I bought my own copy of Gloomhaven. Naked Man continually accuses me of cheating on his Gloomhaven group, and now it isn't just limited to cyber cheating - I am cheating in person. Sweat, groans, hours of grinding and all.
Pinkie Pie was intrigued by the gigantic size of Gloomhaven and wanted to play, so we began a game with just the two of us. I had intended to give her the Scoundrel as a starting class because it has a pretty easy path to competence. There are many things you can do to be superb, but if all the Scoundrel player does is move next to an enemy and do a stabby thing each turn they will be pretty good, and I can pick up the slack.
Of course that didn't work. Pinkie Pie saw the Spellweaver and wanted to blast things with magic! Pew Pew! Unfortunately the Spellweaver has a complicated base set of cards that requires you to really understand the cycle of resting, and the penalty for screwing it up is severe. This is fine if you are a gaming veteran who can pick things up on the fly but I was concerned that Pinkie Pie would flub it big time.
It went fine!
We played on Easy difficulty to start as Pinkie Pie hasn't played before and I know how she is - she will want to pick up every piece of treasure and will wander around randomly instead of maximizing her beatdown. She doesn't have that deep seated desperation to get her numbers as high as humanly possible like I do. This may be a good thing for her, now that I think about it.
At any rate Easy difficulty was no problem for us. She had the Battle Goal of gaining 7 or less experience and she made that no problem - she only got 2. Of course I would have rather liked it if she had used her powerful nukes more often and gotten more experience, but honestly I can't complain about the result. We were super efficient about gathering up the loot too, so we were both very happy with what we got out of the dungeon. I had to work pretty hard to deal enough damage to complete the scenario but in the end it was enough. We did have an issue that she ran into a room by herself, ran into melee with the enemies, and then blocked the only spot which I could attack from. This is, obviously, not an ideal situation for a squishy caster to be in. It will take some time for her to figure out the strategy, that is sure.
It looks like this may be an ongoing thing for us. Pinkie Pie loves the idea of family game nights and I think I prefer doing Gloomhaven over running RPGs, at least with this group. Part of the thing I really like when GMing RPGs is sitting back and letting the players roleplay amongst one another and talk things out, but with only Wendy and Pinkie Pie, I am pretty much on for the entire night and that is tiring.
Education can take many forms, and I think in my household it will take the form of a lot of strategy gaming. Not much good for reciting facts certainly, but I think it is quite a solid way to keep her brain engaged and thinking and that has its own use.
Friday, June 29, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Dead is still the best status condition
In my last Gloomhaven scenario I was not particularly effective. I am playing the Brute and my intention when I selected the Brute was to tank, but in this scenario I wasn't able to do that because the enemies were largely ranged and so my attempts to use Retaliate and Shield effects didn't work. (I can only Retaliate against melee attacks.)
When I first picked up the game I figured that I could build a tank much like you can in other fantasy adventure games. I was not impressed with the Brute's tanking options however because I simply didn't see enough damage mitigation. Sure, I can put up a Shield ability, but it usually will only save me 2-3 damage, and sometimes not even that. This isn't much good because healing effects are just as strong as that and they require less in the way of setup and positioning to work. What I was hunting for was some way to mitigate a LOT of damage so I could just stand there and take it, and Gloomhaven simply doesn't offer that as an option.
I went online to see if other people had the same experience and the experts all said that tanking is just a bad idea in Gloomhaven. If you are in a 2 or 3 person group it is just wretched, and if you are in a 4 person group it is merely suboptimal. The Brute is still a fine class, you just have to build it to beat down, not to tank.
The class is still good at taking hits though. I still have the highest health, and putting on heavy armour and using the perk that negates armour penalties is fantastic. Doing that means I am far tougher than anyone else and it doesn't cost me much at all in terms of offence. The thing I have to avoid is thinking that my job is to Shield damage and Retaliate against enemies. It just isn't that good on average. Retaliating *can* be really powerful at times. There are some melee enemies that take many weak swings at you and in those cases Retaliating for 2 damage on each swing is ludicrous. The problem is that much of the time Retaliating is total rubbish. Maybe the enemies are ranged, maybe they heal this turn instead of attacking, or maybe they attack somebody else. Retaliate is simply unreliable, and Shield is the much the same (though Shield applies to ranged attacks.)
What is far better is consistent beatdown. I just need to apply a lot of regular damage as fast as possible. This is something that I often struggled to get across to people when building strategies in WOW - when the group dies, many people call for more healers or more tanking, when what they actually need to do is kill the damn enemies quicker so that nobody will need any healing. Retaliate certainly is good for highlight reels but packing your deck with cards that assume that you are going to get hit a ton is just not as good as packing it full of cards that murder the enemies first.
