Having worked out the main theme and idea behind the game, I had to start working out the mechanics of the game play itself, this had led to ideas, more ideas, back tracking and a lot of pondering, when designing game mechanics there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.
For example Dice does the game need dice to function properly, when pickpocketing the pickpocket uses his Guile skill, any other pickpockets who are there to cause distractions add their Influence to the pickpocket's Guile to form his total skill for this attempt, then the player chooses his target from the citizens present in the area, he compares his total skill to their alertness rating adding any modifiers from the district itself, if the pickpocket's skill is equal to or greater then the alertness level he succeeds in his attempt........However this meant that there is no way a pickpocket attempt can fail, which is not very realistic, so if we add a dice roll to the action this gives us an element of luck.
So after finding his total skill level for the attempt and finding the total alertness of the target, the player rolls a D6 and adds it to his skill, now if he gets equal to or higher then the alertness level he is successful. This way the action has an element of luck, but with clever usage of distractions and picking the right target the player can maximise the chance of success.
Another initial idea was to that each gang leader would have a special ability, for instance one gang leader could have an ability to "after placement of all pickpockets, you may move one pickpocket to a neighbouring district". But is that enough, would it be better for each gang leader to have a deck of action cards, from which he has two in his hand at anyone time and may play only one a turn, these decks act as special abilities of the gang leaders and their pickpockets, at this time I am favouring an action deck, play testing will decide if this is two powerful and if it changes the game play to much.
The last thought for this post is on deployment of pickpockets, two choices have come to mind, the initial idea was for secret placement, where each player would collect all their pickpockets together, they also have a token for each district, then they would form a stack, placing pickpockets face down in front of them with the district token face down on top, then all players reveal and place their pickpockets, but it got me to thinking does this miss out on a level of strategy as you cant react to another players actions. The other option is for the First Player to place all the pickpockets he wants into one of the districts, then going round the table the other players do the same, then the First Player places his next lot of pickpockets into another district and so on until all pickpockets have been placed, players can only place pickpockets into a specific district once each turn, the first player would be different each turn. This way players can react to what the other players are doing, so if you have a district that you have a lot of influence in, another player places pickpockets there to try and increase their influence and decrease yours, then you could place your pickpockets there to try and face off your opponents and get them to leave the district.
I am favouring the second option now, again if this doesn't work in play testing then I could revert to secret placement.
Cheers for now
Brian
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