Closing with "Summon and defeat a random barrier"


Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion


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...What happens if we draw a barrier without a 'defeated' condition (as we did with Electrical Storm)? Did we just permanently lose our chance to close to dumb luck? Or since "and defeat" becomes impossible instruction - we just draw another barrier (similar to how if we're instructed to "summon and acquire an Animal ally" - we would continue drawing allies until we get an Animal)

I admit, my RAW interpretation would be we just lost a closing chance; however, it doesn't *feel* particularly fair, and no one at the table was excited by having to go through a whole location deck just because of the bad luck of the draw.

(Also, I would really like if we could start getting "defeated" conditions for ALL barriers - I think enough cards care about such things that we don't really need a bunch of edge cases, created by omitting rules. The "Three Laws" barriers are a good example with their "Display this card; it is defeated" approach.)


I didn't search, but this question came up in S&S. I know the community consensus was you just fail the closing attempt. I don't recall if this answers was official.

S&S has a location that requires you to defeat a random barrier.


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Deja Vu?

Lone Shark Games

Out of curiosity, do you feel similarly about randomly drawing a monster that is immune to the only energies a caster has in hand, an incorporeal foe at low level before you get a magic weapon, or even a monster that (randomly or otherwise) removes a character's weapon BYA?

That is to say, how often is it okay for draw a random bane to mean you just lose?


It happens, and sometimes it's unfortunate, but that's how it goes. We did a scenario with one of these locations last night and if we'd gotten an auto-fail barrier we would have lost the scenario. That's how it goes.

This works both ways; some barriers with "Check to Defeat: None" say things like "Display this barrier; this barrier is defeated." in the card text. Is it wrong to have an auto-win card?


Parody wrote:
This works both ways; some barriers with "Check to Defeat: None" say things like "Display this barrier; this barrier is defeated." in the card text. Is it wrong to have an auto-win card?

If we know we'll need to defeat a barrier to close - you better believe that we're going into it prepared. So if the choice is between "auto-win some, auto-lose some" or "you always have to defeat a check" - we'll always pick the second option. I'd be perfectly fine with an instruction "Summon a barrier with a check to defeat and defeat it" - which is really the same as my "summon and acquire an Animal" example, as it makes you draw from the box, until you get a relevant card - but I can see how that's not happening due to wording length limitations.

Keith Richmond wrote:

Out of curiosity, do you feel similarly about randomly drawing a monster that is immune to the only energies a caster has in hand, an incorporeal foe at low level before you get a magic weapon, or even a monster that (randomly or otherwise) removes a character's weapon BYA?

That is to say, how often is it okay for draw a random bane to mean you just lose?

I'll gladly answer this - it is perfectly OK to 'auto-lose' every time with your examples, *as long as we had a chance to win*, i.e we could've planned, weighted the risk and we just drew the short stick. In your examples, if we know the monsters, and we want to be Batman-prepared, we could do the following:

- Elementaly-immune monsters: Of course, we wouldn't send a caster with a single Poison spell to close such location in MM, for example. We would make sure to have at least a couple of different Attack elements, AND then -worst case scenario- to have enough boosts on hand that we could *still* bury the check in blessings and bare-fist the crap out of the monster.

- Incorporeals: we send in the above double-Attack caster

- Random-remove monster: we send that same caster again or even better - a fighter with 2 weapons (TBH, "Summon & defeat monster" locations are usually reserved for fighters in our group)

Yes, of course, we can't always afford to be that crazy prepared, but I think it's obvious how these differ from a card without any condition to defeat, that no amount of planning or strategy can help you against. Besided, your examples really stretch the notion of "auto-lose" IMHO, as by the same token we should lump in our Diplomacy guy drawing an Animal at "summon and acquire an ally", or our Melee-ist drawing a bow at "summon and acquire a weapon".

