Level Two - Lesson 20
Objective Investigations
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and we’re going to dive into investigations - we’ve talked about them a lot in preceding lessons - a lot of “and then the head judge should investigate”. We’re actually going to break this down into two lessons - objective investigations and subjective investigations.
Some folks might refer objective investigations as game state investigations, handling calls, “lower case” investigations, determining reality, factual investigations or any of a variety of names. Similarly, folks might call subjective investigations cheating investigations, “capital I” investigations, or determining intent.
What is an Investigation?
An investigation is any time you want to get information from players - which means pretty much every time you interact with players. I can say with confidence that the vast majority of my calls include at least one question - “what can I do for you?”
You might not think of this as an investigation, especially given the tendency to focus on cheating investgations, but it’s important to learn objective investigations as well - far more calls involve you needing to figure out something that’s based in identifiable facts and through cooperative communication with players than calls that involve you needing to make a determination of whether or not a player is cheating.
We’re going to take a look a few specific sub-categories of objective investigations. Before we do that, I want to remind you of the categories of calls we discussed back in the L1 lesson on Judge Calls - empirical, cooperative, contentious, and combative. With most objective investigations, you’re going to either have an empirical call or at the very least have players who are cooperating with you, even if they’re in contention with each other.
If players are in contention with each other about what happened, it can be helpful to separate them so that they can relate their perspective without it being corrupted by the other person. However, having both players at the table means that a player can issue corrections or amendments like “everything my opponent said is correct, except I also attacked with Greedo.”
Finding Evidence
With these calls, you’re determining what has mechanically happened in the game - this is events that have occurred, and so you’re trying to recover facts. You have a lot of tools at your disposal, and we’re going to walk through them.
You have the cards in play, the distribution of damage, tokens, and counters on cards in play and cards in discard as some very clear pieces of evidence. You have the number of resources a player has, whether they’re exhausted or ready and the number of cards in their hand or deck. Sometimes you have a player’s notes, which often include an auxiliary set of tracking for base HP or other key information.
Beyond that, you have the memory of both players, spectators and the possibility to discuss strategy and intent with players (after separating the players) - and this also means that you have access to the identity of cards in hand and in resources, which can sometimes help you reconstruct a game state.
Random Portion of the Deck
Let’s start with a common piece of information you need to find - what part of the deck is random, and which part is “known”. This is a piece of information that we use frequently, most often in resolving Card Manipulation Errors, but sometimes in other fixes as well.
When a player is instructed to put cards on the bottom of their deck by an ability, and later we need to randomize the deck for a fix, we want to preserve those cards in that location, because the game hasn’t instructed the player to shuffle those cards in - and so any cards that the player wanted to take but had to put on the bottom will remain there.
This is often straightforward - the key question is “do you know the location of any cards in your deck?” - you can name a few cards with relevant effects - “Anything like U-Wing Reinforcement or Inferno Four?” by naming a few frequently played cards that have non-matching aspects, we’re not providing significant information to the opponent - we’re not implying that these cards are in the players deck, but instead referring to a class of ability.
We can also check to see if the player has shuffled their deck recently. While there aren’t currently many cards that result in the whole deck compared to the quantity that put some cards on the bottom of the deck, if the player has shuffled, we only card about the cards that they’ve put back into their deck since the shuffle, because the deck was fully randomized at that point in time.
If the player says no, you can always double check with more examples (because frequently players do forget something and taking the extra second or two to confirm helps ensure that we don’t damage the gamestate with our remedy).
If the player doesn’t remember, it’s time to start digging! First, let’s look at any cards in play, and check to see if any have any action or trigger abilities. For each one, we’ll ask how it was resolved - “did you put cards on the bottom or top, do you remember how many?” If things get complicated, it can be very helpful to keep track of the count in a notebook, so you don’t have to keep a number in mind. For action abilities, you may have to figure out how many times they were activated - but there’s usually some contextual information that can help. If you’re looking at Yoda - Sensing Darkness - his ability can only be activated in phases where a unit left play, and comes with the player drawing a card, so they might be able to remember “I drew this card off yoda” and I activated him another time when I deafted that unit.”
We can of course repeat the process with the discard, and then confirm that no cards that might have impacted the deck order were returned to hand (or resources or deck) with effects similar to that on Bounty Hunter Crew or Restock.
