So, as many games as I play, it’s probably not surprising I get plenty of ideas for games I’d like to make as well. An aggravating amount, really, considering my energy and skill level when it comes to stuff like actual coding and grunt work. As cool as video games would be to get into, I also like to kick around pen and paper concepts for ideas as well for an alternative. Seeing the variety of smallish-to-largish card and board games on display at PAX 2015 really sparked a more serious interest in them. I can totally see a board game working as a viable way to put together a self contained gaming experience, and as such I’ve been kicking around ideas for a good while now on how to make an easy to play JRPG-inspired dungeon crawl. Tonight, I felt like finally sitting down and jotting down some notes related to what I’ve been brainstorming on to share for now.

The game actually sort of began life as an action-RPG where you could build a party who moves as one cohesive unit, with you controlling the leader directly and the rest of your team doing different stuff based on their position automatically. Kind of a frantic ball of slashing, arrowing and passive spell buffing, basically. Then I got to thinking that a randomly-generated dungeon would totally be doable with a deck of cards, and having physical stuff to move around is always neat. My aim is basically to create something that would not only be pretty simple to pick up and play as intended, but open enough to encourage groups to invent their own quests or game styles off of the basics. That’s part of why I’m a big fan of the Dream Pod 9 RPG’s, they accomodate different “levels” of play so well that you can usually get away with playing the same units in a massive battle and keep the same basic rules played looser and more cinematically to have the players celebrate the battle with a drunken bar brawl or something.

The notes page above kind of has the basic gist of what I wanna try and do without having gotten far enough to find some testers. It’d be cool to add some extra battle options for when I get to PvP and boss battles and other random encounters, but I’m focusing on the basic idea of ‘guy does this when placed here’ for now since that’s kind of the core tenet.

Also, I know it’s kind of weird but I’d like to try and make the game solo play capable, for the sake of players who want a way to test out a team or deck between “real” sessions.