I hope I'm not coming across as argumentative. I just really don't get the design considerations behind some barriers getting "Display this. It's defeated.", while others are "Display this. There's no defeat condition", especially as this creates some (IMHO) unfortunate situations. I'd be curious if you could shed some light on the internal considerations you guys go through for this decisions (as I always am when we could glean something from the creative process behind the game)


Hawkmoon269 wrote:
Deja Vu?

LOL. Geez. That has completely slipped my memory :( I guess that's what happens when you're not an AI. Or maybe it's just the age.

...
Or maybe it's just the age.

Lone Shark Games

To be fair, that was over a year ago. Thanks for the answers :)


So then, does this prove that Hawkmoon269 is actually a rogue AI loose in the PaizoNet?


It certainly doesn't prove that false.


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I think there's four differences between the monster situations Keith lists and the undefeatable barrier thing:
1. You can prepare for them (pretty much as Longshot11 said already)
2. You can be unprepared but then throw enough blessings at it and punch the monster out anyway. Except for the incorporeal monsters and trolls cases of course. Which in turn I do in fact find almost as annoying, except that it's mitigated by the fact that I at least "could have" prepared.
3. There's something "fairer" feeling about getting hit by the perfect counter card that's designed to make life hard for your specific character, compared to getting hit by something that's just impossible for anyone. In the first case I can think "oh well, characters need to have weaknesses", in the second case I'm not so likely to equivalently think "oh well life just has to suck sometimes for everyone".
4. The monsters cases are better themed. The monsters feel like "this is a power this monster has that makes it interesting and difficult to deal with", whereas the barrier feels like "this is a corner case of the rules that wasn't dealt with properly". I can imagine being haunted by a ghost I can't touch, it's kind of cool, but I can't imagine needing to overcome a storm only to find out that no-one defined what overcoming a storm means so I can't do it.


Running into a barrier that you cannot defeat is as strange as encountering a shark in a forest.
Don't try to align the game to the narrative you have in your head, fit the narrative to the cards you draw.
Actually, when you encounter a Lightning Storm you just cannot defeat it. Seems to make sense and I can see my hero having no control on some on the Gods events like weather. Why then when it's linked to closing a location would we decide it suddenly does not make sense anymore?
It's your game, you can adapt it the way you want, but I strongly disagree with the idea of the corner case not adressed in the rules. It is as logic as the test when you fit into the logic to adapt the narrative.
IMHO.


Frencois, I'm talking about how it feels. Which means I can't be wrong anyway :)

I know it doesn't always have to be realistic. I rarely care whether it is. But when you get screwed over by something then I still think there's a difference between whether there's flavor backing it up or not. If it's a ghost/troll/golem, that's what makes them interesting, it's meant to screw you over sometimes, and you can understand why.

The difference with barriers is that when they don't have a check to defeat, it's not "for a reason". It's not because it's something that's impossible to overcome. It's because barriers are a very abstract concept representing "a thing that might happen", and most of the time the conditions and consequences can be represented by a check, but sometimes they can't be.

So when you close a location, it's saying "To secure this area, you'll have to overcome some sort of obstacle of an unknown nature". When there's no check, it's saying "you'll have to overcome this obstacle, for which there's no easy way to define what 'overcoming' it actually means. Therefore your attempt to do so disappears in a puff of logic. Sorry.". It's immersion breaking. It very much feels like a consequence of the game system not of what the system is simulating. The barriers themselves aren't things that are impossible to deal with, they're just dealt with in ways that aren't a check.

I'm not saying it's not addressed in the rules I'm saying it's not addressed in a satisfying way. It feels like a better system would define what "defeating" them means, and then even if you fail you've at least failed at something rather than at nothing.

Actually I've thought of a good analogy. If I encounter a shark in a forest I don't care, I do the checks and whatever happens happens. The barrier thing feels more like "you find a shark in a forest, and since a shark can't be in a forest you automatically fail to defeat it". I don't care if it's realistic, I just don't want to get screwed over by the ways in which it isn't.

