TUTORIALS!: Seven Deadly TCG Sins Errata Text

so your game is done it's all ready to go you've gotten it written and proofread the art is perfection just absolute perfection the test prints are ready to go your Kickstarter is all put together and you're ready to get it out there now then what is the most important thing that people should know about your game how how to play it hello and welcome to erratatext the sequel series to the seven deadly Trading Card Game sins that looks at the various features of game design one of the things that tends to make or break a game aside from its visual presentation is how easy it is to grasp the rules probably the most common thing I do in my consultation level patreons just a hundred dollars a month and you get me for the entire month and you can even get Discord access for as little as one dollar per month on the link in the description below is going over the rulebooks straightening them out and making them easier to understand I have also done a few videos on the subject of rule books but I feel it's worth repeating here like I've said time and time again you write your rules in the order that the players need them when they first open the box starting with the win condition winning the game is chronologically the last thing that happens but needs to be the first thing you explain as it is the axle around which all of the other rules turn otherwise people will wonder why you should be stockpiling sheep or something by knowing what they are working towards they can then understand how these mechanics lead them there after this are introductions Box contents card diagrams lore and how to set up to play specifically with what each player should have for a game some games mess with this order putting these introductions before the win condition which actually is fine but the win condition should never be placed after any of the actual play rules following this comes the flow of an average turn often in a quick diagram like a table of contents that mention the page where the finer details are many of these steps can be easily broken down but for more complex interactions those should get their own section deeper into the book finally a section addressing common points of confusion keywords and other scattered details to smooth out the wrinkles of the learning process and on the back cover of breakdown of the turn sequence and various important tables that players can easily consult while still learning a games rulebook can vary in its complexity some are long others are short some fit on one page and still more get printed on the back of the play mat you should never do this by the way and I mean never do this because the moment any player needs to consult the rules what am I supposed to do with this part I don't know let me check the rules oops yeah I've shown solutions to this problem plenty of times but I guess it's worth repeating you want a separate rule book so that it and the mat can work in tandem to teach your game but if you like suffer some odd mental compulsion that forces you to print the rules on the back of the match then either put a two-player mat into your one player decks so that you can have one for play and one to read or just pack in two mats for the same effect probably the most Occam's Razer solution there is but as is the case with rule books a lot of times it's just figuring out how to parse them out explain things in ways that are concrete and easy to understand and fix up typos but rule books aren't always your best teaching tool not everybody can easily pick up on how a game is supposed to be played by simply thumbing through a wall of text many need to see the game in action in order to get it and that is where the tutorial comes into play tutorials for games come in many forms books Comics movies video games phone apps and they all tend to vary in quality some are great some are okay others are and still more are yeah anyway the point of a tutorial is to teach the game by having a game play out to demonstrate how the rules are supposed to work it can also include breakdowns of cards and components but the vast majority of them are focused on actual gameplay of course thanks to the Advent of the internet we have a huge variety of ways to teach a game from written narratives to video demonstrations to even companion apps if you have the Hotspot of course direct consultation where you can teach the person by hand is probably the best since you will always have all the answers but it's impossible to be everywhere at once so you do sometimes have to come up with a decent alternative in the form of a tutorial and in fact I have a crazy idea how about we do my video about tutorials with a tutorial so here we go it's kodak's step-by-step guide to playing the Pokemon [Applause] hey boys and girls it's time to learn how to play the Pokemon Trading Card Game do you think you're ready to be the very best yes all righty then let's break open that Battle Academy box and get playing set up the board take out the rules and grab those decks player one you take the red box and player two you take the uh okay they're taking the third hidden Eevee box that's already going off script and they're modifying the deck I mean I guess that's okay kinda rude to do it right before a game but as long as your deck is