When is it acceptable to disobey a direct order from your team leader or scenario general? Is it ever acceptable? There are as many answers to this as there are paintballers. As a team commander and sometimes general, I can say that “Yes, it is okay to go against orders… in certain situations.” (That will come back to bite me in the ass later at practice, I can tell!) Let’s take a stroll down Hypothetical Lane and talk about disobeying direct orders in scenario paintball.

The Pros and Cons of Obeying Your Commander

A good general or team leader can make all the difference in the world to a great many people’s enjoyment of a game. If they get everyone involved, maintain good communications, manage resources well, and take care of their troops, everyone has a better time and enjoys the game more. But every commander has a different style and to be honest, some are more capable of leadership than others. What happens when someone in your army/team doesn’t do as ordered?

The Situation

First let’s make one thing very clear. We are talking about scenario paintball, not the REAL military or paramilitary like the police. Those are life and death situations where you are paid to take orders and put your actual life on the line. You enlist your services and swear to obey your chain of command. The punishment can be court martial and prison for not doing so. This is paintball where everyone is doing it for a day of controlled aggression and testosterone and adrenaline overload. However, we are talking about a mil-sim scenario here. There is a winning and losing side and “playing” mil-sim is supposed to be about simulating a military situation and a command chain. If you can’t follow orders, you came to the wrong party, Cinderella.

The two major goals of scenario paintball are to have fun/make it fun for others and to work as a unified force on the army you are playing for. In that order. It is the general’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has fun and everyones responsibility to try and win and work together while they are having fun. Sometimes taking one for the team requires a temporary lapse in ‘fun’ while you guard that vacant fort that is worth 50 points. That comes under the chapter titled “Your Responsibilities” Bunky! Playing on a scenario or a team comes with some responsibilities to the army and your fellow teammates. Buy the Trinitron and get the Big Picture. Newsflash: it ain’t just about you!

Pros of Disobeying Your Commander

Possible valid reasons for not obeying a direct order…

The order will put you or your team in a real world, physical danger (I’m not talking about getting shot with  buckets of paintballs wienie-boy, I am talking about breaking a leg, possible burns, removing your mask, etc.)

The order is completely illogical or makes no sense. If the commander wants your squad to set an ambush where no one will EVER go or to do a recon in an area equally unpopulated, this doesn’t make sense (in paintball where time is limited). This is when you take your commander to the side and have a talk with them about a “better allocation of resources toward the overall goal”. Illogical orders like this are issued all the time in the real military (oxymoron = “Military Intelligence”), but they have men to spare, all the time in the world for the enemy to go to that out-of -the-way area, and the goal is security, not having fun or winning a war game in a limited amount of time.

You are physically incapable of completing the mission or task and it would let down the team if you tried and failed. It is best to let the general know so he and the team doesn’t count on you. This gives him an opportunity to assign some one else who can. If a mission involved climbing a rope line, I am not the guy for the job! At the recent Valor vs. Venom game, a good portion of our team was simply too exhausted from playing full throttle all day to even attempt a mission by the end of the day. Communicating that to the general when, and if, he asks, is important. In another game, I was the commander and asked a squad, by radio, if they could do a mission and I was happy to hear them say that they were in the middle of a firefight and couldn’t get to the rendezvous point in time. This showed real team thinking on their part. This allowed me to reassign this to a different team who successfully accomplished the mission. Had the original teams egos gotten in the way, they could have easily accepted the mission and then failed. Sometimes, you should Just Say No.

My personal favorite reason for not obeying a direct order is… I don’t take orders. Seriously. (I’m not kidding here. Why are you laughing?) Now, you can ASK me anything and I will try my damnedest to accomplish it, but you are not my daddy or my employer, so ORDERS are out of the question. Requests are always better. Even my wife knows that and she doesn’t even play paintball. Remember, we are paying to PLAY this GAME, not getting paid to do it, be nice to your troops and they will be much more likely to comply. Everyone is volunteering. This is not a job. But when it gets right down to it, there is no real world penalty for them when they don’t obey your requests… or is there? (More on this later.)

Cons of Disobeying Your Commander

I recently heard of (a common situation where) a scenario general asked a team to do some special missions. The team seemed to not take this particular scenario game seriously and declined. Their reason: they just didn’t want to. Even though they are a fairly experienced and well known mil-sim team, they just wanted to treat the day as a recreational day and play however they wanted to. Was this wrong? Again, it depends on how you look at it.

If they didn’t want to follow a chain of command, they should have gone to another field where it was just a rec day, but (we can assume) they came to this scenario because there would be plenty of action, or this was where their friends were. The price of all that (scenario) action is to work as a coordinated unit, not a bunch of loose cannons. But when you ‘enlist in a scenario army’ (or join a team), you are now a part of the Trinitron again. You are not just an individual player or a squad any more, you are an integrated part of the whole army and each piece needs to carry its own weight (which is more for some of us than others!). By NOT doing what was required of them and just doing whatever they wanted, they let down their army and more importantly friends and fellow players. It doesn’t matter how many bad guys you whack, if you don’t coordinate with the rest of your team, you are not playing mil-sim. You are playing recreational paintball and today might not have been the best time to do that. The speedball field am that way Sweet Pea.

If the numbers of opponents are 100 on each side and 20 of your army is only playing at 50%, or half as effective, because you are not coordinating with the rest of your army, you have reduced the Effective Force of your friends’ side by 10 players, giving the OPFOR and unfair advantage against your side. Friends don’t let friends play half assed.

In an example in that same game as above, a whole group of players didn’t go out and do their agreed upon, and expected part, of an attack plan (without letting the general know), because it started pouring rain (and it was assumed they didn’t want to get their electronic guns wet). The downside was that some really dedicated squads DID go out in the rain and were expecting support from them. Literally left hanging. Luckily, an equal number of players from the opposing army didn’t go out in the rain either and that cut down the OPFOR the wet squad ran into. A happy ending to a bad situation. Communication would have helped even if they didn’t want to get wet. That would have allowed for alternate planning.

In part two, we discuss what commanders and players can do when orders seem optional….

Continued in the Upcoming Part Two. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.