Event: Ramsay Bolton - Kill of Unnamed Character (Kills)

Episode 9: Battle of the Bastards at 38:53

38:53 (+72) Ramsay Bolton:

Ramsay commands his archers to fire volleys of arrows into the battlefield, killing Stark and Bolton soldiers alike. The arrows hit 23 soldiers and 13 horses. (Kill of Unnamed Character)

submitted by adinarda (approved!)

According to the kill rules "A commanded kill is counted, if it requires absolutely no skill on the part of the person carrying it out. Precdents:
Precedents:
Joffrey ordering Ilyn Pane to execute Ned Stark (S1E9), which was carried out and required no skill on the part of Ser Ilyn.
Failed precedents:
Tyrion giving Bronn the signal to light the wildfire in Blackwater Bay (S2E9). This required skill on Bronn's part to land the arrow over a long distance.
Stannis ordering Mance Rayder's execution by burning, which was interrupted by Jon Snow shooting an arrow through Mance's heart. Stannis' order was given to Melisandre, and Jon acted of his own accord."

Being that Ramsey commanded every single one of those arrow volleys, and that the arrow volleys were blind and required no real skill, according to the rules, Ramsey should get a kill point for every single body in that mountain of corpses that was killed by an arrow. -adinarda

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2016 Jun 21 camille.dupont, twalters, alicehanners, rajatnigam, 3 others like this
Firing a longbow is not a skill-less action. -bookworm13457

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2016 Jun 21 nyan, alexanderdropkin, taylorreneegoodrich like this
Neither is swinging a great sword to cleanly behead someone. I would say that requires more skill that drawing and firing a volley. Ramsay absolutely deserves points for those volleys. -alicehanners

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2016 Jun 21 rajatnigam, twalters, Nick the Irish like this
fuck you are right. he most certainly does deserve those kills.... but how do you count them.... and then do they count as betrayel points for killing his own men? -cmwalken15

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2016 Jun 21 twalters likes this
I assume he would only score for on-screen kills by arrow. Thanks to Davos, there is no confusion over where the arrows are coming from. -twalters

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2016 Jun 21 nyan likes this
Moved the discussion into its own event submission. -nyan

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2016 Jun 22
The rulebook wording is pretty unambiguous on this. "Requires absolutely no skill". Any person in this forum could successfully execute a prisoner by beheading (It being in 1 stroke is not at all a requirement). I'd bet that only a handful could fire an arrow the distance shown in the show. If a normal person couldn't do it, it requires skill. -bookworm13457

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2016 Jun 22 jedjackoway, zounder, as38, taylorreneegoodrich, 2 others like this
Wasn't the entire professed purpose of the "skill" rule to avoid granting points for commanders leading battles? -jedjackoway

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2016 Jun 22 nyan likes this
i couldnt agree more with bookworm, those arrows had to go quite a distance and thats why trained archers in ramseys army were the ones firing them, because it requires a lot of skill to be able to consistently shoot arrows that far -as38

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2016 Jun 22 nyan likes this
I imagine the reason for the rule is to prevent 'double-dipping' by scoring both for killing a dude (by proxy) in a battlefield, and also for winning the actual engagement (which admittedly here Ramsay did not). -dopeghoti

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2016 Jun 22
The spirit behind the skill rule was to allow rewarding of kills that were so easy/definite that they could have been easily carried out by the commander, but they just delegated some subordinate to do it. Joffrey's execution of Ned or Stannis ordering the burning of Shireen would be prototypical examples - anyone off the street could be given a sword or dropped a torch and made those same kills on a tied-up prisoner, or Joffrey/Stannis could have easily done it themselves if they so chose.

As @jedjackoway mentions, the intention of the rule is to exclude battle orders, which present problems both for scorekeeping and game-balancing in general. The scorekeeping is the usual bit about having nice black/white rules so the scorekeeper can avoid subjective judgment calls - it's much easier to differentiate "zero skill vs. non-zero skill" than "a little bit of skill vs. that was too much skill". And for game balance, counting battle commander kills just makes the Kill category non-competitive; drafting just 1 battle commander nets you several hundred kills and makes it pointless to draft traditional fighting characters.

As @dopeghoti alludes to, we later added the "Victorious Battle" political points to reward the competent battle commanders who do little direct fighting themselves.

Specifically for "firing arrows blindly" being unskilled, I think @bookworm13457's accurately conveys the skill needed just to fire a longbow, much less fire it at distance, in sync with hundreds of other archers (volleys only work if everyone shoots simultaneously). The fighters were also all free to move around and dodge the arrows, and not bound in place like the execution examples, and arguably required distraction from the infantry/cavalry to be hit (else they could focus their shields defensively against the arrows, a la 300).

Hopefully that explains the rationale behind this scoring. If players still feel like non-scoring this event doesn't fit the letter of the rulebook, I would actually ask for suggestions to tighten up the scoring language so that it does fit, for the scorekeeping/game-balance reasons mentioned above. -nyan

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2016 Jun 23
This has been enabled for Ruleset 3.1b. I counted all soldiers and horses directly struck on-screen by arrows, here: https://imgur.com/a/m9APA

Arrow striking bodies on the ground were not counted. Due to the nature of Ramsay's archery strategy (firing blindly in the general direction of the soldiers), the entire ground and all the bodies were riddled with arrows, so it can't really be said that all bodies with arrows were killed by archers. -nyan

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2016 Jul 1

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