Netrunner

We picked up a copy of the new Netrunner and were going to play it Friday. Alas, con crud spoiled those plans, so I’ve had to make do with browsing the box.

Netrunner was one of the old guard of CCGs. It was the third to come out of Wizards of the Coast, just three years after Magic: The Gathering. It only lasted two years before WotC stopped production. It did some things that are, to this day, impressive and elegant in design. It was asymmetric, with one player building a fortress and working on projects within it while the other player tried to infiltrate it and steal things. The basic mechanics allowed a great deal of subtlety, bluffing, and misdirection, and both players could do a large number of things without needing explicit permission from a specific game piece. I myself once wrote this about it:

It lets you, not your cards, play the game. More so than in a typical game of its type, it's not what you have, it's what you do with it. This grants skilled play a bigger weighting factor over deck construction, giving the truly better player more of an edge over someone who's simply identified and piled together all the “power cards”.

The game has a small number of ardent fans — myself included, obviously — who are quite curious whether its new publisher, Fantasy Flight Games, is worthy of the property. I’m not sure yet, but it looks promising.

The rules have scarcely changed. The only significant difference is in deck construction. (That makes sense given that the game is packed using FFG’s “Living Card Game” format, which is essentially entire playsets sold at once instead of the traditional small random packs.) You must now include a Runner or Corp identity “card” with your deck. In addition to giving you a persistent special benefit or ability, this identity locks you into a particular faction. When building your deck, you may use any cards that are from your faction or factionless (a.k.a. “neutral”), but only a limited point total of other factions’ cards and no foreign faction-locked cards. There is also a limit of three copies of any one card by title. Now, it may seem odd that I bring this up. After all, rules like this have been common in CCGs for over a decade, but this game was a bit of an outlier. There was still a division between “regular rules” and “tournament rules” when Netrunner was originally printed, and extra restrictions like “only N copies of each card” fell into the latter category. To append more rules to the ones in the box was to admit that the rules as written didn’t produce a good game. Whereas many games recognized the benefits of per-card limits and made them part of the basic rules, Netrunner players so strongly resented the notion that their brilliant game needed such restrictions that they were slow to be adopted even in the tournament scene.

Regarding why the original game floundered in the marketplace, I’ve dug up a couple of post mortems using the magic of the intarwebs:

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NETRUNNER-L Mailing List interview with then-producer Ryan Dancey
Feb. 5, 1998

Netrunner-L: Netrunner fans are obviously disappointed by WotC's choice to put the game "on maintenance." What is it that keeps it there?
Ryan Dancey: To be blunt: lack of sales. If I thought that Netrunner could generate enough interest to maintain a limited production schedule, I'd print it. We're currently putting some ideas into place to gauge what the actual market interest is for the game, and if results are favorable, we'll reopen a discussion on printing more cards.

NR-L: Does Netrunner have some insurmountable tragic flaw? i'm thinking of the possibility that the licensing deal with R. Talsorian was too onerous (that's hard to imagine, but i don't know the details), or the inaccessibility of the genre for many CCG fans, or its inflexibility with regard to the number of players. Obviously v1.0 was seriously overprinted. Did WotC just make some mistakes in production and marketing that were too costly to overcome?
RD: Netrunner has four major issues it must overcome, which I will simply list instead of getting into a whole lot of gory detail:
1. Lack of "Tribalization." There are no factional alliances for the players.
2. Good Guy/Bad Guy duality. It's tough to play the runner and the corp instead of one or the other.
3. No value from license. The R. Talsorian license doesn't contribute much to the game.
4. No concept of "you." It is difficult to relate to a game where "you" are an abstracted participant.

NR-L: What do you mean by the "concept of 'you'"? How would Netrunner be different if it incorporated this concept? When i first played Netrunner, playing the Runner (perhaps moreso than when i play the Corp) and taking damage really felt like I was taking the damage.
RD: The "runner" side of the Netrunner duality has a stronger "you" factor than the corp side, but it still isn't strong enough in my opinion.
What does the player know about the person they represent in the game? Here are some questions that the game should answer for the player:
1. Why am I committing computer trespass, fraud, and vandalism, risking my personal liberty and possibly my health or even life? In other words, what's the backstory?
2. Where does the money come from to pay for all my high-tech doodads, and what favors or deals have I struck for my compensation?
3. I have a physical body as well as a network presence. Where do I live? What kind of lifestyle do I have? What is my relative income level? Who are my friends? Do I have family? What do I do for a "real" living?
4. What is my ethical system? What do I believe? Am I religious, and if so, what type of worship do I participate in? How do I view the welfare of others? What general attitude do I project to strangers? To my friends? To my family?
Obviously, the lack of details about the Corp is much larger than that of the runners. Also, there is no sense of who "you" are in context of the Corp. Are you a security guard? Are you the CEO? Do you have access to Corp resources that others do not? Etc.

NR-L: If you could change anything about Netrunner, what would it be? One poster to Netrunner-L reported back in June that you had posted suggestions to the [Legend of the Five Rings] list: that you would focus on development of multiplayer play, and that you'd emphasize the storyline by developing "clans."
RD: If I was designing Netrunner from the start today, here is my first cut at what I would do:
1. You'd play a member of a faction struggling for some specific objective defined in terms of a larger story. You might be a member of a hi-tech, lo-life street gang intent on just grabbing and holding turf. You might work for a secret team of highly paid information brokers who are trying to unlock a hidden data fort. You might represent any number of corporations with various interlocking goals. Whatever you were, you'd know who you were, why you were in the game, what the stakes for success or failure of your faction are, and you'd have an idea (maybe not a clear one) of who your enemies and allies are.
2. I would take as much background from the R. Tal license as possible and use it in the game. That means using stuff like the material in "Near Orbit" era of sourcebooks and the "future history" from the main rulebook. If the license allowed, I might stir in some elements of the Cybergeneration materials. You'd see familiar Corporations, you'd interact with well-known NPCs, and you'd travel to locations documented in the game. If I couldn't achieve that objective, I'd abandon the license and create my own cyberpunk milieu.
3. We would have a standard format for organized play including 1:1 games and multiplayer games. TCGs in today's market must have a multiplayer role in order to be successful. My objective would be to create a visual, textual, and rules-based storytelling experience for cybperpunk, using the medium of the card game. I am less concerned with the intricacies of the game mechanics than I am concerned that the players tap in to the cyberpunk concept at some point and start creating their own mini-stories within the context of our larger epic. But that's just me, as my good friend John Wick says.

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from my own post-mortem sometime in 1999

If it's so great, why did it fail?

There have been dozens of suggestions made, showing varying degrees of bitterness towards Wizards of the Coast. Some go so far as to claim that when WotC called for suggestions from the public on how to save the game, they deliberately sat on the responses they got and allowed the game to die — that, rather than applying these suggestions as remedies to the sales of an already-ailing product, they instead gathered and culled them at their leisure to produce a more cohesive marketing strategy solely for use with other games down the road.

Conspiracy theories aside, there are all sorts of potential factors that may or may not have contributed to the demise of this well-designed game, presented here a la carte so the reader can pick and choose the ones he or she likes best.

• High dabbling cost due to the twin starter packaging. If you wanted to buy just a deck to read the rules and give it a test spin, the MSRP was $18 — twice the outlay of other CCGs.
• The complexity. More casual purchasers are willing to try a simple game than a complex one. Someone who doesn't catch onto the game's subtleties is also more likely to report to friends that it's stupid or mindless, and Netrunner has a lot of subtleties. For example, making a run on a data fort does not necessarily have the sole purpose of getting at the cards locked inside that fort, but this nuance isn't readily apparent to most beginning players. Until this and a few other truths are realized, Netrunneris just a boring race to see if Type X ice gets drawn before a Type X icebreaker is.
• The related matter of the disparity in the learning curves between the two sides. The Corp side is easier to learn, which led newbies to conclude that the game is biased in the Corp's favor. People don't like unbalanced games.
• The significant strengthening of the Runner side granted by the Proteus expansion (quite possibly in response to player feedback — see above), which led experienced players to assert that the game was now biased distinctly in the Runner's favor. People don't like unbalanced games. [addendum: It’s been pointed out that the game went into decline before Proteus released, so this is more of a nail in the coffin.]
• An incredibly over-optimistic initial print run. It's a CCG, it's made by WotC, it's designed by Richard Garfield… guaranteed success, right? Unfortunately, Netrunner was released at a time when the gaming community was beginning to exercise self-restraint and not automatically buy into a new game just because it was collectable. Making matters worse, an abundance of supply can appear instead as a dearth of demand (c.f. Fallen Empires). If no one else is buying it, why should I?
• Another problem with its release date: it was less than one month before Magic's Alliances expansion was scheduled to hit shelves. Gamers had already been waiting for a new Magic expansion for an eternity — an unprecedented nine months — and their disposable income was earmarked long in advance.
• Its basis in a short-lived hot genre. In literary and game circles, cyberpunk died faster than disco. [Remember, this was 1998!] This may have nowhere to go but worse: how can "running the 'net" be sexy when email is something you get from your mother nowdays?
• Though the game’s debut was well publicized, there was a lack of advertising and support articles afterward, even in WotC's own CCG magazine, The Duelist. A quick visit to WotC's own back issues index shows only three issues with more than one column on the game, all clustered about its debut. Even Proteus didn't elicit more than single-article coverage.
• Misdirecting the advertising that was done during the game's fall. The most-cited example is the full-page spreads in Wired magazine — apparently the subscriber base for this magazine of technology and cyberspace pop culture doesn't coincide much with typical gamer demographics. (As an aside, I have personally witnessed commercials for Magic, pushing it as a pastime that exercises one's mind, aired during Beavis & Butt-Head. Yet Magic is still selling.)
• The cancellation of its demo tour part-way through.
• The licensing of an existing second-party game world that lacked widespread appeal and brand loyalty (R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk: 2020 role-playing game) combined with not developing this background or presenting it in a way that would be interesting to Netrunner players.
• Its unsuitability for multiplayer games.
• Relatively vague notions of who or what the player, especially a Corp player, represents in the game world. People enjoy games more when they can get a feel for what's going on, what role they play inside the game.
• The lack of factions. The theory, according to one prominent game company manager, is that the presence of factions — the groups in Illuminati: New World Order, the tribes in Rage, even the colors in Magic (back before pre-made color-themed decks were available!) — broadens the appeal of a game. An individual who has no initial interest in the game itself may still identify with one of its factions and be drawn to purchase and investigate it as a result.
• The fact that, under standard rules, players must construct and play both a Runner and a Corp deck. Besides being twice the work, twice the learning time, twice the number of cards to purchase, and twice the number of mental states to develop, it's also a counterpoint to the faction argument above. Players who were drawn to Netrunner by an attraction to just the Runner or the Corp motif discovered they couldn't play only their favorite side, and this soured them.
• Few powerful rares. This, in combination with a fourth rarity class more common in starter decks than Commons, made it less necessary to buy large quantities of cards to build functional decks. (One would think that Netrunner's lack of per-card limits in decks would counteract this. Apparently not.)
• Lack of, and large time between, expansions. Without steady expansions, strategies stagnate and the game as a whole becomes less interesting. It's easier to keep interest than regain it.
• The abstract nature of some of its art.