Collective Setting System: War and Things Other Than War

War

Histories have both War and Peace cards. Peace cards give a base bonus, and then another bonus if there’s another nation at Peace in the same era. Border Wars are minor clashes that don’t necessarily need another participant.
 

The big history is The Great War cards. There are five of them (the number of nations the system was built for). The Great War cards are red on one side and blue on the other. Players play them with the color of their choice facing up. After all histories have been played, whichever color is most popular wins The Great War and receives the win bonuses (and penalties). Whichever side loses receives the loss penalties (and bonuses). There are some specials that can affect this.

Whatever era The Great War is played on will be the era that all other Great War cards are played on. If the first The Great War card is played on a nation’s Recent Era, then all other The Great War cards must also be placed on that era. A player playing a The Great War card may move a nation’s history card to another one of that nation’s eras in order to play a The Great War card, provided that nation doesn’t already have a history card in the other era (Again, if a nation has Histories on all of its eras, no more Histories can be played on it.). If the first The Great War card is played on a nation’s ancient era, then all other nations immediately get their own Ancient era.

If there are no opposing colors of The Great War at the end of play, no one wins The Great War and no bonuses (or penalties) are received. Cheaters.

Ideas for the Future

Template cards better. Putting bonuses for Holdings on the sides and templating Histories to make their eras clearer would be a marked improvement.

Specialization in the form of defense/offense for Power, trust/monetary for External, infrastructure/culture for Internal, etc, etc, would be something to add, possibly on Attitudes or Histories.

Collective Setting System: Your Types

Attitudes: Attitudes alter a nation’s maximum resource values. A nation can only have one attitude, and once it has an attitude, only a special card can change it.

A nation with a Neutral Attitude has the potential to support a much healthier economy, but they tend not to have much potential for expansion. To get a strong ecnomoy, the player needs Histories or Holdings.

Holdings: Holdings are the heart and soul of the system. They represent things the nation has or lacks that defines what it is. Holdings give a +1 bonus to one of a nation’s resources (sometimes +2) or give an equal penalty. Holdings can be played up or inverted; it’s the choice of the player who puts it down (though some cards can invert them later). A nation may have any number of holdings, though a player may not put a holding on a nation that would exceed its maximum and when a player puts an Attitude on a nation that would place a resource’s maximum below its current level, they must remove holdings from that nation to reduce that resource’s level to or below its maximum. Histories are not removed this way or do they face any play restrictions based on a nation’s resource maximum.

Histories: Histories, like holdings, can modify values, but they often have drawbacks as well. Like Holdings, they can be played inverted, which usually reverses their penalties and bonuses alike. Wars are an exception (see tomorrow’s post).

Specials: Do all manner of non-conventional things. They’re a miscellaneous card type that can do anything from invert cards (see above) to represent great heroes and swap histories.

Collective Setting System: The Basics

Before play begins, it needs to be established how many nations you’re building and how many players you have.  There should be at least five cards per nation, so the starting hand size should allow for that many cards, total plus however many more cards are needed to give each player an equal starting hand.

You can share starting hands, make some plans, discuss your intentions for each state, and determine starting player and order of play by mutual agreement. It would also be a good time to hammer out some names and talk about general aspects of the setting; its themes, environments, and moods. This isn’t a competitive game where one player is trying to make the strongest state. It’s supposed to be a fun semi-collaborative effort to produce surprising game world elements. By default, hands are concealed, direction of play is determined randomly, and the starting player is the storyteller for the game the world will be featured in.

Play it, don’t do it.

On each player’s turn, they may either play a card or draw a card, discard a non-history card, and then play a card. Cards are played on states (though some specials may affect other cards in play) and remain on them as long as that nation can support them.

History cards are a special case. Each state has two periods in its history; Distant History and Recent History (there is also an Ancient History Special card which can produce a third period). Once all states have a History card on them for each of their periods, play is over.

Looks kinda like this.

Lightning Round

Sometimes, a group of players will run out of cards. When a player has an empty hand at the beginning of their turn, instead of usual turn options, they draw three cards, play a History card if possible, then discard the rest.

The Lightning Round exists to keep things simple. There are only so many features of a nation that people can keep track of before they simply glaze over everything. The purpose of this system is to make memorable nations that players are familiar with, not large stats and piles of descriptions. The Lightning Round exists so that if players are having a hard time finding the History cards to finish up, they can search for one without having to pass a turn without doing anything.

With any luck, your results will look similar to:

Collective Setting System: Resources

As you probably noticed Monday, the states made with this system are mostly defined by five resources, described below.

