[Classic] Weekend Assignment

Continuing with finding old posts to the Wheel of Time CCG playtest list, in the Summer or 2000, the playtesters were given an assignment to try out various errata for cards identified as being problematic.  Not a very common playtesting request, in my experience.

“Weekend Assignment”  [July 31, 2000]

Dark CotL v. Dragon
Pattern: 1/7/12
LB totals: 6/31

This game was played using the discard to use for Lines and with one Decrees per challenge, though no Decrees were played because only one was drawn and B&A was in play.  Light wins by 29.

Same
Pattern: 0/6/14
LB totals: 34 dice to 88 dice

Lines banned. One decrees played for 22 support on top of whatever would have been rolled.  We were already sick of these decks to bother rolling.

Dark Illian v. same Dragon
0/8/12
37/30

Lines banned.  Decrees played for 14. Light 3 damage away from all of its characters dying (ignoring using Pattern for damage prevention).  Light won by 5 … with Decrees (14 point).

Same
0/11/11
32/37

Same match up with Lines back in deck.  Decrees for 22.  Light wins by 38, 16 without Decrees.  First turn Genocide by Shadow important.

In the last two days, the Light has *averaged* 12 Pattern during the LB.  The Shadow has averaged ZERO.  Thought I’d mention this before taking an interlude to comment on the seven cards *we* considered errata for.

Decrees – 1 support/opposition per target, once per challenge.  Or, this has got to go.

Lines – Mixed.  I’m still concerned about selective use of the discard to use version.  That option certainly changes my deck.  Enough that I’d probably pull it for some other way to draw cards.  Not having Lines in that deck at all was an incredibly important change.  Lines allowed for searching for the important characters – Elyas, Prophet – who search for most of the troops.  Without it, the deck had a lot of problems achieving critical character mass.  Good.  Means that I’d have to find some other way to exploit Pull openings.  Wasn’t like a deck built around the card lost or anything without it.

Elayne – General dislike for removing text, removal is considered counterintuitive.  Couldn’t really agree.  Not the first change we’d make with DP cards as trying to test the proposed errata is virtually impossible as it completely changes the opening hand and tends to mean building a completely different deck.

Pull – In anticipating future replacements based on Pattern, we didn’t have a problem with reducing the blow up ability to either search or reduce – the prepostplaytest version.

PwP – Shouldn’t go get itself.  Couldn’t agree beyond that.  Bill’s feeling was no card should be able to search for itself.  He finds Rahvin for Rahvin as annoying.  Suggests a blanket rules change to that effect.  A card we could use more time looking at.

Genocide – Where to begin?  How about that Genocide may be the Shadow’s only chance.  That it is better for the Shadow out of the opening hand.  Though, Decrees gives the Light the ability to shoot down midgame Genocides, which is interesting.  Suggestion that we could live with:  remove from game after it resolves.  A complete thematic failure no matter what is done with it in my mind, but limiting it to the Shadow may help the current game and Bill thought it was more thematic.  In its favor, Genocide’s effects give a strong reason for both sides to participate in the same challenge.

Invasion – Remove from game once it finishes resolving seemed to be the most popular fix.  Other suggestion called for reducing the third ability to 1 card to prevent infinite Invasion combos.  But, remove from game seems more elegant.

As a result of our discussions on the state of the game, we concluded that a good idea for a card would be a starting Forsaken that reduced Pattern requirements by 2, to give Shaidar a chance to see play, to give some reason to play Draghkars, etc.  Another idea was an event that temporarily reduced Pattern requirements.

I liked Bill’s Dark Illian deck a lot.  Opening hand of Sammael, Genocide, Brend, King.  I’ve commented before how I felt Illian was too midgamish.  He fills out the deck with Forsaken for long term punch.  In the early game, Genocide slows the Light.  City of Illian in combination with Invasions and Genocides is a bitch to deal with.  “Oh no, you put all that effort into stopping my Genocide and all I did was win the Pattern and pull back an Invasion which I’ll use to get back the Genocide.”  Pretty good synergy on a number of levels between Forsaken and Illian.

We are all trying to figure out how far Genocide/Invasion goes towards giving the Shadow a chance.  We have yet to build the Light G/I deck.

The no Lines Illian v. Dragon game was incredibly interactive [note:  wrong game, corrected in a later post].  Tough decisions had to be made and challenges were incredibly important.  That the Shadow had 0 Pattern, though, is still rather ridiculous.

