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The problem is that under your scenario, rolling higher is still better. Having more options is always better than less. On top of which, I have a strong suspicion players are going to really dislike the randomness and probably perceive rolling high to be MORE powerful than it really is. Additionally, it sounds like you have a solid concept but are trying to find somewhere to force randomness in.
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Mar 10, 2013 19:25
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So Whixly is finally at Playtest, and Super Robots just went into its next revision. On top of that, Sandy Pug has been getting a fair chunk of attention from the Dungeon World sheets I made, and I have an interview coming up for an indie games site  . Now, to find actually find a publisher and get paid for all this effort 
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Mar 11, 2013 16:10
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Came up with a game that I made WAAAY back around 1997 for art class. Our final project could be anything so I made CCG based on making artwork throughout the ages. You were an artist, and you painted things. The technique you used, the tools you could afford, and the studio you were in were all factors in the paintings you made. You were looking to make as much fame as possible. Was thinking about LCG and realized I could change it up slightly and make two separate games that flow into each other and either part is optional! So the first part is mainly what I described above but instead of painting anything, you paint a style. Technique is important but on the flip side, that style you are doing is HOT HOT HOT so making quick money from painting stuff that barely qualifies as a work of art will give you a quick burst infusion of cash but ruin/flood the market. Whoever wins is the one who has the higher fame/wealth. Now fast forward 300-700 years You are all distant relatives of the previous artists characters. You are given so much money to go and make the BEST collection of artwork. You win by either donating the most (while not making money), having the largest private collection (while INCREASING the value of any artwork from the period still out there, including the crappy ones), or making the most money (sharply decreasing the value of artwork out there as the game progresses). Now these paintings did not just sit around in impervious-acrylic-air-vacated boxes. Stuff happened to them. Two examples I came up: One was stolen and the whereabouts are unknown. You have to track it down or you might not find it at all... but don't find it TOO quick because as copies of this type of art during the period become inaccessible, the price of the missing painting will go up. Forgeries - A forgery was made of one piece. Both are considered half the worth of the original. One can be proven a fake, but it would take work. You can also pick BOTH the forgery and the real one and you double the worth of the original because since you have both and have publicly made it know you have both, people are more willing to pay more. (forget there could be multiple forgeries) The thing that will make this interesting is each game can be played by itself. Folding them together will make it somewhat unique when that Piece of Crap one player did is not worth WAY more than the painting that was the toast of the town 500 years ago.
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Mar 15, 2013 19:56
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Do you have any mechanics for it?
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Mar 15, 2013 20:00
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So basically Modern Art: The LCG?
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Mar 15, 2013 20:04
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Mr. Glass posted:So basically Modern Art: The LCG? Yep, but two games instead of just one depending what people want to play. Achmed Jones posted:Do you have any mechanics for it? For art creation, yes. I still have my notes or the ideas are in my head. Half-finished paintings, for instance, can be sold if you note a player is about to finish two paintings at once is one. Better gear will help you finish great works faster, but will eat heavily into a starving artist's finances. Some new ideas about the game. Finite art line. If anyone makes a work, it goes on this line. Tens works will be done before the first game's end. There are some interactions against people who try to cheese the system I'm thinking of. What if someone does nothing but flood the market with half-finished poo poo? Fame for the artist will go up slowly and in the second half of the game, the paintings will not be worth much. Flooding can also be countered by an not-well-known artist who is discovered and his few paintings will be worth more because the art crowd are pretentious mothereffers. If people are banging out masterpieces left and right, you can suit yourself well by checking in some half-painted poo poo riding on the coattails of the vibrant art style. Art Buyers do not have to be good at art appreciation. So 10 (changing) pieces of work is the hard end of the game (maybe there needs to be several example pieces in existence to consider an art style a "movement"). Depending on what type of quality is on the time line, the second game will either be a flea-market because everyone decided to make black-velvet quality art or a hot-collared auction of works worth millions. I do like cause and effect in games and I think it will be unique to have two separately games flow into each other naturally but still can be played alone. edit: To link the two games, artists who made lots of money will pass some of this success to their distant relatives. Or maybe not. That is to be figured out later. EVIL Gibson fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 20:18
