Tesla: Work in Progress

First off I just wanted to give a big thanks to HavelockV and Jay Treat. Last week life got in the way of me delivering a post, but they both stepped up to the plate with excellent posts to keep Tesla humming along. And now we can get back to laying the groundwork.

Two weeks ago I asked you to discuss mechanics that we could use to convey exploitation. I was thinking along the lines of Innistrad where mechanics represent different elements associated with the horror theme, like transformation with Double-Faced Cards. Well, that’s how I’d been viewing Innistrad, but Ant Tessitore astutely pointed out that those elements also more directly support the horror theme. Transform cards make you fear the actual event of the change, Morbid makes you fear creatures dying, and the like. If Tesla is going to be about progress, we had better start there.

Startup

But first, one more thing to address: in the comments on my last post, HavelockV asked if Tesla was top-down or bottom-up. The answer is that it’s not exactly either, but the question made me realize I’d never actually spelled out what plan I’m following. Today I remedy that oversight. Back when we were beginning this process we had a series of pitches for different sets and voted on which to pursue. While far from fully fleshed out, these pitches ended up containing both mechanical and creative elements, and I don’t feel comfortable throwing Tesla’s to the wayside. So we can’t really start with either flavor or mechanics because we’ve already got both.

But does that matter? After all, at the end of the day if both design and creative do their jobs, the audience isn’t supposed to be able to tell the difference. Wherever we start design, eventually we come to a cohesive structure that needs to be represented both creatively and mechanically. So I thought to myself: “Why not go straight there?” We’ve picked a theme, so my inclination is to jump in and try to design to it.

Making Progress

So what exactly are we going for? When you say “progress” most people are likely to think of continued improvement. We certainly need to capture that mechanically, but we’ve already run afoul of a problem. We’re not trying to convey a word; we’re trying to convey a concept. That’s why I went into more detail below each potential theme when we were voting. We’re not exactly talking about simple improvement so much as the process of change for the purpose of improvement. For humans that entails fear of new things, nostalgia for the way things used to be, excitement at a sea of new possibilities, and having to adapt ourselves to the new way the world works. It might not be possible to capture all of this in a mechanic simple enough to print at common. That’s okay. What we’re really aiming for is to make playing with Tesla as a whole feel like that.

We’ve got a delicate balance to strike. After all, Magic is already a game all about change. Every year we go to a completely different world with cards that work in ways we’ve never dreamed of. We could certainly push that further, but at some point it will feel too alien and unnerve people who came to Tesla wanting to play the Magic they know and love. Then again, Magic’s structure can also hinder our themes. The mana system inherently allows players to make more impactful plays as the game progresses. That sounds good, but this pattern is so engrained that it doesn’t even strike most experienced players as progress anymore.

But it’s harder to miss when a single card improves. We’ve seen ways to do that in Zendikar with quests, Rise of the Eldrazi with Level Up, Innistrad with the Vampire/Slith mechanic, Gatecrash with Evolve, and numerous others. It’s unclear just how much of this we want in Tesla, but I’d bet the answer isn’t zero.

Keep at It

As you might imagine, we’ve already come up with some potential keywords that fit the bill, but I’m not about to list them. Too often, I feel, we get caught up in discussing the problems of a specific mechanic and stop looking at the design goal the mechanic was trying to meet. So here are a few standalone cards each designed to capture a different facet of our theme. They might make it into the set, they might not, but hopefully they convey some of the emotional elements we’re going for. Your job, then, is to design to these niches or any other facet of progress that piques your interest.