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

So a quick refresher on boss battles, it is going to be one half of the level book that has the battles in it, so when you flip open a page, one part will be the level itself with all of the level actions and artwork, and any restrictions for the level, anything like that. The other side is going to be the map for the boss battle. This map will tell you some about the terrain, but not about the boss whom you’ll be facing, you’ll find that out by talking to information brokers, NPCs, and PCs. When all the players are done taking actions on a level, that’s when the players decide together to jump into battle.

When fighting monsters, it was just going to be a do or don’t you hit sort of thing to defeat them, but bosses are going to be different. Bosses will track hit points like the characters. And bosses are going to have their hit point track split into multiple parts. This is how the boss is going to change up their attack as time goes on. But a boss will attack in a predictable pattern, like video game monsters do.

Let’s do a fake boss fight: Glorglor the Minotaur stands menacingly in the room.

First Attack: Rush Forward, attack everyone directly in front of him and to the front left and right spots on the grid for 10 damage.

Second Attack: Move to the nearest character do a power blow for 15 damage and push them back two.

Third Attack: Attack any enemy adjacent to you for 10 and dodge, add +2 to Minotaur’s defense.

Something along those lines. Those three attacks would repeat 1 through 3 over and over again until one of the health bars is completely empty, then between Two and Three the Minotaur would add in a new attack.

New Attack: Leap 5 spaces, attack all adjacent squares for 10.

This would change up the battle so that you can’t, as players, complete your puzzle and just let it auto play itself out based off of what the monster is doing. The added card is probably going to be a card the players haven’t researched before as part of learning about the boss monster, so it should mess up their plans.

Finally for the boss, they are going to have their standard targeting. It is going to target whomever is the closest to them. If there are two or more heroes close to them, it will target in a way that it can hit the most, if it can only hit one, it’ll target clockwise from the direction it’s facing. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule, mainly if an attack can hit multiple player characters and there is a grouping like that in range, it will move to attack them. So like the jump ability, say there are three archers off to one side of the board, it’ll jump over to them to hit them all if it can, instead of focusing on the tank in front of it.

So as for the players, what are they doing on their turn?

Players are always going to have two things on their turn that they’ll do, and players can actually go all at once, doesn’t matter turn order. It seems like it might if they are placing a weakness on the boss or a buff on everyone else, but generally those are going to stick around, which means that you don’t get it for that turn, but you’ll get it in upcoming ones. I wanted to create as little downtime for the players as possible. So everyone decides what to do, and then players move and attack/buff/weaken accordingly.

The move is going to be simple, but there is one thing to pay attention to, if a player has a faster speed than someone else and they are both moving to the same spot on the board, ideally, the faster character will get there first. So I guess, when I say everyone is going at once, the movement will be based off of speed. And your speed/movement is also going to determine how far you can move. In this, there is no walking, it is just assumed that everyone is going all out, as you would in a game where you could die, and therefore there won’t be boosts to movement.

The next thing is an attack, buff or weaken, but I’ll start with an attack. An attack is going to be something the players can always do, if they are within range. The players will have a choice though with their attack how to do it. They will always have a basic attack, so a basic long sword might be 4 basic damage, plus strength, plus one modifier flip. But they can also augment an attack with a skill, so maybe they play “Furious Strike” that would have a cool down of one, add 2 to the damage and give another modifier flip. Or maybe they augmented the sword with poison and it’d add in 8 poison damage. The augment would always do it’s extra damage, but the skill would then go into it’s spot on the cool down track and then after the monster goes, everything in the cool down track would shift down one.

Let’s talk a bit more about the cool down track. It would have up to six spots on it, there would be a 5 down to 1, plus a 0 spot. That means that any skill you play, such as Furious Strike, with a cool down of 1, would always be out of your hand for a turn. If it’s at 5, it’s going to be out of your hand for 5 turns. Skills are placed in this track face down, just because of the upcoming mechanic to differentiate.

