You made a second claim about "appeal to non-experts=randomness" being my own crazy idea. I'm pretty sure this is not a life-turning point for either of us, so whatever you feel your time is better spent on than on clearing this internet thing up, go for it. Or don't. Whatever you like. I'm lying awake with nothing better to do, so unless you convince me, which I hope is a thing in the realm of realism, I'll probably still reply, even if it's just to say "Sorry, I was wrong". But yeah, we can cut this off right here if there's nothing for you to gain from it. II'll take not trying to guess what you thought as a lesson learned.
I have never suggested that "randomness" is how you make an expansion good for new players, and you acted like I did. And then disagreed! You gave me a stupid position, and then said how stupid it was. From my chair it's just such monumentally awful garbage. "Look what an idiot Donald X. is, he thinks 2+2 is 5. That doesn't make sense to me!"
You can't just throw Heirlooms, Boons, Hexes, Durations, playing from the trash, non-supply cards, States, exchanging and a new phase at players and expect that expansion to be "something for new players" just because it's also random. That doesn't mean I dislike Nocturne as a whole, as I like lots of the cards and also the Heirloom mechanic, but the logic just doesn't add up to me."
I mean look at that.
This is simply not the place for me to discuss the expansion. This thread should be friendly to people who want to say "I agree with Tom" or whatever without the designer stepping in. I mean it no longer is, it's ruined, but whatever, I am just here to say, cut it out. People in general have not found it hard to get my opinions on everything ever, so I do not imagine you will forever remain in the dark about what I did in Nocturne to try to appeal to the masses of Dominion players.
I did not write this to make you look stupid. My point was that Vasel stated the expansion was only for experts, and I said that I agreed to some extend, as it is too rules-heavy (in parts) to appeal to the majority of non-experts. Whether those non-experts are casual players, new players or "the masses of players" was not my point, and I have admitted that I should have expressed that more carefully. I also probably shouldn't have assumed that you answering a question about randomness by talking (among other things) about the player base meant the two were connected, at least not as strongly as I implied. But my main point is, Nocturne has many components and rules, which I
believe will repell some non-experts, and if it was designed for non-experts, that's a problem. In the process of trying to line this out I was sloppy, and misrepresented what you said. And I do apologize for that.
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About my point of Nocturne being too complex for non-experts, I'm aware that this is only my perception, and people might very well find points that make it invalid: For example they might argue that in their experience, a majority of the non-expert players are still very familiar with all of the rules in the game, and will know what exchanging means by heart, or that you can't buy non-supply cards. Or people might say that Nocturne is very heavy on components, but not complicated because of it, or not even heavy on rules or components at all. Maybe they'd say that the rules that do appear are simple ones, or self-explanatory, such as "when you trash this" or "when you gain this" appear self-explanatory to us now.
Tom and me both didn't give Fool as an example by chance, either: I'm hardly an expert myself, but I'm very familiar with the rules of the game, and I found Fool very confusing, random and fiddly (with "random" including the hot-potato thing, as thanks to Lucky Coin, you more often will lack a way of influencing when Fool will come up in your deck compared to other people's). The more I think about it though, the more I become aware that I'd have to look for a long time to find another card in Nocturne that I feel comes close to Fool in either of those dimensions, so maybe my problem is with Fool mostly and not actually Nocturne as a whole. While Boons always come with a non-supply card and Hexes always come with states, and some of those cards are also Night cards, that's still less than Fool in either way.