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Mechanic Monday: Fantasy GM Squared Waiver Claims Revisited

Hello, and welcome back to Mechanic Monday.  I’m your host, Fin Coe, and I think I went the whole week without getting suspended on Twitter! To celebrate that, and my recent v1.1 tweak of Fantasy GM Squared, let’s do that thing where a blog post comes out on a Monday and dives into a specific mechanic.  Okay, go!

Draft Order as Waiver Wire
In Fantasy GM Squared, the Draft Order is determined randomly at the start of the game, by drawing the Guild’s Draft Order Markers from a bag and placing them on the Draft Order card.  Starting with the lowest numbered Guild in the Draft Order, players turn in their Draft Coins in exchange for a new Hero.  The Draft Order carries over into the Season; after each Category is revealed, players may make a Waiver Claim, again starting with the lowest numbered Guild in the Draft Order.  However, higher-numbered Waiver Claims, placed on top of previously placed Claims, supersede those Claims, and only the top-most Waiver Claim is awarded the Hero.  Once a player successfully claims a Hero using their Waiver Claim, they move their Guild Marker to the lowest number in the Draft Order, bumping all other Guilds up.  The Draft Order may therefore change as Waiver Claims are made throughout the season.  At the season’s end, the Draft Order is reset based on the number of VP awarded in the season, granting the Guild that scored the fewest points the lowest numbered position in the Draft Order.

So this is a pretty dumb but crucial simplification.  I had two tracks that were essentially inverse of one another; Draft High? Waiver Priority Low.  But one was static and one was dynamic.  And that made the components so confusing that the entire mechanic almost got cut for bloat and finnick.  But instead, the static element just became the starting point for the dynamic element, with a manual intervention from the system at the end to end the cycle / start it back up again.  Two components with a weird relationship now folded into one elegantly intraconnected one.  I’m happy about it.  I also massively simplified Front Office Abilities, which was another mechanic I was soooo proud of all those Mondays ago.  I think that the clean elegance of v1.1 is its strength; not massive mechanic changes (though I do have some of those in mind to build and test) so much as many-tendriled Idea Beasts meeting the cold harsh light of reality and settling into more stable and sensible forms.  1.1 is just the cleaned up version of 1.0, but even that feels nice.  Got to actually update the physical prototype, maybe make a second copy of it for myself now that Those Ironrise Boys have the first one.  And I must make some time tomorrow to get in a solo playtest of Potionarium.  End of post.

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