A Playtester's POV on Yore

I am the mystery third person (or second or fourth, I guess, depending on how you look at it) that is part of Patrick's board game playing/testing/thinking group. I personally haven't managed to create a prototype of my idea yet (but it is cool and exciting and kind of backwards from the norm) but I do get to play a lot of Yore and Golem. This post will be my thoughts on Yore (I'll write another post later on Golem).

Yore


After the first playtest session Patrick went back to the drawing board for the combat system and also discussed adding in more player choice for his current iteration. I really like the concept of Yore and had fun the first time we played it. Unfortunately, in the newest version I felt that I had no strategy and no control over circumstances. After thinking about Yore for a few days, I have come up with some ideas that could possibly be explored.

Currently in Yore, players explore a grid system composed of separate 3x3 tiles. You explore a tile by flipping a new one over and orienting it in any way you choose. The tiles may be blank, have a monster encounter, a treasure encounter, or both. I feel that that alone is not enough choice. There is no objective in the game other than to reach the exit (a filled in middle square on one of the 3x3 tiles). Reach the exit too soon, and you will lose from having not enough treasure points. Until the 3x3 tile is flipped over with the exit on it, there is no real strategy other than wandering and hoping for encounters that give you victory points. My first proposal is adding mini objectives on some of the tiles. Possible hoard rooms or even mini-bosses that give unique treasure.

Quick Sketch:

Thoughts on this:
1) Creates more player choice by giving objectives throughout the game instead of just at the end.
2) Causes players to come together and possibly interact (in our playtest every player went in a separate direction).
3) You could add directional arrows on the 3x3 tile that must always be placed in X direction to keep a player from orienting the 3x3 tile in their favor.
4) Mini bosses could be a deck of cards with monster stats and information on the top and a treasure on the bottom - possibly victory points or even an ability. Player would keep the monster card after defeating it.
5) Single square tiles could have treasure removed from them entirely so this is the only place treasure is obtained.

My second proposal is a change in abilities. Abilities are currently physical cards the player can purchase with experience points. Abilities are only used in combat and are generally a conversion of one fight type to another. My proposal is that different types of abilities are added that can be used in regular game play. Cool abilities would be being able to reorient a tile already place or possibly a Mystical Elevator sort of situation where an entire 3x3 tile is moved to another part of the board. To keep abilities from being too powerful, one-time or multi-time use abilities could be introduced.

The next issue I had with Yore was the difficulty. Straight away the player could defeat the strongest monster. You'd be hurt, but it wasn't a big deal. I'm not sure how to completely fix that, but since Patrick eats probability for breakfast, I'm sure he has a few ideas up his sleeve. One simple change I thought of was to change the item Potion. A potion can currently be used at any time and restores a player to full health. If Potions only restored a single heart at a time, I think that would help balance the difficulty.

The last thing I noticed was the pace of the game. I felt a lot of stuff could not get done in a single turn. The rules currently state a player can move 3 squares, but only explore a single square. That means most turns you are only moving one square. One idea is to add blank halls and passageways to the 3x3 tiles. Somewhat like my idea for treasure rooms/mini bosses, except just a way for the player to expedite movement. This would cause the amount of 3x3 tiles to be explored faster, and would also cause the player to place single tiles carefully so hallways could be used and not blocked.

I think with just a few changes, Patrick could add more player choice and a little bit more fun to Yore. I love the idea of a randomly generated dungeon crawl through the flipping of tiles and I am very excited to see where Patrick takes Yore next.
                            

The Problem with Symbols

Behold my card game!

I call it GOLEM. It's a beautiful mess right now, and the numbers are all pretty much made up. Fight value of 10 for a Dick Wolf? Sure, sounds good! Watch out for Sparkle Vampires, they'll decrease your max health by 1 if they beat you. Plus they're scary... and not quite like the other teenage boys at your High School. What are you hiding, you sexy scary Sparkle Vampire?

I've had my GOLEM concept for as long as Patrick has been developing Yore. Patrick is a little more methodical and clean working than I am. All my playtest pieces are just hand-written on chopped up index cards. The 5x5 card layout you see in the picture is what an island in the game will look like. Players will generate an Island during game setup by referencing location cards (seen below) which show what your next Island will be made up of. Players then move their characters from card to card and react to the card they land on. In order to decide which cards build each island, the island cards have symbols on the back to match:

Squiggles! Spirals! Pound signs! And me red balloons! As you can see, Shadow Mountain consists largely of... umm... stars? It's a starry shadowy kind of mountain. During setup, we might very well draw Shadow Mountain as our first Island location, and that location card tells us which Island card of each symbol to draw, shuffle together, and then place on the table to create our new and unexplored GOLEM Island.