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Can I get a talk about die rolling mechanics? Lets assume you're trying to hit something with a sword, where applicable. In D20; To-hit is 1d20 + modifiers, you hit when you equal or exceed a target's static defense, damage is based off the weapon + modifiers, minus any damage resistance. In GURPS; To-hit is 3d6, hitting when your roll is equal or less your skill + modifiers, enemy can defend if they roll 3d6 less than or under their defense score + modifiers, damage is based off of ST + Sword's modifiers, minus target's DR. In Descent; To-hit is 1 attack die, you hit if you do not roll an X. Damage is based off of weapon die + Modifiers, minus any Defense Die the target rolls + modifiers. In Inn Fighting; To-hit is default-hit unless the defender rolls a power or a luck on a 1d6 (1/3rd chance of defending). Damage 1d20 + dies showing for attack made; doing high damage if the roll is greater than or equal to the characters skill, low damage otherwise. Can someone give me some other examples of die-rolling mechanics, and if you're willing, a discussion on it? As I play more games, I realize I don't really like D20 -- 1 through 20 is a huge variable, and passive target numbers don't really feel like they engage the player being attacked. Additionally, since the number variable is so wide, static bonuses seem to become more important to hitting these target numbers. GURPS I like a bit more, but the order of attack is something like Attack (If Hit succeds, Roll Defense, If Defense fails, Roll Damage, Minus DR). Descent uses a blue 'Attack' die, a red 'Power die' and a Yellow 'Magic die' on the offense side, and a Brown, Grey, and Black die for defending (In order of least defending to most defending). Every attack rolls a blue die, plus either a red, yellow, or some combination of the two depending on your weapon, and enemy rolls defense based off of what their base is (Players start with a grey) plus anything their armor grants. All die have Surges that can be spent by players via abilities or weapons, with Magic granting the most, and Power granting the least, but Power having the most damage, and magic having less. You subtract the damage from the shields shown. I actually like this system alot, even if it does sound complicated, but I feel that it could be better done without six different die for combat. Inn Fighting is a real simple system: You roll a bunch of die, you get chairs, fists, or power (Other stuff too, but thats not important to attacking). You attack someone (Chair people on the right, power people in the lead, or punch people on the left), and they defend by rolling a single red die and defending a 1/3rd of the time. If you hit, you roll 1d20 adding any fists, power, or chairs showing on the dice depending on what kind of attack you made, and if its over your skill, you do high damage, if not, it's low. Damage is dependent on the attack used. Overall, I'd rate the die attacks something like Descent Inn Fighting GURPS DnD with Inn Fighting probably supposed to be over Descent, but other mechanics tied in with the die seem to hurt it more than it would be standing by itself. I find that Descent is the most fun for the players, while GURPS is slinging a ton of dice around, and DnD being so swingy due to a D20 being used for attacking.
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Mar 18, 2013 18:28
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It comes down to how much granularity you really need in a game. Practically, there's not a lot of situations where you need 5% increments of success, it's a holdover from D&D times. I'd argue any game where you're rolling a D20 probably didn't work to create a tight ruleset. D6s have lots of nice properties, especially when you start rolling multiples, which creates a nice bell curve of probability. Descent's system is interesting as they basically created multipurpose D6s; instead of requiring 4 rolls (range, to hit, special abilities, damage), they bundled it into a single roll. Descent has a pretty narrow focus though, so it can afford to boil down mechanics to a set of 6 dice total.
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Mar 18, 2013 19:21
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In board games, as opposed to RPGs, you usually don't have shades of success in single die rolls. You either succeed or you fail. RPGs are often more like "how MUCH do you fail? How MUCH do you succeed?" That's where the d20 can come in handy (and is still squandered anyway, if you're playing strictly by D&D rules. I used to add flourishes to descriptions based on degrees of success when I was running games, because the d20 let me do that). I actually kind of like new World of Darkness for its elegance. They boiled down actions into four shades: dramatic failure, failure, success, and exceptional success. That's much closer to what a board game would need in terms of what the mechanics require from individual die rolls. Doing so also bundled all the annoying extra rolls form old WoD games into one roll. You don't roll to hit, roll to dodge, roll to damage, and roll to soak. You just roll to hit. Defenses are factored into the roll in the first place, and the successes are damage. It gets a lot of milage out of dice, like Descent (in an odd and indirect way). I've often thought of it like trying to boil your dice down to the smallest number of dice and the smallest number of sides and still be able to randomize whatever range you need. If a decision is a 50/50, for example, then a "d2" (AKA a coin) is all you need. It's only when you get into more modifiers and mechanics that you need more sides: d6's, d10's, etc. The d10 is elegant because it is metric and odds are easy to calculate. But it's got all those sides that you usually don't need if success/failure is 50/50, 66/33, or 75/25. You can get all those out of a d4 or a d6 or two. I've always liked d6's for this reason. The odds are well-known and flexible, and they're easy to get and prototype custom sets. But if I'm thinking of die mechanics for board games, I'm thinking like new World of Darkness: keep it as simple as possible. Get all that poo poo into one roll, if at all possible.
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Mar 18, 2013 19:44
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When you say 'One roll', is that for one action, or one related group of actions? For example; if DnD rolled To-hit and Damage into one roll, would it be better for the defender to have a target number for hitting (Therefore truly one roll), or would it be better for the defender to have a roll for defending (Defense and Resistance). I'm personally leaning towards the latter, even though it slows down the game, due to actively interacting with the defending player, even if it just rolling the die. On that subject, a quick question too -- A +# modifier vs an additional die -- Mechanically if they averaged out the same, I'm eager to say that adding dice is the correct choice for making gameplay, but I can't tell you why. I know that + modifiers are boring and should be avoided; but isn't that what a die is, except for more random?
