by tobyjason
My central point is that the random discard for losing an Intrigue challenge is a bad game mechanism/bad game design, not that the alternatives I mentioned around which the Intrigue mechanism could easily have been designed would necessarily be balanced given the existing card pool. Using any random mechanism that produces wild deltas in outputs in an otherwise lengthy, complex game is archaic and lazy game design, IMO.My underlying question is: why the hell did they design the game with this as part of it?
DON'T GET ME WRONG: I know the random pull produces "dramatic" moments a'plenty. I played enough 1st ed. games to get that. I know the prospect of a loss can make you agonize about whether to oppose an Intrigue challenge when you can afford to lose several of the cards in your hand but can't afford to lost "this one" and/or "that one". But drama doesn't equal "good GAME design" for me.
Arkham/Eldritch Horror or Descent or whatever all have lots of "dramatic" moments in which a die roll or card draw can send the game this way or that. The outcome of a game of Champions of Midgard often hinges on the flip of a journey card (or whatever they're called) on the final turn. Those moments are DRAMATIC. They're TENSE. But IMO they're incredibly frustrating, lazy designs, and in retrospect the drama/tension feels... cheap, I guess, would be the best way to put it.
That said, it's interesting that you (albeit implicitly) posit so much of Intrigue's potency as consisting in potentially causing an indispensable card to be randomly pulled from a hand. Maybe I missed something in the all the forum reading I did several years ago, but IIRC the discussions which boiled down to "overwhelming consensus is that Intrigue is OP/more important than Mil/Power" never claimed that the random card discard was the central reason: they always argued that controlling hand size in general was the issue—that is, that emptying people's hands and reducing their options to almost nothing was what won games, not luckily spiking a key card from a "full" hand, which was more like a bonus you sometimes happen on. Thus I'm surprised that you're saying these changes would totally nerf Intrigue to the point of rendering it pointless. I wonder, are you speaking specifically of 2nd ed.? Do you feel the Intrigue is less powerful in 2nd ed. than in 1st ed (if you played 1st ed.)?
There seems to be a contradiction between this statement...
Idaho11 wrote:
You're underestimating how much these options take the tooth out of Intrigue challenges, while adding a lot of time into each turn.
...and this one:
Idaho11 wrote:
You're not really introducing new decisions, and those decisions will be significantly less agonizing.
If there's no decision and/or no tough decision (you seem to be saying both), and such a change would remove another agonizing decision, how would the change add time to the game? Taking away a hard decision and adding an easy/non-existent one should speed game play.
Of course, I don't actually agree that the decision as to what card to protect/discard/etc. would always be easy. That's not to say that given the cards/development of the game as it stands such a rules change wouldn't underpower Intrigue. If it did, though, that would surely just slide the decision space down the spectrum. (That is, you would now debate whether to let a challenge go [because you can afford the now-lessened loss] you would surely have opposed before.)
Idaho11 wrote:
When the cost is variable and unknown, it's a lot more agonizing to decide whether you should defend against an Intrigue challenge or not.
By this logic every game should have wide deltas of random costs associated with every decision, since they would therefore become "agonizing". We probably have very different understandings of what a good GAME containing agonizing decisions should look/feel like. My guess is yours is much more in line with FFG's design philosophy, which as I said usually boils down to "luck is ok because drama/"narrative"/"memorable moments", with the understanding that games with drama/narrative/memorable moments centered around [card flips/die rolls/etc.] = "good games".
I'd just rather play a game with more control, where the decision I make is whether to lose this card or that card rather than whether to elect to flip a coin that could cripple me... OR see me come out fine. I'd rather know I won because my attack did the thing it always does rather than because my attack "rolled a critical hit", figuratively speaking.
I should also say that based on my reading/understanding most serious LCG players ALSO enjoy the agonizing/delicious choices that are apparently inherent to deck-building. Now THAT is a usage I can get behind, even though I have no interest in spending hours by myself building decks nor in trying to get my friends to do the same. But I can at least see how those KINDS of decisions are fun, agonizing, etc.
Yet isn't that almost exactly the kind of choice AGOT could have presented to the loser of an Intrigue challenge?
Thinking about "this card or that card" choices some more: Man-oh-man would I love it if there were a deck-builder [in the Ascension/Dominion sense] that used the ASOIAF theme and some of the AGOT LCG game play mechanisms.
Idaho11 wrote:
Your later options also will introduce wonky interactions with 2+ claim plots, or with claim manipulation, while altering the power of those effects. And trying to resolve those issues are going to create even more issues and more wonky interactions.
FWIW, for the former options, I just imagined presenting the cards sequentially (pick 1 from these 2; ok now pick 1 from these 2; etc) one card at a time, then treating the 2 (or 3 or whatever) cards no differently from how the 2+ cards lost randomly per RAW would be treated per RAW. For option 3, you'd just protect 1 card and the rest would be fair game. This seems trivially simple in a game that's a wonky as this one already is.