#Vanilla Discussion

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

worldly spire
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I'm hoping to keep this civil, but I thought it might be nice to have a philosophical debate about what counts as "vanilla"

For me personally, I find that mods that only add jokers are "vanilla".

My reasoning behind this sort of comes down to my years of playing Dominion, a deck building game, that has 15 expansions. Some of those expansions work well together, as they all share the same base mechanics. Other ones, like Nocturne and Alchemy, add unique mechanics that can work well when added to the base game, or the base game and one other expansion. However, if the mechanics become too diluted by many expansions they end up not being worth pursuing.

An example of this would be a Balatro mod that adds a new type of edition. For example, if a mod adds a Pineapple edition (random example) that mod can have jokers that interact with the Pineapple edition, however other mods won't know you have Pineapple cards and thus this mechanic is diluted. This matters very little if playing with one mod, as that mod can tailor an experience, however if playing with multiple mods this can be a rather prevalent issue.

Meanwhile, """vanilla""" mods that primarily focus on neglected aspects of the base game, for example Power cards, 4 of a kind, Wilds, 7s, are not diluted. I will say though, if the mechanics behind Pineapple editions are cleverly implemented, they can still have interesting reactions with base game jokers and other modded content through dynamic game states.

cosmic fossil
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what about vouchers?

worldly spire
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because its sort of all about, "does this dilute the core experience in some way, that drastically alters how i interact with core systems"

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I'd guess most vouchers are at least vanilla friendly

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ooh! while looking for some examples of modded vouchers (shout out to Betmma Vouchers) I found some other people talking about this very same idea, albeit from a different perspective

IMG_3377.png
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It does make me wonder though how much Balance relates to the concept of Vanilla

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like does content need to be meticulously balanced in order to keep the experience feeling vanilla

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I bet a lot of people would say yes, but maybe not everyone

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I'm also curious how simplicity factors into the Vanilla conversation. I haven't seen it talked about explicitly, maybe its a clear defined rule, but it seems like Local Thunk creates Jokers to have a max of two ideas happening, two sentences

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while some Jokers can be a bit confusing at first like Ride the Bus, it really doesn't do all that much, it just wants you to not play face cards.

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Here's another example from the game Dominion

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this was probably something like the 500th card designed for the game

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meanwhile this card was within the first 100 designed

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while the bottom one might appear to have more going on and be more interesting, the simplicity of the top one is what makes it so easy to implement into different builds

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in the end, Noble Brigand was errata'd out in the second edition

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due to its unnecessary complexity

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and this was the card that effectively replaced it

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an example for Balatro, from the Extra Credit mod, is this

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no base game jokers have more than a single pause in the middle of their text, two if counting ( as a pause

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the joker that gets closest in word complexity is probably

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but I'd say the dagger is an outlier, and is actually quite complex if you read its components / key words (Blind, destroy, Joker, right, permanently, double, sell value, Mult)

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now, do I think Hold Your Breath is some crazy departure? no, but it is important to realize if it were in the base game it would likely be tweaked to be 2 concepts instead of 3

cosmic fossil
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Another important imo is not having to much it doesn’t matter how vanilla like your jokers are if they are way too many that delute the pool

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Also decks are very hard to do in a not vanilla way if they’re not all as complex or more the plasma deck then It should be fine

verbal storm
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I do understand your dilution principle and have considered similar ideas a lot when making my own mod pack that's supposed to essentially collect tons of mods while still being somewhat vanillia-ish-ish, however, I think it mostly occurs when a mod has content that relies on other content in the mod in a way that makes it stand out

verbal storm
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But that's coming from someone who plays with 1600+ jokers, lol

worldly spire
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is that the pack you were talking about?

verbal storm
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I need to make a new release, lol. It's ready but executive dysfunction in well... making the damn zip and updating the readme