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Feels a bit like the computer game (playable both solo vs AI and duel against a player) Frozen Synapse. Have you played/seen it?
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Feb 6, 2014 19:43
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So a friend of mine made a joke suggestion to me that I should make a Monster Hunter board game, and after thinking about it I think it could have some potential as an idea. It'd be a cooperative game of players working together to try and take down one big monster that has lots of breakable parts. My initial idea would be the monster being a board, with cardboard bits placed on top of it that can be removed to show parts breaking. Players would take turns doing actions (healing, attacking, gathering, carving, etc) and then the monster would also take actions (attacking players). I haven't thought of individual combat mechanics, but I think it could probably work out. Variance would come from different monsters behaving differently, and with different weapons/armors giving different advantages or playstyle. I guess the primary challenge for keeping it entertaining would be ensuring that the actual combat itself is fun and engaging. Choice of what to actually do with your turn would need to be important as well, essentially turning the game into a resource management puzzle while trying to deal with a rampaging wyvern - low on stamina, which hinders my attacks and means I can't take certain actions so I need to eat some cooked meat - I'm out of meat, so I need to kill a small fodder monster so gather some, but risk taking damage while doing so if the monster decides to attack me - can another player give me some meat, but then we'd BOTH risk getting hit in order to speed up the process, etc.
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Feb 6, 2014 22:00
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So I've been working on my first game design... put together a functional prototype, designed and made up 104 different cards (12 of which I've already redesigned), and gone through one playtest. I'm impatiently waiting for the cubes I've ordered to arrive, and it takes forever to get a group together to run-through the game (I'll probably only get to once a week). The first playtest went fantastic. Everyone seemed to have fun and was really into it. The game ran longer than I'd like, so I made changes to shorten it (I'm hoping to be 45 mins to an hour with 5 players). Anyways, in the mean time until I get another chance to playtest I wanted to introduce my game and post the rules here to see if I could get some feedback! Thanks in advance! Ecologix Ecologix is a game for 2 to 5 players where each player controls the evolution and growth of a species of microorganism. Main Game Mechanics: -Simultaneous Action Selection -Worker Placement -Dice Rolling (with non-transitive dice, producing a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic, see: http://singingbanana.com/dice/article.htm#GD ) -some Card Drafting Rules: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nAdUds28SnWbtwsmt6uD0UfLuYURHdkn6dcURvfi9C0/edit?usp=sharing If you have some time to go through the rules, please let me know what you think. Do they give you a good sense of how the game works? What's unclear? Any sections that need work? I don't have any card examples in the rulebook so I'll put a few here: Event - Bonus - Each nutrient swamp gains +3 nutrients Event - Disaster - Next turn, no players may move Event - Disaster - All players' nutrients are dumped to their swamp Evolution - Whenever you eat at a swamp with 1 nutrient, you get 2 (Cost: 4 gray, 3 black) Evolution - Spend 2 nutrients to retry a losing conflict (Cost: 1 white, 2 gray, 4 black) Evolution - Pay 1 nutrient to move last (Cost: 1 gray, 5 brown) Evolution - Reduce the cost of growing by 2 (Cost: 3 white, 4 brown) Advantage - If the player who beat you in a conflict eats, those nutrients go to you Advantage - Steal a card from a player, then they steal a card from you Advantage - You may eat and reproduce this turn
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Feb 6, 2014 22:03
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CodfishCartographer posted:I'm out of meat, so I need to kill a small fodder monster so gather some, but risk taking damage while doing so if the monster decides to attack me - can another player give me some meat, but then we'd BOTH risk getting hit in order to speed up the process, etc.
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Feb 6, 2014 22:28
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The Leper Colon V posted:I really like the idea of the monster actually being the board. That' a very interesting use of the genre. I'm not sure if I want the monster to be the board, or just a board that is placed onto another to represent the map. My initial idea was just having the monster be a board, that players add/remove tokens and pieces to (cut off tail, so remove that piece - damage the wings, so place on a piece that shows the wings being damaged, etc. I didn't intend for player pieces to be placed onto the monster board, but that could be a possibility for players grappling the monster or something similar) but then that could limit some of the non-combat choices. If I'm out of healing potions, I'll need to gather herbs in order to make more. If there was a map board, then it could be that Area 7 is the nearest one with herbs in it, so I'll have to go there to gather them. I suppose it could just work without a map board in that I'd need to spend an action turn to gather herbs, or maybe spend one to search for them, then if successful spend another to gather.
