|
Over the weekend as we were heading to the Celtic Fling in PA, we were discussing PACG. My buddy would love to play more but his free time gets chewed up a lot. He loves the game as much as I and a lot of it is the mechanics involved. The use of dice, ability/skill modifiers, your deck as your hit points, etc. is pretty much genius overall. My friend has been talking for a while (before PACG came along) about a card game based on RPG but having a DM build a deck that plays against a set of players and their decks.
I tried to convince him that while his idea is interesting, the mechanics of PACG works so damn well that I'm not sure if we can find something to work better. Mike and Lone Shark Games have a set of mechanics that can be themed for other genres.
So the question I have, are the mechanics of PACG exclusive to Paizo's game? Or are they going to be used to create a Horror or Sci-Fi or Superhero based card game?
I could see this for a Cthulu, Cyberpunk or DC/Marvel/Image superhero game. (Would love a card game based on Invincible!) It could work for World of Warcraft.
Chief Technical Officer
|
Paizo is keeping plenty busy with the PACG, and that's all you'll see from us on this channel for the foreseeable future.
That said, game mechanics are not copyrightable*, and I'm confident that we'll see other ACG-style games from other publishers in the not-too-distant future.
*Specific expressions of game mechanics are copyrightable, so people can't just reprint giant chunks of our rulebook in their games—they have to put them in their own words. Game mechanics may in very rare circumstances be patentable.
Penny Arcade are working on a card/deck based RPG: Thornwatch. So far, it seems the most similar to PACG, though I think it falls more on the RPG side than the board game side as PACG does, as it requires a Game Master.
Read any of the several thousand posts on Hasbro v. Cryptozoic for interesting discussion regarding how close is too close for the copyright of card games.
Or, you know, let the game designers worry about that, because it's really a thorny, dark, smelly minefield of sheer awfulness.
|
|
One of the other unique aspects of PACG is the sequential nature where current play is influenced by previous game sessions; obviously, this has a lot to do with its RPG roots, but I think it also is informed by legacy games (like Rob Daviau's Risk Legacy) which seemed to be one of the first tabletop games outside of RPGs to feature sequential play sessions.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And to directly answer the question Theryon asked: Lone Shark Games and our sister company SDN LLC own the mechanics of the game, which we have gleefully licensed to our friends at Paizo, hopefully for a very long time.
Penny Arcade are working on a card/deck based RPG: Thornwatch. So far, it seems the most similar to PACG, though I think it falls more on the RPG side than the board game side as PACG does, as it requires a Game Master.
Thornwatch is nothing like PACG, except that there are character decks. Trust me, I've played it more than anyone who doesn't work for Penny Arcade, because my office is in the Penny Arcade building. It's also really, really, really good.
And to directly answer the question Theryon asked: Lone Shark Games and our sister company SDN LLC own the mechanics of the game, which we have gleefully licensed to our friends at Paizo, hopefully for a very long time.
Penny Arcade are working on a card/deck based RPG: Thornwatch. So far, it seems the most similar to PACG, though I think it falls more on the RPG side than the board game side as PACG does, as it requires a Game Master.Thornwatch is nothing like PACG, except that there are character decks. Trust me, I've played it more than anyone who doesn't work for Penny Arcade, because my office is in the Penny Arcade building. It's also really, really, really good.
That's pretty cool.
As I recall, Thornwatch works oppositely of PACG in a lot of ways. You die when your hand fills with wounds, so a fighter would have a larger hand size than a wizard. I'd imagine that would also create some problems where the tough characters also have more options than the squishy ones.
So, to theorize, you'd make up for that with mechanics that let the wizards cycle their hands faster (which would multiply their squishiness, of course) and chain combos together as they top-deck.
Well, it looks like it's time for me to spend all day designing a derivative work.