Donald, I appreciate your patience in explaining repeatedly why you don’t look at fan cards. I think the reason that people keep posting with counterarguments goes something like this:
• It would be nice to have more Dominion cards.
• Donald isn’t creating any more sets.
• Some of these unofficial cards look cool.
• Wouldn’t it be great if those were official so that I could play with them online and/or buy a box of them without all manner of tedious printing, cutting, and sleeving.
Maybe that’s all obvious but I thought I’d actually put it into words so that it’s clear why this discussion is even happening. From the Dominion enthusiast's perspective, it seems like an obvious direction to go if you personally aren't making more cards.
The Guy-Who-Argues-On-The-Internet side of me compels me to respond to some of your points that I disagree with. Hopefully, as someone who has fallen into this trap yourself in the past, you will forgive me. I’m really not trying to antagonize you here.
The problem with making new expansions isn't difficulty coming up with cards. It's increasing complexity, diminishing returns on variety, unpopularity of linear mechanics that would work fine in spin-offs, having better projects. See http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=73.0. It all still applies if someone else produces the ideas.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You say that coming up with cards isn’t difficult. But if a card is too complex, or redundant, or uniteresting, or uses a linear mechanic, then that is a bad card. So what this boils down to is that creating
good cards IS difficult. There are still fresh, simple cards left to make. Not vanilla cards, but simple ones. The easiest way to make more simple cards is to introduce a new, nonlinear mechanic, which is again difficult—but not impossible—to do.
The point I’m trying to get across is that having somebody else produce good ideas
is a time-saver, because good cards are already the result of repeated playtesting, tweaking, and not being afraid to throw out a card that you can’t get to work or that is too complex, etc. Of course you’d have to further playtest any such cards personally, but you already play Dominion online (when you can log in, of course), so that begs the question, mightn’t you be playtesting cards while you’re doing that?
I don't want to look at the cream of the crop either though, that will just make me not make those cards.
I am going to hazard a guess that you wouldn’t make those cards anyway, not because they’re actually bad, but because they wouldn’t occur to you. As a sort of backwards example, I started making cards after Hinterlands was released. To date, I believe there has been exactly one card I had to scrap because I felt it was too similar to a card that was subsequently published. I am not going to use this paragraph as a sneaky way to tell you about this card, so suffice to say that the published card was Scavenger. Although the rest of the card was different, the core concept of “look through your discard pile and put a card on your deck” was the same and I felt like there didn’t need to be two cards that did that. I don’t feel that any of my other cards are redundant with published cards. My point is that although there may be some small amount of overlap between two individuals’ card ideas, now that all the obvious cards have been done, it’s increasingly unlikely that two people are going to have the same ideas.
All that being said, I think there are very legitimate reasons to just say, “No, I am never going to ok a fan-made expansion.” Two that I can think of off the top of my head are:
• It potentially opens the floodgates of fan card submissions. Maybe you already get a dozen emails a day from people submitting fan cards and this is a non-issue. I have no idea. But I could easily envision a situation where an expansion made by some non-famous game designer gets published and every Dominion enthusiast and his brother thinks, “Herp derp, I should submit some fan cards, too!” As previously established, most fan cards are terrible, so this is all sorts of undesirable any way you slice it.
• Wanting to be the guy and getting to. I think this is reasonable. Let’s say that somebody wrote an unofficial 8th book for the Harry Potter series and that, somehow, 95% of the Harry Potter fanbase thought it was a worthy sequel and should be part of Harry Potter canon. Somehow, I could not find it in myself to blame J. K. Rowling for saying, “No, I am not going to recommend to my publisher that this fanfic be released as the next official book!” To be fair, there
is precedent for this sort of thing in the world of board gaming. Some of SmallWorld’s expansions are composed of contest-winning ideas, for example. But there certainly isn’t any obligation on the part of a creator to include fans in the creative process, nor should there be.
Just to be clear, I am not trying to convince you to reverse your position and start publishing fan cards, so I apologize for being argumentative anyway. I do appreciate your clarifications. It’s good to get a solid “No fan cards are ever going to be published” so that if I ever feel that a set of cards has reached publishable status, I can submit it to BGG as a fan expansion without worrying about what might have been. If nothing else, the processs of reading your secret histories and essays and creating cards for this game has taught me a lot about game design in general. I really appreciate your taking the time to write all of your essays and also respond to our questions.