I think I’ll post my Dragon deck soon, just to give an idea of what we were using for the vast majority of the games.

[Classic] Perpetuity

I was reading my posts to the Wheel of Time CCG playtest list, which still exists amazingly enough.  On the one hand, by this point, I knew how to playtest.  On the other, wow, I was incredibly arrogant at times; plus, I had a vast number of opinions on the flavor of cards, suggesting that, *sigh*, I really was/am a fan of the Wheel of Time series.  Anyway, this was the first that I found that seemed to be interesting in a “this is what CCG playtesting is like” way.  Some of the others, especially from playtest days where we played a bunch of games, are likely more interesting, but unless the group (and my saved sent e-mails) go away, I’m going to try to post more of these.  I enjoy reading them, at least.

Perpetuity [June 29, 2000]

This was a great deal trickier.  I had a sense before playing the card that Perpetual Conflict had the potential for breaking the game (broken in the true sense) as its mechanic allows for different deck designs.

The deck I built was just one of the possible uses for PC (which should probably change titles so that not every challenge is abbreviated PC).  This concept was to initiate anything and everything to slow or cripple the opponent out of the gate.

The deck list …

Sammael
Liandrin
Perpetual *
Into the Fight

A reasonable combination of threat and support to push PC through.  Originally Be’lal, but decided that the one combat wasn’t all that important, whereas bringing C&T out when drawn was.

Battle Hardened x3
Aura of Death x3
The Art x3
Momentum

BH is more for the characters, whom I expect to take damage.

Draw Him Out x2
Genocide x2
Incite Rebellion *
Political Prisoner x2
Prolonged Campaign
Rallying Cry
Rampage x3
Skirmish x2

This probably isn’t the optimal choice of challenges.  I did tinker around with them after rediscovering Assassination Attempt is useless and the like.  Also, playing them in the right order is not a skill I’ve mastered yet.  Generally, I like to get Incite Rebellion in play first to stop card drawing.  Rallying Cry frees up my characters. But, the Light usually isn’t *that* slow.  The most effective was Political Prisoner by far.  DHO didn’t work in killing off Thom like I hoped, though a bunch of these are just good for keeping the Light in the battleground (Genocide, which never won).

Darkhound x2
Eyeless x3
Barthanes
Shaidar x2

Eyeless – good synergy with strategy.

Decisive Tactics
Guarded by Fate x3
Healing x3
Into the Fight x2
Personal Growth x3
Portal Stone x3

Figure Sam and Liandrin will usually be in, so they need all the protection they can get.

Fist x2
Footmen x3
Horde
Raiders x3
War Band x3

How to win, eventually.

So, we got into a disagreement as to what caused my opponent to concede half way in.  I contended that it was the unrelenting pressure (ha ha) of perpetual conflict.  Bill thought Eyeless were ridiculous (got two in play).  As the game played out, the Light had a bit of an edge in recruiting (Aes Sedai), but Thom and eventually Moiraine both got imprisoned.  The game played the way the deck was designed – attack the opponent’s resources, especially the ability to recruit and draw cards, while eventually bringing greater force into play, except I never found out if I was going to bring greater force into play.

This is definitely a rough draft, I wanted to post this to try and give some ideas for something better.  Not having DP cards in front of me in card/proxy form also makes building the best decks difficult.  Anyway, even the concept may not be optimal as it may be preferable to just use PC to go get elite challenges.  A Light version would also be interesting.

I would like to restate that PC in its current version makes any restriction on challenges in the opening hand – Rampage?, Find That Which Is Hidden – meaningless.  The other deck I’ve begun to sketch out has Lanfear, PC, Liandrin, Into the Fight as its opening hand with the idea of using PC to get the 3 Finds.  Given a choice between which challenge I’d bar from the opening hand, I’d choose PC over Find (obviously).

Also, PC will only go away when there aren’t any challenges left.  Five turns of not playing a CBC, when you are playing PC, is not realistic.  Much better would be something like “If you don’t initiate a CBC this turn, discard PC.”  It requires, then, for someone to think about how they will use it. Not that you will consider this as I believe the intent was to get people to play CBCs, which this certainly does in its current (I consider possibly broken) form.

Ah, but with the other hand, something is taken away.  Though hardly a game breaker type card, Incite Rebellion does seem to go way too far as a hoser.  My Premier Dragon/Mercenary deck would have no chance against any sort of real deck if IR hits the table early on.  It’s mostly built around Taking Advantage, the card that is supposed to be fixed.  Two Pattern may be trivial to some decks, but I think this card mainly hurts the decks that can’t easily gain Pattern.  Might consider an additional or a different mechanic for getting rid of it.

Enjoy?

So, I was reading Starcitygames.com’s front page, free section.  (All the articles in this section are Magic related.)  One person’s post talked about what he enjoyed in Magic.  What prompted the thought for him, Matt Elias, is interesting in other ways since it was a game Matt played where his opponent played a land and a one-drop, Matt won on turn two, and his opponent asked him if he enjoyed playing decks like the one he was playing.  Matt goes on to explain that the answer was “yes” because he enjoys drawing lots of cards and not, assumedly, because he likes having games that don’t qualify as being an actual game.

When it comes to Magic, I also like drawing cards, though it’s probably not as important to me.  The reason why card drawing is important to me has more to do with how I believe Magic’s greatest problem is the draw one card a turn mechanic.

Anyway, I want to talk about more than Magic.  I want to think about what I enjoy most in the CCGs I have played or have been most invested in.  I’m going to try to go in order of what I’ve played the most.

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

I’m sure I’ve spent more time playing this than anything else, perhaps as much time playing this as all other CCGs combined due to longevity of play and relative  consistency of play.  It’s also my largest CCG collection from a straight card quantity metric.

What do I enjoy most about V:TES?

Not deck construction.  I may be prolific, but I dislike many of my decks, certainly don’t have the same attachments as I’ve had with decks for other CCGs.  I don’t even consider deck construction all that important.

Not the source material.  I was once fond of Vampire: The Masquerade, back before I played much of it.  I have some connection to the source material, I guess.  Though, I’ve always had separate interests.  For instance, I actually enjoyed playing cards that require Dominate for many years whereas … to give an idea how little interest I had in Dominate in the RPG, my two main characters were a Tremere and a Ventrue – neither had any dots in Dominate.  I could go on about the differences, but there are so many examples that it would likely just be tedious.

Not the politics.  Funny thing is that politics was far less important in my early years of play – 1996 (when I started) to maybe 2002.  People were much more focused on either the player to the left or the right and doing what their decks did, which was often lots of bleeding.  My style of play, which is far more concerned with what the crazy people across the table are doing than with my natural partners to the left and right, developed in reaction to that.  Now, of course, I often lament how much table management is a consideration over having people get ousted.  I have a basic view that any table can be talked to victory, and that’s just annoying.  What interests me the most seems to be …

Card interactions?  I stress context.  For everything.  There is no meaning without context, an argument I remember making in a college philosophy course.  Card interactions, in and of themselves, probably don’t do it for me.  I think it’s because games, more so with some CCGs than with other CCGs or other games, have a feature to them besides just the numerical values of the components.  I’ll come back to this when I get to Babylon 5.  But, as a V:TES example, I find it hilarious to Shattering Blow someone’s Assault Rifle in constructed play.  It’s not so much the flavor, it’s that there’s a game context that Shattering Blow is a bad card and that the odds of being at close range against someone with an Assault Rifle are negligible, after all, the odds of even playing against someone with an Assault Rifle while running Shattering Blow are minute.  It’s these sorts of odd/surprising card interactions, where odd/surprising is determined within the context of how a game plays, that floats my boat.  Because they are so much more varied in CCGs than in other games is likely why I value CCGs so highly.

What about on a more tree level than forest level?

I enjoy having lots of minions, though I seem to forget this a lot.  I enjoy being successful at actions.  I enjoy surviving when survival seems implausible.  I enjoy guessing at what is in my opponents’ hands at any given time.  I enjoy discarding master cards to Pariah.  I enjoy lots of sound and fury signifying nothing – lots of cards played with little of consequence occurring, to an extent, anyway.  Far more than other CCGs, V:TES is the game where I can accomplish the least in results and still be enjoying playing.

Babylon 5

For a game that I didn’t start playing until the year after it came out (1997) and which I haven’t played in nearly a decade(?) at this point, I sure did play a lot once upon a time.  Once our group started playtesting, it was crazy how much we had to switch between living in the future and going back to what was already in print.

