Human is overpowered

Humans are ridiculous.  We have the entire world dominated.  Dogs live where we want, when we want.  And yet here we have signs calling for dogs to be nerfed, as if they aren't underpowered already.

Drives me crazy to see humans who won't admit how much dogs need a buff.  I am playing human myself, and I can see how overpowered humans are - they win every major tournament, any time a solitary dog gets a win they overreact and lose their minds.

Don't listen to nonsense signs in grocery stores.  Buff dogs!

The fewer the better

Yesterday I played a lot of games.  Two of those games were Terraforming Mars, one 3p game and one 5p game.  The 5p game had the distinction of being the fastest game of TM I have ever seen - 6 turns.  It makes sense that the game would be quick with 5 players, and it is good that it didn't go 12 turns or something because with 5 people that would take way too long to play out.  Unfortunately when a game of TM lasts only 6 turns it is a stupid game in many ways.

TM has lots of cards, most of which generate income of some sort or other.  The cards are balanced such that they pay for themselves after four rounds, roughly speaking.  This works well in a 9 turn game where you transition from generating income and engine building into point generation about halfway through the game.  It is terrible when the game lasts 6 turns because income cards played on turn 2 only just pay for themselves, so you really only build an engine on turn 1.  After that, just get points.  You can have a fun game where you just hunt for points, but when most of the deck is built around the idea of building an engine it feels silly.

Certainly in the game I played that went only 6 turns the shortness of the game made a lot of plays look ridiculous.  For example, on round 4 someone dropped down a microbes card that generates a point every 3 turns.  She played it the instant it was legal and only got a single point out of it, paying 16 bucks for the privilege.  That is worse than a standard project!  About half of the plays in the game were of this nature, setting up income when everyone really should have just been doing standard project Greenery over and over, occasionally interspersed with cities.

We were using the Colonies expansion and this made things even sillier looking given the 6 turns.  Of the 7 colonies in play, only 4 were ever used, and each of those was only used once.  The idea of placing a colony in order to generate income when people visited it was laughable, and the cards that generated trade fleets and better trading were worthless from the start.  Of course this also increased the percentage of blank cards in the deck, pushing people further towards standard projects.

I built a big engine on turn 1 and then spent the rest of the game throwing meteors all over the place.  I bought a couple of cities, some standard projects, the Terraformer milestone, an award, and won the game comfortably.  I enjoyed the game, but it did feel silly that I just tossed nearly all the cards I drew after turn 2 in the trash because there wasn't any point in cards anymore.  I kept only 3 cards in the second half of the game - a city, a card to generate massive income to snag Banker (didn't end up using it), and an income card that I regretted buying moments after paying for it.   The rest were all rubbish.

What it all adds up to is TM is a bad 5 player game.  The 2 player version is my favourite by far, in large part because of how swingy the hate cards are when you have 3 players.  If you get targetted it often feels like you lose just because you happened to look threatening, not because of any play choices.  With 2 or 3 players you have time to build a big engine, use the deck, and only throw away your cards at the end of the game.  I like that style a lot more, and it feels like the game was built to be played that way.

Unfortunately at WBC there are a lot of games that are much better competitive games at 2 or 3 players rather than 4.  TM is one of them.  However, few of these games can manage to hold heats with so few players per table because there aren't enough copies of the games to go around.  It is unfortunate, but it is a practical limit that I can't see a good way around.

It sucks being strong

My new DnD campaign started last night with a stark reminder that being strong is the worst.

Given the raw choice between being strong and weak, you might as well be strong, but that isn't how the game works.  Generally if you care about being strong at all you have the choice of being strong, wearing heavy armour and using big weapons, or you can be quick and use light weapons and light armour.  This sounds like a reasonable tradeoff, but the real issue is all the extra benefits of being a Dexterity character instead of a Strength character.  Dex characters get to be stealthy, go first in combat, and have excellent ranged weapons.  Str characters get to be noisy, go last in combat, and have pathetic ranged weapons.

This is why I keep on building Dex based characters.  I hate being stuck with my thumb up my butt while the rest of the party has fun.  If I can't sneak, and I can't do ranged attacks, and I have no other powerful abilities, I just stand there like a brick until we need to do the frontal assault plan.  Yuck.

Our party consists of a Dex fighter using a crossbow (me), a Dex rogue, a wizard, and Str based paladin.

