Design Diary end of February

OK it feels like there is progress.

Christmas and January were time consuming. CB, as she will always be known for those that know me, is as usual amazingly understanding (CB was originally a joke about the "Child Bride" amongst friends at a time, I hasten to add, when she was neither). There are not many wives that will let you disappear into the study to spend 3 hours on the computer on Boxing Day to look at spreadsheets of cards. Especially when you have a two year old tearing up the house.

Still it has to be done. The entire Player Design Team has evaluated every card that they want from the Diamond base set, the pre-Diamond Diamond-legal expansions and the post-Diamond-pre-Lotus bugged expansions (try saying that lot after a beer or two!). What I need to do is try and look at what each person is saying, which choices we have the greatest consensus on and why some cards might need to go in or come out despite those choices. As a companion I have a 35 page Lotus Design Guidelines document.

The other thing I have is the boundless energy of my colleagues. We spend most of the holidays trying to put the finishing touches to Enemy of my Enemy as well as drafting out Lotus. This gives us a jump-start, as technically we are not supposed to start work until the New Year.

Peak week for this phase is in early January. First week of Lotus design proper and last week before Enemy goes to print. Whew! I look at more L5R cards in these two moths than I ever remember existing!

So what we do is rough out our draft outline of Lotus. We spreadsheet the set and add in any old Open cards that we think might make the environment better. Then, in turn, both Roger Giner-Sorolla and I attach a phase and function to each card that is a possibility. We look at the gold cost for all clan personalities and what archetypes they might support. We also look at each fate-based card to see what phase of the game it affects and how it affects that phase - is it a tempo card, a control-like effect or an attritional effect? Every single card is analysed. Roger has a real talent for getting to the heart of things.

So that gives us lots of options. At this point we make new decision number one. Lotus base set will probably not be all reprints. There are two reasons for this.

Number one is that looking at the player base now it is quite clear that some of the reprints we are looking at are for the set are from a time when many of our players were not involved in the game. A card from Anvil of Despair will be as good as a new card for probably 80% of the player base. That being the case there is not much difference for many players. This of course puts extra work on us as this has now gone from a collation, wording templating and playtesting job to a design exercise as well. Still nothing like ambition, right? I mean ask Shoju. Hmm, maybe not.

Secondly, we feel that having the option to have cards do exactly what we want, as opposed to nearly what we want will be a good thing. We also think that the right number of exciting new cards will make the set more interesting for players. But after talking with both Jeff Alexander and Ray Lau we agree that no new cards will fill rare slots. This means that we will not be creating chase rares for those players that have been with us a while.

Of course the other thing that we want to look at are rules changes. We have already spoken publicly about changing duelling. Our playtesters have done a fantastic job of working through ideas with us and much credit needs to go to them. But there are al sorts of other tweaks that we want to go with.

Many evenings are spent on the phone talking across the Atlantic with Jared Devlin-Scherer and Ryan Carter - my colleagues on the Player Design Team. I have to say that two more creative and energetic people you would struggle to find. There is a truly great rapport between the whole team with each of us filling our own niche. It is working with all of these guys on both Design and Playtest as well as the desire to do something good for the players that gets me through a long hard-working January.

One of the main ideas that Ryan ad Jared have been working on is how we can make Lotus a set that will be good for draft. Which means we also have to sit down and work out exactly how draft will work. More long phone calls. We are getting there. Having a draft format means that we have to actually get the base composition of the set right not just for constructed play. This is unexplored territory.

February brings a number of challenges. We are going to actually have to design some cards - not just for Lotus but we have Code going at the same time. I am also going to have to look at playtest applications. And there are a lot. I mean A LOT. Around five hundred teams - that's over two thousand players. I reconcile myself to the fact that the mathematics of this means I am immediately going to make myself unpopular with about one thousand nine hundred and forty people. Good start! I set aside an entire weekend to reading the applications. I set another weekend aside for my son's second birthday. CB is understanding, but not THAT understanding.

