Holotheatre/11 November 2020 transcript
Holotheatre (11 November 2020), a weekly Star Wars CCG show streamed on the Players Committee Twitch channel, included a five-minute excerpt from Kendall Halman's interview with former Decipher lead designer Jerry Darcy, in which Darcy describes how he devised the Objective card type. The rest of the episode covered the 2020 online World Championship registration, the release of Set 13 and pre-Worlds events. Participants in this segment: Dan Tartaglione (host), Kendall Halman, Jerry Darcy.
Source: Star Wars CCG - 11/11/20 Holotheatre - with Dan & Kendall - Interview: Jerry Darcy, Star Wars CCG (Players Committee), YouTube (uploaded 12 November 2020; streamed 11 November 2020). The segment runs from 25:57 to 34:30.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript
[25:57] Dan Tartaglione: I think we referenced this a little earlier. Kendall, you recently sat down and interviewed somebody.
[26:05] Kendall Halman: After the season premiere of The Mandalorian, this guy named Jerry Darcy posted on the Facebook group about his experience designing the krayt dragon, and how cool it was. We all saw The Mandalorian and the connection between that card and what happened in that episode. It was really cool. So I messaged him, more or less to interview him about that, and he agreed to the interview. In between that time and when I actually interviewed him, I found out that he was not just some random designer that designed a krayt dragon. He was the head designer of Star Wars CCG, basically from A New Hope until Endor. Technically his title didn't say that until Hoth, but basically the core of the game, this is the guy that did all the things. So if you played back then and you played using numbers, Clouds, Objectives...
[27:45] Dan Tartaglione: What's the big thing from Special Edition that broke the game? Operatives.
[27:48] Kendall Halman: Operatives. This is the guy to thank for all that fun stuff. And just the game: when I interviewed him, it really felt like this is the guy that made Star Wars CCG what it was. I kind of didn't realize that. It's this guy that nobody knows who he is, but he did a lot. I think that speaks to how a lot of us know a lot from the PC era, and none of us know a lot about what was going on behind the scenes earlier than that. This was supposed to be a 10- or 15-minute interview; it turned into an hour-long interview. We don't know how we're going to broadcast the whole thing, but I do have a clip of him telling the story of how he came up with the idea for Objectives.
[29:45] Kendall Halman: First of all, Objectives: how did those come about?
[29:50] Jerry Darcy: Objectives was one of the things that, for better or worse, I am at least proud of: the thought process, the creativity, and, how can I put this, I'm eventually proud of the effect of that on the game. What I saw at the time, the intent of what I wanted, was to turn things like carbon freezing, or blowing up planets with the Death Star, into more viable strategies for decks. I wanted storylines that you were familiar with from the movies to become strategic opportunities. I remember feeling that at the time numbers decks were really huge. The game had started becoming burdened by edge-case mechanics that we hadn't anticipated, and I wanted to bring strategies that brought it back to doing stuff that you saw in the movies: doing it your way, doing it with different characters, going your own path along that storyline, but something that felt like Star Wars again, rather than playing a numbers game that just had Star Wars slapped on the front.
[31:20] Jerry Darcy: But the idea of game conditions that changed was extremely hard. I remember just taking the Epic Event template and expanding it to almost the whole card, so there was no image, and then just writing all this text: if A, then B. Then having the consequence of, okay, now you have a new set of rules; if you manage to achieve all of this, then this happens, but your opponent can make it go back to that. So there was back and forth, a push and pull. But this was not viable. There was no room for an image on the card.
[32:28] Jerry Darcy: I remember going out with some of the other Decipher folks to the local mall, and we were eating mall pizza, sitting at a table, and the guy across from me picked up his pizza, and there was a pepperoni on the bottom of his slice. And I went, huh, there's something on the bottom. Cards have two sides. Everyone at the table is going, yeah. I'm like, no, no, no, cards have two sides. So I raced back and created that: it'll flip, and you'll have that. I remember that being a huge breakthrough. But the intent behind it was always to pull stuff away from the things that had gotten broken mechanically, and more towards things that felt more like you were playing Star Wars.
[33:35] Kendall Halman: And that's what the Players Committee has been trying to do.
[33:40] Jerry Darcy: If I could do it all over again, there are things I wish I had done back then. But I respect all of the folks in the Players Committee, and best of luck doing that stuff. Don't listen to a word I say; make it your own.
[34:00] Dan Tartaglione: Objectives are cool. That was a little five-minute interview, out of the hour that Kendall has with him. Hopefully we'll be able to get him on the show, part of the Holotheatre family, as we like to call ourselves.
See also
- Holotheatre/18 November 2020 transcript (second Darcy excerpt: the krayt dragon)
- Jerry Darcy · Kendall Halman · Corran on the Horn · Objective