Jump to content

Tuning down Red Joker on damage


mojopin

Recommended Posts

Hi, I've been sharing this opinion with some local players. Red joker is fine with value 14, and not allowing the enemy cheating when fliped, wild suit and taking it even with negative flips BUT...

we find that severe AND weak damage is too much for a random blow for an encounter. Fliping black joker most of times will lead to lose your AP or taking a hit but red joker on damage means a lot in AP eficiency because you are gonna deal a lot of damage that otherwise would require a lot of AP´s hitting and dealing more than weak damage.

What do you think of leaving it as it is but doing just regular severe damage?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mostly I say play however your group wants, but I doubt you'd get many people outside that group to go along with it. As far as the AP efficiency goes, flipping a black is in general like losing an AP, flipping a red is like doing two hits in one, a severe and a weak, so like gaining an AP. 

The whole premise of the game is fate deciding when your time is up, when bad things will happen. I wouldn't want to change that.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Rob Lo said:

Mostly I say play however your group wants, but I doubt you'd get many people outside that group to go along with it. As far as the AP efficiency goes, flipping a black is in general like losing an AP, flipping a red is like doing two hits in one, a severe and a weak, so like gaining an AP. 

The whole premise of the game is fate deciding when your time is up, when bad things will happen. I wouldn't want to change that.

Hitting a high df model or with hard to wound that most of the times will lead to a weak damage because of the minus flips will require many AP to get that load of damage regularly because you also will need to conect those hits.

If the model has armor or some kind of prevention/reduction this Ap efficiency skyrockets. Also, dealing no damage with black joker would probably leave the table as it was, fliping red joker on damage will lead probably to taking out a model in one blow.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In first edition Red Joker damage was severe plus a second damage flip without modifiers. So you could easily end up with two severes worth of damage. There were giant flame wars (the forums were way, way rowdier back then) on whether it should be toned down (the most popular suggestion among the proponents of toning it down was to make it severe plus weak) or whether it was part of fate doing what it does and how toning it down would take fun and excitement out of the game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The best case scenario is red is a 14 any suite/severe , black is a 0 with no suite/weak.

both are cheatable and neither of them takes precedence on any flip. Just a regular card in the deck.

 

This unfortunately will never ever happen in malifaux, the game does cater to a certain level of casual player and the random flips allow inexperienced players to "luck out" and pull out maneuvers they would not be able to do otherwise. 

This is why a game such as Relic Knights did not make it, players with more experiance would consistently wallop casual players, the randomness has been greatly reduced in that game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, PolishSausage said:

This is why a game such as Relic Knights did not make it, players with more experiance would consistently wallop casual players, the randomness has been greatly reduced in that game.

Even though I kinda agree with you in that I would prefer Red and Black Jokers to be less extreme, I'm pretty sure that Relic Knights had quite a bit of other problems contributing to it not making it ;) 

Someone was just describing a game where his opponent flipped Red Joker on damage every turn while his Red Jokers always came out in places where it didn't really matter whether it was a Red Joker or an eight.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

BTW, TOS is similar to what I described when it comes to jokers.

I see not 2018 but 2019 TOS becoming the new Malifaux for more competitive gamers (sapping in warmachine players as well).

 

All in all looking at Wyrd and Malifaux/TOS shaping up to become the most balanced/competitive games on the market (Malifaux already is to me)

40k/AOS is effectively a hand of Red Jokers for players going first, showing how bad I go U go is.

Warmachine/Hordes are on the chopping block because of the counter list play 

 

The reason I went on a tangent, is if the red/black joker interaction makes people feel meh, look at other other game systems out there and the poopy design they have been using for years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As a game, I.E. a mechanical system of skill, the game would be better without the jokers, period.

As an experience, the Jokers add a lot of narrative and excitement. People in general like big unexpected swings. Jokers provide that. Depends on which you value more.

I'd certainly back a move ( to be clear it's not going to happen) to just not play with Jokers, but they seem to be popular so I can overlook what I personally consider a design flaw and other consider a feature.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Fetid Strumpet said:

As a game, I.E. a mechanical system of skill, the game would be better without the jokers, period.

I don't think it's as cut and dry as this. The jokers do a lot to obfuscate the mathematics and make it harder to calculate probabilities , and they add plenty of interesting* decisions based on their risk/reward nature, as well as the old keep or ditch the black joker debate. They do swing games occasionally, but I wouldn't be so quick to rule them out as bad for competitive play. I think perhaps the issue lies just as much with the fact Malifaux Tournaments are usually Best of 1 rather than 3 or 5.

 

*I'm using the word "interesting" here to mean non-trivial, preferably not directly mathematically comparable, or at least not feasibly comparable. So an uninteresting decision is "two damage or three damage" - three is obviously better. An interesting decision is two damage or gain a soulstone, or in the case of the BJ for example, hold onto it or ditch it. Or take extra negatives on an attack to fish for the RJ.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you wanted to do that you could do it how TOS does it, have the BJ be a 0 with no suits and RJ be a 14 with one of each suit, maybe BJ be another Weak and RJ be another Severe.  Though them being in each players' deck or not is part of the mind game, and knowing someone might  flip the BJ in that crucial moment keeps everything much more exciting IMO, so I'd argue don't remove them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, retnab said:

If you wanted to do that you could do it how TOS does it, have the BJ be a 0 with no suits and RJ be a 14 with one of each suit, maybe BJ be another Weak and RJ be another Severe.  Though them being in each players' deck or not is part of the mind game, and knowing someone might  flip the BJ in that crucial moment keeps everything much more exciting IMO, so I'd argue don't remove them.

