I envision a game with some relation to the B5CCG: each Faction has a playing area, consisting of characters and faction-affecting cards.  There's also a middle area for cards which affect the entire game.

Characters are brought in as "Pawns," promoted to "Members," and under unusual circumstances can replace the "Leader."  Some rare factions may have no leader.  Or we may wish to de-emphasize leaders and just have Pawns and Members.

We should look at what it takes to get a character from your hand into your Faction as a Pawn, and what it takes to promote him to Member.  I'm inclined towards "free" and "cost based on his coolness".

Spells will be somewhat unusual in that they can be attached to a character, distributed to a faction, or made public domain.  I think *you* can decide to make one of your character's spells faction-wide, but *anybody* can pay the cost to promote it from faction-wide to public-domain.  If three people know a secret, it isn't a secret any more. --bts

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We might want to make public-domain spells cheaper or cooler in some way; it would be nice if making magic public-domain was encouraged on the part of the person doing it, not just through industrial espionage. After all, cooperation and knowledge sharing is one of the things we really want to put into the game mindset, because that should help with spell research. 

Also, I think we want to discourage rules-heavy play; i don't think Pawns and Members are too
complicated, but anything that can be done with a card should be (and i'm thus wary even of the "spells can be individual or faction", although i think it's a good idea.) Perhaps instead of having a "faction" or "public domain" idea in the rules, have FactionEnhancement cards and GameEnhancement cards of "faction library" and "public library" which serve the same purpose but have all the text on the card? Making the "public library" voluntary-only but giving it
a "reduce spell cost by one" or similar power might be a nice way of encouraging cooperation.
Make IndustrialEspionage an entirely separate card.

Characters should probably, at least initially, have two Attributes (Mage vs Mundane, and a Race) and a few Stats-- Essence, Health (for HitPoints), anything else? Strength for walking up and hitting things, perhaps. We need to distinguish the races somehow, though. Do we want that to be with stats (elves are more charismatic and better at dealing with spirits, trolls and orks are stronger,  dwarves are tougher, etc) or with cards modifying the groups? Or both? I'm trying to come up with a way of making orks better than "wimpy trolls", and making humans interesting. And I'm not sure that we want the difference to be entirely in cost-- if you say "orks and humans are cheaper than trolls and elves, but not as cool", you're putting in the mindset of
"only accept a human or an ork if you can't afford anything better", which seems counter-productive. --ariel 

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I suggest using horizontal rules (&lt;hr&gt;) to set off comments from one another.  I think a good way to encourage public-domainness of spells is to make it cheaper to promote a spell to public domain if there are a great number of characters in the faction which owns it (the more people you have, the more secrets leak).  Cooperation and Knowledge Sharing doesn't help with spell research in this universe, they hinder it by preventing you from discovering the idea of an initiatory group, which maxes out around a dozen people --- a faction.

I don't think I understand what you mean by "rules-heavy play" --- do you mean things like Munchkin and Coz with many overlapping rules?  If so, I agree.  If you mean that play should be free-form instead of moderated by rules, I think you're designing performance art instead of a game, and want nothing to do with it.  

Reducing spell cost based on how many people know it is a very weird idea, metaphysically.  I argue against it.

Indeed, the idea that spells can be "personal," "factional," or "public" is only an interesting special case:  there are many cards (e.g., items) which are only personal, many (e.g., a good news story) which are factional, and many (e.g., a high mana level) which are public.  Spells are only odd in that they can be any of these.  I think the right way to do this is with a tag on the card indicating what it may be played into, and the promotion rules (if any) go on the card.

There's no need to indicate Mundanes separately from Magic 0 Mages, unless you really want to put cyber-nuts in game, and if you want the emphasis to be magic I suggest against doing so.  So all cards have a stat "type" and "class":  class is (personal, faction, global).  type is (character, item, spell, spirit character, event, etc.).  Characters have Essence (=Magic), Health, Strength if you want melee to be possible but I suggest against it, and I'd suggest a social stat, possibly Connection.

For balancing races, I suggest giving each race a noticable advantage and a notable disadvantage.  For example:

* Humans: Versatile but ?

* Trolls: Strong (recover from fatigue faster?  can carry more Items?) but Big (some items don't work for them)

* Orks: Berzerk but Berzerk

* Elves: higher Connection but lose Essence easier (Fruity nature lovers)

* Dwarves: good at enchanting but ?

I suggest sticking with either "all of the ads/disads are *bonuses* to things everybody can do" or "all of the ads/disads are new powers which are unique to the species," probably the first.  Then put in a few but only a few "bonus to Race" cards. --bts
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I'm adding a "features/goals" tree back a level...  I think we should start there, but that's just me.

