Introduction
The idea for Aether Summon was born many years ago from the desire of having a TCG (Trading Card Game) like game, with the same sort of turn-base gameplay, but without the randomness inherent to all competitive ones, that make them effectively be, hidden down below the several layers of keywords and appearance, a multi-layered poker game.
Aether Summon went through several develoments, initially it was even called Aether Wars, and while the goal of achieving a game without the type of randomness associated with draws and shuffling was managed, other game design issues started popping up in my mind and I took the chance to develop an actual engine and ruleset that further rewarded mastery over randomness, tactical thinking over "I win" items and specifically built to be played solely online, in a browser, desktop and mobile. That in itself, that it was entirely digital, made me look into different ways to approach such a task and contemplate new ideas.
This page is about game-design, game-philosophy, it goes into what makes Aether Summon be different and why it does so but to explain that it needs to use fairly specific language - common-place terms related to game-design and TCGs, that although common in that domain might be unfamiliar to you.
While most TCGs don't lack mastery elements, to me they're very unfulfilling as games for being played more regularly as hobbies, or on the other hand, more seriously - even when I, as a kid, was more into these games, I never cared for the championships, of who won?, it never mattered other than between friends, if the die roll rolled the other way the championship would have had a completely different result, so why follow? They're great fun for a game day with some friends - I have played several while younger, one or other played at times as well later on. While younger I've also played tabletop Warhammer, normal and 40k, probably played and finished close to the whole catalog of "Make your own adventure" books and many RPGs I would get my hands on, either on console, at a friends house, in MS-DOS, or even commodore amiga (not sure if the tapes for a very basic mostly line drawn rpg adventure game I vaguely remember were for spectrum or commodore), and most of these before actually having contact with TCGs. All that basically informed the world of Alastria, the game dimension where players battle.
Main ideas
I'm going to talk about the central ideas and how they tie together:
- keeping the game interesting without randomness and drawing steps;
- solve the game in a single match - don't use best of X or extensive gauntlets
- no inherent rarities for the game items;
- an advanced marketplace and tournament creator for the players and community;
Getting rid of randomness while keeping the game play interesting
Before you start saying "oh but randomness is the thing that makes it enticing" - well, in part, maybe? for some people? Perhaps. There's randomness in playing any game against an unknown list of scrolls, if the possible constituents of the list are in big enough number to choose from, then randomness emerges organically out of it, you don't need to make the "actual" game be random or dominated by random events. The randomness that is interesting to me is that, a random puzzle of items that you have to figure out as you go and use your strategy and game knowledge to top your opponent's, not an exercise in frustration from dealing with drawing the wrong items all the time.
So, no drawing steps, no drawing scrolls. The codex, also called tome or grimoire when referring to the initial list of 50 playable scrolls that make up a codex, is always accessible to both players but no one knows the scrolls each other has, this means there's always a lot of unknown unkowns, even though randomness in default game-play has been removed, it's not a perfect information game like chess, even when a known list is being played, just a couple of different scrolls, because they're always accessible, is, or can be, a completely different matchup.
Making this work without randomness is more problematic if we would use the same resource systems as other games, where both players incrementally increase their "base resource" (mana, energy, magic points, power points, etc) on their own turns alone. It's kinda a given, perhaps because it's a natural way of balancing random draw games, that to balance out starting first, which is the most advantageous position you can hope for (this is verifiable because 100% of the people choose to start first, even though resource advantage is the most important aspect of these games besides starting first, so this must mean that if they forego one draw to start first, that starting first is more valuable than drawing a resource, aye?).
Now if we remove draws from the game, we have a worse problem because starting first is not handicapped by the opponent getting one more resource, so what is the solution? The solution is simple, like almost every time, what if we allow players to play their resources on each other's turns as well? Such a simple concept unlocked completely this game because now the advantage of the position is being the active turn player. To illustrate this, lets say you start the game, you play your first flux (resource), because it's a flux you keep priority and now play a spell which gives priority to your opponent. Now your opponent can actually also play a flux, which doesn't change priority, and now he has also a resource he can use to counter act.
This is already more balanced, even though the initial player has a certain advantage, he can be the first to play creatures, hexes, or conjurations, it's more balanced because now both players play at the same resource level independently of who started.
Nonetheless, a more interesting thing happens as well when we switch turns. Now the opponent will be the one with priority and playing his flux will put him at being the first to be able to play creatures, hexes or conjurations with 2 total cost.
