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
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

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
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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
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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Now, this one is going to be a little bit less about how they’ll work in the game, instead I’m going to be talking about why I am considering both in the game.

Cards

I think the biggest advantage to cards is that cards remember. It’s an interesting concept that was brought up in Oathsworn Kickstarter campaign that I hadn’t thought about it, but cards remember what you’ve drawn before. You have a discard pile, so say you want it to be like a six sided die, you roll the die, you could get a one six times in a row. But if you use six cards to match that and you have a discard pile, drawing from it six times will always get you the one and always get you the six, in fact always get you every number. So you know that you’ll do average sometimes, but if you get the one and two out of the way with your first two draws, you know that you’ll have only good and average draws left.

Dice

On the flip side of this, dice don’t have that memory. In my example above, I say that you could roll a one six times in a row. Well, you could roll a six six times in a row as well, which is something that the cards can’t do if you have six cards. So while the dice might be unlucky, they can also be lucky and give you options to push for something better with knowing that you always have a shot at a six, not that a six is already sitting in the discard pile.

Now, a game like Oathsworn actually has both. And you can do a blend of both of them, if you are “rolling six dice” you could roll three dice and draw three cards. So if you know that the deck is just going to be average, you could get your few successes that way, and then push for some critical successes while risking more the other way.

So what is going to work the best for my game, is it dice, cards, a hybrid, what is it?

I’m thinking of doing a hybrid, but probably not like you’d think. I’m not going to pull straight from Oathsworn and copy that people can pick one way or another. I’m going to keep the dice and cards separate but I’m thinking that I’ll use them for different things.

In the boss battles, I want to use combat modifiers like they have in Gloomhaven. But I want to build upon that. In boss battles, which I’ll talk about soon, I want to build up this massive pool of damage and have people work and attack at the same time. On their (all players) turn, each player, separately of the others decides what move/skill they’ll use. They all move and do their thing, and you flip X number of modifier cards based off of your skill. But you can build up in your deck modifier cards that can trigger more cards to be drawn by other players if they are using a certain type of attack or skill.

The other option would be to use dice for combat modification. You’d still use your skills and get some damage and successes based off of that, but there’d be a symbol on the dice, so let’s say you’d have a 3+ on one side of the die. The 3 would be your modifier and you’d give an extra die to another player for their modification of their attack. This would be simpler to implement, I think, but I like the idea that you can customize your modifier deck more than you can customize the dice that you can roll, at least at a reasonable cost.

Instead, I want to use dice for the level events and for the players using their skills to complete the level part of the game. If player X goes on a quest and they have to face a challenge, they look at their stat and get their base number, they look at their skills and use any keywords on those skills, and that builds their die pool and you roll that to determine how well you do on that quest. Or you might be talking with an NPC or another PC and have to persuade them of something.

But, I actually am now moving away from this idea as I put it down on paper because, I want there to feel like there’s more tension in what you’re doing and I also want to reward buffing up stats and having a weak stat. My plan has been to limit the number of events on a floor, let’s say that’s seven, and you can stay for ten rounds, but no new events will come up, before you have to fight the boss, I want to do something different. I want to, now that I’m thinking about it, have players draw a hand of modifier cards, seven in fact, to spend throughout their time on the floor. You will still get your base stat total, and you will get bonuses of +1 per keyword based on the skills your character has, but you can, if you choose to, modify it with a card from your hand. However, those cards you spend will not be in your modifier deck when it comes to the boss battle. And sometimes you’ll know the number that you have to beat, farming for XP by killing monsters, you’ll know your target number, of maybe you have an agility of 8 plus a piercing bow and silver arrows that give you +2, and you can kill the werewolf with a 7, so you don’t need to spend a modifier card, but if you have a -2 in your hand, you’d spend it, reduce your success to a 8, which is greater than 7 and now you don’t have that negative. But maybe you want to get the fabled Sword of the Unending Flame as you know that’ll help boost your damage and you need to get a 14, so you spend a two +2’s to get there, now those are out of your deck for this floor, but now you have a sword that might do 2 more base damage than your previous sword in fire damage for the rest of the game, so it might have been worth it to spend those two +2’s.

