I hope I am not annoying....

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Erundil
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I hope I am not annoying....

Post by Erundil » Mon May 27, 2013 00:20

But I am will post some two ideas, and you snowdrop will come to tell me how much you don't like them :lol:
If a feature is put into the game, then it should be fully used.
(quote me :P)

We have two fronts, and i feel they are not considered a lot. If wtactics needs to be different, and the live up to its name, than it should fully valorize the front system.
As a matter of fact, the sheer combat in mtg is rather simple, whilst is the spell system that makes things complicated: this is also one of the things we can actually make better than them!

Battlegrounds
Whichever name will be decided to give them, they are cards that go assigned to a front, and each front should have only one.
This will also had the flavour we lost as we have no cards that make reference to places.

eg:
Fortified town 3
Assign this battleground to a front. The fronts' units gain a defense point.




Mines
Since the game will rely on turned cards for the resources, and they will be all the some, it may be purposeful to have Mines card. They won't be of common use, because they will be limited to 4 each.

eg:
Gold Mine 0
[m]: produce 2 gold



I am not sure about battlegrounds in the core set, but I think mines will be a good addiction, even if just for the Gold Mine.
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Re: I hope I am not annoying....

Post by snowdrop » Mon May 27, 2013 22:00

Erundil wrote:But I am will post some two ideas, and you snowdrop will come to tell me how much you don't like them :lol:
No, you are not annoying - nor would you be even if I wouldn't like any of your ideas. What I like isn't as interesting as how I, or rather you, reason and explain an idea. This is an open forum in the sense that anyone may be registered and post whatever he/she feels like as long as it's related.

If a feature is put into the game, then it should be fully used.
Yes, it should. Or if it is hardly used at all, it shouldn't be in the core rules. Instead, it should (maybe) be implemented as a card instead.
We have two fronts, and i feel they are not considered a lot


The fronts play like two totally separate tables. Whatever happens in a front doesn't affect what happens in the other, usually. That equals to your suggestion about "battlegrounds". In our case it's just called Event and/or Enchantments and/or creature abilities. Meaning, no special or additional card type is needed as it is already implemented: The default area of effect is a front, not the fronts.
If wtactics needs to be different /../ than it should fully valorize the front system.
It says in the design document that it doesn't set out to be different or reinvent the wheel. ;) We're creating a traditional normal CCG, with the unusual and unique difference that it is a) truly free and b) empowers it's community to make whatever of it.

What that leads to is that we are not trying to be as innovative or original as possible and that we don't measure our success from that perspective. If we succeed or not will only be measured in the number of players we will have some time after the release, reasonably 2-3 years.
As a matter of fact, the sheer combat in mtg is rather simple, whilst is the spell system that makes things complicated: this is also one of the things we can actually make better than them!
Combat is indeed simple. Yet despite it's simplicity, it adds very much more depth than 90% of the cardgames where you as an attacker choose which creature is getting attacked. (Like for example in DoomTrooper the cardgame)

I'm afraid I don't follow how the spell-system in MtG is complicated. Please explain, and also explain what you mean with "spell" as "spells" in MtG is almost every type of cards except for lands.

Mines
Since the game will rely on turned cards for the resources, and they will be all the some, it may be purposeful to have Mines card. They won't be of common use, because they will be limited to 4 each.
Cards used as resource cards must be placed face down. Why? Because it makes it overly clear that they are resource cards and not cards in play in some other capacity, like their real one, which can be seen on their face up-side ;) So, it's about keeping the table uncluttered and making it easy to count/see resources played and resourced already used, both your own and also the opponents.

That makes it less than optimal to create dedicated resource cards (cards that can only function like a resource in some way, like for example Lands in MtG) since special resource cards would have to be played face up, and while being in that state, still mixed with all the normal resources that are face down. That "mixed" state would make it harder to count resources and directly see what's going on with the resource aspect of the game. (It also happens to look like shit aesthetically on the table, but that is hardly my main argument.)

So, what you suggest - cards that produce resources - can of course be created, but, will not be created as pure resource cards / a card type of their own. Pure resource cards is a waste of deck space and leads to all sorts of resource issues as seen in MtG. A resource card can only be used in one way, while cards currently can always be used as either an additional resource or as their text intends them to, regardless of what card type they happen to be... all in all leading to situations where you never get problems with getting resources (again, like in MtG) and always allowing you to make interesting choices (should I play a card as a resource this turn? if yes, which one? why? or should I hold onto all my cards for now?)