exactly 60 cards with no more than four cards of the same name then you're probably okay except for Basic Energy you can have as many of those as you want now normally we Shuffle our decks before we play but thanks to the miracle of science this specially built teaching deck is already shuffled for you let's get started draw seven cards from the top of your deck next place sizzly peed in the active Pokemon spot wait what okay I feel like this tutorial has gotten a little ahead of itself don't you think I mean why should I draw seven cards and why am I putting Sicily Pete on the active spot and just what is an active spot anyway well it seems like we've already fallen into a common tutorial trap probably the most common mistake that developers make when creating a turn-by-turn playthrough tutorial like this is when it tells the player what moves to make but doesn't actually take the chance to explain the rules here's another example I can think of for doing this wrong with these surprisingly monstrous learn the rules in one dang turn from aeg's version of Doom Town play Bad Company choosing The Wanted Lawrence Blackwood suddenly with a bonus from Bad Company Blackwood is now a four stud higher than anything the law dogs can muster oh that sounds terrible what's a stud Lawrence is booted so he can't do much else this turn since you already played all the cards you wanted to play this turn might as well pass okay but seriously what's a stud play silence aims from your hand he enters play at your home yeah that's great no but could somebody please tell me what a stud is this problem goes throughout the whole book and it's a common error I see with these kinds of tutorials the book tells the players what to do on their turns but not why they fail to elaborate on what is actually happening this isn't an education this is a a rehearsal it's a script that we are following as written Without Really developing a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics playing this tutorial really did not make me any more confident in playing a game of Doom town oh and by the way in Doom Town things like fights are determined using poker hands where each player draws a hand to Poker to try to get a better hand than their opponent and each stud you have in that tussle allows you to draw an extra card into that poker hand not that hard to explain that was it Lawrence Blackwood is now a four stud meaning he's got the Firepower of four Dudes and his player gets to draw an extra card when drawing a shooting hand but this brings me to my first point if you're going the route of teaching a game by simulating a match in progress you should treat each turn as a chance to teach a lesson as play goes back and forth each turn taken should focus on how a certain card or mechanic is meant to work for example if we're teaching someone how to play Magic the Gathering the first turn should explain how to play land cards the second player's first turn should also have them play a land card then show how to use said land cards to play spells then battling Etc giving a solid explanation of each action as time goes on an example that does a good if rushed job is the hunting tutorial which you can catch now on YouTube or through my Huntik Mega it's pretty solid aside from some voice acting decisions look I have chosen your mission at random from the mission cards in your action and your goal is to retrieve the Ringo [Music] yeah yeah that that was a choice but of note is that in pretty much every action the characters make they introduce a new card type or mechanic and explain how they work on the downside though it does get a bit dry seeing both characters sort of take turns explaining the rules like they were reading out of a book still it is absolutely a good example of writing a tutorial now with this in mind let's rejoin our Pokemon tutorial to start a game of Pokemon both players draw a hand of seven cards next we check our hands for any Basic Pokemon you can tell if a Pokemon is a basic Pokemon by finding the word basic in the top left corner if a Pokemon does not have the word basic up there you cannot put it into play you must start the game with one Basic Pokemon in your active spot and up to five more on your bench if at any time you cannot put a Pokemon into your active spot you lose the game if your starting hand doesn't have any Basic Pokemon come on in it reveal it to your opponent Shuffle it into your deck and draw a fresh hand of seven cards until you get a hand with a basic Pokemon in it your opponent gets to draw an extra card from their deck for the weight for now let's put sizzly Pete on the active spot and score bunny on the bench at the start of the game we place these cards face down until the first turn and flip them face up when the game begins next we deal our prize cards these are the cards you get to take when you knock out an opponent's Pokemon first player to take all of their prize cards is the winner normally you deal six prize cards but for this tutorial we are going to deal just four no peeking and who goes first let's flip a coin I'm gonna call heads it's heads we get to go first at the start of our turn we draw one card from the top of Our Deck hmm not much we can do with this hand just yet might as well attach an energy card to attach an energy card to a