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Pvt. Parts posted:I agree, but would add that if we are not allowed to have a discussion about the charge, evidence, and nature of the Bad Thing then all this thread will be is a narrative. As others have pointed out, you seem to think this thread is a courtroom and you’re a lawyer. It isn’t a courtroom. Mods are not restricted by the First Amendment. There is no standard of evidence to be met beyond what posters ITT ask for, and no legal consequences to the “accused” in this case, nor a presumption of innocence, because it’s just TG readers ITT. And assuming you aren’t being paid and are for some reason defending this family here as a hobby, I’d ask what exactly you expect to get. Starting a “define white supremacy” discussion doesn’t help either the Fryxelius family, their game company, and probably doesn’t help you either if the hill you want to die on (metaphorically) is “man who already showed trash opinion about AI might or might not also be a white supremacist but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt because [insert reason here].” You don’t like their games, and you haven’t come running to the defense of other designers accused of various things ITT. Why fight this fight, beyond sunk cost or being irritated at eating some sixers? Especially as you’re likely to eat some more if you insist on picking this fight in the name of defending someone you don’t know against a possible interpretation of their latest stupid AI-related post which seems reinforced by other available evidence. There may be game designers worth fighting for, but these ain’t them.
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Sep 25, 2023 06:17
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:50 |
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Magic Realm isn't innately that complex, it's that every system in the game operates in ways different from other games and every new system adds lots of new options and the characters you play are designed around understanding rules interactions. Even a basic "fight big monsters and maybe grab their loot after" character like the Berserker or the White Knight interacts with other rules: the Berserker has his special Berserk chit, while the Knight has a splash of magic and very much cares about how the armor rules work. The Berserker can deal with nasty solo monsters but get brought down by ordinary wolves. Because the combat system is still novel after all these years, you need to really understand how it works in order to realize that the White Knight is going to get murdered by those six goblins even if he can kill a dragon without help. The real challenge is in learning how all the rules interact with all the other rules. That's especially true with more players and with PvP or cooperative play. The White Knight alone works completely differently than if he is working with the Wizard. The Black Knight and the Captain can work together, ally with two of the denizen groups and go kill off all the others. Multiple characters can wait for another character to get a big score and then bushwack them on the way back from the dungeon. For the Witch King, you have to really understand the magic system in order to perform even basic tasks in the game; for the Magician, you need to know who you plan to work with and know the magic system well in order to work out how best to do so. Strategy guides will give you guidance in such things (even back in the day, the General had articles showing the odds each character has against each type of monster encounter, though those get changed, sometimes drastically, by equipment or treasures), but the game just gives you all the tools and expects you to work out the rest.
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Nov 2, 2023 18:47
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Thinking about how Ark Nova isn't well-liked in this thread and wondering: what highly rated/ranked (BGG) games don't you like? What was the single misstep? Because I can’t think of anything in the early scenarios that could have led to that. More likely, you and your friends missed one or more important rules. The most likely is “I have 2 hp and suffered 3 damage” and you missed the rule that you can lose one card from your hand or two from your discard to negate all damage from a single source. Setting the difficulty level to twice what it should be is another likely mistake (it’s average character levels divided by two). I usually recommend playing at least a few scenarios at L0 monsters until you get used to the game, especially as L1 characters with very few items are as weak as they can be. The modifier decks and the monster decks offer a huge element of luck, though once you know what’s in the decks you have some basis to guess at the results until you trigger a reshuffle. Getting certain monster actions multiple times in a scenario can make it substantially easier or harder, especially actions without movement or attacks.
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Mar 2, 2024 06:03
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DashingGentleman posted:Yeah, my group played TTS gloomhaven early in the pandemic and it didn’t keep us engaged enough to stick with it. We found that it mostly boiled down to setting up and executing the same couple of combos over and over. Interesting decisions came up rarely and victory was more likely to be determined by card draw than as a consequence of player choice. The more complex characters and scenarios do look appealing but we were not ready to put in the work to get to them. Original flavor Gloomhaven has three foundational issues (and some smaller side issues): 1. The game is hardest in the first few scenarios and the difficulty keeps dropping as you go. 2. Your options are most limited at the start of the game and expand as you proceed. 3. Enemies as set up in the early scenarios aren't selected to avoid complexity, and you encounter very few "late" enemies who are substantially more complex or difficult than the early ones. Frosthaven fixes some of these problems, but partly by having more complex characters who are harder to learn to play out of the gate. Gloomhaven 2E may fix the rest of it. Gloomhaven is my all-time winner for boardgame hours played: I've played two complete campaigns with two different groups of people. The value for money there is considerable. But yes, it isn't a short session game and if you have analysis-paralysis or a co-gamer who has it, Gloomhaven probably isn't your best bet.
