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Da Boss wrote:

However, since I've been working away on hobby projects and have managed to collect a fair few completed painted armies of various kinds, and a collection of scenery, I tend to be introducing entirely new players to wargames in my social circle, and essentially running "demo games" where I provide absolutely everything needed to play.
In this paradigm, which is pretty satisfying too, I get to choose the game system I will use, which models from my collection, and so on. And if there's an issue with the game not producing satisfactory outcomes, I can tinker with it myself, tailor the model selection, change the system, get a new system or whatever needs to happen to make sure the experience is fun.

In this paradigm, what matters most is the accessibility of the rules and the gameplay flavour they evoke. Balance really is a secondary concern - nice to have, but not as important as those other aspects.

It's quite a nice feeling. I guess this is what a lot of historical players do, and indeed I find myself more drawn to historical games as I get older.
.

Sarouan wrote:

That's where Da Boss' own intervention comes to mind and I thought to myself "that's really it" : the main point of Five Leagues from Borderlands is not really about the "challenge" to overcome, but the hobby project that lies so that you bring all those games to life.

Da Boss, what you describe is called 'game-building' as opposed to 'playing directly out of the box'. When you work with the other guy, beat way of referring to it is 'collaborative game building'.

My own experiences echo yourself tournamented hard for about 10 years, burned out twice and the 'casual' game essentially rescued my overall love of the game/hobby.

My take on it is balance is a bit of a unicorn. There are things you can do but fundamentally, Best you'll get is 'some things match up against some other things, at least some of the time and under some circumstances'. Personally while i value balance, and as you say, its nice to have but imbalance isn't necessarily a hurdle, so long as the game/mechanics are interesting and we have the ability possible to game-craft and list-match around the issues helps greatly (but that comes from experience).

In my personal view, there is nothing wrong with the competitive play - it's just not the one I enjoy the most, as I believe that proper competitive balancing, provided potentially infinite resources on the player's side, is really hard. I am, of course, of an opinion that balance is very important on all levels of play, including very casual ones, but realistically there can always be some fringe cases that break the game's mechanics in some way. For example - and it's a game I have a lot of experience with, - playing against late northern Indian tribes in Blood&Plunder as "normal" 17th century lists on land is pure torture. They can do everything and prevent you from doing anything, and it's one of the most miserable gaming accounts I've ever head. However, barring such cases, I think the game is rather well balanced, and I don't think the Indians are such a huge problem, because, realistically, I don't expect to face off 20 people running the same Indian lists in a game centered around 17th century Americas piracy. I never played Warmachine or other "hard" competitive games, but can imagine that with the ever growing set of SKUs and bloated game mechanics it can become harder and harder for casual players to approach such a game if it is heavily dependant on game knowledge and basic mechanical skill.

I personally absolutely believe that a game needs to find fine middle point between being casual-random and determined-competitive (there's more to these ideas than what a combination of two words, but for the sake of being brief I hope that everyone gets what I mean) in order to make it, well, fun. I know that there are people who derive fun from pure mechanical flawlessness, but I am not one of them. Deep mechanics mean nothing to me if they don't excite me. Self-improvement is worthless to me if I'm not having fun in the process. It's a method I apply to videogames in the same manner. I have a lot of experience with competitive multiplayer RTS, and the thing that I generally disagree with a lot of this genre's audience is the idea that pure mechanical triumph over your opponent by any costs necessary with complete disregard to anything else is worth more than said anything else very single time. It's one of the reasons I eventually stopped playing Starcraft 2's multiplayer. The game's mechanics are built in such a way it's a constant struggle against both your enemy and your own management ablities - 10x of that in C&C, Dawn of War or Warcraft. At one point crushing my own skull with a hammer in an attempt to do 10 things at once or I immediately lose stopped being fun, regardless of how objectively deep the gameplay is. Objectively deep mechanics from my subjective point of view are worth nothing by themselves.

