TV Tropes Trading Card Game

Wait a minute...

Are we gonna need a crowner for this?

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

We shouldn't.

We've been over this multiple times already. Having tropes as the base character card does not work. This has been established.

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

Where has it been established?

Video Game Census. Please contribute.

I still want a limited edition, gold bordered, Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies card.

♥♥II'GSJQGDvhhMKOmXunSrogZliLHGKVMhGVmNhBzGUPiXLYki'GRQhBITqQrrOIJKNWiXKO♥♥

I wanna know too. Where has it been established?

(I also want the Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies card, that sounds cool.)

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

They do have a point. The only one I remember being in favor of that is you, Apoc.

Also, giving character tropes base abilities (or preset names, for that matter) so that they aren't a blank slate would be contrary to the premise of the game.

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.

...Today's probably my last day in these parts of the fora, so I may as well post here.

I say the solution lies in pre-preparing a set of character tropes, and having a rule (or perhaps only recommendation) where you can't form a character until you have at least 3 or so character tropes all to be played at once.

Or am I seeing the wrong problem?

Nobody got all that talk about why Determinator isn't a good idea as a base character?

Knight Templar.

How old? Male or female? If male, what if I want a female one? If elderly, what if I want a kid? Do we print a Knight Templar for every possible combination? Are we going back to not having gender and age on the base Character? That drags us full circle back to what happens when characters can just sit in a story and never receive an age or gender? Possible in stories, yes, but that setup lends it to becoming extremely common to the point of absurdity.

Sabbo, that idea might work, but it risks slowing the game down while players wait to draw into enough Characterization Tropes to start playing stuff, especially if they have to wait for the right ones. The build up system allows them to at least get their characters down and begin doing other stuff while they try to find their missing piece of the puzzle.

Furthermore, to all of you, pleasepleasepleasepleasePLEASE try to mechanically rationalize your points within the game. Think about how a player will see the card, how a player will play the cards, etc. The players don't know or care how we "intend" them to play them game. They will play by the rules we write and the cards we print. Yes, flavor is important, but no game can succeed without solid mechanical foundation. For TC Gs the breakdown is about 75-80% mechanical. If the game gets wonky and has confusing corner cases, people will not enjoy playing it, no matter how much fun we have designing it.

edited 24th Jun '09 8:43:10 AM by Apocalypsering

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

Again, why does age and sex matter? I've played many card games and creatures are just creatures. Most of them are just generic attackers. The characters in the card game are going to be what we make them. We can alter the rules to make it so stacking is encouraged, since it would be very likely that we allowed characterization on the opponents character. The entire point of the game is pulling the board in your direction. If the people want to play with Loads And Loads Of Characters, let them. It may give them an advantage, or it may make it so they can't accomplish what they want.

edited 24th Jun '09 9:44:10 AM by arks

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@Apoc: How about two draw piles; one for character tropes and one for everything else? Just an idea.

@arks: Of course gender matters. Have you ever read a story, watched a TV show, or watched a movie (etc, etc.) where the gender was not something you knew from the start? Hence my suggestion for characters being unable to be played without multiple tropes attached. Almost all character tropes have at least a gender implication.

Here's an idea. We can have many tropes that basically do the same thing (Magic does this too, I think).

For example: Jonas Quinn (If you can find a better trope that's fine. I'm just using it because it's the first that popped into my mind.)

Tap: All characters identical to another character will be removed from the game (Killed Off for Real)

How do you make sure that characters aren't identical? There are only so many bases, so you have to stack them.

or

Character Development (again just the first thing that came to mind)

All Flat Characters (that is characters consisting only of a base card) are removed from the game.

This would prevent holding on to a single card and just letting it sit there forever.

@ Sabbo: Sex matters when the character is built. Sometimes it's not decided until a character is cast. So until we ask a character to be doing something that requires them having an established sex, it's not needed. Once that happens, we can shift the marker over.

edited 24th Jun '09 10:20:15 AM by arks

Video Game Census. Please contribute.

First off, we're not using tap.

Secondly, the odds of a character being identical in this game are low right now already.

Thirdly, you're suggesting we print cards specifically as hate for a strategy to solve a problem that we won't have if we do it the other way. That is a BAD way to do things.

Especially given that this game is intended to be removal-light. Mass-removal is almost out of the question. It is not a game about killing people.

We've been over the sex thing. That method lets characters exist for an entire game with no defined sex. That is a massive flavor problem. Your argument that other game don't care about sex is pointless. Other games aren't telling stories.

edit in: I forgot to address the first line. The answer is no. Magic does not have many cards that do the same thing. Magic specifically makes an effort to have as few cards that do the same thing as possible, because that is good, clean design.

Now on to Sabbo,

The two draw pile is an interesting option, but I'm not sure how well it will fit. It would make players build two separate decks and then mix the cards together during play only to have to separate them again. It would be a functional nightmare for players to actually play.

As for tropes having implicit gender, that does not work. Determinator tends to seem male and is usually male, but what if I want mine to be female? If the trope is not gender-specific, it needs to be able to go both ways.

