So let’s talk about the different options that I am considering. I think that there are a few interesting ways that you can improve or change as a game goes on.

Possible Campaign Elements

Character Progression

The first one is character progression. I think that is fairly important if you have characters in your game. I don’t find it a major knock against Paper Dungeons because it’s so loosely a campaign. But you start with your heroes as level one in every game and level them up as you go.

For my idea, I want to have a separate character sheet, much like in an RPG, that you level up your stats. You get bonuses based off of how many bubbles you fill in, in a row. And you fill in a certain number, always, at the end of the a scenario.

If this is a competitive game, the person who wins gets a bonus. But if it is cooperative, there might be a bonus if you do the best in a scenario, like first pick of gear. For cooperative, though, you’d not see as much character development and splitting off.

Skill Tree

Building off of that character progression, skill progression is a great way to cause differences to happen. But the idea of a tree is that you can split off what you are doing. If you are a Gunslinger class, or something like that, you might unlock your first ability at level 1, but then at level two, you have three options. The one that you pick will limit what you can do further down.

Now, while I like this idea, it really causes things to become different and gives progression, I am worried that it’d make the game a bit more complex. I think a lot of the abilities would just need to be things that bump up health or statistics.

Items and Gear

Items and Gear would likely be one time use things, or maybe something like a pack mule to eventually being able to get up to a wagon. Something that can carry more items. Maybe skills are going to be more abilities that’d be used in every game since you are unlocked.

So things like health potions (or alcohol), magic scrolls, dynamite, things that you’d use once. Or maybe some gear like “armor” whatever that might look like. Basically wearable items or weapons. I don’t think I would ever add in ammo because I don’t want to track that type of thing. Plus I like giving more things versus losing things in a campaign game.

Story Progression

Finally, story is going to be an important element to the game. Right now that is what makes Paper Dungeons a campaign game. A tiny bit of story that you read in between games. And while I do enjoy that, I wish there was more. Or more so, I wish the story felt like it mattered a bit more.

I can pull out any card, read the story and play, and it doesn’t matter. I’d love to add in more story to the game. Maybe even give it some choices. Like, make a decision and that unlocks certain items, gives a stats bump, or maybe causes you to lose some money. But all based off of choices that players make. I even, at least once, maybe twice, would want to change up what the players interact with on a map because of a decision that they make.

That makes it feel more like a fun experience to me. The decisions that we make, for example, in Roll Player Adventures or Tainted Grail, change up what can happen in the game later. And that is very cool to have as part of the experience. It takes it from being told a story to character story.

How Much Should Their Be?

That is the question that I’m asking myself, because with enough campaign elements and campaign progression elements, the game can get large. Part of the fun of a roll and write, even Paper Dungeons which has a lot to look at on the sheet, is that it is a sheet.

I want there to be enough decisions that it makes the game feel cool. On the flip side, I don’t want there to be so many decisions that it makes the game hard to play. Looking, again, at Paper Dungeons, now that I’ve played it a few times, I know what to do every time I come back to it. I looked up one rule last time, but I mainly know what I need to do.

A campaign is going to be bigger. It is going to offer more challenges of remembering how to play. But with a nice little sheet of what to do on the turn, or even printing on the sheet the round actions, I hope to make it simple enough that it’s a fast refresher. Which means, things like skills, those are a bit harder to implement, potentially. But that comes down to being clever with how I design the game and work with that idea.

What campaign element would you want most?

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I want to design one now, so let’s get started.

The Campaign Roll and Write Theme

So now I want to design a roll and write campaign game. I thought about just doing another fantasy/dungeon crawler roll and write. But there are several of them out there, Deadly Doodles, Paper Dungeons, Doodle Dungeon, and Drawn to Adventure all fit that fantasy theme. Instead, I thought of two options. I could go Sci-Fi, likely a direction that we’ll start seeing more and more roll and write games go. Or, I could do wyrd west. Think Wild Wild West with Will Smith.

Why that theme, one it is kind of fantasy adjacent. You end up with crazy monsters or creatures that you can play as. But it isn’t going to be your standard fantasy. Pull out your pistol, load up your pack mule, and get ready to adventure in the Wyrd West.

Why Theme First?

Honestly, theme can be where you start, but I doubt it is standard for most designers. Or if it is, it is something that is held onto loosely. In this case, since I thought about it in the context of what Paper Dungeons is doing, I wondered what else might work theme wise for a campaign. It is more specific at a campaign level.

It is also important for me, while I own roll and writes and other games where the theme isn’t there, for me theme is important. If you hook me with a theme from the beginning, I am more likely to buy a game. And Wyrd West, Fantasy, or Sci-Fi all hook me when I think about.

So when I design or start to design an idea, theme is going to be important for me. And I want what I design in the game to make sense in the theme. If I put something into the game that doesn’t make sense, it firstly makes the game harder to teach. But it also breaks the immersion in the theme and in the game.

Why Wyrd West?

So any setting is going to give some level of ability to create a story. Wyrd West is just not one that I see used all that often. To go along with that, it lends itself to a fair number of the fantasy story tropes, but giving you a different setting for them.

Plus, then you are still able to create some of those leveling and story progression items. What character do you pick to start, are you the crafty outlaw, the robot sheriff, the damsel working at the bar with a dead eye shot? There is a lot of story there, and ways that you can build upon those characters.

Wyrd West also allows you to explore a lot of different things for monsters. Zombies, Vampires, Lizardfolk, other dimensions, all of them are fair game. I can even lean into Steampunk if I want, again harkening back to Wild Wild West and their giant mechanical spider.

Campaign Roll and Write Next Steps?

So what is the next thing I need to think through. The mechanics of the game, really, though some of those, being a roll and write, are going to be somewhat in place. But I want to think about missions, what do they look like, how the campaign progresses, and how characters level up or gain new abilities.

That is the one thing I really miss from the Paper Dungeons campaign is progression. I want to take something I got last game, or in between games to make what I do grow. Your standard campaign has character progression, so I want to figure out what that’ll look like in my game.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

Building a Level Part 1

Building a Level Part 2

What this one is going to be focused on is writing out sample events, quests, and more so that I can work on getting the ideas for the game down and you can get an idea of what something actually in the game might look like.

Events, shopping, and information example

Event 1

You open your eyes and see a town full of other people, looking around you realize that you’ll need to pull up the location of your friends on in a chat. You message them and get back the message: “Let’s meet at the bazaar and get some gear.” Pushing your way past people you see that some of them already have gear and others are sprinting off in other directions. You make it to the bazaar and find your friends and you start to browse the wares.

Mandatory Event – All Players Must Go to this Card and Take the Shopping Action

Shopping
Read Passage 101

Passage 101

The din in the bazaar is overwhelming as you get there. You can hear the stall keepers shouting though as the system adjusts the volume on the crowd around you.

“Weapons, armor, get your weapons and armor.”

“Every hero needs a potion, just in case, don’t be caught without one!”

“The best hunting grounds, the best way to get stronger fast, information only 1 gold!”

“The best weapon can’t save you without proper training, but who has time for that, skills for sale to give you a leg up on the other heroes.”

Pull Out cards 1-20 of the weapon and armor decks, and cards 1-40 of the small item deck and 1-10 of the big item deck and cards 1-10 of the skill deck. Purchase items from the card to create your playstyle.

[It is recommended that you get some form of armor and a weapon. Skills are something that you can come back and get unless you have an idea of the play style that you want.

Example: Archer

Leather Armor: 10 GP
Short Bow: 15 GP
Quiver/Arrows: 10 GP
Health Potion (2): 10 GP
Fire Arrows (20): 25 GP
Distracting Shot (Skill): 25 GP

Example: Swordsman

Chainmail Armor: 30 GP
Short Sword: 10 GP
Health Potion (3): 15 GP
Whirlwind Strike (Skill): 25 GP

]

Then Proceed to Passage 102

Passage 102

The lady shouting about the hunting grounds catches your attention. She is wearing leather armor and looks like she’s been through a few battles. She sees you looking at her and comes over.

“For two silver I can get you to a hunting ground that no one else knows about.”

You hand over two coins (deduct two silver if you can from between all players)

“There’s a glade just north of the town, that’s where most people are going, but beyond that, follow the deer paths to the west and you’ll come across an opening with a giant tree in it, there are bound to be a number of giant rabbits there.”

She goes back to her previous spot and starts shouting again until someone else looks at her. You’re not sure if she’s telling everyone about the same hunting spot, but it might not be a bad idea to hurry anyways.

End Round

Event and Hunting Example

Event 2

(Required for all characters)

You take off to the area that the lady had told you about. You pass groups who are fighting what look to be giant rabbits along the way. Apparently there are a lot of spots for players to be able to level up or learn how to fight here. It’s nice that you seem to get your own spot as you draw up to the spot in the forest where there is a clearing and a tree in the middle. You can hear other fights, but they are in the background.

Mandatory Event: All Players must go hunting

Read Passage 108

Passage 108

Combat, quests, and many other interactions will give you choices to make and actions can do many different things. But how you resolve them will be the same every time.

Shuffle your modifier deck [insert deck symbol]

Draw 7 cards

The modifier cards improve the weapon or ability that you are using. Look at your weapon card, it should have the ability that the weapon is paired with as well as a damage number and a number of modifier cards that can be played. You use the damage to defeat the monster and get the reward.

Look at the giant rabbit stats printed in the hunting section of the first level (lower left hand corner of the level page). You can see it’s health, defense, and attack. [note that health, defense, and attack will have symbols by them as well to make pairing up easier]

Look at your stat and weapon damage to see how close you are getting to defeating the giant rabbit. Look at both the health and defense because the defense will protect against damage on every attack you do. You won’t have enough damage to just kill it with your weapon, so you can modify it by playing up to the number modifier cards that your weapon says you can play.

Note: These modifier cards are all used in boss battle combat, every card you don’t use on the level gets shuffled into the boss battle deck so plan it carefully, if you need 2 more damage to kill the Giant Rabbit, and you can play 2 cards, it might be worth playing two +1 modifier cards versus one +2 modifier card.

Select your card and kill that Giant Rabbit. If you don’t, it’ll hit you back and you won’t get the reward for killing it. Once you’ve played your card and defeated the giant rabbit, look at the bottom row of text for the keyword reward in the hunting section on the giant rabbit. Gain the reward it says.

End Round

Now, obviously that doesn’t cover everything, and I think that the wording of a bunch of it will have to get cleaned up, but I wanted to lay out generally how it’s going to work for those first couple of rounds. What I haven’t shown here is branching dialog or what exactly the weapon, armor, etc, cards are going to look like. I might come back and show off those once I have them, but we’re getting to the point where I’m going to have to start doing the physical design of stuff. I wish I had time off around the holidays to spend trying to knock out this level, but might it’ll be a fun project to do coming up, you just might not hear anything for a while.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

Building a Level Part 1

So the first level is going to be a bit different than every other level. In those you’re going to be able to start in immediately doing whatever you want. And I do want you to be able to do that mainly on the first level, but I also want to help players along with knowing how to play the game, so I want to kind of create some of a walkthrough or how to play within the first level.

