Reader John Rhoadhouse currently has read-only Internet access, but made a comment to me that cut to the heart of the Dragon Storm problem.

CCGs are fundamentally competitive. You build your best deck with your neatest tricks and show off to your friends as you try to beat them.
By contrast, RPGs are fundamentally cooperative. In most, the characters are part of some kind of party or team; balance is important so that everyone gets to have some time in the spotlight. In the few instances when they’re working against each other, balance is all the more essential. The idea of buying more cards to make a better character runs directly counter to the idea of balancing an RPG.

This is not to say that cards are a lousy mechanic for an RPG, and John and I were musing about the possibility of a noncollectible card mechanic for some hypothetical RPG. For future consideration.

Roleplaying games and collectible card games (RPGs and CCGs) are very different, but I’ve enjoyed both in my day. Roleplaying games are a great way to hang out with friends and pretend to be Awesome for a while. CCGs have a fascinating triple layer of strategy: Understand the environment that the game is in, understand your deck as you construct it, and understand the game as you play it. They can be such an endless source of fascination that I forgive them the high price tag.

A couple of years ago, they were demoing a game at Marcon called Dragon Storm. It’s a combination of an RPG and a CCG. You buy cards to make a deck that represents your character; these cards are used to give you your abilities during the RPG session. Cards have a point value, and the total point value isn’t allowed to exceed a certain amount (based on the campaign or character level or whatever) so in theory there’s balance.

I was interested and maybe tired or drunk or something, so I signed up for the game. I had to buy the starter myself, although the GM offered to buy it back afterward.

Tip: If anyone tries to get you to try a CCG and doesn’t give you a free demo deck, run. Don’t waste your money. You will never find enough people to play the game to make it interesting.

As it turns out, the game is a nightmare as both a CCG and an RPG. Every cynical and heavy-handed trick to try to get players to buy more cards is used. Common cards aren’t useful; they’re boring abilities and junk objects like clubs. Who the hell wants a club? The points system isn’t properly used for balance. To make matters even worse, if you kill a monster that was using an item, you can take the item… if you own the card that represents it. Otherwise, so sorry, it was broken during the fight.

To make matters even worse, enemies, NPCs, etc. are also represented by cards—yes, there’s GM packs to buy as well. And you’re discouraged from using them without the cards—there’s no book that lists the enemies in the world independent of whatever cards you may have.

As for the RPG aspect, the layout of the cards encourages the most pedantic, least creative roleplay imaginable. Peasant Garb is a card, believe it or not, without which you will evidently be nekkid, and “a shape shifter changing form can remove this garb as a 0/F independent action.” I don’t remember what the hell a 0/F independent action is, but pants are one of the mundane details of my life that I just don’t feel I should have to deal with in an RPG, shapeshifter or no. And it reduces your carrying capacity for other objects. Want to do something, anything? You better have a card for it, or no go. Want a flask? You can’t get ye flask unless you have the card for it.

Want more? It’s easy to pick up a D&D game at a convention. If the game you want to play in isn’t for first-level characters, you just generate a high-level character, pick some equipment, and go. Evidently in the Dragon Storm culture this is frowned upon; you’re supposed to take your character around with you from con to con, getting more experience (and buying more cards) with each game you play.

(Yes, I sold the deck back.)

Marcon has come and gone. Somewhat disappointingly: I didn’t get to play any exciting new games. White Wolf, who’s shown up in years past, didn’t. Getting to hear George R.R. Martin speak was worth the price of admission, though. He read a chapter from the upcoming A Dance With Dragons and was hanging around the con suite later, talking about the history of the War of the Roses and Hundred Years’ War. It’s really neat stuff, and I can definitely see how it became the inspiration for the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Upcoming articles: Dragon Storm (the CCG/RPG) and in a George R.R. Martin vein, an article about Diplomacy and the Game of Thrones board game.

For those of you who’ve never taken it, Spanish has two words for the verb “to be,” ser and estar. The difference is that estar indicates location or temporary condition, while ser indicates nature or a permanent state. Even more interesting, some adjectives are overloaded and have different meanings depending on which verb you use them with. Listo means “ready” if you use it with estar, but “smart” (in the sense of “sharp” or “bright”) used with ser. Aburrido is “bored” with estar but “boring” with ser.

I suppose you’re wondering where I’m going with this. Follow along:

1. The use of Spanish increases as the Hispanic population of the US does.

2. The use of English words as loan words into Spanish/Spanglish continues as well. Hence, the world nerf gets imported as nerfir, and it gets the adjective form nerfido. As we saw in that article, the usage of nerf, nerfir, nerfido will go beyond games into all walks of life.

