Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Out of Mana, Full of Tokens

Time for another Out of Mana! How many of these am I going to do? Let’s see if I can get to ten or twelve of these and then evaluate.  That’s a ways off either way so I’d better get writing.

As I don’t believe the pandemic will end anytime soon, I expect the only gaming I’ll do this year (for the first half at the very least) will be remote/digital, I’m looking forward to when MTG: Arena hits iOS, and may even dip my toe sooner using my laptop.  As long as I strictly limit my budget, I think it’d be another fun way to get some social gaming into my diet - between Terraforming Mars and Star Wars: Squadrons, I’ve spent a grand whopping total of $50 on at least 50 hours of human-to-human social time gaming, and I’ve actually really enjoyed it.  I’ve grown even weirder in isolation, and my speech patterns especially veer wildly between halting and Podcast Played At 1.5x Speed, my sentences twisting and splitting and tangling unresolved.  A little extra human contact, attached to an exercise for my brain, would be quite welcome.

Anyways, who knows when I’ll actually get to try that (hopefully it lines up with the release of Strixhaven, the set I’m most intrigued by), but let’s get to the actual Mechanic, shall we?

Token Energy

In GREEM, you generate Tokens every turn, which are currency for playing cards, the strength and health of a played card, or form the basis of an Underling.  Cards may generate their own Tokens, move Tokens, imbue single- or multi-Token Underlings (or other played cards) with special abilities, or perform special effects by spending Tokens on that card.  Underlings may attack opposing Underlings, cards, or the opposing player; in an attack, the party with fewer Tokens loses all of its Tokens (which usually results in its removal) and the same amount of Tokens is removed from the other party (which may or may not result in its removal).

So this is inspired by less of a formal MTG ability and more the general concept of counters and tokens, which I have always liked; there’s so much flavour and evocation to most cards, but then there’s this other side of it that has these abstracted markers, for creatures, enhancements to those creatures.  Notably, MTG clearly states that counters are not tokens and vice versa, but what this blog presupposes is: what if they were? And also what if we blended that with one of my all-time favourite alternatives to Mana, the Energy from Magi-Nation: Duel (RIP you glorious mess).  Y’all know me, much as I like the storytelling I do in games, I also love abstracting away things and letting players view things as pure numbers and puzzles.  So blobs of mana attacking each other is pleasing to me.  I also think that there could be other types of Token, bestowed by cards; First Strike as a red Token that can be added to an Underling stack of base Tokens, but also there are cards with abilities that require specifically red Tokens, etc.  I think I’ve written before about One Currency For Everything but this is a new extreme of it.  And I love it!

Alright, I’m writing this for next week as I’m actually going to go write a TTRPG Tuesday now.  Til next time!

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