Monday, February 26, 2018

So little money

The DnD campaign I am involved in right now has the characters in a big city where we can finally spend all that sweet, sweet gold that we acquired while pillaging dungeons.  However, now that we are in that city trying to spend all of our gold a bunch of weirdness surrounding money has come to the fore.  For example, when we walked up to the town gate the guard became convinced that we were adventurers and that we thus had gobs of cash.  He demanded a 5 gold piece bribe to let us into the city.  To be clear, this is probably a week's wages for him.  I am trying to imagine a guard demanding a thousand dollar bribe just to let someone into a city in today's money and it is blowing my mind. 

It is especially funny to imagine that somehow he knows that we have lots of money since our characters don't dress the part.  One of us looks like a cleric in armour, another looks like a merchant, and the last two look like scruffy travellers, perhaps low end bodyguards.  However, in this world there are lots of people who professionally wander into caves and emerge with sacks gold under their arms, and for some reason the caves never run out of gold.  An economy of immensely rich murderhobos who never run out of caves to loot makes no sense whatsoever, but in that context anyone who can detect the outrageous wealth of said murderhobos is going to do very well indeed.

I do remember a passage in the old 2nd edition DnD manuals that talked about how adventurers who wander into a town with huge piles of gold are likely to upset the local economy and cause massive inflation, so this concept has been top of mind for DnD designers for decades.  Despite having all that time to come up with something else they still seem determined that every underground area should have enough money in it to completely warp whole cities, no matter how little sense that makes.

Naked Man decided at the start of this campaign to prevent such world warping by reducing the money we get by 90%.  We are going through a variety of published adventures and he has been giving us only 10% of the money that we are supposed to have acquired when the game listed a cash reward. This certainly has kept us from absurdities as I would have hired myself a substantial mercenary army and gone off to war if I had the amount of cash I am supposed to.  As it is I can't possibly afford to do anything meaningful in terms of mercenary hiring so I have to wait until we are higher level and the cash rewards get much larger.

One side effect of this cash shortage is the fact that the costs baked into being a Wizard class make me poor compared to my compatriots.  If you have 20,000 gold at level 6 then the 1,000 gold you spend on spellbooks isn't a huge problem.  If you have 2,000 gold though that 1,000 gold in unavoidable class costs is punitive!

I can't decide if a campaign this gold poor is better or worse than the standard version.  Both are ridiculous and money ceases to make any sense shortly into the game.  The amounts of cash we have on hand compared to the cost of living makes all normal expenses irrelevant and unless there is a return to the magic shops of old there is simply nothing to buy aside from land and titles.  In town we bought a couple of magic items, spending most of our cash, but I have no idea if the cost of magic items has been scaled down to match our lower income.  If it has, then there is no point in lowering income since we just buy the same stuff anyway, and if it hasn't then characters in normal campaigns must buy every item in the book by level 8.

The game itself is fun, and I like the players, but the money situation in DnD games is a joke.  The more I play it the more I like the abstract system in Heroes By Trade that both forgoes the bean counting and also ditches the idea that there is a professional class of 'adventurers'.  Characters going into dungeons and finding riches is a fine thing for fantasy gaming to be about, but a world built around lots of these folks living off of this as a normal thing makes the world feel absurd, and more importantly it really puts a damper on immersion.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Delve that dungeon

Last night I played the board game Above and Below for the first time.  At first glance the theme and mechanics looked perfect for me, as it is a worker placement game where you are playing a group of villagers who are trying to build a town while also exploring a dungeon beneath the town.  There are simple and predictable options like constructing buildings and recruiting new villagers and more random and complex options like going into the dungeon to see what you can find.

The art of the game is pretty and the icons are well made.  It is easy to figure out what cards do once you know the basics, so the production value is good.  Going into the dungeon involves randomly picking an encounter from over 100 choices, and then reading out the encounter just like a dungeon master might do in a DnD type game.  The flavour and variety of the encounters is good, so if you like that sort of thing you will enjoy the game.

Above and Below has some real problems though.  The first thing that struck me was how few women there were in the game.  Possibly there are lots of women in all the encounters I didn't run into, but it sure seemed like somebody forgot that the world has women in it when writing the game.  Poor form, that, to say the least, and sad because it is so bloody common in fantasy games of the past.

