Atlas Hugged posted:

Lizards on lizards you say?

Ilor posted:

Technically, my friend, that is an amphibian on lizards, which you can clearly faaaaaaaaarrt

Atlas Hugged posted:

I apologize for my mistake and any amphibians I may have offended. Perhaps this will smooth things over.

tweekinator posted:

Those look nice, what game do you use them in? Kings of War?

tweekinator posted:

Do you agree or disagree with my clearly expressed point made in the post that you just quoted?

S.J. posted:

I think the point you're trying to make isn't really relevant to the discussion since we're well past the point of clarification. I already said that trying to win at a game means, mechanically, that you're trying to not let your opponent play the game as much as possible, which is also what your opponent is trying to do. In wargaming terms this is really obvious stuff like killing their dudes so they can't use them, and less obvious stuff like blocking LoS, using control abilities to manipulate your opponents army, etc. For instance, in WMH, Haley 2 is a warcaster explicitly designed around denying your opponent the opportunity to use his pieces through placement, action denial, the ability to temporarily take your opponents pieces, and defensive buffs.

Your point/argument/whatever is trying to have it's cake and eat it too - you explicitly said in-game, but then concluded with it being a lovely thing to do to another person. But I already said I'm not talking about being lovely to a person, just to that person's representation in the game - again, mechanics - ie, their army, their character in a fighting game, whatever. You are explicitly trying to remove your opponents [army, character, whatever] from the equation by killing their stuff or denying their ability to play the game as much as possible. As stated by BL, good games limit the way this can be done and bad games allow you to take it to a nonsense extreme. Your entire point seems to be based on the idea that there is this person intentionally trying to use the game as a vehicle to attack another human being, but in reality, people are just using the game as a vehicle to attack their opponents representation in the game, not the person itself.

You use the mechanics of the game to make your opponent not be able to play the game, to remove or eliminate their fun, ie, them playing with their pieces and characters. It isn't fun when my Stormclad gets shot off the table by my opponent, they are literally taking the fun of me using my Stormclad against them away from me. But, duh. One of us is trying to win. He's not attacking S.J., he's attacking S.J.'s Stormclad. Since WMH is well designed, though, now I get to shift over to try and figure out how to win despite my deficit, which is also fun.

When BL said you should be trying to take unbeatable strategies, he's 100% right. Doing so will accomplish one of two general things: you'll either discover a well or decently made game with give and take involved in the play and counter-play of strong options and strategies, or you'll discover a broken mess that you should discard as soon as you can.

If you want me to agree that being intentionally lovely to another person is bad, well, duh, I never said otherwise. But I was assuming that it was obvious that talking about your opponent was shorthand for talking about their representation in the game, hence my comments about the context of mechanics, in-game, dollies, etc. When I said "in the context of dollies," or whatever, that's what that means. So sorry for being less obvious about that, but I think that's a serious part of the misunderstanding here. But I genuinely think that most people just understand that by default.

Swagger Dagger posted:

FrostyPox posted:

I better not have my plastic fightmans shoot at my opponent's plastic fightmans, because then his fightmans can't fight and I'll be taking away his fun



E: And I say this as someone who is absolute trash at miniatures game and routinely has his plastic/metal fightmans killed in dumb ways because I am a dumb idiot

Atlas Hugged posted:

Down thread, down!

Atlas Hugged posted:

Yeah, notice how the standard bearer and the guy behind him are on a single large base. This is because I only have 8 and it's supposed to be a unit of 10.

S.J. posted:

That's the Dragon Tortoise thing from Reaper right? I love that mini.

Atlas Hugged posted:

Yeah I needed some monsters for my Salamanders army and figured Bones was the way to go. I'm not super happy with the color scheme, but eh, live and learn. But talk about mind blown when I discovered that the vine pattern on the Green Knight was done by freehand and not sculpted onto the figure. I didn't attempt to pull it off.

