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Relationships, the Card Game |
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Earlier today, I made a post where I commented that I feel D&D and Pathfinder are an embarrassment to the RPG community. I say this is because they are excessively complex to play a game that can be played with less than 80% of the rules they offer. The reason, near as I can tell, they stay popular, is that D&D has a huge legacy behind it and a highly successful marketing team, and Pathfinder is closer to D&D's brother than a separate entity on it's own. This gives PF a marketing team that is largely unpaid (and this is before we even get to the players of either) and gives it the ability to reap the work of others.
Yet, they, like Magic, stick around. People seem unwilling to move away from these games because it is easy to find a group for them, which makes people less willing to leave these games, which is circular, as you can see.
And why is it always fantasy games that seem to stick around? Futuristic games need a franchise to survive (like Star Wars or Star Trek), and even those seem to have more limited shelf lives than the fantasy games. And both of those genres are niche anyways; how would you convince a random person on the street to build a character for fighting dragons or piloting a starship? Particularly women, who are woefully underrepresented in the genres and horribly mistreated when they admit to liking them.
Which led me to thinking, you don't see many games that break the mold these giants establish. Yes, I've commented on this before, but this one comes with a thought experiment in card games.
The card game is a game where you have two decks, one of characters, and one of events. The characters have four main stats: gender, affection, straight, and gay. These scores would indicate how they react to the events - which are played using another character. For example, Alan, a male with a straight score of 5, attempts to Give Flowers (Affection 1) to Lorraine, a female with a straight score of 3. However, Lorraine has a gay score of 6, making Give Flowers more effective if it comes from a female.
After ten turns, each player counts up the people they have using some scoring system (like, 2 points for each character in a relationship with another player's character, 1 point for each relationship between two or more of your characters, and -1 point for each single person left). The winner, if there is one, is the one with the most points.
For a lot of traditional TCGers, or LCGers, or whatever, that's just beyond bizarre. A game in which you're better off interacting with your opponents beyond just stopping their plans? How would you even actually play the nitty gritty of that?
Yet, my favorite Magic deck of all time was one that interacted with my opponent very heavily. It had the side effect of shutting down some decks, yes, but that trend of liking decks that interact has carried over into Netrunner, too. Of my decks that I've built, I favor the ones that have higher levels of interaction. They may be weaker, but it feels more like a game than solitare.
So maybe someone should build Relationship, the Card Game. Heck, if I'm still thinking about it in a few months (still plugging away at that card game maker - which can now let you build decks), I might try my hand at it.
And who knows? It may be fun.
May your games be interesting.
LiaThistle · Mon Apr 08, 2013 @ 05:34pm · 0 Comments |
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