Far more so than V:TES for me, Babylon 5 was about the connection to the source material.  I didn’t start out a B5 fan.  I was far more interested in Deep Space 9 as the look of season one and the terrible acting of Sinclair were so offputting.  I only saw a couple of season one episodes and gave up on the show.  Then, I saw season two, and I became a fan.

Where V:TES is much more a “game” CCG, B5 was definitely a “genre” CCG.  You were required to play with main characters and numerous cards were recognizable, obviously virtually all of the character cards.  For me, this was an opportunity to mess with people’s expectations, a common theme throughout my gaming.  I think the first tournament I ever won was with a Centauri Diplomacy deck, pumping B5 influence.  That would have been the Fall of 1998, just a tad (3 sets) before Centauri Diplomacy was legit.  I played Minbari Intrigue before Shadows.  Londo got Vorlon Marks.  Sheridan, Shadow Marks.  I often played Centauri Military, in part to counteract obnoxious Narn war decks, but also because … well, there were a number of reasons, so maybe not a great example.

Some characters I liked better than others.  I kept trying to get a Walker Smith card created, including when I was working on the Anla’shok design team.  Again, the point is that B5 was a CCG that lived within the context of the flavor of the show.

Other things I enjoyed:  Non-player influence, especially B5 influence – Shadow and Vorlon influence could get annoying due to the major agenda, but even so, to me, the best part of the show was the Shadow War.  Marks – I loved me my marks, even Conspiracy Marks, even Doom Marks after they became far harder to convert to Destiny Marks and Seizing Advantage got rewritten.  I loved me my hyperspeed, especially hyperspeed military – unlike the V:TES players who virtually always see me screw around, my Spike-ness came through with trying to win major victories in 20 minutes with Conscription openings, even though it was incredibly unfun to play against.

Which brings up something deserving of its own paragraph.  Precedence CCGs allowed you to choose your opening hands.  This was huge, potentially large.  Choosing optimal opening hands was its own subgame.  I agonized about it more with Wheel of Time, but I spent more time (because I played more) on it with B5.  The Great Machine openings, Military Build-Up openings, Gambling Londo being all about not having an opening hand – I think it was a major fun factor to these games that one had so much control *and* so much variety with how to play the early game.  Of course, as B5′s early game was often anti-fun to play, it was likely essential to have something fun about it.  Also, this would be why any sort of aggro opening, like Conscription, was so much more fun – avoid the tedious building actions and taking entire turns just sponsoring or promoting someone.

Magic: The Gathering

I’m not so clear what the order should be after B5.  I think this is where Magic falls in how much I played a particular CCG, though with all of the playtesting we used to do for Precedence games, it’s hard to be sure how much Wheel of Time I actually played.

What do I enjoy about Magic?  This would seem to be yet another opening for me to rant about how frustrating it is that I don’t enjoy the game more, but that’s not the spirit of this post.

I enjoy building limited decks.  I hate building constructed decks for Magic as there are simply too many options.  Yes, the complaint that I’ve seen by others for various CCGs I’ve played where I built tons of decks of it being too hard to complete one deck without thinking of a bunch of others is exactly the problem I have with Magic constructed.  But, limited doesn’t have that issue.

Similarly, I enjoy drafting.  I don’t love it.  But, having a plan for what sort of limited deck to build is interesting.  Drafting Magic is a lot more interesting than drafting V:TES since Magic is designed to be drafted and may be the only good CCG for drafting.

I like burn.  I especially like burn that can go to the dome or nuke critters.  I very quickly developed a distaste for creatures given how easy it was for one to die to Terror, Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, or whatever.  On the other hand, Spitting Earth doesn’t kill your opponent.

I like multicolor cards and non-basic lands.  A lot of this might just be aesthetic appeal due to coloration and layout, but for some reason, I’ve always been attracted to lands that didn’t just tap for mana or that tapped for multiple colors of mana.  I think it’s because basic land is the most boring part of Magic.  Similarly, multicolor cards are rarer, thus more exotic.

I enjoy the ability to come out of nowhere for unexpected victory.  Pretty much the only thing I ever enjoy about a game of chess is when I make some unexpected sudden win move.  It’s a bit more likely in Magic.  I was playing Zak Dolan, that would be Magic’s first world champion, with sealed Tempest product when I had him shut down offensively with Humility, but I had to jump through a bunch of hoops with Capsize with buyback and pinging until I could get enough land in play with the last card in my deck to burn him out with Rolling Thunder for exactly how many life points he had left.  The game was dumb for him for quite a while as it looked like I’d just deck with the board choked with creatures, but I knew that the game was winnable for me.