The process is straightforward and frequently not complicated, most of the time there are only a couple of effects that need to be considered.
Determining Game History
This next process is for helping to evaluate for rewinds primarily, but has a lot of spillover into other remedies. Sometimes you don’t need the information to apply the fix, but you need it to understand what the actual issue or concern is.
Very frequently, we don’t need to understand just what is currently happening - the game state - but also what has come to pass before - the game history.
As we discussed above in determining the random portion of the deck, sometimes we need to figure out how many times an ability was activated, or how many times a unit attacked, or what round we’re on.
The best way to figure out what has happened in the game is to pick a point on the timeline - either the current moment, with the current gamestate, or the point that you’re interested in (the first time a unit attacked, when an error occurred etc...). I recommend starting with where we are now, because it’s easier for players to recount what has happened most recently - they have the cards in front of them, and have to rely on memory less. As they go back in time, they’re able to reconstruct the games events. “Oh, right, before I attacked with Sabine, I played Daring Raid to defeat your sentinel.”
However, sometimes players have the whole history ready to go from the inciting moment, and so you can take that and work with it.
Like with determining the random portion of the deck, you should be looking at cards in play and in the discard to determine what has happened. However, we’re going to want an even wider scope, because we’re looking for more information.
You’re also more likely to look at both player’s game states - linking cards in discard to units in play and discard - “What did this Takedown Defeat? Okay, and how was it’s on defeat trigger resolved?”
Frequently, discard piles are in chronological order, and so going step by step, you can take cards from the top and dig deeper until you find your stopping point - and they contain a ton of information.
If players stumble in their recollection, separate them and talk to them one at a time - ask them what their line of thinking was around the plays that they do remember, and see if that helps them jog their memory. Because you’re discussing strategy, you want their opponent out of ear shot, and ideally accompanied by another judge.
Card Counts
Sometimes, a player will have accidentally drawn an extra card, and sometimes we won’t be sure. Furthermore, we sometimes want to figure out what round of the game we’re on for determining game history. To do that, we use one of a variety of methods to count cards.
The goal of any card counting exercise is to determine how many cards the player has removed from their deck by way of their opening hand, drawing for regroup, and from abilities and effects.
Let’s say a player isn’t sure if they drew one card or two this regroup and they call you over to ask for your assistance.
There are two common approaches to counting cards - I’m going to cover both, and you can practice and determine which one suits you better. In either case, the goal is to compare a player’s accessed cards to either the current round (if it’s known) or the other player’s accessed cards. That’s some nonsense technical language, so let’s walk through an example.
A player calls you over because they’re unsure if they’ve drawn for their Heroic Sacrifice or not - they resolved the attack, and now looking at their hand, can’t remember what card they drew, and so aren’t sure if they ever did draw one.
One approach looks at the game holistically, and the other looks at it on a card-by-card basis.
Card-by-Card Counts
Let’s start with the card-by-card approach.
All we do is look at each card that a player has played, and assign it a value based on how many additional cards it allowed the player to access. Any cards that leave the deck are considered accessed, and are worth “+1”.
For example, the aforementioned Heroic Sacrifice is worth +1 because it draws a card. U-Wing Reinforcement is +0 to +3 because it can put as few as zero and as many as three units into play. All smuggle cards at minimum have a +1 if smuggled, because they take a card from out of the deck. Cobb Vanth, even though the card goes directly from the deck to the discard is also +1. Restock can be worth up to -4 if you return four cards.
However, not every card that has allowed you to access cards has allowed you net access - for example, Yoda - Sensing Darkness, while he draws you a card, you also put a card back in the deck - so his leader side action is worth zero. Similarly, Bounty Hunter Crew, while it returns a card from your discard to your hand, and you’re able to replay the card doesn’t take a card from the deck, and is also worth zero.
Once you have the final count of cards, count all of the cards not in the player’s deck - no matter what zone they’re in. Then subtract the value you have - the result will be the number of cards the player had in their starting hand plus the number of cards they’ve drawn for regroup.
Holistic Counts
The other method starts the other way around - we begin by counting every card the player has access to, subtract the starting hand, and cards for regroup, and then have a number of additional cards accessed, and go through the game history to determine how that quantity of cards was accessed.
