[Idea] Power Loop: the Game-Breaking Game

[Manxome]

Tossing around a game idea, interested in thoughts and reactions.


Concept: Power Loop is a card game that represents a group of players in a badly-designed RPG. Each player creates a "build" by playing cards representing character traits, powers, and meta-game knowledge. The goal is to be the first player to "break" the simulated game by either showing that you're personally better than the entire rest of the party or by discovering and exploiting an infinite power loop. If you can break the card game (e.g. by making continued legal play logically or logistically impossible), that works, too.


Gameplay: Not finalized, but I'm currently thinking that players draw cards from several decks, and are forced to discard a substantial fraction of the cards they draw; this means you're constantly making decisions about which options to pursue and which to ignore, even if you're not playing cards right away. Some of the decks are only accessible if you have a card that says you can draw from them.

Cards are divided into categories. Trait cards are powerful and character-defining, but you can only have a small number of them, and can't change them out easily. Knowledge cards are weaker, but they're permanent, and you can have an unlimited number. Item/Magic cards have costs that limit how many you can use concurrently, but you can take them back into your hand at any time to make room for new ones. Also some "instant" cards that do something and go away.

Cards are deliberately inflationary; that is, there are individual cards or sets of cards that you can play that have a net cost of zero and provide you some benefit. So all players will tend to increase in power as the game goes on, even if nothing "happens."

There are also collections of monsters, divided into several levels. When the party beats all monsters of a given level, everyone who participated in the fights advances a level (letting you play more traits) and starts fighting harder monsters (anyone who couldn't beat any of the lower-level monsters keeps fighting them until they do). If one player can single-handedly beat all monsters of a given level, when the rest of the party combined cannot, then that player wins (victory condition 1).


Card Examples:

Fighter - Trait
+5 wealth, +5 mana, +5 strength
May draw cards from the martial deck

Piercing Weapon - Item, cost: 3
Add your agility to your attacks
Bypasses armor, unless monster has "homogenous" trait

Extra Splatbook - Knowledge
Draw 1 additional card per turn
Discard 1 additional card per turn


Combat: The game's about the character-building, not the fighting, so this needs to be fast and simple, and probably will not involve any choice or randomness at all. I'm currently thinking that you need to get both an offensive advantage and a defensive advantage against a monster in order to beat it, but you have a couple options for each. The goal is to have arbitrarily different and non-synergistic character options, without forcing everyone to be a one-trick pony.

Offense: Each monster has a soak value, and a list of defenses with numbers attached (e.g. "armor (3)"). If your attack beats the soak value, and you can negate all of the defenses, you win. If you can't negate a defense, you can still win, but your attack needs to exceed the soak value plus the values of all the defenses that you can't negate--so you can beat "soak 5, armor 3" with attack 5 and armor-piercing or with attack 8. Alternately, you can get powers that just arbitrarily kill any monster that isn't arbitrarily immune to that power (e.g. "mind control: kills any monster that isn't mindless or psychic").

Defense: Each monster has one or more attacks, with a number and a series of key words. You can get a defensive advantage if you can soak or resist all the attacks. For example, if a monster's attacks are "close physical 5" and "ranged fire 3," then you could win by having "soak physical 5" and "soak any 3," or by having "flight: negates close attacks from monsters without flight" and "wind wall: negates ranged attacks" (or some suitable combination). Alternately, you can get a defensive advantage if your stealth score exceeds the monster's awareness, making it impossible for it to find you.

Monsters also have a series of keywords that don't do anything inherently, but are referred to on cards (e.g. "flight," "scent," etc.). Cards that add to your stealth or that let you arbitrarily kill stuff will generally state they don't work against monsters with traits X, Y, or Z. Not sure yet how many traits I want, but I'm thinking of having tiers (e.g. "flight" grants all the benefits of "climb," plus some).


Stats: Each player has a collection of stats. Some of them (like attack power) have predefined functions (killing monsters); others exist solely so that you can have cards keyed off of them (e.g. "add strength to attack power," or "requires 10 strength to use").

Wealth, Mana: Limits the amount of item and magic cards you can have in your build, respectively.

