I am going to be GMing a fantasy gaming campaign again for the first time in a while. I have made a couple of stabs at running games for Pinkie Pie, but they always ended quickly for one reason or another. This time it is a game for 5 players who are all adults, so my standards for people's effort are going to be way higher, and hopefully we will get some exciting times in. The last time I did this was probably around ten years ago, so there is definitely some rust to shake off.
It is weird running a game for people you don't know. Normally the GM takes charge and organizes things, but I wandered into this gig without having met some of the players at all. That makes things... tricky! With people I know it is easier to know how much to push for things, and what I can expect. Hard to do that without experience with the players.
Also I managed to totally avoid taking my own advice about setting up a game. I have often said that it is trivial to get a bunch of people to say they want to play DnD. The interesting part comes in actually hammering out a schedule that has you meet regularly. My theory is that you should pick the schedule first and get players based on that. Don't just invite six people and then hope you can all meet up, that is a recipe for meeting twice over six months and giving up. First pick a schedule, and then choose players that can meet it.
I apparently didn't do that, and we are scheduled to meet once a month. This usually shakes out to meeting once every two to three months, so I am dubious. But it is too late to do anything about that now, so I will run it and hope that my worries are unfounded.
One of the issues with this campaign is that my stuff is all at Naked Man's house. I took my miniatures back and forth to games at his place for awhile, then ended up just leaving them all with him. So it went with my battle mat and my markers too. I am going to have to confiscate many of my things to go to this new game and that will leave Naked Man's house sorely lacking in materials, as much of the stuff that he uses actually belongs to me.
I would just buy more miniatures, but the $5 price tag for each one gets me every time. How can such a small thing cost so much?
The last thing that is making this all exciting is that the people aren't actually going to be playing DnD... they are going to be playing my game, Heroes By Trade. I expect they will enjoy it and I am confident in the work I have done, but there is always a bit of extra pressure when both the in person experience and the game mechanics themselves are something you have personally created.
I do love to see my creations in action though, so that part of it has me pumped up.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
The deck. Again.
I have had The Deck Of Many Things show up in a variety of my gaming campaigns over the years. For those not familiar, The Deck is a powerful artifact with absurd abilities. You draw a card, and then based on which card you draw, crazy stuff happens. You could be instantly killed, get a wish, be granted treasure, have monster spawn to murder you, among other things. Usually The Deck showing up ended with some characters destroyed and the campaign totally derailed.
People do love their random draws though!
This time it worked out fine. We drew one card, got a huge pile of treasure, and then The Deck disappeared. A good result, considering the total range of options. Having a pile of money meant that our characters can now pursue some of their harder to reach goals like buying land or expensive spell components.
But the process of getting the deck was not well written. We acquired it by clearing out Gardmore Abbey, a 4th edition adventure. Scattered throughout the abbey were the 22 cards in The Deck, but until they were brought together they were much weaker and had their own separate abilities. The way the cards worked is that when a combat begins, a single card chosen randomly from all cards present manifests. It puts a thing on the ground in a random place, and anyone can stand on the thing and do something cool. It works for *anyone* though, so having a card doesn't help you, because the enemies can use it themselves if they feel like it.
The NPCs all treat the cards as if they are powerful and exciting things. My group pretty much laughed at them, because a random card spawning in a random place that benefits the enemies as much as us.... how is that a good thing? Certainly once you have a single card getting lots more of them isn't any use, that actually makes them worse because you have no idea what will happen.
The trouble was that the cards actually were super powerful for the enemies. They got to use the abilities without taking actions, and their cards always popped up and overwrote ours. As soon as my group grabbed a card though, it instantly became crap and lost all of its good abilities.
I can totally understand writing in a singular enemy that has a powerful item that works for them but not for others. That can be a fine thing once in a while. But writing in an endless stream of enemies with powerful, dangerous items that promply and without any in game explanation nerf themselves once the players touch them is a wretched mechanic. It just makes us bitter and destroys immersion. How are we supposed to believe in the world when the writers of the module clearly decided that if the players had access to all this stuff it would be overpowered, so lets just write in 'this stuff doesn't work for the players' on everything?
The whole thing about finding the scattered cards is fine. The card abilities are fine too. They aren't particularly good, but they are neat and bizarre and chaotic and thematic, which is okay overall. The problem is that the writers felt desperate to have the enemies use them, but then felt equally desperate to prevent the players doing the same. If they had just accepted that the cards would do random, not particularly powerful stuff for everyone that would have been fine. The bait and switch isn't fun though, especially when it happens over and over and over.
It is unfortunate because some of the stuff in Gardmore Abbey is actually a lot of fun. Overall I quite enjoyed the module. I liked exploring the grounds, I liked the variety of encounters and situations, and the history was interesting. It was a good place to play. The way various encounters linked together was amusing too, even when we did them in the wrong order and made things extra hard for ourselves.
However, it had two major problems. First, the cards as described above. They were meant to tie the whole place together, and instead they became a running joke. Second, there were way too many random and pointless fights. There were a lot of monsters that had no narrative purpose or sense to them, and were just there to pad the experience totals. Not interesting, that.
