In world of war craft the board game, many abilities seems to be designed to be combined. For example (something similar):
A- If you roll 8 you double the damage of that hit.
B- Change one of your die for an 8.
As you can see, both abilities are useful by themselves but combining them makes them much more powerful.
So I was wondering if people here had some guidelines to actually design theses kind of abilities.
I wanted to use this for a civilization like game in order to create a lot of replay value by allowing various combination of races and fields of magic. The 2 major part of the game is Military and development. I thought that military could be influenced by the races unit types and the wizards spell while the development aspect would be influenced by the technological advancements and the spell.
So for now, each element of the game could be influenced in two different ways and I think that is OK. Still I don't want to create dead combinations. For example, in order to gain the benefit of an ability, it must be combined with that specific ability. I want it to be a bit more flexible and allow various combinations.
One of the problem I had was to design a lot of special abilities for a game that has too few elements on the board to change. Which makes it much more complicated to design especially if you want almost all abilities to be unique. So I thought that by making combined abilities it could give me much more design options. Does it makes sense?
OK I can give you a fictional example taken from my mind.
Let say you get a skill called fire mastery which makes sure that each time you roll an 8 you double your damage. This would be represented on a card and the skill itself if useful because if you are lucky you make double damage.
Now letsay there is an item card called a power ring. This ring change any of your dice roll to an 8. That ring alone is useful because it could mean that you score an extra hit. ( the dice system works like white wolf: roll X dice above Y) .
But combining both abilities increase the odds for the fire mastery ability to happen.
By thinking a bit about it I could divide these abilities in 2 categories: Triggers and status change:
A trigger is and event or an effect that would occur in a certain situation.
ex: Aquaduct: All habitable terrain wil produce extra population.
In this case, all habitable hex increase in population which is a good thing in itself.
Then there is status change abilities which would change a value of a parameter
Ex: Change terrain: Makes all desert habitable.
In this case, if would increase the places where you could expand because there are more habitable hex.
But by combining both abilities, it makes aquaduct even more powerfull because change terrain increase the number of times the aquaduct will take effect.
This is for deterministic abilities. It becomes a bit more complicated with random abilites if you actually want variety.
So this is my meditation so far.