Played through the Strategic Model this evening, which went reasonably well. It was a pretty easy victory for the Stronghold, although they rolled well and got a great region on the first turn.
There were a few clarifications, and the sheets could use some reworking. I edited them so that it's possible to use a tracking cube to monitor the attribute values. That should speed up play quite a bit, as there was too much erasing and rewriting.
My initial thought is that it's a little too easy for the Stronghold. Which was the point of making this model to begin with. But I want to play it through a few times in succession before I start the tweaking.
The other issue is that threats might need some work. It's tough coming up with a balanced way for the GM to cause the player's grief, but it's important in such an adversarial style of game. The tricky part is going to be not overwhelming the GM with all the details about how to create threats. I'm thinking in the actual WotA game that I'll maybe just have charts of threats for the GM to choose from, rather than having to build them too much from scratch.
>read leaflet (taken)
>WELCOME TO THE GAME DESIGN BLOG OF PHIL LEWIS!
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Strategic Model
Well, I've switched the project name to Wrath of the Autarch. Like it better, but could change it again later.
Unsurprisingly, kingdom building games are very difficult to design. There are two different scopes to the game: a mission scope and a seasonal scope. Where the mission scope focuses on the roleplay during the session, the seasonal scope is how the results of all the missions affect the different factions and the Stronghold.
It's not really practical to play out a 25 or 30 session campaign to see if it's well balanced. Instead, I'm interested in creating a strategic model, which abstracts details like characters and developments and aspects out, instead focusing on just the high level faction skills, as well as how all the missions interact with each other.
To that end, I'm going to create a model with the following features for each faction:
Developments also are abstracted away. Instead, developments will just affect the key faction skills: stability, population, influence, military, arcana, and technology.
After creating faction sheets, I'm going to define the missions in terms of these new values.
Hopefully this view of the game will yield useful information. Questions like, how long does the game take to complete? Are all the missions equally useful? How balanced are the factions? Are there any clearly better strategies?
If I can build a decent model for the game, I can try to build the missions to reflect the difficulties in the model, and I should have a better shot at making a balanced game, without having to play through it multiple times.
Unsurprisingly, kingdom building games are very difficult to design. There are two different scopes to the game: a mission scope and a seasonal scope. Where the mission scope focuses on the roleplay during the session, the seasonal scope is how the results of all the missions affect the different factions and the Stronghold.
It's not really practical to play out a 25 or 30 session campaign to see if it's well balanced. Instead, I'm interested in creating a strategic model, which abstracts details like characters and developments and aspects out, instead focusing on just the high level faction skills, as well as how all the missions interact with each other.
To that end, I'm going to create a model with the following features for each faction:
- Stability
- Population
- Influence
- Military
- Arcana
- Technology
- Characters
- Regions
Developments also are abstracted away. Instead, developments will just affect the key faction skills: stability, population, influence, military, arcana, and technology.
After creating faction sheets, I'm going to define the missions in terms of these new values.
Hopefully this view of the game will yield useful information. Questions like, how long does the game take to complete? Are all the missions equally useful? How balanced are the factions? Are there any clearly better strategies?
If I can build a decent model for the game, I can try to build the missions to reflect the difficulties in the model, and I should have a better shot at making a balanced game, without having to play through it multiple times.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The Endgame
The Fall of the Autarch departs from most RPGs in that it has a campaign end condition. There are a few games that have such a thing, like Burning Empires, which FotA draws some inspiration from. In that game there is a single value, Disposition, for both the heroes and the Vaylen (the big bad of Burning Empires), which underlies how strong the forces are. Various "maneuvers" are played against the GM, who controls the Vaylen faction. These will affect the Disposition of one side or the other. When a side has their Disposition drop down to 0, they effectively get what they want out of the conflict.
Most other kingdom building games don't have such an end condition. Instead, it follows a more traditional RPG path, where each side simply continues playing, until some narrative ending is reached. The bad guy is slain, people stop showing up, etc.
For FotA, I'm leaning towards following the Burning Empires model. Instead of Disposition, though, the faction Stability value will probably be the important piece. The mission types will usually either affect the Autarch's Stability or the Stronghold's Stability (occasionally both). When one of these values drops down to 0, the campaign is over, and that side has collapsed.
My main worry about using a single value is that the game may have a period where it's pretty obvious that one side or the other has won, but it takes forever to play out. This happens quite a bit in boardgames, and isn't usually very fun. In boardgames, a player can frequently concede, which is certainly possible in the RPG as well, although that isn't quite as fun. Maybe there can be some "high risk/high reward" type missions that will allow a side to get back in it, or become completely broken. That is, spend Stability as a last hurrah, which is certainly a more climactic way to end the campaign than getting nickle and dimed to death.
Something I'll have to think about.
Most other kingdom building games don't have such an end condition. Instead, it follows a more traditional RPG path, where each side simply continues playing, until some narrative ending is reached. The bad guy is slain, people stop showing up, etc.
For FotA, I'm leaning towards following the Burning Empires model. Instead of Disposition, though, the faction Stability value will probably be the important piece. The mission types will usually either affect the Autarch's Stability or the Stronghold's Stability (occasionally both). When one of these values drops down to 0, the campaign is over, and that side has collapsed.
My main worry about using a single value is that the game may have a period where it's pretty obvious that one side or the other has won, but it takes forever to play out. This happens quite a bit in boardgames, and isn't usually very fun. In boardgames, a player can frequently concede, which is certainly possible in the RPG as well, although that isn't quite as fun. Maybe there can be some "high risk/high reward" type missions that will allow a side to get back in it, or become completely broken. That is, spend Stability as a last hurrah, which is certainly a more climactic way to end the campaign than getting nickle and dimed to death.
Something I'll have to think about.
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