Talk:Doctor Who Trump Card Game (game)

Doctor Who Trump Card Game

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Isn't this fiction? The card summaries come off that way, detailing in-universe facts of the characters, which could be useful to cover - however, thus far they're just been placed in "Behind the scenes" sections and not in lists of appearances. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 10:55, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

An expansion to Forum:MTG Minutiae you say? Najawin ☎ 15:26, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Not really. In this case there is a clear, overt narrative backbone. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:47, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm unconvinced. The standard we were discussing in that thread was of a framing device being used for individual sessions of play, and it's unclear to me that the narrative lede discussed on this page does this. It doesn't seem in accordance with

The OOU flourishes are of no more concern than a video game's opening tutorial explaing "your player character is the Sontaran warrior Thurg; his backstory is XYZ; you can control his actions by pressing such-and-such buttons…". - Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein

I'm not seeing a tutorial here, through the framing device / backbone, and I'm not seeing how the backbone / framing device could serve as one (whereas I could see this for the MTG example, as it's about wizards casting from a library of spells using mana - the example just fell through). The mechanics seem far too disconnected from the backbone as it's presented. If the rules were presented in a more IU way... But they aren't. Najawin ☎ 16:02, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't think you're understanding the quoted part of the ruling in the spirit in which it was written. That sentence was about how tutorials/rulesets/etc. using real-world language is not to be understood as a Rule 1 or Rule 4 breach in a game (whether video- or otherwise). It is by no means a requirement that the rules/tutorial involve in-universe element — the whole point is that we shouldn't take them into account when trying to determine whether a game source passes Rules 1 and 4 either way.

The question is "is a gameplay session meant to tell a specific story". In this case, it uncontrovertibly is: blah blah Aliance of Monsters, blah blah the Fourth Doctor recruits an army of heroes from across Earth history to fight them off, blah blah. It is not even necessary that the gameplay mechanics be directly related to this story — compare some of those mobile games like Legacy where the gameplay is wholly independent from the narrative, just a "solve this Candy Crush game to get to the next chapter of the story" sort of affair. The difficult in the MTG example is that there is no stated narrative framing device other than what we could attempt to glean from what individual gameplay mechanics seem (controversially) to simulate.--Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:19, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I strongly disagree that this is how Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein is to be read, and I think others will do the same, given that in Forum:MTG Minutiae people were agreeing that validity was non trivial due to the nature of the game. Including yourself!

Anyway, I should also note that the validity of this whole thing is not trivial. If we call it a weirdly-printed 'reference source' I could see how you'd get there, but it seems to me like a trading-cards game is much more of a, well, game; I would presume it to fall within the same "we need a second thread to establish theory of coverage" area as Battle for the Universe. -User:Scrooge MacDuck

Right, depends on if you consider the cards individually or as a whole, imo. As a whole we need another thread, but individually I think they either fall under current precedent or are so close to current precedent that it's a real headache. -User:Najawin

Is it perhaps best served as part of Forum:MTG Minutiae? I mean, idk chief. But I think it's clearly not trivially valid. Najawin ☎ 19:46, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

(I've taken the liberty of enclosing the quoted exchange within a frame, it looked too much like additional posts even without the date stamps.)

Now, I'm not necessarily saying Doctor Who Trump Card Game's validity is trivial.

What I was saying, firstly, was that the specific part of the ruling you quoted was not about any of this. It's simply not a statement of standards for whether a given game passes Rule 1 or not (whether positive or negative); it is a statement about ignoring game instruction in cases like FASA modules where there is, separately from the instructions, a clearly fictional narrative at work within the source. In context within that closing post, it is simply not about fixing a standard for what makes an otherwise-non-diegetic game's mechanics "in-universe enough"; it is very specifically saying "in such-and-such cases, disregard the way the game mechanics are expressed".

With that said — hat I am secondarily and more importantly saying is that if there is a DWTCG debate to be had, it is a completely different debate from the MTG stuff, for the following reason. Put simply, it all rests on Doctor Who Trump Card Game (game)#Publisher's summary. DWTCG has a story. It's right there. If that text were printed as its own thing we'd call that a valid "(short story)", no questions asked — it comes across as a close relative of Doctor Who and the Daleks. This story about the Legion and the Fleet does not become any less narrative because a game mechanic is added to proceedings, whereby which one can pit cards representing the Aliens Monsters against cards representing Legendary-Legion-members. Again, think back to something like the Legacy discussion.

