Board Thread:Suggestions and Ideas/@comment-24454571-20141012213528/@comment-24454571-20141126173114

Alright, so I made a bit of headway, but as expected, it's raised more difficult questions to answer. I've 'roughed up' some stats for the Races and included some ideas to improve the flow of the game. The stats are as follows... Humans, 2/9; Sprites 1/10 (not 100% on this -- could be higher -- depends on Leveling and what-not); Angels, 3/8; Devils, 4/6. The general idea here is kind of strange... Sprites aren't meant to trade with anything, while Humans go even with Devils in three rounds but lose to Angels, and Angels & Devils go even with each other after only two rounds.

I'm still thinking about what kind of functions the characters should serve, but I'm thinking that Angels for example will start with only commands like Block or Protect (Block asserting that an enemy cannot attack anyone but the Blocker while Protect asserting that an enemy cannot attack a target ally, but instead the Protector), while Humans will have access to a command like, "Draw," but I'm thinking about calling it "Quest" instead.

As the characters level, though, I'm considering granting them additional commands or powers -- maybe even including Leveling Trees, although I'm not sure; what I am somewhat sure of, though, is that I'd like characters on the field at the beginning of every turn to gain a random amount of Experience -- 1 to 5, say. Every level requires 10 Experience to advance, and there are a variety of different XP cards: 5 flat XP, 1-10, 2-9, 3-7 & 4-6.

Playing characters on the field is required of play, so I'll have to think more about the mulligan phase, but I do know what the cost of playing characters will be: Sprites are free, Humans require you to shuffle one card from your hand back into your deck, Angels require one card from your hand to be put on the top of your deck, and Devils discard one card from hand to a Graveyard.

I put a little bit of thought into classes, as well; for example, but I'm now having mixed feelings about how I want to approach them. Equipping a class will do a few things; it will give your character additional stats upon leveling up, as well as update your stats from a previous class in the case that you switch. For example, if a Fighter gives +3/+3 for every level and you switch to a Theif who offers +3/+1, and you have 4 levels, then you stats switch from +12/+12 to +12/+4. Classes will also offer Unique abilities or Traits.

Originally I conceived of an idea that if you switch Classes then you keep all of your old stats, which allowed me to do something really cool, which was give the Paladin class a condition like, "You forfeit all of your class benefits if you ever kill an Angel or a Sprite," so I'm thinking about sticking with that approach, so that you keep your old stats, and then when you equip a new class, you simply build up from there if you can continue to advance.

At some point, though, characters must cease to advance; I'm considering a level cap of 9 to keep things brief, and as well I'm considering limiting the game to one game-mode, as in one selection-size of prize pool cards. Perhaps stats cap at 99, which would go along with a previous idea of mine, that being a 'god-like' state which may yield some additional benefit for a character and act as a sort of 'game-ender' tool. Contrary to that idea, though, I really liked the idea of seeing each different Class have a different kind of 'Max Stat', so you could look at a particular character with stats that are, just for example, 35/70 and know that was an Archer and it would trade uniquely with other classes rather than having the possibility of boring, predictable trades between characters with maxed out stats -- but, I digress, because there is a process to the whole thing and it should be quite dynamic and difficult to achieve such Maxed-out states.

Anyhow... I've still got quite a lot of thinking to do... I'm wondering what I can do to make Monsters a more engaging element to the game, if they don't do many of the things that Races do, such as equip Items or Classes, but instead only gain Experience... Again, I'll have to keep thinking about it, because it wouldn't make for a very interesting game if they were too linear in nature and totally out of your control... So, maybe Monsters can equip certain Classes to give them access to new commands. I'll... think about it.