What's the difference between a spiral and a strange ziggy-zag symbol on the back of the card, you say? Well... absolutely nothing. I feel like that's a problem right now. At one point I thought it would be cool to theme each Island card to a kind of terrain with symbols to correspond. A skull symbol for a swamp Islands full of zombies! A tree symbol for forest Islands! A fireball for mount...

Oh... shit.

So it turns out coming up with unique symbols is kind of tough. Sure there are some easy and less popular alternatives, like a tiny rock or mountain symbol for mountain-themed terrain... but what kind of choices would you have for a swamp symbol? What color would you use other than black? Swamps are all about rot and mucky water and lillypads... so maybe brown? Only brown isn't exactly appealing for an icon we want to stand out from potential background art. The icons have to make sense and they've got to pop out no matter which card they're on.

I had already used up a bunch of colors, by the way, when designing the symbols in my game Item system; a key component to character advancement in GOLEM.

GOLEM uses Items like swords and magic amulets that the players can equip. They'll have five different symbols, such as a fire symbol for a torch and a magic lightning symbol for a wand. Some Items will have multiple symbols, like a fire axe having both physical and fire icons. This gives me a way to control the number of items a player can use at once that's easy to grasp and doesn't rip off Arkham Horror's two-handed system. Basically you can only equip one of each symbol. If you have a torch Item with a fire icon, you have to trade it out to use your fire axe Item, which also has fire as one of its icons.

I feel like this kind of symbol mechanic works well for weapons in combat. It's going to prevent characters from getting too powerful, while maintaining some cool flavor and player choices. I could even eventually implement monster weaknesses versus certain weapon symbols. I could eventually do craaaazy shit! Symbols attacking other symbols! Symbols getting into heated drug-fueled arguments and throwing other symbols out of their downtown studio apartment! Symbols that steal the babies of other symbols. Symbols that rape other unsuspecting symbols late at night in the middle of the park. Oh and let's not forget Potion cards which have their own little symbol on them as well. Don't mess with the Potion symbol.

If all my symbols make sense, is it still possible to have too many of them?

So then of course without solving any of my initial symbol dilemmas, the gang held a play test to see if GOLEM was even worth pursuing as a game. That resulted in some pretty good feedback and it got me brainstorming other ideas for GOLEM, like the possibility of different monster sub types and the fun I could making that a new element in the game (Types like Undead, Elemental, Spiritual, Mechanical, etc...). Soon I realized I might need even more icons to represent those monster traits. My learning curve is steadily going through the damn roof.


My options for solving this problem are as follows:

• Replace some of the symbols with something else, like colors.
• Cut down on the number of different card types that need unique symbols.
• Do both things.
• Do neither and die a lonely painful death. Cops find my corpse a week later, half eaten by my own cat, and still clutching scraps of paper with zig-zag symbols on them.

 

Yore Playtest V: In Which Fun Makes a Surprising Appearance

With my two favorite playtesters on a honeymoon, I spent my spare time working on my new card system.  The day they got back, I realized: "If I make them play this system, they'll hate me.  Even I don't want to play this."  Somehow, I had convinced myself that adding a system involving routine mathematics was a good idea.  Perhaps I thought Yore would ship with pocket calculators and a multiplication table...

I broke my promise that we'd play at lunch, went home, and started over.  By midnight, I had the whole game simplified to its essence.  The next day, I had the decks ready.  The result was actually... fun.

Draft I: The Unused System

After the previous playtest, I wanted to try a new system. I kept chaining but tried giving each subset of of abilities a different feel.  Magic applied debuffs again, mental affected other abilities did no direct damage, and physical had brutal openings and closers.  The problem was numbers.

This card requires a degree in symbology.

Designing each system took a lot of math, as I needed each branch to scale in a linear way while being balanced against the others.  Otherwise, a magician might be the only class that could do a certain amount of damage or a mentalist might be trapped in a corner if they didn't have enough magic or physical cards.  I had hoped to do all the math on the back end so turns would move fast.  In the end, I had accomplished the opposite.  Every turn would involve multiplication and addition -- which, as an educational game, might be awesome.  As a fast-paced and entertaining board game...

Draft II: "It's like Bejeweled!" But Not

So I stripped everything.  The cards now look like this:

Physical Energy: Simple as Pie

I first removed chaining and requirements.  At that point, no text was needed.  Each card is a different type of energy - magical, mental, physical, or chaos (a wildcard).  Your enemy attacks you with a set amount of energy and you have to match that energy.  If you match each type, you defeat the enemy.  If not, you remove what energy you can and take damage that turn.

