VTES 20230319

*Gasp*

Every four months or so, play a game I’ve been playing since 1996.

Because my Aberrant game was not happening, I was free in the afternoon of a Sunday.  Because it was Sunday, I had no issues with driving up, stopping at donut place to get a salami sandwich, finding … wait, no, I had trouble finding parking.  Eventually, I found parking nearby.

Having consumed the non-donuty salami sandwich, I was not disposed towards consuming food at the cafe.  Arriving 30 minutes early, I sat down and goldfished some.

We played two games.

Game 1

Mark (Akunanse combat) -> Ian (Brujarch) -> Alex (Dom/Obt) -> Rick (Striga)

I had built two new decks.  Because I forgot that I could shoot hoops when other exercise plans didn’t materialize, I had plenty of time to clean up a lot of debris and detritus in the computer room so that I could get at cards and sit on the floor and could sleeve cards, too.  Things still look so much better in there.

I haven’t played with a lot of new stuff as, somehow, only playing twice in 1.5 years doesn’t inspire me to build new decks, especially as I find deckbuilding for VTES rather oppressive.

Matata came out and Mark and I fought a bunch.  I brought out Salvador, Marguerite ADV, Ariane, and Jenna.  I ended one combat between Salvador and Matata by pressing to end twice with Bollix and once with Resist Earth’s Grasp.  Mark did get a vamp Hexed once, but, otherwise, had no pressure.  I bled for 2-4 a bunch as my deck was toolboxy, playing a bunch of threeways.  I also had three copies of Propaganda of the Deed in my deck.  With a few votes.

Rick got low without much ability to not death spiral.  I didn’t care about getting bounced or sitting up not doing anything as the Akunanse fought better than I did.  Rick got ousted, and I had no problem with Mark getting ousted to deprive me of the table win.  In the endgame, rather than a race between my few remaining cards and Alex’s stealth bleed, he brought out Abyssal Hunter, which did him no favors as it locked down his only vampire with blood such that I built back up and ousted the guy with a Cardinal and Bishop and with my zero titled minions with Eat the Rich for 4 off of my three Propaganda of the Deed.

I got to do stuff.  Combat.  Bleed.  Block Mylan with anarch intercept.  Rush.  Vote kill.  That’s like why play CCGs.

Game 2

Mark (Malgorzata & Friends) -> Ian (Ani/Tha) -> Rick (Lasombra Royalty) -> Alex (Unnamed)

I got ousted first and left an hour earlier than our end time.  Brought out Mimir, who bled for 2 once, then got Banished.  Brought out Aksinya.  Didn’t bounce bleed of 6 that ousted me because I had only drawn 1 of 24 master cards in first hour or so of play, though it could have just been bounced back.

Nor did I contest Lord Tremere with my predator.  Having one enjoyable game was fine.  Got home at quite reasonable time to eat, chill, wait for next episode of Tournament of Champions.

While two hours of driving to play for three hours is not particularly efficient, it was just really pleasant – the whole experience.  The deckbuilding, putting some cards away, getting food from place I would rate the place that gave me the most value of all of the places in that hood when I worked right around the corner.  Playing.  Hanging out.  Finding parking.  Getting home when light.

VTD 14

14 was better than 13.  It was just generally pleasant.

Friday 8:12PM

Our first run with usual players.  Epic.  We got ripped up in early fights.  I was playing a theme monk build, where the theme meant having a really low HP total that I was hoping would get mitigated by high AC, but I just constantly got hit, which meant I got dead (as well as turned to stone).  I got better.  Three others or so who died in rm6 also got better.  We wasted a huge amount of time in rm7 puzzle room and didn’t even realize how many steps there were on the puzzle.

Number of combat rounds:  3, 4, 6, 6.

Saturday 11:48AM

Team run again minus three players, plus one person well known to others, plus one person pretty much just known to me.  Epic.  I played poly elf because it sounds like wizards are going to not be polying starting next year.  Problem here was that I didn’t quite metagame well enough as I needed just two more HP to be able to take three hits in rm6.  I was the only one to die.  Without a cleric, someone had to waste a potion to rez me.  We went through rm7 puzzle, helped a lot by one of the tiles being flipped with respect to the others.

Number of combat rounds:  3, 3, 4, 4.

