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Magnetic North posted:When the first of the root political talk came about, I thought about responding questioning the idea of if the LotH could be adequately described as Fascist, mostly because that's such a 20th century idea, despite deep roots. I even considered using the Khanates as a better metaphor, but I know incredibly little about them and did not want to parrot outdated Orientalist ideas out of ignorance. I'm just not a political science guy. When I read Marx last, it was to focus on his philosophy like his species being which is much less relevant to this discussion. I'm glad someone who knows more than I do responded. I know a bit of this and that and like, three sentences of Actual Theory - just enough to weave together an interpretation, but don't take it as word of law or anything, lol. In fact, I think comparing the LotH to some Orientalist concepts isn't unjustifiable - they certainly invoke some imagery of the idea of the 'Oriental Despot' - like the artwork on the back of their mood cards. I think its pretty intentional. I think they aren't just mechanically in the same turf as the Vagabond (they both want items and have a special pawn that represents 'You' on the board) - they're a direct foil, in that if the Vagabond is the Skyrim PC / Conan, then the Warlord is the campaign big bad, the Thulsa Doom. They are oriented around an individuals prowess, but both more explicitly villainous. A vagabond scores from heroism - the warlord via oppression.  look at dis little scourge of god, aint they adorable Root is interesting in that the political ideas in it are only briefly touched on textually - much of the message is how things play out "materialistically". So while LotH gets a lot more 'Bad Guy' verbiage than any other faction, mechanically Root is a game where everyone engages in overt violence and ruthless exploitation of the productive class. Its just generally sanitized thru proxies and thru systems - except for the LotH, who has no illusions about how they manage their affairs past the most straightforward and honest of political slogans: "Do what I say or die". Which is, well, extremely "Authoritarian", but, critically, its also very limited: the Warlord is utterly central to their faction. Its power is just as strong as the Warlords reputation, and extends as far as their sword arm - theirs is a weak 'state', whose only way to rule is to enact methodological, consistent terror to all potential enemies so that nobody dares challenge even a token garrison. This doesn't make it nice - the Mongols use of terror was responsible for some of history's largest instances of mass extermination - but the methods employed by these 'despotic' states are, in a Machiavellian sense, just as pragmatic as the methods used by the 'civilized' states. They drop these practices later, not because they change their objectives or logic - they just are able to employ superior, long term policies like widespread taxation rather than just looting everyone. So thats why I tend to hesitate on describing these kinds of premodern systems as 'Fascist' just because they're extremely mean, despotic, or violently populist - it ends up being less descriptive of their ideological methodology as opposed to it being the heir of that use the fearsome specter of 'Oriental Despotism' (alongside, of course, "Socialist/Communist") to show how one state's use of widespread, systemic violence to extract resources from their territories is morally worse than another's. A 'despotic' Khanate will drop extermination as a policy once they discern that taxation would be more efficient (and indeed, its more effective for the LotH to score legitimacy with 'trade' lategame rather than throwing more trinkets on a brimming pile), a petty 'barbaric' raider will gladly accept a title and a fief in exchange for recognition, a conquering empire will sooner leave you alone as its simply easier to let you manage your own affairs - but a fascist regime is ontologically driven to genocide. Its a common line of confusion from people that read about Nazi practices - why did they waste so much time and resources in wartime to just slaughter their own people? - but it was never 'merely' practical to them: it was heroic. e: I really like Root in case its not obvious, its good, play Root. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 12:43 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 12:41
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Tiler Kiwi posted:It is, in fact, a total hoot. My favorite Vagabond is the Vagrant, whose ability is "I can make a fight break out between anyone" - extremely Yojimbo.
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May 29, 2022 12:58
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Tiler Kiwi posted:
That's Mickey.
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May 29, 2022 17:53
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Khanates are a whole 'nother kettle of worms, and tend to be characterised as ruthless but pragmatic, specifically making use of knowledge and experts that they find even though they're from illiterate cultures, being culturally and religiously tolerant as long as you pay fealty and your taxes, and even adopting culture and lifestyles that suit them. To the point of occasionally being fully absorbed into the cultures they conquer after the Khan dies and the empire splits up. Not really uncommon a lot of invading peoples. Just ask the Franks, Lombards, and Goths. With Genghis Khan specifically, he came to power within Mongol society by cutting through a lot of the aristocratic old order and tribal norms of the steppe nomads and running some kind of very adaptive meritocracy that absorbed other tribes to become the continent-spanning empire that it became. Didn't exactly last, lacked foundations, but it was a hell of a thing. I think Attila the Hun might've had a similar deal. Maybe you could even say similar things about the early days of Islam when they came out of the desert to smash one of the biggest empires of their day, but it's hard to say how much they absorbed the previous culture and how much unique flavor they had from the start that is still around. They got nasty reputations from the other powers that were around who were deathly afraid of the strange new unknown from out of nowhere, but aside from the wars, not bad for the time.
