What's in the Cards
Posted: Fri May 05, 2023 11:01 pm
So, back in April I wrote a blog post discussing my plans to include content for open-source card games, wargames, and other games in addition to RPGs. I want to focus for a moment on card games, because I've spent a bit more time looking into open-source card games and my plans have changed a bit.
Though it's not directly related to my plans for the Wongery, I also want to retract one other thing from that previous post. In the section about customizable card games, I mused about how a card game could have an open license and still retain some sort of collectibility. I suggested that perhaps while the card rules could be open content, so that anyone could in principle make their own cards, the text of the official cards would not be. Or, for that matter, even the text on the cards could still be open content and only the illustrations closed. That way you'd have an open system; people could still create and print their own cards; but if they wanted to legally use the official cards, they'd still need to buy them—or, if it's just the illustrations that aren't open content, they could freely print and use whatever cards they want, but they could still collect them for the illustrations. I implied or at least meant to imply but I guess I didn't actually explicitly say that the cards would still come in randomized packs; there could still be chase rare cards; it's just that you wouldn't have to rely on luck (or secondary markets) to get specific cards you wanted for gameplay purposes—only to get specific illustrated versions for their collectibility.
But then while I was searching for more open card games I ran across some pages that argued against the very concept of collectible card games with randomized packs. Buying packs of random cards in the hope of getting the particular cards you want is, these pages contended, ultimately a form of gambling, ultimately little different at its core from much-maligned practices like gacha games and lootboxes. As just one example, here's a quote from a post by the creator of the (non-open) customizable card game Legacy's Allure entitled "Stop Making CCGs!": "Booster packs are effectively the original lootbox. I would argue that this makes the model exploitative, as it feeds off of gambling tendencies of some consumers. Magic has been called “cardboard crack” partly due to the intense dopamine rush some people get from “cracking packs” (i.e., opening booster packs)."
And you know what? Yeah, I think that's kind of a valid point.
So, what I said (or kind of implied or at least meant to imply) in my previous post about making an open game where the rules were open source but there were still randomized packs sold with proprietary art? Yeah, don't do that. (Not that I expect anyone was going to rush out and do that on my say-so anyway.) Just because the cards would be collectible for the art rather than for the rules doesn't eliminate that aspect of gambling. Instead, if you want to make a customizable card game that ...I propose this instead (which I also don't expect anyone is going to rush out and do on my say-so): Sure, make the rules and the text of the official cards open content, and reserve the art as closed content—or maybe release one version of the art for each card as open content, but have closed-content alternate art treatments. But then don't sell the cards in randomized packs. You can sell them individually, by print on demand—sure, print-on-demand cards would cost more than mass-produced ones, but they could still be sold for a lot less than in-demand cards would go for in the secondary market. You could sell them in non-randomized packs, either starter decks or other themed assortments. Better yet, you could do both. (You could also sell—at a cheaper price, of course—decks of cards with the non-exclusive, open artwork; even though they were open licensed, printing them in bulk you could sell them for less than it would cost for users to print them themselves and still make a profit.) Heck, you could even preserve a kind of collectibility without the randomization by making at least some cards available for only a limited time. Would this business model be as profitable as a successful game that sold randomized packs and appealed to people's gambling addiction? Almost certainly not, but it would be more ethical.
(When I originally started writing this post—which was before the previous post was finished (and actually I think before it was even started); I generally have multiple blog posts in progress at once in various stages of completion because I am an addle-brained doofus with no ability to focus on anything—I was going to write something here about not wanting to accuse Wizards of the Coast of unethical business practices, even notwithstanding the OGL obturbation a few months ago... but then, holy crow, they sicced the Pinkerton company on some sap who was accidentally sent some Magic cards from an unreleased set, and now I'm much less inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt. (Especially since it turns out it's not even the first time they've done this!) I mean, the Pinkertons are basically Evil Minions Incorporated; on the scale of signs that you may be a villain, hiring the Pinkertons for anything falls somewhere between building a giant death ray and living in a volcano lair.)
