Why Breaking Conventions Makes Better Games | Design Club Live

Rearranging and setup. All right. And now we're live on YouTube because I pressed the button correctly. Uh yeah. No, rearranging setups are is like a big deal, right? Especially if you have like the rat's nest, right? Like I have a rat's nest of cables under my desk and it's about to get worse because I'm going to try and figure out how I'm going to get the Switch 2 all set up. Uh and that's going to make it so so much worse. Like my switch one is like out of I can't grab it. It's all the way over there behind my uh gaming rig like on another like side table. It's like all the way over there. But the Switch 2, I don't I don't know. So, you know, we'll we'll figure it out. Going to switch your setup around. H I'm going to switch to my setup around. Bam. I'm going to switch to the Switch. Yeah, that's right. Uh for those of you uh who are struggling with getting a Switch 2, good luck. Mayor Switch to console not come stapled. Uh, and I got mine from Costco this morning. Like they just had

them. You just had to have a Costco membership. So that was cool. Yeah. Costco is surprisingly good at some gaming stuff. Uhhuh. It is actually mild Costco rant on the Oh boy. Here we go. Yeah. Go for it. Costco. One of their big things is Costco will never be like here are 14 types of white shirts. Yeah. It's not You don't go in like you go into Target, it's like here are 14 types of white shirts. Have fun. Costco's like here's two. And we personally have buyers that went and vetted them because we had a hundred people submit to sell white shirts in our stores. And we chose the two we thought were the best combination of like value to this to this to this and then we made them give us a slightly lower price cuz we were going to buy a billion of them. Yeah. like walking into a co a Costco product means it's vetted in a way that I'm increasingly over the years becoming more and more

appreciative of especially having seen Amazon's uh the technical term the initification since I can use that since it's an actual technical term we have we have we have ruled that that doesn't count as the square budget yeah but curation like it's funny there have been people doing curation for a long time, but curation of curation of consumer goods I think is one of the new frontiers of quality hallmark as we get more and more people making things in online stores that just try and dump them there to sell and then disappear. Drop shipping. Yeah. As as a way to to counteract that. Yes. Uh okay, cool. We're going to hang out for like two minutes 15 seconds. uh or so so that ads finish up on Twitch and then we will start our episode. Um yeah, it's fine, Thunder. It's fine.

Uh we've sort of semi we've sort of semi stipulated the guests are immune. Um but that's okay. Uh, and yes, Costco has them, but they were sold out online about 10 minutes after I got confirmation from my dad who placed the order cuz my parents have the Costco membership. Um, and he did it from his phone. He ordered a Switch 2 from his phone from the Costco app to be delivered to me tomorrow. Pretty dope. As I've said, I am Costco. Two thumbs up. Plus, they pay their people well. They really do. Yeah. Uh Costco uh is very good for that. Yes. No heists. No. No heists. No. No. Stop. Stop it. Brad is trying to heist things. That's illegal. Um Janet, uh you haven't seen us in a while. We do apologize for our absence. Matt was traveling on Monday. Jeff was

unwell last week. So, we're back today and we will be back on Monday for more breakfast and we'll be back next week for more design club. So, you do have more content coming YouTube way. I I suppose you could say hoist as long as you don't do that thing where you like substitute one word for another like how on YouTube people say unal alive instead of die, right? Oh, I thought you were going to say sub like hoist for moist. Nope. Nope. That's illegal. That's doubly illegal. Stop it. Get some help. Um, check out my new sweat. Um, I picked this up at PAX when I sat there. My new Child's Play hoodie. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that is awesome. Um, it's comfy. We will see though if it survives the entire stream as my lights may slowly heat up the room enough that he goes. Jeff, I'm in a room with poor ventilation and two full-sized computers. I'm going to die this summer. It's going to be terrible. I'm actively looking at

getting um I have to see if the condo covenants around here have anything to say about uh window mounted air conditioners. And if they do, I have to get a low profile one and put it into place where they can't see it. Cuz how about a heat sink? Yeah. Yeah. Um maybe I'll just flood my room with dry ice. Maybe I'll just get a bunch of dry ice and just do like dry ice fog over like the bottom of my floor. That'll be great. Um yeah. Costco uh was is very pro- union at the management level. Yes, that is correct. Um in that they say if you if you feel the need to form a union, great. But if you feel that need, it means we're not treating you well enough to begin with. Uh so that's pretty great. Okay. Uh today's episode is going to be on breaking conventions to make better games. We're going to do some Monster Train 2. Don't worry if you're not a huge fan of Monster Train 2, that won't be the whole thing. We're going to use that kind of as a Wait, wait. I like Monster Train 2. Sure, but like not

everyone does. Oh, yeah. And it's not a Monster Train 2 stream. We're going to use that as a specific object lesson sort of example thing, and then we're going to expand out into other um other games, other games, other genres, other things. So, we're we're going to Yeah, there are less expensive ways to suffocate. No, because I can vent I can vent the excess CO2, right? That's fine. That's easy cuz it's heavier. CO2, heavier than N2, heavier than O2, right? Per molecule. That means go down, not up, right? It settles at the bottom. Evacuate. Fine. Fine. Listen. Listen. Chad asked me a science question. Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. So, uh, you know the deal. See, I was impressed that you were doing that off the top of your head on walking down the periodic table of combination of molecules.

Yeah. Or particles. In a previous life. Okay. So, I have a ma I have a master's degree. My master's degree and my gra my undergrad degree are functionally both in media. Um, by which I mean like the classics, right? So, my undergrad's in um liberal arts. my masters in the liberal arts. But the way that both of those manifest is in like media literacy, um, media analysis, film analysis, all of that, modern communications, all of that sort of gets rolled into it. So, it's actually pretty appropriate for what I'm doing. My high school was the science of technology high school, and I was in the fasttrack science and technology thing. One of the other people in my program literally did as a senior project anti-angioenesis factors in cancer treatments to help cure cancer. That's the level of high school that I went to for science and technology, which has nothing to do with my current job, but I took organic chemistry my senior year. There's no AP test for organic chemistry. Not enough

people take it. I love chemistry. Chemistry was like my jam. I took regular chem, AP Chem, organic chemistry. I took all of the chemistry that they would let me take. Uh, and yeah, so I learned a thing about you today. Yes, that is correct. Um, if you have functioning floor vents, CO2 is fine. Yeah, I don't, so I'm going to have to rig up a hood. Uh, but that's fine. Okay, cool. Great. Now that we've been sidetracked, followup question to chemistry as we're going on. Yeah. Do most chemists make good cooks? I have a theory that people who are good at chemistry, practical lab chemistry, also make excellent cooks. Well, and it's not even just that. It's the ability to follow instructions closely. That's exactly why. Yeah. Right. It's not like just familiarity with like burner setups or whatever. No. Yeah. The ability to and it's not just cooking. Cooking is season it with your heart. Right. Um the baking baking particularly pastry baking is do this exactly right. If you

don't do it exactly right, it will be ruined forever and there will be a curse upon you and your house for seven generations. Don't mess with pastry recipes, right? So, like chemists make excellent bakers even more than cooks. Yeah. Okay. Uh, great. Anyway, now that we're thoroughly need those up. Well, you sound a tiny bit soft to me. Are we at the same levels when you're checking? Yep. Okay. I mean, I can I can just Oh, there we go. Yeah, I'll just be here. Um, all right. Great. Uh, awesome. Uh, going to black. We'll be right back. Three, two, [Music] one. Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that's back

this week after a oneweek hiatus and that isn't talking about the Switch 2 launch. That is today, the day that we're recording this. I am your humble, proud Switch to soon to be owner Will, joined as always by my co-host Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff. Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey everybody, I'm Jeffrey Zeian, the studio director of Extra Credits and the long not the a long time game designer like two decades plus who is currently had his mind blown the fact that I learned a thing that yesterday will. Yes. Having gotten back into the Unity ecosystem and retaching myself things. We did an episode like two months ago on allocart game development talking about using assets from the Unity store to accelerate your game in the same way you use things like Photoshop or Blender or other tools. Unity much to my surprise where you buy a software package from you know tool package for like 20 to 100 bucks

because these are serious tool packages you're buying. blew my mind by having a $2 weekl long sale yesterday. I spent if I I went and bought a lot of stuff. I spent four hours that I should have been doing other things looking through the store and buying things at the same time that they were running a 10% off June sale. Everything was really for 10% off. So everything was really a$180. Yeah. Okay. and I bought almost $2,500 worth of software for $138 like it that so normally I'm not a fan of like buy it just cuz it's on sale but at that ratio I absolutely bought things that I was like might I need this on a future project or do I just want to look at it and see how somebody more talented than myself built this particular shader.

