Choke, and control mechanics in general are frustrating to play against, since you cannot play. I really like control, and I like those mechanics to be in games, but not made basic gameplay mechanics like intrigue in AGoT.
Gameplay Speculation
23 minutes ago, Barbacuo said:Choke, and control mechanics in general are frustrating to play against, since you cannot play. I really like control, and I like those mechanics to be in games, but not made basic gameplay mechanics like intrigue in AGoT.
Exactly. Print few cards with these kind of actions, do something like one Planet in Conquest (out of 10) with such effect etc. That's enough.
But seems it's a THING in FFG designers book nowadays - look at Destiny where random discard is just one of the major mechanics.
Destiny has increased RNG, I guess, it's because of the success of HearthStone and they tried to replicate that feeling in the game.
4 hours ago, Myrion said:Caldera, yes that sounds pretty bad too. I don't know Cinquest though, so what I had in mind foremost was Mana flooding/starving in MtG, where you just. Wouldn't. Draw. Any(thing else but). Lands.
So frustrating, keeps you from playing anything unless you stuck to really cheap cards and the lands in your starting hand.
Happened in way too many games I played or watched.
Interestingly enough, in MaRo's podcast he claims that eliminating that random element (when designing Duel Masters) removed a lot of suspense from the game: since you were guaranteed your resource drops each turn, you knew how soon you could play stuff and didn't need to prepare for bad luck.
Losing cards in hand at random from an enemy effect is powerful and can seriously mess with your plans. Therefore you should attempt to block, counter, or negate those effects. It creates interaction and a variety of design space options when done correctly. AGOT 2nd edition is a good example as you can block those intrigue challenges, stall the characters, kill them, or reduce them to 0 str. Lots of play options to stop it.
Gold flood/starving was a huge issue in L5R throughout its history. Options for tutoring gold holdings when you didnt get any were created, options for more gold for going second, dyntasy cycling effects to try and draw into more. It was a constant struggle to build consistent decks. Hopefully the rebuild allows FFG to address this issue from the beginning, and if it involves importing ideas from other LCGs so be it.
25 minutes ago, Builder2 said:Interestingly enough, in MaRo's podcast he claims that eliminating that random element (when designing Duel Masters) removed a lot of suspense from the game: since you were guaranteed your resource drops each turn, you knew how soon you could play stuff and didn't need to prepare for bad luck.
Mark Rosewater talks a lot about it too in his drive to work podcasts.
He maintains that luck is what makes cardgames interesting. If you knew exactly how everything is going to playout every time then it would just be dull.
5 hours ago, Caldera said:Ah yes, the 'Kith' conundrum in Conquest, whereby she could screw your first turn by playing a combo of Raid, Razorwings and Archon's Palace to leave you at a serious card & resource disadvantage from the outset (and bearing in mind there is no preliminary 'Set Up' phase like there is in AGOT). Very demoralising to play against, although if I remember rightly Greyjoy Winter Choke in AGoT v1 was even more enjoyment-sapping.
'Choke' mechanics do seem to be a significant ever-present aspect of most FFG games.
That said, I do like the idea of attacking your enemy's supply lines as a (*pure speculation alert*) tactic in L5R, but it needs to come with a sacrifice, e.g. The effort you spend on 'choke' means you have to forego some combat might: The problem with Kith was that she could choke you of cards & resources without breaking stride in terms of combat prowess.
I encountered something like this just this week. My opponent was playing his favorite Lion deck, and I was playing the Dragon starter (I felt like playing Dragon that night but I've never gotten around to actually making a deck for them). The turns went something like as follows:
His 1st Turn: He buys a 3/3 holding.
My 1st Turn: I buy Bountiful Fields.
His 2nd Turn: He buys another 3/3 holding and a personality.
My 2nd Turn: He attaches Colonial Conscripts, destroying my Bountiful Fields.
We played it out, but I was never able to stop his momentum from that point and got absolutely crushed.