Saturday 6:36PM

Theme run.  Cursed.  There are seven cursed tokens for each of the deadly sins.  We had to equip all of them.  So, we had to sing love songs to the monsters on rd1, sit in our comfy chairs on rd2, couldn’t do missile attacks, lost an eye slot, had to look at ourselves in mirrors with melee offhand slot, couldn’t get synergy benefits besides treasure (yeah!!), could only use a candlestick in melee mainhand, had to use two potions for effect of one.  I ran angry barbarian who still hit for 50+ with a candlestick.  Dave’s build was 100hp wizard without any synergy HP bonuses and that used second eye slot from Cranston’s to run Eyepatch of Wealsight to ignore petrification.

Too many people – was a full run.  Organizer got to sing his love songs, but I didn’t bother due to single audio channel.  It was good.  A bit too narrow in how to do builds, though, for my tastes.

Because of the number of people and dependencies on murdering monsters with candlesticks, I don’t really care about the damage output numbers from this run, though my first attack of the entire run was a crit for 106 damage.

Sunday 10:12AM

Anti-Cabal run, only Nightmare, I dwarfed.  We did double monster HP in rm6 as … … …

I took zero damage on this run.  I almost got hit once, but I Shadowskinned that only successful attack against my AC of 48 away.  We wrecked the early combats and knew all of the puzzle solutions.  The irony of my metagaming was that I simultaneously metagamed to take no damage with immunity to Retribution damage, improved evasion, immunity to petrification, and AC48 while at the same time ran Butterfly Cloak to hope to get killed in rm6 and pop back into rm7 without caring that I’d only have 10hp.

I still have never triggered Butterfly Cloak.  When I should have run it was on second run.  That would have been perfect – let the flying alligators kill me as I get mazed into pocket dimension and wave my air elemental fists in the air like I just don’t care.

But, no.  I failed to take the risk of being immune to petrification on blind first run, which would have gotten me more dungeon cred than any dungeon ganglife could possibly bestow upon someone.  I ran Butterfly when it was basically impossible to kill me rather than when I knew I was expected to die.

This was the only run where the DM made us change weapons when our weapons got stoned.  While I was pro petrification for players as there are easy ways to ignore that, messing with weapons is really annoying.  I did get amusement, though, from switching between four legendary weapons in this combat without bothering to change any of my stats (first three had same average damage and fourth round was when we killed monster without deducting 2 damage for my inferior damage wheel using such a loser weapon as Thor’s +5 Returning Hammer of Smiting.

Number of combat rounds:  4, 4, 4, 8 (doubled monster HP for the challenge).

Takeaways

Rm7 puzzle didn’t bother me.  Way better than VTD12 rm7 puzzle as it had multiple steps.  Though, I wonder what would have happened if people had just flipped a tile on first run and realized that they could ignore the runes and just spell words with the letters.  We never did that.

Combats felt kind of stale even though flying alligators was hilarious and I was hoping for some petrification to be immune to.  First monster just made no sense to me, feeling like a monster made for particular mechanics rather than having a coherent identity.

I never did anything in first puzzle room.  I solved second on our blind run, but it didn’t feel like that room was much about the puzzle.  It was really more about NPC interaction.  Something I don’t actually like anywhere near as much as a lot of other people do.

I actually had to look at my notes to remember much of VTD12 – clear sign it was not good.  VTD13 had the 50% miss chance cluster that made playing annoying until you realized what was going on and did your due diligence to ignore incorporeal penalty.

I was way less stressed, as well, as I didn’t have to nag people about buying tickets for VTD15 the day VTD13 started or worry about what was going on with treasure enhancers.

I didn’t much like 2022 VTD, though the B runs were generally better to me as I could focus on what was new and metagaming and ignore how inferior 2022 was to 2021.  2023 is not great, but 14 is a step up from 12 and 13.

I kind of wanted to do a solo run so that I could get killed in rm6 and Butterfly myself to ultimate victory.  But, that:  A) wasn’t possible; B) would have cost more money.  I’m trying to be disciplined about not just doing runs to do runs when they aren’t remotely as good as VTD2, VTD3, and VTD5 (and maybe VTD6A where had two real distinct paths to choose from).  The lack of being able to choose rooms (or like VTD5, paths) just makes it a much less interesting experience.

Still, I will end up with more treasure than from 12/13 due to doing the Cursed run.  Would just be nice to be able to do more theme runs, like one of our two team runs as theme run like we’ve done before.