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Feb 6, 2014 22:38
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Why even have gathering be an action? Why not just have it be a finite supply?
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Feb 6, 2014 22:43
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Hmm, I suppose that could also work! Right now my plan is that each player has a pool of dice (or maybe just tokens) that represent their stamina, that they use to perform actions and regenerate over time. If gathering was an action, you'd then sacrifice, say, 1 stamina die in order to gather herbs. The risk for that would be that if the monster decides to attack you, then you'll have 1 less stamina die to roll in order to try and dodge the monster's attack. Or does that sound too much time-wastey? If it's just a pool of let's say 10 herbs for all players to take, and you could just throw them into your inventory (that would have limited space) on your turn, then the decision wouldn't be based on "how much will this benefit me for the risk of me getting hurt?" and more based on "how much will this benefit me for the risk of loving over a teammate later on?"
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Feb 6, 2014 23:04
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Personally, I feel like if you have an unlimited resource gathering, then the game risks turning into a long, drawn-out slog where you lost four turns ago, but you don't quite know it yet because everyone's still plucking desperately at herbs trying to recover. Maybe it's just me, but resource management sounds like a more fun mechanic than "do nothing and hope I don't get screwed".
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Feb 6, 2014 23:06
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Yeah, I suppose when you put it that way that makes a lot of sense.  I definitely want resource management to be a big part of the game, along with inventory management. So right now the plan is the monster will be a big board in the center of all the players. The image of the monster will be divided up into individual body parts (head, body, legs, wings, tail, etc) that can have tokens and other cardboard pieces overlaid on top of to show their status. Each body part would have a health value, an attack value, and a defense value, that would be altered by attacking that individual piece. Each player will have a status card showing their current health, stamina, and what's in all their inventory. There is also a pool of various resources that players can choose to add to their inventory on their turn. On a player's turn, they can take two of the following actions: attack the monster, use an item, or craft an item. If you attack a monster, you choose a body part and then how many stamina dice you want to roll (they would likely be 6-sided, but not valued 1-6, maybe 0,1,1,2,2,3). If you match the body part's defense value, then you deal damage to the monster equal to how many dice you rolled and then set aside the dice you rolled. When a part takes damage, place a damage counter onto that part and then reduce the monster's total health (kept track of on the board) by the dealt amount. When a part gets enough damage counters, then it is broken and players place the broken body piece on top of the old one. If you use an item, you discard it from your inventory and its effect activates. If you craft an item, then you discard two items from your inventory and gain another - player cards would have a combination chart to show what combinations are available. When you've taken both of your actions, your turn is over. After a player's turn, the monster gets a turn. It attacks a player (at random? have some simple formula for choosing?) by drawing a card to see what attack the monster will use. Different attacks will have a number to beat in order to evade the attack - players then grab however many stamina dice they want to use to attempt to dodge, and then roll those dice to try and meet the evade number. If they fail to match that, then they are hit by the attack and take damage equal to the listed value (often it will be the attack of a specific body part). After the monster makes an attack, it's the next player's turn. At the start of every turn (both player and monster) each player may move one stamina die from their used pool to their available pool. If players can reduce the monster's total health to 0, they win! If a player dies, they respawn with full health but with a lower maximum stamina pool on their next turn. If there are three deaths over the course of the hunt, then the players lose the game. e: Things I still need to work out: -How do monsters decide who to attack? -I want to introduce small monsters, but not entirely sure how. They'd likely be small tokens that could be drawn at random, and would attack along with the big monster if the players don't deal with them. Can probably carve meat off them to increase available/maximum stamina. -Probably a million more things I can't think of at the moment. Any feedback? CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 23:49
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I like the idea that the card shows which parts of the board are dangerous at that particular time. Maybe it stomps, and hits everyone nears its feet/legs, etc. Or it slaps its back with its tail, so everyone in those center rows is at risk, etc.
