Jon's worried that small decks disproportionately empower the remaining cards. How about a Bare Nekkid suite with just one card, the drawback Embarrassingly Small?
I'd also like to have a Blame The Cold Weather card. If you have a small deck size you could churn it anyway until you get the cards you wanted, couldn't you, especially if there's deck manipulation cards?
I'd think so--but I would also guess most deck manipulation cards come as part of advanced equipment, and that advanced equipment has more cards per item piece than basic gear.
I would think so, too. That's one reason I suggested a drawback: the ones we've seen, Dropped Guard and Fumble, seem to be penalizing deck manipulators that would prevent you from accumulating a few good cards and discarding the rest. If you have to churn all over again, maybe it works out balanced in the long run.
Good point. Since we learned about armor and shields, I hadn't really considered how harmful a card like Dropped Guard could be to a tank. Thinking about basic card suites--I wonder what the balance of early-level equipment looks like with regard to drawbacks. If the starting gear has 3 cards in a suite, will two comparative sets of slightly better gear have options between a set of 4 ok cards, or a set of 3 better cards and 2 drawbacks? Drawbacks are reminding me a lot of curse cards in Dominion--not only do they hurt you, but they also slow down your deck engine... Deckbuilding strategy grows deeper and deeper here...
Ha, yes. Skaff already took on that challenge when he tried to play through our current testing set of adventures using nothing but default items. We did find one card that he was able to exploit and removed that from the defaults! It should be pretty damn hard to go far with nothing but defaults.
No, you can't have an item there that confers no cards because that would let you get away with a smaller deck - which throws the whole game balance out of whack. However, the default item there may not give you any armor cards. Or we might create a class that simply doesn't have a helmet slot. Be aware that we're still working on/tuning this stuff.
I would like to take a moment and profess my satisfaction with the basic idea of defaults, at all. That covers a lot of questions about not only deck size, but also the current class and race discussion . . . and other things like how one might implement player-generated content. Can we presume that all these Kobold Miners and such that we beat up have their own Kobold "race defaults," and they are tweaked along class lines?
No, we don't use the same building system for monsters, it would put too many constraints on what kinds of monster decks we can build. Monsters decks can be a lot more wacky than player decks.
Yeah, it was (is) a card called Barge that does one damage and pushes your target one square. Doesn't sound too powerful but it is quite easily exploitable.
Jon, if you want wackier decks you need someone to think up some wackier items!! The Alet Zhav preview mentioned "animate swords" - I'm guessing that's a lot of Slashes and Stabs? Maybe it sounds silly for a humanoid paper doll to represent such an opponent, but the end user never has to actually see the doll. It shouldn't be too hard to take whatever the card selection is and map it out into ten "items." (Unless you cheated and the Sword's deck has fewer than ten cards.) If you insist you could even give all ten the name "Animate Sword" so that the origin written on the card appears to be the intrinsic nature of Animate Swords. Animate Sword Head: equip Swords onlyCards: 4 x Stab, 2 x ParryText: N/A Animate Sword Necklace: equip Swords onlyCards: 2 x Simple Thrust, 2 x ParryText: N/A and so forth. The item system is no limit to the people who can make their own items at need.
This is the Johnny in me speaking when I say that I too would hope to find outrageous means to "exploit" seemingly innocuous cards.
Given the fiendish minds here, I'm sure lots of exploits will be found - and subsequently plugged - in beta testing.
And i'll probably be first to abuse something then say "Hey, this isnt working as intended/is OP combo"
If it's being abused, then the card is working as intended, right? Right? Card combos will be an interesting thing, given the hand sizes and board-level strategy involved. Not only do you have to pull the right cards in your character's hands, your guys also have to be set up in the right positions to pull off the intended combo.
Well that can be dependent on the card and ability too. If its something you can stack at no expense rather quickly then its probably over powered. If its something that gives you rapid enemy movement control at a distance thats renewable with little cost thats ridiculous. Of course stuff like that is all suggestive based on the environment of which the game is set. If many classes and characters have these kinds of abilities then it could be ok if it was balanced, but stuff exclusive to certain characters or enemies could be construed as OP
