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The Burden of Forum Knowledge

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26 Jan 2009 08:09 #18337 by kookoobah
I'm the only one in my game group who goes online and reads up on games on forums and asks questions and posts. Needless to say, I'm the designated rules teacher, rules clarifier and all that.

Anyway, I carry this burden that I take from reading up on the forums. It's not that I read up on strategy, that would take a lot of the fun out of playing, but I do read up on game problems and imbalances. This is where I feel I have a problem.

Since I've read so much on the games we play, I've come across the many perceived problems and imbalances in the games. Like the overpowered Cleric cards in Battlelore, how Descent breaks down in the Gold Level of RtL, the unclimactic change in pacing in Arkham Horror among others.

The thing is, I don't think we'd ever notice these things anyway. My brother and I must have played more than 50 games of Battlelore together, if I include my games with other people, I've probably played that game close to 100 times, and we've never ever said "Wow, that Cleric is imbalanced." We haven't even reached the Gold level of an RtL campaign, thanks in part to my brutal unmerciful style of Overlord play. I haven't even gotten around to playing Arkham Horror with my friends yet.

I end up looking for good house rules (as validated by the opinions of people geekier, and hopefully, more qualified by virtue of aforementioned geekiness than I am)to fix these "problems" that might not even be problems. It's just that the people who talk on the forums seem so convinced that there's something wrong with the game that I can't help but believe that there MUST be something wrong with game. I end up obsessing on how to "fix" the games before we even realize for ourselves that there is a problem.

Maybe it's the fact that the games take sooooo long (what's the point of playing a 100 hour RtL campaign that ends up being a cakewalk for the Heroes) that it feels like a waste of time to play something broken if somebody has already found out that there's something wrong. It conflicts with my play the game as pure as possible, just the way the designer made it though. After all, who else would know better on how to play the game than the designer?

Sometimes I regret reading so many forum posts on the games I love, but I just can't help myself.

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26 Jan 2009 09:45 #18346 by Ken B.
Feel your pain, brother. I'm the "rules teacher" so I have to ready up on everything. Sometimes, yeah, it's a compulsion. And some of that bullshit ends up creeping into your head...and you pre-load your game group with that stuff unconciously...

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26 Jan 2009 10:00 #18347 by Stephen Avery
Good for you man. Make up your own mind. I don't read movie reiews for the same reason.

The difference with a game though, is I know what I like. I loved *parts* of Andriod but didn't like it overall but that will be *some ones* favorite game.

Just take things with a grain of salt and assume everyone is full of shit. Except me of course, I am always right...

Steve"Always_Right"Avery

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26 Jan 2009 10:06 #18348 by Notahandle
On T.O.S. they 'cry wolf' a lot. There's a one in a million chance of such and such a set of circumstances arising that might cause an imbalance, and immediately they're howling "it's broken". My approach is to ignore it all until a problem comes up in play, and then have a look online afterwards.

I also believe in pure play, as the designer intended. I bought a game years ago, and was appalled to discover two Appendices of house rules included with the translation. The first changed the start positions in order to 'rebalance' them; this was after the guy had played it twice! The second appendix changed the turn sequence; this after a third play of the game. This is a breathtaking display of arrogance, as clearly the person had no respect whatsoever for all the hard work the designer & co had put into the game! These days I approach other peoples' house rules with extreme caution.

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26 Jan 2009 10:37 #18351 by Michael Barnes
Well, it's like I always say...I _never_ thought that dice, luck, player elimination, having to cut out counters myself, too-tight box lids, game length or player interaction were "issues" to be "concerned" about until the internet put me in touch with the wider world of OCD/asperger suffers that make up the board gaming community.

Further, on the rare occasions when I do look in forums (other than F:AT) for information, I see tons of questions and "concerns" that make me wonder if people can read rulebooks or not. And what's more, there's this drive for "official" rulings...I grew up answering questions on my own, thinking about the rules and then figuring out what the right answer was in the spirit of the rules. I almost _never_ go to the internet to answer a rules question.