But anyway, I said my plans regarding support of open-source card games on the Wongery had changed a bit, and that's the main thing I wanted to write about (but, as usual, I spent several paragraphs rambling about tangentia before getting to the principal point). The big picture of the plans have not changed; I do want to include cards for open-source games based on Wongery material. What has changed is which games I plan to include material for, or at least which games I plan to prioritize.
Previously, while I guess I hadn't explicitly said that it was one of the first card games I planned to include cards for, I did say that Arcmage was "the only one that seems to both be in a finished and playable state and still be under active development"—and in fact I did have it in mind as one of the first card games I'd include, even if I didn't actually specify that. That is no longer the case, for two reasons.
First, I've taken a closer look at Arcmage itself. There are a few minor concerns I have with some of the rules and the frequency of certain abilities, but the biggest issue I see is that the Arcmage developers really need to find a good rules manager with technical writing skills. The wording of the cards is very often vague or ambiguous; in most cases it's more or less evident what the card is supposed to do, even if it doesn't say it as monosemously as it should, but there are some cards that have such muddled phrasing that I'm honestly not sure how they're supposed to work. But none of that is the reason I'm no longer prioritizing Arcmage for support in the Wongery. These are fixable issues. Even if my concerns about the rules and abilities are well founded (and they very well may not be; I'm not experienced with CCGs), these issues can be addressed with future card sets. And the equivocal rules text can certainly be cleared up if, as I said, they recruit someone with the skills to do so. Anyway, the Arcmage developers are volunteers who work on the game in their free time; it would be unfair to hold it to the standards of a game like Magic the Gathering that has hundreds of people working on it as their full-time jobs.
No, my concern with Arcmage is one I actually raised in my previous post—the very world-specific nature of the five factions. These factions can't simply be ignored; they're as important to Arcmage as the five colors are to Magic: the Gathering (to which colors they closely correspond). Unlike those five colors, however, they have names that tie them closely to Arcmage's setting, and by which they are called in the rules text. This presents a challenge in designing Arcmage cards set in other worlds. In Magic, this is less of a problem because the five colors represent abstract philosophies rather than named organizations; any world could have characters or societies that lean toward the intellectual, perfectionistic nature of Magic's blue color, or the freewheeling, emotional nature of Magic's red; most worlds do not have a House of Nobles or a Red Banner. I suggested in my previous post that either I could find groups in the Wongery's worlds that more or less corresponded to the factions of Arcmage or I could create new factions for those worlds, but neither of those options really seems satisfactory. Perhaps a more palatable alternative will occur to me; I'm not saying I am definitively never going to include content for Arcmage; I am just saying that it will not be a priority.
(Whether or not there is ever content for Arcmage include in the Wongery Gamespace, however, I would encourage anyone interested to join the Arcmage team and help with the game's development. (Admittedly they have not made it easy to join; the navigation of their site is rather a mess, and they've abandoned their forum in favor of Discord and Matrix, which make it much harder to find old messages and present a much higher barrier to entry. Still, I'm sure they'd welcome any new blood.) The same goes for Gaia and the other open-source games I mentioned in my previous blog post on the subject. I like the fact that people are creating these open-source games, and I'd like to encourage more of it.)
The second reason I've decided to deprioritize Arcmage is because aside from taking a closer look at Arcmage itself, I've also done another search for other customizable card games, and I've found a few I missed on the first go. One, Dvorak, is a very open-ended game that has no built-in setting and could certainly have cards made for it themed to any setting. The problem with Dvorak, however, as far as its potential for the Wongery Gamespace goes, is that it's too open-ended; it's so rules-light that it's less a full game on its own as it is a starter kit to use as the basis of the game. You could certainly use Dvorak as a framework to build a customizable card game around—"you can even build your own collectible card game from the ground up", as the main page of the Dvorak wiki says—but this wouldn't be that much less complex than building a customizable card game from scratch, and anyway the point of the Wongery Gamespace is to supply content for existing open-source games, not to publish entire original open-source games of our own.
