Rules of the Road

            Now that we’ve settled on what kind of universe we’re going to be in – Paranormal – we have to decide a few other things. First, and most important we need to find a clear and decisive goal. What are our players playing towards? How do you win? How do you lose? The second thing we need to talk about are concepts – how does the game work? How do we get from start to finish? And last, we’ll talk about resource management and card advantage and how we want to approach these two concepts; and what they are.

            Before we dive in to that, though, let’s clarify something. This game’s intention is to cater to both competitive and casual players. How do we do that? With simplicity. One of the big reasons we went with the paranormal idea (over the other prominent ideas in the last article) is because it sounds simple.

           

            Simplicity!

The ship idea, while cool and original, sounded cluttered. This is streamlined. So our goal in this article is to outline the rules, with as few rules as possible. The less rules, the easier it is for new players to understand and the easier for experienced players to explain more complicated cards.

            Does that sound like a paradox? It isn’t. Whenever you’re making a game this is a very easy rule of thumb to follow; Make your game simple. Make its content complicated.

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            Look at Magic. It’s so easy to learn how to play Magic. The rules are fairly simple. You can play one land per turn. You tap land to produce mana. Use mana to cast spells. Your goal is to dwindle your opponents health from 20 to 0. That’s how you play. It’s the cards that add a level of complexity.

            It’s the same with the Pokemon video games. You catch Pokemon. Those Pokemon learn four moves. Your goal is to eliminate six of your opponents Pokemon. It’s the creatures and moves that add complexity to the game.

            This is the formula we need to follow.

            Let’s start with our concept. Do we approach this as top-down or bottom-up? Since we’ve already got the general flavor of our game it’s easy to say that the game will – mostly – be designed top-down.

            Conception – It’s a Concept within a Concept!

            Here’s the concept:

Players bring Hunters and Monsters to the table. Your Hunters fight your opponents Monsters.

            Okay. That’s a start. So we’ll obviously have cards that are ‘Hunters’ and ‘Monsters’. Already, that’s a lot of design space. There are lots of different types of Monsters, so in our pitch we specifically called out Urban legends.

            American folklore has a lot of different types of monsters from the popular Vampire to the average Ghost. Even things like Gargoyles, Werewolves and Doppelgangers. That helps a little bit, and even can help us narrow down a smaller part of the game – the location. (We won’t make a new world, it can be set in a dark America.)

            Is that it?

            Probably not. Hunters usually carry different types of equipment around with them, so we can assume we’ll have a kind of ‘Equipment’ card that gives Hunters different benefits while fighting certain enemies. For example, we can have Silver Bullets that give our heroes a bonus to Werewolves.

            In our original pitch for this game we talked about bringing two decks (one for Hunters and one for Monsters) to play. There’s a lot of design space for Monsters. We could have different types of monsters, in varying degrees of power and/or leadership from various cities/covens/dens all around the world. So there’s plenty of design space there.

            Is the same true for Hunters? This is one of my major concerns from the original pitch. There are other card games out there that work fine when bringing two decks to play – one that comes to mind is Legend of the Five Rings.

            As far as design goes, though, Hunters have a sense of being contained. There aren’t as many Hunters as there are Monsters. One Hunter might travel around hitting different dens. Or he might stay in his city defending from a whole coven. While there’s a lot of design space for Hunters – it’s not nearly as wide of a field as Monsters are.

            So let’s figure out a way to fix this. We could do something like Decipher’s Lord of the Rings where decks are mixed together – with heroes and enemies. We could even adopt a similar resource system – where playing cards of one faction gives your opponent resources to play the opposite faction. This was a very unique design and creates a constant sense of balance.

            Even if your opponent were to open up with a rush of enemies, you would always have equal amounts of resources to counter-act. The problem with this system is the amount of chance involved. If you hold lots of enemies in your hand, and so does your opponent, then you’re playing two separate games. You can’t defend your opponents enemies – and your opponent can’t defend your enemies.

