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Mark Rosewater's Lessons on Design
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023186/Twenty-Years-Twenty
Not sure where this belongs exactly, so I'll just leave this in tutorials. That's a link to a video of Mark Rosewater's talk at the Game Developer's Conference, entitled "Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons". Not sure if anyone else is interested in this sort of thing, but it covers some really good basics of game design (not just specifically Magic, although he uses Magic examples). Not all the lessons apply equally to what we are doing here (as we are designing cards, not an entire game), and some apply more to those of use designing whole sets instead of just individual cards, but I find you can still apply most of them to individual card design as well.
Heads up: It is an hour long, but I found it to be an interesting listen, and contains some good lessons. For those that don't want to watch the whole thing, I'll go ahead and list the lessons here, although some may require some more explanation, but that's what the video is for.
1) Fighting against human nature is a losing battle.
2) Aesthetics matter.
3) Resonance is important.
4) Make use of Piggybacking (Use your audience's prior experiences and expectations to your advantage)
5) Don't confuse "Interesting" with "Fun".
6) Understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke.
7) Allow the player to make the game personal.
8) The details are where you player falls in love with your game.
9) Allow your players to have a sense of ownership.
10) Leave room for your players to explore.
11) If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail.
12) Don't design to prove you can do something.
13) Make the fun part the correct strategy to win.
14) Don't be afraid to be blunt.
15) Design the component for the audience it's intended for.
16) Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them.
17) You don't have to change much to change everything.
18) Restrictions breed creativity.
19) Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them.
20) All the lessons connect.
Not sure where this belongs exactly, so I'll just leave this in tutorials. That's a link to a video of Mark Rosewater's talk at the Game Developer's Conference, entitled "Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons". Not sure if anyone else is interested in this sort of thing, but it covers some really good basics of game design (not just specifically Magic, although he uses Magic examples). Not all the lessons apply equally to what we are doing here (as we are designing cards, not an entire game), and some apply more to those of use designing whole sets instead of just individual cards, but I find you can still apply most of them to individual card design as well.
Heads up: It is an hour long, but I found it to be an interesting listen, and contains some good lessons. For those that don't want to watch the whole thing, I'll go ahead and list the lessons here, although some may require some more explanation, but that's what the video is for.
1) Fighting against human nature is a losing battle.
2) Aesthetics matter.
3) Resonance is important.
4) Make use of Piggybacking (Use your audience's prior experiences and expectations to your advantage)
5) Don't confuse "Interesting" with "Fun".
6) Understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke.
7) Allow the player to make the game personal.
8) The details are where you player falls in love with your game.
9) Allow your players to have a sense of ownership.
10) Leave room for your players to explore.
11) If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail.
12) Don't design to prove you can do something.
13) Make the fun part the correct strategy to win.
14) Don't be afraid to be blunt.
15) Design the component for the audience it's intended for.
16) Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them.
17) You don't have to change much to change everything.
18) Restrictions breed creativity.
19) Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them.
20) All the lessons connect.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
22) Undercost the newest creature/play type we are pushing.
23) Print Jace in every set.
24) Seriously, print Jace in every set. People might not like him but they will if we print him enough.
25) Hire very good writers to write very bad stories about characters that are required to be walking cliches.
Or to respond:
1) Then why are they banning smothering cards in eternal formats like modern?
2) Is this why all of the BFZ/OTG art was washed-out pastels?
3) I get that the 'main character' in Magic is a nerd out of his depth, but come on.
4) BFZ set expectations low so SOI would look good even if it wasn't.
5) Explain Hedron Alignment
6) Anger seems to be the primary emotion.
7) This is probably the source of the anger.
8) This is true. We are all rules lawyers.
9) And then revoke that sense of ownership when you ban their expensive cards.
10) And then punish that exploration by banning what they find.
11) This is one of those things where more people love Magic than like it.
12) Don't design around superheroes either.
13) Since what is fun isn't the meta for most people, this seems a little odd.
14) Calling a kid an asshole because he called The Gatewatch the Jacetice League seems about right.
15) No one told the story/lore team about this.
16) You know what is boring? 7/8 or 8/8 of top 8 finishers being Eldrazi for months until they had to ban a card and still having it dominate.
17) Yeah, let's just make those free 0/1s we gave out into 1/1s. Or maybe let Eldrazi effects happen on cast and not ETB so they can always be annoying even when countered.
18) This is the opposite of correct.
19) Only the first half is correct.
20) Ok.
