Design from Top to Bottom

While working on the creation of the Vs. System, we had many design goals. Some concerned organized play (or how the game performs in a tournament setting), such as knowing we wanted the game to be draftable and playable from just a few packs. Another goal was to make sure the game engine would be robust enough to support (at least) ten years of expansions. One of the biggest goals was to make sure the game felt like superheroes and villains slugging it out (possibly with the fate of the world hanging in the balance).

This goal really had two parts:

One, we had to make sure the engine itself felt like superhero combat. For example, we wanted characters to directly attack other characters. A hero should point at a villain, shout out something like “That’s all for you!” and then rush over and clobber him.

Sure, sometimes a character can attack a player directly—if that player has no characters or all of his or her characters are stunned. Mechanically, the game needs this rule because without it, a player who never played a character could never be attacked. Thematically, I like to think of this as the characters obstructing the opposing player’s ideology. If I have a villain attack a player, the villain’s really robbing a bank or causing random destruction because there are no heroes around to stop him. If it’s a hero attacking a player, that hero’s policing the area to make sure there are no villains around. This line of thinking is basically my imagination filling in the blanks to make flavor fit function. More on this later.

A second goal we had (and continue to have) in trying to make the game simulate super battles was to make sure characters in the game felt like their comic book counterparts. Which brings me to the main point of this article: top-down design.


Flavor vs. Function

There are many different ways to approach designing a new card, but the two most common are starting with a card’s flavor and giving it a mechanic to match (this is called “top-down” design), or starting with the card’s mechanical function and later assigning flavor to fit the mechanic (this is called “bottom-up” design). 

An example of top-down design is Beast. We wanted Beast’s power to represent his vast intelligence. We had several mechanical options in mind, but in the end settled on having him make it easier for a player to play plot twists. He’s clever, so he helps you do clever stuff.

Top-down design is important because it makes the game feel like a superhero battle. This might not be important to a player who doesn’t read comics and who’s only interested in the Vs. System for its strategy and tactics. But many players (and designers) are comic fans too, and we want to give them the superhero game they deserve. 

An example of bottom-up design is One-Two Punch. We wanted a basic combat effect that could give a small boost to attack and defense. Once we ironed out the numbers (+1 ATK and + 2 DEF) it wasn’t long before we settled on its (groan-inducing pun of a) name. (As an aside, for a while after the creation of this card, one of the designers joked that all of our combat modifiers should just have number names. It’s Clobberin’ Time! would be Three-Three Punch and Savage Beatdown would be Five Punch. Fortunately, I was overruled.)

Bottom-up design is important because while flavor may suck players in, the game’s engine and underlying mechanics are what make it function.

There are pluses and minuses to both styles of design. One of bottom-up’s strengths is that there might be certain mechanics we want to put into a given set or give to a specific team. Usually we’ll just design the power or text for a card and then figure out on which card to put the mechanic. For example, we might want another combat trick or search mechanic in a set. We make up the card text and later figure out what the picture and card name should be.

The downside to bottom-up design is that sometimes it can be hard to find an appropriate home for a mechanic you really want. 

Top-down design’s strength is that flavor can be a powerful tool for inspiration. Often each designer will make up three or four different powers for a given character. Then, after much arguing, whining, and the occasional bribe, mechanics are agreed upon to go on the character. (The characters are then handed off to development to monkey with, but that’s not important because this article isn’t concerned with development. Or is it . . .)

As fun as it can be, there are several challenges associated with top-down design. Here are some of them.

Some Characters Have Too Many Powers

Wolverine has super-senses, an accelerated healing factor, adamantium claws, and an adamantium skeleton. He’s an excellent fighter and tactician, he has a tendency to go into berserker rages, and he’s really short. So how do we represent all of these powers and traits on one card?

We don’t. One of the great things about the version mechanic in the Vs. engine is that we can make several different incarnations of the same hero or villain, each one highlighting a different power or aspect of that character.

Some characters have so many powers and are so popular that they get entire expansions devoted to them. For example, the next Marvel set will feature Spider-Man. We knew we couldn’t design Marvel Origins without a Spider-Man card, but we didn’t want to spoil all the cool ideas we had for web-head’s own set. In the end, we made him a nice little defensive character for the Fantastic Four, but not really a character you can build a whole deck around.

Also, the Vs. System will evolve over time. There are many new mechanics (including keyword mechanics—the first of which you’ll see in DC Origins) waiting to be added to the game. Some characters fit really well with a mechanic we’re working on for a set down the road. However, we might not want to wait until that set comes out to first print that character, so we do one version of that character now, and another one when it’s appropriate. 