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Mar 18, 2013 19:52
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Railing Kill posted:In board games, as opposed to RPGs, you usually don't have shades of success in single die rolls. You either succeed or you fail. RPGs are often more like "how MUCH do you fail? How MUCH do you succeed?" But even then how often would you require more than a D10 for that? Hell, in most cases you could boil it down to a D6 with modifiers, with anything over a natural roll (ie 7 or higher) being a big success with lower than natural (0, -1) being a huge failure. TalonDemonKing posted:For example; if DnD rolled To-hit and Damage into one roll, would it be better for the defender to have a target number for hitting (Therefore truly one roll), or would it be better for the defender to have a roll for defending (Defense and Resistance). It sounds like you don't have a clear vision in your head of what your goal are - I don't mean that in a bad way, a lot of people get hung up on mechanics over function. What do you want to achieve in your ideal system? - How much player interaction do you want in a rolls? - What's your upper/lower limit on how many die rolls you want to resolve a single [combat/action/etc]. - How swingy/variable do you want your combat to be? - How does power level correspond to chance of winning (ie, can a lvl 1 guy ever take down a lvl 15 guy)? - Do you want to reward really good or bad rolls? - How much does your system need to scale? I'm not sure why modifiers are boring; but I'm not a RPG guy either.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:12
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Crackbone posted:But even then how often would you require more than a D10 for that? Hell, in most cases you could boil it down to a D6 with modifiers, with anything over a natural roll (ie 7 or higher) being a big success with lower than natural (0, -1) being a huge failure. I guess that's my point. d20's are usually unnecessary if you think about it that way. I prefer d6's like I said, but d10's do have the elegance of being decimal and make things easy to calculate during design and during play. Oh, and when I said "one roll," that's a related group of actions bundled into one. Old World of dArkness had seperate rolls for hitting, dodging, damage, and damage resistance. New World of Darkness has one roll whose pool is the attacker's hit - the defender's defense. Dodging and damage resistance are built into things as well. What can be taken from this about any game design is how many ways you can modify die rolling mechanics, and that you can boil rolls down into simplicity for the players if your modifiers are handled cleverly (like Descent). You can modify the die pool, the odds of success, or the die result itself. World of Darkness uses all of that to boil down a whole combat action into one roll instead of four, which makes the newer games' combat go a lot faster. That's important in an RPG, but its arguably more important in a board game where players are taking quick turns and rolling dice every turn. Gotta keep things snappy.
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Mar 19, 2013 16:56
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TalonDemonKing posted:As I play more games, I realize I don't really like D20 -- 1 through 20 is a huge variable, and passive target numbers don't really feel like they engage the player being attacked. Additionally, since the number variable is so wide, static bonuses seem to become more important to hitting these target numbers. I can't think of an example of opposed rolls that I like. I think that if a player being attacked isn't engaged when he's being attacked, the problem is the game, not that the player didn't have to double the amount of time somebody else's turn is taking with an opposing roll.
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Mar 19, 2013 22:15
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homullus posted:I can't think of an example of opposed rolls that I like. I think that if a player being attacked isn't engaged when he's being attacked, the problem is the game, not that the player didn't have to double the amount of time somebody else's turn is taking with an opposing roll. I agree, and further, I think that you can get the same statistics (or near enough to not matter) with just one sided rolls, which means it is mechanically useless.
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Mar 20, 2013 16:01
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I think I just figured out the way to solve the problem I've been having with this game I've been designing in my head. To reiterate the game briefly: The game is played on a grid, and the object is to eliminate the enemy team. You have a band of characters that you select to make your team. Each character has a card that displays its movement, reaction movement, and threat area. The threat area is shows as highlighted grid squares relative to the forward facing of the character, i.e. if it's a straight line up, that character threatens a straight line heading out from its front facing. To eliminate an enemy character, you must threaten it such that it cannot escape the threat with its reaction. In other words the enemy can react to your movement, but at the end of each turn (this is for both players), every character that is in another character's threat range is eliminated. It's basically like checkmating that character. I've been grappling with how to manage a hand of cards that allow things that alter the playing field to eliminate stalemates while not adding randomness to the game. I want the whole game to be strategy. I think I found a way to do this. Each player draws up to X number of cards (I want to call it 7 for now but I'll have to see how it goes in playtesting). These cards do not represent actions in themselves, but rather types of actions. The actual effect of using a given card depends on the character that uses the effect of the card. Each character will have an action listed for each type of card. You use your actions during your turn, and at the end of your turn you draw the cards you want to have for your next turn. That way your opponent doesn't know what you are GOING to do, but they do know what you have available to do. You are also committed at the end of your turn to what you're going to have available the next turn. You must be thinking ahead in order to be effective. It also means that as your characters get eliminated, you have more cards available per character, so ultimately having fewer guys limits your options but it also makes each character necessarily more dangerous. I feel that this solution should eliminate the randomness while maintaining the unpredictable opponent aspect while also making setup fast. The next step is to figure out a mechanic that forces aggression and something that resolves stalemates in the event you only have 1 character left.