The way we will do it in WT is to simply let creatures have abilities to create resources for example. Kind of like:

Code: Select all

Tax collector 
Civilian
[A]: Produce 2 gold
0/1
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Re: I hope I am not annoying....

Post by Erundil » Mon May 27, 2013 23:08

My suggestion of battlegrounds had also another reason: there are currently no cards that feature places. And places are very suggestive.

For the fronts, I must have forgotten that the complete separation of fronts is in the core rules. I would expect cards to specify whether they act locally or not, and that some cards had effect on all fronts.

Surely so, however adding 'something different' will increase the attention towards the game.


And then you say you are a competitive player :P
In MtG spells go in the stack, and they resolve in a certain way. Players take a good year to be familiar with it, and probably if you check throughly, you will find 80% of them missed something.


I don't think it will make it hard to count resources, as we are not talking to have many 'Mines'.

Lands in Mtg, are another story, as they absolve also what is here done with the loyalty-limit of 3. Playing against them adds another strategic path to the game, and there are many deep considerations that can be made on them.

'Mines' are really not like lands, as they would accelerate the game, whilst lands almost never do this, and when they do have an heavy drawback.
However, both increase the luck factor. Drawing a 'Gold Mine' would put me a turn ahead of my opponent. Such a strong card, will give flavour to the games.

Something that I noticed is that all the cards (that I have seen) are average and do not stand out, neither as strong or as weak.
The main reason in most ccg there are weak and stronger cards, is not to fill boosters' slots so they can sell more, but to allow skill to affect deck-building.
A young kid will likely go for big creatures, whilst one older will rely more on deck strategics. If the cards are all average there will be no significance in a deck-building skill, which should have a very important place in the game.
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Re: I hope I am not annoying....

Post by snowdrop » Wed May 29, 2013 21:37

My suggestion of battlegrounds had also another reason: there are currently no cards that feature places. And places are very suggestive.
"Places" is indeed suggestive. That said, most CCG players do not dream up landscapes and scenarios while playing a CCG, in contrast to maybe RPG-players. While theme is nice, suggestion isn't that central, and can't be central to a point where we invent card types just for the sole reason that they sound cool or make out imagination go wilder ;)

Card types should be kept low and preferably never go above 6 - 10, and that wouldn't even be a low amount of them. Only time a card type should be created is if whatever it is trying to achieve can't already be created with existing card type(s) and there are some kind of special rules associated with it and it makes balancing easier.

Surely so, however adding 'something different' will increase the attention towards the game.
I don't think places are different. For exampe they were around already in the 1990's in the DoomTrooper expansion set called WarZone, that's even named to state just that fact. Places are also around, I think, in one of the oldes CCG:s around, LotfR CCG, and they're also around in recently released single & multiplayer LCG Lord of the Rings from FFG, just to mention three huge games where locations have a huge presence.

I'm also not sure a game sells more or less because it has a cardtype namd something that no other game has. Say for instance we had a card type called "Souls" or "Brothels". Would we, because of that, get more players? How would quality and gameplay differ, just because we name cardtypes in a certain way? To an extent I would agree with you that card type names are imporantant since theyc an play nice with the theme or help destroy it. Beyond that though what seems to be of import is not the names, but rather the card types function.

What would make is stand out more is if we come up with mecanics and functions that have been unseen in the CCG world, that are easy, yet usable. I personally don't think it is possible to invent new ones since I believe they all already exist in other games, and probably even all of them can be seen in MtG already. I'd love to be wrong though.
In MtG spells go in the stack, and they resolve in a certain way. Players take a good year to be familiar with it, and probably if you check throughly, you will find 80% of them missed something.
When learning a newcomer to MtG about the stack, wouldn't it suffice to just tell him/her that "you and your opponent take turns to play cards as a reaction to the other players action if you want to and as long as you can afford it. once you are all done they resolve from top down."? What is complicated about it? Also, how would you prefer to simplify the process and do it instead?
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Re: I hope I am not annoying....

Post by Erundil » Wed May 29, 2013 23:39

That said, most CCG players do not dream up landscapes and scenarios
That does not mean they don't have to, or that it does not have appeal on them. Especially if you are going to add a background story. A CCG is not just about playing: a good part of it is admiring cards and their awesomeness, particularly for the ones that are more interested on the collecting part.

Also every successful CCG involves roleplay: in Mtg I am wizard, in Pokemon a trainer, in Spoils I am someone that belongs to that world, and so on. Decide not to put the player in a strongly roleplayed position can be done, but then it would produce a much less interesting game.