The finale to Gardmore convinced me that I need to retire my character. Being a crossbow specialist is just unfair. When the other single target dps characters can stand beside an enemy and swing they are worse then me, but not *that* much worse. But I can do full damage to anyone within 120 feet of me, and they are melee, so they spend much of their time unable to do anything or taking weak actions to try to get into range. It isn't right that I do as much damage as the other two combined, so crossbow man Wilbur needs to go.... and The Deck provides as good a reason to change things up as any.
People do love their random draws though!
This time it worked out fine. We drew one card, got a huge pile of treasure, and then The Deck disappeared. A good result, considering the total range of options. Having a pile of money meant that our characters can now pursue some of their harder to reach goals like buying land or expensive spell components.
But the process of getting the deck was not well written. We acquired it by clearing out Gardmore Abbey, a 4th edition adventure. Scattered throughout the abbey were the 22 cards in The Deck, but until they were brought together they were much weaker and had their own separate abilities. The way the cards worked is that when a combat begins, a single card chosen randomly from all cards present manifests. It puts a thing on the ground in a random place, and anyone can stand on the thing and do something cool. It works for *anyone* though, so having a card doesn't help you, because the enemies can use it themselves if they feel like it.
The NPCs all treat the cards as if they are powerful and exciting things. My group pretty much laughed at them, because a random card spawning in a random place that benefits the enemies as much as us.... how is that a good thing? Certainly once you have a single card getting lots more of them isn't any use, that actually makes them worse because you have no idea what will happen.
The trouble was that the cards actually were super powerful for the enemies. They got to use the abilities without taking actions, and their cards always popped up and overwrote ours. As soon as my group grabbed a card though, it instantly became crap and lost all of its good abilities.
I can totally understand writing in a singular enemy that has a powerful item that works for them but not for others. That can be a fine thing once in a while. But writing in an endless stream of enemies with powerful, dangerous items that promply and without any in game explanation nerf themselves once the players touch them is a wretched mechanic. It just makes us bitter and destroys immersion. How are we supposed to believe in the world when the writers of the module clearly decided that if the players had access to all this stuff it would be overpowered, so lets just write in 'this stuff doesn't work for the players' on everything?
The whole thing about finding the scattered cards is fine. The card abilities are fine too. They aren't particularly good, but they are neat and bizarre and chaotic and thematic, which is okay overall. The problem is that the writers felt desperate to have the enemies use them, but then felt equally desperate to prevent the players doing the same. If they had just accepted that the cards would do random, not particularly powerful stuff for everyone that would have been fine. The bait and switch isn't fun though, especially when it happens over and over and over.
It is unfortunate because some of the stuff in Gardmore Abbey is actually a lot of fun. Overall I quite enjoyed the module. I liked exploring the grounds, I liked the variety of encounters and situations, and the history was interesting. It was a good place to play. The way various encounters linked together was amusing too, even when we did them in the wrong order and made things extra hard for ourselves.
However, it had two major problems. First, the cards as described above. They were meant to tie the whole place together, and instead they became a running joke. Second, there were way too many random and pointless fights. There were a lot of monsters that had no narrative purpose or sense to them, and were just there to pad the experience totals. Not interesting, that.
The finale to Gardmore convinced me that I need to retire my character. Being a crossbow specialist is just unfair. When the other single target dps characters can stand beside an enemy and swing they are worse then me, but not *that* much worse. But I can do full damage to anyone within 120 feet of me, and they are melee, so they spend much of their time unable to do anything or taking weak actions to try to get into range. It isn't right that I do as much damage as the other two combined, so crossbow man Wilbur needs to go.... and The Deck provides as good a reason to change things up as any.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Big bird vs. little bird
When playing Wingspan I have found that playing lots of cheap birds early feels great. Your engine purrs along, your actions feel powerful, and the game seems sweet. However, I didn't know if that was just an illusion, and I wanted to figure out how good expensive, high point value birds were in comparison. I also figured I should test out engine cards to see how they compare to point cards. I designed the following experiment to test these theories out:
1. Play Wingspan by myself, pretending the other players do nothing relevant. Every bird is reduced to a 5 point bird that eats a single copy of any food and has no abilities otherwise. I get 11 points from end of round goals and my bonus card. Go!
This assumes some things. Obviously the deck isn't full of birds like this, but this test can tell us if such birds are actually good. It also assumes values for bonus points that are hard to rigourously defend. While playing I won't have to actually work for any end of round goals, which helps a lot, but I also can't benefit from any opponents using abilities that give me stuff. I will assume those two things cancel out since I don't know how to account for them properly.
The result was that I scored 77 points. Not a great game certainly, but not a disaster either. This score would come in 2nd or 3rd in most of the games I have played, which isn't too bad. It won't win any tournaments though, that is for sure. I have never personally scored below 77, so clearly this isn't a powerful strat.
