My apologies in advance for what may read as a bit of a rant.
In another thread, Arnim said:
...after checking back with the list clarification gods: the use of the wedges was not legal. The date is assumed to by a typo, but so far it has not been agreed to be corrected and hence not to be played in tournaments...
The context of the above comment was Arnim using an Early Russian list with German knight wedges, the problem being that the knight wedges are available only after a date which is itself after the end date of the list.
Now there's no doubt that Arnim made a genuine mistake and I hold nothing against him for it. The key thing for me is that Arnim's list was checked by a list checker and approved.
It's an issue I've encountered several times, both as a player and as an organiser: list checkers are only human and make mistakes too. The result is that players occasionally enter competitions with lists which are technically illegal. It gets complicated by the fact that stratagems mean players can't necessarily rely on what they see opposite them on the table to determine whether there's a problem: those elements over there which are more than the enemy list allows may be part of an Exaggerated Numbers stratagem.
So there's a very good chance that a player won't be found to have used an illegal list until a game is nearly complete. In fact a player may well play most of a competition with an illegal list before it's found out.
I realise that, essentially, once the list checker has approved a submitted list it should be considered correct and legal. The problem is that, in my opinion, this penalises players who take time to base their tactics on their knowledge of what their opponent's list can legally include. Say, for example, you're facing an Early Crusader army of 1098 (the regular option) and you see three regular commands on table, with a few points missing. You think to yourself that he's probably got an ambush somewhere, but at least you don't need to worry about that slow army getting around your flanks. Then he rolls a 6 on his 4th PIP dice and he announces he has a flank march of Byzantine LH...
Given, then, that there may well not be time to correct things and restart, what do you think is an appropriate penalty for these sorts of cases? The offending player has very likely made an honest mistake (as has the list checker) but it's his opponents who've probably paid the price.
= = = =
The reason this sort of issue bugs me dates back to the early days of DBM. I played in a competition in which players could re-organise their lists between games.
It was the last round of the competition, and I'd won only one game until then. However, in this last game I was in a good position: I was inflicting heavy casualties on one flank and holding my opponent off on the other. His centre was a little vulnerable, but I didn't have the PIPs to spare to attack there as well.
Finally, based on what my opponent had said about his commands' sizes and losses, I launched a series of risky attacks designed to maximise casualties against his most vulnerable command. The attacks were successful, and as far as I could tell I'd just broken his flank command.
My opponent removed the destroyed elements, checked his list, frowned, and then announced that in fact several elements I'd destroyed in earlier bounds were actually part of the
centre command and not the flank command. Not only was his supposedly broken command not broken, but I'd also missed the opportunity to break his actually-much-more-vulnerable centre command and my elements involved in the risky attacks were now vulnerable to counter-attack by his now-not-broken flank command.
I went on to lose the game.
Yes, my opponent's mistake was likely accidental. But I was an inexperienced player at the time I didn't get many wins. I remember feeling at the time that my opponent's belated discovery seemed just a little too convenient, especially as I'd only just recently asked him to confirm his commands' sizes and losses. It was intensely frustrating to see my own (for once) good tactics get nullified by a factor entirely outside the game.
I'm a more experienced player now, and I thoroughly enjoy the game that DBMM provides. But I still get a little of that frustrated feeling when I find out I've just faced an illegal list in a competition. More importantly, though, I worry that the people who are most likely to be at the wrong end of such an experience are most likely to be the least experienced players, and that such a bad experience may be the sort of thing which would discourage them from entering further competitions.
