Operation Menu
When things Pop: Playing to the Audience
One of the main things I am attempting to do with the National Wrestling Game is to play up the idea that the crowd is just as important as the wrestlers to the show and during the matches. When playing the game the crowd is played by everyone who is not actively involved in the current match and they have powers that the wrestlers do not.
If you actually watch wrestling enough, you will see that the most talented wrestlers aren’t always the ones who become the big stars. It’s the showmen who know how to work the audience that really shine in this area. Some of the biggest names in wrestling history were not really the best wrestlers, but who can deny that Rick Flair and Hulk Hogan didn’t know how to play to the crowd?
When I was reworking this game from the early combat only form it had, I wanted to make it about the gaining of fame and popularity for your wrestlers, not just winning matches through skill. This required it to have some kind of audience interaction system that could affect them during the match, but I wanted to have something that could be played with just two players or with a group watching them and it had to be enjoyable for all.
The first thing I had to do was to make sure that it worked with two people, which meant there had to be a way to add up fame during the match using just the combat mechanics (which includes showmanship actions). That was easy, as each move can have a rating of how much fame it can earn when successfully performed, limited by repetition of the same moves. This has proven to work fine through playtesting.
Next was to have a system that worked when you have an audience of players who don’t have a character in the active match. I wanted to give them some power over the match through audience power. Using an industry term for crowd responses, Pop, these powers are measured in what I have dubbed Pop Tokens. Each audience member is given a number of them (based on certain elements of the planned match) to spend during the match when they want to influence things.
There are a number of different spectator actions that Pop Tokens can be spent on during the match. Some of the simplest ones are Cheers and Boos, which simply give or take some fame points from the characters, and Signs, which allow the wrestler to use the Pop Token to activate some of their own powers or special abilities (without having to use their own Fan Points).
There is also going to be a list of numerous other things they can be spent on, all of which will have some kind of effect on the match. So far I have a short list of about ten or so others, but I want to have at least twice that numbers to give them a lot of variety. Some of these powers are used to tempt certain players to take certain actions. Some of them are used to attempt to directly alter what is going on the match (like delaying a pin count or lowering stun).
All in all, they are used to give the players watching something to do and to actually choose sides in the match. These points can even be used to taunt or tempt the active players into doing things they want to see or taking risks in exchange for their using of Pop Tokens in their favor. I have yet to truly test this aspect out in any good scale yet, but the small testing I have done seems promising so far.
So that is what I have been working on for the last few days, trying to figure out how I am going to make the game fun for the spectators as well as the active players, without losing the feel of the match being the real focal point of the event.
As always, any comments would be appreciated and any suggestions for what I could let players spend their Pop Tokens on would also be a real boon.
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