2. Do the same as 1. except play 5 point, 1 food birds until I have my basic 6 bird slots covered, then switch to 9 point, 3 food birds.
The result here was a score of 81. Better, largely because the expensive birds are more efficient to fill the later slots that are mostly points. However, having less birds on the board means I would likely make less points from bonus cards and end of round goals, so the real difference is likely miniscule.
3. Do the same as 1. except every bird I play is a 9 point, 3 food bird.
This style felt awful with weak early plays and a terrible engine. I was expecting a terrible result. I scored 84, which is the highest so far with these tests. Again though, with only 7 birds on the board I would actually do worse on the goals and bonus scores, so it probably is just about as good as the other two strats.
I was quite surprised at how tight it was. Expensive birds score more, but get less goals, and the numbers seem like they should be tight. Well done on balance!
This does tell me some useful things. First is that even if a strategy feels bad because you are pumping out points in the beginning instead of engine building it isn't necessarily a problem. You can still get a strong result from high point birds early on, definitely in part because filling your board with cheap bad birds means that the late game birds require two eggs to play, which is awful. Playing expensive stuff means you never have to pay that price.
However, playing birds that just have raw points is not going to win you games against good players. Scoring 80 just isn't enough. It will beat people who have a bad game or newbies, but it won't be a dominant strat. To score a lot of points you need cards that can consistently generate value and hit them over and over. There are lots of ways to do this from tucking cards to cacheing food to generating eggs, but the key to scoring 90+ is to get a powerful engine and run it. You probably want to stop building an engine halfway through round 2 though, and just punch the good buttons and play points from then on out. This is a good way to have an engine builder work though - figuring out when to stop building the engine and switch to points works as a core concept, and is certainly dead common in this style of game.
I do like that my simple tests support a style of play that the game is clearly striving for. You *need* to build an engine, and you *need* to stop partway through and focus on points. The cards absolutely enforce that, as engine cards are trash in the last two turns of the game, and you clearly can't generate a big score without playing them. The numbers conclusively support playing the game in a way that is both intended and generally fun. Yay! Game not broken!
1. Play Wingspan by myself, pretending the other players do nothing relevant. Every bird is reduced to a 5 point bird that eats a single copy of any food and has no abilities otherwise. I get 11 points from end of round goals and my bonus card. Go!
This assumes some things. Obviously the deck isn't full of birds like this, but this test can tell us if such birds are actually good. It also assumes values for bonus points that are hard to rigourously defend. While playing I won't have to actually work for any end of round goals, which helps a lot, but I also can't benefit from any opponents using abilities that give me stuff. I will assume those two things cancel out since I don't know how to account for them properly.
The result was that I scored 77 points. Not a great game certainly, but not a disaster either. This score would come in 2nd or 3rd in most of the games I have played, which isn't too bad. It won't win any tournaments though, that is for sure. I have never personally scored below 77, so clearly this isn't a powerful strat.
2. Do the same as 1. except play 5 point, 1 food birds until I have my basic 6 bird slots covered, then switch to 9 point, 3 food birds.
The result here was a score of 81. Better, largely because the expensive birds are more efficient to fill the later slots that are mostly points. However, having less birds on the board means I would likely make less points from bonus cards and end of round goals, so the real difference is likely miniscule.
3. Do the same as 1. except every bird I play is a 9 point, 3 food bird.
This style felt awful with weak early plays and a terrible engine. I was expecting a terrible result. I scored 84, which is the highest so far with these tests. Again though, with only 7 birds on the board I would actually do worse on the goals and bonus scores, so it probably is just about as good as the other two strats.
I was quite surprised at how tight it was. Expensive birds score more, but get less goals, and the numbers seem like they should be tight. Well done on balance!
This does tell me some useful things. First is that even if a strategy feels bad because you are pumping out points in the beginning instead of engine building it isn't necessarily a problem. You can still get a strong result from high point birds early on, definitely in part because filling your board with cheap bad birds means that the late game birds require two eggs to play, which is awful. Playing expensive stuff means you never have to pay that price.
However, playing birds that just have raw points is not going to win you games against good players. Scoring 80 just isn't enough. It will beat people who have a bad game or newbies, but it won't be a dominant strat. To score a lot of points you need cards that can consistently generate value and hit them over and over. There are lots of ways to do this from tucking cards to cacheing food to generating eggs, but the key to scoring 90+ is to get a powerful engine and run it. You probably want to stop building an engine halfway through round 2 though, and just punch the good buttons and play points from then on out. This is a good way to have an engine builder work though - figuring out when to stop building the engine and switch to points works as a core concept, and is certainly dead common in this style of game.
I do like that my simple tests support a style of play that the game is clearly striving for. You *need* to build an engine, and you *need* to stop partway through and focus on points. The cards absolutely enforce that, as engine cards are trash in the last two turns of the game, and you clearly can't generate a big score without playing them. The numbers conclusively support playing the game in a way that is both intended and generally fun. Yay! Game not broken!
Friday, January 24, 2020
The cost of a bird
I have been doing some analysis of bird cards in Wingspan. The game is fairly balanced by and large, but I was curious how the designers valued various types of abilities and what they thought things were worth.
