Wednesday, September 22, 2010

More Alter Ego ideas

First off, regarding Henchmen's bad effects... maybe the rule could be something like this:

At the end of your turn, any henchmen in the same AREA as you who hasn't taken at least 1 damage triggers his Bad Effect (as described on the card).

Bad Effects would be things like:
- Lose 1 Community Bond
- Lose 1 Job Bond
- Lose 1 Family Bond
- Lose 1 Hero Bond
- Lose 1 Bond of your choice
- Take 1(X) Civilian Casualty token(s)*

*upon collecting several of these, lose Bonds in some way. Maybe the Casualty tokens have one of the Aspects depicted (and are drawn randomly), and upon getting 2 or 3 of the same aspect, you lose a Bond from that Aspect. This could be the default, and stronger villains could take Bonds directly.

Regarding other stuff:
Let's say there are 3 AREAS on the simple board. In each AREA there are 3 sub-areas, A, B and C, as discussed in a previous post. When it comes time to find out which henchman to face, players could draw a card off of a single, mixed deck of henchmen (maybe pre-sorted such that the first 1/3 are weak henchmen, the next 1/3 are stronger, etc) PLUS 1 card for each bond in their JOB aspect, and choose which Henchman comes into play. The Henchman card would indicate into which AREA they come into play, and the color/type of card would indicate whether it's of type A, B or C.

Note: You could drop henchmen on other players this way, which could potentially cause them some trouble as they might have to run, fight, or suffer consequences of the new Henchman's Bad Effect which they weren't planning on.

As described before, defeating a henchman of type A allows you to put your insignia on the A space in that AREA, and the first player to get their insignia on A, B and C in a particular AREA gets the "Key to the city" or whatever, which confers some kind of bonus**. However, though these effects would be game-useful, winning still comes from 'collecting' 3 Henchmen of the same TYPE, then defeating the associated Arch-Villain for that type.

** Here's a thought on that. Maybe the Key is a token which goes into one of your Alter Ego slots, counts as a Bond (so +1 bond of that type), and means that slot is protected - no further changes are allowed. So you can't lose any more tokens from that slot, and maybe you also cannot choose to neglect that spot anymore either (or maybe you can, but it's protected from Bad Effects anyway).

Your turn could consist of maybe 2 of the following actions:
- Look for trouble (draw Henchmen cards as described above)
- Fight Crime (fight a Henchman card in your current AREA based on your Hero Aspect)
- Move to another AREA
- Maybe you can spend BOTH actions to gain 1 Bond in an Alter Ego slot.

An action could be to move a Bond from 1 Aspect to another (presumably from an AE slot to the Hero slot, but occasionally from one AE slot to another) - but I think it might be neat if you were compelled to do that at the beginning of your turn. Maybe not compelled, but allowed (and often did). The idea being that if you are going to succeed as a crime fighter, you MUST neglect your Alter Ego.

And one last thought that just popped into my head. Henchmen could have various weaknesses which make them easier to defeat... for example perhaps you get to add 1 to your die rolls for each Family bond for a particular henchman, meaning if your family bond is strong, you can more easily defeat that Henchman. Similarly, there could be Henchmen who are weak to people with strong Community bonds and Henchmen who are easier to defeat if you have a strong Job bond. These should probably be the level 2 Henchmen, as the level 1 Henchmen will come out while everyone still has strong bonds everywhere.

That makes 27 level 2 Henchmen, which sounds like a lot, but whatever. I'm also not sure how they should be arranged - should they be in a big stack, and you have to get through all the level 1 Henchmen before getting to level 2? Or should you draw from the level 2 deck once you have defeated a certain number of level 1 Henchmen? What happens to the ones you look at but don't choose? I'll keep thinking about that.

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