Hey everyone! Here's a link to Forrest's Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/forrestimel/five-color-playmat-collection-by-forrest-imel?ref=5pk3n6
I absolutely LOVE the distinction between input and output randomness. You cleared up literal decades worth of confusion as to why I adore Magic and loathe DnD.
They're very different games haha, the amount of output and input variance in each game isn't the only (or even the biggest) difference haha. Also, it should be pointed out that both games have both input and output randomness in them.
This Luck vs Skill thing from Richard Garfield has shaped my attitude in a positive way for every game I've ever played, so I'm glad I got into Magic like that when I was 13. Play to your outs. Input randomness rocks.
Tf2 still has random critical hits and also has random bullet spread (bullets come out randomly in an area instead of a fixed pattern) They did have damage spread (a grenade could deal something like 90 - 110 damage instead of 100) and that was removed.
Awesome vid. I think one of the arguments in favor of variance in competitive settings is that it makes the narrative of a match between two players way more compelling. Everyone loves a comeback story, and it's because of the variance of one-sided strong hands or really clutch topdecks that we get to tell tales of "the sickest game of Magic I've ever seen dude!" I think that at the end of the day all players are equally affected by variance, but better players are able to put themselves in a position where that variance affects them favorably more often.
1. Love this one, will probably show parts of it to my intro game design course when we do our unit on chance. 2. I think a very important thing about the luck/skill balance is designing around the expectations of your players. A lot of it is genre expectation, but a great deal of player satisfaction with chance has to do with packaging. When you frame output randomness as being a representation of a player failing, they are going to take that as negative, when you frame it ludonarratively as "something happened" they treat it much differently.
One thing about Warhammer despite it's output randomness is that when you're rolling 20-40 dice at a time you get into averages. You're no longer thinking "I just need this one shot," you're thinking "as long as I hit half, and each shot has 2/3 chance of success." Sure over enough games card games have that, but in Warhammer you already get that by default in many situations (not that there aren't instances of needing your big dude to hit that one big shot). As the game progresses and there's fewer units your attacks become more desperate as you are rolling fewer dice at a time. I think for that reason it facilitates the narrative as you talked about fairly well.
One of my most memorable victories came down to pure luck. I had constructed the deck around Delina, Wild Mage and effects to roll multiple times. My board state never stabilized, didn't have my Berserker classes, didn't have haste or treasures... Just Delina. Then I drew one of my targets: Calamity Bearer. Played it swung with Delina copying calamity. Proceeded to roll 15... five times in a row.... Went from dead on board to an opponent at ~20.... To dealing 600+ damage
If you want a non-TF2 example of output randomness: Street Fighter 2 had random damage and stun, all the way up to the final and most competitively played version, Super Turbo. Later SF games very much did not. I don't know that any other fighting games in general did.
“Luck merely reduces the returns you get from skill” certainly sounds like an oppositional relationship, but maybe that statement will be clarified in the video.
I felt they explained it well; basically it's saying that the more randomness a game has, the longer it takes to reliably determine who the better player/s is/are.
It dimishes returns on skill, but does not eliminate it. An opposing force means if the game was 100% random, then there is 0% skill. Blackjack is a highly random game. Multiple decks (is going by casino so people can't count cards) are shuffled together. You are then dealt 2 random cards and the dealer is dealt 2 random cards. The only time skill comes into play is if you hit, which draws the next random card or stay. Yet despite the game being highly random, you can still develop good enough skills to win a lot of the time. You can tell a bad blackjack player vs a good one. Same with poker.
@@benvictim To be clearer, I meant oppositional in the sense of there being tension between the two, since a particularly lucky draw can let the worse player beat the better player, not in the sense of a strict opposition. If one factor presence diminishes another factor's value, in proportion to the degree to which the first is present, that's a form of opposition, at least in the way I understand the word. I figured they would probably go into more detail in the video, but I didn't have time to watch any of it at the time because they uploaded on my lunch break, so I wanted to voice my confusion on that particular point in case they somehow didn't address it.
@@thejollyrajamtg9847which means that for determining the winner of a single match, skill plays less of a role in games with high luck/randomness. Q.E.D.
@@jacobd1984 Unless I misunderstood something, they just meant the two weren't directly disproportionale. It's not "for each 1 unit of randomness, the game becomes 1 unit less skilled". Especially, randomness can allow for more skill *expression* , even if that doesn't result in skill *reward* .
I can't speak to AOS or Warhammer Fantasy, but 40K actually has an extremely active competitive scene. The Line of Sight rules were changed at the start of 8th edition and iterated since then to make them more concrete so it's less of what you were describing where you need to negotiate at the table which things are and are not visible. As for randomness, I absolutely agree with your distinction between input and output randomness, but I feel like the way you describe the game systems makes it sound like players are bound to the whims of dice without much agency, which is far from true. A huge element of the strategy of the game is based on positioning your units such that they benefit from auras from your other units, and managing your command points to try and make sure that all of your buffs go off. I'd compare it more to CEDH than anything, where you are creating a strategy and managing resources to create consistency in the face of randomness.
Oh interesting. I haven’t played 40k in like 10 years so it’s interesting to hear they have moved in a more precise direction. It wasn’t really our intention to make it seem like players are 100% subject to the output randomness. The distinction really is that you’re making a critical decision with an unknown outcome. You can attempt to narrow the possibility space of that outcome to near certainty, but there will still be some amount of unknown.
@@distractionmakers That distinction makes sense and is correct to identify! At the higher levels of play, it's all about creating a strategy that is as resistant to randomness as possible. In the same way that MtG players create decks that maximize what they can do with any given hand and use mechanics like mulligans and deck thinning to tip the probability in their favor, 40K players use command points and character abilities to ensure that damage is going through or resisted.
Heroclix was my game of choice for so long. Sure, there were lame strategies that pulled back on randomness (LAMP was automatic damage), but they literally built mechanics around preventing this specific thing, and have so many weird ways to be clever about positioning that really made it more than the die rolls. You can always roll snake eyes, there is always RISK no matter how good your plan is, but... well, that's part of why it felt so good casually. You get those wild moments where someone beats the odds, that makes stories. That makes you consider plan B instead of going all in. And I loved it for that. (Also any game where I can have a legion of zombies led by Dead Eddie from the Trooper album cover is alright in my book)
I'm glad you guys are finding a way to monetize these (the playmats obv). I know with such a niche market, the ad revenue likely isn't much. Good job, boys.
The luckiest you could possibly be in a game of magic, in my opinion, Is when another player makes you shuffle a card back into your library, and you shuffle well, and somehow manage to top deck the exact same card they tried to deal with that way. And then you slam it back down and watch them have a meltdown.
I’ve played 2 games competitively with luck. Competitive Pokémon singles and mtg. Anyone that has ever played Pokémon knows. At times it can be so unbearable and out of your control. At least in magic it’s like having bad draw, which you can at least control a bit with deck building. In Pokémon it’s like a random critical hit that kills your Pokémon and swings the whole game . Freezing multiple Pokémon on your team with a 10% chance freeze move. Getting flinched into getting paralyzed into missing your high accuracy move. These type of things happen way too often in Pokémon. I think magic is a good amount of luck.
Another point. Once I played with the literal #1 rankled player for singles on the ladder.. Literally sat down and built a viable team and had him ghost me. We lost multiple games due to misses, sleep turns, paralysis, crits, etc. I was low ladder, about 800 points under him. At times he completely took over and made the decisions. We played like 5 games. This shouldn’t not happen in a good competitive game.
I appreciate how Luck can occasionally amplify or itself be part of skill. Risk Assessment/Management, whatever you want to call it, is a pretty important TCG skill. Do they have it? Can you afford to play around a random card in that may or may not be in their hand. Do you have to play in a way to draw a specific card from your random deck? Respecting variance is an important part of these games. ps: play fab lmao
IMO the defining thing that determines if a player likes the input or output randomness is the player's ability to interact with the randomness. Input randomness inherently has player interaction and allows the player to make choices based on the variance. Meanwhile output randomness interacts with the player's choice and can even invalidate the entire decision. In TCG terms, bad output randomness is like the system itself counterspelling you. Which feels worse than an opposing player. Bad input randomness, bricking your hand over and over like that MtG competition story, can feel really bad too but it feels more abstracted than output randomness in terms of system (imo). So good output randomness would allow the player something for failing and/or an ability to interact with the roll. Make it a new interaction point for players and it can be fun.
I will say i really like the new mulligan rules the extra decision points of what to keep and what to bottom makes it a very engaging process even more so than the mulligan is usually. and it almost accidentally made certain very specific strategies better.
Like how Hearthstone has cards that generate a random card from the collectible card pool. Which card you get is random, but it is also a new decision point for the player.