When we switch turns again, now is the original player that gets the same but for 3, and then the opponent for 4, and so on. The advantage swings naturally with being the active players, which is kinda of how I always imagined a balanced game would look like.
Lastly, there's another effect that wasn't being pursued but ended up being a big upside of this approach - games are now much faster to develop. The starting player on his 4th turn (7th game/global turn) has access to 7 resources, the same as his opponent whereas in a normal symmetrical turn by turn game (all the TCGs I know of) he would be playing his 4th resource and the opponent would have 3. Obviously, since playing scrolls and activating abilities, which is what the game is about, requires resources this makes it faster to play out the scrolls during a game.
That should about cover the most important points regarding the lack of draw and randomness which leaves only the randomness that is available to talk about.
Randomness in Chaos Brawl Drafts
While the normal mode of play completely lacks randomness elements in the basic game-mechanics Chaos Brawls thrives on it. Nonetheless it's a different kind of randomness. As the theory of Chaos would put it, a slight variance in the initial parameters can lead to a drastically different outcome down the line. In Chaos Brawls Drafts (CBDs) you, and every other player, start from a random tome of scrolls and pick one scroll at a time, after which you pass the tome from which you picked your choice and receive one from another player and repeat this until you all picked 60 total scrolls, opening each 3 tomes.
While this is random and in fact, there is luck involved in what a player can open, a pod is made of 8 players, so you'll see at least 12 scrolls from the furthest initial player from you. The tomes are also balanced across domains and you don't have that many slack picks, which means, that naturally, finding the right spot on the table or when to force is important. Each player should be able to find somewhat open 3 domains to settle.
In a pod there should be a total of around 60 scrolls of each domain (360 total single domain scrolls), plus anywhere from 30 to 90 multi-domain scrolls and 48 non-domain scrolls. All playable scrolls, no fluxes, so if we assume we need around 43 minimum scrolls for a codex, assuming 7 fluxes and excluding recall that can be any scroll, if each player gets 20 scrolls of each of 3 domains they'll have enough playables (even for recall).
So while there's randomness, we think it's the sort of good randomness, the one that makes the puzzles more interesting and keeps them fresh while not benefitting any player significantly.
Randomness effects
After all this talk about how we don't want randomness to dictate the game you might be surprised to know that there are in fact random effects in the game. While this might look contradictory there's a reason why they make sense, and while the mechanic exists it's also not guaranteed that it's going to be explored further in new developments.
The randomness that you might find in scroll effects is mostly related with the Void domain. We wanted it to be possible to attack the "codex", or "tome" of scrolls of an opponent itself. Not a particular scroll only, or by effects of naming. At the same time we also didn't want to break the imperfect information nature of the game, so what we ended up doing was having scrolls and effects that target the opponent's tome scrolls in a random way, to both allow attacking it but not automatically making its real contents known.
To see the difference of the effects, while it's not guaranteed that it won't ever create very advantageous random choices, imagine a few turns into the game, you have 35 scrolls and one or two or even three get randomly removed, you still have all 32 scrolls. Now on regular card games, usually hands cap at 7 but some much less, so if I hit 1, 2 or 3 cards, sudenly it might just end the game. Like you have 5 cards after 2 turns, including one that is the reason you kept the original hand, and the other player plays something that targets one random card from yours. If it hits the one that was the reason you kept usually there's not much recourse. This mechanic is well understood and plays according to the general feeling of these games but the magnitude of the effect depends heavily on the type of game, so here we believe that it will work just fine.
Solve matches in a single game
Another objective was that the concept of a match, or "duel", the part where two players actually play against each other, would be decidable through a single match. We can do away with multiple matches to decide a winner (or long gauntlets) because there's no draw and randomness, so we don't need to worry about "balancing" bad luck.
This makes it so that a game can only go to a maximum of 50 minutes, in case both players completely exhaust their timers otherwise it will be usually less.
To offer some more strategic approaches to a single game system we created the "RECALL" mechanic, which uses a set of 7 scrolls the player chooses when creating their codex that isn't part of their initial playable scrolls. During a duel, at specific times of the game, in a symmetrical way for both players, they can retrieve scrolls from those 7 they chose and bring them into play. Basically creating a "bench" of scrolls that can be brought in against specific threats or game plans, furthering the strategic part of codex building.