To build off of that, some skills might use the cool down track in a different way, it would be used as a powering up track. So let’s say I have the skill, I don’t know, let’s call it “Lightning Sword”. That would go face up into spot 3. And I’d draw a modifier card. So why would I draw a modifier card, the example text for Lightning Sword would be something like: Place in Spot 3 on the Cool Down Track face up, draw up to 2 modifier cards per attack action. Threshold: Modifier total less than 6, no damage. 6 to 10 – add 10 damage to basic attack lightning damage, 10+ add 15 lightning damage to basic attack and two modifier flips ignoring cancel attack. Then that card would get flipped and would go back onto the cooldown track. So basically, it’s a skill that is probably going to knock the socks of damage wise which is why you would build up to it. This probably isn’t going to be something that you do early, but when you know that you’re doing, you set it up to try and take down the bad guy in a blow. When using an ability that charges up like this, you can still move, but can’t attack.

With buffs and weakens. These are played instead of an attack and they have to be done at the right range. Almost always these will go onto spot 5 in the cool down track and you will have the whole time that buff or weaken is in the cool down track that it is active. These will go face up like the power up just so you remember that they are active. Buffs and weakens are also going to always just be a plus or a minus to a total. These will take up your attack for the turn you play them.

That’s the vast majority of how combat is going to work. To recap how the modifiers work quickly, there will be modifiers that you can add to your deck or swap in for other modifiers that will allow your fellow players to draw more modifiers. The cool thing with drawing a new modifier is if you draw that additional one via a boost like that, and it’s a cancel the attack, it is just discarded, but you don’t get to draw a new one. If you draw a cancel the attack on your own draw, that will kill the attack. That is going to be a required card that can’t be removed from the deck. But you’ll start out with some pluses, some minuses, and some zeros, and you’ll work on building up your pluses or removing minuses through questing, skills, and stuff like that.

So we have two things left with boss fights, the first is the part your guild plays in a boss battle. Before the boss battle starts, you’ll decide how many guild members you are going to take into the battle with you, they are basically going to keep minions off of you. Minions are meant to be annoying, so if you have 0 guild members with you, a minion will hit you for a small amount of damage, let’s say on level one it’s 1 damage, but they’ll do that every round, and you don’t calculate defense against minions, it just always is pinging you. So you want to bring in guild member. There are going to be a few different levels that you check on the minion card. Let’s do an example minion cards.

“Annoying Kobolds”

< 3 – All guild members brought in die, 2 damage per turn, lose 2 morale

3 to 5 – All guild members brought in die, 1 damage per turn

5 to 7 – 2 guild members die, 0 damage per turn

7 to 9 – No guild members die, 0 damage per turn, gain 1 morale

10 or more – No guild members die, lose 1 morale

This basically is the chart that you’d check the number of guild members you picked against. The last one is probably going to have some questions with it, why would you lose morale if you bring in too many guild members? Well, first you’ll lose morale for every two guild members who die, so it’s better to have too many than too few, or just barely too few, but if you bring too many in, you are putting too many people at risk, and that disheartens them.

So then finally, the most important thing, what do you get for loot? If the boss has a signature weapon, that will be dropped, it might drop some skills or augments as well, and then of course currency. On the bosses main card it will tell what loot pack to open as well as how much currency and XP that you’d get coming out of that fight. I want with the bosses in general and the loot pack for them to be sealed things, so before getting to a level and researching the boss, you won’t know what that boss looks like. As you research you find out more and more. This is an idea that I really like from Oathsworn and am borrowing because of that. I don’t want people to be able to open up the box and see all the bosses. Instead, I want to give them something to explore and discover.

So that’s a lot of information, but hopefully boss fights sound found. I want to give players lots of different options for solving the puzzles of a boss fight.

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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

Level Events

So I’ve talked about these a little bit before, as they are one of the timing elements for a floor. Let’s go over that again, with how it’ll work. There will be a deck of 10 cards for each floor. The top 7 cards will be specific to that floor, quests, one time events, stuff like that. I’ll get into those more coming up here, but after that you will have 3 cards that you are told to shuffle and put at the bottom. Depending on the floor these cards will change, but they will be pulled from a general deck. These cards are basically a timer before you start to lose a lot of guild members. Guild members will leave generally on the previous cards, but the bottom, printed on the level itself, will be a harsher penalty, like basically a cost of money, morale, and loss of guild members to stay there longer.

