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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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

Let’s talk about what a guild is, it isn’t a concept that shows up that often in a board game. But in an MMORPG, that’s generally the people who are partied together in a group and share loot, money, tips, and things like that. But as compared to a small group of friends you might play with, a guild is generally going to be larger so that you have more resources to share amongst each other.

The idea of this large group can be tricky to do in board games or even an RPG. The issue with it is that you have so many faceless characters that you don’t have that much of an investment in controlling nameless and faceless characters, they are a bit more cannon fodder than anything else. And in this case, that means in game that you’re killing people, generally not one of those things that you’d want to actually do, so having a guild is going to need to have some weight and some advantage to the group.

I want people to be worried about maintaining their guild for several reasons and we’ll get into some of those when we talk about the levels and what you do on the them. Your guild, based off of many people you have in it, is going to be able to help you on the levels. I’ve talked about it with the boss battles and how you’d need to balance between having too many people protecting you, tiring them out, stressing them out, and putting them in danger too much and having people leave the guild that way, as compared to having too few and having people die, plus then people leave the guild because people are dying.

I think that death is a key concept here and those leaving or joining the guild. If you have enough people die, you will be fighting an uphill battle getting people to your guild and keeping people in your guild. It might be worth it for the late push to risk more, but early game, you could be fighting a battle making sure that you are spending enough time recruiting guild members to offset those leaving because you’d demonstrated that you’re willing to risk people’s lives needlessly, when you go into a boss battle or go through a level battle or quest. So, if you have too many die, you will always be dealing with a steady stream of guild members leaving.

Another thing that I’m considering with guild members is how to use them on the levels between bosses. I think that they will be a communal resource that players will be able to decide on how to use them. Maybe a player is going on a difficult quest, they can take guild members along with them to help mitigate some of the challenges. Or the players could send out guild members to recruit on a level, do a quest on their own, shop for gear, anything that the players can do, but for the guild members instead. I’m thinking something along the lines of, every ten guild members you have, you can assign them one action per round on a level. So if you have thirty people, you got an extra three actions, if you have twenty-nine, you have an extra two.

To go with that, and to get into levels just a little bit, but mainly as it pertains to guilds. Some levels are just going to be nice, or look like a good spot to stop while others push on ahead. You are going to have a few people leave the guild on those levels. Or maybe the level looks very dangerous, and sending out guild members to do anything on that level without them being paired with someone else will cause you to lose a guild member. So it won’t just be a situation where you can always send off guild members to do jobs for you and expect to see the numbers grow and not shrink.

The guild is also going to be a timer on the levels as well. There will be a limit to how long you can stay on a level, let’s say in this example that you can stay on a level ten rounds doing actions each round. So you might shop, you might quest which will take four rounds, you might research the level boss for another round. Now you’ve spent six rounds. You can spend another four rounds, so a total of ten on that level if you want, or maybe as many rounds as you want, but after four more rounds you’ll run out of event cards for that level, more on that in levels, but every round you stay after five, you start to lose more and more guild members. Some get used to it and settle down, some might be discontent about not pushing ahead and trying to get back to the real world. So maybe there is an awesome quest that you really want to do because you know the reward is going to be a skill, and you need another skill to feel comfortable fighting the boss, but it’s going to cost you guild members, and you might then run into an issue with not having enough or using a large enough percentage to fight the boss that you’ll lose some more. So do you push into that quest, get that skill, have guild members leave, and then have to spend most of the next floor recruiting again, or do you push ahead and hope that you get a similar event on the next floor?

Obviously there is a bunch of the fine details to be worked out here. I do think there will be a cap on guild size, which feels like something that is fairly standard in games, because otherwise you could just recruit early on until you have a massive number and just kind of run with it. So I want the pressure of that to be part of what players have to think about through the game. This is something that I feel like good cooperative games do, I want players to have to think about which 5-8 things they really want to do and have a few that they won’t be able to get to even though they’d be good as well.

What do you think of Guilds? Do you think that it will be too much to handle in the game, do you think it’ll be a good type of pressure for the game?

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