The first mission we were on was a scouting mission.  We could have fought things, but the enemy was extremely strong so frontal assault was right out.  As such, me and the rogue scouted, the wizard helped by making us invisible with magic, and the paladin sat there like a lump.  After much scouting and information gathering occurred, we went back to town and got our reward.  The paladin, having done literally nothing, collected his 1/4 share of the loot.

Next in line was a more serious scouting mission to the heart of enemy territory.  The only sensible thing to do was to leave the paladin behind and have the rest of us do everything.  We needed to be quiet and avoid detection, so a clanking clomping tank was not useful.

I insisted that we had to take the paladin with us.  Not because it was a good idea, but only because it would be crappy to be sidelined for the entire adventure just because your character is only good at one thing.

We got into enemy territory with our clanking friend in tow, and finally got ourselves into a fight.  Huzzah, a place where a Str character isn't just a liability!

Hah, just kidding.  The enemies could fly, so the Str character sat there like an idiot.  He threw a couple of javelins for trivial damage and was sad.  Eventually the enemies beat him unconscious.  I, on the other hand, playing a character using the good stat, blasted damage into the enemies from range.  I rolled horribly, and even though I only needed an 11 or greater on a d20 to hit I still missed 15 of my first 16 shots.  The rest of the party was so weak at range though the fight kept on going and I eventually did about 2/3 of the total damage to take the enemies down.

It must have felt pretty terrible to be that Str character.  He built his character the way the book said to, and that build made him a liability for scouting, and a one trick pony in combat.  He is good at slugging his way through tons of melee enemies, but a Dex character would be just as good at that but also effective at range with a bow and stealthy and go first!

DnD really needs to shake this nonsense.  Dex is just too good for everything and there is no reason for it.  Why is it that Dex makes you go first in combat?  Why not Intelligence, or Wisdom?  Why isn't heavy armour better?  Dex characters get to be quick and sneaky - they should at least be squishier to compensate.  If a Str character was actually really tough and tanky then while they would still be only good for one thing, at least they would be good for that thing.

It isn't like my friend did something crazy to be bad.  He did the default build, did it quite reasonably, and it sure *feels* like a Paladin with high Strength, Constitution, and Charisma should be good.  It just isn't, and that is a failure of game design, not character building.

This is something I have taken as a lesson when building Heroes By Trade.  If a thing looks like it obviously should be good, make it good!  Back in DnD 3.5 I remember laughing about how if a person said "I will make a fighter!  I will have high strength, and hit things with a sword" they would be basically worthless.  Someone with a bizarre combination of prestige classes and feats from expansion books would be five times as powerful.  I made it a point that there should be ways to optimize, but reasonable choices like the fighter above should be solid - at least 80% as good as a perfectly optimized character. 

DnD 5th is much better this way, because at least the Str fighter is solid in combat.  It isn't good enough though.  Dex is just the better choice, and that isn't the way the game should be.

I can see

I am building a new character for my DnD campaign with Naked Man.  Our last group got wiped out by a particularly devastating hobgoblin spellcaster so we are starting fresh.  I decided to go with a crossbow specialist to try out the Crossbow Expert feat, and fighter seemed like the best class to do that with.  I had in mind a character who was a military engineer who loved to build and tinker with things, as this seemed to fit with crossbow usage nicely.

The real choice was what race I would play.  I defaulted to human thematically, but I wasn't sure I should do that because being human is often a huge liability in modules.  You always end up in dungeon crawls, and dungeon crawls really punish people who can't see in the dark.  Sometimes you have a spellcaster who can cover that sort of thing with Light spells, but even then it means that the enemies can spot your group from far away, stealth is nearly impossible, and anything that knocks out that light also knocks out your character.

If you don't have a spellcaster to provide a Light spell things get even worse - somebody has to hold a torch, and often there is nobody who can do that easily.  Torches also have problems with running out of fuel, getting wet, or being knocked away down a hole.

Many times I have groaned as I realized we had a human in our group and so we would have to keep track of light sources and fuel and all that other nonsense that goes along with it.

I find the whole thing so ridiculous.  I looked through the monster manual and in the first 50 monsters 45 of them can see in the dark.  The great majority of player characters can see in the dark too.  Why is it that everybody can see in the dark?!?

The answer of course is that back in the day DnD was just endless dungeon crawls.  You can't put monsters in a dungeon where they are blind, so they all need darkvision, ridiculous as that sounds.  They aren't going to be sitting down there completely blind, nor are they going to have enormous mounds of torches to burn while they wait to be slaughtered by murder hobos.  Everything has to be able to see in the dark to make the dungeon thing workable.

