What to do with Pathos?

A lot of the deckbuilder games like Hypnagonia are using some sort of overworld to move the player from one encounter to the next. Slay The Spire pioneered it and before that, the Magic: The Gathering 1997 game also did something similar. A lot of other deckbuilding games’ overworld design, therefore follows a similar pattern. Move around in some sort of map, and encounter things to deal with. I think the only one breaking away from that formula (that I know of) has been Banners of Ruin which always provides 1-3 options to choose from.

I went with a similar approach to BoR myself, (independently landed on it on my own before I bought it) where the player is shown the potential encounters in a storybook format, AKA the Dream Journal. This maintains a level of simplicity that is doable by a solodev, and is also quite thematically fitting to what I am going for.

The underlying system which determines which encounters the player finds with, is called “Pathos” and is split into seven parts: frustration, lethargy, curiosity, loneliness, foreboding, desire, and closure. Furhermore, each part has two accumulations. Repressed and Released. Yes I know it sounds a lot but bear with me [1].

The way it works, each time the player moves to the next encounter (i.e. flips a journal page), all the player’s repressed pathos increment by a randomized amount that is specific for each. E.g. Frustration increases between 10-20 points, while desire increases between 2-5. The more repressed pathos the player has when a page turns, the higher the chance the connected encounter will appear. In this case, repressed frustration corresponds to Torment encounters, whereas desire corresponds to Curio discovery encounters.

The way it’s setup, the player will encounter way more Torments than find random curios, which is the desired result. There’s other systems in place to ensure this behaves as needed, but this is the basic approach.

Each page turned, also has a 1-3 encounters possible. The player has to always choose one of them. Each time a player chooses an encounter, the pathos connected to that type is Released, which means a set amount of that encounter is removed from the “Repressed” pool to the “Released” pool. This naturally reduces the chances of that encounter coming up in the future, until enough of it is repressed again.

The Released pathos is then stored and is used for..?

This the part where I’m struggling :)

Currently I’m using released pathos just for the shop. Each type of purchase in the shop corresponds to one type of pathos. So you buy cards with released curiosity, upgrade them with lethargy etc. This is similar to how Gold is treated in other deckbuilder games, where you receive an amount after each enemy you defeat and use that in various shops throughout the game.

However at the moment I only have 5 possible services in the Shop, and 7 types of Pathos, so not everything is used. Furthermore, I feel like if Pathos is only used in the shop, I could just bundle all of it into a generic “Released Pathos” and allow the player to purchase anything with it as a type of Gold.

But before I go this way, I think there may be ways to use these 7 types of currency in some more interesting fashion. Since Hypnagonia does not use potions, I was thinking that instead we can have something like special powers, where you can use an amount of a specific pathos to get some effect, like extra confidence or recover some anxiety etc.

Do you have any ideas? If you do, please do share :)

[1] Before you say that 7x2 Pathos is too much information, yes I kinda agree. I did consider hiding the repressed pathos, as it doesn’t have any mechanical reason to be shown, but on the other hand, it is information that the player might want to take into account when choosing encounters. For example, they might decide to visit a rest area instead of encountering a Torment, when their foreboding (i.e. elite Torments) is high. This is all under consideration.