#37 - Fidelity

I have hit record. One. Three. Five. Seven.

Nah. Ten. I made you branded. It means it's like a regular episode, but smaller and more orange on both our screens. Actually, your beard matches my shirt and my walls match your shirt. I don't see what more it could have to do with board games. There's no explanation needed. Yeah.

My guess is that fidelity would have to do with how close it is to the source material, oh that's interesting isn't it high fidelity and low fidelity in the same game is a little tough off the cuff i can give you two similar examples and that would be magic the gathering and yugioh this is very formative for me because when i was a kid i played yugioh and then all the attack numbers are 25 000 and then i pulled

out the first poke or i pulled the first magic card i was like what do you mean it has one attack.

Yeah six is a very high attack in magic and i remember initially and initially when i was playing i was i had that same shock of like this just seems weird seems so small and as soon as you having to do any calculations you're like oh thank god these numbers are some right i guess another example could be lost cities lost cities the cards just range one through ten but then the scoring is multiplicative as well or can be at least you could end up multiplying it like two three

four times i think is the highest it goes it also is a good way to emphasize differences if you go from having two attack to three attack that feels like a big deal and so it can make is tiny or rather it makes all changes in the system feel significant now this is nice where you can have games that have what are called knobs where it's like you can tune things and you have more than one dot to tune the most simple example would be you don't just have the attack of the unit you also

have its cost how much does it cost how strong is it but then you have health then you have abilities and if you have non-numerical abilities you can do a lot of different things that but you're right if you're in a spot where all you have are the numbers because that's the big game you're making it can definitely put you in a tight spot where you you need to have some amount of granularity to be able to work with for sure.

Yeah and i was just gonna say but how different how many different cards you can get out of that system like i think listeners would be impressed if you taught them just the core rules and you said you had that many cards they'd be like how how is that possible without having going to numbers.

Yep. I was just going to add to that. I've got another disadvantage of low granular or low fidelity games. Yep. Yep. And sorry, I always thought of it as granularity. So we're going to go back and forth, folks, but just try and know that we're saying the same things. I think still expression is a very real thing. If you have very similar point values for, let's say you're doing a Euro game with recipe full film, right?

And all your point values are pretty similar than And everyone's scores are going to be pretty similar at the end of the game. And it's nice to have different amounts of points because you have higher amounts of fidelity so that players can find the path through the system that gives them the biggest benefit.

I was working recently with a co-designer who's also a listener of the podcast, and he and I found that in our first pass, all of the cards had two similar scoring and everyone's points were just between two or three of each other pretty consistently, as long as you're competent players.

But then we made the points significantly more different it ranges from two to technically could go up to 10 for the cards and then the scores ended up being quite different because you could see people who are really good at the game being able to find the path through the system that benefits them the most absolutely i was just gonna say i think the feel of the numbers is one of the most important things the feeling of low numbers is that they aren't significant so if you have a low scoring

game it's not going to feel right if you have low numbers for your stats it might feel like the weaker higher numbers might require more calculation but they do offer you a bigger feeling because intrinsically in our monkey brains it's just like oh this number's really big i know 5 000 gold is a lot of gold in real life right i was just gonna say that.

I think a very good cheat is for things where it would feel weird to have very small numbers but you want small numbers is to use high numbers with like the zeros off to the side you know i was playing the estates and it's like every one of these bills is one but it's not one dollar it would feel wrong to be like i'm buying this house with one dollar each one is then zero zero zero, So you get the benefits of both. Totally.

I think it's thousands. I think every number is like 1,000, 2,000. Yeah, seriously. Gallauds, I understand.

It's not just a difference of how complex it is to calculate, oh, I'm four spaces away from this target or whatever, those kinds of things. But it's also consistency. If the numbers are flatter, it's more consistently the same numbers, which is much easier to do in a lower fidelity game because you just are using less numbers naturally. And you don't have the granularity to be like, oh, this one goes five, this one goes six, this one goes seven.