So, you take a card which is already pretty useful (2G, 2F follower with a no-bow Battle ability), give it a potent trait with a small restriction (the holding does has to be a Farm), and then, rather than having some additional cost for potentially devastating your opponent's economy (like, say, a Invest cost or even an honor loss), you actually get further rewarded by getting the unit for free! This just seems like frustratingly poor card design! Contrast with Polvora Cache, which has a decent cost (4G and -2 Honor), a restriction to help ensure it doesn't absolutely obliterate your opponent on its own (they have to have at least four holdings), and the item has no other purpose (no force bonus or other abilities), making it somewhat more of a calculated risk including it vs some other card.
I'm hoping that if FFG decides to include mechanics for messing with another player's resources or hand (as opposed to messing with units and provinces), they make it costly and/or add cards that can counter somewhat reliably.
@kempy Intrigue challenges in AGoT are far less crippling for the loser than province destruction in L5R CCG, because they don't reduce your maximum hand size (the only equivalent I can find in an LCG is brain damage in Netrunner).
7 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:@kempy Intrigue challenges in AGoT are far less crippling for the loser than province destruction in L5R CCG, because they don't reduce your maximum hand size (the only equivalent I can find in an LCG is brain damage in Netrunner).
So that's why L5R had two decks. If your one deck (Dynasty) is injured you can still fight with help of another (Fate). Remember that with Ivory was introduced "Compassion" keyword that triggered additional card effects if you had less Provinces than opponent.
Edited by kempy@kempy You continue to draw cards (2 each turn) in AGoT if your hand is empty (by the way, emptying your opponent's hand requires using card effects in addition to intrigue challenge, unless they're flooding the board). You immediately lose an L5R game if you don't have any provinces left.
10 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:@kempy You continue to draw cards (2 each turn) in AGoT if your hand is empty (by the way, emptying your opponent's hand requires using card effects in addition to intrigue challenge, unless they're flooding the board). You immediately lose an L5R game if you don't have any provinces left.
I played countless number of games where i lost Province(s) first and won becasue of other card/table advantage. Whole passive clock decktypes (honor/dishonor) were built about losing Provinces. Or i should say, trying to save Provinces as long as it's possible.
What i was talking about discarding card from hand was connected not with only discardin but RANDOM discard. If you build your tactics about your "safe" hand and it's disturbed randomly - i treat it as NPE. L5R has cards that force to discard from Hand but nearly all of them give opportunity to owner to choose what to discard or take any other effect instead. It's really great difference!
5 minutes ago, kempy said:I played countless number of games where i lost Province(s) first and won becasue of other card/table advantage. Whole passive clock decktypes (honor/dishonor) were built about losing Provinces. Or i should say, trying to save Provinces as long as it's possible.
What i was talking about discarding card from hand was connected not with only discardin but RANDOM discard. If you build your tactics about your "safe" hand and it's disturbed randomly - i treat it as NPE. L5R has cards that force to discard from Hand but nealy all of them give opportunity to owner to choose what to discard or take any other effect instead. It's really great difference!
I consider losing a province my opponent picked to attack NPE. /s
Personally I am not overly fond of the random discard effects like in Netrunner and AGOT, however, there's a difference between NPE and something you don't like happening to you. To call random discard mechanics as NPE is really exaggerating.
Random effects are healthy in gaming of all kinds.
1 minute ago, kempy said:I played countless number of games where i lost Province(s) first and won becasue of other card/table advantage. Whole passive clock decktypes (honor/dishonor) were built about losing Provinces. Or i should say, trying to save Provinces as long as it's possible.
What i was talking about discarding card from hand was connected not with only discardin but RANDOM discard. If you build your tactics about your "safe" hand and it's disturbed randomly - i treat it as NPE. L5R has lot of cards that force to discard from Hand but nealy all of them give opportunity to owner to choose what to discard or take any other effect instead. It's really great difference!
You don't build your tactics around the assumption that your hand is safe in AGoT, because it's not. You can build your tactics around not caring whether you lose some random cards (as long as it's not too many, just like provinces), you can defend against intrigue challenges, or you can put pressure on your opponent in the other challenges (military to reduce their board or power to get closer to victory while putting them farther). Also, losing a province often means losing a random card (or worse, a card your opponent knows), so your dynasty "hand" is messed with randomly.
