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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Why am I making a board game around this idea though, and what is the idea?

We’ll start with a brief synopsis. In Sword Art Online, the first season, the main characters, Kirito, Asuna, and others spend most of the game trapped in a full dive MMORPG, Sword Art Online. In fact it was a couple of years that they were trapped in the game. The creator of the game had decided to create a death game, where the only way to escape was if someone beat the final boss and you had survived, if you died in the game, you died in real life. So the players both had to be careful to survive because of the stakes of the game, and also still forge forward to try and clear the game.

So, you can start to see how this could work potentially as a board game and in particular a campaign game. But let’s pull out the pieces that interest me out of this anime.

Firstly, we have the general idea of basically a level based dungeon crawl, this is fairly common in games so we have to ask how would we differentiate it. I think that leveling and all that is fairly normal. But I want to make it about advancing further and further in and less about specific battles and more about the different floors or levels.

Next I think the idea of no respawn, no retry is interesting. It definitely wouldn’t be the only game to do something like that. But that would suck for a player to have played through a game with their character and then lose everything and be out of the game. But this was an MMORPG, so in the show there are 10,000 users, most don’t climb up levels and try and clear everything because they aren’t experts at MMORPG’s. In this game I’d want to have somewhat if not nearly as leveled characters available for the players to take over, so it isn’t the end of the world if you lose your character, but it is a setback.

Sword Art Online is also less about the boss battles, though there are several that are shown in the first season, and more about how people are surviving and interacting in the world. This is something that I’d want to emulate in the game as well. I do think there should be a boss battle per level, but it would be the second part of each level. The first part, I would want to give players different things that they can do on a level. Questing, interacting with other players or NPC’s, shopping, fighting monsters, and researchign the boss with it eventually leading to facing off against the boss for the floor.

There also is an element of guilds and teams, though Kirito through most of it is a solo player. And I think emulating that is something that I’d want to try and do as well, make it so you have a nameless team behind you and you grow your guild or lose some of it, and you have to balance risks of how you use these guild members, how you balance trying to do the most that you can so you can level up and be ready for the boss battle, but also not pushing your guild members too hard that you lose some due to them dying or that you exhaust them too much and push them away. Plus, you might also want to recruit more.

There is also a concept of unique skills in the game, Kirito, as the main character, gets a dual wielding skill. That is a unique skill in the game, so I want to create a way to create unique skills and to handout skills. When leveling, except for maybe at a few specific levels, you shouldn’t be getting skills, just stat increases that you can spend. Skills I think should be unlocked or gotten as you complete quests or keeping track of actions kills, things like that. You can then unlock different skills, and some skills can be combined with other skills to create improved skills. I’m still trying to figure out how that might work.

Finally, with the boss battle, I want the bosses to feel like they did in Sword Art Online. Bosses had multiple health bars that players had to get through, and as they got more damaged, they could add attacks and change up their attack patterns. This is something that I want to emulate as well. Have it so you can plan and figure out the patterns of the boss if you want to, and you know what they are going to do, but as they knock out bars, new attacks will be added, maybe some will be removed and you have to be able to learn the new pattern of what is going on again, at least if you are going to do well.

So, what’s next for the Design Diaries? Well, I’m going to start taking each part and working out how I think they would work well or interesting as a board game mechanic, as well as talk about some things I didn’t cover too much, like combat and how that would work.

Also, finally, why am I doing this, for me, it’s a fun thought exercise even if it’s something that I never prototype or if it doesn’t work as an idea. It gives me something I really like, board games, and allows me to dig more into how games work, what works, and what I think would be interesting in a game, whether or not it’d work. Now, do I hope that it’s awesome, sure, but this is more trying out ideas and see what could be fun and what might work and just if game design is something I might have fun with in my spare time.

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