Attack: Kills stuff.

Stealth: Avoids getting killed.

Soak: Actually split into a bunch of small pools. "Soak physical 7," "soak fire 2," "soak any 4." All your soaking "stacks," you just need to have some way of allocating it so that it completely negates all enemy attacks.

Strength, Agility, Intelligence: Added as bonuses to other stuff with cards. May also need a minimum score in one to use some cards.


Infinite Loops: Naturally, I don't want to have an automatic "you win" card, so managing the transition from finite to infinite stats is a bit tricky. I'm trying to figure out different ways that it can be pieced together from several cards that all look relatively innocuous on their own. I also don't want this to be so easy that no one ever tries for the other victory condition, so it should require a combination of several cards, probably spread across different decks, and maybe with stringent use requirements.

Also note that I'm thinking you need to get your attack, stealth, wealth, or mana to be infinite (or undefined, or uncomputable) in order to win; getting something like strength to be infinite doesn't count (unless it indirectly causes one of the other stats to become infinite, which shouldn't be too hard, since that's the main thing it's used for).

Indirect Self-Reference: Get two or more stats to feed into each other and ramp up to infinity. Example: Add strength to agility. Add agility to intelligence. Add intelligence to strength. Add strength to attack power.

Divide by Zero: Get a metamagic card that gives you as many copies of a spell as you can afford (limited by your mana), then play a series of cumulative cost-reducers to bring the cost down to zero.

Infinite Action Loop: Find a card that gives you a bonus when a condition is met, then find a way to fulfill the condition whenever you receive the bonus. Example: gain 1 mana whenever your mana is exactly fully utilized; get as many copies of a spell as you can afford; get the spell's cost down to 1. I would prefer for a player's stats to be a function only of what cards he currently has in play (rather than what events have happened in the game--don't want to require note-taking), so I'm thinking this probably won't exist, except possibly as a "draw an infinite number of cards" loop that fulfills win condition 3 (by making it logistically impossible to continue the game).

Then again, maybe there should just be piles of tokens that give permanent bonuses to stats and cards that let you collect them under various conditions.

I'd really like to have several radically different ways to do this, but I'm not sure that very many can actually exist within the constraints I've defined.


So Yeah: I'm not particularly wedded to any of the specifics discussed above.

There are naturally potential difficulties creating a game that is straightforward, elegant, and balanced, but simulates a game that is convoluted, buggy, and breakable. I don't want to abstract things to the point that no one needs to understand the workings of the game-within-the-game (for example, "phoenix duplication" would need to be an emergent property, not the name of a card), because if you eliminate that, I think this will end up being a fairly mindless game that comes down mostly to luck-of-the-draw. But I'm not totally sure I can avoid that in any event.

Don't want players to feel like they're not interacting with each other, but I also don't want the gameplay to revolve around politics rather than strategy. I usually avoid free-for-all designs entirely, but I don't see a good alternative here. Currently thinking that player interaction is limited to anticipating and blocking victory condition 1 (by making sure the party can kill a monster level that one guy can solo) and probably a few "instant" cards that can affect someone else's build.


So...thoughts? Sound like a game you'd want to play?

[Username17]

I like it. I would suggest that the ways to victory should be:

• Power Loop: Get infinity of something.
  
  Curtain Call: The game should have a set of NPCs, Nations, and Gods in the middle of the table (more can be added later). Whoever kills the last one wins.

Sounds like it could be Munchkin+.

-Username17

[Koumei]

This sounds hilarious.

[IGTN]

Sounds fun.

I think that Frank's Gods/Nations/Plot NPCs would be more of the maximum level of monster; after you've defeated all of the smaller monsters, you go after the gods. If you can solo them all, you win. I'm not sure I like killing the last one as a victory condition, since it makes things too random, but I suppose it works to allow coming from behind.

I don't think that having infinite mana or wealth should be an automatic win on its own; you should need infinite attack, soak, or stealth, or an infinite number of item or magic cards in play.

There should also be cards that create tokens that count as cards, of course. Even if it's just "Magic Arrow: Put down as many Cost 1 Magic Arrow tokens into play as you want and can afford. You may expend one to gain +2 to attack with any ranged attack."