This is all to help the designers appreciate the reaction people have and why. It's for future design efforts, not to complain about anything in particular. This hasn't ever even come up for me that I can remember.


Irgy wrote:
This is all to help the designers appreciate the reaction people have and why. It's for future design efforts, not to complain about anything in particular.

Thanks for the input, Irgy. That's really what I was driving at.

The fact that that there aren't any boons/monsters that default to "impossible to acquire/defeat" and that "summon and defeat random barrier" is left as the only To Close requirement that may turn into an auto-fail makes me believe the design intent never was "we want the player to be randomly screwed from time to time", but rather, as I said above, "summon and defeat a barrier [b]that can be defeated[b/]".

As mentioned, I realize there may be reasons -mostly wording-related- they may not want to fix this 'bug' on location cards,; that's why I suggested the approach that is already in use on some cards like the Three Laws, but for some reason is not used on other cards, like the Lightning Storm.


Longshot11 wrote:
The fact that that there aren't any boons/monsters that default to "impossible to acquire/defeat"...

Hirgenzosk. :)

Longshot and Irgy and I look at the game differently.

I doesn't bug me that there is a chance (and it's a low chance) that I could fail to close a location & I have no control over it.

The game has an element of random luck. I've rolled 33 on a 35 villain check on which my dice averaged 57. I see this as in that vein.

I view each scenario as a puzzle to be solved. My concern is that the scenario is winnable, and that with best play your odds are very good to win it.

You have a chance of auto-failing the close check for the "summon a barrier" location. You can plan for that. For me, it's part of the puzzle. Don't let your win hinge on the closing check succeeding. Close it early. Or chase the villain there.

Lone Shark Games

Irgy wrote:
This is all to help the designers appreciate the reaction people have and why. It's for future design efforts, not to complain about anything in particular. This hasn't ever even come up for me that I can remember.

Exactly why I asked for more clarity :)


What about needing to "summon and acquire an ally" to close, but the ally you draw requires you to bury/banish/etc an item when you don't have one in hand?

I honestly don't know how I feel about the impossible to defeat barrier situation when it comes to closing things, but I figure if y'all are discussing reactions to corner cases, I'd toss this one out there since it's a similar case, but it doesn't have quite as easy a way to "fix" it that undefeatable barriers do.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

I don't think it's really fair to critique the closing requirement of a card out of the context of the scenarios it is in. When designers are balancing a scenario, they have a HUGE number of levers they can pull to make things easier or harder. For example, a closing requirement that's a simple skill check has two levers: skill and difficulty. (Combat 10 is more difficult than Combat 8; Craft 10 is more difficult than Combat 10.) And Combat 10 is harder in a B scenario than an AD6 scenario, so that's another lever.

Some levers are less obvious. If a scenario limits the party's ability to control who's at a location, that decreases their collective ability to prepare. This particular lever is interesting because it makes Combat checks slightly harder, but makes Craft checks a LOT harder—it therefore amplifies the effect of the "skill" lever.

"Summon and defeat a monster" decreases your ability to prepare, but since so many monsters ultimately come down to combat, and most characters are always prepared for combat, it's not a big decrease. But it also turns up the randomness, which is an important part of balance in this game.

(Elaborating on that last sentence a bit: this is a game where a significant part of the challenge comes from "constrained randomness"—situations that are highly variable within a particular range of variation. In general, the game is at its most fun when some things are designed to be easy, some things are designed to be hard, and other things are designed for constrained randomness.)

"Summon and defeat a barrier" decreases your ability to prepare even further than the monster version, because barriers use a wider variety of skills. It's got that amplification effect of the "location control" level but without imposing movement restrictions. This is tempered a bit because there are characters and cards that can generally deal with barriers better than others, but since there are barriers that you can't defeat as well as barriers that you automatically defeat, even these characters are not immune to the randomness.