---

Right now, we need to work out the base character card thing. I still am not a fan of using tropes for this because of the limitations it places on design space. As I said, it would request that we create multiple different copies of the same trope to cover all the bases that said trope can cover. printing them with bland names or write-you-own names solves this problem, allowing us to print the character as what we need them to be for the game to work without having to shoehorn the sex/age/alignment onto tropes that they don't fit.

edited 24th Jun '09 12:35:44 PM by Apocalypsering

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

If you give them a name, you already dictate their cultural background, ethnicity, time period and possibly genre.

If keeping track of a character's gender is a problem (and I don't see why it would be, if you're trying to write a story), perhaps that problem could be solved with Gender Counters, similar to those in the Pokémon TCG?

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I'm not a fan of using counters. They're clunky and inelegant. In a game that has so far managed to dodge the need for supplemental play material, I think they would be a step in the wrong direction. As a player of magic, I know we constantly have situations come up where we can't find a decent counter. We end up ripping up paper to mark counters and just trying to remember what the paper represents anyways. Necessitating things other than the cards themselves makes it harder for players to play.

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

It's hardly that much of a chore.

In any case, if the players are supposed to be telling a story, why is it so unreasonable to expect them to keep track of the characters' genders?

edited 24th Jun '09 1:05:57 PM by BobbyG

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If monsters are fighting in Magic, why is it unreasonable to expect players to just remember their power and toughness?

Many players probably wouldn't have a problem with it, but enough would that it presents a problem. If people are not entirely focused on the game, which they probably won't be, as games are better as social pass times than as two people sitting at a table in one of their rooms, (which brings me to want to talk about multi-player functionality, but let's finish this first) the players simply will forget things. it's inevitable.

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

We could make it like some role playing games, and provide note sheets so that people can keep track of the story.

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If we're talking about information people expect to know about a character, the list would include:

• Name
• Species
• Gender
• Age (approximate)
• Physical appearance
  • This is trivial for a visual medium, of course, but also is important to many people in text-based media—I'm seen criticism leveled at a book for one of the main characters not getting a physical description until halfway through the book.

Obviously, there are exceptions to all of these: The Nameless, Older Than They Look, The Faceless, Ambiguous Gender, etc.

An important question, nevertheless, is how important these traits are to the character in question. I have read books with Theme Naming, books where the name of a character was plot important, books where the name of a character affected their characterization, and books where the names were just window dressing. (I've even read a book where no character was ever referred to by name by either the narrator or by the other characters, even though they all had one.) I've read books where every character's gender mattered, books where some of the characters' genders mattered, and books where the genders were superfluous. Age? The same thing, though I suppose most of the books I have read would still depend on most of the characters being adults of some kind for the sake of realism, even though the "adultness" of the characters was never an issue. Physical Appearance? Same deal.

An important thing to remember is that this is not about a finished work. In many cases, it would be entirely possible for a writer to decide later in the writing to change one of the four details on the list, and it would merely be a matter of replacing words. Blond becomes brown. His, him, he, male, and man/boy become her, her, she, female, and woman/girl. For many characters, the gender matters as much as whether they grew up on Plum St. or Peach Ave.

Obviously, there are also many cases where such a change would not be reasonable and would involve major changes to plot or characterization.

So, we clearly have two cases to deal with: the case where forcing the player to assign such details would be arbitrary and the case where such details are essential. I propose the following solution:

• Make character cards complete blank slates, but with spots for name, species, gender, etc.
• Take character cards out of the decks entirely and place them in a pile off to one side. It doesn't matter whether or not they have a proper back, so getting more can be as simple as printing some out.
• Whenever a player plays a Character Trope (Idiot Hero, The Ace, The Dragon, etc.) and does not play it on an existing character (Tragic Hero and Chaste Hero are not mutually exclusive, after all), the player places a character card into play that the Character Trope applies to. On the character card, the player adds any relevant details added by the Character Trope, such as choosing the age due to Kid Hero. Whenever other tropes are added to that character, the character card gets updated. Also, at certain times, players would be able to choose certain details on the character card that the character's tropes have not forced.
  • I say "at certain times" because we do have to prevent a player from changing a character's gender to male in response to another player playing Action Mom on the character. Perhaps players may only determine details at the beginning of their turn or when playing a trope card that would depend on those details. For example, if I play May–December Romance, I am allowed to choose the ages of the characters in question (assuming they don't have one already) so that they are legitimate targets of the trope.
  • Note that when I say "choose", that can range from picking a specific detail (the character's age is "Teenager") to excluding details (By-the-Book Cop requires the character be old enough to be a cop, so I can merely exclude "Baby", "Child", and "Teenager" instead of choosing either "Adult" or "Middle-Aged", either of which would be legit for that Trope).
• Used character cards may freely be discarded at the end of the game, or kept for future use.

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.

If the character cards are blank slates, there's no reason we can't just make a bunch of cards with every combination of age, gender, and alignment available.

