Back in the 50s, there was a workshop to decide what the field now known as artificial intelligence should be known as. For a long time, computational rationality was the forerunner, but in the end, we have what we have now.
Of course, I can’t really say that this decision affected much, but how much more does something like “artificial intelligence” spark the imagination then “computational rationality”. Would we have 2001: A Space Odyssey? Terminators? Asimov’s robot series? Deep Thought?
This post is a direct followup on Aki’s post from yesterday. It started out as a comment but quickly lengthened in a way to seemed like it should have its own post.
Advancement in this kind of a game is problematic. On the one hand many players want to see their characters gaining more skills and progressing towards something like a demigod status. You may advance your character according to the “spend experience” chart found in each playbook. It all changes when you advance to “tier 2”.
This is the threshold of problem. How to keep the character in the same mould but allow him to grow?
I think that something like the advancement of John McClane has always been my ideal of character development. They might get more and more things done but they loose a bit of themselves on the process.
One thing that occurred to me just while I read this post is adding a simple and elegant system for advancement.
“But”
In simplest for this might work out when you change your playbook. You develop from a dealer to the Avenger BUT. This might even be a Move. When “when you advance your character, choose 1” and then a list of shit that might hit the fan.
This idea is presented in some ways in various hacks and I just discussed about something similar with one of the players from the same group as Aki and myself. It should not be simple to do something or if it is there should be a cost for it. You could look it the way Aki said. McClane survives (ie. develops) BUT loses his wife.
The trick here is to build the conditionals in a way that would make sense for the narrative and for the character.
Lauri has been bugging me to write my own seasoned playbook for his AW hack, Wayward Sons (see Resources above, and the Wayward Sons -tag on the right). Just haven’t gotten around to it. Also, I don’t really have inspiration right now… which is a bit of a problem.
One thing I’ve been thinking about though: One of the characters has been becoming more and more sociopathic in his paranoia, while two other characters (mine included) have been becoming more and more relient on alcohol to get through their “adventures”.
Once I began the work on the “second tier” playbooks for my Apocalypse World hack I quickly realised this hack still has some major issues. Though in my mind the premises and the main idea behind this hack is clear it might not be for others.This was a point that I noticed while we get together to play it a couple of weeks ago.
Aki was wondering why would his character stick with the other characters. I realise that this is something that pops up every once in a while in any game. My current approach to this kind of a problem is to get rid of the character as soon as possible. Questioning the motives of a character is a quick way to kill the mood and diverse the story from what is actually happening. But this time was different. It got me think of the reasons any of the characters are involved in “the hunt”.
We’ve previously established that one of our major themes and keywords is berserkers. Berserker means the following: Whenever the creature is blocked or blocks, you can pay some mana and trigger the berserker ability (although its not worded as a trigger, but an activated ability). This gives the creature some temporary bonuses on power and toughness, as well as indestructibility. However, each of them comes with a negative consequence. Its hard to try to contain a berserker, after all.
This is actually the real challenge. The game has shied away from drawbacks since the early days. Although they have returned somewhat in the past few sets, there currently isn’t a real tradition of those. Well, gladly, finding enough flavorful ones for each color is pretty easy. So, here goes (in the priority order set previously, meaning RBGUW).
I might begin with quoting Aki’s post about resolutions. But screw that. I’m cutting (almost) straight into the good stuff.
Role-Playing Games: Finishing What I’ve Started
I’ll finish writing Wayward Sons and write the finale to the Master of Shadows-campaign for Liber Fanatica. The AWhack is more likely to happen but I am still so ashamed that I haven’t written the last part of this WFRP campaign that I just have to do it.
Role-Playing Games: RopeCon to the Max
This year’s Ropecon was more or less lost to me but next year I’ll GM something and try to participate at least into three sessions.
Role-Playing Games: More is more
I’ll be running too campaigns next year and I promise to keep them both afloat. I’ll try to catch as many games as I can, which should be relatively easy if Aki keeps his promise to run more games. This might mean that I’ll have to sacrifice some time from EDH but that’s no big deal. I think I’ll get enough of that once summer comes.
This Blog: More Everything
I’m constantly harassing Aki to use more images and others from our gaming group to write something. I will promise to write more by myself next year. I wont promise that I will write more than Aki. I can try to write at last half as much as him.
