[Ardanet-developers] custom scenarios

[Ris M. <rm...@ne...>]

I just felt like writing down some wildly unrealistic future features
tonight.  This is all just off-the-cuff brainstorming material to read some
time when you're bored and put in the back of your mind to chew on, or get
excited about right now and write me back! :P

 

I was reading over this rules variant called Unsung Heroes
http://www.meccg.net/dforum/viewtopic.php?t=330 and it got me thinking ahead
to a version >=2 feature. this scenario adds a set of rules which are
somewhat complicated and it would be nice to have the software remind us
about these special rules in effect.  This makes me wonder if we could have
some way to "mod" Ardanet with custom scenarios like this, made by the users
based on some kind of custom scenario engine and editor.  I think a lot of
people are into designing custom scenarios like this, so it could be a
useful feature.

 

I don't quite have a clear enough vision of Ardanet to imagine exactly how
it would be modded by players, but it's something to think about.

 

For Unsung Heroes in particular, it looks like mostly deck-building
restrictions.  The part about no characters with mind >6 is a simple
restrictions, but "except for your avatar's home site" is a trickier rule to
define in a data-only kind of custom scenario file.

 

There are also custom rules about playing resources based on your avatar's
abilities instead of their own abilities (warrior/sage/diplomat kind of
stuff) and I'm not sure whether we can even check the playability of
resources like that.  I'd like to if possible, just to give a
user-overridable warning that a card appears to be unplayable by that
character, and we have data to cover most of those cases already for
anything simple like "warrior only."  But it has to be just a warning you
can ignore in case there are effects in play that would make this
warrior-only card playable on this non-warrior character for who knows why.
Anyway I'm just rambling now.  My point was, the way Ardanet handles
resource playing restrictions is still unclear, so it's even more unclear
what to say about player-made custom scenario modules which modify that
behavior.  It would change if/when you get a warning.  Still, it's something
to think about in the back of your mind as we move forward.

 

This also got me thinking about a slightly different idea: single player
campaign scenarios for Ardanet.  Basically you would create a deck for the
usual kind of solitaire variation, drawing from only the hazards and playing
as many on yourself as you can during your movement hazard phase, but we
could enhance it to put permanent events in play at the start, add special
rules, and make Ardanet track additional objectives. like I'm imagining a
Hobbit scenario where you're programmed to be Gandalf and you start with the
full Dwarven company at the Shire and have to perform a successful influence
check against a hobbit on the first turn, not necessarily Bilbo.  Then the
movement is preprogrammed by the scenario to take you to most of the site
cards from the Hobbit in the correct order and also programmed to throw a
deck of very similar hazards at you while you draw from a deck of similar
resources, to come up with a MECCG game that plays out a lot like the Hobbit
but all shuffled around.  It's a fuzzy idea.  Maybe do it as a more
free-form game starting as Gandalf at Rivendel and you get to go around
recruiting/influencing the various dwarves before heading to the Shire to
play a hobbit card and then moving on to the lonely mountain, etc.  This
gives me an idea for a "mystery scenario" kind of thing where you would only
know your next objective, i.e. "bring 13 Dwarves, at least one of which must
be listed on King Under the Mountain" and once you complete this, you find
out your next objective is to "bring any hobbit character into play at his
home site.  The influence check is modified by -10 because respectable
Hobbits simply don't go on adventures."  So you go and play A Friend or
Three with your company of 13 dwarves to win over Frodo, and so on,
unlocking the next objective to guide you along a similar story as the
Hobbit - or some other story you invent, which could open some cool
opportunities - and you play it all out with MECCG cards, basically
scrambling the Tolkien lore in a blender to come up with some fun stories
and single-player scenarios.

 

So maybe for version 2 or 3 we can come up with some kind of data-driven
simplistic model to define custom scenarios like this, something that won't
require hard-core programming, or.

 

Here's a thought, maybe in a future version when we implement all of the
card rules in the code, which I'd love to do some day, we will do that by
making a custom scripting language to define the cards.  Most of the cards'
rules are made from very similar constructs and they follow a consistent
logic, so it should be fairly easy to convert the wording of every card into
a custom programming language if we create our parser around the consistent
phrases they already use on the cards.  The parser would give error messages
where it finds wordings we haven't programmed it for, and we'd either
enhance the parser for that new language and special kind of rule, or we
would fix the wording of the card to fit our parser.  This would take a long
time and a lot of work but it would be fun and I'd love to have a completely
automated game that really knows all the rules.

 

Think how fast the games would go with a software assistant correctly
interpreting all of the rules and cards for you?  Telling you at all times
every number in play counting all bonuses and special effects and capable of
giving you the break down, as well as showing you which of the cards in your
hand are currently playable. 

 

Then it's just a matter of enhancing this custom programming language for
these additional kinds of rules to program the custom scenarios.

 

Unfortunately, all of the above is a requirement before we can tackle the AI
in version 5 or 6 or something. we need a fully programmed understanding of
every rule and every card before we can program the computer to play the
game.  The computer will never build it's own deck, so it will be able to
make heuristic decisions about each card based on, probably a power value we
manually assign to each card, plus points for combinations with other cards
in play, plus checks that it won't be immediately canceled, and so on.  It's
completely within the realm of possibility, but will take a lot of
programming.

 

That's more than enough rambling for one day. next time I'll shut up and
work on programming some of the ideas we already have instead of adding to
the work load lol :P

 

-- Ris