Now if we had a scenario that has a TON of randomness, this would be a problem (unless, of course, the randomness was intentionally designed in as part of a bigger picture), but as long as this occurs within a scenario that *also* gives you things that are easy and things that are hard, I see it as a feature, not a bug.


Vic Wertz wrote:

This is tempered a bit because there are characters and cards that can generally deal with barriers better than others, but since there are barriers that you can't defeat as well as barriers that you automatically defeat, even these characters are not immune to the randomness.

Now if we had a scenario that has a TON of randomness, this would be a problem (unless, of course, the randomness was intentionally designed in as part of a bigger picture), but as long as this occurs within a scenario that *also* gives you things that are easy and things that are hard, I see it as a feature, not a bug.

Thanks for the feedback, Vic.

The auto-fail barriers seemed like a 'bug' mostly in the context of the other 'summon and defeat/acquire' conditions, i.e the auto-fail seemed like an inadvertent consequence, rather than intended result. If you say that was premeditated and a conscious 'win some, lose some' design decision - that settles it. (I still don't like it, but apparently some other people do, so yeah. Can't make everyone happy.)

Grand Lodge

The following may come off as a bit judgemental, and that's not my intent. I'm not trying to belittle people who dislike the possibility of being unable to succeed. I'm just adding my point of view.

I see drawing a barrier which may or may not be impossible-to-defeat the same as rolling dice. Both the dice AND the cards introduce a random element. Saying "it shouldn't be possible to draw a barrier that can't be defeated when I'm trying to close a location" is (to me) like saying, "dice shouldn't be allowed to roll too low for me to succeed".

I've recently encountered barriers that actually quashed any possibility to succeed at a scenario (Best Served Cold, no less, about which I've already whined), and much as it sucked, it was part of the game.


Longshot11 wrote:
...Can't make everyone happy.

As being part of the bad guys who actually love that scenario (even when we fail), I really feel bad that you had a bad experience (especially as I really enjoy all your clever interventions on the forums). And I hope I didn't add to the bad feeling when I said I love the scenario (Nasty Frencois, Bad, Bad, Go find redemption to the Shrine of Imodae and only come back when you have crossed that feat on the corresponding card! Silly you... I mean silly me).

If I may : this is your game, you don't like that scenario the way it is, change it! Being a guy that spends tremendous time rewording rules and creating scenarios and extensions to make a game more "fun", I'm certainly encouraging you to. And I also know that different people expect different kinds of fun from such a game. And I'm still totally amazed how Mike, Vic and the others manage to give a little fun for everyone one way or another.

If I may again: it's always nice to have feed-backs of things people like or not. Sometimes I myself too feels that a given part of the game doesn't answer well my group vision of "fun". Which is pretty rare because around the table I have (and we LOVE it) pretty much as many visions of fun as we have players.

Just for the fun (they WILL recognize themselves and I WILL pay for that, I know):
- There is the guy that is only there for the loot and having the best card in the game
- There is the guy that is only there to make sure he gets that loot before the other guy even if he himself doesn't want it, but it's just so fun to see the other guy's face
- There is the girl who is only there to play the character that doesn't care at all about boons or banes but just wants to be friend with all the others by doing nice things for them (yes she played Alahazra, Mavaro or Varril typically - just because he is "SOOOO cute and is the only playboy to be able to seduce girls in chainmail") - well she also is the best player EVER... never understood how or why
- There is the girl that just don't want to care about rules or deck buildings or little lines... actually I'm not even sure she knows that sometimes there is a second power on a card. So she always plays the barbarian fighter or whatever smashes the harder (much easier to just having to roll one combat roll without having to remeber to roll a second one to recharge a spell, those spellcasters are just too complicated in their lives). She really IS a barbarian. Whenever she shows up, we already know 50% on the boons in locations are already lost because she doesn't care. And yes this IS fun. Good thing is she always preempts the locations with the most monsters (and thus usually we end up not losing too much boons).
- There is the guy that just want to play the adventure, know where it goes, so he always want to already starts the NEXT scenario. So whenever there is a chance to win right there, he just ends it, even when others cry out loud that there is plenty of time and so many things left to visit, kill or loot.
- Oh and the guy who always needs to cry for someone else to play an additional blessing on his check because he only has 95% chances to win... which is pretty much the same who cries for the healer to move to where he is and cast cure because he already has discarded a total of 4 allies and blessings and without that he won't be able to reexplore 12 times during hs next turn.
- And then there is the one playing Ranzak... No let me rephrase that, he HIS Ranzak. Scenario goals? Who cares! Banes? Who wants to take it, I have better things to do! Boons? Yep, shiny, let's see what we can do by immediately banishing it... there will be others, especially in someone's else discard pile! Allies? What the heck, I'm a goblin for Zogmugot's sake...

