misc. rules questions & resources

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saart
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misc. rules questions & resources

Post by saart » Tue Apr 26, 2016 14:07

Peter wrote: Welcome to this project, saart!
Thank you :)
snowdrop wrote: Shout if you want a voice session on skype or discord, and I can help you fill in the gaps of whatever you want to know. Meanwhile, feel free to read one of the rulesets and then start creating cards/decks so we can get some playtesting done...

All in all this project will be to you what you make of it.
I've been through most of the ORC and some of the ARC before posting.
There are some design choices that I am not necessarily very found of, and would like to discuss how flexible they are. 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 don't really like Skype and co, preferring written communications, but I can adapt. I don't know if the presentation thread is the best place to discuss design though. Should I ask here, in the General thread, MP, other? The type of questions would be for example : Would it be OK at this point to discuss reworking in depth the resource management, would it be OK discussing reimplementing colored resources instead of factions, etc.
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Peter
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Re: Introduction saart

Post by Peter » Tue Apr 26, 2016 18:13

When it comes to design, do you mean graphical design of cards or rather game-design (rules)?

And resource managment: Do you mean in-game gold? Or cooperation and coordination of contributers and contributions?

And colored resources instead of factions: No! Not with me! I don't want to help building a MtG-clone! I pretty much like the way the game differs from MtG with quite new and quite unique things.

Many design discussions fit best into the Rules forum. A few rather fit into the General forum.
Kind regards and happy coding :)
saart
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Re: Introduction saart

Post by saart » Tue Apr 26, 2016 22:21

Peter wrote:When it comes to design, do you mean graphical design of cards or rather game-design (rules)?
Rules. Graphical is important to me but way way less than mechanics.
And resource managment: Do you mean in-game gold? Or cooperation and coordination of contributers and contributions?
In game gold. Pretty much what is after the next quote :3
And colored resources instead of factions: No! Not with me! I don't want to help building a MtG-clone! I pretty much like the way the game differs from MtG with quite new and quite unique things.
I personally don't like the notion of factions because it feels more like a lock than a bonus. Here are my reasons:

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" (forgot that I had tried out this one), and to a lesser extent HEX (They don't have the mechanics lock, but have the lore lock).

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.

3 - 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. But in order to gather a lot of peoples, it is preferable to have a wider world, where everyone can imagine its dream imaginary story, like with the magic multiverse. If you put the factions directly in the rules, there is no coming back, whereas you can limit the factions flavor to the cards textbox and stay open for different stories in future set.

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.
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snowdrop
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Re: misc. rules questions & resources

Post by snowdrop » Wed Apr 27, 2016 16:16

I've been through most of the ORC and some of the ARC before posting.
Cool, thats quite the reading :P
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.
saart
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Re: misc. rules questions & resources

Post by saart » Wed Apr 27, 2016 22:05

snowdrop wrote: Cool, thats quite the reading :P
Doesn't mean I grasped everything already though.
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.
Noted.
Yes, I agree. Factions are there in order to be us...oesn't complicate the rules in any way.
OK, confession time, I have misread the ORC (+1 on my first comment...). Just understood it while starting to write answers.

I was under the impression that you had to chose a faction while deck-building, and have all your cards be of that faction. The reason why I didn't like that was because it meant some combinations of cards could never be put in the same deck, like in heartstone where you can't mix shaman spells with demonist spells. After re-reading regions, things do seems better like that. Even though regions are also something I don't really like, but I'll probably talk about that somewhere else :p.

By the way, and that comment has nothing to do with me misunderstanding them ;) , shouldn't more explanatory rules be added to regions cards? It feels like if you are going to use a second deck (Which is what I personally don't like :3), you may want to have a visual explaining the different values on those cards, as with the first deck.
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snowdrop
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Re: misc. rules questions & resources

Post by snowdrop » Thu Apr 28, 2016 08:25

Yeah, there will be regions that pretty much allows you to combine any faction with any other, more or less.

You are right that there could be pictures explaining the anatomy of every card type. Currently it's only the creature type that's there.

I just modified the region template a couple of days ago, and it looke like this >>

http://imgur.com/wh7v1Na

...nevermind the text in the whit box, it's not 100% accurate. Actually there are only two thins to explain about the region card: Heart = HP of the region, and the number I, II or III tells the player where in his/her region pile (chapter) the card should be placed.
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