I played Gloomhaven for the first time last night. This game is kind of absurd - any board game that clocks in at 2500 pieces obviously is going for it, and Gloomhaven doesn't hold back. It is a Legacy game where you mark up the board and pieces as you play, which honestly makes the game so much better. Tracking things without worrying about mucking up the game is so easy!
The theme of the game is right up my alley too. Adventurers wander into dungeons and have a tough tactical battle against a variety of monsters. I like that we are playing what feels like a dungeon crawl DnD game but it doesn't require a GM. Also because it isn't actually roleplaying I can feel free to just twink out as hard as possible.
Our first run through was rough. Not a surprise there, because a game with 2500 pieces also has a truckload of rules. Thankfully the group was prepared and composed entirely of gamers that are quick to master complex rulesets so it was smooth, though not exactly swift.
The idea behind the game is that it is tight on time. You start off with a hand of cards that represent combat moves and you must play 2 per turn. When you run out of cards you remove one from the game and reload with the rest. When you only have 1 card left in your deck, you are out of the scenario. The decisions to make with regards to managing your deck get complicated quick because you can toss cards out of the game for other reasons, like activating a really powerful move or preventing a nasty hit. There is no stopping - every round you must play 2 cards and this pushes you inevitably closer to the point where you run out of cards and lose - so you must keep pushing on recklessly each round. Standing around searching rooms or resting is not an option.
Our first run looked like it was going well at the beginning but when we opened the door to the final room things went disastrously. I was the tank and was full on health with a total pool of 12. The monsters took a turn and they knocked me down to 1 health and even then I had to pitch a card to prevent the killing blow. I had no reasonable way to heal up so I just burned all of my remaining cards for powerful attacks, killed one enemy, wounded another two, and then was shot full of arrows and died.
Through a series of lucky rolls my companions managed to defeat the remaining monsters, but the final blow was dealt on the last turn of the game before the last player was about to run out of cards and lose. It was *tight*.
That makes it seem like the game is difficult and dicey, hard to win. I don't think that is actually the case. We were wasteful at the beginning of the scenario, burning many of our best cards for power moves in the early going. That led to disaster at the end when we realized we had no time for tactics or positioning because we were all about to die from losing our decks. (Well, *I* wasn't about to die, I had lots of deck left, but my companions were all tapped out so me having a deck left wasn't much good to anyone.) If we had played better at the beginning and just used a few less effects that toss away cards we would have had an extra four rounds at the end and that would have made the final battle no problem. We played well for first timers, but practice and knowledge of each other's abilities really matters.
One strange thing about the gameplay is that treasure falls out of monsters as they die and you have to grab it as you go. When the final player dies or the final monster dies the scenario ends and any treasure still on the ground vanishes. This creates some really weird pressure where players try to go out of their way to scoop up treasure with the limited actions they have. If we had finished the game more efficiently and had a couple turns we could have left one dork alive and vacuumed up all the treasure while healing through its attacks. Instead we watched as the game ended and half the loot still sat there on the floor.
I was concerned about this treasure system when I first looked at it but it was fun. There are a huge number of competing priorities in Gloomhaven and figuring out how important each one is ends up being most of the game. How many cards do you need? How many turns do you have? Can you grab that treasure or not? Since you gain XP through card usage, do you use cards for XP or for maximum effectiveness? And in addition to this you have to manage all the normal fantasy battle considerations like positioning, hit points, healing, debuffs, line of sight, etc.
I don't know what I will think of the game after I have played it a lot. I can say though I really enjoyed it from the outset and I am looking forward to playing it many more times as our characters grow stronger and try new things. I want to figure out how all the cool new stuff works and see all the scenarios and buy all the items!
I don't know that Gloomhaven is a 'balanced' game. There were certainly some things in the game that made me cock an eyebrow and wonder aloud if anyone making the game had access to a calculator. But coop games don't have to be perfectly balanced, and since we nearly lost I can certainly say that our ability to min/max is going to be challenged.
If you are a casual gamer who likes to dabble, don't even look at Gloomhaven. It is a monster of a game in terms of cost, storage, rules, and committment. However, if you are a hardcore gamer who wants to devote 100 hours to a single board game and you like the dungeon crawl thing, Gloomhaven seems like an absolute blast so far.
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Toss those books
Sometimes you have to give up on your dreams. This is especially true when the dreams involve lots of bookkeeping for little gain.
