Card Game DB
Sign In
Create Account
Welcome to Card Game DB
Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to create topics, post replies to existing threads, give reputation to your fellow members, get your own private messenger, post status updates, manage your profile and so much more. If you already have an account, login here - otherwise create an account for free today!
Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to create topics, post replies to existing threads, give reputation to your fellow members, get your own private messenger, post status updates, manage your profile and so much more. If you already have an account, login here - otherwise create an account for free today!
2
Quill & Tankard Regulars - Out with the Old, in with the... Old?
May 21 2015 11:10 AM |
WWDrakey
in Game of Thrones
Quill & Tankard Regulars Small Council Ire WWDrakey Ratatoskr JCWamma Istaril
Quill & Tankard Regulars - Out with the old, in with the... old?The rumours were quick to spread among the unchained apprentices. At first, they were simply discarded as legends, similar to Dragons appearing in the East or the dead rising with the cold winds in the North.
However, they did not quite die down as rumours usually do. Some apprentices even claimed to have seen lights in the old abandoned Inn as of late. This of course lead to older apprentices regaling fresh ones with tales of debauchery and derring-do, of candle-lit arguments and old Maesters being lured with drink to talk of horrible and forbidden lore. Of waking up below the benches to a raven’s screech, and not quite remembering where you were or how you got there. Of dizzily looking at the raven, and for a moment thinking you saw one eye too many...
Then one morning, to their shock, a group of bleary eyed older scribes found a group of suspicious looking characters standing outside the doors of the Quill & Tankard, with a sharply dressed and familiar young Maester…
Sometimes, it seems, it does pay to listen to rumours.
With the release of the final Chapter Pack for First Edition and beginning of “preview season†for Second Edition, it’s time to turn our sights away from the old, and towards the new. On that note, the Quill & Tankard Regulars would like to bid a fond farewell to moribund, shadows mechanic mixups, Meera Reed's effect existing in the borderline between an ability & an effect, bafflement on the scope of immunity, Call of the Three-Eyed Crow, Burning Bridges & gained abilities and many other hallmarks of First Edition.
As we all look forward to the new, shiny and more comprehensible, we will be helping you find your way through it all with... seemingly incomprehensible ramblings from our old, trusted, somewhat worse-for-wear Inn and it’s no-less bedraggled Regulars. That is to say, the Quill & Tankard Regulars will be making a return for 2nd Edition, helping players old and new understand how the game's underlying rules mechanics have changed and what players can expect with 2nd Edition.
To that end, in addition to our regular crew, we will be bringing aboard the esteemed Alexander Hynes (Istaril) of Beyond the Wall as an Honorary Regular. Istaril brings a dose of respectability and polish to our otherwise somewhat scruffy fellowship.
Expect your first beer-drenched and FFG-endorsed course on what has changed in Westeros to begin next week.
Antti Korventausta (WWDrakey) is a self-proclaimed Finnish AGoT philosopher and doomsayer hermit, who used to practice Quantum Mechanics, but found that it paled to AGoT in both interest and complexity. Having played and judged for more years than he would like to admit, he has found himself on the winning side of rules arguments more than he would expect. In any game he plays, he has a tendency of playing anything he considers to be off the beaten path, whether it makes sense to others or not.
Helmut Hohberger (Ratatoskr) started playing AGoT in September 2010 and has never looked back (although his wife has, longingly). As a German, he loves rules - and I mean *loves* 'em. He is the quintessential rules board morlock. While the others played and frolicked about outside, he sat by candlelight in a remote corner of the library and tried to get a grasp on the intricacies of the 1st edition rules. He even thought he did not do too bad at it, but then the Call of the Three-Eyed Crow drove him into the darkest depths of madness and despair. But he’s all better now, honest, and looking forward to new challenges.
Iiro Jalonen (Ire) Started AGoT in 2009, got pulled under the waves by Krakens years ago, and has never looked back. While not an Oldtown local, he has often been spotted in the Quill & Tankard Inn making sure that the rules of sportsmanship are maintained with the traditional finger dance games. A self-inflicted Shagga and active member of the global AGoT community, he has always strived to know the rules of the game, in order to make them do ridiculous things.
James Waumsley (JCWamma) is a first edition veteran who has judged at multiple large tournaments including the European championship of Stahleck. A renowned loudmouth and pedant, he will shout about the rules loud enough that he can be heard by those north of the wall.
Alex Hynes (Istaril) co-hosts Beyond the Wall, writes articles for FFG, created and curates the Annals - and even tried to fill in ktom’s shoes in the big ktom drought of 2013. When the Regulars asked him to be an honorary member, he, of course, refused and said he didn’t have the time. Or should have, anyway. Still, how much work can being an “Honorary†member be?
- darknoj, emptyrepublic, scantrell24 and 7 others like this
13 Comments
Hooray. I've been mourning the lack of Q&T articles. I worry that if 2ED is as streamlined as promised that there won't be as much for you to discuss... Who am I kidding? I'm sure they'll find a way to make a ridiculous non-templated card that will have everyone but you scratching our heads.
Yay I love it! I hope a lot more articles will be posted again. When I started playing 3 years ago there were multiple series of articles running which almost all have died out.
NOTE: Istaril already covered some of the angles here, but since I already started writing on the topic, and there's also some new stuff in there... I'll just post this anyway.
Because of it's Core mechanics, A Game of Thrones will always remain one of the most complicated card games out there. The simultaneous turns and varied types of effects pretty much guarantee that. So, it's not like we'll ever really be out of work at the Inn.
However, I am hoping that with 2nd Edition we can move away from answering questions like:
This will allow us to concentrate more on covering the actual new mechanics (think Naval, Prized etc.) and some other interesting and exciting stuff like:
An important difference to mention is that between emergent complexity vs. complexity derived from vagueness and loose definitions. To put this in the context of AGoT - single rules and interactions should be simple and straightforward to understand, and not be riddled with exceptions. However, that doesn't remove the fact that when those simple-to-understand rules start interacting, we start getting complex situations. After all, from the view of a physicist, that's what life itself is, a really complex emergent behaviour derived from simple rules interacting with each other!
This also means that working from the same set of clearly defined rules, multiple rules-savvy people should arrive at the same outcome for something. With 1.0, the rules themselves were defined too vaguely for this to quite often not be the case. Even worse, in 1.0, a lot of the knowledge we had came from what I would call "Black Market" sources - basically word-of-mouth information on how things have traditionally been interpreted. So, it was not enough to know the Core Rulebook and the hugely thick FAQ, but rather you needed to crawl through a lot of old forum threads for knowledge that you would need for interpreting something.
EDIT: A good way to think of emergent complexity is chess. Each piece moves in a simple manner, but that does not mean the game only creates simple situations, or is in any way particularly easy. Hopefully, 2.0 will be more like chess. Too often, 1.0 was a game of chess, where you had no real idea of what your piece will do, if you try to move it!
These articles will be very welcoming when 2nd edition comes out. Like what was already said, the transition alone will take some time because we are all so used to the 1st edition rules and how the game plays out that any minor differences may easily be overlooked. We are also so used to how certain card effects have been ruled to work in 1st edition that they may work very differently in 2nd edition.
This should also be great for new players that will undoubtedly have questions as well!
Hey, Helmut's the one who removed it, so I guess you need to go and invade/occupy Bavaria!
Let's invade Finland while we're at it! The last time Stalin tried it, it actually went pretty OK for him!
I think that's just the usual story of doing well in one game with a stall deck against an all-out Aggro, then next getting cocky and thinking you can start competing against Aggro at pushing challenges.
Well, it helped that the second time round, Aggro drew its big characters like T-34s and wasn't suffering from Fear of Winter.
And take the beer!
Even by the standards of this website, you two are massive dorks.