Theory in VTES - Risk in VTES

kombainas wrote:

Aw, come on, don't play with words. Information and risk are not mutually exclusive.

No, but is revealing information a risk that often ? Especially with expensives card like Coma that you don't want to play.

Giving information is often neutral, and quite a bit of time it's communication and diplomacy more than any kind of risk. "Dear predator, I don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be killed. I am sure we can work something out".

I don't think it's a good idea to label "risk" something that can be an advantage or something neutral. It give the false idea that it's something to be avoided in general, which is not the case.

I agree, that for such cases the initiator, who "shares" information is in not related to risks directly, however there are exceptions, such as influencing out an imbued and risking imminent table hate and unification.

The point of risk by itself comes for the recipients of the information. Do I risk to rush that !Malk without IG? Do I block for-based bleeder with no damage prevention card in hand? Do I risk running out of rush actions against obedience blocker?

All such information-from-the-outside based risks do need analysis at times. It is not trivial, how certain decks work if you are not familiar with them, thus risk values do change based on what others are playing and affect your own gameplay indirectly (aka fear factor).

While I think you hit on important elements of managing one's own game, I see difficulty with qualifying or quantifying what you are talking about.

As one example of what falls under risk management, we have the speed deck, often in the form of winnies, whether winnie Dominate, winnie Presence, winnie Computer Hacking, winnie vote, or whatever. It's a high risk play in that being blunted on offense generally means total collapse.

Contrast with winnie Auspex. Now, one could say it's extremely low risk, but that's only looking at it from the standpoint of it surviving. If we expand risk assignment to the risk of not winning the game, then it has the further risk of not being good enough at ousting.

But, this is only one small part of what you seem to be getting at.

Another example - a favorite card of mine (that I play far less than I used to for variety's sake) is The Barrens. Hand cycling is one of the most important effects in the game even though it doesn't translate well into value measurements. Hand cycling produces consistency. What makes customizable card games fun is that they have an unpredictable element, much of which comes from the random draw. The point of deckbuilding is to generate consistency in deck function. Redundancy is the norm. In games with card limits, usually see close substitutes to one's best cards. Even formats, like Highlander formats in CCGs involve an attempt to create consistency. At this point, V:TES highlander isn't that hard, as there are now a bunch of wakes, a fair number of bounce, a fair number of master pool gain cards, etc. Anyway, The Barrens is in game deckbuilding (along with Dreams, Fragment, Aura Reading, etc.). I buy the idea of mitigating hand risk because otherwise this card wouldn't be so good.

And, sure, I get minion risk. Winnies have so much game because the loss of a dork is in no way comparable to the loss of a stud. Amusingly, Fred Scott enlightened me to this a long time ago when every one of his decks seemed to have 20 The Embrace and I started moving away from clan focused or multidiscipline focused decks and realized that having lots of minions meant fearing minion loss far less.

But, I don't know how you would put this all into a system. Dorks have a risk associated with being irrelevant. Great, my winnie Auspex dude can explode into a fine red mist and not hugely impact my game, but against a winnie Animalism deck, all of my dorks are pretty much irrelevant. Well, to a point, I recall playing in the NAC where Mylan "Crowbait" Horseed Computer Hacking let me oust Robyn's Animalism deck as part of a swarm bleed lunge turn; his noble sacrifice to murderous birds will live on in history.

You would file this under metagame risk or seating risk, though I don't necessarily buy into seating risk. Seating is far less important when players put control elements into their decks. Just a vote deck, even in an age with no seat switching, can crosstable murder. One of the things I don't like about three-player games, which I've had to play on occasion, is that it does mean matchups and seating are far more important, also that speed is vastly more important. But, I'm getting sidetracked.

Metagame risk has some interesting aspects. I'm less concerned with normal matchup problems - my deck vs. stealth bleed, my deck vs. vote, my deck vs. rush, my deck vs. intercept combat - than I am such things as playing a key vampire someone else might play, playing a scarce clan that randomly loses because someone else plays the clan, entire environments heavily skewed to particular strategies. But, again, without being able to quantify, where does this topic go?

As a philosophical concept, that reducing variability is good, whether it be at the deck vs. deck level, having enough minions to function (something I find to be far more important these days), card draw, or whatever, is fine, but as people have said, players already take these things into account, and more experienced players typically take more of them into account.

