Greed is good

 The Flautist and I did another Terraforming Mars alternate rules test.  As I said last time, we decided to see what would happen if we dealt ourselves a bunch of the best trading themed cards from the Colonies expansion.  We took the best 10, dealt out 5 to each of us, and then 5 random cards.  We played the basic corporation so we would have to keep the cards and then played.

Our 5 colonies were cash, titanium, steel, heat, and oceans.  On turn 1 we had 5 colonies out, 3 on cash, 2 on titanium.  Turn 2 saw another colony on titanium, and turn 3 saw 2 more colonies, both on steel.  I played a trading enhancer and a couple ways to make trading cheaper, and The Flautist played 2 additional trade fleets and a way to make trading cheaper.  It was silly.  We had 19 cash, 6 titanium, and 10 steel coming in every turn between us, to say nothing of the extra income from the colonies themselves.  It wasn't just that though - I drew huge income cards and ended the game with 58 raw income and 49 terraform rating, for 107 cash incoming on turn 11... and that didn't even take into account my 5 titanium and 6 steel income.

We filled the entire board on turn 11 and then ended the game with both of us having exactly 38 dollars in front of us that we could not spend on anything.

This isn't a surprise of course.  The trading cards all multiply together, each one making the others more potent.  More than that though, the fact that one of us was in trading meant it was more profitable for the other one to dip into trading too.  I find the opposite usually occurs in large games, as much of the time nobody builds a trading empire at all.  It just isn't worth it unless you get a good combo of cards, and if nobody else joins you in building colonies the return on investment is paltry.

But when every player builds colonies as fast as they can, whoo baby the game goes crazy.

It was a fun experiment but clearly it warps the game completely.  If we hadn't gotten quite as strong a set of colonies the story might have gone differently but even if I was just producing a glorious stack of heat and power it still ends the game quickly.  I suppose it might have been a more normal looking game if a bunch of the colonies that don't enter play right away had been randomly chosen, but that wouldn't even have been much fun, or fit with the theme.

Much like Jovian cards, the trading cards need a critical mass to be good.  Below that point they aren't worth much, but above it they become the entire game.  That does give the game a lot of variety but it does mean that dealing them all out like this feels kind of silly.

I have another idea for our next rules experiment - reject draft.  Any time a player decides not to buy a card or discards a card for money the other player may choose to buy it for 3 bucks if they want to.  I hope this makes card choices much more interesting and lets us assemble cool combos.  I considered making it so that any card you discard can be bought by the other player at a discount - after all, it is a patent that seemingly has little value.  Market value depends on demand!  It would be tricky to figure out if you should buy a mediocre card for 3 if it would cost your opponent only 2 to purchase it.

Naturally this just increases the power level of the game, giving players more choices.  It isn't nearly as big a power level jump as the 'all the trading cards' game we just played though, so I expect the final board state to look a lot more normal.

Flappy flap

Lately I have been playing some DnD with a couple of people using an alternate race that grants flight.  They are a type of Tiefling, decended from both human and infernal creatures, and their bat-like wings allow them to fly around.  They do lose out on standard Tiefling abilities to get flight, but as anyone who has ever tried to GM a game with a flying character in it can tell you, flight is busted and is vastly superior to other racial abilities.

The counter argument is usually that at level 5 a Wizard can cast Fly.  That holds no water though because this costs a memorization slot, one of your few high level spells for the day, only lasts a short time, and can cause you to fall to your death if you fail a Concentration roll.  It also doesn't address the issue that flying destroys a huge percentage of encounters and challenges that characters deal with from levels 1-4.

We definitely found flying to be a serious balance issue in our games so far.  I certainly think it needs adjustment but which adjustment exactly is tricky.  A lot of GMs just flat out ban flying races, and I think that is a fine solution.  You could build a race that flew but was packaged with hideous restrictions to go along with it, but honestly I don't think that would be much fun.  The problem is that flying destroys so many basic assumptions about the challenges in the game that you can't just fix it by making the character otherwise useless.  It would still end up that the flying character automatically defeats whole swaths of the game by themselves, and then does nothing otherwise.  Hardly interesting.

Our flying characters were able to avoid traps effortlessly, hover in the air using ranged attacks to trivialize enemies, and evade spell effects.  This sort of thing can be solved by making a set of rules about how flying works that are restrictive in reasonable ways.  For example, characters with flying want to be able to hover in place, fly straight up, swap direction instantly, and perform tasks without any hindrance.  None of that needs to be true, and in fact it seems kind of absurd when you consider what flight looks like on a large bird.

A hummingbird can do all that stuff, but hummingbirds are tiny and eat stupendous amounts of food to accomplish their feats of aerial magic.  A flying character is going to look a lot more like an oversized pelican weighed down by a ton of gear.  No hovering for them!

I imagine the following rules for flying characters.