Some damage data from the three runs where I cared about damage output (reminder that I was doing monk on first run, elf on second run, dwarf on last run to explain the low damage output on first two runs for my classes):

Raw damage dealt, ignoring Double Strike, Reavers, and offscreen spell stuff (like AoE in rm6):
Friday
Barb 1460, avg 81
Bard 656, avg 39
Cleric 357, avg 26
Druid 642, avg 54
Dwarf 736, avg 49
Monk 733(!), avg 41
Ranger 507, avg 34
Rogue 657, avg 60

Not sure why my ranger builds were missing so often. Of course, Retribution caused some people to use ranged attacks.

Saturday
Barb 1514, avg 108
Bard 504, avg 39
Druid 716, avg 51
Dwarf 829, avg 59
Elf 452, avg 38
Monk 1334, avg 95
Ranger 845, avg 60

Gap between monk and ranger should not be that high, even if I’m making multiple builds. I missed a lot on this run, still would have only gone up to around druid level.

Sunday
Barb 1108, avg 55
Dwarf 1050, avg 53
Fighter 809, avg 40
Monk 1568, avg 78
Rogue 713, avg 36

Of course, rogues lose damage output when start to Flank. Barb lost a bunch of damage in rm4 on this run. Can see the collection difference between dwarf and fighter on this run. Monk is pretty low damage monk, only does like 80/rd, but critted a number of times.

Fairly Unjust

So, I generally like to read theangrygm.com, which may not be shocking given my style of writing.  That it has a bias around D&D style play means that sometimes it isn’t as relevant, and, yet, the internet is rife with GMs and players complaining about the same things I find in my play.

Recent article was on dice.  Not having seen card based systems (along the lines of choosing cards not just flipping cards) in campaign play, not sure what it would be like, but I can imagine enjoying campaign play without dice.  What I do agree on is that narrative dice are crap.  There’s no reason that a game needs to have “yes, but”, “no, but”, opportunity or whatever.  Here’s a secret about RPG play, at least tabletop RPG play – it’s all made up.  The GM is free to add complications or not, adjust success levels or not.

But, that wasn’t the topic I wanted to get to.  That’s just a pet peeve of mine as “100% storytellers” don’t need to be forced by dice to tell a story.  What I did want to get to is something he says about dice being fair but unjust.

So, I ruminated about that for a bit.  Then, days past, and my thoughts are likely less focused.  But, anyway, the idea is that dice aren’t biased – if you have a 31% chance of success and play some horrible percentile system, then you have a 31% chance of success.  However, a “just” result is something that fits our ideas of a coherent narrative.

For instance, I Honor Rolled something in HoR3 with a 97% chance of success.  It annoyed me to fail.  First of all, I shouldn’t have failed the roll in the first place, so the real probability of the combination of failures was less than 1%.  Then, this was something I obviously cared about succeeding at or I wouldn’t have gotten annoyed and just found it amusing to fail at something like a Lore: Heraldry roll or other meaningless filler roll.  That failing an Honor Roll meant losing a rank of Honor, which matters for most characters because of things like, oh, Honor Rolls meant losing a resource that mattered.

Anyway, I was trying to think about how I felt about fairness and justice in RPG play.

As I like fitting stories and not just random results that reinforce that we are deciding what happens randomly and not fittingly, I would seem inclined to be a champion of justice.  I certainly prefer systems with rerolls or after roll modifiers or (less so) preroll modifiers like Void Points because small sample size means remembering those times when probability was un- … unfortunate.  I suppose I could post on his site what he thinks about systems that mitigate the fairness of dice, but I don’t really care what other people think.  Relying entirely on randomness to determine results on very specific rolls that I care a lot about, like winning shogi tournaments with my 4k2 dicepool (where I don’t think I rerolled in that tournament) just sucks out the fun, maybe not always after time passes but also often after time passes.

Again, I think there’s an illusion of challenge in RPG play.  The more rely on dice, the less illusion.  Some players definitely want to wargame their RPG experiences and enjoy things like rolling up new toons, but that just makes me stop caring about my characters and view the game as a boardgame.

Now, I do have more appreciation for failure than I used to.  I also tend to like botches … for things like social rolls.  In combat, fumbles need to get decapitated, immolated, and banished to the realm of unrealminess.  Now, it depends upon the GM (about botches).  But, then, can say that about failure in general.

