by CapNClassic
1)Huh? It is game breaking to eliminate the chance if error. "Mommy, Billy is cheating again. He is counting on his fingers again while touching the board. He has an advantage too, because of his six fingers on his left hand." So, one player cannot mark the board with pennies/pebbles because he will have less chances of making mistakes than those that don't do that? (why don't the other players do the same?)2) why would he forget to lose a troop more frequently? Aren't the other players watching? Wouldn't they see his intentions about where he was moving, and correctly make him lose his troop? Seems like they would actually have the advantage then, because if he forgets after preemptively placing his troops/pebbles, they can remind him when he rolls his first attack roll that he forgot to lose a troop have at loserville. Since this makes him prone to making more mistakes, under your logic it would be unfair to allow everyone else to not play this way since it gives them an advantage versus him.
3) I am pretty sure that Rob couldnt care one way or another if people counted on their fingers, placed troops/pebbles on the board, etc. This had no bearing on the games design in any way.
Also, consider this for a second.
Do players have an advantage that continually make mistakes in their favor? (I.e. Players who forget to lose troops to city resistance, players who forget to add in modifiers to die rolls or apply them to the wrong dice.) What if these players were spending an inordinate amount of brain energy memorizing exactly which cards previous players had collected from the resource deck, or performing 'Monte Carlo' calculations to determine their chances of winning a particular battle. Are they playing they way the designer intended? (the resource cards after being collected are hidden) Do they have an advantage over the other players because their memory is better?
Donald Vaccarino (Dominion) said that he didn't intend for players to write down and track the VP counts of the players. But, they players that focus on the +/- VP counts probably have an advantage over those who don't focus on that. What disadvantage does that put us rules lawyers in, when we have to devote so much mental energy ensuring that people are properly playing their cards right?