On a side note, the version mechanic has a couple of added bonuses apart from facilitating top-down design. First, it allows us to print characters at varying costs. This increases the likelihood that a player will be able to squeeze one of his or her favorite characters into his or her deck. Sure, it may seem a little wonky that one Wolverine has three times the ATK and costs 4 more resource points than another, but keep in mind, in a comic a character’s power level often fluctuates depending on who’s writing.

Another benefit of the version system is that we can put really popular characters at all three commonalities, so even players who don’t buy a lot of packs will be able to put (at least the common) Wolverine into their decks.


Some Characters Have The Same Powers as Other Characters

Often in the comics, a character fits into an archetype. To borrow some terminology from the Champions Roleplaying Game, there are bricks (tough, strong heavies like Thing or Hulk), blasters (guys that shoot stuff like the Human Torch or Cyclops), mentalists (telepaths like Professor X or Jean Grey), martial artists (hand-to-hand combatants like Wolverine) and speedsters (like Quicksilver). 

The good news about characters that fall into archetypes is that giving them an appropriate power is usually pretty straightforward. The bad news is that since there are so many characters that essentially fall into one of the archetypal frames, it can be difficult to keep their mechanics flavorfully similar while mechanically dissimilar.

Sometimes in cases like these we use team dynamics to differentiate the mechanics. (By team dynamics I mean which aspects of the game a team is strong or weak at.) Let’s look at the Human Torch and Cyclops as an example, specifically the Hotshot Torch and Cyclops: Scott Summers. (The littlest and biggest Torches represent his power to “go nova” and loose a powerful heat blast that takes a lot out of him, and the smaller Cyclops exhibits his team leadership more than his optic blasts.)
 
Both of these characters fall into the blaster category. We gave Torch an obvious blaster power. He flames an opponent for 5 endurance. We could have done something similar for Cyclops, but in the comics his blasts are a more concussive than Torch’s, and mechanically we didn’t want the X-Men getting an offensive “bolter.” One X-Men team dynamic is that it’s hard for them to get taken out (they have lots of ways to recover characters and ways to avoid stun). So the idea is while Cyclops is blasting from the support row, he’s able to keep his foe away from him, and consequently, Cyke can’t be stunned.

The most prevalent power in all of comics is super-strength. I mean so many characters have super-strength that it’s all but trivialized—Spider-Man has super-strength, but that’s not one of his more publicized powers. However, there are still a ton of characters whose shtick is simply, “I’m big and strong. Ha ha! Look at me!” So how do you represent super-strength in the Vs. System?

The easiest way is to just give the brick large stats. Thing: Heavy Hitter is just one . . .big . . .dude. But ATK is not just a character’s strength. It’s also his or her combat skill and battlefield cleverness. (In Professor X’s case, it could be his ability to knock an opponent out of the fight by shutting off his mind. Or maybe he just rolls up in his wheelchair and socks the guy in the jaw.) And DEF is more than just a character’s toughness—it's also his or her ability to avoid an attack. Plus, stats are always relative given that they increase exponentially up the cost curve. Thing may be a huge character at 11 ATK/11 DEF for the bargain price of 5 resource points, but just go up 1 resource point on the curve, and the average stats are 12 ATK/12 DEF.

So while stat modifiers make the most sense for a brick, we often try to get clever going about it. For example, at 11 ATK/12 DEF, Colossus is a big guy, but nothing special for a 6-drop. However, once there are five X-Men in the KO’d pile, he becomes one tough Russian. Does his power represent his turning from big, strong, normal dude into bigger, stronger, metal dude? Or does it represent the inner strength of his poet’s soul fueled by his sense of loss for his fallen compatriots? That’s for you to decide.

When powers are very straightforward thematically, it often opens up the possibility to mix in some bottom-up design. For example, we wanted a mechanic where a big character’s coming into play scared off a bunch of little characters. In the comics, Thing often had to deal with ordinary people getting frightened by his monstrous exterior. Mixing that thematic element with the above mechanic, the end result was Thing: Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. (We felt the version name referenced the man underneath the monster motif. Although in playtesting, whenever someone recruited him, I would cry out “Dead God, what is that THING?! Ten points if you get the movie reference.)


Some Characters Have Powers that Don’t Fit Neatly into the Game Engine

This is the opposite problem from the above. Bricks and blasters have straightforward ways in which they can interact with the game. But some characters are not so simple. Magneto can control anything metal (including the metal in a person’s blood—again depending on who’s writing the comic), and he can control magnetic waves, allowing him to fly or create force fields. Flight and force fields are pretty easily translated into game terms, but what about controlling metal? (Sure, we could have him move equipment around, but that doesn’t fully capture his awesome powers. Also, the Brotherhood isn’t really supposed to be good with equipment.)