Instead you go most things are two and some things are three it makes it much easier for players to be able to remember all the different numbers and keep everything in their head because there's a lot less of it to keep track of yes imbalances are interesting it is interesting to be able to look at something and say oh you know what this thing that's up for for buying right now is less good than the normal thing

maybe i'll go do something else and some other sucker will buy it and I'll come back later. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And like you said, it's kind of a cheat to be able to say things like you can go any number of spaces in a straight line. If in your game that max number is five, well, okay, you could have just said you can move up to five or whatever, but instead by just saying go in a straight line, it's more exciting to players, I think.

It's less complex to them and it's a more unique ability as well. Well adding 26 of a thing requires a if nothing else a lot of tokens b if you have 26 of a thing on there then you and then you add more to it then you have to be adding together all these different things that are just piling piling piling that's nightmarish right, mm-hmm mm-hmm.

Totally i think similarly there's games like what was it navigador that i was just playing where you know you've got or maybe it was both of them i've played a lot of yours recently and they'll kind of blend together in my head but these games where you have like refreshes where you get a bunch of workers or you know whatever resources and in these games you upgrade how many things you get but it's not linear it's not every single time you upgrade you get one

more thing because then you're going to upgrade this you know 10 to 20 times of course the game you don't want to be getting 20 workers per thing yeah so instead it goes one one one two and you know some on some of those spaces it goes one one one with a victory point two something like that where it's like you can keep the numbers low and still give players something and note that victory points are something where you're able to i think get away with having higher fidelity

in general where you can get more of those things and it's less of big of a deal whereas having too many resources i think is some is way worse because something you have to count how much do i have how do i use this strategically all those sorts of things it occupies way more of your mental space than just going up a victory point track i have but i'm not really into poker so i bounced off it.

Yeah man i have so much to say now that you open up the can of worms of video games i'm gonna try, i'm gonna try and go very quickly well i'm gonna say a few things but it's all on topic it's all on topic so slay the spire is one of the few roguelikes that i have gone into because the numbers are so small and again it's it's actually really interesting to look at that as an example because in the board game development which i hear is absolutely phenomenal i've looked

it up i haven't played it myself but it looks really really impressive yeah but yeah they basically the numbers in the video game were like you know five to ten or whatever but then you can do things that will multiply them but again it's it's fairly simple and in that one it's important to have, moderate numbers because you need to have a variety of different numbers and effects and stuff but you also need to have it be calculatable because it the

number the exact numbers that you need to hit are really important if an enemy has 43 hp you better be able to count to 43, because otherwise like you could just be wasting damage or you could accidentally undershoot by one and then you lose so even though the computer's doing the math for you it still matters, right, mm-hmm.

Good you're good but yeah i think that's a really really interesting case study of taking a video game to a board game and seeing what they had to do to the numbers to make it work so everything is way condensed six becomes one those sorts of things uh they cap a lot of different abilities to not multiply too crazy but then the other example is a video game that's very much slay the spire inspired and it's called monster train have you heard of that one sure so monster

train is pretty cool the pertinent part of this discussion is you have you know like in slay spire your deck gets better and better and your cards get upgraded and you can do some crazy busted stuff just like slay spire but the the ramp the escalation sure but but the escalation in monster train is crazy by at the start of the game you're fighting enemies with like five to like 40 health by the end of the game you're fighting people with hundreds or thousands of health it's

like insane but what i really like about what i think is really valuable to this conversation is there are still enemies with five or less health so your starter card that just does one damage but does anywhere could still be very relevant later in the game which is super interesting i think we've touched on a lot of things i think the main thing is like a lot of our episodes just being cognizant of it more and more as we go into advice i feel less and less prescriptive and

more and more descriptive of just describing what the problems are what things to be aware of and just make.

These conscious decisions in your design if you. Think that you need to have high fidelity just do it consciously with thoughts to how much cognitive. Overload it's putting on the players in addition to the rest of things that are going on where possible try and keep your numbers lower if players are going to have to interact.