That is a lot of writing. And mostly in English. Therefor I promise to write something in Finnish too. It has been too long since I’ve done that.
I think New Year’s resolutions are a pretty stupid idea. Humans are weirdly programmed. Generally its enough to talk about something we want to do. People who share their goals don’t reach them as often as people who don’t. You get some of the sensation of accomplishment simply from talking about it and for most people that’s enough. Actual accomplishments require actual work and that’s hard. Today’s culture is much more about instant gratification than hard work.
Although that’s clearly a generilization, you should not – under any circumstances – make New Year’s Resolutions.
With that in mind, here are mine.
Last week I talked about the mechanics I might use in the set, but the more important thing is how to have each color have a pretty balanced set of these keywords.
Now, generally not all mechanics are or need to be keyworded. Things such as milling are fine without needing a shortcut for them. There are many such mechanics. However, sometimes people want names for these things. It just makes them easier to talk about them and brings certain completion (see yesterday’s post).
A caveat: I studied communications a bit in university not much, but some. I graduated eight years ago and started my studies in the mists of the last millenium, so maybe this isn’t something people in communications still talk about or subscribe to. Since my knowledge on the subject is quite shallow, maybe this was never a serious theory. Or maybe this is the core of communications theory. Who knows? (Well, people who have actually studied the field probably do.) There’s a strong chance I’m using somewhat wrong terminology, but I can live with that.
Here’s the core of it: When you want to keep your audience’s attention, you need to remember the these three things: familiarity, surprise and completion.
Lets take a sequel to a movie.
New mechanics in a set tell us something about the world and more importantly, they affect how the set feels when playing the game. So, lets look at how often do we see different mechanics in different colors:
| White> | Blue | Black | Red | Green | Gold & Colorless | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bestow | 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | |
| Devotion | 2 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| Heroic | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| Monstrosity | 1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Scry | 3 | 11 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 8 |
| Total | 15 | 20 | 14 | 17 | 15 | 14 |
Including [scryfall]Flamespeaker Adept[/scryfall], because it says something about how scry is seen by different colors.
The same weighted on many you’ll pull on average from a booster:
| White> | Blue | Black | Red | Green | Gold & Colorless | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bestow | 0.26 | 0.15 | 0.26 | 0.15 | 0.17 | |
| Devotion | 0.06 | 0.02 | 0.27 | 0.06 | 0.17 | 0.02 |
| Heroic | 0.31 | 0.22 | 0.07 | 0.17 | 0.17 | 0.07 |
| Monstrosity | 0.02 | 0.07 | 0.07 | 0.17 | 0.17 | 0.03 |
| Scry | 0.25 | 0.77 | 0.1 | 0.5 | 0.05 | 0.2 |
| Total | 0.9 | 1.23 | 0.77 | 1.05 | 0.73 | 0.32 |
No heroic in mythic rare. That’s sort of interesting. Perhaps you’re supposed to think those really great heroes were built up from something rather than starting from there.
Of course, there are other considerations, such as blue has quit a few scry-effects, which give their controllers multiple chances to scry, whereas the other colors generally have to rely on scry-effects stickered on instants. Also, you’ll notice I put gold cards into their own category, whereas they are also strong indicators on where certain things fall, for example, both gold monstrosity creatures are half green and both gold heroic creatures are part white.
Summing the totals, you’ll come to the conclusion that on average, you’ll find in your booster five cards (out of 14) referencing one of these five things. And by the way: this number is exactly five (not counting foils and my rounding of the numbers), so I don’t think its an accident. MaRo talks about “as-fan” every once in a while. As-fan is what your set looks like when you open a booster and fan the cards out. In this case, about third of the cards are going to have one of the mechanics on them, meaning they have a very strong presence.
We can also see that blue is generally a bit of an outlier. In this case, it doesn’t do well in any category until we get to scry. On the other hand, we have “as-played”, which stands for how often we see these cards in action. In standard, we see a lot of devotion, especially both of the blue cards, one black common ([scryfall]Gray Merchant of Asphodel[/scryfall]) and [scryfall]Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx[/scryfall]. We see some monstrosity in [scryfall]Polukranos, World-Eater[/scryfall], [scryfall]Arbor Colossus[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Stormbreath Dragon[/scryfall], although I hardly see the the last one actually becoming monstrous. In limited you see all of these mechanics abused, which means its a pretty good set.
