We make use of the fact that cards have two sides all the time in game design... but so do decks, so why not use that too?

Carving Out a Space

How do you create a side-quest within one of our "standard" scenarios? That was the problem I was trying to answer when I realized there's an aspect of these cards we've never used.

If you've played Scenario 1, you have a pretty good sense of what I consider a "standard" scenario. These are the scenarios that require almost no setup. There's just a Scenario Deck in the center of the table and as you pull cards off the top, it'll guide you through the adventure.

These are great, they're fast paced, allow for a lot of narrative and can have a tightly focused adventure behind them. But... unlike some of our more exotic scenarios (where you might, say, lay out the cards to make a map), they allow for choice, they don't allow for true non-linearity. 

So it was time we solve that!

Pearls on a String

Standard decks are great at what we call "Pearls on a String" design. This is the type of design where there's one linear path from start to finish, but along the route there's these bubbles of freedom.  

You might come to a choice and it'll say something like, "If you pick choice A, draw the next card, otherwise discard the next card without looking at it."

This creates a branch. At this moment you have choice: You can choose your path and go where another group might not... but at some point all the choices you make on the next few cards are going to re-intersect with that main through line of the scenario.

This doesn't mean that there won't be long term consequences—you might make a new contact, learn a piece of information you otherwise wouldn't have or just earn some extra Eddies for making the right choices—but it doesn't really leave you open to take a side gig whenever you want. The pearls exist at fixed points in the scenario and that's it.

But what if I wanted to give you an optional side mission you could do at any point?

The Reverse Draw

A brief note: all the images below come from a future scenario that's in the early stages of testing, forgive the lack of art and whatever typos I've managed to leave on there : )

And here's where the Reverse Draw comes in.  I realized that we could create a floating "do this when you choose" objective by having you draw from the bottom of the deck...

Once we have cards that have you draw from the bottom of the deck, we can essentially make a tiny, sealed off mini-scenario that players can opt into at any time.

We can build this by essentially just having them draw in reverse order (i.e. draw the bottom card, then have that card tell them to "draw the bottom card" again... id est, the second from the bottom card when you set the deck down).

For example, when your crew decides it's time to try to crack the computer pin, they would draw this card:

If they get the code right they'd then draw the new "bottom card" and continue, but if they got the code wrong their side mission would end there and they'd go back to playing the rest of the scenario as usual.

Eventually, if you didn't get knocked out of it early, you'd come to the final card of the side mission (usually a reward) and be instructed to go back to the main scenario like this:

But there's one more thing that we need to actually make this function, and that's the hermetic seal. We need a way to keep you from encountering these cards at the bottom of the deck through the Cardinal Rule (whenever you finish with a card draw the next card).

To do that we need to put a card like this at the end of the main scenario:

This keeps you from ever running into the Reverse Draw cards because it comes right above all of the "draw from the bottom" cards in the deck. That way, if you decided not to do the side quest or you failed it along the way, all the remaining side mission cards will just be discarded when you come to the end of the run... allowing us at last to create true non-linear side missions that your crew can do at your discretion, rather than where I assign them as a designer!

Design Tech

I'll just wrap this up by talking a bit about what we call "Design Tech". These are the conceptual leaps that let us do new things. Now that we've invented the Reverse Draw technique we can use it whenever we want a side quest. It's just a permanent tool in the Cyberpunk Legends designer's toolbox.

You'll notice us building up these pieces of tech all across the first campaign... How do multiple obstacles work? How do we make choices in early scenarios relevant in later ones? How do we build a dungeon crawl rather than a more linear deck? &c.

As we solve these problems and create new pieces of tech, it not only expands what we can do, but makes it faster for the team to create more diverse scenarios in the future. So when I'm blogging about these, think of it less like, "Here's a cool thing we did," and more like, "Look what we can do now..."

BECAUSE NOW THAT WE'VE BUILT THIS YOU BETTER BELIEVE THERE ARE GOING TO BE A LOT WILDER SIDE QUESTS IN THE FUTURE!

—JP

P.S.  Don't worry... I  still haven't spoiled the wildest surprise from scenario 5 ; )