Also Mark was defending something his coworkers, people he's worked with closely, worked on and put their time into. I think it's a funny joke to call it the Jacetice League, it's not the greatest story, but you should do the same if you saw someone you know work everyday on a story that just gets brushed off as a joke and said directly to you as if it meant nothing.
As for the actual thread at hand, I enjoyed the listen. Started listening to it during fitness, there's some interesting topics that I hadn't initially thought of. Thanks for the share @Nickerton , I'll be finishing later today.
"They worked really hard on it so don't make fun of it" is what you say about something a mentally handicapped person does. It does not apply to a group of professional, paid writers and storytellers that produced a work that lots of their limited target audience thought was stupid.
I'm only really complaining about BFZ/OTG though. Khans block was neat, Theros was neat, Return to Rav was meh, Innis was neat, Scars was meh, Zend was meh and Alara was neat. 4 'neat' to 4 'meh' is as much good as bad.
I was more making the point that Mark Rosewater's design/devign team does not follow its own guidelines. They explicitly don't design new cards with only limited in mind. It is hard to develop a set that is balanced, extremely hard to develop one that is balanced and doesn't blow up modern and downright impossible to develop one that can't be broken in legacy. That being said, they do a pretty poor job of balancing even in standard.
For example: OTG standard constructed was entirely eldrazi. Allies were crap and not worthwhile compared to the massive and undercosted behemoths with wild effects that made up eldrazi. Conversely, OTG standard draft had a bit more balance since eldrazi only really flourished when synergizing with other eldrazi effects so unless you got lucky drafting, allies had a solid chace.
When it comes to MTG, there are nearly endless varieties of possibilities and play styles. Unfortunately, in standard constructed there are maybe 2 that are competitive and in modern constructed there are 4-5 roughly. Because of that, many decks that share colors share sideboards. Want to be competitive in modern? You need to sideboard a stony silence and ingot chewer because of the affinity and a grafdigger's cage for flashback/snapcaster and relic of prog for delve.
In SOI draft there is surprisingly little destruction so pretty much every color has to field combat tricks and pseudo-voltron. Want to be madness build? Sure, as long as you use it to cast some big creatures. Want to be investigate build? Sure, as long as you use it to cast big creatures. Want to be anything else? Good luck, you had better have big creatures. All those fun and sneaky cards you drafted with low power/toughness are pretty but entirely useless.
Off the top of my head I can think of at least 7 competitive decks in modern right now, with a bunch of tier-2 outliers that could take a tournament if they hit the right meta in a tournament. And I know its hasn't been that long, but I don't know that I've seen a single Eldrazi deck make a top 8 in a major tournament since they banned Eye of Ugin. I wouldn't consider that "still dominating".
I'd really suggest watching the video. There are some good take aways, regardless of how you feel about Rosewater.
Well someone's upset about recent bannings...
26. Ban Axl Rose from singing any AC/DC songs... ever!
XD
My problems are really more with BFZ/OTG than anything else. There's a lot of potential excuses like the block size shift and revisiting a story that people already weren't too fond of but the whole thing was a mess. Most creatures were either totally overpowered or totally useless with very few in between, there was the surge mechanic that thrived on multiplayer team games when they have been out of focus in the game for a long time, they ignored many of the legends from Zend that people actually were interested in that had story potential and of course, they turned planeswalkers into superheroes rather than just powerful magic users.
The planeswalkers had been going this way for a while, kind of since they started to appear in cards in Llorwyn. They have been taking over more and more of the stories rather than simply being elements in them. Story, theme and flavor are as important to card design as development is. It wasn't until BFZ and Origins though that they really screwed things. They removed the only part of Nissa's background that made her interesting and turned her into a generic hippie elf. Chandra has never had great characterization but they cemented her as a generic hot-headed pyromancer. Gideon is just a textbook fantasy hero from the 80s and Jace, poor Jace, turned into Worf. He was supposed to be a nearly 'unsurpassed' telepath. That was his only skill set. Yet apparently everything and their grandmothers can best him mentally. Bolas when combining his strength with Tezzeret is understandable but since then he's had his mental ass kicked by everything from Eldrazi to Sarkhan to Exava and Lazav to a homeless woman in Innistrad. He now exists solely to show how strong other characters are by being designated as 'powerful' and then losing fights to them.