Baseline, birds have points on them based on their cost.
1 cost - 5 points
2 cost - 7 points
3 cost - 9 points.
Additional egg capacity on a bird seems to be costed at 2 eggs for 1 point, with a base value of 2 eggs. So if a bird has a 4 egg capacity, it has 1 less point on it.
Bonus cards are costed at 3 points. I was often disappointed to play a bonus card bird because they regularly gave me only a couple points, but it seems that this is actually just fine. Getting the big scores of 6-8 points on a bonus card is rare and challenging - mostly you can expect that one of your two bonus card choices will give you 2-4 points, and that works out.
Birds that lay eggs on every nest of a specific type when they are played are worth 4 less points for that ability. They always hit themselves, so you need to have 3 other nests for them to be on par. That won't usually be the case until the last couple of actions, but at game end they are solid.
Flying around from one habitat to another costs 3-4 points. This seems reasonable. It has to work for you 4 times to pay for itself, which is a lot, but it can also let you score up goals pretty easily. Weak in the late game, but extremely strong at the outset.
Getting to play another bird is worth 2 points. This seems extremely good. Your actions are worth 4 points each over the course of the game, so getting an extra action and giving up only 2 points is excellent. Of course it is tricky to save up all the resources to play multiple birds at once, and you have to have the second bird and the room to play it. If the play a second bird card fits into your strategy nicely it is great, but if you really have to work for it it isn't exciting.
The birds that have a random 'when played' ability are all fair. The costs to get the stuff range from 1 to 2, and all of the stuff you get is reasonable. There are a few high rollers that get you a lot of a single food type, but that is often hard to use up efficiently, so they are normally going to be okay but not broken.
There are a ton of birds with 'when activated' abilities and the abilities vary wildly in power. Some of those abilities are symmetrical, like giving every player a fish, or all players drawing a card from the deck. You will want to use those sometimes so they are better than nothing, but they aren't great. All of these abilities are costed between 0-1 points, which looks appropriate to me. The more powerful activated abilities I grouped up based on how many uses you would need in order for them to be as good as a pure points bird. They fell about equally into 3 groups - 2 uses, 3 uses, and 4 uses. 4 uses abilities are really only worth doing right at the outset of the game. You usually will do each row 6.5 times per game, so unless you get the 4 uses abilities in quite quickly they are low value. The 2 uses abilities are obviously superb at the start, and even worth setting up midgame.
One thing that became clear when I looked at the activated abilities was that certain ones were consistently bad. Hunting abilities all seemed to be costed the same, usually about 2 points, but the conditions on which you actually get the points are not the same at all. Some of them involve drawing a bird of <100cm wingspan, which is highly likely to hit, but some involved drawing birds of <50cm wingspan, which is drastically worse. Also the abilities that give you stuff by rolling the dice are all terrible. You will end up rolling 1 die too often and get nothing for your investment.
Activated abilities that do the same thing that their row is already doing also seem like a trap. You might get lots of resources, but you can't effectively spam that button. In particular the draw cards row has a bunch of birds in it that are worth hardly any points but give you tons of card draw, and these are awful. You want consistent card draw to collect the good stuff that pops up. Drawing a ton of cards all at once is just a big pile of random crap, and having a giant mitt of cards isn't the way to win.
The last group of cards to evaluate is the pink cards that work on your opponent's turn. They are all costed from 1-3 points, and all of them seem powerful. Mostly they need to go off 3 times to be worth using, and they rate to go off far more than that, even if played in the midgame. This is the only group of birds that changes in value based on how many players are playing, and it is clear that in 4-5 person groups they are ridiculous, absolutely the best. In 3 or 2 they are merely fair.
My final, general conclusions are that birds that get you bonus cards, fly around, give you bonus turns or have 'when played' abilities are good and fair. However, birds that have activated abilities are all over the place. Many abilities are bad because they rely too much on luck or specific resources. If a thing gives you a ton of berries, you will have too many berries. If it relies on you having grain, you will not have enough. They is not enough weight given to how powerful selection is, or how punishing restrictions are. This extends to nest types, where the star nest type seems to have no cost at all, despite it being excellent for goals, bonus cards, and egg laying interactions. The cards that interact with dice consistently assume the dice will be favourable, when in fact you can assume the opposite because your opponents hate you and want you to suffer.
Take the cards that give you wild resources, not specific ones. Take star nests. Avoid hunting abilities unless they are the premium ones. These are the key takeaways for me.
Baseline, birds have points on them based on their cost.
1 cost - 5 points
2 cost - 7 points
3 cost - 9 points.
Additional egg capacity on a bird seems to be costed at 2 eggs for 1 point, with a base value of 2 eggs. So if a bird has a 4 egg capacity, it has 1 less point on it.
Bonus cards are costed at 3 points. I was often disappointed to play a bonus card bird because they regularly gave me only a couple points, but it seems that this is actually just fine. Getting the big scores of 6-8 points on a bonus card is rare and challenging - mostly you can expect that one of your two bonus card choices will give you 2-4 points, and that works out.