Pokemon place it underneath the Pokemon card you may attach an energy card from your hand to any active or benched Pokemon you have in play but only once per turn hold up the way I wrote this is a little confusing isn't it what does this sentence mean does this mean I get to play only one energy card per turn or am I allowed to attach one energy from my hands to each Pokemon I have in play this is an example of another common Pitfall and definitely the thing I fix most often in my consultations is poorly written text this is more of a language thing than the mechanical thing and it tends to creep up on you because people who are familiar with the game have been working on the development who've been play testing it for a while a lot of that stuff kinda comes second nature to them so the text doesn't strike them as strange this is why it's important to make sure that you occasionally get fresh eyes on your rules so people can tell you when something seems unclear or confusing I know I get pretty obnoxious about that unclear rules text is the worst enemy of learning to play leaving out information like not explaining what a stud does is also an example of poorly parsed rules let's fix this to make it more clear you may only play one energy card from your hand each turn but you may attach that energy to any Pokemon you have in play whether they're in the active spot or on the bench there that's easier to understand part of this comes from the fact that we move the location of the Restriction from the rear of the sentence to the front making it the subject of the sentence that defines itself before going anywhere else anyway let's resume these energy cards are needed to let a Pokemon attack a Pokemon says what attacks it can do on the bottom half of the card to the left of each attack is its energy cost for each of these little circles you must have a matching energy card attached to the Pokemon like sizzly Pete's naw attack which needs one fire energy the symbols of the energy have to match the symbols and the cost except for these white stars those can be matched to any type of energy unfortunately even though we have enough energy to attack the player who goes first can't attack on their first turn we have nothing else to do so let's pass the turn to our opponent okay they start their turn by drawing a card and they're going to attach an energy this time to the spinarak on their bench you see that the first turn taught a lesson and the second one reinforced it before quickly moving on oh but it looks like they're not done yet ah they're playing a trainer card a trainer card is a special card that lets you do something on your turn to use one you simply play it from your hand perform the effect mentioned and then send it to your discard Pile in this case they're playing the supporter card hop whose effect lets them draw three additional cards once this is done hop is sent to the discard pile oh they're playing even more this time it's an item card the card great ball this lets them check the top seven cards of their deck for a Pokemon card something to note when a Hart says to search your deck for a specific type of card you have to show it to your opponent to prove that you did it right looks like my opponent has another trainer card to play this time it's the item poke gear 3.0 it works like great ball but instead it lets you look for a supporter card they are getting the supporter card peers now as much as they'd like to use Piers right now they cannot as even though you can play as many item trainer cards as you like on your turn you can only play one supporter card and they already played hop so if they want to play Piers they have to wait until next turn so at this point it looks like their turn is over that makes it our turn again let's draw oh hey it's bug catcher a supporter card we know how he works so let's play him to draw two cards and look at that it's some more Pokemon we've got the Basic Pokemon Vulpix and the evolution card raboot but bug catcher gives us a coin flip effect when a card asks for this simply flip a coin in the case of heads when we get to perform an additional effect oh man Tails since Vulpix is a basic Pokemon we can put it onto our bench directly from our hand but what about these stage one cards unlike Basic Pokemon these cannot be played straight onto the bench instead they get placed on top of the Pokemon they come from in what is known as Evolution how do you know which Evolution card goes on top of which Pokemon well on the top left where basic would usually go it names what Pokemon that it evolves from complete with a helpful little picture next to it so you can be sure to evolve a Pokemon simply place the proper Evolution card on top of it in this case we'll evolve score bunny into raboot the raboot card essentially replaces the score bunny card with a new hit point total and new attacks now as much as I'd love to I cannot evolve Vulpix into its Evolution nine tails just yet the thing is you can't evolve a Pokemon the turn it gets played or if you've involved it once this turn already and since I just played Vulpix I can't evolve it until my next turn what I don't have to wait for anymore is attacking I'm going to attach another fire energy onto Sicily peed meaning I can use its Ember attack to do an attack the Pokemon