(I don't think it's necessarily the case that the gameplay of TCG is as radically divorced from the narrative as it was there; my point is that the Legacy precedent amply allows us to simply not care about contingent gameplay mechanics even if they're simply acting as narratively-unnecessary add-ons to a perfectly Rule-1-passing core narrative. So the gameplay mechanics of TCG could be completely non-fictional and that would be fine by us. Imagine if you will a full-on Doctor Who novel that came packaged with little cardboard figures of its characters, and encouraged the buyer to act out battles between those figures so as to "live out" scenes from the book.)

And that is precisely what MTG does not have. If there were a stated plot synopsis for what's putatively "going on" in Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, we would be fine. We would be golden. The thread as it stands would be swept away. That entire debate, as I see it, rests on the difficulty of establishing whether there is such a thing as a narrative framework making all those cards cohere into a single "thing" fictionally speaking. DWTCG has everything which MTG "lacks": a clear explanation of who the two "teams" are in-universe, why these two groups of eclectic characters are clashing, what event this is all depicting. i.e. a battle between the Fleet of Alien Monsters and the Legendary Legion. If MTG had an equally-clear blurb making explicit that the business with interdimensional wizards is diegetically operative, packaged right with the cards themselves, we would have been having a very different conversation at that thread from the start. With MTG we didn't know if we could put "The Toymaker may, at some point, have been summoned by a Planewalker to do battle against various other beings" at The Toymaker#Biography; with DWTCG we absolutely can put "Davy Crockett was, at some point, recruited by the Fourth Doctor alongside a bunch of historical figures to fight against a bunch of allied Doctor Who monsters" at Davy Crockett#Biography.

If you want to argue against DWTCG's validity as a story in the Forums, you are free to do so — I think there's enough here for a presumption of validity under precedent, but there could be a discussion to be had, sure. But it's a very different conversation than the MTG debate. Indeed, it's a kind of conversation which could only be applied to MTG if we resolved the actual, ongoing topic of discussion of that thread (i.e. "is there a fictional, narrative framing device for why all those alienses are fighting each other, anyway?!"). --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 20:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

And that is precisely what MTG does not have. If there were a stated plot synopsis for what's putatively "going on" in Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, we would be fine. We would be golden. The thread as it stands would be swept away. That entire debate, as I see it, rests on the difficulty of establishing whether there is such a thing as a narrative framework making all those cards cohere into a single "thing" fictionally speaking.

Surely this is precisely refuted by the quote I gave from Forum:MTG Minutiae, no? This seems analogous to Battle for the Universe (game), which you agreed is invalid and needs a different theory of coverage. Najawin ☎ 20:46, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I think you may have the wrong end of the stick with that quote. I wasn't saying that trading cards games by definition fell in that gray area. I was saying that a trading-cards game should be seen as a "(game)", and if MTG were to be viewed as a game rather than a reference source as was being proposed, then it, in particular, pending discovery of a miraculous narrative blurb, would have to be the kind of weird "non-narrative/maximally-multiple-choice game" for which we lacked a sturdy theory of coverage. This does not imply that any trading cards game does, or that all the games in that gray area will be trading-cards games. (The Doctor Who Role Playing Game is perhaps a better core example than Battle, which I've never played and which may actually not be part of the gray area if it is as narrative as Trump Card Game.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 20:55, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

But... Battle for the Universe (game) has such a blurb. That's why I'm comparing it! It has a tiny, teeny little two paragraph blurb! If you think that perhaps even this blurb is sufficient, I mean, alright, but I think this is a novel reading, rather than vice versa. Najawin ☎ 21:36, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Surely you agree that even that is very different from the "is there even any kind of framing device at all?" questions we were raising at the MTG thread, though! I don't have Battle very well in mind anymore, but would be open to hearing an argument that it passes the current standard and isn't exactly in the gray area… My recollection was that it put forward a selection of possible characters and a lot of macguffins, but not anything so narratively straightforward as DWTCG's "all the monsters are part of Team A, all the heroes are part of Team B, they're all going at it".

To look at it from a broader, practical angle, the concern I was gesturing at with regards to the "gray area" in that closing post is the matter of sources in which you couldn't even begin to talk about what's going on without three paragraphs of "One possibility was that…" caveats. The sort of maximal flexibility which renders the approach taken with CYOA games, FASA modules, and so one, effectively unworkable. My understanding of Battle was that such concerns were in play: who the villain is, what their team contains, what they're looking for, etc. is endlessly variable, not to mention the companion roster, so you couldn't put anything on The Master without a dozen qualifiers for all kinds of possible permutations. Perhaps that understanding is wrong. It is at any rate not a problem shared by Trump Card Game. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 21:47, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

You're confusing two issues. Whether the Doctor Who MTG set has a framing device at all, as detailed in my arguments that it doesn't meaningfully do so, because the standard Planeswalker kayfabe isn't applicable to Universes Beyond, and the question of whether, assuming it does, taking the maximal framing device we discussed in the thread as correct, it would then be a valid GAME. My suggestion is that the thread indicated that current policy is that, were the framing device to exist, it would be too loose for validity.