Let's take again another look at Mtg, but this time on its environment. Mtg is linked with Dungeons&Dragons and Warhammer. A good share of the sturdier and stronger mtg players often play either D&d or warhammer, if not both!
This may as well as be refferred as 'the holy trinity' of table-top game, and is one of the reasons for which in many places games other than these are not well received.
As an Mtg player, I feel much more comfortable towards Warhammer or D&D players than Yugioh ones, or towards Warhammer players rather than LOTR. As a result of this, they substain and defend each other. This must be taken into consideration, because it will affect us as well.

This 'trinity' has also something else in common: they have a roleplay element, they are fantasy, they have an heavy visual impact. And they involve places.

Because our initial player-base will be mostly made up Mtg players, they will want a complete implementation of the fantasy world behind it. Places included.
Leaving places out may not have a big impact on the played game, but it may make the difference between success and failure: think to a story. Done? Now, think to a story in which places, and space do not matter? Done? Then you may as well as be in the queu for a Nobel.

Wtactics' gameplay is about an army that fights another. I guess it happens in a place, and a commander (in our case the player) has the ability to move his army. But not in our game. Silly, no?

I would like to mention a point: if wtactics is a CCG, and yet anyone can print cards, where is the 'collecting' part? I can just print them all.

What would make is stand out more is if we come up with mecanics and functions that have been unseen in the CCG world, that are easy, yet usable. I personally don't think it is possible to invent new ones
I think fronts are a good enough mechanic. And they are not just labelling cards as attacker/defender, because events, enchantments and spells are front-related.

I'm also not sure a game sells more or less because it has a cardtype namd something that no other game has. Say for instance we had a card type called "Souls" or "Brothels". Would we, because of that, get more players? How would quality and gameplay differ, just because we name cardtypes in a certain way?
I explained it above, that we will be better received if we have places in the game.
The role they cover in the gameplay is not of importance, although they should be given a function that is suitable to their name, and should have a substantial difference from other card-types.

Mtg has enchantments and artifacts. Very similar, they differ for what they represent and for the fact that enchantments never ask themselves to be tapped. They even have both subtypes that can be attached to creatures!
Yet, just for the sake of having a different card types to represent continuos spells and manmade stuff, they did it. And it works very well.
Currently we would have in wtactics: creatures, events, enchantments, resources, spells*, equipments, for a total of six. Add battlegrounds seven. Add mines eight, but they may be very well put in as resources subtypes.

* I have seen spells cards, but i am not sure if they are still in.


When learning a newcomer to MtG about the stack, wouldn't it suffice to just tell him/her that "you and your opponent take turns to play cards as a reaction to the other players action if you want to and as long as you can afford it. once you are all done they resolve from top down."?
You obviously never teached anyone :mrgreen:
I tell them that the first thing they are supposed to do is to untap. They draw. It takes them quite a long time to learn this. Is a very basic thing: ordering actions and performing them in that order.

You can say something in a very simple way, however you have no control on how much of that is actually understood. And I believe the explanation you have given is quite similar to the one commonly found.
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Re: I hope I am not annoying....

Post by snowdrop » Sun Jun 02, 2013 12:42

Erundil wrote:
That said, most CCG players do not dream up landscapes and scenarios
That does not mean they don't have to, or that it does not have appeal on them. Especially if you are going to add a background story. A CCG is not just about playing: a good part of it is admiring cards and their awesomeness, particularly for the ones that are more interested on the collecting part.

Also every successful CCG involves roleplay: in Mtg I am wizard, in Pokemon a trainer, in Spoils I am someone that belongs to that world, and so on. Decide not to put the player in a strongly roleplayed position can be done, but then it would produce a much less interesting game.
I agree that CCG:s could make perfect inspirational material for people that want to roleplay or want to use their imagination somehow to "enter the world" of the game or something else.

I see that as possible in almost any game (genre), heck, even chess is flavoured as a battle and allows you to imagine something from the middle ages, and you could easily start writing fiction and a whole world around it or try to explain why the opposing forces do battel, who that knight is, the peasant uprising or whatever your imagination wills.

Even so, I refute the suggestion that a majority, or even a huge minority, of CCG players actually use their imagination in those ways while playing the game, regardless of which CCG it is. The game genre (fantasy) and media (hundreds of names, texts and pictures) is very allowing when it comes to that kind of "role-playing-esque-imagination" , but the gameplay itself is 100% non-reliant of i and has not a single trace of requirements of it.

