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Player Roles
Posted on | January 28, 2009 | No Comments
Yesterday I discussed a two tiered card grouping idea, with a broad division into Science and Context, and then subcategories underneath each. I mentioned that it would mesh well with today’s ideas about player roles, so without further ado:
An important part of the theme and balance is the role each player takes.
Here’s the obligatory comparison to Magic and WoW. In Magic, all the players are identical; it’s only the deck construction that’s differnet. Same life, same restrictions on cards, etc. Choosing how to balance the five colors creates the different deck personalities. In WoW, you’re playing a hero, and different heroes have different strengths and weaknesses. They have different life totals and can equip/ally different cards.
My first stab at player roles was to let them have widely different options. They could play a novice scientist, a veteran scientist, a university, a company, a lab, a city/region, a country, etc. Each of these would have different strengths and weaknesses and different goals. While I really liked the idea (I think it was the first thing I actually starred in my notebook), I think it would be difficult to balance, time consuming to learn, and take some of the competitiveness out of the game if you and your opponent were doing different things. I could make it so you can only play against someone of the same type, but with a TCG, that either ups the expense or limits the number of people you can play this. Maybe this concept will see the light in a video game someday, where it’s shortcomings could be handled better.
My current take on the idea (which amazes me that I didn’t think of this first) is to let the players play different kinds of scientists. You could have a physicist character, an applied mathematician character, a microbiologist, etc. This way, more fields of science can be added later, and the player heroes can be included in sets that have cards that play to them. For instance, if there was a geologist role, it would come in a set that included things like oil companies, bridge building, earthquake reinforcement, etc. As new sets were released, they could introduce new character roles with accompanying cards, as well as include some fresh cards for existing character roles. This way, rather than being stuck with five colors or eight classes, the breadth of options can increase, in addition to the depth.
I’ll post more tomorrow about my view of the role of fields of science on the game. What I won’t post about (because I’m frustrated about being unable to answer) is what the goal of the gameplay is. But when I figure that out, it will be a happy day!
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