3. Now nerfido can be expanded to have both a meaning with estar—“to be in a weakened condition” or ser—“to be crippled or debilitated.”

Here are some examples, so you don’t get confused when you wind up in Texas in the year 2030.

Mi pelo está nerfido: I got my hair cut.

Mi pelo es nerfido: I’m going bald.

Mi salud está nerfido: I’m feeling ill right now.

Mi salud es nerfido: My health is poor.

Ass Dragon. Draggin’, get it? This was the name we used for Iron Dragon, because some people take forever to plan out and play their turns. There’s something to be said for trying to come up with a decent strategy, but there’s also an element of consideration for the other players.

The problem is most easily solved in very competitive two-player games such as Chess and Go. In both of these games, clearly, being able to think for a long time is a great advantage. The solution is equally simple: use a clock that ensures that both players are allowed the same amount of time to think.

These two games use slightly different time control systems. Chess either allots a certain amount of time for the entire game (“G/90” or “game in 90”, meaning each player has 90 minutes for the entire game) or time for a certain number of moves (“40/2” to make 40 moves in 2 hours, after which you receive an additional 2 hours.) Modern clocks have a time delay feature that ignores the first 5 seconds of easy moves, so you’re being timed on thought versus reflexes.

The world of Go seems to vary more widely and I’m not as familiar with it, but it looks like in the most common system each player gets a certain amount of time played at no delay, followed by a smaller amount of time at 1 minute delay. In addition, during this 1 minute delay period, all of your time usage is rounded down to the next minute.

More casual games are trickier because some players, especially infrequent players, sometimes hate to be rushed. Conversely, everyone playing with them hates waiting around while the philosopher comes up with a masterful move. The latest edition of Robo Rally (a game that sometimes found itself severely hampered by slow play) found a good compromise: All players plan out their moves at once, and when the second last person finishes, a 30-second timer is flipped for the last player.

For Iron Dragon and similar games in which each player takes turns that can be long even when played swiftly, I’m afraid that I don’t have a solution at all. The players I’ve been with seem to be more OK with being teased or verbally hurried than with being asked to use a timer; and I’ve put up with that even though it forces me to nag over and over again.

Marcon (stands for Multiple Alternative Realities Convention) is upon us Memorial Day weekend, running from Friday through Sunday. For the first time, I intend to attend the whole thing this year—I’m taking Friday off work. The place is Columbus, OH.

If you’ve never been, I highly recommend trying it out. It’s not exclusively a gaming convention, but there’s plenty of gaming going on the whole time, both RPGs and board games. The variety is much less than the big gaming cons, but unlike those events, there’s no extra charge to game. You’ll have to take what you get, but the people who run the games care about them, which in my experience makes them very good. For your non-gamer friends, or if you get bored, there’s activities for all kinds of fantasy and SF fans: movies, discussion panels, an art show. Last time they had an always-in-use DDR machine set up in the hallway. There are a couple thousand people there—it’s big, but not as overwhelming as, say, Origins.

To make matters even better, this year my current favorite author, George R.R. Martin, is the guest of honor!

After several lighter articles, I’m back to something a little heavier, third and probably not last in an ongoing series.

Name: Trick-taking

Problem: All players have an equal number of cards with two attributes, suit (or some other category) and rank. (Ordinary playing cards are by far the most common example.) The play is to take place in turns, with high cards more able to influence the flow of the hand. Also, you would like to take advantage of a common mechanic that makes your game easier to learn.

Discussion: Somehow, one player is chosen to lead to the first trick. For subsequent tricks, the winner of each trick gets to (alternatively, is forced to) lead to the next trick. Other players must play a card of the same suit, if possible, but usually may play any card if this is not possible. This proceeds until all cards have been played.

The variance in quality of hands tends to be very high in trick-taking games, so many hands are usually played as part of a single game. This smoothes out scoring differences and gives the players the chance to play many different kinds of hands.

Examples: From this basic model of game flow, the diversity of games that can arise is astounding. First, just look at the ways the first player can be chosen:

• Position relative to the dealer (Euchre, Oh Hell)
• Holder of a specific card (Hearts—and the holder has to play that card)
• Winner of the auction (Pinochle)
• Opponent of the auction winner (Bridge)

Even more remarkable is the wide variety of objectives:

• Take as many tricks as possible. (Euchre, Bridge)
• Take as many of a set of specific cards as possible. Pinochle follows this model, as do games like Skat and Schafkopf. (It seems to be common to German games.)
• Take exactly the number of tricks bid. (Oh Hell, and Spades, to a lesser extent.) Shooting for a higher number of tricks may or may not be scored higher.
• Avoid taking tricks, or avoid taking certain cards. (Hearts)

Within the “winner leads the next trick” model, a large variety of options is also available in the flow of play. Following suit is almost always required, but some games have a trump suit that automatically wins the trick if it can be played because that player is void in the suit led. Pinochle adds the restriction that a player must play above the card led or must trump if following suit is impossible. The commercial game Wizard adds to an ordinary 52-card deck special cards which are exempt from suit-following rules and can be played at any time.