The first level is going to have basically everything that a normal level would have. You will have NPC’s and PC’s to interact with, you will have quests, floor events, the guild and monsters, and you’ll have a shop to go to.

That’s probably the first difference is that you won’t have several different shops to go to, you will have a single bazaar that you will go to and you will go to it on your first turn. The first floor event you flip over, before you decide where you’ll go will direct everyone to go shopping. Why do that? Because you don’t start with armor, weapons, etc. It will take you through the shopping experience, let you spend your money and explain how skills work and weapons work. When you talk to the shopkeeper they are going to explain and give examples of the cards and how they work so that you aren’t having to spend as much time in the rule book learning that. That stuff will be in the rule book for refresher, but it won’t be something you need to read to get started.

The next day you’ll flip a new event and it’ll send you fall out to go fight a monster. This is going to give a chance to show how the monsters work and show one of the key mechanics for a level as you draw a hand of modifier cards and use them. This also will show off how XP is gained and tracked as the players defeat the monsters and get rewards. This should be a fairly boring but quick event for everyone to go through, but it’s also important because besides maybe a few PC and NPC actions as well as the shopping, you’ll be given the option to use modifiers on almost everything and to learn how they’ll be removed from your deck for the boss battle and how you can manipulate that.

The third level event is going to kick off the game proper. It’s going to be a level event that everyone has to go to and deal with. This is where the whole game will kick off. There probably will be some thing that you’ll spend a card on, but I don’t really want to spoil any story ideas right now. But most likely this event will lead to some quests or paths that can be opened up in the game.

Then for the rest of the level, another as many rounds as you want, there really won’t be any negatives, creatures will run out so you can’t grind character levels on level one, NPC’s and PC’s will run out eventually, but from that point you’ll be able to go and do quests, fight monsters, research, whatever it is. Also from this point on, there won’t likely be another set of level events that require all players to do something. It might be a very rare occasion where a player is needed to go to a level event, but that would only be if they don’t want to send a guild marker there, or they can’t because the guild is too small.

Once the players have decided they’ve done everything that they need, the boss monster will be up for them to fight. And I again want to do some of a tutorial for this. That means that this is probably going to be a smaller map, just to fit some text onto the page. I’ve talked about how the boss monsters and boss battles will work, but the first boss battle is going to lay out those details as well as how turn order works. Don’t worry, there will be cheat sheet cards that explain how both the levels and the combat works that will have this information as well, but I want to be able to go into more detail and lay out kind of that first monster turn and what is going to happen as well as how some of the combat will work for the players. I don’t with it, however, want to tell the players what they have to do, no play this card as the optimal play or attack this way as the optimal way.

Finally, just to recap some of the layout of how this will all be set-up. This will be in a book, there probably will be a page of intro story that can be read at the very beginning and how to use the book/mark where you are at, that sort of thing, but general layout will be, on the left page, you’ll have spots for all the actions that you can take. For the quests, monsters, NPC’s, etc. Most won’t be limited as to how many people can go there, but sometimes they might be, in particular for something like the monsters, the quests, or the level events there might be a limit, otherwise people can go to the same spot if they want. With this there will also be spots to put down the cards for the level. That might be the level events, it might be cards that you have unlocked as new quests, it might be a list of the NPC’s or PC’s whom you can talk to, or it might be the monsters that you could fight. These are generally going to be small cards, think like the modifier and item card size from Gloomhaven if you are familiar with that game. They aren’t meant to have a ton of information on them, they are meant to drive you to the story book or adventure book in the game. Then on the right page you’ll have the map for the boss battle. It’s going to also help you know what type of level it is, there will be artwork throughout the levels as well, but this will be generally a large spot to highlight that.

The next part of the level design will start to dive into samples of how quests, level events, NPC and PC interactions and more might go.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

So, this really should have more of a graphical component to it than it will. I would love to show some art, but I don’t have that, to give a sense of the design, or a layout of how I think the board is going to work, but we are in the super early phases of this design. What’s really going to happen is that I’m going to move this over to a spreadsheet and create a number of different characters based off of that so that everything is formatted the same.

The Real World Character

Male – Age 26 – Office Drone

A recent graduate with high hopes and now nothing more than an office drone. Changing the world was the dream, and now it’s changing numbers in the spread sheet. Friends moved away and not enough energy after working overtime to make that many more. At least the people he works with are nice enough, and the coffee isn’t bad.

“I’ve been waiting for this game for months, I know some old friends have too, it’ll be just like old times.”

Keywords: Gamer, Business

In Game Character

Stats:

Strength: 5

Agility: 5

Vitality: 5

Allure: 5

Guile: 5

Currency: 100 Gold

Oddly enough, that’s about it for a character when you pull them out of the box. The real nuances to a character are going to come with how you allocate your 10 extra points for the stats.

The Other Stuff

I think it’s important to talk about what else you’ll have right away, even though it might not be pure character creation stuff. Such as what sort of weapons will you be able to find, and what sort of skills can you pick up. You will be dropped into the world without any gear, just normal commoners clothes, and no skills, just basic attacks that you can do, so that’s why you get 100 gold to start. You can save it up, because there is better stuff you can get on level 2, but you might not live that long.

For armor, and this could have really been it’s own section, you’re looking at two types of armor.

