Hi guys, Time to show the first designs of my newest project: A free, print-and-play solitaire RPG.
Kind of a niche game, but being a solo game its quite easy for me to playtest. Attached you find a very first screenshot of the design.
So far I have the basic rules fleshed out, but the rulebook is still missing several explanatory paragraphs.
Im now into world building and I am actually a bit intimidated by the amount of content required. It might be a bit over-ambitious, reminds me of designing a world for a MMO like WOW.
Basically you control one or more heroes and travel or battle monsters. There are traps and disasters to avoid, but essentially its a hack-n-slash game. There is a lot of equipment and skills but its limited to the character class.
For example the knight may only use a knightsword or a greatlance. You can switch between those two in order to change your strategy, but essentially thats all the weapons a knight can use. There are exactly five different knightswords and greatlances in the game, getting subsequently stronger.
the whole game is inspired by older console games like Secret of Mana or Legend of Zelda. You can see the cartoon style in the attached screenshot already, this is true for the whole art style of the project.
combat is fast paced and deadly, usually it does not take longer than 1-3 combat rounds. you roll a ton of dice during combat in a sort of Hero Quest / Dungeons and Dragons Boardgame Style (Shields, Blanks, Hits etc.). By rolling both your Heroes and the Monster Encounters dice at once, combat can be accelerated a lot. Critical Hits (nat 6) allows you to activate special abilities (skills).
The map is subdivided into locations and moving between those locations requires a set amount of days. For each day you have to roll on the encounter table. Besides monster encounters you can meet NPCs, find treasure and trigger traps. etc. Each location has encounters of its own: Travel Encounters for Woodland, Plains etc, Town Encounters, Dungeon encounters for the various dungeons.
well, its a lot of stuff and Im quite busy putting all the bits together. As said earlier, the complexity is overwhelming.
Im writing this to gather some first impressions and also to keep myself motivated.
thanks for reading and for any feeback!
ttps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18289607/screenshots/fairview-web.png
Thanks for your heads up guys!
Did get some more work done on the basics of my game over the weekend, its still a lot of work though.
@Soulfinger: Good idea, im currently resarching Lone Wolf as well as Fighting Fantasy (Steve Jackson) and a few others. There are also some really good free PnP games out there for inspiration.
@Leeton: The difficulty is the novel part. Im not really that good at writing so I decided to make a game completely out of short paragraphs, graphs and tables.
But there will be a background story of sorts: There are 3 kinds of quests: The one and only story quest, several main quests and even more side quests. All of them are RANDOM.
Side quests are not story related and just add a bit of flavor to the game. they also give the player something to do. Its usually the typical fetch-quest or kill-quest of sort. you can do them in any order and they must not be completed in order to advance.
The main quests are chained and required in order to advance the story. The player must complete 3 main quests in order to unlock the final story quest. these quests are like side quests on a larger scale and there are not so many of them to choose (roll).
the final story quest is required in order to complete the game. its usually a evil villain that must be defeated and there will be one villain in each of the highest level regions of the game (about 6). One villain is chosen randomly once the story quest is revealed.
im still working on the details but thats the plan. its mostly a game of tables and encounter rolls actually.