Ghost Tarot Communication 001
Developing the Game
Hey everyone. Welcome to the first Ghost Tarot Communication. I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the game: specifically to show how the combat in the game has changed over the last few years.
My first prototypes used a card based, programming style resolution system with a few goals in mind:
The Character Sheet: I wanted the Ghosts to have a large suite of abilities. These abilities would be tied to limited resources forcing you to make hard decisions about when to use them.
The Initiative System: I wanted you to make your plans, and then watch them resolve. Each ability was assigned an initiative value, with low numbers resolving earlier and high numbers resolving later (ties being broken by the abilities ‘Suit’). Enemy actions also used this system weaving in amongst the Ghosts turn.
The Ego Deck: I wanted to mitigate bad luck, making failure rarer but more meaningful, and so I replaced dice with a deck of cards. Cards could be added to this deck to represent the things happening to your Ghost during the descent, adding a minus due to an injury, or a high number due to being well prepared.
The Threat System: I wanted to get rid of the idea of ‘wounds’. With abilities adding ‘Threat’ instead of dealing incremental damage. This was an attempt to represent bullets and swords flying around until one eventually landed. Threat could be reduced/mitigated/transferred between Ghosts and enemies.
An early Gutter Wych character sheet.
The Fusilier in a later ‘trimmed’ version of the design.
I worked on this system for around two years before I ended up giving up on it and going with something much more traditional (a simple dice + modifier) but I thought it would be interesting to talk about why I think each of these intentions failed.
Survival Horror: The top reason for my ditching these systems was it just didn’t evoke survival or horror. You had far too much control over your character, and spent more time micromanaging the various mechanics on the sheet than dealing with the enemies. The resource management was hard to parse as it was difficult to gauge how long you had to make your resources last. Choosing between the myriad of actions, and discussing how to synergise with the other players took waaay too long. The system was interesting and tactical, but it lacked the immediacy of a good survival horror game.
Solved Turns: The plethora of abilities/combinations were mostly reduced down to one or two combos that you would do over and over, meaning that a lot of the time, all that complexity was just bloat. Coupled with the fact that your abilities always ‘hit’ and always dealt the same amount of Threat meant turns could be solved, severely limiting your choices.
Lack of Exciting/Crushing Moments: This was a big one too. The lack of dice meant that the sting of rolling a one, or high of rolling a critical at just the right/wrong moment was gone. Drawing from the deck just didn’t feel the same, was far too consistent, and lacked the tension that dice bring.
‘Bad Luck’ Wasn’t The Issue: Over time it slowly dawned on me (with great horror as I’d invested so much time in this system) that dice, luck and seemingly limited choices might actually be the exact things I needed to evoke the feelings of terror and elation I wanted. I realised that failing wasn’t an issue if failing was as interesting as succeeding.
Gutter Wych from a later prototype. This version still used the Ego Deck instead of dice.
A similarly updated Fusilier from a later prototype.
There was probably around four or five other, completely different versions of the game I designed after this as I struggled to find what I wanted out of the game. In a lot of ways it was incredibly hard to admit I had completely misunderstood my own feelings on what I liked and didn’t like, but I always want to be focused on the mood and atmosphere of the games I make, and for me making sure that the mechanics fit the setting is far more important than proving I can make a unique combat system.
With the latest version I went back to some of my original notes for what I wanted the game to be. Stripping it all back into something leaner and more immediate, and taking lessons from RPG’s like Blades in the Dark and Heart about how to manage failure in an interesting way whilst embracing the randomness and excitement of dice.
Thanks to those of you who read this far, next time I’m excited to show you more current development work, and hopefully give a better idea of what you will actually be doing in the game!
-Sam