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4626

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 02:57:11 am »

The distinction between the randomness of your starting hands and the randomness in the rest of the game is pretty artificial. If we're playing a variant where we remove the randomness of starting hands, why don't we remove some more randomness from the game? How about if we ensure that your first two buys are never at the bottom of your deck after the first shuffle? I'd say that shafts players far more than a suboptimal opening split.

One answer is perception. Somehow there's this perception that a better opening split just wins the game for you a lot of the time. I don't think it's really true, but it's certainly a fairly widespread belief. I admit that it can suck to play out an entire game where you constantly feel like you're behind due to a bad split and then you lose. I couldn't say how much of that is self-fulfilling prophecy, but there it is. As Donald has said in other threads, perception is important. So there are definitely reasons to have identical starting hands. I just think there are more and better reasons not to.

I think I've pointed out the what-about-all-the-other-luck thing elsewhere on this site, some other time it came up. It's true that the opening split is especially visible (maybe the next most visible thing is final hands; casual players often completely blank on someone getting an extra turn). That's got a positive side though: you can blame it. It wasn't me officer, it was that first-turn Mine he got.

IIRC in the Richard Garfield podcast about deckbuilding games, he preferred having special powers at the start, each player starting with a different deck to some degree. The idea being that then the puzzle that the game gives you to solve is less likely to have the same solution for each player. Varying starting cards by player is of course the opposite direction from identical starting hands.

4627

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 02:44:24 am »

I don't think it's nice that the worse player gets to win sometimes due to luck.

I actually think it's essential, for any new game hoping for a wide audience.

I always say, it has to be fun to lose. If it's fun to lose, we can go ahead and let you lose; you still get to have fun. But despite that, having a chance to win is significant for many people, they would much rather win once in a while due to luck than never win at all.

4628

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 02:41:19 am »

I don't see how someone could be against identical starting hands but in favor of last loser goes first. (Well, other than, the rules of Dominion call for one and not the other. And yeah, okay, I can accept that explanation.)

But otherwise, aren't all the arguments the same for both? Like, McQ says he enjoys winning from "unfavorable splits." I assume he also enjoys winning from second position, then?

They both have an effect on your chances for winning; but picking who goes first doesn't go any further than that, while varying the starting hands adds variety to the game (which it desperately needs, someone can say, go ahead, I don't mind).

Like, someone is going first. If we change that rule, okay, you are going first in a different set of circumstances now. You still go first sometimes and last sometimes; you have all the turn order experiences. But switching to identical starting hands removes experiences.

4629

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 08, 2014, 06:30:26 pm »

I rather think it's
C) Lots of people prefer playing with a VP counter.

Yes, that's what it comes down to.

4630

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 08, 2014, 06:29:06 pm »

I think "identical starting hands" gives you a worse game. I encourage people to play whatever variants they want; if you are playing identical starting hands irl I do not mind.

However I think it's a poor feature for Online Dominion. It makes the game worse... and removes some luck. If it's an option, some good players will play with it simply because it's advantageous to... and have less fun. I would rather some people were having less fun due to being denied a variant than have other people have less fun due to feeling like they had to play the variant.

And well as always Dominion has plenty of skill-testing. I am not so sympathetic to the people who can't stand that particular bit of luck; you already have endless opportunities to win via skill.

It could be fine I guess for unrated games; it could be an option on the "host special game" screen, and force the game to be unrated if you choose it. Someone wanting to run a tournament with identical starting hands could then do so without having to restart games repeatedly or whatever. As it stands such a feature would be a long way off.

I don't like identical starting hands as a Salvager option, because I think in the long run either Online Dominion will die or it will have all the features Salvager currently has, and if it's the latter then it won't be great that Salvager has this one remaining feature that OD will not be getting. OnDo? Maybe Salvager will find more things to do by then, dunno.

4631

Rules Questions / Re: Empty Black Market Deck. Can I still play Treasures?

