The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

One of the big things with a video game RPG, MMO or otherwise, or playing a pen and paper RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, or even playing a board game like Gloomhaven is that your character levels up and gets better. This can be done in a few ways depending on the system.

In all cases there are a few things that I would generally consider to be normal. The biggest thing is that when you go up a level, you get more health. Even within this, there can be some variability. It can be that you go up by a fixed number, or go up to a fixed number, or it can be variable. Let’s talk about a few of the different ways and how they work. Gloomhaven has the easiest one to explain. In that game you start out with a fixed number of healthy, every level your health goes up to another fixed number. Now Dungeons and Dragons covers most of the rest of the ways. You can either get a variable number, based off of a die roll or something like that, or you can go up by a fixed number. In either case in Dungeons and Dragons, that number is modified by your constitution modifier. For my game, I’m leaning towards the latter. I think that the characters will go up in health by a fixed number modified by a vitality stat or a fixed number based off of their vitality stat, more likely.

And talking about stats, what are stats that would make sense. I could use what Dungeons and Dragons have and go with Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. But for this game, I don’t think that makes that much sense. In Dungeons and Dragons you are playing another character completely in that world. In this game, you are playing as a person trapped in a video game. You are going to have your mental faculties still, so stuff like Intelligence and Wisdom are going to only be useful character stats for interacting with an NPC, maybe, more likely that’d be charisma.

Before I’d referred to the base stats as:  strength, agility, guile, toughness, intelligence, and allure. This is fairly close to mirroring what D&D has. However, I think I’m going to change that up slightly. We are going to still have Strength and Agility. Those are going to be the stats that influence your combat the most. Instead of Toughness, we are going to have vitality. Your HP, your ability to shake off poison or stun effects and stuff like that. I’m also going to keep Allure and Guile as stats. These will be important for influencing NPC’s, negotiating, seducing, intimidating, or whatever it might be that a player decides to use them for. But intelligence is going to go away. Storywise, maybe that was a part of the game before, but now it’s gone, and even before, it was probably just a rolodex of knowledge that your player could look up things in, versus a stat that was used to influence anyone.

So, when you level up, you have those five stats. How do you improve them, do they improve at a fixed rate, most certainly not. Instead, you’ll end up having a ability pool or points that you can put into a stat or stats as you see fit. You can bump up your strength as fast as you want, but you’ll have a harder time negotiating with NPC’s and probably even getting some of the quests that they might have to offer. But they’ll be much better at fighting.

Even at the beginning when building your character, you’ll have a few basic skills you can pick from, but you’ll also have a point pool for your base stats and you can assign them as you want. I’d probably do a base 5 points in every stat but then give an additional 10 points, or maybe even 15 points to add to customize your character. The reason for doing this is that I want character creation to be part of the game, and I also want characters and play styles to feel different from the very beginning. If everyone starts out as a level 1 commoner, that’s boring. You aren’t a commoner NPC level character at the start, you start as a hero.

One thing I haven’t mentioned are skills and how they’ll work. There’s a reason for that, I want skills not be something that you just get. Sure you’ll have “skill trees” to some extent, but I want skills be things that you to have to find. That can be from buying skills at certain shops, but they’ll be more generic skills to going on quests and getting skills. When you’re buying skills, they’ll be a bit more generic but you’ll have a larger variety of them that you can grab. The ones in quests, they’ll be better, and my current plan is that you’ll pick a skill pile and draw that type of skill. That skill will have a number that will modify the quests difficulty, but you can pick that from the start and you’ll know how much more challenging it’ll be, the better the skill the more challenging. I also want skills to be able to grow with the player. They are going to be based off of the base stats some, modifying how much they do with how good the player is in that stat or that combination of stats. I want something you grab at level one if you happen to get lucky, to be worth playing late into the game. Now, since skills with have cooldowns related to them you’ll want to have several.

I also want skills to do better when played in “sequence”. I don’t mean that you have to play Skill A1 before Skill A2 and then Skill A3 is better, and they always have to be in that order. I want to borrow from games like Marvel Legendary and Clank! In! Space! where you have factions of cards, so a card might be an Avengers card, and if you play that card before you play another card, that card might have an ability that triggers off of an Avengers card having been played. I’ve talked about keywords before, I want to do that with skills, if you’ve used a skill and it’s cooling down and it has a keyword on it that matches one for an additional ability on your next skill you play, boom, added benefit and power. This is kind of like the comboing between character with the modifier deck draw, but for yourself, so you can set-up turns. Granted, you still have to do that to match what the boss monster is doing as well.

Anyways, that got a little off track for the main topic, but I think that it’s important to add in when talking about leveling. You are basically just increasing your health and base stats when you level. Skills will increase based off of those stats, but you won’t get a new skill for hitting level milestones or just because you leveled up.

What are your thoughts on that, should you get skills when you level up, or should they be rewards for completing missions in the game, defeating bosses, and maybe even being something that you can buy?

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

So, I’ve talked about how on a level you have a big boss battle, but that isn’t the only thing on the level, in fact, while the boss battles are probably going to be the most tactical part of the game, I want to really focus on story as much as I can, and that’s where the other part of the level comes in to play.

