Skip to main content

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.

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

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...
Post a Comment
Read more