TV Tropes Trading Card Game

1) Comparing The Hero to The Scrappy in terms of popularity is just plain silly in this case because The Scrappy is one of the dozen or three character tropes that automatically specify a fan reaction. If you really want to show proof on concept, compare, say, Beast Man and Barrier Warrior, since neither of those has automatic popularity considerations. There is only a small percentage of character tropes that inherently make a character more popular within any particular sufficiently large subset of fans. What do you call the category of fans that hate Knight in Shining Armor but like Spirit Advisor? Obviously this may be more than one group, but can you define multiple categories that fit?...without making those categories too specific to be meaningful?

Or are most character/characterization tropes just value-neutral? Of course, at that point, if the game is based around popularity, what's the point of playing Noble Savage if it doesn't mess with popularity in any way? Obviously it'd be good to play if it can help you indirectly, but how would Noble Savage help in the case of a popularity contest?

2) SP are Story Points. They were supposed to represent influence on the story. In the case of characters, SP represented the staying power of a character—how long they remained in the story before being Put on a Bus (sent to the appropriate discard pile). (Side note: I don't know if it ever got into the rules, but there were effectively three discard piles: Away, Dead, and Dead & Gone, depending on how the trope could be brought back.) Anyway, the SP on tropers represented the ability of that troper to affect the story—the capacity to add ideas was not infinite, and the troper would effectively "loose interest" in the project if their ideas never paid off or too many things they hated showed up.

3) I would say that Magic has four basic types: Creature, Land, Instant, and Enchantment, with artifacts and sorceries being derivative—I'm not counting Planeswalkers as a fifth type since they're only a year and a half old. (In short, the four types are the things you hit people with, the things you use to pay for stuff, the things that have one-time effects, and that things that sit around and give generally passive boosts.) If we're talking about mandatory inclusions, lands plus any other card type (except perhaps enchantment and planeswalker) are sufficient to win a game. (Magic being Magic, you don't even need that much, but there's no need to go into the corner cases here.)

Ignoring the troper cards, which I was never particularly attached to and which were designed separately, the core system of the old game had four parts:

• "Permanent" tropes—the Character tropes and their derivatives; since characters didn't swing for damage or anything like that, the main thing separating characters and applied phelbotinum was that almost every plot card required at least one character trope.
• "One-shot" tropes—tropes that didn't actually show up in the story for more than one scene, instead having a one-time effect; this also included many Meta tropes such as Put on a Bus
• Plot tropes—these were the weird ones that had very specific conditions for when they could be played, but otherwise functioned as either a one-shot or permanent trope. Additionally, they didn't go to the discard piles, because they were needed for keeping Arc cards
• Arc cards—these were pretty much a way of keeping score to avoid making the plot card system too complicated. Mechanically speaking, they were just a list of how many plot cards you needed to play in specific categories in order to score the card. The decks existed to serve these Arc cards, since the first player to claim X arc cards won the game.

The idea behind the system was that players were racing to complete "their" version of the story while still incorporating (and exploiting) the elements added by the other player. For example, I could be playing a deck focused on action-adventure, while you could be playing a deck focused on romance. We both try to gain control of the story. If I win, it could look something like The Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you win (but only just), it could turn out looking more like Romancing the Stone.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

So Arc Cards would be in a separate deck, and one is played at a time with certain conditions on it (have X established plots, have X Characters established), and the first person to meet that condition gets the card - the person with the most cards wins?

That's actually pretty interesting (although thinking up varied-enough Arcs, and deciding whos Arc cards you're using is a potential issue). I still don't quite see how that would render the idea of combative characters unecessary or irrelevant, or why it wouldn't be an entertaining suspension of disbelief to have the Stalker With a Crush knock seven shades of pain out of The Dragon; in either a figurative or literal context.

Well, in my original proposal, both players had one or two arc cards face-up at the beginning of the game, and they could only claim their own arc cards (the idea being that your arc cards represent where you are trying to drive the story, so it would be silly to claim your opponent's arc cards). It was shot down as being too complicated, so the "normal" rules featured the ability to claim your opponent's arc cards, which I thought defeated the purpose of the system. Anyway, returning to the original comment, yes, you had a separate deck of maybe 6 arc cards that would have noticeably different designs, including having a different back (so there was no unintentional mixing). Whenever you claimed an arc card, you flipped the next one off the top of this mini-deck to take its place, so you always had to arc cards you could go for.

