A couple of tests of the ideas described in the last couple of posts show some promise, and after a long period of dramatic changes after every test, the core structure is stable enough to leave it intact and go into tweaking mode for a while. (This is especially good news for me, since the last 10 iterations or so have each required pretty major component overhauls. It would be nice to have a change that is mostly just rules instead of components!)
Not all of the ideas panned out. The idea about only being allowed to collect cards from certain categories, reflecting your character's strengths and limitations, hasn't yet made it to playtesting. I decided to try the less restrictive approach first and see if it worked well enough, and it did. But it nevertheless works to think of your hand limit as 'iconic characteristics and items that are associated with your character', which can include not merely equipment but also quotes and character traits and such.
Unfortunately, the temple really did not work, in the sense that there just wasn't much dice-rolling. This was as I had feared -- if the number of dice you roll is based on your holdings relative to the other players, then not many dice are rolled when we're all clustered in our holdings, and that was what consistently happened.
The idea holds some promise, but it needs a tweak so that more dice are rolled. The one I'm most interested in to have a marker (maybe representing the enemy) that starts at 1 and moves up by one each temple card (of which there are 5). Each turn, you see how many symbols you possess that match the current temple card's peril, and place your marker at that position on the track. Then the number of dice you roll is either the difference between your marker and that of the player with the most symbols, OR the difference between your marker and the enemy's, whichever is greater. This adds an arc to the temple, since the enemy gets stronger and so later cards in the temple are strictly more important in the temple from a preparation standpoint. Except! While everyone else is viewing and preparing for those, you can view and prepare for the earlier cards, forcing the other players to take more rolls on those early cards, which gives them more noise, which has a cumulative effect. Unless they do the same thing, in which case no one takes much damage early on but no one is very well prepared later on. And so on. So this arc might add some interesting decisions, perhaps.
Although shared encounters outside the temple were supposed to reduce length and tedium, they don't succeed with respect to the former. The game still takes about 2 hours to play; ironically, a live 3p session took longer than my solo 3p session! Latency isn't a big issue, and no one felt bored, but it still just seems like an awfully long game for what it is. Player decisions whether to join an encounter or not, and how much to commit, and then whether to stay in or get out, and then which rewards to claim, all just take time.
I'm considering whether we might at least make all decisions simultaneous outside the temple. Basically, choose simultaneously whether you're in for the encounter and what if any you'll contribute to it, and then choose simultaneously after each roll who is in or out. This last is a bit closer to Diamant than I had wanted to come, but the decisions aren't informed by the same considerations as those in Diamant so maybe it's ok. The investment decision, at least, seems ok to convert to a simultaneous decision. My original thought in making it serial was simply that, since players will have the opportunity to back out and claim rewards in turn order, it's better for players to also invest in order so earlier players have to sweeten the pot a bit if they want later players to also join in and contribute. We could have a compromise of this, perhaps -- the first player must be in, so perhaps he must reveal his level of commitment to the encounter, and then other players decide simultaneously based on that what they're going to do. Not perfect but maybe quicker. Another benefit of simultaneous decisions is simply that it's more congruent with the temple phase, in which players simultaneously decide whether to invest any cubes in the current temple card. So if "simultaneously allocate cubes" happens in both phases, maybe that also helps make the game easier to learn.
Needless to say this is all quite different from the v7 rules, and I'm not sure what to make of that. The encounters do seem more immersive and suspenseful than the v7 rules, but they've required a lot of changes to the other aspects of the game to make them work in a reasonable time frame, because they eat up a lot of time. The simplicity of the theme cards is back, though. The one thing I guess I miss most was the ease of setup -- shuffle some piles, grab a card from each, boom, go. But I think for features like this that we've lost, there's a lot more direct player interaction, and I think that's a net gain. Now, as for whether it works equally well across all player counts...
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