23 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:You don't build your tactics around the assumption that your hand is safe in AGoT, because it's not.
So that's kind of game is not appealing to me. I thinks it's one of the weakest designs available. I just want to have in my hand "safe" CARDS in CARD games.
You still continuing with argument about discarding Dynasty - i wrote earlier about that unique design of L5R utilized two independent decks when one supports second. Other card games i played don't have such a choice.
Also Dynasty deck (Provinces) is unknown for both player for most of time where your hand is "uknknown" only for your oponent.
27 minutes ago, Moto Subodei said:Personally I am not overly fond of the random discard effects like in Netrunner and AGOT, however, there's a difference between NPE and something you don't like happening to you. To call random discard mechanics as NPE is really exaggerating.
Random effects are healthy in gaming of all kinds.
"Personally I am not overly fond of the random discard effects -> Random effects are healthy" (?)
As you see ther're various types of randomness. Messing with my hand i treat as NPE. And yes, definition of NPE is personal choice, but random hand discard is one of them for me.
Edited by kempyMy greatest hope is that FFG has decided to make a larger part of the Action cardbase universal. It seems like such a waste of design space to have each faction only able to use a tiny fraction of the available cardpool for things like that. And it also makes the meta almost comically complicated as a player has to remember what the version of a given effect that each faction they are playing does, see all the different negation cards in AGoT.
7 minutes ago, Horiuchi Nobata said:My greatest hope is that FFG has decided to make a larger part of the Action cardbase universal. It seems like such a waste of design space to have each faction only able to use a tiny fraction of the available cardpool for things like that. And it also makes the meta almost comically complicated as a player has to remember what the version of a given effect that each faction they are playing does, see all the different negation cards in AGoT.
Don't hold your breath. In the previous version of AGoT, events (equivalent to L5R actions or strategies, as they were called later) were pretty much universal, as in L5R CCG. They moved away from that.
31 minutes ago, kempy said:"Personally I am not overly fond of the random discard effects -> Random effects are healthy" (?)
Yeah, chop up my words to change their meaning. Good man. What I was saying, despite you being entirely disingenuous to my point by deliberately misquoting me, is just because I don't like something, doesn't make it NPE. I'm just separating my own personal subjective frustration of not liking a mechanic, and my objective view of the mechanic.
31 minutes ago, kempy said:As you see ther're various types of randomness. Messing with my hand i treat as NPE. And yes, definition of NPE is personal choice, but random hand discard is one of them for me.
It depends in what context you are using the term NPE. By your logic, pretty much anything that goes against you could be described as NPE.
If you are talking from a more objective design point of view, the term needs to be used a little less liberally.
For card discard there are three ways of doing it:
Player A plays Discard effect Strategy card on Player B, it is either
- Player A chooses ( Super Strong card, picking their strongest card and ditching it could be game winning)
- Player B Chooses (Not Likely to be worth a slot in your deck, player B just discards the lowest priority card)
- Random (A compromise in between, luck effect, sometimes if falls under option 1 sometimes option 2, but most the time in between)
The number 1 version is going to be far more upsetting to play against than card 3. Card 2 will probably just stay in your collection box unless it adds to an overall discard theme (An overall discard theme definitely has potential to be NPE).
Card 3 is actually a healthy compromise between the two that also offers some randomness to the game.
Just one example of card discard effect being NPE was Razor's Edge Dojo, which received an Errata iirc. It wasn't even random, but it was smothering. In the scheme of things, a one off random effect really isn't that bad.
Mark Rosewater has a great Drive To Work episode on randomness in game design. Definitely worth a listen.
Edit: Spelling
Edited by Moto Subodei13 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:Don't hold your breath. In the previous version of AGoT, events (equivalent to L5R actions or strategies, as they were called later) were pretty much universal, as in L5R CCG. They moved away from that.
Admittedly, it may be less applicable than AGoT, but in the co-op games I've played (Arkham Horror and Lord of the Rings), there are ways to include cross-color cards in your decks. I personally hope that they include some way in L5R to allow for splashing in non-clan cards (with some restrictions).