What does it mean to fail a roll?  The challenge is increased?  One would think so, but I’m a relativist when it comes to challenge.  That you fail your immediate goals?  I suppose that works in my case, where my goals are often to make the world better and/or make my characters more popular/respected in their worlds.

That you get less treasure/power-ups?  Sure, this works.  I guess.  For some players, it’s a big deal.  (For some, too big of a deal and get mad when failure happens.)  I think this works for me as I don’t feel strongly about these things.  I do care about missing out on cool stuff, like having a ship named after your PC.  But, I both feel the loss of not maxing out in power while not feeling that strongly about it, so it makes for decent stories – “I could have become a god, but, instead, I just became destined to be an eternal flunky to the gods after I bit it.”

Regardless as to how gamist, simulationist, or storytellerist one might be, I think the best RPG play is when there’s an emergent story.  Just how you get there is different.  Dice results (or any probability results) create that unscripted result.  On the other hand, player decisions/actions also create that unscripted result.  The reason why I’m not just looking to play a character sheet is that my decisions and my actions are not going to be the same as anyone else’s.

I don’t think I care much about fairness in RPG play.  At least not in this context – I’m rather negative towards griefy play where fairness means something different.

And, yet, I want that illusion.  Pulling back the curtain and realizing that failure isn’t really an option makes success just hollow.

I guess that’s it.  Something in here got me to thinking about a different topic – dice use besides determining success/failure.

TD Class Rankings March 23

This should be utterly fascinating to all.

While shooting hoops Sunday morning, I spent a significant amount of time ranking True Dungeon classes.  For me.  For funhood.

I decided I had to exclude subclass impact entirely as it really messes with averages.

Druid

Sure, this class is saddled with healing spells so have to healbot sometimes, but it has saves, has big blast spells, can Neutralize Poison [no, seriously, this is a plus], and polymorphs.  Buildwise, I like chucking a Hammer and more typical for most folks poly.  Melee has never interested me.  I made a not-quite-max saves build that I’ve never played that doesn’t actually look useless, though it makes no sense on Epic.

While don’t need Iktomi’s to poly into elementals, polying into elementals is enjoy-able.  Dungeons are all about which elemental to poly into in each room so that get at least every elemental type in on every run.  Iktomi’s enables not wasting potions for doing Fruit Ninja Runs.  Poly into chocolate fruitcake is what TD is all about, eh?

Sometimes, having heal spells is okay, too.  It’s all about choices and variety.  Druid is simply the best, better than all the rest.

Monk

May seem like I’m attracted to nigh infinite power as druid is also power class.  But, where monk wins for me isn’t in the averaging over 100 damage a round or having a slew of abilities that allows ignoring (normal) poison and normal missiles.  Monk is all about taking most powerful class in game and crossbowing … or staffing … or shurikening.

Get to the reverse later, but this is my taking L5R 3r Mirumoto Bushi and having only two ranks in Kenjutsu at IR-2.

Sure, I do Death Star monk quite often on our themeless Epic runs to bolster survivoring.  It’s okay.  Below can see a very different case of how powergaming turns out.

Wizard

Not afflicted with the insipid Alertness spell.  All about the burn- … -ing desire to be Angry!  Where once I wizzed all over the place to not have to slide and to pick planes of existence off a board, now the pinnacle of joy is smashing face with Drake’s.  Keep that class card clean by never casting.

But, Wizard offers more.  There’s poly in the most inefficient way possible, chucking a Hammer, and even *gasp* Fire Dart/Frost Dart.  Can go massive hit points and *not* ever use MEC effect (maybe not cast a spell at all).  Sometimes even enjoyable to AoE monsters.

Dwarf!!

Yes.  I.  Hater of demihumans and nonhumans in D&D and all of the D&D ripoffs and to some degree in Tolkien have been converted into the funlihood of playing a goblin archer.  Uh, I mean, dwarfing.

How did this mountain mining event occur?  Oh, how?!?  Playing the Anti-Cabal Run gave me only two options – worse-than-barbarian and taunting-worse-than-barbarian.  Because of the 3x crit on nat20 and how that works with missile attacks, I find dwarf archer pleasing.  Only got better when dungeons started polying me more than once into goblin.

Taunt isn’t actually all bad.  Sometimes, it gives RPing opportunity, well, no, not really, sometimes, it gives joke opportunity.  When get to Fighter will speak to the main benefit of this loser class.

