I’m definitely as excited to see Gamma World coming this year as some of you are, and I get the uncertainty and dislike for the idea of random booster packs that some have expressed. I would like to remind everyone that the game is about eight months from releasing and the only things that most people are commenting on are just based on the idea of the game and the cards.
To clear up some confusion that I’ve seen, the iteration I played with Rich doesn’t use the cards for character creations or base character powers. I got a random mutation at the beginning of the day which I pulled from the deck, and once per combat the mutation could randomly change, prompting a new draw from the deck. It was a fun and awesome way to keep things interesting, change up the encounters, and keep me guessing as to what would happen next. While I found myself hoping for a fun or powerful mutation from time to time, I never had a mutation that I didn’t enjoy in some way.
Now we didn’t use player decks and DM decks, we only had the DM deck. I want to see the full iteration before I jump to any conclusions, but I may just run the game without player decks and just have cards in the DM deck that support their concepts/play style. But the jury is still out on that one because I haven’t seen the whole game or exactly how player/DM decks will work.
As to the cards themselves, a booster pack will give players and DMs more options, not necessarily better options. I personally love more options, and having them in card form to draw from a deck during combat had an awesome visceral feel. The random card model I can live with, especially since this isn’t a game that lends itself easily to power gaming. You are encouraged to randomly roll up a character’s stats and base mutations, and you get random power draws during combat. You can definitely build to be uber powerful and tweak everything to your advantage, but again, it just doesn’t seem like that kind of game to me.
In the end, if you’re worried about the impact to your wallet or have some kind of deep hatred of collectible cards (damn you baseball cards for ruining everything!) – I would very strongly point out that you don’t need to pick up the random boosters to make a good, fun character in Gamma World. Those of us who want them, will buy them. Those of us who don’t, won’t. But with all that said, I would ask that we all just wait for final judgments until the game is out and we’ve had a chance to run through it or at least looked at it. Heck, I’ve played it and I still don’t know everything about the inner workings and complexities of the game.