For the past few weeks I have been obsessing over a detail of mechanics in Heroes By Trade. The way the game used to work is each character had a Vigour score that described how powerful their abilities would be. If you tried to use an ability of higher rank than your Vigour, you would take damage equal to the difference. If you have a Vigour of 5 and use an ability of Rank 7, you take 2 damage.
This system is balanced. It even feels right - characters can desperately strive to do something challenging but it hurts to push beyond your limits.
The trouble is that it ends up being a lot of bookkeeping. People were constantly using abilities and forgetting to take 1 or 2 damage when doing so. When they used a really high rank ability they tended to remember, but it was a regular problem. Not only was it an issue that combats weren't going the way they should, but also players hated it. Some people just didn't like the idea of taking damage at all, but everyone hated the constant recording of tiny amounts of damage to do normal things.
It needed to change. This system would be fine in a computer game where the bookkeeping was taken care of automatically but in a tabletop game it is important to keep things moving.
My new design is to have Vigour be a hard cap on what abilities you can use. If your Vigour is 5 then you can only use abilities of Rank 5 or less. Simple. However, I really liked the idea of people being able to occasionally do something spectacular so I added something else in to replace the old system called Surges.
The mechanic behind this is simple: Once an encounter you can Surge, which adds your Constitution to your Vigour. Generally this means that on the turn you choose to do this you can do something spectacular, either using an advanced version of an ability you normally use, or using an ability you generally cannot access.
This still means you have to remember if you have used your Surge or not. It reduces bookkeeping a little, but does not eliminate it entirely. However, I think that it is far less likely to be forgotten, which is a plus, and it also feels better. Instead of constantly recording the 1 or 2 damage you take you just have to remember that you used your Surge, or didn't.
It is funny how many knock on effects this sort of change creates. It makes Constitution slightly more powerful, which is actually something I think is good. Constitution was extremely weak in combat up to this point, so a buff is a positive. It also means that character power is reduced because of lesser flexibility, and this sort of power reduction is quite challenging to quantify. The other tricky thing is that ability ranks started at 5 and went up to 13, but starting character Vigour could be as low as 2. I don't want people to have no abilities they can use at all, so I am going to need to lower the ranks of all abilities by 2 to make sure that nearly everyone has some cool stuff to do, but doing that inflates character power overall....
It is a tricky thing, sorting out all these changes and figuring out what tweaking one thing will do to a huge system. I think though that my current change package is a real positive as it should keep character choices just as varied but reduce the complexity of implementing those choices. That is a big thing for me - make sure you have to think a lot about what is best, but once you choose it should be easy to resolve. Kind of the opposite of how I feel when playing DnD a lot of the time, where I spend too much time keeping track of all my shit but when I have to make a choice the answer is always Fireball.
I mean, it isn't *always* Fireball. Sometimes our characters talk to people too, rather than just murdering them.
But when murder is afoot, Fireball is always the choice, and then we spend a long time rolling dice and adding up damage, and that is not the system I want.
For the past few weeks I have been obsessing over a detail of mechanics in Heroes By Trade. The way the game used to work is each character had a Vigour score that described how powerful their abilities would be. If you tried to use an ability of higher rank than your Vigour, you would take damage equal to the difference. If you have a Vigour of 5 and use an ability of Rank 7, you take 2 damage.
This system is balanced. It even feels right - characters can desperately strive to do something challenging but it hurts to push beyond your limits.
The trouble is that it ends up being a lot of bookkeeping. People were constantly using abilities and forgetting to take 1 or 2 damage when doing so. When they used a really high rank ability they tended to remember, but it was a regular problem. Not only was it an issue that combats weren't going the way they should, but also players hated it. Some people just didn't like the idea of taking damage at all, but everyone hated the constant recording of tiny amounts of damage to do normal things.
It needed to change. This system would be fine in a computer game where the bookkeeping was taken care of automatically but in a tabletop game it is important to keep things moving.
My new design is to have Vigour be a hard cap on what abilities you can use. If your Vigour is 5 then you can only use abilities of Rank 5 or less. Simple. However, I really liked the idea of people being able to occasionally do something spectacular so I added something else in to replace the old system called Surges.
The mechanic behind this is simple: Once an encounter you can Surge, which adds your Constitution to your Vigour. Generally this means that on the turn you choose to do this you can do something spectacular, either using an advanced version of an ability you normally use, or using an ability you generally cannot access.
This still means you have to remember if you have used your Surge or not. It reduces bookkeeping a little, but does not eliminate it entirely. However, I think that it is far less likely to be forgotten, which is a plus, and it also feels better. Instead of constantly recording the 1 or 2 damage you take you just have to remember that you used your Surge, or didn't.