Among Rosewater's points, at least 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 and 11 involve story and many if not most of the recent stories violate them. Wizards is capable of making good stories. Almost every time they come up with a new plane they think of something interesting that makes people want to know more about it. It's most of the return sets where the stories suck. SOM? Crap. RTR? Crap. BFZ? Crap. Even SOI has just been a story about Jace warding around in the rain and losing metal battles to homeless women. It's even more annoying because we know that the block-spanning stories in Dominaria were all solid.
The point I was making in my first post is that the list really isn't that helpful to cardsmiths on this site. Not only does WOTC fail to meet most of those points but half of them are irrelevant and some of them are even wrong or totally contrary to the design experience. "Restrictions breed creativity" is the opposite of the point of this site.
Resonance is not necessarily about the story either. There is resonance with individual cards, resonance with mechanics, resonance with themes. Yes, you would hope for the story to have resonance with the audience as well, but it's not solely about the story. The same thing is true about the emotional response you're trying to evoke. If you're creating a scary monster, you want it to feel scary. That concept applies to the story, but it also applies to individual card design.
The point about everyone liking a game, and no one loving it absolutely has to do with individual card design, not just Magic as a whole, or the just the story. Not every card should be for everyone, and not everyone should love the same cards. If no one loves what you've done, there are probably ways to improve it.
All these things can be applied to creating a story as well, but that's because they are concepts that apply to the creative process in general. Wizards may not be doing what you want with the story, but that doesn't invalidate these ideas when applied elsewhere. And I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss those concepts as not being helpful. It's about what you want to take away from it, and how you want to apply them. You may not feel some (or any) or what MaRo is saying is useful to you, and that's fine, but others may take something else away from it.
As far as "Restrictions breed creativity" goes, that concept is alive and well on this site. Some of the best designs come from the challenges posted here (not to mention people really enjoy them). The challenges provide the restrictions people must work with, and it pushes people to come up with concepts they otherwise wouldn't have. Simply choosing to design a card for a piece of art provides restrictions. Designing a set with a theme in mind provides restrictions. No one is saying people shouldn't be allowed to explore and create how they want, or have restrictions forced upon them. The lesson is that restrictions aren't a bad thing. They provide a problem to be solved, and give up guidelines to solving that problem, and force us to come up with new ways to solve those problems, which leads to creativity. The point is not to be scared of restrictions, but embrace them, and use them to make something new and interesting. Which I'm pretty sure is at the heart of this site.
21) Randomly assign mythic rarity to cards that are terrible.
Design doesn't set rarity.
22) Undercost the newest creature/play type we are pushing.
Design doesn't do extensive play testing, development does.
23) Print Jace in every set.
Even I'll admit that I'm worried about my favorite 'walker's future as a poster boy, but I trust Wizards with their own characters. And if they see fit to put Jace into subsequent sets, hey more cards for my Jace EDH deck (15 from a full 100!)
24) Seriously, print Jace in every set. People might not like him but they will if we print him enough.
Seriously, shut up. It might seem like Jace has been printed a lot recently but where was he during Khans block? What about Theros block? And before RTR, he wasn't in Scars block or Innistrad block either. And in Zendikar, he was barely a footnote, other than being a format warping card. (20/20 hindsight)
25) Hire very good writers to write very bad stories about characters that are required to be walking cliches.
I also miss the days of characters like Toshiro Umezawa, and Agrus Kos, but let's face it, those characters were larger than life, even if they were likable. Planeswalkers represent us, the players, or at least those like us, across the planes. At the very least, trust that Wizards has done enough market research to determine this is the direction that they want to take their game.
Or to respond:
1) Then why are they banning smothering cards in eternal formats like modern?
I think you're confusing Design with the DCI. This is an article on DESIGN not WHICH CARDS WOTC DECIDES TO BAN FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE GAME.
2) Is this why all of the BFZ/OTG art was washed-out pastels?
Again, this is Design, not another department of Wizards, in this case the Art Department. The aesthetics that Maro is talking about is in reference to the card's design as a whole. Artwork is RARELY the basis for a card's design and is more often decided at a later date to match the overall theme of a set and the card itself.
3) I get that the 'main character' in Magic is a nerd out of his depth, but come on.
Did you even listen to the podcast? Resonance goes beyond identifying with a "main character" it goes into how the cards resonate with each other in the set and how the players feel about the cards in relation to themselves. If you've ever imagined yourself casting epic spells and battling faceless opponents with feats of wizardry, you know what its like to resonate with a given card design.
4) BFZ set expectations low so SOI would look good even if it wasn't.