Paladin

Paladin was actually the class I had the hardest time ranking.  I had it much lower while I was mooting on the topic.  But, I couldn’t escape that I choose to play Paladin a lot, far more than other classes I could choose with my team or when on PUG runs.

It has a bit of a healbot sensibility that sucks, but defense in and of itself isn’t uninteresting.  Guard is boring.  But, I like Sacrifice.  One of two classes that can play Figurine of Power Phoenix, which is my sort of effect.  I can go all out aggression with Averon’s +5 Deathcleaver, do the natural archer build, chuck a Hammer.  Maybe even attack with Ava’s in the Evil Outsider room of the dungeon.

Another thing I’ve come to embrace (no doubt because it gets so much hate from the community) is high AC.  While I can make any class AC40+ due to spending way too much money on this game, I can get into the 46+ range with the heavy armor classes without straining credulity.

What sucks about fighters, uh, I mean heavy armor classes is lack of damage output.  I don’t hate dealing damage.  That’s how you win, so I can’t avoid it, though dungeons should work on combat victory conditions besides monstermurder.  It does make me sad just how anemic this class is both in isolation and as part of team monstermurderers.

Fighter

I almost had this higher.  Why is the most irrelevant class in the game so appealing?

Uh, duh, who is writing this post?  I’m a powerlessgamer, a buttki- … … powerlessgamer.  Same reason I play Miya Herald or played a ton of !Salubri or Human Military.  Take something that sucks and try to make it suck less.  This is the reverse of the take something broken and make it funny, I mean, fair.

The whole idea with components in games that suck is that it doesn’t really matter what you do when you have no good options.  So, sure, Averon’s, Io’s, chuck a Hammer, Goblin Maul, shuriken, who cares?!?

Then, some runs require sucking.  I view Nightmare as the difficulty to try to solo.  To fit in on low difficulty runs, just armor up and do pathetic 25-30 damage a round (less on Hardcore).

Elf Wizard

Afflicted with inhumanity.  Afflicted with Alertness.  Invisibility does nothing.  Does have poly ability.  Does have ability to Quicken/Conserve Bull’s Strength on self for Anger!

Except, that means losing HP when Wizard can just not cast any spells and be Angry!  Does chuck a Hammer slightly more accurately.

I pretty much always would rather wiz the other way, but this ranks this high because the classes after this just suck to play.

Bard

So many options.  Can play Coward Bard, made funny because you always fail to be sufficiently cowardly when DMs just ignore that you are wearing Cloak of Blending.  Can chuck a Hammer.  Can now run Berserker Boarding Axe!!  Something I didn’t realize got screwed up with 2023 tokens.

Bardsong, though, is just oppressive … except when it isn’t.  I can enjoy being on runs where the party is grossly overpowered and just tell DM I’m bardsonging while I wander around the room, sit, go into the kitchen to look for drink/snack, or whatever involves waiting for team monstermurderers to finish murdering.

I thought I would enjoy Blaster Bard, but it is so, so boring.  I’d rather Flute.  Doing Monster Lore isn’t terribly interesting even if I like getting more monster info.

I can find fun, but it’s effort.  Various Discordites like to complain about not having more individual awesomeness – others get their cool moments, bard just provides nigh-infinite power to the party.  (I rate monk strongest, like Might Guy, but bard shares its chakra.)

Barbarian

This class is just so boring.  I smash.  I smash some more.  This round, I smash.  Sure, you can Fury with Io’s, which might be entertaining, except I rarely do in person runs where this actually works as website app wouldn’t even allow running Bog’s without a 2h melee weapon.

Can’t really lean into Damage Reduction as there’s no barb support for it.  Can do AC build with 1h melee weapon and still be better than fighters, which is a bit entertaining.

Just not as interesting to play against type.  If I’m running barb, something I rarely do as all of my usual runs have a devoted barb, party likely needs smash smash.

Cleric

I found my joy in Templar.  Regular Healbot is mindnumbing.  I Bless.  I Prayer.  Do you need any healing?  Are you almost dead?  Good, good, much more efficient to let you die so that I can rez you for free.  More healing?  Let me take this round to heal.  Where bard can just fire and forget, Healbot has to pay attention to what’s going on to make sure the party can win rm7, then proceed to decline survivor pins.

