As some of you will recall, I workshopped a game a while back called "the 12 Disciples" in which players play Disciples, following Jesus around Palestine. One element of the game involved calling upon Jesus to perform actions and collecting "Gospel" tokens. Scoring these "Gospel tokens" is the subject of this post.
Originally, the Gospel tokens gave a flat payout to the player with the most. But, I think I'd like something that scales a bit more, so I'd like to make a change that works like this: your VPs for Gospel tokens is the average of the # of tokens collected by you and the player with the next-lower total. So, if I had 7 tokens and you had 3, I'd get 5 VPs; if I had 8 and you had 5, I'd get 6 (assuming rounding-down, for a start).
The question I have is, is this kind of simple averaging too much math? I want the mechanism to depend not only on your own tally, but also on what other players have done. This is in keeping with the general philosophy of the game, in which many scoring opportunities are related to helping others to score in addition to yourself. So, the idea here is that to maximize your payout, you want to make sure the person with the next-lowest tally is close to yours. I haven't been able to think of another great way to do this, although I have considered a straight "you get as many points as the number of tokens held by the next lower player" or something comparable.
So, any thoughts? Is a simple two-point average too much math for a game? Can functions other than simple addition and subtraction ever be tolerated?
thanks for any input,
Jeff
It shouldn't be too much math, but depending on how high the values in your game go you could put in a small table for the mathematically challenged. As long as the values arent higher than like 20 a side a table should not be TOO cluttered up...