3 hours ago, BayushiCroy said:

Explain to me how it makes less sense than yours with dueling please.

Because your deck doesn't lose to duels against non dueling decks, obviously. If I'm playing against a military deck without duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against a cav deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against a naval deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against an honor deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against an enlightenment deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. Dueling required very specific meta against it and made it unbalanced and not fun. None of the other decks required specific meta against it to win against. If you were playing a non dueling deck, you just lost duels against dueling deck. If I am playing a military deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I am playing an honor deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a naval deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a dishonor deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a naval deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a cav deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing an enlightenment deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment.

9 minutes ago, Sparks Duh said:

Because your deck doesn't lose to duels against non dueling decks, obviously. If I'm playing against a military deck without duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against a cav deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against a naval deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against an honor deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. If I play against an enlightenment deck with no duels, I won't lose duels. Dueling required very specific meta against it and made it unbalanced and not fun. None of the other decks required specific meta against it to win against. If you were playing a non dueling deck, you just lost duels against dueling deck. If I am playing a military deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I am playing an honor deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a naval deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a dishonor deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a naval deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing a cav deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment. If I'm playing an enlightenment deck, I don't just lose to honor, military, dishonor, naval, cavalry, or enlightenment.

So, lets reduce it to just cav then. It seems to me that you are saying that if you are playing a deck without cav, and your opponent has cav, then you will not lose to cav?

I want to know how you would do that. Because unless you have specific, absent, cards; or have your own cav, then you do just lose a province , maybe 2.

See, that bold part is important because the same is true for dueling. To which my next question is, why aren't you putting in meta for dueling? You can't neglect deck building against certain actions and then complain that those actions are unbeatable, when you built your deck to never be able to compete with them.

Because the meta against dueling was only useful against dueling, whereas meta against cavalry was useful in other match-ups as well.

Take poisoned Weapon for example, or Arrows from the ranks, both were completely useless if no duel occurred. Adding meta cards against duels in your deck made it so-so against the dueling decks, but weaker against the rest of the field.

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=10931

17 minutes ago, BitRunr said:

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=10931

What about that card? It this supposed to be Dueling-Meta that's good in other match-ups?

Because that's not meta against Duel, that's Dueling card that can be used against other decks, not the other way around.

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=1151

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=10139

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=1492

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=696

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=6

I wish you could see Monstrosity from TBS.

Do such cards exist outside of Emperor Edition too?

Because five cards that can be okay as a counter to dueling without being worthless to a non-dueling deck is only a good response to his arguments if they aren't a fluke in a single edition.

3 minutes ago, Myrion said:

Do such cards exist outside of Emperor Edition too?

Because five cards that can be okay as a counter to dueling without being worthless to a non-dueling deck is only a good response to his arguments if they aren't a fluke in a single edition.

In fairness I started with EE and didn't have such problems with dueling for those reasons.

However, just to point out, even if was only good in EE, and was a fluke, that at least proved that dueling could be done a decent way.

And its not like they weren't messing with other mechanics to tweak and make them better too. Cav was my favorite in IVE or 20f. Whenever it turned into a 1 target absent ability.

Similarly with early editions, I am thinking people are just choosing to remember it how they want to.

58 minutes ago, BitRunr said:

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=1151

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=10139

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=1492

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=696

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=6

Holy **** I forgot about bar fight. I've lost to that card a couple times.

Fair enough - it does seem like many mechanics were in rather constant flux. Which probably didn't help keep the fanbase large and caused different mechanics to be OP or useless at different times. Dueling does seem to be particularly at risk of being too separate and something that you either focus on or are screwed by, but it's not the only mechanic where that could happen.

31 minutes ago, Myrion said:

Do such cards exist outside of Emperor Edition too?

Lets look at it together.

A Champion in Court - Destroyer War (Celestial)

Cool Heads Prevail - Age of Enlightenment (Lotus)

There's two cards I've already linked. That would be a 'yes', would it not?

I think we can actually drag this all the way back to Diamond, in the very set I started playing. (Reign of Blood) Maybe not beyond that.

False Trail, Misdirection - Rain of Blood (Diamond)

Any more? Absolutely! Check the Oracle for Strategies with the card text "focus effect" from Race for the Throne (Samurai) and Age of Enlightenment (Lotus).

Crippling Cut gets honourable mention, because memories.

I think of the problem with dueling as it being essentially a minigame that you're forced into, have little chance of winning, and at times dragged on even with an obvious conclusion (when forced to focus). It was just especially bad because, even though only a couple clans could build viable dueling decks, everyone got just enough characters who had duel-based abilities that it sapped at reinforcing clan themes.

It'd be like Crane getting a steady supply of low-force Cavalry -- not strong enough to be a deck, overcosted for its abilities, and existing purely as meta for something you'd need still more meta to justify, instead of a series of characters who actively helped you toward victory.

2 hours ago, BitRunr said:

A Champion in Court - Destroyer War (Celestial)

Cool Heads Prevail - Age of Enlightenment (Lotus)

There's two cards I've already linked. That would be a 'yes', would it not?

No, because that's one card each in a different edition, which isn't enough. Nevertheless I believe you that it wasn't just a fluke.