I really like this conclusion. One of the problems with many fantasy RPGs is that somebody has to tank and somebody has to heal. Many times people don't want to do that, they want to bash and have fun! In Gloomhaven you can set yourself up to be tough, which is good, but dedicated tanks that don't do anything aren't actually the best path. The ideal strategy is to pack enough defence that you can survive the hits you can't avoid taking, and kill the enemies fast enough that those are the only hits you take. Maybe you survive those hits by going Invisible, maybe you survive by dodging away, or maybe you have a lot of armour and health like the Brute.
I really enjoy a system that has a lot of customization like Gloomhaven does but which avoids hard roles. You can spec for certain styles or combos but nobody is forced into a pure role where you only have one function. You all have to deal damage, avoid damage, and assist your teammates in some way or other.
Now I just have to cope with the fact that my item selections were based on the assumption of being super tanky. Time to vendor some stuff and buy new gear for smashery, I think.
When I first picked up the game I figured that I could build a tank much like you can in other fantasy adventure games. I was not impressed with the Brute's tanking options however because I simply didn't see enough damage mitigation. Sure, I can put up a Shield ability, but it usually will only save me 2-3 damage, and sometimes not even that. This isn't much good because healing effects are just as strong as that and they require less in the way of setup and positioning to work. What I was hunting for was some way to mitigate a LOT of damage so I could just stand there and take it, and Gloomhaven simply doesn't offer that as an option.
I went online to see if other people had the same experience and the experts all said that tanking is just a bad idea in Gloomhaven. If you are in a 2 or 3 person group it is just wretched, and if you are in a 4 person group it is merely suboptimal. The Brute is still a fine class, you just have to build it to beat down, not to tank.
The class is still good at taking hits though. I still have the highest health, and putting on heavy armour and using the perk that negates armour penalties is fantastic. Doing that means I am far tougher than anyone else and it doesn't cost me much at all in terms of offence. The thing I have to avoid is thinking that my job is to Shield damage and Retaliate against enemies. It just isn't that good on average. Retaliating *can* be really powerful at times. There are some melee enemies that take many weak swings at you and in those cases Retaliating for 2 damage on each swing is ludicrous. The problem is that much of the time Retaliating is total rubbish. Maybe the enemies are ranged, maybe they heal this turn instead of attacking, or maybe they attack somebody else. Retaliate is simply unreliable, and Shield is the much the same (though Shield applies to ranged attacks.)
What is far better is consistent beatdown. I just need to apply a lot of regular damage as fast as possible. This is something that I often struggled to get across to people when building strategies in WOW - when the group dies, many people call for more healers or more tanking, when what they actually need to do is kill the damn enemies quicker so that nobody will need any healing. Retaliate certainly is good for highlight reels but packing your deck with cards that assume that you are going to get hit a ton is just not as good as packing it full of cards that murder the enemies first.
I really like this conclusion. One of the problems with many fantasy RPGs is that somebody has to tank and somebody has to heal. Many times people don't want to do that, they want to bash and have fun! In Gloomhaven you can set yourself up to be tough, which is good, but dedicated tanks that don't do anything aren't actually the best path. The ideal strategy is to pack enough defence that you can survive the hits you can't avoid taking, and kill the enemies fast enough that those are the only hits you take. Maybe you survive those hits by going Invisible, maybe you survive by dodging away, or maybe you have a lot of armour and health like the Brute.
I really enjoy a system that has a lot of customization like Gloomhaven does but which avoids hard roles. You can spec for certain styles or combos but nobody is forced into a pure role where you only have one function. You all have to deal damage, avoid damage, and assist your teammates in some way or other.
Now I just have to cope with the fact that my item selections were based on the assumption of being super tanky. Time to vendor some stuff and buy new gear for smashery, I think.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Big jumps
My DnD group just levelled up to level 2. My character gained 67% more HP, 100% more healing, and about 80% increased damage. Funny thing is that while I got a lot better, my increase in power over level 1 wasn't even close to the power increase our druid got. My healing, for example, went from 5 to 10, but hers went from 17 to ~84. She also has a shapeshift form that increases her damage by 300%, just for fun. She went from a weak melee attacker with healing spells to being by far the toughest character we have and she dishes out far more damage than anyone else. I know that druids with this ability are supremely broken at level 2 and it smooths out from there on out, but at this point it is kind of absurd.