Somewhat connected to this is a thing that I sometimes observe in Internet and real life discussions around me, concerning the way some people new to the hobby behave themselves in competitive environment. Specifically - MTG players that started joining the hobby (mainly Warhammer of course) in recent years. While it's not a problem related to my experience directly and I doubt I will encounter this attitude in the future, I've started noticing a common thing present in complaints I receive from gaming acquaintances who have already has such experience and read on forumboards. It's seemingly a very different set of expectations to what the words "skill" or "victory" mean. Seemingly a lot of players with (for some reason?) specifically MTG background consider exploitation of purely mechanical mistakes going against RAW or abusing the opponent's bad memory as pure showing of skillful victory in the same capacity as proper tabletop tactics, which is wild to me. From a first-hand dialogue with one such player when I asked this question out of curiosity, he seemed to be baffled that "normal" wargamers consider it OK to correct your opponent when they make a direct mechanical mistake (forgetting they should be saving better from your shooting because their models are in cover, for example). Like, making overly long and time intensive moves on purpose so that the other player forgets he needed to do something by the game's rules, not telling him about that or, better, calling in judge to loudly reprimand him for "daring to forget playing by RAW" and thus gaining an advantage against upset and now more sloppily playing person is totally valid tactic in his opinion. Which is kind of insane to me. Similar sentiment was repeated often enough that I can't help but notice similar pattern. I never played MTG, is that just a coincidence and I'm thinking things through too much or is there something in the game's culture that makes people think it's absolutely normal to basically treat your opponent as hostile entity that you need to cheat against every time?

Deadnight: I'm not sure, but I think it may have been posts from you a few years ago talking about this type of thing - moving away from reliance on companies giving you an out of the box experience, taking ownership of the game yourself, that eventually spurred me to move in that direction.

At the time, I was dissatisfied with the various offerings from companies and getting fed up of the edition threadmill, but it seemed an impossible task to strike out on my own as you were describing. A decade in a gaming deep freeze where I just painted stuff and made scenery with no real thought to what it was "for" later, and I found myself able to tackle what you'd been suggesting (if I'm remembering correctly!)

Sarouan: Ah yeah, I do agree with you. I should have been more specific - I mean the "main" communities for the most popular "lifestyle" games. Games that have monthly new releases and an expected edition churn and the like. Even within those games there are smaller totally hobby focused groups that ignore the churn, but with the nature of the modern internet they become hard to find.

I found that playing those games tended to lead to people looking up "builds" online and then just replicating them, which sort of wrecks the slow process of discovering a game together that I really enjoy. Because once one person starts doing that, the rest of the group starts to follow - looking up solutions from others is a lot easier than figuring them out yourself. So soon your group is just following the "internet version" of your game. I even found this happening in my Dungeons and Dragons games. If you play games that are one book, say like Warlords of Erehwon or something not aimed toward this sort of puzzle solving, list building gameplay like Frostgrave, then you have less of this sort of thing. The internet discussion around games like Erehwon is pretty muted, because there's nothing new to discuss, no new puzzles to solve. So there's not really much received wisdom about what the best way to play is.

But when you find one of those hobby groups online, it's really fun to read through. I've been really enjoying reading stuff around the Wargaming in Middle Earth crowd, people doing book-inspired rather than movie inspired Middle Earth Wargaming, as an example.

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
In my personal view, there is nothing wrong with the competitive play - it's just not the one I enjoy the most, as I believe that proper competitive balancing, provided potentially infinite resources on the player's side, is really hard. I am, of course, of an opinion that balance is very important on all levels of play, including very casual ones, but realistically there can always be some fringe cases that break the game's mechanics in some way.

There is indeed nothing wrong with competitive play, with caveats. So long as it knows how to stay in its lane. Its like dating. On a very simplistic level, When someone takes a competitive list against another competitive list, and both players want the same thing - go nuts. when you take a bleeding edge competitive list into a casual ecosystem, it causes problems. Sure, its technically legal, but not very ethical in my mind.