It is funny how many knock on effects this sort of change creates. It makes Constitution slightly more powerful, which is actually something I think is good. Constitution was extremely weak in combat up to this point, so a buff is a positive. It also means that character power is reduced because of lesser flexibility, and this sort of power reduction is quite challenging to quantify. The other tricky thing is that ability ranks started at 5 and went up to 13, but starting character Vigour could be as low as 2. I don't want people to have no abilities they can use at all, so I am going to need to lower the ranks of all abilities by 2 to make sure that nearly everyone has some cool stuff to do, but doing that inflates character power overall....
It is a tricky thing, sorting out all these changes and figuring out what tweaking one thing will do to a huge system. I think though that my current change package is a real positive as it should keep character choices just as varied but reduce the complexity of implementing those choices. That is a big thing for me - make sure you have to think a lot about what is best, but once you choose it should be easy to resolve. Kind of the opposite of how I feel when playing DnD a lot of the time, where I spend too much time keeping track of all my shit but when I have to make a choice the answer is always Fireball.
I mean, it isn't *always* Fireball. Sometimes our characters talk to people too, rather than just murdering them.
But when murder is afoot, Fireball is always the choice, and then we spend a long time rolling dice and adding up damage, and that is not the system I want.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
I am legend
Yesterday I made Legend rank in Hearthstone for the first time. I talk about the game a lot but mostly I spent my time drafting Arena decks instead of playing ranked constructed games. One of the reasons that I never much bothered with playing ranked games on the ladder is that I always assumed it would take an incredible amount of time to get to Legend rank. Hearthstone has some real randomness to it and there are plenty of good players out there so I figured I couldn't realistically expect to have a win rate higher than 55% or so, and at that rate it takes 300 games to get from Rank 6 to Legend - that is a *lot* of games!
It turns out I underestimated myself.
Or maybe I overestimated the skill of other people on the ladder? Hard to say.
In any case this month so far I have played 64 games on ladder. If I was only able to maintain a win rate of 55%, as I had assumed, I would only have advanced a fifth of the way. However, I actually went 47-17 for a win rate of 73%. Now that I look at it that seems completely nuts. Are there really enough decisions in games that I can beat people at to maintain that kind of win rate? Apparently yes, even though I constantly make mistakes and throw games away with foolish choices. Other people must be absolutely rubbish at Hearthstone!
My perceptions of the game do not generally reflect reality I have found. For example, one day I played for a few hours and felt like I was really getting nowhere. I was losing more than felt right and I thought perhaps I should just give up on my deck and try something new. Then I checked my status... and realized I had advanced from rank 3 to rank 1, with a net gain of 9 wins. I had gone 15-6, a 71% win rate, and made it most of the way to Legend, and yet it still felt like I was playing badly and losing too much.
Clearly my emotional brain expects to win every game. Wins come as a thing I expect, just the status quo, but every loss is etched in there and I can't look away. I remember that my opponent Barnes/Y'shaarjed me on turn 3 and then I died, and I remember playing my Mistress of Mixtures on turn 1, delaying my Mountain Giant by a turn, and then losing the game based on that tempo loss. In the first case I simply got blown out by luck, and in the second case I lost because of a chain of events that most players would never have linked together. But I see the link, and I know that I shouldn't have done the thing I did. I lost because of garbage play, not RNG.
Now I suppose I need to start grinding away at Legend rank players and see how I stack up against them. I know I can beat them more than 50% because I played against lots of them when I was at rank 1 trying to get that final victory to tip me over into Legend. I don't expect I can maintain a 73% win rate in Legend, but I am certainly going to give it a try.
For reference, here is the deck I am running. It is Cubelock teched against aggro. I dropped out some of the slower cards that are great in the warlock mirror match and added in Tar Creepers and it makes a huge difference in beating aggressive decks like Secret Mage, Spell Hunter, and Aggro Paladin, and interestingly it actually works well against Priest too because it is a minion that can kill a Northshire Cleric without allowing a heal. (Plus having a cheap taunt to avoid OTK combos is good.)
