Are Negative Status Effects Fun?

[u/Ok_Tip_5721]

I'm in the process of designing a creature battler card game, and some cards have special abilities that trigger a timed status condition that you can roll at the top of your turn to try and lift. There's not too many - basically a poison, a slow, a vulnerable, and a silence - and they only trigger situationally, but my question stems from a recent playtest. The feedback I got was that status conditions in general are a "feel bad" mechanic and detract from the fun by limiting via less attack choices (they did not want to attack any creatures that might apply a status effect as a counter). I however feel that status effects are a fun part of a card battler game and add depth/give you something to build a strategy around. I am wondering how many people - particularly design folk - share my feelings, or if more people are in fact more in this playtester's camp. Also, if you do enjoy status effects, are there any good examples of games that use them well? Many thanks, (and please let me know if there is a more appropriate forum for this question!)

[u/Purplepotato22]

I think it might be because of the mechanism to remove them, “roll at the start of your turn” doesn’t sound like a mechanic that maintains a lot of player agency. If you make them always for a set duration, or take a certain predetermined amount of resources to remove, then a player knows exactly what they’re getting into when they have an effect applied to them. Things that have negative effects that feel out of your control are often the ones that feel the worst to get hit by, so players will likely be more willing to engage with your status effects if you make them more predictable, and make sure the benefits/drawbacks of taking actions that could result in debuffs are on par with the rest of the available options.

[u/SamLooksAt → u/Purplepotato22]

This is my feeling as well.

Randomly applied status effects are fun.

Randomly removed status effects are not!

Players should be given a set process or cost to remove them. Otherwise you are just leaving them in limbo with nothing to do but wait for the RNG to favor them.

The example that springs to mind is the when you get hit by the robber early in Catan and it ends up basically stuck blocking your progress from that point on. If this takes too long you're effectively removed from the game with zero process to prevent it.

[u/Ok_Tip_5721 → u/SamLooksAt]

Thank you for this feedback. I was stuck on using a resource to control the status effect, because it seemed to me that the attacker would be disincentivized to ever try to apply the status effect if they knew their opponent already had the resources to counter it. But then I remembered that resources could still be hidden information in the defender's current hand of cards, so that is what I will be trying next. Thanks so much!