A collection of rambling posts about gaming, running, and politics. (and, in 2009, photography.)

Sunday, January 25, 2009

A board game that I want to play

This board game may already exist. If so, great! Or, it may not exist, and I may be forging bravely ahead into uncharted territory, and will be able to soon retire off of the millions and millions that I'll make when I publish my board game. Now I'm being silly. Anyway.

After playing a [seemingly longer than necessary] game of Dungeons and Dragons 4e, and a game of Shadows Over Camelot, and having recently played games like Tomb, and Order of the Stick, and having read some stuff about old school 0e Dungeons & Dragons.... I'm getting to it, I promise... I want to play a game that is an even mix of boardgame and D&D.

Since I'm brainstorming this, here's what I'm looking for.

Each player has a character. Each character is somewhere between Munchkin and D&D4 in complexity. Like, you may be the thief, and you'll have a few stats, but not reams and reams of them. And while each player will have a character, the party doesn't get to split up, there'll be a party marker for the dungeon, which I'll get to right now.

There'll be cards, dungeon tiles, if you will. Much like the street cards in the Zombies game, where you flip them over and line up the streets to create the town. In this case, they'll be dungeon corridors with rooms and stuff. You'll have cards for monsters and traps and treasure and so forth. Instead of being hugely static, there'll be some randomness to it, to simulate D&D's random encounters and random treasure and traps and so forth.

I'd want players to be able to do stuff like disarm traps, or solve somewhat simple puzzles. My first stab at it is to have a trap card, which the player would not see (one player would be the GM), the player could choose to use Strength, Cunning or Dexterity to try to disarm it. One would be a great deal more likely to succeed than the rest. Somehow the player would have to figure out which to use. I wouldn't want it to be totally Gygaxian random, but I don't know how you'd give them clues without completely removing the guesswork.

Fights against monsters would have to be somewhere between (again) Munchkin and D&D4. Maybe a few dice rolls.

I'd want it to be scalable, and have campaign play. Treasure and some kind of XP could be kept, and it could totally take the place of your regularly scheduled D&D game. You could find some stairs and go down to the second level (!!!), and continue the adventure, and so forth. In order to not have hundreds and hundreds of cards, you'd have to have some way for the monster cards and stuff to scale.

You know, after having typed all of this up, I think I'm talking about 0e Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe I just need to cool my heels and read my Rules Cyclopedia. Maybe that'll be the fix I need.

No comments: