Basic NPC card structure in Unicorn Robot Party

Hi guys,

You may have seen my earlier posts about my card game, Unicorn Robot Party.

Initially I had planned for this to be a printable card game, however I am now working towards making it a digital card based game instead as I feel that this will meet the goals of the game better.

I am going to break down an NPC card in this post but first I will provide some background info about Unicorn Robot Party for those who don't yet know about my game.

ABOUT UNICORN ROBOT PARTY

Unicorn Robot Party is a digital card based game aimed at adults that has story, RPG and deckbuilding elements. Topically the game focuses around robots and unicorns.

This game is a game where your decisions matter and could be compared to a choose your own adventure book or a game like Detroit Become Human in this regard.

It also has RPG elements and combat systems.

Unicorn Robot Party has both a Story Co-op mode and a PVP mode.

The game has a Base Game currently in development and it will also have expansions / DLC. The Story mode is designed to have multiple stories over the Base Game and its expansions with connections between them. Expansions can add extra cards, another story, or both.

WHAT IS AN NPC CARD?

An NPC is a non-player character within the game. Some NPCs within the game have their own NPC cards. I intend for these cards to remain part of the game even when the game goes digital and NPCs don't necessarily need cards anymore but how much detail remains on the cards is yet to be determined.

NPC CARD: MYLO

Here you can see a card for an NPC named Mylo.

There is a lot of information on this card. Let's break it down further.

THE NPC NAME, SPECIES AND HP

Highlighted in the image above is Mylo's name (Mylo), Species and HP.

Mylo's species is Kobold. The Kobolds in Unicorn Robot Party are based on traditional kobolds, that is the sprites stemming from Germanic Mythology. They are not lizard like or dog like, unlike some more recent depictions of kobolds.

There are a variety of species within the universe of Unicorn Robot Party and that part of the card states the species of the NPC.

The next component of the card is on the same line as the NPC's species. This is their HP, or Health value. As you can see, Mylo's HP is 65.

Sex, Gender, Life Stage and Image

Highlighted in the image above is the next set of information that makes up an NPC card.

Mylo's sex, gender, life stage and image are highlighted.

While sex and gender refer to different things, many things will only use one. Part of the reason Unicorn Robot Party uses both is that robot characters by nature kind of make sex not a good measure and not all creatures have gender either so it works best with both.

Robots don't have sex because sex refers to the biological markers of male and female such as chromosomes, hormones, body hair, genitals, fat distribution, reproductive organs etc and robots don't have any of those things. Robots don't have sex. They could be designed to look like a stereotypical male or female body but they don't have biology at all, hence they don't have a biological sex. This makes sex alone not a good way of describing characters in my game.

Pixabay profile of person who made this picture: https://pixabay.com/users/bcogwene-1114581/

On the other hand, many creatures probably don't have gender. Gender used in this way (to denote male, female or other genders) is generally referring to gender identity, which is a personal sense of one's own gender. It's a personal sense of being male or being female or being something other than male or female. This is an internal thing but it isn't the same as sex. As far as I know, we don't know which other creatures have gender because while we can speculate based on a species' understanding of other things like their general sense of self, we can't really know if they have the concept of gender. Creatures in Unicorn Robot Party vary from animals and beasts through to creatures who are comparable to humans cognitively. This shows that gender alone is not a good way of describing characters in my game either.

The other option is to do away with it completely but I'd rather have the two categories for this than have no category for this at all. I decided to use both.

I have classified sex with M for male, F for female, NA for not applicable (such as robots and other individuals who have no sex characteristics) and B for both to cover both intersex individuals within a species and species that are either both sexes or can change sex.

I have classified gender as M for Male, F for female, NB for non-binary (genders that do not fit into the strict gender binary of male or female; includes gender identities such as agender or genderfluid but is also a valid label on its own) and NA for not applicable.

As I went along it seemed that maybe sex may not have been required and I could have just used gender, as I found I didn't want to draw the line and say "this species doesn't have a concept of gender so their gender is NA" and ended up putting the gender of species that might not have gender as being that they had the same gender as their sex. This seemed like it might make including sex in the cards moot but I decided sex still adds valuable and interesting info for some species. Some species, both in real life and in mythology, have fascinating biology in terms of their sex. Some species can change sex. Some are both male and female throughout their whole life. Some are male or female but have characteristics you would generally associate with the opposite sex. While the corresponding fascinating fact is not communicated by simply putting a M, F, NA or B in the sex category, it alludes to an interesting fact and it feels like its a significant enough aspect of some of those species that it should not be excluded from the card, especially given it fits on the same line as gender and life stage anyway.