I'm sorry (not really) that you're so butt hurt over the most recent block. Piggybacking on to expectations is in regards to what your target audience will expect in a set based on what was dome before. Return sets are a big example. When they returned to ravnica, expectation was that it would have the 10 guilds in it and be a block of gold (color) if instead they decided not to keep to those expectations and printed a mono color set with a tribal theme, it would have been less well received than it was.
5) Explain Hedron Alignment
Um... Its a 3 drop blue enchantment that provides an alternate wincon and a repeatable scry at will? If your question was actually a poor attempt at pointing out a flaw with this bullet point, you are completely off base. What this means is that the game doesn't need to be complex to be fun. If every card had as much complexity and card text as Dance of the Dead the game would have died a quick death long ago.
6) Anger seems to be the primary emotion.
Its funny that you say that. If you're so angry with the game, stop buying Magic cards. Maybe that'll teach them and maybe, finally, if enough "angry people" leave the game maybe it'll be enjoyed by those of us that ACTUALLY appreciate the game through its ups and downs.
7) This is probably the source of the anger.
You might want to reread this one. It doesn't say "take it personally when Wizards does something with their game that you don't agree with." This point, again, goes back to the previous point about resonance. I have built a deck based on Necromorphs from Dead Space. Am I somehow doing something wrong by likening Magic cards to another franchise? Is the game created in such a way as to disallow me to mix and match as I see fit?Do I have to follow some unwritten deck-building paradigm?
8) This is true. We are all rules lawyers.
I believe @Nickerton was correct with the example of Griselbrand here. Its the small details that throw cards off balance. This is not about how well you can "rules lawyer." Rules I believe are Matt Tabak's department and his department also probably extends to cover the next few issues (as well as the "banning" point from above. (At this point I'm trying really hard to refrain from pure admonishment of the ignorant. )
9) And then revoke that sense of ownership when you ban their expensive cards.
Aaaaaand again, this is DESIGN. Not DCI. Design doesn't decide what gets banned, they haven't even made it yet!
10) And then punish that exploration by banning what they find.
Stupid... stupid... stupid... You ever have those moments where you want to beat your head against the wall? I guess that's why I decided to take the time to write this.
11) This is one of those things where more people love Magic than like it.
Then I guess what's why its successful. The point here is in regards to appealing to everyone. Sometimes, its better to narrow your demographic rather than spoil it by trying to incorporate rainbows and ponies to appeal to the preteen girls. I love Magic as a game. I wonder which camp you fit into?
12) Don't design around superheroes either.
Again with the planeswalkers hate! Do you realize how far back these "superheroes" go? Go on, take a guess. Its not Lorwyn. Its not Future Sight where the Planeswalkers cards were FIRST supposed to appear. It isn't even Plane shift when the rare cycle of "Planeswalker's _____" came into being. The first time Planeswalkers were mentioned was in an essay in a '94 issue of the Duelist, just ONE YEAR after the game came out as a way to describe what the players playing the game were likened to. So, to be frank, I guess you should probably stop playing a game "designed around superheroes" since you have such a visceral reaction to them.
(Do you feel me mentally punching you? Because I am. A lot.) I and my friend had a debate the other evening. I had called a specific card garbage, and his position on the issue was that there "were no bad cards." After a little back and forth where I had pointed out a few examples of cards with differing levels of power (same casting cost, better abilities, p/t etc on one over the other) the debate moved to "what is the point of Magic?" To which he replied "to have fun" Now I didn't necessarily disagree with his interpretation of the point of Magic, but I went on to describe to him that as a Game, the point of any game is to achieve the objective, and thusly, be declared the winner of the game. If there were no point, or no objective to the game, what would be the point in playing? Now this is where we butt heads. Yes, the point of Magic, being a game, is to meet the objective (20 life to zero, "mill" the opponents library, various instant win scenarios; Hedron Alignment, etc) and be declared winner. But where we divide from being "Just a game" is how the game is DESIGNED. Otherwise, if it were all just about winning, and not about having fun in the process, why don't we just choose any other game to compete at and win? How about it @strongbelieves ? Why don't you go play chess if this game isn't more fun?
14) Calling a kid an asshole because he called The Gatewatch the Jacetice League seems about right.
While I'm not afraid to be blunt, I'm also trying to keep this very thorough reprisal educational as well so that those that come after might glean more than just someone on a soapbox.
15) No one told the story/lore team about this.
