Archive for Michael
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
So I took Dragonslayers downtown today to the local video/board gaming scene. I played a game of 2p competitive and by the end of it we had 3 or 4 spectators too. They all had notes to offer so I thought I would share them here.
They said thematically it had some issues: The tax collector card seemed a bit off to them. "What's a tax collector doing out wondering through this swamp with us? Can't we just fight him?" They had similar issues with discovering various shops while dungeneering.
There was also some issues during the start of non-turns. By this I mean turns where you don't do anything but avoid a large monster. Since each player has an equal probability of getting these non-turns, it's not really a balance issue as much as it was a game flow issue. The top half of the deck was heavy with strong monsters, so a lot of the game was just passing back and forth doing nothing. My opponent said he would like the game better if there was more action/decision making early on.
The game they most compared it to was Munchkin
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
So after a couple more plays DragonSlayers in it's current form, its just not working. There are no decisions an individual can make. It is very much just a solo game with 3 people making the decisions.
This shouldnt be a surprise. The game was designed as a solo or 2 player competitive and works very well as that aside from minor balance issues. But it can't be turned into a 3/4 player semi coop or coop with just minor adjustments. I'm going to suggest a DS variant that includes some major changes, and hopefully it has some workable ideas in it.
The combat mode is tricky. Having all the players fight one monster takes away individuality, but drawing one monster per player blows through the deck very quickly and allows for weird monster combinations.
First I would take out all the monsters from the adventure deck and increase the number of monsters to 24 because of how friendly it is to division. Grimlock is not included in that pile. Next I would divide them into 2 levels of difficulty and place them into 2 piles. Then I would shuffle each pile and place the easy pile on the hard pile and put the hard pile on top of grimlock.
Now inside of the year deck I would place "fight" cards that just say fight. As the rotating leader scrolls through this deck all the events occurring happen to him, but any locations are saved.
Once a fight is drawn, a fight occurs. After the fight is over, the leader chooses one of the locations drawn to visit, and all players may utilize it. Then the leader chip is passed, and the new leader begins drawing cards for his turn.
Oh did I not mention the combat system? Well it goes like this: the leader would draw as many monsters as there are players and reveal them to all. Starting with the leader and going in turn order players select the monster they want to fight that turn, with the last player being just stuck with whatever monster is left. Now after each player has a monster they can use all their heroes to fight it.
We begin with the rotating leader. This fight goes through one iteration. Each hero in monster gets a turn to strike once in the order that their INIT suggests, with the monster focusing on the hero with the weakest DEF. After one iteration of this fight, the next fight goes through one iteration and so one.
If a player kills a monster: Then that monster is discarded if it is a coop or placed in his personal pile if it is a semi/coop or competitive. Play proceeds around the table until it gets to that players turn again. He may now attack any other monster still fighting. If he gets the final blow, he wins the trophy, but the player assigned to fight him still gets the rewards. This is to prevent one player from becoming super controlling by stealing final blows. Once two players start attacking a single monster, the monster stays focused on the hero he started attacking, and if he slays that hero, continues to attack heroes of the player he was a attacking. The monster only attacks during the turn of the player who chose him to battle.
Running Away: This variant would utilize the INIT based running away system. If a player runs away from the monster he was assigned to fight, that monster is placed in a pile of "still lurking monsters" even if there are other players still in the fight. No one gains the reward or trophy of that monster.
If a monster kills a player: a player is killed when he has no more heroes. The monster that kills the player is put in the pile of still lurking monsters immediately, even if there are other players attempting to finish him off. Now in this scenario I kind of want to make it hard for players to win when one player dies because it sucks dying and then having to wait a long time for the game to end. So, after a player is dead in the next fight you still draw as many monsters as there were players original. Players still take turns choosing monsters, but this time the rotating leader ends up with 2 picks and has to fight 2 monsters at once. Each of these monsters uses the same targeting system. The player still only gets one attack each iteration so his survival chances are much lower. To escape he must use one turn to run away from one, and a second turn to run away from the other.
End Game: The number of monsters can be set with the number of fight cards so that all the monsters in the pile are either dead or in the still lurking pile. At this point we can have the players either fight the still lurking pile, or use the size of the still lurking pile to trigger bonuses with Grimlock. Of course you don't get rewards for avoiding monsters, so maybe thats penalty enough.
