What are Variable Player Powers

Ever sit down at a game where the person teaching the game looks at you, and their first words are, “Who do you want to be?”

What an excellent question that is. I just pulled up a chair, and now I suddenly have this choice to submerge myself in the identity of someone or something awesome.

Variable Player Powers [henceforth referred to as VPP] are a game feature–not a mechanism–wherein each individual assumes the role of a specific entity in the game, often with unique capabilities, advantages, and/or disadvantages.

VPP aren’t right for every game–very few things really are–but they can be right for a surprisingly large number of games. In fact, when I look into one of my own prototypes (or even a client’s prototype), I’m instinctively looking for space to insert VPP somewhere into the game’s moving parts.

Unfortunately, VPP can be a tad tricky to implement, and require a fair amount of testing to balance. So why bother? VPP are a big deal because they appeal to gamers with a variety motivations, and the entirety of their rules weight can usually be relegated to game components.

Basically, for a little extra work, you get something for free in your game. Let’s use a few different games as examples to illustrate exactly what VPP can offer to take your game to the next level.

1) Replayability and Exploration (Cosmic Encounter)

Yes, I know. I talk about this game a lot. But it’s really a great design lesson in a lot of ways.

Cosmic Encounter is an area control race for 3-5 players (or up to 7 with expansions). In fact, it’s a very simple area control race. The first person with ships present at five planets outside of their home system wins.

Granted, Cosmic Encounter is also ex tremely rich in dynamics and interactions, but you can really only play that game so many times. What keeps players coming back to the table in Cosmic Encounter is it’s absurdly deep VPP. The base set comes with fifty different alien races, and every expansion comes with 25(?) more. If you’ve been keeping up over the years, there are probably close to 200 different unique alien powers you can use.

Seriously, 200? How do they even balance all of those abilities?

They don’t.

In fact, some of the VPP are wildly powerful, and others are rather situational. The strong (and I mean strong) presence of dynamics in the game allows the session to balance itself. If you’re one of the better alien races, you might find it difficult to find friends and allies. This internal balancing is perhaps one of the game’s greatest successes…but I digress.

Back to the point, VPP grant fresh context, which translates directly to replay value–especially for gamers that are deeply motivated by exploration and discovery. When I am the Amoeba in Cosmic Encounter, I am playing a different game than I did when I was the Zombies. My decisions, and indeed my entire perspective on the game shifts in a significant way. Every session of Cosmic Encounter is new, and that’s an incredibly valuable asset for any game.

2) Social Reinforcement (Epic Spell Wars)

In Epic Spell Wars, you draw cards, piece together magic into spells, and sling them at one another with the most violent ill-intent. The game, in all honesty, suffers from a number of design flaws, but it’s still a fantastic little title to trot out for the right group. The art, theme, and yes the characters are all hyperbolically humorous.

So what do the VPP do in Epic Spell Wars?

Absolutely nothing.

VPP can serve to reinforce the group’s climate and provide a social buffer through which players may interact with one another outside of the game itself. The VPP don’t even technically need to be variable player powers for this to work–which, yes, means they’re not genuinely VPPs, but they function in the same way in this case.

Piecing together spells to throw at each other can be a good time, but the best moments in Epic Spell Wars come when someone decides to do a voice for Fey Ticklebottom the Enchanter, or when Zanzabart the Slag Genie imperiously points his finger. The characters come to life through the players at different levels, stoking social interaction and fulfilling the ultimate goal of the game’s designers: to create an experience.

3) Immersion (A Game of Thrones)

It’s likely you know all about A Game of Thrones. In fact, if you’ve seen half of what the monsters on my facebook feed have said, you know everything about the few episodes you haven’t seen yet, too (thanks guys). Just in case you came straight to this blog post after leaving Plato’s Cave, however, here’s a bit of exposition.

A Game of Thrones is based on a popular series of books (and an even more popular HBO series) set in a gritty fantasy world–primarily a realm called Westeros. In the board game, each player controls the nobles and armies of one of the six major houses in their struggle to dominate the titular Game of Thrones. The first player to end the turn in possession of seven or more holdings is the winner.

Consider this: every single time I’ve played this game, players are already debating which house they’ll get to be before the box is even off of the shelf.

VPP induce the player to focus his or her in-game identity on a single entity–be it a character, a faction, or whatever else. This imprinting is absolutely crucial to immersion, and VPP are the single best way to achieve it.

The more thematically appropriate the VPP, the better. For example, in Game of Thrones, each house is complete with a unique deck of character cards, and each character’s card is a procedural representation of that character within the scope of the game. Stannis Baratheon becomes more intimidating if he is the king, and Tyrion Lannister is a clever trick to play on your opponent.

The procedures themselves reinforce the immersion when used, yes….but VPP actually reinforce immersion every single time they enter the decision matrix (and thus should be proactive rather than reactive if immersion is your goal). A player that considers whether or not they should send in Robb Stark, for example, just thought about sending in Robb Stark. This immersive value can’t be overstated.

4) Strategic Depth (Ghost Stories)

Ghost Stories is a notoriously difficult cooperative game where each player controls a Taoist monk in a (futile) effort to defend a village against evil spirits. Each Taoist has one of two possible VPP that the player may choose from at the start of the game.

This game might be hard enough that the selection of VPP is a false choice (as you’re doomed anyways, uggggghhh). However, every combination of Taoist powers makes for a different game. Your capabilities change, and so does the entire game.

Without these VPP, the game may actually be quite flat. Your decisions would be fairly linear. Fortunately, VPP can offer additional options that widen the game’s decision matrix, thereby creating a modular strategic depth without much extra complexity.

In cooperative games especially, VPP add a whole new dimension when it comes to delegating tasks. With homogeneous player powers, anyone can do anything. When each player can do specific things more efficiently, however, this changes. Yes, you have to consider what jobs are best suited for which players…but you also have to weigh the value of waiting to assign people to their correct jobs against the pressing urgency of the game clock. With the simple addition of VPP to a cooperative game, you’ve changed an analytical decision into a potentially-much-more-rewarding intuitive decision.

5) Focus in Customization (Android: Netrunner)

Android: Netrunner is a rather-popular Fantasy Flight Games reboot of Richard Garfield’s mildly-popular 1995 CCG. One player takes the role of a corporation, trying to advance their shady agendas. Meanwhile, the other player is an individual hacker called a “runner,” trying to steal those agenda cards from wherever they may be hiding in the corporation’s servers.

When building a d eck in Netrunner, the first thing you do is determine your identity. For the corp, this means the specific company; the runner, the specific character. This identity will determine several things–size and focus of your deck, the flexibility in that focus to diversify into other groups of

cards, a couple numbers here and there, and a special perk or ability.

The desire to customize and design is a strong motivation with gamers, and this derives from a need to be creative, or to express one’s ego onto the game state. VPP can set the stage and offer the guidelines for a player’s creativity, and those guidelines will lead to greater creative satisfaction. In the famous words of Magic: the Gathering’s design lead Mark Rosewater, “Restrictions breed creativity.”

The strange truth is, if players could access every card to build a deck in Netrunner, then deckbuilding would actually be less satisfying. Using VPP as a focus here gives players an exciting reason to adopt a creative theme.

This isn’t limited just to deckbuilding. In fact, in tabletop RPGs, the different capabilities of character classes often lend focus to players’ builds and customization. Even in the microcosm of a board game, having a certain player power might encourage the player to design a specific strategy or approach.

Design Lesson

Consider the game Monopoly.

Consider how much you really wouldn’t want to play Monopoly right now.

Improve Monopoly using only VPP

Isn’t that so much better?

Ahhhhhh.