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This may just be me ranting, but...
I think there's a little too much sticking to the B5CCG format here, though I certainly do like some of it.  I'm going to put it at ZebediahsProposedBasicStructure.  And I'm going to make an effort to have it be clear and coherent.--jwc

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This isn't sticking particularly to the B5CCG format.  Saying "that's wrong" is among the best ways possible to kill good brainstorming, beat only by "I'm going to go off and draw up a complete plan which is mine not yours."  Please learn to play well with the other children.  And sign what you do.  And eat first. --bts. 

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sorry...I'm used ot a very different style of \'brainstorming\'.  I'll try and rephrase what I actually mean with a number of positive statements, and I've now signed all the things I put on this page.

I like the very simple style of victory conditions in Magic--deal your opponent 20 damage is something one can always do.  I really like the idea of it being a "build resources" game rather than a "do damage to someone else" game.

Having locations can add a whole world of card interactions with a minimal increase in complication.  You could have a 'library' location that you could attach spells to, and everyone in the library could cast those spells, and you could add enhancements like "security system," "magic wards," "convenient sewer entrance," etc.  Certain locations could give cost reductions for playing particular classes of characters there.  Stuff like that.

I like the idea of physical, social, and magical conflicts, even mundanes being normally (sometimes more) effective in physical and social conflicts, and only having a basic resistance to magic unless conferred by something else (like being behind wards, or a friendly mage).

Questions (is this OK?)--what might the mechanical advantage of having an Inner Circle / Supporting Character dichotomy be? --what sorts of things would distinguish a Faction Leader?

--jwc<hr>

Something stolen from a LotR ccg--Spot prereques.  Conditions that, if they exist, make it easy to play certain cards, like events or items.  For example, Spot WallStreet to play SellStock at half cost, or spot three Elves in a Performance Space to be able to play InterpretiveDance.  Or, for lesser restriction, Spot a member of each race on the table to play CulturalFair. --jwc

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Locations aren't something I'd considered.  In Illuminati, the different victory conditions give a good "faction flavor" &mdash; it would be nice to duplicate that effect.  I don't think Faction Leaders are necessary (though I welcome argument that they are), but Pawn/Member could be mechaniced by having Pawns be in the public area and Members in your Faction area.  So you can play a character into public for cheap, and anybody can use him from there, but you can recruit him into your faction and then only you get him.

Dropping physical combat and sticking with just magical/social helps to emphasize that this is a game about Magic, not about 2060.  --bts

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Your right...individualized win conditions do add flavor, and making factions distinct could be cool...I'd just like the game to have a general win condition that can be achieved without an agenda.

Having Pawns in a public area, or publicly usable is a neat idea, but I can think of a few issues that would need to be resolved...things like the annoyance of other people using up your public guys just to you can't, adn questions of keeping track of what everyone in the public pool can do and what can be done to them.

In the B5CCG, a lot of the interaction with other plays was on conflicts, and I think conflict cards, etc. is an added complication we don't need at the moment.  Something else needs to take it's place, and I'm not sure what--the obvious things I was thinking of are competing over things like characters, locations, and items, working with spells (I'm not sure how, but I'm sure it'll be important and could be interactive), and doing things that make other people's win conditions more difficult, i.e. knocking off their Victory Points in some way, or digging into their resources.

Besides, what social or magical advantages to trolls and orcs really have?  Hmmm...instead of Physical and Social, what if people had three stats--Power, Finesse, and Resistance? Elves would be high Finesse but low Resistance, trolls would be Power and Resistance powerhouses with little finesse, orcs would probably have some way of damaging themselves for more power, dwarves would have high Resistance, humans would be avarageish.  It would establish some strong points for nonelves that aren't explicitly violent.

Also something else to steal from another game--Exerting character, instead of (or along with) tapping them.  It makes the game more counter-heavy, but it's mostly just one kind of counter--damage.  When you were thinking of tapping a character, instead add an exertion counter to him.  If somebody beats him up, he also gets exerted.  If the exertion counters on him ever equal his resistance, he leaves the playing field (or gets flipped over until he's all healed, or whatever).  There's probably something about the last exertion counter has to come from damage, you can't just run your people to death (unless you're really *special*, and not in a good way).  Each ready round, remove an exertion counter from each card.  Or, it could be combined with tapping, but make there only be one tapped state, so people could be tapped once but exerted a bunch of times, and if you're untapped in the ready phaze, you lose one point of exertion, if not you untap.

There are some really basic questions we need to answer at some point.  I'll try to list some on BasicQuestions, which I should add off the main page.

--jwc<hr>