Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

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A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion.

It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are present in any given game are randomly selected from a set of 25 (around 170 in the expansions), without constraint.

The variations are extreme. Some games have fast drawing and high power curves, some are slow slogs. Some games progress linearly, others build slowly and then explode, and some have stair-shaped power curves because there just aren't any cards at certain price-points. Some games have ways of attack other players. Some games have alternate victory conditions. Some games have multiple paths to victory, other are won by fine-grained control over normally-minor details. In short, the variation is immense and novel experiences have continued, even years after I first started playing.

Can we extrapolate from this? I think so. The two conclusions I would draw are: qualitative variation, and combinatorial traits. Differences in game worlds that are the most interesting may not fit into a slider, and binary or enumerated traits should be considered. Also, the interaction between random variables is what allows for a combinatorial explosion of situations. Stemming from that, it must be the case that multiple variables are meaningful.

While I don't know how readily Dominion conforms to the definition of "procedurally generated", it's interesting to consider how its lessons can be applied to creating unique experiences in repeatedly-played video games. The game is always built on the same foundation of rules (expansions notwithstanding) and every game has the same goal. The difference in each game is the selection of actions available to each player, and the thrill is in attempting to compose a more effective sequence of actions than any other player.

To make this interesting, you need both a very wide pool of potential actions, and the mechanics of each action need to be designed such that feedback loops arise naturally.

Dominion gets off easy here, as the "medium" through which different cards interact is the very simple system of resources: actions, gold, and buys. You can create an enormous selection of cards just by having any given card grant some unique combination of these three resources, and then attempt to balance the card by dialing up or down its cost. It's all very abstract, and that eases the burden on the designers.

But how do you do such a thing in a video game, where actions are usually not abstract, but specific (and as a result, limited in number)? What medium of interaction do you exploit to create the game-breaking feedback loops that are the delight of a Dominion player? Better still, how do you make it so that the interactions between actions are subtle enough that game-breaking strategies are non-obvious, making them a joy to discover?

Off the top of my head, you could start with a game that already has a huge number of actions and create a replayable game mode where you limit the number of available actions. Let's use MMOs as a concrete example. You could just take World of Warcraft, assemble four five-man parties, and then present each party with the same randomly-reduced selection of the game's classes, where each class is limited to only one or two of the three talent trees, the class' usable abilities are pared down, and the talents within each talent tree have been shuffled randomly. Each group then races to assemble a functioning party and see who can down the most bosses in a non-randomized dungeon. And instead of instancing each party, you could just pseudo-instance them: for instance, downing a boss makes that boss unavailable to kill for any other group, rewarding groups who made hasty party selections (but punishing them if their hasty selections slowed their ability to deal with the trash mobs leading up to the boss).

I dunno, I suppose it could be fun with enough effort.

I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial.

I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies.

What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken.

To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics. Most procedural gameplay content doesn't necessarily introduce mechanics. That's why it's easy to feel "boring".

Dominion is balanced largely through the fact that it's symmetrical. No matter how good or bad the kingdom cards, both players are interacting with them in the same way, so, barring things like writing cards that give additional advantage to the first player, it's hard to unbalance it.

If you played "a game like Dominion, except each player had their own independent set of Kingdom cards," it would be big-time not balanced. Like, kingdom sets aren't balanced against each other.

Or perhaps you meant that it's balanced like "a given card tends to be about as good as a given other card." But that's just... not very true. In any Kingdom, there are typically a few must-buys and a few must-not-buys, and there are cards that are almost never good buys and cards that are almost always good buys.

Source: played a few thousand games of Dominion on isotropic back when that was a thing.

Disclaimer: Haven't played Dominion since Hinterlands, so this may not still be accurate.

Thanks for clarifying, I've only casually played Dominion.

Dark Ages and Guilds don't change this.

Oh, you can definitely break the game with the wrong combination of cards in the same game. When we were starting to play, I did just that... I could essentially cycle through my entire deck on a single turn. But here you can always choose which cards to include or exclude, so the overall game is mostly not breakable unless you choose to or luck into it.

Games are played and any amount of variation that isn't reflected in the game play is quickly filtered out. It isn't a problem of better sliders or more sliders or more realistic ranges of results, it's about the variation in gameplay they produce. The variation in game play is all down to the rules of the system and how the generated world influences that.

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