Catalyst has been a part of my life for over ten years. My mind has been drifting into the apocalypse for all my adult life. I rarely went a week without playing a session from late-2011 until the last campaign guide was released in mid-2015. I still play Catalyst regularly, though not with the same frequency. We wrapped up my first Roll20 campaign. All this play forces me to compare the five-year old RPG against both the current gaming ecosystem and my own design knowledge. With the anniversary at hand, I wanted to share some thoughts that have been percolating alongside visions of demon hordes razing cities and the badass heroes trying to stop them.
Much like our Far Away retrospectives, it’s more informative to focus on specifics. If you’ve never played Catalyst, I’ll explain the mechanics and other specifics for everyone (though it’s a great time to try it for yourself). Talking about design philosophy in the abstract is better left for the pubs and those are closed right now. I want to highlight concrete parts of the RPG I’d change and the design lessons behind them.
Overall, I needed to be cleverer with the mechanics. I needed to combine systems and chain them together, instead of having disparate systems. The primary example is cards and vigor. Every Catalyst character has a small deck of cards that represent their combat actions. Everyone plays one face-down and flips to reveal what they do. The card also effects how others fight you: Defend or Move type cards give you a better chance of avoiding harm, while Attack and Interact leave you wide open. However, playing a card doesn’t exhaust it. Instead, a character loses vigor (a renewable resource for energy based on character stats). There’s a lot focus on the cards, but they’re more of an abstract concept than anything else.
To streamline combat, I’d remove vigor entirely. Vigor acts as a tempo mechanic (you can only do so much before taking a breather) and Catalyst still needs that to force players to make decisions. Instead, having the cards be part of a deck-building system would make the card deck a more integral part, while retaining the tension and speed from the simultaneous choose-and-reveal pattern. Also, vigor is hard for game masters to track for a bunch of NPCs. The less burden on the GM, the better.
A more card-centric combat system would let the leveling mechanics feed into the cards. Instead of rolling additional dice when improving your Firearms skill or Blood vein, you’d get additional cards (perhaps with cool variants that match the current spells and abilities). That would let you use the skill more than others, instead of just rolling better. This also touches on a problem with combat: I mirrored the D&D system of roll to attack, then roll for damage. This two-phase system is slow and confuses new players (though, to be fair to myself, the cards make Catalyst combat significantly faster than D&D fights). If Catalyst focused more on the cards and a direct rock-paper-scissors-like system, you could remove the initial do-you-hit die roll and get to the fun damage roll. A combat round becomes play a card, see if your target played a compatible card, and apply the card effect if possible. The dice become variability of success (like damage or healing amounts) while the cards solely control success or failure.
There were a couple other RPG conventions inspired by D&D that I should have dropped. The idea of an initiative order (reaction in Catalyst) sucks. It’s awkward to create and remember. Most importantly, it’s another thing the GM manages (though it’s easy enough to delegate to an experienced player). I also ordered the attributes like D&D does (with Strength first and Charisma last). No idea why I thought that was a good idea. Finally, I added spells and potions that gave temporary attribute bonuses. These are obnoxious to track in both games, particularly when you factor in any derived statistics (like vigor). All these little things I kept from D&D out of tradition. Five years later, I know to question every tradition and drop them when playtesting shows their weaknesses.
Some gameplay scenarios need better rules and explanations. Cars are the obvious candidate. While there are rules around getting hit by a car, I underestimated how much players place their car at the center of the party. Every campaign has at least two fights where someone is driving (regardless of whether it’s a good idea). Catalyst needs clear mechanics about the car as an extension of the player. I also should have balanced snipers better. When you have a blend of swords, guns, and magic, players are naturally going to favor some elements. If you have a gun, you’re going to want to fight at a distance. The only real counters are to have enemies also fight at a distance, remove scenarios where there can be significant distances, or make sniping boring (which is a terrible solution). I already lowered the effective ranges on guns to a distance that upsets gun enthusiasts, so clearly there’s some fix I’m missing. These minor points all cropped up in late-stage playtesting; when it was too much to redo major parts of the game and still ship something in a reasonable timeframe.