Pokemon mentioned so i get to weigh in! One thing that may or may not be relevant to the luck/skill/psychology is cost of competitive. My understanding is that standard MTG is prohibitively expensive at the very top end. Whereas in Pokemon, last year's world's winning deck cost $60, which is still the high end for ptcg decks. When all players have reasonable access to all cards, the perceived skill gap can shrink, and the "competitive buckets" get larger, and there are less "tiers" of player skill at the table itself, for better or worse. However, this also introduces a factor that this episode didn't really focus on (not a criticism), which is deckbuilding and deck choice. The game outside of the game in competitive pokémon is the meta-call (i assume MTG has this too, don't get me wrong), but again, because top end cards are so accessible, and tournaments are 2500+ people large, the skill expression of the best players often comes before the tournament even starts.
Pokemon has one of the highest elements of luck due to having so many cards that involve coin flips. The designers intentionally wanted luck to be a major part of the game because they wanted younger, and likely less skilled players, to be able to win games. If they lose all the time, they'd quit playing. On the converse, Pokemon is also one of the most linear games due to the omnipresence of search effects and free card draw. You can and will always have your best Pokemon in every game. That's not true in Magic--you need to be able to win games without your deck's signature cards because tutor effects are something R&D has said they want to limit. Heck, I once went a 4-round tournament not drawing one of the best cards in my deck in a single match. Still went 3-1 doing that. Regarding card access, this is not an actual issue at competitive events in any format of Magic. People who don't have the cards they need don't generally enter. Even in the game's most expensive formats (which are EXPENSIVE), if you go in thinking "These cards are too expensive so no one will have them," you will be very very wrong. You'll see some of people making budget choices at weekly LGS events but not that many; at larger events, this is quite rare as the high entry fee discourages people from spending that much to play when they know they haven't got the cards. (You can argue that there's an accessibility issue with comp Magic but that's not what you're going for here. You're talking about how everyone who plays has the best cards. That's still true in Magic.)
@@JD-gk7eh Hey thanks for the discussion, because I'm on the internet, please read everything I'm about to write in good faith, I'm not here to argue or belittle. I may be overexplaining if you know Pokemon, but I'm laying this out for people who don't. 1. Luck: the coin flip argument is a little outdated in the competitive scene. The world championships is this weekend, and there are 2 cards that involve a coin flip that will likely see play in 2 very specific decks. These two decks are both considered subpar choices in the current meta, and even within these decks, there are contingencies for when the flips fail. In past formats, there have been card combos that mitigate the luck of coinflips (cards allowing reflips), but these are combos in which the ability to tutor out all the pieces in one turn is not possible, because the payoff is too great. However, I will concede that pokemons lack of optional mulligan is a big "luck" factor that often goes overlooked and should be fixed, but it also creates a deckbuilding challenge in and of itself to create decks that don't produce dead starting hands often. Ultimately, I would point out that if luck was a dominating factor of the competitive scene, Bo3 pokemon would see new champions at these 2,500+ people tournaments all the time. As it stands, there are maybe 50 people in the room that actually have a shot, and repeat winners and especially top 16ers are extremely common (this isn't as true in Japanese Bo1 tournaments of the same size). This idea of repeat champions and consistent top 4s also holds true at the local level, which suggests that skill, over the long haul, is still much more important than luck. 2. Strength of draw/tutor: I think the misunderstanding here might be the same as when I talk to my MTG friend irl, in that MTG players sometimes think of pokemon as "simpler MTG". We're playing two different games, with two different board state systems, so it's hard to discuss in plain terms. Simplest example may be to say that in many of the best decks and games, ptcg players are managing the value of the prize race against the value of eliminating the opponents ability to draw or tutor (many signature pokemon are two prizers, while many supporting pokemon are one prizers). This leads to interesting decision trees because players have access to most of their possible lines of play... until they don't. I'm not saying MTG doesn't have its own version of this, I'm just pointing out where the intricacies of ptcg can lie. Pokemon also lacks a sideboarding component, which means that a skill of the game is to deckbuild balancing consistency and flexibility to match up against EVERY deck in the room the best you can, which is a skill expression that can only exist due to tutoring strength paired with lack of sideboard. This is not a value judgement on either game, it is just a core difference of the games that needs to be understood. 3. Card access: I guess what I'm getting at here is that the competitive scene of MTG is dominated by people who take MTG seriously enough to shell out that money. Obviously these people are skilled too, don't get me wrong. You point out the accessibility issue, and that is actually what I'm speaking to in a roundabout way, because it can possibly complicate Magic's "competitive buckets." Broadly at the whole community level, there may exist tiers for "good at the game," "good enough to spend lots of money on the game," and "Good enough to win at the highest level amongst those who spend money on the game." Whereas pokemon's buckets are more straightforwardly "bad-okay-good-best." From the outside looking in, this could appear to be a lack of skill gap. Again, thanks for weighing in. I love to have an excuse to yap about card games.
@@cody2teach277 I'd also like to chime in and say Magic has so many various formats being played all over the place that it's kind of a poor comparison. Some of the most competitive formats you need 4x of a really pricey card that hasn't been printed in a decade or more. Magic has a similar low barrier to entry in Standard to Pokemon, but once you jump out of that category it starts to get muddied.
@@JD-gk7eh Coin flips are gone in the modern meta. Luck matters a lot less than you think too. The skill ceiling in the game right now is very high The game is not linear at all. If you think that, you clearly haven't played it much competitively. Some decks are more linear, but some are very non-linear and toolboxy Isn't players not attending events proving the game is prohibitively expensive and gatekeeps potential good players?
A friend of mine and I were talking about the sense of hope that Mark Rosewater attributes to the psychological benefit of luck-based variance in a game like Magic. However, we noted that while luck is a factor in any game with a random set, like TCGs, there are times where the hope provided to the player with lower skill often comes at the despair of the player with higher skill. That example of the pro-Magic player mulliganing down to 4 cards and just having a non-game at the top tables is incredibly demoralizing, even for seasoned players who are not use to naming “bad luck” as the reason they lost.
I think that placing the acceptance on the higher skill player makes more sense. LSV knows how much luck is involved in mtg and was not upset by the loss. Acceptance of luck is part of becoming a better mtg player. When we remove luck to benefit the more skilled players we are asking the less skilled to accept that they will lose a ton before they are good enough to have a meaningful game.
Luck vs skill is currently a hot topic in flesh and blood. I don't play Magic the Gathering anymore, but I still enjoy listening to this about game design
Watched almost every video on your channel, great content! I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about resource systems, advantages / disadvantages and how to generally approach them as a designer. That would be golden :D
I find it interesting that people talk about Magic as if it has been consistent in ANY way throughout the years. Theres SO MUCH variance! Between introduced sets, power levels and power creep, used mechanics in a particular format, etc etc. People not in the know see Magic as a stable thing, whrn in reality, Magic at any point in time cannot truly be compared to itself from another moment..
That four hand mulligan is one of the reasons I love Dragon Ball Super and One Piece's mulligan systems. DBS you get a single partial mulligan and One Piece gets one free mulligan. They also have more reasonable resource systems. With DBS, after you draw, you choose a card in your hand to turn into energy which becomes a land that you can use. In OP, you have DON!! which you have 10 specific cards set aside from your main deck, but they are quite flexible in use; they can pay for cost, they can be attached to a character or leader to give them a boost of power during your turn, some cards get additional effects from attached DON!! cards, and some effects return DON!! cards for effects. There's also the flavor of DON!! representing impactful moments in One Piece which are given the DON!! onomatopoeia in the background to make it more striking in the manga.
I've noticed that the quiet est expression of I just got unlucky in flesh and blood is when the person that loses at the end of game flips over the next four cards of their deck... Basically, since most Heroes have an intellect of four and will draw four cards, they're saying oh the next turn I could have done something awesome but it didn't happen
The issue with luck vs skill in games ultimately comes down to how it plays out in tournaments, as touched on briefly with the LSV story. Any time there is something on the line it will be a feelsbad when luck affects outcomes more than one would like, and especially with how tournaments are structured for most games it can be pretty crushing. There are no "regular season matches" in most games, especially tabletop games, where one can average out their winrate over the season and be rewarded with a placement based on that. Instead, players need to show up to events and do well on that day, usually to an unreasonable degree when all is considered, and luck will often play a factor in games with high degrees of variance such as TCGs, lending to the popular phrase "better to be lucky than good" in such environments. Even if one tallies up their overall winrate for the year and they have an 80% winrate overall, they could lose one or two games per event and never make any waves with that winrate if the events are swiss rounds with top cuts. It is very possible to go 6-2 on the day and miss top 8 on breakers if the event is large enough, for instance. 6-2 is a great record! It sadly just doesn't usually pay out most events. Even "ranked" ladder systems don't tend to reward players for consistency, and rather ask players to have win streaks to rank up; its obviously better than the swiss round example but still infamously demoralizing to lose in games when you are right on the cusp of ranking up. So TL;DR: I think that a lot of blame gets placed on variance that is probably just being redirected away from competitive event structures where the blame belongs.
