43 KiB
How would you go about designing an engaging match for a story, using a game of known rules?
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Author: u/SimoneNonvelodico Dai-Gurren Brigade*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/9az174/how_would_you_go_about_designing_an_engaging/
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Score: 35
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Created: 2018-08-28T13:44:15
Post:
I've been thinking about the possibility of writing a short rational!Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction. This has led me however to a pretty big problem. On one hand, a setting like YGO is ideal for grounded conflict, since the rules of the game are well known, and all conflicts are resolved through it because of magical mumbo-jumbo that's just part of the way their world works. On the other, the amount of possibilities for a YGO card game, considering that there's some leeway on how the contestants can build their deck, is immense. This especially if you wanted to build clever strategies, foreshadowed beforehand but still surprising when executed. Of course, one possible way to do this is using the approach that was seen in the original show - just make up new cards as you go along, possibly less ridiculously broken than the ones they kept pulling out there. But that doesn't feel very rational. What would be best is designing games using a specific subset of the existing cards, and its possible combinations/interactions. A further limitation is given by the fact that given characters have their own signature cards and themes which can be the basis for a rational playing strategy (since a lot of themed cards support each other in complex interactions). However, it's still a very large configuration space. What would be your approach to this? Just use real games from big championships as a basis, possibly joining different bits of multiple ones? Build some core combos, and then fill in the spaces in between them with less important exchanges until all the numbers work out? Of course I have full control over which cards the players would draw at any given time, and since we're talking champions we can assume they'll always play the best possible move at their disposal, but that's about it.
Comments:
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+23] Champion of Justice and Reason (51 minutes later)
I've struggled with this too. Unfortunately it seems like the yugioh tcg is simply not rational. It's too much luck and relying on the heart of the cards and not enough skill. Furthermore there's no good reason why the game wouldn't be dominated by wealthy elites who can afford all the rare cards. I tried using a different game for an AU fanfic of yugioh, but I'm not sure how well it works.
http://sailorvulcansstarship.blogspot.com/2017/10/ma-ho-oh-match-of-millennium.html
u/Icare0 [+31] (6 hours later)
While the anime is certaily not rational, there is no reason why the TCG couldn't be played in a rational and optimized manner. In fact, it is, and there are a lot of competitive and professional players that do it. It is, of course, vastly different than what is presented on the anime, because people actually build decks with plans in mind instead of just bunching together random monster cards and praying. The thing is that the rational thought that goes on a TGC game either are some pretty complex concepts, such as card advantage, tempo and value, or happens before the battle, at the moment you are building your deck.
Randomness doesn't precludes rationality. It is perfectly possible to play a random game rationally, because otherwise there wouldn't be poker tournments, and the top poker players wouldn't be able to consistently perform much better than the average player.
u/Kuiper [+29] (18 hours later)
The random aspect of TCGs actually provides a lot of great opportunities to teach lessons in applied rationality, especially when it comes to identifying cognitive biases. For example, Magic players often talk about the importance of avoiding "results oriented thinking" (which is a common enough term in Magic for some players to abbreviate as "R.O.T."). The basic idea is that you shouldn't judge the correctness of a decision based on its results.
This seems like a counter-intuitive idea at first, but consider this example: I offer you a deal. I'm going to flip a coin three times. If any of the flips come up heads, I'll give you a dollar. If all three come up tails, you have to give me a dollar. Should you take the bet? Basic probability says you have a 87.5% chance of winning a dollar, and a 12.5% chance of losing a dollar. That's pretty good expected value! But, what if you take the bet, I flip the coin, and then all three flips come up tails? Are you going to say, "Agh, I made the wrong decision"? Well, no. Maybe you might feel that way, but you were still right to take the bet, and the rightness of that decision is true irrespective of the actual outcome of the coinflips.
This comes up in any game where you have variance, because what card you (or your opponent) is going to draw next is random in the same way that coin flips or dice rolls are. Sometimes, you can make all the right decisions and still lose to variance, and you need to realize that you shouldn't retroactively appraise all of your "correct" decisions as wrong just because you lost the game, and by the same token you can't say, "Well, I won the game, so that means my decision-making was correct." (The latter would be analogous to someone who says, "People say I was dumb for choosing to play Russian Roulette since I had a 1/6 chance of maiming myself, but the chamber was empty, so my choice to play Russian Roulette is thoroughly vindicated!")