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Mar 21, 2013 04:31
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I have an inkling for a game, inspired by, of all things, Uggtech and BatHotH. The working title is Hanlon's Razor, and it goes something like this. It's a cooperative game with a traitor mechanic. Except, with the loyalty cards handed out, or whatever they are, each of the 'loyalist' cards has some restriction. What that restriction might be depends on how the mechanics shape up, but it should be something fairly obvious in retrospect, while not being a dead giveaway during play. You're not allowed to mention what your restriction is, either. In this way, everyone is hindered in their own way, fumbling with what they've got to try to make this thing happen, while everyone else thinks they're just a moron. Everyone except the traitor, who has no restriction. But, they're all but required to keep up the facade of having one lest he be outed as the traitor. Then again, if someone else's restriction is handled badly enough, their own machinations might go unnoticed. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Edit Did some more thinking, think what it will be is there will be a score card for each round, giving different parameters for scoring. Like, Jacks are worth five points, Spades are worth three points, Eights are worth a point, but Sevens are worth negative three points, and Hearts are worth negative one. Then, everyone plays a card face-down, and they're all revealed simultaneously. The loyalty cards might have restrictions like "you can't play a card with the same suit or number as the one you played last round" or "you can't play cards worth 0 points", or "if you have two or more cards of the same suit, you must play one of them". Things like that. And the traitor still has no limits. Not sure on the theme, though. I could keep it abstract. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Mar 21, 2013 |
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Mar 21, 2013 06:28
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I have a couple ideas I haven't made progress on for a while. Anybody want to help brainstorm and/or take them and make a game? 1. The purpose of the game is as a filler to play while people are arriving, something similar to but slightly more board-gamey than Egyptian Ratscrew. It's a 1-vs-all game where new players can jump in at any time. 2 players are battling to the death, a 3rd player can jump in between turns when he thinks the current players are weak enough that he can beat both together; the other two now have to team up against the new player; a 4th can join if he thinks he can beat all 3, etc. Score points based on how many people you beat, anybody observing but not in the round gets -1 point. Start new round with winner vs. newest arrival. -Anyway, I like the concept but I have no mechanics for how the game actually plays, anything I come up with just feels tacked on. 2. Another concept: A co-op game where sharing information is dangerous. A Cthulhu-esque theme - you are trying to learn things man was not meant to know without going insane. As a mechanic, think quantum Blackjack - you are trying to get a hand of 21 without breaking, but you break if you even KNOW where cards summing over 21 are (i.e. I have 16 and I know player two has a 6 - I broke 21). If you go over, you go insane and discard your whole hand, and everybody discards one card. You can trade cards with other players, but only at random. There's some kind of turn limit to the game to force you along, maybe different suits interact in different ways. Other possible victory condition - if you can identify exactly where 21 is in a single suit, without necessarily holding them all. (Cards would go 0-10 in each suit). Again, my problem is I don't know what else to do with the game, I don't know if there's any actual strategy to it, and as a co-op game I don't know that it encourages interaction, the idea was basically to get around quarterbacking. 3. A SCARY GAME MECHANIC for a horror game: Game comes with a hundred unique character cards, each with their own name, picture and maybe a minor special ability. At the start of the game, you draw and lay face down in the middle of the board a card from a Darkness deck. The deck consists of 99 Darkness cards and 1 Beast card. At the end of the game if you lost, you reveal the card. If it's the Beast, you have to BURN YOUR CHARACTER CARD. If it's a Darkness, you just lose - but you burn that Darkness card. I don't know that there's really a game in this, I was just trying to think of a game that would actually be scary to play, and I thought having that unknown face-down card looking at you all game would be intimidating (there's a big red eye on the back!), that plus the sense of loss in destroying a unique character, and the idea of gradually making the threat higher every game. Dr. Video Games 0069 fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 05:38
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Somewhat board game design related, but definitly more on the board games as art side of things http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157884/game-designer-jason-rohrer-designs-a-game-meant-to-be-played-2000 quote:Rohrer's A Game for Someone was presented at the 10th (and final) Game Design Challenge at GDC. This year's challenge was themed "Humanity's Last Game." I'm fascinated on few levels, one being the sheer amount of pretension, but still really neat concept of a game that might get played by someone long after you are dead. The second is his process of black boxing the rules. As a software engineer and a fan of automated testing, I'm wondering how he did it, and if you could generalize it in such a way as to create a toolkit for other games. A rigorous, automatic, mechanical way to ensure game balance would probably be a good thing for the industry, especially if you could get it out to the little guys, who just don't have the budget for large playtests. Ulta fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 13:13
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quote:The second is his process of black boxing the rules. As a software engineer and a fan of automated testing, I'm wondering how he did it, and if you could generalize it in such a way as to create a toolkit for other games. A rigorous, automatic, mechanical way to ensure game balance would probably be a good thing for the industry, especially if you could get it out to the little guys, who just don't have the budget for large playtests. It's a very hard problem to even get started with. It's easy for a computer to explore a general state space, and for many games this will be good enough to play against a human - but the computer's play will not look like a human's without human-designed heuristics or a much more advanced approach. It's easy to find a game that's balanced under optimal play, but doesn't work at all for humans. Solving games (a much simpler problem) is a fun little hobby though, and I'll sometimes dig for a few to try on the BoardGameGeek forums. Games with sequential play and perfect information are fairly simple - the most you'll usually need is a little Dynamic Programming to make things finish on time (unless the state space is too large, I don't usually bother with those because AB search is boring). Games with hidden information quickly become mixed-strategy equilibria - then you have to bring out a bunch of linear algebra to work out percentages (and, later, Simplex when the matrices get too big). These are the most interesting (and most applicable to analysis of modern boardgames). Games with more than 2 players are almost always a mess, I don't bother with them either.
