Designing Keet – Part 2: Artifacts

Last week I talked about my original idea for Slugfest Games' RDI 2014 Character Design Contest, and how I decided to change plans and build a deck for my goblin archaeologist, Keet.

When I started designing Keet's deck I had an idea for a secondary deck, similar to those found in RDI:3, but I wanted to do something different. I had an idea; archaeologists are always studying valuable artifacts, so why not replace Keet's gold with a deck of unique artifact cards?

I knew Keet was overly excited about mundane things, so it seemed natural that some of his 'artifacts' would be worthless, random pieces of trash that he had just found lying around. I loved the image of Keet proudly anteing into a round of gambling with an ancient shoestring, or being fascinated by a 'rare and mysterious' bent coin. I could just hear him: “It's not just any coin,” he'd say enthusiastically, “look at it it! It's bent!” to which his comrades would just look at him, unimpressed. Not all of his artifacts would be that terrible, but I couldn't resist the humour of it. Worthless items and cursed items were just entertaining. Of course, bad items also opened up the possibility of designing more powerful artifacts that balanced out the trash.

I liked the idea that Keet would have to carefully manage his artifacts, and cursed items played right into that. I've always been a fan of cursed items in stories and RPGs; I feel that they provide characters with a very difficult choice: are the bonuses worth the drawbacks? Keet's artifacts, even the good ones, would serve a similar role. Good items would have to be discarded to be used, meaning if Keet was running low on Gold it would be risky to use those artifacts. By contrast, Keet's cursed items would have a negative impact on his Fortitude or Alcohol Content, meaning if he was getting beaten up or drunk he would have to find a way to get rid of them.

With all of this in mind, I knew I had to give Keet specific tools to manage his artifacts. For instance, I knew I wanted the artifacts to start face down; I liked the randomness of not always knowing what Keet was using to pay the inn or ante into a round of gambling, but it wouldn't be fun if Keet had no control at all over which artifacts he anted. This meant that the deck would need some way of 'identifying' artifacts by turning them face up. This way, if the goblin was able to spend some time 'studying' what he had, he could pick and choose which artifacts to keep, and which ones to give away.

Keet's deck came together surprisingly quickly. Once I had a rough draft, I printed a copy and began testing as soon as I could. I scribbled notes on the cards with tweaks, corrections and more major changes. I did the same with the rulebook. After some feedback from testing, I added card types to the artifacts (Sometimes, Action, etc.) so that other decks could interact with them more, and I removed a problematic mechanic that turned face up artifact cards face down. Otherwise it was going very well.

One thing I knew I wanted to include were artifacts from the existing Red Dragon Inn universe. I loved the idea that Keet had 'discovered' treasures like Dimli's Great-Grandfather's Helmet and took them to study. Interestingly enough, these artifacts were the easiest to write rules for, since I was basically able to copy their effects from other decks. I also felt like adding them really put Keet in the RDI world.

I could go on, but I'll leave it here. I look forward to Slugfest's final version of my deck. They're making some changes, which is good. While I was pleased with my work, there is definitely room for improvement. I trust Slugfest Games to do a good job, and to take good care of my Keet.

13/13

Designing Keet – Part 1: Relic

Recently, Slugfest Games announced that I won their 2014 Character Design Contest!

When I got the e-mail letting me know that I had won I was giddy beyond compare. Heck, I still am! They asked that I not tell anyone that I won until they made their announcement, so I had to wait, but now that they've announced it, I can talk about it. Since the cat's out of the bag, I thought I'd talk a bit about the design process I went through to create Keet, the goblin archaeologist.

When I first heard about the contest, I jumped at the idea of turning one of my RPG characters into a deck. My initial plan was to make a deck for a completely different character than my winning entry: an ancient warforged named Relic. I had been playing this stoic character in a D&D campaign for some time, so I had a pretty good idea how I would translate him to RDI; I was going to make a tanky, durable deck that would win by attrition. It would be able to ignore drinks and fortitude loss very well, but would deal less damage than the other 'bashy' character decks. Relic was all about endurance.

With this plan in mind, the first step was to go through the existing Red Dragon Inn decks to figure out the card distribution of a typical deck; I knew that there were a number of cards that each deck had (“Gambling? I'm in!”, “Tip the Wench”, etc.), and each deck was 40 cards. How many of these common cards did each deck have, and what was the distribution of each other type of card? How often did the bashy decks deal damage, and how often did they prevent it? My girlfriend and I sorted all of the decks and I put our findings into a spreadsheet. I was surprised to find just how similar the basic structure of each deck was. This kept things simpler than I was expecting, which was nice; it meant that I had fairly rigid guidelines for the distribution of abilities in my deck.

During this grand sorting, and over the course of several days, I would periodically jot down ideas for card names and effects. While doing so, a few good phrases popped into my head that a different character of mine would say, and they sounded like they would fit into a Red Dragon Inn game quite well. In fact, they sounded far better than what I had been coming up with for Relic!

Keet, the other character, was one that I created for a short-lived RPG campaign last summer. We ended up only playing about two sessions, but I really enjoyed the character I had made for it. He was a hyperactive little goblin archaeologist, whom I described as “a bad Indiana Jones.” He was remarkably clever, and was a great researcher and appraiser, but he was also a handful. He was very energetic, and got extremely excited about the most mundane things, like libraries and ancient grain shipments.

In the end, I decided that I would set aside the deck I was making for Relic to focus my efforts on this new project. To be honest, I was unsatisfied with how passive Relic's deck was going to be, and Keet's personality would fit in far better in the Red Dragon Inn setting anyway.