Another example of a lesson on rationality that can be well illustrated with card games is aiming yourself at a probabilistically "bad" place when you're at an even worse place. For example, imagine the hypothetical example of a card with an ability that reads: "Flip two coins. If both are heads, you win the game. If either is tails, you lose the game." That seems like a pretty bad effect! If you use that effect at the start of the match, you've effectively reduced your win% from ~50% to 25%. But what if you find yourself in a losing game and you're in a situation where you're 10% favored to win? Suddenly, bumping your 10% chance to win up to 25% actually seems really appealing! The issue is, taking that line can sometimes be scary, because oftentimes taking action means accelerating yourself toward the outcome, which you presume is negative. Some people look at two options, one of which is a 90% of losing 5 turns in the future due to attrition (and a 10% chance to draw the card that they need before they slowly bleed out), and one of which has a 75% chance to lose instantly (but a 25% chance to win instantly), and they'll pick the "death by attrition" route because the idea of losing the game instantly is so scary that they'd rather slowly bleed out than make a decision that instantly results in them losing the game. A loss is a loss, but some losses can feel worse than others, and there are some people play to avoid the "feelbads" more than they play to actually minimize their chances of losing.
I've actually thought for awhile about using a TCG ratfic to teach about these kinds of cognitive biases, specifically using the approach of treating each match as an Aesop that presents a simplified view of events such that readers can reasonably calculate the odds of certain play patterns. (One of the things that can make card games kind of opaque is that the sheer number of variables in play rarely makes things as simple as "doing this play gives me a 55% chance to win, while this other play gives me a 60% chance to win, so I should choose the latter," and if you watch a lot of commentary by pro magic players, a lot of it comes down to explaining why one choice is marginally better than another. But in the context of fiction, you can reduce the number of variables and tailor events specifically to make important outcomes based on calculations that the characters -- and readers -- would be able to make.)
The challenge of writing a fic based around explaining these lessons comes from the fact that if you're trying to illustrate the Aesop "it's possible to make all the right decisions and still lose to variance" can be incredibly narratively unfulfilling if you illustrate it by having your protagonist constantly making all the right decisions and then losing the tournament. I think the solution is to give the story another set of stakes, so that the outcome is something like "Lost the tournament, but won the respect of their rival" or something like that. (Honestly this is a challenge that seems more difficult on paper than it probably is in practice, just based on my own experience: I lose Magic tournaments all the time but it doesn't significantly diminish my enjoyment of the game. I went 3-3 at an RPTQ last weekend but I didn't leave the venue feeling "defeated," on the contrary, I felt good about having managed to win 3 matches against people who were good enough to have qualified for a RPTQ.)
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+4] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
I think an easier way of illustrating something like this might be some regular casino games, like Texas Hold'Em or Blackjack. Same concepts, with probabilities updated as the game advances and choices made based on these probabilities, but much simpler mechanics to follow (and you can in fact take the time to compute the probabilities exactly on your side, so you don't need to be a real life champion to get it perfect). And it avoids the problem someone else mentions, that writing about TCGs would be a pain (imagine having to describe someone's hand in detail...).
The fundamental problem with applying this to the YGO universe is that in that universe, games are magic. This means first that most of the times the stakes are too ridiculously high to let the protagonist lose, and second, that the chance isn't really chance at all. Fate is at play at all times - in fact I think the best way to describe it would be something like placebomancy in "Unsong", with the Universe itself conspiring to help those who are most committed to the game ("believing in the Heart of the Cards" or such things). If one took this element in consideration, then the strategy of choice would be rather different - not necessarily the move that's most likely to succeed when drawing from an unbiased random deck, but the combination that's most spectacular and dramatic and thus likely to be aided by the cosmic forces that direct the game.