The reason we took out character combat was that the characters in the story did not have allegiances that lined up with the players who controlled them. If I wanted to attack with my characters, in many cases it could make more sense for them to attack each other than it would for them to attack your characters. Beyond that, we didn't want to default method of dealing with opposing characters to be attacking them in an attempt to kill them off—that goes against the idea of trying to create an elegant story. It'd also seem especially silly when an action-adventure or horror deck goes up against, say, comedy or romance, because there'd be the unfortunate effect of all of the comedic or romantic characters getting shot or stabbed.

In short, though, the real problem was that a "my character vs. your characters" mindset was against the entire concept of the game, and if that's what people want to do, there are other TC Gs out there that can better serve their needs. This was designed to be the TCG where the path to victory was utilizing your opponent's story troeps as though they were your own instead of destroying them because they got in your way. It's sort of like the yes and "rule" of improv (and roleplaying)—if someone else is feeding you material, take it and run with it instead of shutting them down.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Ah,well then we have a difference of vision. Maybe it's because I'm of a playing style (in all games) that shuts down or punishes opponent strategies, and I don't see much room for that in your vision; or maybe it's because I see a 'fantastic' conflict of media, where in the face of being number one, the characters will drop what they're doing and fight for dominance, like a 4th Wall break meeting a crossover. Comedic and romantic characters can be just as deadly in conflict if written or represented in such a way. I'm not so ambitious that I'll challenge a game staple for the sake of being different. Maybe for a personal project...

But anyway, that leaves us at a loggerhead. While I do see the merit in your idea, I'm also reluctant to give up in my own - even if it means I work alone on it. I guess I'm selfish - or stubborn. I'm perfectly happy with sharing resources with you - if you don't mind the two games looking extremely similar.

Eh, I figured we could do something different because attacking with Blood Knight would never be as cool as attacking with Blood Knight—an abstract character trope couldn't reach the level of awesome of a guy wielding a lance that's ON FIRE. In short, tropes are all substance, no style—the mechanical bare bones without any of the delicious flavor on top.

The reason why a crossover-type style (which actually shows up in Magic The Gathering) didn't appeal to me in this case was that there weren't actual character or monsters or planet-cracking superweapons...there were just descriptions. A crossover game where Light Yagami teams up with Superman, Darth Vader, and the Constructicons, on the other hand, would be pure awesome...and far cooler than The Chessmaster, The Cape, Black Knight, and Combining Mecha on the same team. And thus, we decided to take the game in a different direction. What are tropes? The building blocks of stories. Why don't we make a game about telling a story?...or at least something like that. Admittedly it was a departure from the standard method of smashing your opponent, but we thought it fit the trappings of tropes better. And, well, through the glory of meta tropes, there were still ways to directly interfere with your opponent, via cards like Put on a Bus and Dropped a Bridge on Him...the cards were just slated to be expensive to encourage players to try to work with their opponent's tropes instead of trying to get them out of play as quickly as possible...not to say that having a meta-based strategy wouldn't work if you committed yourself to it...

Anyway, I think we should wait and see what everyone else things before deciding what the "official" project should be.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Personally, I liked the story telling idea. It's something original, and it's within the spirit of TV Tropes.

Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text-Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The Staff

So... what are the rules now than?

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

That depends on who you're asking.

I would suggest that Ironeye actually writes out a full document of game rules and flow, so it can properly be analysed and compared, instead of just looking at a single mechanic.

I got the framework for Character Cards done, by the way - although I guess it's not worth posting it right now. I shall try and set a target for myself to make all 9 Card backgrounds. I have Sci-Fi and Romance done, maybe I'll try Fantasy next...

I'll try to find my old notes. I have a big paper due Thursday, so I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do before then.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

I'll propose some rules then (this is mostly taken off the wiki page, but some of it's my own stuff):

• The game is a fight between two writers for dominance of a shared story. (Note that the fight is over who writes the story, not necessarily over whether it's actually any good. Any actual story written under these conditions probably wouldn't be.)

• At the start of the game, everyone has a writer card out, 5 cards in their hand, up to (arbitrarily) 60 cards in their deck no less than (arbitrarily) 40 cards in their deck, and no SP.