Also, since people don't seem to have noticed it, each category includes an Irrelevant option, which means that that category has no bearing on the character until a trope is applied. For example, if a character card was listed as having Irrelevant Gender, then characterisation cards could be applied to it regardless of whether they were set for Male, Female, or Alien. However, if this happened, that Gender of the characterisation card would become the character's gender.

For example, let's say I have John Doe (Male), Jane Roe (Female), G'khan Nkalzhz (Alien), and Alex Brisbane (Irrelevant) on the field.

Also, I have Magical Girl (Female only), Handsome Lech (Male only), and The Stoic (Irrelevant) in my hand. Here, I could play Magical Girl on Jane and Handsome Lech on John, or I could play any of my cards on Alex. Likewise, I could play The Stoic on any of my cards. However, if I play Magical Girl on Alex, then Alex becomes Female and I can't play Handome L Ech on her (though I could still play The Stoic).

I think Gender can be represented by symbols: Male◊, Female, Hermaphrodite◊, Alien, and Irrelevant◊. (Note: In the last one, I accidentally typed 'Genderless' where I should have typed 'Alien'. The Alien category includes both characters who explicitly have no Gender and those with weird alien genders not known on Earth).

The same thing works for Age: There's Kid, Teenager, Adult, Elderly, and Irrelevant. Great Detective would be classed as Gender and Age Irrelevant, while Kid Detective would be Age Kid, Gender Irrelevant.

Ukrainian Red Cross

I really like Ironeye's idea here. I do think it gets rid of some major problems.

Well, ironeye, you're thinking. The fact that the cards get used up by being written on strikes me as a mild problem and the idea of printing them up also runs the risk of "I don't have a printer". More importantly, though, this once again allows players to drop all of their Characterization Tropes separately. There would need to be some kind of limiting factor.

That solution boils down to "solve it by making them write everything down."

But it throws another interesting idea into my head. Hold thta thought, because it might actually be a good one. I need to do some math really quickly. I'll post again in a few minutes.

Vampire Buddah, remember that we don't have an infinite number of printable cards here. The Irrelevant subtype is interesting. it could actually be applied fairly easily.

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

sorry for double post, finished my math.

Setting aside character cards could work. As I wrote the line about limitations, the answer finally clicked. We already have a limiting agent in play. SP. If each character card eats up SP, players will have to be careful about using too many.

The write everything down idea still strikes me as bad, though, so here's what I figured. From a game perspective, appearance is too difficult to do. There's just too much involved, the game can't handle it. Scrap it. Species is important, but Most Writers Are Human and so most characterization tropes have every bit as easy of a time landing on other species. Also, species is a monstrous spectrum that I think we want to avoid for the time being. By simply not naming it, we can let the players decide on a species. This leaves name, sex, and age. If we let the players write their own names onto the cards, we're down to two stats that can be split into four categories each. Child, Teen, Adult, Elderly and Male, Female, Alien, Irrelevant. There are a total of sixteen combinations of those things. Sixteen cards is workable. Players will need to have all sixteen if they want to use all sixteen, but they'll be set aside at the beginning, never drawn, and simply put in when a player wants to make a character, as you said. They pick any of them. Of course, they also have an SP cost to keep them there, which forces players to limit themselves and build characters up.

This does, of course, drop alignment, which I liked, but the we can set it aside as something that might come into play some other way, maybe in an expansion pack. It could also be that the alignments actually become characterization cards in their own right, but that's for when we actually make cards.

The last thing I'll say on this idea is that Irrelevant still bugs me as a gender option. Removing it would drop u down to 12 such cards, which might be more functional, but this one's really up in the air.

edited 24th Jun '09 4:03:23 PM by Apocalypsering

"Seasons don't fear the Reaper. Of course not. Seasons aren't alive. You are, though . . ." -Reaper King

VB, can I suggest that Alien become this symbol?

EDIT: ninja'd.

edited 26th Aug '09 6:32:30 PM by BlackHumor

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

I think part of the problem with having the "irrelevant" type is that the gender (or whatever) of the character can only be defined by Character and Characterization tropes. If I play a trope that only has a one-turn effect, I can't reference that character's gender, even though the character presumably has one in the context of the story—it just hasn't come up yet. Of course, if I'm playing a card that cards about gender, presumably it is an issue in the story now, if only a temporary one, and the gender of the character is relevant. With "irrelevant" as a type, if I play a card that cares about the ratio of males to females, where do the irrelevants fall? Later this turn, I could play Genki Girl on one of them, fixing its gender, which should have already come up.

Part of the appeal of a "write down as you go" system is that you can leave things undefined until they become relevant, at which point they are fixed. With the previous "tally the genders" card, when it hits the table, then every character is assigned a gender, which is kept for the rest of the game.

Edit: Majorly ninja'd

edited 24th Jun '09 4:13:54 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.

The only big problem I see with Ironeye's system is writing on the cards. It's not really a problem if we don't make this a physical card game (which we probably won't), but if we ever do then it's gonna get all sorts of messy.

I do kind like Apoc's system, though. (And BTW, you calculate ratio of males to females in a group with irrelevants the same way you calculate ratio of apples to oranges in a group with pears. Just ignore them, it's not a problem at all.)

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