Something Punny About Drafts

I'm finishing up my series on why asymmetry is excellent, what its pitfalls are, and how to use those to your advantage - see Fair is Fair, Too and It's Drafty In Here if you need a refresher!

Asymmetry is amazing for widening and deepening possible strategic interactions in games, but comes at the cost of tilted matchups, where players of equal skill do not have an equal chance of winning simply because one of their characters has an inherent advantage over the other. Drafting fixes that to an extent, not getting rid of the problem but turning it into a positive attribute of the system, where tilted matchups exist by picking your option set better than the opponent does.

The only requirement a game has to be draftable is that when picking your starting option set (we’ll call them characters), you have a number of reasonable choices to pick from, and you pick more than one character. It doesn’t make sense to draft a single character (second to pick would simply counterpick first, and that’d be that.) But if we pick 3, with players A and B picking in the order A B B A A B, there’s interesting dynamics going on – player A gets to make their first pick from any character they want, but player B gets to pick the last character which would work best against A’s team, and both players get to make two uninterrupted picks in a row which helps solidify our strategy uninterrupted (but not uncounterable.)

What’s really interesting is that drafting is naturally resilient to bad matchups. It won’t fix a character having a matchup so bad that it’s unwinnable, but slight imbalances get smoothed out because you can pick other characters which make your bad matchup less significant. An individual bad matchup matters less because there’s so much more going on during the game than that 1v1.

Even though draft resists bad matchups, which is a good thing, it’s still not immune to them. This is the real shining strength of draft, in my opinion – you can set yourself up for a good matchup, but you have to really earn it. When picking characters blind, without knowledge of what the other player/team is picking, one can get a good matchup simply through luck of the draw – you didn’t know what they would pick, they didn’t know what you would pick, and it happened to be tilted one way or the other. Whoops!

That cannot happen by accident in a draft. If I happen to pick a team of characters with a lot of mages, let’s say, then the opponent could easily pick a character that works well against magic users. It’s my fault for going with such an obvious strategy (that has such an obvious counter.) That’s no accident – you used your game knowledge to gain an advantage against me. Let’s say that I’m well aware that the mages I chose looked like a greedy team build with an easy counter, but I knew of a peculiar strategy or interaction with all the characters I chose that you didn’t know about. In that case, I’m rewarded through my game knowledge – you don’t know what I have planned, so you plan around the obvious strategy but not against the secret one. My knowledge, and your lack of knowledge, puts me into a great position there. I earned that position, my secretly good matchup against you, through knowing more about the game.

Comments

[Peter]

This is interesting, but I think I'd like a couple examples and a sense of what games would benefit from a draft (and maybe that's all coming in another piece, I don't know). For example, does Marvel vs. Capcom have drafting? If so, how is it different from League of Legends? And how is drafting different in League, where a player likely doesn't have access to all of the champions because he's not purchased them? What do you think about banning choices? As drafting so clearly relies on a knowledge of the metagame, this isn't a mechanic that is designed for casual players--do you think it impedes their ability to learn about the game (because they're winning or losing, but not for reasons they understand)? Or is there a way to teach casual players about drafting, so that they're able to learn the importance of counterpicking--without forcing someone to play a character they're unfamiliar with or don't like to play?

You've got me asking all these questions, and I don't know what to do with them!