This is the core of Cubelock, which pretty much everyone uses:
2 Mortal Coil
2 Dark Pact
2 Mistress of Mixtures
2 Kobold Librarian
2 Defile
2 Hellfire
2 Amethyst Spellstone
2 Possessed Lackey
2 Doomguard
2 Carnivorous Cube
1 Skull of the Man'ari
2 Void Lord
1 Bloodreaver Gul'Dan
The rest is mostly tech cards, tailored to your tastes. Some people go full combo with 2 Faceless, Prince Taldaram, Spiritsinger Umbra, and 2 Mountain Giant. That sure does blow people up sometimes, but it gets absolutely rolled by aggro. My list is a bit more flexible, using N'Zoth to win late game wars, Tar Creeper to stall aggro, and a grab bag of midrange tech cards. I am quite pleased with the list right now, but these choices absolutely are based on the metagame I faced, and shift based on what you see on the ladder.
2 Tar Creeper
1 Spellbreaker
1 Faceless Manipulator
1 Mountain Giant
1 N'Zoth
It turns out I underestimated myself.
Or maybe I overestimated the skill of other people on the ladder? Hard to say.
In any case this month so far I have played 64 games on ladder. If I was only able to maintain a win rate of 55%, as I had assumed, I would only have advanced a fifth of the way. However, I actually went 47-17 for a win rate of 73%. Now that I look at it that seems completely nuts. Are there really enough decisions in games that I can beat people at to maintain that kind of win rate? Apparently yes, even though I constantly make mistakes and throw games away with foolish choices. Other people must be absolutely rubbish at Hearthstone!
My perceptions of the game do not generally reflect reality I have found. For example, one day I played for a few hours and felt like I was really getting nowhere. I was losing more than felt right and I thought perhaps I should just give up on my deck and try something new. Then I checked my status... and realized I had advanced from rank 3 to rank 1, with a net gain of 9 wins. I had gone 15-6, a 71% win rate, and made it most of the way to Legend, and yet it still felt like I was playing badly and losing too much.
Clearly my emotional brain expects to win every game. Wins come as a thing I expect, just the status quo, but every loss is etched in there and I can't look away. I remember that my opponent Barnes/Y'shaarjed me on turn 3 and then I died, and I remember playing my Mistress of Mixtures on turn 1, delaying my Mountain Giant by a turn, and then losing the game based on that tempo loss. In the first case I simply got blown out by luck, and in the second case I lost because of a chain of events that most players would never have linked together. But I see the link, and I know that I shouldn't have done the thing I did. I lost because of garbage play, not RNG.
Now I suppose I need to start grinding away at Legend rank players and see how I stack up against them. I know I can beat them more than 50% because I played against lots of them when I was at rank 1 trying to get that final victory to tip me over into Legend. I don't expect I can maintain a 73% win rate in Legend, but I am certainly going to give it a try.
For reference, here is the deck I am running. It is Cubelock teched against aggro. I dropped out some of the slower cards that are great in the warlock mirror match and added in Tar Creepers and it makes a huge difference in beating aggressive decks like Secret Mage, Spell Hunter, and Aggro Paladin, and interestingly it actually works well against Priest too because it is a minion that can kill a Northshire Cleric without allowing a heal. (Plus having a cheap taunt to avoid OTK combos is good.)
This is the core of Cubelock, which pretty much everyone uses:
2 Mortal Coil
2 Dark Pact
2 Mistress of Mixtures
2 Kobold Librarian
2 Defile
2 Hellfire
2 Amethyst Spellstone
2 Possessed Lackey
2 Doomguard
2 Carnivorous Cube
1 Skull of the Man'ari
2 Void Lord
1 Bloodreaver Gul'Dan
The rest is mostly tech cards, tailored to your tastes. Some people go full combo with 2 Faceless, Prince Taldaram, Spiritsinger Umbra, and 2 Mountain Giant. That sure does blow people up sometimes, but it gets absolutely rolled by aggro. My list is a bit more flexible, using N'Zoth to win late game wars, Tar Creeper to stall aggro, and a grab bag of midrange tech cards. I am quite pleased with the list right now, but these choices absolutely are based on the metagame I faced, and shift based on what you see on the ladder.
2 Tar Creeper
1 Spellbreaker
1 Faceless Manipulator
1 Mountain Giant
1 N'Zoth
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Copycat
A few new cards from the latest Hearthstone expansion have come out, and one in particular really caught my attention: Azalina Soulthief.
Whether or not the card is good I will definitely say it is cool.
But is it good?
I think the answer is that it can be, but only in really narrow circumstances.
The stats on it are so low that it can only be useful if it is generating a ton of cards for you. That is only going to happen if you empty your hand and then get a bunch of cards from your opponent, who presumably is hoarding cards. So the only possible use is in a deck that wants to empty its hand and then use whatever the opponent has against them.