An element which you kind of touched on is really how much control you have over interacting with the variance. Take MTG, variance in what you can top deck in an ordinary game is very low, then you see cards like Sensei's Divining Top being so powerful as it lets you steer the main randomness. In Warhammer and XCOM, you have control of how to apply the randomness. You could roll high and hit, but maybe there is a statistically better option to take; even bonuses for not taking an action instead might be better. This is a problem of the agency of randomness and difference between strategic and tactical games. Magic is strategy; each player has a plan and the ability to execute that plan as a whole determines the winner. Tactical decisions like what to counter or destroy are largely determined by overall game knowledge. You win and lose by who has the stronger deck, and how the top decking unfolds between otherwise equal players. 40K and XCOM are tactical; you are given a complete toolset and need to make decisions on the fly to best execute the objectives. Each player has near complete knowledge of what their opponent has at their disposal, so it comes down to how to minimise the risk of a bad roll. In Magic, naturally, you have limited control over the randomness of your own deck and near no control over your opponents. In 40K/XCOM, you have control of how to apply the randomness of taking a shot, or choose not to. Another way to look at is Civilisation VS Age of Empires/Startcraft. Macro decisions in Civ can determine a games output much more than stronger micro will win in AoE/SC with otherwise equally skilled players.
There's also a skill perceived as luck. Playing 3 cups it's a great example. Some perceive it as a luck game, some perceive it as skill, but really it's a different skill removing variance from one side of players. 😊 So the game revolvers about mitigate the variance to a minimum by skill. At least until you get caught - then it's skill vs skill :)
As a Flesh and Blood player, I think 11:20 is an issue the game is currently grappling with (catering more to competitive players vs casual). They're still developing a PVE mode, and fanmade versions of those exist, but the brand and game system itself is leaning towards competition, high skill, and low variance. So yeah, looking forward to that Flesh and Blood video haha. :)
A favorite tcg of mine is Cardfight Vanguard. Often dismissed as an "all luck, no skill" game but the game is designed with the random element in mind and player actions can make what looks like a blowout a victory. Trigger checks being a big part of the game, revealing cards off the top and activating effects depending on if the card has an icon, but the way guarding works and the numbers means you can ensure that a trigger doesn't cause unnecessary hits or a loss. Even the one doing the checks has to consider how the effects are applied to better optimize their deck's attack plan in the event of a damage check changing numbers. The one thing I will give you though is the existence of the Over Trigger. It doesn't feel good to hit on offense or defense and some decks just crapout with the giant wall it suddenly builds. The only saving grace is it's just a one-of. But I will add in the years playing the game with OTs in both standard and premium formats it was pretty rare the OT ruined any games and some games it didn't matter it was checked at all.
I would almost argue that it's sort of like detection Theory in signal processing where there is a signal you're attempting to locate in additive white gaussian noise and you have to account for the noise and the probability of false positives. When you're determining what threshold to set for a detection. I.e you have to account for the probability of a false detect in your threshold of success
Generally, we assume additive white gaussian noise has a zero mean and because it's a gaussian probability density, the average will be the underlying signal.... Therefore, given an unbiased estimate, the Cramer Rao lower bound on the variance of estimating. The underlying parameter will decrease as the number of samples increase, I.e the more samples you average in the lower, the noise contributes and the more likely you are to come to an actual estimate of the underlying value
That’s exactly the way to think about it. You’re adding noise to the data collection. The right amount is the amount your players will tolerate. As you pointed out, you need more data to see through the noise, which means more games need to be played before you can determine who is better.
Part of the issue i think with having that randomness is it can hide when you lost or your luck lost. With games that are only skill or more skill it can be very clear where that line is drawn
I think for most people, that is the opposite of a problem. For people who aren't trying to go pro, they appreciate being able to blame luck. And for people trying to go pro, you try to overcome luck through deck building and skill.
There are tabletop games with much tighter rules than Warhammer, and for those games, at least in their respective heydays, top players take the competitive scene much more seriously. All much smaller than Warhammer, but Guild Ball, Warmachine, and Marvel: Crisis Protocol come to mind. All of these use output randomness primarily.
I just played a Bo3 in standard and drew 2 of my lands in my first 23 cards. Lost that game and then was locked out of a color for four turns next game so lost the match. Overall upsetting but it happened twice out of 30ish games so not too terrible 😂
Maybe someone has already pointed this out, but in terms of output/input randomness, historically Hearthstone had cards in it like Crackle, which dealt 2-6 damage, with the amount being randomly decided. Over time though, they've clearly realized that players didn't like playing a Crackle on a 4 health minion, only for the spell to deal 3 damage. But cards that generate random cards, draw a random card from your deck or summon random minions are still made, maybe more now than they used to, presumably because it has more decision points or because they're randomness allows for more unique outcomes. Also, I'm not certain how much the Pokémon designers design their Pokémon for the casual crowd relative to the competitive crowd. I'd imagine most Pokémon ideas are casual-oriented (like what it looks like), but their mechanics are competitive oriented. Unless you were talking about the Pokémon TCG, not VGC, then I just misunderstood.
I don't think output randomness is *bad* for a competitive game, but mitigation strategies need to be very clear amd very common. For example, if I know that a specific decision will result in me having to take bad odds, I should have access to a suboptimal but more reliable option in the majority of cases, and I should know what that option is and what its specific differential impacts are compared to my default option. Risk mitigation is a legitimate aspect of skill, the same is true in input randomness games, so making that a focus can make things feel much more skillful. A good example in a non-competitive context is a Fire Emblem etc. style combat system. Damage is fixed, so for any given scenario you only have to consider 2 (or maybe 3 if crit chance is involved) outcome branches for a given combat, it's a hit or it's a miss. That's reasonable to parse, elegant, and makes tactical decisions based on randomness clear and impactful. Compare that to something like D&D where, for the majority of actions, there can be dozens of potential outcomes. That's unreasonable to parse, not elegant, and makes specific tactical decisions based on randomness harder to make, especially when multiple instances of randomness intersect. D&D can still be tactical, but at the coarse/intuitive/vibes level. You know what generally good decisions are, but thats because of general heuristics and knowledge of the systems and/or mechanics. It's not because you actually worked through the potential outcomes in your head. Which is more reasonable in hit/miss style systems.
viarence gives for game freedom while skill makes a game worth playing. a lot of TCG design goes into design of keeping varience at the level where it does not undermine skill too much. thats why lower power level formats are generally better balanced when each indivitial bit of viarence is not important each game can be different without 99.99% of games being decided by luck.
Suprasingly many 1v1 miniature wargames don’t take high-level play seriously. Especially historicals, that try to translate facts about units or formations of certian period to game rules rather tham design balanced game.
Manipulating player perception is an interesting topic. For the XCOM example, clicking "Shoot (95%)" and missing is annoying, but you can just click it again. It starts to feel unfair when there are severe consequences for missing randomly. However, you could back up to an earlier decision point. Running a unit into danger and having to make six consecutive shots to save him is a mistake that generates a lot of good tension. You feel awful when you recognize it, and if you don't miss, you feel lucky. I wonder if there are good ways to encourage players to recognize risk, and not have them think "80% is more than half, I don't need to consider what happens if I miss." Reset the whole game when they fail a level? Maybe not... It reminds of a different design problem where players play platformers too slow and carefully. Moving fast is fun, but risky. Do players become more risk-averse when they feel more agency in the results?
If given the choice, players will optimize the fun out of your game. It is the responsibility of the game designer to ensure that the most efficient way to play your game is as fun as possible.
EDH exacerbates the luck dilemma because every deck either runs 20 cards that do the most important thing or the deck and/or a suite of fetch cards that get you the cards you need at best or reduce the number of cards in the deck at worst
Any game with some rng has a skill component in accounting for rng and ensuring you are in good position regardless. Like in Magic deckbuilding and factoring draw odds is a skill. As someone who prefers lower luck games and being able to see my own improvement in play or skill difference vs opponents, the unfortunate part (to me, anyways) is that skill effect is not easily captured within a small set of matches. Did you play the odds as best you could and get unlucky or did you fail to account for it properly? And if you did account for it and they still get lucky, it seems more disappointing to lose, like the Magic player mulliganing to 4. Looking at poker, the high variance is what keeps more losers playing, but those same people also consider being drawn out on to be the most frustrating loss possible. I struggle to get in to poker because every time I try I get turned off by the fact there is very little positive feedback learning reinforcement between taking the mathematically correct action and end result.
I think most players are not screwed solely by variance. Unless you are a MTG god, who always makes the right decision in deck construction and in play, then there is always something you could have done to improve your chances of winning, even with variance. The example they used is so notable because it is so rare. To have two players, more or less equally skilled and with not much room for improvement, and one loses to pure variance like that is like a Tornado or Shark attack. Rare as hell, but over-scrutinized. Most people who complain about variance or luck are just coping, and need to get better at deck construction and playing to their outs. Now, I don't think everyone needs to be a try hard at Magic, but I also don't think people should castigate Magic for luck when they are not good enough.
I have to correct Forrest here. Pokemon has just put in a lot more money into their tournament structure. Because of this it is getting really competitive. There are some more casual players that go to tournaments but the competitive scene is strong.
I agree luck is important (I don't have much). I think skill can Carry you far more consistently but luck will get you the furthest occasionally depending on how lucky you are😅 I personally have had to grind through sealed events with next to no rares in my deck more often then not 🤷 still have fun tho
What do you guys think about 1v1 commander? I’ve, primarily, played 1v1. Standard 4person free4all is great; however, I can’t reliably go to a Shop or get 4 pps together. I really enjoy the 1v1 environment just as much …. If not more… than the free for all. I like the lack politics & collusion … just the skill & heart of the cards ;p
Hello Forrest, are you planning to sell pillage the bog artist proofs on your website? I love the art and want to hang up a large print with the proof on my wall.
There is a difference between playing a game casually, and playing a chaotic random mess. Most CASUAL magic players dont want lucky determining the winner of their casual marches.
Most CASUAL magic players need to get better at building decks, including mana bases and curving out. The chaotic random mess can be the result of bad deck building. It's like how in Commander, it's a singleton format, but people play so many redundant effects and tutors that it really isn't singleton. You can remove variance through skill, not just in play, but in deck construction.
@@shorewall My point was specifically about them saying reducing randomness makes the game less apealing to the casual players. Wich I don't believe to be the case.
I think a big difference between luck and skill is when you loose. "I lost, but if I had taken this other action, I could've won", feel better than "I lost and there's literally nothing I could've done about it". Of course magic is different because it's a deck building game, you're mistake may not've been in gameplay, but perhaps in deck building
I think the deck building skill is majority responsible for removing variance. Skill in play has some result in removing variance, and then finally there will always be some variance left over. Knowing that is also part of skill. Complaining about variance is not a skill. :D
I think the Input vs Output Randomness distinction is a bit of red herring. Is my initial 7 cards I draw in Magic (or any other time I draw a card) input randomness? Obviously not! I chose the 60 cards in the deck and that determines what I end up drawing in the game. The "critical choice" was what cards I put in my deck. Is the coin flip from Invert Polarity output randomness or is it input randomness for the board state after the counterspell? Sure, the coinflip happens after I make the choice to counter the spell, but it happens before the next decision I make in the game, which is also hopefully a meaningful one. I think the important thing at the end of the day is that the variance is limited such that after the game players feel like the game result was determined by skill more than luck. Like you said, the rando-chess example would be a bad game. Still a very high skill game where the best players will rise to the top and hits in that 15-20% upset ratio, but feels terrible because when the result is determined by luck there was no counter play. It seems to me that the more luck-based results a game has the more the most important skill is mitigating unlucky outcomes. In XCOM for instance, if you watch really good players, the rationale for their actions is always "Assuming the worst, am I still in a ok state?" It is still a high skill game, but the main skill is mitigating the unlucky outcomes.
I hate to be that guy but Team Fortress 2 Still has random cross enabled on official servers. It’s been a contentious issue in the playerbase for decades whether or not they’re healthy for the game. However it seems Valve has probably kept them since they’ve basically become infamously iconic to the game’s identity.
@@distractionmakers i don't know if i can agree with that. maybe they were rebalanced, but melee weapons had their crit chance increased from one of the earlier builds. you can tell if you ever play one of the original unadulterated console versions.
I know this is also sort of the schism people feel between "Ameri-Trash" board games that generally rely on die and randomness, vs "German/European" board games that tend to not have sort of dice level randomness.
@@distractionmakers They are often removed in community run servers, but it’s still around in Valve run casual servers. To quote a common chat bind, “Random Crits are Fair and Balanced.”
Competitive TF2 removes crits and random spread, but comp tf2 has always been a microscopic percentage of the community. It was relatively popular for community servers too.
As a casual player who hates randomness in magic (specially garbage gambing mechanics like discover) I enjoy the competitive side more and only play draft and standard bo3 cause it minimizes the amount of randomness into the game while keeing the small amount it needs.
Discover and Cascade are only "gambling" mechanics, if the content of your deck is random. In Pioneer and Modern both mechanics have actually contributed to very successful and very deterministic decks.
@@MischievousCassowary In bo1 standrad those mechanics can't be build like those older formats. Not everyone is into broken combos hahaha but in standard were there is less cards to manipulate the hit, discover decks are 100% fully gambling decks is all about if i hit win if i dont lose always. Makes the game experience completely pointless is worst solitare than a moderrn combo deck When no inputs is needed (deck building, card casting, desicion making) and is all about hit win wiff lose..... yeah!!! BTW there is a reason why cascade got hit in the ban list. we need to admit both cascade and discover are bad designs.
@@bladorac I definitely agree on them being badly designed mechanics, with Cascade even having the dubious honour of being one of the few mechanics to get an errata (besides things I consider complete reworks like mana burn and damage stack). And I must admit I have no experience with contemporary Standard and definitely not as a Best of One Format (probably popular in Arena? never touched that one though). But I would imagine that Bo1 by itself must be already very swingy, in which case I can agree that it is probably even worse with mechanics like these around.
@@MischievousCassowary Bo3 standrard right now is really REALLY good but only bo3 if you wanna avoid the sacky decks. Rotation was a much needed fresh air after 3 years of emperor deluge control and raffine midrange :P. Also domain decks nowhere to be seen in arena atm, idk if it is the new cards but so far 1 atraxa since BLB release in bo3 rank (Platinum/Diamond). People started the mono black discard deck but it failed hard, i went tons of win only 1 lose in that matchup but today I noticed not a single 1 deck of those. I don't recomend mono black discard.
i think you misunderstood some of the complaints (intentionally or not), i think evrybody knows that magic has variance. because of the mana system and it is being a cardgame with random draws alone are a lot of variance obviously, and i think most of the players are ok with that, cause they choose to play the game. the problem is for a lot of us is too much luck. with magic it means the crazy powercreep (if you have crazy high power level cards that you might draw, every draw could impact the game more), the prioritization of haymaker cards, the mechanics based on luck (like discover), and things like these. I think magic has given up a long time ago to balance the game via card design, and they choose to more and more balance it with luck (and on arena with the matchmaker). it is true that a balanced game, where everyone has a similar chance to win is a better game, but magic is not like that. magic is thinking in winrates on a longer run, so the individual games are very often not balanced (an not really fun) at all. if you and your opponent are playing decently the number of games where what you are doing actually matters are in my opinion around somwhere between 1in10 and 1in5 at best. all the other games are comes down to luck only. from 10 games there are those two or three where you know that you had no chance (bad draw, opponents god tier opening hand, very unfavorable matchup, etc) and there is at least 1 game where you are getting mana screwed or flooded. thats 3-4 games, and there are the other 3-4 games when the bad things are happening to your opponent, when you may think that you are winning because you play better, but thats not the case at all, you just dont see what the opponent struggles with, or you have the unbeatable opening hand, and so on. so where you actually play and not just go through the moves and get a result is maybe 2 games in 10. or less. long story short, its not that magic has luck incorporated, but that it has a little (or way) too much of it.
I think chess is about the only game that has no element of luck. Sports all have luck because there's weather and field conditions. Any time something physical is in the game, there's so many variables that you can't control them all. The ball bounces a certain way and you lose. No amount of skill can control everything.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey everyone! Here's a link to Forrest's Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/forrestimel/five-color-playmat-collection-by-forrest-imel?ref=5pk3n6
I absolutely LOVE the distinction between input and output randomness. You cleared up literal decades worth of confusion as to why I adore Magic and loathe DnD.
They're very different games haha, the amount of output and input variance in each game isn't the only (or even the biggest) difference haha. Also, it should be pointed out that both games have both input and output randomness in them.
This Luck vs Skill thing from Richard Garfield has shaped my attitude in a positive way for every game I've ever played, so I'm glad I got into Magic like that when I was 13.
Play to your outs. Input randomness rocks.
Tf2 still has random critical hits and also has random bullet spread (bullets come out randomly in an area instead of a fixed pattern)
They did have damage spread (a grenade could deal something like 90 - 110 damage instead of 100) and that was removed.
Awesome vid. I think one of the arguments in favor of variance in competitive settings is that it makes the narrative of a match between two players way more compelling. Everyone loves a comeback story, and it's because of the variance of one-sided strong hands or really clutch topdecks that we get to tell tales of "the sickest game of Magic I've ever seen dude!"
I think that at the end of the day all players are equally affected by variance, but better players are able to put themselves in a position where that variance affects them favorably more often.
Great point. There’s a reason why every TCG best moments video are mostly top decks.
Exactly.