S.J. posted:

Yeah gently caress that, the paint job on that one mini is a testament to that loving studio painter. Although the Green Knight is a sick fig regardless. Too bad he doesn't exist anymore

FrostyPox posted:

The new trailer for the new Star Wars looks cool and good

spectralent posted:

For god's sake, you're not "taking away fun". Your stuff dying is just an expected part of a wargame. You make it not fun by being a dick about it.

I mean yeah, if a game is structured so things dying is unfun you're playing a poo poo wargame. GW is bad. We know this.

tweekinator posted:

Right here ^

BL even clarified with his "virus bomb on turn 1 wipes out your army" example he provided. Why do that in a casual game? There's no contest with two people playing a game and trying to win there. That's just two people setting up game pieces and and almost immediately putting them away. One person doing that in-game action makes the entire exercise pointless and removes any enjoyment from the game because at that point, there is no game.

spectralent posted:

You're the only person who thinks that lascannons cause self esteem damage.

(Tabletop) games are about shifting decision points and priorities. This is, in fact, the fun. A game without opponent's interference is liable to be less fun because there's eventually going to be optimal strategies; it's the "mine the spawn points" problem in singleplayer video games. If having to re-evaluate your plan because things didn't happen as planned on turn 1 is an unfun experience then arguably literally every game ever devised should be thrown in the trash.

If what you're actually saying is "games that are easily broken are bad", then A: No poo poo and B: Actually say these words instead of repeatedly making up bizarre insinuations about slashing brake lines and refusing to be kind to people like some kind of space marine version of Ayn Rand.

Also you can just go "No virus bombs", these things happen*. It's about the amount of effort you want to put into a ruleset to make it work. The ideal is "none", but most games have at least some by virtue of discussion like "So this piece of scenery is probably a hedge". We live in a tainted and imperfect world.

*I suspect the real issue with 2e was that resolving everything took forever, which is a far more fundamental and less easily patched problem.

S.J. posted:

I already answered that. You either find fun in the counterplay, or play something else that allows for better counterplay. You're both implicitly trying to win by sitting down to a game where there is one winner and one loser at the end. Turns out virus bombs were bad and dumb and people shouldn't play that game. That's not the fault of the player, and the implicit idea that virus bombs are somehow attacking your opponents person is kind of weird.

I mean we don't even have to use virus bombs as an example. Plenty of versions of 40k have had armies that, if they won the roll for first turn, would wipe out 50%+ of their opponents list without much variance or effort involved, because it's a bad game. You either deal with that or find a better game. Honestly a lot of these problems aren't even really caused by people seriously sitting down and trying to figure out optimal ways of playing, they're stumbled upon by casual players because, again, it's a bad game.

tweekinator posted:

Yes. We agree that people should not play that game.

I guess I'm just coming from the perspective that obliterating the entire army of your opponent on turn 1 without them having any way to avoid or counter that is, while a hallmark of a bad game, an incredibly rude thing to do your opponent. You are both people who have carved this time out of your limited schedules, gotten everything organized and set up, and turn 1 elimination with no counter makes all of that pointless, wasting everyone's time. I don't understand why someone would want to do haul their miniatures to the wherever the game is, and spend an hour to set everything up, only to just say "I win, nothing you can do about it". I just can't see where any enjoyment for either party comes from in this scenario. One player has wasted at least an hour of both players' time, and for what? To play a bad game to the max?

S.J. posted:

Also, please don't put the burden on people playing the game to make the game playable. That's what the people who make the game are supposed to do. There's a world of difference between agreeing to the definition of a piece of terrain and whether or not to exclude certain sections of the rules. Ironically, 40k tournaments comp the poo poo out of the system for just that reason.

spectralent posted:

I'm just going to address the parts that might lead to a proper conversation again.

Yeah, there's a huge difference in magnitude. You have games that are good and ones that are terrible, but there is a huge section of middle ground. So, say for some reason, you really like 2e (I don't know why you would, but let's say you do), but you're annoyed at the virus bomb thing: Going "Well, poo poo, I guess we just have to play infinity" does not actually meet your needs. What would meet your needs is a patch our houserule: "No virus bombs". This isn't playing non-competitively, this is just altering the clear expectations of the game.