The second thing is that the dungeon delving part of the game is really random and that can be frustrating.  Sometimes people went into the dungeon and came out with great hauls, and sometimes they got absolutely screwed.  In a game that otherwise is about careful planning and worker placement it feels really strange to have this one section be so random.  I could easily understand if failing to win in the dungeon encounter was disastrous because then there is an element of risk management.  Send a powerful group into the dungeon, get good stuff, or split them into two weaker groups and hope you roll well - that is a choice.  But one time I went into the dungeon, passed the challenge, and got punished with a net loss anyway!

I suspect that for many people this would be a plus.  You read the silly encounters, make choices, roll your dice, and stuff happens.  Definitely for kids this is a fine game, and people who like Betrayal on the House on the Hill or games like that will probably enjoy it.  I just don't like that part of the game much, and honestly I don't know that it mixes well with the worker placement strategy portion of the game.  It feels like a mix of genres that doesn't quite work for me.

The final issue I had with the game is that the balance is way off.  I built a powerful engine that recruited all kinds of mighty heroes that went into the dungeon to fight.  I was easily able to overcome even the most powerful foes, and yet that didn't matter - the winner was someone who built an orchard and then sat there picking apples all game.  It turns out that apples are worth a lot more points than crushing monsters.  She didn't even enjoy the win because other people's turns were exciting adventures with at least some choice involved, while her turns were "I pick my apples.  Done."  Her strategy was powerful, but boring.  I don't much like games where the best strategy is really boring to play.

Also the designer obviously didn't think hard enough about how the cards work.  For example, you can recruit new villagers to do stuff for you but you need a bed for each one.  I bought a building with two beds and two new villagers to fill them by the end of turn 3, which is the fastest you could possibly do it.  The game is 7 turns long, so I got 4 turns of 2 actions each from my new people.  Gross benefit:  8 actions.  However, it took me 3 actions to set this up, and cost me 15 gold.  Net benefit:  5 actions, at the cost of 15 gold.  That is *terrible*.  I would have been ecstatic to be able to get 3 gold for an action, and here I was making that trade in reverse. 

The cards in the game that set up an engine are just trash.  What you want to do is just buy points.  I should have simply bought the expensive building that the winner eventually purchased to solidify her game and even though it wasn't that good for me I would have done much better had I done that instead.  I am completely okay with cards being situational and rarely used but I can't see any reason to buy the engine type cards ever, and that is a sad state.

The funny thing was that my strategy had the two experienced players at the table terrified.  They seemed convinced that I had so many villagers and so much stuff going on that I must be winning.  Problem was, I had bought a powerful engine, not points.  My cards *looked* exciting but didn't actually do anything, in fact they were terrible.

Above and Below is pretty, and graphically speaking well designed.  Unfortunately the game has massive balance problems, more randomness than I want, and the ideal strategy ignores most of the game and just buys points as fast as possible.  Not a game I will be returning to, I think, even though there is definitely a market for it.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Shhhh

Hearthstone has a troubled history with silence effects.  In the game silence removes all buffs, debuffs, and abilities of any kind, reducing the minion it targets to its base stats.  This is a difficult mechanic to balance correctly because it varies so wildly in power.  Right now silence effects are being run in a huge number of decks because there are a variety of really powerful cards that are absolutely ruined by silence.  While any kind of play needs some sort of counterplay I feel at the moment that silence effects are too good and are making the game worse.

One of the really fun things in Hearthstone is to try to make enormous minions with crazy abilities.  People really like trying to pull off their crazy thing but when they do it is regularly met with a silence effect that ends all the fun.  As an example, consider Carnivorous Cube:


This card is hilarious thematically, and really powerful.  You can bash your minion into an enemy, leaving it at 1 health, then eat it with the cube.  When the two new copies pop out, they are at full health!  That is a huge swing.  The problem is that when you try to do this the fun police show up and silence your cube, preventing the minion you killed from being spawned.  This massive loss of tempo is often game losing, so nobody uses the cube.

Except warlocks.  They use the cube.  Do you know why?
Warlocks use the cube in a deck called CubeLock, and the reason they do is because they can kill their own minions efficiently.  Playing the cube and then immediately killing it without giving the opponent a chance to silence it is a key part of this deck.  This is a ridiculous statement of the way the game works at the moment; a class can have a format defining minion that is only good because they can kill it *themselves* better than any other class can.

Two years ago we had a similar situation going on.  People were running Ironbeak Owl in way too many decks because it was a cheap 2/1 minion for 2 mana that silenced an enemy minion.  Blizzard didn't like how prevalent it was and how much it suppressed the fun and wacky stuff people wanted to do.  They nerfed Ironbeak Owl to cost 3 mana instead, and it hasn't been seen since.  At the time it was clear what the natural successor to Ironbeak Owl was - Spellbreaker.