On a level, there are going to be a number of locations or things that you can do as heroes, and you can decide how long you want to take doing them. I want this part to really feel like it’s fairly open to what you can do, though, you’ll probably want to do everything. With the levels I’m hoping to create a tension of not being able to do it all and having to make the choices on how your character levels and develops. Let’s take a look at some of the things that you can do.

• Quest
• Deal with a Level event
• Fight Monsters (aka Level Grind)
• Shop
• Recruit to Guild
• Interact with NPC’s
• Interact with PC’s
• Research Level Boss

That’s a lot of things that you can do. Now, you don’t always have all of the choices though, maybe there aren’t any quests or NPC’s on a level, but there are a lot of monsters to fight, it’ll depend on the design of the floor. Let’s take a look at all of these (order of me taking a look at them not guaranteed) to see what they all do.

Research Level Boss

So what do this get you, it helps you be able to know what sort of combat the boss is going to throw at you. What sort of weapon it has, what sort of minions it has, those are going to be the easy things to get that you can get from just a quick glance. Spend some minions or your hero here once and you get that, but the more time you spend, the more information that you can get, including knowing specific attacks. All of this is going to make it easier to solve the puzzle of the boss battle.

Shop

It is what it says it is, there will be a few different store options that you can go to, though. There will be an apothecary for your healing items. An armorer will be where you buy armor, and a blacksmith or weapons dealer will get your weapons. There will also be information brokers. This is going to be somewhere that you can information, it might be about quests for the floor, it might be information about other guilds in the world, about the boss of the level, but there’s going to be some information and it’ll depend on the level that you are on. Also, not all shops will be available on all floors. Finally, with the shops, there are going to be things to buy for the heroes, for sure, but there will be also group buys or group upgrades for the guild itself, these will be more generalized things that you keep track of on your guild board.

Fight a Monster

This is something that is going to be very different than your big boss battles which will use tactile grid movement. Instead, this is going to be much simpler, and the reason that you’d do it is for XP, money, or loot. This one is going to be simple, whether it is guild members or the heroes fighting.

Recruit to the Guild

Recruit to the Guild, this is fairly simple as well, not much risk in it either, so no worries about losing anyone. What you’re looking at here is going to be some things like the guild morale and how many times you’ve been there and recruited. It’ll be a simple matrix that you won’t know the first time you do it, but after that on each floor you’ll know how many you’ll get next time.

Interact with NPC’s

Interacting with NPC’s is going to be useful for a number of reasons. They are going to be a bit like the information brokers in that you might get a lot of things from them. It might be a quest, it might be world lore, it might be about the floor boss, or what sort of monsters there are on the floor, it might be information that’ll be useful about levels coming up, or hints to what sort of events might be coming up. The difference between an NPC and an information broker is that an information broker is going to have specific information, versus an NPC, which you might not know what information you’ll end up with. I also want to introduce an idea here with quests that might be added to upcoming floors, or the information that’ll be useful in the future. If it’s a quest, it’ll add in a card to that upcoming floors quest deck.

Interact with PC’s

This one is going to be trickier, but I want this to be where a fair amount of emotional weight from the story comes in. It is going to be dealing with the PC’s and their personal problems, and just some of the problems that would exist because of being stuck in a game. This is also going to be a story element that I want to be able to tie through multiple levels. It’ll be story elements that get added as things you can do on multiple floors and might even lock you into an action because a PC might come back and seek you out again on another floor as part of the emerging storyline.

Quest

Going on a quest is going to be interesting because there are going to be some small quests and some big quests, a big quest might use up multiple rounds to complete as you push forward and through it. A quest might have some monster fights, it’ll have some other challenges, but it’ll be about using resources, actions, cards, and what not so that they can complete them. Generally you’re going to be pushing forward on these as a hero, but you can send guild members. Guild members won’t be able to unlock a skill for a hero to use later, but completing them will improve morale for the guild.

Level Events

Level events are going to be interesting and also another spot for story to start to develop because a level event could be the MMORPG saying, hey, the first guild to do this gets a bonus or a hero gets a bonus. Or it could be something between PC’s that had ramifications on the world. So I’ve talked about the guild board, but we’re also going to leverage a status board, so if you have a given status, that might be something happens for sure and you have to send someone to do something, or it might mean that something is now closed off, and Level Events, if they are done, are going to be handing out a lot of those, same with the PC and NPC interactions. But generally a Level Event, compared to a quest, is only going to take one round to complete, unless it’s a persistent level event. And level events will be a kind of timer for how long you should stay on a floor, but any repeatable or non-event events will get added back to the event deck, so that you never run out of events to do.

Those are my current ideas for what can be done on a floor. There might also just be a rest action. This would be less for the heroes, unless there is some condition that has been applied by the boss from a previous floor that you need to shake, but generally going to an apothecary would do the same thing and give you more options as well. The reason for having a lot of actions to be done is for the action economy and replayability of the game. The fact you won’t see everything and that you won’t talk to all the NPC’s or PC’s, that’ll mean that there will be new things you can do every time, if you decide to play it again. Now, it won’t be limitless, but most likely if you come back to it, you’ll have forgotten most of what might be coming.

So, what else would you want to do on a floor? Obviously, some of the actions are built more for the guild members to do than the heroes, so how should I balance it out so that the choice is still difficult as to who to send to that location? Those are questions that I’m still asking myself and that I’d be interested to know what people think on them.

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