replaces three
silk items.

The way i interpret the Rules As Written, the journey home fufills the requirement of Number 2 in the picking order, coming ahead of all other players and getting to pick first.

Please note that we classify the heist as fullfilling Number 4 as it says the player has to be able to pick a scenario first;

15 Burglary: From now on, whenever the player gets to pick a scenario, he may choose to play the “The
Heist” scenario (either attacker or defender) instead of any of the regularly allowed scenarios.

Other players are worried this is unbalanced (i say its not too unbalanced as they just have to take my cart and silks away) and that i need to fall back in the choosing order.

there are players with more CP than me and a few with Choose First Abilities gained from Traces to Emprise (furfilling Number 3)

What's the general consensus on this issue? how did you guys do the choose order, we've got 14 players and I can get pretty confusing some times haha

We had some big debates about this in our group also. Eventually we agreed on a similar interpretation to you. Different achievements have differences in wording that dictate when the scenario can be chosen.

I agree that "Journey Home" can be chosen through step 2.

I also agree that "The Heist" can be chosen at step 4 but only if the player has the highest CP. Otherwise it can be chosen at step 5 when the player has a lower CP and a 1-2 is rolled on the Progress Table.

Thanks for the reply RL.
From what I can gather there's 3 scenarios that fit Number 2, they all have the May Be Played type wording and also seem to have a secondary requirement;

Journey Home; secondary requirement: 12 silks or equivalent and a cart

The Horde Approaches, as accessed by the Portents of Doom acheivement for Scion of Chaos
Secondary requirement: seer or shaman in the warband

And Hostile Embargo accessed by the Abandoned Trading Post exploration reward
Secondary requirement: the trading post has been fixed up

Ha ha, this is one of those situations where I assumed that the wording was rock-solid and just applying the rules as they are written would work out and be crystal clear eventually. Looking at it now I can see a few things that should be cleared up. Oh well...

Let's look at steps 1 to 4:
They are all about choosing an opponent. None of them actually allows you to choose a scenario. These steps are there to create pairs. Step 1 is needed to get everyone together for the Siege! scenario. Then, those players who may choose any of the special scenarios get to pick their opponents. This is obviously the case with a caravan player who has 40 CP.

Step 5 is actually meant to be applied to each of the pairs/groups created in the previous steps. During this step you would get to choose your scenario freely if you earned this effect (e.g. from the Traces to Emprise scenario). If no participant in the pair/group may choose a scenario, roll on the table.

This means that a player with acces to the Journey Home would get to pick his victim in step 2 but then still need to be allowed to play that scenario in step 5 - either by having one of those one-time effects or by rolling lucky on the progress / scenario table.

The one that ruins it all:
Obviously access to The Heist as granted by the Burglary achievement means that the warband totally qualifies for step 2. But that's not how that achievement is meant and if you read it then you might catch my intention: For this player, if she gets to choose a scenario freely, then that scenarios available in additon to the standard scenarios. No further rules and effects should apply.
Otherwise it would require the Silent Threat player a mere 15 points to from now on always pick his opponent through step 2 with no proper relation to the Heist scenario itself.

The idea behind all was to give those players who are about to play one of those milestone scenarios an upper hand in the scenario determination process. Well, well...

In a FAQ this whole process should be described better.

There will definately be a much better procedure definition in Gierburg.  Is anything still left unclear? By the way, if your group agrees on adjusting the rules because they consider something unbalanced, fun or whatever then it's of course fine to do so. On the other hand it should also be obvious that meddling with the rules when one (or more) player(s) have already achieved the major task of accumulating 40 CP and are very close to winning the campaign is not fair at all and any player who is honest with himself should admit that any decision he makes are very likely to be biased. I prefer to keep the rules discussions to the point where no one is involved in the results and there is at least some possibility of an objective decision (though that is hard once you have suffered from a certain situation/setup/combination no matter how unlikely that may be in general)

The way I looked at it. You have core scenarios and special scenarios.

'The Heist' is categorised as a special scenario in BTB. However, the intention is that the scenario is treated in the same way as selecting a core scenario by the player with the relevant objective to select it.

The campaign achievement 'Burglary' is not really unbalanced. Unless the player with this achievement rolls the desired result which allows them to choose a core scenario, then they may not play 'The Heist'.

Interesting. I had always been put off by the "Choosing an Opponent" rules. Now I understand them a bit better.

Woah yeah, that makes way more sense, and it's really clear now you've pointed it out, the difference between choose opponent and choose scenario.

As you mentioned one of the main problems we both of us involved in the dispute we both the people playing the scenarios, had the highest cp and are both organisers. It helped to take a step back and see what was most fun and fairest for everyone. It's gonna be much clearer going into the next campaign. Thanks again guys!

DicLombardi wrote:

Woah yeah, that makes way more sense, and it's really clear now you've pointed it out, the difference between choose opponent and choose scenario.  

As you mentioned one of the main problems we both of us involved in the dispute we both the people playing the scenarios, had the highest cp and are both organisers. It helped to take a step back and see what was most fun and fairest for everyone. It's gonna be much clearer going into the next campaign. Thanks again guys!

Doesn't wording solve this?

"The player with the highest CP (compare warband rating on a tie) may select an opponent to fight from those remaining"

If both players have the same number of campaign points, the one with higher warband rating "wins". In the unlikely event (hence I didn't write it down explicitly) of both warbands ALSO having the same warband rating, they would just roll a die and see who rolls highest (I think this is pretty much the universal means of decision making in GW games).

Sorry I mean 2 highest CP our silent threat player is on 46 Cp and I, the lure of fortune is on 42. Next highest is a scion on 39

DicLombardi wrote:

Sorry I mean 2 highest CP our silent threat player is on 46 Cp and I, the lure of fortune is on 42. Next highest is a scion on 39

Uhm... the roster only goes up to 40 CP and so do the rules... meaning: You can't have > 40 CP.  

I sort of wondered why the Silent Threat player hasn't won since all he has to do is get to 40 CP...

I never really thought about not being about to able to go past 40 cp, we know it doesn't do anything I just kinda thought it would to make CP order easier, but all is really does is let the leaders get further ahead, we'll probably stop at 40 next campaign. I also thought it would be over much sooner. Our silent threat has only beaten 4 out of 6 objectives so he hasn't won just yet.

Quote :

Our silent threat has only beaten 4 out of 6 objectives so he hasn't won just yet.

I don't understand.  What 6 objectives?

Edit:Oops I'd forgotten the exact wording of the last Achievement for Silent Threat. Never mind  

They have to win "the heist" scenario against one of each objective, we have one or more players doing each objective

Gotcha. I had forgotten that. I was surprised at how difficult it was to achieve the winning objectives, too. I expect it is harder with the number of players you have involved.

Yeah it's way harder than it seems reading them, and with this many players all with different schemes and plans its been a wild ride. It took a few players a bit of time to get used to the cp system so there's a wide range of CP at the moment, I think our lowest is 15 (a restless dead player that got their liche and necromancer killed 4 games in and had to start again). We're not sure if in the next campaign to make it more fun if every second round maybe choosing order goes from lowest to highest? Just to make it so the underdogs feel like they have more impact on the game, and do really. But we're not sure, now everyone knows what they're doing from the start (we also had 4 brand newbies to Mordheim) they'll actively seek CP and know how to stop other objectives scoring big, so it's probably not needed changing it up?