JP Weaver - System Analysis

Hello! This is that start of a new blog project that seeks to answer some craft questions RE: systems and magic and how writers do that. As I’m a guinea pig, I’ve chosen to self interview with some help to kick off System Analysis.

I hope to have this be a weekly feature, but I haven’t decided on a final spot for it yet.

Freya Stone/Alexa Lee deigned to interview me to kick this off. Questions from them are in bold.

Questions for the author:

 (1) How’d you come up with this system? 

This was a mash up of several deck builders. I wanted to really dig into some of the elements of how Honor Rae represented cards in her work and combine that with the leveling system in Kerberos work. In both the cards are heavily tied into the world and I wanted to reflect that in my own work. In the later books, new cards reflect the protagonists. I made it pretty apparent that everyone in the book is an ALTA fan. No one speaks about it, but it’s true.

I wanted the system that created the cards to reflect the history as well. There is history behind some of the cards and the decisions behind how available they are. The gate card in particular is behind a lot of locked doors for reasons.

I sense spoilers and keeping your cards close to your chest. Do you have an example of a card that’s tied into the history without giving any spoilers away?

The strategist card that Valerie unveils later on is something that has been handed down through her family and it’s already had mileage on it for a while. That one is definitely something that has been in her lineage and helped her parents to be professors at the military academy where she is found.

Another example are the air bender and various bending cards that are all from Finley interacting with the thirteen people Isekaied from Earth.

Ooh! That’s an intriguing system. I like it! 

(2) Was it based off a game you played and loved or a book? 

Definitely Jake’s Magical Market plus All the Skills plus A Summoner Awakens. If this was a game though it would be a combination of Vampire Survivor, Minecraft and tower defense.

I loved the idea of a ten card deck in Jake’s Magical Market. However, the level up system where you have to destroy or trade in cards to upgrade others meant that the economy was messed up. I like how they use cards. It’s not like a card game.

I’ve never read Jake’s Magical Market, so can you explain this more? How do they use cards without making it a card game? What elements did you utilize in your own book? 

In Jake’s Magical Market, the cards are either passive abilities one can equip or they are active abilities like with a cool down. There’s not really “mana” the way I use it. It would be super broken as a card game! In a way it’s similar to Dungeons and Dragons 4e where you can have your player character sheet and each ability is a card. In this way you could roll for abilities based on the skill/ability level if I wanted to turn this into a ttrpg.

Okay! That makes sense. Are cards randomly shuffled and drawn like in a typical deck building game or can someone choose any card to activate?  

Some of my writer friends have told me that this makes my guys like pokemon, and yeah that kinda makes sense. They have skills that are a part of them. If all of their cards were static it would be sooo pokemon.

But also one card can’t be traded from someone’s soul deck… This I got from All the Skills. Monsters are all born with cards. Humans aren’t, which is the same in my books. All the other races are born with a card. Then common, uncommon or higher they have to live with the cards they can acquire or make with pieces.

For the races that are born with a card, is it race specific? Or is it a random card awarded at birth? Can they ever upgrade or discard a card from their deck?

None of the cards are race specific. They are all randomly awarded at birth. Every other card can be moved into and out of their deck. If they upgrade their one soul card it still cannot be removed from their soul. It can be removed after their death and it does cause their death if it’s removed.

(3) Is the math a constant obstacle for you? 

Hell yes. It comes up all the time. I think the key is simple model really is going to be the thing that I’ve worked out from this story. I have another unrelated Litrpg (Gamer Manager) in the works now that has a system screen. This will have nearly the absolute minimum system possible. It’s going to be slightly more of a system than The Wandering Inn, and slightly less than Player Manager.

Do you keep a spreadsheet or calculator on hand? Or do you have a different system to help you keep track of it all?

I had to have several character sheets but after a while I stopped going into depth. The characters shifted gears from the mains needing cards to everyone needing a full suite to do their work. I hope to have a good index at the end.

(4) What are the main skills and why did you choose those? 

So the main thing is that each person has a soul deck and one soul card that they are born with. Some of them are born with shit tier cards and have to merge them with better ones to qualify for better jobs. Some are born with okay cards but then inherit good cards from their families.

There’s a big deal in A Summoner Awakens about the ten families and how they have so much power because they pass on great cards down the line to their families and how that sets them up for life. I wanted to show a microcosm of that inside of my work as well.