Birds that lay eggs on every nest of a specific type when they are played are worth 4 less points for that ability. They always hit themselves, so you need to have 3 other nests for them to be on par. That won't usually be the case until the last couple of actions, but at game end they are solid.
Flying around from one habitat to another costs 3-4 points. This seems reasonable. It has to work for you 4 times to pay for itself, which is a lot, but it can also let you score up goals pretty easily. Weak in the late game, but extremely strong at the outset.
Getting to play another bird is worth 2 points. This seems extremely good. Your actions are worth 4 points each over the course of the game, so getting an extra action and giving up only 2 points is excellent. Of course it is tricky to save up all the resources to play multiple birds at once, and you have to have the second bird and the room to play it. If the play a second bird card fits into your strategy nicely it is great, but if you really have to work for it it isn't exciting.
The birds that have a random 'when played' ability are all fair. The costs to get the stuff range from 1 to 2, and all of the stuff you get is reasonable. There are a few high rollers that get you a lot of a single food type, but that is often hard to use up efficiently, so they are normally going to be okay but not broken.
There are a ton of birds with 'when activated' abilities and the abilities vary wildly in power. Some of those abilities are symmetrical, like giving every player a fish, or all players drawing a card from the deck. You will want to use those sometimes so they are better than nothing, but they aren't great. All of these abilities are costed between 0-1 points, which looks appropriate to me. The more powerful activated abilities I grouped up based on how many uses you would need in order for them to be as good as a pure points bird. They fell about equally into 3 groups - 2 uses, 3 uses, and 4 uses. 4 uses abilities are really only worth doing right at the outset of the game. You usually will do each row 6.5 times per game, so unless you get the 4 uses abilities in quite quickly they are low value. The 2 uses abilities are obviously superb at the start, and even worth setting up midgame.
One thing that became clear when I looked at the activated abilities was that certain ones were consistently bad. Hunting abilities all seemed to be costed the same, usually about 2 points, but the conditions on which you actually get the points are not the same at all. Some of them involve drawing a bird of <100cm wingspan, which is highly likely to hit, but some involved drawing birds of <50cm wingspan, which is drastically worse. Also the abilities that give you stuff by rolling the dice are all terrible. You will end up rolling 1 die too often and get nothing for your investment.
Activated abilities that do the same thing that their row is already doing also seem like a trap. You might get lots of resources, but you can't effectively spam that button. In particular the draw cards row has a bunch of birds in it that are worth hardly any points but give you tons of card draw, and these are awful. You want consistent card draw to collect the good stuff that pops up. Drawing a ton of cards all at once is just a big pile of random crap, and having a giant mitt of cards isn't the way to win.
The last group of cards to evaluate is the pink cards that work on your opponent's turn. They are all costed from 1-3 points, and all of them seem powerful. Mostly they need to go off 3 times to be worth using, and they rate to go off far more than that, even if played in the midgame. This is the only group of birds that changes in value based on how many players are playing, and it is clear that in 4-5 person groups they are ridiculous, absolutely the best. In 3 or 2 they are merely fair.
My final, general conclusions are that birds that get you bonus cards, fly around, give you bonus turns or have 'when played' abilities are good and fair. However, birds that have activated abilities are all over the place. Many abilities are bad because they rely too much on luck or specific resources. If a thing gives you a ton of berries, you will have too many berries. If it relies on you having grain, you will not have enough. They is not enough weight given to how powerful selection is, or how punishing restrictions are. This extends to nest types, where the star nest type seems to have no cost at all, despite it being excellent for goals, bonus cards, and egg laying interactions. The cards that interact with dice consistently assume the dice will be favourable, when in fact you can assume the opposite because your opponents hate you and want you to suffer.
Take the cards that give you wild resources, not specific ones. Take star nests. Avoid hunting abilities unless they are the premium ones. These are the key takeaways for me.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Dead. Almost. Sort of?
In my last DnD session my character died. It wasn't one of those grand deaths where I made a great sacrifice for the common good, or where I heroically attempted something truly difficult and paid the price.
It was one of those questionable, sorry deaths. I was in a fight. Monsters spawned randomly, then they attacked me and I died. I had no place to run to, no tactic to use. There was no reasonable defence. The only way to save myself would have been to run away from the fight earlier and leave my friends, which would have resulted in them being dead instead.
When I am GMing I hate this sort of thing. I try to let the dice do the talking in fights, but I work hard to set up encounters so that if you die, there was a reason. I want you to have made a choice. Maybe that choice was just to be foolish and aggressive, but at least I want the player to be able to think that they did something to make that happen. "I should learn to fall back and heal when I am hurt" is a fine lesson to carry away from a death. "I sure did die heroically!" is also good. "I got killed and there was nothing I could do about it at all." doesn't cut it.