in your active spot targets the Pokemon the opponent has in their active spot also known as the defending Pokemon it then deals the damage listed next to the attack to the defending Pokemon which is represented with damage counters each counter means 10 damage sizzly Pete's Ember attacked us 20 damage to the defending Zigzagoon so he put two damage counters onto Zigzagoon if a Pokemon ever has as much or more damage then its hit point score in the top right then it gets knocked out the energy that you used for the attack stays on the Pokemon that used it meaning that it's ready to attack again on your next turn attacking is the last thing you can do on your turn though so my turn is over and it looks like our opponent is going to have another busy turn as we guessed they're going to play the piers card pulling a Darkness energy and a goal bat with its effect they're then going to evolve the Zubat on their bench into Golbat and play the Basic Pokemon Darkrai onto their bench oh yeah it looks like these Pokemon cards have abilities an ability is a special effect that a Pokemon has that isn't an attack some have permanent effects like dark rise Darkness guard While others have to be activated like golbat's discrete draw this one's pretty straightforward when Golbat gets evolved the one who played it draws two more cards I'm starting to worry I'm a little out of my depth here and it looks like one of the cards that they drew was zigzagoon's Evolution linoon and just to keep things clear even though the evolved Pokemon basically replaces its old form any damage taken carries over looks like they're going to strike back by attaching an energy to lenune and attacking with rear kick for 30 damage uh-oh looks like my sizzly feeds in trouble so this turn I'm going to treat it by wait what is that really in the script why the heck would I do that I mean the card I drew this turn was its Evolution centers Scorch and with one more energy it can want this silly trash pandemon forget this I'm going off script say goodbye La noon okay I think you can see what happened here there's another important thing we need to keep in mind when making a believable tutorial the actions taken in the tutorial need to make sense this is another common misstep I see and it's usually in service to showcasing a mechanic even if it seems like the wrong choice to make this can have the disastrous effect of undermining the importance of the mechanic or breaking the flow of the tutorial a good example of this Believe It or Not comes from the actual tutorial from the Pokemon Academy box where both players spend a lot of time with a couple of really good Basic Pokemon in their hands and they have basically the same thing happen to teach the retreat mechanic that I just put my foot down on not doing I'm also reminded of a terrible melee combat tutorial I saw once on Warhammer kill team which didn't really do a good job of teaching the Perry mechanic because they had a character use it when the better choice was to just attack it's why I went out of my way to write my own fight sequence in my example the attacker took advantage of the initiative to deliver the guaranteed damage and the other parried the attacker's lone remaining die so they could counter-attack without remorse the Orcs players certainly had other options but swinging first and asking questions later is just the orky thing to do plus that flayed one is finished if another orc swings at him from any perspective the actions of both players were reasonable they made sense it's an important part of script writing the so-called suspension of disbelief if characters or events play out in a way that conflicts with the story's internal logic it tends to knock people out of the experience and a narrative driven gaming tutorial runs on the same logic not to say that you can't include a player making a mistake both the hunting video and the video for Hot Wheels acceleracers feature a misplay but the players who did them get called out for it either by the opponent taking advantage image of that mistake or insisting on correcting an illegal play still it's important that you make sure to clarify that this is a mistake so you're not teaching people the wrong way to play your game but do you know what isn't a mistake shopping from today's sponsor hey do you like my snazzy new Duds do you want to learn where to get your own this jersey came to us courtesy of today's sponsor fancustom.com fancustom.com is a website dedicated to making custom sports jerseys no cheap screen tone patterning here these jerseys are made from real Jersey material with stitched on patches featuring special lettering and even custom cut designs if you want get them for the office ball Club your local Little League team just for fun or my personal favorite idea get a matching set for the family vacation basic t-shirts can be as low as 20 jerseys start at 40 and if you use my special link and enter coupon code Kodak at checkout you can save 10 off your order thanks again fan Customs for supporting the channel so let's get back to the game in progress when a Pokemon takes more damage then it has hit points it is knocked out it and all cards attached to it such as previous evolutions and energy cards get sent straight to the discard pile the player who knocked out the Pokemon gets to draw one of their prize cards which again they win if they draw all of them the opponent then gets to choose one of their benched Pokemon to move into the active spot again if you are ever unable to do this you lose the game they're choosing spinner rack that has less than 100 hit points I wonder if they're up to something it looks like they are they are going to evolve spinarak into ariados ariados has an ability that when it gets evolved can make the opponent switch their Pokemon with an evolved Pokemon on their bench and they're going to choose raboot kicking my powered up sentence Scorch to the bench not a bad play as it's not easy to get sent to Scorch back in with another energy attached to ariados it can perform poison sting an attack that deals 30 damage and poisons the target poison is one of five status conditions in this case represented by a green skull token which I just noticed we don't have in the academy box so there there are five conditions poison and burn which are represented by tokens and sleep paralysis and confusion which are represented by turning the card a certain direction now the poison effect is a nasty one any Pokemon that is poisoned takes 10 damage in between turns including between this one so brabu takes an additional 10 damage this is bad between the accumulated poison damage and another poison sting raboot has only one turn to live if I don't do something so yes now we will learn about retreating in order to retreat a Pokemon that's in trouble you have to pay the Pokemon's Retreat cost that is discard that amount of energy from it which like attacks can be paid for with anything rabout has a retreat cost of one energy and at the moment Zero Energy attached huh really makes me wish I had drawn the card switch that card lets me swap my Pokemon for free so for my turn I guess I'll attach an energy to rabout then immediately take it off to pay the retreat cost retreating a Pokemon switches its position with a Pokemon on the bench in this case I think my choice is obvious an added bonus to moving a Pokemon back to the bench is that it removes all special conditions and other effects so rabbit's poison goes away too hey see that managed to work in the mechanic and even add a bonus detail in the process something nice about rubbing the game's pieces together is that sometimes things just sort of fall into place like with riding a good play it's not at all a bad idea to start from the finish line and work backwards to show off what you want to happen where were you last turn I'm starved for energy still no reason not to knock out ariados sentis Gorge has taken a lot of damage but it managed to get me two of my prize cards good work Buddy finally an energy card too late to attach it though and yes poison racks up between every turn well let's see what my opponent has for me now in comes Golbat he's adding an energy and oh no Crobat it does a hundred damage for just two energy and he gets to draw three more cards on top of that oh no Santa Scorch no oh man I don't have anything that can handle cro bat all I can do is hope nine tails can survive a turn and buy me some time my draw and oh good another energy card but I can't get nine tails ready fast enough oh it hurts my next draw and this doesn't help me well at least I can finally strike back at Crobat but it's not enough oh this is the worst not only am I nearly out of Pokemon but even if I do manage to take out Crobat his dark rye is almost ready to go and to make matters worse he's healing Crobat with a potion card I'm sorry nine tails I'm sorry so this is it then all I have left is a half dead rat boot with no energy even if I manage to heal it it just doesn't have the numbers to survive crobat's attack let alone the power to defeat it and even if I do defeat Crobat Darkrai is coming in and its attack does even more damage so even if I draw Basic Pokemon here I'll just be delaying the inevitable so here's something else that I frequently see left out of these sorts of tutorials regardless of the format and that's drama the game tutorial should tell a story one with twists and turns and make or break moments Thrills and chills to show how exciting your game can really get it goes back to what I mentioned before about the Huntik tutorial if the tutorial lacks any kind of like narrative Stakes or emotions it can come off as kind of dull or boring it's one of the things people forget about when Yu-Gi-Oh aired its first episode in the United States sure the episode itself would be a poor tool to teach the game with these days but it had loads of drama it had a clear narrative high stakes twists and turns good guys and bad guys and the entire thing came down to one fateful draw draw your last pathetic card so I can end this Kodak well here goes [Music] yes this is it it's exactly what I needed the supporter card professors research this lets me draw a fresh hand of seven cards of course I have to discard my current hand in order to use it so I should use this potion on my rabbit first and now let's do it come on come on come on come on come on come on yes there it is for my first move I'll be evolving rabbit into its final form cinderace wow its attack is strong enough to take out crowban in a single shot but it needs two energy hold up I have another way I'm going to use a Pokemon