No rarity levels
Items rarity. There's no intrinsic rarity to any of the items in Aether Summon. While rarity is a nice incentive for people to spend money, or time, on the game acquiring items, it introduces a distortion to game design. Now items have to have power levels that somehow walk hand in hand with their intrinsic rarity. It makes sense, in a way, it's a reasonable way of incentivising spending either, or both, time or money and rewarding that. At the same time, wouldn't a natural rarity emerge if all items have the same rarity? By this I mean, if the pool of choosable items is 20 and a "tome", or item pack, has 20 items, if we prevent repeated items, every item has a 100% chance of being included. All items are. If we add to the pool 60 items, now each item has only a chance of 25%. That's still a pretty low number of items if we consider a fully fledged game, where it's not unreasonable to reach in the order of thousands of different items, specially if the game is basically playing those items. If the game reaches a thousand playable scrolls, it would mean a scroll has roughly 0.02% chance of being in a tome that is opened.
If now we add to that the fact that scrolls will naturally develop a "value" due to them being used or not, at certain times, and according to the meta, we should see a natural value emerging for those scrolls, since the most competitive forms of game-play require you to have somehow acquired those scrolls to play them, if at that time there's only a 0.02% chance of opening any particular scroll, those that are being played with greater success will probably be seen as more valuable.
Marketplace
This natural value that we hope emerges is what ties to the other objective - creating an advanced marketplace where players can sell, buy and borrow scrolls. In a game were we tried to remove the game-play randomness we think this will lend itself very well as a way of players to trade the results of their winnings, in case they prefer that.
The marketplace aims to put in the hands of the players, or community at large, those that would like to invest in the game or even trade inside the platform, the power to dictate the value of the items. Since there's a fully unblocked sandbox like mode where you can play with any existing scroll (playground) we don't feel that having a marktplace is problematic. Players can always choose to play the playground versions of events, matches and chaos brawl, that are either completely free or significantly cheaper than their other versions.
Tournament scheduler
In the same vein we believe the community is probably the most apt at deciding what types of tournaments and game-play they want to pursue and because we believe in providing tools for that, the last part of the Aether Summon universe, and again a differentiating factor, is the tournament scheduler. Instead of only offering basic queues and matches, we will offer players the opportunity to set up their own tournaments and gauntlets. A tournament can be as small as a single match elimination between only two players and go up to hundreds of players spread between point based rounds qualifying to a chaos brawl top 8. Tournaments have a small opening fee that is charged to the organizer, and the organizer will be able to set prize pools, fees, style of rounds (single elimination, round qualifier for top 8/16/x, etc), restriction etc.
The idea is players will be able to create the type of experience they want. Want a restricted scroll list chaos brawl draft with multiple pods, where players actually play against the players in their draft table and then try to qualify in the two top spots of each table for the tournament top 8 finals? Go ahead. Want it to start at 00:20 UTM? 5 minute breaks between rounds, 160 players, automatic rounds, prize pool distributed incrementally to the top 80 players? Sure. Want to split qualifiers and finals into two days? There you go. Want it to be playground so anyone can use any scroll? Be our guest.
Of course this doesn't mean we won't have our own very official tournaments but there won't be anything different that we will be able to do in them, other than perhaps restrict it to certain players (like a ELO ranking masters tournament) or connect them to some other in-game stat that might be relevant for players. In terms of structure and options available a player will be able to start their own tournaments with the same structure if they so wish. The reason for this is simple, simple things, like a part of a community being from somewhere and having a timezone that is different and just want to have a sunday tournament after lunch. But if tournaments can only be set by "us", then this would be much harder to pull off, and probably wouldn't unless there was a big community to justify it. If players can solve this they will and, perhaps, better than a dedicated team of persons thinking about it from a completely different perspective - simply because they wouldn't be solving for the same type of concerns.
Thanks for reading.
This is a sum up of the philosophy behind Aether Summon. There's other details, again simple things, like creatures healing discrete damage points instead of in totality, antecipating creatures that have very high guard points, but because of the nature of the damage/healing system won't become "I Win" items, since they can be taken care of with plain strategical play and can't simply mow through the game relying on their oversized stats. Lots of small decisions like these were made in different parts, abilities, rules, overall game design so that cool, interesting unique effects, scrolls, can be created without subverting the game-play.