And in addition, you win a goldfish in a plastic bag.
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lol, i remember an old magic card that if you tore it up, you won the game HAHA.
EDIT: oh wait, it was even better: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5712
I would argue that psi can acctually be very high skill, you just need to be pressuring each others economy. May I reccomend an exceptionally well produced video by @Willingdone where he does just that and talks through his logic.
Yes they can also be a huge pain, but Netrunner always gives the great work around of attacking somewhere else, which your deck should be built for anyway. The corp needs ways of forcing the runner off of thier plan A (i.e. RnD lock which was incredibly linear and boring), caprice also does an important and underappreciated job here of punishing linear archetypes, imho a good thing.
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As Stimhackâs premier menâs rights activist, I must say that this is the main issue this game is facing, not the proliferation of powerful psi effects.
I understand that in order to balance out the grievances of the past, we must accept some amount of this, but in Netrunner it has gone much too far!
Save us, Geist and Laramy.
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I mostly disagree on that point.
Caprice isnât some sort of physical dexterity test you can master if you try hard enough.
It also isnât the same as just rolling a D6 and saying you succeed on 1-3 and losing on 4-6.
She is somewhere in between, but my gripe comes from the fact that she feels more like the second example than the first. The first is a test of skill, and the second is pure luck. IMO Caprice brings too much luck into netrunner, which is a game that generally veers towards skill being required to win.
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You need to calculate which play is most appropriate including the fact that e.g. caprice is installed. I think you probably do that anyway.
If it turns out that running makers eye on a caprice defended R&D is your best line, youâre in a bad spot. Sometimes you get lucky. On the contrary if youâve put your opponent in the position that their best line is a makerâs eye on a caprice defended R&D youâre in a great spot, but sometimes you get unlucky.
Netrunner essentially is a game of giving yourself the best chance to succeed. Very rarely do you know for certain one way or another. Caprice is another tool for manipulating the odds.
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Isnât there skill in guesstimating the probabilities of certain things? Do you naturally embrace that or try to avoid it?
What do I reckon is the probability the ICE on R&D is one I can break?
What do I reckon is the probability that itâs something really nasty?
Given that I donât know where all the agendas are, what do I reckon is my expected agenda point haul from R&D with Makers Eye, assuming I can get in?
Combining all of those kinds of estimates, you get some kind of a reward/expense estimate that informs what play you make on your turn. Surely Caprice is just an extra probability on top of that? (If you like to perceive of Caprice as being wholly random, itâs an easier probability!) If you personally prefer making plays when the outcome is absolutely calculable beforehand (i.e. youâre a logic puzzler rather than a poker player), then obviously you wonât be comfortable with it. But that doesnât mean itâs good or bad, it just doesnât naturally jibe with your way of thinking.
Personally, I think I tend to approach the decision-making from a probabilistic angle rather than a deterministic one. (Iâm not going to play some Ruhr Valley-ELP-Turing combo where I know you canât get in, Iâm going to install agendas when I guesstimate you have a 30% chance of getting in and stealing it. If my guesstimations are roughly correct, Iâll win in the long run!) Through that prism, Caprice can be annoying, yes, but her mechanic doesnât seem out-of-place in the game.
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Iâve always been a bit confused about the âCaprice is random!â complaints, given that this is a card game where the runner is regularly playing the odds on random accesses out of centrals â where, indeed, that is an expected part of virtually every match. But I think this question of âfeelâ is probably the crux of it.
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I like that post on BGG for many reasons, but primarily it opened my eyes to how deep the Psi-game is on Caprice. Since reading it, Iâve been able to succeed more often on the Corp and Runner side of Caprice, most notably with the Corp.
One of the more useful insights I had is that if Iâm playing Valencia and have the Bad Pub still available when I play the game, thereâs no point in bidding 1 credit, for either me or the Corp. The Corp doesnât want to bid 1, because it costs the Corp something and not the Runner; theyâd rather bid 2 and have a better chance to lock out, or bid 0 and save money. Because of this, the Runner also doesnât want to bid 1. And if you realize this as the Corp, then it is in your favor to occasionally break the trend and bid 1 anyway. (So you end up with like a 40%-20%-40% distribution on your 0-1-2 credit choices for Corp.)
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What I like most is that people donât care whether the card depicts a male or female.
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All the people saying itâs not random make me laugh. I guess it isnât if you donât make it random. One of the guys in my meta rolls a die to determine what he bets and he never loses the psi game with his RP. The only time anyone beats him is when they steal a couple of his MK2s and NAPDs via top decking. Itâs basically caused everyone around here to hate caprice with the fury of a thousand burning suns!!!
Absolutely agreed. It doesnât feel fun to play against, and it breeds frustration and irritation. Although there is randomness in every match caprice feels to make like a direct way the corp gets to leverage randomness to win the game. This is not quite the same as the bad luck of having lots of accesses and not pulling anything. Or at least, it doesnât feel the same to me.
So if thatâs the case, why doesnât everyone just bet 0 playing against him? Equal chance of being correct and no risk to you.
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This is actually quite an interesting line of thought to me.
On the whole a game of netrunner becomes more and more calculable as ICE is rezzed and the rig is set up. Less and less risks come into the runnerâs play. They do still have to make decisions about where and when to run, and they can still get hit by bluffs/traps, but risks decrease as their position solidifies. To me, the issue with caprice is that you know she is coming, but you canât do anything to stop it or mitigate her effects (short of the rather hard task these days of bringing the corp to 0 credits). Often it feels like my play up until that point essentially becomes entirely irrelevant. It all comes down to whether I can win this game (which I consider to be largely, but not entirely, luck based). This just⌠it irks me, it doesnât feel to me like such critical bits of a netrunner game should come down to luck!
[I know there is an inherent irony in this, as you could argue this is no different than accessing a final couple of cards before you lose and hoping they are agendas, but the difference to me is that one situation is out of the control of both players, the other is a scenario put in place by the corp to use a random mechanic to beat the runner]
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If he always bids randomly, then (whatever his opponent does) he will lose a third of his Psi games. If he consistently loses less than a third of his Psi games, it suggests that he isnât bidding randomly!
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We tried it, he still wins, you canât drain his economy. He runs three celebrity gift, three hedge funds, three interns, and restructure.
So he runs an extra interns in the normal RP econ suite?
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Sure, you might lose 1/3 of psi games in the long run by rolling a die. That doesnât make it any less bullshit as a mechanic when it is literally deciding the game on a die roll.
He does bid randomly, he just doesnât bid in the same way every time he rolls. He randomizes his randomization. So one time he rolls the dice 1-3 is 1, 4-5 is 0, 6 is 2. Next time it might be 1 and 6 is 2, 2 and 5 is 0 and 3 and 4 is 1. He just keeps resetting his randomization. He claims if not even he knows what heâs betting how do you.
If heâs always randomizing, just bet 0 every time. Thatâs an easy one!
My problem with psi games is that I probably have a tell. I counted and went 2/32 at the last regional running against Caprice.
So I just donât run against Caprice ever. In tournament settings, Iâve basically decided that I will either win off lucky R&D accesses or let RP roll me quick so I donât go to time.
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