FAQ
General
Q: Won’t printing/developing the cards be quite expensive?
Not compared to buying any other pre-printed CCG on the market, no. It will actually be quite cheap since:
1) The player knows exactly which cards he/she wants to print, so he/she doesn’t have to pay for random cards or other cards they don’t intend to ever use.
2) Card rarity is not an issue that will push prices upwards on existing cards on the (second hand) market.
3) Commercial and closed-source CCG:s are purely profit-driven, so they have a constant incentive to keep prices up and devise ways to milk you for as much cash as possible in the long run. We don't. We give you all the material and you can then decide how and where you give the cards physical life – you choose what photo lab you will use, if you print them at home, school or at somebody's work. In the end we give you great freedom to acquire the physical cards any way you want, suggesting that costs become what you make of it.
4) In the worst case scenario we could ever imagine and by using really bad numbers we have concluded that the cards could cost you about the same amount as the almost cheapest cards you'd find on the second hand market for the popular commercial and close sourced CCGs out there. But here is the sweet thing: Even if the price of our cards was 2-4 times higher than those, you and your friends would still end up saving fortunes due to what's mentioned in the previous paragraphs above. Also keep in mind that you can print/develop every card for the exactly the same price per unit (or even lower if you get quantity discounts and do a develop/print order together with other players).
Q: How will the game be playable with real paper cards?
Yes, we will supply the world with the cards as high resolution files in standard file formats like png/pdf etc. People can then print the cards for themselves (and use plastic ccg sleeves to make them thicker/sturdier) or develop them as digital photos and get really professional-looking cards to play with. There's nothing to stop you from printing on materials other than paper, if you want. (Should you find a way to print on plastic cards please let us know!)
Q: How will the game be playable online?
By using open source CCG engines like OCTGN2, gCCG or others like LackeyCCG the game can easily be played online, totally for free, without spam and other unwanted distractions. It can also be done so in a decentralized and totally community driven manner – something we value highly. The power will always be in the hands of the players.
Q: I'm not into this DIY-crap. I just want play an already assembled game.
Everyone is also allowed to sell this game, meaning there is probably somewhere that you can buy it online, pre-printed and nicely packaged. You could also pay somebody to assemble it all for you if you can't/won't do it yourself. WT would, even in that case, still be very competitive and price worthy. To be honest though, if you are not interested in even assembling a game odds are high that you would thrive in a non-community driven forum where the players are just consumers. We would however still recommend you to try this out: It's actually fun and gives satisfaction to have accomplished something yourself.
Development
If you want to become a developer, team member or are a developer of another project then this section is for you.
Yes, of course! We'd love to get more active members to our team. Please present yourself in the forum and tell us what you're good at and interested in, and we'll give you some tasks.
Q: Can I use your assets but create a totally different game/rules?
WTactics is organized in such a way that you are welcome to join the project even if you want do develop a totally different ruleset: We'd just organize ourselves in different rule developing teams. After a while we would pick out the best one as the official one for the project. By working this way and joining forces, infrastructure and assets under the same project roof we grow stronger instead of having to re-invent the wheel all of the time.
You are of course also free to just harvest our resources and use them for whatever you wish without being a part of our project. In such a case you would however still have to abide under the same license as our assets, meaning your product would have to be open source and compatible with the GPL2 or later. We do not recommend such an approach though as forking only creates fragmentation on the very small indie CCG developer scene that is around. Most of the time all small projects perish since they star all over, doing work that has already been done by other teams, facing the same problems and so on. We encourage us to merge forces instead, so that we can create something stronger and better together.
Q: What kind of cards should the game be focused on?
WTactics should focus on a world containing sentient humanoid creatures in a low-fantasy medieval era, inspired by and set in the <a href="http://wesnoth.org">Battle for Wesnoth</a> universe. As such, the creatures are the main pieces in the game. Cards that are played are somehow related to these creatures and their various lives, conflicts and tasks.
Q: How much player administration is tolerated?
WTactics is intended to be playable both on a tabletop and on a computer. It's our opinion that the sort of things a player must do every turn, or usually does every turn, in terms of writing, removing/adding tokens, shuffling decks, keeping score and so on, should always be kept to a bare minimum.
We believe the focus of a game should be on playing it, and not administrating it. Too much administration takes away focus and fun for the player, and prolongs the game needlessly.
Q: What sort of player preparations may be required?
When designing rules for WT they should always be written in a way which have very low demands on player preparation. It's OK to require players to have x amount of cards, have some tokens, pen and paper, normal six-sided dice, and so on. It would not be OK to require that players have specially-designed boards, terrain pieces etc.
The game must always be portable and easy to (un)pack. It should also be easy to play it on a casual mid-sized table, and every part it uses should be easily available without epic preparations and adventures to get hold of/create the parts needed to play the game.
Q: Is card balance a central aspect of how a good WTactics design should look like?
Yes, yes and yes! Card and faction balance is central to the game. Every designer should make it his/her goal to not deliver broken cards or cards that break the game itself.
Unlike many CCG's all cards in WT are freely available for everyone. There is no point in designing super-cards or cards that are only ‘balanced out' by the fact that they're ‘rare'. Super-cards, and games that use systems where the player with the ‘best' cards win have been devised by the commercial interests within the CCG industry and the only reason for releasing such cards has been to make greater profits. The super-card concept is inherently flawed, unrepairable and generally indicates poor design skills on the part of the creator.
To ensure balance the WTactics developers must always be prepared to revise cards which need to be changed once they have gathered enough data about the problem.
Q: How big can the card pool be?
if you're prepared to finance the creation of new art or can contribute new art yourself the card pool can be whatever size you want it to be.
Otherwise, the card pool in the core set is around 250-300 cards, which is a standard number in the CCG industry. Of those around 120 are creatures since we already have all the art for them in place, while the rest of the cards will be other card types with different artwork. These other cards still lack artwork, and any contributions are appreciated.
Q: Must deck-building be a part of the game?
Yes. We believe that a solid card game, which wants to compete with the CCG industry on its own turf, must allow deck-building and have some kind of rules for handling it. Releasing pre-constructed decks etc. is in order, but the option for players to somehow customize their decks to a huge extent must be there.
Q: Is there a minimum or maximum number of cards for a deck?
This is up to the designer of the specific ruleset. The only global limitations we have set is that a deck of some size should be constructed and that the deck is not over 60 cards. Preferably and due to availability and economical reasons associated with the player and the nature of how this game is distributed, a complete and playable the deck would be in the range of 10 to 40 cards.
Of course, you are searching for the <a href="http://wtactics.org/wiki/index.php?title=General_Design_Document">General Design Document (GDD)</a> in our Wiki. It outlines what criteria should be satisfied when developing a new rule set for WTactics.
Notice that in addition to that, local design documents – documents made by each dev. team for their own rule set – may also exist. Please harvest <a href="http://WTactics.org/wiki">the wiki</a> for more info about those, or contact the rule set's development team directly.
Q: Who decides which rules will be the official ones if several suggestions come in?
All development teams that participate in the project and want their rule set & cards to be a contender for the official rules version will be playtested, the community will have a lengthy discussion. In it there would in best case scenario be some kind of agreement of to which degree the rule sets meet the criteria in the GDD and how fun each game is. In the end though, snowdrop will then declare the winning rule set that will become the official for WTactics. All other rule sets will however be kept here at the site as alternatives, allowing the community to maintain them if it wants to.