1.  You can only ascend at 1/3 of your flying speed.  

2.  While aloft, you must take a move each round for your full flying speed or fall.  

3.  You need at least a 20 foot wide space to turn in.

4.  All attacks made while flying are at disadvantage, and all spell casts require a Concentration check or the action is wasted and the spell is lost.

5.  You can carry at most 5*Str pounds of gear while flying.

This makes you feel not like an attack helicopter or a hummingbird, but rather a big clunky flappy bird that can get aloft if you need to.  You can still get up to the tower to grab the thingie when your companions would have to climb.  You can scout effectively and avoid many outdoor hazards.  You can even engage melee opponents from on high, though the penalty to attacks and spells makes this much less effective.  These are significant advantages.

What you can't do is constantly be out of reach so your friends have to soak all the attacks.  You can't just zoom around ignoring all area control type spells.  You can't launch yourself through tiny dungeon corridors, attacking enemies at will then dodging out of reach again.  

This ruleset means that outdoors, outside of combat, flying has huge advantages.  This feels right!  It should be great in that situation.  In a fight though being a bipedal creature with big clunky wings just isn't an advantage unless your opponents are totally unable to attack someone in the air.  In the tight corridors of a dungeon wings aren't much use at all, except perhaps for gliding over a pit of spikes.

That feels, to me at least, like a good spot.  I would still love to have flying, and I think it would still be the absolute best racial ability, but it won't break most combat encounters and it will be situational.

When I built Heroes By Trade I included a race with wings, but their wings weren't strong enough for flight.  They could slow their fall easily and thus jump down from any height, and even run on water for short distances using their wings to help out.  Players found this useful and thematic, but it never broke anything.  That might be my best answer yet if someone really wants wings, though I suspect that most people that want wings really do want to take off into the wild blue yonder.

Alternate formats being just the same

 The Flautist and I have been playing lots of 1v1 Terraforming Mars over the last half year and we have taken to performing experiments with the game.  The first experiment was to end the game only once the deck of cards ran out, and this resulted in a fun but silly game that we don't intend on repeating.

Our second attempt at new rulesets was born because we wanted to try a game where we both got *tons* of card draw.  We figured the game would go really long because our early money would be invested in cards rather than heat / plants / ocean production, but it didn't quite work out that way.  We set it up by choosing 10 great card draw cards, shuffling them, and dealing 5 of them to each of us.  Then we dealt 5 other random cards to each of us and we played the basic corporation.  This way we were both guaranteed to get an engine.  We had 8 basic science symbols and 2 cards that required 3 science symbols to play.

The Flautist drew 6 science symbols.  I drew 2 science symbols, and both of the cards that require 3 science.  Unlikely, and quite a mess for me.  She slammed down her engine and it was a tremendous success, though not because of all the card draw.  She played the science payoff card that gives 4 energy on turn 2, the one that gives 6 energy on turn 3, and the other one that gives 4 energy on turn 4.  By turn 5 she had 17 energy production, a steelworks to turn it into oxygen, and then dropped the top science payoff card Anti Gravity to top it all off, making all of her cards cheaper.

With her taking an oxygen and a heat every turn and me using a bunch of steel production to place an ocean every turn using Aquifer Pumping we ripped through the game and ended on turn 11.

My game went reasonably well too, with my turn 4 Advanced Alloys boosting 3 steel and 4 titanium per turn.  I built a ton of cities and greeneries, notching 37 points just from greenery/city board points (pretty good for turn 11) and almost stole the terraforming lead on the last turn by grabbing 10 terraform.  It wasn't enough, and 14 points of Jovian payoffs still left me behind, losing the game by a single point.

Our attempt to have a long game with lots of cards drawn didn't work.  All it did was give one of us a ludicrous early science engine.  We drew cards, sure, but I didn't get into card draw until halfway through the game, and The Flautist ended up tossing away a dozen cards at the end.

We had fun with it, but given how the card draw cards work it isn't that easy to have lots of cards without also making the science portion of the game kinda broken.  Card draw without science symbols is kinda limited.  If we had randomly not drawn the science payoffs for awhile I think it would have gone a lot more like we envisioned.

The next experiment we are going to do is one based on the colonies expansion.  When we play a few colonies usually get put down, but they usually don't play a crucial part in the game.  We plan on doing something similar to this last experiment where we take 10 trading / colony cards, deal 5 to each of us along with 5 random cards, and see where we end up.  There will be a ton of extra resources in the game because of all the trading, but our other production will surely be miserable given that set up.

We shall see if she can notch another win against me with this weird setup.  I suspect there will be some serious randomness in the cards - if one of us gets cheaper trading and better trading along with 4 energy production they are going to have an absurd early engine, particularly since there *will* be lots of colonies further boosting trades.

I will report back with the results.  If you have any other odd rulesets that you would like to see me try out and report on, speak up.