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May 29, 2022 22:41
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since I got Root on my brain (new expansion came in today), I'll write a little bit about the capitalist scum otters of the woodlands, coming from afar in anticipation of the upcoming conflict with one goal in mind - acquire wealth with which to dominate. Basically pure evil Their main gimmick is that they can sell Services - mercenaries (may use Waterfolk warriors in combat on your turn), riverboats (can move across water on the board to a clearing connected to it), and cards (the Riverfolk's card hand is shown at all times, and you can buy a card from their hand). At the start of your turn, you can buy any one service (cost set between one and four on the Otter's turn), plus one for every Riverfolk trade post you have a piece in, and you pay in warriors. Using these payments, the Riverfolk can do, well, basically anything - recruit, draw cards, move, fight, build new depots, craft cards, or just sit them on a big pile and try to earn passive scoring based on how big their pile of little angry woodland creatures is. Recruiting and building depots spends warriors, but every other action lets them cling tight to their gains. If nobody buys from them, they get an out in the form of Protectionism (your key word of the day, here), where they pay themselves two of their own warriors instead. They are also unique with how their trade depots work - when destroyed, theyre removed from the game - but Riverfolk's crafting piece is not the depot, but the space on the board uncovered when they place a depot - unlike every other faction, their ability to craft, once obtained, can never be taken. This means when they're firmly in the lead it can be very hard to stop them from just crafting to victory. But what defines the Otters, and often sees them called as the hardest Root faction to play (although they have a high winrate in four player games, for reasons that will be clear soon) is that they're the only faction whose major mechanics depend entirely on 'consent' - otters can beg, plead, promise, badger, and threaten, but there is no way for them to grab your little meeples and put them in their payment box without you signing off on it. But, hey, we're all nice and reasonable here - you can give yourself an edge over the rest of the table with some key cards early on, and the otters build some depots with it and you get your funds back and, well, this is all great! This is value creation, we're making peace dividends, you tell yourself as you drop more little meeples in their payment box. And so do the other two players because, hey free market, baby! And then the otter player solemnly racks up the prices on everything, grasps all your little pawns in a death grip, and parks a giant army somewhere to either start scoring passively while you all struggle to scrape up enough remaining warriors to stop them, mill through the deck to craft everything, or just decide to take their otterball and roll it up and down the table and kill everyone in one turn. So, next game, everyone decides "none of us are buying from those goddamn otters today". And that lasts until someone else realizes, "gently caress! I'm not going to win the game... but maybe if I buy that card, I can...". So they shell out some little pawns for some powerful cards - and then everyone starts dropping their guys in the otter's payment box because theyre not going to lose because someone else was dumb enough to deal with the devil. And maybe if the third player is somewhat reluctant then the Otters can just go ahead and drop a lutrinae brigade on their doorstep and insist they start thinking a bit more rationality about the mutual benefits of asset liquidity. And then three turns later the otters score 27 points in a single turn and win the game. You all gnash your teeth and glare across the table because holy poo poo Root is actually a mean loving game - but really, isn't it your own fault? You went and bought that ambush card at Ottermart, you participated in the liberalizing power of the free market, and yet somehow you're all upset. Curious!  There is no love or mercy behind those eyes Capitalism is pushed by modern liberals as, well, liberalizing - the ideal market is the one that provides the best value for the consumer, and the ones that do it best are free ones - free trade and free markets makes a free people! This is all very logical, a very real and serious theory, backed by reason, and explained as such at yuppie conferences where the ease it is to buy McDonalds is correlated with global peace. (Its fortuitous that it turned out that the solution to all global problems was exactly the same thing that made all those attendants fantastically wealthy!) Its a theory that postulates that, instead of unionizing, those Amazon workers would be much better served if they just all worked hard and earn better pay after creating more value - everyone floats when that tide comes in! A market where everyone has equal rights and operates based on consent could never be, *scoff*, exploitive. Or even, untoward! Protectionism is a cornerstone of the old theory of mercantilism, which does not fundamentally agree with the liberal ideals of a free market and its associated dreams of fairness - instead it sees the market as a zero sum landscape where the winners sell and losers buy. Imperialism in this context isn't about using the IMF to put entire nations in 'benevolent' debt slavery while you pat yourself on the back for teaching all those people to fish instead of asking for handouts - its to have regions of economic control where you can extract raw materials and sell all your manufactured goods (or just tax the hell out of a vital trade route), and deny the chance for your rival nations to do the same. Rather than it being about creating benefit for 'consumers' or even 'shareholders', its about national scale rent-seeking, an extension of the warfare that dominated the European continent. Eventually it was discredited and economic soothsayers turned to other dogmas, either because the power of Reason convinced everyone that we all should have more efficient and peaceful free markets, or because the capitalist class could derive greater superprofits without having to contend with tariffs and national interests all the time. Depends on who you ask, and how credulous you are when reading economic textbooks.  