But let’s assume that you won’t spend all your time there frittering away the guild members and morale, what can you do with these events?

The fun thing about these events, at least to me, is that these evens will only happen at a certain time. The level events are going to be in a specific order, not shuffled, so that we can have the NPC’s provide information about them, but you have the choice the day turn of the event to do that event, after that, it’s gone. So you might decide to abandon a quest in the middle of it, if the event is something that looks/seems important. I want skipping an event also to have some negative. While skipping a quest might not be that big of a deal, a floor event is something specific to that place, and should be important to it, and while not all of them will be that negative, maybe a slight drop in morale or someone leaves the guild, that sort of thing, some of them might be fairly big dings to player reputations, guilds, money, etc, but it should be pretty obvious when that is the case.

So what sort of things might there be?

I’m going to go stuff as basic as a good sale at a shop that you have to commit to, this might be why you end up at a shop again. There might be some epic quest that is brought out that you can do. This is kind of like the Christmas quest in Sword Art Online type of thing, it gives you something awesome and rare. There will also be bigger level events that might require multiple people or a hero and guild members to do. Going back to the quest section, I talked about having Trolls attack, well, that event is going to come up sometime and if you’ve done the other quest, you get a benefit, but it’s going to happen, and that wouldn’t be a required event to take part in, but something like a troll attack would definitely ding morale, guild size, etc. a lot.

Beyond that though, there are going to be some floor events that aren’t actually related to the programming of the MMORPG, they are going to be related to the PC’s. Let me lay this out very clearly, these will always be a big deal. The reason I say that is going off of the premise that you are stuck in the game and it’s life or death, player conflicts could easily lead to death. There is going to be some that happens in the game, you will have guild members die, you will see the population track lower in the game no matter what you do, because you aren’t the only group who is fighting through, but when it’s a floor event, it’s going to be public, noisy, and will set conditions that could come back to haunt you later.

All of these will follow the standard flow of things, the quests inside the quest will behave like a quest. When dealing with an NPC or a shop, it’ll be similar to that. When dealing with a PC, it’s going to be the same as that. The only thing that might be different would be something like the troll attack example, that’s not really a quest, that’s just something you can commit some people to. There might be multiple ways that you can help deal with that, but that will be an event that is there that day and probably the next.

Monsters

Monsters, on the other hand are going to be simpler. They are going to be a pretty straight forward battle, but they don’t take place in town, hence not using them in the last game design post.

Fighting a monster will have you going out, and there will be up to three areas to fight monsters. Monsters for a level will fall into three categories, easy, medium, and hard. Easy will give you a little bit of XP and gold, medium will give you more, and hard will give you a lot. You won’t know what monster will be coming up though, so you can flip from any of the decks, and it might be that you hit a harder monster than you were hoping for, but you’ll have an idea of the range.

Monster combat is going to be quite simple, you will flip the monster and compare your attack skill to it’s defense, and if you do enough to kill it you do, if not, it can hit you back. The advantage you have is that once you flip it you can certainly modify your attack to do more damage. Most of the time you won’t be tracking hit points on these monsters, it’ll just be, do you hit them, if you hit them you kill them sort of thing. There will be some monsters that will, for sure, hit you back, because you’ll need to hit them twice.

So what do you get from killing monsters, the two big things are XP and gold. Some of them might drop an item, but these are going to be things like health potions or trinkets stuff like that. Maybe in the hard deck will there be one especially hard monster that would drop a skill or something along those lines. When a player character is out fighting monsters you are going to get more XP and less currency versus the guild out there fighting monsters.

They are going to get more currency simply because they are going to have “killed” more things. The guild will have a fourth option to pick from and that is basically a “farming” option. By that I mean that they’ll go out and kill a lot of really really low level things, things that wouldn’t bump up XP really much at all for a player, but those will be the way to get a good chunk of currency for the guild.

So that was a bunch of digest there. Monsters are going to be very straight forward but the floor events, I think there is an opportunity for a lot of story there. And I really like that about them, I think they are going to be something people will want to do, though sometimes might feel like they have to do them, but I never want it to seem like there isn’t a choice.

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However, you don’t have to play a min/maxed character when playing D&D, and I actually think that can lead to some better game play than if you do have min/maxed. The issue with min/maxed character can often lie with them being too good at everything and not having anything unique about them. A skilled player can role play a min/maxed character just fine so that they have depth and are a unique character, but they aren’t going to have as much to over come.

An example of a poorly min/maxed character is Robert Langdon from The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. In the book, he is figuring out all of these puzzles with no problem, he’s able to do fairly athletic things no problem. And for a long time, you don’t really think that he has any flaws. Then he has to get into a small car and you find out that he has claustrophobia, which is then “cured” the next page. Now, this is clearly an example of how not to min/max a character in a story so that you don’t end up removing anything interesting or unique or challenging for them. But the same holds true, in a world of magic and fantasy, when you have a character doesn’t naturally have some flaw, it’s easy to play them without flaw, and often times, without character because of that.

So instead of min/maxing the heck out of your character, you might want to go about creating a character who isn’t the ideal combination of things, but is still effective in the game. This gives them a true weakness and true strength in given situations. Let’s look at our Mountain Dwarf Fighter, the tank/fighter build that we did. Without using anything special, we were able to create a character that was going to be getting a lot of hit points each level and had a lot of armor class from the very early levels. Yes, they were weak-ish to magic, but they were meant more to deal with melee combats, and with their hit points, unless they are being mentally dominated, they are going to be tough to get out of a fight.

There are certainly other ways to bring in flaws and issues to the character for role playing purposes, we didn’t touch on the background items like Personality Traits, Flaws, Bonds, and Ideals, which I’ve done articles on previously. But those are limited to role playing for a character like our tank, and more likely than not, the person playing the tank would be there for the combat more than the social encounters anyways. So those things might be lost on the character sheet.

If, however, you wanted to create a more flawed tank, but still be a tank, you can certainly do that. When we created our tank, we gave them both solid dexterity and strength. The advantage of having both of those solidly stat’ed is that you can get into combat quickly and still hit well. Let’s say instead, for the tank, that they were actually a nerd growing up and loved brewing, keeping the Mountain Dwarf and Fighter in the mix and same equipment, we can just adjust the stats to make it a very different character.

If, instead, we keep the 14 in Constitution because it becomes a 16 with our racial bonuses, so that we still get our +3 to health each level until we hit our first ability score increase, where we can make it a four. Then, instead of doing strength and dexterity, we focus on intelligence and wisdom, we get a very different character. We still have 19 for our armor class and 13 HP at the first level, but we’re now not that great at hitting anything with a lower than average strength, since I put an 8 in there. That becomes a -1 for a modifier, though, we are proficient with the weapon, which gives us a +2 bonus for a +1 bonus overall, the damage output is just going to be bad. Now, you still have a character that can tank and is actually better at dealing with mental domination than our previous one was, but is worse at fighting.

We’ve also created a character with a more unique backstory for role playing purposes. Why are they so good at deflecting punches and hits? Maybe they were bullied as a kid, and they never learned to fight, but instead they developed the skills to take a punch and not be affected by it, and that’s how they dealt with their bullies. That skill then translated well for them when they decided to go out adventuring to learn more about the world and find out information that they don’t know, because they can go around and if something tries to get them, they can still take a punch. That’s more of a unique character that easily comes out of the choices we made in not making a character with their ideal stats.

When you create characters, do you strive for a character that is the ideal at one thing, such as combat or social interactions, or do you seek to create a character with a more interesting story naturally built in?

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An example of this would be a fighter in Dungeons and Dragons who knows that they want to tank. The two primary stats for them are going to be strength and constitution. With more strength, they’ll be able to do more damage on their attacks and be more likely to hit. But constitution for the tank is the biggest thing. Constitution helps bump up hit points and makes it harder for that character to be taken down.

Now, that’s a simple look at what Min/Maxing is in D&D, but it goes beyond that, and there are some reasons to not find it that great in your game. Most of the time it is going to be fine and good if a player does that in the group, the concern is that you have someone min/max into an area that another character is supposed to be better at. Maybe the fighter in our example also puts points into Wisdom and now they are better at perceiving than a class that naturally would want wisdom is, and the fighter is now stepping on the toes of another character. Fighter isn’t a great example for this, but classes that get expertise like Rogue and Bard can have this issue if a player min/maxes over another character specialty.