Leather – No movement penalty, +2 defense

Chainmail – Minus 1 movement, +4 defense

Something along those lines. the advantage with chainmail is that you are going to be taking considerably less damage. When an attack might only get through on leather armor at 2 to 4 damage, that means chain might mean that you take no damage. But it does mean that the enemy is going to be more apt to focus on you, because you are going to be the closest with that slower speed, so it’s a trade off. Numbers are not final at this point obviously, but for an example.

Weapons then, you’re going to have much more of a choice. You will have two handed swords, short swords, daggers, bow and arrow, axe, crossbow, and maul at least all available at the start of the game to buy.

As for skills, we’re looking at pretty simple ones that would be available. Something like sweeping attack, bash, counter attack, rush, disengage.

Plus there will be items as well, health potions probably being the biggest of those items that the players might want to buy.

Now, with getting items, I could be really nice, I could be really mean, or I could do something between that. What do I mean? If I was really nice, you’d have a catalog of items that you could pick from and purchase without it costing a turn. If I was really mean, I could make those places four separate shops and make players almost have to decide to shop at least 3 times in a row before doing anything else. I’m going to be less mean than that, I don’t want to hand out gear, and players can do other things on their first turn, but on the first level, there is just going to be a bazaar that’s the shopping area, so you can go and shop once and be done with it, unless you decide that you need more and then you can come back again. The first level is going to play a bit differently than others, I think, and I will delve into what I’m thinking when I start building a level, though I probably won’t build the first level.

Character creation, pretty simple, basically all a player would need to do is allocate those points and fill in the player name and the character name. The character boards, for the stats, might be more like a character sheet, and then a side board. Or I might go with dials that keep track of stats, that’s too be determined, with a save sheet so if the dials get bumped it isn’t the end of the world. Or with a save sheet, maybe I’d do a dry erase player board, that’d be pretty cool and useful.

What do you think of character creation, it should be extremely simple. Obviously, the keywords I handed out this time were pretty generic, but I want to create more unique real world people than just what I wrote for this one, someone might run a greenhouse so they’d know about plants, or maybe a chef, give people a ton of different backgrounds.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here

The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

So a quick refresher on boss battles, it is going to be one half of the level book that has the battles in it, so when you flip open a page, one part will be the level itself with all of the level actions and artwork, and any restrictions for the level, anything like that. The other side is going to be the map for the boss battle. This map will tell you some about the terrain, but not about the boss whom you’ll be facing, you’ll find that out by talking to information brokers, NPCs, and PCs. When all the players are done taking actions on a level, that’s when the players decide together to jump into battle.

When fighting monsters, it was just going to be a do or don’t you hit sort of thing to defeat them, but bosses are going to be different. Bosses will track hit points like the characters. And bosses are going to have their hit point track split into multiple parts. This is how the boss is going to change up their attack as time goes on. But a boss will attack in a predictable pattern, like video game monsters do.

Let’s do a fake boss fight: Glorglor the Minotaur stands menacingly in the room.

First Attack: Rush Forward, attack everyone directly in front of him and to the front left and right spots on the grid for 10 damage.

Second Attack: Move to the nearest character do a power blow for 15 damage and push them back two.

Third Attack: Attack any enemy adjacent to you for 10 and dodge, add +2 to Minotaur’s defense.

Something along those lines. Those three attacks would repeat 1 through 3 over and over again until one of the health bars is completely empty, then between Two and Three the Minotaur would add in a new attack.

New Attack: Leap 5 spaces, attack all adjacent squares for 10.

This would change up the battle so that you can’t, as players, complete your puzzle and just let it auto play itself out based off of what the monster is doing. The added card is probably going to be a card the players haven’t researched before as part of learning about the boss monster, so it should mess up their plans.

Finally for the boss, they are going to have their standard targeting. It is going to target whomever is the closest to them. If there are two or more heroes close to them, it will target in a way that it can hit the most, if it can only hit one, it’ll target clockwise from the direction it’s facing. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule, mainly if an attack can hit multiple player characters and there is a grouping like that in range, it will move to attack them. So like the jump ability, say there are three archers off to one side of the board, it’ll jump over to them to hit them all if it can, instead of focusing on the tank in front of it.

So as for the players, what are they doing on their turn?

Players are always going to have two things on their turn that they’ll do, and players can actually go all at once, doesn’t matter turn order. It seems like it might if they are placing a weakness on the boss or a buff on everyone else, but generally those are going to stick around, which means that you don’t get it for that turn, but you’ll get it in upcoming ones. I wanted to create as little downtime for the players as possible. So everyone decides what to do, and then players move and attack/buff/weaken accordingly.

The move is going to be simple, but there is one thing to pay attention to, if a player has a faster speed than someone else and they are both moving to the same spot on the board, ideally, the faster character will get there first. So I guess, when I say everyone is going at once, the movement will be based off of speed. And your speed/movement is also going to determine how far you can move. In this, there is no walking, it is just assumed that everyone is going all out, as you would in a game where you could die, and therefore there won’t be boosts to movement.

The next thing is an attack, buff or weaken, but I’ll start with an attack. An attack is going to be something the players can always do, if they are within range. The players will have a choice though with their attack how to do it. They will always have a basic attack, so a basic long sword might be 4 basic damage, plus strength, plus one modifier flip. But they can also augment an attack with a skill, so maybe they play “Furious Strike” that would have a cool down of one, add 2 to the damage and give another modifier flip. Or maybe they augmented the sword with poison and it’d add in 8 poison damage. The augment would always do it’s extra damage, but the skill would then go into it’s spot on the cool down track and then after the monster goes, everything in the cool down track would shift down one.