« on: April 07, 2014, 04:24:06 pm »

The top image is the English base cards; the bottom, with larger symbols in one corner, is the newer German ones. Are you saying those are available in English? I have not seen such a thing.

Will those ever be available in English?

Jay hasn't said anything about it to me. I don't even know if he prefers them. You could indicate demand by requesting them.

4632

Rules Questions / Re: Empty Black Market Deck. Can I still play Treasures?

« on: April 07, 2014, 04:16:21 pm »

So, according to the pictures on BGG the Special Edition updates match those released well over a year ago with the new Base Cards.

The top image is the English base cards; the bottom, with larger symbols in one corner, is the newer German ones. Are you saying those are available in English? I have not seen such a thing.

Edit: And when I say top/bottom images, I mean these ones: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/13924661#13924661

4633

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 04, 2014, 09:32:11 pm »

Wait... I don't understand this comparison. Why would you build a road to the same vertex as someone you supposedly have an agreement with?

And especially if all three edges have different players on them, there is no possible agreement. It's just a race to build a settlement. The only person who can benefit from the road at all is the one who settles there.

I just want the longest road dude, I'm not putting a settlement there. Tom is going to put a settlement there, put the robber on his bricks why don't you.

4634

General Discussion / Re: Your first music purchase

« on: April 04, 2014, 08:00:49 pm »

I would totally make a comment here about age, but I think I'm closer to your age than I am to the median age on the forum...

It's interesting that vinyl lasted ~60 years, 8-tracks and cassettes lasted about ten years each, but CDs are still hanging around despite being outclassed by digital.

When I bought that album, the money I spent didn't come from an ATM, and the clerk didn't scan a barcode to see what it cost. The store didn't sell any alternative rock, for some reason. If I had to cross the street outside, there was no little guy or red hand to indicate when the cars would be coming. That was just the world we lived in; we didn't know any better.

Wax cylinders had ~30 years in the limelight. The path there is straightforward, vinyl was just better than wax and CDs are just better than tapes.

At this point the beauty of a CD is that it's a physical artifact, a possession you can hold and hey there are some pictures and maybe lyrics, so you don't have to google them. I like the physical artifact.

4635

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 04, 2014, 07:12:32 pm »

So you don't think a player saying "I react to A with B" is sufficient to establish that B triggered off A, and make the implicit stack arise?

I would like to be there for you, but I can only devote so much time to this. Handling timing in games was a tricky issue, not really addressed thoroughly until Magic. Magic didn't do as well as you can but well standing on the shoulders of giants.

4636

General Discussion / Re: Your first music purchase

« on: April 04, 2014, 05:02:03 pm »

Abbey Road, on vinyl.

Looks like we got ourselves a hipster, boys.

I bought it at a "record store." Sure I could have gotten it on 8-track, but man, that wasn't sticking around.

4637

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird "Adventure" Mode

« on: April 04, 2014, 05:00:43 pm »

Are they ever going to 'complete' the adventures? There is still a big empty spot on the map which I assume was for Guilds adventures.

I made a list of 20 sets-of-10. I imagine they will add it when they fix the other adventures. I was promised "soon" but haven't asked how that's coming.

4638

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird "Adventure" Mode

« on: April 04, 2014, 04:07:23 pm »

Here's another question:
Why even have adventures?

Many people like to play sets of 10 that have been pre-picked. Many people are not especially interested in leaping into playing against humans, the bots will do. So, collections of sets of 10 vs. bots, it's filling a need (or would be).

4639

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 04, 2014, 04:03:56 pm »

You can't just get rid of the stack and support old instants with no errata. I mean the stack is what they came up with to handle timing. If you don't actually replace it, you haven't replaced it.

Wouldn't a general ruling like "Any instant that doesn't say otherwise has, 'Play this as a sorcery or a reaction to any other effect,'" still create the implicit stack you mentioned a couple posts ago?