The issue with GW games is they often leave you in situations where these clear expectations aren't. This is the TO conversation, even: People are mad because other people are breaking the GW code of silence. The process that's an issue here is clarity.

Now, as I said, GW's games are generally kind of poo poo. I don't know why you'd want to play 2e; you'd probably have to do way too much work to turn it into a decent game. And you're right that game designers should be providing functional and good systems. It shouldn't be a responsibility of the player to turn some rules suggestions into a game. But, if you're enjoying a game, and then you find one weird trick to degenerate play that results in a bad game, it's entirely reasonable to just alter the explicit terms of your game and say "No stacking rerolls" or whatever. This is explicitly a player-response thing; this is "what it is cool to do at a club". It's not an exoneration of the designers. And, of course, if you've got houserules longer than the actual rulebook, you should probably just dump the game because there's almost certainly something better for you out there. But one amazing move shouldn't necessarily be a death sentence; most games are massive interlocking structures of rules. It's why decent designers issue errata. Mistakes happen.

S.J. posted:

In general I agree, and said as much above, though in less detail. I would disagree about the non-competitive part, the game is what the game is, no more and no less, but since that doesn't seem to be what you want to discuss, I'll say: the real answer here is to take the core gameplay that you want and design your own game without the bullshit in order to fix the systemic problem. The presence of virus bombs is a good indicator that there are deeper structural issues that need addressing

spectralent posted:

The game is ultimately as agreed; (tabletop) games are conversation. I think it's fine if you have houserules and then do your best to win from that.

Also agreed more people should homebrew. It does reveal how hard avoiding unintended interactions and incentives is, for one thing, and also how poo poo most people are at playtesting because they do generally take obvious assumptions for granted. If you don't have playtesters who're taking the game seriously you let the door wide open for dumb stuff to get into your book/PDF/coffee note.

S.J. posted:

In general I agree, and said as much above, though in less detail. I would disagree about the non-competitive part, the game is what the game is, no more and no less, and that cutting part of it out literally does make the game non-competitive in a strict sense...

goatface posted:

Don't engage in bondage play without having the conversation about boundaries first.

Avenging Dentist posted:

This is getting back to being a semantic argument, but by that interpretation, even professional tournaments aren't competitive. Plenty of game tournaments feature additional rules to restrict degenerate interactions between players. Perhaps the most famous example is Smash Bros: "Final Destination, no items." Other fighting games naturally have their own bans (unlockable boss characters are a big one), but I don't really follow them. Overwatch tournaments, which I know a lot more about, typically ban entire game modes (2CP maps are commonly banned: Volskaya, Hanamura, and Anubis) and added a "single-hero" limit (i.e. only one of the same hero per team).

fnordcircle posted:

I don't even know what fun is anymore, thanks thread.

S.J. posted:

Those games are explicitly made to allow for all of those options, so that's not even remotely correct. Those rules, and the option to use them or not, are part of the package you're buying into.

S.J. posted:

Saying 'it's fine' is just saying that you're okay with spending money on a substandard product when you could be spending that same money on a better one. I reject the idea that shifting the burden over to the players to attempt to patch the money they threw into those rulebooks is a real answer - the real answer is to start spending money on good rulebooks instead of bad ones.

Avenging Dentist posted:

No, they're not. At the time one-hero limits were added to tournament Overwatch play, there was no in-game option for it. Likewise, there's no in-game option to ban Hayate's cartwheel in Dead or Alive 3, and yet TOs still banned it.

spectralent posted:

On a more serious note.


In a perfectly spherical game world of infinite games that might be the case, but practically not all games do everything right. Like, for example, the thing with warmachine allowing you to see through forests only if people are stuck partially in it sounds super dumb, but warmachine is apparently also pretty great. Surely the best thing to do is just go "Yeah the forest is concealing", rather than go play Kings of War because the game's now tainted forever.

S.J. posted:

Also, in case anyone brings it up, that doesn't mean a game has to be perfect in order to warrant playing, it just means the flaws of the game shouldn't be so overriding as to require correction for an agreeable experience. No game is perfect.