I have been playing a lot of Terraforming Mars over the past year and much of that has been training people new to the game. One of the greatest acquired skills in Mars is the ability to figure out which cards to pay for and which not. Mostly I find the problem that new players have is they keep far too many cards and end up with 100+ cost worth of cards at the end of the game that they need to dump.
This is a major flaw in their game, and leads to huge blowouts. The key is that all the money you don't have invested into infrastructure is wasted. If I keep 3 extra cards for 9 bucks I could have probably spent that money to get 2 income per turn. That income adds up, and means that people who perfectly ride the wave of cards with little waste end up with a lot more stuff at the end of the game.
Obviously the way to fix this is to play Mars 100 times and git gud. However, that isn't much use to a newbie in the short term, so I have come up with a formula for how many cards to keep that I call Two Plus One.
What this means is that you keep cards that you can afford to play over this turn and the next. You get two turns, including the turn you are buying the cards on, to play everything in your hand. If you want to keep delicious cards such that you can't play them all over 2 turns, slap yourself smartly across the face, both sides, and stop buying cards.
There is an exception.
You don't want to end up with no cards to play, and sometimes the game throws you only crap. The way you hedge against this is to keep one singular card in addition to the guidelines above. That singular card must be generically good, extremely expensive, and hopefully uses up steel or titanium if you are producing any significant amount of either. The best examples of this are cards like Open City, which you can slam down for a bunch of points and plants to use up steel and/or cash, or Giant Ice Asteroid which also provides points and income to use up your titanium and/or cash.
Do not under any circumstances keep a bunch of cheaper cards just in case you don't draw anything good. Spending 3 bucks to hedge against a total whiff on new cards is okay, spending 9 is game losing.
Keep 2 turns of cards, plus 1 more expensive card. That is all. Throw the rest away.
This strategy won't win you championships, but it will put you steps ahead of the other noobs, and it will make sure you don't end up throwing away a hand of cards you paid good money for at the end of a game. You don't want to be that chump.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Friday, March 13, 2020
I did it again
Many years ago I was in a DnD campaign where I caused a lot of problems. The GM had a fairly sedate pace for us much of the time with lots of travel, so characters with spells got many opportunities to use them. DnD is unfortunately balanced around groups having many fights in a single day, so this ended up being a bit of a problem. I was playing a cleric and so with the slow pace (which it should be noted, I quite like) I was able to always use all my best spells and be overly powerful in combat. If we had done standard dungeon crawls with tons of pointless, contrived fights to drain away my spells things would have been more balanced, but that wasn't the sort of game we were playing.
We also had issues with me solving all the problems we encountered with some spell or other. We were playing with all the expansions and extra books at the time, so whenever some difficult situation showed up I was free to peruse all the cleric spells ever printed to find the one that would trivialize it. We got to the point where when we found a difficult situation the other characters would look at me expectantly, assuming I would suggest sleeping for the night so I could memorize the spell that would whisk us safely past the obstacle. I busted us through a stone wall with Stone Shape, summoned creatures to scout or carry us, and made us immune to all kinds of other things. It was frustrating for the GM I am sure, because it made so many of his creative works fall down flat.
This wasn't much fun for the other players, I think, and it felt kind of silly to me too. I can't just look at the solution to a problem and do nothing just so somebody else can try something far inferior, so I decided to retire my cleric and take up a paladin instead. I still could cover the healing role, but my spell list was much more restricted to simple bashing and healing so other problems could still pose a threat.
Recently I concluded that my crossbow specialist in my 5th edition DnD game was too good. Other characters could do similar damage to me under ideal conditions, but I could do my damage to any target on the map, while they had to run about and struggle with rounds where they could do nothing at all. I also had the ability to burst out huge chunks of damage on command which they did not. Like before, I retired my character to let everyone else have a better chance to be the big hero.
I decided to start up a cleric instead, so I could take over the healing and buffing while other characters did the beatdown. I settled on a Light cleric because the roleplaying stuff behind this seemed to fit. The first fight we stepped into was against trolls, which regenerate like crazy until you apply fire damage to them. Light clerics also get lots of fire spells so I used Wall of Fire, Flaming Sphere, and Scorching Ray to blast them with fire. Our melee people got to deal a lot of damage, but nothing like the carnage I was laying out with my burnination.
