MoG's Game Dev Journal Pt. II: Fo' Real This Time!

[Man_Over_Game]

I am taking this game dev stuff seriously now. I've worked out most of the kinks I've found, and I'm having a 4-person playtest group test out my card game 4/17, so I decided to give you folks the chance to play it yourself in case it sounds like something you're interested in.

The game itself is expected to become available to the player in "Levels". As you gain more experience with playing the game, you can choose to "level up" your game and open the next deck of cards to add as an expansion for future rounds, which each includes a small rulebook. There are expected to be 5 levels total, with Level 1 teaching you how to use the core rules and concepts needed to play.

Below are the Level 1 rules, and the cards that come with it.

Spoiler: Level 1

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In this game, you are using a power that manipulates fate, reality, and minds to your will. This power is represented by the 6-sided dice you start with. Each time you are injured, your control over this power grows, gaining a die. However, after having seven dice, the next time you are injured will be your last in that fight, causing you to forfeit and flee until your next encounter.

As you play, you will gain levels between each encounter, adding more rules and cards, and increasing the number of dice you can end with in your encounters.

To understand how these battles play out, first you must understand how dice pools, dice rolls, Power and Initiative functions.

You, and each card you control, has a Power that's equal to the number of dice assigned to that source. When that card or player must roll, it rolls all of the available dice from that source, keeping the highest value from the rolled dice and adding +1 for any duplicates of that value.
Example: If you make a roll with a card that had 3 Power, and you rolled a 5, 5, and 3, your final result on that roll is 6.

To determine what acts first in any phase of combat (such as two players, or their cards), refer to Initiative, which is simply the highest Power of sources that can act in that phase.
Example: if you are determining which player plays their cards first and you have 2 Power while your opponent has 3 Power, your opponent will act first.

If a player has a tie between their own cards, they choose which of those cards/pools gets to act first. If opposing players have a tie, they instead roll against each other with one of their eligible pools, with the higher result acting first.
Example: If you have a card with 1 Power, another card with 1 Power, and your opponent has a card with 1 Power. Both players only roll 1 die to see who has Initiative. If you win, you choose which of your two eligible cards acts first, and then Initiative would be checked again after your card takes its action.
If, somehow, two dice pools tie with 0 Power, but are eligible to act (like if players have 0 dice in their pool during the Strategy Phase), they each roll 1 die to determine the outcome.



Each player will start with a starter deck, containing 10 cards, and 5 dice each in their dice pools.

Players start each round by drawing cards equal to their Power, discarding the top card of their deck, then determining who plays first through checking Initiative between the players’ pools. This begins the Strategy Phase.

During your turn in the Strategy Phase, first unexhaust all of your cards and flip any of your cards faceup. Afterwards, return all of your facedown cards to your hand, returning their dice to your pool. You may then play any number of cards from your hand facedown, assigning any remaining dice to any of your cards, making sure that each card on your field has at least one die. When you are finished playing cards, put any remaining cards in your hand on the bottom of your deck in any order. During the first round of the game, you may play any of your cards faceup.

After cards are played and all players have acted, the Strategy Phase ends and the Command Phase begins. During the Command Phase, each card will act based on the Initiative between all faceup and unexhausted Command cards. Remember that Initiative is determined by the card with the most dice, with players rolling their respective pools in the result of a tie.

The card that has Initiative may do one the following actions:
• Engage an enemy target.
• Flip facedown.

Engaging a target can be done with one of two ways: Spending a die (which moves that die to your Player Pool) or Exhausting that card by turning it sideways. Note that a card is discarded if it ever runs out of dice.

During an Engagement, the aggressor generally will start by making an Attack Roll against their target, who rolls a Defense Roll. Each card may have bonuses or penalties to these rolls, indicated on the top of the card. Unless the Defense Roll was higher than the Attack Roll, the defender is Hit and is generally discarded afterwards. Otherwise, the defender may make their own counterattack against their assailant, making their own Attack Roll with an opposed Defense Roll.

Players who are Engaged by an enemy will use their dice pool for their Defense Roll, but generally cannot make Attack Rolls. However, if they are Hit, they permanently add a die to their pool (moving one step closer to defeat), and the resulting backlash of this event both Exhausts and removes a die from the card that Engaged them.

Each facedown card has a special benefit, the PROTECT trait : When something without PROTECT is Engaged, you can have a card with PROTECT Engage the aggressor as the new defender (you can pay for the Engage as normal, with a die or by Exhausting). Facedown cards are then flipped faceup.

If, during the Strategy Phase, a player doesn’t have enough cards in their deck to draw, they may choose to channel their own life force to reinvigorate their resources, shuffling their discard pile into a new deck at the cost of being Hit.

This repeats until a player is Hit while having 7 dice within their control, which forfeits that player for the remainder of the game. Last person standing wins the encounter.

Spoiler: Level 1 cards

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+2 Defense
Guardsman

+2 Attack, -1 Defense
Mercenary

+1 Attack, +1 Defense
Templar

+3 Attack, -2 Defense
Zealot

-1 Attack, +3 Defense
Guardian Golem

The level 1 decks contains 2 of each of these cards

Level 2 will introduce key words (like the Ambush key word that facedown cards already get).