One number to rule them all:
draws 3 mana, worth 3 points

With just mana, there was little player choice, so I added ability cards back in.  This time, however, they were vastly simplified.  They cost energy to play, but they output a different type of energy.

Players could choose to buy more mana cards, new abilities (separated by tier), or level up to draw more cards during their turn.

Results
 

The game was even smoother this time.  We got through a good number of rounds during lunch and things scaled nicely.  By the third turn, one of the players could reliably attack higher level creatures.  Even better, she wanted to keep playing.  That was the most promising part of the whole experience.  I can tweak numbers endlessly, but fun is far more ephemeral.

Other thoughts

 

I. Different schools of energy still the same feel.

 

After all the work I spent differentiating the sets of abilities in Draft I, I felt like I'd stepped backwards.  While playing however, the dilemma felt less noticeable.  Perhaps, and I'll decide after additional testing, differentiation is unnecessary here.  Each mana doesn't need a different feel -- the important mechanics are in how you build your deck.

 

II. Not enough diversity in strategy.

 

I forgot the character cards for the playtest, so players could only buy action and mana cards.  Additionally, without health, losses meant nothing.  The two strategies that emerged were buying higher level ability cards and buying chaos energy.  At the start, there seemed to be no reason to buy the normal energy.  I think as the game progressed, there would be more reason, especially as you level up and can hold more mana in your hand.  Since abilities are random, it takes a little control out of player hands, but at the same time, it means they are given strategical choices on how they want to stack their mana deck.  A longer playtest would be ideal for seeing if my plans for the strategies panned out. 

 

III. Playtest structure.

 

One of the major things I'm working towards, besides better game design, is more productive playtesting.  One dilemma I've had so far is parsing player feedback.  I've found that the earlier the feedback, the more reactive and harder to appraise it is.  Early in the game, patterns have not emerged and the initial problems may just be with the way I've explained the game.  As the game goes on, those objections may disappear or even become positive situations.  

I had considered implementing the rule "no feedback until after the game", but spontaneous feedback is still valuable.  Anything that stifles responses has consequences. I think it's better to get cryptic or difficult feedback than none at all.

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack

The Inspiration Factory, part I

I'm writing this for a friend who asked, "How do you transform inspiration into action in regards to both beginning your projects, but also finding like-minded people to collaborate with?" 

I'll treat that question as two separate ones and focus my answer in this post on the first part.  I'll write about team building later, since it really comes from the foundation of the first one.

In one of the classes I took on poetry, my professor said, "Don't worry about dissecting a poem -- it's not a bird, you aren't going to hurt it by picking it apart."  However, in breaking down a system, it's easy to focus on the parts and miss the whole.  Sure, the wing is how the bird flies, but if you just have two wings and nothing else, you won't be traveling anywhere...

With that in mind, here's a breakdown of how I turn inspiration into action.

Don't Get Attached to Ideas
  

Ideas are not your children.  You have to be ready to orphan them if they don't work out.  I've experienced major creative block from holding on to an idea that needed to be left out in the cold.  If I grow attached to an idea and am afraid to show it to the world, I'll procrastinate or become defensive to protect it.  "It just needs more time; it needs to develop further; I'm not ready to show it just yet."  This is a dangerous line of thought, because if I'm afraid to show it to world, I am recognizing on some level that there is something askew with the idea.  Either it is too personal or it is flawed in some way.  Either way, I'm probably not being honest with myself.

Similarly, do not judge your personal worth by your ideas.  Everyone I've met has bad ideas, even the most brilliant of my friends.  If you cannot dissociate your ideas, every stupid idea you have will be one more hammer blow of self doubt.  The best thing you can do with one of your bad ideas is to identify why it's bad.  In doing so, you'll be defining what is required for a good idea.

 Branch Off As Needed
 

Time spent on an idea does not mean it's more valuable.  If I spend a hundred hours on an idea that's not working, does that merit a hundred more?  If there is no solution in sight, I usually try another idea.  More important: I don't call it "cutting my losses" because that implies that the hundred hours of working was lost. That work is still there, I can draw from that experience one way or another.  Really, this involves a reconceptualization of failure.  The worst mistake would be calling the time spent "wasted."