The implicit stack arises from the fact that everything but the first item triggered off of another item. You play a spell, I counter it, you counter my counter. People can understand that without needing to talk about a stack. It's not like that if the effects are unrelated, you do something, I do anything else, you do anything else. There the stack is explicitly how it works.

4640

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 04, 2014, 03:13:05 am »

That doesn't sound too far off from what I recall in the Revised/4E era, if there had only been one timing window to worry about back then.  And your wording is simpler than either "last in first out" or the explicit stack.  I wonder if maybe the multiple timing windows (for instants, counters, prevention effects, etc) were as much a part of the confusion as instant resolution itself, and just putting everything on the same timing, without adding the stack, would've worked as well or better. 

Countermagic, damage prevention / redirection, and non-countermagic interrupts (stuff like Sleight of Mind and Purelace) had special windows, effectively limiting when you could play them so that they were like reactions as I propose (except you could also just play some interrupts nonreactively). They didn't spell this out though (no "play only when damage would be dealt") and they didn't use it for anything else. There were tons of instants and only a small number fell into those categories.

It seems like if your version were tried now, with the single fast effect timing, it could work even if you don't bother to errata the instants.  You'd effectively have a bunch of reactions that say "play whenever you want," so things would still happen in end steps and upkeeps and all the weird times that only hyper-competitive players know or care about, but at least the stack would be gone.

You can't just get rid of the stack and support old instants with no errata. I mean the stack is what they came up with to handle timing. If you don't actually replace it, you haven't replaced it.

4641

General Discussion / Re: Your first music purchase

« on: April 04, 2014, 02:56:45 am »

Abbey Road, on vinyl.

4642

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 03, 2014, 08:36:42 pm »

So I'm coming around to reactions.  If several reactions from different players are played off the same initial event, or in the same step, how would you have them resolve?  Still LIFO/"implicit stack"?  It seems like those situations could still come up a lot if you have during-combat reactions that affect attacking and/or defending creatures.

If multiple players want to respond to the same event, it's still APNAP (active player non-active player). Effects can feed off of other effects - I counter your counterspell - and that effectively gives you an implicit stack, like in Dominion, but it's just implicit, and always a chain of things that triggered off of each other.

I "contributed" to the 6E rules, but did not think of this in time. They probably wouldn't have done it anyway (since it requires errata for every Instant), but it would have been nice to have offered it up.

4643

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald announces new expansion!

« on: April 03, 2014, 04:32:25 pm »

They weren't serious, it was just an elaborate April's Fools prank to get you to over-explain.

http://nedroid.com/2011/04/wont-get-fooled-again/

4644

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 03, 2014, 04:27:49 pm »

Yes, you could do that and have a fine but very different game.  Instants would be played a lot less, I think, because flexibility is what made a lot of them worthwhile compared to other card types.  Situational variants of popular Instants have been tried, but they tend to see less play than their flexible counterparts because you don't want to risk drawing them dead when you could instead have, say, a creature or artifact in your deck that's playable almost every time you draw it.

The idea isn't to make cards you can never play - it's to have the simplest way to handle the stuff you do all the time.

I do not think the game would be all that different. The bulk of what you did would be the same. Some of the actual differences are great, like not teaching new players "okay do as much as possible in your opponent's end step."

Aside from the beauty of getting rid of the stack, a big thing reactions do for you is get rid of possibilities you don't actually use anyway. I don't just randomly cast Giant Growth (there will always be an exception and Orgg is my example here); I cast Giant Growth when it matters. It's reactive! The rules letting you do it any time is not doing much for strategy.

If you are up on things you will be familiar with New World Order, which is essentially them working out that new players play with expansions, not just the main set, so expansions need to be simpler for new players. They switched to having simpler commons; rarer cards are allowed to be more complex. This worked out fantastically for them, sales have never been better.