The next fight was supposed to be a deadly confusing mess with our group and a pile of allies being ambushed in the dark by a bunch of gnolls with night vision. A big part of the challenge was the vision disparity with our allies being overwhelmed by foes they could not see nor effectively fight. Just before the gnoll attack hit, I used Daylight and filled the entire battle area with bright light, completely negating the surprise attack and giving all of my allies light to see by. We brutally crushed the gnoll attack and sent them fleeing with their entire leadership wiped out.
Our next fight is for the following day, and I already have another spell lined up to completely trivialize it. The enemy force we face is overwhelmingly powerful, and although we have allies with us we would be crushed if we fought them in open combat. Thankfully I expect to be able to defeat all of them without any danger at all because I have a day to prepare just the perfect response.
For much of this campaign we have had barrages of fights every day and I wouldn't have been overpowered as a cleric. Now we are back to 1 encounter per day, and my new cleric is dismantling them by employing the cleric spell list to its greatest possible effect.
I don't know if Naked Man, my GM, likes the creativity I bring to the problems he presents to us, or if he finds this all kinds of frustrating. My fellow adventurers certainly love the way we stay alive, but they also surely grumble at the way I solve all the problems. Now the only question is whether or not Naked Man will respond to my arrogance towards our latest problem by trying to kill me off once and for all.
We also had issues with me solving all the problems we encountered with some spell or other. We were playing with all the expansions and extra books at the time, so whenever some difficult situation showed up I was free to peruse all the cleric spells ever printed to find the one that would trivialize it. We got to the point where when we found a difficult situation the other characters would look at me expectantly, assuming I would suggest sleeping for the night so I could memorize the spell that would whisk us safely past the obstacle. I busted us through a stone wall with Stone Shape, summoned creatures to scout or carry us, and made us immune to all kinds of other things. It was frustrating for the GM I am sure, because it made so many of his creative works fall down flat.
This wasn't much fun for the other players, I think, and it felt kind of silly to me too. I can't just look at the solution to a problem and do nothing just so somebody else can try something far inferior, so I decided to retire my cleric and take up a paladin instead. I still could cover the healing role, but my spell list was much more restricted to simple bashing and healing so other problems could still pose a threat.
Recently I concluded that my crossbow specialist in my 5th edition DnD game was too good. Other characters could do similar damage to me under ideal conditions, but I could do my damage to any target on the map, while they had to run about and struggle with rounds where they could do nothing at all. I also had the ability to burst out huge chunks of damage on command which they did not. Like before, I retired my character to let everyone else have a better chance to be the big hero.
I decided to start up a cleric instead, so I could take over the healing and buffing while other characters did the beatdown. I settled on a Light cleric because the roleplaying stuff behind this seemed to fit. The first fight we stepped into was against trolls, which regenerate like crazy until you apply fire damage to them. Light clerics also get lots of fire spells so I used Wall of Fire, Flaming Sphere, and Scorching Ray to blast them with fire. Our melee people got to deal a lot of damage, but nothing like the carnage I was laying out with my burnination.
The next fight was supposed to be a deadly confusing mess with our group and a pile of allies being ambushed in the dark by a bunch of gnolls with night vision. A big part of the challenge was the vision disparity with our allies being overwhelmed by foes they could not see nor effectively fight. Just before the gnoll attack hit, I used Daylight and filled the entire battle area with bright light, completely negating the surprise attack and giving all of my allies light to see by. We brutally crushed the gnoll attack and sent them fleeing with their entire leadership wiped out.
Our next fight is for the following day, and I already have another spell lined up to completely trivialize it. The enemy force we face is overwhelmingly powerful, and although we have allies with us we would be crushed if we fought them in open combat. Thankfully I expect to be able to defeat all of them without any danger at all because I have a day to prepare just the perfect response.
For much of this campaign we have had barrages of fights every day and I wouldn't have been overpowered as a cleric. Now we are back to 1 encounter per day, and my new cleric is dismantling them by employing the cleric spell list to its greatest possible effect.
