Fantasy Innkeeper: How to attract the heroes?

Could your hires basically be townies with specific attractions, maybe use a Small World style selection? Where the first in line is cheap but if you chose the back of the line you pay off the others.

Townies available to work this round:
Old Bertram the Sage
Billy Bard
Sassy the Server
One Eyed Jack
Gil the Guide

So some attract characters in different ways and others add bonuses for quests, others increase income, etc.

Generic is likely better, I hadn't much looked through your other posts. Art resource demands could get big with custom characters.

I like the direction this design is going.

Perhaps a refinement to your auction mechanic is that for every room type (mead hall, stage, library, etc) you get so many bidding tokens. During a bidding round let's say 3 or 4 adventurer cards are laid out and each player gets to put down bidding tokens which correspond to the adventurer's wants/needs on the cards of adventurer(s) they want to attract. The player who placed the most tokens a particular adventurer card gets to keep that card. Perhaps at the end of the bidding round if you didn't win the bid you get your tokens back but if you did win you don't get them back until the adventurer leaves the inn.

This was all brainstomed on the drive to work and written down quickly before my shift started. Apologies for being disjointed and incoherent.

So the point of this game is to score the most VP by completing quests. You do that by sending patrons (using patrons because it's easier to type than Adventurers) on these quests. Game has two decks, Patrons and Room/Quest, plus something to represent gold coins.

A patron has these stats:
Lure Value - what he's enticed by (number, plus symbol: 2 Book). some patrons may have two symbols (3 Book/Cross); in this case, you can mix and match.
Skill - could be a number, could be 'lock-picking'; used to complete quests. Better skill would mean higher lure value
Income - the amount of Gold the patron pays you at the beginning of your turn. Better income might mean higher lure value
Refund Value - the amount of gold you must pay him to kick him out of your establishment. If this is to crunchy, just say you must pay twice their Income to kick them out.

Patrons (examples)
Paladins - like drink and crosses
Priests - like crosses
Barbarians - like muscle
Rogues - like crowds
Wizards - like books
Bards - like gold. Bards don't quest, but pay you income to perform, or instead they could be used as wildcards to Lure other patrons (think singing a song about someone to lure them in)

Rooms
Rooms provide currency to lure patrons; libraries provide books, churches provide crosses, etc. Some special rooms offer swaps: gladiatorial arena lets you trade drink for muscle on a 1:1 basis.

Quests:
Quests are worth victory points/glory. VPs vary based on the requirements. You can send as many patrons as you want to complete the quest, but after that, those patrons are discarded (perished/moved on). The balance here is to send an efficient number of patrons, so that you're not shooting yourself in the foot when it's time to collect income next turn.
Requirements could be skill based (needs "Strategy" and "Wisdom"), or value based (6 Swords/2 Holy), or to keep crunch down you could use their lure values as skill values.
If you wanted a more difficult variant, "Elite" patrons could have word skills (Leadership, Cunning, Engineering) and number values while normal patrons could just have a number value. Quests could require one word (Strategy) and a number (5 swords). the words could be ignored for a basic game.

The patrons form a queue as they walk into the town. Each turn you take the top card of the Patron Deck and add it to the end of the line. Each turn, the patrons move one space from the town entrance to the town exit and their Lure Value goes down by one to 0 (free) until they get moved off the queue. I picture town entrance to town exit is five steps. Assume average lure value is 4, so by the 4th and 5th step, the patron is free to acquire.

On your turn you must:
1) Discard/Draw Cards (this could also be the last thing you do instead)
2) Collect Income/Gold
3a)Build your Tavern/Remodel, or
3b) Lure the first patron in the queue, or
3c) Go on a quest

The decision here is to weigh how much benefit is that patron versus building up your tavern. Do you buy the patron, or let him go down in price so the next player gets him for cheap?

You hand is full of quests and tavern rooms. The rooms cost Gold to put into play. The quests have requirements to complete.

Each room has a name, but the currency values differ, so you can't play the same room twice on your tavern. Instead, you can remodel by dumping a lower value room for a higher value of the same name (swap a Mead Hall/3 drink for a Mead Hall/5 drink). You could have this cost gold, if you like. Each room also holds one patron (or more, if you want more crunch, rooms could have a capacity value). If you don't have enough space, you can boot a patron from your tavern by giving them a refund.

Game ends when X VP are reached; set target number or target number based on number of players.

That's all I got. I really like your idea and want to see what you do with it. Please keep me in the loop. :-)

Just throwing a random idea out there, not sure if it would work.

If there was a reputation measurement for each 'type' of patron, Say Warriors, Mages, Rogues and Clerics. I'll use just the mages. So there would be a knowledge reputation that each innkeeper is trying to get/keep. Each turn, the tavern with the most books in their library, would move up the reputation track, and the person with the least books would move down. The benefit of a high reputation is that you would get first pick of all the Mage type heroes, including split-class heroes like Spellblades or Magethieves. I'm also thinking, that as you send your mages on quests, you would have to pay them some gold and some books, or just books as an upkeep each turn. Then collecting books would become a choice between getting mages and losing books, or keeping books to get reputation to get better mages.

Other ideas:
Certain patrons could require a minimum reputation to be hired.
Some quests would lower/raise your reputation. Some event cards too, if they exist. Maybe even some patrons.

I'm not sure if this would fit into your idea, but I like that it changes over time. That way it's not just instantly "I have all the books, so I get all the mages!", the player would have to hang onto those books for a while. The main idea is that it would reflect the wider reputation your inn gets among the population of the world.

I was thinking something along these lines. Perhaps offering a certain kind of quest could be more enticing for certain kinds of heroes: wizards would be more enticed by magical quests, bards by some sort of writing-based, etc.

Usually in games with adventurers, one of the reason is that players go to a tavern to *learn about quests* in that part of the woods... So instead of selling ale, cider and such, you could perhaps MATCH heroes to quests.

Maybe there could be a *center area* in which something like 5 heroes are randomly chosen. Then players take turns in order and pick the hero of their choice, one that could match well with the cards in their hand.

A hand could be comprised of all kinds of items such a weapons, armor, magic potions, etc. As the owner of the tavern, your goal is to *SPONSOR* a hero and help him succeed in his quest. When a hero succeeds, the player receive a certain amount of reputation points.

I think this sounds more interesting than selling drinks. This is a general idea and of course would require more development...

Bidding would be a real nice mechanic. And it does not have to be too complicated. For example you could have like 5 heroes to pick from, and how it works is a little like Stag suggested:

1-On your turn, you play a quest card for a specific Hero face up showing the value of the quest.
2-Next you can add a certain amount of equipment cards FACE DOWN. So nobody is 100% certain of the bid.

Each player makes his bid + the secret part and the player that wins the sponsorship will be the one with the BEST bid. Again I think you need a MATCHING mechanic.

For example: A *Fireball Scroll* is good for a Wizard and a *Battleaxe* is good for a Warrior.

Think up of classes of Heroes and the divide the equipment accordingly. The interesting part about this is that you don't necessarily get the BEST hero... You get the BEST FIT hero (MATCHING) because your bid is more RELEVANT. So some players will have the upper hand while bidding (because they have very relevant equipment cards for the hero).

Note: The reason I suggested 5 heroes is because it makes for a nice 4 player game. Since each player needs a hero, 5 gives the last player the choice between 2.

The problem with bluffing with NON matching gear is that players would ALWAYS exhaust their hand and play, for example, all 5 cards in their hand. This would tend to indicate that each player has 5 relevant cards which is probably an incorrect assumption. So you would need to be careful about allowing NON matching gear.

There could be SHARED gear which improves a bid also: it may be worth LESS than SPECIFIC gear.

For example: a *Healing Potion* can be used by ALL heroes.

Also in the resolving of Quests, I would use a Push-Your-Luck mechanic in which you can use the gear to move along FURTHER... If you try to earn too much gold, you may lose all of what you had accumulated on that particular turn. Giving equipment a DUAL role adds some complexity - but it also adds some depth to the game and definitely more strategy.

So the game could have two distinct phases:

1-A bidding phase to try to win the BEST hero with a quest and equipment
2-A push-your-luck phase to try to earn the most possible gold out of a quest

Perhaps if we *replinished* hands to 3 cards instead of 5 would make it that much more conservative. Then players would carefully count the cards they use knowing that on their next turn they won't get the chance to use 5 cards (because they bid with more this turn...)

As for the "Push-Your-Luck" mechanic here is a sample, check out this older THREAD: http://www.bgdf.com/node/7666 (Read the LAST message in the thread).

You would need to modify things a little, in that instead of continuing with the existing Hero, you would continue with the Hero that you won during bidding.

I am *recycling* that mechanic because I had no practical application for it (did not work for any game I was designing). But I think the mechanic has merit and maybe somebody could use it; specifically for *this* game... since it adds an element of chance and it gives a way to "do quests" and "earn treasure".

In another thread, the OP considered using dice, so the heroes could try to accomplish quests by die rolling. Suppose the VPs earned vary on what the hero does?
- the warrior scores extra VP if he completes a monster quest solo
- the barbarian scores extra VP if he uses less equipment

The OP could consider consider custom dice, like fighter dice have more "hits" than wizard dice.

On a different tangent, I don't know if this would work with the way you've set up the heroes to be bid on, since you mention a group, but even if the heroes aren't bid on serially, maybe you can look at the previous round instead.

My idea would be as thus:

Fighters love drink, so any inn that has that gets a discount (better drink = better discount)

Wizards are lofty and aren't affected by discounts

Thieves don't like other thieves, so any other thieves at the inn make them less likely to go to the inn. On the other hand, they like crowds of non thieves. (more people = more discount, unless thief is already there, in which case each other thief already there = big penalty). If you want more variety, maybe you could say that each thief there makes the other three classes slightly less likely to go there (or even more more variety, maybe every thief that was in the previous round instead of this round, because of reputation, since any thieves in the inn at the moment aren't likely to announce themselves)

Bards love crowds. Any inn that has already attracted a crowd will get a discount (more people = more discount)

You could still run a secondary currency, perhaps food for the actual bid. One advantage of doing it this way is that everything is still bought in a single currency (food), but each class feels different, and it fits thematically.

Just my 2cp.

Any new developments?