The reason for moving away from the dice there is that while dice build tension of a good roll versus a bad roll, you need some resource or something to mitigate them. I’m looking to build a better tension than just that, I want players to be able to specialize some in what they’ll do on a floor, but I want to keep some of that puzzle feel, resource management that is more interesting than just rolling some dice. It has a whole new tension when knowing that you’re spending a good modifier or maybe even a modifier that can combo for another player to get something done. And I’ve given examples where the player knows their target, talking to an NPC who might have a skill for you, for all that you know, you might not know your target number that you’re shooting for, so you have a 5 in charisma, and you know that lore and silver are the keywords, do you’re at a 7, the person handling the book then tells that you can modify it if you want, what do you do, does it matter that much for you, or are you still looking for something in particular. And you’ll have some idea that with a 9, you’ve seen some really good thing things happen, but you can possibly go down to a 5 and still get a quest, so do you risk it.

I think that by now you’ve noticed a key for what I’m going for when creating this game. I want all the decisions to feel meaningful, I want all of them to have some tension to them. Fighting a rabbit might not have that much tension, but spending a card to beat it, that might. And the decision to go to the forest to fight the rabbit, that means you gave up a chance to do something else.

So, in the end, I guess the answer is cards. Do you like the idea of using the modifier cards are both a draw and flip from the top for a boss combat as well as then a more determined resource from your hand on the level?

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Like a lot of dungeon crawl-esque games, this game isn’t going to have one central board that you go around. In fact my current thought process is that you will have no central board that you play off of. Instead, we’re going to use what something that I’ve seen in games like Forgotten Waters, Stuffed Fables and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is a book.

There are a few reasons for the book, but the biggest is that we want the different levels to feel varied. The amount of tile pieces would be epically high to make a completely varied board. There are a lot in Gloomhaven, and those can seem somewhat limited at times, so to make something feel truly unique for different levels, you’d need a ton of pieces of terrain, and map tiles, and more to really keep it varied, but in this, I want to make it so that each level can be unique. Especially for the boss battle, I want to work with the idea of space in the game. I think that the new Descent game does an interesting thing with that where you build up vertically at times and can push people off of towers and things like that, I want to be able to do that. And some of that can be done with negative space on a map that’s drawn easier than map tiles that just create more random empty space on the table.

Besides the boss battle, it’ll help me be able to change up the level part of the floor, where players can go on quests, fight monsters, shop, and recruit to their guild. I could completely drop off one of them if I wanted, or I could add in additional spots where players can send people to go questing. This will allow each level to again feel different than the previous ones and give hints as to what might be more important for a level, or I really like the idea that some levels might not allow you to do things, maybe like recruit, so you need to plan accordingly, and you might not get that researched or figured out, but you need to have that in your mind that the next level might not have everything you want, or it might mean you can all go questing and pick up story and lore of the world.

But there are going to be a few actual boards in the game. The first will be the player boards. Each character is going to have their own board. This will have their stats as to what they are good at on it. Those stats are going to then influence how good they are at other things. Someone who is average at everything might do okay on all the tasks and tests, but they aren’t going to get the best outcome and I’ll be talking more about that in the future. But players will have ways to keep track of their stats, but along with that, this is where you’ll keep track of skills and equipment, conditions, and things like that which are common for dungeon crawlers. In my mind I want something closer to the Neoprene mats from Midarra versus something like the paper board from Sword & Sorcery. Gloomhaven does it a little bit better, but I want to build even upon that, because I’ve seen some nice custom ones for Gloomhaven that would hold things better. Also, with cool down and tracking skills, I feel like that’s something that Sword & Sorcery tries to do decently well, but ends up not really doing that well, so I’m curious to see how I can improve upon that.

The other board is going to be the guild board, and this one I have more of an idea of what I want on the board. This board is going to be fairly simple. You are going to keep track of a very few things on here. The two primary ones are going to be guild members and morale. Morale is going to be important for a few things, it’ll be about the attrition that you have with the guild or maybe how it’ll grow naturally. The better your morale the more that you’ll also be able to recruit on a floor. The other big thing, as I said, is guild members. Tracking them will be important because as you hit numerical points, that’ll give you more groups of guild members to use on levels. So if you have a ton of them, you’ll be able to cover a lot of ground, but you’ll also be sacrificing opportunities to level up by doing that. Again, building that tension, but also we’re on boards here, so that’s going to be important to track for that reason. Finally you’ll be tracking a few other things, gear level of the guild, statuses that you’ve found, deaths in the guild, and population left in the world. The statuses that you have found as a guild pertaining to the game can influence your options going forward. Gear will make a difference in battle, deaths in the guild will influence left total in the game, so important things, but will be less often you’re checking those things.