Balance is important with caveats (like i said, if the game/scenario is 'interesting', ill accept skewed balance). My take on it though is after twenty years of gaming, I am doubtful of any games ability (from any company) to blindly 'self-balance' as it were, out of the box. There will always be silver bullets, crutches and gotcha! builds. Especially when the business model if this industry is to expand the game/factions with 'new' waves of stuff. I think, regardless of game, a not-insignificant amount of the balancing needs to be handled by the players themselves, which is why I value the skill of 'game-building' and the pre-game conversation so highly.

 Da Boss wrote:
Deadnight: I'm not sure, but I think it may have been posts from you a few years ago talking about this type of thing - moving away from reliance on companies giving you an out of the box experience, taking ownership of the game yourself, that eventually spurred me to move in that direction.

At the time, I was dissatisfied with the various offerings from companies and getting fed up of the edition threadmill, but it seemed an impossible task to strike out on my own as you were describing. A decade in a gaming deep freeze where I just painted stuff and made scenery with no real thought to what it was "for" later, and I found myself able to tackle what you'd been suggesting (if I'm remembering correctly!)

.

Cheers! I'm not used to being listened to! :p But I'm glad you've found value from my approach.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Is the goal of an asymmetrical game to completely beat the other force?
Or is there a more achievable goal, like survive four turns, or kill one specific model, or hold a point for a round?

If the only goal of the game is to beat the enemy, then yeah-not much meaningful choice.
If there’s an achievable goal, then there is meaningful choice.

I think we are starting to cross our wires and not communicating clearly with each other.

Perhaps we need to go back a bit. Are you saying that the only meaningful choices are choices that lead to a win?

You can only have meaningful choice if your decisions influence your success or failure.

In a pickup game, this means that if one army is 10% the price it should be, your choices don't meaningfully impact whether you win or lose-the 90% discount army is going to win, barring literally giving up or astronomically unlikely rolls.
In an asymmetrical scenario, like a desperate last stand against an overwhelming force, you can't succeed by wiping the enemy forces. (Or if you can, the game is really horribly balanced.) But if that's the goal, then the scenario isn't a good one-the weaker force should have some other goal. It could also, reasonably, be a high score kinda thing. Players take turns being the overwhelmed force, and see how many turns they can survive, for example.

So, to be 100% clear, the only meaningful decisions in a game will lead to a win or loss in that game? Am I understanding your POV correctly? All other choices that a player may make in the game are meaningless? Is that accurate?


*****************

Also, the question in front of us is not if competitive play should exist, or whether it is good or bad. It obviously should exist, and does exist. It is not a value judgement on a player if they like Competitive play.

The question is, does a competitive focused design hurt or hind a game?

My POV is that is hinders a game, as once competitive game play is espoused as the default, it crowds out all other types of gamer preferences. This eventually leads to a dead end in the design space and narrows what future units and forces can do into a fixed set.

As a previous poster said, Balance is a Unicorn.

 Easy E wrote:


My POV is that is hinders a game, as once competitive game play is espoused as the default, it crowds out all other types of gamer preferences. This eventually leads to a dead end in the design space and narrows what future units and forces can do into a fixed set.

As a previous poster said, Balance is a Unicorn.

I wanted to ask you : from a game designer's point of view, if competitive game play espoused as default hinders a game, what solutions could you find so that you avoid that dead end while still not upsetting your competitive scene on the game ? Because while balance is a unicorn, it's certainly one they love to death.

Is it just as "simple" as writing the game from another point of view, and then make a "competitive set" pack with rules more focused / written with balance in mind ? Or, is it also a Unicorn in itself to do such a thing ?

This is the $64K question.

You have to understand that different players want different things and that there are different niches for games. Competitive is just a single niche. Other care about other things. Some people care more about some aspects than others. Each player is unique in their exact mix of interests, but they fall into general categories.

The first step is deciding what Niche your game is going to fit into. You really should not try to be all things to all people. Instead, choose where you want to lean into, and lean into it. You should spend time deciding on what you are trying to "do" (simulate, narrate, or gamify), and lay-out your design goals early in the process. These goals are the guide rails you use when making decisions about how and what to do later.

It is okay to make a game that is hyper-competitive focused, BUT the trade-off is that you know it has a shelf-life. Once you get to a certain point, you have to be ready to just call it done. There is no more space to design.