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Mar 2, 2024 19:30
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Gloomhaven player summons are broken good, the game just doesn’t have any innate mechanism to teach you how to handle them beyond being the person handling monster turns. Circles in our run-through just totally clowned on the game: one loss card would often do upwards of 20 damage and once we added Music Note to the party thinga really got broken. We never were one of those groups routinely playing on difficulty+2, but we sure could have with that group. Frosthaven makes changes that render summons even better, IMO, and Prism may be my favorite class in tne game. All that said, you need the right players working together, and both games are overly sensitive to party composition. The right set of characters substantially change the game dynamics. That’s certainly something my gaming groups enjoyed—every retirement completely shifts the dynamics of the game—but I can see where another group might hate it. Frosthaven has better character design, but higher learning curves for characters, and that can get frustrating in that period where you don’t yet understand how a character works and wind up with some wasted turns. If you do enjoy the game, it’s a ridiculous amount of gameplay and variety in a single box, and without the amount of prep work that an RPG requires. What are the similar games-in-class that manage to outdo Gloomhaven? I’ve played through some of the FFG “tactical app-driven combat” games and they’re more streamlined but suffer from the “read the developers’ minds to figure out how to proceed” effect in a way that, say, Mansions of Madness avoids by not being a long campaign where scenario 2 choices will matter for months of real-time play.
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Mar 3, 2024 16:47
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Glagha posted:Wait what how, player summons are generally regarded as bad or at least extremely hard to use effectively because they are almost always going to attack the wrong target because rng works against you and then just die pointlessly so your big loss card achieved nothing. Like I LIKED circles but playing felt like doing 4D chess to be able to play slightly around the level of effectiveness of much simpler classes Let's assume you don't get your summons killed instantly. A L1 Circles card could read Attack 2 Pierce 2 Stun/Attack 2 Pierce 2 Stun Loss and that wouldn't be a great card, but it'd be OK. Multiple turns of the attacks and it becomes better than most loss cards very rapidly. There's really three issues that lead people to see summons as bad: 1. Narrow range of effectiveness. If you're playing scenario L7, Circles is in big trouble. If Circles is your first unlock and you're still at prosperity 1, Circles' summons will seem a bit better but the necessary items to provide support won't be there. Late game and high prosperity, Circles can't keep up. 2. Comparative ineffectiveness. You can play carefully and still lose a summons to an unlucky turn. Meanwhile Eclipse is just deleting enemies. Then you clear the room and everyone rushes into the next while your summons linger behind (or run ahead and get instantly killed). Circles needs items to manage summons or needs to be willing to unsummon and recover between rooms. Also, most characters don't end up being blocked or attacking the wrong targets; summons can really get in the way in certain scenarios and you have to make adjustments going in; depending on what you do with scenario set-up, you may not know that. 3. No support. If the whole group is focused on keeping summons alive, their utility jumps considerably. The problem is that several of the characters who can tank probably won't want to or won't be able to for your melee summons. Circles can try to provide support alone, but that's insufficient. You really need a dedicated character who pulls focus from melee summons; the advantage is that you can, in turn, have the summons pull focus from that character when necessary. That means having coordination internally. At higher levels you probably need a class like Music Note who can boost all the summons in ways that partly compensate for their limitations. And yes, you have to handle Fire Demons carefully, etc. Eraflure posted:(spoilers for both haven games I guess) I thought Prism was a wonderful design and it has a lot of depth in terms of adjusting your deck to completely change how the class plays from scenario to scenario. Just amazingly flexible.
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Mar 4, 2024 01:59
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:50 |
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I think bigger and complex games need systems that make it worthwhile to play things out, and that includes mechanisms to end play early if someone establishes a dominant lead. Such games also need mechanisms to avoid player elimination or virtual elimination. Monopoly is terrible in both those respects. Three examples: Here I Stand really needs six players, has complex rules, and takes 4+ hours to finish. It has a victory rule if one player gets too far into the lead. There’s a “sue for peace” mechanism that allows a player losing a war badly to recover, and the rewards are meaningful for the conqueror but not so good that picking on the weakest power is going to be a game-winning strategy. Best of all, each player has particular objectives that are fun to persue even if you know you’re going to lose: Protestantism may have claimed much of Europe, but you finished St. Peters and burned three heretics! Magic Realm is ridiculously complex and challenging for a group of players, but you can make progress on your own VP objectives and enjoy play even when you lose, and it can be just as fun to see the stories that develop during a session, even if it’s all about the White Knight gathering a lot of loot and then getting killed by orcs. Britannia has a VP system that obscures who is actually in the lead, and gives each side its own specific objectives. I don’t think it works nearly as well as the other two, but it is usually the case that if your side is struggling, something weird or cool is happening as a result. In one extreme case, my Welsh managed to wipe out both the Angles and the Saxons, leaving a large portion of England unpopulated. (For those familiar with the game, this was technically the result of my sacrificing the Jutes entirely to ensure Welsh dominance.) I’m not quite sure it was “fun” for anyone else, exactly, but it was memorable and eventually legendary among that group of players, even if it was also the last time we played Britannia.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:38
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