Let’s talk a bit more about the cool down track. It would have up to six spots on it, there would be a 5 down to 1, plus a 0 spot. That means that any skill you play, such as Furious Strike, with a cool down of 1, would always be out of your hand for a turn. If it’s at 5, it’s going to be out of your hand for 5 turns. Skills are placed in this track face down, just because of the upcoming mechanic to differentiate.

To build off of that, some skills might use the cool down track in a different way, it would be used as a powering up track. So let’s say I have the skill, I don’t know, let’s call it “Lightning Sword”. That would go face up into spot 3. And I’d draw a modifier card. So why would I draw a modifier card, the example text for Lightning Sword would be something like: Place in Spot 3 on the Cool Down Track face up, draw up to 2 modifier cards per attack action. Threshold: Modifier total less than 6, no damage. 6 to 10 – add 10 damage to basic attack lightning damage, 10+ add 15 lightning damage to basic attack and two modifier flips ignoring cancel attack. Then that card would get flipped and would go back onto the cooldown track. So basically, it’s a skill that is probably going to knock the socks of damage wise which is why you would build up to it. This probably isn’t going to be something that you do early, but when you know that you’re doing, you set it up to try and take down the bad guy in a blow. When using an ability that charges up like this, you can still move, but can’t attack.

With buffs and weakens. These are played instead of an attack and they have to be done at the right range. Almost always these will go onto spot 5 in the cool down track and you will have the whole time that buff or weaken is in the cool down track that it is active. These will go face up like the power up just so you remember that they are active. Buffs and weakens are also going to always just be a plus or a minus to a total. These will take up your attack for the turn you play them.

That’s the vast majority of how combat is going to work. To recap how the modifiers work quickly, there will be modifiers that you can add to your deck or swap in for other modifiers that will allow your fellow players to draw more modifiers. The cool thing with drawing a new modifier is if you draw that additional one via a boost like that, and it’s a cancel the attack, it is just discarded, but you don’t get to draw a new one. If you draw a cancel the attack on your own draw, that will kill the attack. That is going to be a required card that can’t be removed from the deck. But you’ll start out with some pluses, some minuses, and some zeros, and you’ll work on building up your pluses or removing minuses through questing, skills, and stuff like that.

So we have two things left with boss fights, the first is the part your guild plays in a boss battle. Before the boss battle starts, you’ll decide how many guild members you are going to take into the battle with you, they are basically going to keep minions off of you. Minions are meant to be annoying, so if you have 0 guild members with you, a minion will hit you for a small amount of damage, let’s say on level one it’s 1 damage, but they’ll do that every round, and you don’t calculate defense against minions, it just always is pinging you. So you want to bring in guild member. There are going to be a few different levels that you check on the minion card. Let’s do an example minion cards.

“Annoying Kobolds”

< 3 – All guild members brought in die, 2 damage per turn, lose 2 morale

3 to 5 – All guild members brought in die, 1 damage per turn

5 to 7 – 2 guild members die, 0 damage per turn

7 to 9 – No guild members die, 0 damage per turn, gain 1 morale

10 or more – No guild members die, lose 1 morale

This basically is the chart that you’d check the number of guild members you picked against. The last one is probably going to have some questions with it, why would you lose morale if you bring in too many guild members? Well, first you’ll lose morale for every two guild members who die, so it’s better to have too many than too few, or just barely too few, but if you bring too many in, you are putting too many people at risk, and that disheartens them.

So then finally, the most important thing, what do you get for loot? If the boss has a signature weapon, that will be dropped, it might drop some skills or augments as well, and then of course currency. On the bosses main card it will tell what loot pack to open as well as how much currency and XP that you’d get coming out of that fight. I want with the bosses in general and the loot pack for them to be sealed things, so before getting to a level and researching the boss, you won’t know what that boss looks like. As you research you find out more and more. This is an idea that I really like from Oathsworn and am borrowing because of that. I don’t want people to be able to open up the box and see all the bosses. Instead, I want to give them something to explore and discover.

So that’s a lot of information, but hopefully boss fights sound found. I want to give players lots of different options for solving the puzzles of a boss fight.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Level Events

So I’ve talked about these a little bit before, as they are one of the timing elements for a floor. Let’s go over that again, with how it’ll work. There will be a deck of 10 cards for each floor. The top 7 cards will be specific to that floor, quests, one time events, stuff like that. I’ll get into those more coming up here, but after that you will have 3 cards that you are told to shuffle and put at the bottom. Depending on the floor these cards will change, but they will be pulled from a general deck. These cards are basically a timer before you start to lose a lot of guild members. Guild members will leave generally on the previous cards, but the bottom, printed on the level itself, will be a harsher penalty, like basically a cost of money, morale, and loss of guild members to stay there longer.

But let’s assume that you won’t spend all your time there frittering away the guild members and morale, what can you do with these events?

The fun thing about these events, at least to me, is that these evens will only happen at a certain time. The level events are going to be in a specific order, not shuffled, so that we can have the NPC’s provide information about them, but you have the choice the day turn of the event to do that event, after that, it’s gone. So you might decide to abandon a quest in the middle of it, if the event is something that looks/seems important. I want skipping an event also to have some negative. While skipping a quest might not be that big of a deal, a floor event is something specific to that place, and should be important to it, and while not all of them will be that negative, maybe a slight drop in morale or someone leaves the guild, that sort of thing, some of them might be fairly big dings to player reputations, guilds, money, etc, but it should be pretty obvious when that is the case.

So what sort of things might there be?