This is the lesson every game of Root is really about. The Riverfolk Company then, through their mechanics, demonstrate firmly the cutthroat roots of mercantilist logic, and how much a figleaf the notion of 'consent' can be in a market - especially one monopolized by one seller. It is individually detrimental to not buy Otter services, but detrimental to everyone but the Otters if everyone buys their services. Even absent a swordpoint being jutted at your throat to encourage you to open your wallet, if you end up trying to stick to some kind of principle in not buying from exploitive arms dealers then all you're really consenting to is uphill struggle and likely defeat to those that do. Many times, apologists for capitalism will treat the owning / merchant class as being some innocent, put upon class that the jealous and ignorant blame for their ills - "they just happened to show up and start providing massive sums of money for human chattel, that doesn't make them responsible for people selling them slaves" kind of poo poo - but this sort of logic holds up only in little pocket dimensions (like many economic theories) where you ignore the social contexts that can compel people to participate in an economy even when they know its screwing them. As Root is, by its design, extremely zero sum, defeating the Riverfolk is either about maintaining your own tablewide, protectionist style trade embargo - which is generally a limited idea since even if everyone sticks entirely to it, it just means that two of the players were bad enough at the game to think losing to one player is better than losing to another - or by realizing that the notion of 'value creation' is a load of absolute rubbish in this game. Every transaction with the Riverfolk is going to be zero sum in the end - you just have to make sure you get more out of it than they do, you need to make sure theyre desperate to deal with you, and at any chance you get you get you murder their little warriors to waste their funds - and when they whine you laugh and buy their crating cards away from them so they can't hope to mill the deck to victory later. This nicely mirrors the idea of mercantilism being about the ability to leverage power over the economy to sustain said power, the extreme distaste many premodern societies had with traders, and the later liberal obsession with 'natural rights' to keep people from just seizing property or otherwise 'restricting economic freedoms' - beyond just moralistic notions like how they did not 'create' anything, its the fact that the ruling classes depended on them for maintaining their own power, while at the same time they weren't so dumb as to think that dealing with someone made them friends or warranted any sense of fairness. Whether you're a murder of the mischievous, or a mischief of the murderous, you're going to want to wallop the otters with the clubs they sold you. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Jun 6, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 11:52
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Missed opportunity making them otters instead of octopi imo.
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Jun 4, 2022 22:23
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I get it. Elon Muskrat.
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Jun 5, 2022 19:28
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Tiler Kiwi posted:since I got Root on my brain (new expansion came in today), I'll write a little bit about the capitalist scum otters of the woodlands, coming from afar in anticipation of the upcoming conflict with one goal in mind - acquire wealth with which to dominate. as someone who hasn't played the game, this is a great write-up and much appreciated it all brings to mind the strain of libertarianism that focus on state coercion and the non-aggression principle, while steadfastly ignoring the underlying aggressive implications of denying essential goods and service to someone. someone who corners the market on bread and gouges is simply an agnostic part of the natural force that is "the market", those who would set price ceilings or nationalize the product are the "aggressor"
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Jun 5, 2022 20:17
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I'd also say about the Otters, that they are not the manifestation of all capitalism in the forest. The deck of cards that represents the common people of the forest beneath the level of the player factions demonstrates that; there's shops and even banks among the common people of the forest (and also tax collectors that the players can make use of, as is their right as the rulers). The Otters are just one company. And a company strong enough to contend with the other prospective rulers of the forest, so that adds more verisimilitude to if the rest of the players despise the specifics about the Otters, as merchants daring to hold power and influence without having fully bought it in blood like you're "supposed" to do. I guess you could say that they're teetering on the edge between being just a part of the economy and holding direct political power over territory. Like they have enough people on their payroll that they can hold territory on their own, and may need to in order to pursue their goals, but that's not their main focus. They want to engage with the other factions to keep trade going (and if people refuse to engage with them, they will have no recourse but to try brute-forcing control over areas and going through the trouble of sabotaging other factions' attempts to rule because they've already invested in mercenaries that gotta get used somehow, and also that's the nature of the game of Root). I think you can even interpret the fact that they have riverboats as underlying the nature of the faction as engaging in trade. It's very common for states in history to have a lot of trouble getting their military over the water because ships are a major investment, but if you're already invested in moving goods from place to place, you'll have plenty of ships to repurpose for military ends. Most powerful naval states like England, Athens, or Portugal start out with investing into ships for more commercial purposes before getting into conquest. I think Venice might be the best parallel to the Otters, even if their name evokes more the East India Company, because Venice was constantly in business relations with other states even as it ended up managing their own territory.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:39
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Most empires are maritime empires.