While there’s still a few minor details that bug me each time I play, the only one related to character creation is having to choose your character’s sex. A Catalyst character can be male, female, or intersex. Each choice gives a small attribute bonus. At the time, I thought this would force minmaxers (people who optimize their stats for specific scenarios) to role-play outside their comfort zones. While the playtesting all went fine, I don’t think making this a stat-driven choice holds up. The backgrounds give enough roleplaying opportunity. All the sex choice does is invite an argument and potentially make people uncomfortable.
It’s also important to revisit design choices that worked. While the cards could be refined, as described earlier, the core concept works. Making people decide their actions simultaneously speeds up play and forces players to think about what cards others might play. The cards also help new players understand their options: there’s no one scanning their character sheet mid-fight listing asking if they can use animal empathy against a skeleton.
Character leveling was heavily based on Arcanum’s systems. I loved both the ability to freely spend points without a class restriction and that you could max out any one skill long before the level cap. Catalyst embraced a classless system: everyone gets seven “growth points” per level and they can go into attributes, skills, veins, spells, or abilities. You can also max-out anything by level 5, though you’re often better off spreading your points out across multiple things, rather than being amazing at one thing. While this system steepens the learning curve, it simplifies the leveling experience at higher levels. Players quickly grasp the spend-seven-points thing and quickly learn to level up without the GM’s help.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on the theme and setting. The fantasy layer on top of the here-and-now world is solid. Players love being in their town. They love searching through Google Maps to understand what the terrain looks like. They can contribute to the story with ease because they know the parameters of the universe. When you’re starting a battle, you can trust players to help create a city street or gas station. They can add details that bring it to life because they’re not solely reliant on the GM for context. It’s also morbidly fun to imagine the post-apocalyptic version of our world. That scene-setting speculation breaks down the barriers between players and their characters.
All of this is looking at Catalyst as a game. For Cherry Picked Games, Catalyst was also our first product. It was the first time we had to raise funds through Kickstarter, create advertisements, make a company website, plan manufacturing, and ship hundreds of copies to expectant buyers. If you’re a one or two-person operation, there’s no real way to prepare for that. You have to go through the process, ready to adapt, and learn as you go. I woke up in a cold sweat three months before shipping because we hadn’t yet designed a box. I was so focused on the game, I neglected how people were actually going to pick it up. The first print run had the book, cards, box, and shrink-wrapping done by four different companies. We personally assembled every box and filled it with the book and cards (which was a challenge because the cards came unsorted). None of this was either efficient or cheap.
It’s also impossible not to reflect on the people that helped make Catalyst come to life. Catalyst was a niche game with no venture capital being designed by a line cook. No one could be paid what they should have been. Instead, a lot of stuff was done as favors, fun side-projects, and learning experiences. Considering this, I relied too much on the generosity and guidance of others. I trusted the companion apps would be made without real product management (the Android player app came out great though). I also needed a lot more help from Bennett (the original artist of CPG) than our arrangements fairly demanded. With no knowledge of graphic design, I couldn’t make educated asks. We iterated way more than necessary on card designs and spell trees. I’m still super thankful for all he accomplished and put up with. From all this, I better understood the distinction between artistic freedom and lack of direction for the product. It’s another lesson that can only really be learned first-hand.
The running theme here seems to be experience, which is quite fitting when discussing an RPG. Catalyst would have benefited from my own experiences in design and production, though I would have obviously needed a different first game in its stead. There’s also five or six years of experience the whole industry gained. Gloomhaven, D&D 5th edition, and Blades in the Dark all released after Catalyst could react. Games are always evolving and it’s hard to not lose context of the era in which a title was released. This is not to say the design of Catalyst is bad, but if there was any demand, I’d love to remake Catalyst with my current sensibilities. I can’t imagine a single creative person who doesn’t wish to revisit their early work. Often, the best we can do is move forward with our old experiences and learn new lessons about new projects.
-- Alex