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Feb 6, 2014 23:59
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Actually that just gives me an idea of how to deal with who the monster will attack. Players will have player pieces, and will move the piece to whichever body part they want to attack. On its turn, the monster will turn to face the next player whose turn it is - then the card will determine which body part the monster will attack with, and any players near it will have to try to evade it. So if you know the tail deals lots of damage and don't want to risk getting hit by it, then move so that you won't be in a position to get hit by it if the monster decides to swing its tail - since you know the monster will turn to face the next player, you can predict where the monster will face, but not necessarily where it'll attack.
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Feb 7, 2014 00:05
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That's a good idea.
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Feb 7, 2014 00:09
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silvergoose posted:Feels a bit like the computer game (playable both solo vs AI and duel against a player) Frozen Synapse. Have you played/seen it? Absolutely! Actually, come to think of it, my first thoughts about Frozen Synapse were "man, it'd be so cool if it was less abstract/barebones and instead, say, a SWAT game". So I guess it stuck in my head on some subconscious level. (And yes, I know about Door Kickers) The game that got me thinking about this though is Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. It's a WEGO (meaning simultaneous turn resolution) Cold-War-gone-hot wargame whose shtick is, turns of each player vary in length. It's really quite ingenious and one of few instances where PC wargame actually get to use their platform of choice in different way than just dumping more stats on what would be an already tedious board game. The way it works, everything gets resolved in one-minute ticks (a bit like in Paradox games) and every X minutes you get to give a limited number of orders (depending on state of your command structure). I mean, chit-pull (board) wargames often try to convey similar things, but the granularity of this system really gives it its own quality. modig posted:It seems like you'll need someway of specifying where you move, unless all the units are just on rails. Frankly, it'll probably be just an adjacent area chosen on the fly. Thematic reasons are both that the actual battleplan would specify objective to reach rather than micro details of each platoon moving and the highly trained troops wouldn't march under machine gun fire just because that alley was marked on their map. Mechanics-wise, I think it's simply unnecessary to go any more restrictive. Precious few moves would make sense in context of remaining standing orders and the timing of it should be enough of a coordination issue. The major sources of friction I envision are: - Semi-predictable enemy action/spawning - (Tying to that) time pressure - Orders getting delayed due to squads being suppressed or engaged - Some micromanaging of disengaging the enemy and shifting fire (which is both an actual concern commanders face, and a way to open the possibility of getting actually fixed and flanked)
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Feb 7, 2014 01:31
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So, working a bit more on the monster hunter game. I figure I could work in little monsters by having some Big Monster attack cards instead be event things that happen, like 3 small monsters show up, or the monster changes areas and thus some of the resource supply gets replenished. Small monsters would attack whenever the Big Monster does, but would be pretty easy to kill and deal small amounts of damage. The players could ignore them, but their damage could add up over time. Another system I think would work would be a rage mode - at various points along a monster's life bar, it'll go into rage mode, allowing it to draw two attack cards every turn for a full round. Some monsters would go into it more often than others, but it will always get more frequent as monsters get closer to death. I'm a little iffy on players rolling dice for actions, since four players with maybe 10 dice each to manage would mean a shitload of dice. Cards would be the next-most-obvious choice, but they aren't quite as all-purpose as dice are for what I have in mind? And I was thinking that maybe each specific monster could have its own deck of attack cards to make them each feel really unique, so more cards would just be overkill as I'm already hesitant on having a ton of decks anyways.
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Feb 7, 2014 03:43
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Well, you can either have everything either be set numbers, with the cards, or dice. If it's set numbers, then it's less swingy, but might also be less exciting.
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Feb 7, 2014 05:16
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eggburger fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2014 06:05
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CodfishCartographer posted:-monster hunter chat- The worst thing about following this thread: Encountering the most exciting, ludicrous game concepts, and knowing that it will be available to really play in maybe a few years at best, if ever. If you build a playtest model, I want in.
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Feb 7, 2014 07:25
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pine posted:I would be so grateful if anyone would be willing to lend a hand. Also, hi, and nice to meet you all. I'm pine, and I like games. I'd be willing to help out with the math side of things. I'm fairly new to this stuff too but I have a strong math background. I'm going away for the weekend so I'm gone Friday afternoon until Monday afternoon, but if I can help out tomorrow morning or after I get back I will.