Anyway, the Grimlock battle is the final way for the game to end. I would suggest giving him minions so that each player has a specific target in the final battle. The minions might be weaker and allow all the players to converge on the Grimlock at the end.
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
So we did a 3p cooperative game with the new rules posted on the blog. I'm going to put down some of my initial impressions here.
Rewards
Monsters attacking every hero was a bit interesting. Definitely scaled the game. Rewards I think worked out well with the player number switch in terms of amount.
Say I'm Playing solo. A monster attacks me 4 times before I kill it, and for my reward I get 100g. Now with 4 players the monster would take 4 attacks to kill (one from each) and deal out 4 attacks (1 to each). Now each player has been attacked once, and receives a 25g reward for their effort. Being attacked once for 25 g is equivalent to being attacked 4 times for 100 g.
Or is it? Because defense values reset after every battle, players in the 4 player example wouldn't take any LP damage unless the monster has a very powerful single attack. They would get to the next battle at full health easily. Meanwhile the soloist probably took at least one LP damage, maybe 2. His next battle will be a lot tougher, and he may even need to heal up first.
This gives the advantage to larger parties. We felt it in our co-op game. There were a lot of battles that should have been tough that we escaped from with no permanent damage.
Now there are also some difficulties for larger parties. Gaining 100g as a group isn't so great because it can't buy too much for people on an individual basis. The soloist can visit the blacksmith next and greatly improve his hero which is of course the entire party. Meanwhile the group of 4 basically had to pick someone they wanted to buff if they didn't have enough gold for all.
So an advantage to larger parties is that they are much harder to wound in the present system, but a disadvantage is that it is more difficult for them to improve the overall status of their party. Advantage and a disadvantage ---do they cancel out?
Shared Resources and Attacks:
This didn't go over so well. With a shared pot of gold and divisible items people began to feel like it was just a group making a few decisions, instead of individuals playing a game. Since in a fight you don't make any real decisions. The main decision is to fight or two avoid, and in this sense can only be made as a group. On your turn you just roll, no personal decisions. Well except the wizard on his ability.
It kind of turned into how some pandemic games can with one player just basically dictating the moves. Because it isn't your gold, it's the teams gold, you cant even buy stuff for yourself without the groups consent. This system was a bit frustrating.
This version felt like a solo game where we had a group of people make the decisions.
Overall:
The balance issues were a bit interesting. We won in the 3rd year. I would want to see how this played out over several games, and with a variety of player numbers. I would also be interested in seeing the different sets of year cards.
The hero selection worked out well, but with the limited number of available heroes, we just had one person choose out of 3, then reshuffle all the other cards together before drawing the next 3
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
Game modes wrote:
| |
Very Important
|
Somewhat Important
|
Moderately Important
|
Not Very Important
|
I Would Not Play This Game Mode
|
Vote Count |
|
Solo
|
41.9% (31)
|
14.9% (11)
|
9.5% (7)
|
23.0% (17)
|
10.8% (8)
|
74
|
|
Cooperative
|
38.4% (28)
|
26.0% (19)
|
15.1% (11)
|
16.4% (12)
|
4.1% (3)
|
73
|
|
Semi-Coop
|
12.3% (9)
|
30.1% (22)
|
26.0% (19)
|
24.7% (18)
|
6.8% (5)
|
73
|
|
Competitive
|
23.6% (17)
|
22.2% (16)
|
18.1% (13)
|
30.6% (22)
|
5.6% (4)
|
72
|
|
Total Voters |
74 |
This poll is now closed.
74 answers
Closes: Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:00 am
The poll is still open of course but with 28 votes giving 5 points to very important, then 4, 3, 2 and 1 I've come up with this:
Solo: 93 points
Cooperative: 106 points
Semi-Coop: 81 points
Competitive: 98 points
Obviously an internet poll has flaws beyond flaws, but its interesting none-the-less. I was personally surprised how well "Solo" did.
If you want to vote yourself or check the current stats you can go here.
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
There is a push to make Dragonslayers a semi-coop which could be difficult. I feel that it would require major changes in the game to become a semi-coop due to the number of challenges this would bring. Now of course difficult is not impossible, and I believe it can become a great semi-coop, but there will be some hurdles in the way.
