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Anniversary posted:If I'm reading this right the only difference between the two players puzzle is their secret card? That asymmetry seems fascinating, but I can't help but worry it could make the variance between players capabilities insurmountable on a round by round basis. Is there a way you're balancing around that? It's a really tricky balance. The fun of the game is supposed to be the element of trying to figure out the puzzle better under time pressure, with the gambling aspect being used as a much more interesting way to display that mastery. Hidden information of some kind is pretty crucial so that two players who are really good at the puzzle aspect still have something to chew on. Ideally, we'd want the "better player" to always win, but if both players can see the optimal solution on the board, then we essentially need to change the game into poker where one hand really is strictly better than the other and it's about the bluffing. The problem is that pokers balance point is about usually folding, and poker tends to not really have a winner or loser. So we don't want pokers structure of being about "money", and we want folding to be reasonably rare. But it's hard to think of a discrete gamey structure that will work. Just summing points? Boring. But going deckbuilder would be even worse. Imagine playing poker, but the winner of a hand just gets better cards for their other hands. Eventually you hit this really dull lame duck end where the other person just always has better cards. So basically, we have a really fun round structure that looks a lot like Mage Knight and Poker. But we'd like to string those rounds together into something that doesn't look like Mage Knight or Poker. That's the tough bit! I guess I could just go the Pandante route, but that doesn't seem that good with two players any dang way. hito fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Sep 26, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 04:55
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Mister Sinewave posted:I ran into something semi-unexpected while working on my custom token-based combat planning system for Mage Knight. These look incredible! Indolent Bastard posted:This post has given me quite a bit to consider. I will have to hash out what is going to work better for my game and its engine and its win condition. Have you considered some other resources to go along with money? Reputation is the first/most obvious one that comes to mind, then Contacts. Then you could structure them something like: Money - Used to upgrade/maintain your ship, and occasionally as bribes on Missions. Contacts - People who can help you out in various ways. Might provide ship upgrades, help with missions, or build your Reputation. Reputation - What the world at large knows about you. Having a high Reputation will mean that you will be expected to perform less rewarding missions or take 'Black Marks' which impact your score negatively at the end of the game. Having a low Reputation will keep you from taking on certain missions, so manage it carefully. The idea is that ships would cost Money to maintain based on how powerful they are, keeping you from victory spiraling too hard off of a few key upgrades. Reputation being high would mean that you're forced into taking sub-optimal jobs to keep it in good standing. Contacts would be the most helpful during the game, but wouldn't count towards score at the end. They would do things like give discounts on upgrades or maintenance, help you pass missions, etc. Then for winning you look at Reputation and Money. Money is worth Y/X, while Rep is maybe Y/2X. You could also go a more Dominion route as mentioned previously and go by Reputation and Assets, and let the players invest Money into hard Assets that are worthless during the game but help score at the end, either as a flat bonus or based on your other stuff? Maybe a Hydroponics Bay is worth 10 Score, an Asteroid Casino is worth 2/Reputation, and Mining Rights are worth 2/Ship Fire Power?
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Sep 28, 2015 16:29
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Misandu posted:These look incredible! Thanks! I am pretty happy with them, especially the white highlight. 
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Sep 28, 2015 23:34
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Misandu posted:These look incredible! I had considered adding reputation to the game as the path to victory. But hearing someone else say it helps bolster my confidence in it as a viable concept. Thanks.
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Sep 29, 2015 00:28
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I've been thinking on the viability of reversing some standard deck-building mechanics. There is still a deck that starts simple and is added to and refined into an engine, but instead of each player having their own deck to build, the game is coop and the built deck is shared. Instead of public stacks of available cards, players draw from a central buy deck and may only add cards to the shared deck from their hand. On their turn, a player reveals cards from the shared deck (as opposed to drawing a fresh hand of cards) and utilizes the resources revealed to buy new cards (from their hand) and contribute to a shared objective. The revealed cards are discarded and the next player starts their turn, reshuffling the discard pile if necessary. Many cards have a penalty which is only activated if multiple cards with the same penalty are revealed on the same turn. Does this seem like a mechanic worth pursuing? Is there some fundamental flaw I'm not considering? Or has this space been explored in another game I can examine?
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Oct 16, 2015 15:52
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Well the first thing that comes to mind is that maybe you play as Doctors treating a patient? The deck starts with a bunch of Penalty Cards that represent Illness, Injury, or Infection, and the buy deck is full of treatments and techniques to offset and eventually remove the Penalty Cards from the central deck? The Patients Vitals start at say 100% and Penalty Cards lower it a bit, or by a lot if several of them show up at once. Treatments could be cards that offset Penalty Cards, say by increasing Vitals directly by a small amount, or directly addressing them, Antibiotics removing certain types of Illness. You could even have bad interactions between treatments if they show up in the same reveal. Did you have a theme in mind?
