Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Elegant Turn Order Cards

I kind of wanted to write about some mechanics from BURN today (a 2p asymmetric coop set in the world of ROOT) but I ran out of time.  Time is a funny thing in this quarantined world we abruptly find ourselves in.  Elastic and brittle all at once, stretching out and snapping without warning into unlikely instants.  I wanted to write about BURN, a game about someone inside a city trying to help someone trapped inside a city to escape.  Instead I’m going to touch real quick on a mechanic from the reserve pile.  Let’s take a look.

Elegant Turn Order Cards
In GREEM, a 4p game, each player (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow) has 4 initiative cards (numbered 1-4) for the 4 turns that comprise the game, with each number having a different player colour tiebreaker sequence.  At the start of each turn, each player will secretly select an initiative card to play face-down.  Once all players have selected a card, reveal them all simultaneously; turn order will be based on the lowest card played, with each number having a different tie-breaker (All ‘One’ cards break ties in the order of Red>Yellow>Green>Blue, whereas all ‘Two’ cards break ties in the order of Yellow>Green>Blue>Red, etc).

This mechanic is particularly utilitarian.  Very little attached to it, though it can scale up and down a bit, and probably be expanded upon a little bit before it loses its nice clean elegance.  You could also replace/conjoin numbers with roles for role selection.  Just a practical little widget for trying out in a design where you need to determine order but wish to bake in some choice and player agency.
Tune in next week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: The Secret Calendar

Welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Have I done any this year? Looks like no! On pace to be a pretty low-posting year I guess. Today I actually have a full-fledged one pager TTRPG to share.  I was listening to a Ludology with Camilla Zamboni as the guest and was inspired by her collection Roll for Learning.  The Secret Calendar came to me pretty much fully formed as I walked and listened to the episode, though I do want to acquire RfL to get layout inspo. Anyhow, the first draft can be found HERE .  I think this could be a fun activity for students (was also thinking of Wolfenoot) and maybe I’ll publish it or submit it at some point. Okay I’m out of practice so that's it buh bye!
Post a Comment
Read more

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

TTRPG Tuesday: Let's Do That Hockey

Yo uh is it another TTRPG Tuesday? I think it is! I said I’d bring something to Playtest Zero on Thursday, and you know what’s been rattling around my head? Well, Channelers still, and Cold Iron Company, but today in particular: this post on mechanics inspired by Blue Lock.  But I don’t want to make the Blue Lock fan game - I want to take an already insane feeling system and map it on a world I care more about - Tartans Hockey Live! THL is, as everyone knows, the narrative fiction podcast series that exists entirely in my head and various Google docs, following a ragtag team of players in the fictional Hockey Elite League, which includes games played atop a moving train, trapped in a time loop, or in the shadow of Goshzilla, the Great Lakes Kaiju.  While THL follows a specific cast, I think for this game (which I might call Outside Edges or WHEEL BABY WHEEL or the Top Shelf system) we’ll play a lot looser, somewhere in the middle of the “This Is An Insane Approach To A Real S...
Post a Comment
Read more