A relic hunt by Jeff Warrender and Steve Sisk

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

The finish line recedes once more

We had the game's first 5p session on Saturday, and it went rather poorly.  It's tempting to just write it off as a consequence of the player count and/or just a bad test, but there were a few concerns that are worth contemplating.

First, the encounters and their in-or-out decisions prompt the players for a lot of decisions in rapid succession.  For slow players, these decisions, though simple, come at a faster pace than they can keep up with.  We had progressed through 6 encounters in about 90 minutes, way too slow.

But second, one player expressed the view that the in/out decision is, game-theoretically speaking, easy and therefore uninteresting.  If you had only set aside one cube for a reward, get out early; if you have multiple cubes in for rewards, stay as long as you can.  But chances are the players with low rewards had high investment, and when they leave, everyone else wants to leave too.  Now I think there's a bit more to the decision space than this, chiefly that, if the group always leaves encounters early and with few rewards, the temple is going to eat them alive.  But if it takes a full play through to see this, maybe that's not going to give a good first player experience.

So, what to do?  A suggestion was discussed, which I think has promise.  In each encounter, there would be two teams (good guys/bad guys), and each player drafts a particular role -- the protagonist, the love interest, the antagonist, maybe even an extra, etc -- which is affiliated with one team or the other.  Then, players 'invest' by allocating cubes to the cards they have that match the encounter, and your investment goes to the team you've chosen for this encounter.  Then resolve the encounter in the usual way, but it's on rails -- no one exits until one side or the other wins, and only the players on that side get rewards.

The nice thing is that, since you choose roles before you invest, there's some speculation, but there's still the ability to double-cross.  Someone joined your team thinking you were going to make a big investment, but in reality you held back so as to benefit yourself.  But importantly, the tragedy of the commons concern, of players trying to freeload, is broken.  If I hold back so as to be selfish, it doesn't hurt all of us -- it only hurts my team.  The other team gets the reward.  

In what way can I be 'selfish' and hold back?  I'm not 100% sure but I think there might be two ways. The simpler is that the other team can deal you damage during an encounter, and so cubes you don't allocate to boost the encounter can be used to block this.

The other would lead to bigger changes.  I've said before that your mat represents your character and the cards you add to it represent attributes of your character.  What if these were arranged in a pyramid such that at the top of the pyramid is your most 'iconic' attribute -- the thing that viewers most associate with that character.  But in game terms, maybe there's some way in which this slot is also more powerful, i.e. it gets a multiplier?

Ok, so far so good.  What if also, each time a card is activated, that's you saying "this is a key attribute of this character!", and so the card moves toward the top of the pyramid (switching places with the card ahead of it?)   The thing is, cards that are useful outside the temple are only useful outside the temple, and cards useful in the temple are only useful inside.  So it might be that you'd sometimes want to select the cards that you know will be useful in the temple, so that they can start to float to the top of the pyramid and become more powerful.  Of course, allocating cubes to such cards does you no good in the encounter, but it may help you long-term.  

Relatedly, what if you also have a couple of core abilities that aren't promotable in this way, but they can help with encounters or perhaps convey special powers.  So now you must decide, where those are concerned, do I activate them now for their benefit, or do I instead activate something to promote it to a higher level so it will be more useful long-term?

And then add in to this a possible role for hubris, to promote a card before the encounter resolution rather than after, and/or just to fast-forward or short-circuit the promotion process.

Not sure about this but it might be worth thinking about at least a bit.  It might replace or supplement the idea of placing cubes in the temple to boost cards.  Instead, you're rewarded for knowing early on what cards to get and boost, and to actually spend the time boosting them.

One issue that has come up is with victory.  What does it mean?  Before, it was, thematically, "person who made the shortest movie", but that makes less sense if each encounter we're divvying up roles.  If I was the protagonist the most times, then it would seem silly that a player who was always the extra would be the winner.  Screen time should relate to victory.  There's a bit more to it than that, though -- I think the idea is that the game is about the raw material you're giving to the film's editor, and in the end the winner is the player who emerged from the editing process as the protagonist.  So it could be that a minimal contributor could be edited to be the protagonist, if the more invested character's arc results in his death.  And so maybe that's the tension -- players who acquire more screen time acquire more rewards, but are also more of a target for damage, and so maybe it all balances out.

There's the added complication that not all screen time is equal.  Screen time that you eat up being on camera is good, screen time for exposition is less good, but the combination of the two is your film's length and if it's too long you've bored everyone.  So do we also need to track "good time" and "bad time" for each character?  But this too is a bit strange, since the roles that you draft are what give you your "good time" points.  Thus maybe it's just that total running time is a guard rail you have to avoid crashing into.  That's acceptable but it means we're back to needing a concept of victory.  Maybe back to achievements that pay out VPs a la v7?

Maybe it's just as simple as you "win" each of the cards of the temple:  start city, five 'peril' cards, grail room, five hubris cards.  Winner is the person who survives to the end and possesses the most cards of the survivors.  Or shift it around such that grail room is worth 2 VP and each hubris card is worth 1/2 VP, or whatever.   This at least gives you something tangible to shoot for, and it's the thing the game seems to be telling you to shoot for anyway -- 'prepare for the temple!'  So it may not actually change the player behavior that much, and may even motivate more logical behavior.  No one has enough experience with the game to have reached this level, but you could sort of see skilled players gaming the time system in odd ways, since time ultimately equals score.  If time is instead just a finite currency you have to spend, then the winning behavior is much more straightforward and much less gamey.

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