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Oct 16, 2015 16:05
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The theme I have in mind is film production. The players are all Producers and the buy deck consists of Cast and Crew which, when hired, are added to the shared Production deck. The objectives are Scenes that need to be shot and edited using technical or creative resources that the Cast and Crew provide. The penalties could represent anything that might derail and delay the production, wasting time and money, like strong personalities that clash, injuries, rookie PA's that knock things over, or even bad weather. More famous actors have more or multiple penalties. Experienced Crew can mitigate penalties (with a Veteran Stunt Coordinator you disregard an injury penalty). Some Crew have special abilities (Second Unit Director allows you to work on two Scene objectives at once) Your Patient Vitals idea makes me think of some sort of timeline with Opening Weekend at the end, and if you fall too far behind schedule either the studio pulls the plug and you'll never work in this town again, or you have to spend so much extra money to make up for lost time that there's no way the movie can be successful. You fall behind as a result of penalties or by assigning inexperienced Crew to Scenes and they take forever or because your Star refuses to come out of their trailer until you get "their" make-up guy. You get ahead by hiring more experienced Crew or just cutting Scenes from the shooting schedule. Maybe that contributes to some sort of meter that measures how frustrated the Director is with you messing with his vision, and if the meter fills all the way, he stomps off in a huff and what do you do then? Seems like there's a lot of creative space but not sure if the core mechanic will support it.
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Oct 16, 2015 16:43
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So I got inspired and decided to brainstorm up a solo game and, well, I came up with something. I'd describe it as Dark Souls meets Mage Knight and, for a first play test, it was surprisingly functional. Though I did forget to put in a way to heal, which is something I think I will need to address, maybe. Also I'll need to play with the duration, which will likely need to be elongated if I put in the aforementioned way to heal. I've never played a solo board game before, but I think the gameplay here was pretty engaging and record keeping is minimal and I have a functional, if basic, enemy AI in place. Actually, a lot of the game design is based around "outsmarting" the enemy AI, as you have a reasonable degree of control over its actions and can exploit them in order to gain a significant advantage because the tactics of a particular enemy AI are deterministic, as you take actions they accumulate energy and then take the highest priority action they can afford to retaliate. While you start with a fixed deck (which will hopefully, eventually be customizable via a level up system) and use the actions drawn to attack the enemy (you also have a selection of Basic Actions that you can turn any non-Wound card into). The first Boss I designed started as a joke and became a proof of concept design that tests a players forward planning. He's named Jack the Black and while he has relatively low health for a boss, if you deal more than 21 damage to him, he heals back to full health. It seems I'm at the point where I need to flesh out ideas into numbers and iterate into a more nuanced game but that's always one of the hardest parts of a design for me.
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Oct 25, 2015 06:58
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Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks is usually a good idea for making bosses. That, and finding fun rule exploits and either punishing or encouraging them with the boss design.
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Oct 25, 2015 08:59
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I've been kicking around a basic idea for a few days of a post-nuclear apocalyptic co-op gamewhere the goal is to rebuild your town, with worker placement mechanics. In addition to basic loss conditions like having no food/water, etc, the players can lose if a percentage (more than half?) of the group's workers becomes mutated, with a chance of mutation when workers take actions outside the town walls (ie scavenging for resources). Mutated workers would suffer some sort of penalty (ie can't take certain actions), and players can vote to banish/execute mutated workers to avoid reaching the loss threshold. What I'm looking for before I try to flesh out mechanics is some incentive for players to try to keep their mutated workers hidden for their own personal gain, making the game semi-co-op without there being a dedicated "traitor" player. The best I've come up with is "a player with X amount of workers who are all mutated wins the game by hostile takeover" but that idea has a lot of problems. Is there any way to do something like this without running into Dead of Winter style hidden objective bullshit?
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Oct 26, 2015 01:41
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Big Ol Marsh Pussy posted:I've been kicking around a basic idea for a few days of a post-nuclear apocalyptic co-op gamewhere the goal is to rebuild your town, with worker placement mechanics. In addition to basic loss conditions like having no food/water, etc, the players can lose if a percentage (more than half?) of the group's workers becomes mutated, with a chance of mutation when workers take actions outside the town walls (ie scavenging for resources). Mutated workers would suffer some sort of penalty (ie can't take certain actions), and players can vote to banish/execute mutated workers to avoid reaching the loss threshold. I think your idea has a lot of promise and just needs to be explored a bit more. Perhaps have it so that when a character would risk becoming mutated their dealt a Mutation?! card in secret, some are blank, some are secret mutations, while some are public. Have the public mutations provide benefits, like better scavenging, less resource consumption, etc, to make exiling them not an obvious solution, and then have it be once a player has a certain number of workers become mutated they can try to go for a solo win (as a traitor, like you outlined above). Though I think that's a little different from what you outlined, it's just one way I think you could take that really neat idea. Poison Mushroom posted:Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks is usually a good idea for making bosses. That, and finding fun rule exploits and either punishing or encouraging them with the boss design. Yeah I'm definitely in that try and break the system as hard as possible mode to find exploits that can be incentivized or patched out. Right now the biggest issue is that it seems it might be too easy not to die, which is something that I'm toying with.