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Mar 30, 2013 19:05
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So I've been revising a semi-cooperative game I made a few months back and we just did a ton of final testing the the past week. The bigger concepts are proven and now I'm down to fine-tuning the numbers, which I can do myself for the most part. I've been testing this for a few months in different stages, so now I'm trying to figure out when it's "done" enough for a pitch to publishers. I found a great way to network with publishers (this "Twitter" thing that all the kids are talking about), so I think I have a good shot of getting some honest responses from a lot of folks. I'm still concerned about components and art, though. My prototype components are pretty rough and the game has none of its art assets put together yet. Maybe that's alright and publishers will worry about that, but I'm not sure. I guess I'm just thinking aloud here about when a game is done enough for publication, and how valuable Twitter has been to me. I wouldn't have said this last year or even a few months ago, but I really recommend Twitter for this stuff. My account is pretty much exclusively for networking with game players, designers, and publishers, mostly because it's tied to my board game podcast. Because most of my followers are gaming industry people, it's a good one-stop-shop for publishers, both small and large. I had a hard time manually slogging through the 'net for small publishers, but Twitter has amassed quite a contact list for me over the last few months.
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Mar 30, 2013 22:01
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Railing Kill posted:I guess I'm just thinking aloud here about when a game is done enough for publication, and how valuable Twitter has been to me. I wouldn't have said this last year or even a few months ago, but I really recommend Twitter for this stuff. My account is pretty much exclusively for networking with game players, designers, and publishers, mostly because it's tied to my board game podcast. Because most of my followers are gaming industry people, it's a good one-stop-shop for publishers, both small and large. I had a hard time manually slogging through the 'net for small publishers, but Twitter has amassed quite a contact list for me over the last few months. I'd love to hear more about this. How did you start connecting with people through Twitter? What kind of things do you do to maintain that presence? I'm in a similar place though with 2 of my games, though one of them I'm pretty sure I'm ready to scrap. Right now though, I'm in some of the final testing phases for Ghosts Of Whixly Manor. Its evolved a bit since I last rambled about it to everyone and has become a really neat game about players managing their actions and forever walking this fine line between working together and trying to go their own way. The color based resource mechanic that came from this thread has been a smasher too. If anyone would be up for some blind playtests, let me know, all you need is some little mans, everything else is printable. On top of that, I wrote a short sort-of-series about Games Design for my website. Its a very very simplistic look at the process of design from the point of view of a first time or very small time designer. - http://sandypuggames.com/?cat=3 Thoughts? I tried to toe the line between being too simple and not actually explaining anything, while still trying to be accessible for someone who has no idea how to make a game. Most 'How To Make A Game' guides online are absolute shite that focus a lot more on like, physically building the product and less about the process before and after.
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Apr 4, 2013 21:13
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'd love to hear more about this. How did you start connecting with people through Twitter? What kind of things do you do to maintain that presence? I was never interested in Twitter up until last year but everyone in our podcast signed up for it to chat with listeners and other podcasters, so I did the same. Links to our Twitter feeds are up on the podcast page, and because it is a board game podcast, the folks finding my account tended to be board game people. Those connections spiraled outward like social media does, and I now have game publishers, designers, and players following the account. I've maintained the account for about ten months and I have a couple dozen small game publishers on my list. I don't have to do much to maintain it, either, which is nice because Twitter still kind of bugs me. I see it more as a networking tool than a personal social tool. I just post a tweet every few days, usually about the games I'm designing. Checking in on the thing every few days and posting 140 characters is about how much I want to be engaged with it, but it still works like that. Even at the lazy pace I use it, I get at least a few new followers every week. I'll get more if I go out and look for them, which I do for publishers more and more these days. So I guess it helps to have some draw to your account that attracts board game people if that's who you want to connect with, but it's not necessary. That just speeds up the rate you make followers and gives you a regular stream of new followers. You can build a list of followers manually, though, by finding a board gamer's account and following their followers. The etiquette on Twitter is that you follow people (who are actually people and not bots or scammers) who follow you (unless you're a celebrity that has too many followers to make that practical). So if you find board game folks and follow them, they will in turn follow you. It might take a couple months to build up a list of publishers like that, but once you've done that it's a good one-stop-shop for getting in contact with them all. I've compartmentalized my following list into groups of publishers, designers, and so on, so if need be I can tweet just at those groups. I haven't done much with that yet, but it's a good tool.
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Apr 5, 2013 15:42
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Hey guys, thanks for keeping this thread alive while I was gone. There's some good stuff here that I haven't had time to respond to... just wanted you all to know that I'm not dead, just a new father, and I'll get back to this thread more once my life resumes a slightly more normal schedule, which I would expect will be in eighteen years or so. 
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Apr 5, 2013 19:03
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xopods posted:Hey guys, thanks for keeping this thread alive while I was gone. There's some good stuff here that I haven't had time to respond to... just wanted you all to know that I'm not dead, just a new father, and I'll get back to this thread more once my life resumes a slightly more normal schedule, which I would expect will be in eighteen years or so. Wow! Congrats, Xopods! We'll hold down the fort. I finally put together the time and materials to make this dice game I've had on the back burner. I might post info tomorrow to get some feedback. Some days I'm just excited to be physically making stuff, rather than just writing. Tomorrow is going to be one of those days. I might also post a summary of the revised rules to the co-op game I've been focusing on. It's gone through a bunch of testing in the last couple months and I like where it is right now. I don't want to rest on it yet, though, so I want to see what folks here think.