Really interesting, thanks for the answer.

So the crucial point here is to know where you want to go with your game and not try to chase the last trend just for the sake of it, thinking it will be enough to make sales.

It is okay to make a game that is hyper-competitive focused, BUT the trade-off is that you know it has a shelf-life. Once you get to a certain point, you have to be ready to just call it done. There is no more space to design.

That point makes me think about some recent games that were released on the miniature market, like Star Wars : Shatterpoint. It has a game system that is really appealing for the competitive scene on paper, and it really feels like to me it can't be the kind of game that is intended to last for a long time (like they will release a few extra packs for some characters / emblematic units and then call it a job well done).

Maybe the point of these kinds of game is not about the survival on long term, but they're rather designed to last a specific and finished amount of time before being dropped and replaced by another one. It's certainly fitting for crowdfunding / Kickstarter projects, like CMON branded boardgames.

I wouldn't really say Shatterpoint has that much obvious competitive appeal. It does a lot of things the competitive crowd would consider "wrong" with all the ways it takes control away from the player and focuses on reactive decision making.

AMG is certainly interesting in that regard. One of the big issues people had with MCP initially is that there wasn't much of a competitive push when it launched. No convention packet or anything like that and AMG made it very clear that most of their OP support would be in the form of special multiplayer scenarios and other non-standard game modes. In spite of that, the core game has fostered one of the more voracious competitive communities built entirely by players wanting to play it that way (and a lot of help from TTS).

I do think one of MCPs best features is that there's little that separates a competitive game from a casual one. Players often leave out tactics cards or play with more random scenarios than they "should" but the game itself doesn't demand enough that you'd want to play with less than a full game.

In the end, it really depends on the game and the meta. Some games can pull it off (MTG), and some others... not so much.

The thing with MTG is that it is not strictly designed for competitive play. There are actually a variety of ways to play, and the designers have been pretty transparent in who they are targeting with what types of play.

My blanket answer was going to be yes, if "focusing on the competitive scene" means "being interested in balance in a meaningful way." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I've straight up left game systems behind because the community around them were too focused on the competitive scene.

I left WMH in 2E because:
1. Everyone wanted to play 75 pt Steamroller games, a point level and format I've never loved.
2. I played the same list style every week (colossals had just premiered and everybody wanted to run one with their Infantrymachine lists).
3. There was next to no emphasis on hobby, and unpainted minis on flat terrain suck.

I haven't returned to WMH because:
1. Nobody plays around me.
2. Everyone who does play seems to want to play 100 pt Steamroller games, a point level and format I've never loved.
3. I'm not a good enough player to play WMH with clocks. While I'm not against clocks in general (I play KOW on a clock with no problem), I don't have the reps to not clock out in WMH ... and you can only play WMH on a clock, apparently.

I left 40k in 5E because:
1. I moved and found a WHFB group, the game I would rather be playing.
2. While the powergamer ethos had always been a thing in 40k, this is around where it started to become particularly unpleasant for me. Most casual matches I played or saw at the shop involved (unpainted) netlists built to spam whatever was currently best in faction. My hobby-centric army, always weak, became even less fun to play into a gaming community built on min/maxing. This would only get worse as the editions went on.

I left 40k in 9E, after coming back in 8E, because:
1. The game became even more reliant on having an updated codex, to get access to all the stratagems that had been pumped into the game. Unfortunately the chaos codexes dropped late in the edition, and were on the whole really underwhelming and felt woefully disconnected from Chaos as we had known it.
2. The edition, as far as I could tell, was almost wholly focused on the competitive experience. This may have been my experience from the outside (I've read or watched battle reports since the '90s), consuming largely competitive reporting, but GW itself ramped up its coverage of the competitive angle.

To this day, I hold that Casualmachine and Casualhammer are genuinely fun experiences that I would partake in any day of the week, and so I maintain legal armies for both systems. But I also virtually never play them, as "casual play" is very hard to find in either community outside of your insulated friend group.

