Observations of the Fox

Yesterday's anecdotal post was intended to be more than just a trip down memory lane. There's actually quite a bit to unpack in it. A lot of good game theorising occurred in the early 2000s to give names and context to what we were doing, but at the time we were just following trial and error. The main reason I'm thinking about this is one of those many projects I've got that feeds on previous ideas and occasionally rears it's head demanding attention. I'll probably meander back and forth between a few developments where these ideas have manifested through my work over the years, but to keep things a bit more organised, I'll add a few discreet heading categories. Flat Comparisons vs Randomisers This is where I was heading with yesterday's post, before I cut things off. Standard Magic: the Gathering uses flat comparisons to determine conflicts. If a creature's power is at least equal to their opponent's toughness, they kill them. If it's...

Back in the mid 1990s, we played a variant on Magic: the Gathering for a while. We didn't pay it for long because it wasn't 'proper' Magic, and most of the other people we tried to get involved in the games just couldn't handle it. The variant was simple. Every time a creature attacked or defended you rolled a d4, the power and toughness of the creature were boosted by the result. If a 1/1 creature rolled a 4, it might take down a 4/4 creature that rolled a 1... it might walk away unscathed from a conflict with a 3/3 creature who rolled a 1. There would only be a 1 in 16 chance of it occurring, but there was still the outside chance of a upset. Similarly, once a creature managed to score a hit on a player the player rolled a d4 to reflect a potential mystical barrier that might absorb some or all of the hit. The dice were only rolled at the end of the conflict, when everything is being resolved. The simple concept made certain abilities more powerful, others les...

Friday night. I attended a three hour class on game design by Steve Dee from Tin Star Games. I've known Steve for years on social media, and vaguely remember meeting him at one (or both) GenCon Oz convention(s) about a decade ago. Back in those days there weren't many of us designing games in Australia, and in the intervening years, Kickstarter and Patreon have changed the game design landscape dramatically. There are numerous design groups, playtest groups, podcasts and reviewers, new conventions, and expanded gaming space in wider pop culture conventions. It was appropriately described as a renaissance in gaming at the beginning of the class. Steve began things with an introduction to himself, and to gaming before launching into the design process. There were nine of us (and Steve), and we were divided into four groups. I was happy to see that four of the nine participants were female (almost half). One student asked that there be a female in each design group, which felt a...

The black and white photo manipulations I've been working on have started being inserted into the Dispatch Guide for The Law,  but they've also seen an immediate second use. They'll form the basis of the first run of NPC and Equipment cards for the game. I just posted this on G+ (so, sorry if you're seeing it twice)... The first eight image layouts for the NPC cards... I've just looked through the first 24 of them and have noticed something slightly imbalanced. 22 of the 24 present as female (whether they are female gendered, or of fluid identity but leaning toward female identification doesn't matter), and the remaining 2 are obscured enough in their depictions that they are effectively androgynous. Not a single male presenting identity among them. While I think that's an interesting coincidence (it certainly wasn't deliberate), I don't want The Law to simply turn into a game about beating up and imprisoning women (and those who identify as s...

So, I'm thinking about cards again.  But there are numerous ways in which cards can be incorporated into a game design. The simplest option for using cards in a game is probably substituting them dor the dice as a variant form of randomiser. Standard playing cards are great for this, because they add extra degrees of information that might be quickly used to add flavour to result outcomes using suits and ranks. Tarot cards might be even more useful because you gain access to major and minor arcana, interpretations of cards in upright and reversed configurations, as well as thesuit and rank values. Then you could always play with the option of developing your own custom deck to specifically explore the thematic content of your world, but this is probably the most time consuming option.  A different option for regular cards can come through character generation. I've played with this in my " Hold Em NPC Generator " (which happens to be on sale at the moment),...

A few designers have experimented with the concept of using a deck of cards to describe a character. Where different cards might be used to reflect different things that had been learnt along a character's journey, perhaps exhausted (or flipped-over) when they are used, perhaps drawing a hand of cards as the abilities that a character might see as potential strategies in the current situation, or maybe using the complete deck to simulate hit points (with the deck gradually eaten away as damage is taken). There are so many options for cards, and over the years here on the blog I've explored quite a few of them. So it's hardly a surprise that I'm considering this option for my "mysterious lands/magical post-apocalypse" game idea. As I think about it more, this game is turning into a spiritual successor to "Voidstone Chronicles" , and may indeed be adapted into a second edition of that game. There are certainly a few elements from that game idea that ...