Quote Originally Posted by Karellen View Post
You know, I just realized why I don't like the current scenario much. I always kind of disliked the notion that Parson was starting an operation using only dragons, because that's emblematic of a variety of unsophisticated brute-force methods and frankly, not that interesting. Also, now it looks like the use he thought for them was near suicidal - basically, he put his only trump card on stake in this fight, in a kind of all or nothing kind of bid.

That's not bad in itself. Only... let's suppose that we don't get a Deus ex Machina and that Parson loses all of the A dragons. Can he still win the campaign? The genre conventions would have us think yes. Only... if he actually can win without his trump card, the trump card so superior that he didn't even bother using anything else on his first operation, then do you know what that means? It means that the strategic situation wasn't anywhere near desperate enough to actually warrant an operation this desperate.

Now consider this: Why did Parson bother with the trap in the first place? It had certain success as a diversion, perhaps, but clearly since breaking out of it was this unproblematic for Ansom, it brought Parson barely any strategic advantage whatsoever. As it stands, he'd probably be better off if he actually had used the B dragons to defend the wounded stacks. It's not that his plans have failed, they've backfired. He's worse off than when he started, in part because he did things that were more clever than actually useful.

If he doesn't lose his dragons, at this stage it pretty much has to happen in a cheesy and lame way. If he loses his dragons and then still goes on to win, I'll be thinking all the time how by any logic it should have been pretty easy if he hadn't screwed up this badly at the beginning. It's going to leave a sour taste to my mouth, one way or another. Pretty much the only way Parson could possibly even the odds at this stage would be to croak Ansom and/or get the Arkenpliers, scoring a Plot Victory, but fact is, no matter how, I'll probably still think that he's a boop-up.

Very well said. This post sums up my growing discontent w/ the story.