Except for humans, of course, because we actually know that humans can't see in the dark.  We can launch fireballs and survive falling in pits of acid, but see in the dark?  No way!

Thankfully when Naked Man rolled up some magic items we would have available to our characters some goggles that grant darkvision were among them.  I grabbed those right away both because it seemed fantastic to avoid the whole blindness thing, and also because magic goggles seemed a perfect thematic fit for my character.

I just shake my head looking at all of it.  The legacy elements of the old school DnD games continue to echo on down to our current games and there is nothing I can do to stem that flood of silliness.

I suppose I should be careful about getting up too high on my horse though.  I am playing a character that can shoot a crossbow five times in six seconds, and that is just as absurd as any of the blindness / darkvision nonsense.

I need tedium

At WBC this year a couple gamer buddies of mine taught me Through The Ages.  I didn't actually play a game though, just learned the rules.  They sold me on getting the app, and when I got home I played through it a couple of times.

That game is THICK.  It took me hours to play through even against only a couple of AIs who never hesitate or think.

I learned that I can beat the Training AI on my first run through, and the level 1 AI on my second game.  I also learned that playing online for my first games has some real issues.

When you play in person you actually have to move all the bits around.  That is annoying for sure, especially with all the bits that TTA has, but moving those bits gets you accustomed to how all the bits are supposed to move.  You actually know the rules!  When you play online for your first game all kinds of rules are handled by the machine and you never end up learning them.

For example, in my second game I was in a spot where I seemed sure to lose.  I just didn't have enough points to beat one of the AIs.  I durdled through my last turn, playing as many things as possible for fun, and then noticed that I was ahead instead of behind.  Juh?

It turns out I got a bunch of points for just playing out my cards.  I didn't know that was a rule, and had to try to figure out what the rule was by replaying my cards slowly and watching my point total shift.  I still don't know the rule properly... I got 3 points for some cards, but I don't know if that is 3 points for an Age 3 card, or 3 points for any cards, or what else it might be.  If I was playing in person I would have actually watched players moving tokens around and been able to ask what was up.  Against the AI though, it managed to happen in the background without me noticing.

I need to sit down with some experienced players and actually shove all those stupid tokens around a time or two so I can actually figure out what the heck is going on in that game.  Tedious counting and positioning, here I come!

Also, I need to play a bazillion times.  Every turn I was up against some problem of my own creation - not enough workers, and 1 food short of being able to make another one.  Too many rocks, and not enough places to spend them.  Not enough rocks, and a wonder that is going to blow up when the age changes.  I kept on making errors that cost me small amounts of stuff, and it is clear that I am going to need to play one hundred times to be competent at the game.

I can *feel* how bad I am.  I can see all the ways a good player would crush me, but I can't see them until I have already screwed everything up.  There are some games where I can see further, plan better, and my instincts work, and this one is going to take a long time to get there.

There is a league where I can play TTA but I haven't signed up.  I would just end up being the bank, the player with a bad army who everyone beats up to steal resources and points.  No point in playing there until I can be vaguely competent, I think.  Once I can beat the hardest AIs consistently I will be ready to face actual human opposition.

Old school chaos

When I come up north to visit my family I usually end up at a game night at my brother's place.  This week was no exception, and last night we ended up playing a five player game of Magic.  I haven't played Magic much in the past 15 years at least, so I had to shake off the rust.

I remember playing in high school, where some of our games were the standard 1v1 game, but many were just silly group games.  The most extreme of these was a 100 person tournament where we all played a game with custom rules simultaneously.  After half an hour or so the tournament director announced that somebody had won by taking infinite turns, so we gave them the grand prize, kicked them out of the tournament, and kept playing.  I ended up getting beat out of the tournament on the back of an incorrect GM call after outlasting about 60 players.

This five player game reminded me of those old times.  One player declared that he didn't know the game well, so he was just going to draft to try to screw with other people.  Partway through the first game I had a 8/10 creature in play that made a fresh 2/2 every turn and blew up a permanent of my choice every turn.  Nobody else had anything in play but land.  This is obviously fantastic, but in a five player game somebody is going to have an answer.... except that the random guy played Armageddon, destroying all the lands in the game.  I quickly killed the random guy and one other person and was declared the victor.

Random guy seemed extremely pleased, because his plan of screwing with people had come to fruition.  I felt unfulfilled with my victory.

I guess this is what I should have expected.  Group games where you can directly go after people always devolve into dogpiling or kingmaking, that is just the nature of the thing.  Nothing I can do about that.

