Penny Arcade

Like most sensate organisms, Gabriel didn’t know what he was supposed to think about the Wii U.  Reasonable, perceptive creatures can’t be faulted for thinking that the enhanced controller was simply a peripheral, not terribly unlike the two fairly high concept peripherals they might already have been asked to purchase - one which is placed on the floor, of all places, and another that increases the resolution of the remote when used in space (?).  The idea that a new controller would come out that has a teevee in there isn’t that weird.

Playing it at PAX sold it to him big, though, because the power of those asymmetric experiences is immense.  His boy was there, and the young man was haunting his family ghost-style while everyone else scurried around in terror, and I can only imagine his face.  We had lighter versions of this experience before - recall that, as the only people on earth who liked Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, we were receiving private correspondence from our parents, crafting, and all manner of things in a completely private way.  But there’s so many ways to play with hidden information both competitively and cooperatively - it’s a staple of board and card games - that it’s easy to get excited about even the more obvious manifestations.

It doesn’t need to have the explicit D&D brand, but it could, and it would help to communicate the basic idea.  I had Neverwinter Nights, certainly, but that toolset encompasses a very wide set of possibilities.  It’s not “couch compatible.”  It doesn’t need to be that broad to be enjoyable, and the easier it is to play the more likely that it will be played.  I’m not bagging on it, I had awesome times in there.  But it’s a much bigger gun than is required for most people, and its heft is intimidating.  I think about something like Super Dungeon Explore, and how you’re basically just hurling great handfuls of figurines at players, and it’s fucking rad.  The only bad part is the setup, which would go out the window here.  I don’t know.  Seems good.

Something that happened at this PAX that has never happened at any PAX prior was that people would corner me, literally corner me, like, in a corner, and make me look at their game.  My purpose at the show is to be available at a minimum and as useful as time allows.  Literally goaded into corners though, over and over.  I wasn’t worried, because I know Karate.  I could kick your heart out, you’d have to go pick it up if you wanted to stay alive.  But this was not “fun” for them, it was scary and hard, and it was so scary and so hard that that the need must have been equal to it.

I am often at odds with the arbitrary, frankly illegitimate manner in which shit regularly goes down; I try to ameliorate it when I can, by letting you know about things.  But this…  desperation, this was new.  I “get it” in absolute terms.  Making something great seems like it should be the end of the process, but it isn’t.  You can make something great, and nobody knows.  That’s not what we’re taught to believe.

(CW)TB out.

the answer to every question

I ran my D&D group through a test of my new game on Saturday. I was nervous as hell but it went really well. It is a tabletop role playing game that attempts to express each class as a deck. I realize this is nothing new but none of the other games we’ve played have done it how I would do it. I figure there must be lots of people out there like me who want to make a game but just aren’t sure how to get started. I’m not a professional obviously but I’m having a lot of fun. I figure if I share my process maybe it will inspire some of you guys. I’m still ridiculously early in the development but here’s how I got started.

I knew I wanted to use decks for characters and so I started thinking about the WOW TCG. This is a game that my players and I loved, especially the raid deck mechanic. It was missing some stuff that we liked from D&D though. So I listed the things that I wished the WOW card game had:

-Character Progression

-Rules for adjudicating RP and Skill Challenge events

-Tactical grid based combat

-A more literal representation of the character as a deck

So with those ideas in mind I tried to imagine a card game that modeled the character as a deck of skills and powers. I started thinking about the Pokemon card game and began messing around with replacing the idea of “Energy” cards with “Skill” cards. So for example in Pokemon you might have a Fighting/Electric deck and in my game a Rogue would be a Strength/Dexterity deck.

That was sort of my jumping off point and I printed out some really basic cards just to start doing tests by myself. I created some card types like attacks and utility style powers that require various combinations of skills. It was very raw but it was interesting and so I kept working on it. Pokemon gave me a good starting point and from there I began making it my own.

By the time I put it in front of my players on Saturday I had already done some simple tests with people here in the office. I had four very basic decks, a Rogue a Cleric, a Fighter and a Wizard. I also had fleshed out my damage mechanic. I love deck building games like Dominion and Penny Arcade:Gamers vs. evil. I thought about how in those games you are forced to put “attack” cards into your deck that clog up the works. With that in mind I tried having enemies deal wound cards when they hit. These get shuffled into your deck and cannot be discarded. So they take up valuable space but they also start to build up in your hand. Each class has a limit they can hold before death occurs. So for example if the rogue can only have four wounds in his had before he’s dead. The Wizard can only have three. That makes it the job of the healer to remove these cards and keep his groups decks clean.

Once I had that system in place the fighter class became really obvious to me. In his battle rager stance the fighter can play wound cards as Strength to power his attacks. He becomes a sort of damage sponge for the party. Then I imagined a Warlock class that used wound cards to power his dark pacts. Maybe he could even hurt himself to add wounds to his own deck. The pieces were starting to line up and I was getting super excited. I thought about other status effects besides wounds. A poison dagger attack forces the player to shuffle four “poison” cards into his deck. When he draws into one the poison hits him and he falls over. Curses and critical effects get managed the same way. it made for some really fun events as the group’s rogue would prepare for a killing blow on an enemy but draw into a curse that forced him to attack an ally instead.

My players ran through a little adventure using the basic rules I had ready and they all loved it. I have to say that watching them play a game I made up was fucking incredible. Beyond just having fun though they had some awesome feedback and ideas for me. After watching them play I was energized and could not wait to get back to the drawing board.

So there you go. I’ve got a lot more of the game fleshed out than I’ve talked about here and even more ideas still kicking around in my head. But this was how it started. I’m not soliciting ideas or anything like that I just wanted to share a diary of my progress. I’ll keep you all updated.

-Gabe out