The trouble is that the cards you get are going to be completely worthless much of the time. If your opponent is running a combo deck you rate to get some of their combo but not all of it, and since you won't have the cards to complete the combo this will be mostly garbage. If you get cards that have a lot of synergy with their deck those cards with also be extra weak because you lack that synergy. If the metagame is full of high synergy or combo decks Azalina is just going to be trash.
However, if the metagame is full of decks that are just running a bunch of good cards and lean towards midrange or control strategies then Azalina could be really good. You would want to play it in a deck that runs cheap cards, aims for aggression, but can close out the game with a variety of tools. Some classes work well in this way, and others do not.
For example, Paladin aggro decks close out the game with minion attacks. If you get a bunch of defensive minions, board clears, and healing from your opponent's cards it will do you little good. However, if you are playing Hunter then you have a hero power that will slowly end the game for you and you don't have to necessarily push minion damage so stalling the game out may work out just fine.
Another consideration is that this is a legendary, so if your deck relies on drawing it then you are in a bad way. You can't build an aggressive deck around the assumption that you will always draw the single card you need to finish opponents off, because you either build it to run out of stuff on turn seven in which case you are dead if you don't draw Azalina, or you build it to have lots of stuff to do after turn seven, in which case Azalina is bad. The way to solve this is to find another card that fills a similar niche and gives your otherwise aggressive deck a way to find a lot of value in the endgame. Again hunter seems like the ideal solution because you can use DK Rexxar, a card that has dramatically different mechanics but fills the same role.
In most classes Azalina simply isn't any good. It will be used for fun meme decks but won't make a dent in serious play. In an aggressive Hunter deck though I think it has real potential as the second refill / value card after DK Rexxar.
Even then I think it is only good in an environment with lots of midrange and controlly decks. It is bad vs. combo, bad vs. aggro, and bad vs. intense synergy.
There exists a metagame where Azalina is good. I would bet against it, but I wouldn't bet the farm because there are definitely ways for it to shine, even if the odds are against.
But is it good?
I think the answer is that it can be, but only in really narrow circumstances.
The stats on it are so low that it can only be useful if it is generating a ton of cards for you. That is only going to happen if you empty your hand and then get a bunch of cards from your opponent, who presumably is hoarding cards. So the only possible use is in a deck that wants to empty its hand and then use whatever the opponent has against them.
The trouble is that the cards you get are going to be completely worthless much of the time. If your opponent is running a combo deck you rate to get some of their combo but not all of it, and since you won't have the cards to complete the combo this will be mostly garbage. If you get cards that have a lot of synergy with their deck those cards with also be extra weak because you lack that synergy. If the metagame is full of high synergy or combo decks Azalina is just going to be trash.
However, if the metagame is full of decks that are just running a bunch of good cards and lean towards midrange or control strategies then Azalina could be really good. You would want to play it in a deck that runs cheap cards, aims for aggression, but can close out the game with a variety of tools. Some classes work well in this way, and others do not.
For example, Paladin aggro decks close out the game with minion attacks. If you get a bunch of defensive minions, board clears, and healing from your opponent's cards it will do you little good. However, if you are playing Hunter then you have a hero power that will slowly end the game for you and you don't have to necessarily push minion damage so stalling the game out may work out just fine.
Another consideration is that this is a legendary, so if your deck relies on drawing it then you are in a bad way. You can't build an aggressive deck around the assumption that you will always draw the single card you need to finish opponents off, because you either build it to run out of stuff on turn seven in which case you are dead if you don't draw Azalina, or you build it to have lots of stuff to do after turn seven, in which case Azalina is bad. The way to solve this is to find another card that fills a similar niche and gives your otherwise aggressive deck a way to find a lot of value in the endgame. Again hunter seems like the ideal solution because you can use DK Rexxar, a card that has dramatically different mechanics but fills the same role.
In most classes Azalina simply isn't any good. It will be used for fun meme decks but won't make a dent in serious play. In an aggressive Hunter deck though I think it has real potential as the second refill / value card after DK Rexxar.
Even then I think it is only good in an environment with lots of midrange and controlly decks. It is bad vs. combo, bad vs. aggro, and bad vs. intense synergy.
There exists a metagame where Azalina is good. I would bet against it, but I wouldn't bet the farm because there are definitely ways for it to shine, even if the odds are against.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
One less axis of incompetence
Hearthstone is doing something really neat with its draft format called Arena. In Arena right now the player is shown a set of 3 cards, chooses 1, and then does that 29 more times to make a 30 card deck. The sets of 3 are all of the same rarity - common, rare, epic, and legendary. That sameness of rarity does basically nothing though because rarity in Hearthstone has little effect on card quality or type.