Ideas for card names were coming easily for Keet's deck, but I still had a long way to go before I would have something playable. I had to work quickly, too; the deadline was looming.

Please join me next week for part 2 of Designing Keet.

13/13

Getting it Wrong

This past week I played a couple of games I had never played before: Five Tribes and The Ancient World. We read the rules, and we thought we understood everything, so we got started. There was just one problem: How were we supposed to score points, exactly?

In Five Tribes one of the ways to score points is by collecting resource cards in suits. We took this to mean several cards of the same type, so getting a lot of Grains was advantageous, but diversifying would not be as good. While playing, I started to notice small diamonds on the cards, and surmised that they must indicate how frequently you would see a given type of card. Gold, then, would only have two cards, while Grains would have several more. This didn't make sense, though. If that were the case, Gold could never yield as many points as Grains. Thematically, it was backwards.

I thought about it more and re-read the rulebook. After much head-scratching and discussion, my opponent and I determined that a suit in Five Tribes must actually be a collection of DIFFERENT card types: the opposite of the way we were playing. We discovered our mistake during final scoring, so we just calculated things the way it should have been.

A few days later, a group of us learned The Ancient World. Here again we were set collecting. Upon an initial read-through we determined that the scoring was similar to how Five Tribes was supposed to work: collect as many different colours of banners as possible. The scoring track was clearly marked on each player board, with points for sets ranging from one to six banners. We started playing, and all was going well until the second half of the game. By this time we had all begun to wonder what the sixth banner colour was, since we were all diligently acquiring as many different colours as we could, and none of us had gotten more than five different ones.

We had once again made a mistake. There was no sixth colour; we were supposed to be collecting banners of the SAME colour, and scoring simply capped at six banners per set. We still had a quarter of the game left to go before the end of the game, though, so we had to come to a decision: would we finish the game with the proper scoring, or would we finish with the scoring method we thought was correct at the beginning? We had a short discussion, and the table voted to use the proper rules, effectively changing the game for the second half.

We were lucky, all things considered; getting a scoring method wrong is far easier to correct than game play related mechanics. While it may have a larger impact on who wins, it has little effect on the flow of the game itself. I've certainly goofed with mechanics as well, whether with a new game or with a game that I haven't played for a long time. Almost always, the group chooses to finish the current round before making the necessary changes. If it's still early, and corrections to the board state can easily be made, all the better; doing these corrections is usually preferable to starting all over again. But this is always more complicated than changing the scoring method. The only problems I see with changing how to score is with competitive players. For them, it is likely better to finish the game with the scoring method agreed upon at the beginning; it will seem more fair.

These misinterpretations just remind me of the importance of good examples; even the best rules can be made clearer with them. Still, both these games were a lot of fun; I look forward to playing them again. Properly this time.

13/13

The Replay

Replay value is often toted as one of the most important considerations when making or buying a game. This is usually equated with variability; the more ways subsequent games will differ, the better. Modern games have been latching onto this idea by implementing elements such as modular boards, assorted scenarios, optional cards, different roles or factions, and so on. Even the concept of a board game expansion emphasizes the idea that a game is more fun when it offers something new and different each time you play.

This make sense; that feeling of discovery is great, and games with assorted ways of playing do well in reproducing it. This idea, though, that a game without all of these extras is somehow inferior has become so ubiquitous that it seems strange to see a new board game these days that doesn't have modular components of some sort. As things are now, adding in something like a modular board is perceived as being a trivial addition and is, in some consumer's eyes, mandatory for a game to be worth even considering. I know I've taken less interest in certain games because of that, which is unfortunate.

With that said, however, changing the board, or the scenario, or even what cards are being used from game to game is clearly not a requirement for an enjoyable game, or even for a successful game. Games like Go and Chess haven't survived for as long as they have because they encapsulate that 'new game feeling' every time you play. Enjoying these classic, high strategy games is far more about mastery than variety; playing them is far more akin to solving a puzzle. The sense of discovery that is implemented in modern games by changing how you play instead comes from moments of epiphany, when things click and you better understand the game. The replay value comes from getting better at the game each time you play.

Still, the modern, modular game is likely far more sustainable in the current market than a static strategy game, though this is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more modular games that are created, the more gamers will expect them, and the more it will be associated with what a game 'should' be. Classic-styled games that do not incorporate a 'modular' element could get pushed out of the market entirely; as it is I am hard-pressed to name any that have come out recently; Knight Moves comes to mind, but it is already ten years old.

Couple this shift in the market with the ability for companies to constantly create new content for their popular games, and the gaming market starts to look like the movie industry: a sea of sequels, remakes, and spin-offs. Just look at popular titles like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and Munchkin, to name a few. Each one not only has a multitude of expansions to modify the game, but each one also has whole spin-off games and re-themed versions. It is a robust business model, with far fewer risks than creating brand new titles, so it is no surprise that it seems to have been adopted by nearly every game publisher.

Now, don't get me wrong, I really do enjoy modular games. It really is a big selling feature for me, and I do feel that it is a simple, effective way for a gamer to get more out of their game. Expansions, too, are a great way to rediscover an old favourite. My concern here is really more in the style restrictions that have been placed on designers; it is expected that games have to be expandable to be successful; they must be modifiable and provide drastically different game play every time you open the box or no one will be interested. But really, there is room in every gaming collection for strategic, non-modular games like Chess, Go, and Knight Moves. They have remarkable replay value, and mastering these kinds of games can be very rewarding. Plus, since they don't have a pile of expansions, they will leave plenty of room on your shelves for other games, too!

13/13