6 hours ago, BayushiCroy said:

So, lets reduce it to just cav then. It seems to me that you are saying that if you are playing a deck without cav, and your opponent has cav, then you will not lose to cav?

I want to know how you would do that. Because unless you have specific, absent, cards; or have your own cav, then you do just lose a province , maybe 2.

See, that bold part is important because the same is true for dueling. To which my next question is, why aren't you putting in meta for dueling? You can't neglect deck building against certain actions and then complain that those actions are unbeatable, when you built your deck to never be able to compete with them.

Maybe YOU do, but unless it was a particularly bad match up for my specific deck, I never packed meta... even against cav. And still won against cav because I usually build decks to do certain things, not to not lose against certain things. Sure, it may be a play style or deckbuilding issue, but my decks were usually well-oiled machines that were great against the field. To answer your second question, I never put in dueling meta for the reason I just stated and also because I didn't lose games to dueling decks, that's not what I'm arguing, I lost duels to dueling decks. I still won games against dueling decks regardless of adding duel meta to my decks. To me, adding meta is a last resort to any deck building strategy. Build your deck to do what it needs to do, make it as efficient as possible. THEN find out what your weak match ups are and adjust (add meta) accordingly. I don't just willy nilly throw meta cards in the deck because I know there are Military, Honor, Dishonor, Cav, Naval, and Enlightenment decks out there. I don't think anyone should.

sparks is speaking truth

I don't agree with his particular reasoning, but I do agree with Sparks that there was something different about dueling as compared to those other mechanics that gave it its own unique issues (those other mechanics had their issues as well from time to time, such as Cavalry being very non-interactive for most of the game's history).

I would single out two things that were problematic about dueling. One is that it's just pretty complicated. I shoot your guy with a ranged attack, he's just dead. I play an action that says "bow a guy," your guy is just bowed. For dueling we have to go through this whole involved process, which makes dueling a relatively clunky mechanic. This was exacerbated because, while duels were supposed to be "special" (in theory justifying the elaborate mechanics), a dueling deck generally wanted to duel you as often as possible. Many duels never actually used these mechanics, because it was just challenge-strike, but they were still out there and had to be learned.

Which leads us to the second bit of baggage for dueling, which was a disjoint between setup and reality regarding the chance of losing them. Again, when I shoot your guy with a ranged attack, he's just dead. When I play a card that says "bow a guy," your guy is just bowed. You can always play cards that address specific situations - reduce ranged attack strength, negate bow, prevent death, straighten, etc. - but there's nothing built-in to the mechanic. Dueling, on the other hand, has that elaborate built in process that, in theory, lets the challenged player actually win the duel. If you're playing a dueling deck and you have a real chance of losing, you're mostly doomed (cards that kill your own personalities for no effect 25% of the time are generally bad, it turns out). If your opponent doesn't really have any chance of winning the duel, why set up this elaborate process to determine who wins and loses, when its a foregone conclusion? It made people feel grumpy about losing duels in a way that they didn't about getting shot in the face, or some other mechanic with no built-in response.

That doesn't mean there's no way to mitigate these issues, but I don't see any way to eliminate them while having dueling in anything resembling its AEG form (and it seems like the same problems would arise with the Burning Sands knife-fighting mechanic, although I have no personal experience with that one). Given the mechanical reboot, it would seem an awful lot easier to have cards that represent duels, but without all the mechanical baggage (e.g., a lethal iai duel might simply target my guy and then your guy with lower chi, and kill your guy, and that's that).

How have you guys gotten 10 posts into duel meta and NOT mentioned kharmic strike?

Dueling is one of the hardest things to balance . Typically it was too strong or too weak . Even when it was strong there was a chance you could lose your duel (which was rare but it could happen) and when dueling was weak it was a crap shoot at best .

10 minutes ago, Daramere said:

I would single out two things that were problematic about dueling. One is that it's just pretty complicated. I shoot your guy with a ranged attack, he's just dead. I play an action that says "bow a guy," your guy is just bowed. For dueling we have to go through this whole involved process, which makes dueling a relatively clunky mechanic. This was exacerbated because, while duels were supposed to be "special" (in theory justifying the elaborate mechanics), a dueling deck generally wanted to duel you as often as possible. Many duels never actually used these mechanics, because it was just challenge-strike, but they were still out there and had to be learned.

Dueling was actually fairly simple. Compare Duel stat totals between the dueling personalities you may boost duel stats by Focusing a card, alternating between each player in the duel until some either chose not to focus or the max number of cards had been focused.

11 minutes ago, Daramere said:

Which leads us to the second bit of baggage for dueling, which was a disjoint between setup and reality regarding the chance of losing them. Again, when I shoot your guy with a ranged attack, he's just dead. When I play a card that says "bow a guy," your guy is just bowed. You can always play cards that address specific situations - reduce ranged attack strength, negate bow, prevent death, straighten, etc. - but there's nothing built-in to the mechanic. Dueling, on the other hand, has that elaborate built in process that, in theory, lets the challenged player actually win the duel. If you're playing a dueling deck and you have a real chance of losing, you're mostly doomed (cards that kill your own personalities for no effect 25% of the time are generally bad, it turns out). If your opponent doesn't really have any chance of winning the duel, why set up this elaborate process to determine who wins and loses, when its a foregone conclusion? It made people feel grumpy about losing duels in a way that they didn't about getting shot in the face, or some other mechanic with no built-in response.