MARE NOSTRUM is the poster child for all of this. If it had been released before 1990, there wouldn't be all this shit about it being "broken" or "unbalanced". The simple rules wouldn't have been debated and bantered about. There wouldn't have been a bunch of fucking crybabies giving the game a low rating because they played it once as Greece and lost because they didn't know what to do.

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26 Jan 2009 10:53 #18353 by BradHB
Well, it's like I always say...I _never_ thought that dice, luck, player elimination, having to cut out counters myself, too-tight box lids, game length or player interaction were "issues" to be "concerned" about until the internet put me in touch with the wider world of OCD/asperger suffers that make up the board gaming community.

Sometimes I wonder if you and I are twins seperated at birth.

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26 Jan 2009 11:03 #18357 by ubarose
Michael Barnes wrote:

There wouldn't have been a bunch of fucking crybabies giving the game a low rating because they played it once as Greece and lost because they didn't know what to do.


The games that most often get damned as being "broken" or "unbalanced" are the ones that require a bit of creative thinking to play well, and can also require a bit of negotiation and/or alliance building.

I have also found that Eurogamers just plain don't get AT games. They play them in the strangest ways. Like there were these guys who claimed that "Pirate King" was broken because they had played for 4 hours with no one getting close to winning. It turns out that in the entire 4 hours, no one had attacked another player. DUH!

I don't read anything about how to fix a problem with a game, unless I actually encounter the problem myself more than ONCE. And then, my first instinct is that I misinterpreted a rule, which, in my case, usually proves true.

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26 Jan 2009 11:36 #18360 by Juniper
Michael Barnes wrote:

Further, on the rare occasions when I do look in forums (other than F:AT) for information, I see tons of questions and "concerns" that make me wonder if people can read rulebooks or not. And what's more, there's this drive for "official" rulings...I grew up answering questions on my own, thinking about the rules and then figuring out what the right answer was in the spirit of the rules. I almost _never_ go to the internet to answer a rules question.


The problem is that, when you're playing a Euro, you can't answer a rules question by asking yourself "which interpretation of the rules is best supported by the game's theme or setting?" The game's theme is incoherent anyway.

Instead, you're forced to ask "which interpretation of the rules is the one that was playtested?" The payoff matrices in your efficiency engine logic puzzle will be skewed toward a single preferred strategy if you get a detail wrong, so you have to play the game exactly as the designer intended, and that intention probably makes no thematic sense, so you can't guess at it.

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26 Jan 2009 11:47 #18361 by JMcL63
Juniper wrote:

The problem is that, when you're playing a Euro, you can't answer a rules question by asking yourself "which interpretation of the rules is best supported by the game's theme or setting?" The game's theme is incoherent anyway.

Instead, you're forced to ask "which interpretation of the rules is the one that was playtested?" The payoff matrices in your efficiency engine logic puzzle will be skewed toward a single preferred strategy if you get a detail wrong, so you have to play the game exactly as the designer intended, and that intention probably makes no thematic sense, so you can't guess at it.

That makes little sense to me. In my experience, rules are rules. If you have to ask yourself which interpretation is 'true to the background', then the rules writer failed in their job, which is to write a manual which has 2 purposes:
- To teach readers how to play the game.
- To act as a reference source about the minor points that invariably crop up.
Another way of putting this is to say that good rules writing has nothing to do with genre, thematics, or other issues. Rules writing is a technical art, like writing technical manuals for other purposes. ;)

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26 Jan 2009 11:56 #18362 by Juniper
JMcL63 wrote:
That makes little sense to me. In my experience, rules are rules. If you have to ask yourself which interpretation is 'true to the background', then the rules writer failed in their job[/quote]

With what part of my message are you disagreeing? I'm not saying that incomplete rulebooks are OK. I'm just saying that incomplete rulebooks are particularly problematic in Eurogames.