DEX Healbot only works in some runs.  No, really only reason to run Healbot is to run Angry! Healbot off of Eldritch tokens couple times a year.

Ranger

Tsuruchi Archer is the most boring school in L5R to me.  Ranger can double fist Hammers or chuck a Hammer or even use some sort of crossbow for entertainment.  Sure, 5th Ranger has a heal spell, so you can pretend to Healbot, which is the only fun way to Healbot.

Am I biased by lack of success on runs with ranger?  I don’t think so.  I think I finally realized that it’s just the most boring class in the game even if it has multiple real options.  Everything is just efficiency focused.  Even Warden sucks as you should never be missing when blowing ammo on attacks.

I make ranger builds all of the time to get that 99 points of damage a round in for Epic runs.  But, I try to pawn off these builds on others.

Rogue

Rogue’s problem is party expectations.  “Rogue” can be entirely fun, though I rate this class as the worst mechanically in the game even if it can do massive damage as it’s the glassiest cannon of them all with the worst saves, awful HP, challenging time getting AC up.

I want to “rogue” in in person play just to promote my guild, The Right Honourable Guild of Chest Fearers.  Got to do one run of shurikening while fleeing from the inevitable Mimic in abject terror.  That was, to my knowledge, the only time someone confused me with a rogue.

Oh, the ironic ironihood of ironicness.  I’m sure I mentioned before what I’m alluding to.

Well, that’s all 12 classes as ranked by the being who understands fun on a level incomprehensible to mere monstermurderers.

Calk This Way

Working on a new game.  Not a CCG, yet there are plenty of similar issues to address.

After Traveller, have way more respect for simplicity as expandable game components make games plenty complicated without help.

So, we had to deal with timing.  Specifically, sequencing as opposed to response timing.

One of the things I like about Ultimate Combat! is that it has specific times for playing Advantage cards.  One of the problems with the rules is that timing is fluffy with Action cards.  There has to be response timing or Psychic Delay wouldn’t work, but is it a true LIFO?  We can project Magic timing on all sorts of games, I tend to do it with Shadowfist all of the time even though SF has a pretty good rulebook.  Well, doesn’t matter a lot with UC!.

Anyway.

You have two effects that happen during same phase/subphase.  How do you resolve order?  It’s pretty typical that active player has “priority” but does priority pass back to active player after any effect generated by an opponent or do you go around clockwise (or by some initiative system).

We are trying to avoid having initiative in the game as a mechanic, but this sort of how to resolve multiple players trying to do effects comes up.  There are also cases where multiple effects are “simultaneous” and how to resolve those.

For instance, two soldiers are resurrected by same effect.  They have come into play effects or trigger other components’ triggered effects.  How do you resolve?  Let’s say that they inflict 1 damage on every other soldier when they come into play.  Does one damage the other?  Do they not see each other?  Both see each other?

Could you interrupt the resolution of simultaneous effects?  What plays can interrupt?  Just triggered effects or player-generated effects?

Damage assignment, in particular, seems to create a lot of timing considerations.  After all, the sort of games I work on have responses, things like giving damage reduction to a game component in response rather than fire and forget damage reduction.  Damage redirection is a complicated aspect of Shadowfist.  I’m happy to not try to create rules akin to it or other older CCGs where people were much less sophisticated about timing and the implications of effects.

How to resolve multiple ongoing effects interacting with each other?  Is there even sequencing?  Like effects could add or subtract, but what about tangential relationships?  I have an ongoing gain 1 health effect while another component is in the hood.  Other component has a “other components in the hood have half health” [because we screwed up coming up with good mechanics].  Do you halve first then add or add first then halve?  Okay, maybe have mathematical operations rules.  Maybe have some horrible mechanics like “all components in the hood may make exactly two attacks instead of one” on one component and “all components in the hood may make up to three attacks instead of one” on another component.  Which gets priority?  Is there a sequencing question as to which effect was put into play first?

So, we got into sequencing and will need to develop fuller timing rules when get further along.  Doesn’t always feel like games pay attention to how meaningful these considerations are, so we are trying to do solid design and development.

I do wish I could remember better the numerous other topics that come up just trying to create one game component.  I don’t actually have a ton to impart today, but I think another “design and development vignette” could be on syncing up game component mechanics.  Not just keywording abilities and templating language but having costs and effects be consistent across components.  If interested in this sort of shorter form, give a Hell, Okay, Sure, Whatever.