When choosing cards you have to account for two things - first, how good is the card in a vacuum, and second, how good is the card in the deck that you have. Bonemare is really powerful, but since it costs 8 mana you simply can't load up with 6 of them because you will lack early plays.
Hearthstone just announced an intriguing change to the system. Instead of grouping card picks by rarity they are grouping them by power level. Blizzard is going to figure out how good cards are in Arena and then offer 3 cards that are all similarly powerful. You will still have to figure out how well the card matches your deck, but you will not have to worry about raw power.
Right at the outset this will clearly reduce the skill in deckbuilding substantially. You will still have to manage your mana curve and make sure your deck has the cards it needs but people are not going to pass up high powered cards by accident anymore. In particular someone who only dabbles in Arena will have a massive advantage because they are likely to be aware that they need a good curve and should have some specific bases covered like AOE, big removal, etc but they will often not be sure which specific cards are of the most use in Arena. The system will now take care of that for them.
I would expect to see win rates for the top players to go down when this system arrives. Obviously poor players can still find lots of ways to lose games but one axis of incompetence will be removed and that will matter a great deal.
That isn't a criticism. Just a fact. I don't mind the system being changed this way, and I expect the rubes will like it a lot.
A couple of obvious notes need to be made. Clearly in a system where card quality varies a lot from card to card an average pick will be much better than an average card. If all cards are rated from 1-100 then your average pick will be ~70 or something like that because you get the best of 3. However, in the new system cards will all be the same tier so Blizzard will need to substantially reduce the occurrence rate of really trash tier cards or we will regularly be picking between cards that are nearly worthless. They say they are going to do this but no numbers have been supplied so we can't yet know if overall deck quality is going up or down.
Blizzard also hasn't said if they are going to control for overall deck quality. Is it going to be possible to be offered 30 sets of absolutely awesome cards, or 30 sets of trash? If not, how tight is the system going to be? They could easily make it so that every player gets offered a specific number of picks in each tier of cards to make sure that each deck has similar potential, like so if all cards are ranked 1 to 100:
90+ 2 picks
80+ 4 picks
70+ 5 picks
60+ 6 picks
50+ 5 picks
40+ 3 picks
30+ 2 picks
20+ 1 pick
10+ 1 pick
0+ 1 pick
This arrangement gives you a deck that is similarly powerful to current ones, but makes sure that every deck gets a few bombs and a few duds. There will still be substantial variance in deck effectiveness because of mana curves and specific utility but it will cut the variance in the system hugely from the current situation.
One other interesting question is how they will handle the dramatic differences in class power. If a warrior has few powerful cards then potentially they just get bad decks - this is the current system. However, in the system I outlined above it would simply give warriors lots of neutral bombs to make up for the lack of powerful class cards they have. I don't advocate for all classes to be the same by any means, but I do like the idea of closing the gap that currently exists between the power level of classes in Arena.
Hopefully they will announce more details on this shortly so we can see where they are headed. In any case I think these are fine changes, but without more details I can't be sure if I love the new direction or merely tolerate it.
When choosing cards you have to account for two things - first, how good is the card in a vacuum, and second, how good is the card in the deck that you have. Bonemare is really powerful, but since it costs 8 mana you simply can't load up with 6 of them because you will lack early plays.
Hearthstone just announced an intriguing change to the system. Instead of grouping card picks by rarity they are grouping them by power level. Blizzard is going to figure out how good cards are in Arena and then offer 3 cards that are all similarly powerful. You will still have to figure out how well the card matches your deck, but you will not have to worry about raw power.
Right at the outset this will clearly reduce the skill in deckbuilding substantially. You will still have to manage your mana curve and make sure your deck has the cards it needs but people are not going to pass up high powered cards by accident anymore. In particular someone who only dabbles in Arena will have a massive advantage because they are likely to be aware that they need a good curve and should have some specific bases covered like AOE, big removal, etc but they will often not be sure which specific cards are of the most use in Arena. The system will now take care of that for them.
I would expect to see win rates for the top players to go down when this system arrives. Obviously poor players can still find lots of ways to lose games but one axis of incompetence will be removed and that will matter a great deal.
That isn't a criticism. Just a fact. I don't mind the system being changed this way, and I expect the rubes will like it a lot.