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Jun 6, 2022 00:23
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As any Civilization player will tell you, a strong military is an extension of a strong economy.
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Jun 6, 2022 05:09
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yeah with the otters its really about how their presence can destabilize the "regular" economy of the game - and profit off the escalated market environment. Everyone "gains" from this but a buyers ability to profit from buying below value has the limit of said value, while profits of a seller can far, far exceed the products value. That's the source of the otters power in a figurative, and an ingame very real sense. The maritime aspect doesn't come up that much, tho they can recruit in all river clearings. The Venice comparison is solid anyways tho - they can do military things but they can't sustain open warfare against a real military power - they can't replenish losses without cost, unlike other factions. But they also don't need to since they do not have to control territory at all. Their extraction isn't about direct control of the woodlands productive class, its (enough of) a monopoly on being the middlemen. They would much rather sell you the ability to go sack their enemies rather than do the job personally. But they do feel the stain of not having an absolute monopoly - if people have a cheaper way of doing that rather than going thru you, then you're going to have to encourage them (such as by destroying anything on the board th+at increases their card draw or lets them bypass the need for river travel). e: like really the scheme is only somewhat 'constrict supply' or even coercion like the stereotypical Evil Conglomerate monopoly, its more 'provide high supply of lower cost option', which matches the logic of 'benign monopolies' (that current legal doctrine argues can't be considered bad if they provide value for consumers). If you get enough depots up and they don't get torched, you can actually drop the price of your services to next to nothing and, since depots let people buy an additional service per depot whose clearing they have a piece in, this can provoke a real frenzy of buying. Since everyone is doing it, its not really giving them much relative benefit versus each other, but it does raise the opportunity cost of not handing you funds. Which means of course that the Otters profit even more off the tragedy of the commons going on. Course, being a zero sum, winner take all game, the end result is also the otters get to jack up all the prices to cut off everyone as they use their funding pile to storm past the finish line so the 'value for consumers' is rather nebulous in the end, as these sorts of arrangements tend to be. e2: There are some strategies that tend to try to pull off more outright blackmail, like the "Cat Tax" (your opening play is to move all your otters to sit on a vital building that another faction needs to have access to, and set your prices for mercenaries to max so they have to pay thru the nose to 'Rule' the clearing - the logic then often being 'don't worry I'll spend your warriors so you don't really pay anything at all (except giving the otters a big jolt of power)!). People swear by it, but it has a good chance of blowing up in your face if the extorted player ignores you, or moves more warriors in to clear your Rule, or decides to just murder your valuable otters instead, which is especially likely if the otter player threatens retaliation for not paying the ransom - threats like that are best responded with pre-emptive counter retaliation, as Root's combat mechanics greatly favor attacking, and otters are especially bad on defense as everyone can see if they have ambush cards or even buy them off them. Even if the Otters are willing to pour funds into the play to follow up to 'teach a lesson' (as people online like to claim they'll do), its generally an extremely inefficient use of their funds so I'm not a big advocate of either using or humoring said gambit, especially since threats based on 'ill throw my game to make you lose' is, literally, loser talk. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Jun 6, 2022 |
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Jun 6, 2022 09:54
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One interesting thing about Root is it is not actually inherently zero sum. Each faction earns points for doing more of the thing they want to do. Each faction can end with a lot of points, or only a few. A 4 faction game could end with anything between 30 and 119 points on the table. Some pairs of factions do have a zero-sum struggle between them (a building space cannot contains both an eyrie and a sawmill), but overall things are positive sum. You can perfectly play the game in the euro style, where what matters is your point score, and winning/losing is meaningless. Choosing to play in the American style, where winning is all and there is no distinction between 2nd, place and last is a choice. One the (American, but euro-loving) designer anticipated and planned for, but still a choice. In the game world, a faction that scores 29 points and can expect to score 10 the next turn has met all almost the aspirations of its people, and the restate in sight. Any political leader who delivered that for his people would be lauded as a hero to be emulated, not forgotten as a loser.
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Jun 10, 2022 10:13
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radmonger posted:Any political leader who delivered that for his people would be lauded as a hero to be emulated, not forgotten as a loser. The Eyrie Dynasties won the popular vote. 
