Community Game: Mechanics

[aardvark]

All of the Proposed Mechanics

Alarms: Traps can trigger an alarm instead of (or in addition to) their regular effect. Can be deactivated.

Ally: Interesting characters who can join your main character. If they have a stat higher than your main character, you can use them for skill checks instead.

Clan Card: A card that describes the various characteristics of a clan (their strengths, weaknesses, etc)

Drawbacks (or Negative Awards): Documents have negative traits.

Gathering Favor (aka Sucking Up): Influencing Ally cards via counters and/or other sources in order to win them over.

Locations: Cards that represent certain places that the characters may move between.

Main Character: A single character card that starts in play and remains in play no matter what. It represents your character in the world, and has stats that affect how well you can use certain cards.

Mud-Slinging: Hinder an opponent's actions (either public or shadowy).

Ruse: Cards that come into play face down, but when they are revealed you can either do what the card says or replace it with a card from your hand.

Secret: Cards that come into play face down.

Security: Place counters on a card to make it more difficult to affect.

Skills: Characters have skills. Certain cards require a skill check to be played. Roll 1d6 and add your character's stat. It must meet or beat the difficulty on the card before you can do what that card says.

Snoop: Look at one face down card.

Spywork: Raid your opponent's tower. Cost can be: (1) by threshold, (2) continuous, (3) one-time, and/or (4) combination.

Training: Cards to make your main character better.

Trap: A card that imposes a negative effect on the opponent when uncovered via snoop, investigation, etc.

Trust Scale: A scale (-5 to +5) that makes it harder/easier to obtain certain employees, favors, etc based upon the current level of trust.

Two Decks: A deck for espionage activities and a deck for tower building.



Win Situations(Mechanics that have been suggested as win conditions)

Documents: Fulfill the requirements on a document card before your opponent. Most documents at game end wins.

Papers n' Bricks: A combination of Documents and Tower Building.

Public Landscaping: A combination of Tower Building and Rig n' Elect.

Rig n' Elect: Get enough influence from ally cards through any means. Once your main character has allies with a combined total of x influence, s/he is put into power.

The Chase (aka The Fox and the Hound): One player (the hound) pursues the other (the fox).

Tower Building: Build a tower with (10) tower pieces.

Triple Win (Win): A combination of Tower Building, Rig n' Elect and Documents.




The poll will end 2 days from now (January 29, 2010 1815 PST).
We each have 5 votes to do with as we please. Go!

[Ripplez]

ummmm i dont think this is a good idea.... its better to have some idea of what the game will shape up to be and then fix mechanics rather than fixing mechanics and then choosing what itll be represented as ingame

im not talking about - oh lets all decide on shards of alaras theme and then well design the entire game around it

im talking about - magics a duel between two wizards who can summon power from the land and use it to cast spells or summon monsters

to fix and then work on the mechanics so early means that were not going to progress much beyond the first set since the first few mechanics are going to have such a hold on the design process from the get go, cutting off alot of design space. once we pick something like security as a main mechanic that must define the game, the ENTIRE GAME will have the influence of this mechanic. the fluff will have to be tailormade to include it and so on. its usually best to leave things as VAGUE as possible so that you can go back to it and say, hmmm, we could also interpret things this way...... and then come up with more ideas. even you dont mean the game to last more than one set, its still not good practice to pigeonhole everything this way

my empathic suggestion would be to have everyone come together and just decide on wht the game would 'feel' like. is it supposed to feel like opne prson trying to keep another person frm finding his stash? is it supposed to feel like people trying to expose the evil of the oppponent? and then we vote on the win condition, the only realy important mechanic since all the others can be worked out according to the win condition. once you know magic has a main win - other person loses all life, you can work out ideas for doing so (creatures, burn), balances for making sure that it dosnt get out-of-hand (summoning sickness, payment costs) how to help players continue laying the smack down (drawing rules, untapping rules). then we can go back and tack on whatever we like thatd fit (milling, haste, land destructon). doing this is just backwards, we dont have a mental image of whats going to happen when we pick options because we have no plan or purpose to these things. if i pick The Chase, i cannot see what the other mechanic i pick will have to do with it because theres no theme, theres no underlying idea that marries the two, even as flavour. if i pick The Chase and Security, i have no idea how itll work. and if i do have an idea, wed see that weve come back to the other problem of having to design the whole game this way, right away

i really sugest we dont do this now. maybe after we have some idea of what the game is going to represent... but not now sorry

[sneaselx]

I agree with Ripplez.


The first thing to do, is to give each team a goal.

Mechanics/Rules: General goal of game, and begin fleshing out how it will be accomplished.
Fluff: Begin Working on how the world will feel.
Art: Work with others until we have enough info to do card templates.

We need to avoid trying to add out individual mechanics until the whole thing is roughed out.

[aardvark]

Maybe I misunderstood but I thought that the Win mechanics are the feel of the game. We've seen descriptions of the tower building, secret documents, power playm spy v. spy and combinations. Once these are chosen they will give the game its texture. Perhaps something more industrial with the towers, a fast pace in the chase, or shadowy with the documents, etc.

While choosing a Win it would be probably be wise to choose a mechanic that compliments it, mud slinging, for instance, would probably be more difficult to integrate into tower building then security or spywork. If it comes down to it I will take responsibility for tweaking the "conflicting" mechanics.

However, if we don't restrain ourselves in some way this may turn grow into something that is never finished. Really, though, until the Win(s) are decided, we won't know what is or is not feasible.

We need to avoid trying to add out individual mechanics until the whole thing is roughed out.

If I implied that I wanted the Rules/Mechanics teams to get started, then I apologize. There is nothing to be done until this is decided. Only the fluffers and artists have anything to work with at the moment. Once the mechanics have been chosen by the community the mechanics team will do their best to make the community's vision a reality.

[Tokimo]

I personally didn't realize at first that there even was a win condition part of the poll. I looked at alarms at the top and thought to myself "Why would you pin down keywords right now?"