EDIT: I'm a huge champion of Kings of War, a game with very good internal and external balance (I won't say perfect in either case but it's the best I know of for a multi-faction wargame). I play in multiple tournaments a year, and see relative levels of success despite actively bucking the meta. However, I'll admit that I'm not deaf to the complaints of casual Kings players, who feel left behind when the meta shifts or endlessly outclassed at tournaments. I think the disparity between casual and competitive is that Kings has a much stronger emphasis on hobby than other games I've been a part of, and the level of balance and scenario play mean that you can compete no matter what you take. You will certainly have a harder time if you don't bring tools with you, but I've never felt hopeless or had the NPEs I've had with GW games. (I won't lump WMH in on this one, my losses always felt like my fault - or the damn clock's!)

That said, KOW is entering a period of growth where tournament lists are becoming much stronger, in part because a lot of WMH players have entered the scene (at least in the Eastern US regions), in part because we're all figuring out what works competitively and what just doesn't. Legacy armies have largely been replaced with new, purpose-made ones, and why build good units when you can build better units? Mantic is trying to address this but I do think a divide in tournament and casual play is widening for KOW. And I don't think Mantic wants that, as it isn't feeding it in the way I've seen PP or GW.

Yeah, pretty similar story here, down to games and editions. But if you'd asked me this in Mk2/5e era, I'd have been giving you an unambiguous "Competitive Balance is an axiomatic good in game design".

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, pretty similar story here, down to games and editions. But if you'd asked me this in Mk2/5e era, I'd have been giving you an unambiguous "Competitive Balance is an axiomatic good in game design".

I think this is just showing that there's a difference between building a games core mechanics and balance around competitive gaming and building the whole game experience around competitive gaming.

One aspect allows for a tight game that has good balance and presents a mostly even (for well built armies) competing field where player skill on the table is the greater measure of victory. That structure can then be used in casual, competitive, narrative, home brew or whatever.


The other is one where everything is focused on the competitive and it bleeds into the marketing, the product focus, the feedback and can create an environment where every game is competitive; where every focus is on competition and where casual play suffers as a result.





I think its very important to separate the two.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Doesn't matter if the focus is on competitive play if the company behind it all doesn't know how to use the incoming data and writes knee-jerk reactions based on high-level win-rates and a few very loud personalities in the tournament sphere.

^^ this

would actually go further and state that if the company is unable/unwilling to make good use of any feedback, using a blinkered approach or otherwise, you probably won't have a very good game

also so far for me at least "good" games tend not to have an associated model range the company is pushing leading to, understandable, commercial pressures to promote newer models

I guess this would all depend on how you define "competitive" and "focus".


I've argued for a VERY long time that a good rule set caters to all types of players for that game. If a ruleset can't pull off competitive, narrative, AND casual within its parameters, then it's worthless as a game. It's why I argue so hard for tight, balanced rulesets. You can ALWAYS take those sets in a narrative direction as players, and the very nature of a balanced set makes casual play easy. It also makes it easier to fine tune the rules when competitive play shows some exploitability.

yeah, if there rulesystem is good every player no matter what they want from the game, can use to their liking without major adjustments
the bad systems need to be tinkered to get one thing right and the others are left behind

 Boss Salvage wrote:

EDIT: I'm a huge champion of Kings of War, a game with very good internal and external balance (I won't say perfect in either case but it's the best I know of for a multi-faction wargame). I play in multiple tournaments a year, and see relative levels of success despite actively bucking the meta. However, I'll admit that I'm not deaf to the complaints of casual Kings players, who feel left behind when the meta shifts or endlessly outclassed at tournaments. I think the disparity between casual and competitive is that Kings has a much stronger emphasis on hobby than other games I've been a part of, and the level of balance and scenario play mean that you can compete no matter what you take. You will certainly have a harder time if you don't bring tools with you, but I've never felt hopeless or had the NPEs I've had with GW games. (I won't lump WMH in on this one, my losses always felt like my fault - or the damn clock's!)