If you meet all the CCG-players in the world I would suggest that 1 - 3% have ever done the kind of creative mental journey you imply that they do. 99% of the players have not daydreamt about beaing the knight on the card (while many of them have been dreaming and fantasizing about it before then and in ways unrealted to the game itself). A majority of the players don't really care much what the relation between x y and z is in the lore. They mainly care if x y z have good and cool card art and if the mechanics and abilities of the cards are cool and playable and also in style with the kind of deck they want to play.

All of this can easily be observed by just watching average players play a couple of games of for example MtG. How do they behave? What is the tempo of the game? How much do they stop and imagine and how man fairytales do they tell each other while playing?

Simply put, a CCG is not a RPG. The average player doesn't act like it is. Nor is the main activity and attribute of the RPG present while playing a CCG.

Yes, this of course doesn't mean that you or somebody else can't be very RPG-ish while playing a CCG. You can, and you should if you want to. It just means that the overall majority of players will not. For them it is not an issue who the father of Drago the Dragon is, or if there are cards called "places", or "locations" or "rooms". What they seek is a solid coherent theme (if even that at times, looking at the garbage that has been published on the CCG scene where sometimes manga, fantasy, scifi etc is all mashed up into a non-theme where all and nothing makes sense) and, primarily, good gameplay.

The game doesn't exist as a means to primarily create the world/the lore/the theme. The game exists to be played. The theme is there as a support function to the game. It's not the other way around. Meaning, whatever makes sense thematically shouldn't necessarily be included in the game.

For example, mounts, bakers, candy, grass and houses all make sense thematically in the setting. It doesn't mean that we must include them as cards or cardtypes or add more rules to accommodate them. We are not building a fantasy "simulator" driven by cards.

As for location as a cardtype it is still true that what can be done with it can already be done with other card types.


Let's take again another look at Mtg, but this time on its environment. Mtg is linked with Dungeons&Dragons and Warhammer. A good share of the sturdier and stronger mtg players often play either D&d or warhammer, if not both!
Maybe so. But then again, a good share of those players have also played Super Mario or at some point Texas Hold 'Em and/or are watching sci-fi or fantasy TV-series to a larger extent than the average person that doesn't play games/ccg/rpg:s do. So what?

What it tells us is just that if you are into something you are so because you have certain preferences and because of that you are more likely to be into something else as well. I agree about that, but I can't see the logical path from that to the conclusion that x y z should be a cardtype in a game because people use CCG:s as RPG:s (which they still don't, even if some - and also a minority actually - of the players happen to play both genres).
This may as well as be refferred as 'the holy trinity' of table-top game, and is one of the reasons for which in many places games other than these are not well received.
As an Mtg player, I feel much more comfortable towards Warhammer or D&D players than Yugioh ones, or towards Warhammer players rather than LOTR. As a result of this, they substain and defend each other. This must be taken into consideration, because it will affect us as well.
I think you and me, and plenty of other geeks, are more or less non-representative of how the casual player acts, behaves and thinks. What you wrote in the quote above shows my point: No casual player would ever argue like that.

I agree that players that like x due to it's genre, theme or style will, for the same reasons, dislike or like y less, since it is of other qualities and different. You give a good example of exactly that when mentioning yu-gi-oh vs magic, where most magic players would of course not touch yu-gi or like it's theme.
This 'trinity' has also something else in common: they have a roleplay element, they are fantasy, they have an heavy visual impact. And they involve places.
No, 99% of all CCG:s ever created have exactly zero roleplaying in them, on their cards, or in their rules. (There are however RPG:s that use cards and those look or operate similar to what might be found in for example MtG, but those are not CCG:s.) If you claim that successful CCG:s do indeed involve roleplaying you need to build a case that in turn build upon facts. Show statistics of it or rules that indeed point out roleplaying elements as a part of the game and so on. Your claim is controversial and nothing the average CCG player would identify with.

That games have a visual impact might be true depending on the game. Most successful CCG:s do indeed have one. Many are also set in a fantasy world. "Locations" are always present. As long as something is material it would be placed in time and space.

A game doesn't become more or less played or favored by the players because it't "location" is explicit. Again, use Chess as an example or 80 - 90% of all CCG:s where the specifics of the "location" is implicit and irrelevant. Location is always implied. Creatures live/act/fight somewhere. Lore can explain that. "Rules" can explain that. You don't need to introduce a card(type) to explain it, just like you don't need to introduce food for our creatures to eat and be fed with.

Your reasoning shows that successful games all somehow connect to locations. Yeah, sure they do, but how many games, in any genre, ever created, do not somehow connect to location? Very few take place in a location-less-setting unless of course they are pure abstract games like 3-in-a-row etc.