But if it's possible to build a collectible card game using Dvorak, has anyone perhaps already done so? Yes, as it turns out; quite a few people have. But most of these Dvorak-based CCGs are closely themed after existing properties, and those few that are thematically open enough to have cards made for any world—"Elemental TCG", "Imaginary Wars", "Myth CCG", the presumably yet to be assigned a final name "A Magic-y CCG card set"—have only a rudimentary level of development, each with only a handful of cards and some very basic rules. The Dvorak game not based on a copyrighted property that comes the closest to being complete enough to form a decent foundation to build on and having a setting general enough to be adapted to other worlds is a time-travel-themed game called "Chronogeddon", but even that one is borderline—and doesn't seem to seen any development since 2013, so I don't know whether its creator still has any interest in it. In any case, it might not be entirely out of the question that we might eventually make some content for one of these games, but it's certainly not going to be a high priority, and for now Dvorak seems like more or less a dead end.
However, I did find another game that, like Arcmage, is still under active development and has enough cards to be considered in a playable state—and that, unlike Arcmage, is easily adaptable to any setting. In fact, it's designed to be easily adaptable to any setting; as the rulebook says, "Fantasy, sci-fi, western, whatever! If it involves characters fighting, then it can be made into an expansion for Strike Engine!"
The work of someone who goes by the nom de plume "SillyRookie", creator of a webcomic called '32 Kickup, Strike Engine is released under a CC BY 4.0 license. I haven't read through the rulebook in depth yet, but I've seen enough to be fairly confident that it's well suited to be one of the first card games supported in the Wongery's Gamespace.
I say one of the first card games supported, because I think it would be a bit odd to have just one open-source CCG represented in the Gamespace. When I first do get the Gamespace implemented, there probably won't be any card games represented; at the beginning it'll likely just have RPGs. (I'm currently leaning toward starting it with Basic Role-Playing, Dominion Rules, GURPS, and the Year Zero Engine, and then next adding EABA, Savage Worlds, Expedition, and FASERIP, in that order, but this isn't finalized.) But when I do add CCGs, I want to start with at least two. At this point Strike Engine is more or less a shoo-in; as for the other game to start with, I think I'm leaning toward Libre. While Libre's theming around gods and temples is somewhat restrictive, it's less so than Arcmage's factions; it may not be possible to make Libre cards set in every world of the Wongery without stretching the theme, but it should at least be possible to make them for some worlds.
I suppose I should probably spend a little less time deciding exactly what will be in the Wongery Gamespace when it's first created and a little more time... creating it. Hm.
Though it's not directly related to my plans for the Wongery, I also want to retract one other thing from that previous post. In the section about customizable card games, I mused about how a card game could have an open license and still retain some sort of collectibility. I suggested that perhaps while the card rules could be open content, so that anyone could in principle make their own cards, the text of the official cards would not be. Or, for that matter, even the text on the cards could still be open content and only the illustrations closed. That way you'd have an open system; people could still create and print their own cards; but if they wanted to legally use the official cards, they'd still need to buy them—or, if it's just the illustrations that aren't open content, they could freely print and use whatever cards they want, but they could still collect them for the illustrations. I implied or at least meant to imply but I guess I didn't actually explicitly say that the cards would still come in randomized packs; there could still be chase rare cards; it's just that you wouldn't have to rely on luck (or secondary markets) to get specific cards you wanted for gameplay purposes—only to get specific illustrated versions for their collectibility.
But then while I was searching for more open card games I ran across some pages that argued against the very concept of collectible card games with randomized packs. Buying packs of random cards in the hope of getting the particular cards you want is, these pages contended, ultimately a form of gambling, ultimately little different at its core from much-maligned practices like gacha games and lootboxes. As just one example, here's a quote from a post by the creator of the (non-open) customizable card game Legacy's Allure entitled "Stop Making CCGs!": "Booster packs are effectively the original lootbox. I would argue that this makes the model exploitative, as it feeds off of gambling tendencies of some consumers. Magic has been called “cardboard crack” partly due to the intense dopamine rush some people get from “cracking packs” (i.e., opening booster packs)."
And you know what? Yeah, I think that's kind of a valid point.
