[With Great Power ...] Brief but strong play in Sweden
James_Nostack:
Another consideration is strategy during the big conflict scenes.
When I GM'd, I understood that the rules would let me win very easily. Early in a conflict, I would play low-value cards in order to lull the players into a bidding war. After they exhausted 80% - 90% of their hand (and likely wrecking several of their aspects along the way), I would crush them with wild cards and aces. (Tactic: player lays down an ace with a satisfied smirk: "Ha ha, super villain, I win!" Respond by playing a wild card set to the same suit to cancel their ace. Next round, play an ace of your own.)
The fact that I burnt through a lot of my own cards to do this didn't matter, because every time a conflict started I got a massive infusion of new cards because the players had stressed their aspects so much. I did this over and over again.
I suspect the optimal strategy, from a player's perspective, is to realize they cannot win most conflicts early in the game, and therefore forfeit the battle. This lets them husband their good cards for mid-game, where the GM has fewer wild cards. If you only devastate one or two aspects along the way and leave the others untouched, you should be pretty competitive.
If the players aren't comfortable forfeiting, they should just play the best card they have for each suit and yield if all suits have been filled. There's a chance with this strategy that you might beat the GM, especially if his attention has been split with a simultaneous conflict, but you'll only lose approximately 4 cards.
Ron Edwards:
Hi guys,
In agreement with both of you, I'm thinking that battling to keep one's Aspects pristine is probably not in line with good strategy, satisfying story creation, or the spirit of the game. With the rules as currently written, it seems to me as if getting one's Aspects savaged is part of the point, and that much of the climax is about (i) what happens to which one and (iii) redeeming something before it gets Transformed.
I wonder whether, at some point in the design process, "the worst thing" that the hero players are trying to prevent shifted from Devastation to Transformation. I'm basing this on the pre-publication version, in wihch there was no Plan and no Transformation if I remember correctly, and as far as I could tell, in which Devastation was more like a final fate. Whereas, as I've tried to articulate here, in the full game, basically, Devastation is the real start of the game in action.
I think the current rules are much better in terms of genre and many other things, but they display a little ambiguity between these two frameworks. In the illustrated example, Steven gives up because he doesn't want to Imperil the Armor of Truth himself, which would open it up for one step worse if he loses the next round. He loses it anyway, for a final result of Imperiled, and my impression from that example is that this is a very big story moment. Here and in the majority of relevant examples, the player fights like a dog to protect the relevant Aspect from increasing in Suffering via conflicts, and again, the implication is that although you might want the cards, it's really quite significant to overplay your risk and end up with more Suffering than you planned.
Which is again kind of weird, because given the Story Arc and the fact that Transformation looks quite difficult to me given the heinous advantage of the players (even without the Plan to target directly as an Aspect) ... well, hell man, in strategy terms, in story/thematic terms, and in line with the excellent text in the game about how important it is to get your ass stomped first (with which I agree as a comics nut), I'd be racing the GM to get my Aspects devastated.
The fun seems to come from (a]i) those times in which the fictional content of the conflict is something I find too awful to submit to (Mike referred to how I unexpectedly "gotcha'd" him this way in our game); (ii) those times when I have two or more Aspects in the mechanics fire simultaneously, as the color depicts; and (iii) a combination of the first two. Or rather, here I'm talking about the strategic + fiction fun, becauae larger-scale emergent content of play is also all kinds of excellent, as I discussed about villains in the older thread and those things I'm interested in further discovering as I wrote in this one.
Best, Ron
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