Two ways that we can go about this one: 1. This goes right into the psychographic profiles that Mark is so fond of (as well am I). If you are designing a card to meet a specific desire, or a specific audience, let's say, don't half ass it because you want it to appeal to this other person as well. Make it a card completely worthy of a Johnny. Sure, Spike won't know what to do with a Hedron Alignment, but Johnny won't care. He will play the heck out of that card. Design the component for the target audience. And 2. Have you maybe considered that you might not be the target audience for this particular setting?
16) You know what is boring? 7/8 or 8/8 of top 8 finishers being Eldrazi for months until they had to ban a card and still having it dominate.
(You know what's really boring? Reading answers that DONT ANSWER THE QUESTION BEING ASKED. Hope you never have a court appearance. The judge will eat you alive.) This one goes to the heart of the game, and now that I think of it is a reinforcement of a previous topic. A lot of this is repetition. Perhaps because it bears repeating. Don't worry about complexity and making your card the "answer to ____ (insert format here)" if your game is so "challenging" that players need to break out their trigonometry books to play, its not going to be considered fun and might even be boring. And we know that Wizards is still making the game fun, or else strongbelieves would have quit some time ago. And yet he graces us with his presence and input.
17) Yeah, let's just make those free 0/1s we gave out into 1/1s. Or maybe let Eldrazi effects happen on cast and not ETB so they can always be annoying even when countered.
(Gasp! I haven't the mental tenacity to admonish any more of this narrow-sighted drivel! There's only so many subtle ways to call someone an idiot!) To answer this one, I turn to Bucky's entry on Old Fogey: "These kids today with their collector numbers and their newfangled tap symbol. Twenty Black Lotuses and twenty Plague Rats. Now that's real Magic."
18) This is the opposite of correct.
I believe this one has been succinctly been answered above. This forum is restriction. Yes, you can just design cards all willy nilly, but if you contribute to any of the contests on here, and "design a card that... (Insert restrictions here)" You are breaking the mold of your comfort zone and making a card to a specific way, that's how R&D does it. They find a hole in their set and say: " Hey we have a spot for a 3cmc Green uncommon creature that could have mechanic a, or b but not c. And then that card becomes Graf Mole through Development testing.
19) Only the first half is correct
I experienced this one just recently. Twice actually. And I think either R&D had some crazy foresight or I just got lucky, or point 19 applied and R&D does a kick ass job of designing its game. Anyway, so I'm sitting up at 1 in the morning trying to decide how to build a Standard competitive clues deck when in one of my last ditch efforts to find a way to make the deck work, I happened upon Tragic Arrogance (to sac multiple clues while Fleeting Memories is out for lot so mill.) This elegant solution helped cement me into Blue and White (sad to say, this deck doesn't do as well as I'd like it to.) Moral is, I was able to define a problem, Wizards helped with the solution.
20) Ok.
Yes and as I said before, a lot of this is redundancy upon redundancy some things cover multiple points again, but that just means that those points are important to consider in design. And the best part is that all of this doesn't just apply to Magic design either. You can apply this to any type of design, be it home design, clothing design, tech design, you name it. Wotc has their best interests covered by making sure that we feel a certain way about the game. Trust that they've done the legwork to ensure that you don't hate their product.
How cool is that!
XD
2):THERE ARE NO BAD MYTHICS, JUST SOME ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS. Inverter of Truth is a amazing card (when used correctly,) but Kalitas is just better all around. I can imagine some cases when Inverter would be better, but Kalitas is just more versatile.
3): I LIKE JACE
...
Whoops, did I actually say that? Oh well...
4): LIVE AND LET LIVE. You are still ranting about a set from 6 years ago? You are scandalized by TWO okay stories IN A ROW? You think that everything was irreversibly messed up in Origins and will never be fixed again?
?
Rarely do I ever get mad and stay mad at a particular story/plane (unless WotC came out wiht a plane called "Happytown.") It may be my nature, but I always try and not remain mad about something that has occured and resolved. This does not mean that we should forget the past; my favorite subject is History because I want to insure that events from the past will never ever happen again. But remaining angry at something will never resolve it, especially if it was just a mistake. I am very glad that my history teacher doesn't hate me with a fiery passion because I misread my essay question. Try focusing on the positives; Scars of Mirrodin gave us Melira, Infect, Wurmcoil, Karn, Ezuri, Tezzeret, Elesh Norn, Affinity stuff, Venser, Koth, the cool rare lands, the Zeniths, and more. If you play Modern, I bet you are using at least one SOM block card in your deck, whenever it's a Karn or a Vivisection. To put it a different way, Lumberjacks should not call axes and saws useless.
* Hope I stayed neutral in this conversation