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Oct 26, 2015 02:44
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I definitely like the idea of mutations having a chance of positive effects. That way you're tempted to hold on to a worker that's scoring lots of points for you - even if too many of them will ruin the game for everyone. I've been working on a card game, and I'm starting to prototype some cards. My apologies if someone has posted a link to this, but I found a pretty great website that seems to be intended for video games, but has clear copyright indications and a bunch of neat stuff: http://opengameart.org/
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Oct 27, 2015 21:57
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Perhaps random minor mutations that give the player a small bonus to actions outside of the town walls, with less chance of further mutations? Then have some mutations be: draw a (hidden) drastic mutation card. These could let you score big at the most opportune time, at the detriment of the other players. Then maybe you need to self-exile a worker because he's too grotesque to fit in. If there's too many mutated workers, have them exiled starting with the player who has the most, so there's a genuine risk to fishing for mutations. If you let it be possible to win by having the most mutants, people will race to send all their workers outside. Bonus difficulty: exiled mutants could become enemies that need to be dealt with.
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Oct 28, 2015 15:28
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Because of a combination of Frozen Cortex, BattleCON, and my love of reinventing the wheel, I've been thinking about a simultaneous action game about not-Rugby. The way I've imagined it so far is a (say) 7x10 board. Each "coach" has three players, and a prebuilt playbook with seven Offense actions and seven Defense actions. Each play, both coaches set face down one card for each player that has an action card with some predetermined movement/actions on them. (For offense, they'd be things like Break Left, Sprint, Long Pass, etc. Defense would get things like Intercept, Block Right, Sack, etc.) The cards are performed one at a time, with order based on a Priority number on the card. Players on Defense get tackle and intercept zones based on their actions. Once a play is complete (either because all cards have been played or the carrier's been sacked), two of your used cards are chosen to be set aside face-up and can't be used next play. This gives each coach five cards to choose from between three players. First team to three points (or the team with the most points at the end of Play 15) wins. I chose three players and 5/7 cards because that feels like the right amount to give a decent amount of options without overloading a new player with too much AP or making play too unpredictable and random.
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Oct 28, 2015 22:07
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Big Ol Marsh Pussy posted:What I'm looking for before I try to flesh out mechanics is some incentive for players to try to keep their mutated workers hidden for their own personal gain, making the game semi-co-op without there being a dedicated "traitor" player. The best I've come up with is "a player with X amount of workers who are all mutated wins the game by hostile takeover" but that idea has a lot of problems. Is there any way to do something like this without running into Dead of Winter style hidden objective bullshit? This way, players are incentivized to have some mutated workers and use them for bonuses, but everyone is going to feel constrained when other players use mutated workers. You can keep the inside the colony/outside the colony distinctions between actions with risks and rewards being tuned so that using a mutated worker inside the colony is much more likely to trigger the negative effects than having them work outside. And, of course, unmutated workers outside the colony are more likely to be mutated. Maybe have enough workers so that players can still have some choice about whether or not to use mutated workers at all in the first few turns when their workers start getting mutated. Then you could have any resource-based victory conditions you want, as long as it's pretty much guaranteed a player will have to use SOME mutated workers at some point to win. This kind of loses the political uncertainty of who might be working against the best interest of the collected survivors to win, so maybe you could just use basic hidden objective cards, where each one is a unique victory condition based on a different survivor mindset or resource or something. So everyone will be vying for slightly different things more than others throughout the game, but no one will be sure exactly what someone needs to win, forcing players to try and block each other strategically. One of those hidden objective cards could be something like "You win if you have X+ mutated workers, or Y+ mutated workers per player."
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Oct 28, 2015 23:04
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So I have a question about where you would rather have luck in a game; would you rather have players action selection be somewhat random (like Mage Knight), enemy/NPC actions be somewhat random (like Kingdom Death), both, or neither? I started off with players actions being random but that led to too many unwinable game states (that said I think this, or both, is the right answer, I just need to refine it to have more meaningful choices). Then I tried neither being random and that turned it into a solvable math problem. I think the right call here is to have both be random, with ways for players to manipulate both. How exactly is somewhat up in the air, but if anyone has any suggestions here I'd love to hear them. This sounds fascinating, but also super complex. Can't wait to hear more.