• Ways to win: Get a majority of the SP pool, make your opponent's writer quit, or have your opponent do nothing for three turns. (I'm scrapping Arc Cards for now, all formulations so far have either made the game unbalanced or too complicated. Might be able to add them in later if someone can think of a balanced way to put them in. Also eliminating multiple writers to make the game shorter.)

• Genres: Most cards have a genre, but not all. There are quite a few universal cards and a very few multi-genre cards. The main thing genre effects is the playing style of the card; cards with conflicting genres don't tend to work well together. (Might want to put a bit stricter limit here later. Maybe have writers have prefered genres that cost less SP for them.) The list of genres is the same eight as before. My guess as to how the genres should work:
  • Sci-Fi: Works somewhat like blue from Magic; relies on trope cards as opposed to character cards. When it does deal with character cards, they're not that strong. Also really likes writer effects. Has a tendency to borrow chars from Genreless. (well, they all have that, but Sci-Fi especially.)
  • Fantasy: Works somewhat like green from Magic except not restricted to character cards. Big strategy here: put as many cards out as possible. Likes trope cards that give boosts to the writer's char limit.
  • Comedy: Strategy here: lots of trope cards that draw directly from the SP pool. Characters also mainly draw from the pool and aren't threatening to enemy characters. Very susceptible to kill effects, not so much SP damage.
  • Tragedy Drama: Revolves around sacrificing its own cards. It's theoretically possible to play this without paying much attention to what your opponent is doing.
  • Romance: Revolves around pairs (or more) of characters that complement each other. Then you stick as many bonuses as possible on 'em. Again, a bit like green from Magic.
  • Mystery: The defense genre. Mystery likes to put characters out of reach of kill effects and SP damage, and then just wait it out. Also, tends to have a backup strategy of a few trope cards that generate SP when a char is killed. Chars are always fairly weak when not defended.
  • Action/Adventure: This is the full on combat genre. A/A likes destroying enemy tropes. It doesn't have that many kill effects or SP damage, so it mainly uses tropes/char effects that compare one char's SP to another (usually hurts the weak one, but again, not many kill effects.)
  • Horror: This tends to have one or two strong characters that have a kill effect and/or an ability to draw extra SP by killing other characters. All other horror chars are horribly weak and mainly are there to get sacrificed to the monster in a pinch. Trope cards are mainly weak defenses and/or bonuses.
  • Genreless: For Omnipresent Tropes like The Hero and Big Bad. No real unifying strategy.

• Types of cards:
  • Writer cards: These represent you. They all have some abilities (probably should make them stronger than anything else) and an SP limit. The SP limit relates to character cards, below. Go over the SP limit, your writer quits and you lose. High SP = bad effects. Low SP = good effects.
  • Character cards: These represent characters in your story. They always stay out permanently.
    • The main reason to have these is because they can draw SP from the SP pool each turn. They also have abilities that are relatively strong in comparison with most other types of cards.
    • Whether they can hurt other characters or not depends on the genre; but remember physically hurting a char has nothing to do with how much SP it has left.
    • Your writer limits how many characters you can have out; writers with lower SP limits have better abilities.
    • Characters can be destroyed only by card effects, but there are quite a few card effects that destroy characters.
    • If any character costs 0 SP (for most chars this is equivalent to "can draw 0 SP"; this phrasing is just to prevent a potential loophole), it's destroyed.
  • Temporary Trope cards: Cards that are played once, do something, and vanish. Whole bunch of things they can do including draw SP (again, one time only), destroy other cards, hurt your opponent's SP pool (only very rarely draw from it), reduce the enemy writer's SP cap (usually temporarily), etc, etc.
  • Permanent Trope cards: Like trope cards, but permanent. They can't draw SP, but they can destroy other cards, reduce the enemy writer's SP cap (usually as long as it's out), give all sorts of other bonuses, etc.
• The graveyards: One is tentatively named "Out of the story", the other is "Killed Off for Real". Put on a Bus and Only Mostly Dead both go in the first one. Killed Off for Real works like "removed from play" in Magic, Yugioh, etc.; usually you won't deal with it that often (though the Horror genre kinda has a thing for it.)