u/DuplexFields [+9] New Lunar Republic (8 hours later)
I've had many thoughts about writing a "Yahtzee" screenplay in the vein of Hasbro's big summer movie "Battleship." The rationality and statistics would be a big part of it.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+9] Dai-Gurren Brigade (9 hours later)
Heh, if we're talking playing games of chance with rationality, there's always "Kaiji - Ultimate Gambler". Where people manage to spend whole episodes on things like a game of rock-paper-scissors (with ridiculously high stakes, of course).
u/DuplexFields [+2] New Lunar Republic (10 hours later)
One of the reasons I thoroughly enjoyed Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series in high school was the game-playing written out in long form in each volume.
u/Akiryx [+2] (16 hours later)
If the author writes out Konami being money-whores, I agree
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
Oh, that would not be a problem for me - my idea would very much focus on the idea of 'destiny' and the fated Yugi-Seto-Marik trio. I think plot convenience re: card draws is literally a force of nature in-universe, within a certain logic. So that's not an issue, but however predestined, these duels should still feel engaging and clever.
u/FordEngineerman [+19] (7 hours later)
If the characters know that they have the power to draw whatever card they need, you could have interesting rational set-ups. If I could always stack my deck, I would build it completely differently than for a random draw. You don't have to worry about consistency. You can play an oversized deck with 1 of each card and have weird overly specific answers to certain situations and "tech" cards built in. You as the author probably need to introduce a maximum deck size and have characters plan out their matchups and consider deck building constraints and what answer cards they can use in addition to their core strategy and win conditions. Plus, Yugioh with deck stacking would definitely be an all combo deck format. That's not necessarily uninteresting though when the opponents also have magic card draw powers and can draw things like D.D. Crow on command to answer the combos. Cards like Jar of Greed could be interesting and useful because they let you get the specific answer card you need at instant speed to be flexible in what you are countering.
The other thing I would heavily rely on is the collection aspect. Don't let characters just buy any cards they want. Make most win condition type cards be truly unique and one of a kind. Show the main characters buying and acquiring cards over time and changing their strategy based on their growing collection. Maybe Kaiba doesn't have magic fated card draw powers but his insane collection lets him compete anyway - that would be an interesting juxtaposition.
Another interesting way to build this would be an inversion. Run the universe as it works in the show with the same characters and decks and magic card drawing. Make the protagonist be a random guy who doesn't have magic card draw powers but actually knows how to build a powerful and consistent deck - basically a real pro from our world. Show the struggles he has to face to beat what are effectively cheaters and how he overcomes that with real world skill. This would be a little less of a rationalist fic and a little more of "rational protagonist breaks the world" fic but it would still be superfun for a short to medium story. Maybe do it as an isekai if you don't consider that genre too overwrought.
u/eleves11 [+13] (7 hours later)
I always wondered why the characters in the show would play blatantly suboptimal cards even despite their crazy draw skills. I'm not talking about the super specific tech cards that the protagonist draws at the perfect time. I'm referring to the cards like Celtic Guardian which can be easily switched out for cards with bigger stats or strictly better effects.
It would be interesting to see the odd card choices be rationalized as a means to magically stack their decks. Like decks with a consistent theme will draw better than decks that have 'stronger' off theme cards. So if the rational protagonist gets dropped into the Yugioh world and tries to game the system by playing meta decks, they brick every time and get bodied by incredibly unlikely combos.
u/FordEngineerman [+10] (7 hours later)
Yeah, it's hard to justify stuff like Celtic Guardian. The only viable explanation is that at the start of the show Yugi just used his grandpa's deck and it was full of collectors items instead cards that were picked for usefulness. Later in the show Yugi still plays some questionable stuff but his deck gets far more synergistic and the basic low stat vanilla creatures are either gone or used for specific purposes.
One interesting option would be to have a magic system in the world in which cards literally evolved and got more powerful with use. That could explain starting with weak cards - you are working on leveling them up.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+5] Dai-Gurren Brigade (9 hours later)
The presence of those cards could also be justified if, simply, cards are much more scarce/expensive than they are in our world. If buying enough boosters to find one Gemini Elf or Vorse Raider is so expensive that only one Seto Kaiba could possibly afford it (after all, there were only four copies of Blue Eyes White Dragon in the YGO world - whereas there are thousands in ours), then someone might use Celtic Guardian simply because that's the best they have, and they need a passable LV4 frontliner. Even if it's just a plain old Normal Monster with 1400 ATK.
u/FordEngineerman [+5] (9 hours later)
Yugi's grandpa was a store owner. He clearly had access to a lot of cards. Surely some were better than that. That's also clearly not the case because the main cast all improved their cards greatly as the show continued and they certainly didn't have access to a lot of money.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (18 hours later)
Well, Yugi won the Duelist Island tournament, there was bound to be some tournament prize money (beyond the restitution of one's loved ones trapped souls). Anyway, yeah, we wouldn't be here talking about this if YGO was very rational... but that cards are generally rarer for them is indisputable. Beyond the case of the Blue Eyes, consider how much fuss is made during the Duel City tournament about winning ante cards that are relatively trivial (seriously, what's so great about Red Eyes Black Dragon? Or what was, before they included in the game an enormous bunch of synergies that made the Red Eyes deck viable?).
u/darkflagrance [+2] (5 days later)
I believe there was prize money but Joey used all of it to pay for his sister to recover her sight.
u/turtleswamp [+3] (a day later)
To be fair he was also past his prime dueling days, could be a combination of power creep and complacency has made his deck fall behind and the strictly superior cards just weren't in print when he last made serious revisions to his deck.
u/turtleswamp [+4] (a day later)
It'd probably make more sense if the standard format were some variation on Draft/Sealed where you had to play with a deck composed chiefly off cards you pulled from packs you juts bought. That's actually pretty common in TCG competitive scenes.
If you wanted to lean into the extreme rarity I'd recommend not juts changing the price but also the distribution model.
Real world TCGs guarantee you a rare card in every pack, for there to only be 4 Blue Eyes in print they have to have to either have a lot more distinct rare cards, have a lot of packs that ship without a rare card or have uneven distribution of cards among rarity tiers.
If Duel Monsters packs are just 15 cards completely at random from a set of ~400 or so distinct cards with twice as many copies of every common as any uncommon, and twice as many copies of every uncommon as the most common rare, and rare cards potentially having as few as 1 copy per print run, you'd get a very different distribution of cards.
edit:
Also further evidence for increased rarity of cards in the YuGiOh world is that nobody has multiple decks.
u/sicutumbo [+4] (13 hours later)
Maybe playing worse cards could be a form of karmic payment for getting better ones. If you always play the best card you are dealt, the heart of the cards gives you crappy ones when you really need it to count. If you trust in the heart of the cards, and play bad cards when you are dealt them, you balance the scales to get the good draws when they count. At the far end, when you flagrantly mock the heart of the cards, you start drawing shitty cards that you never even included in your deck.
u/taichi22 [+8] (2 days later)
be kaiba
everyone else has bullshit magic drawing card powers
you have to beat their asses using nothing but luck and money
write fanfic: kaiba seto, yugioh batman
u/FordEngineerman [+4] (2 days later)
I would read the shit out of that.
u/Badewell [+9] (5 hours later)
Lean into the perfect topdeck thing then? The main characters can all know that during important draw phases Yugi is going to topdeck what he needs. Yugi starts constructing decks to abuse that as much as possible, and everyone who plays against him tries to figure out ways to beat him that can't be stopped by a good top deck. I think those different approaches of how to best abuse heart of the cards, how to prevent that abuse, and what they start doing in response to each other would be interesting.
(Also, see Time Seal or Yata-Garasu for a couple of high value cards that completely shut down Yugi's blatant cheating.)
u/Rouninscholar [+10] (an hour later)
Hikaru no go uses real matches of go, so that is very possible.
Another option would be pretty role play heavy, in that you could have two people emulate the play styles and play with the decks, doing it a couple times until you got one you liked.
Hell, if you wanted to make it rational a big help would be having a spoiler/expanded post that lets you know what is in the MC's deck before hand, which would allow for there to be drama in what you are fighting, without there being a magical ex machina in what you top deck.