            While this might not be such a huge deal it creates an amount of inconsistency that I’m not particularly fond of.

            It also means that Monsters and Hunters should be made on the same level – and that’s not exactly appropriate. Monsters should be more abundant than Hunters to give a solid representation of the atmosphere we’re aiming for.

            So that doesn’t work as well as hoped.

            On the track of Heroes, we could look at the other Lord of the Rings game. In FFG’s LCG of the Tolkein’s epic, players create a pool of “Heroes” in that battle against the game. The Heroes are more powerful than other cards, but are rare and limited.

            Let’s take that. So Hunters are powerful and important – they’re an integral part of the game. But they start the game outside of your deck and already in play. This allows the deck you bring to have just Monsters in it.

            That completes our “concept”. You bring a deck filled with Monsters, and a group of Hunters to defeat your opponents Monsters.

           

            Don’t Shoot Until You see the Whites of Their Eyes

            But how do you win? In most card games the typical form of victory is combat. In Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! Players play monsters and creatures in order to deal damage to a point value their opponent has. The goal is to reduce that value to 0.

            Flavorwise, in Magic you represent a Planeswalker fighting against an opposing Planeswalker. Reducing your life to 0 makes sense. In this game, though, you aren’t represented by anything so having the point value isn’t as meaningful. It also makes the importance of the Hunter smaller. You could just have two different groups of Monsters battling one another if you wanted to have a life total.

            So, it’s safe to say that if a player has no Hunters left, they lose the game. Since the concept is to have the Hunters fighting against Monsters, it makes sense that if there are no Hunters the Monsters win.

            But how do the Hunters win? We could say that they have to defeat all the Monsters, but that has an ambiguous meaning. Do they have to defeat all the Monsters that are on the field? Because then they would win turn one when an opponent has no Monsters. Do they have to defeat all the Monsters in a deck? Because that could take a while.

            Let’s take a look at other win conditions from popular games. In Pokemon players have to defeat 6 of their opponents Pocket Monsters to end the game. On paper, this is a cool concept but I have a problem with the way Pokemon does it.

            In Pokemon, before the game starts, you remove six cards from your deck to become “Prize” cards that you can’t look at. Every time you defeat one of your opponents characters you receive one of your “Prize” cards. Some more powerful Pokemon allow your opponent to take two of their Prizes instead.

            The biggest problem with this is randomization and chance – again. If you remove six of your key pieces, then you start the game at a serious disadvantage. This might not always be a problem, but when it is a problem it can limit the amount of interaction that players have.

            Star Wars: The Card Game, the FFG LCG, has a similar concept but it’s used backwards. Each player has “objective” cards with a certain amount of health that the opponent choose to attack. One of the players can win by eliminating three of their opponents objective cards. In this capacity the objective cards are used with the intention of being attacked.

            This eliminates the cards being removed from the deck, doesn’t reduce your chance of drawing any necessary cards and allows players to customize how they win the game (based on which objectives they bring to the table).

            Adding a third card type that starts out of the deck sounds like a lot of trouble and could clutter up the table, so we have to look at killing Monsters. Since that is part of the main concept, it would make sense that you have to kill so many Monsters. But now we’ve come full circle.

            We can’t tell our Hunters to kill “all” of the Monsters, because that’s ambiguous and complicated. Instead, we can tell them to kill so many Monsters.

            So, now we have our goal. If you want to focus on the Hunter part of the game – you need to kill so many Monsters. If you want to focus on the Monster part of the game – you need to defeat your opponents Hunters.

            It’s Just a Phase

            In card games, turns are almost always broken down into phases and/or steps. The reason for this is to dictate to the players how to play the game. It’s basically “What goes where?”

            The three most common phases, or phase concepts, are the Main Phase – in which the active player takes the opportunity to play the cards from his hand – and the Combat Phase – where cards interact with one another in a struggle for victory or supremacy.