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Feb 7, 2014 07:43
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pine posted:It's a pretty straightforward roll-and-move game with various peril/bonus squares, with multi-player interaction involved in most turns. I'm mainly concerned with ensuring I have enough of each type of square (perils/bonuses etc), sufficient squares in total so as to make the game neither too short or too long, the right placement of squares on the track so that it would be rare for someone to gain a huge lead on the other players, etc. I would say before anything else we'd need to know what kind of game mechanics you're using, and how complex the game is. It sounds like the game you have in mind is relatively simple, but if you're making it for gamers I doubt you're just reskinning Candy Land or Snakes & Ladders. Is the player choice more like Backgammon or Sorry or Parcheesi, or is it more complex like something a hand of special cards, or with several resources, or whatever? What kinds of choices do the players make? How do they interact with one another? I suspect there are plenty of us who would be happy to provide mathy advice. But we need to know what kind of math we're doing. 
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Feb 7, 2014 12:30
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Gutter Owl posted:The worst thing about following this thread: Encountering the most exciting, ludicrous game concepts, and knowing that it will be available to really play in maybe a few years at best, if ever. Haha thanks for the encouragement. I'm working on the design doc now, and I figure it can probably be easy enough to get a downloadable version people could playtest, if I work it to just use standard d6s or something. It'll probably take me a week or so to get everything designed out, maybe longer? I'll let the thread know when I've got a playable version ready to test.
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Feb 7, 2014 16:28
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eggburger fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2014 19:14
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Yeah, it's probably best to just info dump everything you have right now.
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Feb 7, 2014 21:53
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Tunga posted:Yeah, it's probably best to just info dump everything you have right now. Yeah this. It's up to you how much you want to get into theme, but generally whatever you think is necessary for us to provide feedback. If you have a four-page backstory to your game's world we probably don't need to know that, but knowing theme can help come up with some creative solutions to problems you may be having. Unrelated to that, but I've run into a teensy problem with the Monster Hunter game. I decided to rework how monsters' turns work a bit. I realized that them turning to face players in a sequence would just lead to the monsters spinning around wildly, and would make for some weird calculations of "okay, in four turns I'll be near the tail, which is dangerous!" So I decided it'd work best with an aggro system. There would be a pool of 10ish aggro tokens divided evenly between players, and as players deal damage they take those tokens from other players. Then when it's the monster's turn, they'll face the player with the most aggro. They won't necessarily attack that player, as the drawn attack card determines which direction and body part they'll attack with, but each monster will have a general theme - one monster will have lots of attacks facing forwards, one will have lots of attacks to the side, etc. the problem I have with this right now is it adds another layer of upkeep, and I'm a bit worried I might have too much. When a player attacks, they'll roll their attack dice to see how much damage they deal. They then move the monster's health tracker, add damage tokens to the body part they attacked, and then grab aggro tokens. Does this sound like too much work for each attack?
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Feb 7, 2014 22:09
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How faithful to Monster Hunter are you trying to stay? If you're planning on having different weapons with different ways to attack then Aggro could just be a function of the type of weapon attack you're using. Instead of multiple aggro tokens you could just have one Aggro marker that gets passed to the player who's done the most damage, or specific attacks/combos could draw aggro onto you.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:04
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CodfishCartographer posted:the problem I have with this right now is it adds another layer of upkeep, and I'm a bit worried I might have too much. When a player attacks, they'll roll their attack dice to see how much damage they deal. They then move the monster's health tracker, add damage tokens to the body part they attacked, and then grab aggro tokens. Does this sound like too much work for each attack? Surely there's a way to make one of those steps do two things at once? Perhaps a player's damage tokens are "stored" in a track on their player card. You remove damage tokens from e.g. right to left to take them off your card and move them to the monster when you deal damage. But as you remove damage tokens from your storage track you reveal increasing "aggro" numbers printed underneath them. So first damage token reveals "1" under it. Next is 2, then 4, then 6, then 9, etc. The highest revealed number is how pissed off the monster is at that player, and it attacks the player with the highest value. As long as the damage tokens are always used in the same way, it works. Something like the population, etc tracks in Eclipse. But you could add a few knobs to it, too. Something something allows you to refill your damage token storage track, therefore rendering your "aggro" to 0. Something something lets you add one damage token back to your card from the bank after dealing your damage, so your aggro is actually 1 level less than it would normally be, etc etc.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:12