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Jun 10, 2022 10:49
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i don't think it would work great in euro style since scoring windows are very different between factions, especially depending on the board state. cats, eyrie, and lizards can be at 25+ points and be completely incapable of winning in two turns, woodland alliance can be at 12 points or so and be one turn away from an absolutely certain victory. it'd really mess with game balance as well, since a lot of lategame play would fall apart if people prioritized securing a higher, but still losing personal score rather than being willing to pile on the frontrunner, and you can absolutely blow both your feet clean off scoring too early with a lot of factions.
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Jun 12, 2022 06:47
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Tiler Kiwi posted:i don't think it would work great in euro style since scoring windows are very different between factions, especially depending on the board state. cats, eyrie, and lizards can be at 25+ points and be completely incapable of winning in two turns, woodland alliance can be at 12 points or so and be one turn away from an absolutely certain victory. it'd really mess with game balance as well, since a lot of lategame play would fall apart if people prioritized securing a higher, but still losing personal score rather than being willing to pile on the frontrunner, and you can absolutely blow both your feet clean off scoring too early with a lot of factions. That’s pretty normal in euros, which are often a race between scoring points now and gaining the ability to score more points soon. The ability to double your score the turn after the game ends is worth rather less than a blue vote in California. I’m not saying the game should be different, or should be played differently. Just that if you are using it for political metaphors, be aware that the strictly-zero sum ‘one winner’ is not actually in the part of the game that has any kind of intentional real-world mapping.
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Jun 13, 2022 16:29
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This is sort of registering with me with the same effect as claiming Diplomacy's mechanics aren't zero sum just cuz you can reliably get "second place" by being a loyal, ineffectual patsy - you can, but the idea it makes you higher on the pile than anyone that actually tried to win is not going to be well regarded. Roots rules are extremely deliberate and concise and behoove you to not add in your own interpretations based on what you think something should be, no matter how much it might make sense to a player. And in the rules for Root, victory is only defined as the first player to either reach 30 point or fulfill the criteria for their activated Dominance card, with ties going to the player taking the current turn (only one exception: Vagabond can use dominance cards to have a mutual win). There is zero distinction made between losing by one point or losing with one point. Playing a Dominance card also requires you to straight up remove your score marker from the board - so you can win the game without even having a score at all! If you play the game as defined, Root is emphatically zero sum, so I think analysis can absolutely be made on that basis. It's really not a euro game and luring someone to a table with the claim it is should be considered a vicious breach of trust.
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Jun 13, 2022 18:29
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Tiler Kiwi posted:This is sort of registering with me with the same effect as claiming Diplomacy's mechanics aren't zero sum just cuz you can reliably get "second place" by being a loyal, ineffectual patsy - you can, but the idea it makes you higher on the pile than anyone that actually tried to win is not going to be well regarded. That’s a very good example. Under the rules, explicit and implicit, of Diplomacy, something like NATO or the EU would be impossible and/or undesirable. You can’t live in peace without war; what would be the fun in that? How would you even know who won? I think it is fairly clear that certain real world political actors genuinely do think that way. They would take an outside chance of marginal victory, at horrifying cost, over a near- certainty of peace and prosperity. There are no doubt plenty of Nazis who, if brought forward in history and shown modern Germany, would take the lesson ‘ok, we needed more tanks’. But if you create a game about a time and place where a majority of people _do_ think differently, then the rules need to have a different structure. To represent the Euro, you need a euro.