That said, KOW is entering a period of growth where tournament lists are becoming much stronger, in part because a lot of WMH players have entered the scene (at least in the Eastern US regions), in part because we're all figuring out what works competitively and what just doesn't. Legacy armies have largely been replaced with new, purpose-made ones, and why build good units when you can build better units? Mantic is trying to address this but I do think a divide in tournament and casual play is widening for KOW. And I don't think Mantic wants that, as it isn't feeding it in the way I've seen PP or GW.

there is something interesting going with KoW in the US, listening to different podcasts and looking at the list or what is considered good or bad and things are different than in Europe

like in the EU/UK withdraw is hardly used because people see the game better balanced without it while the US is kind of the opposite
also there is a trend that US kind of goes into more "extremes" for list buildings were the UK/EU is more torwards balanced lists

 Just Tony wrote:

I've argued for a VERY long time that a good rule set caters to all types of players for that game. If a ruleset can't pull off competitive, narrative, AND casual within its parameters, then it's worthless as a game. It's why I argue so hard for tight, balanced rulesets. You can ALWAYS take those sets in a narrative direction as players, and the very nature of a balanced set makes casual play easy. It also makes it easier to fine tune the rules when competitive play shows some exploitability.

If only it was that easy.

Balanced rules work best when they are mirror matches, ala Chess. The further you move away from a mirror match the more likely it is to become unbalanced. On the flip side, players don't really want to play mirror matches all day long either. They demand variety, and then more unbalance creeps in. Balance is a unicorn.

What most competitive players want is "predictability". If I do X I can be reasonably sure Y will happen. Meanwhile, Narrative gamers want less predictability, they want to know If I do X, what will happen? You can see why designing to both of these preferences becomes mutually exclusive. Now to make it more complicated, players are not 100% Competitive or 100% Narrative, they have their own level of tolerance going either way on the spectrum, but this level of tolerance varies by player. To make things even harder, there are some players who actually want a game to represent what they think a simulation would look like and ask, "If I do X, would the same result happen in a consistent, real-world universe?" and that is a whole other slew of variables.

The IDEA of balance is great. The reality of balance is that it is impossible. Somewhere, someone will break any system you can build. Plus, players all have different tolerances for balance, and how far you can go from their core question before they reject the game. There is no ONE player type to cater to. Even purely competitive players will have differing tolerances for non-predictable outcomes.

Now, to get back to the OPs question. If you made a game purely for competitive players, you would need to reduce it to its most predictable outcomes. Again, Chess is another great example of this. It is all known outcomes and hence has a thriving competition scene. Shoots and Ladders does not, and no tournament system exists (that I am aware of).

As we see with Chess, you can focus on competition and get a very popular and survivable game. However, no one is making gobs of money off Chess innovations anymore. The design space for Chess is essentially closed. The only space left is to take it to less competitive versions, which many folks do.

disagree here

stick with chess, it is a very good rule set and therefore works for the casual gamer the same way as it it works for competitive gamers

none of those 2 suffers because the rules are balanced and tight

and the narrative gamers have fun by adding themed miniatures and play Rebels against Empire


Shoots and Ladders on the other hand is a game were you play against the game and not against the other people
this is just there to spend time and not about actual "gaming"

and games like 40k, that are more like Shoots and Ladders are used for tournaments because "reasons" and do not work for narrative at all without additional rules

PS: and no, narrative gamers are not just people who want bad rules were the outcome is unpredictable
for the most part they want to play their army and tell a story with their games
and a game were you have no chance winning if you take a themed army with the models you like does not work for that

hence a balanced game is most important for narrative and casual gamers
competitive gamers do not care at all about balance

That’s insane. Narrative gamers like chess? Come on, man, just admit you don’t understand what he’s telling you.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That’s insane. Narrative gamers like chess? Come on, man, just admit you don’t understand what he’s telling you.

I mean if you take all the words inbetween out you can kind of get that.


But that wasn't his point. His point is that Narrative gamers want to tell a story and its a LOT easier to tell a story within a game when you've a well written set of rules and balanced armies. Because now you know what happens when you start to tweak the rules and the game balance; or at least have a decent understanding.

This means if you, say, want to do a heroic last stand with a defender with fewer models than an attacker; you can have a better idea how big a disparity of points you can create between the two without it making an auto lose in turn 1 for the defender.

Again the point is you can unbalance a balanced game and get a great result. However if the core game itself is poorly build/balanced then the Narrative has a harder time because the core is already wobbly.
That means the narrative has to do way more game theory work themselves to work out the imbalances and then work out how to factor those into what they are trying to build with their narrative game. Now this can be a lot of fun for those who like to do that, but for most people its a whole extra step and when you pay for the core rules and the army expansion (which means for 2 armies you could be easily spending the best part of £100 - and that's sharing the big rule book) many feel that its something you should be getting for your money.

Overread, your comment is a common misunderstanding from players who prefers predictability to what a Narrative gamer actually wants.

Narrative gamers do not want to tell a story. They can do that without a game at all. They want the game to unfold a story for them, they want to see how the game and the story develops by playing the game.

This is the opposite of what the competitive player wants, as the competitive player wants to tell the game what the story is; they want the game outcomes to be predictable.

You can see that designing for one extreme of these two spectrums limits your appeal to the other. They are mutually exclusive.

Obviously, these are sweeping generalizations as each player has their own tolerance within the spectrum. In addition, there is a third axis regarding "believability" of the outcomes that makes things even harder to balance.

The best games straddle these extremes so it can appeal to all sides. The more you move closer to one side, then the more players you lose from the other. In addition, these players at the far edges have a hard time even understanding what the other types of gamers even want from a game experience. This makes it even harder to balance for any individual players tastes and wants.

Therefore, competitive only games eventually get to a point where there is no place left to go. The designer has to inject some unpredictability or the game has no more design space, they have painted themselves into a corner. Chess is such a game. There is no more design space to make it MORE predictable, you can only make it less predictable.



Edit: Just to be clear. This is not about Comp play being bad. It isn't bad at all. This is about the OP's question about whether it is good for the long term survivability of a game. A game can survive a long time being highly competitive. However, a company supporting such a game eventually runs out of space to do anything with it, so stops. Many gamers than think an unsupported game is dead.

Is chess dead? No. Is it unsupported by a manufacturer making money from selling chess sets to people by updating and expanding the rules for chess? Yes.

Sorry what? "unfold a story"?

Last time I checked even narrative players still make choices when playing, still want to have an agency.

They do not roll a scatter dice each time they move a unit or randomly select what to shoot at what.

You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

You make a choice, and you see what happens. That is a story unfolding too.


Also, this thread is not about whether Narrative or Comp is good. They are both good. They are doing different things. The question is focusing on Comp good for the survivability of a game. On the other hand, focusing on Narrative only is equally dangerous for a game. Both directions limit your audience and therefore reduce the survivability of your game.

 Easy E wrote:
You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

That has nothing to do with unpredictability, and arguably is the opposite.

"What would happen if a shoot a Space Marine with a Volcanno Cannon? well he dies, obviously"

"What would happen if shoot a lasgun at a Land Raider? nothing, obviously"

Also I'm pretty sure that is more simulation than narrative, although admittedly I have always struggled to differentitate the concepts.

But simulation has little to do with unpredactibility. In fact we can only make simulations when the variables are predictable.

 Easy E wrote:
Overread, your comment is a common misunderstanding from players who prefers predictability to what a Narrative gamer actually wants.

Narrative gamers do not want to tell a story. They can do that without a game at all. They want the game to unfold a story for them, they want to see how the game and the story develops by playing the game.

And you can get that with a balanced game as well. Deploy differently; setup the terrain differently; arrive on the table differently; make difference choices during the game. There are a MASSIVE number of things that can take place in the game before the dice roll and the game runs which can influence how two armies play out.


Also what you seem to be arguing for is that narrative players don't care or want imbalance within the game itself. Or so much random that it manifests as imbalance. The thing is because each model has fixed stats before it enters the game; the imbalance is also a potential known quantity. It just manifests that instead of X = Y you get X > Y every time (or statistically enough times on the dice rolls).