My understanding of Battle was that such concerns were in play: who the villain is, what their team contains, what they're looking for, etc. is endlessly variable, not to mention the companion roster, so you couldn't put anything on The Master without a dozen qualifiers for all kinds of possible permutations. Perhaps that understanding is wrong. It is at any rate not a problem shared by Trump Card Game.

Ahem

GAME TWO

Any number can play in this exciting game!

All the cards - both Heroes and Aliens - are shuffled together and dealt. Cards are placed face down in front of the players and the game then continues as in game one.

This seems to have the exact same issue, no? Najawin ☎ 23:06, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

In my eyes, this is where the fiction-mechanic divide comes into play. That game two is purely mechanics. There is no attempt at fiction there. It can therefore be discounted, allowing us to, for the purposes of validity and in-universe coverage, only consider the fictive information. Bongo50 ☎ 17:22, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

What Bongolium said — and, well… "Game 2". Rather implies that the T:VS-compliant "Game 1" can be considered a "(game)" unto itself! The first of the two stories conjoined under the title of Doctor Who and the Daleks would still be valid even if Story #2 had some feature which precluded its validity, I'm sure. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:55, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be just as much an attempt as there is in game 1, in my eyes.

"Game 2". Rather implies that the T:VS-compliant "Game 1" can be considered a "(game)" unto itself!

Not under standard conventions of the English language, no? Session vs system. GAME refers to the latter, (it had better, or else we're in deep trouble in how we wikify) we're discussing the former. Najawin ☎ 20:22, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

No we're not! Or at least, I'm not. "Game One" and "Game Two" seem to be two different systems of rules that you can use the same pieces/cards for. Not two different sessions under the same system. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 20:34, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

This is clearly false, Game One is a strict subset of the possible states of Game Two. Najawin ☎ 23:07, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

And chess is a subset of all possible states of a free-for-all where anyone can move any pieces any ways they like, but that wouldn't make that game "the same" as "chess", surely! And again, the "two sessions" interpretation is wholly untenable. Surely you're not saying the intended playthrough experience is to always have one session following the first set of rules and one following the broader ones? --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 08:53, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

You're confusing dynamics with initial conditions. What you've described is chess being a subset of a wide variety of different dynamical systems. I'm saying that the first game is a subset of initial conditions in a specific dynamical system. These are qualitatively different things.

Surely you're not saying the intended playthrough experience is to always have one session following the first set of rules and one following the broader ones?

Yes? The first seems to be a tutorial of sorts. Najawin ☎ 09:03, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I think the rules of a game, in the vernacular sense, include their initial conditions. "Chess" is only a subset, in this sense, of a wider category of games which might use the same dynamics but are differentiated by starting from a different arrangement of pieces on each side at the beginning of a session.

Also, that's a very strange interpretation. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 11:37, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I think this is the most obvious interpretation imaginable, given it literally says "Game 1" and "Game 2". Also, for card games I don't know anyone who thinks rules of a game would preclude generalizing on initial conditions as I've done. Najawin ☎ 19:28, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I would like to say that I agree with Scrooge that your interpretation that game 2 is supposed to follow from game 1 is a little unusual. I see this more as game 1 being the "story mode" and game 2 being the "freeplay", to liken it to a video game. To use an example of a non-DWU game I happened to play recently, the fact that the (excellent) game Firewatch includes a freeplay mode where you can freely explore the game's world, in a way that doesn't fit with the events of the main game, after completing the main game doesn't invalidate the main game and its narrative. I'd say that it's pretty normal for games (particuarly video games, but I see no reason this can't be extended to other games) to have secondary methods of play that use the same underlying mechanics in order to create a different experience without invalidating the primary story. Moreover, I don't feel that the use of numbers in any way implies that there is an order to the games. It's just an easy way to refer to them, like we would do when enumerating options in a forum discussion. Bongo50 ☎ 19:58, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Postgame/freeplay almost always comes after the "story mode" of a game, and usually contains more wikifiable information than the "story mode". Generally we consider these two the exact same game. This analogy you're giving only supports my analysis, to my mind. We'd have to consider "Game 2" equally a candidate for validity here, if we adopted this analogy. Najawin ☎ 21:39, 19 April 2024 (UTC)