Ranged/Melee/Fear Attacks were Force checks that could be boosted by combining them with others of the same type. Duels at there core were duel stat (often Chi) checks with a built in way to boost them and play additional cards if the challenger opted to do so.

More often than not the cries of "NPE" were tied more to non-dueling players seeing Focusing as a form of deck/hand milling rather than a method of playing/drawing cards that dueling decks did. The design team rarely gave non-dueling decks reason to care about focus values and focus effects save as dueling meta. Properly designed the win/lose/tie effects of duels would be potentially be secondary compared to those gained from focusing cards.

I suspect that dueling would have been far less of a NPE if the following sorts of things were included:

• Focusing covered all cases where a card was discarded from hand or the top of the deck to check its Focus Value and doing so would trigger Focus Effects.

• There existed traits like Tactician that granted various abilities based around focusing cards such as the ability to focus a card to make a Ranged/Melee/Fear Attack based on the card's FV.

• More cards with Discipline and other ways to play from the Fate discard pile.

• More focus effects that benefited the focusing player without screwing over the winner or being win more effects. (i.e. Gain X honor, chose a player to lose X honor, give a personality at this location +XF, attach this Item/Follower/Spell to a personality at this location paying X less Gold

• More cards that played with or compared focus values.

15 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Dueling was actually fairly simple. Compare Duel stat totals between the dueling personalities you may boost duel stats by Focusing a card, alternating between each player in the duel until some either chose not to focus or the max number of cards had been focused.

Thanks for letting us know how the dueling mechanic worked... I'm sure nobody posting on duels knew how they worked at all.

10 minutes ago, Sparks Duh said:

Thanks for letting us know how the dueling mechanic worked... I'm sure nobody posting on duels knew how they worked at all.

Funny... Daramere called it complicated. I pointed out how simple it actually was. People similarly complained about Iaijutsu duels being complex in the 4e of the RPG when they are in fact 3 easy steps obfuscated by poorly presented rules. AEG was stupidly good at making explanations of simple ideas stupidly complex in order to close loopholes they accidentally created.

The LBS Knife Fighting rules are far more complex than the L5R dueling rules, but are more well liked because the rules and environment doesn't punish those who didn't build for it as hard.

44 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Funny... Daramere called it complicated. I pointed out how simple it actually was. People similarly complained about Iaijutsu duels being complex in the 4e of the RPG when they are in fact 3 easy steps obfuscated by poorly presented rules. AEG was stupidly good at making explanations of simple ideas stupidly complex in order to close loopholes they accidentally created.

The LBS Knife Fighting rules are far more complex than the L5R dueling rules, but are more well liked because the rules and environment doesn't punish those who didn't build for it as hard.

if you think dueling was simple, i have to believe you never taught l5r to anyone.

"do i focus face up or down? how many times? whats a focus effect? who goes first? why do you focus more?"

dueling is not simple. the basic _idea_ is simple, but that goes for everything in this game. in practice, dueling is a nightmare, as daramere pointed out.

53 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Funny... Daramere called it complicated. I pointed out how simple it actually was.

You said it was simple. That doesn't mean it "actually was" simple.

The biggest factor is, I think, the way that - when we have played a game for a long time - all of the complexities just become second nature to us, and we don't readily realize how much there is, and how hard it can be for newer players to grok (and continuing to bring in newer players is always a factor for any customizable game that wants to stay viable).

1 hour ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Dueling was actually fairly simple. Compare Duel stat totals between the dueling personalities you may boost duel stats by Focusing a card, alternating between each player in the duel until some either chose not to focus or the max number of cards had been focused.

Even this recitation is complicated compared to most actions. Most actions are play the action, do you react, and then the action just happens. The presence of multiple back-and-forth card sub-actions within the duel process is a significant additional complexity (in Ivory edition, there were seven steps in a duel, some of which involved back-and-forth, and that was after the challenge was accepted).

And this recitation is wiping away part of the rules. What's the difference between a "challenge" and a "duel?" Can I refuse the duel? What is the duel stat? What does "focus" mean? Who focuses first? How do you focus? What is a "Focus value?" (a part of the cards that did relatively little in the game outside of a duel) How does focusing interact with effects that affect stats and bonuses/penalties to those stats? Are the focused cards face-up or face-down? Can I look at my own face-down focused cards? Where can focused cards come from? What is "the max number of cards" that can be focused? Does that number change depending on where I'm focusing from? What are the consequences for winning and losing? What if there's a tie? What are "Focus Effects" and how do they work? What happens to the focused cards? Many of the above questions have different answers depending on which arc you were in, as the rules were repeatedly changed.

But I think most of all it is easy to forget how much there is for someone to try to grok in most customizable games, including L5R.

Yea, I'm saying that i don't think duels have been a major problem.

They were complicated though. Not simple at all.