Blog

Patrick Sullivan

By the time you read this, I’ll be back in New Jersey.  I never had the chance to go back for the holidays this past December, so this will be the first chance I’ll have to catch up with my old friends and family in a while.  I’m an East Coast guy and I suspect I always will be; not even the comforts of Southern California have made me miss home any less over the years.  My early memories are vivid and I guess that imbues the area with a personality that it wouldn’t have otherwise.  I can drive through my town and generally find things as they were when I left.  My best friend’s folks are still living in their same house.  The K-Mart on 206 that I worked one summer is still there, in spite of its own best efforts.  I can still go and get some burn on the basketball courts where I turned myself into a street legend.  Change comes pretty slowly to small towns, and there’s something comforting about feeling like I could just pick up where I left off, if I desired.

My parents didn’t have a ton of money when I was young; I was one of three kids and there wasn’t a ton left over after buying the groceries and paying the mortgage each month.  So, going out to eat as a family was kind of a big deal, and we did it every so often.  One of the popular spots for us to go to was a diner out on the highway.  The food wasn’t great, but it was our spot, so it was an important part of my childhood.  When I came back home a few years ago, I was devastated when I drove by and found it had been turned into a karate studio, of all things.  Never mind that I wouldn’t have eaten there today unless it was a demand of someone who kidnapped by parents, I still had certain expectations; when those weren’t met, it threw me for a loop.

I get asked on the regular about repeating text boxes.  You know, why there is some “punish four or less” card for Rogue in every set, or a bubble for Paladin.  A lot of established players assume its laziness on our part, but I can promise you it’s not.  I believe the best thing Heroes of Azeroth was very clearly establish what each class was going to be about.  The mechanical definition of each class is laid out from the very start.  Because new players hop onto the game with each set, it’s important that each set does this to some degree.  This doesn’t mean we need to put a Dispel Magic effect into each set for Priest, because that just isn’t a realistic use of our space.  But it does mean that our class abilities, especially at common and uncommon, need to clearly give the message of each class, even to a first-time reader.

Past that, setting up expectations is a valuable tool in helping players process information.  When text boxes use repeated clauses (“exhausted” or “four or less” for Rogue, “unpreventable” for Holy damage, etc.), it makes remembering the text boxes of cards much easier.  TCGs are pretty complicated to play, so the easier we make it to compress the information in player’s heads, the more players can actually focus on the fun parts of the game (like actually playing it).  As an example, if we had a cycle of cards that said, “As an additional cost to play X, discard an ally, ability, or equipment” and one of the ten said, “As an additional cost to play X, discard an ally, ability, or location”, I would be willing to bet people would try to discard equipment to the second card pretty often.  Once your expectations are set in a certain place, it’s jarring and unintuitive to encounter things that go against that line of thinking.

This philosophy also influences how we design mechanics.  Believe it or not, Stash and the Green Dragons were not designed in concert.   Actually, for a long time in testing the mechanics were unrelated; Stash powers did not trigger Green Dragonkin.  At some point, someone on the team said something to the effect of, “We have a mechanic that triggers off of turning things face down, we have a mechanic where a card is revealed, then turned face down.   They appear in the same set.  Won’t most people expect these things to work together?”  Obviously, we believed the answer was “yes”.   Even though it took a long time to nail down the actual language of the keyword, and it can create some messy rules interactions, we believe that cost was significantly less than having two resource mechanics that appear to work together not actually work.

When designing individual cards, there can often be confusing interactions in the rules.  This is unavoidable.  Still, the desire to fulfill expectations can guide us towards an answer.  For example:

“New Card A creates a confusing/unclear interaction with Old Card B.  There are two conclusions a reasonable person could draw.  Does it work the way the person controlling New Card A would hope?”

“New Card A is confusing.  Does it work similarly to cards with similar language?  If not, can we change the template so it intentionally looks different from the cards that work differently?”

There is no genius in making things more complicated than they need to be.  We often talk about complexity in terms of things like word count, or rules complexity, but intuitiveness (or the lack thereof) is a large part of that puzzle.  “Making things work the way you would expect them to work” should be a goal of someone designing any product, and the games we make are no different. 

And, with keeping up with the expectations set by my previous blogs, I’m going to end this abruptly.