But let’s look at some of the positive things that can come from it as well. If you are smart about your min/maxing as a party, you can have character who cover all the bases that you want. You can cover attacking, social interactions, sneaking, healing, etc. and be good at all of them because you and the group have min/maxed the skills of the group. This means, you aren’t ever going to feel inadequate when trying to do something, if you are there as a whole group. And, if you are in a combat focused game, everyone can focus on doing more damage and hitting more consistently by min/maxing as well.

I will also add, that if you are min/maxing, it’s good to have the whole group doing it. Sure, one player character can be min/maxed, and that would probably be fine. But if you have four of you at the table and three of you are min/maxing and the other player isn’t because they don’t know how, I’d recommend helping them min/max, or if they don’t want to, don’t fully min/max your own character so they don’t seem like they’ve fallen behind or can’t keep up with the rest of the group. I’ll go back to the saying that I learned from The RPG Academy, “If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right”, and that means fun for the whole table.

But let’s talk about how you go about min/maxing a character, because, it can be fun to play that extra powerful character in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. When I go through this, I’m going to be using my fighter example where combat and tanking in combat is their most important thing.

The first thing to look at is what class you want to play. In this case, we know we want to be a tank and we want to hold up well enough in combat. We have a few options, we could do barbarian for their D12 hit die, but the limitations on armor puts the barbarian more into an attacking role, whereas fighter has more armor options can use a shield which will bump that armor class up even more.

With that figured out you want to think about what race you are going to want to take. In our case, we have a couple of different options. The Half-Orc has +2 to strength and +1 to constitution to start with, and that would allow us to create a good combat character. The Mountain Dwarf, however, has +2 to both strength and constitution, which is just better. However, the Half-Orc, in it’s favor, has a trait called “Relentless Endurance” where, when it gets knocked out or down to 0 hit points, once per day, it can go back up to 1 hit point and keep on fighting. That is useful, but I’d prefer the extra hit points that we’ll be getting from the Mountain Dwarf.

Now, going back to the class, we have some features to look at, at the first level. The main one being the fighting style we can get at first level. We have a lot of different option. Protection would be interesting, because we’ll have a shield, but defensive is even better for us, because it gives us a permanent boost to our armor class.

Finally, because background doesn’t give us that much in way of bonus to this fighting min/max build that we’re doing, let’s put our stats together. We’ll use the standard array as not to make it confusing, but that gives us a 15 and a 14 to place. I would place the 15 in constitution, giving us a 17 to start with in that stat, and then a 14 in dexterity, actually, versus strength. The reason for this is that we have a 13, which will give us 15 in strength, but only would have given us a 13 in dexterity. With the 14 in dexterity, it means that our initiative is going to be a +2 instead of +1 for our die rolls, and we still have a +2 to hit, which isn’t bad. It also gives me two odd numbers, so at level four when I get to go up a level, I can take my strength to a 16 and my constitution to a 18, and improve both of those stats to a +3 and a +4 respectively.

But wait, I forgot one last thing, we get our equipment as well. Now, I could have gone shopping for this, but standard equipment works out well for us here. We get chain mail for armor, and we can get a shield that are going to make us hard to hit as well.

So let’s look at some of our key stats. At level 1, we’d have 10+3 HP, so 13 hit points isn’t bad at all, but more importantly, we have an armor class of 19. That is extremely hard to hit. So while, maybe, a lucky hit would be able to take us down, but unless the monster is rolling with a decent modifier to their attack, it’s going to be hard for them to hit us. Our fighter is set to run into the fray, take on attacks and slowly deal damage to the enemies.

And you can do this with any class or any character type that you want, whether it is for combat or not. But should you, that’s the question, I’ll be talking about why you might not want to or why I generally don’t use the most min/maxed characters out there.

How do you play in a video game RPG or D&D? Do you like min/maxing, or have you ever run into an issue with it?

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