In my Heroes By Trade game with my family things are going really well. Pinkie Pie enjoyed the first simple adventure she got to play in but was only so so on the treasure at the bottom of the sunken temple - a ring of silversteel entwined with roc feathers called Breeze. She was in love with the idea of grabbing a fancy axe and chopping her enemies to bits, and the fact that she is a warlock who uses implements like wands, flutes, and silversteel rings entwined with roc feathers hardly deterred her. Wendy and I eventually convinced her that since her character is a warlock who uses magic to attack people an axe is not the correct weapon but she still eyed the new special weapon with suspicion.
But oh, I changed her mind.
After her character carried around Breeze for a few days I had her character have a dream where she carried Breeze up to a roc (a bird the size of a large building) and when the roc gave her a feather she built it into Breeze and then flew away on new magical feathery wings.
She was delighted. She figured out that Breeze meant for her to find a roc and get a feather and immediately started asking where she could do this. Breeze had gone from a treasure she had little care for to the most interesting thing in the world.
I was so pleased.
This design is part of the core of Heroes By Trade. When you find a magic item it usually doesn't do anything right away. Most of the time you have to figure out what the item wants, what its purpose is, and perform some kind of difficult task. Some tasks are challenging but straightfoward like getting a roc feather but some can be extremely difficult indeed. Thing is, once you have taken the time to figure out where rocs are, gone to locate one, figured out how to get a feather without getting eaten, and finished up your magic item you are never going to forget it. The powers you unlock will be all the sweeter because you earned them and they have a story attached.
I am not going to make her wait forever to get a roc feather. I know she wants to fly and I want to let her have her fun. But I am going to make sure the adventure is a big one and she remembers finally activating Breeze. One thing I really want to make sure of is that when people play Heroes By Trade the magic items they find are memorable and never interchangeable - so far it is working out perfectly for Pinkie Pie.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Just a little less spite
I played Terraforming Mars again this weekend and my impressions of it weren't much changed from the first two times. The game is well themed, well made, and has some stuff in it that bothers me. I still don't like the way a lot of the cards punish other players because they so often have no choice in who they attack. Letting players punish the leader is one thing, but having lots of cards that will usually only be able to attack one target means that the game feels really capricious.
I am not going after the game's balance here; I don't have enough knowledge to do that. I am just talking about enjoyment and feel. The cards that destroy stuff suck as far as I am concerned but I am sure if they all went out of the game the balance would massively shift. My best first guess is that plants would become completely the dominant strategy if the meteors that blow up plants were removed and I don't think that is a good thing.
The other thing that bothered me was the drafting element. Lots of the time I would open a pack of four cards and see nothing much interesting for me so I would simply hate draft the the the next player needs. I would often see two good cards I couldn't use so I would make sure to take the one the next player needs so that they would hate draft against the player after them. This honestly isn't much fun. Having players talk about the great cards they took from you while you go turn after turn not seeing the stuff you need is crappy. They usually aren't even using the cards either, just tossing them away into the trash.
The drafting part of the game also adds a lot to the duration. With quick drafters it wouldn't be much of an issue but in all the games I played I am sure the draft added on most of an hour to the game time all in all.
I thought of a couple ways to address these concerns. The simplest way to speed up the game is to simply not draft and just deal each player four cards. That reduces the skill component a little but would definitely speed things up so overall I think that is a better way to play. There is another solution though which doesn't speed the game up but which does mean that each player would be more likely to get cards they want and you would be a lot more likely to find the big payoff cards for the strategy you are employing. The idea is that you pay for cards as soon as you draft them rather than waiting until the end of the draft and tossing cards out if you don't want them.
Right now you draft one card from each pack and usually pay to keep 1-2 of them. The rest go in the garbage. I would rather a system where you must pay for any card you draft at all. Each pack would still go around the table once and you could only take 1 card from a pack when it passes you but you don't have to take a card, and if you do take one you must pay your 3 bucks for it. This would mean that hate drafting would have a real cost, and while it sometimes would be worth it to spite people out of their cards you wouldn't end up just spiting everything by reflex. I don't think we need to eliminate hate drafting completely, I just want to tilt the game towards positive drafting that builds your own strategy and away from constant hating.
