Card Games Where Players Craft Their Own Cards

[NotAI]

Card games where players and NPCs craft their own cards...perhaps like spells in Morrowind...is this a good idea or a bad idea?

1. Would this be fun? Not clear that it would, and not clear that it would not!

2. Something along these lines was in MUDs, wasn't it? How did that play out?

3. Slot based crafting (trees) versus graph based crafting versus text based crafting with pattern match to nearest valid pattern? This one could give a sense of magic discovery: a wrong spell might match, by accident, to a much more powerful spell at a higher level. Lucky!?

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On the development side this might look something SNOBOLish.
Alternatively use partial models on second order logic with a small list of ingredients.

[J1M]

I find more enjoyment in collecting a complete set of discreet game pieces than these craft-a-spell systems.

Whenever someone puts something like this in front of me, I invariably trivialize the entire game by breaking it. I think this only really works if it is the focal point of the game and there's some sort of limit to the persistence of what you can concoct. (For example, you craft a spell from components you find that goes out of scope after the current dungeon.)

In some ways this is essentially the class vs. classless character progression system question. I think it is more interesting when you have to play around instead of modify out all of the trade-offs and drawbacks.

[Havitner]

Most card-based games seem to focus heavily on challenge, and a system like that sounds extremely hard to balance. Maybe for a more casual game.

[SoLong]

I find more enjoyment in collecting a complete set of discreet game pieces than these craft-a-spell systems.

Whenever someone puts something like this in front of me, I invariably trivialize the entire game by breaking it. I think this only really works if it is the focal point of the game and there's some sort of limit to the persistence of what you can concoct. (For example, you craft a spell from components you find that goes out of scope after the current dungeon.)

In some ways this is essentially the class vs. classless character progression system question. I think it is more interesting when you have to play around instead of modify out all of the trade-offs and drawbacks.

Finding broken combinations is kind of fun, as long as there is variety (like, say, giving different dungeons effects that make one combination unusable). The problem is that entirely random systems are too annoying, while too free systems become trivial too quickly.

[Lich]

You can learn to script new MTG cards with Forge. If the scripting process were streamlined it would make a very fun game.