My point is, everybody can have fun his own way

OK what was I saying? Yeah... I too have things I didn't really enjoy (someone said Arboreal or Horde?), and discovered that in some circumpstances some things indeed didn't totally shine.
So?
3300 different cards home, 10000+ if I count the doubles... nothing that cannot be fixed with that.

But to make that LONG post a story short, my point is, there would be nothing more boring that having all monsters with a combat check to defeat, all locations with a check to close, and so on.
Been there, looted that.

We absolutely love when they try something brand new. It's like cooking (hey, I'm French...) sometimes it's a miss, sometimes it's just another taste, and sometimes it's heaven on earth.
You'll never taste real cooking if you never try strange funny stuff.
Or cocktails (I mean, if your name starts with "not-this-M.").
Or goblins
Or cameltrops scenarios...

It reminds me the first day we read the Horsechopper +1 card.
Nobody around the table said that the card was certainly wrong.
But our goblin guy just said "I don't care if it is wrong or not, please Frencois, don't mention it on the forums, because it's much more fun like that!"

We'll never pretend our kind of fun is "the good one" or "better" or even "any good".
It's just our kind of fun.
What do you expect from someone eating snails and frogs?

Ranzak.... give me back that mouse, I need it to post that thing...


Frencois wrote:
Longshot11 wrote:
...Can't make everyone happy.
As being part of the bad guys who actually love that scenario (even when we fail), I really feel bad that you had a bad experience (especially as I really enjoy all your clever interventions on the forums). And I hope I didn't add to the bad feeling ...

Haha, no hard feelings at all, mon ami! :)

As for changing the rules: we did end up making the guy who drew Lightning Storm, to just draw another barrier with a check and defeat it. My initial OP appeal for making the cards more consistent was provoked by the whole game-stalling discussion born out of this corner-case scenario, however, as the way I see it - if something is vague and unclear enough to provoke an argument on table - it is an area that can be improved upon (see also: the "You moved!-I didn't move!" resulting from moving at the same location). Of course, only later did we find out that the auto-fail barriers were covered by the rules (and I of all people have already inquired about it), but not one of us could remember this particular rule right then...

Also, your player type write-up is hilarious, doubly so because I know most of those players! (I'm just not sure yet if the GF is the 'barbarian girl' or 'the Ranzak'...) :D


Longshot11 wrote:
If we know we'll need to defeat a barrier to close - you better believe that we're going into it prepared.

You cannot prepare for everything. Decks are random, dice are random, and there's only so many characters with a lot of things that need to be done. You do the best you can, but sometimes it comes down to getting lucky. This week we played 3-3A: no villians to clear out decks, plenty of cards moving around, a couple unlucky examines of the Promo barrier that adds monsters to all the decks...the last location was the one where you draw a barrier to close, and we got lucky on turn 30.

Longshot11 wrote:
(I still don't like it, but apparently some other people do, so yeah. Can't make everyone happy.)

There's a big difference between "like" and "accept as part of the game". :)

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