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I like the idea of having one agro marker to move around, but I think the revealing different aggro levels by moving damage markers is probably a better fit. I dunno why something like that hadn't occurred to me. It would work, but runs into a problem when there's no more breakable parts left (or when players attack a part that is already broken). Right now the design uses damage tokens to mark how damaged an individual body part of a monster is. When it hits a certain threshold, the body part gets broken and the damage tokens are removed, then the broken part overlay for that part is placed on top of the monster board. Having them cover aggro levels could certainly work with this, as players could choose how those tokens get distributed to help remove aggro from weakened players, but then they aren't used for anything after that - since if players are attacking a body part that is already broken (or unbreakable) then they wouldn't place damage tokens onto it. The monster also has a separate track of its health, represented by a meter on the monster's status card that players move a marker along as they deal damage to the monster. The idea behind this is so that players can just damage the monster by attacking whatever they want or think is important at the time, as opposed to having to break everything overall. Maybe it could work that instead of moving a marker along a track, players place their damage markers onto the card to cover up stages of its health when they attack an already broken or unbreakable body part, and when all of the monster's health gets covered then it's dead. My only problem with this idea is that when a player has already given away all their damage tokens, what are they going to do? Unless there's an item players can use to refill some of their damage tokens...
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Feb 7, 2014 23:48
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True, the idea falls down if the tokens are used for more than one thing / in more than one way. But there might still be a way to optimize in a way that makes one mechanic fulfill two roles if you're otherwise happy with the way things play but just want to optimize and reduce overhead.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:51
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At first I kinda liked the idea of using an item to refill damage tokens (whetstones), but then that would lead that item to having two very different uses - one to be able to deal more damage, and one to reset aggro. I'm getting close to being able to an initial basic playtest the game's system, so I'll definitely try different things and see what sticks and what doesn't. Or, random idea while typing this out: player cards could have two different 'tracks' that damage counters can be placed over - one that covers aggro, and one that allows the tokens to be placed on their reverse side, which would give a bonus to attacking. So players could decide whether to reduce aggro when they get damage tokens returned, or they could deal more damage. Although that does provide a bit of a weird thing in that players generate more aggro by dealing less damage? gently caress, I dunno.
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Feb 8, 2014 00:12
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Strange question: When thinking of how your game concepts would be described, does anyone else hear said description in the voice of Quinns from Shut Up and Sit Down?
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Feb 8, 2014 11:10
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Okay whew glad I'm not the only one.
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Feb 8, 2014 17:20
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If you want to reduce upkeep, you could have damage that the players do be static. Static damage allows players to plan out how much aggro they receive, because in the current system it seems that doing random damage would give you random aggro.
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Feb 8, 2014 20:06
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Not entirely sure how I feel about purely static damage, as I like having it be a bit swingy at times. I'll of course try to balance the dice so it won't be super random or anything. I recently got an idea to replace the aggro system entirely by having each attack card from the monster list a priority of which player the monster will face before it attacks. Red player, then blue player, then green, etc. Each card would be unique, so one fire breath may face red, while another may face yellow. The plus side of this is it keeps monster behavior unpredictable without falling into an obvious pattern and simplifies upkeep and things players need to learn, but does get rid of some depth of aggro manipulation. I'm hoping to get some play testing done on my own tomorrow, and maybe then get some friends to help do a run through during the week. I'll let you guys know how things turn out.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:12
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What if once you get Aggro it becomes kind of sticky? So if you reveal 15 aggro in a turn you get the Aggro Dial and turn it up to 15. From that point on if a player reveals more aggro then is on the dial, it passes to them and they dial it up to the new number. If no one beats your Aggro Dial, and you deal less than the damage on it in a turn, it ticks down one. That way big damaging attacks grab the monster's attention, but over time it forgets how badly you hurt it so that other players can take the heat off of you.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:41