Yes. Yeah. For for $2. The fact that I might use it later. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That that I might take it apart and learn from it. Yeah. Uh absolutely. I just I had to bring that up because of all I expect that on like the iTunes store or maybe like Steam Ultra Indie games down to, you know, suda. And it's funny though, like it's a bad proposition for a game bringing this back in because most studios, even if you're pretty fast, you're not making a game every two weeks, right? Or you know, the game you make, unless it's really good, is probably not selling five or 10 years later. Where if you're doing software development and building tools and you're like, "Here's a tool. Now I'm going to go make another tool. Now I'm going to go make another tool." Selling somebody a tool for $2 that they look at, they're like, "This was a good tool. What else has this dev team made? Like it's it's an actual like loss leader marketing kind of thing. Yeah. Uh which

I think is is very smart, right? Uh I think it's a very cool way to do it. We were talking about Etsy too that Etsy does similar things. Um but it's it's a little different obviously because Etsy is physical goods largely, not exclusively but largely uh and and Unity is digital goods. And the beauty of digital goods is once you've made a digital good, selling an extra thousand of them does not cost you anymore. Correct. Where for a physical good, you can get to a point where it costs you more to make it than you sell it for if you've deeply discounted. Yep. Which is a tangent, but it's also a little bit since we're talking about breaking rules today. Yeah. Or breaking um conventions like $2 software is not a thing I am used to seeing. Correct. Yeah. And and I think Grass has it absolutely right. It is a good price for consumer or for customer acquisition, right? That that's correct. Like the the cost of uh and that's what Epic's been doing for a really long time, right? Epic's been doing the um uh they pay developers for every copy

of a free game that you claim, right? Times the number of copies. Um and they have viewed that cost that they have been paying out money to developers as a cost to acquire users into their ecosystem which is accurate right um and in this case it's it's much the same thing uh and actually in um man in the st case case of the um Unreal wait why did you what what storefront did you just mention Epic thank you in the case of the epic store the biggest thing they're also combating is it's a two for one thing because They're like, "Come get free game." People like, "Oh, I like free game." But when you're doing that, you're building up a library. Because one of the biggest disadvantages the Epic Store has is the Steam store where people have 20 or 50 or 100 games sitting in their library. Moving to a new store means you have, you know, you're basically splitting where you're

hoarding your things. Yeah. And so they're trying to get you critical mass where you're just you're not going to abandon the Epic Store because you're like I have 15 games in here, right? And just sort of like I'm I'm going to like I'm not I'm not we're not bailing on this topic, but we're kind of tacking back towards our our plan our plan topic for today. That is a thing that Epic decided to do. That's a big risk that's breaking one of the rules about storefronts, which is you can't really give away your main product for free, right? You can have a loss leader, Costco chickens, right? Right. We're talking about Costco and getting Costco hot dogs. Yeah. Costco hot dogs, right? And the food court at Costco, right? That's a way to get people in. But giving away your product for free, that's kind of that that is weird, right? And the amount of free product that Epic's given away is more than $1,000 per account. Staggering. Yeah, it's a staggering amount, right? But it's been successful and they had to do something big and different to compete with Steam because Steam is the juggernaut in the room in the room. Epic came in and said, "We want to 5 to 10

years from now be a competitor for Steam, and we are willing to spend money along the way to get to the point where eventually, like Steam, we will print money by selling all of these things, right? They got them. They got those Fortnite dollars. Fortnite money, V-Bucks, V-Bucks money goes pretty far." So, uh, Jeff, our topic this week, yes, breaking conventions makes better games. Hi. Monster Train 2 came out recently. We've both been playing it. We played the demo a while ago on stream to just kind of like take Yeah. Take take a quick look at it. Walk me through how you came to this revelation. So So we're going to we're going to walk through how Jeff came to this conclusion. We're going to show you a bit of how that conclusion came to be and then we'll talk about some other games. So, so I played a lot of Monster Train one just it was it's been one of my rotation games especially because they have a really nice iPad port. Yeah. And I have three games on my iPad that are my go-to

I need to space out games which is Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and Bellatro. Those are like my three rotation games of Those are three games any one of which has devoured thousands of people's entire like free times. Yes. Great. And they all have fantastic iPad ports and because I don't have a computer in bed or you know sitting when I'm waiting to pick up my kid from school or anything else. These are my easy go-to games and I put a lot of time into all of them. Both actually I also put a lot of time to the PC versions. But Monster Train is a good game. Just straight up. It's not my favorite of all time, but it is a good good game. So, I started Monster Train 2, and one of the immediate things as a designer that I noticed was that they were leaning a lot more heavily into the differentiation of clans, which is the equivalent of a character-ish for this. And one of the biggest ways that they are differentiating is

basically saying here is the set of rules for how the monster train game exists. Yes, every single clan and every single hero within that is going to find an interesting way to break the conventions like strongly so. So if you analyze monster train in a weird way, it's kind of a tower defense game. Yes. and that you are picking your towers, your monsters to position on three floors and enemies come in usually starting on the bottom floor and work their way up until they reach the py. And if they do that, they actually do long-term damage to you. Yep. Your job is to stop them with your towers plus your spells along the way up. Yep. And so one Go ahead. Let's slide into it and we'll we'll we'll we can we can show people some some visuals while we while we do that. Yeah. So, so here we go. We got we got Monster Train 2.

Uh we're going to depart on a new run. All right. Let's see. And we're going to choose some stuff. So, Jeff, you wanted to take a look at the these are the five clans. I only have three of them unlocked. I haven't had a lot of time to play. Um let's see. Py P. Actually, do me a favor. Select py. Let's break two things and go with um for your second clan banished. And I want yeah the just cause one. Cool. Cool. Um what you get by the way when you're selecting here is you're getting a hero. We see we've selected the dragon here. You select a secondary clan. This gives you the base starting cards of that clan's hero. In this case using in the bottom right just cause. Yep. And we'll get to that in a second. All right. So, so keep going. So, we have this game. We're gonna I'm gonna get us to the first fight and we'll talk about why this is weird. And so, when you

finish each level, sorry, what's up? I'm glad we're not finishing this run. We have to fight Sarah Fraternus Chosen of Dominion, which does corruption, too. And I hate corruption. Yeah, it's gross. Okay. Anyway, um there we go. So, select what you actually hold on. Let's just see. Oh, so like and when you finish a level, you get gold. Gold could be spent in shops to power up your towers or i.e. minions and power up your spells and a couple of other things. Yep. So, gold is the power up currency. There's literally no other use for gold than in some way making you stronger. Correct. Most of the time, right? And I think that's sort of the the theme here is that we're going to get we're going to tell you a bunch of rules about this game. And I want you to imagine that every single one of these rules that we've just described has an asterisk. Yep. And that's one of the things that I was most impressed about Monster Train because like one of the

other basics of most tower defense games. You put a tower down and that's where it is to attack the monsters. Yep. Clan number one, which we took their card for with Just Cause, breaks that rule with a common card. Yep. Straight up. Which, uh, they have a new ability called advance. Advance means select a thing, move it to the frontmost position of your towers. Notice it doesn't say advance friendly. So, this also means you can take an enemy in a wave that is hidden behind the big blockers and be like, "Oh, let's put you in the front where you're the first thing that's going to get killed as combat happens, right?" Like, positioning in tower defense of where you put towers is a pretty basic thing. And I want to talk about this real quick because I think this is really important. The game never says your minions don't move, your units don't move, because it's building on a convention of tower defense games,

right? It's building on a set of genre expectations from tower defense games that say when you place a thing down, that's where it lives. That's where it is, right? That's that is a me that is a a genre convention of that kind of game, right? You don't generally I every time we talk to defense dabble in it like um Clash Royale is a combination of actually is a tower defense game. Yeah. And for example, you know, if you put a big beefy ogre down and put a little archer behind it, assuming you know the move speeds, it's not like your archer suddenly jumps to the front of the ogre. Yes. Like it positioning matters in these games. Like that is that is a convention of how these games work. Yes. position well and then see how the combat happens. Correct. The same thing with like finish a level well to get more gold to use for upgrades. Right. Uh I'm going to Cool. Okay. Having said that, what do we got here? Uh we're

going to take the Emma. Both of those are solid. Yeah, we don't have any welps now. And I hate build I hate I hate speculating on major artifacts. This is like a this is a strategic difference between me and I think you're starting. Um yeah, we don't have any. Okay, because we're on zero. We're not on We're not on Covenant one to keep this under control. Is this going to give me the thing? Okay, so so here's here's a great one. Here's another great one in uh and and other rogike card games do this, too. And I'm really glad we got this one. This one says, "Every time Lord Phoenix, big beefy dragon boy kills our hero." Yeah. Kills something, it gains an attack permanently. Mhm. Permanently meaning the rest of the run. Correct. It's not the rest of this fight. It's the rest of the run. There are plenty of things that get buffs in this fight. But for the rest of the run is weird. And there are other games obviously that do this. Um you get stacking bonuses on some jokers and Bellatro. You get uh things like

sacrificial dagger in um slay the spire, right? But it is um what's the shield defect gets the oh um um uh it gets more powerful each genetic algorithm. Yeah. Yeah. Um so this is not unheard of but it's fun to see this coming in as a base level ability right on something that in the last version was a lot more rare actually little flame. Um, yeah. But well, and my and my larger point is the idea that the convention of we're using cards as a way to represent things. There's an intuition that those cards are less mutable, right? They're they can generally be upgraded, which you can think of as replacing the card with a better version of the card, but they're less mutable. And this is a permanent upgrade, right? This is a this is a way that the game changes fundamentally on a turnbyturn basis,

which is weird and cool, right? And that's that being said, both of these are solid upgrades. Yeah, but I like this one better. All right, let's do it. Um, okay. So, uh, worry not, we're not going to do the whole run. We're just going to show you how this works. So, uh, we get to see we're facing some zombies. Uh, and we can choose to face more zombies to get some gold. But what I heard was I can choose to face more zombies so that my dragon can eat more things and get more powerful. Um, true. I'm seeing all upside here. So, uh, you don't need to worry about that. But we're going to we're going to look at the basic conventions. So, at the start of the battle, enemy units appear on each floor. That's a modifier to this one. Um, that's unusual. Oh, I also just noticed because we're playing the Ascension Zero version. Yep. Oh, by the way, before you end it, Will, how big is Dragon? Oh, never mind. He's three. Dragon three butt.