1. Level of Difficulty in Fights
With 3 or 4 players defeating monsters early on with the present rules would be pretty easy. One simple solution would be just to add more monsters per fight. One monster per player would be simple enough to get the same difficulty level the same as the solo game. Other scales could also be possible. But in this situation, problems arise. If a fight requires more then one monster, large chunks of the deck would be drawn on each fight. We've all drawn long runs of non monster cards, especially in late game. But those would increase even more if we had to draw until we picked 2 or 3 monsters. And what about the level of difficulty in the fights? You could draw the easiest monster and the hardest monster in the same fight, this would make the game much more dependent on the combination of monsters drawn.
The solution I would favor more is to give the monster more attacks. If there are 3 players, I would argue the monster should get 3 attacks for every time each player gets one. The attack order could go as follows:
1. Player A. 2. Monster 3. Player B 4. Monster 5. Player C. 6. Monster Repeat
This would allow the deck to take its time developing, and fights to become more practical. Now the issue here is that it throws the INT stat out of whack. Most likely it would become useless and discarded, or it could be used in other situations. It would require some adjustments to heroes stats, but I think this solution could work.
2. Who gets what?
This issue has been expressed many times before. In a coop game, it is easy to say whoever needs the treasure most gets it, but in a semi-coop there are challenges. Every item will help each player somewhat, and it would result in fights over who gets the treasure. There has been the suggestion of whoever deals the final blow getting the treasure, but that could but too much emphasis on turn order.
Additionally, who does the monster attack?
In the regular game the monster just attacks the weakest player in terms of DEF, but I fear that may lead to players just stacking DEF, and the player with the lowest being the only one focused. It would hard for the lowest DEF player to win, making low DEF characters very undesirable.
I think these matters can be solved with a turn order. When it is your turn you draw the cards, the events happen to you, and only you may choose to visit a drawn location. But when it comes to the fight, your team fights together. In the fight the monster focuses your heroes, targeting the one with the lowest DEF and you reap the rewards of the victory.
This solution also throws INT out of whack, but I think may solve many other issues. It would allow players more time to recover from their wounds, so there may need to be a buff to some monsters to adjust.
One other possibility could involve a treasure splitting method and a monsters that attacks everybody's weakest hero at the same time.
3. How do you win?
For starters I want to say that in a good semi-coop the emphasis on the coop, especially in the beginning. If it is really stressful to win, then players will readily help each other out until winning seems possible then individual play takes over. If is easy to win as a group, but hard to win as an individual, the game will break down into competitiveness right away and there will be no co-op involved.
But how will a winner be determined?
Final blows dealt?
Gold acquired?
These seem like they would be almost random.
Robert mentioned "secret mission cards" which seem the most practical to me, but could be tough to balance out fairly. I would be interested to see some of those.
4. General Semi-Coop Issues
To me this style of game is unpleasant. I would much rather play full coop, or full competitive. I recognize I may be in the minority on this. When faced with a decision where either another player will be declared the winner, or we will all lose, I generally would favor the second. I'm going to lose either way, but in the second situation so does everybody else, so I'm no worse off. Secret mission cards could help because you don't know if your winning or not in some cases, but I expect you could tell if you were going to lose in many cases, if not who was going to win.
I'm worried that if the game is too tough, then players will only care about the coop feature and not care too much about the individual winner, but if the game is too easy, then the individual winner is all they will care about.
One other thing I was curious about. Will the players have to attack every monster, or can they run away as individuals?
-
Michael
United States
Nebraska
-
Hey all – but enough chit-chat, let’s get to Dragon Slayers. I’ve done some solo play and wanted to record my initial impressions.
The first thing I noticed was the Avoiding Monster feature. Even if you draw a monster, you don’t have to fight it – even if that’s all you draw. This is a good feature because when you start the game out, you might get dominated by high level monsters if you had to fight them. But let’s look at the solo scoring method. Current gold – (number of years * 50). This means that you could avoid all the monsters in the deck, scroll through the entire thing and only be penalized 50 points. Now if you do that, you will get 3 cards for sure. Find a level 1 treasure, Sell treasures, and place a treasure from out of game back in the deck. You will also accrue some free spells. Level 1 treasures sell for 100 g, so you would be making 50 gg per scroll through. Of course you will encounter a 1/3 chance that you lose an item which we will represent as a -33 gg per year. So if you don’t fight any monsters you will gain 27 gg per year. It’s not a huge amount, but can lead to infinite scores if you go through infinite years. In addition the witches hut will allow you to acquire the whole spell deck. There is of course the Foul Stone, which can’t be sold, but once you have it, you will return to the 27 gg per year.