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So, after few test runs of the Battleplan system, I'm positively surprised at how nicely my slapdash testing scenario (made from a converted Combat Commander map) held up. Sure, there's a lot of tweaking in front of me, but I'm glad to see some of my core ideas working as expected (which cannot be said about a million lovely game prototypes I made in the past). The one thing that could use a major re-thinking in order to streamline is the AI. The way I made the draft (which proved to be necessary to test the whole thing) was by streamlining and modifying the system used in Fields of Fire. Basically, it's a table you follow from top to bottom and stop at the first applicable trigger (e.g. "is shot at and not in cover"), roll a die and reference the result in that row (from about five total, no big deal). The personal touches are each trigger having three colour-coded variations depending on global alert level (not important) and particular units using different sized dice for a wee bit more personality. It pretty much fits my purposes very well (including the ability to print variants for particular scenarios like it ain't no thing) and it won't be a tragedy if it stays unchanged, but it has one flaw: you have to roll a die for each enemy which generates a bit of downtime (especially if you want to be anal about randomising the order). It's not terrible and a lesser problem since it's solo design, but stil ehhh. I wonder if there's a nice way of speeding this up without sacrificing much of the good parts. I don't really have a good idea though. The only thing that came to my mind would be to add a second deck of cards (uuugh) with a sort of remodeled-to-fit version of table, grouping particular reactions to units with particular symbols printed on them (and you get to have a set randomised order). Perhaps with two concurrent symbol sets on units*, so that there's less of clone robot effect. Still, ehhh. It doesn't appear to me to be good enough to warrant counting the odds and printing, but I just want to get started thinking. * I feel I might have been unclear here. Like, imagine a counter having a red triangle and blue circle on it, while a second one has a red triangle and blue square. If 50% AI cards has red and 50% has blue symbols, these units will behave differently half of the time. Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 01:29
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What you could is put them into groups, and they respond in a group in response to said stimuli. Then you get to keep your semi-randomized AI, but not slowing everything to a crawl. Have you played any of the recent D&D board games? They have a really cool approach to AI that might be worth looking into.
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Feb 9, 2014 08:28
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eggburger fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2014 02:47
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Trip report on initial Monster Hunter playtest: two players died (don't worry, they aren't removed from the game) by the time the players had dealt 35 damage to the Rathalos. He has 425 health.  Guess my initial guesstimations of numbers was way off, and we decided to call the game when we figured there was no hope of winning without dragging it on for hours.I used the system for aggro-management I mentioned last, which is having attack cards list which player the monster will face, then each attack will hit a specific area. This was easy enough to understand and while it kept things unpredictable, they were TOO unpredictable. You didn't know where the monster would face OR attack, so it had the Arkham Horror effect of having a bit of control, but mostly it's just reacting to things happening to you. Players could mostly deal with it and stay alive, but if they got careless and wasted their stamina they'd get destroyed. Which I suppose is plenty appropriate for the source material, but still. I won't be tweaking the damage numbers around much yet, I like Misandu's suggestion about aggro being sticky. I'm about to try out another playtest with that aggro system in place and I'll see how it goes, hopefully it'll give the players enough control. Upkeep-wise it seemed just fine, players didn't have much of any issue with the amounts I have so far, so I don't think adding in that little bit more will hurt things too much. Also, Rathalos will be neutered down to 200 health, and I fear even that may last too long.
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Feb 10, 2014 03:36
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pine posted:SPIRIT ANIMALS! So there's two ways to add Spirit Stones to the game: -Challenge Square (100% chance) -Mystery Square (say 80% of the time someone gets a Spirit Stone) There's one way Spirit Stones would be returned to the "bank": -Snare Square (say 30% of the time someone gives up a Spirit Stone) Attack Squares simply end up transferring stones between players and don't change the total number in play. From the sounds of things you go around the outside track once before heading up the track to the Spirit Circle. So the number of spirit stones in the game by the time all players head to the centre circle is: (Number of Players) x [(Odds of landing on a Challenge in a zone) + (Odds of landing on a Mystery in a zone) x (0.8) - (Odds of landing on a Snare in a zone) x (0.3)] x (Average landings per zone) x (4 zones) So how many rolls on average do you think it should take for a player to get out of a zone? That can determine how many squares per zone. Since the average roll is 3.5, if you have 14 squares per zone, you would average landing on 4 squares per zone. That would give you 56 squares on the outer circle, an average of 16 landings per player, and a minimum of 9 (if someone rolled all sixes). Assuming 14 squares per zone, you should determine how many of those should be: blank, challenge, attack, mystery, and snare. Let's say 4 blank, 4 challenge, 3 attack, 2 mystery, 1 snare. Substituting back into the formula above to see how many spirit stones would be in this hypothetical game: (Number of Players) x [(4/14) + (2/14) x (0.8) - (1/14) x (0.3)] x 4 x 4 = (Number of Players) x [0.378] x 4 x 4 = (Number of Players) x 6 So on average you'd have 6 spirit stones in the game per player. What's a good number to set the win condition at? 10? Hopefully this gives you a good idea about how to go about the math. And hopefully I didn't have any glaring misunderstandings about how your game works. I will say, if you use these numbers I think the game will run way too long. You might want to add more blank squares and adjust the calculations accordingly.
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Feb 10, 2014 08:48
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LoanWolf posted:So there's two ways to add Spirit Stones to the game: LoanWolf's analysis looks pretty good to me. His last point does bring up an important question, though: how long is your target game length? Obviously, game length will increase with more players in the game (probably fairly linearly: an 8-player game will take about twice as long as a 4-player one), so keep that in mind. If you just have +1d6 movement each turn and no redirects or setbacks, the statistics fuzz out very quickly and you're left with simply having to assume that if X% of the tiles are a certain type, that type will be hit on X% of the time (and that it will take spaces/3.5 turns to go around the track). So come up with an estimate of how long each activity will take (say Challenge has a 2 minute time limit, so you estimate that a turn involving a Challenge will take 150 seconds from start to finish, including overhead). Take this turn time and multiply it by 8/7 (4 players * totalspaces/3.5 * spaces/totalspaces), or ~1.14. Summing all these for each space type (including blanks) will be the estimated length of the game (up to about double that amount for an 8 player game). Use this formula, along with your gut intentions about how often you want various activities to happen, to get a feel for what kind of distribution you want (or, if you're not comfortable with that kind of juggling, come up with those estimates and a target value and come back and ask us to pitch distribution options at you). That's the simple answer. Of course, this only estimates the "pregame" (up until everyone is in the Spirit Circle squabbling over stones). Because players can/will steal stones from one another, it is impossible to rigidly control how long it will take for someone to win, unless you guarantee somehow that by the time every player is on the inside track, at least one of them is guaranteed to be able to conquer the tree on any given turn (the game can still draw on due to other players attacking and stealing from the current lead, but at least in that case the game becomes sudden death and thus, if it stretches out, is hopefully at least tense and interesting). You could guarantee this by either making sure at least players*(goal-1)+1 stones are in play by endgame, or by simply changing the win rule to be "have the most stones / more than any player." Of course, the latter choice reduces some of the "race" feel (which is admittedly entirely luck except for Snare tile choices), since only one player in the game can be currently trying to win. So to guarantee there is a minimum of X stones in play by endgame, consider your "guaranteed add" squares: Challenge squares. You could also introduce freebie "gain one stone" squares. You could modify the Mystery Square where, even if nobody guesses correctly, the active player chooses who had the closest answer and awards them (but not themselves) a stone. You could add a kitty: when no players win a Mystery, a stone is added to a kitty that sweetens the next claimed award. Perhaps Snare payments go into this kitty. The next winner of a Challenge wins 1 stone, plus the kitty. Then all you need to do is guarantee a Challenge before the end of the game: easily done either with stop tiles (below) or by simply making all the footpaths Challenge squares and at least 6 spaces long. Note that with a kitty, you also add the possibility of introducing a "take the kitty" square; like the freebie space, this adds randomness/removes skill from the game, if that's something you're comfortable with. As long as such squares are placed at least ten spaces from players' starting points and, in the case of the kitty win, occur an equal number of times in each zone, there is no noticeably skewed game balance shift. Next, you need to either modify the Snare penalty to not result in a net loss of stones, or calculate pessimistically (assume every Snare is hit upon, and paid, by every player). The former is done by keeping the escape payment in play: directing it to another player (of your choice, possibly introducing politics and arguing, or to whoever has the least stones of the other players -- or the most) or to the kitty. To guarantee that players land on certain squares and add stones to the game, you could have 6 square long stretches that consist entirely of "guaranteed add" squares: Challenge squares under your current ruleset, freebie squares, Mystery squares under the kitty system, or maybe tiles that simply add a stone to the kitty. Obviously, having more types of these squares would result in more varied and interesting stretches. If you don't want such stretches for whatever reason, you could add "stop tiles" somewhere in each zone (such as the end, or the last space before the footpath) that force you to land on it even if your roll would send you past it (they had these in the Game of Life, I don't remember what were called there). The stop tile would be something guaranteed to