With it or if players are going to have to use the numbers involved in their strategy if i have to what one thing that's pushed me away from a lot of heavy euros is you have to calculate a specific set of stuff you're going to need many turns in advance i am going to need 10 wood three sheep four brick and two wheat five turns from now okay now i have to get those exact things in order the if you're going to make players if you're going

to punish players for not reaching that goal or if you're going to heavily reward players for reaching a specific goal that they have to strategically plan for a long way in advance then you should make those numbers manageable for them because that's where it's going to really compound the issues that we're talking about whereas something like ti is a bit more flexible where it's like the resource you care about is just resources you know maybe it's trade goods yeah so it's like

you have to have 10 goods and there's only you know that's only that one thing so you can look at that number 10 and not have to overwhelm yourself with too many things even though it's like a moderately high number because you're getting ones and twos from different places. It's just one type of resource. So it's not compounding the issue of having multiple different high numbers of things that you're keeping track of. Sure. Yeah. That's a great point. And that leads into the knobs, right?

Where it's like you've effectively added a knob to a resource by saying it's wild. It now has one extra meaning to it. And another interesting one goes along with that point is that you can just change the number of resources in the system. If you're drawing cards from a deck, maybe there's just fewer of the thing in there. And so if you have something that lets you search for that, it's much more valuable. Yeah. And I think looking to knobs makes the game way more interesting, too.

Because yeah a card that has three attack versus a card that has two attack like okay yeah the three one's better but a card where it's not super clear it's very interesting for players to have to figure out if it's if it's incomparable right if you have you know one creature who's got the ability of flying and then a different ability a creature with the first strike ability, which one of those is better you know it's it's kind of situational it's kind of up in the air,

yeah just gonna say another example for magic is two mana for a counter spell they tried that and it was way too good for most formats three mana for counter spell was way too slow so what you see is a lot of two mana counter spells with a downside it's not fully counter spells counter spell unless or counter a specific type of spell and then the three mana counter spells is counter a spell plus and that makes the game a lot more interesting if three was the perfect number then you know

i think it'd be less interesting or if two is the perfect number but because it lies somewhere in between for that one effect it gives them a lot of design space, by big fidelity.

Oh look at this listeners we get a rare aj and peter disagree so i think that that certainly can be the case like if you if you're looking at something like the mind. The mind has 100 cards 1 through 100. There is no tie. But if there's still the possibility of a tie even if you make it less likely you still need the edge case of the tiebreaker right? Unless I misunderstand what you're saying. It depends. It depends on how central the tiebreaker is. Like in Rising Sun,

the tiebreaker is like such a focal part of the game. Yeah. But I hear what you're saying. If I can, I'm going to restate and see if I understand you correctly. You're saying it makes ties happen much less likely or much less often. And ties are, generally speaking, not something that players are going to feel as satisfied with as one person clearly beating the other in one way or another.

Fair enough. fair enough i've seen that before i almost never make simultaneous games not related to them so explains why it's uh more on your mind than mine i think we covered it sure do you have a fun question prepared about fidelity i don't celebrate my birthday i don't do anything Like, really, I haven't had a birthday party since I don't even know when I would have been like young teenager, maybe I will tell you it has a little something to do with it more,

more of the entire planet falling apart. But let's let's not get into things here. I will say that now that I moved away from a lot of people to Aurelia in away from Toronto, So I think I'm going to start having birthday parties, mostly as an excuse to get people to drive to me. But it's really just for that. It's not because I care about my birthday at all. You? Oh, you like it when you're the center of attention, huh? I never would have guessed. Happy birthday.

I don't think my birthday is yesterday, is it? Yeah. Yeah, I was hoping you weren't going to call me on. I rezzed as soon as I said it. Right. Perfect time for a birthday present. Nope. Actually, it might make sense. So we're about to do a YouTube exclusive one.

Sorry, audio listeners, but what we're going to be doing is reviewing my cell sheets. Or rather, Peter is going to review my cell sheets. and that doesn't really make sense in an audio format because you can't see them so tune in to YouTube yeah, yeah Peter Peter's not going to hold anything back he's just going to tear me a new one, bye everyone it wasn't very many.