Thoughts on Death

[garykac]

In playtest 7, there were two (yes, two!) instances where player death was not really much of a punishment. And in one of these cases, Death was actually used as a way to quickly clear out the Tapestry to cast spells more quickly. It revealed that, as the Death punishment currently stands, mage suicide could be used as a strategy and that doesn't feel good in the game.

So Death needs a bigger punishment.

Simple thing is to discard all but one Tapestry cards and force the mage to start over. This will effectively cost at least one turn as they need to build up a decent Tapestry again, but they can buy 2 Tapestry cards to get this going quickly.

[garykac]

@blinks had an interesting suggestion here:

Upon Death, the mage is trapped in their Tapestry and needs to move around the boxes to clear out all the Threads before they can be restored (to the Astral Plane, of course).

This is an interesting use of the Tapestry, and it sounds like it would be great for an Astral Prison spell. Downside for a spell is that it's fairly complex to describe for a single spell.

[blinks]

The big thing about death penalties:

• they have to be big enough to actually be a penalty.
• they have to be recoverable enough so dying doesn't make you die more.

This is why the death timer has become so popular: waiting doesn't make your position worse in most modern games, though it's terrible in board games. The "trap" penalty makes it downtime without strictly being "skip a turn" downtime.

[garykac]

The death penalty also needs to not effectively be player elimination.

It needs to be a significant penalty: it should probably be equivalent to the lose of 1 or 2 turns at most. The problem with playtest 7 is that it was effectively a 0-turn penalty.

Problems with being stuck in your Tapestry:

• It's probably about 3-4 turns (depending on implementation details), which is effectively player elimination in a 10-turn game
• It has you play a solitaire mini-game instead of playing the actual game
• It requires special rules just for this case

And adjusting the "trap" so that players are only stuck there for a 1-2 turns make the rules-weight even more of a bad trade-off.

In comparison, losing your Tapestry (back down to 1 card) is about a 1-2 turn penalty (first turn building back Tapestry or partial rebuild and jump back in). These are more interesting decisions that don't require any additional rules and the player is still playing the same game.

[blinks]

I'd bet that losing your tapestry feels worse, though. Try it?

[garykac]

It might. That's why my initial thought was to lose only 1/2 your Tapestry, but then you could pad your Tapestry with extra cards to make Death less of an issue (well, for the first time at least).

As they say: the playtest's the thing.

[garykac]

From Playtest 11:

• Losing Tapestry felt really bad after investing time to build it. It could be re-built, but...
• Too easy to camp at spawn location after killing

So once you died, it was too easy to fall into a cycle where other players could prevent you from getting back into the game. This was not good.

[garykac]

Alternate proposal for Death:

• Lose all Tendrils and Charges (but keep all Threads)
• Reset to start location
• Permanently lose 1 mana (so, continue with 12 tokens instead of 13)