I enjoy thinking about all of the various card combos.  Well, not all, I’m not that Johnny.  Some, with cards I think are cool.  And, that’s the thing.  Magic has so many cool cards.  In a more general sense, I enjoy thinking about deck archetypes and how to win the metagame.  I hate how Magic relies on hosers and I’m no fan of sideboards, but sideboards do enable vastly more metagame choices.

Magic, more than V:TES, where I don’t think it matters, more than Babylon 5, which is more about doing “what if” riffs on the show, is a CCG that appeals to my sense of efficiency and effectiveness.  Now, for two others.

Ultimate Combat!

I’ve probably played more Wheel of Time than Ultimate Combat!, but UC! is more important to me, and it makes sense to put it next to Magic, considering that it’s basically Magic, with the awesome flavor and variety of Magic replaced with fun game play.

I feel compelled to mention, yet again, that UC! was the first CCG I ever played.  My first game turned out to be frustrating after the fact, but it’s quite possible that failing to win that game after taking away 19 of my opponent’s 20 hit points in one turn motivated me to learn more about the game.

It’s an impossible sell.  For those who like UC!, it’s preaching to the converted.  For everyone else, can’t get past the art, the theme, and/or the card names.  Nevertheless, UC! is the most fun CCG to play.

Why?

Well, what makes games fun to play?

I’m fairly sure that the single most important thing to a game being enjoyable is closeness of result.  In other words, that every player had a good chance at winning the game.  A huge turnoff to me is when I feel like a game is unwinnable, including for an opponent.  Similarly, the sporting events I find most compelling are the ones where the winner barely wins.

This is why Magic is a vastly inferior game to UC!.  Sure, there are blowouts in UC!.  There are games where you can get a lock.  They are rare.  Or, at least, they are so much rarer than other games that I always think of UC! as the game where “if I don’t get you this turn, you win next turn”.

UC! is the CCG where games play fast, players get beat down hard, and both players are always in danger of losing.  It’s also a game where tight play and subtle moves matter.  Deciding whether to throw a Speed/Strength in defense may determine the game.  May deck one turn before putting an opponent away (decking is easy and has the same result as it does in Magic).

As for the limited variety that comes with only having two sets, I still believe that there are plenty of decks for me to build.  Sure, some day, the variety won’t be there not just because of the small card pool but because so many cards are functionally the same, but it’s sad that the game was never given a chance to be played out to that level.

Wheel of Time

A strange entry in that it was never particularly popular, I only had two regular opponents, and it didn’t last that long, but I was incredibly invested in the game.  Can I call myself a designer?  Maybe not.  I’m in the game credits as of the second expansion, but whether that’s because I helped enough with design or whether it was because I was doing things like art requests, I’m not so sure.

B5 introduced me to the awesomeness of choosing an opening hand for a CCG.  Wheel of Time was where I spent hours deciding on an opening hand for one deck.  While the dice mechanic was full of problems, some of which were fixed with the expansions, the probability calculations and permutations of results meant that a tremendous amount of analysis could be built just around the first few turns of the game.  This for a two-player game that often took us two hours.

I enjoyed the brokenness.  Typically, I get tired of brokenness quickly, but WoT was different in that it embraced brokenness to where it was the norm rather than the exception.  Okay, admittedly, a couple of card drawing cards got fixed as they were absurd, but the game was always a battle of broken card drawing, searching, and discard.  I really liked the different starting character possibilities.  Yes, this is just a subset of opening hand, but I became highly knowledgeable about the source material and the Forsaken options were particularly flavorful.

On a more general level, I can probably say that Wheel of Time was the one CCG I took seriously (most of the time) and really put my analytical skills and interest in efficiency/value to the test.  I can’t say I was a great player.  The one major I played in, I was screwed in the one game I lost because I was playing with a proxy, but I also didn’t feel like a great player during the event.  I was never top 10 in the world like I was with three other CCGs.  But, our playtesting was by far the best playtesting I’ve ever seen.  I still can picture sitting in Dave’s apartment, proving to ourselves that Forsaken.dec had no game against Maidens.  The level of analysis I read about with Magic is the level of analysis we were doing for WoT.