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Apr 6, 2013 01:37
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I thought you guys might be interested in this. Every once in awhile on our podcast we do a design challenge and try to encapsulate how we would design a game within 10 bullet points. This time we redesigned Candyland to be an actual game. If you are interested in hearing us talk about how to make Candyland better, you can check it out here: http://www.npccast.com Earlier in our episodes we also did a redesign of Monopoly.
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Apr 6, 2013 04:43
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Let's talk about drafting. I think it's a neat mechanic because it's inherently balanced and it can add a touch of strategy to lots of types of mechanics. I've been experimenting with drafting in a dice game I've been building. It started as a "dice-building" game, i.e. a game where you buy dice during the game like you buy cards during a deck-building game. I haven't scrapped that idea, but I am experimenting to see if drafting is a better fit for this game. The game is heavily tactical in that you roll dice and then decide how you're going to make the most of what you rolled by choosing how you spend them and in what order. Players take turns spending dice that might impact the dice their opponent has yet unspent, so you have to prioritize what you're doing to protect your potential gains. In the end, it's a race to a certain number of points. The "dice-building" form of the game put more deliberate emphasis on players building a good set of dice during the game, going from a weak starting set and getting stronger during the game. The reason I think drafting might be a better fit is that the buying/trashing mechanics were taking up too much of the game, so if I let players strategize and build a good set of dice at the start of the game with drafting, I can presumably avoid the game getting bogged down with buying/trashing in the middle. That addresses one problem I have always had with Quarriors, a game I otherwise enjoy: too much of the game is spent building an engine, and the game ends before anyone's engines really get chugging. Drafting lets players put all that together form the start, so it puts the emphasis back on the tactics during the game, which is what this game should do. So far a practical problem I foresee is giving players a way to quickly look at what is on each die. Quarriors, the alpha "dice-building" game, has cards accompanying each set of dice that tells you what is on each face, so you don't have to goof around looking at each face of the die you're holding. This game doesn't have piles of dice in the same way, so that wouldn't work. I want to find some way for players to easily refer to what is on each die they pick up. Not sure what to do about this yet, but I may have to think outside the box for this one.
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Apr 6, 2013 19:42
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quote:I want to find some way for players to easily refer to what is on each die they pick up. Not sure what to do about this yet, but I may have to think outside the box for this one. Perhaps part of the solution is giving each dice some character. I did a RPG'ish dice game a while back, and the extra dice you could get were things like a pet bear. The bear dice had bear-y pictures as well as the normal "effect" symbols. Nobody confused the dice, and while you might not know all the sides immediately, you got the general idea from the theme. I like the idea of a dice draft in a game like this, though it does make it a bit harder to have the draft be secret.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:21
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jmzero posted:Perhaps part of the solution is giving each dice some character. I did a RPG'ish dice game a while back, and the extra dice you could get were things like a pet bear. The bear dice had bear-y pictures as well as the normal "effect" symbols. Nobody confused the dice, and while you might not know all the sides immediately, you got the general idea from the theme. I really like the idea too. I'm actually wondering why Railing Kill said that they couldn't do it as a card draft. It seems like you could have players draft cards with the stats of the dice on them during the draft portion and then after the draft was over pick up the corresponding dice and play, but I guess there's an as yet unmentioned design issue preventing this?
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Apr 6, 2013 21:20
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Anniversary posted:I really like the idea too. I'm actually wondering why Railing Kill said that they couldn't do it as a card draft. It seems like you could have players draft cards with the stats of the dice on them during the draft portion and then after the draft was over pick up the corresponding dice and play, but I guess there's an as yet unmentioned design issue preventing this? Cripes this is a way better solution. No, there isn't a reason I can't use cards in the draft. That solves my problem. I'd still want to do something like what jmzero suggested and graphically differentiate the dice, just so players could more easily dig out the dice that match the cards they drafted. I guess that was more what I was worried about, no matter how the draft is conducted. I'm going to put this together and share more of it here if people are interested.