I’m going to go stuff as basic as a good sale at a shop that you have to commit to, this might be why you end up at a shop again. There might be some epic quest that is brought out that you can do. This is kind of like the Christmas quest in Sword Art Online type of thing, it gives you something awesome and rare. There will also be bigger level events that might require multiple people or a hero and guild members to do. Going back to the quest section, I talked about having Trolls attack, well, that event is going to come up sometime and if you’ve done the other quest, you get a benefit, but it’s going to happen, and that wouldn’t be a required event to take part in, but something like a troll attack would definitely ding morale, guild size, etc. a lot.

Beyond that though, there are going to be some floor events that aren’t actually related to the programming of the MMORPG, they are going to be related to the PC’s. Let me lay this out very clearly, these will always be a big deal. The reason I say that is going off of the premise that you are stuck in the game and it’s life or death, player conflicts could easily lead to death. There is going to be some that happens in the game, you will have guild members die, you will see the population track lower in the game no matter what you do, because you aren’t the only group who is fighting through, but when it’s a floor event, it’s going to be public, noisy, and will set conditions that could come back to haunt you later.

All of these will follow the standard flow of things, the quests inside the quest will behave like a quest. When dealing with an NPC or a shop, it’ll be similar to that. When dealing with a PC, it’s going to be the same as that. The only thing that might be different would be something like the troll attack example, that’s not really a quest, that’s just something you can commit some people to. There might be multiple ways that you can help deal with that, but that will be an event that is there that day and probably the next.

Monsters

Monsters, on the other hand are going to be simpler. They are going to be a pretty straight forward battle, but they don’t take place in town, hence not using them in the last game design post.

Fighting a monster will have you going out, and there will be up to three areas to fight monsters. Monsters for a level will fall into three categories, easy, medium, and hard. Easy will give you a little bit of XP and gold, medium will give you more, and hard will give you a lot. You won’t know what monster will be coming up though, so you can flip from any of the decks, and it might be that you hit a harder monster than you were hoping for, but you’ll have an idea of the range.

Monster combat is going to be quite simple, you will flip the monster and compare your attack skill to it’s defense, and if you do enough to kill it you do, if not, it can hit you back. The advantage you have is that once you flip it you can certainly modify your attack to do more damage. Most of the time you won’t be tracking hit points on these monsters, it’ll just be, do you hit them, if you hit them you kill them sort of thing. There will be some monsters that will, for sure, hit you back, because you’ll need to hit them twice.

So what do you get from killing monsters, the two big things are XP and gold. Some of them might drop an item, but these are going to be things like health potions or trinkets stuff like that. Maybe in the hard deck will there be one especially hard monster that would drop a skill or something along those lines. When a player character is out fighting monsters you are going to get more XP and less currency versus the guild out there fighting monsters.

They are going to get more currency simply because they are going to have “killed” more things. The guild will have a fourth option to pick from and that is basically a “farming” option. By that I mean that they’ll go out and kill a lot of really really low level things, things that wouldn’t bump up XP really much at all for a player, but those will be the way to get a good chunk of currency for the guild.

So that was a bunch of digest there. Monsters are going to be very straight forward but the floor events, I think there is an opportunity for a lot of story there. And I really like that about them, I think they are going to be something people will want to do, though sometimes might feel like they have to do them, but I never want it to seem like there isn’t a choice.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Shopping

The first of the in town activities is going to be shopping. Shopping is going to have three parts, the second part, however, is going to be optional. The first part is simply picking where you want to go. Levels might have information brokers, weapon and/or armor smiths, general stores, apothecaries, and more. There is not generally going to be a true one stop shop for everything. If there is a general store that would be the closest, but the armor, weapons, and medicine that you’d find there are going to be worse than you’d find at location that is specific to them. A general store will have more trinkets or interesting items that might be useful for PC quests, NPC quests, guilds or more.

The next part is the optional part and that is interacting with the shop keeper. They are going to have a limited dialog tree that you can go down, and while they might have a quest or information, not all of them will. So if you’ve been somewhere once and it just seems to be general conversation and nothing that’ll lead to a quest, you can certainly skip it. Most likely you won’t frequent the same person and shop too often, but who knows.

Finally, you shop, I mean, that’s what you came there for. Shopping is split into two parts, there is stuff that you can buy for the hero, and there is stuff that you can buy for the guild. You can spend your own money to buy stuff for your character, or you can use the guilds money. Same for buying stuff for the guild. If you spend too much of the guilds money on yourself, your morale will go down and you’ll lose more people dropping out of your guild. The flip is true, if you spend your own money on the guild, you are going to raise the morale, because you’re one of the elite players in the guild, so when you’re helping those who aren’t as good, that catches people’s attention.

Now, I’ll talk more about items and how they work coming up sometime soon.

Interact with NPC’s

I’ve kind of walked through some of this with how it’ll be work when I talked about quests. Now, NPC’s won’t only give you information about quests, they might let you know about floor events that could be coming up, they might let you know about secret locations to go on the level, they might give you a quest, knowledge on the floor boss, or just knowledge on the game. You’ll have a branching dialog path that you can go through, and while it might be like an MMORPG or video game RPG in general where you can go down one path of conversation and then it’ll go back to the previous list of questions, that might not always happen. Eventually either you’ll just be able to end the conversation, or you’ll reach a decision point that requires you to use a stat or a skill and that you can modify. When you hit one of those, you know that your conversation will be ending after that, or if it does continue, you’ll need to spend another round talking with that NPC.