This came into clear focus for me the last two weeks.  I was working on Yore and trying to balance the different sets of abilities.  After a solid dozen hours of developing the new system and cards, I realized I had gone entirely in a wrong direction. I had created a balanced system that even I didn't want to play.  So last night I scrapped it, picked the best part, and started fresh.  It's intimidating to leave behind of huge amount of work and start anew, but you can always go back to it to salvage value, the ideas, and (sometimes) the content itself.  The result was great.  Had I not gone through the process the first time, the revision would not have been so robust.

Test First, Analyze After
 

Except for those with superb precognition, planning only accounts for the situations you can think of in advance.  Testing reveals what planning misses.  Testing also prevents attachment to ideas, since the process externalizes the ideas and keeps them from fermenting.  That's why testing early is so crucial.  The more feedback and data you get through testing, faster you can improve your ideas.  This is true of every design profession I've worked in.

Everything is an Iteration

From my years running track and cross country: if I focused on the finish line, the end was far away and every step insignificant.  Instead, when I focused on each step, the race ended quickly.  Of course, if I looked just at my feet, I'd run off the trail into a tree.

In design, setting milestones are key for accomplishing small parts of the whole.  They give the feeling of accomplishment needed to push through a project. At the same time, they set up structure so that you don't always need to constantly watch the larger plan.

The Big Picture
 

What does turning inspiration into action look like as a complete system?*  It's easy to say, "I'll give up on ideas sooner!" or "I'll test my ideas as soon as possible!", but those are merely the routines behind turning inspiration into action.  The system outlined above would give me nothing if I didn't already have a fundamental belief that my creations have potential.  That's the soul that moves the machine.  Someday, and it may take all my life, I will have created something of lasting value.  Without faith that I'll accomplish something from all my work, I would not even be able to start the creative process. 

*Some creative workflow disclosure: Originally, this section was a continuation of the opening parts of the bird metaphor, but in the process of writing it, I meandered off into indecipherable symbolism about flying over obstacles.  What you read is a complete revision. 

Thought Exercise V Solution

The exercise: Describe an alternative method of limiting cheating in an online RPG.  Bonus: make it appease the fickle, foam-at-the-mouth fanbase of Blizzard games.

During the controversy over the Diablo announcements last month, I mistook mods for add-ons.  Mods alter the rules and mechanics of gameplay while add-ons alter the UI and cosmetic elements of the game.  With that in mind, I have a whole hosts of thoughts.  The first of which is:

Make a map editor.  Here's a short game: name all the Blizzard games since the original Warcraft without a map editor (Hint: there are two and they both start with "Diablo").   While that certainly didn't hurt the sales of those games, I am surprised Blizzard missed out on that opportunity.  Watch any Blizzcon and you'll see stereotypically large and pony-tailed guys mumbling into microphones about all the things wrong about Diablo.  A map editor would give them room to prove it (and maybe they will!  Some of those guys have played more Diablo than the entire Blizzard team combined).

Mods were a significant part of keeping Diablo II going for so long.  I had roommate that swore by several of them, claiming they were more balanced and enjoyable than the original game.  I tried them and disagreed, but the large library of mods to choose from at least meant Diablo has some diverse replayability.

With Battle.net in place and now a requirement for playing the game, safe distribution of maps is already there.  Players could make two types of maps: arenas and campaigns.  Arenas could be Vanilla or Custom, with vanilla using all the mechanics from the normal game.  Custom would allow map designers to add new abilities and test them in glorious player-versus-player combat.  Campaigns would all be custom, since they involve adding new items, zones, and monsters.

The original Diablo team eventually left and created Runic Studios, famous for Torchlight.  They provided, separate from the game, an excellent little map editor.  The small Torchlight community created a impressive number of mods for the game, including new classes and levels.  There is precedent for map editor for this kind of game, and with Blizzard's diehard community, it would be vastly successful.

I don't mind the concept of real-world-currency auction houses, but since I am thinking of alternatives, why not Redesign Item Ownership.  Where WoW had Bind-on-Equip and Bind-on-Pickup items, Diablo III could implement a system of Bind-on-Server items.  Once an item drops, it can only be picked up and traded by people who were on the server when it dropped.  This means no cross-game item selling.  This would not apply to every item, just items of certain rarity.  This cuts out the flagrant item selling.

Yore Playtest III and IV: In Which Slash-and-Burn Prove Viable Design Choices

I cut out half of the features of the cards and they went from looking like novellas to flash cards.  This change in readability sped turns up dramatically.

The mechanics of the game were much better.  The turns went faster, counting points was better, and laying down cards was much more natural.  The other playtesters did not have much trouble picking up the rules.  Turns went from 4-6 minutes each to 1-2 minutes each.  We could actually get some rhythm going.  However...