Risk management, statistical calculations, and more are just as important of skills compared to your deck building.
1. Love this one, will probably show parts of it to my intro game design course when we do our unit on chance.
2. I think a very important thing about the luck/skill balance is designing around the expectations of your players. A lot of it is genre expectation, but a great deal of player satisfaction with chance has to do with packaging. When you frame output randomness as being a representation of a player failing, they are going to take that as negative, when you frame it ludonarratively as "something happened" they treat it much differently.
One thing about Warhammer despite it's output randomness is that when you're rolling 20-40 dice at a time you get into averages. You're no longer thinking "I just need this one shot," you're thinking "as long as I hit half, and each shot has 2/3 chance of success." Sure over enough games card games have that, but in Warhammer you already get that by default in many situations (not that there aren't instances of needing your big dude to hit that one big shot). As the game progresses and there's fewer units your attacks become more desperate as you are rolling fewer dice at a time. I think for that reason it facilitates the narrative as you talked about fairly well.
One of my most memorable victories came down to pure luck. I had constructed the deck around Delina, Wild Mage and effects to roll multiple times. My board state never stabilized, didn't have my Berserker classes, didn't have haste or treasures... Just Delina. Then I drew one of my targets: Calamity Bearer. Played it swung with Delina copying calamity. Proceeded to roll 15... five times in a row.... Went from dead on board to an opponent at ~20.... To dealing 600+ damage
If you want a non-TF2 example of output randomness: Street Fighter 2 had random damage and stun, all the way up to the final and most competitively played version, Super Turbo. Later SF games very much did not. I don't know that any other fighting games in general did.
“Luck merely reduces the returns you get from skill” certainly sounds like an oppositional relationship, but maybe that statement will be clarified in the video.
I felt they explained it well; basically it's saying that the more randomness a game has, the longer it takes to reliably determine who the better player/s is/are.
It dimishes returns on skill, but does not eliminate it.
An opposing force means if the game was 100% random, then there is 0% skill.
Blackjack is a highly random game. Multiple decks (is going by casino so people can't count cards) are shuffled together. You are then dealt 2 random cards and the dealer is dealt 2 random cards.
The only time skill comes into play is if you hit, which draws the next random card or stay. Yet despite the game being highly random, you can still develop good enough skills to win a lot of the time. You can tell a bad blackjack player vs a good one.
Same with poker.
@@benvictim To be clearer, I meant oppositional in the sense of there being tension between the two, since a particularly lucky draw can let the worse player beat the better player, not in the sense of a strict opposition. If one factor presence diminishes another factor's value, in proportion to the degree to which the first is present, that's a form of opposition, at least in the way I understand the word.
I figured they would probably go into more detail in the video, but I didn't have time to watch any of it at the time because they uploaded on my lunch break, so I wanted to voice my confusion on that particular point in case they somehow didn't address it.
@@thejollyrajamtg9847which means that for determining the winner of a single match, skill plays less of a role in games with high luck/randomness. Q.E.D.
@@jacobd1984 Unless I misunderstood something, they just meant the two weren't directly disproportionale. It's not "for each 1 unit of randomness, the game becomes 1 unit less skilled". Especially, randomness can allow for more skill *expression* , even if that doesn't result in skill *reward* .
I can't speak to AOS or Warhammer Fantasy, but 40K actually has an extremely active competitive scene. The Line of Sight rules were changed at the start of 8th edition and iterated since then to make them more concrete so it's less of what you were describing where you need to negotiate at the table which things are and are not visible. As for randomness, I absolutely agree with your distinction between input and output randomness, but I feel like the way you describe the game systems makes it sound like players are bound to the whims of dice without much agency, which is far from true. A huge element of the strategy of the game is based on positioning your units such that they benefit from auras from your other units, and managing your command points to try and make sure that all of your buffs go off. I'd compare it more to CEDH than anything, where you are creating a strategy and managing resources to create consistency in the face of randomness.
Oh interesting. I haven’t played 40k in like 10 years so it’s interesting to hear they have moved in a more precise direction. It wasn’t really our intention to make it seem like players are 100% subject to the output randomness. The distinction really is that you’re making a critical decision with an unknown outcome. You can attempt to narrow the possibility space of that outcome to near certainty, but there will still be some amount of unknown.
@@distractionmakers That distinction makes sense and is correct to identify! At the higher levels of play, it's all about creating a strategy that is as resistant to randomness as possible. In the same way that MtG players create decks that maximize what they can do with any given hand and use mechanics like mulligans and deck thinning to tip the probability in their favor, 40K players use command points and character abilities to ensure that damage is going through or resisted.
Backgammon is one of the longest lived games more or less based on just its ratio of luck and skill
I was about to comment on Backgammon as well. Hopefully the gentlemen that make this channel will cover it as part of one of their future talks.
Heroclix was my game of choice for so long. Sure, there were lame strategies that pulled back on randomness (LAMP was automatic damage), but they literally built mechanics around preventing this specific thing, and have so many weird ways to be clever about positioning that really made it more than the die rolls.
You can always roll snake eyes, there is always RISK no matter how good your plan is, but... well, that's part of why it felt so good casually. You get those wild moments where someone beats the odds, that makes stories. That makes you consider plan B instead of going all in. And I loved it for that.
(Also any game where I can have a legion of zombies led by Dead Eddie from the Trooper album cover is alright in my book)
I'm glad you guys are finding a way to monetize these (the playmats obv). I know with such a niche market, the ad revenue likely isn't much. Good job, boys.
We actually aren’t running any ads at all haha. Hopefully you’re not seeing ads 😆🤦♂️
@@distractionmakers Oh, I've used YT Premium since they started it (YT Red). I haven't seen an ad on here in literally 9 years
Got ya haha. I was worried for a sec.
The luckiest you could possibly be in a game of magic, in my opinion,
Is when another player makes you shuffle a card back into your library, and you shuffle well, and somehow manage to top deck the exact same card they tried to deal with that way.
And then you slam it back down and watch them have a meltdown.
I’ve witnessed multiple chaos warps instantly replay the card they shuffled in, it has never not been a hilarious disaster
@@nicks4802 the luckiest is when you cut your opponent into fetch land the whole game!
I have watched the Dr G talk on luck vs skill so many times
I’ve played 2 games competitively with luck. Competitive Pokémon singles and mtg. Anyone that has ever played Pokémon knows. At times it can be so unbearable and out of your control. At least in magic it’s like having bad draw, which you can at least control a bit with deck building. In Pokémon it’s like a random critical hit that kills your Pokémon and swings the whole game . Freezing multiple Pokémon on your team with a 10% chance freeze move. Getting flinched into getting paralyzed into missing your high accuracy move. These type of things happen way too often in Pokémon. I think magic is a good amount of luck.
Another point. Once I played with the literal #1 rankled player for singles on the ladder.. Literally sat down and built a viable team and had him ghost me. We lost multiple games due to misses, sleep turns, paralysis, crits, etc. I was low ladder, about 800 points under him. At times he completely took over and made the decisions. We played like 5 games. This shouldn’t not happen in a good competitive game.
I appreciate how Luck can occasionally amplify or itself be part of skill. Risk Assessment/Management, whatever you want to call it, is a pretty important TCG skill. Do they have it? Can you afford to play around a random card in that may or may not be in their hand. Do you have to play in a way to draw a specific card from your random deck? Respecting variance is an important part of these games.
ps: play fab lmao
IMO the defining thing that determines if a player likes the input or output randomness is the player's ability to interact with the randomness.
Input randomness inherently has player interaction and allows the player to make choices based on the variance. Meanwhile output randomness interacts with the player's choice and can even invalidate the entire decision. In TCG terms, bad output randomness is like the system itself counterspelling you. Which feels worse than an opposing player.
Bad input randomness, bricking your hand over and over like that MtG competition story, can feel really bad too but it feels more abstracted than output randomness in terms of system (imo). So good output randomness would allow the player something for failing and/or an ability to interact with the roll. Make it a new interaction point for players and it can be fun.
I will say i really like the new mulligan rules the extra decision points of what to keep and what to bottom makes it a very engaging process even more so than the mulligan is usually. and it almost accidentally made certain very specific strategies better.
Like how Hearthstone has cards that generate a random card from the collectible card pool. Which card you get is random, but it is also a new decision point for the player.
Pokemon mentioned so i get to weigh in! One thing that may or may not be relevant to the luck/skill/psychology is cost of competitive. My understanding is that standard MTG is prohibitively expensive at the very top end. Whereas in Pokemon, last year's world's winning deck cost $60, which is still the high end for ptcg decks. When all players have reasonable access to all cards, the perceived skill gap can shrink, and the "competitive buckets" get larger, and there are less "tiers" of player skill at the table itself, for better or worse. However, this also introduces a factor that this episode didn't really focus on (not a criticism), which is deckbuilding and deck choice. The game outside of the game in competitive pokémon is the meta-call (i assume MTG has this too, don't get me wrong), but again, because top end cards are so accessible, and tournaments are 2500+ people large, the skill expression of the best players often comes before the tournament even starts.
