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Author Topic: House rule for reducing luck factors?  (Read 22242 times)

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timchen

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House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 24, 2012, 03:56:00 am »
0

How about a house rule stating that
"You may reshuffle all the cards from your discard into your deck in your clean up phase, before you draw the cards for your next turn, if you have shuffled in this turn."

This rule will help on those unfortunate situations where the victory is determined by unlucky reshuffle misses, such as drawing the witch at the bottom of a deck.

For a casual game this rule might be too bothersome to implement, but I think in a competitive environment it is worthwhile.

Thoughts?
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aaron0013

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2012, 08:07:55 am »
0

Not sure that I am completely following you, but it seem like this would make certain cards too powerful.  First one that comes to mind is stash.  You can see where that would lead...
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Lekkit

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #2 on: November 24, 2012, 08:28:28 am »
0

The way I interprete it is that if you trigger a reshuffle during your turn, you may reshuffle again at the clean up. So if you play a Witch on turn 4 you can get to play it on turn 5 again.
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TrojH

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #3 on: November 24, 2012, 10:24:34 am »
+3

Here's a house rule to reduce luck factors:

"Don't play Dominion."

Face it. Horrible luck is a part of the game.  :)
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aaron0013

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #4 on: November 24, 2012, 10:30:40 am »
+2

The way I interprete it is that if you trigger a reshuffle during your turn, you may reshuffle again at the clean up. So if you play a Witch on turn 4 you can get to play it on turn 5 again.

But that is one of my favorite aspects of the game: know what cards are in your deck, and know when to trigger reshuffles.  The better you get at that, the better you become at Dominion.
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Watno

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #5 on: November 24, 2012, 10:32:11 am »
+12

Different fix: play more dominion
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timchen

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #6 on: November 25, 2012, 04:16:32 am »
+1

Play more fixes nothing....
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michaeljb

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #7 on: November 25, 2012, 05:34:07 am »
+1

Play more fixes nothing....

Play more and (statistically speaking) you will see good luck even out the bad luck.
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Morgrim7

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #8 on: November 25, 2012, 05:53:42 am »
+1

No house rules i've come up with have made dominion better.
Horrible luck is a part of the game.
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rod-

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #9 on: November 25, 2012, 09:51:09 am »
+1

Play more fixes nothing....

Play more and (statistically speaking) you will see good luck even out the bad luck.

Variance being evenly distributed about the mean has no effect on the fact that the variance is high. (Statistically speaking)
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Tables

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #10 on: November 25, 2012, 09:53:28 am »
+2

Play more fixes nothing....

Play more and (statistically speaking) you will see good luck even out the bad luck.

Variance being evenly distributed about the mean has no effect on the fact that the variance is high. (Statistically speaking)

No, but your luck compared to the best and worst possible cases will very quickly tend towards something roughly in the middle.
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

rod-

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #11 on: November 25, 2012, 10:36:24 am »
+1

Suggestion for mitigating unequal tax burden:

Spend time being both poor and rich.  Sometimes you will pay taxes, sometimes you will get a refund.

Maybe that's too subtle.  The point is:  The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem. 
« Last Edit: November 25, 2012, 10:45:31 am by rod- »
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rod-

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #12 on: November 25, 2012, 10:54:34 am »
+2

I have actually put a decent amount of thought into solving the reshuffle problem, and when it comes to online implementations, it is quite trivial:

Each card has a 'has been drawn X times' counter associated with it.  Every bought/gained card is assigned the highest value of that counter. (EG: On turn 1, your starting 3 coppers and 2 estates have a counter = 1.  The silver you buy also has a counter = 1).  You will always draw cards that have counter = 0 before counter = 1, so you'll get your 4/1 hand before that silver.  However, you will *never* get your starting estate a fourth time before you get that silver a second.

Effectively, nothing ever 'misses' a reshuffle - every card will get drawn exactly one time per deck cycle. 

Mostly impossible to do offline, though, so i can't really fault Don for leaving it out of Dom
« Last Edit: November 25, 2012, 10:55:47 am by rod- »
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SirPeebles

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #13 on: November 25, 2012, 10:58:40 am »
+7

I really like having some luck though.  I don't want Dominion to be a game where you can plan your moves several turns ahead of time.  I like that as you construct your deck, you need to prepare for some randomness and adapt accordingly.  In the long run, the better player really does win.  This is why I'm not at the top of the leader board.  But it's also nice that sometimes the weaker player wins.
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DStu

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #14 on: November 25, 2012, 11:50:37 am »
+2

The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem.

