Top-Down Design: Finding the Meaning in Mechanics

Alright, so a little while ago I rambled for so long about ‘bottom-up’ design that I didn’t get to talk about top-down design at all. Time to rectify that.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is top-down design? 

Easy: Top-down design is when you build your game by letting your narrative determine your mechanics (rather than creating your mechanics first then bending your narrative around the way they play).

A great example of this comes from Magic’s Arabian Nights. So let’s talk about Shahrazad. 

I’m not sure if any card has ever delivered on its theme better… or been mechanically worse… in the history of CCGs. I love Shahrazad, though, because it’s kind of genius. Yes, playing against it is the most heinous thing ever and might make you quit Magic, but looking at it as a designer, seeing how it tells the story of Shahrazad…there’s something beautiful about it.

So let’s break it down.

This card basically makes you stop the game you're playing, take the remains of your deck and play a whole new game. When that game finishes you go back to playing your original game but the loser of the sub-game loses half their life rounded down. Why is this genius?

Because think about how it plays out. You’re about to lose so you play Shahrazad. You start up a whole new game but you’re about to lose that… so you play another Shahrazad (and this was when there was no ‘four card limit’ in Magic decks)... So long as you can keep the stories going, you never die.

It is the tale of Shahrazad, encapsulated in one card.

But herein also lies the danger of top-down design. Because whenever this thing hits the table literally everyone lets out a huge groan and then quits. The design is so focused on telling its story that it ignores the experience it creates for the player.

A few weeks ago I talked a bit about how we convey meaning with design when talking about Bouncers and Another Way In. But those were Scenario cards, where we get to do more top-down design because one of their main goals is to make you feel like you’re in the narrative. What about Player cards? How can we use top-down design to make them feel like what they’re supposed to represent without falling into the top-down trap of making the mechanics cumbersome (at best…)?

The answer here is actually experiential rather than any rigorous game design logic. Whenever I’m thinking about making a top-down Player card, rather than asking myself “what story am I trying to tell with this card?” I ask myself, “What’s the biggest moment in this story?” or, “What’s the single most engaging part of the scene I’m imagining?”

Now for an example from Cyberpunk Legends, look at Spotlight’s On:

I used to play a lot of music and I wanted to capture that moment where the lights come on and it’s now or never. You’ve got one chance, one shot, that will never come again…

Then it all clicks. You’re in the zone, you’re perfect, you’re on fire. And you’re not alone.

I want to get that moment that comes up a handful of times in life where no one is sure what to do, or a decision has to be made and you step forward and lead… and everyone is right there to support you. That moment where a move from being a group of people to a team, synced up, and burning hot.

To get that moment, I knew I needed two things:

1.  The card had to give direction to a floundering team. 
2.  It was only great if the rest of your crew backed you up.

The mechanics on this card say “Follow my lead. Join me in this and we’re going to win”. You slam this down and now everyone knows what to do. By having so many numbers it allows your teammates who didn’t think they had anything to contribute to back you up as you take the limelight.

But I wanted it to serve the other version of that moment too, where everyone is doing disparate things and you bring it all together. You make the melody line that makes the whole thing sing.

Which meant that this card had to work as well when played last as well as when played first. So the rules text had to be written so that it could work either way. Since damage is tabulated after the Plan executes, this phrasing allows players to build up pairs or to turn on the spotlight at the last moment and bring things together.

It was in isolating that feeling, what happens when the lights go up, not the actual physical actions themselves, that allowed us to do a top-down player card that still fit all the mechanical needs of the game.