Flipping this around, though, I just had a thought. I keep trying to tell people to stop worrying about things like their decks and focus on improving their play skills. One could get off into the realm of trying to analyze risk at a play style level. "Playing one's game", which often means not paying attention to what those bastards across the table are doing to mess up your game, is far riskier than making sure that you help keep their lunacy under control. In the last 17 years, I've seen a lot of people lose more than their share because they have a high risk, no compensating high reward style of play.

Suoli wrote:

Analyze choices and individual cards by identifying their costs, probabilities and potential gains. Seek interactions with positive expected value, avoid interactions with negative.

Jeff wrote:

But minimizing your prey's pool counters *is* the goal.

Suoli wrote:

No, it really isn't. It could be said that minimizing your prey's pool is usually the best way to remove his last pool counter, which in turn is usually the best way to get the game win. That's not the same as being a goal in itself.

When you break it down to the basics, it really is all about removing the last pool from your prey, at least twice during a game, to win. I don't think we disagree on this part.

Each situation can be evaluated differently. That's where game tactics come into play and timing matters. The two cases you offer are not equal since one involves a victory point and the other does not. Clearly stop the VP. Risk and expected value don't really come into play because (aside from redraws) you have rightly provided perfect information to illustrate the point. I'm sure most players have at some point or another refrained from ousting their prey for a turn or two, even if they had the cards in hand to easily do so (stealth bleed and a prey with no bounce or stealth vote with vote lock), so the prey could further weaken the grand-prey.

My point is that I think it is impossible to assign some point value (risk/beta/what have you) to a particular situation since there are often multiple different plays that can be made. In your scenario, someone else cross-table may have a DI or DT or other way to thwart politics. Lots happens.

When talking about risk and EV, the realms of strategy (individual card evaluation and deck-building) and tactics (situational plays) are very different. The former can be evaluated statistically, while the latter is clearly an art form. As ICL often says (to paraphrase): "Decks don't matter, players matter."

ICL wrote:

Flipping this around, though, I just had a thought. I keep trying to tell people to stop worrying about things like their decks and focus on improving their play skills.

And a follow-up thought:

I think there is a psychological aspect to why more discussion centers on strategy (deck-building) than on tactics (situational play). People more easily accept criticism for making bad decisions about card selection than for making bad decisions when sitting at the table. Deck-building is one more step removed from the game, and once the game starts, you can't change it. It's a convenient scapegoat for poor performance (and sometimes it is true).

Post-game debriefings on tactics are time-consuming on scarce game nights and require personal interaction, unlike deck-building on your own time. Maybe a way to facilitate these discussions is to identify "Moment of Truth" scenarios and go over them after. When receiving a competitive soccer referee assessment, the assessors always identify (and ask YOU to identify) a "Moment of Truth" for the game. It could be a game-changing decision, or it might be justifying a yellow or red card, or awarding a penalty kick, or allowing advantage after a foul which led to a goal-scoring opportunity.

These Moments of Truth are often high risk situations and therefore merit more discussion than they probably get. Tournament reports often include these situations because they are the high drama of VTES.

Some V:TES Moment of Truth examples:
* Earning/denying a VP
* Backousting/letting a player be ousted when you could have "saved" them
* Making/breaking a deal
* Extensive talks, negotiation or manipulation
* Any minion leaving the ready region (combat, Banishment, etc)
* Sudden Reversals/Direct Intervention/other cancel cards
* Lunges for an oust
* Bleed bounces to a non-prey Methuselah
* Transferring into "ousting range" to bring out a new minion

Jeff wrote:

When you break it down to the basics, it really is all about removing the last pool from your prey, at least twice during a game, to win. I don't think we disagree on this part.

Yeah, ok.

When talking about risk and EV, the realms of strategy (individual card evaluation and deck-building) and tactics (situational plays) are very different. The former can be evaluated statistically, while the latter is clearly an art form.

I'm pretty sure you can totally evaluate specific situations from a statistical point of view. In all likelyhood, you'll never be able to have 100% certainty but you will always make a better decision if you try. I mean, what other way is there when you can't have absolute knowledge of other players decks or hands? Don't say instinct or gut feel, because that's just your brain unconsciously doing really crappy statistical science.

Mind you, I'm not talking about actual numerical calculations when there are no numbers available, just recognizing that some things are more likely than others and roughly evaluating how the probabilities are distributed.

As ICL often says (to paraphrase): "Decks don't matter, players matter."

Well, that's a bit exaggerated.