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Mechanic Monday: Under or Overperforming in Fantasy GM Squared

 Yeah okay definitely didn’t just finish the last post, doomscroll for a hot second, then start in on this one.  Yeah so anyway, today I want to knock out my first actual honest-to-God Mechanic Monday in a while by barfing out some thoughts for Fantasy GM Squared that came to me while I was listening to an episode of Dan Thurot’s Space-Biff Space-Cast where he interviewed TauCeti Deichmann (about Sidereal Confluence, which I am absolutely going to buy the second edition of).

I know what you’re thinking: Fantasy GM Squared? That old chestnut? That game from the 2010’s? Isn’t it done by now? Interviewer, go fuck yourself.  I had a brainwave about a way to inject another element of Fantasy Sports into it, so while I don’t know if this would actually help the game, my brainworms compel me to get it down and puzzle it out.


Hot and Cold Streaks by Class

In Fantasy GM Squared, Heroes may out-perform or under-perform their printed abilities based on how the season unfolds.  The Category cards have classes printed on them and the Scoring cards have bonuses and penalties printed on them, and each combination will result in a hot or cold streak for all played Heroes of that class this Season.  For example, the Magic Category card lining up with the 3 VP Scoring card results in a bonus for all Fools and Outlaws, and a penalty for all Paladins.  As each streak is revealed, players should take a Streak token and place it on all of the Heroes of that class, with either the Hot (bonus) or Cold (penalty) side facing up.


So yeah, that’s my big idea.  I figure we could fit a bunch of little tiny circle tokens in between all the Heroes on the punchboard that are red on one side and blue on the other, and they can represent the way that players and teams in real life sports have better or worse games and seasons than the analytics would predict.  In earlier brainstorms, I had mused on having all Heroes roll a d4 to add to their stats, but this feels - more fun? I’ll talk to the Ironrise fellas and see what they think.  If I was a real brainiac, I’d love to come up with a system where players’ predictions shaped the outcomes; like a world where everyone revealed secret votes, and the most-predicted and least-predicted outcomes came true.  But that might be a bit too fancy.  This mechanic FEELS like a sweet spot that you can play with or without to add in just the right amount of gradual RNG.

That’s all the time we have folks; tune in next week for [whatever I have time and inclination to write]!

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