While I enjoyed the game night overall, this certainly reminds me why I have shifted away from playing group Magic when we have a bunch of people together.  These days I like my games to reward skill a lot more than luck and political posturing.  You can make a good political game (Diplomacy says hi) but Magic isn't it.

Crushing lefty's dreams

Below is a picture of my final board at the final table of the world boardgaming championships Castles of Mad King Ludwig tournament.

I am not that happy with this board.  My bonus cards got me 14 points which is about right for 3 cards but I had to work hard to get those points, taking tiles I otherwise wasn't that happy about.  I also didn't time the ending of the game all that well and had to put my 300 elbow blue room on just to finish up my purple room instead of planting something better there.  With one more turn in the game my position is drastically better as I can get an additional 4 points for the blue room and probably another 4 points for whatever red / green room I used to finish off the purple.  Still, I got second overall in the tournament, so I can't complain too hard about it.

The most interesting point in the entire game to my mind was on turn 1.  I was fourth chair (Fourth chair is awful in CoMKL, and next year I hope we are on a bidding system for seating) and Drummo was in first chair.  The flop contained the basement that likes basements, a 300 blue room, and a bunch of random stuff.  The blue room is relevant because both of the blue room favours were out, so blues were extremely high value.

Drummo arranged the tiles with the basement in 1, four reasonable rooms in the 2, 4, 6, 8 slots, and the blue room at 10.  First player bought a stairs, second player bought the room at 4, I bought the circular green room at 2, and Drummo was faced with a decision.  His purchases at 6 and 8 were bad, so realistically he was either buying a stairs for 3 or paying 10 for the blue room.  This decision was critical because player two was the only one in stairs, and the corridor square footage and completed rooms favours were out, heavily favouring basement play.  If Drummo buys the blue room, player two gets the basement that likes basements for free on his master builder turn, and also gets to stockpile a ton of cash.  This puts him in a dominating position.  If Drummo buys stairs then Drummo has position in terms of buying basement rooms ahead of the others stairs and has more cash on hand to run through the next 3 turns.

Drummo bought the big blue room for 10.  Player two happily put the basement at 1 buck on his master builder, got it, and proceeded to win the game in part by dominating the completed rooms and corridor square footage favours.  Drummo came last.

I am pretty sure that this was the key play that set up that victory.  Now, player two played a tight game throughout, and I don't want to take away from that.  But getting that basement room for free and making sure he had a big bankroll right from the outset was crucial to his dominance.  Drummo also had cash problems throughout the game, and I think these were exacerbated by him blowing too much of his stack on turn one.  The blue room he got ended up being worth 11 points, but buying 11 endgame points for 10 bucks on the first turn seems too aggressive to me.  Plus there is the argument that you need to be defensive and prevent any one player from getting too great a deal.  This is something I focus on hard in CoMKL, more so than other players I think.

We were talking afterwards about the play and defensive play in general.  Someone said that if I really wanted somebody to take the defensive stairs I should have done it myself.  This is reasonable as a general rule, but I don't know that it applied here.  I was fourth chair, so other players expecting me to be the one to give up value for defence seems unreasonable.  Plus Drummo was in the ideal spot to defensive stairs, him being directly before the other stairs.  Moreover, he lacked other good value options.  He wasn't giving up a great buy to defend, just foregoing what I see as a sketchy purchase for 40% of his stack.

In general you can't just refuse to defend and always expect the last person in last to do the defending.  People won't put up with that sort of leverage being applied if they are good.  On the other hand you probably should expect defensive play if the player in question has no other good options.

At any rate this game really reinforced the value of position in CoMKL.  Playing after me is not ideal because I am going to play defensively.  I will guess your cards held (made 3 guesses during the final match and was correct on all 3) and work hard to prevent you getting the tiles you want.  But some players lean far more towards offence rather than defence and playing after them will get you deals now and again.

In the end the game itself was a great experience.  I am friends with all three other players at the table and having a final table with three strong gamers in a game I love where everyone has a good time is a far more positive experience than merely winning.  It doesn't hurt that Drummo and I were trashtalking the entire time and I crushed his hopes and dreams along the way.  He claimed that since I didn't win the game I can't really crow about my victory... but I submit that I beat him and the player to his left won, which thoroughly cements my claim of superiority at CoMKL.  If lefty wins, you should have done something about that!

Maybe next year I will finally get my 1st place trophy at that game.  Eventually a final table has to work out for me!