You're basically swapping one instance for another and I'd argue you're justifying a weaker option because inherent inbalance means that the game is always a negative for those forces on the weaker side no matter if its narrative or competitive and especially if it is competitive. Same for casual - its one thing to go into a game not caring if you win or lose; its another to go into a match knowing that every time you are at a known disadvantage to your opponent purely because of your army choice . Again somewhat extreme, but we've seen it happen where balance gets so bad that one army is almost an auto lose to another no matter the model combinations.

No my argument is that Competitive focus in your game design reduces the survivability of the game. You may have longevity, but it will not survive as a product.

Everything else we are talking about is an aside from that point.


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To indulge in the aside a bit.....

Now, a lot of people think Comp play equals balance. Not necessarily true. If White always beats Black you can still have comp play, but it will only be White on White. However, the game is still not balanced.

Every player has a different "tolerance" for imbalance, and only they know what it is. Again, Chess has a known imbalance that White (I think) always goes first. However, very few people argue that Chess can not be Competitive because of it, and very few people refuse to play Chess because of it.

Is playing on the Black side in Chess always negative no matter what? Everytime you know you are at a known disadvantage to your opponent purely because of your color choice. Does that mean people stopped playing Chess or having fun playing Chess? Of course not, because Chess has balance but not Perfect Balance. I am arguing that perfect balance is a unicorn, a myth. Balance is not what makes a game popular, give it longevity or survivable.

Now to be clear, I think some sort of internal control is great. The closer to balance you are the better. However, making it the end goal of a game is impossible. You will never have perfect balance, and you will never create a system that someone, somewhere will not be able to break and get an advantage on.

Instead, popular and long lasting games focus on straddling the line between people that want a simulation, people that want a fun past time, and people that want a competition. It is the best at being all things to all people, and NOT lean to far into one particular sub-set of player wants more than an other sub-sets wants.

 Easy E wrote:
You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

yeah, for the outcome of the game, not for rules interaction

can Napoleon win Waterloo is the unpredictable question a narrative player asks and for this he wants a balanced and predictable system and not one were it is random who wins or one that is designed for the English to always win because "balance is a unicorn"

what you are talking about has nothing to do how well designed a game is as if you think you need an unbalanced game with bad rules to tell a story because no one knows what happens if one player starts shooting with a unit than haven't ever been part of a narrative group

90% of the historical gamers are narrative players and the rules that are popular among those are the well written and balanced systems that are easy to learn and also easy to modify to fit the scenario

No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

If balance is so critical to the survival of a game, explain to me the long-lasting appeal of Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, and other casino games. They are be definition not balanced, yet they are very survivable.

If balance and "well-designed" (Whatever that means) was so critical, than why has 40K been so dominant? It does not follow your own criteria of what a successful game needs, yet here we all are! Why does it keep lasting in spite of your guy's theories?

 Easy E wrote:
No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

If balance is so critical to the survival of a game, explain to me the long-lasting appeal of Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, and other casino games. They are be definition not balanced, yet they are very survivable.

If balance and "well-designed" (Whatever that means) was so critical, than why has 40K been so dominant? It does not follow your own criteria of what a successful game needs, yet here we all are! Why does it keep lasting in spite of your guy's theories?

Most likely because balance is only one of many facets.

The gambling games you note are popular because money and vast amounts of advertising (and drink). They work by favouring the unbalanced element and tempting people into the concept of getting rich quick. Take the money out and those games would still be popular, but I'd wager they'd not be anywhere near as popular as they are today. They'd likely join Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly and such on the shelf.


As for GW's situation its often been argued that GW is successful despite not because of their rules. GW get a lot of things right and some things wrong; they also have a momentum others in this market just don't come close to touching in terms of marketing, outreach and influence. And GW have had times where their writing was so bad (along with other things) that they were bleeding customers. It gave rise to the likes of Warmachine for a time.


Similarly Warmachine fell apart not because of its competitive rules themselves; but because of a whole host of internal and external pressures and a focus on listening too the competitive end too much in certain aspects (eg shifting toward 2D terrain etc)