Tomb Raider

Yes, Tomb Raider.  What’s interesting here is that almost all of my Tomb Raider play was playtesting or demos.  I just really wasn’t that into the game.  So, why bother bringing it up?

I’ve defended Tomb Raider a lot.  I’m not an art guy when it comes to CCGs.  I appreciate great art, but it doesn’t determine whether I enjoy playing a game or not.  So, it’s hard for me to relate to people who will only get into a game that appeals visually, even if I did pass on checking out Magi-Nation because of aesthetics.  In terms of game play, Tomb Raider is not a strong CCG.  It’s not even that much of a CCG.  It’s really more of a boardgame with CCG elements.

Sure, I thought about opening hands with Tomb Raider.  My best recollection of one was running two copies of the “draw two cards” card.  And, I’m sure the CCG elements were important to having the game be something more than just a boardgame.  But, I think the main takeaway from my experiences with the CCG is that it could be a fun boardgame that could handle a range of players that, with a different genre (or much hotter Lara Croft art), could have been something as appealing as the HeroQuest boardgame, which I see similarities between.

Other?

I had a Netrunner collection once upon a time.  I could include Dragon Dice.  And, so forth.  But, really, this has gone on long enough and none of these were comparable to the above (except, maybe, Tomb Raider).

Practical Testing

I was recently reading AEG’s L5R RPG forums, when I was reminded of a method for testing for value. I might as well get talk of CCGs out of the way for those less interested in applying the methodology to RPGs and whatnot.

CCGs

A bit of wisdom that is passed around in the V:TES community is to look at what cards you discarded over the course of the game and remove or, at least, consider removing them from the deck. While I don’t think that many players actually use this – I don’t in any sort of rigorous sense, it is a relatively easy way to weed out (likely) suboptimal cards. The closest I come to applying this process is keeping in mind that virtually every Crocodile’s Tongue and almost every Diversion I put into decks ends up getting discarded, which is why I never play the former anymore and play the latter more as a joke. For instance, the latter shows up in my Striga deck, and we all know that Striga is so broken that even joke cards “work”.

So, great, a way to tune decks. But, then, I rarely tune decks, so I’m more interested in other applications of the same sort of thinking. What is the core concept? That what people actually play has value and what people don’t is lacking. Particularly profound? Not so much. Underutilized as a system for balancing games? Way underutilized.

Balancing games? … moving on to playtesting. There were all sorts of reasons to be frustrated by playtesting niche CCGs. Rather than rant about yesteryear, I’m focusing on a particular aspect of playtesting that should be more worriesome to game managers (if anything about playtesting is). The usual situation, in my experience, is that a small amount of a new set gets an inordinate amount of attention and much of the set gets no meaningful testing. Let’s think about the logic of this. Certain cards or groups of cards attract for various reasons, but the primary reason is power level. Sure, I tried repeatedly to get Walker Smith printed for B5, and I playtested Gerontocracy so much more than anyone else that I’m credited as its designer, but taking out individual interests, groupthink tends to lead to focusing on power cards. So, logically, cards that are ignored are, on average, below the power curve.

In my ideal playtest world, the playtest manager would force everyone to provide a list of all of the cards they didn’t want to test. Why not just force people to actually play every card? Because, really, playtesting is painful enough without the mindnumbing process of trying to generate interest in chaff, nevermind that the interest level will be so low that any testing is questionable, anyway. So, you get the lists. Because you allotted enough time and resources, because you are terribly clever, or just because you’ve gotten fed up with junk playtesting far too often, you start the playtest with the bottom of the set. Well, after you test any new mechanics or other stuff you expect to undergo major overhauls. Not that you actually play-test the crap. You brainstorm reasons why people aren’t interested in it. Throughout the playtest, you repeat the process so that there’s no cards left behind. In theory, every card will rise to the level of interesting enough to people that they do get tested. No, this doesn’t provide some sort of balance of power, since it is well-established that different players look for different qualities in cards, but it should reduce the variance in attractiveness of cards.

Dominion

Whereas the idea of tracking what gets played and what doesn’t is underutilized in my experience with CCGs and RPGs, my friend who runs lots of boardgame events is a proponent of using this methodology with Dominion.

What we do, since Dominion plays fast, is take a look at what people buy and remove those cards for the next game, repeating until we stop playing. Now, I don’t like Dominion. I actually believe it’s insanely overrated. I am of these opinions because I find that Dominion lacks variety, i.e. within any given game, people mostly buy the same cards or, at least, the people who have any chance of winning buy the same cards. While it seems like the process we use to weed out obvious strategies has some effect, each individual game still sees rather little strategic variety. Not finding the variety between games all that compelling … at least it’s quick – tellingly, a common justification for why people should continue to play Magic even though so many of its games suck.

RPGs

I consider there to be three classes in d20 Conan: barbarian; scholar, thief. I keep mentioning this even though it’s a waste of time to try to convince non-analytical people of anything. Borderer? Barbarian strictly better. Noble? Mechanically crippled. Nomad? Pretty much a borderer. Pirate? Not bad, but easily replaced by barbarian/thief. Soldier? The worst class yet the hardest to convince people that it sucks – skills matter in Conan (so do saves). Temptress? Just a scholar/thief or thief, depending upon what you care about.

Obviously, if I’m right, then the game is flawed. If the game is known to be flawed, it shouldn’t be printed (in some imaginary world where balance matters more than anything else), or if not caught until too late, then it should be repaired. RPGs are trickier than CCGs, of course, as they aren’t competitive and speak to different interests. Actually, one wonders whether the psychographic profile system of Timmy, Johnny, and Spike can be applied to RPGs. Given that I’m somewhat more of a Spike when it comes to CCGs and I’m a big powerlessgamer in RPGs, probably not. Anyway, while little can be done on the publisher’s end for Conan (don’t see a problem, not publishing the game anymore!) and everything can be done on our playgroup’s end (a feature of RPGs not shared with CCGs), I still find the exercise of determining balance, both in terms of mechanical balance and in terms of interest balance, based on what people decide to play and what they don’t a compelling one. Given that the playerbase, if accurately represented on the Conan forums, for this particular game is so out of step with my analysis, maybe my analysis is just off. But, probably not.

To me, Conan made no attempt at balance. Based on comments I see, such as “barbarian should be more powerful”, imbalance could have been entirely intentional. But, what of L5R 4e, where an obsession with balance seemed to take hold. I can see little value in trying to chart clans and families, after all, the differences mechanically are mostly trivial except for how you combine with schools. In particular, there’s no benefit to rating clans when there are hardly any mechanical benefits at the clan level, nevermind that people strongly attach to clans and the like in RPGs for flavor reasons. It’s really about schools or the combination of schools with families for doublestacking traits or avoiding getting saddled with a trait bonus that one doesn’t care about. It could be argued that Crane and Scorpion having multiple doublestack possibilities makes those clans stronger, but anyway, back to spotlighting schools.

Which schools will people eschew? Is it for power reasons? Of Scorpion schools, I tolerate Bayushi Bushi and none other for flavor reasons. Likely, many others have similar personal interests that are hard to account for. But, maybe the methodology can be tested. For instance, it might be quite interesting to see how many people play Mirumoto Bushi in 4e vs. a hoped for apples to apples comparison with 3e. Mirumoto Bushi in 3e is broken. In 4e, I only see a subpar and dull school. This is quite unlike how Akodo Bushi is quality in 3e and, arguably, the best bushi school in 4e. My sense, which is quite specious at this early date, is that few are interested in Mirumoto for HoR3 where I commonly adventured with Mirumoto in HoR2.

Another observation is that few players play Agasha Shugenja and many play Isawa Shugenja. This may be an intentional imbalance as the world calls for far more Isawa than Agasha. But, what of Asahina Shugenja? They were grossly powerful in 3e, I believe nerfed in 3r, and I don’t know what in 4e. I like the school, but I like defensive powers. The meaningful comparison, of course, being between Asahina and other shugenja schools. What of people’s inclinations when doing Different School? I see Daidoji Iron Warriors being an attractive option, especially if not terribly concerned with doublestacking. I don’t see Yoritomo Bushi being an attractive Different School (or school to begin with).

What of the Imperial schools? The minor clan schools? With cool RPGs, everything gets adherents based on flavor. So, there’s always going to be the Boars of the world. But, check out the ridiculously synergistic Badger/Badger build.

What won’t a meaningful number of people play? If something, that something was a waste of ink better used for coming up with something people will play. Of course, this comes from someone who thinks about Omoidasu builds, so whatever.