TV Tropes Trading Card Game

Again, how?

Gut feeling that I can't justify. In other words, feel free to ignore me.

Ah, okay.

Okay, so we have passive Tropes...

These are differentiated from Setting Cards by the fact that they can still run out of SP, while Setting Cards do not have SP to begin with.

Perhaps we should add some other restriction on setting cards. Maybe a limit on how many setting cards can be in play? A limit per player?

Yeah, one per player.

Just like field cards in Yu Gi Oh.

edited Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:33:33 by Matrix

I know this is probably getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but how expensive should Setting Tropes be relative to other tropes? If we make them cheap, it encourages players to switch them out when need be. If we make them expensive, we encourage players in invest in their one setting (and we'd probably need to make them fairly powerful so that people will play them).

Yeah, they should be expensive.

Though there could still be a few cheap but weak Settings, but the majority would be expensive and powerful.

For the discard piles, how about calling them the Bus, Graveyard, and Afterlife? The Bus is for characters who have been Put on a Bus, the Graveyward for those who have been Killed Off for Real, and the Afterlife represents whose who have moved on and cannot be resurrected from the grave. Then To Hell and Back could be used to bring a Character out of the Afterlife.

Nitpick: In Yu-Gi-Oh, there can only be one field spell active at a time. Period. For the purposes of our game, it might be plausible to allow one Setting card per player to be active at a time, with the assumption that the setting depicted in the story is a fusion of the two. For example, if one player is using the After the End Setting and the other is using Suburbia, the story would be set in a post-apocalyptic suburb.

Also, just so we're clear, Settings cost SP to invoke but could be seen as having an infinite supply one played - in other words, no SP is allocated to them, and they instead just stay on the field until dispelled. Right?

Yep.

One thing I'd like to explore is the bonuses and penalties of on-genre cards and Nightmare Fuel. (Since Fetish Fuel is an easily-defined extension of genre bonuses, there's no need to cover it unless we are going to change it.)

Obviously, you can't invoke Nightmare Fuel tropes. I would also say that if for some odd reason you happen to control some tropes that are Nightmare Fuel, you can't activate their abilities. The less interesting part (albeit one more related to balance) is how much SP damage you take when:

• A one-time-use Nightmare Fuel trope is invoked
• A Nightmare Fuel trope is in play

"some odd reason you happen to control some tropes that are Nightmare Fuel"

Yeah, the most probable would be if your Active Troper runs out of ideas and a Trope played while that Troper was Active is Nightmare Fuel for the next Troper.

Exactly. It'd be fairly risky deck design to have tropes like that, given that they'd hurt you and be unplayable part of the time.

I would say, maybe 1 SP damage per turn while it's in play, and maybe something like 5 when it gets used?

Sounds reasonable. Now the trouble is balancing the breadth of a troper's Nightmare Fuel so that there's not so much that NF is overpowered, but not so little that it generally isn't relevant.

Yeah.

For example, with me, Insects are probably easily played, so I could be in trouble, but I have lots of SP to spare.

On the other hand, how many people are going to be running Insects in their deck?

Depends on their strategy and what insects primarily do.

As much as "Snakes" would easily make the NF on my troper card, there really aren't that many snake-related tropes.

Perhaps we should tweak the mechanic, maybe even doing something as radical as not making it Nightmare Fuel. Though I'm sure some people have NF that would be fairly common, right now I have the feeling that NF won't be a particularly popular aspect. I imagine things like: "I totally would have won it he hadn't chosen Killer Space Monkey for his deck in order to satisfy Alien Invasion—NF Monkey wiped out my last troper. It doesn't even have "Alien" in the name! Everyone runs Starfish Aliens or Rubber-Forehead Aliens anyway."

Edit: It's one of those things where it won't matter 98% of the time, but be quite the obstacle for that 2%.

edited Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:29:29 by Ironeye

Well what would you suggest?

If we're going to have a weakness mechanic, it needs to be one that has a reasonable chance of showing up. For a bonus mechanic like Fetish Fuel, it's ok that fewer than 1% of cards will satisfy, because you can build your deck to include them.

I think that perhaps we should switch the weakness mechanic to a genre. While a given deck likely won't be running a particular genre in any strength, genres would certainly be common enough for players to anticipate it. Of course, the SP loss would have to be reduced...

I'm thinking we can pull back some of the proposed stuff for the sliding scales. Tropes can be [Genre] (2), in which case there is a 2 SP penalty on invocation if it's a genre you are weak against. Tropes that are generally not particularly committed to the genre would be Genre 1 (Such as Sci-Fi Hero), tropes generally in the genre would be Genre 2, and tropes that practically define a genre would be Genre 3. I suppose there'd also be SP damage when a Plot card is completed...

Alright then, so we're bringing back Genre weaknesses then, but only for Tropers?

Actually to keep it similar to the Nightmare Fuel mechanic, it would be the Troper's least liked, or hated Genre, like the Nightmare Fuel was something they were afraid of. Instead of set Genre weaknesses.

That's exactly what I was going for.

Alright, so, what are we going to do with genre bonuses? Extra SP upon invocation? Cheaper invocation costs?

A Genre Bonus is just something extra that the Card gives to Cards of its Genre. So, Genre Bonuses vary.