• Role - Lead Designer

  • Size - Solo Project

  • Platform - PC - mod - Tabletop Simulator

  • Work Period - 35 hours of work

  • Project - Prototype for a new character deck/mechanic for an established card game

Tabletop simulator is a multiplayer physics sandbox game developed by Berserk Games that allows players to play and create virtual tabletop games. With this tool, I wanted to make a custom character deck with a unique mechanic for the established card game Red Dragon Inn by Slugfest Games. I have had many hours of fun playing with the official characters released in the sets and I wanted to take this opportunity to take a deep dive into the balance of decks as well as try and add something new to a game series I enjoy.

Intent

My intent for this prototype was to make a generally balanced deck alongside a unique mechanic that would not only add a new spin to the base gameplay but would fit a theme that has not been seen in the official game yet. From my experience of the officially released characters, the two major aspects that go into the balancing and theming of the decks are the win condition of each deck as well as how the mechanics are arranged to fit the win condition. With this in mind, I wanted to make a character whose primary win condition was to deal damage not just at a single target but at multiple targets. This win condition is enhanced by the additional mechanic of a secondary deck of cards that can only be accessed by using certain cards in the primary deck which is flavored as the secondary deck being a gun while the individual cards are the bullets being fired from it.

Early Development

The initial steps of development were planning the special mechanic/theme for the character alongside a general balance scale for the individual card’s power level for the deck. The main theme for the character being a fantasy cowboy was set from the start due to the inspiration of a player character I made in 5E Dungeons and Dragons which was an arcane gunslinger. The only question that needed answering from there was “what kind of mechanic would work best for this theme?”

I took inspiration from an official character deck named Piper who is a sniper with the bow. Her mechanic involves an extra deck of cards referred to as the quiver which she can draw from in addition to her normal deck of cards. This secondary deck being arrows for Piper’s bow is a great thematical element allowing the separation of her personal skills and her weaponry skills. This brought forth the idea of a secondary deck of cards acting as the gun/bullets but to further expand from there instead of drawing normally from the second deck you place the cards in front of the player. This is to fit more in line with the gun theme of a revolver holding bullets in the chamber. The player does not have direct access to these bullet card resources and must instead play their normal cards from their hand. Some of these cards will allow the player to reveal a bullet card or to refill the bullet cards in front of them. The separation of normal and bullet cards allows for either focused effects on a single target, the random chance for a dud effect to occur, or the main intent of spreading the effects out to multiple targets. The reasoning behind this is that even though one card directly causes the other card to activate, the separation of effects happening to come from multiple different cards allows for an easier occurrence to target multiple people.

icon for normal cards to reveal bullet cards

 

Piper, the offical character that I based Clay’s mechanic on

 

Player’s board layout of bullets, bandolier deck, and normal deck

 

icon for normal cards to refill/reload bullet cards

While the general mechanic and theme were set up, I focused on the individual card values for balanced gameplay. My first steps toward this were looking at a select few decks and putting their values into Google Sheets to see their general power level per card alongside any patterns that showed up between decks. There were two main patterns that came out of this research. The first is that characters with special mechanics generally have lower power base cards on average compared to standard decks. This is primarily to focus more on using the special mechanic of the character to make up the difference in play rather than the character’s base cards. While the second is that all decks share the same amount of universal cards such as “Gambling, I’m in” and “Wench, bring some drinks for my friends!” Every deck has the same number of these types of cards allowing for everyone to have a fair chance of having any one of these cards in hand for any number of board states. I made sure to keep my base cards' power on the lower end to help bring out the usefulness of the secondary mechanic of activating bullets cards from the base cards as well as keeping the ratio of universal cards that all decks have.

In Practice

During initial playtesting of both the gun/bullet mechanic and the balance of the deck’s power level, one key issue came up being the gritty details of card interaction through text. This appeared mostly in trying to convey to the player how to play the deck in the (rules) but also appeared in the cards themselves in keeping consistent wording/formating with official cards.

The primary issue that came from this was how ignore and negate effects interact with the base cards that reveal bullet cards. This came about due to how the player needs to play a base card that says they reveal a bullet card in order to actually use the bullet card, but what happens when the base card is either ignored or negated. I had to dive into the rules to see exactly how these effects resolve. I found this section on ignore and negate effects:

When you Negate a card, you completely prevent it from resolving. The Negated card goes to the appropriate discard pile. None of its effects happen. When you Ignore a card, the card resolves normally, but it has no effect on you. It still affects other players as usual. (Red Dragon Inn 3rd Edition rules book)

Following this logic, I added to my rules that when one of these base cards is ignored then you can still reveal a bullet card is not affected by the ignore effect. However, if the base card is negated then no bullet card is revealed due to the base card being unable to resolve.

After the main issues with wording and formating were resolved, players understood and utilized the mechanic to not only single out major threats but also spread out their threat range to multiple players. As for Balance, the initial power level of the deck was in line with other official decks with special mechanics sans for a few select cards that some players felt were one value change away from being fair.