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Apr 7, 2013 19:45
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The only problem with that is twice as many components. Not a big deal when you're designing for fun, but your odds of finding a publisher diminish exponentially with production costs... one of my early designs was kind of like that. Wrights Gone Wrong, a game about building a crazy flying machine... the core mechanic was auctioning parts, but they had to be drawn randomly and they came in different shapes like Tetris pieces... so in order to prevent players from feeling around for the shape of piece they were looking for, I had to have a deck to draw from to decide what was available for auction... Aside from being a bit of a pain for the players, it was just way too many components for the game to be manufactured at a reasonable cost.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:01
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xopods posted:The only problem with that is twice as many components. Not a big deal when you're designing for fun, but your odds of finding a publisher diminish exponentially with production costs... one of my early designs was kind of like that. Wrights Gone Wrong, a game about building a crazy flying machine... the core mechanic was auctioning parts, but they had to be drawn randomly and they came in different shapes like Tetris pieces... so in order to prevent players from feeling around for the shape of piece they were looking for, I had to have a deck to draw from to decide what was available for auction... Aside from being a bit of a pain for the players, it was just way too many components for the game to be manufactured at a reasonable cost. That is something to consider. Hmm. This game is already essentially a huge pile of dice (70, give or take a few) and little else, so I might be able to get away with it. I won't necessarily need 70+ unique cards, as some of the dice will be duplicates. As long as I can find a way to use jmzero's idea, I can match dice to cards even if they aren't unique. I might need 30 or so cards, which might be feasible.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:20
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I made a game. I started with a simple premise, just roll a d6 every turn and try to get to space 100 and play cards to help you. The game was called Math! and I started with about 100 cards. The cards did things like all players on a multiple of 5 move 5, or move someone backwards if they are on a multiple of 13, players on prime numbers go to start. It was nerdy as hell. The cool thing I liked was that I decided you could take your turn actions in any order. Actions you perform on a turn are: roll for movement, use movement (optional), draw a card, play as many cards as you like. So you could do neat things like, roll for movement before using a card that doubles your movement roll, or try to land on say, 64, because it has 6 prime factors and you have a card that works with that. Most cards have an opposite, to sort of balance the equation. If you have the opposite of a card (denoted by  and  ) you can use it to counter.I got a few friends to play and the games were usually hard won, even though there were just as many negative cards as positives it seemed to be easier to set someone back. Then I realized I had a lot of different dice. So I added cards to utilize the 7 standard gaming dice, and I added an upgrade/downgrade mechanic as well. If you play 3 cards in a turn you can upgrade to the next die size, if you play 2 you can downgrade someone else. That wasn't too bad. But then I started making more cards, and more. I ripped off a slew of deck manipulating cards from magic because I like that sort of thing and I wanted to get more cards in people's hands. Then I made a board that also had a negative track so that you could send people to -32 or whatever, but also as an alternate victory route. When I put the cards into different categories, and then made a category based around using that design space I knew I had a problem. I've got about 300 cards now, some are more mathy then others. With 300 cards they (ironically) lose their uniqueness(or familiarity), also the reciprocal countering mechanic loses value. The game is awful hard to win because whenever anyone gets to around 70 or so the knives come out and everyone beats them back. The winning strategy seems to be to stock pile a lot of cards and hope no one notices how far along you are and that you have enough protection when they do. The winning strategy is boring (I usually lose). It is still fun to play but has gotten away from its math roots. I think I need to cut it down to 100 cards again. I have a plan to make different card sets. I.e. if you want a hardcore just math game use these categories, if you want a wacky game where everyone is all over the place use these, if you want lots of risk and dice rolling use this set. I haven't gotten alot of play testing in. Here's the board:  It is 2 golden spirals in opposite directions. The little green number are pi carried out to some insane length, the light blue is the Fibonacci sequence. I'd like to make a digital version but I've had a hard time making golden spirals the way I want them that I can edit into a board. The shortcuts require cards that require you be on, or at least near, the shortcut space (negative spaces are more lenient). There are cards that create shortcuts and teleports, cards that wipe out whole sequences of numbers and cards that create decimal splaces (make the path longer by adding in decimal place spaces i.e. going from 1 to 2 now requires you to traverse 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc..) Between the cards that alter the board, the cards that manipulate the deck, the cards that copy and reuse other cards, and the actual math cards, I feel like it is trying to be too many games at once. I like it like this, except it is hard to get the cards to synergize for one strategy, but I also realize I need to down size it into something more focused and then have the extra cards be expansion decks or something. Anyhow, I'm posting so you all can critique it. Questions are welcome, I tried to keep this post succinct, but just like making my game I had to keep adding little things.