The main reason I died without any recourse is that we were fighting Shadows. Shadows drain your Strength score and my group had no way whatsoever to avoid, prevent, or heal that sort of attack. One moment I was fine, the next shadows all appeared next to me and my Strength score was drained to zero, killing me. Shadows are a scary opponent when there is only one or two, but when there are a dozen they are death machines, especially when they randomly appear and then attack, denying us any way to defend ourselves.
The module offered us a way out though. We were defending a paladin doing a cleansing ritual to get rid of the taint in a holy temple. The god associated with the temple decided to reward us for winning, and one of the rewards was a resurrection. The resurrection in question didn't help at all with having my Strength drained, but that was handwaved away and the boon was deemed able to resurrect me anyway.
Problem is, we each got a boon. And one of those boons had to be used to resurrect me. Everyone else was going to get an extremely powerful, permanent bonus, but I was going to get 'not dead'. That makes being killed totally randomly feel even worse. I did nothing wrong, the GM/dice declared me dead, and I get punished hard. Even worse, one of the options available was to make my weapon magical. Nobody puts magical crossbows in modules, so if I missed this I would be using a nonmagical weapon and doing half damage forever.
I was perfectly content with being dead. I don't like 'oh no, you are dead. Let's warp reality so you aren't dead' as a mechanic. Why bother to roll dice at all, if you can't lose? Just declare all the enemies defeated and move on, or describe battles narratively. If losing is impossible, then winning is irrelevant, so if I am dead I want to stay dead. However, the boon being able to bring me back was definitely intended, so saying that the resurrection also included a spell to remove my Strength penalty is quite reasonable. Still, I wasn't exactly thrilled about everyone else getting amazing, fun new powers while I got to look on.
Things didn't quite turn out that way though. One of the other characters decided to use his boon to bring me back to life, which meant I could use my boon to ask for a magical weapon so I can stop being terrible against the endless hordes of monsters that are resistant to nonmagical weapons. More than that though, now we have a story, and a debt. I owe that character something huge, something that will be terribly difficult to repay.
He didn't even make out that badly from all of it. After we decided on our boons and he didn't get a cool thing, we found another really powerful magic item and he grabbed it. We all ended the session with something new and exciting we can do, which is a good way to finish off a big section of a module.
So in the end a silly, pointless death turned into something cool and exciting. It set up potential conflict or drama in the future, and I sure do love that. All the credit goes to the player though, not the module. This combat and the fallout from it were a disaster waiting to happen, and we successfully snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
It was one of those questionable, sorry deaths. I was in a fight. Monsters spawned randomly, then they attacked me and I died. I had no place to run to, no tactic to use. There was no reasonable defence. The only way to save myself would have been to run away from the fight earlier and leave my friends, which would have resulted in them being dead instead.
When I am GMing I hate this sort of thing. I try to let the dice do the talking in fights, but I work hard to set up encounters so that if you die, there was a reason. I want you to have made a choice. Maybe that choice was just to be foolish and aggressive, but at least I want the player to be able to think that they did something to make that happen. "I should learn to fall back and heal when I am hurt" is a fine lesson to carry away from a death. "I sure did die heroically!" is also good. "I got killed and there was nothing I could do about it at all." doesn't cut it.
The main reason I died without any recourse is that we were fighting Shadows. Shadows drain your Strength score and my group had no way whatsoever to avoid, prevent, or heal that sort of attack. One moment I was fine, the next shadows all appeared next to me and my Strength score was drained to zero, killing me. Shadows are a scary opponent when there is only one or two, but when there are a dozen they are death machines, especially when they randomly appear and then attack, denying us any way to defend ourselves.
The module offered us a way out though. We were defending a paladin doing a cleansing ritual to get rid of the taint in a holy temple. The god associated with the temple decided to reward us for winning, and one of the rewards was a resurrection. The resurrection in question didn't help at all with having my Strength drained, but that was handwaved away and the boon was deemed able to resurrect me anyway.
Problem is, we each got a boon. And one of those boons had to be used to resurrect me. Everyone else was going to get an extremely powerful, permanent bonus, but I was going to get 'not dead'. That makes being killed totally randomly feel even worse. I did nothing wrong, the GM/dice declared me dead, and I get punished hard. Even worse, one of the options available was to make my weapon magical. Nobody puts magical crossbows in modules, so if I missed this I would be using a nonmagical weapon and doing half damage forever.
I was perfectly content with being dead. I don't like 'oh no, you are dead. Let's warp reality so you aren't dead' as a mechanic. Why bother to roll dice at all, if you can't lose? Just declare all the enemies defeated and move on, or describe battles narratively. If losing is impossible, then winning is irrelevant, so if I am dead I want to stay dead. However, the boon being able to bring me back was definitely intended, so saying that the resurrection also included a spell to remove my Strength penalty is quite reasonable. Still, I wasn't exactly thrilled about everyone else getting amazing, fun new powers while I got to look on.
Things didn't quite turn out that way though. One of the other characters decided to use his boon to bring me back to life, which meant I could use my boon to ask for a magical weapon so I can stop being terrible against the endless hordes of monsters that are resistant to nonmagical weapons. More than that though, now we have a story, and a debt. I owe that character something huge, something that will be terribly difficult to repay.