Having there be a subtle metaphysical force dictating what cards exist/don't exist (The maker of the cards would have a compulsion of some sort), and there rarity, plus adding in MC's like of a stable financial situation to just buy what he wants, means some additional plausibility. The publicly acknowledged values of the card keeps the market from being flooded.
Some times you should have the player make the less optimal move, because the optimal move requires top decking something and they can't count on that, just to have them top deck it anyway.
u/turtleswamp [+11] (3 hours later)
I saw a movie by the guys who did The Gamers 2, which handled this pretty well (wish I could remember the title).
I would say, the first thing to do (rule 0 if you will) is make sure that YOU know all the rules. That is start with the rules and cards written out for your own reference, and any time you revise them go back and re-evaluate everything else you've written in light of the new revision.
Regarding the balance between telling the plan and suspense, the approach used in the movie and what I personally recommend is to have a widely recognized "best" deck archetype that your villains more or less all use because it's crazy OP (include some side characters with different stertegies for diversity), but your hero for reasons that are important to him refuses to just copy (it was because he was trying to get into the pants of a girl who wanted the OP decks taken down a peg in the movie, and would probably be related to it being his Grandfather's deck in YuGiOh). This gives you the uphill battle you want because the OP strategy beats everything, including with sufficiently good play and draws, the MC's deck.
Additionally, in the movie the hero's deck is composed of old cards that are now obscure/impractical to obtain, and no longer present in the meta. Because of that he is able to surprise the players who have the OP decks with moves and cards they didn't know about and thus weren't prepared for. As he advances that advantage naturally erodes as every trick he uses becomes well known and opponents modify their decks and play to deal with it eventually colluding and using the format of the tournament against him (a player loses but forces a permanent removal of a key card for the remainder of the tournament). The final showdown uses a strategy that was mentioned early on as impractical (in the movie it's activating the rarest of rare cards that requires you rip it up to activate, in YuGiOh I'm not sure but maybe Exodia) combined with a frequently used and fairly effective but a bit silly strategy (in the movie it's the "Largest Turnip" quest, no idea for YuGiOh). It's also good as his oponent (and presumably the audience) expect the card to return the force-removed card from earlier to play as that is what it's normal use is, which wouldn't have been sufficient to win, but instead it's used to buy one turn in which he accomplishes his win condition by choosing an unconventional target >!(it's a relic that has to power to raise the dead supposedly enough for 'an entire army', and he uses it on his opponents undead army wiping their side of the board). !<
Broadly speaking that should work Ok with Yugi using his grandfather's deck, which one would suppose being both an old guy and a game shop owner would have old and obscure cards.
Now, where the movie probably doesn't pass muster for rational is that the surprise ending involves a what sounds like applying the flavor text of the card rather than the rules of the card. But then again YuGiOg has "cannon turtle, target the stabilizer" so done right it could be an amusing homage to the canon... um turtle.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (3 hours later)
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of using the rules to the real game rather than the very creative way they're applied in the show's early seasons, so no cannon turtle trickery. Though your description made me think this is how it could play out in an hypothetical card game that has a heavier RPG component and is played with a GM who referees such decisions...
Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions! These sound like very good ideas, and now I'm interested in finding the movie as well...
u/turtleswamp [+5] (5 hours later)
Well Google to the rescue. Turns out it's Gamers: The Hand of Fate
u/abcd_z [+3] (15 hours later)
I saw a movie by the guys who did The Gamers 2, which handled this pretty well (wish I could remember the title).
