The Evolution of Elemental, Part 1
Okay, so this is a little bit different than what most people might expect. Following is the fairly long history of development and thought behind the creation of a game I’m currently working on, entitled ‘Elemental.’ Read on for a rather rambling report on a rather rambling process ;-)
An RPG I stumbled upon back around high school, called Dragonstorm, presented me with a mode of play I hadn’t thought about before: rather than using a set of books ($30 hardbacks or otherwise) for the game, the rules of Dragonstorm are compact enough to fit onto a few pages of insert material folded up inside a box of cards. (Incidentally, the rules can be found for download from their site, if I recall correctly.) The cards themselves represent basic characters, items, spells, special abilities, pieces of terrain, monsters, plot twists, and so on. Each character is built using a point-buy system and different types of cards, giving a fair amount of customizability and making for some interesting combinations and strategies. However, Dragonstorm still uses dice for random resolution of tasks, despite the card-focus of the rest of the game.
Playing Dragonstorm gave me a chance to think about what a game might be like if it used cards for a resolution system. I’ve always been a big fan of the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny, and the Trumps (magical Tarot cards that can be used by the characters to, among other things, divine the future) gave me even more wild ideas and crazy schemes about using cards for an RPG. When I finally managed to track down a copy of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, I was greatly disappointed to find that it didn’t use cards—just number-comparison and description (though I’d like to note that I think the Amber DRPG is great). The ‘Diceless’ aspect of the game is superb, and I liked the idea very much, but it just wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
However, those two things eventually combined in my head:
1) Having a set of static stats and abilities that are bought with character points (much like any point-buy, but the fact that it was Diceless was what made Amber the one that sticks in my head, over other games like GURPS and the World of Darkness), and
2) using cards to resolve conflicts and judge results; while Dragonstorm used cards in a way I liked very much, I wanted the cards to be used very differently.
What they combined into was a game using a deck of cards, basically a full Tarot deck, as a random factor, with the characters being described in terms of how closely they matched each of the four Suits of the Tarot (in this particular version, Swords, Cups, Rods, and Coins). Drawing a card that matched the relevant Suit would be beneficial, higher numbered cards were more successful, drawn values were added to character stats to attempt to beat a target number, etc. This game had some other interesting features, but that’s the most relevant description.
This gave me some of the things I wanted; I liked the randomness, but I liked that it was tied more directly to what the characters specialized in and/or were doing at the time. For example, the Suit of Swords represented physical action, like atheltics or combat. Drawing a ‘10′ card would be great at any point, but if someone trying to jump a yawning chasm were to draw the 10 of Swords, they would count it as if it were an 11of Swords—so it’s still essentially random, and most actions will still have the same chance of drawing the same numbers as any other action (because they all have a Suit that would get that bonus), but there’s more of a thrill of triumph to be had when the cards fall perfectlyand you get something ‘impossibly’ high. And beyond the randomness, I liked the breakdown of the characters into four ‘attributes’ that also were, essentially, their ’skills.’ Almost like taking the GURPS 4-stat philosophy, and applying it much more broadly. It makes it easier to see what a character can do, and also easier to build a characters, since there are fewer long lists of skills and such.
However, a problem then arises: how do you make the characters unique if they’re all represented by so few things? I tried adding a specialty system, to let people get better at things in ways more focused than the simple Suits would allow, but nothing seemed to fit, and it wound up overly complicated. I started changing the way I did things to use less numbers, and moved from using the whole Tarot deck to just using the Major Arcana (22 major cards which aren’t part of a Suit, and which have very detailed meanings and suggestions), but then I wasn’t sure about using the four Suits for the character’s abilities, since they no longer matched the cards in the way they had before—especially now that I’d moved to having the Game Master interpret the meaning of the cards in relation to the situation, rather than comparing numbers.
In the end, I showed the game I’d come up with to a friend of mine. We talked about it, and went over how I wanted GMs to use interpretations of the cards to resolve actions in much the way that the Tarot can be used to answer divinitory questions. It seemed to work in general, and I decided to keep working at it. Also, my friend said that what I’d come up with was very similar to a game called Everway, which I hadn’t heard of previously.
Curious, I picked up a copy of Everway on Ebay since it was fairly cheap, and I did find that the game is designed in a way similar to what I was envisioning when I started work on the system that has since come to be called Elemental. It uses four ‘attributes’ tied to the four alchemical Elements, has point-buy character generation, and uses a Tarot-like deck of cards to resolve actions. I highly recommend Everway to people interested in games that promote roleplaying and simple rules over complex game mechanics.
However, I still had some problems with Everway. I didn’t like the fact that the ‘Fortune Deck’ didn’t seem to be related to the attributes directly—the story to tie it in with the game was interesting, but it felt ‘tacked-on’ to me. Also, unlike my original conception of the Tarot-based game, Everway used the reverse meanings of their cards as well as the ‘upright’ meanings, making things a lot more complicated to interpret. Looking at the Powers system of Everway, I found it matched some of my favorite ideas for generation of characters (using questions the player has to answer to decide costs for powers/character traits/etc, ala some older computer games), but was far too vague for me to feel comfortable using it. When looking at Everway in comparison with Amber Diceless, Everway also suffered from the ready possibility of characters with nearly identical stats, since there were only four and they only went up to 10—in Amber they still had just four, but they went from 0 up through the hundreds, potentially infinitely.
These comparisons between my game, Amber, and Everway helped me focus on what I wanted. I wanted to be sure characters could be unique, but wanted a little more structure than Amber’s infinite stats; I wanted to deal with just a few character ratings, but more than the ‘four’ that seems popular; I wanted to emphasize the cards; and I wanted all the different aspects of the game to be as related to each other, as integrated, as possible.
So that lead to the current development of the game I call Elemental, a diceless, card-based system, using a few concepts drawn from a fantasy world invented by a friend of mine. What exactly this has become will be looked at in Part 2, next week (or sooner if I’m lazy and don’t do my school work). However, here’s a preview of the very first draft I’ve created for the back of the cards:
