I've been through most of the ORC and some of the ARC before posting.
Cool, thats quite the reading
Not that I want to (nor can ^^' ) change all the core concept as I just arrive, but I'm not sure I'd be very helpful if some important concepts goes against my conception of a CCG. /../ I've read somewhere on this website that the community of open source CCG was very small and that it would be preferable to not divide ourselves.
How/if you change something that is at a current rulesets core just depends on the merit of
your ideas and the reason of the maintainer of that ruleset: I can only speak for ORC, and what is there is mostly what I will want to playtest for that ruleset before revamping the whole resource system without playtesting it. You have at least 2-3 more rulesets brewing... some of which are probably more in line with your vision of coloured resources (ARC i.e.).
Please don't have the belief that your opinions don't matter or matter less because you are new here. Sane people would judge them by their content, not "how-many-days-was-he-registered".
Lastly, yes, in the ideal world people agree and co-work. However, we live in the real one, and still manage well. For example Nico began working on the ARC, and by doing that he is investigating paths in rule development that nobody else does, also putting a good preasure on others to "outdo" him by bringing better rules themselves if they don't like his.
You are always free to take anything you find at the site and start work on another ruleset if you want to, or create one from scratch - or delve deeper into an existing one. All up to you. That's what us being open allows you to do.
Rest here is about faction roles in ORC, as I can't answer for why others have them:
I personally don't like the notion of factions because it feels more like a lock than a bonus
Yes, I agree. Factions are there in order to be used as:
a) a restriction when deck building
b) creating a design framework for the developers
c) balancing
( d) flavour/identity in lore)
Factions are not supposed to be seen as a "bonus". Factions are just one single variable on a card, together with others like gold cost, ATK/DEF, card type et.c. and they allow us to let them work a a super-super, or rather, META category while designing in some regard.
Having that variable (here called "factions" but it can be called just x, same same) means what the developer of the rules make of it. In the case of "All creatures that are Gaian get +1/+1" then we clearly use factions to add a "bonus". In the case of deck building we don't. In part the deck building restriction of factions is in ORC because we don't have different colours of the resources.
What I am more curious about is if you find factions problematic in Magic, or any other game? Ad if your reasoning is the same? There are ofc many card games where there are no factions, but, they use some other variable and name instead for similar purposes.
1 - The concept of fations isn't that unique in my experience. That's basically what hearthstone uses, same for "might and magic duel of champion"
Answered this one above: We don't have factions to make our game unique (and by having all cards have no faction they actually become even less distinctive, not more). We have them as a design variable. We could for example get rid of them and let every creature have a "religion" or "faith" printed on them instead. Fills identical function, just different flavor.
2 - You can have slight rules differences with magic, and end up with a very different feeling. That's the advantage of simple rules, light modifications have bigger implications on a little set of rules.
Agree, and I honestly think that we already have rulesets in their pre-testing states that are in theory already offering more interesting and deeper play than MtG does, partially thanks to MtGs contributions to begin with.
All in all, my point is that a good CCG should keep the main rules simples, Factions do not need to be part of the main rules, hence it would be preferable to limit factions to card text.
I don't follow. The word "faction" is mentioned 14 times in the rules, and half of them is when describing icons. The only two things a player needs to know is that 1) there are factions and you can see which ones by look at x and 2) "How many different factions a player can put into play during simultaneously is determined by the active Region that the player controls." That's it. This doesn't complicate the rules in any way.