This feels like way too much of an increase to me. Specifically the trouble is that the GM absolutely must control who the party fights ruthlessly if the game is to work. If a level 1 party goes off the beaten path and runs into a level 2 encounter they will likely get mulched. A level 1 encounter for a level 2 party is going to be a cakewalk. The difference in power is just so enormous that if you set up encounters to be challenging you absolutely cannot allow groups to run into the wrong encounter.
That to me feels like a real design flaw. I get that level 1 is supposed to be a training level, and it isn't supposed to last very long. It isn't meant to be a place you hang around. Still, I wish that you didn't have to control them so hard, and after they level up once or twice, throw out all the encounters that worked for level 1 because they aren't worth running at higher levels.
A big part of this problem in my particular group is the issue of transforming into stuff. I have consistently found that things that polymorph people are an endless source of fun and an equally endless source of balance problems. It is a great time to turn into a bear and maul people but it always seems to turn out that the monster manual contains a bear, or dire wolf, or stone giant, etc. that has stats that are a huge problem. Somebody inevitably finds something that breaks the system, as our druid did, and then the rest of the group stands around wondering why they are even along.
I have a similar issue in my other campaign where I am a level 7 wizard with polymorph. What can I turn into? This is an important question. If I can be a beast with a ranged attack that is extremely powerful. If I can pick that beast that happens to have way more AC or damage than is appropriate then I can do ridiculous things that are wildly unfair.
Naked Man has ruled that I can't turn into something I haven't seen. But which beasts have I seen? His first response was that I can turn into what I have seen during the campaign, but that list is nearly empty. It has only been a couple months from level 1 to level 7! Plus I am playing an elf that is hundreds of years old and has wandered the world as a smuggler for most of that duration, prior to becoming an adventurer. Wouldn't I have seen all kinds of crazy stuff? And if so, I need a list telling me every single thing I could turn into, because otherwise we have to have an argument each time I go to use the spell.
The system DnD uses for this is just begging for abuse. The monster manual providing character power is a problem, and they should have avoided it. In the case of a druid they could have done something like giving the druid bonuses to physical stats based on the type of animal they turn into - more strength from a bear, more dexterity from a ferret, etc, but keep their base stats. Or they could have supplied stat blocks for various forms separate from animals in the monster manual. But the current thing is a total mess.
People like turning into animals and polymorphing stuff. I get that. I just think that if you are going to let people do that you should find some reasonable way to control it so it doesn't go off the rails, and DnD has failed at that. Again. Because they always do. (Except in 4th edition. Props for that. Slops for going back to this foolishness again for 5th edition.)
People also like power increases. But do we really need to increase power quite so much in a single level? I feel like there has to be a way to tone it down some to avoid this thing where once you level up all the previous challenges just fade away into irrelevance.
This feels like way too much of an increase to me. Specifically the trouble is that the GM absolutely must control who the party fights ruthlessly if the game is to work. If a level 1 party goes off the beaten path and runs into a level 2 encounter they will likely get mulched. A level 1 encounter for a level 2 party is going to be a cakewalk. The difference in power is just so enormous that if you set up encounters to be challenging you absolutely cannot allow groups to run into the wrong encounter.
That to me feels like a real design flaw. I get that level 1 is supposed to be a training level, and it isn't supposed to last very long. It isn't meant to be a place you hang around. Still, I wish that you didn't have to control them so hard, and after they level up once or twice, throw out all the encounters that worked for level 1 because they aren't worth running at higher levels.
A big part of this problem in my particular group is the issue of transforming into stuff. I have consistently found that things that polymorph people are an endless source of fun and an equally endless source of balance problems. It is a great time to turn into a bear and maul people but it always seems to turn out that the monster manual contains a bear, or dire wolf, or stone giant, etc. that has stats that are a huge problem. Somebody inevitably finds something that breaks the system, as our druid did, and then the rest of the group stands around wondering why they are even along.
I have a similar issue in my other campaign where I am a level 7 wizard with polymorph. What can I turn into? This is an important question. If I can be a beast with a ranged attack that is extremely powerful. If I can pick that beast that happens to have way more AC or damage than is appropriate then I can do ridiculous things that are wildly unfair.
Naked Man has ruled that I can't turn into something I haven't seen. But which beasts have I seen? His first response was that I can turn into what I have seen during the campaign, but that list is nearly empty. It has only been a couple months from level 1 to level 7! Plus I am playing an elf that is hundreds of years old and has wandered the world as a smuggler for most of that duration, prior to becoming an adventurer. Wouldn't I have seen all kinds of crazy stuff? And if so, I need a list telling me every single thing I could turn into, because otherwise we have to have an argument each time I go to use the spell.