He didn't even make out that badly from all of it. After we decided on our boons and he didn't get a cool thing, we found another really powerful magic item and he grabbed it. We all ended the session with something new and exciting we can do, which is a good way to finish off a big section of a module.
So in the end a silly, pointless death turned into something cool and exciting. It set up potential conflict or drama in the future, and I sure do love that. All the credit goes to the player though, not the module. This combat and the fallout from it were a disaster waiting to happen, and we successfully snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Make a button
I acquired Wingspan for Christmas and I have been playing a bunch. I enjoy the game a lot, as the design is both pretty and generally well balanced. I don't know what other people manage in terms of high scores, but I managed a collection of results in the 103-107 range that seemed really solid, and several of them happened the same way.
I built an egg button and hit it over and over until I won.
Basically my strategy was to play a bird on the egg row that let me turn eggs into cards, and then another bird that let me turn eggs into food. This way I could just hit the egg button nearly every turn and get all the resources I needed, freeing me to play pure points into my other two rows. Normally you get too much of one thing if you hit a button all the time, but because I could toss away the main resource I was gathering it was fantastic. I generally hit the food and cards buttons only about 3 times over the entire game combined.
Question is, can you rely on this strategy? Answer: Hell no! I went through the bird deck and there are only 2 good cards to turn eggs into food, and 2 cards to turn eggs into cards. I just got stupid lucky to put together this same engine three times. You can't do this sort of thing with the food or card rows either, because there aren't things that let you efficiently trade away your cards or food for stuff so you can pound that button all game. You can make those rows good in a variety of ways but you are still going to have to hit your other rows, which dilutes the power of the button a great deal.
My first try at the game awhile ago led me to think that it is not great with five players, and maybe not even that good at four. The pink cards that activate on opponent's turns are nuts with high player counts and they make the game feel quite random. However I have been playing a bunch of two player Wingspan and at two players the pink cards aren't great, which isn't as much of a problem but isn't ideal either. A few weak cards you can just discard to discard effects, but a few overpowered cards can erase the skill element of the game too much.
Three players seems great though. The pink 'on opponent's turn' cards are good, but not absurd. Unfortunately I suspect that at WBC next year we will see Wingspan played, and it will end up at four players just because of the lack of copies of the game. I would hope to see it at three players for the finals though, as that seems like the superior format to me.
I know now what cards I want to see in my opening hand though. Common Raven (pitch egg for 2 food) and Franklin's Gull (pitch egg for 2 cards). Those two together are a powerhouse, giving you an amazing button to push over and over by your third action! Mix in a Common Grackle (tuck a card for an egg) later in round 1 and you can hammer that egg button the entire game long, never once needing to hit the food or card rows. Delicious.
I built an egg button and hit it over and over until I won.
Basically my strategy was to play a bird on the egg row that let me turn eggs into cards, and then another bird that let me turn eggs into food. This way I could just hit the egg button nearly every turn and get all the resources I needed, freeing me to play pure points into my other two rows. Normally you get too much of one thing if you hit a button all the time, but because I could toss away the main resource I was gathering it was fantastic. I generally hit the food and cards buttons only about 3 times over the entire game combined.
Question is, can you rely on this strategy? Answer: Hell no! I went through the bird deck and there are only 2 good cards to turn eggs into food, and 2 cards to turn eggs into cards. I just got stupid lucky to put together this same engine three times. You can't do this sort of thing with the food or card rows either, because there aren't things that let you efficiently trade away your cards or food for stuff so you can pound that button all game. You can make those rows good in a variety of ways but you are still going to have to hit your other rows, which dilutes the power of the button a great deal.
My first try at the game awhile ago led me to think that it is not great with five players, and maybe not even that good at four. The pink cards that activate on opponent's turns are nuts with high player counts and they make the game feel quite random. However I have been playing a bunch of two player Wingspan and at two players the pink cards aren't great, which isn't as much of a problem but isn't ideal either. A few weak cards you can just discard to discard effects, but a few overpowered cards can erase the skill element of the game too much.
Three players seems great though. The pink 'on opponent's turn' cards are good, but not absurd. Unfortunately I suspect that at WBC next year we will see Wingspan played, and it will end up at four players just because of the lack of copies of the game. I would hope to see it at three players for the finals though, as that seems like the superior format to me.
I know now what cards I want to see in my opening hand though. Common Raven (pitch egg for 2 food) and Franklin's Gull (pitch egg for 2 cards). Those two together are a powerhouse, giving you an amazing button to push over and over by your third action! Mix in a Common Grackle (tuck a card for an egg) later in round 1 and you can hammer that egg button the entire game long, never once needing to hit the food or card rows. Delicious.
Friday, January 10, 2020
Such a feast
Last year at Farmageddon I played a lot of A Feast for Odin. I enjoyed it but I saw a lot of room for improvement. This year I played a lot more Feast but I got to play the new edition and I was extremely pleased with the changes they made.