(Edited as I get ideas, until someone posts, then I'll make another post.)

edited 1st Jun '09 5:15:58 PM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

I know we no longer have Troper cards, but could we maybe have some cards based on the Contributors anyway? Or if not that, then maybe cards based on the Wiki culture (Natter, YKTTW, TV Tropes The TV Show, The Great Crash, #tropers, etc.)?

Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text-Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The Staff

Really quick note: it's typically a good idea to have a lower bound on deck size instead of an upper bound. If decks are allowed to be small enough, it can lead to players putting in the exact ten cards they need to win, ensuring that they draw everything they need by turn 5...with perhaps a few doubles or backups to avoid running out of cards—the exception is a system where having more cards is an automatically good thing (like Decipher's first Star Wars TCG, where cards doubled as life points). In fact, so long as there is a limit to the number of copies of a particular card, larger decks are actually a disadvantage.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

I'm liking those strategies established.

I largely have nothing else to say (or object to, at least)

I like Black Humor's ruleset, it's simple enough to be playable but has a lot of potential. However, what would the scale for SP be? Would the numbers tend towards 1-2 digits, 1-3 digits, or 3-5 digits?

1-2 or 1-3 digits, more towards 1-2 than 1-3.

Or at least, that was what I've been assuming so far.

EDIT: So, no objections? I'll assume no objections to me replacing the wiki page with it, then.

edited 1st Jun '09 5:43:01 PM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Go ahead and replace it for now—I'll throw in my opinion when I have more time.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

No really - that system is so much more straightforward. I agree with this much more than the Arc system.

I'd... suggest we use better names than 'Temporary' and 'Permanent' Tropes (and that we decide What the average SP cap for a Writer is - I'd suggest that a full bench of characters will take up half of the player's SP on average. 20?)

Oh and... could we have agressive character tropes limit/consume SP of targets, and non-agressives protect/recover SP? It would be a combat system but not really.

Hooray for procrastination! At least I don't have to wake up early tomorrow. Alright, my thoughts:

Ways to win: It's probably best to pick one way to win and focus on it. If there are too many "standard" ways to win, then it'll just serve to confuse new players (Note that the original game had this problem in a big way, as it incorporated three different win conditions that three different people came up with.) This is not to say that there can't be alternate win conditions, just that they are the sort of thing that only comes up in corner cases or with advanced decks built around the other condition. For example, the "standard" way to win in Magic The Gathering is to reduce your opponent's life total to 0. You can also win via cards that say "you win the game", "target opponent loses the game", giving your opponent 10 poison counters, or by making your opponent run out of cards in their deck (since a player loses if they are unable to draw a card when forced to do so). While there are those other conditions for victory, Magic focuses on the life totals. So, which is the "standard" victory goal? Is it getting the majority of the SP or is it knocking your opponent out of the game?

I'm excluding the "three turns no action" rule because that seems to simply be a corner case. I'm not actually too hot on that one because it doesn't seem to serve a purpose that couldn't be better served with a different rule. Is it to reward players for locking down the game? If so, shouldn't they be able to win via one of the other conditions as a side effect of gaining board control for three turns? Is it a mercy kill for players who have run out of gas? If their opponent is able to capitalize on that, then the rule is irrelevant, and if they are not, then the game will come down to which player will be the first to draw something playable. Is it a way to end the game if a player can't draw any more cards and will be unable to pull out a win with the current hand? This seems like the situation from before, in which the other player should be able to capitalize on that or is in a similar predicament, in which case the advantage goes to the first player to realize that the game is sputtering out and hold back actions accordingly just to get out of the three-turn rule.

Anyway, it'll probably be better to pick one of the two as the focus and have the other as an alternate win condition for more advanced players to exploit. I think the SP majority makes more sense with the current mechanics, but I'll comment on that in a bit.

Genres: I'll pass over this one for now, since the SP mechanic really needs to be addressed first.

Alright, card types.

Characters: It doesn't make particular sense for character tropes to generally have more powerful abilities than other trope cards. They are already "special" and vitally important due to their unique ability to generate SP, so it doesn't seem particularly necessary to give them better abilities so that people will play more of them. If the character cards are more powerful, the main incentives to play other trope cards are:

• The trope card has a unique ability not found on a character card—this doesn't produce an incentive to play other permanent trope cards in great mass, since this really serves to fill in the gaps left by the more powerful character tropes.
• You'll hit your SP limit for character tropes and have to play the weaker non-character tropes as a substitute. This obviously isn't particularly fun, especially since there's an incentive to keeping your character SP some space away from the max SP just in case...