Pokemon has one of the highest elements of luck due to having so many cards that involve coin flips. The designers intentionally wanted luck to be a major part of the game because they wanted younger, and likely less skilled players, to be able to win games. If they lose all the time, they'd quit playing.
On the converse, Pokemon is also one of the most linear games due to the omnipresence of search effects and free card draw. You can and will always have your best Pokemon in every game. That's not true in Magic--you need to be able to win games without your deck's signature cards because tutor effects are something R&D has said they want to limit. Heck, I once went a 4-round tournament not drawing one of the best cards in my deck in a single match. Still went 3-1 doing that.
Regarding card access, this is not an actual issue at competitive events in any format of Magic. People who don't have the cards they need don't generally enter. Even in the game's most expensive formats (which are EXPENSIVE), if you go in thinking "These cards are too expensive so no one will have them," you will be very very wrong. You'll see some of people making budget choices at weekly LGS events but not that many; at larger events, this is quite rare as the high entry fee discourages people from spending that much to play when they know they haven't got the cards. (You can argue that there's an accessibility issue with comp Magic but that's not what you're going for here. You're talking about how everyone who plays has the best cards. That's still true in Magic.)
@@JD-gk7eh Hey thanks for the discussion, because I'm on the internet, please read everything I'm about to write in good faith, I'm not here to argue or belittle. I may be overexplaining if you know Pokemon, but I'm laying this out for people who don't.
1. Luck: the coin flip argument is a little outdated in the competitive scene. The world championships is this weekend, and there are 2 cards that involve a coin flip that will likely see play in 2 very specific decks. These two decks are both considered subpar choices in the current meta, and even within these decks, there are contingencies for when the flips fail. In past formats, there have been card combos that mitigate the luck of coinflips (cards allowing reflips), but these are combos in which the ability to tutor out all the pieces in one turn is not possible, because the payoff is too great. However, I will concede that pokemons lack of optional mulligan is a big "luck" factor that often goes overlooked and should be fixed, but it also creates a deckbuilding challenge in and of itself to create decks that don't produce dead starting hands often. Ultimately, I would point out that if luck was a dominating factor of the competitive scene, Bo3 pokemon would see new champions at these 2,500+ people tournaments all the time. As it stands, there are maybe 50 people in the room that actually have a shot, and repeat winners and especially top 16ers are extremely common (this isn't as true in Japanese Bo1 tournaments of the same size). This idea of repeat champions and consistent top 4s also holds true at the local level, which suggests that skill, over the long haul, is still much more important than luck.
2. Strength of draw/tutor: I think the misunderstanding here might be the same as when I talk to my MTG friend irl, in that MTG players sometimes think of pokemon as "simpler MTG". We're playing two different games, with two different board state systems, so it's hard to discuss in plain terms. Simplest example may be to say that in many of the best decks and games, ptcg players are managing the value of the prize race against the value of eliminating the opponents ability to draw or tutor (many signature pokemon are two prizers, while many supporting pokemon are one prizers). This leads to interesting decision trees because players have access to most of their possible lines of play... until they don't. I'm not saying MTG doesn't have its own version of this, I'm just pointing out where the intricacies of ptcg can lie. Pokemon also lacks a sideboarding component, which means that a skill of the game is to deckbuild balancing consistency and flexibility to match up against EVERY deck in the room the best you can, which is a skill expression that can only exist due to tutoring strength paired with lack of sideboard. This is not a value judgement on either game, it is just a core difference of the games that needs to be understood.
3. Card access: I guess what I'm getting at here is that the competitive scene of MTG is dominated by people who take MTG seriously enough to shell out that money. Obviously these people are skilled too, don't get me wrong. You point out the accessibility issue, and that is actually what I'm speaking to in a roundabout way, because it can possibly complicate Magic's "competitive buckets." Broadly at the whole community level, there may exist tiers for "good at the game," "good enough to spend lots of money on the game," and "Good enough to win at the highest level amongst those who spend money on the game." Whereas pokemon's buckets are more straightforwardly "bad-okay-good-best." From the outside looking in, this could appear to be a lack of skill gap.
Again, thanks for weighing in. I love to have an excuse to yap about card games.
@@cody2teach277 I'd also like to chime in and say Magic has so many various formats being played all over the place that it's kind of a poor comparison. Some of the most competitive formats you need 4x of a really pricey card that hasn't been printed in a decade or more. Magic has a similar low barrier to entry in Standard to Pokemon, but once you jump out of that category it starts to get muddied.
@@JD-gk7eh Coin flips are gone in the modern meta. Luck matters a lot less than you think too. The skill ceiling in the game right now is very high
The game is not linear at all. If you think that, you clearly haven't played it much competitively. Some decks are more linear, but some are very non-linear and toolboxy
Isn't players not attending events proving the game is prohibitively expensive and gatekeeps potential good players?
@@Vrir16 Magic doesn't have a low barrier to entry in paper standard tho. Most decks are hundreds of dollars while in pokemon they're like 50 bucks
A friend of mine and I were talking about the sense of hope that Mark Rosewater attributes to the psychological benefit of luck-based variance in a game like Magic. However, we noted that while luck is a factor in any game with a random set, like TCGs, there are times where the hope provided to the player with lower skill often comes at the despair of the player with higher skill. That example of the pro-Magic player mulliganing down to 4 cards and just having a non-game at the top tables is incredibly demoralizing, even for seasoned players who are not use to naming “bad luck” as the reason they lost.
I think that placing the acceptance on the higher skill player makes more sense. LSV knows how much luck is involved in mtg and was not upset by the loss. Acceptance of luck is part of becoming a better mtg player.
When we remove luck to benefit the more skilled players we are asking the less skilled to accept that they will lose a ton before they are good enough to have a meaningful game.
@@distractionmakers That does certainly ruin the new player experience. Also the barrier to entry is quite high
Luck vs skill is currently a hot topic in flesh and blood. I don't play Magic the Gathering anymore, but I still enjoy listening to this about game design
Watched almost every video on your channel, great content! I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about resource systems, advantages / disadvantages and how to generally approach them as a designer.
That would be golden :D
I find it interesting that people talk about Magic as if it has been consistent in ANY way throughout the years.
Theres SO MUCH variance! Between introduced sets, power levels and power creep, used mechanics in a particular format, etc etc.
People not in the know see Magic as a stable thing, whrn in reality, Magic at any point in time cannot truly be compared to itself from another moment..
That four hand mulligan is one of the reasons I love Dragon Ball Super and One Piece's mulligan systems. DBS you get a single partial mulligan and One Piece gets one free mulligan. They also have more reasonable resource systems. With DBS, after you draw, you choose a card in your hand to turn into energy which becomes a land that you can use. In OP, you have DON!! which you have 10 specific cards set aside from your main deck, but they are quite flexible in use; they can pay for cost, they can be attached to a character or leader to give them a boost of power during your turn, some cards get additional effects from attached DON!! cards, and some effects return DON!! cards for effects. There's also the flavor of DON!! representing impactful moments in One Piece which are given the DON!! onomatopoeia in the background to make it more striking in the manga.
I've noticed that the quiet est expression of I just got unlucky in flesh and blood is when the person that loses at the end of game flips over the next four cards of their deck... Basically, since most Heroes have an intellect of four and will draw four cards, they're saying oh the next turn I could have done something awesome but it didn't happen
The issue with luck vs skill in games ultimately comes down to how it plays out in tournaments, as touched on briefly with the LSV story. Any time there is something on the line it will be a feelsbad when luck affects outcomes more than one would like, and especially with how tournaments are structured for most games it can be pretty crushing. There are no "regular season matches" in most games, especially tabletop games, where one can average out their winrate over the season and be rewarded with a placement based on that. Instead, players need to show up to events and do well on that day, usually to an unreasonable degree when all is considered, and luck will often play a factor in games with high degrees of variance such as TCGs, lending to the popular phrase "better to be lucky than good" in such environments. Even if one tallies up their overall winrate for the year and they have an 80% winrate overall, they could lose one or two games per event and never make any waves with that winrate if the events are swiss rounds with top cuts. It is very possible to go 6-2 on the day and miss top 8 on breakers if the event is large enough, for instance. 6-2 is a great record! It sadly just doesn't usually pay out most events. Even "ranked" ladder systems don't tend to reward players for consistency, and rather ask players to have win streaks to rank up; its obviously better than the swiss round example but still infamously demoralizing to lose in games when you are right on the cusp of ranking up.
So TL;DR: I think that a lot of blame gets placed on variance that is probably just being redirected away from competitive event structures where the blame belongs.
I’ve occasionally wondered if Magic would be better if you got to sculpt your opening hand then shuffling, it would create interesting play patterns.