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Jun 13, 2022 18:58
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It's not just how there's only one winner to the game, even in much of the moment-to-moment gameplay, for one player to benefit, another player must suffer. That's how a lot of wargames work. You need to be aggressive and confrontational to play them right. There's often a dichotomy with boardgames between wargames where all players are in constant friction and with more economic engine-building "Eurogames" where none of the players really interact and more just play adjacently to eachother on their own boards, and only indirectly interacting. I'd like to talk about another game that takes a third route.  Sidereal Confluence is a game about trading. Like Root, it's a heavily asymmetric game. Each player is a different alien society.  Unlike Root, I don't think there's much political philosophy or ideology represented in the specific different factions, although I do kinda love the idea of an "adhocracy". There isn't really a single map, and all the names on the cards tend to be weird abstruse high-concept sci-fi things.    How the game works is that all these cards the players have are "converters". You put the required resources in, and it outputs resources on the other end. Basically it represents industry. Planets also output resources on their own, but you can spend resources to upgrade them. Resources come in the flavors of small cubes (white, green, brown), large cubes (black, blue, yellow), and hexagonal prisms. There are specific things that they're supposed to represent, but even then, that's not the strength of the game.   What the game is about is how all the players need different things and produce different things, so they all need to trade with everybody else to get what they need. The game illustrates the principle of comparative advantage. Players need to figure out what the other players need and are best able to produce in order to squeeze the most they can out of trades. The trading phase of the game gets pretty crazy with players shouting out what they need, what they're willing to give away. It's like the game Pit but more complicated. Most of the factions' special abilities play into that. Players are encouraged to make deals to overcome their shortcomings, and trade away everything they have access to, even parts of their playerboard. There are even rules for dealing with players that promise future payouts for current deals that will be enforced by the game system. When technologies are developed by individual players, everyone else in the game gets access to the benefits. It is a game about using trade to get more than you put into it, which is possible because of how differently players value different things. A positive-sum game. Even if at the end of the game every player's points and cubes get counted up so there's just the one winner, every turn you have more than you did the last. Even if there's a lot of tough negotiating over the deal, players will still get something that they wanted at the end of it. The design diary about how the game was created is interesting, since the game started out as one of those 8-hour-long behemoths like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse, but with bits pared down and shaved off until it was a two hour game with no map. That's also why the various factions are less clearly allegorical about their gimmicks, since in that process, they needed to be trimmed and simplified and redefined as the mechanics through which their nature was expressed were eliminated. I can try doing a rundown of the specific factions later. Or maybe this was just another defense of the Otters.
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Jun 13, 2022 21:49
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It is interesting how little the dichotomy between zero sum or positive sum can mean - whether or not you're dedicated to burning down someone's stuff or subsidizing them has a lot less to do with how nice you are and more how much cost and gain you get from these interactions. Sometimes you play to win and that means you're building utopia, and then sometimes that means you're burning down a woodland. There's quite a few political theories that lean into this - one I've heard describes how one of the reasons that wars of conquest fell off was just that you'd begun to attain better overall dividends from developing your own lands than trying to seize a neighbors. And there's a fair bit of Marx's critique of capitalism that comes from that notion as well - the tendency for monopolies to form, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the tendency for the state to become an organ of the ruling class, and so on is just driven by the 'mechanics' of the capitalist means of production resulting in these things developing in due course as they are just the 'winning' stratagems of the players in an economy. Its where mechanics can be extremely expressive - one thing I've seen is games which allow cooperation but enable a player to try for a selfish, win-alone victory. If you make that selfish play damage the chance of the group winning, you have a model of intrastate conflict and how individually 'rational' actions can lead to the destruction of the entire group (which is one theory I like about the fall of the Roman Empire - nobody was really convinced Rome could fall, so they all were willing to act selfishly). But if you instead twist it about so that the selfish win condition enables group survival, you have a model for crab-in-a-bucket style gameplay where heroes are cut down by their jealous peers (which is also a thing that is theorized as part of the reason Rome became brittle - successful leaders were seen as too great a political threat to be left alive, leaving only the mediocre and uninspired, who were not up the the task before them). radmonger posted:That’s a very good example. Under the rules, explicit and implicit, of Diplomacy, something like NATO or the EU would be impossible and/or undesirable. You can’t live in peace without war; what would be the fun in that? How would you even know who won? Most real world political actors are 'rational' - they behave in ways that are consistent with their desire to maintain their own political survival. Even the scumbags, for good and (much more often) for ill, can be extremely flexible with their own personal agendas if the alternative is ruination. The problem with Nazis isn't their Machiavellian desire to achieve marginal victory - its that the Nazi's notion of victory and theories on how to attain it are so insanely detached from reality that you cannot engage with them like you can with other rational actors, so a lot of the political 'metagame' collapses in the face of colossal idiocy. The Nazis were willing to start a global war they couldn't possibly win based on theories which directly hampered their ability to fight said war - people just didn't take them nearly as seriously as they should just on the basis of everything they said was so stupid that the major political actors believed they were either blowing hot air or, worse, that they could be controlled. To make a tabletop metaphor, its like playing Risk with someone who just wants to attack whoever is on the left side of the board because its easier for them to reach. It doesn't matter that its a fundamentally self destructive strategy - if you're some hyper rational actor that wants to win, you have to avoid that side of the board. And if everyone else at the table is just as hyper rational, they will all make that same judgement, granting that player gets a major advantage. Its a contradiction that I think is the biggest weakness in game theory - when there are multiple actors at play (and even in some situations with only two), being too rational can leave you very vulnerable to the fanatically stupid. Its a common problem in Diplomacy - the usual advice given is 'find a new table', but real life politics don't let you do that, generally.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:08
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I am probably not the best person to do a post on it, but there is a game called Cutthroat Caverns that I own where it is a cooperative to COMPLETE game but only one player can win There are 9 encounters that must be cleared to complete the game, each encounter scores points only to the person who lands the killing blow However players can be killed by the encounters(or friends), encounters do not reduce for dead players, and if the party wipes then you all lose anyway Thus it encourages backstabbing, but just enough to win or ELSE. Another game I like to play is Terraforming Mars where you represent a megacorporation out to and I try to make it clear to people SCORE THE MOST PRESTIGE ONCE MARS IS TERRAFORMED actively going out of your way to terraform mars is actually kind of stupid when you can do anything else to score points because you are not time limited in the game and instead the game ends when mars is terraformed which is itself represented by three different sliders being finished. Its also an engine builder game and generally the cards that terraform do not build your engine as well as cards that don't terraform. I routinely beat the pants of my brother because he tends to forget to just go for the score. Conversely and a game I am bad at is Castles of Mad King Ludwig where you are an architect building a fancy castle for the crazy king with each player having hidden objectives only they know as well as some baseline objectives everyone know. each round rotates who is the "master builder" who sets prices and picks last with the other players picking before and paying the master builder with the master builder paying the bank. This can lead to some weird things, and also I am... bad at the game and lose it routinely but boy it is fun.