The most obvious change was to the wood/ore space. In the old edition it was 1 wood / player and 1 ore. This was totally bizarre because all other spaces provide a fixed amount of stuff and do not vary by player count. The new one is 3 wood and 1 ore, which is just right. It is a good spot, regularly used, but certainly not overpowered.
The other changes all seem good too. Animals are improved and it seemed quite strong to have them on your farm. The exception was cows, which seem to hard to make or not good enough, one of the two. The real kicker is that horses are excellent (buy them on turn 3, forget about them, get 24 points) but cows are just as hard to get and simply don't pay off as well. The cow synergy space just isn't good enough to make cows profitable, to my mind. However, animals fit into lots of strong strategies, so it isn't a problem that some animals aren't that great.
The spots on the board are reorganized some and the new setup is much superior to the old one. The weak spaces got combined in useful ways so that nearly all the actions have a good use, but more importantly all of the strategies seem close to each other in strength. Most of our scores were in the 110-120 range, but we had people winning big twice in the 140-150 range and the big scores all looked quite different from one another.
I got the second highest score of our plays with a horse / shed / main board setup using weekly market spaces heavily, while the single highest score did it with a ton of exploration and raiding. It certaily seemed like there were many strategies that could work and navigating your way around the randomness and predicting other people's choices was critical. No matter the situation I always seemed to have several good choices open to me, and I really liked that.
The wildcard in the game is occupations. Some of them are really powerful and game defining. They regularly determine what path you should take, and that works as a mechanic. Unfortunately some of them are dramatically better than others, and it is clear that if you get a focused occupation and use it effectively you are going to flat out beat someone who got a terrible occupation. I think this hurts the game from a competitive standpoint but from a fun standpoint it isn't a problem. You just put out ten occupations onto the table and draft them among your players - everyone is going to get something powerful, you can make sure you don't overlap too much, and then everyone can have a blast playing their game.
You could use this drafting mechanic for a competitive game I suppose, but you would have to be willing to break from the rules as written.
In any case the game feels great and I love the theme. It does strike me as absurd to praise a game for theme when it involves covering 50% of Iceland with a single fur pelt, trying to figure out if there is room on Baffin island for a goblet, or getting extra beans because you threw a pig into a shed... and yet that doesn't seem to matter. The immersion is deep and I love playing, even if the rules are a bit of a headscratcher.
The real problems with A Feast for Odin are that it costs a ton and teaching people all the rules is a big barrier to entry. Once you are playing the game though, it is a beautiful thing.
The most obvious change was to the wood/ore space. In the old edition it was 1 wood / player and 1 ore. This was totally bizarre because all other spaces provide a fixed amount of stuff and do not vary by player count. The new one is 3 wood and 1 ore, which is just right. It is a good spot, regularly used, but certainly not overpowered.
The other changes all seem good too. Animals are improved and it seemed quite strong to have them on your farm. The exception was cows, which seem to hard to make or not good enough, one of the two. The real kicker is that horses are excellent (buy them on turn 3, forget about them, get 24 points) but cows are just as hard to get and simply don't pay off as well. The cow synergy space just isn't good enough to make cows profitable, to my mind. However, animals fit into lots of strong strategies, so it isn't a problem that some animals aren't that great.
The spots on the board are reorganized some and the new setup is much superior to the old one. The weak spaces got combined in useful ways so that nearly all the actions have a good use, but more importantly all of the strategies seem close to each other in strength. Most of our scores were in the 110-120 range, but we had people winning big twice in the 140-150 range and the big scores all looked quite different from one another.
I got the second highest score of our plays with a horse / shed / main board setup using weekly market spaces heavily, while the single highest score did it with a ton of exploration and raiding. It certaily seemed like there were many strategies that could work and navigating your way around the randomness and predicting other people's choices was critical. No matter the situation I always seemed to have several good choices open to me, and I really liked that.
The wildcard in the game is occupations. Some of them are really powerful and game defining. They regularly determine what path you should take, and that works as a mechanic. Unfortunately some of them are dramatically better than others, and it is clear that if you get a focused occupation and use it effectively you are going to flat out beat someone who got a terrible occupation. I think this hurts the game from a competitive standpoint but from a fun standpoint it isn't a problem. You just put out ten occupations onto the table and draft them among your players - everyone is going to get something powerful, you can make sure you don't overlap too much, and then everyone can have a blast playing their game.
You could use this drafting mechanic for a competitive game I suppose, but you would have to be willing to break from the rules as written.
In any case the game feels great and I love the theme. It does strike me as absurd to praise a game for theme when it involves covering 50% of Iceland with a single fur pelt, trying to figure out if there is room on Baffin island for a goblet, or getting extra beans because you threw a pig into a shed... and yet that doesn't seem to matter. The immersion is deep and I love playing, even if the rules are a bit of a headscratcher.
The real problems with A Feast for Odin are that it costs a ton and teaching people all the rules is a big barrier to entry. Once you are playing the game though, it is a beautiful thing.
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