Sometimes when a character’s power has no obvious implementation into a mechanic, we turn to bottom-up design. (This is similar to what I said up above about Colossus.) The Brotherhood has lots of ATK pumpers that make it easy for them to take down opposing characters. What powers could we give Magneto that would fit this aggressive strategy? We wanted Magneto: Master of Magnetism to represent him at his peak when leading the Brotherhood, so when he shows up, your opponent should be pretty scared. While there’s nothing about magnetism that translates directly to opposing characters not recovering, I like to imagine that it’s his mercilessness in his crusade for homo superior to rule the planet.

But the bottom line is that it’s a cool power. Here’s a little secret: As long as a card’s game text doesn’t contradict what a character’s power should be like, it’s a player’s natural tendency to fill in the blanks to what’s going on thematically. For example, Magneto: Eric Lehnsherr’s power is to exhaust an opposing character. Does this represent his incapacitating that character by trapping him or her in a metal shell? The power has the restriction that you must control another Brotherhood character for it to work. Mechanically, it has that restriction because we wanted a player to have to “earn it” by playing with some other Brotherhood characters. But perhaps it represents Magneto sending out his minions to distract an enemy before he closes in for the kill.
 

From the "Just in Time For Mother’s Day" Department . . .

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about taking flavor and putting it into a mechanical context. Usually the opposite is bit easier (you have some cool effect, you make up some flavor for it, and you’re done), but I thought I’d share this story with you.

Throughout much of development, we had a card called Personal Force Field. The card basically did what it does now, and it even had the same name. The problem was the card was designed to be an equipment card, but when it came time to put it into the set, it turned out the art wasn’t exactly appropriate. You see, rather than a character with a machine or device generating a force field, the picture showed Valeria Richards being saved from a speeding car by her mother, Invisible Woman. Apparently, Valeria’s personal force field generator is her mommy. Flavor didn’t exactly match functionality, but we thought the joke was funny enough to keep the card in the set with that art.


Top Down . . . Development?

Okay, I lied earlier. This article does have a little bit to do with development. Typically, development isn’t concerned with flavor. It really just wants to make sure a card is balanced and functionally appropriate in a given environment. However, because this is a super-hero game, there are a few important issues.


Characters' Relative Power Levels

How strong is Thing? In the comics, he’s probably stronger than Luke Cage, but weaker than Hulk—exactly how strong he is doesn’t really matter.

The Vs.0 System is a game, and by nature it has to quantify potentially ambiguous or undefined traits. But it’s also a super-hero game, full of popular and iconic characters, popular and iconic characters about which players and fans can be extremely vocal.
The point is, development tries to set a character’s mechanical power level not only for the purposes of game balance, but also for the purposes of where that character fits in on the thematic power scale. Of course, players will argue over which character should have gotten bigger stats or the better power, but those kinds of arguments are part of what makes the Vs. community so much fun.

Of course, the version system (which allows a character to exist at multiple points on the cost curve) influences a character’s stats, but the power scale comparisons should still make sense at any given point on the curve. For example, with the exception of Wolverine at 3 and Juggernaut and Magneto at 7, Thing has the highest combined ATK and DEF at each of his three versions.


Over-Attached Designers and Unfeeling Developers

Designers can get very attached to cards they create—especially if the card happens to be a super-hero they really love. But development can’t allow flavor to make a card unbalanced. A typical conversation might sound something like this:

Design: Hey, I’ve got his great idea for card X! What do you think?

Development: You fool! That’s completely broken!

Design: But I love this card! Can’t you fix it, you know, make it balanced?

Development: How about changing it like this? (Writes down new card text.)

Design: Um, but that takes away all the cool flavor. Isn’t there some other way to fix it?

Development: I could delete the text box.

Design: But—

Development: No. (Stalks off, black cape trailing behind.)


(It may seem that I often portray developers as evil. That’s because they are.)

On the one hand, designers need to make sure development doesn’t suck all of the flavor out of a card. On the other hand, it’s often a good thing if the developer doesn’t know too much about a particular character’s power lever. It keeps 'em honest and doesn’t jade the testing process.


The Popular Character Gets the Juice

Often, a character’s stat or power will be right on the border of a break point. Let’s say there’s a character whose only power is create a force field around himself. Let’s say he’s in the 2-cost slot and his power is to activate to give himself +2 DEF. Should we make his ATK/DEF 2/2 or 2/3? If this character were somebody really cool, there’s good chance he would have gotten the extra D. Unfortunately for him, his name is Unus.


Okay, that’s all I got about top-down design and development. Tune in next week for a good hard look at the Robots of Marvel Origins. As always, send any questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com.