I suspect this alternate game style would inflate scores. You would have some money that just gets thrown out of the game when people draft and pay for cards they can't use at all but people would get their big payoff cards substantially more often and would end up with higher scores overall. More relevantly though I think you would see new and/or weaker players actually get to have their strategies work out. They wouldn't be so penalized for not knowing exactly what their opponents are doing (because hate drafting has a much larger cost) and they would end up with their cool stuff more often.
I really like the idea of people getting to finish off their strategies more and I am completely willing to give up some skill emphasis to achieve this. I also think it would be a better game to teach and people just starting would enjoy it more.
I guess it says something that I have so many issues with the game and yet I am invested in trying to improve it; Terraforming Mars certainly does some things right, just not quite enough things.
I am not going after the game's balance here; I don't have enough knowledge to do that. I am just talking about enjoyment and feel. The cards that destroy stuff suck as far as I am concerned but I am sure if they all went out of the game the balance would massively shift. My best first guess is that plants would become completely the dominant strategy if the meteors that blow up plants were removed and I don't think that is a good thing.
The other thing that bothered me was the drafting element. Lots of the time I would open a pack of four cards and see nothing much interesting for me so I would simply hate draft the the the next player needs. I would often see two good cards I couldn't use so I would make sure to take the one the next player needs so that they would hate draft against the player after them. This honestly isn't much fun. Having players talk about the great cards they took from you while you go turn after turn not seeing the stuff you need is crappy. They usually aren't even using the cards either, just tossing them away into the trash.
The drafting part of the game also adds a lot to the duration. With quick drafters it wouldn't be much of an issue but in all the games I played I am sure the draft added on most of an hour to the game time all in all.
I thought of a couple ways to address these concerns. The simplest way to speed up the game is to simply not draft and just deal each player four cards. That reduces the skill component a little but would definitely speed things up so overall I think that is a better way to play. There is another solution though which doesn't speed the game up but which does mean that each player would be more likely to get cards they want and you would be a lot more likely to find the big payoff cards for the strategy you are employing. The idea is that you pay for cards as soon as you draft them rather than waiting until the end of the draft and tossing cards out if you don't want them.
Right now you draft one card from each pack and usually pay to keep 1-2 of them. The rest go in the garbage. I would rather a system where you must pay for any card you draft at all. Each pack would still go around the table once and you could only take 1 card from a pack when it passes you but you don't have to take a card, and if you do take one you must pay your 3 bucks for it. This would mean that hate drafting would have a real cost, and while it sometimes would be worth it to spite people out of their cards you wouldn't end up just spiting everything by reflex. I don't think we need to eliminate hate drafting completely, I just want to tilt the game towards positive drafting that builds your own strategy and away from constant hating.
I suspect this alternate game style would inflate scores. You would have some money that just gets thrown out of the game when people draft and pay for cards they can't use at all but people would get their big payoff cards substantially more often and would end up with higher scores overall. More relevantly though I think you would see new and/or weaker players actually get to have their strategies work out. They wouldn't be so penalized for not knowing exactly what their opponents are doing (because hate drafting has a much larger cost) and they would end up with their cool stuff more often.
I really like the idea of people getting to finish off their strategies more and I am completely willing to give up some skill emphasis to achieve this. I also think it would be a better game to teach and people just starting would enjoy it more.
I guess it says something that I have so many issues with the game and yet I am invested in trying to improve it; Terraforming Mars certainly does some things right, just not quite enough things.
Friday, January 12, 2018
Murderhobo: The Next Generation
My daughter Pinkie Pie has been clamouring to play Heroes By Trade for some months now. She built a character quite some time ago and has been wanting to play, and I couldn't quite tell if it was a real desire to play roleplaying games or more just curiosity about the game I have built. In any case we finally got around to playing last night and Pinkie Pie got to test out her elven warlock.
Wendy played too, and I decided that a three person party was best so I ended up running an NPC to follow them around. As is usual for these sorts of things I made a character that was a tank, designed to run in and block for the two ranged characters that Wendy and Pinkie Pie were playing. I also made sure that my character had a few skills the group otherwise didn't have but was a quiet sort, not much inclined to negotiate or make decisions. That way the players would be able to make the choices rather than me, but I would have access to a vehicle for producing suggestions should it be necessary.
The character I was running was a troll called One Ear, named in a practical sense in the way that trolls do in Heroes By Trade. Pinkie Pie immediately decided that he should be called Steve and took great delight in addressing him as Steve throughout the game. She was thrilled when I roleplayed One Ear being all grumpy at being called Steve and seems determined to make this into a regular feature of our game.
Of course when you play RPGs with children you need to railroad them pretty hard. If you just let them act completely of their own accord the game is a mess and nothing happens, so I had the characters start in a bar and a local ran in to try to sell them a treasure map. It so happens that the map was real and the temple it showed the location of even had treasure locked away deep inside. I didn't have to make anything up from scratch though as I had used this adventure as a testing ground for HBT years ago and I just picked it up and ran it again.
One potential issue with getting the adventure done is Pinkie Pie's tendency to seize on things and pursue them relentlessly. When she heard about an old gold mine that was all mined out and abandoned as part of the adventure backstory she desperately wanted to run across the endless jungle to find it. I wanted to keep the group on track, for the first adventure at least, but thankfully Wendy could tell what I was trying to do and insisted on following the actual adventure instead of just heading to a random cave to see what was inside. Having an adult around who can mostly let the kid run free but shove her back into a useful path occasionally is excellent.
I wasn't particularly sure that Pinkie Pie would enjoy the game once she finally tried it. I thought there was a real chance she would get bored halfway through. However, she had an absolute blast and wants to play again as soon as possible, as often as possible. She figured out what her character was good at that the rest of the party wasn't good at and looked for opportunities to shine, but she was perfectly content to let other people do their thing; One Ear is talented at smashing stuff and she took great joy in asking him to shove things around and break stuck doors and such.
Pinkie Pie's introduction to RPGs is going to be so much better than mine was. I just found Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at the bookstore and puzzled out how to game by myself while she is getting an introduction tailored to her from a grizzled veteran.
It feels good to be back in the GM's seat. I think this is a thing I need to do more of, and not just for Elli. I think it is time to run another campaign; I need a creative outlet and building a world and a story is a grand way to do that.
Wendy played too, and I decided that a three person party was best so I ended up running an NPC to follow them around. As is usual for these sorts of things I made a character that was a tank, designed to run in and block for the two ranged characters that Wendy and Pinkie Pie were playing. I also made sure that my character had a few skills the group otherwise didn't have but was a quiet sort, not much inclined to negotiate or make decisions. That way the players would be able to make the choices rather than me, but I would have access to a vehicle for producing suggestions should it be necessary.
The character I was running was a troll called One Ear, named in a practical sense in the way that trolls do in Heroes By Trade. Pinkie Pie immediately decided that he should be called Steve and took great delight in addressing him as Steve throughout the game. She was thrilled when I roleplayed One Ear being all grumpy at being called Steve and seems determined to make this into a regular feature of our game.
Of course when you play RPGs with children you need to railroad them pretty hard. If you just let them act completely of their own accord the game is a mess and nothing happens, so I had the characters start in a bar and a local ran in to try to sell them a treasure map. It so happens that the map was real and the temple it showed the location of even had treasure locked away deep inside. I didn't have to make anything up from scratch though as I had used this adventure as a testing ground for HBT years ago and I just picked it up and ran it again.
One potential issue with getting the adventure done is Pinkie Pie's tendency to seize on things and pursue them relentlessly. When she heard about an old gold mine that was all mined out and abandoned as part of the adventure backstory she desperately wanted to run across the endless jungle to find it. I wanted to keep the group on track, for the first adventure at least, but thankfully Wendy could tell what I was trying to do and insisted on following the actual adventure instead of just heading to a random cave to see what was inside. Having an adult around who can mostly let the kid run free but shove her back into a useful path occasionally is excellent.
I wasn't particularly sure that Pinkie Pie would enjoy the game once she finally tried it. I thought there was a real chance she would get bored halfway through. However, she had an absolute blast and wants to play again as soon as possible, as often as possible. She figured out what her character was good at that the rest of the party wasn't good at and looked for opportunities to shine, but she was perfectly content to let other people do their thing; One Ear is talented at smashing stuff and she took great joy in asking him to shove things around and break stuck doors and such.