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Jun 14, 2022 03:10
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Tiler Kiwi posted:Its a contradiction that I think is the biggest weakness in game theory - when there are multiple actors at play (and even in some situations with only two), being too rational can leave you very vulnerable to the fanatically stupid. Its a common problem in Diplomacy - the usual advice given is 'find a new table', but real life politics don't let you do that, generally. This is more than a bit unfair to game theory, and a personal pet peeve. Game theory is a field of mathematics and not psychology/sociology, so of course it can't make predictive statements about the behavior of people. It's explicitly not designed to do anything of the kind and that's specifically orthogonal to the kinds of questions game theory is trying to answer. This would be like looking at a banana and saying its biggest flaw is that it's not a bicycle.
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Jun 14, 2022 03:58
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Fair enough, just more a critique of people that try to employ game theory by trying to gauge all actions by some scoring methodology than anything then. Which covers, well, a lot of people it feels, sometimes.
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Jun 14, 2022 07:27
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There's all this hate for the Root Vagabond but I am absolutely terrible at diplomacy, trading, backstabbing and if you give me a side that ignores all that and lets me kill Dragons in not-Skyrim I would rather do that. And if I can do that and beat all the people who ARE good at diplomacy, trading and backstabbing, I would never stop doing that. Comstar fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 10:55
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Yeah but that makes it unfun for every other player, bad for game design and bad for friend groups
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Jun 14, 2022 12:04
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I always wanted to play Castle Panic with the competitive point scoring rules but the kind of people who generally want to play that game are into fully co-op. We're Doomed is a great party game exploring cooperation vs nuking each other in a similar way
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Jun 14, 2022 12:46
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Comstar posted:There's all this hate for the Root Vagabond but I am absolutely terrible at diplomacy, trading, backstabbing and if you give me a side that ignores all that and lets me kill Dragons in not-Skyrim I would rather do that. You don't so much kill Dragons as you need to massacre your friend's armies.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:53
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SlothfulCobra posted:You don't so much kill Dragons as you need to massacre your friend's armies. But isn't that what you do in this sort of game? I mean, why is destroying enemy armies as the Vagabond more upsetting to this friend than destroying armies or holdings as a different role? Or destroying their armies in Risk? Is it the asymmetrical aspect?