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Nov 3, 2015 05:07
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Anniversary posted:So I have a question about where you would rather have luck in a game; would you rather have players action selection be somewhat random (like Mage Knight), enemy/NPC actions be somewhat random (like Kingdom Death), both, or neither? The important thing is, as usual, making sure your players have interesting and, at least somewhat, strategic choices to make. Too much randomness sucks away the significant of player choices and can undermine this, so I always try to balance randomness by having interesting ways to use what would be the worst random results, or by having different approaches and strategies to mitigating the randomness. You can look at more Euro-type games that have randomness to see different ways to do this: Bora Bora (rolled dice are workers to place, with high #s being better, but low #s block out higher #s from taking a worker space), Village (set action cube #s, but random distribution, then distribution is visible to players and they can choose which spaces to use when based on this), Agricola (randomized starting player powers, and small amount of set randomization with new actions becoming available somewhere within the same 2-3 specific turns), etc. I try to approach hidden vs. known information somewhat thematically, thinking "what would this player's character actually know about this enemy upon first encountering them, and what would they find out only after engaging them?" (But balance should take precedence over theme most of the time, in my opinion.) So one idea I just came up with could be that your enemies and your enemy AIs could be separate, and the enemy AIs could be on different cards that fall into categories of type. Like, say there are 5 Berserk AI cards, and 5 Guard AI cards, and 5 Prowler AI cards, etc. with their AI type printed on the back. Each card is unique, with unique AI plotting to run through, but they are based on their AI type, so you can make some assumptions about how a "Guard" might act as opposed to a "Berserker." These cards can be all shuffled together and placed into a facedown AI deck. If you don't want the player to be able to know what type of enemy AI is coming up next, you can have a blank dummy card on top of the deck, or draw cards from the bottom of the deck instead of the top. Then, when a new enemy appears, draw the first AI card and apply it to them. The player would probably be able to tell how an enemy is behaving before engaging, so it would make sense that they can identify "this enemy is guarding, this one is berserk, etc." You also get the added bonuses of having a lot more varied encounters, as each enemy acts differently and has to be fought differently when they have a different AI card. Enemy AI is really hard to do right, of course, but I think the best approaches have both some hidden information and a little randomness involved. But whatever the systems of your game are, you need some ways to gain an edge over the randomness as player powers and/or rewards (draw an extra card, or draw 3 cards and choose 1, or peek at an enemy's action plan or the next card in the AI deck, etc.)
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Nov 3, 2015 18:06
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When a company like FFG makes a new wave of ships, how do they determine that the cards and ships are balanced against the previous waves of releases? Is it just massive amounts of play testing or can they determine how a ship will react to the existing ships in the game? The reason I ask is I am trying to determine what is in my Space Smugglers hazards deck and what ship upgrades and in what combination can overcome these hazards and I don't envy the idea of endlessly play testing the game to see the interactions or to figure out what the distribution of particular hazard cards should be. Are there any useful shortcuts in this part of the process, or just lots of "seeing what is broken" via play testing?
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Nov 3, 2015 18:42
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Indolent Bastard posted:When a company like FFG makes a new wave of ships, how do they determine that the cards and ships are balanced against the previous waves of releases? Is it just massive amounts of play testing or can they determine how a ship will react to the existing ships in the game?
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Nov 3, 2015 18:45
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I also would wager that they have some formulas to get into the ballpark of balance. Some math can really help smooth out some initial balancing - figure out what metrics are important in your game, what resources are used to alter those metrics, and then figure out a steady ratio between those metrics and resources. Obviously you don’t want to rely on this 100%, as there will (and should) be different effects that you can’t account for with math / statistics depending on the game. But getting some quick numbers can help ensure things start roughly on equal footing, then you can fine tune with playtesting.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:59
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This is a lot to chew on and a really, really good idea for how to approach it. I'll definitely be mulling over this. I'm really digging your AI suggestion. Though I'm not sure if its the direction I'm going to go. That said I do really like it and I'm very tempted to mock up something inspired by it and at least give it a little testing before deciding. Indolent Bastard posted:When a company like FFG makes a new wave of ships, how do they determine that the cards and ships are balanced against the previous waves of releases? Is it just massive amounts of play testing or can they determine how a ship will react to the existing ships in the game? You could probably do some statistical modeling, depending on how many variables you might be able to eyeball it to a degree, but if its too complex playtesting is probably the best call. (Play testing is always the best call.)
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Nov 3, 2015 19:04
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quote:Are there any useful shortcuts in this part of the process, or just lots of "seeing what is broken" via play testing? For some scenarios, computer testing can help a lot (if you are/have-access-to a competent programmer). Co-ops and 2 player games are obviously the easiest here; often it's pretty quick to make an optimal agent for these types of games (especially if there's limits on hidden information/simultaneous action). Barring that, often you can make a simple greedy player that will give you a pretty good baseline. There is limits to this, though. Often an optimal player will not behave at all like a real player, so you may have to juice up "advanced" strategies to make them feel balanced (to human players) with their easier counterparts. (You can't go too far with that either, of course; if your game is successful then players will eventually start playing it right and exploiting the OP plans. You see this in games like Magic (Black Lotus), or even Agricola (Taster, Lover), where cards that were balanced or neglected in casual testing ended up being far too strong later in advanced play. But that's a better problem to have than having only a small section of your game get explored because there's no payoff for trying advanced strategies).
