TV Tropes Trading Card Game

Figures it'd break, now I have to do this the long way.

• Xanatos Gambit◊
• Xanatos Roulette◊
• The End Of The World As We Know It◊
• Not Important To This Episode Camp◊
• Kid Hero◊
• Everytown America◊
• Happily Ever After◊
• Determinator◊

EDIT: And now I just realized that that dotted line looks silly if there's nothing above it.

edited 30th Jun '09 12:22:45 AM by BlackHumor

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

Black Humor, you are awesome.

Vampire Buddah, you REALLY love removal.

A few comment on the cards. For the crapsack and sugar, make it 1 and -1, otherwise the card instantly disables most characters.

For the removal, you should try to tack on some penalties. Remember that getting Killed Off for Real or buried in the deck means likely losing two, three, or four cards. In a game where removal is supposed ot be a somewhat weaker mechanic, we need some extra costs ot at least balance it with the card advantage. Its still fuzzy exactly how much IP one card is worth. That will likely show up in playtesting.

Also, in general SP isn't something that we are actively paying to do things. It is a limit on how mnay and how powerufl of cards you can have in play, but we're not spending it to play the cards. If you have three cards in play that each cost 7 SP to keep, you are using 21 SP. If one of those cards is blown up, you are now using only 14 of your allotted SP.

As the character deck is not something to be drawn form, but something that you simply select the blank template from, there's no point in putting it on the bottom.

Anything else is just minor formatting stuff that I'll reword in the Excel file so that it keep the same functionality but carries the same wording style as every other card.

Also, I know I haven't mentioned this in a while, but IP should be transferred, not just gained or lost. We're operating on a principle of conservation of IP so that we don't allow a game state in which neither player has enough IP to trigger a win condition. Mos tor all games should end with the same total IP between all players, even though one player will have much more of it than the rest.

edited 29th Jun '09 8:49:37 PM by Apocalypsering

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

Oh yeah: we still have Genre in this game, y'know. You do have to list it in your stats, otherwise I get to make it up.

(Also, anyone else want my MSE template? It's pretty much done.)

edited 30th Jun '09 12:31:09 AM by BlackHumor

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

Hmm... I don't particularly like removal, I just decided on a whim to make cards for a bunch of Death Tropes.

Also, when I talk about gaining IP, I'm going on the assumption that it comes from your opponent, and vice versa. Tropes do still require SP to use, right?

Revised versions of some cards:

THE CHESSMASTER

• Characterisation
• Cost: 6 SP
• Intelligence 7
• Effect 1: Gain 1 IP per turn
• Effect 2: During each turn, select and activate one of the following effects:

o Draw an extra card o Look at one of your opponent's cards.

• Flavour: People are so predictable. Just like pieces on a chessboard...

MANIPULATIVE BASTARD

• Characterisation - Villain
• Cost: 5 SP
• Intelligence: 6
• Effect 1: Gain 1 IP per turn.
• Effect 2: Discard one card to cancel a relationship between two other characters.
• Flavour: Jack mentioned your wife the other day. Said they enjoyed a wonderful evening that time you couldn't take your birthday off

CRAPSACK WORLD

• Setting - Cynical
• Cost: 4 SP
• As long as this card is in play, Characters with Idealism of +1 or higher cannot take any action. This card cannot be played if a Setting card with the keyword Idealistic is already in play.
• Flavour: Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment

SUGAR BOWL

• Setting - Idealistic
• Cost: 4 SP
• As long as this card is in play, Characters with Idealism of -1 or lower cannot take any action. This card cannot be played if a Setting card with the keyword Cynical is already in play.
• Flavour: And then the fluffy bunny gave the little girl a big hug

WIDE EYED IDEALIST

• Characterisation - Hero
• Cost: 3 SP
• Idealism: +3
• Each turn, select and activate one of the following effects:

o Gain 1 IP. o Increase the Idealism stat of one character by 1. This effect can only be used on each other character once.

• Flavour: God's in His Heaven and all's right with the world

Also, just for fun, here's a few death/removal cards.

ANYONE CAN DIE

• Setting - Cynical
• Cost: 4 SP
• Effect: When a Character would be sent to the Bus, it is sent to the Graveyard instead. Either player may discard a card to prevent this from happening.
• This isn't some movie where only the nameless henchmen die. Bullets kill you just as easily as the do that guard over there.

DROPPED A BRIDGE ON HIM

• Death
• Cost: 6 SP
• Remove all Characterisations from a Character and shuffle them back into your deck. Then return that Character card to your Character pile.
• She's not merely mostly dead, but really most sincerely dead.

DEADER THAN DEAD

• Death
• Cost: 5 SP
• Select a Character in the Graveyard return it to your Character deck. Then shuffle any Characterisations that were attached to it back into your main deck.
• That's it. Death. The final curtain. The big one. Molly ain't coming back

KILLED OFF FOR REAL

• Death
• Cost: 4 SP
• Send one Character to the Graveyard.
• Flavour: We are gathered here to mourn the passing of...

MCLEANED

• Death
• Cost: 2 SP
• Activate when a Character would be sent to the Bus. That Character is sent to the Graveyard instead.
• Flavour: Sorry folks, but Henry won't be coming back

BUS CRASH

• Death
• Cost: 1 SP
• Select a Character in the Bus. Transfer to the Graveyard.
• The plane carrying Col. Henry Blake was shot down over the Sea of Japan. There were no survivors

---

Here's a couple of others.

Never Found the Body

• Resurrection
• Cost: 5SP
• Move a character from the Graveyard to the Bus. If that character returns to the storyboard, gain 3IP.
• Flavour: Next time you try to kill somebody, make sure he's dead!

NOT QUITE DEAD

• Trope
• Cancel the effect of a Trope card that would result in the death of a character. The cost of this card equal to the invocation cost of the card being cancelled.
• Flavour: Actually, I feel pretty good

ONLY MOSTLY DEAD

• Trope
• Cost: 1 SP
• If a Character would be sent from the storyboard to the Graveyard, they can perform one last action before being moved.
• Flavour: With my last breath I stab at thee!

CHEKHOV'S GUN

• Trope
• Cost: 4 SP
• Select a card from your deck and set it aside, then shuffle your deck. Either player can bring that card into the game by paying its invocation cost.
• Flavour: If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

RED HERRING

• Trope
• Cost: 3 SP
• Select a card that had been set aside. That card is discarded.
• The gun had nothing to do with it.

Deus ex Machina

• Trope
• Cost: 7 SP
• Select a Trope form your main deck and apply it immediately. You must still pay the activation cost of the Trope.

Ukrainian Red Cross

Re: CHEKHOV'S GUN—Suggested additional rule: "You can't win the game while this card is set aside". Other aspects may require rebalancing if we add this.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

A lot of good stuff, but the SP question is a no. The Trope card type does not require SP to use. SP cost is a part of permanents that remain in the story. Card of the supertype Trope Card are not permanents.

Red Herring mechanically seems to refer only to Chekov's Gun and the inevitable other Chekov's Tropes, of which there aren't a large number. Might want to modify it a bit.

I kind of think Chekhov's Gun needs a tweak anyways to make it function more or less the same way it does now, as a tutor that requires additional payment later to use the Plot Device. How about: "Choose one - Search your deck for a Plot Device and discard it or; Put a Plot Device from your discard pile into the story. Either way, shuffle Chekov's Gun back into your deck." Part of the reason for doing this is that setting the card aside creates another small tracking issue, and building the card like this makes Chekov's Gun a fun and exciting card to play, as both players wait for the moment the discarded item will return.

Never Found the Body is absolutely perfect.

The Chessmaster's second ability needs fixed. Nobody in their right mind would ever look at an opponent's card over drawing another card. I'm putting it in the file as making opponents discard a card instead and upping the SP cost a little to reflect the one-sided Howling Mine effect.

What do you think about giving Manipulative Bastard a Charisma stat? Goob/bad?

McLeaned and Bus Crash are functionally identical, with McLeaned being a little weaker due to the restriction on its timing. I'll put both in the file but when it comes time to make the set list only one of the two will likely make the cut.

Only Mostly Dead is underpowered, as the situation won't come up too often and most character's abilities aren't worth running an entire card just to get an extra activation.

Not Bad overall. The database looks decent so far. I think we've hit the limit for removal, though, so lets try to dig up some other tropes.

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

• Random Number God
  • Writer
  • 60 SP
  • During your draw phase, before you draw, you may look at the top three cards of your deck and put them back in any order.

• Luck-Based Mission
  • Story Arc - Filler
  • 7 SP
  • When Any player controls a character with a Luck of 7, that player draws three cards

• Evil Overlord
  • Writer
  • 65 SP
  • Your opponent's play with their hands revealed.

• Captain Obvious
  • Writer
  • 90 SP
  • You play with your hand and the top card of your library revealed.

• Contemplate Our Navels
  • Trope
  • Characters cannot use activated abilities this turn. If you control a character with an Intelligence of 7 or more, draw a card.

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

• Mon
  • Trope
  • Search your deck for a Monster-type Characterization and place it in your hand.

• Olympus Mons
  • Characterization
  • 16SP
  • Alien - Monster
  • COMBAT 10
  • If this character kills any other characters, steal 3IP from an opponent.

• Com Mons
  • Characterization
  • 2SP
  • Alien - Monster
  • COMBAT 1
  • If this character is killed, steal 2IP from an opponent.

• Magikarp Power
  • Trope
  • Choose one character with COMBAT =< 4. Raise its COMBAT to 8. Keep this card attached to target character as if it were a Characterization. If a Characterization comes into play that raises the target character's base COMBAT to > 4, discard this card.

• Goddamned Bats
  • Trope
  • All characters with all stats =< 3 have a reduced SP cost of 1 per attached Characterization.

Ooh, I oughta make all these. Not post them anymore, that's gonna get annoying fast, but make 'em at least.

Also bump.

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

If everyone is okay with it, I'm going to finish updating the comprehensive rules to conform to the current card formatting we've been using, and then repost them on the TV Trope's TCG actual page.

Also, we're still in need of a good number of cards of all types. The first set should probably be at or above 150 cards to give enough variety.

To spark interest and get your creative juices flowing, here's a suggestion: The first set's trio of theme decks will be:

• Avatar And The Airbending Fellowship Of Vampire Slayers
• My Little Rainbow Princess Pretty Moon Shortcake
• The Punishers Song Of Evangelion And I Must Scream

Go to those pages, pick out some fun Tropes, and get cracking. I'll also be working to make sure we have a decent base of standard Tropes to work with. This project has come a long way in a short time, and I'd love to see it keep going.

And Black Humor, you could make a public Photobucket account so everyone could view them.

Aslo, I don't understand the flavor for that Goddamn Bats card at all. Mechanically it is nice, but aren't the bats supposed to annoy the hell out of everyone? That effect is actually quite helpful to everyone.

edited 2nd Jul '09 7:07:30 AM by Apocalypsering

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

Hmm. I guess I was thinking more about how they're weak and expendable and less about how they're annoying.

Basically, a card to allow swarm tactics, as the Goddamned Bats are known to do.

And another strategy in the cards I made:

Have four Flat Characters, each with only a copy of Com Mons on them, and kill them all with Olympus Mons. That's 20 IP right there.

Of course, Olympus Mons is gonna be a rare.

Oh, and speaking of Flat Character...

• Flat Character
  • Characterization
  • 7SP
  • Place on a Character with two or less Characterizations. No more characterizations may be played on this character.

edited 2nd Jul '09 1:29:37 PM by Matrix

I must admit, it seems to have been abandoned early on, but I like the idea of Sliding Scales. However, only having one (I vs C) or 2 (I vs C and S vs S) would be far better than FIVE. I think that was what killed discussion on it, but one or two sliding scales is a good idea.

GPTW, please read the whole topic before you post. We've already pretty much put that back in.

To everyone else, does this work?

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

I see a gallery with nine cards in it.

Hmm, I see a bit of a problem with the card type currently named "trope" (which I still haven't found a better name for yet): since there is no SP cost, each one of these cards effectively costs one card, and thus they should all ideally be roughly the same power level (which they certainly will not be in practice).

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.

Sure there will be powerful trope cards and weak trope cards.

But every card's gonna have its weaknesses, right?

@BH:Yaay! That's great. Thank you whoever added it back in! (Sorry, too lazy to go back through the thread to see who it is.)

In the long run, as equal as we (or anyone) try to make the cards, some cards will inevitably be more equal than others. I remember reading an article on the MtG website discussing this. I don't mind if some of the tropes aren't as powerful (well, maybe as long as they're not blisteringly weak either), if it'll satisfy the Johnnies.

(I'll bet Apocalypsering could have explained this much better than I)

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

@Ironeye: Oh, that's easy to fix. Have tropes cost SP for just the turn they're played. (Weren't we already doing that? Eh, doesn't matter either way.)

@VB: Your death tropes are weird; they all imply they should be only used on your own characters. (Also, they are all trope cards, right?)