That would be Gamers: Hands of Fate (the third in the Gamers series). I felt it would have been an okay film, except that it was quite determined to preach that women are not prizes to be won, to the detriment of the rest of the story.
u/turtleswamp [+2] (a day later)
With the main plot being about a dude trying to win a girl in card games they kind of had to take a stance on that issue and it'd have been a lot worse if they took the other one. Adding a parallel to the B plot doesn't seem out of place once they've already got the theme going.
u/abcd_z [+4] (a day later)
And who wrote the plot in the first place, hm? They could have easily chosen to make the plot about anything at all, but the writer(s) chose to set up a situation that required the main character (and by proxy the audience) "learn a lesson" about dealing with women.
u/turtleswamp [+1] (2 days later)
So you just wanted 90 minutes of hydra dick and Reservoir Dosgs mascot tourture?
u/abcd_z [+5] (2 days later)
I'm not saying "they should have cut out the A-plot, leaving only the B-plot". I'm saying the A-plot should have been completely replaced with something else.
u/turtleswamp [+0] (3 days later)
You also said you though it was a good movie. of coarse now it's except the A, plot. And except one of the B plots, and it can't juts not have an A plot.
Are you by any chance trying to remove the Romans from Judea?
u/abcd_z [+1] (3 days later)
Look closer. I said it would have been an okay film, if they hadn't made the authorial choices that they did.
u/FordEngineerman [+2] (7 hours later)
I'm very interested in watching this movie. Any chance you could look around a bit and see if you can find it? Or maybe give more details on the name of the game they are playing or other people involved?
Edit: Nevermind, found it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2312390/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_5
u/Charlie___ [+8] (8 hours later)
Look at Liar Game (find the manga somewhere). It's an example of actually doing this, (though not in a TCG context) over and over.
The issue is that the audience has to intuitively understand the rules and their application before they can be used in the story. So either the rules have to be simple (Liar Game's games are all simpler than yugioh), the story has to educate the reader over the course of it (in Liar Game, the first thing the reader sees is always characters trying easy-to-understand strategies, complexity is only introduced gradually), or the readers have to be experts.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (9 hours later)
Oh, I read Liar Game, I know it. But the (additional) difficulty with the card game is that it's well established, but the set of possible cards is really immense, which makes it a bit daunting to consider all interactions. In this case I'd also be interested in specific practical advice. I'm actually even wondering whether there are dedicated tools/software for this specific problem (CCG), maybe used by players to simulate different situations or re-examine past games.
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+5] Death of Crabs (9 hours later)
Simplify the rules but maintain the absurd stakes and high drama. Like this.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (9 hours later)
BUT WHAT DOES POT OF GREED DO
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+2] Death of Crabs (15 hours later)
It may or may not allow you to draw two new pieces of thin pasteboard.
u/Icare0 [+12] (2 hours later)
I only have a passing knoledge of YGO, being a MTG player myself, but I would say that it's really hard to write rational fiction about them TCGs.
I think Brandon Sanderson's First Law of Magic applies: An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. So if you want a game in universe to feel engaging, you need to explain the rules of the game to the audience, because otherwise, they can't get why the genius play is supposed to be clever. The main problem being that It's very hard to completely teach a interesting game system without being monotonous. It can be done, Hikaru no Go did it with Go, and Akagi did it With Mahjong, but it's rare to see it well done.
For TCG I think it's even harder, because most of the decision made in a TCG game in real life are made days to weeks before the big championship. They are made when you are building your deck, and the gameplay changes completely depending on your deck. An aggro v Aggro matchup plays under strictly different rules than an Control x Combo matchup, and the viewer has to be educated in both.
You probably should give this video a watch in any case. It's a commentary on TCG anime, but it raises some questionn that a rational TCG would probably have to address that would make it different from most TGC-themed media.
Edit:
As for the story itself, you could simply write a story in which a RL person is transported to YGO world and wins everything by not being dumb and understanding basic deckbuilding and card advantage, but that would get boring fast. You could also rewrite the complete universe, and actually play through the matches, maybe rebuilding all decks in the show so they aren't, you know, horrible, and actually play matches using proxies to determine who wins, but that would require extraordinary deckbuilding skills from you, which I assume you don't have because otherwise you would be too busy being a pro player to be able to write this. But then, somebody is bound to get a tournment-level deck, and faceroll over the opposition. Or maybe you can rewrite the story so characters all use actual real life tournment-level decks of each era and update the decks accordingly as the expansions are released in universe.