Lame, assemble your combo every time.
@@shorewall knowing you’re opponent either has theirs or interaction?
An element which you kind of touched on is really how much control you have over interacting with the variance.
Take MTG, variance in what you can top deck in an ordinary game is very low, then you see cards like Sensei's Divining Top being so powerful as it lets you steer the main randomness.
In Warhammer and XCOM, you have control of how to apply the randomness. You could roll high and hit, but maybe there is a statistically better option to take; even bonuses for not taking an action instead might be better.
This is a problem of the agency of randomness and difference between strategic and tactical games.
Magic is strategy; each player has a plan and the ability to execute that plan as a whole determines the winner. Tactical decisions like what to counter or destroy are largely determined by overall game knowledge. You win and lose by who has the stronger deck, and how the top decking unfolds between otherwise equal players.
40K and XCOM are tactical; you are given a complete toolset and need to make decisions on the fly to best execute the objectives. Each player has near complete knowledge of what their opponent has at their disposal, so it comes down to how to minimise the risk of a bad roll.
In Magic, naturally, you have limited control over the randomness of your own deck and near no control over your opponents.
In 40K/XCOM, you have control of how to apply the randomness of taking a shot, or choose not to.
Another way to look at is Civilisation VS Age of Empires/Startcraft. Macro decisions in Civ can determine a games output much more than stronger micro will win in AoE/SC with otherwise equally skilled players.
There's also a skill perceived as luck. Playing 3 cups it's a great example. Some perceive it as a luck game, some perceive it as skill, but really it's a different skill removing variance from one side of players. 😊 So the game revolvers about mitigate the variance to a minimum by skill. At least until you get caught - then it's skill vs skill :)
As a Flesh and Blood player, I think 11:20 is an issue the game is currently grappling with (catering more to competitive players vs casual). They're still developing a PVE mode, and fanmade versions of those exist, but the brand and game system itself is leaning towards competition, high skill, and low variance.
So yeah, looking forward to that Flesh and Blood video haha. :)
A favorite tcg of mine is Cardfight Vanguard. Often dismissed as an "all luck, no skill" game but the game is designed with the random element in mind and player actions can make what looks like a blowout a victory.
Trigger checks being a big part of the game, revealing cards off the top and activating effects depending on if the card has an icon, but the way guarding works and the numbers means you can ensure that a trigger doesn't cause unnecessary hits or a loss. Even the one doing the checks has to consider how the effects are applied to better optimize their deck's attack plan in the event of a damage check changing numbers.
The one thing I will give you though is the existence of the Over Trigger. It doesn't feel good to hit on offense or defense and some decks just crapout with the giant wall it suddenly builds. The only saving grace is it's just a one-of. But I will add in the years playing the game with OTs in both standard and premium formats it was pretty rare the OT ruined any games and some games it didn't matter it was checked at all.
I would almost argue that it's sort of like detection Theory in signal processing where there is a signal you're attempting to locate in additive white gaussian noise and you have to account for the noise and the probability of false positives. When you're determining what threshold to set for a detection. I.e you have to account for the probability of a false detect in your threshold of success
Generally, we assume additive white gaussian noise has a zero mean and because it's a gaussian probability density, the average will be the underlying signal.... Therefore, given an unbiased estimate, the Cramer Rao lower bound on the variance of estimating. The underlying parameter will decrease as the number of samples increase, I.e the more samples you average in the lower, the noise contributes and the more likely you are to come to an actual estimate of the underlying value
That’s exactly the way to think about it. You’re adding noise to the data collection. The right amount is the amount your players will tolerate. As you pointed out, you need more data to see through the noise, which means more games need to be played before you can determine who is better.
Part of the issue i think with having that randomness is it can hide when you lost or your luck lost. With games that are only skill or more skill it can be very clear where that line is drawn
I think for most people, that is the opposite of a problem. For people who aren't trying to go pro, they appreciate being able to blame luck. And for people trying to go pro, you try to overcome luck through deck building and skill.
I think the trend reverses for games with high variance, because a lot of the skill is in variance management and making decisions around consistency.
There are tabletop games with much tighter rules than Warhammer, and for those games, at least in their respective heydays, top players take the competitive scene much more seriously. All much smaller than Warhammer, but Guild Ball, Warmachine, and Marvel: Crisis Protocol come to mind.
All of these use output randomness primarily.
I just played a Bo3 in standard and drew 2 of my lands in my first 23 cards. Lost that game and then was locked out of a color for four turns next game so lost the match. Overall upsetting but it happened twice out of 30ish games so not too terrible 😂
Yeah.... play FaB! i would like to know your thoughts and analysis
Maybe someone has already pointed this out, but in terms of output/input randomness, historically Hearthstone had cards in it like Crackle, which dealt 2-6 damage, with the amount being randomly decided. Over time though, they've clearly realized that players didn't like playing a Crackle on a 4 health minion, only for the spell to deal 3 damage. But cards that generate random cards, draw a random card from your deck or summon random minions are still made, maybe more now than they used to, presumably because it has more decision points or because they're randomness allows for more unique outcomes. Also, I'm not certain how much the Pokémon designers design their Pokémon for the casual crowd relative to the competitive crowd. I'd imagine most Pokémon ideas are casual-oriented (like what it looks like), but their mechanics are competitive oriented. Unless you were talking about the Pokémon TCG, not VGC, then I just misunderstood.
I don't think output randomness is *bad* for a competitive game, but mitigation strategies need to be very clear amd very common.
For example, if I know that a specific decision will result in me having to take bad odds, I should have access to a suboptimal but more reliable option in the majority of cases, and I should know what that option is and what its specific differential impacts are compared to my default option.
Risk mitigation is a legitimate aspect of skill, the same is true in input randomness games, so making that a focus can make things feel much more skillful.
A good example in a non-competitive context is a Fire Emblem etc. style combat system. Damage is fixed, so for any given scenario you only have to consider 2 (or maybe 3 if crit chance is involved) outcome branches for a given combat, it's a hit or it's a miss. That's reasonable to parse, elegant, and makes tactical decisions based on randomness clear and impactful.
Compare that to something like D&D where, for the majority of actions, there can be dozens of potential outcomes. That's unreasonable to parse, not elegant, and makes specific tactical decisions based on randomness harder to make, especially when multiple instances of randomness intersect.
D&D can still be tactical, but at the coarse/intuitive/vibes level. You know what generally good decisions are, but thats because of general heuristics and knowledge of the systems and/or mechanics. It's not because you actually worked through the potential outcomes in your head. Which is more reasonable in hit/miss style systems.
viarence gives for game freedom while skill makes a game worth playing. a lot of TCG design goes into design of keeping varience at the level where it does not undermine skill too much. thats why lower power level formats are generally better balanced when each indivitial bit of viarence is not important each game can be different without 99.99% of games being decided by luck.
Suprasingly many 1v1 miniature wargames don’t take high-level play seriously. Especially historicals, that try to translate facts about units or formations of certian period to game rules rather tham design balanced game.
Manipulating player perception is an interesting topic. For the XCOM example, clicking "Shoot (95%)" and missing is annoying, but you can just click it again. It starts to feel unfair when there are severe consequences for missing randomly. However, you could back up to an earlier decision point. Running a unit into danger and having to make six consecutive shots to save him is a mistake that generates a lot of good tension. You feel awful when you recognize it, and if you don't miss, you feel lucky. I wonder if there are good ways to encourage players to recognize risk, and not have them think "80% is more than half, I don't need to consider what happens if I miss." Reset the whole game when they fail a level? Maybe not...
It reminds of a different design problem where players play platformers too slow and carefully. Moving fast is fun, but risky. Do players become more risk-averse when they feel more agency in the results?
I think people complain on the internet, but designers need to try to give players what they need. Gamers need their vegetables too. :D
If given the choice, players will optimize the fun out of your game. It is the responsibility of the game designer to ensure that the most efficient way to play your game is as fun as possible.
EDH exacerbates the luck dilemma because every deck either runs 20 cards that do the most important thing or the deck and/or a suite of fetch cards that get you the cards you need at best or reduce the number of cards in the deck at worst
Any game with some rng has a skill component in accounting for rng and ensuring you are in good position regardless. Like in Magic deckbuilding and factoring draw odds is a skill. As someone who prefers lower luck games and being able to see my own improvement in play or skill difference vs opponents, the unfortunate part (to me, anyways) is that skill effect is not easily captured within a small set of matches. Did you play the odds as best you could and get unlucky or did you fail to account for it properly? And if you did account for it and they still get lucky, it seems more disappointing to lose, like the Magic player mulliganing to 4. Looking at poker, the high variance is what keeps more losers playing, but those same people also consider being drawn out on to be the most frustrating loss possible. I struggle to get in to poker because every time I try I get turned off by the fact there is very little positive feedback learning reinforcement between taking the mathematically correct action and end result.
