Little details of mechanics

After a long discussion with Jarek yesterday about the structure and mechanics of Glass Ceiling, I have so many new ideas and options running round in my head it's hard to know where to start. But I want to make a note of some of these as they're really useful.

First, we reached the important conclusion that it was ok to have scenario cards that weren't applicable to the current player and needed to be discarded and replaced. This is particularly relevant for the Love and Family categories, where scenarios are very different depending on whether the player has a partner or child respectively.

Second, we considered the necessity of obfuscating the outcome of a choice from the player, in order to make it so that the single player version would work. I'm still undecided about whether this is sufficiently important to justify the possible aesthetic implications, so will reserve judgement until I have mocked up some options for scenario card layouts.

Third, we debated the display and management of player stats in a lot of detail. I had a few ideas for how to do this - using dice to define and reflect the stats (like some players do in Magic: The Gathering), using a tracker on the edge of the character card for each stat (like in Betrayal at House on the Hill), or using cumulative tokens (like in Talisman).

We eventually agreed that using a tracker was the only one of these methods that would allow the stats to be fully bidirectional (i.e. not having one end of the spectrum instrinsically valued higher than the other). I am going to do some mocking up of this option and see whether I can make it work.

Finally, we talked about how the objectives really work, and indeed whether they do. It's hard to define meaningful objectives for the Everyday, Online, and Social categories. So I'm now considering alternative ways of managing the victory conditions. Watch this space!