There are ways to include cards of other factions in AGoT: they are the Banner agendas (each allows you to include cards from the corresponding faction) and, more recently, the Alliance agenda (which allows you to use 2 of the former at the same time). There are ways to do that in the other competitive games, too.
@Moto Subodei
Ok, i see your point now. Talking about discarding at all i mostly see any hand discard mechanics as weak (very cheap) one. And yes it's mostly subjective feeling, becasue i remember to be most frustrated when loosing becasue losing crucial card from random hit of Disrupting Communication or Murder of Razorwings (Conquest). I'm not good in theories of games to speculate to know if there are more people who love to discard randomly than people who hate to be forced to do this.
Maybe becasue i'm mostly avoiding games that uses such techs. That's fe i completely ignore AGoT (Intrigue).
Edited by kempy6 minutes ago, kempy said:@Moto Subodei
Ok, i see your point now. Talking about discarding at all i mostly see any hand discard mechanics as weak (very cheap) one. And yes it's mostly subjective feeling, becasue i remember to be most frustrated when loosing becasue losing crucial card from random hit of Disrupting Communication or Murder of Razorwings (Conquest). I'm not good as theories of games to speculate to know if there more people who love to discard randomly than people who hate to be forced to do this.
Maybe becasue i'm mostly avoiding games that uses such techs. That's fe i completely ignore AGoT (Intrigue).
Yeah I get ya, and to be honest, it's pretty difficult to define NPE, because at the end of the day it's important how a mechanic makes a player feel when they are playing the game.
There's also a fair point to say that a random discard card effect has potential to piss both players off!
Couldn't find the drive to work episode, but here's an article rosewater wrote on it that goes through pros and cons of randomness.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/kind-acts-randomness-2009-12-14
I actually don't like the intrigue mechanic either in AGOT, part of the reason I stopped playing it. I actually don't mind it as much in Netrunner, but I hate the secretly spending credits in that instead! >.<
Edited by Moto Subodei
I'm okay with discard and choke mechanics as long as they balanced accordingly.
I really hate random discard though I feel they can completely undercosted by being able to pull an opponents out.
With static discard, at least you know it's appropriately costed for getting a less useful card, and a reasonable player can get around it by using his high value effects before they are forced to be discards from a lack of other cards.
27 minutes ago, Moto Subodei said:Yeah I get ya, and to be honest, it's pretty difficult to define NPE, because at the end of the day it's important how a mechanic makes a player feel when they are playing the game.
There's also a fair point to say that a random discard card effect has potential to piss both players off!
Couldn't find the drive to work episode, but here's an article rosewater wrote on it that goes through pros and cons of randomness.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/kind-acts-randomness-2009-12-14
I actually don't like the intrigue mechanic either in AGOT, part of the reason I stopped playing it. I actually don't mind it as much in Netrunner, but I hate the secretly spending credits in that instead! >.<
I didn't play netrunner long so I may be wrong but:
I like the discard in netrunner because it wasn't discard. It was a reveal mechanic. Only discard if it was trashable which invoked an additional cost.
Just now, BayushiCroy said:I didn't play netrunner long so I may be wrong but:
I like the discard in netrunner because it wasn't discard. It was a reveal mechanic. Only discard if it was trashable which invoked an additional cost.
I forgot that random mechanic too! Which I didn't mind so much.
I was mainly referring to meat and net damage.
4 minutes ago, Moto Subodei said:I forgot that random mechanic too! Which I didn't mind so much.
I was mainly referring to meat and net damage.
Oh I forgot that. I like that one because it meant you some how messed up or knew it was coming on revealed ice.
As opposed to agot where, it just happens.
Also to mention, among options A, B, and C, I hate c, and at risk of having a weak discard effect with b, I'd choose a everytime the time.
Here's why: if it's random I can't plan. If I get to choose which of my cards to discard then I can plan around that. Also I don't put useless cards in my deck so I have to not use some resources to protect the others because of discard.
If they get to choose, then I likely know what they will choose and can plan accordingly, and if they don't choose that one, I can reverse engineer their thought process and see how they came to that conclusion. Which allows me insight into their point of view of the game and its state.
Random doesn't allow that, and feels like cheap suspense.
Disclaimer, I am very pro discard effects.