tool card a Pokemon tool is a special item card that stays in play attached to a Pokemon and grants them a new ability or in the case of single strike Scroll of scorn a new attack yeah you've probably been wondering about this single strike tag up in the top right corner this is a bonus attribute something that really only matters when other cards bring it up such as single strike Scroll of scorn The Scroll of scorns attack only needs one energy to work but that energy is a fighting energy and isn't this a fire deck well thanks to the fact that cinderace is a single strike Pokemon I can attach a single strike energy to it single strike energy is a special energy card which is similar to a Basic Energy card but like Pokemon and trainer cards you can only have four copies of any special energy card in your deck look at me still teaching lessons in A Moment Like This since cinderace is a single strike Pokemon I can attach the single strike energy whose special effect is that it acts as either a fighting or a Darkness energy and since the scroll of score needs one fighting energy in order to work we're in business so my cinderace is going to use the scroll of scoring attack Furious anger Furious anger does 10 damage plus 10 more for every damage counter on the user which right now is just one for a total of 20. I know that doesn't sound impressive but let's take a look at Cinder Race's ability crisis power it says that it's a tax deal 30 more damage for each prize card my opponent has taken huh now that I look at it cinderace has a powerful ability but its attack leaves It Wide Open to retribution if you use it forcing you to miss a turn basically however its ability says it works on any attack it uses even the ones on these Scrolls and these scroll attacks don't have the downside of losing a turn wow I found a card combo a card combo was when two cards who on their own seem like nothing special become really powerful when combined together crisis power increases the power of furious anger by 30 for each prize my opponent has taken which at this point they've taken two which when combined with the 20 it's already dealing has a grand total of 80 damage for just one energy wait 80 damage oh no crowbad has 90 hit points left 80 damage isn't enough to defeat it no I misplayed using that potion was a mistake it made Furious anger weaker oh I was so close but wait the single strike energy it it has another effect it makes the attacks performed by the Pokemon it's attached to deal 20 more damage and 80 plus 20 is 100 damage yes go cinderace use the power of your Fallen comrades to defeat the one who took them down bye bye Betsy Bring It On Darkrai I'm ready for anything you've got 120 damage huh that's a lot but not enough to take down cinderace and now with this final fire energy I'll have it Go cinderase fireball shot attack [Music] so at the end of the day what makes a good tutorial isn't just what it teaches us but how fulfilling the experience of engaging with it turns out to be I try to do the same thing with my videos and I know I'm not always successful at that but it's important to establish that something can be just as entertaining as it is educational to make sure that the lesson is truly taught and that's not limited to Children's card games either also the whole card combo thing was never in any Pokemon tutorial I've ever seen it's something I made up but introduce something like that to the kids and they'll go crazy for it but I admit this tutorial went on a bit long a full game is probably not needed if your goal is to teach the game quickly and showing off the core mechanics before leaving on an interesting Cliffhanger can probably be just as effective as long as the tinge of drama leaves people wanting for more because that's what a good tutorial can do it doesn't just teach players how to play your game but also why they should play your game a good tutorial when written as a game introduction presents your game as interesting and exciting and something worth getting into I hope that by presenting my probably not too simple tutorial I have given you some guidance on how yours should feel out keep those things in mind and you too can make a better card game join us next time on Errata text and a special thanks to my Patron supporters specifically those who got the five dollar and up tier I know I've already plugged my patreon a couple of times in this video but it really is a great way to get connected I've seen a lot of people discuss their game design and all sorts of interesting stuff has been happening on there including somebody who's actually made a series of tutorials about how to make a card game app in the unity engine so it's a great place to check out just one dollar one dollar per month is enough to get you into my Discord check out all of those amazing things that are happening and of course there are better tiers there's even a special video on there right now and I have some other amazing things planned for that patreon so uh if that interests you please feel free to use the link in the description and until next time this is Kodak signing off [Music]

Channel: Kohdok

Views: 29,678

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Id: 3kWvyI55Ssc

Length: 34min 40sec (2080 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023