Where a game is set is theme and lore. Theme and lore is not the game or the main point with the game. It is still a support function, and more correctly, it's not even a function gameplay wise.
Because our initial player-base will be mostly made up Mtg players, they will want a complete implementation of the fantasy world behind it. Places included.
Leaving places out may not have a big impact on the played game, but it may make the difference between success and failure: think to a story. Done? Now, think to a story in which places, and space do not matter? Done? Then you may as well as be in the queu for a Nobel.
I'm not sure our initial playbase will indeed be MtG-players. If anything, it would be disgruntled MtG-players that liek MtG but don't want to keep wasting money on it to stay competitive. Many of the MtG.-players will stay with MtG as they are already heavily invested in it.

And no, people that play CCG:s don't want a "complete implementation of a fanatsy world". They would rather play something else if they wanted that, like an RPG. MtG-players don't mainly play the game because of it's world that is super-huge anyhow by now and totally impossible to grip without reading hundred of books with thousands of characters in tens of eras.

"Place and space" always matters in a material world. So does atoms, yet I can think of few successful CCG:s where the "atom" is a cardtype or included explicitly somewhere at all. ;)
Wtactics' gameplay is about an army that fights another. I guess it happens in a place, and a commander (in our case the player) has the ability to move his army. But not in our game. Silly, no?
The player has a freedom to explain what happens in a number of ways. It's all about imagination, should one want to have it explained at all. (Most won't even think about it.)

Example 1: The fronts are two separate places in space. Each front is one area/region. One of the regions is your opponents base. There you can attack, but you might be intercepted by his defenders. This is suggested by the fact that we speak about "moving" in the rules. :P

Example 2: The fronts are not separate places in space. They are just gamezones on the kitchen table, making it easy to distinguish which creatures are in the mood or have the readyness to attack, and which that are in the same for defense. In addition some stuff that happens only affect the attackers, and some only the defenders. "Movement" in the rules is just a movement of the creatures mental state ;)
I would like to mention a point: if wtactics is a CCG, and yet anyone can print cards, where is the 'collecting' part? I can just print them all.
CCG as we use the abbreviation stands for Customizable Card Game, and not "Collectible". If a person wants to collect WT there is nothing hindering him/her from doing so: We can sell cards at random, or he/she could just let a dice decide what cards he/she owns, and if he/she also wants to lose money for every dice throw he/she can donate that money to us.

"Collectible" means just that you have decided to collect. In CCG:s that often implies artificial scarcity of the goods, created by "rarity" factors of cards and a commercial model that exploits that.

LCG:s are "collectible" and allows players to "collect" every new card/expansion that come out, should they want to. Their collectbility doesn't diminish because of you knowing what you get when you pay for it. WT is collectible in that same way. WT could, as I show above, also be collectible in a traditional way where you pay for unknown cards and end up getting shit you don't want. As seen, you as a player have 100% of the power to decide in what way, if any, you want to collect anything. Nobody is hindering you from doing it exactly as you want as a player. That is hardly the case with any other CCG I've seen on the market.

I explained it above, that we will be better received if we have places in the game.
No, it won't. Why would it? "Places" is just a word. A game doesn't sell better because you have that word on a card. It's other factors that explain the reception.
The role they cover in the gameplay is not of importance, although they should be given a function that is suitable to their name, and should have a substantial difference from other card-types.
Nothing that has no importance on gameplay should ever become a card or a cardtype. Variables in a game should always be kept to a minimal for what is needed to achieve whatever the design goals. Everything else is a bad design and mistaking complexity for depth. Again, chess is a non-complex game, but with astonishing depth. As are all good strategical games.
Mtg has enchantments and artifacts. Very similar, they differ for what they represent and for the fact that enchantments never ask themselves to be tapped. They even have both subtypes that can be attached to creatures!
Yet, just for the sake of having a different card types to represent continuos spells and manmade stuff, they did it. And it works very well.
No, they did not do that for the sake you state. They did it to be able to balance the game easier. The two different card types are indeed very similar function wise, but different classes of cards interact with them very differently. They also did it to add design space... and not because people would play more MtG because there is now a card type called "artifact".

Currently we would have in wtactics: creatures, events, enchantments, resources, spells*, equipments, for a total of six. Add battlegrounds seven. Add mines eight, but they may be very well put in as resources subtypes.
Nothing should be on that list unless it fills a clear role and it makes gameplay sense to have it there. For the time being the notion of how spells work is in the works, and they should also not be there unless it is established. Mines/places have no function that can't be replicated by any of the other types. "Resources" are not a cardtype - any card can be used as a resource if it's placed face down from hand.
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