The system DnD uses for this is just begging for abuse. The monster manual providing character power is a problem, and they should have avoided it. In the case of a druid they could have done something like giving the druid bonuses to physical stats based on the type of animal they turn into - more strength from a bear, more dexterity from a ferret, etc, but keep their base stats. Or they could have supplied stat blocks for various forms separate from animals in the monster manual. But the current thing is a total mess.
People like turning into animals and polymorphing stuff. I get that. I just think that if you are going to let people do that you should find some reasonable way to control it so it doesn't go off the rails, and DnD has failed at that. Again. Because they always do. (Except in 4th edition. Props for that. Slops for going back to this foolishness again for 5th edition.)
People also like power increases. But do we really need to increase power quite so much in a single level? I feel like there has to be a way to tone it down some to avoid this thing where once you level up all the previous challenges just fade away into irrelevance.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
A good offense
I am in a new season of my Agricola leagues and things are going well. They should go well, since I had some issues last season with UI problems, and also with being an idiot, so I got punted down to the D league at the bottom of the pile.
The players here are noticeably weaker and I have been consistently surprised at how many good actions have been available on each turn. I regularly get premium actions on my last action of the turn so I haven't been taking start player often because I don't seem to need to!
One thing I haven't been sure about is how aggressive to get about starving. A lot of my non league games recently have been against a group of players who are a LOT better than me and they consistently delight in punishing me if I take any risks with regards to food. I don't know that this is a great play for them generally because I come last anyway so punishing me likely isn't that relevant, but I suspect they can't stop themselves. There is certainly something delightful in watching someone swing in the wind because they took some foolish risks. These players are a solid 300 Elo points ahead of me so I get mashed every time.
In my league games against much weaker players though I am regularly taking all kinds of risks and it keeps paying off. On multiple occasions I decided to take an aggressive action to get points knowing that if the other players just took food from the board I would be screwed when it came to feeding time, and in every case the food wheeled around to me and I got out of the situation unscathed.
I suspect this is an issue when it comes to training. Playing against players who won't punish me for overextending certainly lets me rack up higher scores but when I end up against superior players again I will likely end up falling back into risky plays that end up with me begging for food.
On the other hand taking those risky plays is paying off, and makes it more likely that I will be able to win my games now and move further up the ladder to actually get to those games against the better players.
One thing that is new this season is I am trying completely different strategies in all my games. I don't have any occupations the same between my games so it is all different. In previous season I managed to draft 3 copies of the same occupation so my games were either defined by trying to get to stone house really fast to drop Manservant or taking a lot of day labourer to maximize Seasonal Worker. This time I just took whatever was the best and ended up with a mishmash, so each game is different. I think I learn better when I have multiple games with the same profession because I can really dig into what makes it work or not, but I certainly don't get quite the breadth of experience that I am getting this time.
The players here are noticeably weaker and I have been consistently surprised at how many good actions have been available on each turn. I regularly get premium actions on my last action of the turn so I haven't been taking start player often because I don't seem to need to!
One thing I haven't been sure about is how aggressive to get about starving. A lot of my non league games recently have been against a group of players who are a LOT better than me and they consistently delight in punishing me if I take any risks with regards to food. I don't know that this is a great play for them generally because I come last anyway so punishing me likely isn't that relevant, but I suspect they can't stop themselves. There is certainly something delightful in watching someone swing in the wind because they took some foolish risks. These players are a solid 300 Elo points ahead of me so I get mashed every time.
In my league games against much weaker players though I am regularly taking all kinds of risks and it keeps paying off. On multiple occasions I decided to take an aggressive action to get points knowing that if the other players just took food from the board I would be screwed when it came to feeding time, and in every case the food wheeled around to me and I got out of the situation unscathed.
I suspect this is an issue when it comes to training. Playing against players who won't punish me for overextending certainly lets me rack up higher scores but when I end up against superior players again I will likely end up falling back into risky plays that end up with me begging for food.
On the other hand taking those risky plays is paying off, and makes it more likely that I will be able to win my games now and move further up the ladder to actually get to those games against the better players.
One thing that is new this season is I am trying completely different strategies in all my games. I don't have any occupations the same between my games so it is all different. In previous season I managed to draft 3 copies of the same occupation so my games were either defined by trying to get to stone house really fast to drop Manservant or taking a lot of day labourer to maximize Seasonal Worker. This time I just took whatever was the best and ended up with a mishmash, so each game is different. I think I learn better when I have multiple games with the same profession because I can really dig into what makes it work or not, but I certainly don't get quite the breadth of experience that I am getting this time.