A total of 5 levels are expected, but I'm trying to not jump the gun and plan for those before I know how well the playtest of the core rules works out.

[Man_Over_Game]

For those nerds that might be interested, I had been asking for an Anydice function that shows the stats for this kind of dice-rolling method, and I got an answer! : https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/183918/45619

I was trying to mull over a way to have a simple dice system that allowed greater investment but still was chaotic. I also knew I wanted to have dice function as the primary resource, and it was a conundrum to figure out how to make adding more dice less predictable than it should, which eventually realized itself as some sort of "crit" system. I didn't like most crit systems (they feel far too important as an RNG effect in most instances) so I had to find a way to add randomness without it being too impactful or convoluted.

Well, my buddy Erik was interested in helping with the project and came up with the current roll version, which has a unique benefit of nearly scaling linearly in averages with each additional die (by about .35 points for each die, so a 2d6 averages 4.6, 3d6 averages 5.2, 4d6 averages 5.6), while also increasing the deviation with higher sets (more chaos) and reducing the deviation in lower sets (more average) than the standard "Roll X Keep High" method. This essentially means that your decisions matter more than normal with fewer dice, but you can still roll poorly with more dice than your opponent (assuming someone is only 1 or 2 points from beating you).

Adding in the whole "+3 to Attack Rolls, but I always attack last" mechanics of the game, and I'm very happy with where this is going (although I guess there's a similar rolling method from the Simple D6 system that worked well, too, according to some responses).

[Man_Over_Game]

We had to push it back a couple weeks, due to some folks getting sick, so the next expected date is 5/1. Post more then!

[Man_Over_Game]

It's been a while, and I hit a few hurdles, but everything is still moving forward.

Most of the folks who were going to playtest my game keep flaking out on me, and the ones that did play with me weren't very experienced with this kind of game, so I've decided to solve my problems with money.

I found this good playtesting group that has a lot of great testimonies. They'll have an hour and 1/2 session of reviewing the rules, playing a few rounds, giving insight on how the theme, instructions and gameplay all flow together, they seem pretty great. They'll record the whole thing on video, and they're testing it out on Tabletop Simulator. It's like $35 per player, so $70 for a standard 1v1 session, plus another $15 in case I want them to make the mod for it in TTS.

Here is their site: http://playerlair.net/playtesting-an...consultations/

I'm also learning this program called Nandeck that would allow me to basically program how my prototyping cards will be, so I can just merge from an excel spreadsheet. That way, I'm not spending hours on GIMP just because I decide that I want the non-basic cards to have some kind of cost to obtain (It's a deckbuilder).

I've moved most of the big development stuff to http://www.bgdf.com/node/23318.

Since the gameplay revolves around becoming stronger by nearing death, and you gain power the more you lose on the battlefield, I've decided to go with the working title of "Unholy War" (which I am very surprised isn't trademarked). The theme will probably be cartoony-grimdark, as I don't want it to be too serious, the games are supposed to be chaotic and fun, and I definitely wouldn't be able to afford an artist that does MTG-style stuff.

The instructions are all made, and the starter cards are written out, but I still need to see if I can make the mod myself and figure out enough Nandeck to make the starter cards. So...about 2 weeks? That's what I'm kinda expecting for the playtest. Post more then!

[Man_Over_Game]

Had a real playtest! Unfortunately, money's been tight because of reasons, so I haven't been able to pay for the professionals to review my game, but I have gotten some friends to play it. Although they were kind of harsh (they're kind of depressed and don't really say much of anything that's nice), they agreed that the game plays fairly well and doesn't feel clunky. Most of the gameplay loop flows fairly naturally, to the point where you might finish your "turn" within 30 seconds once you get the hang of things.

Unfortunately, I didn't pay much attention to the synergy between aggression, lots of dice on a single card, and Initiative, so the winning strategy so far was to have a ton of aggression.

The game, as-is, has a defensive mechanic where a facedown card can "Ambush" (previously called "Protect") an enemy that's attacking you or a faceup card you own and become the new attacker. Since gameplay works by having the defender make a counter attack if he survives, and the fact that facedown cards can't benefit from the Ambush mechanics themselves for protection from your other facedown cards, a player just had to stack all of their dice onto one monster and keep pounding away at the enemy's facedown cards (who can't be protected) until the enemy player is clear to start taking some hits.

Next time, I'll expand the Ambush feature to allow you to protect other facedown cards to counter the power level of aggression (since Ambushing a card means you get to attack first with your Ambusher, giving you the advantage...until the opponent ambushes back). Each Ambush also comes with the same normal cost (it loses a die or it's tapped for the round), so you might have a situation where you're tapping several facedown cards in a row to counter his ambushers, just to find out that you both saved your high defensive cards in the end and neither were able to kill each other. Or maybe you bait the enemy into wasting resources into committing into fighting a high-defensive target, conserving your resources for your own assault.

Sure, it was imbalanced on the first draft, but it f**kin works, man, and not a single 'bug'! I am giddy as a child. More updates coming (once I find more suckers to play it for me).