So, what I said (or kind of implied or at least meant to imply) in my previous post about making an open game where the rules were open source but there were still randomized packs sold with proprietary art? Yeah, don't do that. (Not that I expect anyone was going to rush out and do that on my say-so anyway.) Just because the cards would be collectible for the art rather than for the rules doesn't eliminate that aspect of gambling. Instead, if you want to make a customizable card game that ...I propose this instead (which I also don't expect anyone is going to rush out and do on my say-so): Sure, make the rules and the text of the official cards open content, and reserve the art as closed content—or maybe release one version of the art for each card as open content, but have closed-content alternate art treatments. But then don't sell the cards in randomized packs. You can sell them individually, by print on demand—sure, print-on-demand cards would cost more than mass-produced ones, but they could still be sold for a lot less than in-demand cards would go for in the secondary market. You could sell them in non-randomized packs, either starter decks or other themed assortments. Better yet, you could do both. (You could also sell—at a cheaper price, of course—decks of cards with the non-exclusive, open artwork; even though they were open licensed, printing them in bulk you could sell them for less than it would cost for users to print them themselves and still make a profit.) Heck, you could even preserve a kind of collectibility without the randomization by making at least some cards available for only a limited time. Would this business model be as profitable as a successful game that sold randomized packs and appealed to people's gambling addiction? Almost certainly not, but it would be more ethical.
(When I originally started writing this post—which was before the previous post was finished (and actually I think before it was even started); I generally have multiple blog posts in progress at once in various stages of completion because I am an addle-brained doofus with no ability to focus on anything—I was going to write something here about not wanting to accuse Wizards of the Coast of unethical business practices, even notwithstanding the OGL obturbation a few months ago... but then, holy crow, they sicced the Pinkerton company on some sap who was accidentally sent some Magic cards from an unreleased set, and now I'm much less inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt. (Especially since it turns out it's not even the first time they've done this!) I mean, the Pinkertons are basically Evil Minions Incorporated; on the scale of signs that you may be a villain, hiring the Pinkertons for anything falls somewhere between building a giant death ray and living in a volcano lair.)
But anyway, I said my plans regarding support of open-source card games on the Wongery had changed a bit, and that's the main thing I wanted to write about (but, as usual, I spent several paragraphs rambling about tangentia before getting to the principal point). The big picture of the plans have not changed; I do want to include cards for open-source games based on Wongery material. What has changed is which games I plan to include material for, or at least which games I plan to prioritize.
Previously, while I guess I hadn't explicitly said that it was one of the first card games I planned to include cards for, I did say that Arcmage was "the only one that seems to both be in a finished and playable state and still be under active development"—and in fact I did have it in mind as one of the first card games I'd include, even if I didn't actually specify that. That is no longer the case, for two reasons.
First, I've taken a closer look at Arcmage itself. There are a few minor concerns I have with some of the rules and the frequency of certain abilities, but the biggest issue I see is that the Arcmage developers really need to find a good rules manager with technical writing skills. The wording of the cards is very often vague or ambiguous; in most cases it's more or less evident what the card is supposed to do, even if it doesn't say it as monosemously as it should, but there are some cards that have such muddled phrasing that I'm honestly not sure how they're supposed to work. But none of that is the reason I'm no longer prioritizing Arcmage for support in the Wongery. These are fixable issues. Even if my concerns about the rules and abilities are well founded (and they very well may not be; I'm not experienced with CCGs), these issues can be addressed with future card sets. And the equivocal rules text can certainly be cleared up if, as I said, they recruit someone with the skills to do so. Anyway, the Arcmage developers are volunteers who work on the game in their free time; it would be unfair to hold it to the standards of a game like Magic the Gathering that has hundreds of people working on it as their full-time jobs.
No, my concern with Arcmage is one I actually raised in my previous post—the very world-specific nature of the five factions. These factions can't simply be ignored; they're as important to Arcmage as the five colors are to Magic: the Gathering (to which colors they closely correspond). Unlike those five colors, however, they have names that tie them closely to Arcmage's setting, and by which they are called in the rules text. This presents a challenge in designing Arcmage cards set in other worlds. In Magic, this is less of a problem because the five colors represent abstract philosophies rather than named organizations; any world could have characters or societies that lean toward the intellectual, perfectionistic nature of Magic's blue color, or the freewheeling, emotional nature of Magic's red; most worlds do not have a House of Nobles or a Red Banner. I suggested in my previous post that either I could find groups in the Wongery's worlds that more or less corresponded to the factions of Arcmage or I could create new factions for those worlds, but neither of those options really seems satisfactory. Perhaps a more palatable alternative will occur to me; I'm not saying I am definitively never going to include content for Arcmage; I am just saying that it will not be a priority.