Um, have you seen the undo button here? Yes. So, there is I I have praised this. One of the things that this game does that I wouldn't consider a rule break, but I would say is the height of design that should be praised. It's quality of life. It is pure quality of life. Is you can undo an entire turn. You up until the enemies move. Yeah. You can undo everything you have done since the last enemy move. Correct. And it is bananas. And they managed, the game is such that it doesn't lend itself to analysis paralysis, which is a problem that often occurs when you let players rewind something indefinitely. Is that you may want to limit it some because if you don't, then what happens is they will do it over and over again until they get the perfect solution. But the game has enough tolerance here that the perfect solution either isn't hard to find or isn't important. Yeah. Well, and you can't go quite far enough back because it's per per turn of thing. It's not

like the mistake you made two turns ago can be undone. Correct. And that is one of the things that I dislike a little about Monster Train is the um the disconnect between your actions and the ultimate effect of them because it can be a little difficult to see why you actually lost. Um so, okay. So, we've deployed all of our stuff, right? So, one of the things I just realized because we're not getting additional starter cards, we're not actually seeing one of the main abilities of the dragons, which is the ability to generate obscene amounts of gold in ways that no other clan gets. Right. I was I was hoping that we'd get one of the dragon egg abilities, but we'll we'll talk about that. This is We don't because we're on zero. You don't get extra cards to level one. Uh doesn't Phoenix have a hoorde ability? Hold on. Um isn't his third ability a hoorde ability? Let's see. Look at his what? Actually, doesn't doesn't matter for right now. Let's keep going. Um, so like we said,

it's a tower defense game. Uh, I'm going to deploy. Wait, wait, undo that real quick. Why? Let's do positioning real quick. I was Okay, see that little foot soldier there, Will? Yes. Let's put a foot soldier in front of the big buff blocker soldier. Okay. I was going to use those elsewhere, but okay. And look, you can move and you can undo this too, right? One of those basic abilities. Hey, look, we've repositioned this guy in like that's just the basic ability that came in with this clan. Let's move you to the front and give you a buff. And there are and there are other cards that care about being moved as well, right? Yes. So, they get bonuses every time they get moved. Yes. So, you end up doing a lot of moving. And again, in a tower defense game, I'm just saying this is so unusual that basically we're seeing moving towers as a base ability, which is great. It's them looking to say, "No, here's the thing. This clan is going to this clan

will be memorable because right you're going to be in tower defense that you never do normally instead of um the clans are far more distinct than like slay the spire characters because while slay the spire characters have different starting artifact or starting relics and starting decks they generally operate on the same principles which is one of the reasons that the prismatic shard card is viable at all. That's I would actually argue that slightly. We can get to that when we get to Spire. I would say they start off in the same point and they start diverging wildly. We can argue about that. Poison orbs. Yeah. Uh yes, they can. They don't have to. Um okay. So, uh I'm gonna You can undo that if you want to for this round. I just I wanted to show that it's like base level card. Yeah, I know. I I had a I had a

thought of how I was going to demonstrate a bunch of stuff with the turn and it has left my mind. So, let me let me play through real quick. So, uh we are going to use Oh, that's the other one. Uh this guy's got an ability, an activated ability. So, that's good. So, he's going to murder something in the back and then he's going to murder something in the front and we need to put something back here and something back Why did you all get pyro gel? When you flame Oh, that's right. Yeah, they all get py. He flames the whole row, but only one person takes straight up damage. Yep, that's right. Uh, and if you want some armor, you could put it on the front guy. Um, the Just Cause will give him armor every round after this for being in the front. Yeah, Valor is uh the thing. Uh, yes. Paradox asks, "Prismatic shard is the one that allows you to put any card from any class. It said prismatic is weird in card rewards. All cards from all classes and neutral cards are added to

card rewards at the appropriate rarities. Shops remain unaltered. That's a minor. And you don't get to pick them, but yes. Uh, okay. So, we're going to take a hit and that's fine. Yeah, I'm I'm of the the same opinion as Demon Works that um spire characters all operate under the same broad rubric. I would agree with that. Um more zombies, more stuff. Great. Got to flame the little imp back there to get your gold. I'm trying to decide uh how much damage mitigation I'm trying to do here versus how much I'm trying to murder stuff. Yeah. Uh, we want that guy's going to die to the wrong thing. So, I got to think about that real quick. Um, kill that for now. That's fine. Worry about this guy next turn.

Schmack. Yes, even defect. Well, defects orbs um are actually there's a hidden passive part of prismatic shard because defects orbs are such a big deal. Um the guess you're going to kill that. That's fine. Um the prismatic shard gives you an invisible orb slot. Prismatic gives you if you use the there's another card um watcher can do that pulls in a card possibly from other people as well. Yes. Uh I don't has to exist for that too. Yeah. I don't remember if that one um what I don't remember is if that one um gives us gives orb slots or not. Mhm. I'm just gonna stack all this up. You

might want to advance the front guy to the back just to give one more heavy hit. Yeah, I guess. I'm not sure if that's pyrogel is a unique weird thing. Uh, okay. Pyro gel basically when it's on something makes every hit it takes do extra damage equal to the stacks on that. Don't forget you have a breath weapon again. Yeah, I'm getting there. Boom. And then he's going to die to the right thing. Yep. So, it's not piloting at the base level isn't mechanically complicated, right? There are lots of good choices, but it's lots of good choices in a way that makes sense in a simple way, right? The rules are pretty straightforward. There are things on this floor. I have things on this floor. They're going to fight. We're going to keep going until someone

is dead. Yeah. The interesting part about this game and why I think it stands out is the um there you got to take I'm I'm getting there. Um or actually, what's the one to the No, Golden Touch. Yeah. One of the reasons that it's so interesting is that the um is that taking the base rules and then building weird on top of it for different things, especially when you get to combine two different groups of people is really powerful for making the game memorable and interesting, right? So, for instance, um the pyro gel is a stacking debuff, right? That stays on that the basic cards from the Pybor get to do. that's weird and leads to specific strategies and the way that those strategies interact with the movement strategies means that while the fundamental rules that underly it are weird are are simple, right? You put

units down, they fight, something dies, by breaking some of those rules selectively, we get a more memorable experience, right? And in this case, the memorable is fun. Yes, memorable is fun and good, right? And and this is there's all kinds of uh this is this is a really great one. So we can kind of see here how breaking one rule from tower defense games leads to a lot of possibilities. So here we have a card that says challenge. Advance a unit to the front of the floor and it applies a debuff. Instead of uh our starter cards which apply a buff, this is a debuff. I can call someone out from the back of the enemy line. right here. I can pull someone forward and make them take a hit or someone melee weakness means the next time they're hit, they take double damage. Yes. Um, uh, selfless sacrifice lets you negate damage. And then my one of my favorite

cards, the penitent body suit. It's a suit of spikes that you put on an enemy and then every time it moves, it takes a bunch of damage. So if you want to, you can put it on something that has a lot of health and then make it dance back and forth until it dies. It's really funny. I like it. It's great. dance. Yeah. Right. It's really good. So, um, can I get to this? Let's see. Do they have magic on? Oh, so here's an interesting one for the dragons. We, you saw if we'd actually started one level higher. We might have had a chance to start with one of the cards that did this in our deck. But they have a new mechanic, which is collect dragon eggs. At the end of a match, you have the option to cash in your dragon eggs based on how many you have. And so, for example, if you have two dragon eggs, you can 25 gold. If you have eight, which is currently the maximum will can do, you get 75 gold, a minor artifact from the clan, and your choice of one of two other

artifacts. So basically stacking up your treasure. They're giving you a separate miniame to play here, which is, oh, you're a dragon. You like loot. Do the right thing. Let's start handing you out lots of extra gold and lots of extra artifacts for doing the thing you probably were going to do anyway, which is trying to kill your opponents, right? And you can choose to forego some amount of stuff that'll make you more powerful in the game for the ability to hold more eggs. You only hold eight base. There are other things that you there are um artifacts that you can get that instead of taking something which will make you more powerful and make it easier to beat the game, you're increasing your capacity for dragon eggs. So, you can get up to 13. And if you get 13 dragon eggs, you get to select a free boss relic. You only normally get two of those the entire run. Would you like a third one? Right. So again, we it goes from and and this is really interesting.