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Jun 14, 2022 16:57
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Yeah, it is. Because the Vagabond is op and gets not fun to play against. It's like playing a thematic wargame army vs a hyperoptimized netlist. Or playing a gimmicky pizza and beer DnD campaign but one friend brings a perfect badass build from the internet. It's not unfun in the "oh yeah your friend might backstab you, five beers in, the sparks will fly" like say a fantastic Diplomacy game can be. It's flat out not fun for either person. It turns into two too different games where ending other people's fun is the one person's game. e: like vs people who know how to play it, it reminds me of throwing down my all goblins warhammer army in a pickup game vs someone's tournament army. We both knew the outcome before we started, it wasn't fun for either of us, and we weren't playing the same game. I should have brought my decent elves instead to at least let them warm up. Nobody enjoys the game even if we get along well otherwise. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 17:32
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Yeah its not just the OP aspect to them, its Vagabond gets a big bag of things to do to you (and several things they can do without you) to get points and you have really one thing to do to stop them - hit them repeatedly and often. You can never have an even fight against them because they score off killing your guys, its the best way they score, and you, yet again, get absolutely nothing in return - and once it gets to that point, there's also basically nothing anyone else can do to keep them from turning you into a bloody rug and winning the game except try to win first. And you can never get the sense you're seriously setting them back or carrying out something particularly cleverly nasty against them either, its just "you delay their rise to power by one turn if you pick them up by their little legs and swing them repeatedly into a brick wall". If they're a horrible person and are playing Tinker or Harrier then you're absolutely dead since Harrier can skip to any clearing on the map so there is seriously no way at all to defend against them, and Tinker on the default deck can basically nuke a third of the map at will. I'm not joking, they can wipe out a third of the map, every turn, then pull the card they used to do that right back out of the discard, and there is no way for you to stop this from happening once they get the ability to do so. So turn one, if you want to win, you literally have to stop the Vagabond player from playing the game on a full half of their turns, and you have to do this somewhere between twice, and every single turn possible, depending on which one they are. Then instead of getting to do everything, they get to do basically nothing except probably wreck someone elses chance of winning if they persistently keep going in their clearings. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jun 15, 2022 |
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Jun 15, 2022 00:07
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The craziest part is the designers didn’t discover these hyper-aggressive strategies before the public beta testing, and had to nerf how many points they got for fighting people multiple times. It was so bad initially that even fighting a roided out Vagabond scored them points outside the vagabonds’ turn. Would have loved to see how the designers played the game in private playtesting, the other ways the Vagabond can score points such as completing quests or becoming allies with another faction are such uphill struggles in comparison.
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Jun 15, 2022 00:54
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Servetus posted:Or destroying their armies in Risk? Let's pour one out for all the friendships ruined by Risk: Legacy. Any game where you can command bear-barians riding giant bears against tanks after causing the moon to fall on the nuclear wasteland that was left from the last session is a good game.
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Jun 15, 2022 00:54
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Triskelli posted:The craziest part is the designers didn’t discover these hyper-aggressive strategies before the public beta testing, and had to nerf how many points they got for fighting people multiple times. It was so bad initially that even fighting a roided out Vagabond scored them points outside the vagabonds’ turn. Tournies have nerfed it again, now they only get one extra point for removing any number of enemy pieces in battle. Probably won't be an official rule, though.
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Jun 15, 2022 01:17
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I think it's telling that the Vagabond wasn't part of Cole's initial design and had the weakest link to the political/power thematic elements.
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Jun 15, 2022 06:10
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it is amusing to get to sympathize very strongly with every nefarious empire that is up against a plucky hero, tho.
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Jun 15, 2022 07:09
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Tiler Kiwi posted:it is amusing to get to sympathize very strongly with every nefarious empire that is up against a plucky hero, tho. I was going to say, from the description the only thing I can think about the Vagabond is "good". Like, I'm not going to lie here, every single one of the various animal empire seems like dicks, and kicking them in the face repeatedly seems like a great time. It's not good game design, but it is good to see
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Jun 15, 2022 07:50
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Josef bugman posted:I was going to say, from the description the only thing I can think about the Vagabond is "good". Like, I'm not going to lie here, every single one of the various animal empire seems like dicks, and kicking them in the face repeatedly seems like a great time. By the political theming of Root, the Vagabond is full capitalism, in contrast to the otters mercantilism. individualistic, contributing to the economic development of the forest by increasing the number of building spaces available, doing positive sum trades with everyone, doing opportunistic violence sometimes but never holding territory. And destined to win the current era by Marx’s universal law of history.
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Jun 15, 2022 10:46
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Josef bugman posted:I was going to say, from the description the only thing I can think about the Vagabond is "good". Like, I'm not going to lie here, every single one of the various animal empire seems like dicks, and kicking them in the face repeatedly seems like a great time. Hence the number of games where the protagonist gets decide the fate of the gameworld based on their qualification of hitting things really hard. ... If anything, it feels like over the last few decades, the number of protagonists who are everymen or comic losers or are otherwise not kicking badasses has grown smaller and smaller.
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Jun 15, 2022 11:15
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Xander77 posted:If anything, it feels like over the last few decades, the number of protagonists who are everymen or comic losers or are otherwise not kicking badasses has grown smaller and smaller. Violence, as it exists, is not something we can escape from in our everyday lives and instead of being able to imagine a world without it, there is instead a desire for it to be used correctly. I think this is probably what contributes to it. That and, probably, the failure of various none violent protest methods over the past few years. I'm very much not saying this is a good thing, just something I've seen! Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Jun 15, 2022 |
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Jun 15, 2022 11:33
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I've put Root on my Steam Wishlist now, thanks! I'd buy the boardgame, but I doubt I'd have the time nor playergroup to try it out more than once. Sounds like a really neat game.
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Jun 15, 2022 13:28
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