Hence, my cards state both sex and gender. The character sheets / character profiles of player characters also have both sex and gender, because they are different to each other but both are important.

Sex and gender have been used throughout the story when I have had male or female characters involved in the actual story. In these cases, if instructions have followed that bit of story, I have written instructions such as these:
"Draw NPC cards until you get 2 gnomes, one of which must be male in sex or gender."

Choosing the correct NPCs can be done digitally in a digital game and would likely have to be done earlier than it would in the story I created for a printable game, but it still relies on the sex and / or gender of the NPCs.

Image by Mote Oo Education from Pixabay

Following sex and gender is the life stage of the NPC. These come in 4 categories: Child, Teen and Adult. The way robots fit into this is different to how other beings fit into this as robots don't have a life cycle and hence don't have the same sort of life stages that other living beings do.

Following the life stage is a picture of the NPC. Mylo does not currently have a picture.

SKILLS

Highlighted in the above image are Mylo's skills. The skills of the NPCs are simpler than the player character skills.

NPCs have seven skills:

Strength
Coordination
Social Understanding
Charm
Intimidate
Logic
Perception

Player characters have a similar set of skills but also have subskills and they are arranged a bit differently. Player characters have these skills and subskills (subskills are indented):

Strength
Coordination
- Gross Motor
- Fine Motor
Social Understanding
- Benefit Them
- Benefit You
- Benefit Both
Presence
- Charm
- intimidate
Logic
Perception

As you can see, there are only six main skills for a player character because Charm and Intimidate are subskills of Presence for player characters. However once you add the subskills, the player characters have skills with significantly more depth.

Player characters also have a kindness skill which starts at 0 but can increase and decrease over time.

Returning to the image, you can see that the first column of Mylo's skills is the name of the skill.

The second column includes the dice allocated to the skill. These are the dice that will be rolled when Mylo uses the skill.

The final column is for modifiers. This might for example give a character a +1 to their strength roll. The modifiers of the NPCs are partially based on their interactions with the player characters. I had designed the NPCs modifiers to only apply for defensive rolls (ie when rolling against an action the player character did) as opposed to when they initiate an action, because the cards only have room for one modifier for each skill and for some things it makes sense for them to have an altered modifier for defence but not for their own actions. However making this as a digital game may change this and allow two modifiers per skill, one for defensive actions and one for actions the character initiates.

The way I have designed it has the modifier part of the cards blank until the players have interacted with them. Interactions between player characters and NPCs have the ability to change the modifier by making the NPC more or less willing to interact with them in certain ways in the future. In my planned digital version of the game this will still be the case, but there may be separate modifiers for defence and initiating actions, and they may also gain modifiers in other ways also.

That is the whole of the skills table. I don't completely know yet, but I suspect the skills table will likely be removed in a digital version of the game. It was included in the printable game because it told the players what the NPC needed to roll in order to do actions or defend themselves against certain actions the player characters could do, but this can all be done behind the scenes in the programming in a digital game and I feel that not seeing this has benefit because it makes it harder to predict whether an action is likely to be successful against a target. The logic behind the skill table will still be similar, with some likely differences like the ones I described above when discussing modifiers, but the information will likely not be available.

Friendship Circles

Highlighted in the image above is Mylo's Friendship Circles. It is possible to become friends with the NPCs. To do this, you need to colour in all of the friendship circles on an NPC's card. Mylo has three. Certain actions can class as a positive social interaction and lead to colouring in one of these friendship circles. If you were to colour in all three of Mylo's friendship circles, Mylo would now be your friend.

In the original printable game, once you got all the circles for an NPC coloured you would keep them out of the NPC deck in a separate friendship deck. This will be automated in the new digital game.

CONCLUSION

And that's it. That's the entirety of an NPC card. The main change to the NPC cards going from the printable card game I originally envisioned to the digital version of the game will be the removal of the skills table. The rest will likely remain as is, with some artistic rearrangement of the elements.

To summarise the major bits of info that I envision will be on an NPC card within a digital version of the game are: