Not an RPG, but Project: Shaper, a make your own cards and duel with 'em game

[Elliott]

I'm not sure if Indie Rpgs is the right place, as this is not an RPG that has popped into my head. Rather, it is an idea for a dueling card game that isn't collectible.

One with 99.99% about what I love about trading card games in it and %.01 of what I hate about them.

Currently, it's in Early Design, and doesn't have a proper name. Just call it Project: Shaper for now.

It's a set of rules for building cards with a point-buy system. How is it point buy? Why, more powerful cards have a higher initial cost in order to bring them into play. Cards are more powerful if they have higher stats, more and/or more powerful special abilities, especially abilities that trigger - i.e., "Whenever you would draw any number of cards, instead draw double that number of cards;" "Whenever a character you control is destroyed, deal 2 damage to a character your opponent controls" - rather than being activated by your expenditure of actions or resources.

You also build an avatar that determines what kinds of resources you can spend at most every turn, and build a deck of 60 cards.

Then you go about proving that your unique cards are better than someone else's cards, by smacking that bitch's deck across the room using the integrated dueling rules.

Now my questions are:

   1. Does this sound cool?

   2. How workable is this idea?

   3. What design pitfalls should I look out for?

   4. There's no freaking way I'm going to be able to hold big tournaments of this, is there?

Thanks in advance!

[Vulpinoid]

   1. Does this sound cool?

This could also work as a basis for a magic/power system in a roleplaying game, so I wouldn't see it as totally beyond the bounds of this forum. After all, we are here to explore new ideas aren't we?

   2. How workable is this idea?

It's workable, but setting up a deck where you have to set up the individual cards first will be very time consuming and a turn-off to a lot of players. The kinds of players who this would appeal to are those who love playing with mechanics and finding loop-holes in rules. Which leads to question 3...

   3. What design pitfalls should I look out for?

One of the mechanics that dissappeared quickly in Magic the Gathering was the concept of mutlipliers on cards (eg. double this particular value), because as a one off it may be balance, but once you apply twice (eg. x2 x2 = four times the value), or if applied three times (eg. x2 x2 x2 = eight times the value), things get expontially out of control. Be careful with these, unless you have some kind of balancing mechanism in play.

Also beware of other combos that boost one another to give unstoppable effects (eg. One cards deal instant death but with a saving throw, one card allows any effect to ignore saving throws...combine the two and it's game over).

   4. There's no freaking way I'm going to be able to hold big tournaments of this, is there?

Probably not, especially if you are allowing player to build their own cards, within decks that they also construct themselves. This is very much leading to opportunities for "munchkin"-"min-max"-"powergaming" modes of play. Competitive "rule-playing" rather than collaborative "role-playing".

Allowing people to generate their own cards may stop the rich people with duplicates of all the "uber-rare super" cards from winning all the games, but it would be very time consuming at a tournament level because the organizers would have to confirm all the individual cards in a deck for legality, then confirm the decks legality. Most organiser just don't have time for that sort of thing, especially when there are more than a half dozen potential players in the competition.

Something that might minimise a few of these effects might be to include common cards, uncommon cards and personalised cards. You might force avatars to have more common cards than uncommons, and similarly, more uncommons than personalised.

The common cards might cover the resources and a few simple effects that an avatar type has to include in their deck. Uncommon cards might include a much wider range of effects that are classed into themes of some type (summonable creatures, direct damage, healing effects, artifacts, etc). For the personalised cards, this is where players can get really creative. You might allow a player to customise a card based on one of the uncommon profiles and add some cost to it in order to give it a twist (eg. a summonable creature might get a basic ranged attack for 1 extra cost, or an armour transformation might provide extra protection against a specific type of attack for an extra cost, etc.)

If you make a game like this too open, then you might as well not even be using the cards. It will get very unwieldy very quickly.

Of course, if you choose to do it more as a role-playing game where players have to research the magic represented by the cards, or make friends with their summonable allies...that could work.

Just some ideas.

V

[Seth M. Drebitko]

1. Does this sound cool?
Very awesome I have pondered the same concept for ages due to the monetary investment that sucks with ccg
2. How workable is this idea?
If done right, very. I can see extensive hours...weeks of play test trying to mix and match abilities to make sure things stay even, in the end it would be great though.
3. What design pitfalls should I look out for?
In my pondering the concept that I have come across which provides more balance is that players can only choose abilities from a pre set list. Basically imagine if instead of buying the latest set of whatever you had 25 boosters, you purchased a small perfect bound booklet giving some fluff (if needed) as well as the new abilities introduced in the set.
Another thing I would do in this case is make a game that uses small decks, for example magi nation functions on a 40 card deck, and accomplishes this by recycling your discard pile. The cycling of a discard pile aside from being convenient adds a new layer of strategy to the game.
4. There's no freaking way I'm going to be able to hold big tournaments of this, is there?
Off the bat no, but I would still set up rules for a tourney that way individual groups can set up their own if they have the desire.

I would say the basis of your business end could work as follows.

Players can upload cards on-line allowing others to vote on them and create a giant database.
From this data base can be farmed pre made cards that can be grouped with similar cards and sold in a non-collectable manor. This would be simple to do once there are some more POD card companies out there.
You can sell uniform blank cards, as well as the booklets providing all the optional rules.

Just my 2 cents for the moment, maybe if we could see some of the mechanics behind this a unique method for delivery may arise from how the game is played.
Regards, Seth

[AdAstraGames]

I happen to be close to ordering a set of magic card sized pre-perfed laser printable cards, plus deck sleeves.

I'm looking for about 12 more pre-orders before I commit the money.

For $6, you get 6 sheets of 9 cards (54 total), and 54 sleeves to put them in so they'll shuffle nicely, plus an MS-Word table template for putitng in your text and artwork.

If you're interested, email me at ken.burnside@gmail.com

[Paul Czege]

Hey Elliott,

Check out Infinite Armies:

http://www.btrc.net/html/iarmies.html

Paul

[Satanman]

Question 1, regarding coolness

This sounds like the sort of customized deck vs. customized deck game I've been looking for. I love the idea of CCGs exactly as much as I hate the way that they're marketed, produced, and sold. I believe that this would solve many, if not all of my problems.

Question 2, regarding workness

I have faith that a person (though a group would be helpful) with enough love for this idea could make it work wonderfully.

Question 3, regarding Pitfalls

I second Vulpinoid's idea of creating common cards, or at least simple templates for them which would cut down on many things that could easily stop this game in its tracks, especially player arguments. Clearly defining what a card can and cannot do is going to be important, I don't think that the common line "if a card contradicts anything stated in these rules, the card's text takes prescience" is going to work in this case. In every card game I've ever played I've had at least one rules difference with someone that had to be brought before an official or researched extensively to resolve, and its probably unavoidable, but in a game like this I think you'll want to reduce those possibilities as much as possible.

Also, in a game like this it would probably be good to give some incentive to players to create wildly unique decks to avoid the trend in most card games that create a single build for each possible path to success that dominates the field. Maybe the inherent nature of a game with customizable cards will make this concern invalid, though the point would be lost if the mechanics supported six or so decks sporting cards with particular mechanics dominating the field and which everyone was copying in order to play competitively.

Question 4, regarding Tourneyness

With a solid enough system and enough support among the player/organizer base I believe it could be done. In fact I'd like to think that the tournaments for such a game could be the most competitive and enjoyable in the deck vs deck genre. If you want them bad enough, and create a system that upholds their ease, it would be a beautiful thing to see.

Good luck! I'd also like to hear more about the development of your project as you get along!