So, in Vikings, I’d like to have about a similar number of mechanics. Four or five will do. But I also need to find ones that can encompass all colors about equally. I’m going to try and find something you can put into each color at least once, but I’m also going to try and find something especially for each color, so that each color can have its distinct identity. Although, in some cases (see heroic or monstrosity above in black), the same mechanic can have a very different feel in different colors.
Also, if possible, each color combination should have a distinct feel to it. This shouldn’t be as strong as the individual cards, but this can be as simple as blue-red wanting to cast instants and sorceries and getting extra benefit from them (see [scryfall]Spellheart Chimera[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Flamespeaker Adept[/scryfall].
So, as I’ve stated prevously (in some forgotten post), I’ll be using Landfall from Zendikar. This will occur mostly in green, as I’ve already made green the exploration color. Of course, I’ll have to look closely at Zendikar so that I won’t tread the same waters, but there seems to be plenty of design space there.
Next, were going to have berserkers. I have two distinct ideas here: berserker could be a keyword (actually an ability word) which lets a creature grow and become indestructible when blocking or blocked, but it often (but not always) has a an additional cost, such as sacrifing the berserker at end of turn. These will probably be mostly in red, but again, at least one for each color. Even white and blue.
An example:
Arnulf’s Berserker
Creature – Human Berserker 1U
Berserker — UU, this creature gets +2/+2 and gains indestructibility until end of turn. Target player puts the top five cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard. (You may only active Berserker once per turn and only if this creature blocks or is blocked)
The other idea (which I might put under a different name and use anyway) is having many of the other cards have an activated ability involving discarding it and giving bonuses to a creature. A bit like bloodrush, but its not limited to being a creature ability. This way it would probably be more of a white thing, but its easy enough to find suitable abilities for all colors. This would also mean I could put pretty narrow cards into the set, and the narrowness would be mitigated by this ability. These might be hard flavorwise, though, although I am once again confident that I can come up with something.
An example of this kind of a card would look something like this:
Secret Location
Sorcery 1G
Search your library for a basic land card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.
{Mechanic title} — G, discard Secret Location: Target creature gains hexproof until end of turn.
I’m guessing this is actually Channel, but Channel (and somewhat similar Evoke) are creature abilities. I probably could just call this Channel and be done with it, although there might be some rules concers, which aren’t really my problem. I like this because it lets you put all sorts of effects into you deck without necessarily compromising your combat capabilities, which are very important in limited.
Blue is always hard, since this is a somewhat combat-oriented set in a combat-oriented game, and blue tends to be stronger outside of combat. I’m not going to use scry, as Lauri suggested, because it was just used so recently, even though it would fit here very well. Of course, another problem I have is that I’m trying to keep the fantasy in this first set pretty low key, which means no effects with effects that are too far from what could happen in the real world flavorwise.
These might be a bit farfetched or hard to get a handle on, but at this point these are only ideas anyhow:
Perhaps redirection within cards.
Well-Aimed Arrow
Instant 2W
Well-Aimed Arrow deals 4 damage to target attacking or blocking creature.
Redirect — If this card would be countered because it no longer has valid targets, you may pay R to assign it a new target.
That would probably need some clarification, but seems fine. Don’t know if there’s enough design space.
Another could be named something like “Omen”. These cards could be either cheaper or they could have an additional effect if you’ve done something during this turn.
Example:
Bloodeagle
Instant 2B
Destroy target nonblack creature.
Omen — If a creature died this turn, the destroyed creature can not be regenerated
or
Call of Home
Instant 1U
Return target creature to its owner’s hand
Omen — If you have drawn a card this turn, you may target any permanent instead.
I like the latter much more and it feels like there’s much more design space there, so that’s probably what I’m going to go with. It should be easy enough to come up with things for blue with this mechanic.
This leaves black without a signature mechanic, but that might be a good thing, because black is my favorite color and therefore it’ll be easy enough to find uses in black for all of the above.
.. and of course the Grandeur (at least for now), which is not a major thing, because we only have the five big boys, who have it. Although, I may add a land with the same ability into the set. Even then, six mythic rares with an ability don’t do much for the feel of the set.