Pinkie Pie's introduction to RPGs is going to be so much better than mine was. I just found Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at the bookstore and puzzled out how to game by myself while she is getting an introduction tailored to her from a grizzled veteran.
It feels good to be back in the GM's seat. I think this is a thing I need to do more of, and not just for Elli. I think it is time to run another campaign; I need a creative outlet and building a world and a story is a grand way to do that.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Feed me
In December I posted about my Agricola league where I was expecting to notch two 1st, one 2nd, and one 3rd place finishes in my four games. That might well have been good enough to win my division and move up to the next division but it turns out I actually got three 1st and one 2nd place finish to come in an overall 1st place finish with a commanding lead.
My last game to finish was this one. In the middle of the game I thought of myself as being mid pack, likely to not lose but I didn't figure on winning. Instead I won 42-37-30-20, a big victory. So why did I guess my game situation so badly? With that big a margin of victory I feel like I should have been able to tell easily. I did have a great last turn wherein I grabbed 13 points but much of that was set up ahead of time and I should have accounted for it.
Looking back on the game I think I simply didn't add up the food situation properly. I had a massive investment in food infrastructure given that I had the Well (5 food), Fruit Tree (6 food), Spindle (1 food), Laybout (6 food), and Sheep Farmer/Fireplace (14 food). I had most of that set up fairly early on so I was able to focus on racking up a ton of points in the later stages of the game while my opponents regularly spent their latter turns scooping up loose food on the board or grabbing animals to cook them immediately.
Looking at all four games I played this round there is a trend. In three of the games I set up an excellent food engine and won the game. One of those games was the one I just described where my engine was just a bunch of food generating cards, but both of the other games involved fast renovating into the Manservant, which is a food plan all by itself once you get it out. In the fourth game I didn't get a food engine set up properly and I came second. I think this is where I am at in terms of Agricola now - I really love the strategy of building one room, growing once, and setting up a food engine in the first seven turns. Then I can spend the last seven turns of the game grabbing all the points I can, and only getting my fourth dude when I manage to get my turn at Family Growth Without Room.
At any rate I am now moving up a division so I will get to test myself against stronger opponents in the next round. There were some good players in my division, but also some people who were fairly weak, and I don't really expect the top players to get much better in the higher division but I do expect that the minimum level of skill will rise dramatically.
Onward and upward!
My last game to finish was this one. In the middle of the game I thought of myself as being mid pack, likely to not lose but I didn't figure on winning. Instead I won 42-37-30-20, a big victory. So why did I guess my game situation so badly? With that big a margin of victory I feel like I should have been able to tell easily. I did have a great last turn wherein I grabbed 13 points but much of that was set up ahead of time and I should have accounted for it.
Looking back on the game I think I simply didn't add up the food situation properly. I had a massive investment in food infrastructure given that I had the Well (5 food), Fruit Tree (6 food), Spindle (1 food), Laybout (6 food), and Sheep Farmer/Fireplace (14 food). I had most of that set up fairly early on so I was able to focus on racking up a ton of points in the later stages of the game while my opponents regularly spent their latter turns scooping up loose food on the board or grabbing animals to cook them immediately.
Looking at all four games I played this round there is a trend. In three of the games I set up an excellent food engine and won the game. One of those games was the one I just described where my engine was just a bunch of food generating cards, but both of the other games involved fast renovating into the Manservant, which is a food plan all by itself once you get it out. In the fourth game I didn't get a food engine set up properly and I came second. I think this is where I am at in terms of Agricola now - I really love the strategy of building one room, growing once, and setting up a food engine in the first seven turns. Then I can spend the last seven turns of the game grabbing all the points I can, and only getting my fourth dude when I manage to get my turn at Family Growth Without Room.
At any rate I am now moving up a division so I will get to test myself against stronger opponents in the next round. There were some good players in my division, but also some people who were fairly weak, and I don't really expect the top players to get much better in the higher division but I do expect that the minimum level of skill will rise dramatically.
Onward and upward!
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