How the Afghanistan Principle Affects Game Design

Tuesday, January 11, 2017

I'm big on game design rules. For example, you can see me talk about ten (or so) of them in my PAX Dev video lecture Ten Rules About Writing Rules. In this blog, I want to talk about one rule of mine that gets quoted a lot, and its effect on game design in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.

A couple years ago in a Paizo forum post, I described a rule we use at Lone Shark called "the Afghanistan Principle." Its technical definition is:

No interconnectivity without availability: For an expandable game, a component from an expansion cannot be required for use in any product other than the one it is in.

The genesis of this principle came at Wizards of the Coast as I was helping prepare a shipment of games to members of the military stationed in the Persian Gulf. Instead of just throwing everything into the box, we sorted and bundled up several items at a time, labeling each set as a single playable unit. For example, one Magic: The Gathering deck is not very useful. Two Magic decks can be months of entertainment.

Now, I don't know what happened after that. Some bureaucrat may have popped the labels and made that work for naught. But I like to think that many of our soldiers wiled away the desert nights with a D&D 3rd Edition Player's Handbook, a Dungeon Master's Guide, and a Monster Manual.

After that, I started thinking about how to enforce that principle on the games I worked on. I imagined a soldier with a copy of an RPG adventure that said, "For details on this important thing, see this other adventure," except that other adventure was three countries away. That was no good. In my head, everything needed for that adventure should be either in that adventure or in the basic game materials required for play. It's not that I succeeded in getting this principle enforced everywhere, or even that it worked everywhere, but I did make people aware of its desirability.

A couple years later, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and the principle got a name. A couple years after that, I co-founded Lone Shark, and now I bring this principle into every project I help create.

You can see it in action in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Each Adventure Path has a Base Set, and the components of that box (including its Adventure Deck 1) are the only components that can be required to play any of the other adventures in that path. Here are some of the decisions that the principle mandates:

• Any card needed in multiple adventures must be in the Base Set box. For example, the Mummy's Mask support card Defensive Stance is used in adventures 4 and 6, so even though it isn't used in adventures B or 1, it's a B card.
• The corollary to the above is that a card introduced in Adventure Deck 2 or beyond can only be used in the deck it came in. So the Adventure Deck 1 cohorts Irabeth Tirabade and Horgus Gwerm can appear again and again, but the Adventure Deck 2 cohort Queen Galfrey won't turn up in later adventures. (A practical implication of this is that when you add Adventure Deck 3 to your box, you can safely remove the Adventure Deck 2 adventure, scenarios, locations, villains, henchmen, and cohorts from the box if you like. You may find this speeds setup a bit since you only need to look through the ones from B, 1, and the current deck.)
• The role card for a character needs to be in the same product as the character card. So even though roles aren't used until the end of Adventure 3, when a character appears in the Base Set, his role card is in the Base Set as well.
• The mythic paths and mythic tokens you need in Wrath of the Righteous Adventure 2 and beyond are in the Wrath Base Set. (Though the new mythic paths introduced in Adventure 5 can be used in Adventure 6, that adventure works just fine without them, so they don't need to be in the Base Set.)
• The rules for cohorts weren't introduced until Wrath, meaning they're not in the Rise of the Runelords or Skull & Shackles rulebooks. Since the Witch and Summoner class decks use cohorts, and can be used with RotR and S&S, the rules card in those decks tells you to download a free PDF of the latest rulebook. The basic cohort rules will therefore now be included in every new rulebook, even when there are no cohorts in that rulebook's Adventure Path (as is the case in Mummy's Mask).
• Troops appear in adventures 2 and 6 of Wrath. Since troops are meant to be a surprise in Adventure 2, the new rules for troops that appear on the back of the troop card in Adventure 2 had to be repeated on the back of the troop card in Adventure 6.
• Since we don't provide a d20 with any set other than Wrath, only cards from that set can use a d20.

I'm sure you can imagine more. The rule can be restrictive sometimes. We've often talked about making a Swashbuckler Class Deck, but we can't put new ships in that deck without enforcing the ship rules from Skull & Shackles, and those rules don't work in Mummy's Mask. We would probably not write a power like "You gain the Craft skill equal to your Intelligence skill when on a ship," because that power would be useless in Wrath. (For flavor reasons, we gave the Skull & Shackles promo character Ranzak one power that works only in that set, and only on one of his roles.) Without those things, the hypothetical Swashbuckler deck loses some of its flavor. Until we figure out how to replace that flavor, you probably won't see Jirelle outside of Skull & Shackles.

All this said, there is one place where we violate the principle. In Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild play, we break this rule because fairness demands that every one of the thousands of PFSACG games is played with the same box of cards (with the mechanically negligible exception that the associated Character Add-On Deck is optional for parties smaller than 5). For example, Season of the Runelords Adventure 4 requires the Rise of the Runelords Base Set and Adventure Decks 1 through 4 to play, so it can use locations from Adventure Deck 3. (Plus, this mix creates a better experience for veteran players, since they're seeing combos of cards that they won't see in the box sets.)

The Afghanistan Principle doesn't work for every game, but it works for ours. It's got a good reason to exist, and a committed team behind it. Thanks for reading about it, and for supporting our troops.

If you have any stories about how the Afghanistan Principle has affected you—even if it has nothing to do with the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—let us know about it in the discussion thread for this blog!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer