It's Drafty In Here

It’s preferable that two players of the same skill level in any game will win about the same number of games against each other in a set. It means that fewer things are left up to chance – you win more often through your good decisions (or your opponent’s bad ones) than through something like the luck of a die roll. Asymmetry messes with this, though. It’s relatively common for two different characters to have an uneven matchup in a game – two even players playing against each other in an uneven matchup will likely not have an even number of wins because for whatever reason, one character has an advantage over the other.

Imbalance caused by asymmetry isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a game. Dominant strategies may crop up more often than they do in symmetrical games by virtue of having more variables, more things that can go wrong. Asymmetric games also have a better chance of answering dominant strategies, due to more options being more likely to counter a given strategy – or, should a natural counter not be found, more tweakable knobs to bring the dominant strategy in line (both by nerfing the dominant strategy, or buffing other strategies.)

Perfect balance in an asymmetric system is never going to happen, but that can actually be leveraged to your advantage as a designer. How? Draft! Draft doesn’t fit with everything – draft requires multiple moving pieces to fight over. Draft would not make a lot of sense in, say, a fighting game where you only pick one character, but it does work in some games where you build a team of multiple characters. I have seen drafting happen in single-character games, though – it usually involves picking a number of characters and playing with them all in an order.

So, why is drafting good? Well, drafting works differently for different games, but it is essentially taking character/team/deck/whatever choice, usually something that happens before players start interacting with one another, and turns it into an interactive process. Players or teams, before the game begins, try to secure strong options to make use of during the game. When this process is not interactive, players are free to do things which are batshit crazy or seemingly impossible – win so fast that defense is nearly impossible, ignore entire aspects of the game if they can get away with allocating those resources elsewhere, devise fluid toolboxes that have answers to literally anything, you name it!

Insane strategies are fun but they often lead to imbalanced matchups, where two players are functioning on completely different wavelengths and might not be able to interact meaningfully due to their choice in options. When players can’t meaningfully interact, the game feels flat and unsatisfying. If I show up with a sword and a slingshot, then of course I’m at a disadvantage if you somehow bring an airplane! If we didn’t draft, then I’m just terrible and there’s no way I’m going to win. Your starting options clearly outclass mine, and there was nothing I could do about it besides predict you would bring the airplane and plan accordingly. If we were drafting instead, I could pick the airplane – but you would see that, and pick the anti-air gun, or the fuel for the airplane.

Drafting forces a system of checks and balances into the option set you decide on. You can’t simply pick all the huge, expensive, unstoppable options, because the opponent could simply pick some hyper-aggressive options and win before you get anything going. You can’t simply pick all the hyper-aggressive options because the opponent could simply pick efficient defensive options and a few powerful game-ending options, staving off your attack until their options (which are simply better due to requiring more time to come out – balance!) come online and destroy you. You can’t just pick defensive options because you’ll lack an offense, meaning the opponent can just pick giant unstoppable options and have all the time in the world to utilize them. Without drafting, any of those strategies (or other all-in strategies) might be viable choices, but when drafting they’re incredibly risky because being a one-trick pony is so easy to defend against. Drafting forces you to diversify, so that while the opponent might counter individual startup choices you make, you are countering some of theirs.

Join me next time, when I dig into how some specific games handle their draft modes, and how that changes the way the game functions.

-Jacob