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Nov 3, 2015 19:14
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I've been working on my game again (see previous posts if you're interested) and I've run into a lot of these issues. So far my unit costs are based entirely on intuition because I haven't invented any useful way to model it. What I did make is a simple formula for missiles - it models a full missile spam against a template 'typical' fleet. This gives me an upper bound for missile power because it must be adjusted so that missile spam plain can't win because it's unfun and destroys strategy. I also have a spreadsheet for modeling weapons vs armor. This lets me easily visualize (numbers there don't necessarily reflect current ones) which weapons can inflict damage on what level of armor at a given range, which helps me in deciding just how valuable a weapon or amount of armor is. I ended up overhauling a lot of systems. I removed hp, but kept critical hits and status effects - all hits are now critical. You no longer need to do any math, just compare damage and armor to see if you inflict a crit. Ships can take a given number of crits before they keel over. To-hit rolls provide a random element but whether you can do damage is entirely dependent on weapon and damage. Missiles will always hit and always do damage. Bigger volleys are just harder to eliminate. I still have this nagging doubt in the back of my head - what if some strategy I haven't seen yet breaks the game, what if it can't be fixed, what if, in the end, there is no depth and it's irrevocably a bad game? I feel like I can't know this for sure until there's been a lot of playtesting. Maybe the best indicator of its viability is that I lose about 80% of the time to the guy I've been playtesting with, so it can't all be luck.
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Nov 3, 2015 20:55
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Elukka posted:I still have this nagging doubt in the back of my head - what if some strategy I haven't seen yet breaks the game, what if it can't be fixed, what if, in the end, there is no depth and it's irrevocably a bad game? I feel like I can't know this for sure until there's been a lot of playtesting. Maybe the best indicator of its viability is that I lose about 80% of the time to the guy I've been playtesting with, so it can't all be luck. Basically yeah, that does mostly sound like stuff that just requires more playtesting to nail down. Try playtesting with as many different people as possible, to get as good a grasp as you can on the different strategies and what kind of people enjoy /dislike your game, and what you can maybe do to alter the game accordingly.
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Nov 3, 2015 23:28
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Poison Mushroom posted:Because of a combination of Frozen Cortex, BattleCON, and my love of reinventing the wheel, I've been thinking about a simultaneous action game about not-Rugby. This makes me think of WoW Arena for some reason.
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Nov 4, 2015 01:50
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CodfishCartographer posted:Behemoth Got any fresh links to the Print 'n' Play version of this? I've been playing a couple of semi-cooperative boardgames recently and hankering for more. I remembered reading about this one a while back and still have a copy of the rule set, but I think the links to the cards themselves have expired. I'd be interested in giving it a try next time folks are over.
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Dec 16, 2015 20:59
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Hammer Bro. posted:Got any fresh links to the Print 'n' Play version of this? Not at the exact moment, but sometime tomorrow evening I'll be able to re-upload them for ya. I've done some touching up and rebalancing since the last version anyways, just been super busy with design stuff at work and haven't had a chance to finish it, since that's been taking most of my creative juices.
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Dec 17, 2015 08:04
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I lost all my project files when I had to reformat my PC. Years of "I'll finish this someday" all down the drain. Guess that means it's time for some new ideas!
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Dec 17, 2015 09:44
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Crosspost from the other game design thread: So I'm thinking of abandoning this whole "high but not too high" thing and instead maybe doing a rock-paper-scissors type things with actions, specifically four actions of roll (backwards), lure, attack and strong (attack). So, Attacking beats Strong (because it's quicker), Strong beats lure (breaks defense, hesitates a "beat"), and lure beats attack. Rolling just rolls back, and so attacks always miss. So, as a table of choices it looks like this: pre:Unit A vUnit B Lure Attack Strong Lure Nothing <Hits ^Hits Attack ^Hits ^Hits? <Hits Strong <Hits ^Hits Both? Also, I want shields and off-hand weapons to do things, but I'm not sure how they work.
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Dec 17, 2015 10:57
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Hammer Bro. posted:Got any fresh links to the Print 'n' Play version of this?  Here we go, Behemoth V. 2.2!Here is the most recent and up-to-date rulebook. I've updated the rules and the card clarifications at the bottom, to hopefully catch any questions before they come up! If you have any questions on card behavior or weird card interactions, please let me know. Here is the full changelog (all changes are bolded) - there's been a shitload of rebalancing, the game is in a MUCH better state than any previous iteration. Standard and Spear has been reworked heavily, Sword and Shield and Lance have both been nerfed. The bad news is I've removed Greatsword, as I was having a really hard time keeping it fun with 3+ players (it just took WAY too long for turns to come up). The good news is I've replaced it with a shiny new weapon: Bowgun! Bowgun has received less testing than the other weapons, so it may be a bit unbalanced. It's intended to be a more complicated and difficult weapon to play though. Great Sword isn't dead for good though, I'm just planning to rework it and make it more interesting to play and more interactive overall. The only major rule changes is that attacks only add 1 damage counter, regardless of the damage dealt (previously an attack would add the same number of damage it dealt). I noticed that players would just let damage counters rack up a shitton, then whoever happened to grab them basically won the game - so I'm trying to make that less of an immediate game ending scenario.
