That Randy Brown

Deck and Bag Building as an Oppositional Mechanic to Dice

A while back, I wrote about my experience playing wonderland war. In it, there's a mechanic where players collect tokens representing potential point amounts, and add them to their dice so that they can try to be the first to score a set amount in the combat phase and win the territory (for game points, not combat points). In this scenario, the volume of troops in a territory only acts as an offset on drawing negative impacts from the bag instead of troops, which always eliminate troops. Every battle, in this way, is a battle of attrition.

Two interesting things that came out of that experience:

First, I began to understand deck building games much more. I don't think I'll be picking up a new copy of Dominion any time soon, but the mechanic certainly has much more appeal to me. This became especially relevant recently because I picked up adventure tactics and have been playing it with the boys, and it treats 'level ups' as a deck building experience: players pick a new available level, which gives them new cards to add to their character deck. In combat, they flip over four cards, so the more of one kind, the more likely it is to be drawn. This is a clever approach to character building.

Second, and related--I began to think about diceless scenarios much more. In classical RPGs, lots are driven by dice mechanics, and the way in which many games deviate is the level to which there is an associated dice mechanic to a scenario. Skill checks, combat checks, and hit checks all represent this mechanic--the more often the scenario has a mechanic associated, the more crunchy it is deemed, and the less associated dice mechanics, the more 'rules lite' or 'narrative' the game is.

Adventure Tactics straddles a line--the player can make only moves that they have the card for, and those cards almost always lead to a die roll (minus movement). This is the 'just enough dice' system that alleviates the need for a DM because the answer to 'can I do that' is answered differently--by the cards available to the player.