Spellbreaker is 1 more mana for +2/+2 in stats, and is the new standard for silencing things.  In fact we see two copies of Spellbreaker in all kinds of decks, ready to be the fun police for anyone trying anything too entertaining.  Spellbreaker needs a nerf.  Not because it is especially overpowered, but because the fact that it gets run a lot just eliminates all kinds of fun and interesting stuff from the metagame.  You can't play a Lynessa Sunsorrow deck in any environment where there is a lot of silence, and I want Lynessa Sunsorrow to be good, dammit!

Lynessa isn't overpowered.  If you let people run all kinds of buff spells then she becomes a really powerful but vulnerable finisher.  She can still be killed by all kinds of single target removal, but at least that means people are running single target removal to stop big threats like her.  When she just gets demolished as a side effect of people running Spellbreaker for other reasons entirely that is a sad state of affairs.

Hearthstone is more fun when people get to try their big exciting things and get paid off.  If you want to avoid getting demolished by gigantic scary stuff then run cards like Assassinate or Deadly Shot.  I don't mind the silence cards that belong to classes like Hex, Polymorph, and Silence - at least those are deliberate choices that only some decks can use.  What I don't like is masses of silence effects out there raining on the parades of people wanting to play minions that aren't just big piles of stats.

I say this even though right now I am running Spell Hunter and silence effects are pretty much worthless against me.  Hell, I want every opponent to be running as much of it as possible so I can laugh at them.  But I do want a metagame where I can run Carnivorous Cube or Lynessa and have them be effective without me having to kill my own stuff right away.  I think Blizzard is going to come to the same conclusion and nerf Spellbreaker, most likely by increasing its mana cost to 5.  Good riddance.

(Yeah, yeah, aggro decks need Spellbreaker to cope with turn 6 Void Lord.  The problem in that scenario is Void Lord, so that may need to get addressed on its own.)

Monday, February 12, 2018

Holding pattern

Recently Hearthstone introduced some changes to how their ranked play system works.  Currently the way it is set up is players start at rank 25 and can work their way up to rank 1.  After rank 1 they become legend, which basically is a separate system that ranks everyone by assigning them a place in the group - for example, only one person can be legend 1, and there are something like 10,000 total legend players.

You rank up by winning games.  Each win gets you a star, and for most ranks you need 5 stars to advance.  You get a bonus star if you win 3 or more games in a row.  You lose a star each time you lose, but you can't actually lose stars until you get to rank 19, and you can't go below rank 20, 15, 10, or 5 by losing.  Once you get there it is a floor.  At the end of the month everyone gets their rank taken away and they drop a *ton* of ranks, leaving players who were in legend suddenly fighting people at rank 13 again.

The changes seem largely designed to solve the problem of new players getting mauled by good players over and over again.  My usual experience each month was getting to rank 15, then getting reset back to rank 22 or so.  I would log in and half of my games were against players who had mostly complete decks like mine, and the other half were against people who clearly had no collection and were using terrible basic cards.  I smashed those people and it wasn't very interesting. 

There are two reasons for this issue.  Firstly there is a problem with there not being enough room at the entry level.  It only took a few wins to get from rank 25 to rank 20, and tons of people like me are sitting at rank 20.  This meant that there was basically no safe place for the newbies to battle each other.  The other silly thing is that people like me would get set back so far each month that there was no realistic way for me to *not* be battling the noobs.  Every time the month ticked over I would lose the great majority of my progress and the only way back to where I was involved mashing new players for a long time.

The new system actually addresses both of these concerns pretty reasonably.  Firstly they added a lot more room to the early ranks so new players would spend more time gaining their first few levels.  This means they will take longer to start off, but that longer start will be played against other people with hardly any cards or experience, which is great.  The ideal is that people will slowly fight harder opponents using better cards and more refined decks and they can see which cards and decks they like before buying in.  Instead of getting pounded by perfect decks found on the internet right away they have more time seeing their competition ramp up.

The other good change is that people lose exactly 4 ranks at the end of a month.  Instead of all the pro players grinding out wins against much weaker players for days people will spend a lot more time fighting even matches.  All the pros will get set back from legend to rank 4 at month's end, so if you want to avoid them just get yourself to rank 5 each month and then get set back to rank 9.  You don't have nearly as far to grind to get to your happy place and you will more consistently fight against appropriate opponents.  Previously it was silly to play much at the start of a month because the ladder was full of strong players beating people up for stars, climbing to their equilibrium point.  That mechanic isn't removed entirely but it is drastically lowered, and that is a big plus.