Today, straight after work, I spent 4.5 hours after work in a soundproofed room with a white noise generator blaring at 70 dB, judging the quality of the amplifiers on firefighters’ masks by trying to distinguish between soundalike words. It’s for science! Well, technology anyway.

What this means for you is that I don’t have anything even remotely resembling the intellectual capability for, say, a Design Patterns article. What you do get is the meanderings of my brain in between words.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a game with the following theme and parameters:

One player controls a hero of legend, either real, mythical, or fantastic. He or she is pitted against a huge army of foes (monsters, thugs, or whatever) that are controlled by the other player or players. The hero is expected to fall in the end! The hero’s score is determined by either the amount of time he lasts, or the number of foes he takes down with him. On the other hand, it should be possible for the hero to squeak through—a memorable experience when it does. So the balancing should be tight—or at least it should be able to be balanced tightly.

If you are playing in a two-player game, switch roles after the first game and see who does better. To expand to more than two players, I would like to see the forces of evil allied, but competitive. Each one is trying to do more damage or in some other way outdo the others. If all of the evil forces worked together, they would be easily able to overcome the hero—but the temptation to backstab just a little to get a bunch more points should be so very strong…

I would tend to implement the hero’s and enemies’ resources in terms of cards that are drawn and played on a turn-by-turn basis, but that’s just because I find cards an easy medium to work with, and there’s no particular necessity for it. A dice mechanic might also be very useful, and certainly a series of well-timed rolls would be necessary for the rare hero victory.

Today, I present to you some dictionary entries from the year 2030, as brought to you by my fellow players of Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft:

gay adj. Powerful, overwhelming, or devastating, as per a weapon. Until the development of the hyperspace death modulator, the hydrogen bomb was the gayest weapon known to mankind.

You see, whenever I someone execute a cunning or powerful strategy, some hapless recipient inevitably calls it “gay” as they proceed to lose. It seems like only a matter of time until “gay” fully takes on the meaning of “very strong.”

jew n. One who employs gay tactics. Alexander the Great  is considered one of history’s greatest jews.

…and I have no idea why people throw “jew” around as an insult. (No, it’s never uppercased.) I’ve never heard it used in real life, but for some reason it’s all over the battle.net. I think it’s logical that it will follow “gay” from insult to compliment.

From the World of Warcraft, a slightly less intellectually desolate land:

nerf v. To weaken or reduce in potency. Saudi’s Arabia’s economic power was severely nerfed when a way to synthesize petroleum from dandelions was discovered. Also n. a change that has this effect.

This term didn’t originate with WoW, but that’s where I encounter it most. The etymology of this term is “to make soft or harmless, like a Nerf weapon.” The antonym is buff: Prohibition was a major buff for organized crime because it increased their potential revenue.

noob: n. An incompetent person. “My opponent is sorely mistaken. Only a complete noob would believe that this crisis can be resolved through force alone.” Innumerable spellings exist, but only this one translates into speech well enough to stand the test of time.

Several years ago I came across a great dice game called Button Men. The gimmick was neat: you’d walk around a convention wearing your button, which simultaneously advertised that you would play and served as your “character” in the game. As appropriate for a game from Cheapass Games, the buttons were inexpensive and required no other equipment except for ordinary polyhedral dice.

I think the game is great. It’s very fast to play—a best-of-three match is probably 3 or 4 minutes long. Luck is involved, but understanding probability and controlling risks is a much bigger factor. Probability junkies like me will love the intense, sometimes counter-intuitive calculations that go into the deceptively deep play.

Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on, or didn’t stick around as a fad. I didn’t see any buttons at Origins last year, and I’ve never seen one at Marcon. I suspect that after the novelty wore off, the high math factor made most players shelve the idea. Which is a shame, because for me, it’s still a fascinating game.

Luckily, you don’t have to actually buy any buttons to play the game. The stats for various characters are all published on sites like this one. I recommend printing out the list of characters from one of the easy sets, grabbing a handful of dice and a friend, and getting started. To make matters even better, there’s a site that lets you play online with other fans.

Final note: the flavor of the game was a welcome swipe from the roleplay-snob zeitgeist of the 1990s as well. The little foldout rulebook that came with the buttons contained little biographies of the characters, like: Iago is a sorcerer with mystic powers and is available for bar mitzvahs. He also likes to beat people up.