I think most players are not screwed solely by variance. Unless you are a MTG god, who always makes the right decision in deck construction and in play, then there is always something you could have done to improve your chances of winning, even with variance.
The example they used is so notable because it is so rare. To have two players, more or less equally skilled and with not much room for improvement, and one loses to pure variance like that is like a Tornado or Shark attack. Rare as hell, but over-scrutinized.
Most people who complain about variance or luck are just coping, and need to get better at deck construction and playing to their outs. Now, I don't think everyone needs to be a try hard at Magic, but I also don't think people should castigate Magic for luck when they are not good enough.
I have to correct Forrest here. Pokemon has just put in a lot more money into their tournament structure. Because of this it is getting really competitive. There are some more casual players that go to tournaments but the competitive scene is strong.
I agree luck is important (I don't have much).
I think skill can Carry you far more consistently but luck will get you the furthest occasionally depending on how lucky you are😅
I personally have had to grind through sealed events with next to no rares in my deck more often then not 🤷 still have fun tho
It’s like poker~~ luck/skill is best at 60/40. So new player can play
What do you guys think about 1v1 commander?
I’ve, primarily, played 1v1. Standard 4person free4all is great; however, I can’t reliably go to a Shop or get 4 pps together.
I really enjoy the 1v1 environment just as much …. If not more… than the free for all. I like the lack politics & collusion … just the skill & heart of the cards ;p
1v1 commander solves a lot of the format’s problems for sure.
Hello Forrest, are you planning to sell pillage the bog artist proofs on your website? I love the art and want to hang up a large print with the proof on my wall.
There is a difference between playing a game casually, and playing a chaotic random mess.
Most CASUAL magic players dont want lucky determining the winner of their casual marches.
Most CASUAL magic players need to get better at building decks, including mana bases and curving out. The chaotic random mess can be the result of bad deck building.
It's like how in Commander, it's a singleton format, but people play so many redundant effects and tutors that it really isn't singleton. You can remove variance through skill, not just in play, but in deck construction.
@@shorewall My point was specifically about them saying reducing randomness makes the game less apealing to the casual players. Wich I don't believe to be the case.
Buy this guys playmates… I play Animar and need a mat this large :)
I think a big difference between luck and skill is when you loose. "I lost, but if I had taken this other action, I could've won", feel better than "I lost and there's literally nothing I could've done about it". Of course magic is different because it's a deck building game, you're mistake may not've been in gameplay, but perhaps in deck building
I think the deck building skill is majority responsible for removing variance. Skill in play has some result in removing variance, and then finally there will always be some variance left over. Knowing that is also part of skill. Complaining about variance is not a skill. :D
I don't want to play flesh and blood, but I want you to do it, so I can get some design info on it with as little effort as possible. Thanks :p
Haha noted
I think the Input vs Output Randomness distinction is a bit of red herring. Is my initial 7 cards I draw in Magic (or any other time I draw a card) input randomness? Obviously not! I chose the 60 cards in the deck and that determines what I end up drawing in the game. The "critical choice" was what cards I put in my deck. Is the coin flip from Invert Polarity output randomness or is it input randomness for the board state after the counterspell? Sure, the coinflip happens after I make the choice to counter the spell, but it happens before the next decision I make in the game, which is also hopefully a meaningful one.
I think the important thing at the end of the day is that the variance is limited such that after the game players feel like the game result was determined by skill more than luck. Like you said, the rando-chess example would be a bad game. Still a very high skill game where the best players will rise to the top and hits in that 15-20% upset ratio, but feels terrible because when the result is determined by luck there was no counter play. It seems to me that the more luck-based results a game has the more the most important skill is mitigating unlucky outcomes. In XCOM for instance, if you watch really good players, the rationale for their actions is always "Assuming the worst, am I still in a ok state?" It is still a high skill game, but the main skill is mitigating the unlucky outcomes.
I hate to be that guy but Team Fortress 2 Still has random cross enabled on official servers. It’s been a contentious issue in the playerbase for decades whether or not they’re healthy for the game. However it seems Valve has probably kept them since they’ve basically become infamously iconic to the game’s identity.
which team fortress are you talking about that removed random crits? they're still there
As was already pointed out TF2 reduced, but did not remove crits. Garfield discusses it in his luck/skill presentation and we misremembered.
@@distractionmakers i don't know if i can agree with that. maybe they were rebalanced, but melee weapons had their crit chance increased from one of the earlier builds. you can tell if you ever play one of the original unadulterated console versions.
I know this is also sort of the schism people feel between "Ameri-Trash" board games that generally rely on die and randomness, vs "German/European" board games that tend to not have sort of dice level randomness.
I don't think you can say that low luck games are less engaging for causal players given the popularity of chess.
Lol, popular among which casual players?
"Shoots", shouldn't that be "chutes"
Haha yes
Team Fortress 2 still very much has critical hits
Oh really? I thought they were removed. My mistake.
@@distractionmakers They are often removed in community run servers, but it’s still around in Valve run casual servers. To quote a common chat bind, “Random Crits are Fair and Balanced.”
Competitive TF2 removes crits and random spread, but comp tf2 has always been a microscopic percentage of the community. It was relatively popular for community servers too.
As a casual player who hates randomness in magic (specially garbage gambing mechanics like discover) I enjoy the competitive side more and only play draft and standard bo3 cause it minimizes the amount of randomness into the game while keeing the small amount it needs.
Discover and Cascade are only "gambling" mechanics, if the content of your deck is random. In Pioneer and Modern both mechanics have actually contributed to very successful and very deterministic decks.
@@MischievousCassowary In bo1 standrad those mechanics can't be build like those older formats.
Not everyone is into broken combos hahaha but in standard were there is less cards to manipulate the hit, discover decks are 100% fully gambling decks is all about if i hit win if i dont lose always. Makes the game experience completely pointless is worst solitare than a moderrn combo deck When no inputs is needed (deck building, card casting, desicion making) and is all about hit win wiff lose..... yeah!!!
BTW there is a reason why cascade got hit in the ban list. we need to admit both cascade and discover are bad designs.
@@bladorac I definitely agree on them being badly designed mechanics, with Cascade even having the dubious honour of being one of the few mechanics to get an errata (besides things I consider complete reworks like mana burn and damage stack).
And I must admit I have no experience with contemporary Standard and definitely not as a Best of One Format (probably popular in Arena? never touched that one though). But I would imagine that Bo1 by itself must be already very swingy, in which case I can agree that it is probably even worse with mechanics like these around.
@@MischievousCassowary Bo3 standrard right now is really REALLY good but only bo3 if you wanna avoid the sacky decks. Rotation was a much needed fresh air after 3 years of emperor deluge control and raffine midrange :P.
Also domain decks nowhere to be seen in arena atm, idk if it is the new cards but so far 1 atraxa since BLB release in bo3 rank (Platinum/Diamond). People started the mono black discard deck but it failed hard, i went tons of win only 1 lose in that matchup but today I noticed not a single 1 deck of those. I don't recomend mono black discard.
@@bladorac I imagine the death of Domain is because of the rotation of Triomes.
i think you misunderstood some of the complaints (intentionally or not), i think evrybody knows that magic has variance. because of the mana system and it is being a cardgame with random draws alone are a lot of variance obviously, and i think most of the players are ok with that, cause they choose to play the game. the problem is for a lot of us is too much luck. with magic it means the crazy powercreep (if you have crazy high power level cards that you might draw, every draw could impact the game more), the prioritization of haymaker cards, the mechanics based on luck (like discover), and things like these. I think magic has given up a long time ago to balance the game via card design, and they choose to more and more balance it with luck (and on arena with the matchmaker). it is true that a balanced game, where everyone has a similar chance to win is a better game, but magic is not like that. magic is thinking in winrates on a longer run, so the individual games are very often not balanced (an not really fun) at all. if you and your opponent are playing decently the number of games where what you are doing actually matters are in my opinion around somwhere between 1in10 and 1in5 at best. all the other games are comes down to luck only. from 10 games there are those two or three where you know that you had no chance (bad draw, opponents god tier opening hand, very unfavorable matchup, etc) and there is at least 1 game where you are getting mana screwed or flooded. thats 3-4 games, and there are the other 3-4 games when the bad things are happening to your opponent, when you may think that you are winning because you play better, but thats not the case at all, you just dont see what the opponent struggles with, or you have the unbeatable opening hand, and so on. so where you actually play and not just go through the moves and get a result is maybe 2 games in 10. or less. long story short, its not that magic has luck incorporated, but that it has a little (or way) too much of it.
Its very easy to go around luck: Cheat or Instead of "best of 3 match" do "Best of 3 millions" ;)
I think chess is about the only game that has no element of luck. Sports all have luck because there's weather and field conditions. Any time something physical is in the game, there's so many variables that you can't control them all. The ball bounces a certain way and you lose. No amount of skill can control everything.
Go and shogi and similar games have no luck either