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
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