On the other hand, if other permanent tropes are of comparable power (without counting SP generation), there's still a strong incentive to play a lot of characters (for the SP), but the players don't feel bad about not putting in too many characters (because the SP cap would make the additional characters wasted space).

Temporary Trope Cards: Nothing to point out here—this is the same sort of thing I would have them do.

Permanent Trope Cards: See my discussion on Character Trope Cards. Otherwise, pretty much what I would do.

Two graveyards make sense, though I can see things in Fantasy and Science Fiction messing with the way these things are used, since characters could be legitimately dead but still manage to come back.

Anyway, I still need to comment on the SP mechanic. At this point, it seems a bit detached from the flavor of the game, in that the players are rewarded for keeping a lot of character tropes in play, not for actually using those character tropes in an interesting way. If I'm playing, I'll be perfectly content sitting around with characters whose SP total is close (but not too close) to my max and then doing nothing whatsoever so long as my opponent isn't interfering with my plans and doesn't have the ability to race me. In terms of flavor, the game rewards "authors" who clutter up the story with characters that do nothing (or completely ignore the other half of the story) more than it rewards "authors" who finesse their way through to victory by utilizing the elements that the other "author" introduced—which doesn't seem like something that is encouraged in this version of the game. In short, the message is:

• Good: Systematically eliminating characters you didn't create
• Good: Characters who don't actually do anything (because they get you just as close to winning as the ones who do do things and if you have to actually use a character, it's a sign that you're not far enough ahead)
• Good: Ignoring characters you don't create so long as they don't actively interfere with your main goal.

In short, this is exactly what you don't want writers to do in a cooperative work. It is better to have characters that stay active instead of taking up space. It is better to integrate other authors' work into your own creations instead of either ignoring it or providing an in-story reason why that subplot is over or even can't continue at all.

It also seems a bit off the the ideal position to be in during a game is the one where you are perfectly willing to pass your turn after doing nothing at all, not even making the fully expected trivial attack (as can show up in Magic but obviously not in this game). So, uh, yeah, I think you're giving out SP for the wrong sorts of things.

Oh, thoughts on writer cards, now that I've covered SP:

• Considering just how critical SP are to winning the game, writer cards with low max SP would really need incredibly good abilities to justify using them over the ones with high SP and merely great abilities (as compared to tropes). This isn't so much of a problem if we have a very small number of writer cards available, so people take what they can get, but since I think we're hoping that we can expand the game... So Yeah, we'd really have to tune these cards very well to stop either the SP totals being the dominating factor (or the reverse problem of the abilities being such Game Breakers that SP totals don't matter. Also, the "too much SP and you lose" seems a bit harsh, especially since it can effectively make your hand unplayable if you have a bunch of character cards in it, perhaps even forcing you to kill your own characters just so you can play ones with more relevant abilities. Also, SP-total-reducing abilities seem to hit tropers with lower totals that much harder because -1 total SP is a larger proportion of their total. While this doesn't seem to bad at first, the semi-mandatory buffer could end up being a much larger proportion of the total for a low-SP troper than a high-SP troper, effectively making the difference that much more pronounced.

I'll leave the genres alone for now because they are so tied in to the SP mechanic which I think rewards players for the wrong things.

Anyway, if I had to choose a few core points on how I think we can make this better:

• Reward SP for characters being useful, not just being there. (Perhaps even include a way for other permanent trope cards to generate SP, since in some cases, particularly in the Speculative Fiction genres, the characters may not be the most important story elements.)
• Don't make characters generally more powerful than other tropes—they already have the +SP thing that makes them nigh-essential.
• Find a way to reward players for utilizing tropes played by other players. (I actually have a few ideas in this regard, which I will explain in detail in my proposal some time tomorrow.)