This is undesirable as it basically negates the score relevance. To fix it there either needs to be more negative cards in the deck, or a fee for not fighting a monster on your turn in solo play. Note, in competitive play this is not a problem because the winner is the one with the most monsters. Avoiding a battle in competitive play is a chance for your opponent to gain ground on you. I suggested a 50g penalty every turn you don’t fight a monster in solo play. To ensure that this doesn’t inflict too much damage on low level players Andi suggested the penalty only be applied when you have over 500g.
Upon reflection however, this seems a bit high. You can still cycle through the deck and start with 500g and a lot of spells before you are forced to fight. To counteract this, I would suggest changing the scoring method to (Amount of Gold- (100 *Years)) or even 200*years. For solo play scrolling through the deck should have a harsh penalty in terms of score if the deck remains with a positive effect for players. This can be changed by adding more cards that hurt the solo player. For instance a “Lose 100g or 1 LP” card or something.
Another issue with the score is that it doesn’t take into account the expense of the equipment. Players will maximize their scores by avoiding a weakling creature until all other creatures are dead, and then selling all their equipment before destroying it. This utilizes the treasure trading card. My problem with this card is that you sell your used equipment for full value. I think there should be penalty for selling equipment. -50g per item would do well. For example if you are selling a 200g item and a 150g item you would gain 250g (150g+100g). Doing this would actually fix the infinite scroll through problem now that I think of it, as it would bring the average gold gained per scroll through below zero.
I think the game would benefit if your solo score assumed you sold all your equipment using this system right after you won. Because leaving one weak creature alive to kill after selling your equipment will so greatly increase your score, score conscious players will do it automatically, and so it becomes just a waste of time.
I think in its present form, DragonSlayers has a big problem with allowing for infinite scores in solo play. Here I’ve offered some solutions to it, including 1. Monster Avoidance Penalty, 2. More negative cards in Deck, 3. Scoring that subtracts more per year, and 4. Gold penalty for selling used equipment. Anyone of these could solve the problem, so not all of them have to be implemented. I do think the gold penalty for selling used equipment would be beneficial to game play though in all aspects.
While the scoring system is a bit flawed at present, I think the game is very well set up for competitive play. It is my understanding that the designer focused mainly on this aspect, and it seems to work very well. I think it could easily accommodate 3 or 4 players in this manner simply by increasing the number of cards in certain decks. Doing this would greatly widen the playing audience.
I really like the design of the card backs. They capture the feel of the game very well and are pretty cool. The text of the card backs is a bit unreadable however, and the level 1 treasures and level 2 treasures seem pretty similar in color.
Balmir the Brave seems woefully underpowered. He is 2LP,3INT,-3ATK,4DEF and can gain 1INT and 1ATK when he bears a sword. The dwarf has 1 more LP and 1 more DEF then Balmir which is a huge defensive advantage. But is offensive capabilities are the same. The dwarf gains 2 ATK when wielding an axe which in my mind is roughly equivalent to Balmir’s bonus. I don’t think I would ever choose Balmir over the dwarf. Additionally you can make a similar stat comparison between Balmir and Ulg and will find the same thing. Magnifex also seems to be underpowered. His defense is super weak and his attack is even worse. His special ability is doing 2 damage to a monster once per battle. To me that sounds basically like adding 2 to his attack once. Granted he can use the damage anytime, which will allow him to push monsters that are close to the wound point just over, but his base stats are too poor to be effective in my mind. He has great INT, but attacking first isn’t that big of an issue when you do so little damage.
Just an added thought in terms of the competitive game. The player with the most monster kills wins, but some monsters are a lot stronger then other monsters. Would it be beneficial to make it the most "monster points" wins the game, and then assign each monster a point value based on difficulty? or something to that effect?
All in all I really like the game, there are a lot of aspects I enjoyed but here I just focused on what I thought needed tweaking. I think adding cards to accommodate a wider range of players will greatly boost the appeal of this game and maybe even allow for “target Player spells”
|
|
