Building a game around a fictitious character

It popular to make boardgames from popular videogames.

I think that its a good idea

Edit: using popular characters in your boardgame will make it easier to market the game

The drawback is that you need the permission to do so!

The biggest obstacle I can see would be that most games require two or more players. Who gets to be the main character, and what is player two doing in the meanwhile?

That's not to say that it's a bad idea. There's just more to consider. In video games, the gameworld itself is the antagonist. How often does that happen in board games? How many games are solitaire? Good games, I mean.

Beowulf.

In a cooperative game, all players could work towards advancing the theme character against a game-system enemy. (Help Indiana Jones steal the Ark of the Covenant away from the Nazis.)

In a competitive game, players could be characters that seek their own goals in the world of the theme character, with the theme character himself (or herself) as a resource that all players can draw upon and compete to use. (Try to make your museum the best in the world, both by enlisting the aid of Indiana Jones to find artifacts for you, and by conniving with his enemies to steal the artifacts he's obtaining for other players.)

How many of us can name all the characters from Clue? I was always partial to Colenel Mustard.

Add in Mr. Green, Mrs. White (the cook). Was there a 6th?

M.

Add in Mr. Green, Mrs. White (the cook). Was there a 6th?
There was. Green and White? You're right! I figured there were more creative names :/

Blue was the 6th color perhaps?

Thread-jacking a bit, but I tried something like this in my GDW game "Profit and Provenance". The mechanics were rather generic but you did commission archaeologists to go and uncover relics which you'd then bid on, and for fun I named two of them "Jones" and "Belloq".

I'm working now on a more overtly themed Indiana Jones game, and it's interesting as a challenge. Obviously, going with a licensed property means the game is dead in the water unless a publisher picks it up and runs with it, but from a design standpoint, it really helps the design process flow, and I assume, helps the players buy into the game, if it's based on an iconic character rather than a made-up-just-for-this-game character like "Alabama McGee" or some such.

The real advantage to developing a new character or story-line, as I see it, is the potential to watch the character develop over multiple expansions; ie, for players to become "invested" in the characters' story. I think this is an important thing to leverage. Otherwise, it's likely that a game about a specific character will feel like any other game onto which a backstory has been slapped. It's not a bad thing at all, particularly if the backstory is evoked well by the mechanics. But it's a delicate balance, because a theme is typically meant to be an aid to learning the game's mechanics. If players have to learn a complex backstory to be able to understand or appreciate the mechanics, it may be counter productive. But the catch is that to make a character truly interesting, there has to be some complexity to his story. That's why I say that developing the character's narrative over several games or expansions could be a good way to achieve this.

-Jeff

For all practical purposes, whenever you play any type of game, aren't you, in essense, playing a character? Granted, depending on the game, the concept of "character" can be fairly abstract, such as playing checkers or hearts. In these cases, you are simply a character with a blank slate who's only objective is to win.

But looking at games with a theme, aren't you really playing as a "wealthy land owner running plantation and putting slaves to work" in Puerto Rico, a "leader of a set of adventuring goons" in Munchkin, or a "command in chief with world domination issues" in Risk?

rd

I fiddled with a design like this for a bit. You started with a "blank slate" character, and for the first half of the game, everyone wandered the board performing quests in exchange for customizations to his fighting style (earning weapons, stances, techniques, etc.). In the final round of the game, everyone gathered at a temple and fought it out. Basically, it was a card battle game where the first half of the game consisted of building your deck and the second half of a fighting tournament.

I never thought of taking it to the next level by making the characters part of a fiction external to the game. Your idea sounds very interesting...

Mark

Not really. I look at it more like how some background actor plays "Policeman #3" in a movie.

Giving a player a character cad that says "Ponce DeDoofus wealthy land owner with 14 cats" in Puerto Rico doesn't change the game, or the way you play, but I guess it might get you "more incharacter," whatver that may mean.

In the old Star Trek board game, all the players were the Enterprise and each player interacted with cards and locations that applied to any ship. Because of this, the story was mostly a marketing thing but at least everybody got to be Kirk.

This would work well with the "Tech Trees" idea in one of the other topics in the Design forum.

There are other ways to make the main villain a true threat. Namely, make him unpredictable. You can achieve this in several ways. You could have him controlled throughout the game by one of the players, thus giving that player a separate set of goals to accomplish. This way you could even have an interesting two player game where the hero and the villain are both players who are against each other, rather than two heroes working separately towards a common goal.

Another idea is to have random goal-oriented cards which spell out the task of the villain character. This could be as simple as 'kidnap so-and-so' or as complex as 'Turn 3: Infiltrate the police station. Turn 7: free prisoners. Turn 10: etc...'

With different goals for the villain, the task of the players becomes ever changing. No two games will be the same and the villain will become a character based on the methods behind his madness.

How about an idea where the players are, for example, gods from some panetheon, and the game is about influencing a particular hero to do certain things ... such as fulfilling personal (posisbly secret) objectives or performing quests in your name and so on ...

That way the game might be about (say) Hercules/Heracles, but no-one is actually Hercules.