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Dec 18, 2015 09:55
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Time to get mighty acquainted with my old friend, Scissors. I'll report back once I've had a chance to play it, although lately leisure activities have proceeded on a geologic time scale. Then one of these days maybe I'll get back to my own design aspirations. Edit: After printing up and cutting out the cards, it was not obvious which cards belonged to which weapon deck. I wrote some letters on 'em (with corresponding letters on item cards), but you may wish to include an icon or text on the cards somewhere. Or even different backings in the final version, if they're not designed to intermingle. Hammer Bro. fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 18, 2015 18:18
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I typed up the latest version of the Feint Wars rules. I'm going with a sort of hybrid of the number system (now 1-6) and rock-paper-scissors where if you beat the type you get a +6 bonus, so that basically means you're going to win, but factors of bonuses from being a unique/hero unit, or buffs might mean you win. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but there's no real way to test this myself to find out. I think I got everything down, but if something looks like it's missing, let me know. I think for now I want to focus test plays on single unit "duels" just to get a feel for the combat. If anyone is interested, please contact me.
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Dec 19, 2015 00:41
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Behemoth trip report! I got together with two friends and one sister (we didn't even know he had a sister) for a bit of impromptu Behemoth. I'd read the rules once a few days prior, but for the most part it was reading aloud as we went along. The first issue we ran into: what do Power Counters do? Especially as the Bowgun user, I was uncertain if they were purely mechanics-oriented or if they served some additional purpose. We didn't find any mention of them in the rules but eventually decided (primarily due to Sharpening Stone) that they must by default increase the power of the attack by however many counters are placed on it. The guy with the Sword and Shield used the special ability, so he had no cards at the end of his turn. The Behemoth missed two wing attacks (wrong side), then hit this guy with one. But since it was before any attacks had gone off, he had no cards in hand and also no reward points. We couldn't quite figure out what to do in that situation -- it seemed like our options were Nothing At All or Eliminate Him. Naturally, having just started the game, we chose the former. But the rules weren't explicit on that front. Also it took us a moment to figure out how Sword and Shield worked. He readied Quick Stab, so as it says on that card he was allowed to discard a card to ready one item card. Using the Sword and Shield ability, he got to ready two item cards instead (at the cost of discarding his hand at the end of the turn). So he ended the turn with nothing in hand, but a Quick Stab, a Flash Bomb, and a Potion readied. We were eventually comfortable that that was how things should play out, but again, it took us a minute to figure out that that's how things (hopefully) should have happened. I should mention that we didn't read any of the cards in advance. The Bowgun was a little odd, but I think I got the feel for it, and I like what it was theoretically intended for. It seemed like my attacks would stay out, and I'd pick one, but if it didn't have any Power Counters on it when I picked it, then it would be removed forever. The first thing that came under question was when the removed Power Counter took effect. I first readied Explosive Shot, which came in with one Power Counter. Next turn, was I supposed to remove the Power Counter before doing my damage (effectively 3), or do 4 damage then remove the counter? We ended up going the less-damage route, but not due to any confident insight. Also, Explosive Shot's text says that "You may remove an Item Card in your hand from the game to place 1 Power Counter on this card." It wasn't clear to me when I was supposed to use that ability, or how often I could use it. Since other cards restricted themselves to certain phases or had other limitations, I assumed it could be done whenever and as many times per turn as I wanted. I quickly started dumping items so I could max out Shrapnel Blast. Pitfall Trap seemed overpowered. When the game ended, the Behemoth had 9 attacks readied; we took it from Yellow to dead before it had a chance to act. Sword and Shield seemed the strongest. Every turn you could do something, double-up on the effect, then dump your hand so you'd get a fresh hand next turn. I know the theory is that it leaves you vulnerable to damage, but we wrecked the Behemoth far too quickly. I think the furthest person along the turn track was at the top-right corner; just over halfway through. Lance and Greatshield guy felt a little disappointed with his deck. I (Bowgun) and Sword and Shield guy were going through our hands rather quickly (Sword and Shield because of the ability, me because I dumped all my items to Explosive Shot), whereas he didn't have a good way of drawing multiple cards. His abilities were based on blocking, but on two out of the three or so attacks the Behemoth got to make, it went for the wrong wing. Not only that but his only defensive cards were also his attack cards, so he quickly had a hand full of items and no defenses / attacks to charge up. Maybe the card-drawing items could have helped him out some but it still wouldn't've had the turnaround that the other two of us had (thanks to drawing up to 6 each turn) and the game was too short (turn-wise) for that to really matter. Standard and Spear girl was generally confused, but that might not be an aspect of