I seem to have designed a waiting game...
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Paul,
The first thing that came to mind was Uno. For most people, they play with the house rule that cards played against you can get passed on with an appropriate card - "Take 4 cards" is played against you, so you play "Reverse" and now it's passed back to the original person, etc.
Maybe you could do some kind of thing with Negations that allow players to either pass it along, or reverse who it lands on.
Alternatively, maybe there's a mechanic that will allow people to remove other people's Negations? At which point you want to spend your Negation before it gets taken from you.
Chris
Paul Czege:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on June 17, 2011, 11:53:25 AM
Seems like it would be simplest to either make the negations blind to ordering...
...for example: when a new thing comes up for resolution during a scene, anybody who's already spent a negation so far in the scene may choose to move their negation to this new thing. This way going first would certainly attract a negation, but it would also be possible that the player in question would choose to move the negation to somebody else later in the scene; going first or second would not be an advantage, as the guy with the negation would choose where to put his negation freely. This would also change the story-telling in that new developments in the scene could provide a new lease of life to previously failed actions, which might or might not be something you want.
Now that's interesting. Maybe instead of "negations" I call them "blocks". The game already has tokens for another purpose. Maybe I make four tokens that say something on one side that indicates an unspent block, and "blocked" on the other. Then in play you have your unspent token in front of you, and you flip it to "blocked" and put it in front of another player when they try to claim something on their victory path that you want to stop. But you can always move it later. Which frees up the player you blocked first to try again to "murder a named NPC" or whatever.
Then when does the scene end? When all players who aren't blocked have claimed something on their victory path? What if a player with a token decides for whatever reason he doesn't want to use it to block someone? Probably doesn't matter? Scene ends when all players who aren't blocked have claimed something on their victory path.
Hmm. What prevents a player from moving his block back and forth between players as running interference to keep them from claiming something on their victory paths? Can only move the token once? That re-institutes the waiting game. Can't give it back to someone who had already been blocked? That creates a kingmaker strategy where I maybe use my token to block you, and then I unblock you, to give you unblockable access to a victory condition that other players can't block. So, you can move it as much as you want, but you can't give it back as a block to someone that you personally had blocked previously in the current scene?
What do I call the unspent side of the token?
Paul
davide.losito:
Hm... sad to know the timer didn't work, it seemed a good suggestion at the INC table.
Maybe you can try something like this: you can use a number of negation in the game equal to the steps you already achieved in your victory path.
So a player that have 1 victory step achieved may use 1 negation. If he wants to use his next negation, he needs to achieve another step.
Then you may insert a "fan-mail"-like rule so that a player can have ONE AND ONLY ONE free negation to use, if he is the one who got the more "fan-mail"-like token in the previous scene.
Callan S.:
Quote
And then when all the negations have been used you can roleplay something from your victory path free and clear.
Why is that part there? How is it important to the design that someone can get off scott free like that? I'm not saying it isn't important, but just on it's own I don't understand why there is a 'avoid all adversity' path available?
A design thought comes to mind to hinge this entirely on sympathetic reaction from other players. They all have the capacity to crush the free and clear, any one of them. Much like a GM duty, they judge whether they crush it based on whether the player paid with enough roleplay (whatever 'paid' means to the subjective listener), or just sat there waiting cagily.
Paul Czege:
Hey Callan,
That's the core mechanic of the game. You win the little card game, and it doesn't give you the sole right to fulfill something from your personal victory path. It gives you the right to stop someone else from fulfilling something from theirs. If I switch it to the winner(s) of the card game getting the exclusive power to fulfill things from their victory paths, I think it would take a lot of energy out of what the other players choose to do in the scenes; all of their roleplaying would be just...uh...the roleplaying equivalent of good sportsmanship; they'd just want to end the scene and get on to another one where they might be able to actually progress on their own victory path.
Paul
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