Interacting with PC’s

Interacting with PC’s is going to give you more of the story that is going on outside of the game. Even though you won’t know what is happening in the real world, you’ll find out the stories of the other PC’s and you’ll have to see if you can help them, potentially. There’s going to be branching dialog, but most of the time, when talking with a PC you won’t be spending modifier cards or checking your skills. Maybe if it gets into a physical confrontation you’ll check your stats against the other PC’s stats, but fairly often the decision points won’t allow you to spend a modifier card or check a skill, you’ll just need to make a decision. Those will still end your turn and to continue further with that PC you’ll need to spend another action. Also, interacting with PC’s will be different than NPC’s because PC’s aren’t as likely to allow you to loop back and ask a question that you hadn’t asked before.

Recruit to the Guild

The final thing that I’m going to be talking about is recruiting to the guild. This one is pretty straight forward, you go there, you check your morale versus the relevant skill for recruiting that you choose to use, and see what you get, granted, you can modify it. So why wouldn’t you send over the guild members to recruit. Two main reasons, firstly, sending a generic guild member will mean that you cannot modify the check of the stat, and guilds general stats are generally worse than yours. And because they are generic guild members who are recruiting they don’t generally have as much sway period, so they are working off of their own side of a recruitment card which is going to have a lower top end, so even if you have the best guild possible, you wouldn’t get as much as if you had gone there yourself.

Thoughts on how all of these would work? All of them can be done by the guild, though, there would be a few differences. Mainly that you’d not be able to modify something if a guild member went there, and the guild doesn’t have access to the players funds for shopping, just to the guilds funds.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

Quests are going to be one of the more interesting things to do in town or on a level when playing in this game. Not to say that the others won’t be interesting or important, but quests are going to delve into the story of the game and the world more than other things might. I do want to tie story into as many elements as possible, but quests are an obvious area to do it.

So, first thing that we need to consider is how do you find a quest?

There are a few ways that you can do this, but I want them to be something you have to “find” by doing other actions. If you go shopping a weapon crafter might have a quest for a rare metal or crystal, same with an armorer or an apothecary. If you talk to an NPC, they might have a quest for you, if you talk to a PC, they might have a quest that they can’t do but that they know about if you want to try your hand at it. Or it might be a level event that triggers that you can do as a quest. Some of the quests might even have multiple ways to get to them, a PC and an NPC might give you the same information, but it might branch slightly depending on who you got it from.

Now, with having to “find” quests, does that mean that the first time frame or potentially multiple ones on a level there won’t be any quests available to go on? No, there will always be a level quest. Something that will give you a more generic thing, mainly money and XP. Those can be great because if you are getting an interesting skill or weapon, that’s going to be the bigger reward, and you might get some money along the way, and you will for sure get XP, but it won’t be as much money and might not be as much XP. Of course, that won’t always be the case, it might be possible that the level quest will branch and you might find something unexpected at the end, so you can’t always just pass on that quest, or send guild members to do it. Again, as I’ve said so many times, I want every choice in the game to be hard and meaningful in an interesting way.

So, how will quests work?

So quests, are going to generally be multiple part things, though, some might be pretty simple. They can also be evolving or chaining things. For example, rescue the farmer’s daughter could be a very simple quest that will then find out about a troll invasion that is going to happen and will unlock that quest from an earlier point that it would have if you hadn’t done the rescue the farmer’s daughter quest.

But that’s again pretty general as to how these will work. I’ve talked about it a bit before with the modifier cards, but each part of the quest is going to be a little bit of story, something will happen, it could be that you need to track the trolls through the forest, or avoid an ambush while looking for the trolls. I’m thinking that this’ll almost be a Near and Far like thing where in that you are trying to reach a certain threshold but you can go higher and hit a second threshold. So let’s take the farmer’s daughter quest, tracking the trolls should be pretty easy for a PC in the game, so that’s just a check of a five, as the player you know that you’ll pass that, but you’ll also know that there is a higher mark you can try and make it to, but the PC won’t know what that means, so the player shouldn’t know what that means either. So if they spend, now they are paying enough attention to spot the ambush up ahead as well as the tracks, that’ll give them a branching path for the next part of the quest where they can either spring the ambush and fight, or go around it. That’s what that player would then be doing on the next time period on that level.

Now, let’s quickly talk about skills. I’ve talked about them a lot as of late. Just a refresher, on some quests you’ll be able to get a skill. That skill will modify the end challenge for that quest. To also talk about weapons or armor, if it makes sense, so an example of when it wouldn’t, a dragon isn’t going to wield a sword, those will be attached and modify as well. When thinking about loot drops, why would something that drops a legendary or an interesting item, weapon, armor, or otherwise, not be using it themselves? So I want those to attach and modify for a monster as well.

And finally, what happens once you complete a quest or part of a quest?

So if you’ve done part of it, you’ll have the option to continue in the next time period. Any XP you’ve gained can cause you to level up and you can allocate the points you get for your character from that.

If you reach the end of the quest, you are going to get more of an XP bump, plus any rewards at that point in time and you’ll be transported back to the town. I’m not a fan of games where you have to fight your way into the dungeon and then run back through the whole cleared out dungeon to get back to the closest fast travel point to then go to the town and turn it in. Screw that noise, you get teleported to the town and to the person who gave you the quest. The next time period, you can, if you want, complete that quest at that location as well as do whatever action is attributed to that location. The player doing the quest will have already spent a lot of time on that potentially.

How long could a quest be? I mentioned it above, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. Quests will vary in length. If something sounds like a short quest, it probably is, it might chain another quest, but the first will be done. To go back to what I just said above, a chained quest, you’ll have the option to continue into that quest immediately instead of getting teleported back. If you do, you’ll still get the reward at that point in time from the one that you’ve just completed so that you don’t miss out on it. But back to my question, a single quest might be as long as 6-7 time units, which would be most of what one player does on the floor. Most won’t last that long, but each part of the quest will have one challenge decision point, might be conversation that wouldn’t require a card, and quests might vary in length depending on choices. To go back to my example of rescuing the farmers daughter, if you sneak around the troll ambush you’ll miss out on some XP, but that’ll make the whole quest faster, so you’ll have time to do more. I want it to be fairly logical like that where you can guess when it’d be faster.

