Version 0: Board Game

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Fate: Grand War went through quite a few iterations, originally starting as a team vs team board game where each team was comprised of a Master and a Servant and the goal was to be the last Master/Servant pair standing.  Having a player for both Servant and Master felt cool, as a Servant could receive orders from the Master and they would work independently to achieve their goal. 

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I quickly realized that one player telling another player what to do isn't fun for the second player.  Additionally, since the goal is to defeat all other Master/Servant pairs, the game wouldn't really be fun in a single Team vs Team game.  To have a good game it'd require somewhere between 8 and 14 players.  With that amount of players, I knew I'd have to build in simultaneous turns so that people didn't grow bored, but who would even have that many people for a board game to begin with?  I decided that it wasn't feasible to continue so I pivoted to something I knew very well: card games.

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Version 1: Card Game

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I've played a lot of card games and I have a strong love for Magic: The Gathering and it's ruleset.  Weiss Schwarz is a card game that uses Fate's characters, so I looked into that, but ultimately didn't gather much useful information.  I wanted a game with as much depth as Magic, but I also didn't want to recreate it. 

 

Considerations I had to make/Problems to solve:

1. Seven servants per Holy Grail War

   1. One of each class

2. Each Master is unique in their skills and strategies​

3. Masters didn't have to "charge up" their mana​

   1. This means generating X resource per turn isn't really thematic

4. Masters had to summon Heroic Spirits using mana​ and Servants consumed it constantly

5. Each Servant class had techniques that they used

   1. Each individual Servant had one or more special abilities/attacks

6. How does combat work?​

7. Magic The Gathering's resource system variance causes unfun/uninteractive games

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I'll be addressing each of these in order as best I can.  My first problem was that there were only seven Servants in any Grail War.  Letting players fill their deck with 10-20 Servants didn't feel very thematic.  I recalled that  Yu-Gi-Oh added an "Extra Deck" of monster cards that you always had available in addition to the ones you draw from your main deck.  What if a player didn't have to draw Servants out of their deck at all?  

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Around the same time, there was a new addition to the FATE series: FATE Apocrypha.  This show was a bit different than the previous ones; it featured two teams of seven magicians, each with their own servant fighting for the Greater Grail. 

 

 

**MINOR SPOILER WARNING**

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During the show, one side's Servants all get reassigned to one Master. 

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**END SPOILER**

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I decided with this addition to the source material that each player would be represented by a Master and they would all have seven Servants. Each Master could summon any configuration of Servants.

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Resources

I struggled a lot with resource generation, since that's an important part of card games. At the start of a player's turn in Hearthstone, they generate a Mana Crystal, and then fill up all existing Mana Crystals. This means that each player is guaranteed to be able to play the game and there is no such thing as not getting enough resources or getting too much resources and not enough spells/monsters. While I liked it, I didn't feel that it really fit with the variability in FATE's Master's mana. Some characters had almost no mana (and ended up with weaker Servants) and some had enormous amounts. 

 

I decided to test giving each Master a mana regeneration stat that they would generate each turn. This value didn't have a cap, so holding onto resources for a few turns would let players play very powerful spells or summon the strongest Servants at the cost of being wide open to their opponents attacks. It didn't quite feel thematic enough, but I'll talk more about how this worked out later.

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Since Servants constantly consumed their master's Mana in FATE, I created them with an Upkeep stat - essentially a tax on keeping them around. This was subtracted from your mana every turn after your Master generated theirs. More powerful Servants had a higher Upkeep. This felt thematic, so I moved on.

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In combat, each Servant could use a number of skills, some more powerful than others. It didn't make a lot of sense to make each Servants skills cost it's Masters mana, as that would be a huge drain and would slow down play with the Upkeep and Summon costs. Instead I gave each Servant a Technique Point score that would regenerate at the beginning of the Master's turn. Each Technique has a cost and players spend points from their pool to use them.  Techniques can only be used in combat and each player would take turns playing a Technique card until they both decided to stop.

