Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: We're All In The Same Boast With Out of Mana

Hallo hallo hallo.  I’d have liked to get this Mechanic Monday written sooner but last week’s focus was a Writer application, and along with the press of grants reports and proposals due in the month of March, and those deadlines needed the dedicated hours.  And now I’m watching GBBO (a Bread Week no less) while I work, which is hardly a RECIPE for success.  But I still think I can get this post out on time, especially as I did spend a good chunk of my drifting off last night pondering Magic! at the Gathering.  That’s right, it’s another Out of Mana!

I’d like to take a stab at flying, trample, regenerate, some classics there, the tribal concept, cipher, scrying, kicker, but the one I want to write about this week is the other keyword from the Kaldheim set: Boast.

Cascading Conditional Triggered Abilities

In GREEM, the ordinary turn order is alternating actions by each player, but that order is disrupted whenever the conditions are met for a piece’s ability.  When a piece’s ability conditions are met, that player gets to take the piece’s special action, which may in turn trigger another piece’s ability conditions.

Lots of potential here - not surprising, considering achievements are a videogame mechanic that more and more analog games are adapting or drawing inspiration from, and that’s basically what we’ve got here.  What I like about Boast is that it incentivizes attacking, a higher-risk higher-reward choice for a lot of creatures.  To mitigate that risk and maximize the payoff, you have a balance of building an easy combo, or taking wild one-off swings for a big quick score.  I’d like to see a good mix of situationally-easy-to-achieve-but-weak-effect and situationally-complex-to-set-up abilities, which would also allow players to build combos backwards.  Piece A’s ability requires 2x,2y, and z, and z requires an equal number of x and y, y requires an x, and x triggers itself.

Is this a game of removal, taking opposing pieces off the board? Control, to outmaneuver the other player and choke their combos and options? An engine builder toward a highest achievement to fulfil the conditions of? Heck, a la Infinity Shards (kind of a disappointment tbh), Onitama, or any number of civ games, it could have multiple victory conditions, some moons more shootable than others.

I also think pieces would have ranks of some type, to act as tie-breakers, to further limit condition triggers or focus the effects of their abilities.  Fun shit! I should mock this out further.  Anyway, I’ve still got my Accountability Club email to send, so I’ll leave it there for 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: 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

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