Edit: To clarify, I did notice that some genres feature cards that reward the player with SP for actually doing something—that makes sense. What's bad is that a character trope sitting around for 8 turns and seeing no action could end up being more valuable than the other character tropes with a higher turnover rate...when really that sort of thing should be punished instead of rewarded—character tropes that are never relevant are a bad thing and shouldn't be treated as good little SP generators.

edited 2nd Jun '09 2:00:12 PM by Ironeye

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

This is easily fixed by not having all Character Tropes recover SP, and having a Character card on its own not be especially useful or powerful. A Chessmaster card isn't going to go too far without a Chekhov's Gun or a Xanatos Gambit equipped (I know, taking that card literally and having it be a gun would be a misunderstanding, but Rule of Fun/Cool should take precedence).

I would also reccomend a common way of forcing an unassisted Character or permenant trope off the field, so they don't clutter up the area or act as a 1-man SP factory. Having conditions for SP recovery would also be common, instead of it happening automatically (The Time Police Character Trope recovers 2 SP every time a Time-related Tropes is played). Having no single character recover over 5 SP, and/or having some characters only recover SP once (this could be shown by Tapping them - and having them only be untapped by Tropes that say so), are also feasible ideas.

I'd leave Permenant tropes as Rules alteration rather than just doing the things characters do (Fantastic Racism would prevent SP recovery for all Non-Human Character Tropes. Absurdly Spacious Sewer removes the players cap on max. hand size)

edited 2nd Jun '09 3:20:07 AM by SixOfSpades

I have a few ideas bouncing around involving untapped trope cards costing SP every turn, but I'll wait until I am more awake to post it.

edited 2nd Jun '09 10:58:35 AM by Ironeye

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Mm, what I thought would work is to give Characters up to 2 standard 'abilities'. They generate around basic Keywords and (usually) a number.

• Block X - Tap this Character to 'shield' X SP on the Writer. this SP cannot be used, but it can't be drained, either. Block can be invoked at any time (but if you block 2 SP on a Trope requiring 3 SP to function, that Trope won't work) Untapping or removing this character from the field unblocks the SP.
• Drain X - Tap this Character to destroy X SP on the opponent Writer. This can be Blocked, or negated via Tropes.
• Restore X - Tap this Character to restore X of your own SP.
• Destroy X - Tap this Character to put any Trope in play costing X SP or less into the discard pile (excluding itself).

Tapped cards cannot be equipped with any Tropes, and cannot untap by themselves (maybe if you pay their original SP cost again?). They stay in the plotline, but they're essential dead-weight until you deal with them. They're still in play though, so any Tropes that require a certain number of Characters still count Tapped cards. Any extra abilities or special alterations to base Keywords are also mentioned on the card.

EXAMPLE! The Staff Chick:

• SP Cost: 2
• Videogame Trope - Female
• BLOCK 2
• RESTORE 3
• Staff Chick may tap itself in order to untap any Videogame-Based Character Trope (excluding itself).

edited 2nd Jun '09 6:27:24 AM by SixOfSpades

...So we get to tap the Staff Chick?

Sorry, I just had to say it ._.

Don't be silly.

She taps herself, and we get to watch.

Also this.

edited 3rd Jun '09 3:36:29 PM by SixOfSpades

While keywording things is great, I'm hesitant to say that we should hand out one or two of the standard four abilities to each character trope just cuz—there doesn't seem to be a flavorful reason to do so.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Well actually there is - it all depends on what that character is like.

The Staff Chick (as per her page description) is often a defensive (BLOCK) or Healing (RECOVER) role, who often fights for her friends and romantic relations with the Hero (Untap Allies). For other characters? If they're agressive, then they're likely to have DESTROY. Manipulative? DRAIN. It doesn't just have to be limited to the 4 I thought of, either. It totally solves the problem of the Characters just sitting there, and gives them more of a role than them just restoring SP like you suggested. Of course you could give some *no* Tap Abilities, but I wouldn't have that too common.

If you assume (or rather, insist) that none of the characters have an assigned personality; or that we can't actually GIVE them one (which would be a silly way of thinking), then none of the Characters do anything.

Just giving them an interesting, personality-filled card art (I hope that when we start doing these cards properly, we can score some artists), a meaninful string of flavour text, and the willingness to exaggerate or play upon their matter-of-fact entry descriptions, then we can have characters with a personality.

edited 2nd Jun '09 12:16:32 PM by SixOfSpades