I would guess the proposed "solution" was mostly a joke, which of course partly reduces the problem, as the more you play the more likely the better player wins.

What's true is that it is not very efficient, quadratic runtime and such, and also probably not applicable, because of course one should assume that everybody already plays as much Dominion as time permits, so the possibility to increase that time does not exists.

Your solution next post is of course nearly the optimal solution to this problem, or at least tries to be it with some correctelable edgecases.  When reducing variance is the goal, going to deterministic is optimal.
Edge-cases: If you discard cards with say Warehouses, and redraw them with Lab the same turn, and iterate this, you can increase the counter of some cards by more than 1 per turn. I don't think this is a desired behaviour.  Would be a nice way to get rid of some Victory cards from your draws.  Don't want to think how to solve this, but should be easy.
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rod-

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #15 on: November 25, 2012, 12:56:17 pm »
+1

The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem.
I would guess the proposed "solution" was mostly a joke, which of course partly reduces the problem, as the more you play the more likely the better player wins.
None of the four different people who said "deal with it" gave any indication that they were joking.  Also, if four people make the same joke, shouldn't it at least be funny?  I don't think any of them were joking.  They're all coming into this topic effectively just to say "I don't have a problem with that, you shouldn't either".

Peebles' comment is another of the same.

Play regular dominion all you want, a house rule for reducing luck is no threat to that. 

I don't know why I'm all up in arms trying to keep posts on topic for this topic in particular, i know the internet's full of failure, and i know i've posted plenty of things off-topic, but at least i don't go into the "what's missing?" threads and post "an actual game of dominion" as the answer to every one.  If you don't see how those two are the same, maybe someone else can clarify for you.
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Piemaster

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #16 on: November 25, 2012, 01:05:52 pm »
+1

Why bother with shuffling at all?  Why not just make a rule where every time you would shuffle, you just reorder your deck in whatever way you like instead?
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DStu

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #17 on: November 25, 2012, 01:07:23 pm »
+1

The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem.
I would guess the proposed "solution" was mostly a joke, which of course partly reduces the problem, as the more you play the more likely the better player wins.
I was thinking of Watno, but anyway...
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DStu

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #18 on: November 25, 2012, 01:08:26 pm »
+1

Why bother with shuffling at all?  Why not just make a rule where every time you would shuffle, you just reorder your deck in whatever way you like instead?
Because that is an entirely different game with different power levels of cards (->Chancellor).
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Drab Emordnilap

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #19 on: November 25, 2012, 02:03:38 pm »
+1

Why bother with shuffling at all?  Why not just make a rule where every time you would shuffle, you just reorder your deck in whatever way you like instead?

"Left hand opponent reorders your deck" is more fun.
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SirPeebles

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #20 on: November 25, 2012, 02:14:34 pm »
+1

To give a more reasonable response, I agree that there is some randomness/luck which is positive, and some which is negative.  In particular, randomness which contributes to the strategic depth is, in my opinion, quite positive.  I like knowing that I need to be cautious while building my village/smithy engine for instance.  That is, there's a fundamental and strategic notion of reliability which randomness thrusts upon the game.  Another example is the importance of managing your reshuffles.

On the other hand, it is quite frustrating when someone utterly disregards reliability, and yet gets a lucky draw and megaturns anyhow.  Similarly, it sucks when your opponent's Sea Hag hits your Sea Hag.  Was it wrong to buy that Sea Hag?  Probably not.  Was there something you could have done to protect yourself?  You likely didn't have the time.

And of course, many cards are balanced with these factors in mind. 

"Play more games" was mostly likely suggested tongue in cheek, since the spirit of this topic is clearly to decrease the amount of luck within a game.  But at least what I'm suggesting is that the randomness does not necessarily diminish the role of skill in the game, and in fact contributes to the strategy.