It is also now much clearer how much you have to play to reach an equilibrium each month.  In any given game the winner has a roughly 25% chance to have won their 2 previous games, which would earn them an extra star.  Also there is a approximately 4% chance that the loser is located on a threshold rank so they can't actually lose a star if they lose.  This means each game gains the players involved about 29% of a star.  To gain 4 ranks of 5 stars each you need 20 stars, so you need to play 138 games of Hearthstone to get your 4 ranks.  If each game takes 10 minutes you need to commit to 23 hours of competitive Hearthstone a month to maintain your rank.  If you want to rank up even more, play more!  (Or, you know, play better.  Or play a faster deck.)

One certain effect of this change is that there will be more legend rank players, and more people in all the higher ranks in general.  The time commitment required to maintain any given rank is less, so all things being equal we expect to see the higher ranks swell.  While this will reduce the prestige of any given rank I think it is good for the game.  Those masses of high ranked players will be drained out of the beginner levels and leave a lot more room for new players to fight even fights.

Most collectible games have huge issues with bringing in new players.  The companies running games like Magic or Hearthstone really need to find the right equilibrium where new players see the powerful cards and want to buy them but also can actually find some games against other people who don't have many cards and get some wins in.  You don't want people to just get crushed constantly because that encourages them to quit, not buy in, but you do want them to run into cool stuff that they can aspire to own someday in order to sell packs.

For a long time Hearthstone has leaned way too hard towards the side of showing people the powerful cards they could have by crushing them over and over.  I think this new design will shift the ladder experience towards a much gentler introduction and the game will be the better for it.  People will have a lot more time fighting with their basic cards and having some kind of a chance, and a much gentler slope up the hill of competitive play.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Gods like buildings

Recently the board game Santorini came into my household and I wanted to write about it because I think it is an excellent game for parents to acquire to help bridge the gap between complicated strategy games and trivial children's games.


The board is a 5x5 grid with each player having 2 workers to move about.  Every turn you move a worker and then that worker builds 1 unit of a building next to themselves.  The buildings have a maximum height of 4 units, and when the little blue top cap is put on you can't move onto it anymore.  You win by moving onto a building of height 3, and since you can only move up 1 level at a time there is a lot of strategy in terms of blocking opponent's plays and working on your own plans.

The game is actually pretty great for little kids who want to make up their own rules and just play with the pieces.  The buildings can be fun to build and even if a little kid hardly knows how to win they can easily enjoy themselves just using the bits.

A slightly older kid will be able to play the game properly and have fun with it even if they aren't much good at it.  The rules are incredibly simple but the possible ways the game can play out are extremely varied.  It is like chess or go in terms of possible number of plays but dead simple to get started on.

The game as described so far would seem to be solved, or at least repetitive, but there is a wrinkle.  It can be played just as is for small children but better players get a God card to change their abilities.  Some Gods can move twice in a turn, some can destroy enemy workers if they move a particular way, yet others have new win conditions.  There are dozens of Gods available and each one drastically changes the strategy so the game has an enormous number of different configurations. 

Advanced players will find all kinds of interesting challenges depending on which God cards are in play, and if any particular card emerges as being obviously too powerful there is a way to play that fixes it:  Player 1 picks two God cards and Player 2 decides which player gets which one.  This strikes me as a good competitive structure to use and certainly keeps a single unbalanced card from wrecking the game.

The game can be played with 2, 3, or 4 players and my limited experience suggests that the 2 and 4 player variants are the best ones.  4 players play on 2 teams of 2 players each, which works, but the 3 player version did not seem ideal to me.  It was a lot of people forcing other people to defend against the 3rd player's win condition and then kingmaking occurred.  I think in a well played 3 player match it would nearly always be decided by kingmaking and that sucks.  For non competitive players or small children this probably isn't an issue, but for good players I think the 3 player version is bad.

Santorini does a bunch of things well.  It is a good toy for small kids, a good introductory game for medium ones, and seems to have deep strategic potential for adults.  It is dead simple to explain but optimal strategies are hard to calculate, and that combination makes for a great game.

I don't know that I would play a lot of Santorini competitively but for a hybrid game that can be good for all ages and skill levels Santorini is top notch.