Expanding On Game Design [Learning From Game Designers]

[overgeeked]

I started a couple of threads awhile ago on similar topics.

D&D 5E (2014) - [+] What can D&D 5E learn from board games?

Note this is a plus thread. If your response to the thread title is "nothing," then this thread isn't for you. Please keep that comment to yourself and move on. The premise of the thread is: D&D 5E can be improved by learning from board games. If you want to argue against the premise of the...

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D&D 5E (2014) - [+] What can D&D 5E learn from video games?

Note this is a plus thread. If your response to the thread title is "nothing," then this thread isn't for you. Please keep that comment to yourself and move on. The premise of the thread is: D&D 5E can be improved by learning from video games. If you want to argue against the premise of the...

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I'm especially interested in what tabletop RPGs can learn from video games. That seems to be where most of the money is, so most of the research is focused on video games.

 

[Art Waring]

No I dont get annoyed by folks talking about it, I'm annoyed it happened but I still really love, perhaps the IDEA of Magic, or what it potentially could still be. Other formats, cube, EDH, all that stuff is still great.

MTG could absolutely be saved by the community if there was a will to do so. The game itself is still great, Wizards in their greed just damaged the historical fabric of the game.

The part that I cannot get over, is that they knew what they were doing. I know in the deepest, darkest corner of my soul, that Maro and Forsythe knew exactly what FIRE was going to do to the game, and they did it anyway to hit a bottom line that Cocks set for them and its embarrassingly upsetting to me still to this day, and I've been out of the community/game for 5 years or something.

Thank you for letting me know Scribe.

FIRE design is certainly not healthy when they are creating artificial set rotations via power creep instead of actually rotating out sets. There is a reason that mtg survived for so long, they had a very good formula for set releases, with the power level of cards rising, then falling again in the next rotation to keep things balanced.

This also matched with mtg sales over the release of older sets (when you have a more powerful block of sets like Urza's block, you got more sales, while sets like Fallen Empires, Homelands, & the Kamigawa block all suffered in terms of sales in comparison to higher powered sets, to the best of my knowledge). They decided to change this formula in recent years, the previous one was designed so sets had an ebb & flow to game design balance so that they would never cross over the line in terms of imbalance (then cards would get banned when they were a mistake).

The current issue (for C-Suite) is that every set needs to sell more than the last one, so they threw out the old model for a profit model. Even the rules have fallen behind when you look at what is & isn't getting banned (but anyway that's for another conversation I guess).

One other thing is that before EDH became the go-to format for the game, is that it was a more interesting format where you had to look over old cards to find new uses for them in a new format. Instead today they are designing cards exclusively for EDH/ Commander and IMHO it is damaging the format because the spike in power creep is not just powerful cards, but more of them, particularly recurring cards that do effectively the same thing to add redundancy to your deck, which defeats the entire purpose of a singleton format like EDH. A good example are legendary creatures, they used to be unique creatures with unique abilities, now many are designed as one-card value engines that only need one other card to combo off.

Just to note for the public: that criticism of a game can come from a place of good intentions, like the hope that a game will improve over time. Not every criticism is a condemnation, as even Richard Garfield has has his own well worded "constructive" criticism's of the current health of the game.

 

[Art Waring]

I started a couple of threads awhile ago on similar topics.

D&D 5E (2014) - [+] What can D&D 5E learn from board games?

Note this is a plus thread. If your response to the thread title is "nothing," then this thread isn't for you. Please keep that comment to yourself and move on. The premise of the thread is: D&D 5E can be improved by learning from board games. If you want to argue against the premise of the...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E (2014) - [+] What can D&D 5E learn from video games?

Note this is a plus thread. If your response to the thread title is "nothing," then this thread isn't for you. Please keep that comment to yourself and move on. The premise of the thread is: D&D 5E can be improved by learning from video games. If you want to argue against the premise of the...

www.enworld.org

I'm especially interested in what tabletop RPGs can learn from video games. That seems to be where most of the money is, so most of the research is focused on video games.

Thanks for letting me know!

I have plenty of material to cover, but I am also kinda busy these days so I will be getting at it in bite-sized bits.

 

[Stalker0]

Reading up on a lot of game designs and also working on my own boardgame, I put forward two keys principals in paramount.

• Focus on the fun. The goal is to find out what about your design is fun and interesting....and push the design in that direction. Less is more, you strip away anything that is holding up the fun until you find the nugget inside. This brings to me that famous quote: "A designer knows they have achieved perfection, not when they have anything left to add, but when they have nothing left to take away".
  
  
• Get it on the table as quickly as possible. Just as writers are taught to write the first draft, and then toss it as they go into the 2nd, a game designer needs to get their design on a table early in the process, and break the game in two. Have playtesters that are not friends or family, and therefore will not spare the designers feelings. You want them to brutally rip into your game, find the issues, find the problems, find out what doesn't work...and the parts that do. From there the game should be redesigned like a phoenix. Far too often people spend too much time on getting the design "perfect" before showing it to anyone, and then feel too invested and attached when testers start to tear it down. A game is not good because a person made it so out of the gate, its good because the designer made a lump of coal that was polished to a diamond by testing and feedback.

 

[overgeeked]

Just as writers are taught to write the first draft, and then toss it as they go into the 2nd

As a writer and editor, I can tell you this is incredibly terrible advice.

 

[Scribe]

Not every criticism is a condemnation, as even Richard Garfield has has his own well worded "constructive" criticism's of the current health of the game.

Do you have a link for this?

 

[Pedantic]

Just to note for the public: that criticism of a game can come from a place of good intentions, like the hope that a game will improve over time. Not every criticism is a condemnation, as even Richard Garfield has has his own well worded "constructive" criticism's of the current health of the game.

I'd argue his most effective criticism of MtG was Netrunner.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with EDH is that multiplayer free-for-all is a terrible basic idea for a conflict game structure, and immediately signs all the players up to either design their own metagame of largely unspoken etiquette, or to just outright play Diplomacy.

 

[Art Waring]

Just as writers are taught to write the first draft, and then toss it as they go into the 2nd

I like the rest of the advice you provided, but this one does not mesh with what I learned in college as an English major. Personally, I always keep everything, especially first drafts because they can contain your unfiltered ideas, or quirky insights that you can expand on and evolve over time.

My personal process involves multiple drafts & iterations, then I take what I like form each one to make a cohesive piece from the best parts. That is just me though, each writer has their own process.

 

[Art Waring]

Do you have a link for this?

Hey Scribe, I am looking for the link as we talked a little bit about this in our last MTG conversation last year. Richard Garfield did some great interviews and I will have to find them again.

 

[Art Waring]

I'd argue his most effective criticism of MtG was Netrunner.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with EDH is that multiplayer free-for-all is a terrible basic idea for a conflict game structure, and immediately signs all the players up to either design their own metagame of largely unspoken etiquette, or to just outright play Diplomacy.

Hi Pendantic! You are right on the money, because Netrunner is one of the games I will be covering in the future (though from a different angle, that it was better than the Cyberpunk 2020 netrunning rules, so people used the Netrunner game instead to simulate netrunning in games at the table).

The thing about EDH is (while I love the format at times) that it goes against the design intent of the game. Standard games are 60 card decks & 20 life (EDH is 100 card singleton & 40 life per player for the uninitiated), this means that a big chunk of cards do little to nothing in EDH. A lightning bolt is perfectly balanced for 1on1 standard games, but for a lightning bolt to be balanced for EDH, it would have to deal 9 damage (for 1 mana), or it would have to hit all three opponents for three damage for 1 mana to have the same effect in an EDH game.

This also means that the most typical strategies don't work as well. Aggro (attacking with creatures), now requires that you deal a total of 120 damage to win. Mill decks need to mill around 300 cards to win. This incentivizes strategies that do not always make for a better game, for example EDH players are not incentivized to attack, as they are wasting their resources while the rest of the players are building value engines waiting for their chance to combo off.

Counter to normal games, the winner at an EDH table is often times the one who is better at table diplomacy (and good at misdirection in regards to threat assessment), or the one who managed to skate under the radar while everyone else was going through the rounds.