A couple of obvious notes need to be made. Clearly in a system where card quality varies a lot from card to card an average pick will be much better than an average card. If all cards are rated from 1-100 then your average pick will be ~70 or something like that because you get the best of 3. However, in the new system cards will all be the same tier so Blizzard will need to substantially reduce the occurrence rate of really trash tier cards or we will regularly be picking between cards that are nearly worthless. They say they are going to do this but no numbers have been supplied so we can't yet know if overall deck quality is going up or down.
Blizzard also hasn't said if they are going to control for overall deck quality. Is it going to be possible to be offered 30 sets of absolutely awesome cards, or 30 sets of trash? If not, how tight is the system going to be? They could easily make it so that every player gets offered a specific number of picks in each tier of cards to make sure that each deck has similar potential, like so if all cards are ranked 1 to 100:
90+ 2 picks
80+ 4 picks
70+ 5 picks
60+ 6 picks
50+ 5 picks
40+ 3 picks
30+ 2 picks
20+ 1 pick
10+ 1 pick
0+ 1 pick
This arrangement gives you a deck that is similarly powerful to current ones, but makes sure that every deck gets a few bombs and a few duds. There will still be substantial variance in deck effectiveness because of mana curves and specific utility but it will cut the variance in the system hugely from the current situation.
One other interesting question is how they will handle the dramatic differences in class power. If a warrior has few powerful cards then potentially they just get bad decks - this is the current system. However, in the system I outlined above it would simply give warriors lots of neutral bombs to make up for the lack of powerful class cards they have. I don't advocate for all classes to be the same by any means, but I do like the idea of closing the gap that currently exists between the power level of classes in Arena.
Hopefully they will announce more details on this shortly so we can see where they are headed. In any case I think these are fine changes, but without more details I can't be sure if I love the new direction or merely tolerate it.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Enter mine, fight
I am continuing to do regular family RPG nights. Pinkie Pie is always excited to play, but playing with her often has me scrambling to figure out what to do. She seizes on things and insists on following them to the end at times that I simply do not expect. For example, in the last session the party decided to go explore a mine that I had put on a map in an earlier adventure. The mine wasn't important at all, and the only information they had was that the mine was long abandoned and no longer profitable.
But at some point in the past Pinkie Pie had asked what was in the mine and I made a joke about it being infested with bearsharks. That is, a monster with the body of a bear and the head of a shark. It was out of character, obviously silly, and not intended to be taken seriously.
Pinkie Pie was determined to go to that mine and see if there were bearsharks in it.
So off they went. They didn't find any bearsharks but they did find some dwarves who had enslaved other dwarves and were working the mine. The characters had some hilarious discussions with the dwarves and then eventually decided to insist on the slaves being freed and violence ensued, as it so often does in fantasy stories.
When designing adventures I like to throw in lots of side stuff. People that aren't necessarily important, places that the characters don't need to visit. I think the game is a lot more fun if things that aren't plot critical still get fleshed out. I hadn't intended that the mine be a thing the characters did, though I had the basic premise sketched out of what would happen if they did go there.
This is one of the things that gets a lot better with time. Eventually a GM can get a lot better at figuring out what random stuff their group will seize upon and follow up so the preparation can be more efficient.
Pinkie Pie has a powerful magic item that she wants to activate so I assume she would be all about chasing down that storyline. Instead she was all about going into an empty hole in the ground.
I have some things to learn yet, it would seem.
But at some point in the past Pinkie Pie had asked what was in the mine and I made a joke about it being infested with bearsharks. That is, a monster with the body of a bear and the head of a shark. It was out of character, obviously silly, and not intended to be taken seriously.
Pinkie Pie was determined to go to that mine and see if there were bearsharks in it.
So off they went. They didn't find any bearsharks but they did find some dwarves who had enslaved other dwarves and were working the mine. The characters had some hilarious discussions with the dwarves and then eventually decided to insist on the slaves being freed and violence ensued, as it so often does in fantasy stories.
When designing adventures I like to throw in lots of side stuff. People that aren't necessarily important, places that the characters don't need to visit. I think the game is a lot more fun if things that aren't plot critical still get fleshed out. I hadn't intended that the mine be a thing the characters did, though I had the basic premise sketched out of what would happen if they did go there.
This is one of the things that gets a lot better with time. Eventually a GM can get a lot better at figuring out what random stuff their group will seize upon and follow up so the preparation can be more efficient.
Pinkie Pie has a powerful magic item that she wants to activate so I assume she would be all about chasing down that storyline. Instead she was all about going into an empty hole in the ground.
I have some things to learn yet, it would seem.
