Thursday, July 26, 2007

Two new ideas, hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew

To whomever may be listening,

So, before I get started on my rant about my game, I just wanted to say I got my appeal off, it’s received, and I asked my congressman for help. I don’t know, as cynical as I get about politics sometimes, I do really like this guy. I hope he’ll be able to help (I think he will, but can’t help but feeling like this cause may be hopeless at this point).

Anyways, two things I wanted to talk about today. Well, first a small update. So, things seem to be running smoothly with the game. I’ve test played it again a few times. I think that the rushing might still be a problem, although at this point it’s good enough that I can send the game out to beta testers and see what they think. I plan on doing that pretty soon, maybe releasing it on The Forge and The Board Game Design Forum. So, I’ll see how the viewing public likes it, at least in its first draft form.

I have two major things I’m wondering about now, like big things that I’m wondering how to change. First off, within a week I’ve had three completely independent people say that I should think about putting more links between the worlds in. Like, make more abilities that carry over, or things like that. Right now, well, there aren’t too many. I guess they are as follows:
-If a character dies in one world, they’re screwed in the other
-A few abilities have effects from one world to the other (though not many)
-Magic points are shared between worlds
-A character can only make an action in one world, rather than both, each turn
I’ve thought a lot about what more I could put in. Here are some thoughts. First, have “meditate” abilities, where the character in the spirit world falls unconscious, and it causes the character in the other world to power up. Second, that being alive in the real world can cause a dead spirit to become revived with some small probability. Third, maybe certain actions in the real world could grant a bonus in the spirit world, or vice versa. Fourth, a character, if they act in one world too much, grows tired (I don’t think I’ll do this, because I fear it might get overly complicated or annoying). I don’t know, I think I’ll post to bgdf about it, see what other ideas are out there.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is character creation. So, as it stands, what I’ve been doing so far is that each character has a class (or, as I call it, and archetype) in each world. All characters have the same stats to start with, and they each get 2 abilities. The abilities or stat increases a character can get depend upon the character class (so, for example, a warrior mostly gets things to boost her ability in melee combat). This has worked so far, especially for what I’ve done with it, but I can’t help but feel like there’s more to be had. I had an earlier post on bgdf, where someone suggested making the party design like creating a deck in a CCG. I thought this was really intriguing, though it will be hard to pull off. I mean, should I just let loose and let anyone create anything they want? If I do, will every party look the same? I mean, a real difference between CCGs and, say, D&D, is that in CCGs you often get really specialized decks (i.e. a burn deck, a rush deck, a dispel deck, etc), whereas in most RPGs, every party looks the same, a group of one of each type of specialists (a warrior, a healer, a rouge, and a magic user), forming a general group. I don’t know, the CCG model seems like it would be a lot more interesting, but hard to pull off. I feel like if anyone can just choose anything, it will turn into the RPG idea. So, a counterbalance thought I had to that was that each ability type has a color, or a flavor, or a guild, or something like that. Because of that, choosing one type of ability will rule out other types (i.e. getting a Necromancy power allows you to also get Black Magic, but rules out healing and protection magic). I also might make it that the more specialized your party is as a whole, the wider access you have to abilities (like, either you can get sucky abilities from every type, or decent abilities from half of the types, or really good abilities from only 1 or 3 types).

Anyways, something to think about. The whole appeal thing has me a tad emotionally drained, so I don’t really feel like talking any longer right now. Take care all!

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