Dwarven families have hoarded powerful cards generation after generation, and when I introduce Valerie, she was just given her inheritance card from her parents. The orcs have this generational thing where they have changed their commerce to be cards first and they have been trying to get more cards from the elves.

Interesting! This begs the question, other than inheriting, trading or being born with cards, how does one acquire them? Can they be bought? Or maybe stolen? (As long as they aren’t part of a soul deck of course) 

Monsters drop cards and card pieces. 5-6 blank card pieces can be formed into a card of the same rarity. 5 common pieces turn into a common card when combined. Combining them isn’t necessarily a skill, but you need to learn how to do it. Cards can definitely be stolen and there’s several heist scenes to this effect. The Eldritch beast Ca’at can pluck cards out of a monsters chest with their super sharp claws, a nod to Brixaby the lead dragon in All the Skills.

Cards form the economy in the book. In fact, that’s a major plot point as gold no longer has value for the caravan.

All of this is history that is reflected in the cards, or will be when the edits are done.

So to go back to skills, one of the big ones is animal handling. In Caravan of Blades, they need to move around a lot. So the two horses they start with are very important. They get a lot more animals shortly afterwards so one of the first things that Finley, our main character, does is to create more animal handling cards. Each skill card levels up through usage. Well most of them do.

Oh fun! Create! They can create them? Is this a special skill/class/race? Or can anyone do it? 

Then skill cards can be combined into class cards. Not every combination is viable, so it’s important to use a manual when you don’t know the particulars.

The animal handling skill could be a standalone skill or merge with others.

(5) Did you make the system first or work through the plot first?

This was a plot first one that I began in an April writeathon. I had the ideas strongly in mind.

I wanted to write a Deckbuilder. I also wanted to write a campaign of Band of Blades in my own way. I combined that with the ideas of the Zachary Pike series where the economy rules the roost… And then when the system breaks how does a trader take on the apocalypse?

I love that idea, it’s very intriguing. What made you want to meld those ideas together? Just felt right or did you want the challenge? 

I was going for a specific idea and this was very adjacent to what I wanted to do. Then the characters decided to mess with me. Like who knew that one would be a cake boss and that one would get with the mob front woman? I didn’t, but the characters decided that for me. I pantsed a lot of this novel, but I had an original outline and an end goal in mind.

(6) Is there anything you wish you had done differently? 

I did a lot of writing where I was just trying to get through it. One of the things that I need to learn to do is to kill off characters. I went through the entire series without killing any characters. I have a tendency to make a big ensemble cast, and this was problematic because the initial idea of this had a lot of people being Isekaied at the same time. Like the first original draft was that there was going to be hundreds of Heroes and it was just going to be stupidly problematic for Finley.

I cut it down to 14 but made it so that any deaths would create another big bad for the mains. For that and I also made a reason why they had to make sure that everyone lived.

Because they were fighting people that had been turned, and all the chosen if they are turned will become a death knight. That would mean that would be something like a national level threat immediately upon his/her death. So the other option was that I was going to have to have them completely kill somebody who was halfway dead or destroy their corpse.

None of those options really felt right. I had to face the fact that I’m not really somebody who wants to kill off characters, and I need to learn how to do that. Of course I write a lot of slice of life….

Valid. Not every book has to have death as a pinnacle stake. Would you consider this more of a cozy fantasy then? Or did you create high stakes in a different way? 

It was more cozy/slice of life. There are stakes but they’re far off. The chosen are OP except when they are caught flat footed. A lot of the stakes are personal in nature but there is a lot of growing into roles that no one expected before.

The other big thing that I wanted to do was to keep a running tally of who had what cards. I wanted to put in a codex at the end of each book and now that I’m done with the entire series first draft, it’s becoming a problem where I have to go back through and actually see what everyone’s doing every chapter. I don’t want to comb through my own work to do this. I got a tool to identify what cards I’ve put in.

Next time I would definitely just add to their character sheet. I had a good thing going there but I kind of forgot to keep it up and it went out of hand.

(7) What’s a “level up” in your system?

In my system, cards can get advanced by emerging weather cards or they can use their abilities more and more to level up. I have a good section there where some dwarves pass around a druid card so they can get better while shaping. The card gets better, not them, which means that whoever has the card can wild shape for longer.

Fun! Ya answered one of my earlier questions with this. 

So I figured out how they would game the system. It’s something that the natives figured out because they were having trouble talking to each other and due to plot reasons they were all stuck in goat bodies.

I have so many questions about that last sentence.

RAFO!

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