I would be interested in a house rule which decreases the "bad" effects of randomness while preserving the "good".  The suggestion in the original post seems to do more to remove the strategic concept of shuffle management than it does to mitigate the impact of shuffle luck.
« Last Edit: November 25, 2012, 02:17:16 pm by SirPeebles »
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WanderingWinder

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #21 on: November 25, 2012, 02:25:14 pm »
+6

The total re-order of your deck allows for weird best/worst case luck (who is doing the ordering), which is usually really off from the average case. Which mostly makes it into an entirely different game, but one which among other things has ENORMOUS AP - if you get rid of the randomness of the shuffling, the game should be quite directly 'solvable' by pretty direct backward induction, but this will take FOREVER. Of course, you can do this with the probabilistic game we actually have too, in terms of probabilities, but it's so complicated that, like chess, you just aren't going to even try to calculate the game to the end from the start position.

So "Play more games" or "Play a different game" are sort of tongue in cheek, but I think at some point, you do actually have to acknowledge that the luck thing is an inevitable issue with dominion. I mean, we can say the same thing about poker, no? But even something as modest (and complicated) as rod_ suggests in reply#12, you actually get some issues - what happens is that the cards that miss the shuffle all get clumped at the start not only of the shuffle immediately after they miss, but also in the next shuffle. Which lets me plan ahead somewhat for certain collisions. Is it tricky and sorta small? Yes, but especially with software aid, it's doable. And this doesn't solve things like sea hagging a sea hag. The problem is that any way of forcing some regularity in is going to fundamentally change the nature of the game by changing either the percentage of times that particular sets of cards collide downwards or upwards, and you're looking at a quite different game.

LastFootnote

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #22 on: November 25, 2012, 02:35:49 pm »
+2

I am vehemently against any rule that 'reduces luck' in a game. I can see the reasoning behind wanting reduced luck; you're a competitive player and it sucks losing games to weaker players because you get unlucky. You want that to happen less often.

But when the community surrounding a game starts to embrace that kind of rule, it can easily become a slippery slope, and I don't use that expression lightly. If you want proof, look at the competitive online Pokemon community. Pokemon (the video game, not the TCG) is the game I played competitively before Dominion. It could be a great game, with deep strategy and lots of potential variety, two of the things I also love about Dominion. The problem with Pokemon is that it's built to be unbalanced. Little kids just love their legendary Pogeymons! So in order to make the game interesting, certain things had to be banned. Among those things were some moves that the community felt "promoted luck over strategy".

I won't get too far into the details, but suffice it to say that this sort of rule pretty much just breeds discontent and frustration in the community once you have a bunch of player-created rules for minimizing luck. Is Stash too powerful using this new rule? Let's just ban Stash. No big loss, right? What, 30% of the players don't like that Stash is banned? Etc., etc.

The beauty of Dominion is that it's a great, balanced game where every card can shine given the right circumstances. Although I understand the desire to "improve" it, I'd prefer to play it as is and leave the metagame design for other, less-balanced games.
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blueblimp

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #23 on: November 25, 2012, 03:07:37 pm »
+1

I agree that luck mattering more than skill becomes a problem at higher levels of Dominion. I'm not that good a player (level 35-ish), yet I'd guess more than half the games I play are decided more by luck than by skill. That's boring. (The games that are decided by skill are still quite interesting though!)

I think the solution here is NOT to try to reduce luck, but try to increase skill. Witch+BM with zero luck would still be boring, because then it'd just come down to analysis and calculation, and hey if I wanted that then I'd play Chess or Go. So the problem is that mirror strategies reduce the importance of skill. Skill can still be more important than luck in mirrors; for example, if Amb is available and only one player plays it well. But generally there isn't enough opportunity for skill to influence the outcome in mirrors.

I like one idea that was posted here about increasing the number of kingdom cards. Instead of 10, have 12 or more. That increases the number of viable strategies, leading to fewer mirrors, and it also increases the number of card interactions, which favours skill.
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Drab Emordnilap

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Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« Reply #24 on: November 25, 2012, 03:20:31 pm »
+3

I like one idea that was posted here about increasing the number of kingdom cards. Instead of 10, have 12 or more. That increases the number of viable strategies, leading to fewer mirrors, and it also increases the number of card interactions, which favours skill.

I would argue the opposite; the more card in the kingdom, the more likely that some combination of two or three is the clear best strategy. At least, it's not as clear cut as "more options means more viable strategies".
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