I don't know if Naked Man, my GM, likes the creativity I bring to the problems he presents to us, or if he finds this all kinds of frustrating. My fellow adventurers certainly love the way we stay alive, but they also surely grumble at the way I solve all the problems. Now the only question is whether or not Naked Man will respond to my arrogance towards our latest problem by trying to kill me off once and for all.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Flappy bird
In Wingspan there is a variety of bird that moves around from place to place. Normally you have to build up your card, food, and egg rows separately, but this kind of bird can fly to another zone after you use it, which effectively gives you extra development in all 3 zones. It does constrain your actions and plays some though, which is a downside. I haven't ever played with flappy birds before because they always arrived too late to be good, but today I opened a starting hand with 2 of them. Time to experiment! I was especially excited because two of the round goals were 'number of birds in a zone' and flappy birds are fantastic at scooping those up with minimal effort.
I was optimistic. Being able to always take actions at rank 3 is crucial, and I expected it to give me a huge early game advantage. I slammed down my two flappy birds and got busy.
I ended up with my worst score ever at 78. Ouch!
When you do this sort of experiment it pays to look at the other factors like how my bonus cards and end of round goals played out. My score card looked great, except for one thing. I had 26 points in eggs, just 2 shy of maxed out. That is good. I got 18 points in round goals with little invested in getting them, which is excellent. My single bonus card got me 6 points, again with minimal investment. I got 2 tuck points and 2 food points, which is fine, but the crushing failure was my 24 points in birds. Normally I end up closer to 40 points in birds, which explains why most of my scores are in the mid 90s.
I made 2 errors that I know of, each of which cost me 1 point at endgame, though both were defensible in that they might not have been errors, depending on draws. I also ended up with 5 bird cards in hand because I took a single draw action trying to get something good to play and whiffed completely.
Overall my game looked strong, except for those extra bird cards and that terrible ending score. I think the conclusion is that flappy birds, while they seem powerful, just aren't. They have wretched point values on them so you pay a huge price to have them. They also suck in the endgame where you just want to take eggs a bunch of times in a row because they don't have any ability to help those actions. You do get rank 5-6 eggs, which is nice, but you don't get anything extra.
I thought that flying around the board would be a massive advantage, but it doesn't seem that way. I have had consistently superior results going with normal birds that stay in place and keep on using their abilities to generate points or resources. Flappy birds are exciting but the total advantage they bring just doesn't seem to add up.
I am curious to know if other people have had this same experience. When other people have had flappy birds I have been worried about it, but I have never actually lost to someone using one, so maybe that was a sign. In any case if you have used flappy birds and been really successful, please let me know, and explain why you think that is. In my admittedly limited experience, flappy birds are weak indeed.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Hello? Anyone out there?
The Contact Other Plane spell in DnD is a bit of a problem. It reads as follows:
You mentally contact a demigod, the spirit of a long-dead sage, or some other mysterious entity from another plane. Contacting this extraplanar Intelligence can strain or even break your mind. When you cast this spell, make a DC 15 Intelligence saving throw. On a failure, you take 6d6 psychic damage and are insane until you finish a Long Rest. While insane, you can't take Actions, can't understand what other creatures say, can't read, and speak only in gibberish. A Greater Restoration spell cast on you ends this effect.
On a successful save, you can ask the entity up to five questions. You must ask your questions before the spell ends. The DM answers each question with one word, such as yes, no, maybe, never, irrelevant, unclear (if the entity doesn't know the answer to the question). If a one-word answer would be misleading, the DM might instead offer a short phrase as an answer.
My character, a wizard, has just gotten this spell and I am going to be using it as often as possible. Many people would be intimidated by a difficult saving throw where if you fail it you go insane, but that bothers me not at all. I have a monstrous +11 Intelligence saving throw and two bards in my party to grant me Bardic Inspiration to help my saving throw along. I can only fail on a 1 or 2 on a d20, and even then I fail only if I roll quite low on the Bardic Inspiration die. I think the game designed this spell to be potent and the thought was that the saving throw vs. insanity would rein it in but that doesn't work against me. It is even a ritual spell, so in theory I could just sit around casting it over and over again all day if I wanted to.
This presents real problems. I can spam questions to figure out where my enemies are, what is in the next room, where treasure is located, all kinds of crazy things. If, for example, I wanted to locate a particular person I could just play twenty questions, starting with "Is Blorfmap the bloody north of me right now?" and after a few castings I could determine which rock Blorfmap is sitting on.
That seems like a real problem for campaign design. It gets even worse if I start asking questions like "Is Everick planning on breaking his promise to me?" and effectively getting mind reading in the bargain.
