Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday (Belated): Fantasy GM Squared's Front Office!

Is it a Mechanic Monday if it’s on a Thursday? You bet your ass it is!
It’s been a crazy busy week for me, what with work and the theatre company and [my dog] and my poor time management skills and my need to fill every hour with productivity and the smiling oppressive all-crinkling eye of Capitalism and
ANYWAY.  Gonna keep work, work, working away at Fantasy GM Squared (maybe I’ll just go with square cards to double-down on that title?) because it’s got the most legs, legs, legs, marketability.  I even made a Google Form to try and harvest data on just what it is that non-gamers most like about fantasy sports, and will try and spring that on people in the coming weeks.  But today, let’s talk about a mechanic, shall we? Here it is: The Front Office!

Front Office
When a Hero is at the Dedicate level, and the season ends, instead of rotating them again, flip the Hero card over and place it in your Guild’s Front Office.  For the remainder of the game, that Hero, now retired from adventuring, but still adding the wisdom of their experience to the leadership of the Guild, will offer a special ability that you can take advantage of.  The card’s special ability will indicate when in the season it can be used, and how many times, or if it is an ongoing persistent or end-of-game effect.

So this adds some long-term planning to the game.  And it incentivizes you to pick up or trade for players past their prime instead of endlessly returning to the youth well.  Ways I could tinker with this: Put a cap on number of FOH, and/or break the ability into multiple variations based on different slots (aka steal from Pixel Tactics and change the ability based on if the card is slotted into the Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, Defensive Coordinator, etc).  I also anticipate a truly wild selection of powers, including scouting (being able to draft cards-as-yet-revealed), magic (delay or accelerate player aging), rule manipulation, stealing VP or draft picks, otherwise sabotaging other characters, equipping characters, re-rolling dice, better free agent stuff, straight victory points, etc.  So we’ll see.
Anyway today’s MM is short and it’s late but it’s HERE.  Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mechanic Monday: Winding Down an Engine Builder

  Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self! Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there. Gradually Shorter Engines In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round. So engine builders (and th...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Campaigning

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday, let's see if I get something written before sleep overtakes me. I'm still on that Channelers kick, but today I want to talk about a possible campaign path: The Magpie Offensive.  I see this as a military campaign where the PCs are conscripted, volunteers, or mercenaries for an army that is marching to quell Spirit threats and unite the region under a protectorate. There should be free RP sections as interludes between missions, and missions should be chosen by the party.  The army ensures loyalty with intangible rewards as well as artifact items. NOTE: This whole thing is being designed with the Rascal article on militarization in ttrpgs in mind. What is the thrust of the campaign? It's fundamentally one of conquest.  How do I encourage characters to question their presence and their complicity? How much interpersonal violence is an acceptable price to pay for environmental justice? How can party composition affect all this from jump? H...
Post a Comment
Read more