            These two are a given. Now, we need to look at the deck. Monsters are going to dying fairly frequently, so players need a way of drawing new Monster. That’s where the third concept comes in to play. The Draw Phase. During the Draw Phase the active players draws the top card of their deck and puts it into their hand.

            For these three things, the order has typically been Draw – Main – Combat. This allows a player to draw a new card, play that card and then use that card in combat. In Magic, though, creatures are afflicted by “summoning sickness” which means they can’t attack on their first turn.

            Originally, this design was to prevent a player from taking an unfair advantage on the first turn. Now, it has become more a device of timing and planning.

            Since our deck is made up of just Monsters, it’s safe to say that drawing and playing Monster cards will occupy the first two Phases. But how does our Combat Phase work? Do we attack with our Hunters? Or our Monsters?

            The rest of the turn seems to be made up of things to do with the active player’s Monsters, so it would make sense to have the active Monsters do combat. But then, flavorwise, our Hunters seem to not be very good at their jobs – just waiting for the Monsters to come to them.

            How do we fix that? Our Hunters, remember, are powerful. So we should add a Phase in which the Hunters do stuff, instead of just get attacked. For now, let’s call it the Hunter Phase (makes sense, right?). But that kind of breaks up the stuff we were talking about earlier about how the rest of the turn involves the active player’s Monsters.

            What if the opponents Hunters attacked the active player’s Monsters? It would still center around the active Monsters.

            So now we have a Draw Phase, Main Phase, Combat Phase and Hunter Phase. Keep in mind these are all temporary names for now. And these rules are pre-alpha (meaning they’re an idea written on a piece of paper somewhere). Through play-testing these could changed, added, removed, modified, etc.

           

            Always Prepared

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Wizards of the Coast

            Resource management is one of the oldest concepts of card games. Whether it’s mana from Magic, Monster slots from Yu-Gi-Oh! Or just resources from VS System, managing resources is just the first step to being a good player. This function is so that players keep the game balanced and to restrict how quickly players play cards.

            So now we come to the question of “How do we play Monsters?” And that’s a good question. Hunters will start the game in play, but Monsters go from our hand to the play area – the question is how do we determine how we play them?

            We could use a resource system similar to Magic where we have cards that generate some form of resource. But there’s no flavor behind that. These Monsters aren’t magically summoned or created. You don’t pay these Monsters to come and wreak havoc.

            We could use a system like Yu-Gi-Oh! And have only a certain number of Monster “slots”. But this detracts from the feeling that we want Monsters to “overrun”, or be more abundant than, Hunters.

            Instead, we should look at some way to do this flavorfully. Monsters create lots of suspicion through their antics – murder, kidnapping, strange sounds, fear, etc. We should give each Monster a “suspicion” value. Combined, your Monsters should never exceed some sort of suspicion “ceiling”. We’ll predetermine this number later, but for now we can see that it’s a strange spin on Yu-Gi-Oh!s slot restriction.

            The Taste of Paranormal

            Now that we have the core concept and mechanics hacked out, let’s recap.

            Each player brings a number of Hunters and a deck filled with Monsters to battle those Hunters. Your goal is to eliminate a number of Monsters or all of your opponent’s Hunters.

            Each turn the active player will draw a card, then play Monsters from your hand, but you can never have so many Monsters that they have a high Suspicion. Then your Monsters will run and create chaos by attacking Hunters. Then, your opponents Hunters will attack back.

            This is the beginning of our game rules. And from it, we get a lot of implications about the world that we’re creating. First of all, there’s a Monster problem. Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts, Gargoyles and Shapeshifters are running rampant – and there’s a need for Hunters. These Hunters are sworn defenders of the public. They can travel to find different Monsters, or maybe they live in a big city where there’s a concentrated problem.

            Now that we have a general understanding of our world, we can wrap this part up. Flavor is something that we’ll explore, in-depth, in a future article. Next week we’ll look forward to sorting out the different card types and different “states” of cards.