Random as catch-up...or not

A friend invited a bunch of us to help him playtest a game. I like it, because generally everyone can come up with SOME game they'd like to see made. This will probably become a fallback question that I use when meeting people. What game would you make?

The friend, he is heavy on analysis and generally anti-dice. I guessed correctly that there would be limited randomness (a stack of tiles), and would be driven by player brawls. (Brawl over race...it's not that much of a guess.)

Randomness can be a useful catchup mechanic. Look at it this way - if everything remained status quo, the current leader would win. The other players want some dynamic behavior to shake things up (hopefully in their favor).

In my friend's game, the leader is generally attacked directly by other players. This leads to plenty of see-saw action, but most of the mechanics are driven by money. Want to do X? Pay money. Want to do Y? Pay money. If you don't have money, you can't do actions...and it can be pretty debilitating. In some ways, similar to discard hand mechanics in trading card games. There's a reason why discard is feared as a mechanic. Create an imbalanced economy, the economy doesn't right itself.

His fix was to create an official 'dark horse' position. If you're doing extremely poorly, there is a point at which you get crazy discounts on all of your actions. Again, money. Money is everything, except at the end...and then you need the victory points from buildings that you purchased and still control. It's still got all of the makings of a good game - it's just not my ball of wax.

I shared a game that I am working on. (The other designer's final comment was "I was just trying to figure out how to reduce the randomness in your game." Bwhahaha.)


So I like some randomness. I like being able to choose my odds - maybe play risky if I'm behind, or even just to cement a win in the mid-game. Or just to have smidgens of good/bad luck to overcome. I don't want a game that is flip a coin, get a point for heads. I also don't want chess, where it's very static and players SHOULD paralyze themselves, thinking further ahead.

In currently named "Magic Masters", players start with somewhat random spells, based on the Talents that the players draft in the beginning. As apprentice wizards, they also have some dice that generate mana to cast spells (or research new ones). As the player explores the world and takes over locations, they gain more regular sources of magic as well as other trinkets/abilities. The tiles they explore are random (within the limits of "all are one of 5 elements", "all are octagons", "all can be entered from 4 directions", and "all have some location of interest where you can battle a creature to get something").

What's random?

• Tile exploration (you can reduce some of the randomness by taking the Explorer talent)
• Mana dice (you can reduce some of the randomness by conquering elemental nodes, finding familiars, using certain magic items)
• Combat (it'll get its own post, but your spells use dice to determine if the spell hits or not...and each spell has different combat speeds and different combinations of dice to resolve combat)
• Quests come from a constrained deck, as do monsters. The quests are broken up by difficulty - you won't be taking a Tier 3 quest until the end of the game, but the Tier 1 quests are all roughly even.

A fair bit of mitigating randomness, if the player chooses to spend effort on it, instead of charging straightforward towards victory. How much mitigation the player wants - it's one more way the player can choose their method of play.