EDIT: Oh yeah, that's what you were supposed to see. Good.

edited 2nd Jul '09 6:26:02 PM by BlackHumor

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

It is inevitable that some cards will be better than others—that's not a problem. The issue is when there is a huge swing in power level. For example, from Magic The Gathering there is a big difference between killing the weakest creature on the table (Wretched Banquet) and killing all the creatures you don't control (Plague Wind). Accordingly, Plague Wing costs far more to cast.

In our game, there's a difference between getting Killed Off for Real and being Put on a Bus, and unless we throw some drawbacks on the former, it will be played more often than the latter. Beyond that, one of the major guidelines for card design is that unconditional removal should be quite expensive or difficult to play, but the removal we have thus far is most definitely not either of those.

Edit: @BH: Apoc specifically said we weren't doing that, which is where this problem came from: A lot of good stuff, but the SP question is a no. The Trope card type does not require SP to use. SP cost is a part of permanents that remain in the story. Card of the supertype Trope Card are not permanents.

edited 2nd Jul '09 6:08:46 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.

Ah, I see what the issue is now.

I guess it's back to power vs. cost again. For Trope cards, we might just have to get creative with the cost if we're planning a more powerful card, since SP is out of the question.

Ideas...

• certain conditions that need to be filled before the Trope card can be played
• side effects that help your opponent
• side effects that hurt you in some way
• giving up IP to an opponent

Also, thought of this card:

• Awesomeness by Analysis
  • ??? SP
  • Characterization
  • INTELLIGENCE 5
  • This character may use INTELLIGENCE in place of COMBAT.

Uh, do we have a sort of scale (not to be confused with sliding scales) on the stats? For example, does 0 mean a lack of that ability? And just how smart is someone with, say, 3 INTELLIGENCE? 5? 7?

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

The reason that tropes should not cost SP is because they need to be perpetually playable. Players need to be able to maximize their board position without being limited by the what-ifs of when they will need to play a Trope.

Secondarily, we have plenty of alternate costs to use for Tropes. IP payment is an easy one for powerful cards. Discarding cards from the hand or from play can also be a penalty for using powerful tropes. No trope that causes Killed Off for Real should come without significant drawbacks.

As for power level, yes there will always be weak cards and strong cards. That is the nature of an asymmetrical game. Our job is to make it so that as many of the cards as possible actually have a chance to see play. We want to make them interesting and effective so that players will want to play them. There will be jank. By definition, there has to be a worst card. Besides, if every card were perfectly balanced, there wouldn't be an interesting metagame.

Stats range form 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. No stat can ever be above ten or below 0. The exception at the moment is idealism, which has a min of -5 and a max of 5. All none-assigned stats on a character are treated as 0, including idealism. Tomorrow I'll post the new comprehensive rules document on the actual wiki page. It includes this information. Right now, I am sleepy.

edited 2nd Jul '09 9:16:37 PM by Apocalypsering

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

0-10, got it. But the other thing I wanted to know was what a given number actually represented. When you're playing the game, it doesn't really matter, but... well, flavor again.

Say, COMBAT. Which number would represent your stereotypical donut-eating cop? How about the axe-wielding barbarian that can lift a car with his bare hands?

Or we could try another trait, LOVE. What's the number for your average happily married couple? The hopeless romantic who can only dream of it happening? The apathetic loner whose fiance died in a mysterious pool ladder accident?

edited 2nd Jul '09 9:43:20 PM by Kyler Thatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

But that was the point of Tropes costing SP. If you're too close to your SP limit you can't play powerful Tropes.

That is true, but it doesn't always work to put one of those costs on a card. Some tropes just don't work like that.

Besides that, it would tend to give the whole game the flavor of black cards in Magic.

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

If every card requires SP to play it becomes possible and in fact easy to lock an opponent out of the game by resurecting a character/plot device/sotry arc that puts them at their SP limit when they cannot get rid of anything in play. They would be unable to play cards. So long as Tropes do not require SP, that is much less likely to happen.

And I don't think the magic reference is quite right. The only tropes that need heavy drawbacks are the ones that deal with removal of characters. Anything that is a simple 1 for 1 effect needs no drawback.

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

Then why would we let people resurrect their opponent's characters(etc.)? What you just said seems to be the only reason anyone would do it, and it's a pretty broken strategy even if you can still play trope cards.

edited 3rd Jul '09 1:02:03 PM by BlackHumor

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