#1356: Inertia

Mark Rosewater· Host0:00

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is inertia. But, uh, I used to... I did a series from, um... When I went to talk to my daughter's class when she was in fifth grade, I did a series called 10 Games- 10 Things Every Game Needs. Um, and then I did a separate podcast on each of those 10 qualities. One of which was inertia, but there I was talking about i- within a game, the need for the game to end, that every step that you, everything you're making your p- your player do, has to push toward the game ending. Uh, so today is about inertia, but a different style of inertia. So while there is a podcast previously on inertia, not quite the same thing. Uh, what I'm talking about today is why things that we think maybe should change don't change. Um, and that is the topic of today. Um, so I'm talking about inertia of the game as it applies to design at, at all. So this is, um, not inertia within the game, making the game end. That's, that's the other podcast. It is about how inertia, meaning working on a game that's 33 years old, how that affects decisions we make. Okay, so to start with, I'm going to talk about mana costs. Uh, so on a Magic card, um... So interestingly, when Richard Garfield first, uh, in Alpha or pre-Alpha, in, in Alpha play testing, um, the way mana costs work