the game so much as the crowd and her history with table gaming (I don't know what it is). The point spread was surprisingly close: 10 / 11 / 12 / 13. Thematically I liked that the cards telegraph some amount of what is going to happen, and I haven't looked at all of them (or really most of them, given how few attacks the Behemoth got off), but I imagine that will lose its fun factor quickly as one simply memorizes what the distributions are. I definitely liked the surprise urgency created by enraged cards. That's a keen mechanic that scales nicely; when we hit the Behemoth for 9 (Sword and Shield guy. I forget how the turn worked but he discarded a card which added a Power Counter to an effect which added two Power Counters, which he then doubled using the Sword and Shield ability. And I think something else had gotten another counter or two on it), the Behemoth got good and ready to hit back hard. It just never got the chance. It was engaging while we played it, though half our energies went toward figuring out how things were supposed to work, and only a portion of that can be blamed by my lack of preparedness and their unfamiliarity. But it felt way too easy. I don't think we were misusing the rules and I don't feel like we got terribly lucky, either. I don't have a feel for how well the game would hold up to repeated plays. The card pool is certainly limited, but it's designed to be a quick game (I imagine, which I also think is a good thing). I think it would've been more exciting had the Behemoth gotten more hits off and damaged people -- we were perfectly willing to sacrifice Reward Points instead of cards-in-hand just to delay the Behemoth's death so we could damage a few more body parts, but we didn't get the opportunity. Returning sacrificed Reward Points to the Behemoth's action pile is cool in theory, but it never happened in practice. If it had, I would've been unclear if it was in-spirit to look at the specific attack pattern of the card before returning it to the pile, but the one card we put back (from a Flash Bomb) was picked solely based on a convenient delay number. I imagine the game would be more difficult with fewer players (we'll possibly try it again with three although I don't know how long into the future it'll be before I have three table-gamers in the same room). It would certainly be easier to make more difficult with either additional regular (Blue/Yellow/Red) Behemoth cards or maybe optional Purple (post-Red) cards. And I have a hunch that the draw-up-to-six mechanic also contributes to the ease of victory. Theoretically one could just play one attack then absorb five damage every turn without returning cards back to the Behemoth. Conceptually, I also like that each player picked their weapon which also determined their play style. I had no complaints with Bowgun, other than that I'd set up Shrapnel Blast to have 8 counters, which I assumed meant that next turn I'd do 8 damage, then I'd ready the quickest card I had (some item), and the turn after that I'd do 7, et cetera. I never got that big damage turn in, though, and I'm not sure I could've worked toward it much quicker.
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Dec 20, 2015 06:17
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Hammer Bro. posted:Behemoth trip report! Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate it! I'll clarify some rules stuff when I can, since apparently I missed some of the newer mechanics  Yes, each Power Counter adds 1 Damage to the attack it is placed on. As for what to do when you take damage with nothing to discard, that is the correct choice - nothing happens. I'm trying to work out what I want to have happen if you take damage while empty, but it generally only happens early on and getting delayed means you'll be more likely to take more damage, and thus get more delayed, and thus take more damage, etc. It feels really lovely and I've tried to avoid having too much delaying of players on damage.Yup, that's the correct interaction for Sword and Shield! As for Power Counters on Bowgun, it was intended to deal damage BEFORE being removed. I'll reword the Bowgun card to read "After a Shot Card resolves..." Explosive Shot was intended to only trigger once per turn, as are all the abilities on cards. I'll mention this in the rules. It sounds like overall the game was definitely too easy. I'll look into some ways to up the difficulty! I think I might just straight-up remove the delaying aspect of Pitfall Trap, and probably reduce a ton of the Behemoth delays. How much did you guys chain Pitfall Traps together? A fourth difficulty isn't a bad idea, I'm a little hesitant to solve the problem with "throw more cards at it" though, so I'll do more brainstorming on how to solve the issue. I feel like I need to include a more threatening lose condition, but I'm not sure how I want to go about it either. I'm thinking that maybe if players take damage a certain amount of times, they lose - I'm not super happy with that solution, but it would also punish players who have no Reward Cards who take damage. I'm trying to decide what I want to do with players cruising through their decks super quickly. On the one hand, having a hand full of the more supporty items is kind of a bummer, but I don't want the player to have access to their entire deck and be able to just do the same combo of cards over and over and over. I'm considering adding some kind of option to discard your entire hand for some kind of benefit / as an action, but I'm not sure how I want it to function. The draw item cards were intended to help with not having fun options in hand - specifically Well-Done Steak. Did the Lance user try out these items? I might need to just design each weapon's kit to have some method of redrawing quickly if desired. Thanks again for the feedback! If you think of anything else you guys thought about the game, please don't hesitate to let me know!
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Dec 22, 2015 06:22
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I think we only chained Pitfalls once, but it was crucial since we really didn't want the Behemoth attacking by that point (it already had 4 or 5 cards readied). Deck-spanning is a little trickier of a problem to tackle. Going through effectively one card a turn, as Greatshield was forced to do, seems like it would be boring. I realize there are items for that but when other people have other means (Sword and Shield can effectively draw 6 every turn) of doing it better, using the items feels like a waste. I still think the drawing-back-up-to-six mechanic is the problem point. The only discouragement from going full-wombo, besides whatever associated delay costs there are, is that the Behemoth maybe might attack you and force you to give up some Reward cards you may not even have. But it's easy to determine when that's impossible (due to the timer track) or unlikely (based on the card descriptions). If you only got to draw one or two cards per turn (still up to six), you'd have to be a little more cautious when going ham. It would also make the draw-cards items a little more savory. Another thought that would be interesting: what if each Enraged card added to the Behemoth's readied pile also Sped it Up by 1? I already like how dangerous they feel, but having to react to a change in timing would be brutal, but I don't think unfair. You can still essentially control when you're willing to risk hitting it hard (something we were initially nervous about but then realized that the consequences were pretty avoidable), and by moving it backward on the track the game should get an extra turn or two while the players deal with this increased difficulty.
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Dec 22, 2015 18:46
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Do you have any plans for Behemoth or is this going to always be the Monster Hunter fan game it is? I don't mean that in a bad way; I'm just curious. I wish I could get people together to try it out to see if my impressions from reading the rules are accurate.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:36
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Casnorf posted:Do you have any plans for Behemoth or is this going to always be the Monster Hunter fan game it is? Haha, I didn't take it in a bad way, don't worry. I'd like to see about getting it published / kickstarted when I'm happy (enough) with it, but I think it (obviously) still needs work. I don't know poo poo about publishing or kickstarting, so I'd mostly like to try and get the design down pat before I even start stressing about that. Hammer Bro. posted:I think we only chained Pitfalls once, but it was crucial since we really didn't want the Behemoth attacking by that point (it already had 4 or 5 cards readied). The reason I included the draw-up-to-six mechanic was to avoid situations where the player gets stuck with no options to refill their hand after taking damage, and they'd be left with possibly few choices in what to ready after they take damage. Say you lose your hand to damage, then you draw one or two cards, you'll have basically no decision to make in which card to ready - and if you just lost your drawing items to damage, then you'll be hosed for a looooong time. Although, I suppose this could be avoided with just careful balancing of the Behemoth cards - but this situation could still arise for players that poorly manage their hands - and while I'm fine with punishing poor play, I don't want to make this punishment remove the fun. You say playing one card a turn is boring, and I'd be worried that more limited draw might discourage playing multiple cards at once. However, I do like the idea of a limited draw amount enough to give it a shot, I think. I'll also see about trying to include more ways for Lance and Greatshield to draw / play more cards. I really like the idea to Speed Up the Behemoth when it becomes Enraged, I'll definitely implement that and see how it works. It solves the issue of the Behemoth not getting enough turns rather nicely, I think. fe: While typing all this and thinking about what direction I want the gameplay to go in, I think at the end of the day the gameplay I want is for players to have to try and puzzle out the most efficient combo of cards in their hand for the current situation each turn. Whether that's for providing defense, offense, whatever. I'm not exactly sure I've accomplished that to my own satisfaction so far, and I'm not even sure if the current system can support that. I feel like Sword and Shield and Bowgun are the closest to that right now, maybe Standard too.
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Dec 23, 2015 07:25
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CodfishCartographer posted:Haha, I didn't take it in a bad way, don't worry. I'd like to see about getting it published / kickstarted when I'm happy (enough) with it, but I think it (obviously) still needs work. I don't know poo poo about publishing or kickstarting, so I'd mostly like to try and get the design down pat before I even start stressing about that. Speaking of which, and back into positivity, are there any easier tools for turning handwritten cards and notes into a print and play so I can try to be more active with this? I mean I know I'll have to rewrite the notes into coherent rules. Short of making a template in photoshop or word, does something like nandeck support cards with multiple orientations? Or is there another tool I can use?
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Dec 23, 2015 13:41
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Casnorf posted:Speaking of which, and back into positivity, are there any easier tools for turning handwritten cards and notes into a print and play so I can try to be more active with this? I mean I know I'll have to rewrite the notes into coherent rules. Short of making a template in photoshop or word, does something like nandeck support cards with multiple orientations? Or is there another tool I can use?
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Dec 24, 2015 15:25
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Casnorf posted:Speaking of which, and back into positivity, are there any easier tools for turning handwritten cards and notes into a print and play so I can try to be more active with this? I mean I know I'll have to rewrite the notes into coherent rules. Short of making a template in photoshop or word, does something like nandeck support cards with multiple orientations? Or is there another tool I can use? Poison Mushroom posted:If you just need simple cards for PNP, you can use Magic Set Editor. If you don't need many different fields (or can figure out MSE's custom card system, which I never could), it works well. My cards have a little more infp, so I like to use Microsoft Access, making a report in the shape of a card and fill it with data from a table. You can then do print view to print them out easily.
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Dec 24, 2015 20:42
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