[CatharzGodfoot]

Sounds a little bit like Dominion with some reflavoring and (of course) loops. I'd play.

[Manxome]

Ironically, I don't actually like Munchkin, because I think there's too much random and backstabbing. And I don't think it'll be terribly similar to Dominion mechanically or strategically, but I can see how it might have a similar feel to it.

Curtain Call: Well, naturally, there will only be a finite number of levels of monsters in the game. I see no reason that the top level shouldn't be gods, and if the party advances past that level, then it's probably time to declare a winner before they realize there's nothing left to fight. My inclination would be to make it the player who killed the most gods, rather than the last one, though (ties possible)--I'm already thinking there will probably be a "monster trophy" concept at the party's current level. And I still think it should be possible to win before that if you can show that the party needs you but you don't need the party; I don't really like the idea of getting to maximum level every game, or that the winner would be the one-trick pony whose ideal opponent happened to be at the bottom of the deck.

Tokens: This is tending to sound more and more like a good idea, but I'm not sure exactly what types to have. I could have a "counts as a spell, consumes X mana, provides Y benefit" token, but that's kind of complicated and tends towards having a lot of types of tokens. Alternately, I could have "+1 mana," "+1 attack," etc. tokens, which would be simpler to use; that'd make it harder to do the "gets lots of spells" thing, but you could have mechanics like "convert mana tokens permanently into attack power" that still lend themselves to loops. (Of course, then I either need "negative mana" tokens, or need to treat "mana tokens" as a separate resource from "mana from cards").

Also, if I'm going to have that divide-by-zero trick in the game, the cheapest spell that boost your attack power probably needs a cost of 3-4, so that getting its cost down to zero (or maybe even just down to 1) requires the interaction of several cards.

Either way, I don't really like the idea of spending consumables in combat (like the "expend a token for +2 attack"). Fast, simple, zero choice. The monsters are there as a foil to show that you're awesome, not because beating a single monster is itself a significant accomplishment or goal. Besides, actually using the expendables any time that it doesn't change whether or not the game ends right now would almost certainly be a bad idea, so they probably don't do anything but make the endgame longer and more volatile.


Thanks for input and support so far; always appreciated.

[Username17]

In general, if something can be done without tokens it should be. The more things can be paid for by tapping and discarding cards the better. For that matter, I think that the more things can be handled implicitly rather than explicitly, the better.

So rather than having a mechanic of "win when you have unlimited" the general mechanic should be "win when you empty a deck." That is, if you can take the last card from any deck and put it into play such that you don't have any in your hand to refill the deck with a discard, you win the game.

So the piles might be:

• Treasure
• Power
• Knowledge
• Weapons
• Friends
• Places
• Enemies

So the thing is that taking any card gives you some kind of advantage. If you defeat an Enemy (and thus "take" it as a trophy) you get to pull rewards out from doing that.

Your actual turn begins with "Leveling" (in which you just put crap into play from your hand), and "Adventuring" (in which you use your abilities to take Friends, Places, and Enemies off the middle of the table). When you deal with the "world" decks (Friends, Places, and Enemies), they have a fixed open hand and as soon as a card is taken it is replaced off the deck. So the only way to win through killing the monster manual or conquering the world is to make a run on a single deck in a turn. Naturally, it behooves people to spread out their slaying of major NPCs and looting of dungeons so that none of those decks get so thin that someone can end the campaign without doing something bullshit.

So you actually draw and discard back into the deck from the Powers, Knowledge, and Weapons decks. That's what you use during your "leveling" segment. And that's kind of like trying to make a Mahjongg hand. But while you're at it, you get to pull out of the treasure deck for completing adventures. And yeah, some things would have really open ended crap like "exhaust two treasures to take an extra adventure" or "gain an extra treasure for completing any adventure" and crap like that, so you could just power your way through one of the adventure decks or even the treasure deck itself by dint of simply taking all the easy ones that come up until you have all the artifacts and the campaign ends.

You might want to split the treasure deck for symmetry purposes. But I'm not sure what distinction you'd make.

-Username17