Monday, June 11, 2018
A filthy cheater
I am cheating on my gamer spouses. Gloomhaven is a game that you gain real advantage from playing through multiple times because you learn what to expect in various encounters and can plan ahead. As such people who play as a group have some reason to want their partners to remain faithful and not play with anyone else... but I am not going to do that. Gloomhaven promiscuity, here I come.
I have been playing a second campaign on tabletop simulator with Oldhobo and it is being a blast. Normally computer supported board games are a lot faster than the manual kind because everything is automated but that is not true in this case. It is just as annoying to do many things, and there are a few outliers here and there each way. Shuffling is easier, but searching for stuff is harder.
I wonder if Naked Man is worried that I will leave him for Oldhobo. I am quite able to maintain multiple Gloomhaven relationships at a time, in the same way that I maintain romantic relationships at the same time, but Naked Man seems more jealous of exclusivity than Wendy is.
My last scenario with Oldhobo was quite the joke. We killed everything in the entire place except for a single super slow golem that had a ton of health and was laconically making its way towards us after we dashed past it to the final room. We got our combat goals, left only 2 coins in the whole dungeon, and were never in anything even resembling danger.
I think a lot of that ease was due to my combat abilities lining up particularly well against the dungeon. I had a pair of abilities that did a single damage AOE, and this AOE ignores shields because you don't actually pull cards for it. One of the major challenges of the dungeon was that there were a bunch of enemies with high shields and 2 health, so the ability to pop off my 1 damage AOEs and just instantly end them was devastating.
I can't quite tell yet how much of Gloomhaven success is based around having just the right class for a particular encounter. I know in my main Gloomhaven game I absolutely butchered a group of Retaliating enemies by popping a big Retaliate and Shield on myself and standing in the middle of them - single cards are not usually supposed to deal 10 damage and prevent 10 damage to me! Many other classes struggle facing those enemies but I just laughed at them and mowed them down.
I do like that the way you handle particular groups of enemies is still being fresh and exciting even after many encounters. I haven't seen anywhere near all the stuff yet and even just simple combinations of things I have already done require lots of thinking and creativity.
However, the one thing I am appreciating more and more as time goes by is automatic damage. Enemies with lots of shields and retaliate really make it clear that effects with low numbers that can ignore enemy mechanics are super powerful and you need some of them in your toolbox.
I have been playing a second campaign on tabletop simulator with Oldhobo and it is being a blast. Normally computer supported board games are a lot faster than the manual kind because everything is automated but that is not true in this case. It is just as annoying to do many things, and there are a few outliers here and there each way. Shuffling is easier, but searching for stuff is harder.
I wonder if Naked Man is worried that I will leave him for Oldhobo. I am quite able to maintain multiple Gloomhaven relationships at a time, in the same way that I maintain romantic relationships at the same time, but Naked Man seems more jealous of exclusivity than Wendy is.
My last scenario with Oldhobo was quite the joke. We killed everything in the entire place except for a single super slow golem that had a ton of health and was laconically making its way towards us after we dashed past it to the final room. We got our combat goals, left only 2 coins in the whole dungeon, and were never in anything even resembling danger.
I think a lot of that ease was due to my combat abilities lining up particularly well against the dungeon. I had a pair of abilities that did a single damage AOE, and this AOE ignores shields because you don't actually pull cards for it. One of the major challenges of the dungeon was that there were a bunch of enemies with high shields and 2 health, so the ability to pop off my 1 damage AOEs and just instantly end them was devastating.
I can't quite tell yet how much of Gloomhaven success is based around having just the right class for a particular encounter. I know in my main Gloomhaven game I absolutely butchered a group of Retaliating enemies by popping a big Retaliate and Shield on myself and standing in the middle of them - single cards are not usually supposed to deal 10 damage and prevent 10 damage to me! Many other classes struggle facing those enemies but I just laughed at them and mowed them down.
I do like that the way you handle particular groups of enemies is still being fresh and exciting even after many encounters. I haven't seen anywhere near all the stuff yet and even just simple combinations of things I have already done require lots of thinking and creativity.
However, the one thing I am appreciating more and more as time goes by is automatic damage. Enemies with lots of shields and retaliate really make it clear that effects with low numbers that can ignore enemy mechanics are super powerful and you need some of them in your toolbox.
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