Q_x wrote:But I think estimating what we might need is far more important. /../ does anybody imagine having a cost ..., that goes like: marking two cards, discarding one from hand, one from table and paying 3 gold? /../ We can of course standardize the costs to gold, marked cards, card discarded from hand, table and piled, but I'd rather be creative when inventing a card...
I can imagine cards that cost
anything and can't think of a single good thing with standardizing them. Standardizing means the player knows beforehand that there won't ever be a card that costs anything beyond x y z and that the only thing that changes is the quantity.
Standardizing manly means limiting our options, as you point out. While your example is extreme in the sense that it has a long text cost and therefore would be rare I think that it should at least be theoretically possible to create such cards, even if they would be rare.
What wouldn't be as rare are cards that have costs like this (number is just indicating a diff example here, but I think that the higher the number the rarer the usage would be):
1. mark,
2. customtext
3. mark, customtext
4. customtext, customtext
5. mark, goldcost, customtext
In the examples I also totally omit the new "assign" feature (if that's to be used that is) that I wrote about in the ORC rules recently, and I also omit the marking of other cards (rectangle with number in inside). Add those two in the mix and you get some smooth Cajun Stew, offering mighty fine taste and almost limitless design creativity. It empowers us to create cards that are really dynamic and that have costs that are very adapted to the cards usage.
Here are some " semi-exotic cost" examples of what I think an advanced ccg should be able to handle:
1. Show hand to target opponent
2. Discard 2 cards in hand at random
3. Show 5 top cards of deck to the opponent with the least influence.
As a general rule I don't think a card should have more than 2 customtext costs,
at most, on the same card. It's way better to be inventive with 1, max 2, custom texts and really try to find something interesting than to have a combo of 3-4 customtext costs that are all mediocre. That would just be bad design and simple quantifying, which should better be done with gold cost or marking. I think your example is a good one of how we should avoid doing it:
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" marking two cards, discarding one from hand, one from table and paying 3 gold"
It reads something like this:
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[2], 3, discard a card from hand, discard a card from your kingdom:
It "only" uses two customtexts as cardcost but I think one should easily be ditched and/or either the other re-constructed or the gold cost raised instead. (I know you took a silly example and wouldn't suggest that cost - I'm just re-using your example here which suited very well..)
My point is that we need a way to make clear what is the cost, and what is the result
In ORC I suggest the same as in MtG and probably other games as well. Use a
delimiter. All that is to the left is cost, all to the right of that delimiter is the effect. As simple as that. I don't see any problems with it either (until I made a mess by showing the dropcaps in combo with cerature abilities that have a cost, but more about that soon). The delimiter I suggested is the colon sign (:), which is good since it's already a part of any normal keyboard and makes life easier for both players and designers in some minimal regard, but better yet is that it is a natural delimiter already, even before we use it as one. It's perhaps one of the more perfect characters to express what we want to say - "first this , then that follows". I don't think there is any confusion about what is cost and what is the effect of you paying that cost with a syntax that's
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price1, price2 : effect1. effect2....
And I doubt if we would need more than a line, maximum two, to write the cost in the end
I share your doubt & would take it even further: It should actively be avoided.
qx wrote:like discarding a card from RP. So how to write that? Is making the cost with bold alone or any font change not enough?
Both, in separate, would be enough. WotC use neither. They just use plain text followed by a colon. I don't think they are optimal though and think we can do it better.
As I wrote in previous reply though using bolds and italics should not be the case
if we also use it for the named abilities, which we currently do. I'm not sure yet, but I have some reservations about using bold at all for ability cost as it would be very heavy and chunky/massive when using it for customtext. Imagine 1,5 or 2 lines of bolded text, being the cost, and then seeing the effect. It wouldn't really look good (just subjective aesthetics though). I have included a sample:
I think 12/11 is the easiest to look at and that it diffs itself most from effect text without looking too heavy, but the fun part is that 7/8 look next best.
While I usually like Italics i think it's
horrid to read several lines of text in them, not to mention doing so in small sizes, and I also don't think they diff a lot here from effect text. They almost blend nicely, which isn't our intent. Then there's still the problem with this being in conflict with the named abilities that are written in bolditalic.
Last thing about the pic above: Nevermind the poor choice of colour by me (grey) - in real case it would be some (probably darker) shade of the beige/yellow we use on the creature cards. I think it would be enough..
Honestly, I think a drop cap may in the end reduce readability here, especially as it would use most probably same font as regular text.
I think I agree the more I look at it. What makes a mess is that the drop cap covers two lines, but that the cost won't always be two lines or even a full line, also making a mess with the delimiter. So, let's ditch the drop cap when writing out costs.
I would however want to keep drop caps whenever a) we don't give out costs & b) it doesn't force us to shrink text beyond 9 (thats not an inkscape 9, its the one used by the world...probaby "pt") Unless of course there is still a readability issue with the drop caps, but if there is then it was there all the time on the Event-template as well...
So, on creatures we wouldn't use drop caps whenever we have activated abilities. That would solve all our problems. People may wonder why not, but then we have some good shit to show them in here. We exchange consistency for readability. We get extra-pretty looking cards when we can, and when we can't we get functional ones
Example 2 (with longer cost effects start from newline):
Title
Type
Cost that may go in
several lines:
Effect that may have many
lines as well
It is virtually the same as we use already, with the diff that
effect and cost don't share lines, ever. In one way one could argue that this improves readability since a player would know that the effect always starts on a new line, the one after colon. Then again, Costs also start on new lines, but that's not relevant since there would be a separator (empty space right now, line as you suggest to tighten it all some more)
Problem I see with this is that
most costs are probaby 30 - 50% of a line. That would mean we often will waste 50 to 70% of a line. If you have 2 abilities then suddenly we waste 100% to 140% of a line. This also looks very strange(?) when you have a cost of only "m" or "3" etc, in which case it almost lowers readability since you have to not only read from left to right but also go down to next line - seemingly without a reason since we're used to reading full lines in society.
If use line to separate those, or not, is just aesthetic question, I think with line we may squeeze more onto cards, that's all
Agree... and yet, I don't: I think that we should have as little graphical elements as possible mixed in between the text and think space and "air" looks better (aesth). That said, isn't it so that text is easier read the less we have crammed in around/inbetween it? I get the feeling stuff will look "tight" when we have a line in there, like we really try to cram the text. And that it looks more "spatious" if there is air instead. Hrm... hard to say really without some nice and different examples...