Part of NWO is getting rid of stuff like Wyluli Wolf at common. You can use the ability any time; this adds a lot of board complexity. Whereas a triggered effect only happens at a certain time and is simpler, so those are better at common. So they are already shifting in this direction on permanents; Reactions would let them also do this for instants (rather than just use sorceries at common).

Maybe I'm missing something important about your vision of reactions.  It sounds to me like they would be similar to existing instants, but restricted in when and how you could use them.  Back when I played a lot more Magic than I do now, instants with restrictions existed, but the restrictions made those cards worse overall than cards with the same cost in other types, usually creatures.  So those instants didn't see competitive play unless their effect was big enough to make it worth building your deck around overcoming the obstacles to playing the card.

Reactions - not Dominion-style - are just cards that say when you can play them. You play them then. Some could give you two timing options, such as the option to play them as Sorceries or at a certain other time.

Counterspells are already similar to reactions, because you can only play them at the only time they make sense. Damage prevention is similar; you can randomly play that Bandage but are mostly saving that stuff for when it does something.

Cards that are really reactive have natural times to play them and can just spell it out. I want to play Giant Growth when my creature is going to deal or receive damage; limiting me to those situations is not limiting me much. Cards that you just play in your opponent's end step because you can, that's something to be glad to be rid of rather than to try to preserve, but you could even preserve that if you wanted; play New Inspiration as a sorcery or in an opponent's end step.

You can endlessly find situations where you lose whatever strategic option. You play Armageddon and I can't play my card-drawer to dig for a counterspell in response. Those situations just don't add up; you keep almost all of the strategy you have and have a game with less barrier-to-entry.

4645

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald announces new expansion!

« on: April 03, 2014, 04:03:46 pm »

Wait wait wait, let me check if I got it right the first time: you are working on an expansion of a game that you aren't close to publishing yet, and you've already decided that the name of the expansion would be Dominion, and you tell this here the other way around? In what universe is that not cruel? THE FEELS! 

The name of the expansion is not "Dominion". At least not based on what he said here. I'm not sure where the confusion lies. He's simply working on an expansion for a game; nothing that has anything to do with Dominion in name or in game.

How do you explain the "Oh Dominion" in "I have actually been working on a new expansion. Oh Dominion. No, not a Dominion expansion."?

I did not think anyone was serious about this. The thread title does not refer to Dominion - just some new expansion. Stressing the word that previously wasn't understood is a thing you can do in English; there's an implicit "you mean" after the "oh."

4646

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald announces new expansion!

« on: April 03, 2014, 01:32:35 am »

Perhaps I just haven't played enough times, but I think there are usually several good decisions to be made in the Gauntlet phase. Enough such that new players (who tend not to boast) want to play again. I agree that the not-boasting issue is the game's biggest problem, though. It takes several games before you can get a decent handle on the power level of various heroes, and until then the boasting round is sort of moot.

There are decisions in the gauntlet; I am just summing up the case against it. People who didn't bid tend to feel like there was no skill involved, and of course they feel that way because a lot of the skill is in the bidding.

I think the easiest way to fix this is to add more decisions in the Gauntlet phase. You can even do this with the existing game by playing with 2 heroes per player, even when playing with 3 or 4 players. Unfortunately, the rulebook fails to address a lot of questions regarding 2-hero games. Just off the top of my head, does the Wand's always-on ability continue to function even after that hero dies? Is the player locked into using the Wand hero if he does use the Wand's ability(s)?

When the hero with the Wand dies you no longer have access to the Wand. You can use the Wand ability and then send the other hero.

I don't play with Wand for a first game but like it fine otherwise. It would be better as an expansion card but well.

4647

Rules Questions / Re: Overgrown estate + market square

« on: April 03, 2014, 01:27:33 am »

But MTG has other "response-like" cases that shouldn't have the restriction of "play only as a reaction."  The classic example is when you try to kill my creature with a Lightning Bolt and I try to save it with a Giant Growth.  Giant Growth shouldn't be a "reaction" because it clearly has other non-reactive uses, so what to do? 