Friday, March 2, 2018
A spot of fame
This week I was contacted by a person I have never met before by the name of Jonathan Nadeau to do an interview on his podcast. Apparently he found me on thegamecrafter.com where my game Camp Nightmare is available to buy and decided that he wanted to chat with me about the game and share it with the world.
What a strange and wonderful world we live in that things like this just happen! The internet!
Today we did the interview. That itself was pretty much what you would expect as we spent half an hour talking about the way the game plays, how the theme works, and what is cool or unique about it.
The podcast can be found here: http://nadeaumedia.com/category/pixels-and-pirates/
The podcast featuring me isn't there yet, but it will be sometime in the next week or so. If you like the idea of podcasts about indie games feel free to browse - I can't say much about it as I haven't listened to much of it but learning about all kinds of new games seems entertaining.
The sorts of questions the host asked were definitely familiar to me. I have talked about the game to all kinds of people so it was easy to do that again in a slightly different setting. I enjoyed the chat as I like talking about how the game plays and why I made it that way.
It turns out that Jonathan is also working on launching a new website that aims to bring together a community of people interested in new games. The idea would be that they would feature a new game every day, help the author promote it, and take a cut of the gross orders.
This is one of those ideas that I think is cool and a lot of people I know might be interested in it. Unfortunately I don't think the financials make any sense for me. If I took part I would still have to order my copies from thegamecrafter.com, take delivery, then ship them out again to all the people who order. At $35 a pop for the game, plus $10 to deliver, plus the cut for the website, I would need to sell them at $50 each just to break even. The game doesn't have that much in it so I would be surprised if I could get significant orders at that value, and even then I am taking risks and making zero profit for a considerable amount of work.
Lots of work for no pay seems like a poor deal.
If I sold them for $60 a pop I could make money, but only if nothing goes wrong, and $60 for a small game like that is a real stretch, especially when you can just order it directly from thegamecrafter.com for cheaper than you order it from me.
It seems to me that if I really wanted to do a ton of work I could use this opportunity to possibly get my game into the hands of a few more people - perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds. But that just isn't so appealing to me. I am happy that the game exists, and increasing the copies in existence from 100 to 200 doesn't change my life or happiness in any way. If I could change that 100 value to 100,000 then we would be talking! Even ignoring the money that would have a real impact.
So while I like the idea of the website I don't think it is a good idea for me to get involved in it, except possibly as a customer.
What a strange and wonderful world we live in that things like this just happen! The internet!
Today we did the interview. That itself was pretty much what you would expect as we spent half an hour talking about the way the game plays, how the theme works, and what is cool or unique about it.
The podcast can be found here: http://nadeaumedia.com/category/pixels-and-pirates/
The podcast featuring me isn't there yet, but it will be sometime in the next week or so. If you like the idea of podcasts about indie games feel free to browse - I can't say much about it as I haven't listened to much of it but learning about all kinds of new games seems entertaining.
The sorts of questions the host asked were definitely familiar to me. I have talked about the game to all kinds of people so it was easy to do that again in a slightly different setting. I enjoyed the chat as I like talking about how the game plays and why I made it that way.
It turns out that Jonathan is also working on launching a new website that aims to bring together a community of people interested in new games. The idea would be that they would feature a new game every day, help the author promote it, and take a cut of the gross orders.
This is one of those ideas that I think is cool and a lot of people I know might be interested in it. Unfortunately I don't think the financials make any sense for me. If I took part I would still have to order my copies from thegamecrafter.com, take delivery, then ship them out again to all the people who order. At $35 a pop for the game, plus $10 to deliver, plus the cut for the website, I would need to sell them at $50 each just to break even. The game doesn't have that much in it so I would be surprised if I could get significant orders at that value, and even then I am taking risks and making zero profit for a considerable amount of work.
Lots of work for no pay seems like a poor deal.
If I sold them for $60 a pop I could make money, but only if nothing goes wrong, and $60 for a small game like that is a real stretch, especially when you can just order it directly from thegamecrafter.com for cheaper than you order it from me.
It seems to me that if I really wanted to do a ton of work I could use this opportunity to possibly get my game into the hands of a few more people - perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds. But that just isn't so appealing to me. I am happy that the game exists, and increasing the copies in existence from 100 to 200 doesn't change my life or happiness in any way. If I could change that 100 value to 100,000 then we would be talking! Even ignoring the money that would have a real impact.
So while I like the idea of the website I don't think it is a good idea for me to get involved in it, except possibly as a customer.
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