 

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Combat

Combat was originally like Yu-Gi-Oh in which you must defeat all of your opponents creatures to attack them directly. In FATE, some characters were dramatically faster than others, so I created a Speed stat. In an attempt to emulate the feeling of being faster or slower than an opponent, I made combat exceptionally complicated. 

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These are the rules for Speed and resolving combat:

1. A character being attacked loses 1 Speed(minimum 0 Speed).

2. If an attacker's Speed is within 1 stage of the defender's, they deal damage equal to Attack Power - Defense Power to each other.

3. If an attacker's Speed is greater than 1 stage ABOVE the defender's, they deal damage ignoring the defenders Defense Power.  The defender deals damage as normal(Attack-Defense).

4. If an attacker's Speed is greater than 1 stage BELOW the defender's, they deal no damage to the defender.  The defender deals damage as normal.

 

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Feedback

While my playtesting pool was small, I was lucky to receive good feedback from them as well as through my own observation.  I also tested a variant mana system where each player gained mana equal to the turn it currently was(1 on turn one, 2 on turn two, ect).  The overall feedback was that there were simply too many numbers to be accounted for and too much math to do.

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Version 2(Current): Still A Card Game

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I needed to remove some math from the game and there were obvious places to start.  Mana generation and Servant Upkeep costs were a massive issue, so I decided to remove Upkeep from the game completely. Gaining X Mana from your Master, adding it to how much Mana you had, and then subtracting the Upkeep cost of each Servant you control from your Mana before you get to take your turn isn't fun and in most cases was just annoying. 

 

Because Upkeep was removed, I needed to rethink how Mana would be generated, as characters with more Mana Regeneration would almost always outperform those with less.  I considered a game I played a few years ago called Force of Will and how it dealt with resource generation.

 

In Force of Will, each player has a special card that represents a leader for your forces, called a J-Ruler.  Each player also has a side deck of resource cards, called Magic Stones.  Your J-Ruler would tap/exhaust/turn 90 degrees to let you take the top card of your Magic Stone deck and put it into play.  While this still didn't fit the idea of a Master starting with a pool of mana and it ebbing and flowing based on combat and rest, I liked it because it was very simple and didn't involve math.  

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A problem that Force of Will had with the J-Rulers (if I recall correctly) was that most, if not all of them, didn't have any decision making to do instead of generating a Magic Stone.  You could use a special ability to turn your J-Ruler into a creature to fight for you, but that was mostly strategy dependent and only useful on certain J-Rulers. 

 

I needed to add something to the Masters to ensure that they had a choice of whether or not to generate a resource, even if that choice wasn't made that often.  I decided to give each Master a special ability that required them to exhaust.  Now they can choose between using that ability and "igniting" a "Magical Circuit."  Once you've ignited a Magical Circuit, it's available to use every turn from then onwards.  I decided that each Master would have their own limit to how many Circuits they could have in play at any time so that I could make the characters feel thematic and to create characters with diverse strategies and individual power levels.

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Speed as a mechanic made combat too confusing so I decided to remove it, opting to create keywords or additional mechanics for classes like the Rider at a later time.  Players felt like they weren't really doing things outside of combat, so I decided to allow Techniques to be used at any time and added some non-combat Techniques for diversity's sake.

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I started playtesting again and have received positive feedback on the changes though I'm not happy with all of the mechanics.  I don't think that pursuing this particular avenue will be fruitful, so I've decided to conclude development.

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Takeaways

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• Simpler is better. Don't bog down players with math if it's not a core component of gameplay, especially if it's not fun.
   

• Magic The Gathering is an incredibly well designed game. I never got close to emulating the feeling of multiple strategies that I was hoping to achieve.
   

• The original resource generation system with unit upkeeps and mana based on the Master's mana regeneration rate felt thematic, but it was way too complex for an analog game. I'm curious as to how much of the discarded design could be salvaged by making Fate a digital game.