add a stone to the game. Similarly, you could guarantee a hit as in Monopoly's Go: when you pass over it, you perform its action, in addition to whatever you land on. These would help you guarantee at least players*zones stones in play. Both methods also let you guarantee that certain actions happen at least once per player per game, and the stop method also gives you a teeny bit more control over the probabilities of landing on certain squares within a zone. Finally, and this has little to nothing to do with math and you probably already know this, but you are going to have to come up with a *lot* of cards for this, lest people learn the cards (particularly the trivia - especially for you, the creator of the game; don't you want to play, yourself?). You may have this well in hand, I don't know, but I would be super intimidated by that if I were in your shoes; I would probably just replace the trivia activity with a modified two- or one- contestant version of Mystery or Challenge, or substitute in some third party source like a deck from Trivial Pursuit or something. But for the Mystery squares (and you could add variety by using a Pictionary or Charades methods in addition to the Taboo/Articulate one) you might want to consider having Mad Libs style subjects: (some) cards would be in the style of "A <creature> <verbing> a <thing>" or "The result of <creature> and <creature> breeding" or just "A broken <thing>" and supplemented by appropriate decks - or even by having each player, before the game starts, writing down candidates for each category, recreating the deck anew each game (or adding to it, if you retain cards from earlier plays). It would give the player whose card was drawn a slight advantage if they realized it, but that could be part of the fun. You could use a similar method for the Challenge cards ("Name as many foods as you can think of that begin with the first letter of <thing>" or "How many explanations can you think of for a <creature> <verbing>?") Holy poo poo, that ended up being a long post. I think I need to sleep, and I hope I wasn't too long-winded.
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Feb 10, 2014 15:36
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So, as an exercise in streamlining I made this mock-up of an AI card: So, there'd be two sets of four symbols, each set featured on one half of the AI deck and with each opposing unit having one symbol from each set. The way the card would be resolved would be similar to the chart & die option: you go from top to bottom and then left to right. When you hit the appropriate symbol, you get the action to perform (sadly, indicated only by a single letter due to real estate issues). The first icon column indicates the case of trigger recipient not being in cover, while the grey column indicates being in cover , effectively cutting the number of combat-related triggers by half. Unit group symbols are color-coded, being applicable only in particular global Alert Level. The last row lists the most typical outcome of an action, applicable for all triggered units whose symbol wasn't featured in the needed row - which should save me enough real estate to make this stuff possible. I'll probably do a 2x6 cards set to pretty much convert my draft table to this little experiment. A few things that came to my mind: - Since it's pretty easy to see which trigger is applicable to each unit at glance, the most  way to resolve it will be to just go through each trigger rather than follow particular symbols. While it's easy to randomize order of symbols on each card for random order, since I'll print multiple instances of the same table, I wonder if it'd be possible to change the order of triggers themselves every now and then and still make sense.- While it's certainly tempting to tweak the probablities a bit to give each symbol a bit of its own "personality" it probably can't go too far, such as including qualitative differences, since the symbols can't really correlate with particular groups for fear of silly (and gamey) robot clone army look. - Since I really won't need an entire deck for these, and I really can't cut space from my Orders Deck, there could be some fun in doing distinct AI "sets", from which the particular Scenario AIs get shuffled together. Or have each containg-symbol-set half mean something different, like Unprepared + Defensive. - The phrase "player unit" is really slightly too long to fit comfortably. - I need to find a way to clearly state that the "in cover" row doesn't refer to the unit whose reaction you're checking, but the one asked about in trigger (so it refers to AI mooks that are under fire, but player units that are spotted). [edit] I brainfarted while drawing this, defeating some of the point. The first icon column should be greyed out and mean "applicable only if in cover" while the next one should be applicable regardless of cover, as long as that symbol wasn't already triggered in that row. Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 01:34
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