Of course the GM could just start replying "Unknown" to all kinds of questions and refuse to let me figure anything out this way but that feels frustrating. I don't mind constraints, but I don't want a system where every time I think of a clever solution to a problem the GM just flat out says no. Giving the enemies informational plot armour is weak. I don't like a system where I can figure out lots of stuff but as soon as it becomes plot relevant it gets locked out.
Many other solutions keep the power of the spell in check but also make it unusable. For example, having the entities you contact lie you to if they feel like it would make the spell worthless.
Ideally what I want is to know what the spell can do and then be clever in working within those constraints. My character is a genius so he ought to be able to work out great ways to use his powers just as I can. One thing I suggested to Naked Man my GM is that the spell not be able to determine people's thoughts or state of mind. The system generally doesn't seem to assume that all gods can read everyone's mind, much less any random powerful being out there. I think that retains plenty of power for the spell but gets rid of some of the more outrageous abuses.
The sort of power this spell represents really changes the nature of the GM's job. Fireball is good and all, but there are answers for it. Contact Other Plane changes the nature of the player / GM interaction in far more fundamental ways than any combat spell does, so it requires a lot of finesse and thought to adjudicate.
It is probably a lot worse when you have someone like me with the spare time to scheme up all kinds of sneaky things to ask.
You mentally contact a demigod, the spirit of a long-dead sage, or some other mysterious entity from another plane. Contacting this extraplanar Intelligence can strain or even break your mind. When you cast this spell, make a DC 15 Intelligence saving throw. On a failure, you take 6d6 psychic damage and are insane until you finish a Long Rest. While insane, you can't take Actions, can't understand what other creatures say, can't read, and speak only in gibberish. A Greater Restoration spell cast on you ends this effect.
On a successful save, you can ask the entity up to five questions. You must ask your questions before the spell ends. The DM answers each question with one word, such as yes, no, maybe, never, irrelevant, unclear (if the entity doesn't know the answer to the question). If a one-word answer would be misleading, the DM might instead offer a short phrase as an answer.
My character, a wizard, has just gotten this spell and I am going to be using it as often as possible. Many people would be intimidated by a difficult saving throw where if you fail it you go insane, but that bothers me not at all. I have a monstrous +11 Intelligence saving throw and two bards in my party to grant me Bardic Inspiration to help my saving throw along. I can only fail on a 1 or 2 on a d20, and even then I fail only if I roll quite low on the Bardic Inspiration die. I think the game designed this spell to be potent and the thought was that the saving throw vs. insanity would rein it in but that doesn't work against me. It is even a ritual spell, so in theory I could just sit around casting it over and over again all day if I wanted to.
This presents real problems. I can spam questions to figure out where my enemies are, what is in the next room, where treasure is located, all kinds of crazy things. If, for example, I wanted to locate a particular person I could just play twenty questions, starting with "Is Blorfmap the bloody north of me right now?" and after a few castings I could determine which rock Blorfmap is sitting on.
That seems like a real problem for campaign design. It gets even worse if I start asking questions like "Is Everick planning on breaking his promise to me?" and effectively getting mind reading in the bargain.
Of course the GM could just start replying "Unknown" to all kinds of questions and refuse to let me figure anything out this way but that feels frustrating. I don't mind constraints, but I don't want a system where every time I think of a clever solution to a problem the GM just flat out says no. Giving the enemies informational plot armour is weak. I don't like a system where I can figure out lots of stuff but as soon as it becomes plot relevant it gets locked out.
Many other solutions keep the power of the spell in check but also make it unusable. For example, having the entities you contact lie you to if they feel like it would make the spell worthless.
Ideally what I want is to know what the spell can do and then be clever in working within those constraints. My character is a genius so he ought to be able to work out great ways to use his powers just as I can. One thing I suggested to Naked Man my GM is that the spell not be able to determine people's thoughts or state of mind. The system generally doesn't seem to assume that all gods can read everyone's mind, much less any random powerful being out there. I think that retains plenty of power for the spell but gets rid of some of the more outrageous abuses.
The sort of power this spell represents really changes the nature of the GM's job. Fireball is good and all, but there are answers for it. Contact Other Plane changes the nature of the player / GM interaction in far more fundamental ways than any combat spell does, so it requires a lot of finesse and thought to adjudicate.
It is probably a lot worse when you have someone like me with the spare time to scheme up all kinds of sneaky things to ask.
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