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.

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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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