[Man_Over_Game]

Finished Phase 1! All I needed to do was have cards with Protect/Ambush (Same thing, I just changed the name to Ambush halfway through) be able to Ambush for other facedown cards, and make it so that the attacker wins on a tie between attack/defense rolls. After implementing those changes, all of my problems went away and the game functions perfectly! There was a fun moment during a playtest where my opponent decided to turtle up with a high defense Slime with a ton of dice. While facedown, he'd just tank anything I could throw at him, and flipping him faceup would still grant him Initiative so he'd just use the Hide action to do it again. So I decided to attack the player directly with high-defense cards that the Slime couldn't kill, which would require the Slime to lose dice in order to intercept (while I would just end up with tapped cards). Once the slime was low on dice from blocking attacks, I finished it off with a high attack card. It was an excellent interaction, and the idea of being aggressive with high defense cards was a welcome strategy that I think shows just how versatile the game can be, even at the simplest stage of its development.

So now I'm onto Phase 2, which is all about keywords and deckbuilding.

So far, I've decided that I want interaction to play a part in almost everything, so each keyword will play off of things that your opponent is doing, and the deckbuilding will as well.

The deckbuilding aspect will be focused around a mechanic called The Ritual. The Ritual is basically a hexagon that 5 cards are placed around, with at least one card facedown. The unused neutral cards that haven't been drawn yet are placed in the center of the Ritual. Going clockwise from the facedown card, each card costs 1 extra die for each space. So the card immediately after the facedown costs 1 die, the card next in clockwise order costs 2, the next card costs 3, and so on. When you purchase that card, you immediately put it faceup play with the dice it costs. You cannot put any more dice on that card, and you can only purchase one card from The Ritual per turn during the Strategy Phase. During the start of each player's turn, the facedown card is flipped faceup, the card counter-clockwise from the facedown card (if any) is put on the bottom of The Ritual deck in the center of The Ritual, and a new card is drawn facedown to put in that slot.

For instance, you see cards B, C, D, and E on The Ritual, in costs of 1, 2, 3, and 4, with the 5th card being facedown on position A. You decide to purchase Card 3 on position C, which costs 2 dice. The next player's turn starts. Card/Position A/5 is revealed, with Card 4 put at the bottom of The Ritual deck, and a new card drawn facedown on that position. Card A now costs 1, Card B now costs 2, Card C has an empty slot, and Card D now costs 4.

Essentially, cards get more expensive the longer they're on the stack, but that also means they have more dice to leverage when you pull them. Command Cards cost an extra card when they're discarded (making them expensive to lose), while the pending Magic and Might cards have better effects while facedown, so it still ends up still being a long-term advantage to have these cards in your deck after you purchase them for cheap.

So you can buy a bunch of 1-die cards as soon as they show up to stack your deck, just don't expect them to do too much before they're used up and tossed in your discard pile. Someone who buys all of the 4-cost cards will have a huge powerhouse each turn, it just makes their strategy a lot more obvious and 1-dimensional. And considering the players who act first know what cards are going to be expensive later on, those that act first will be able to react to the strategies their opponent can leverage, even before their opponent takes their turn. Even if the facedown card happens to be a trump card that counters your strategy after you acted, it'll only have 1 die on it and won't be able to influence much of the game.

So lots of good things.

I haven't decided what keywords I have yet. Came up with a few, but I'm still uncertain about what direction I want to go with all of them. The few I came up with were:

• Survivor: I may reroll my lowest die during Attack/Defense rolls.
• Heroic: If my opponent has more Power than me during my Defense Roll, I get a +1 bonus to all of my rolls this engagement.

That's it. I'll be doing more playtesting to see what kind of mechanics are needed first before I start jumping ahead. As-is, I don't even know how big I want cards from The Ritual to even be. The core cards are set up to have a total point value of +2, or +1 if they have an Attack bonus of +2 or higher (so the Zealot has a +3 ATK and a -2 DEF, while the Slime has -1 ATK and +3 DEF). Do I keep that trend and just tack on keywords to the new cards, or do I balance them around a +3 stat spread and try to treat keywords as a mechanical +1? I dunno yet. I think I'll just make The Ritual a thing in my next playtest, start adding in some random cards with about a +3 stat total, and see how players play around that.

[Man_Over_Game]

Just posting some notes about cards and keywords I need to make once I get a moment:


Challenge: Make a contested roll between your card (the Challenger) and a specified target, with the Challenger winning on a tie. The Challenger card states what happens on a success or a loss.ch
Disenchant: Remove a die from a card.

Coldsnap
Type: Magic
Trigger: An enemy enters an engagement.
Activate: The enemy is Exerted. After their first roll in this Engagement, Challenge them. If they succeed, Exert them. Otherwise, they are Hit.

Aegis Golem
Type: Command
+0 ATK, +2 DEF
You may Exert this card to give any Command card +1 Defense before their Defense roll.

Wind-Up Golem
Type: Command
+2 ATK, +2 DEF
After this card makes a Combat Roll, Exert it