You don't need Giant Growth to have a good, strategic game (Dominion for example does not have Giant Growth). However much you like whichever card, you really don't need it.

With reactions, I would do things similar to Giant Growth, but they would be different. You could do multiple varieties: combat Giant Growth, creature-saving Giant Growth, do-more-damage Giant Growth. There is a phrasing that actually mostly simulates the current one, but I think it's too confusing to use (play this only when a creature's power or toughness is checked. it has +3/+3 until end of turn). It doesn't matter though, it would be a fine game despite giving up some flexibility from Giant Growths.

- That leaves timing rules that let Instants act as responses, which is what the game originally had, just without the word "stack."  The first rulebooks said that when everyone's done announcing their competing Instants, they resolve in the reverse order from how they were announced.  The phrase "last in first out" even appeared in the rules, with the same meaning it has when CS 101 professors use it to describe a stack. 

The *first* rulebook said no such thing. It is probably available online somewhere. I have it but I'm not digging it out to quote it. Originally instants could be played "any time" and the rulebook just waved its hands at two effects contradicting each other. There was no implicit stack. Later they had a stack, which resolved all at once rather than resolving one item and then getting to add more to it; as of 6E you could add more things after resolving one thing.

Magic is an old game. In its day it was not so weird to just hope things would work out. With an endless stream of new cards they had to figure out how to actually make interacting rules on cards work.

But I am pretty sure that introducing the stack explicitly, declaring that all Instant-speed effects go on the stack, and errata-ing all Interrupts into Instants made the game simpler than it had been before. 

For sure the stack makes the game more complex and is not worth it. It is unlikely that you will convince me otherwise; I have devoted a lot of time to this issue, both for Magic and for my own games. You can have a very simple system with no stack that does everything you need; I have made such systems and so am confident they exist. Wizards meanwhile avoids saying "the stack" on cards because it confuses people. The game is not just for computer programmers and so should not have a stack.

Sorry for the wall of MTG history, I guess the TL;DR is that they did try it the Dominion way, more or less, back in the day, and it didn't work for MTG, so they did something else.

I was there dude, it's just not true. There was a time period where damage prevention/redirection and countermagic had their own special windows of resolution, but there was never a time with reactions as I envision them, and I remain confident that they are a better solution then the stack.

4648

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 02, 2014, 10:56:00 pm »

To make my position clear, the reason I oppose automatching games based on VP tracker is that the more such qualifiers you have, the harder it is to find matches. Some qualifiers are important: "ranking ±X" and "Pro/Casual" are obviously key. But as you start including VP trackers preferences, hate list preferences, maximum quit %, etc., it takes longer and longer to find games, especially if your preferences for any of these are in the minority.

Well it seems obvious that Making Fun is only working on the game because they think they can actually end up with a lot more people playing. And if they do then it will be less hard to find people who match whatever you've picked.

I did not end up including hate list as an option, so, if what I proposed is actually used, that isn't part of it (it would stop you from getting matched with someone in a casual game who forced a card you hate-listed to be used, but that's it). And I put quit% on the "blocked list" screen instead, thinking, most people aren't thinking about this and the best possible system wouldn't even include it (instead you let people finish the game vs. a bot if a player has to leave).

4649

General Discussion / Re: Writing a novel! (The Broken Globe)

« on: April 02, 2014, 08:52:15 pm »

I don't really get rating music with explicit lyrics either, though I could see rating music that has sounds of people getting killed or something. The lack of audio and moving picture makes a ton of difference, it leaves everything up to your imagination.

I would like non-explicit lyrics marked, so I don't accidentally buy the censored version of something, which I have.

4650

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 02, 2014, 08:19:17 pm »

Or what do you think about the board game Diplomacy, if you're familiar? That was always one of my favorites, and it leans very heavily on the politics. Leads to some grudges sometimes, but my friends and I played the heck out of it in high school.

I have not played Diplomacy. As an outsider it looked overly complicated.