19th of January 2025
One of the pet projects that I am working on is The VOW – a competitive, political Role Playing Game. The intent is that players play as the leaders of a nation (or nations) and have to manage their promises to their citizens – their Vow – against the day to day demands made by their citizens and the movements of the other empires. I have begun playtesting this game, and while initial playests have been promising, I have quickly run into a couple of issues. In todays post, I am going to discuss the iterations of the resource system, the feedback I have had on them, and my thoughts on this and the attempts I have made to address it. While this is very “devloggy”, bear with me! I think there are some interesting learnings to take away.
In our first two playtests, players all generated gold from their kingdom and could spend and trade this on various projects, where the more gold spent, the more dice could be rolled and the more likely a project was to succeed. Each player also had a resource that was unique to them, and could be spent on dice for projects they rolled, as long as they could justify its use in that project. For example, one player began the game with “iron” and used it to improve their farm equipment, while another had “devotion” and used it to convince citizens to help build a road to a holy site of their religion. This initial system, while simple, suffered from the fact that every player had access to gold, and no player had much incentive to acquire special resources from the other players, so the players didn’t feel much need to trade. In addition, the players felt that the special resources essentially equated to “more gold” or “niche gold”.
After considering this, I felt that I had two directions that I could go in. Do I follow the Catan route and create more resources (Sheep, Wood, Stone) that must be combined to create or do specific things (e.g., Two Grain and three Stone to build a city), OR do I go in the direction of a game like Twilight Imperium, where some of the resources you acquire are unusable, but can be traded to other players who can then use them.
Although probably the more complicated of the two options, I decided to go (softly) into the Catan route, as I thought that creating specific uses for resources would incentivise more interesting trade negotiations and micro economies than resources that you are incentivised to throw away.
To address this in our third playtest, we got rid of the special resources and introduced “change” as the second resource players had access to. Change is generated by cities and can only be used for rolls involving a change in ideas. Scientific discovery, creation of a new religion, or convincing citizens to change their opinions all fit in the category of Change, and Gold can no longer be used for any of these kinds of rolls. The goal here was to create a second resource that felt distinct from Gold, and their uses did not overlap. This may incentivize players to trade between resources if one player was using much more Change, while another was using much more Gold. In addition, Cities and Farms (which generate another resource required for feeding citizens) have their own specific costs to build, incentivising players to trade for that resource if they want to build a lot of these.
Although this system was an improvement, the issue now was that all players had access to all resources. Although one player may use one resource more than another, they could still produce a decent amount of it and did not have to rely on trading if they did not need to. In Catan, resource scarcity is created by dice rolls and the placement of the numbers and resource hexes in the board. But in this playtest, resources were essentially equally distributed among all players.
The breakthrough came when I introduced Demand. Every round, a player’s citizens will DEMAND something of that player, and they will lose favour if they fail to address it. Sometimes citizens may demand the player attack another player, restore a historic monument, or export more of their furs to other nations. This causes the value of resources to fluctuate across the board, as one player may require more Gold than others because their citizens are demanding an expensive project to be completed, while another player may require more Change than others, because their people are trying to achieve a scientific breakthrough. Essentially, in economic terms, instead of changing the supply, I have found that changing the Demand has significantly improved the way the economy of my game operates and feels to play. Players are much more involved and engaged in trading and sourcing that next couple of resources they need to meet the demands of their people.
I still think there is a way to go in developing this system. I keep coming back to the idea of special resources – I like the idea of players having something unique that everybody wants. I have been experimenting with introducing these halfway through the game and giving them different powers than “can be used to improve rolls”, such as providing temporary favour to nations that acquire them or being able to spend them on acquiring political secrets.
For now, I think that the citizens demand effectively causes resource fluctuations between players and across the board. I now need to address the supply side and examine whether I can make improvements here that are not overly complicated, cause the world to feel alive, and give the players a feeling that the resources are different and have different purposes.
Until then, thank you for following the beginnings of this journey!