Both methods are essentially the same - totalling up the number of cards accessed, figuring out where they came from, and then checking to see if the numbers add up.
Determining the Round
Sometimes you won’t know what round it is - especially in the late game, players may have skipped resource drops. To determine the round in this case, begin by counting the other player’s cards. We act under the assumption that they have the correct quantity of cards - we get the total, subtract starting hand, and then additional cards accessed and that should leave us with the number of cards drawn for regroup, which will be the same for both players. We can then use that to determine the original player’s card count.
Card Count - Common Errors
Make sure you don’t miss something like Colossus, which will reduce a player’s count by one. You’ll also want to check with players to see if any cards that could have accessed cards has returned to a hidden zone - returning a restock to your hand with Bounty Hunter Crew can have a significant impact on the card count, and so you want to make sure you don’t miss that. Of course, every card that has resolved has been public, and while you don’t want to reveal if the player still has the card in hand, you can ask the players at the table if any cards like that have been returned to hand - and can confirm with the opponent.
Base Health Discrepancy
Sometimes players will disagree on the amount of damage on a unit or base - although more frequently on a base than a unit.
When this happens, you need to reconstruct the gamestate and game history. One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “How did this happen?” It’s very broad, and gives players the space to include additional information that can help your investigation.
Look in the discard and in play, and account for units that may have attacked, account for healing, and make your best judgment. This is more likely going to come up when players are independently tracking both base damage totals, rather than just relying on their opponent. Frequently, at large competitive events, players will be tracking damage totals on a sheet of paper.
While a written record can be maliciously altered or accidentally misrecorded, it is easier for dice to be accidentally mishandled or jostled, resulting in inaccurate game states. This means that you shouldn’t rely absolutely on a written health or damage total, but you can use it as a resource. You can see the event history - you can see the increments of damage and see that a player marked their damage going from 16 to 19 recently, but their opponent hasn’t had any units with three power in play for a very long time. This is likely erroneous, and you can look for other potential units that attacked in that time frame to find the correct information.
Relying on Player Testimony
Now, here’s the challenge with all of this - we called these objective investigations - scenarios where you’re dealing with facts, and elements that you can look at directly and compare.
However, you’ll note that most of the time, the way we’re getting this information is by asking the players how things occurred. There are, of course, underlying concerns here.
The first is that while we generally believe that players are honest and trying to help us come to a correct and natural conclusion, there are some players who are acting maliciously and will give us bad information. The second is that people are actually really bad at remembering things, broadly speaking. Next time you’re playing, have a friend come up to you after the match and have them ask you which player started with the initiative or if you took a mulligan - there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be able to remember it. Or if you do, your memory might be partially fabricated.
Players will misremember things frequently - this is why we need a little bit more security than just asking a player what happened.
You want to look at elements of objective evidence. Card counts can reliably tell you how many cards a player has accessed (if not how), and written damage totals are much more concrete than a player memory (and this is why I encourage all competitive players to track damage totals on paper - it protects both them and their opponent from errors). You also want to confirm with the opponent. While you may separate players to discuss what happened exactly, and ask questions about strategy and plans to help jog the players’ memory, you want to bring them back together at the end and lay out your complete understanding of events, which are all public.
Take the evidence you have, but reinforce that evidence with other elements so that you can be more confident in your final judgment.
Making the Final Call
Sometimes, however, you’re not going to have that confidence. You’re not always going to be able to nail down the certainty of what happened, or there isn’t enough evidence one way or the other - one player remembers things playing out one way, the other playing out another. This is where your judgment comes into play, and you have to make a decision. Sometimes you can dig a bit deeper into talking with the players about why they believe that the game played out that way, but it can be really difficult. However, for the game to move on, you need to make a ruling.
Express to the players your understanding, and where you’re basing your understanding on - whatever evidence you have. Let them know that that is your final ruling. However, be prepared to be appealed - in these circumstances where there isn’t concrete evidence or at least a compelling sequence of evidence, it’s AP said/NAP said, and the player you don’t end up ruling in favor of is likely going to seek an alternate opinion. Don’t take that as an evaluation of yourself - accept it as something that happens in situations that aren’t wholly precise.
Speaking of that lack of clarity, it’s starting to dive into subjective investigations, which we’ll dive into in much more detail in our next lesson. If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
As always, good luck, and have fun.