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andymeneely / project-timber-wolf

Masters of the Heist. A cooperative game for the tabletop.
http://mastersoftheheist.com
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Easy to exhaust ideas 💡 #4

Closed derekerdmann closed 5 years ago

derekerdmann commented 7 years ago

Right before triggering the escape phase, it was extremely easy to stall and generate ideas by using Hesitate and Study without causing additional sound. We were easily able to use this mechanic to use up all the idea tokens; exhausting the tokens was the only reason we bothered advancing the game. Even after running out of tokens, it would have been extremely easy to stall and acquire ideas until we hit rolls we were happy with.

Maybe always generating at least 1 noise would be a good way to keep the game moving forward?

andymeneely commented 7 years ago

What board were you on? What characters did you have? What Event did you stay on?

I'm surprised you were able to do this. There is a rule about not having more than one person passing.

derekerdmann commented 7 years ago

This was on the first board (The Fall Guys, chapter 1) using Angry Locksmith, Script Kiddie, and Burglar, not sure who the 4th character was. I think we were able to stall just before "Sound the alarm!" - whatever it was, we knew that we couldn't perform noisy actions without starting the Escape phase, so we farmed ideas so that we had enough to escape cleanly.

Part of the trick was that Burglar can always Hesitate to gain an idea. The remaining 3 were able to Study or pass - some of this was the luck of the dice, but since Study gives 2 ideas we could spend ideas to make sure we picked Study. Most cases we'd end up gaining 1 idea or keeping the same number since we spent 2 to choose Study and then gained 2 from Studying. If there was a player who couldn't do that, they could just pass - pretty sure we only ever had 1 person pass per turn. I think we did this for 3-4 turns before running out of tokens.

derekerdmann commented 7 years ago

It might also be worth mentioning that this turned into a major part of our strategy for chapter 2: we looked for ways to quietly gain ideas on nearly every turn, which worked a little better since one or two players could still make noises and perform other actions. Planning our escape was much easier with a glut of ideas.

chrisbenti commented 7 years ago

Absolutely loved the game, was an absolute blast!

To go into exact details/probabilities for our character upgrade config:

Combine that with passing, and there's a 83.333% chance every turn we can just sit still and do nothing without spending ideas if we don't like our rolls.

(Because we only care about 2 characters, there are 36 roll combinations. Of those 36 roll combinations, only 6 have both characters needing to spend noise and an idea, which means you can't pass your way out of it. That leaves 30/36 possibilities that end in no noise / no lost ideas.)

Our characters

Grease Man

grease man

Demolitions

demolitions

33% of your rolls can have no noise impact for net idea gain 50% of your rolls can have no noise impact without netting any idea loss 66% of your rolls can have no noise impact for < 1 idea loss

Hacktivist

hacktivist

66% of your rolls can have no noise impact for no idea loss

Technician

technician

100% of rolls can result in no noise for no idea loss

chrisbenti commented 7 years ago

This is of course assuming fair dice roll

derekerdmann commented 7 years ago

Ooh, you actually documented the repro. Nice.

Do you have the info from chapter 1 when we first realized we could do this? That's when we had the Burglar/Script Kiddie/Angry Locksmith.

chrisbenti commented 7 years ago

We played with recommended chapter 1 chars, so I can rebuild from the rules

Aggregated

Combined with passing, 100% chance of zero noise turn for no idea loss for the entire team

Characters

Angry Locksmith

image

50% chance of no noise turn for net 0 ideas 66% chance of no noise turn for net at most -1 idea

Burglar

image Hesitate, 100% chance of no noise turn for 0 ideas

Shutter Bug

image

100% chance of zero noise turn for 0 ideas

Script Kiddie

image

100% chance of zero noise turn for 0 ideas

djrenren commented 7 years ago

/r/theydidthemath

djrenren commented 7 years ago

Your rolls for the Angry Locksmith are incorrect:

Now the locksmith has an 83% chance to have a free silent turn. He's also netting on average .5 ideas per turn, which means that given the proper cushion he can support himself silently.

This gets even worse if the script kiddie is outside

andymeneely commented 7 years ago

Thanks guys for putting this together. I'll definitely be making some changes.

So, a little bit of history, for most of the last year's worth of playtesting the Events system had some randomness in it that protected against this kind of exploit. Instead of having the Event be deterministic, it would be a D4 roll - so even if you turtle the game advances and you lose time to complete your objectives. The change to make the Event deterministic was a recent one (April or May?).

That being said, I do like having the Event be deterministic because it (a) allows for min-maxers such as yourselves to really squeeze every ounce of out of a turn, (b) it gives another job to someone at the table (c) it eliminates randomness which I'm a big fan of doing, and (d) it's easier to understand and communicate. So I'd like to keep Events deterministic for now.

And, to be clear, I have no problem with a little bit of turtling. Being patient and waiting until the right moment is a key decision. So I'm happy with the idea that you figure out a way to do nothing for a turn... if the Alert tracker still advances because then you're balancing patience with getting things done. So having a net profit of ideas is actually my target!

So one change that I'll be making is to tweak a couple of events so that they always advance at least one card. Maybe that means more events overall - there's balance to achieve there.

Also, it's been a while since I've balanced the Skills. I'll probably be reducing the number of Study's overall. It is the best action in the game, after all.

I could also just limit the total number of Idea tokens in the game. That's an easy solution but doesn't quite fit thematically. Not sure I like this solution.

I could also just disallow passing entirely. Again, given that the Event is deterministic now that might be more appropriate.

andymeneely commented 7 years ago

I'm starting to land on my decision for fixing this. Maybe the Event cards work where you always deal the next Event card once you process it. That way the game always advances, and you have to be more strategic about turtling.

(Honestly, this is how most people think how it works anyway and I usually have to clarify...)

To balance this, I'll lessen some of the "Raise Alert" events to just be Raise 1 or 2 alerts. And also focus on a few other board-changing consequences as opposed to "Raise Alert" consequences.

djrenren commented 7 years ago

I think while you're reworking this it would be good to reexamine some of the confusion we've had around noise and alert. I created a separate issue so as to not derail this one #6

andymeneely commented 7 years ago

Ok my v16.0 release should(tm) fix these issues.