u/FordEngineerman [+6] (7 hours later)
This is basically what I came here to say. OP especially watch that video please. I would love to see a rational rewrite of Yugioh that focuses way more on the deckbuilding and matchup analysis instead of on the "destiny draw" and scripted duels part. You could even foreshadow critical moments by having the protagonist consider "how would I beat an aggro opponent?" for example and put cards in their deck for certain situations then many chapters later have those cards get drawn at the right time.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (9 hours later)
To be fair, what I had in mind for now was a more shorter and smaller in breath than this, with only two-three key duels, since I'm already involved in writing a rather long fanfiction (The Optimised Wish Project). I'm just speculating. I would really love to read something like you describe, I just doubt I could possibly have the strength to write it, because it would take a ton of thinking and planning, and I don't even own physical YGO cards (which would be a very useful thing to have to plan this stuff, just because they're easier to think with than description on the Wikia).
u/JusticeBeak [+1] (23 hours later)
If you do decide to write this, nothing is stopping you from copying the stats and descriptions of cards you want to use onto index cards for use in place of the real thing for match simulation. Of course, that would still take time and effort that you probably don't have.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Well, it would work once I decided at least on the general decks. 40~ish cards per duelist is feasible.
u/JusticeBeak [+1] (a day later)
You could also use one of the websites people already use to play against each other online and create multiple accounts, or you could use Tabletop Simulator, which probably already has a YGO mod out there somewhere
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Percy's YGO Pro may be my best chance for this. I'm not sure if it can be used this way, but perhaps I can hack it to.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (8 hours later)
If you give Frodo a lightsaber you must give Sauron the Deathstar. So that wouldn't work. Like you said it would be boring.
Another alternative is that if you aren't connected to certain cards you won't be able to use them. Even if there's rules text on it, the rules text might be wrong or incomplete so the card won't work the way it says it will when you try to use it. Maybe the monster won't appear when you summon it, or it's effect is different than you thought.
u/Icare0 [+1] (11 hours later)
It could work if the author wanted to descontruct the series and teach actual YGO to the readers. Think a Uplift story, except instead of tech, the guy would be upstrateging. I do agree that it would get repetitive early, that's why I made some more suggestions.
I reall don't like the idea of restricting card use. This heart of the cards stuff is stupid and should be done away with as fast as humanly possible. But then again I love playing TCS and I have a pet peeve with the infantilization done to them in the series.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (12 hours later)
What's TCS?
u/Icare0 [+1] (14 hours later)
It was me somehow mistyping TCGs
u/Modularva [+5] YURK (an hour later)
this was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdQs9t5wRA
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+6] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
I love that moment, but it's also a completely broken play and only possible because of loopholes that do not exist in the real game.
u/tjhance [+1] (4 hours later)
yeah man this is like the only moment from yu-gi-oh that i vividly remember :D what a boss play
u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (4 days later)
Reminds me of the Lost in the Woods sideboard trick in MtG (search for "get lost").
u/Modularva [+3] YURK (an hour later)
since we're talking champions we can assume they'll always play the best possible move at their disposal, but that's about it.
Keep in mind that this depends on risk preferences, and will probably vary with the stakes of a particular round.
u/pku31 [+3] (5 hours later)
Alternative: make the heart of the cards an explicitly known thing with formal rules they can manipulate in game.
u/Jalor218 [+2] (8 hours later)
It would have to look more like a sports manga than a card-game manga. In the real world being good at a TCG means studying the metagame and practicing different matchups. Actual unexpected moments in play would be rare, like end-of-an-arc big deals, but that just makes it more rewarding when they happen. Look up some of the most iconic plays from real-life tournaments and put those in.
u/eroticas [+2] (a day later)
I was kinda thinking about this with Pokemon. Conveniently, real world strategy guides very nicely tell you what the tiers are and how to use them (so you can even account for power / rarity ratios to some extent)
On the other, the amount of possibilities for a YGO card game, considering that there's some leeway on how the contestants can build their deck, is immense.
Okay, but how many strategies does the real world Yu-Gi-Oh meta-game have? Winning strategies are all that really matter in a zero sum game.