It goes from uh the simple idea that there is an additional currency based resource that only that clan gets only that clan gets that is at the beginning roughly exchangeable for gold and ends with there is an extremely precious limited thing that you normally only get two of. If you're really good at this miniame that only one of five clans can do, you can have an additional boss relic, right? And so that means that any run that involves the Pyreorn is going to be just going to feel fundamentally different. It's going to have this fundamental underlying current of I need to keep an eye out for this because the payout is so good, right? Because it allows me to break this rule and get this third thing, right? Why would I choose between drawing more cards and having more energy and having bigger floors when I could potentially have all three? I take one of two of those for my first for my two regular boss relics and take the third one as my Pybor relic and

now I'm super powerful and it lets me feel like I've been rewarded for doing this thing and it's really clever, right? That's kind of the where then in addition they build on that by saying we're going to give you a couple of creatures that if you deploy them have power based on the number of eggs currently in your inventory or in your inventory when they were played. Yep. Just to make you be like, "Wait, if I cash these in, correct, my dragon hoarder that is shown like clutching dragon eggs is going to be weaker on deployment, right? So they lean into this system. In fact, I can uh let me I can show you. So, the the things that we're talking about, uh, also just as long as we're in Monster Train, this is bestinass information accessibility for a card-based rogike. It's bestin-class. You have all of the information about pretty much everything you could care about referenced in one place in an easy to

digest fashion that lets you sort, that lets you find all the information at a glance. It filters. it. Yeah, it filters. It is wild, right? So, we're gonna look for Pybor, right? So, we have um it's an uncommon Pybor card, so you can just hit the UNC. There you go. Yeah. So, so we have we have all kinds of other cards that interact with this. The Gildmonger, a unit, normally you don't want your units to die, but when the Gilmonger does, it gets an egg. You get an egg, right? We have uh greed. Greed says, "Deal 20 damage to all units." That means yours, too. And sle is for every unit it kills, death, right? It doesn't care whose it kills. So you can kill your own units to get eggs, right? And remember earlier Jeff was talking about gold, how gold is exclusively used to make you more powerful in shops and in events. Yeah. Which is the the area between the fighting, right? Except we have a card called make it rain where we can spend our gold in the

middle of combat to do something cool. Right. We also have an ability called avarest that lets us build gold in the middle of combat. Right. So again, the miser every 10. Every time he hits something, you get 10 gold. Yeah. Give him multi strike so he goes twice a round, you get 20 gold in a boss fight. If you positioned him last in your row so he hits the boss like 12 times during the fight as it goes back and forth, 120 gold, right? Pretty crazy, right? So this this is kind of where we're getting to with this, right? And I think this is a really great example of this is there's a line between building identity for a character, faction, unit, um, archetype and um, and making it interesting and doing it in a way that is super memorable because you set out a bounding box for what design is going to be for your game and then said, "Except

And then you made all of these weird little carveouts and doors at the edge of the bounding box to let things bolt onto it and break those conventions and break those rules. This is kind of one of the the big examples of that, right? And this is literally the kind of thing in a design doc as you're thinking of the clan, you'd be like, "What's the tagline for this clan?" And you know, or the hero and it's going to be like dragons are greedy and like gold, right? Because you see, there's things that like encourage you to hoard gold and there's things that encourage you to use gold. Yep. Oh, bottom left, by the way, you were talking about spending gold. Soldier of Fortune is one of my favorites on that. You can spend gold to buff a specific unit, which is very powerful. Um there again, there's all kinds of of very interesting um uh stuff that you can do, but I think that's probably the green dragon is the one I was talking about right there. Yeah, the green dragon. that for every egg you have, he

gets 10 bonus offense and 10 bonus health, right? Payoff is another one. Um, you can uh you can only do it once per fight, but you can restore long-term health based on your long-term resources, which is weird, right? Because normally those are things that interact with you interact with on a different layer. Healing is done out of combat. Spending or worrying about your egg count is done out of combat, but here it's done in combat. Right? So, we've got a layer translation between the metagame layer or what I would call the metagame layer in between fights and the actual fights itself. And this is one of the only clans that does it so far that I've seen in this game. Correct. So, that's another thing that they're breaking with it is here is the interaction that happens between fights moved into let's make some of that matter during a fight. Correct. And I think that that is that's a really great example. I think that's probably good for monster training. can dive into some other really weird different examples. Um, we just wanted to like this is a really Yeah, this was

the game as I was playing I was looking at how cleanly they did it on a per clan and per hero basis and how much they'd upped it from number one, right? Like number one, there was definitely identity around clans with mechanics, but man, they took that. They're like, "Oh, hold my beer monster train one here comes monster train. There's a new train on the track, right?" and they just took it and dialed it up. Probably one of the best examples. You could play this once per fight. You gain three uh dragon eggs and take 10 damage. 10 long-term damage. Surely between fights, nothing bad will happen. Nothing bad will happen if I do this. Right? So, um so that's sort of what we're talking about, right? We're talking about this these ways that people uh that designers create a system, create a bounding box and then break it, right? So, um, it's we should probably stipulate it's really common to do this in rogue likes and Jeeoff and I both love rogue likes, right? It is it

is very easy to see um where where that happens. So, uh it's done in Slay the Spire, Enter the Dungeon, Binding of Isaac, uh Risk of Rain, uh um less so in Spalunky. Yeah. But like if you Yeah. If you pick if you pick a deckro thrives on it, right? Every deck, every deck says this one rule doesn't apply to you, right, in some way or this rule about deck building doesn't apply, right? Like, hey, what are fa uh abandoned deck face cards? They're not a thing. You don't need face cards, right? What if you had a super thin deck that was all numbers, right? That's weird, right? Because the base conceit of Batro is you are playing with a 52 card deck except when you're not. Right. Right. Um so but it's also funny to see the interactions. Like there's an awful common joker which is get I think it's

get plus one multiplier per hand played and it goes back to zero as soon as you play a face card. Isn't that ride the bus? Think it's bus. I don't think it's No, I think maybe. But anyway, like that's a pretty awful common because most of the time you want to play face cards because they give you more points. In the abandoned deck, which has zero face cards to start with, there is unless you add one to you, there is no chance of playing a face card and an awful common joker suddenly becomes a somewhat worthwhile common joker. Right. Okay. It is ride the bus. You were right. I remembered. Right. Richard pointed it out in chat. I will decide to say if you both you and he say it. Yeah. Um Yeah. And and I think that these are um so so we'll just kind of stipulate that like this is how characters work and jokers and relics and artifacts and um upgrades. That's how all of those

work in rogue likes, right? Uh every every good memorable upgrade I can think of in every rogike I've ever played. and I have played literally hundreds uses this core principle to make it sink right but there are other places that it happens where it's a maybe a little less obvious maybe it's a little less straightforward and we wanted to talk about some of those and actually let let me cap the rogike section one of the reasons that rogue likes need to do a thing like this is they are expecting you to play this game over and over and over slowly unlocking things or learning things along the way. Yes. And if every single run felt the same, right? These games would get boring really quickly. And so part of what it is is almost all these games, especially in the first couple runs, establish this is kind of how a thing normally goes. And for example, in Slay the Spire, you

don't start with all the cards for Ironclad unlocked, right? You unlock cards as he levels up. In monster train you unlock cards as your clan levels up. You know in Bellatro you un actually you don't you find new joker actually. Do you unlock some of it's unlocked some of it's fine. You unlock new decks. You need to beat runs with decks in order to unlock new decks which are also the things but and actually I think some jokers get un yeah some jokers get unlocked when you do certain things. Mhm. are basically saying we're starting you with a less complex version and as you play more we're slowly expanding the complexity level and by doing that we're increasing the amount of interactions that might happen and provide different play experiences on a per run basis. Yep. And that's also the reason for a lot of these it's weird convention breaking and random a lotment of these things because if you could go into Spire and say I want to pick you know

floor one I want to find budgeon floor two I want to find flame barrier you don't get to pick which thing you do it's here's a small selection pick from these same with bolatro same with monster train it's always here's a small selection because what it means is you can't say this is the optimal deck, I will always play it, right? It's here is what I think is the best one for what I can currently pick from. And it's really interesting because when games do let you do that selection, it's generally because the game will respond in a way that requires you to have made good selections. Risk of Rain has the command artifact which does let you do that. Every time you find an artifact of a certain rarity or category, it lets you choose which thing of that category you're getting. But Risk of Rain is also more than capable of delivering a run which you will need that level of control to beat. Right. Right. Um and so yeah, it's really cool. Yeah. And so anyway, just saying for a game like that that you're

going to play over and over and over, you can see why they want this kind of combinatoric field of play of all these things that could happen with it being different on a per run basis. But not every game expects you to do kind of that infinite loop, right? like this is a solution for a certain kind of game, right? But in other games sometimes uh and we're going to talk about uh two sort of groups of these. We probably should put these next to each other and I'll move my section. Um is uh hero shooters and moas places where you need to have a strong character identity, right? Um so I don't know about all of you, but I've been playing a whole heck of a lot of Marvel Rivals, right? or and and I played some Overwatch before that, right? I'm not as up and hip on the Overwatch lingo, but like So, this is hero shooters, by the way, that we Yeah. So, hero split into Yeah. Hero shooters um depend on this to make each character

meaningfully unique, right? What makes this DPS different than all the other DPS's? Right. Both that's part of the identity of a hero shooter. This isn't Counterstrike or Halo, right? Yeah. which is, you know, you're all roughly the same kind of thing. Or this isn't a class-based one like Battlefield or Call of Duty where like I'm a medic, I'm a sniper kind of thing. This is, you know, I'm Trace, I'm you know, well, even the we we could even look at the two the two snipers, right? Widowmaker versus Anna and Hanzo, right? Like though they each have different rules that they break, right? Widowmaker gets to do oneshot head shot and Anna gets to heal from further away than is reasonable in any circumstance. Right. Normally the rule is healers have to be up close and like in the fight to be healing and Anna says, "Nah, that's for you youngans. I'm going to be all the way in the back." Right. Right. As an example, the reason for this is usually it's frustr.