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Apr 13, 2013 20:06
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quote:Between the cards that alter the board, the cards that manipulate the deck, the cards that copy and reuse other cards, and the actual math cards, I feel like it is trying to be too many games at once ...and yet in the end it sounds like it's only one game: chip-taking (ie. the quintessential political game... aka. "Munchkin"). The strategies you describe as effective (hide your strength, make one big push by hording defense, fly under the radar, etc..) have nothing to do with math or the unique mechanics of the game, they're just the standard strategies of a game where politics is dominant. Many people like political games, but it sounds like you want other aspects of the game shine a little brighter. The simple fix is to remove player targeted effects or tone them down. The other property that is perhaps a challenge here is lack of tactical clarity (in particular, your immediate options on a turn seem likely to be very scattered on the board). It's also unclear from your summary the kinds of longer-term strategies or game heuristics a player might employ or learn. It might be easiest to approach this last part head-on: just grab a "gamey game" mechanic like drafting, bidding on cards, or betting, and things will naturally tend to shake out to a more strategic game with a cleaner learning curve. In any case, I don't think you'll get a significantly different game with tweaks to cards and what not; I think you'll need at least one big new mechanic to make the game shake out differently. I do like the idea of a game with non-trivial math - a modern Rithmomachy with a bunch of arcane stuff would be cool (maybe do a forbidden math summons Lovecraftian horrors type theme). jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Apr 13, 2013 |
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Apr 13, 2013 21:04
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You're absolutely right! it does shake out to just a politics game in the end. My first play tests were with people who weren't really gamers, or that great at math. I got a chance to play it with some gamer friends and they were able to play it like I want it to be played. However, in the end, though we had some awesome turns, it was a crap shoot as to who won. I haven't play tested it that much, so strategy ends up being, hmm, I can play this many cards this turn, hmm I should save these cards. I think maybe with a smaller card pool players might learn to value certain cards more and try to play them at more opportune times. Right now it's just play 'em as you get 'em. I want it be about mathematical manipulation of your space and your opponent's spaces. Like rearranging stacks of cards in King's Corner/Free Cell or manipulating pieces in Rummikub, or playing a Myr deck in M:tg. Originally the idea was to have some powerful cards with narrow applications (i.e. usable on multiples of 13) and weaker cards to set them up (i.e. move someone up to 3 spaces). I have a lot of interesting cards but you're right that in the end it boils down to mostly politics. I've started revising the cards and right away I was able to cut at least 50% because they didn't involve any math. I wouldn't call the math involved trivial but there is very little harder than, say, algebra. I think if I can boil it down to just 100 very math related cards, and with an eye on keeping player targeted effects minimal, I can get it to play a little more like I want. Perhaps it is just a game where the 2 player version plays vastly different than the multi-player version. I like the theme being just pure math, but I'm going to give that Rithmomachy page a thorough reading.
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Apr 13, 2013 22:09
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quote:I think if I can boil it down to just 100 very math related cards, and with an eye on keeping player targeted effects minimal, I can get it to play a little more like I want. Sounds good to me (and I may not have conveyed my legitimate enthusiasm here in my previous post). A game that rewarded some mathematical intuition would be super cool, and reasonably unique.
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Apr 14, 2013 04:31
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The math game sounds like it would be a good educational tool for teaching different mathematical functions and concepts to kids. That isn't a bad thing, either, as it sounds like a decent game in and of itself. "Roll and move games," i.e. games where decision is all but absent and you just roll dice and move along a track, can be pretty awful simply because they're not games if there's no player decisions. Your game, though, adds player agency both by being able to choose your turn order and by being able to choose what cards you play. It reminds me of the "Calculator" class from Final Fantasy Tactics: the class chose targets for spells based on mathematical parameters and multiples, such as "height, prime number," or "level, 5." It let you do all sorts of crazy things and it was a lot of fun for the same reason your game could be: playing with math to find big opportunities with the game. I'd try your game! Edit: If you're concerned about focus, just trim down the deck. The basic idea is sound, but if you're game is all about math, just try it without all the cards that don't specifically affect mathematical functions or concepts. The copy cards and direct player conflict can go. If players want to screw with each other, make them do so through math.  I guess that's why I mentioned the Calculator from Final Fantasy Tactics: the calculations could target anything as long as you had the right parameters, but sometimes you had to choose a calculation that hurt you a bit as well as hurting the opponent a bunch, or one that would help a couple opponents but helped you a whole bunch. Just sticking to math could do the same for your game and give players interesting risks and choices.
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 14, 2013 |
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Apr 14, 2013 13:50
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I've been thinking about taking the dice roll out entirely. Maybe adding a bunch of cards that move you forward 1 or 2, then let the layers try to get to 100 that way. Also possibly only playing one card a turn. I don't get to play test it very much though. I guess I will finish trimming down the deck and then play myself. VVV Variants upon variants upon variants. This is why I ended up with 343 cards. I'll give it a go, but I think I'd rather keep the cards secret.
Eyflfla fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Apr 16, 2013 |
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Apr 14, 2013 21:37
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Maybe drop the dice, make all cards face up, play one card per turn. That way you can scheme based on what other players have, try to trick them into playing something that will set you up for one of your card to kick rear end?
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Apr 15, 2013 01:27
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Back in the world of "designs for games I'll probably never actually make", I've been watching a marathon of the Harry Potter movies, and playing way too much Academagia. So, for some reason, I really, really want to create a "magic school sim" board game, with each player attempting to gather points. There would be a lot of different ways, doing well on your final exams in different classes would be the obvious one, but so would be 'having amazing adventures on the side'. My first instinct is to make it almost a worker-placement game. You choose where you go each day, get some kinds of events, and proceed. Maybe four per turn, with each turn representing a month? It'd be hyper-compressed compared to 'actual' sims, but I really don't want to play a game with 40 rounds.
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Apr 16, 2013 05:03
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If you want to make the math game a bit less political, you can use math to your advantage. Some types of numbers (e.g. primes) decrease in density as you move to higher numbers, while others (e.g. multiples of 3) are constant in density, and still others increase in density (e.g. numbers with at least 4 prime factors). You can use those properties to make it so that the negative cards are easier to play in the early going (by being usable only on someone who's on e.g. a prime numbered space) and the positive ones are easier to play the further along the track you are. That'll produce a game where it's a struggle for players to get going, but hard to stop someone once they're close to winning. Tune it right and you'll end up with a game that feels close for most of its length and doesn't drag on at the end.
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Apr 16, 2013 19:49
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