More thoughts on encounters and variety

Thoughts after writing up the "New nutshell" post about encounters and encounter cards specifically.


Each encounter card features a scene description (flavor text), a challenge category, and a success track.  I now think that the success tracks for all cards of the same city shape are going to be the same.  Thus, we could perhaps just have the track(s) on the board or a mat, and the encounter cards could become mini cards.  I like this, since all of the other cards in the game are mini-size cards.  The encounters were the only holdouts, because they needed those tracks, and the tracks needed to be on the cards because each track was slightly different (each had a different payout curve and/or the placement of some damage points, but all of that is going away, I think).


Of course, this also means that the encounter deck is a gussied-up version of the die-roll-to-find-the-encounter-category of v7.  It does exactly the same thing mechanically, but also provides a little story.  Maybe that's ok.  Perhaps what we actually want to do here is to have a paragraph book.  It could be quite simple:  roll a d6 (or d12 or whatever), look up the corresponding entry in the book for the city you're in.  "Cairo 6", "Bucharest 4", etc.  The entry tells you your challenge category and the pertinent flavor text.  There are obvious benefits; we can make encounters city-specific to inject more flavor, in addition to having more variety; instead of 45 encounter cards we'd have 72 or even 144 encounters.  And 6 or 12 entries should be easy to fit on a page, so it's a 12-page book, basically a second rulebook, which is probably not super different cost-wise from a deck of cards, maybe.


The decision of whether to implement this as decks of cards that are city-shape dependent, or as a paragraph book, is a publisher-level decision.  What we need to decide is whether it's sufficient to differentiate the encounters merely by the challenge category and flavor text, or whether we need something more.


I think we may need something more, but it needs to be an extremely simple something.  My current thought is that each encounter can modify the standard encounter resolution rules in some simple way, such that it brings out some aspect of the encounter but is easy to remember and implement.


For example, maybe the encounter is "the basket game" scene from Raiders, a "wits" encounter.  So, flavor text might be:


"You turn the corner to find a group of large baskets; men are loading the baskets on to a truck.  An enemy agent lifts the lid of each basket as it is loaded.  You notice one of the lids move slightly; is your contact hiding in the basket?  Which basket was it?"


Rule:  a "1" on the white die turns to a "4"


Now this is easy to implement (and for the other players to help you remember), since you only roll the dice three times.  It has an interesting effect.  The general rules is that white die moves the success track up by the white die result IF your investment exceeds that result.  So for this card, you know that an investment of 3 or less is harmed by this rule, because a "1" turns into a "4", which exceeds your investment, and gets you nothing; but, an investment of 4 or more is actually helped by this rule, as a "1" becomes much better.  Thematically this fits: investing more 'wits' makes it more likely that you'll find the correct basket before the enemy, but not enough wits and you might not make it.


Or perhaps instead it's


Rule:  "If the black die exceeds 4, end the encounter"


Thematically, this means that a high roll for the enemy means they've found Marion before you.  Mechanically, the enemy ordinarily moves toward your city when their roll is lower than their presence (number of cubes) in the region.  Thus, ordinarily high black die rolls are good for you -- less likely the enemy will move toward you.  With this encounter, they're bad.  As a result, do you maybe want to invest more so as to get further along the success track before this happens?  Do you want to invest less but plan to use a dynamite card to cancel an unfavorable enemy roll?  Oops you rolled a 5, do you want to burn a 'script rewrite' card to re-roll, or have you gotten far enough along the track?


Simple rules like these are easy enough to use, but may be substantive enough to make the encounters each feel just a bit different. 


My concern is that without this, after playing a few times, you'll just gloss over the flavor text of the encounters.  "Yadda yadda, the basket game, got it".  Whereas with them, it might be "Oh, the basket game -- this one makes high investment especially valuable and low investment especially bad; how badly do I need this info again?"


Of course it could instead be that each encounter is an entirely distinct mini-game unto itself with particular rules for how it's resolved (e.g. "Choose a basket on the card, then roll both dice; if the white die matches your choice but the black die doesn't, get one success.  Repeat 3 times" or whatever), but I think I prefer a common framework to a mini-game approach in that it will tie in better with the rest of the game, and specifically the game's "penalty currencies" - time, hubris, curses, injuries.  There's another post on that subject, coming up next.