Problem: The game was not fun.

Granted, the current state of the game is the least developed of all the playtests.  All the schools of abilities were the same and there was no reason to choose one over the other.  We were only fighting one monster in three different flavors.  Though I did not misprint the cards this time, the numbers were still horribly skewed.  If you could lay down 4 points of damage, you had a 16% chance of winning.  If you laid down 6 points of damage, that jumped to 50%.  Players could only lay down four cards in combat, making 6 points hard to reach with the starting abilities.  Since we rolled for the enemy we fought, it made it even more crushing when we lost the combat.

The combat mechanics were not empowering.  Everyone could hold up to 8 cards total and play 4 of them in combat.  I instated a cooldown mechanism to make sure the same combo was not used over and over and to add some spice to the game.  The problem was that everyone was using their best combo and then was stuck with a shoddy hand afterwords while their main attack was on cooldown.  Maybe a strategy would emerge that you mix up the cards more, but I don't think we would have discovered that in the current state of the game.

Card maintenance was a pain with the cooldown stacks, all the active cards, gaining and losing abilities, and keeping track of your hand.  In this confusion one person lost a card or two and other players forgot to fold back in their cooldown stacks.  A game that has so many things to balance expects too much of its players, and I could tell the other players were losing their interest and patience quickly.

Solutions:

Since those two playtests, I've spent time differentiating the ability schools.  Combat now has big numbers as openers and finishers and is good at linking other abilities.  Magic has enchantments that accumulate into explosive finales.  Mental is all about multiplying other attacks.  Playing with different stats feels much different.  The numbers are fairly balanced.  I am confident that the deck has improved.

The majority of my time will be spent on the hardest part before Playtest V: figuring out and playing around with deck and draw mechanics.  The ideas I have so far all have drawbacks, and I'm wondering what in the game I'll have to sacrifice to make things work.  I've already cut a lot out to great effect, but I may need to cut even more.  There are a lot of elements in my combat system I want to see blossom, but I may need to prune them so the whole game can grow.

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack

Yore Playtest II: In Which Cards Go Everywhere But Do Nothing

With the changes conceived in the first playtest session, I went home and spent the entire evening rebuilding Yore.  I wanted to move towards the actual board game structure and away from versus, though the imbalances were very clear there.  I designed a starting set of monsters, tweaked numbers on the existing abilities, added a few new abilities for balancing purposes, and redesigned the character cards.   After running through the rest of my printer cartridge, I was sure of wowing my playtester friends with the progress I had made.  Oh, how I was wrong.

Changes

I designed the monsters so they would be beaten 75% of the time.  Unfortunately, I flipped the numbers and misprinted their stats... players would only beat them 25% of the time.  Also, I changed the spell mechanics so that effects did not stack.  You can have a frost or a fire active; one replaces the other instead of cancelling out.  To make combat more interesting, I added a bleed debuff if you use multiple combat moves in a row.  I made a number of changes to the abilities as well.  Mental cards made it easy to chain combos.  I printed fewer ending and beginning cards and more chains.

The starting monster.

Problem I: Too complex

The game started faster this time, but quickly got muddled in minutiae.  Each card read like a mini novel.  I had given abilities enough wiggle room that they had countless edge cases.  The playtesters had endless and good questions, but turns were taking over five minutes a person to complete.  The game was far too complex, even though we were playtesting a small section of it.

This was actually a valid deployment of cards...

Problem II: Stacks too fast

By the second turn, two of us had decks stacked so well we went through the entire thing in one hand.  The next turn, since it was still stacked well, we did it again.  The interesting mechanic I had hoped for: pockets of good, planned combos, was not there.  Instead, the additional draws of the mental cards made it easy to cycle through every card.

Problem III: That effect does what?

Because I added the bleed mechanic last minute, I had not thought about what it would do.  I don't think adding things last minute is bad though.  Adding a half finished mechanic forced me to come up with answers at the start of the game.  While my solution was sup par, at least I was able to test different things with the mechanic.  In the end, I saw that the complications facing the mechanic were too great, and it would need to be shelved.

The confusing second bleed mechanic.

Solutions:

After finishing the playtest, I knew it was time to start parring down the complexity.  It was the most glaring problem, and my changes the previous day had added complexity where I hoped to eliminate it.  I had gummed up the system so much that nothing in the entire length of a player's turn could be described as "fun."

After considering how to simplify things, I drew up a completely new card design.  From there, things started to look promising...

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack.