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Author Topic: House rule for reducing luck factors?  (Read 22239 times)

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Donald X.

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #75 on: November 26, 2012, 05:07:41 pm »
+1

Not to be pedantic, but isn't "Guess the Nth digit of pi" the same measure of skill as "Keep track of the cards remaining in a deck so that you know what the last card is"? Either way, it's only random unless you put the work in to memorize/calculate it, and then it's a skill? Or in the "Guess the Nth" game, are you not told what N is?
Guess the Nth digit of pi, for large N, is always going to end up with a completely random winner. You won't possibly have memorized the digit you need, and there's no way to calculate it fast enough. If the winner is completely random, most people would call that "luck." This is utterly different from counting cards, which many people can manage.

The entire point of the "guess the Nth digit of pi" game, in Richard's speech, is in fact, "here is an example of something that's luck that you might not have considered."
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Drab Emordnilap

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #76 on: November 26, 2012, 05:33:23 pm »
+1

This is utterly different from counting cards, which many people can manage.

I feel like it's only a difference of scale, though. You can't compare counting a deck of 52 cards to knowing the 1,002nd digit of pi. If you add enough decks of cards, you hit the same issue; neither you nor I have the calculatory capacity to derive the answer, even though it's fully mathematically derivable.

I think we're just defining words differently, though; I don't look at "I can't figure out the Nth digit of pi fast enough" as me being unlucky; I look at it as being unskillful in that particular aptitude test. The new test that I'm giving myself (Guess a digit) is completely luck, but I don't think that makes the original question a luck-based one.
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Toskk

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #77 on: November 26, 2012, 06:21:22 pm »
0

Personally, I try to split the luck-based factors into 'kingdom selection factors' and then 'game design factors'. Ultimately, Dominion has a fair amount of luck/randomness to it, and addressing all of those factors would totally remake the game (it wouldn't be Dominion anymore, and it wouldn't be a deck-building game with discrete hands, either). That aside, I feel like there are a few definite ways to minimize the effect of luck/randomness on how the game plays out by artificially selecting kingdoms. The first and biggest one, in my opinion, is the 5/2 vs 4/3 split opening strength difference in some kingdoms. For example a Witch/Chapel opening vs. a Silver/Chapel opening.. that's very likely going to go to the player opening 5/2, *especially* if they're in first seat anyway. I've tried a variety of methods for minimizing this with kingdom selection, but the one I ultimately implemented was to grab the councilroom.com best-and-worst opening buys database (while it was available), and to use it to determine the relative strength of each possible opening. The system implemented in my card picker program takes that data and will reject any kingdom where the strength difference between the best 5/2 opening and the best 4/3 opening is outside of 1.5 levels. Yes, it does rely on a whole lot of averages (i.e. councilroom.com data), and doesn't work at all for Dark Ages (no data). But it seemed to work reasonably well for rejecting the really really broken kingdom sets out there where the 5/2 opening absolutely dominates the game.
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Guy Srinivasan

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #78 on: November 26, 2012, 06:59:21 pm »
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Luck versus skill, I love that topic. :) I hadn't seen the comparison between chess and tic-tac-toe before, that's quite a nice illustration that chess has luck of the sort that Garfield is talking about. Thanks for the pointer!
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Toskk

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #79 on: November 26, 2012, 07:13:40 pm »
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The kind of 'luck' Garfield is talking about isn't really what people here are talking about, though. I think a better continuum line would be 'control'.. i.e. how much control does the player have over the outcome of game events by the 'decisions' they make? You have everything from activities with zero control (e.g. Chutes and Ladders), to activities with complete control (e.g. Chess). Basically, what's the correlation factor between making the 'correct' decisions throughout the game and winning the game. In chutes and ladders, players make zero decisions. In Chess, making the 'correct' decisions is 100% correlated with winning the game.
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GigaKnight

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #80 on: November 26, 2012, 08:47:49 pm »
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This is utterly different from counting cards, which many people can manage.

I feel like it's only a difference of scale, though. You can't compare counting a deck of 52 cards to knowing the 1,002nd digit of pi. If you add enough decks of cards, you hit the same issue; neither you nor I have the calculatory capacity to derive the answer, even though it's fully mathematically derivable.

I think we're just defining words differently, though; I don't look at "I can't figure out the Nth digit of pi fast enough" as me being unlucky; I look at it as being unskillful in that particular aptitude test. The new test that I'm giving myself (Guess a digit) is completely luck, but I don't think that makes the original question a luck-based one.

Rather than say the original question is a luck-based one, I'd say it's at a specific place on a continuum of luck.  I'd also argue that, as you consider all factors affecting a game, you quickly arrive at the conclusion that literally everything has some element of luck (even if it's a lame definition like "were you lucky enough to have the aptitude for the skill this game requires").

Looking at it another way, you have to separate calculating pi from the hypothetical game itself.  The core task of calculating pi digits is mechanical.  But the game "Guess the Nth digit of pi" puts constraints on that such that you cannot predict the outcome (which is Garfield's definition of luck).
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