Even very well designed games (e.g. Chess) which have an extreme diversity of play options generally coalesce into some well defined strategies.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Problem is, YGO is way more messy than Chess. Chess is complexity arising from simplicity. YGO is complexity arising from... even more complexity, if anything. The only way I see this being viable is excluding at least all the most recent additions (like Pendulum monsters, XYZ monsters, and so on) which makes sense since we're talking a Duel City setting, and focusing on the original card set. At which point, yeah, there's a number of fixed strategies in the meta I guess. I played Duel Links a lot - it's not exactly following the rules of the tabletop game so that changes the meta too - and there were a few prevalent decks. Cyber Angels was annoying as heck, but it includes mostly GX cards, so let's put that aside too. There was one deck that was played mostly with Weevil, but would fit any villain, including Marik, because it was just annoying as heck (it relied on preventing the opponent from attacking altogether and just draining their life points, with the cherry on top being Lava Golem). Bamboo Sword was so annoying they had to limit some of the cards involved.
I suppose one could pick the three core monsters for each player - Dark Magician for Yugi, Blue Eyes White Dragon for Seto, and Lava Golem for Marik - then build a deck and strategy around each of them, and see how they interact. That would restrict the space of possibilities significantly.
u/nipplelightpride [+1] (3 hours later)
If it's a game that exists in real life and is popular, like your example, you could probably just transcribe an already exciting match that has been played.
u/Frommerman [+1] (a day later)
If you're writing in that universe, games are more-or-less decided before they start based upon the narrative weight and faith of the characters. It's not unlike Practical Guide in that evil can't win in the long run. You could use the games as a backdrop upon which a meta-conflict is fought, deciding who can win the binding magical games before and during them.
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (a day later)
For a rational yugioh fanfic, where both parties are rational, I would suggest having the rationality expressed in the deckbuilding phaee (strategies and counterstrategies, trying to determine an opponent's card pool, espionage and false clues), via bluffing and interactive strategies during play (think goat control-- you know the opponent has a mirror force in their deck. But do they have it now?), and via side decking (carefully displaying a strategy that your opponent will counter, that you then turn around and turn into something completely different on match 2,eaving your opponent unsure what to do for match 3.)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (2 days later)
I have several thousand words of such a story (except MtG instead of YGO) languishing on my hard drive. The problem is that it's completely opaque to the readership unless they are already familiar with the rules and, more importantly, the specific cards. Otherwise, you get "Huh. Bob just drew the Celestial Balefire card and everyone gasped...why was that, exactly? Wait, it's interacting with his Demonbreath Cape? When did he get that? ... Oh, huh, 20 chapters ago. I forgot about that. Okay, how exactly do they work together...?"
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
I was thinking I could actually write down cards and effects as they come up. Though that makes for a weird, janky kind of read... example:
Seto drew a card, then he declared "I'll play a spell card - Pot of Greed!"
Pot of Greed
Allows the player to draw two cards
...not great prose by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, quite terrible one.
u/turtleswamp [+1] (3 days later)
Footnotes to the rescue!
Well, at least in ebook, or web series format. There you can link to an appendix or even the official card spoiler so the reader juts sees the card name which is a link they can use to see the whole card. In print it'd be harder to do well.
Though, it would probably also help to make heavy use of the "show the plan but the plan doesn't pan out" format of storytelling so the reader gets a refresher on what the highlights of the character's deck and how it's supposed to work before important matches. So they're trying to remember cards from the start of the chapter not 20 chapters ago for the main character's plays, and the oponent's plays can be explained in more detail as they're plot twists.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (4 days later)
Yeah, pretty clunky. Something like that would break the immersion for me, and it would work poorly for anything more complex that needed longer text. Some of the interactions would require even more explanation as well.
u/MilesSand [+1] (3 days later)
I'd look for plays by play of professional games. A non-expert player can explain the match but miss a certain part of the eventual winner's strategy. That might work for a few matches.
That said, the premise would likely work a lot better focusing on the preparation aspects of the game. The match isn't a good place to build and then release tension but to resolve the tension built previously. " Is this new strategy going to work against whatever the opponent came up with" and so on.