So what do you think of quests, does it start to make sense as to how they are going to work?

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Skills

Skills will be quicker to run through because I have talked about them some before in the Character Leveling part like I said. But there are some important things to note about skills.

First, skills are going to be tied to a base stat, so strength, agility, vitality, allure, and guile. When a player buys a skill, gets one in battle or as a reward for a quest, they’ll be picking which stats pile they want to draw from. Now, it might seem obvious that you’d go with your highest or best stat for a skill, but it’ll depend on the keywords that you are looking for some as well. This is to make it so that you won’t always want a strength stat if you are strength fighter. I’m also thinking that it’ll make sense to limit how many skills you can have a type based off of your stat level. So if you are getting multiple skills early, maybe for every five points you can hold a skill, so if you only have 10 in agility, you won’t be able to use a third strength skill.

So, how would skills scale? That’s something I’m still working on. But for combat, it’s going to be some sort of bonus based off of the level of the character. It might be a plus based off of the level, like half your level rounded down sort of thing so it scales up every other level. Or it might allow you to add in additional modifier card draws, increasing the chance of comboing and the amount of damage that they are putting out. So say there’s a level cap at 50, same number as levels and bosses in the game. It might be no added bonus for the first ten levels in terms of scaling, but then every ten after that you add in a modifier card, or every 10 you get something new plus the one before it. Hopefully it is something that wouldn’t become overwhelming, so I want it to be laid out in a very understandable way on the skill card.

The other question would be around why you’d want a skill that comes from allure or guile. Those doesn’t seem like they are as combat focused stats. And while it might not be a skill that adds a fixed amount of additional damage or something like that, both allure and guile can be used to distract and confuse the enemy. And I want it to be that those skills do things like that, it might give a bonus pull from a modifier deck to another player, or it could be that you can place a status effect onto a boss by using a non-traditional combat skill. Those skills are also going to be helpful outside of combat. A skill in cooking could distract an enemy, think of it as pulling some tasty treat for the bad out of your inventory. Or it could be that you use it for recruiting members for your guild and you’ll get more because you have better in game food. I want all skills, even if it just gives some static non-changing bonus, to have uses in and outside of combat, some will just be better in one area than another.

Weapons

Weapons are going to be a bit more simple, they are going to give you a base damage value, if you add in a stat, and if you add in a modifier pull. Yes, there will be math in the game, but I want to keep it pretty simple. I don’t want it to be a situation where half damage means that you have to add everything up, divide it by two, round down because they resisted damage and then because you were attacking from the back while someone else attacked from the front you get to multiple by 1.5 to get your actual damage. Nope, I want your weapon to do X damage + X stat + X modifier – X resistance – X defense. It’s all basic math, addition and subtraction, nothing fancier than that. Weapons will not scale up, however, that doesn’t meant hat you won’t maybe stumble across a weapon early on that you’ll use all game. The weapons won’t have nearly as much variety in how wide a range of base damage they do, the skills are going to be more important.

Armor

I want to keep Armor simple as well. I’m not going to do an armor class like a Dungeons and Dragons would do to see if something hits. If the boss monster or a monster in a field swings at you they are doing X amount of damage + X modifier – X defense – X resistance. And your armor is going to give you defense. Now if you have a shield the “X defense” can be broken down into X armor + X shield for your total defense.

Items

These are going to be the small items like a health potion or something that will give you resistance to a damage type. It could also just be a trinket or a bauble or a quest item, but those will go in your limited inventory space.

Augments

Augments are something that I have hinted at before but not really talked about much. I didn’t have a term for them until now. I wanted to create combinations for skills. So by that I mean that if you have a skill that is called “Parry Stab Stab” you’d be able to attach and augment to it that would go with it all the time once it’s attached that would turn it into “Fire Parry Stab Stab”. So your weapon would be on fire and deal fire damage for that attack. But you could augment “Arrows of Death” with fire as well. Or “Smoldering Gaze” with fire. And it’d always do something so you can really make whatever skill you want to be augmented in whatever way you want.

With that said, skills aren’t the only thing that can be augmented. A weapon would be given the status of fire, and now it is always going to deal fire damage in addition to it’s other damage. The downside is that once you’ve given it fire, you can’t take it off. And there’ll be some augments or skills that go on the player as well, versus as on the weapon. An example of this I’m going to rip straight from Sword Art Online. The main character Kirito unlocks an unique skill called Dual Wielding, aka, he can fight with two weapons. Something like that would be a specific quest given augment that could go on a player versus going on a weapon or something like that. It would be an always on ability. Something like that is going to be on certain types of quests, which it might not be obvious that it is on a quest when you start it, it might ask you to draw an augment until you find a character one and add it to the quest or make it an optional item on the quest, like, you can gain access to this if you beat the quest or complete it with this much overkill on the final check.

Money

Final thing to talk about is currency, basically, you’ll get money and you can spend it. The guild, by sending out members to do stuff on the levels will also get your money and spend money for you. So it won’t be like you have no flow of income, but most of your money is going to come from beating quests, fighting monsters, and beating the boss.

What do you think of augments. I think everything else is actually pretty straight forward, with skills being a bit out there, but fairly easy to grasp, but augments are something different. Does that customization sound interesting?

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