Posted 1/29/2025
so i've been watching a lot of northernlion play slay the spire recently. sometimes background noise, sometimes to fall asleep to (i find the chatter of voices relaxing, and boy does nl fucking chatter when he plays slay the spire).
he's recently been on ascension 20 or so with the silent character. i think he plays really well and really smartly (despite what the comments on his videos say), im not very good at slay the spire and have trouble even with ascension 1. im not the type of person very keen on learning and exploiting all the meta possible in both slay the spire and other games. ive also been playing some balatro again recently and i feel quite the same about my runs there, im good enough to get to ante 10 or 11 if im lucky, but i can never go any higher, im still in the low stakes on a lot of the decks i have unlocked too.
i really like slay the spire and balatro, i'd put them in some of my favorite games even, but im not "good" at them. to keep in line with card games, i really like magic: the gathering too but im not that good at it either. these are personal evaluations against other people that i see play these games, whether they be friends, streamers, strangers etc. i'd put myself in the low skill range in a lot of deckbuilding or strategy type games, even if i play a lot of them and play them frequently.
i'll be real, i dont find the concept of mastering a game through understanding its meta all that interesting. i play mtg because i love funny cards that cause weird interactions. i dont make powerful decks, i make decks that i think are fun for me to play.
this concept extends to balatro and slay the spire, but in the way that i dont know the "best practices" of gameplay because i cant see them as emergent patterns due to the randomness of gameplay. unless i look up "best builds" its unlikely i'll ever know what the meta is. and ive never done that. i only know some of that stuff now from northernlion's commentary but i dont quite get it all yet because the randomness is still a factor.
i like to design and make games, ttrpgs a lot of the time. i play dnd, but i never min-max my characters because i find that makes characters "boring" versus ones that i make intentionally weird and with varied skills (which can lead to some bad stats but i just live with it).
as a game designer who doesnt like min-maxing and high optimization and meta usage, how do i make a game that is more mechanics heavy? referring to the title of this blog post, do i have to be a master of every single mechanic of my own game?
im struggling to design the game im currently working on, feeling stuck with decision paralysis on certain mechanics because im worried about potential mechanical synergies/combos that i'd be missing out on or design a full on nonbo (two mechanics that clash or cancel each other out rather than work together) and not realize it.
and then there's the demon in my head thinking about "designing for an audience" which i dont try to listen to as much as possible, but then i watch northernlion on ascension 20 and think about the fourty ways my game can be broken and exploited in ways i could never anticipate by people that aren't me. and that is a little exhilarating to consider, but also really scary. it would feel good to see my game pulled and channeled in different ways, but it also brings a sense of a loss of control.
i would have to think that the slay the spire devs thoughtfully designed how their game would work, especially with ascensions increasing the difficulty. they would have to be masters at their own game and accommodate how their mechanics interact with randomness.
i would say ttrpgs are not dissimilar, especially those that run on random tables and random encounters. how do you design and balance for randomness? how can you predict how a latter run of a dungeon will go when the party is hurt and heavy with loot?
i have to figure a lot of OSR "balance" might just be that player character death was how that was "dealt with". you push your character too hard or get unlucky and they fucking die. i am a pro-character death person, but i can maybe see how the culture around not liking it in modern dnd and other ttrpgs would get born out of this resolution.
randomness is an intense mechanic to design around, i cant say i have any good handle on it. but maybe looking at balatro and slay the spire and others like them could help me understand how better to do it.
i dont think that dnd has it "solved" in the ttrpg space, look at how many mechanics are shoved into 5e and how contradictory some of them become that you have to house rules the resolution because in a strictly mechanical sense you do something that the game never predicted. maybe a game ive never heard about has it solved, but so long as some devs still think pbta tables where a 2 is rolled as often as a 7 is valid "randomness" it might not live in the ttrpg space at all.
i think i'd be fine at not being the master of my own game, i'd have to see how players interact with it to know how some things end up "actually" working. but that wont happen until i actually finish writing and designing the damn thing so i gotta go do that first i guess.
maybe one day i'll write about something other than game design anxieties. i unfortunately just think bout this stuff a lot.