For a game this large there was always going to be a bunch of things to keep track of, but I want, with the book for the board, to make it so that part of the game is an easy flip out and play because that’s going to make the game way more accessible to players if they only have to keep track of their own stuff instead of helping set everything else out. I do think that there’ll be some tokens for the boss battle, such as placing on terrain, though I’d love to be able to make as much of that 3D terrain as possible, either 3D molded terrain, but that might be an add-on if it goes to KS or carboard pieces that can be put together to create height and visual appeal. I might pull a bit from what Oathsworn is doing where you can either get minis for the bosses or you can standees as well, but keep the bosses, and any terrain items, hidden away in either envelops with punch out stuff, or something like that, but ways to bring more surprises to the game. But that’s probably something for another time to talk about.

What do you think of the game thus far, definitely still in concept phase with this one, but I’m going to try and tackle some more specifics this week.

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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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Spells have a lot of different components to them, and if it wasn’t hard enough to already have extra things to track, now you need to figure out which spells you want to take with you into combat.

With spells for most casters, you have a few different things to keep track of. The first is the number of spell slots that you have. If you are a Wizard, and this will be my standard example throughout the post, and you are at 3rd level, you will know 3 cantrips, and a number of spells in your spell book, generally to start that is going to be level plus intelligence modifier So let’s say your intelligence is 3 and your level is 3, you’d have at least 6 spells known. Then you have spells that you have prepared for the day. Again, intelligence plus your level, so you’d be able to prepare at least 6 spells for the day. Finally, you have your spell slots, that’s how many non-cantrip spells you can cast each day, which is 4 first level and 2 second level spells.

Now, as a Wizard, that doesn’t mean that you can cast each of the six spells you prepared once, and you need two second level spells ready to cast. You can cast the same spell all six times as long as it’s a first level spell. Spells can be cast at a higher level, so you can cast first level spells at second level, and you generally get some sort of bonus. So maybe you only use a few spells all the time, but you can prepare more so that you have the utility if you want.

Finally, cantrips are different. Those can be used as many times as you wanted throughout the day. But these spells tend to be weaker spells. It might do less damage or be an easier save, but more likely, if it has a save, it simply won’t do any damage if the person saves against it. These spells, though, sometimes do scale with level, because the spell slots, even at 20th level are still somewhat limited.

But that’s just about preparing your spells for the day for a Wizard. It’s similar for a lot of the other spell casting classes, with Warlock being the biggest exception, I’ll write about the Warlock specifically later. The other question with spells is what does the information mean on the spell itself?

Spells are going to have a handful of basic components. I’m going to be using the spell Thunderwave (found here on DnD Beyond). The first thing we see is the level. Thunderwave is a first level spell. That information isn’t extremely important, you’ll have that noted down on your spell list based off of where you put it. There are a few other things that can be useful, but not always. The school is useful if you are that type of Wizard because it makes it easier for you to learn. The same can sometimes be said for the damage type. Especially at low levels most monsters won’t resist much damage.

The next part is extremely important though, and that’s the casting time. For combat, casting time needs to be like Thunderwave and be an action. There are others that are bonus actions which can be used in combat, but you’re probably not going to be want to cast a spell that takes 1 minute to 1 hour to cast. You’ll be stabbed well before that. Then onto the duration of the spell. In the case of Thunderwave it’s instantaneous, so it’s a one off attack. There will be other spells that last a longer period of time. And the area of the spell, some of them will have a range to them, such as fireball does a sphere of damage at up to a distance away from you. Finally in the spell header information, we have the components for the spell. It might be an actual material or it might mean that you need to do a gesture and say something when you cast the spell. Most spells are going to have a verbal piece to them, but not all of them will.

Then we come to the main body of the spell. This tells you the affect of the spell and what sort of save people need to make against the spell. A lot of that information can be gotten from the header of the spell, but this makes it clearer and spells it out in order of how things will happen. It also tells you how much damage is being dealt and if it’s an attack spell, because not all spells get a save, some you need to make an attack roll for them. And beyond the damage, for a spell like Thunderwave, it tells you more flavor of what is happening, so it makes a loud noise that can be heard for a distance. Finally at the bottom, it tells you what it does if you cast it at a higher level. In the case of Thunderwave, for each higher level, you get an extra die eight of damage (1D8).

Now, this is a pretty dry read, I realize that. I’m really going through and breaking down a spell in detail. Most all spells are going to work like this and most casters are going to work like this. The Warlock is an exception, and some of the other classes, as compared to a Wizard, might not know more spells or have more that their disposal to pick from. I’ll actually give some advice for picking spells in a later article. Let me know what you think of spell casting, is it easy enough to understand, did I help make things clearer?

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