(Whether or not there is ever content for Arcmage include in the Wongery Gamespace, however, I would encourage anyone interested to join the Arcmage team and help with the game's development. (Admittedly they have not made it easy to join; the navigation of their site is rather a mess, and they've abandoned their forum in favor of Discord and Matrix, which make it much harder to find old messages and present a much higher barrier to entry. Still, I'm sure they'd welcome any new blood.) The same goes for Gaia and the other open-source games I mentioned in my previous blog post on the subject. I like the fact that people are creating these open-source games, and I'd like to encourage more of it.)
The second reason I've decided to deprioritize Arcmage is because aside from taking a closer look at Arcmage itself, I've also done another search for other customizable card games, and I've found a few I missed on the first go. One, Dvorak, is a very open-ended game that has no built-in setting and could certainly have cards made for it themed to any setting. The problem with Dvorak, however, as far as its potential for the Wongery Gamespace goes, is that it's too open-ended; it's so rules-light that it's less a full game on its own as it is a starter kit to use as the basis of the game. You could certainly use Dvorak as a framework to build a customizable card game around—"you can even build your own collectible card game from the ground up", as the main page of the Dvorak wiki says—but this wouldn't be that much less complex than building a customizable card game from scratch, and anyway the point of the Wongery Gamespace is to supply content for existing open-source games, not to publish entire original open-source games of our own.
But if it's possible to build a collectible card game using Dvorak, has anyone perhaps already done so? Yes, as it turns out; quite a few people have. But most of these Dvorak-based CCGs are closely themed after existing properties, and those few that are thematically open enough to have cards made for any world—"Elemental TCG", "Imaginary Wars", "Myth CCG", the presumably yet to be assigned a final name "A Magic-y CCG card set"—have only a rudimentary level of development, each with only a handful of cards and some very basic rules. The Dvorak game not based on a copyrighted property that comes the closest to being complete enough to form a decent foundation to build on and having a setting general enough to be adapted to other worlds is a time-travel-themed game called "Chronogeddon", but even that one is borderline—and doesn't seem to seen any development since 2013, so I don't know whether its creator still has any interest in it. In any case, it might not be entirely out of the question that we might eventually make some content for one of these games, but it's certainly not going to be a high priority, and for now Dvorak seems like more or less a dead end.
However, I did find another game that, like Arcmage, is still under active development and has enough cards to be considered in a playable state—and that, unlike Arcmage, is easily adaptable to any setting. In fact, it's designed to be easily adaptable to any setting; as the rulebook says, "Fantasy, sci-fi, western, whatever! If it involves characters fighting, then it can be made into an expansion for Strike Engine!"
The work of someone who goes by the nom de plume "SillyRookie", creator of a webcomic called '32 Kickup, Strike Engine is released under a CC BY 4.0 license. I haven't read through the rulebook in depth yet, but I've seen enough to be fairly confident that it's well suited to be one of the first card games supported in the Wongery's Gamespace.
I say one of the first card games supported, because I think it would be a bit odd to have just one open-source CCG represented in the Gamespace. When I first do get the Gamespace implemented, there probably won't be any card games represented; at the beginning it'll likely just have RPGs. (I'm currently leaning toward starting it with Basic Role-Playing, Dominion Rules, GURPS, and the Year Zero Engine, and then next adding EABA, Savage Worlds, Expedition, and FASERIP, in that order, but this isn't finalized.) But when I do add CCGs, I want to start with at least two. At this point Strike Engine is more or less a shoo-in; as for the other game to start with, I think I'm leaning toward Libre. While Libre's theming around gods and temples is somewhat restrictive, it's less so than Arcmage's factions; it may not be possible to make Libre cards set in every world of the Wongery without stretching the theme, but it should at least be possible to make them for some worlds.
I suppose I should probably spend a little less time deciding exactly what will be in the Wongery Gamespace when it's first created and a little more time... creating it. Hm.