Yes. It's kind of hard to knock off the healer. Right. and the healer just keeps to get healing the person up front and that's annoying, right? And uh and we see it if you're if you're more familiar with rivals, we see it there, too. All of the teamups are really great examples of this. Um one of the best ones is uh you have to move your character except if you're Jeff or Rocket and you have Groot because then you just get to ride Groot, right? Then you get to worry about healing and putting your stuff down and doing damage and coordinating for your team and Groot carries you. That's a weird rule break, right? That's a the convention in hero shooters is that you are in control of your character most of the time barring like pushes and pulls and stuns and whatnot, right? But like you get to do something different because they said now you don't have to do that one small thing, right? And both Rocket and Groot, by the way, have their own other rule breaks, but the main one I'm thinking about is Groot. Um Yeah. Yeah. or like cloak and

dagger. Yes. Like you don't usually get two separate sets of powers, right? Unless you're cloak and dagger, right? You you can toggle between the two. Uh I'm uh cloak and dagger is my favorite healer by far. Right. And it's I'm a healer except Right. I'm a healer except when I get dove on and then I'm not a healer anymore. Now you're going to die because I can blind you and do a whole bunch of damage because though I was a healer a second ago, I can switch, right? And that's a weird powerful ability that that they do. And this this is, by the way, we're talking about hero shooters and uh in a second when I let Jeff when I ask Jeff to talk about League characters and then I lose track of what we're talking about because Jeff has so much experience in League. Um, this is why part of the reason why they're so difficult to balance, right, is because they're good and because they break all of these rules. If you break you broke all of these rules in consistent or easy ways, it would be much easier to balance, but it would be

less fun, right? So, like uh in League, right, you have to heal yourself with items or back in the fountain or have a support to it unless you're Garen, right? because everybody slowly heals over time in League. Garren's passive ability, every without getting too deep into it, every hero has three active abilities, an ultimate, and a passive, right? Garren's passive is I heal much faster. Yes. Straight up. Which means that he has a different play pattern. If you're playing in top lane with him, usually that's a battle of attrition. You fight, you back off a little bit. People have different trading patterns. Some want to go in and just keep fighting. Others want to hit and run. Darren is happy to wait in whack you for a while, back off slowly, or excuse me, quickly heal up while you're like, my healing's doing this and his healing is like and you're like, oh, that's not good. And then he comes back

in for another trade pattern and you're like, I can't keep fighting against him in this way, right? And and the cost for that is that Garen is relatively short-ranged and has a pretty straightforward kit in the grand scheme of things, right? This is not to say that these things are broken. We'll talk about when you break the rules too far and things become broken in a second, but um but that's part of his identity. Yes. Part of his identity. Like they found a different way to make him feel like he can take a staggering amount of damage. Yes. Some characters have more armor, some characters have abilities. and he also has one that does it. But the fact that you see him, you know, take half a building, fall on him, shrug it off, shake for a minute, and then like come back in, you're like, "Oh, that's a thing, right?" Malahar is a character I play a lot. He's an anti- carry. He does not carry games by himself. He is good at making other carries lives significantly harder. But he also has a really interesting thing. In MOBAs, you farm.

You kill minions as they come in. That's how you get gold. One of the basic rules of farming is you kind of got to be there. Mahar has a really nice dot, damage over time, that if it kills something, jumps to the next closest enemy unit if it's in range. He also has another little ability that spawns voidings. These little like void crap that come up and they will attack the nearest enemy with a dot on it. So you can theoretically once your ability strong enough throw a dot on the first minion in a wave, summon your voidings and leave and they will clear the wave for you while you go do something else. Right. Like they're breaking a rule. You have to be there to farm, right? You have to be there to get experience and gold and get more powerful unless Yeah. Unless Ash is probably one of my favorite examples of this from League, right? talk about Ash. Um, uh, the rule is you have to be able to fight. You have to be able to see someone or have an engagement range to fight someone. Unless you're Ash. And

then Ash goes, "Go long. No longer. No, no, even longer. Great. Now you're far enough away. I'm going to hit you in the face with a global stun." She has an her ultimate fires an arrow that is a projectile that just keeps going until it goes the length of the map. And anything it hits takes damage and gets stunned. And the further away you were, the longer you get stunned. Ash usually plays bot lane. I've occasionally seen Ash's lane or shoot an arrow across the entire map diagonally to hit top lane. Hit the opponent there. Like it takes six seconds to travel across it or whatever. Yeah, like their leading is good. Stun the opponent for like an ungodly amount of time and your friendly top laner is like, "Oh, well, thank you. I'm gonna go hit them as well." Right. And so, right, and it's so these are these are not huge complicated rule breaks either, right? These are these we're talking about the simple one. Now, granted, we're talking about league, so there's like hundreds of characters,

right? But we're talking about like a selection that lets that shows how easy it is to make a memorable character by tacking an asterisk next to a rule, right? Carus is one I used to play a lot of. We were just talking about Ash's global ultimate. There's League slowly removed most of the global ultimates in the game and they left a couple in. Carus' ability for his ultimate is he channels for a moment. Meaning if somebody does a certain kind of thing and knocks him out of it, then casts a spell that hits every single other enemy champion no matter where they are in the game. So, jungle Carus became a thing a couple seasons ago where he's farming in the jungle and you look you see your buddies battling. You see the enemy limping away at like 10% health and you're like, "Oh, hold on. Let me push my ultimate R channel." Boom. Every enemy champion gets hit. You get a kill. You're like, "Awesome. Back to farming in the jungle some more." Yeah. And the enem is like, "How is that fair?" Yeah. Right. because

it doesn't and and that is that is the other part of the balancing coin is that it is very easy for this to feel very unfair right because you get to point you are pointing at if you're a Garen pointing at a Carus right you go but I don't break any of the rules like that and so it feels unfair until you take a step back and you realize that Carus can get dove on and get squishied. Yep. and Garen can, but Garen's going to be back in the fight much faster than Carus would be, and that's his form of rule breaking. And they're also useful at different times. Like I have played games of Carthus where my team's doing so so and never gets anybody low. Yeah. For a while. And if I'm playing jungle Carus, that means my alt is just sitting around not doing anything because sure, I could cast it and do some damage, but I want to cast it in like when it's meaningful and get a kill. Yeah. or same kind of thing like um like every hero and that is part of the thing whether it be League or Dota

or some of the others that they the league has each of these games has conventions on this is how it's typically played and they establish character identity by saying we're going to take one of the conventions of the game and modify it in some way memorably to help give the identity to this character right uh and it's not always their ultimate. Their news champion, Mel, has a spell reflection ability where you you cast a projectile most of the time or a targeted one and if the player hits it fast enough to bring up that shield, bing goes right back at you, including ultimates. Like, there's been some crazy interactions I've seen where you're like, "Cool, here comes the big ash arrow." Well, ping back at the direction it came. Like, it's a weird thing and it's fun and that's part of what gives her her identity as a character. Yeah. And so, we've talked about some uh some PvP

examples, right? In the PvE realm of things, MMOs use this pretty handily, right? We were talking about FF11 the other day, which is weird. I play a lot of 14. Um, and I played 11 back in the day. Yeah. I 11 is on my list of MMOs to play because it's still kicking. It will not die is not good after 14. It is a it is a game where you cannot play solo. Yeah, you have to party in that game. Correct. Yeah, I I have I have heard all of the drawbacks and I understand them and I want to try it anyway. Get Yeah. Uh but 11 has twohour cool downs. They're twoour. So, one of the especially for when it came out cuz this came out in the early 2000s, I think. Early 2000s, mid early to mid 2000s. So 20 plus years ago is they threw in these ability every class and this the fun just like 14 you could switch your classes around and make custom one. Well, excuse me. You could switch your class around and you

could do a subclassing thing that let you make kind of an interesting combo. But every class had the ability that was slanged the two-hour ability which was an ability with a two real hour cool down. All of which did something absurd. White mage with their two-hour ability healed the entire party. Didn't matter how low you were, healed the entire party all the way up to full full heal all party. Monks had one that took your attack speed and turned it basically to 10% of what it was. So if you were hitting once a second, you were hitting once, you know, 10 times every.1 seconds. The Rogues had one I think it was like perfect dodge where for a certain amount of time you just couldn't get hit. Like all of these are things you're like that's not an ability that fuels balance and they weren't. But they also with a 2-hour cool down they didn't have

to be right. It was the you know you're adventuring with a party white mage is like oh the whole party's about to get wiped. Things are going poorly, 2hour, bam, you feel like a hero, but your party also then knows that safety net is gone, right? It is not coming back anywhere in the foreseeable future. Yeah. And and 14 inherits some of that. In 14, white mage's level 50 signature ability is benediction, which is on a threeminute cool down. I can uh point at a party at a party, no, anyone doesn't have to be a party member. point at a friendly target and say you are now full health. That's it. That's the that's the whole ability. There's no heal for x amount. It they are now at full health regardless of debuffs or anything else or restrictions or no no that person full health which is incredibly powerful. And then you realize that there are a bunch of reasons why you need that in 14. And um why that's true

in just a lot of cases in MMO design is that um we were talking about absolute virtue, right, which is one of the giant legendary boss fights in 11 that requires multiple people to have their two-hour cool down and is a multiple hour fight. You might get to use your twohour twice. It's a Wow. Oh yeah. Virt I think I think original virtual virtue clear was like a 14-hour fight. It was not well balanced when it came out. Don't worry about it. Um, so it is it's a very interesting sort of way to both give designers room to present big challenges and give players really cool opportunities to answer those challenges, right? Because breaking the rule for the players does mean that you now can expect them to have that thing, right? Which is really cool. when when we um every expansion comes out, right, we get a a whole list of all the things that in 14 that the healer gets to do. And some of them are really really they seem really broken,

right? They seem incredibly powerful. One of them is everyone in the party gets a free use essentially of sprint, which lets you move faster, which in a game that is about a mechanics ballet is incredibly powerful. And then we played the expansion that that Scholar got that ability in and we went, "Oh, I see why they gave us that ability now because it looks really broken because it breaks a rule." And then we play and we're like, "Oh, there's a lot of places where we need to be moving very quickly. We really want Expedient up for this because we need to all be moving in a direction and if anyone doesn't make it, we all die, right?" And sometimes these things are thrown in for like specific reasons, but of course that's a tricky balance thing because then you look at previous content and you're like, does having this now suddenly make every other thing easier, right? And like um actually Artemis had asked, how long did that go? Um doesn't seem like good design.

