Has anyone more infos about WotC Gamma World Booster Packs?

As described on the newest Nodwick entry (ps238principal: Roll to see if your favorite game can save vs. CCGs...) WotC is/will be selling booster packs for Gamma World (Might be old news, but I just noticed it).

Has anyone more information about how this works? After all, if successful it might also be integrated into other RPG lines.

The box set includes a non-randomized deck of 80 cards. This is sufficient for play.

There is also a randomized set of 120 cards, sold in 8 pack boosters. The cards are divided into commons, uncommons and rares, 40 of each. The box set includes one booster pack.

If I'm completely misreading your question and telling you stuff you already know, um, apologies in advance. But I believe this is how it works:

Gamma World uses two elements in card format: Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech.

Alpha Mutations represent random fluctuations in reality that alter the characters. These fluctuations typically change from combat to combat, though they can flux during combat itself, or the use of them could even backfire.

Omega Tech represents treasure the party finds - powerful items of alien tech, from advanced human civilizations, etc. Laser swords, ray guns, jet packs. While they can last for multiple combats, such tech is unreliable and could break down after any fight (though one can occasionally salvage something useful from the remains.)

Now, note that both of these elements are designed to be both random, and also regularly changing. Now, you could provide these benefits by rolling on random 'mutation' and 'tech' tables - but the card format tends to be a quicker way for the DM to just deal out some random mutations/treasures, and have players discard the old ones when they go away. (Rather than writing down and then erasing new abilities every combat.)

So, that's the premise behind the cards themselves. You don't, however, actually need to buy any boosters to play the game. The game comes with a full deck of 80 cards (40 Alpha Mutations, 40 Omega Tech), which should easily provide you with what you need. If players don't have any cards of their own, everything gets drawn from the DM deck without a problem.

However, boosters exist. From what I can tell, the boosters all contain random cards from a seperate 120 card deck, so you won't have any overlap with the deck that comes with the game.

Why would you want to buy boosters? A DM might pick them up simply to have even more random results. A player might pick some up and build their own mutation and tech decks to randomly draw from - there are some rules for this (to prevent people from just stacking up on their favorite cards), and even then, you might sometimes have to draw from the DMs deck anyway.

So, booster decks are available to enhance the game. Investing in them, as a player, might provide a small boost in your power level (in that you will be drawing items and mutations you are already a fan of), but I suspect the benefits will be minor at best.

How will this be integrated into other games? From what I understand, some card expansions are already being planned for D&D. I think I've heard of Fortune cards (which would provide random events during combat to liven things up), and possibly Item cards (which really are just another way of randomizing treasure.)

At its core, there is relatively little difference between using these cards and just rolling on random tables to have stuff happen or to generate items. The cards are, obviously, more expensive, but also provide the benefit of convenience - it simply is quicker to shuffle a deck and pass out some cards than to have everyone roll on a table and write things down.

None of these approaches requires booster packs to play the game. Gamma World comes with plenty of cards on its own. D&D Fortune cards and Item cards will be purely optional - if a DM wants to use them, they can, and if not, they can either avoid such randomness or design random event tables as desired.

Thanks for the explanation. However card rarity implies that some cards will just be better than others. Maybe I'm completely wrong about that, but why else would they be rare?

Is there some mechanic that prevents the player from stacking his deck with rares other than they have to be different, and to avoid ridicule from fellow players and the GM? I know of such players that are resist 20 to that kind of ridicule.

MrMyth said:

None of these approaches requires booster packs to play the game.

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Technically Magic: The Gathering also doesn't require booster packs to be played. The starters are enough. But I think we all know how the reality looks like.

Derren said:

Technically Magic: The Gathering also doesn't require booster packs to be played. The starters are enough. But I think we all know how the reality looks like.

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Doesn't feel like a really good comparison, at least not to me.

If playing Magic competitively, you want more cards to be able to build better decks. That doesn't really map over to a situation like this, where you don't have the same sort of direct competition nor do you get any huge power boost from buying the boosters.

If not playing Magic competitively, one is probably just playing for fun, and one might get more cards to try out different decks or keep the game from getting stale. But the cards are one element in an RPG - the bulk of the entertainment comes more from the adventure itself, and that will constantly be changing from one session to the next.

I'm sure some people will go hog-wild and buy tons of these boosters. Just like some people have closets filled with D&D minis or jars filled with Dice. Some people have one battle-mat for the game, others have hundreds of dungeon tiles, and others don't bother with mapping the game out at all.

Buying more cards is a core part of magic. But the boosters here are an accessories, just like D&D minis. Some will pick up tons of them, some will snag a few packs, and many won't bother with them at all.

OchreJelly said:

Thanks for the explanation. However card rarity implies that some cards will just be better than others. Maybe I'm completely wrong about that, but why else would they be rare?

Is there some mechanic that prevents the player from stacking his deck with rares other than they have to be different, and to avoid ridicule from fellow players and the GM? I know of such players that are resist 20 to that kind of ridicule.

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I'll try and take a closer look when I have a chance (though I only have the one booster to make comparisons from.) The rares didn't seem exceptionally more powerful than normal cards - maybe slightly so, doing an extra die of damage or whatever, but the rarity seemed more about them being less common or more exciting mutations than anything else. But I'm going on memory and an extremely small sample size here, so I might be wrong about that.

From what I recall about the player deck, the limitations mainly are that:
-I don't think they can have more than 2 copies of any given card;
-They have a 50/50 chance, I think, of having to draw from the DM deck anyway;
-Pretty much all mutations are beneficial, so the differences between getting some cool mutation you prefer for the character, and some other random mutation from the DM deck, is pretty slim.

Again, not having seen all the mutations, I can't say this for sure. But I get the sense that a player with their own personally chosen mutation deck will have less of a boost in power than... well, any D&D game in which one character is min/maxed and the others aren't. The characters in Gamma World just seem on a tightly balanced enough scale, and the mutations are unreliable enough, that I can't forsee any real abuse of the system.

Gabe from Penny Arcade gives his opinion on Gamma World and the boosters here: Penny Arcade - More Things Than Are Dreamt Of
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I have no doubt that someone out there in TV Land is in the process of transcribing the cards into a form convenient for printing on 3x5 cards, if only for personal use.

I heard from the manager of my local game store that they want people to buy 2 booster packs in order to participate on Gamma World Day. I agree with Gabe that $3.99 for a booster pack is awfully pricey for 8 cards. My store sells them rock bottom for $2.00 each, and I've seen them for sale online for $3.00 each. You should keep an eye on the prices to make you don't pay too much.

And in a couple months time once the newness of Gamme World is over... some stores will probably start opening up packages of boosters and sell cards singly anyway. So any player who really cares that much will be able to buy those cards that they want when the time is right.