The other thing that I want to do is ask a wider fan-base what they want from the game. We have a draft Lotus put together. But there are many, many options. I decide that if I can post to each clan forum I can get a straw poll of what different players like about their clans. This will give us better ideas for the base set and give us better ideas for expansions that follow. The response is immediate and (thank you very much all of you so far) very well presented. And by the way don't stop the ideas coming. We have three months of changes ahead of us. One of the good things is that many of the choices that we thought were the right way to go are echoed by many of the players. Of course there is also the issue that one person's "most fun" seems to be the antithesis of another's. But we all knew that, right? The other good thing is that I was able to see some options and wrinkles that we had not thought of, amongst peoples' posts.

Perhaps even more encouraging were the posts where someone said, "What I really want in Lotus is." and I was left thinking, I really want to reply to this and say, "I am sorry we just cannot do that. Because we have already got it in Enemy of My Enemy or Code of Bushido!". This was never more true than when I read a comment form a guy on the Shadowlands forum who said "I want big scary Onis! Damnit, Onis are not scary enough!" Just wait. a. little. longer.

"Look it's a tiny little Crab!"

So February sees three good things happen. We have all the new cards designed, we pick the playtest teams and have a short list for the Beta testers who will join in April and we get the first pdf of cards produced. So what can I tell you? Well obviously not too much. What I will say is this. We listen very much to what people are saying. We try to balance what is said with tournament results, our own experiences, the information from our playtesters and what people are telling us through on-line forums and other communication.

One of the issues that we feel as a team that has been a problem in the way that the game has responded to concerns. People do not like Blitz/Free Gold so it all but goes, people do not like Chi-Kill it goes, people do not like Honour that sits there and gains from doing nothing, so it goes, but then people do not like honour that proactively targets their cards either. The history of the game is one of strong movement away from one theme and into another. But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If speedier decks go then control gets easier. If control is easier then fast honour often comes through. Nothing is exact, but there are always consequences. The more you deny a strategy the more you make another one easier.

Also people see things very much from their own perspective of fun. I read a post a while ago complaining that Crane decks now come out and duel all of your guys - that is not interactive. Yet I can remember almost no time in this game when honour decks would have purchased personalities with 4 personal honour at reduced cost purely because they wanted to "do stuff" with them.

I digress. I am supposed to be talking about Lotus. So, by the end of February we have discussed and agreed that what we want to do in Lotus is get away from the boom and bust approach to strategies. No Chi kill is a bad thing. No Action phase control elements is a bad thing. No speedier military is a bad thing. No slow roll military is a bad thing. What we are going to try and do is have a pacey but exciting game where quick attacks and control elements can be combined but where it is difficult to totally overpower your opponent with any one single strategy. We need answers for players to have to other strategies. So we ant Lotus to be offering a mixed bag. Our philosophy is one of a "bit of everything you like is good for you"

Oh, and one other thing. We are trying to make the base card set have simple functions, we are trying in Code to do the same. We are aware that the game is complex. Some players like complexity others do not. We want to follow that philosophy of "something for everyone" not just in card function, but also in card form.

We have both Enemy and Code to help with this.

Playtest has begun. Our first sets of guys are going through now. We are trimming off some of the fairly rough edges, the first Lotus legal decks are forming in people's minds. We have instructed them to break and bust what we have put together. If they can, then we will alter the mix a little more, till they can't.

So there you have it. My diary for the first two moths of Lotus. I want to finish by thanking everyone who has helped so much even at this early stage.

I want to especially mention my PDT colleagues - Jared, Roger and Ryan are amazing to work with. Those guys deserve a lot of respect. They go way beyond volunteers and I hope that more than anything else people can appreciate that. So before this starts sounding like an Oscar acceptance speech and I burst into tears, I will finish.

Like I say, it feels like there is progress.

Mark
PDT
Lotus Lead Designer