I have no reason to believe that poor rulebooks are endemic to any particular gaming genre.

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26 Jan 2009 12:01 #18363 by JMcL63
Juniper wrote:

The problem is that, when you're playing a Euro, you can't answer a rules question by asking yourself "which interpretation of the rules is best supported by the game's theme or setting?" The game's theme is incoherent anyway.

Are you not here arguing that rules-interpretation in Eurogames operates under the special burden of thematic incoherence? :)

Instead, you're forced to ask "which interpretation of the rules is the one that was playtested?" The payoff matrices in your efficiency engine logic puzzle will be skewed toward a single preferred strategy if you get a detail wrong, so you have to play the game exactly as the designer intended, and that intention probably makes no thematic sense, so you can't guess at it.

IMO, what we should be asking at that point is: "What do the rules actually tell us to DO?" In my experience, simply focussing on this tends to demystify what had otherwise seemed an insoluble contradiction. ;)

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26 Jan 2009 12:10 #18365 by NeonPeon
JMcL63 wrote:

That makes little sense to me. In my experience, rules are rules. If you have to ask yourself which interpretation is 'true to the background', then the rules writer failed in their job, which is to write a manual which has 2 purposes:
- To teach readers how to play the game.
- To act as a reference source about the minor points that invariably crop up.
Another way of putting this is to say that good rules writing has nothing to do with genre, thematics, or other issues. Rules writing is a technical art, like writing technical manuals for other purposes. ;)

Rules are often imperfect, or misinterpreted. It's nice to be able to make up a rule that makes sense that everyone agrees works well for the game. Because the rule is tied to a theme, it is not arbitrary. Say you're playing Doom and you're not sure how Knockback works if a monster is pushed into another monster. You could conjure up a rule that says when a larger monster (one that takes up more than one space) knocks into a smaller one, then the smaller one is knocked back too, otherwise the first one just stops. If everyone is cool with that then awesome. What "makes sense" usually works.

If you're playing a Euro where you're not sure what happens when you trade a brown resource cube for a pink resource cube on Box X when the king demands you pay his facial hair tax, what do you do? The Euro designer never tried to make sense in the first place. He tried to make the theme fit the mechanics, and where it doesn't work, he just shrugged his shoulders, feeling it's not important.

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26 Jan 2009 12:16 #18370 by Notahandle
On T.O.S. 95% of the rules queries have one answer: RTFM!

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26 Jan 2009 12:18 #18373 by JMcL63
Notahandle wrote:

On T.O.S. 95% of the rules queries have one answer: RTFM!

I won't post if that's all I've got to say. I'd at least post the rule, sometimes with a reference. ;)

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26 Jan 2009 12:24 #18377 by Schweig!
I guess I have now played enough games to even rule out situations not appropriately covered in the rules while playing the games. If I still care enough about it the next day I might ask online whether my interpretations were correct.

As a downside though we sometimes play games wrong because we assume something is not covered by the rules although it is, and make us something on our own.

Juniper wrote:

The problem is that, when you're playing a Euro, you can't answer a rules question by asking yourself "which interpretation of the rules is best supported by the game's theme or setting?" The game's theme is incoherent anyway.

Instead, you're forced to ask "which interpretation of the rules is the one that was playtested?" The payoff matrices in your efficiency engine logic puzzle will be skewed toward a single preferred strategy if you get a detail wrong, so you have to play the game exactly as the designer intended, and that intention probably makes no thematic sense, so you can't guess at it.

I agree. The opposite is true in war games. Sometimes people think by their faint grasp of history that some rule or another is unrealistic and try to fiddle with it. "Just a game" is the only answer here.

ubarose wrote:

I have also found that Eurogamers just plain don't get AT games. They play them in the strangest ways. Like there were these guys who claimed that "Pirate King" was broken because they had played for 4 hours with no one getting close to winning. It turns out that in the entire 4 hours, no one had attacked another player. DUH!

True story? That's too funny.

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