Some of these things are thrown in for identity in addition to the design aspect. Like the white mage identity or the the the fantasy of being a white mage is I'm going to have amazing buffs in healing. And this gives you something where you're like I am going to have amazing buffs in healing. Watch this click. Look, I have amazing buffs in healing. You know, the monk was like, I'm a badass martial artist. I'm going to get in there and do my, you know, martial arts and look like a, you know, on steroids Bruce Lee and hit my ultimate. That gives me my fantasy, right? The rogue is like, I am going to dance through danger no matter what is going on. Boom. And so in some cases they're not necessarily great design, but in other cases they're almost quintessentially amazing design because it's fra helping frame the fantasy of what your character is by giving you an ondemand access to that fantasy even if

you can only use it rarely, right? But even just knowing you have it, right, helps give the identity of what it is. And you can timebind a lot of things to make those abilities less um less uh things that you don't have to worry about as much. Right? If there are um we see this a lot in 14, there are things where you will probably use your limit break for a thing and you won't have time to generate another one, right? So that means that you don't have access to that tool. If you have multiple encounters in a row and the first one is something that's probably going to demand at least one twohour, you know that that players probably aren't going to have it in the next one because the players aren't going to sit for two hours to wait for the white mage to get their cool down back cuz that's boring, right? If you can depend on anything, players don't like being bored and like breaking your game. That's just two things that are universally true about players and doubly true of MMO players. Um, right. So there there are

ways around making it truly gamebreaking instead just being a rule break a convention. And it's interesting because also in a computer game, you can enforce this in a way that like if you look at a game like D and D, since we've been talking about RPG, like most MOBAs and MMOs are are at least to some extent RPG focused or feel on that. Something like D and D is harder because they want to give you customization options. In a computer game with a hero shooter or a mobile, you can say this is the exact character design. You cannot ch you can maybe tweak it a little bit but you can't change it right where in D and D you can be like I'm gonna be a mage but I'm gonna take a wizard but I'm going to take a couple levels of fighter and a level of artificer and then go back like you can start kit bashing almost what you are going to build and the kind of possibility space that allows like you look at the update for um 2024 D&D they changed a pretty simple

wording which is you're only allowed to cast one leveled spell per turn. They just they clarified that where before it was they had some exceptions. So like you'd get wizards taking two levels of fighter for action surge because action surge gave you another action that was you could theoretically cast a spell even though that probably wasn't the intent of it. Right? So the most powerful wizards actually had two levels of fighter just so that once a short rest they could double cast a spell in a way nobody else could. Right? And so that's the kind of thing where when you're designing pen and paper and you want to give versatility, it's harder to do rules breaking because players start to optimize against it. where with a computer game that's very defined and doesn't give you that same flexibility, they can go in much more and say characters are partially at least defined by the way in which they interact with the game's rules and memorably change one of them to help form an identity. Yeah. Um I think it it

is worth noting that that sort of example brings up this this um there is a real possibility and there is a real downside to this which is when you break the the bounding box right the box around things that are allowed in the game and you start making carveouts. Sometimes you carve out too far. Sometimes you remove too many boundaries and things go poorly, right? And and that is that is a potential downside of this and I think we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it. Um yeah, and one of the advantages again of a computer game on this is if you do that in a pen and paper game, it's hard to patch, right? In the same way that you get something like League that every two or three weeks puts out a patch, you're like, "Oh, here's our current state. We we do balance every single patch because we have so many characters and so many items, etc., and the meta shifts that we need to be in a constant state of making sure that the game feels right. Yeah, exactly. Uh, Magic is sort of notorious for not being able to go back on this,

right? The Power Nunch breaks so many rules. So, the power nine, for those unfamiliar, are nine cards from the original um alpha beta unlimited versions of Magic, which are hideously completely unbalanced. They include one mana, draw three cards, recall. It's also a recall. Let's see if I can name them as you go. Uh, take an extra turn for two mana. Time walk. Uh, an extra turn. A whole extra turn, right? You you get to untap and upkeep and draw and do all the and have a second combat and do all the things. Um generate uh three additional mana for the cost of playing an artifact and sacrificing it. Well, zero cost artifact. Zero cost artifact. Black Lotus. The five uh I can get one colorless mana every or one color of mana every turn as a zero drop artifact that makes me break the one land per rule ability. So the five Moxes, right? Okay. So I've got Moxes, Timewalk. Oh,

and uh I'm missing Twister, which is Yeah, Time Twister. Yeah, I uh you know how I I it's late in the game and I've put all of my cards in the graveyard and I don't have anything left in my deck. What if I just shuffled it all back together and drew seven cards? Yeah. Notice that pretty much all those were the were either artifacts or blue colored cards because blue was their I manipulate things. Yeah. Um and counter or Yeah. magic manipulation, right? And turns out balancing magic manipulation was a little harder than they thought. Yeah. And so they're stuck with it, right? They're stuck. There is an entire format. There's one complete format where you can play the Power N. And it's vintage. That's it. The only place. It used to be called unlimited. It's now called vintage. Yeah. It's it's called vintage. Um and and that's it. That's the only place. Uh because in every other format they're banned because they're too powerful. Right. And if you are playing in vintage and you don't have those, you are at a severe disadvantage. Correct. The the other the other uh asterisk note is that um

instead of buying a complete set of genuine power nine to put in your vintage deck, uh you can buy a house. I'm not kidding. In some places, yeah, in in some places you can just buy a house instead of buying the power n. It's a little ridiculous. Um, and that, by the way, is because the cards are so old and they were printed in a limited quantity because they stopped printing these, right, 30 years ago, ago, or roughly. Yeah. Um, the other one that Magic has uh failed to live down is fetchlands. Turns out the um I need to put lands in my deck part of Magic is important and fetchlands let you break that. And Fetchlands also let you break the I can only have one land enter the battlefield per turn thing. And they also break the I need to have lands that generate I need to have a suite of lands that generate the correct colors of mana to cast my spells thing because fetchlands go oh this land is all of the cards I could possibly need it to be at

any given time so I always have the best one when I play it. Hideous design mistake. Uh and modern is run by fetch lands um because they they can't walk it back right and those put a land tax on those. Yeah. Um, that's sort of a big example is that right there is a fine line here and there's one more I'll talk about one more magic card then we'll move on to others that that sort of does that. It's called Corey Steel Cutter and if you've played Magic recently you you've played against it. It's a two-minute artifact and every time you play your second spell every turn you get a free monk token that gets bigger for every spell non-creature spell you play. Mhm. And the amount of free value that you get might be a little rule break, right? The the little rule break is I just get free tokens for playing things, right? Normally you have to do an effect that causes a token to happen. Incidental

free tokens are usually pretty rare. Um, and it might be super broken, but it might not be. I'm glad they took this shot, but it looks like it's too powerful and is probably going to get banned in at least one format. And so that's kind of that is sort of the um the get key points or any other fun thing. No. Uh no, you don't. No, you just get it. Tokens don't get tokens that. Oh god. Well, thank you. No, thank goodness. No, it's hard enough to track prowess on a growing They have an ability called prowess. You have to track how many spells have been cast while each token exists. It's a nightmare for tracking. Yeah, because you get a increasingly large army of tokens and the horrible part is you can have multiple Corey steel cutters out that came out in different parts of the turn. So like it's a nightmare to get a whole little like go board or something to lay out and just start tracking. Correct. And so it it is it can become difficult to see when you break these conventions if you're too far outside

your guidelines. Right. Magic I think has it almost the hardest of anybody. It does because unlike League where it's like we can put out a champion every 3 or 4 months and it's good, Magic or their business model needs to put out a new set at this point every 3 or 4 months with hundreds of cards in it. Yeah. That they have to balance against not just their current set but almost every set that has been released in the past. Correct. And and the other additional problem that Magic is running into is that the new set will be played more during pre-release weekends. It's right before the pre-release for Final Fantasy. More Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering will be played this coming weekend than was played during all of the play testing when they were designing the set. Right. It we're running into the the the rule of 10. My rule of 10. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Which by the way, for having been a game designer that worked on very large MMOs and other things, one of the things that I discovered very early on and gave a

slang name to ingest that stuck was the rule of 10 testing rule, which is if you have 10 players in, they're going to find a certain amount of things that your team did. And every time you add a zero that a whole new set of things get found. When you move to a 100 players, suddenly they find things that nobody in your group of 10 players found. Same with a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, a million. Just that many people playing your game, if it's a game with a lot of possibility space, will find things nobody ever thought of in the previous cohort. And it's just it is surprisingly true. And it's one of the reasons that it's really hard to test games like Magic or some other things is because they go even say they could do a big stress test internally. Say they could get a thousand people to come test it. That's a lot of people. Watsi doesn't have a thousand people sitting around to test. But even if they could, when it goes out to 10,000, 100,000, a million,

10 million people playing it, new things are going to get discovered that nobody could, even in that super large test group of a thousand. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons you see a lot of online games during beta beta test weekends where they'll come in and try and cram as many people as they can. One thing they're trying to do is stress test. Do our servers, networking code, etc. stand up to this? The other thing they're testing is what are the players finding and breaking that nobody before them thought of? Right. Is there because Okay. Because can we fix it before we release? Yeah. like the um I guess and and this sort of brings up like the the idea that you broke the rules in too many places too close to each other and they accidentally overlap and that's where like you get into like major problems with um with particularly competitive games, right? You're like, "Oh, we didn't think about the interaction between those two." Oops.

Mhm. Right. And that's where it becomes that's another place where big player test and the rule of tens comes into play and to help you crank back the yeah amount of fraction. And that's one of the reasons that especially for online competitive games they are so aggressive about patching even like midcycle like I have seen league plenty of times do a you log on like that's weird they patched two days ago. Why is there another small patch? And you'll see a little notes like the interaction between so and so and so and so proved to be a little stronger than we thought. We've scaled this back or even once we have disabled this champion while we decide what to do like Yep. And you just have to do that because players in online games are competitive and if there is a thing that obviously works better than other things, people are going to do it. Yeah. They just they're going to even if the game game designers don't get to go that's not how the game was designed. If

it's in the game and players can do it, they're going to do it. Right. Exactly. Um so we've talked about a lot of places where this does happen. Let's talk about the places that it's less likely to happen and why real quick. Oh, real quick. Um, one more 4X games pretty like Civilization and others like that because again like MOBAs, sorry, like rogikes and other things, they expect you to play a whole bunch of times and they want to feel a little different. Like civilization will give you both a leader and a civilization um that both have benefits and the combination of the two and I say leader and civilization because for example, as they start putting out more leaders, you might have three leaders from Rome. So there'd be the here's the Rome bonus, here's the Caesar bonus versus the so and so, you know, bonus. But and they're fairly good at saying this civilization leader combo breaks the rules in a little bit to make, you know, Rome feel

different than the Greeks, than the Babylonians, than the Americans, right? And that's again that's fun. And again, those go through a lot of those are easier in some cases to balance because they're not looking at 150 league champions. And the way they tend to break it is lower. Not always. Yeah. Like there's a um there's a group there's a civ in Civ 6 that starts out without a city or a settler to make a city. They start in the ocean. They um Yeah. And basically they go land and found, but they don't start on land like near a good spot. They're in the ocean. That's really cool. That like And I think that that moment, right? That moment that I just went through is the point of designing in this way and why it's so cool, right? Because you're like, wait, you can't. But they did. And it's it's interesting and weird. I trust Thunder to know the the Mauy. Okay,

that's really cool. Yeah, that's really neat. That's a really interesting way to break a rule, right? Every civilization for as long as I've played Civilization started with a settler and to not do that is really interesting, right? Or like um the um Hold on. Who did Hannibal invade against? Uh the theian the Carthaginians. Carthaginians. The Carthaginians in Civ was from Anyway, don't worry. I mean, sorry. Um yeah, there. Thank you. um can relocate their capital where every other civilization usually when the city you found is almost always your capital. Yeah. Like they can be mid game like hey we're moving it. Yeah. Like finding things like that again are interesting. Actually will I have my cat doing a weird thing. Give me a second. I will I will take this opportunity to answer a question. Uh is civ roguish? No. We went through a very long discussion when I started the Rogue Review years ago about what was and was not roguish. There are

specific carveouts for 4X games and battle royale that they explicitly are not rogues despite the fact that they share many commonalities with other roguish games. Chat, what's your favorite way that uh rules get broken? And if you're watching this on the YouTube bot, what's your what's your favorite weird design break in any game you've played, right? Whether it's a character in a moa, a card in a card game, um you know, your favorite Overwatch hero, a map, a scenario, a D and D character. What's your favorite way that something breaks? Um I would be very interested to hear about those cuz we've been talking about this idea for a while, Jeff and I, like behind the scenes. Uh, and I'm very interested to hear what what you all what you all think about that. Um, okay cool Jeff, we have settled we have settled an age-old discussion. Civ is not roguish. What is sorry what is not what civilization not a rog like

we carved out for when when I started doing rogue review um we carved we made carveouts specifically for battle royals and 4X games because they were large enough groups of things that shared common elements with roguish games but were different enough to not warrant being part of the same group. Yeah. If I was in my old classification days, I would say a lot of Forex's have elements of rogue games in the same way that a lot of other games, like you could say, have RPG elements. Yep. Oh, I love I love this one. I'm I'm all about this. Um uh Bob says, "I love when roles get broken. For example, here that it heals through doing damage." 14 has one of those. It's called Sage. It zaps people with lasers, and zapping people with lasers heals somebody. It's great. Um, my old necromancer that I designed in EverQuest was a con I designed them as a conduit. It's like they had spells that would damage themselves, including as a mage that thing that no other mage

got the ability to heal another character by damaging themsel, but they also had a lot of life tappy kind of spells. Yeah. So, they would be like sucking damaging an opponent, sucking life into themsel, passing it along to somebody else and kind of moving life force back and forth, which was fun. Yeah. But even like back in my old thing for that, like the way we did class design was we tried to find certain things that were unique to classes and other things that the class did better but weren't unique. Yes. Like our clerics had the most mana efficient healing or a straight heal, but that didn't mean other classes couldn't heal or heal better in different ways, right? Right? Like our druids and shamans had better hots, heals over time, like regeneration effects that were more efficient but didn't heal you as quickly. So you start doing the trade-offs. MMO balance in that regard is so fishly difficult. Um

so we've talked about two reasons to break rules. One of them is to provide identity and the other one is to provide power, right? And balancing both of those against other examples of things that are like that but are not that is so difficult, right? Uh it is like the four healer. There are four healers in Final Fantasy 14 and they all do amazingly roughly the same amount of damage and in uh any shield healer and any pure healer and there are four valid combinations of those um can accomplish all of the healing needed to beat any content in the game, which is a wild balancing feat. And then you get into the fact that there are 19 DPS jobs, 20 20 DPS, many DPS jobs, and that they all uh exist in a spectrum of advantages and disadvantages and rule breaking and balancing so that you can make parties that will clear content, right? And actually, we should probably define here what we're talking more about for this

is actually specialization versus rule breaking. That's true. Yeah, there are some games like hero shooters that are like you can't normally walk on walls unless you're this character. Like that's a rule break where my healing is more efficient and your dots are more efficient is a specialization. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um we'll break basically it's kind of I would say it's on a spectrum like the highest part is breaking rule where a lower part is specialized and most games do specialization not many games do the convention rule breaking. Yeah. There's a which is a good transition into games that just don't right. Yeah. And and there are plenty of reasons not to right. We've talked about some of them. Right. There are chances that if you screw this up, everything becomes hideously unplayably broken. Um or hideously unbalancedly broke unb broken, right? Like those are those are real possibilities that exist. Or destroy the

kind of game that you're looking to make. Yes. Let me throw out a good example. Sports games. When people go in to play a sports game, say you're going to go play Madden and you're like, I'm going to pick the Raiders to play or I'm going to pick the Chargers. You're not expecting the Raiders to have a game-breaking ability that is different than the Chargers. You might have players that are better, but you're not expecting when you're going to play your football game that one of the teams or one of the players is going to have equivalently something that breaks the rules of how football works, right? Or baseball or tennis or basketball or archery or horseback. Like none of the sports style things. The whole point of a sports game is it is a level playing field with a known set of rules and you are then playing that with, you know, your characters might have stats like in some sports games or they might not like in others, but you're playing according to a base set of rules and everybody is starting on a level playing field. Yes.

Yeah. And and even uh I'm thinking about it a lot because I'm I've been thinking about Mario Kart because the Switch 2 just released, right? Mario Kart characters aren't generally rule breakers, right? They have stats, they have specializations, but the weird broken parts of Mario Kart are always in the item boxes, right? Which is kind of the interesting point of it. It isn't I want to prince pick Princess Peach because she always gets to do X. Correct. Yeah. We're not talking about Double Dash, chat. We're not We're not We're not doing that. I could do an entire two hours on Double I will get You keep this up. I will go get my GameCube and we'll play Double Dash someday. Um right. Um, fighting games aren't really Oh, yeah. Fighting games. Oh, not really known for this. Again, hold on. Let's hold on. Tournament style fighting games. This isn't like Streets of Rage or Golden Act. This is Street Fighter and Tekken and Right. They don't stuff like that, right? They have characters that are specialized, but they all generally fall into the same category or characters get

banned out, right? You can tell if a character's broken a rule because they generally get banned pretty fast because the minor advantages that characters can get from breaking a rule too hard really add up in the hands of extremely skilled fighting game players. Um so they're they're generally not. There is one exception uh which I wanted to bring up because I think it's absolutely fascinating. Mhm. The anime One Punch Man, the core conceit of this is that the hero Saitama Wait, wait. So they have a fighting game for Yes, there's a fighting game for One Punch Man. Tell me more. Okay. Right. Okay. So, Saitama, the whole conceit of the anime is that he defeats everything in one blow. And the way that they balance this fascinating is that it's a three character versus three character um team battler fighting game. So, you can swap characters in and out. If you choose the One Punch Man, you don't fight with three characters. You fight with two. And your victory condition is

now no longer to knock out all three of your opponent's characters. It's to survive until One Punch Man shows up and lets you win instantly. So that is that is like that deserves calling out because that's a huge rule break. That's an absolutely massive like shattering. They almost have to for the IP they're working on, right? Yeah. In the Street Fighter IP, there is not a character who's like, I am undefeable and if I hit you, you will just fall. Correct. Yeah, it's um Yeah, it is it is a uh and and Chad is correctly pointing out that there's like ludo narrative harmony here with this that like uh his play matches the story cuz Mo's arcs end the moment he shows up. Correct. And he's disappointed about it too cuz he really wants someone to get in a good fight with. Right. And it's but that is an example of how you could break it in a fighting game in a way that's interesting, right? Because it becomes difficult to sort of lose a

battle of attrition slowly enough to win that way, right? Um so that's that's but by and large not because it's the exception. Yeah, it it's a big exception, but mostly right uh Tekken, um the Street Fighter, Soulcalibur, Guilty Gear, yeah, all of those. They generally Yeah. the the bounding box around what is acceptable for a character to have and do is pretty locked, right? It's not as loosey goosey. The game is more about punch counter, count, etc. It's not about each of these 14 characters you pick does a weird thing in the fighting like that just isn't in the same way that that isn't what the games are about cuz I think the core fantasy of a fighting game is in many ways follow me down this rabbit hole chat the same as the core fantasy of becoming an excellent chess player especially if you're playing on a tight clock

it is to outthink your opponent at speed, right? It is to develop reflexes and quick neural pathways that let you genuinely be a better player with a known tool set at speed than your opponent. Right? It's not just about winning because I have an I win button, right? That's not interesting. That's not demonstrating skill. I've never seen a community that is more dedicated to cultivating personal skill and like that level of quick interaction than fighting games. Right? You can watch any fighting game documentary uh to to kind of see what I'm talking about there. But I think that that's that's that's why they don't do it in those places, right? Just like we you don't have a superpower when you're playing the Miami Dolphins in a sports game because then you're not really playing the Miami Dolphins, are you? Right? You're playing something else. You're not getting to participate in the fantasy of being the coach of the Dolphins, which is what the what that's about. And there are variants like I if

they made a Space Jam basketball game, I guarantee you it would be about it would involve rule breaking. Yes. Because happier characters are Looney Tunes characters and Looney Tunes characters break all sorts of rules of physics and other things purely by their IP. Yes. In the same way that One Punch Man wins fights by showing up. So it's not saying like a sports game couldn't. It's just most players fantasy of playing a sports game. involves the involves things that don't involve global rule breaking on a per character or team basis. Absolutely. Yeah. Mario Mario Sports and Madden Sports, different sports. Um I think this is a a good place. That's a pretty good swing. Like, but again, it was just playing getting into Monster Train 2 and watching how much they'd upped their mechanics of we're going to break conventions cleanly and make it feel good. And actually, not

just break them, build sets around them. Dragons building sets around gold. The angels building sets around basically movement, right? the the um the next clan, the one that we didn't show, uh has um a moon mechanic where every turn the moon is either full or new. And there's a whole additional even odd turn thing that you need to care about and you manipulate the moon phase to like do additional things. That's a whole other mechanic that only that group participates in. Nobody else needs to care whether it's an even turn or an odd turn. But the Luna clan, they don't even get shown unless you happen to have a moon unit with you. Correct. The Luna clan really cares about even in odd turns. Cares, right? So yeah, I I think this is an excellent place to wrap up our discussion. So YouTube, the your your assignment for the comments below. What is your favorite way that a game has broken its own conventions to make the game better? Whether it's a Magic card um its own conventions or genre

conventions. Yeah. In there, right? What is it and why? Uh say more in the comments below. uh chat, thank you so much for joining us. Next week, we're going to tell I think we're going to tell them what we're going to talk about next week. Oo, let's do it. Next week, we're going to talk about the Switch 2 launch. We're going to talk about why uh people are upset. We're going to talk about the packaging failures cuz it's it hasn't even been out for a whole day and I'm already hearing about the packaging failures. Um we're going to talk about how it went, what our initial thoughts of the Switch 2 are. I'll have one in my hands when we do it. So, that is our topic for next week. So, please join us for that. Until then, please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other. And we'll see you all next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. See you [Music] everybody. But it was all a lie because we were back. Haha. And better than ever. Yeah, I thought that was good.

Yeah, there's a lot to get through. There's that's one of those ones where we could theoretically ramble for 15 hours. Yeah, correct. Or for 20 minutes. Like I was can go broad wide. I was I I had I was like burning my eyes into my uh recording clock to be like, "All right, like an hour and a half, like 90 minutes is probably long enough." Um Oopsie wants us to do a double dash design club. Listen, we're gonna I don't know. Like there there are only God, it's so weird because like I'm gonna upset some people. There are like four real Mario Karts. There are a bunch of spin-off Mario Karts that were like there are real Mario Karts, but there are four major Mario Karts. 64, Double Dash, um, uh, eight, and now World, right? And it's so weird because I guarantee you I could find someone to defend to the death that any individual one of those is the best and

authoritative Mario Kart and all others are imitators based solely on the things about that Mario Kart that they liked. It's it is it is one of the most fascinating franchises for that. Right. Yeah. See, exactly. There we go. Thunder 64 is the best. Right. And now someone will arise and say Double Dash is the best. Uh DS and Wii fans would like to know my location. Uh that's classified uh because they're wrong. Um it will as long as we're telling secret things since well I guess next week's topic isn't really a secret. Yeah, next week's topic isn't really a secret, but we are definitely going to um we I kind of want to tease that we're going to tell them about something later. Oh, I I was just going to tell them that we're going to do a thing at some point soon. Yeah, it's at some point. This is probably a different thing than you're thinking of. Okay. What are you thinking? Art. Yeah. No, I was thinking of art. I was thinking Okay. So, it's mentioning to you because of course

you're our best friends and nobody here is going to say anything. And even if you do, it's okay. We did a Kickstarter last year. We did a Kickstarter for our history calendar. It did pretty well. We moved a lot of calendars. We had a lot of people that were pretty happy and we had a good time doing it and we're doing it again this year. It's not announced yet, but it's also not a big secret that hey, we might do another history calendar Kickstarter. Like, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's not going to break anybody's brain that we're doing that. Last year, Will found a really, really cool thing that we could give him a picture and he could have it broken up to become a puzzle. And there was an app where through your browser you could go and we could collaborate jointly on putting a puzzle together and he then basically could put do a time lapse of it. the time lapses when we put them on like in the Kickstarter like updates page were so

popular that this year I think for um Twitch and YouTube actually we can do both right this time yeah we we can do both cuz it's just a link right so so Janet you'll be able to join in so for Twitch and YouTube before we even launch the Kickstarter we're going to show a couple of art pieces here for the first time and we're going to do puzzles of them or Actually, we'll start a puzzle and reveal the picture through puzzle. Correct. And we'll then use those time lapses of us doing the puzzle to help promote the calendar when we do it because they just look cool. Yeah. And also, it's kind of fun to show off what we've been working on for the past four months of art. Yeah. Of some of these pieces. Some of these new pieces are um really good. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I I'm going to I'm going to tell you about things that I'm not going to tell you about cuz Jeff told you about something and actually told you. I'm gonna tell you about stuff that you're not going to tell you about and then we're gonna be done for today. So, the first thing that I'm not going to tell you about is that next Friday or Saturday, we don't know which one yet. Oh, yeah. This is a good

one, right? And I'm I'm going to do this in the broadest way possible. Matt and I are going to do an interview of a couple of people about something really cool that you're not going to want to miss. That's all you aren't going to see coming. Yeah, you won't see it coming. It's completely out of left field. Uh we have not mentioned anything about this anywhere. It's a total surprise. Even the mods don't know exactly what it is. Um so please look forward to it. That'll be a thing. Uh in addition, in a couple of weeks, we're going to have some very special guests that you might be familiar with on for breakfast and design club to do some really cool um work uh that you actually we can say where they're from, too. Like this one I don't think has to be surprised. Um we're going to we're going to have some friends from CSM Children's Hospital on. We've done um work with them in the past. Uh and we're going to need your help to help design on a brainstorming project. Yeah, it's it's going to be great. So it will help sick kids. Yeah, it's it's going to be great.

Yes, that's right. Sean totally got it. That's 100% it. Sean, you're a genius. How could How could you possibly have guessed that Will and Matt would interview Hatsune Miku? That's it. Game's over. Everybody go home. Sean got it. We're interviewing Hatsune Miku. I hope you now know that that's going to be the joke forever. I hope you now know that I that's my favorite way to respond to that. So now anytime we're doing something secret, it's going to be So Matt and I have to interview Hatsune Miku next week, just so you know. And you all can blame Sean every time it happens. So, uh, that's going to do it for our our stream today. Um, yes, Richard. Uh, Janet, we will be back on Monday. Please join us for breakfast on Monday. Matt and I are fingers, toes, everything all crossed, both getting Switch twos in the next 24 to 48 hours. That is the goal. And we will hopefully be able to give you our first thoughts, talk a bit about the launch from like a news perspective

rather than like a design perspective. We're going to talk about that on breakfast. Uh so please join us for that. Tomorrow here on the channel, there will be a free play day. Chat is currently voting in the Discord on what I play. Currently, Final Fantasy 14 is winning, but it could be anything. So please join us for that. And Janet, we will see you all Monday. Everybody say bye Janet.