Power works like a general military strength, though it measures both internal and external forces. A nation that’s well-defended can have a force that’s capable of withstanding an enemy’s marauding forces. While there’s no technical specialization, it’s assumed that nations with comparable skills (or total skills) will balance out when fighting with their strengths.

Wealth indicates the trade, material wealth, and the fruits of that wealth.

Size is only somewhat self-evident. It is size, but also size in relation to the other nations as well as quality of things within a nation's borders. A mile of productive farmland is worth more than twenty miles of monster-spewing deserts.

External is the nation’s relationships and esteem with other nations. Whether it’s an undeserved reputation or a history of valor, other nations will weigh the nation’s input and treat its peoples and rulers with respect.

Internal is the nation’s cohesiveness, interconnectedness, and order. A nation with a high internal rating has generally happy citizens, benevolent nobility, and can boast an overall culture of peace and justice.

Each resource starts at 0, with a default upper limit of 2 (Attitude cards can change this). Players use cards (mostly Histories and Holdings) to change these values either up or down, depending on the character of the state they’re building.

Collective Setting System: Results Speak

A few weeks ago, my roommate brought me to a game of munchkin with some of his friends. While there, I saw that they had the A Song of Fire and Ice roleplaying game. I flipped through it, half interested, until I came to the part labeled “House & Lands.” While it’s a system intended to help players find a nobility and home to be aligned with, it had a lot of what I needed for the collective setting project I was thinking of earlier.

We also played Munchkin, and that was fine too (but Pandemic would have been better.).

Using that as a basis, I made up some cards that players could use to define states/cities/planets[1] in a setting and played a few rounds with myself, patching up the rules as issues arose. The rules aren’t important. This isn’t a win/lose game; it’s a collaborative setting creation process, so refereeing isn’t as important as making things fit intuitively together and reigning in complications.

I’ll share the results of a brief ‘solitaire’ session and explain the mechanics throughout the rest of the week.

Spent to Cast: Ruminations

"Spent to Cast," aka Ogre Savant Ability, aka Sunburst, aka cards in the Shadowmoor/Eventide cycles including River's Grasp and Moonhold.  These cards care about the mana that was spent to cast them. Sunburst doesn't care what mana was spent so long as it's different and it provides one of two set effects related to that. That makes it different enough that it discussed in depth elsewhere.

Spent to Cast encourages splashing other colors. It usually requires mana of one color to cast, but gives a bonus if another color is spent. It's popular on instants and sorceries and when it's used on creatures, it often confers a one-time effect , even if that effect is just to keep the creature, in the case of the Simic, Azorious, and Rakdos implementations (where Spent to Cast acts like strange Evoke instead of a strange Kicker). This avoids memory issues in much the same way that Sunburst does with counters.

Cons

The spell taped to a creature issue sometimes results in cross-color abilities: Court Hussar has a very blue ETB effect, but has a white ability, one you only get to use if you pay white mana for it. While it's an interesting approach, it ends up being a blue card with vigilance, just like Azorius Herald is an unblockable white card and Crypt Champion is a black card with Double Strike. That particular approach to the color pie might not work in a core set.

Crypt Champion itself raises an interesting point; while Crypt Champions can't reanimate one another, these strange evoke creatures are very resistant to being cheated into play. This might discourage new players and even cause uncertainty when the appropriately colored mana is spent on an ability that puts them into play (Quicksilver Amulet or Birthing Pod). This is either an opportunity for education or a dangerous point of confusion.

Monday's Pitch: The Boxes Precinct

Fuck! This was supposed to go up last Monday. Bear with me, Blogger does this "I know you clicked, 'Post,' but I wanted to keep this blog our little secret forever," bullshit. It's saccharine and disturbing, Blogger! Quit it!

What about a story told from the perspective of the unused Magic cards that sit obsessively in long boxes? Not even the pauper-level cards, but the real, unusable, passed-over stinkers that aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on, along with a few overlooked gems put in for variety?

Imagine, a player's hunt for a particular, elusive card that they just know is in their collection anthropomorphized as one of these cards as a...noir/semi-noir detective. It spans from the long boxes to the utility pile, to the dregs of half-completed decks, and--the Valhalla for Magic cards--played, constructed decks.

A buddy-buddy cop format might also be cool, pairing something like Shauku's Minion with a planeswalker card like Jace, the Mindsculptor in a good/evil playable/unplayable combo only united by their common purpose in finding a missing card.