The problem with this approach is TOS is designed to interact with things completely differently. One of each suit potentially gives you multiple triggers/effects on an action in TOS, and only potentially give you mixed suits for a single trigger in M2E. Damage flips in M2E work off of range of the card itself, where damage in TOS is determined by differential.

 

The jokers provide the potential for a wild swing, which is great for narrative play and can make a game turn much more interesting. If I have substantially more skill than my opponent, I still have to worry about jokers coming up. If I have substantially less skill than my opponent, that same risk will keep them playing cagey-like and can take the sting out of my loss. As others have pointed out: there are people who are drawn to Malifaux because of how it handles and generates randomness. I'm one of them. I stopped playing WH40k for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the game tilted very heavily with whoever took the first turn. WM/H was more interesting because it had more back-and-forth (as long as both players were playing to their strengths with optimized lists), except for the bit where rolling so few dice means that a relatively short string of above or below average rolls would tilt the game very heavily very fast with no chance of recovery. It's really frustrating to be doing everything tactically correct but have every action fail because dice don't self correct their probabilities.

With card probabilities working the way that they do, sure, I can have many actions fail because the cards just aren't coming up right, but that's self-correcting in a way. If I have a bunch of low cards in hand or turn up early in the turn, the probability of getting high cards later in the turn is higher, so I have reason to play in a way that cycles my deck faster. The cheating fate mechanic also helps--but I can also see why there's special cheat interactions on jokers for this reason. It helps with the narrative play and keeping the game interesting. Admittedly this goes hand-in-hand with some of the things I left unsaid in the thread that talks about Byes and tournament pairings: wild swings, even if only happening once or twice, affect a couple things:

  • The outcome of a game if the wild swing happens during a crux moment, such as attempting to swing momentum during an otherwise close match,
  • the impact of skill in overall standings when games are run similar to single elimination (best of 1) within a tournament setting.

In this way, those wild swings are not unlike general random value generation; enough games smooth out those wild swings and help differentiate between skilled and lucky players, but limited games make each swing more significant.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find jokers very rarely have a big impact on my game. Its very rare that bj makes me lose a crucial dual and just as rare that rj couldn't have been an eight or ten.

I think it's really important to keep them though. Balance wise the game is better off having 2 cards that can completely change an activation and force people to adapt to a new situation.

Dealing with jokers is also a question of skill and removing them or toning them down would take away one of the few truly random things in the game.

That said I would never want it to impact on vp, which is why I'm so happy symbols of authority was changed. Losing a vp to a bj on a simple duel would make me scream things unfit for my little tots ears.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Angelshard brings up a good point: dealing with Joker flips is a test of skill as well. Can you adapt to something going horribly wrong for you or well for your opponent? Are you flexible enough in your thinking to switch to Plan B? These are two questions that when answered are marks of proficiency in the real world (especially in career fields that are life or death).

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, clockworkspide said:

And here comes the competitive crowd to suck all the life out of the game and make it as bland and chesslike as possible, in the name of "skill".

If, in M3E, Wyrd either removes the jokers or renders them toothless, I'm gone.

Ah, this reminds me of the M1 to M2 change. Very similar rhetoric regarding the changes which were done then. Changing the Red Joker damage from severe + another flip to severe + weak took away the soul of the game and left it a sad withered husk fit only for the robot-like competitive players :P 

(Personally I think that Jokers are fine but I wouldn't be sad if Red Joker damage was adjusted to, say, Severe+1 or just Severe - it would still go through negative modifiers. A Red Joker on a normal flip is just a bit better than a 13 but a Red Joker on a damage flip is humongous)

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've never thought that Red Joker damage was all that amazing in the general case. Sure, it's noticeable for models like Howard or Nekima, but a lot of the time it's just 1 or 2 damage over severe.

Confirmation bias makes it easier to remember Howard getting a red, so I guess that can make people upset.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Bengt said:

I've never thought that Red Joker damage was all that amazing in the general case. Sure, it's noticeable for models like Howard or Nekima, but a lot of the time it's just 1 or 2 damage over severe.

Confirmation bias makes it easier to remember Howard getting a red, so I guess that can make people upset.

Could be. I do remember one instance from the previous tournament that I took part in where a "random" Red Joker on damage altered a whole game but it isn't all that common, really. Even when Red Joker comes up on Howard's damage, the victim would've often died to a double severe or something anyway.

Straining my memory, I can conjure up at least three wins of mine that are basically attributable to a Red Joker damage flip. I mean, I might've won the games anyway but a Red Joker damage made them trivial cake walks. But naturally I've played quite a few games so it's not as if it's common, really.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've had games were I was counting on a model surviving, to heal them on my next activation, die to Red Joker damage.
Games where I needed to heal a key model copying the Heal from the Librarian with Hannah, and every single flip needed to be cheated with a high card, depleting my hand, only to flip Black Joker for the heal (clearly Fate didn't want that heal to happen).

These things can destroy  your strategy. And I wouldn't change that.

The unpredictability of the Jokers creates tension in the game. And it's not like dice. Once it happens, you know you're safe for the rest of the round.

I've also cheated down to flip more cards looking for the RJ. And that one time it worked, it was glorious.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information