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Help with location selection mechanic

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Shpee
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Joined: 09/18/2012

I have an idea from a dungeon crawler-esque game that requires a mechanic that I'm struggling to create. Players will move to numerous "rooms" in search of a "boss" to battle. The room that the boss is hidden in is chosen ahead of time and kept secret. I need a mechanic that will let a player enter a room and then find out if the boss is in that room while keeping the actual boss room secret in the event that the boss is in a different room.

Imagine playing clue and being able to check if your accusation was wrong or not without having to look inside the envelope.

Also, Hi! I'm new here!

Team Gambit
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Joined: 02/19/2012
what happens after you find

what happens after you find the boss? Can I win the game my first turn by guessing the right room and defeating the boss?

Chegra
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Joined: 08/31/2012
When Darkness Comes

When Darkness Comes is a fun game (all-be-it flawed fighting mechanic) that has a location mechanic you might like. When you enter a Tile (room) you randomly put these discs face down in predetermined spots in the room. The disc are weapons and allies and monsters to name a few. If you have a Game Master screen you could do something similar and set the whole board and they would never know until they got to the boss.

kos
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Joined: 01/17/2011
Welcome!

Firstly, welcome to BGDF Shpee.

Idea 1
A possible mechanic would be to put an Event card or token on each room. Before the game starts, if you have 20 rooms you would deal 19 Event cards from the deck plus the Boss card, shuffle them together, and then deal them out onto the rooms. When you search the room, flip the card. The downside of this mechanic is cluttering up the board. The upside is that you could have other interesting events in addition to the Boss battle. It could be interesting if the event cards were mostly good and you had the choice of playing it or putting it back without showing the other players. This would let you weigh the benefits of bluffing vs taking the goodies, and also let you choose when to attack the Boss (assuming that you're not powerful enough to win if you attacked it on your first turn).

Idea 2
If you have a relatively small number of rooms, another option would be to collect tokens indicating which room the Boss is NOT in. Say you have rooms numbered 1 through 10, and there are 5 1-tokens, 5 2-tokens, etc. Before play starts, randomly select one set of 5 (without looking at it) and put them out of play, then put all the other tokens into a bag. Every time you explore a room, you collect a token from the bag. Once you have 9 different tokens you can move to the Boss room (i.e. the only token you don't have) and trigger the Boss fight. The downside of this mechanic would be that it could take a LONG time to collect 9 unique tokens, unless you have a trading mechanic whereby the players can "trade evidence" with each other (and/or "steal evidence"). The upside of this mechanic is that nobody can accidentally stumble onto the Boss right at the start of the game, since the Boss is only triggered once the player can prove which room the Boss is in.

Idea 3
Using the same tokens from Idea 2 but in a different way, the tokens could represent the threat level in the room. At the start of the game, put all the tokens in the bag. Players collect tokens by exploring rooms (or by some other mechanism; it doesn't matter). Each turn you must reveal one token. The tokens stay revealed. When any player enters a room, the threat level of that room is equal to the number of revealed tokens around the table. Once the threat level on a room reaches 5, the Boss attacks the next person to enter that room. The upside of this mechanic is that the difficulty of random encounters/traps could be modified by the threat level of the room, so the dungeon naturally gets harder as the game progresses.

Regards,
kos

larienna
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Dungeon run use the last room

Dungeon run use the last room in the stack of room as the boss room, the problem is that players could guess which room it will be. Using token could be a solution. It depends if all your room are laid out at the beginning of the game, or if they are laid out through the game while players are exploring.

You could end up with a problem where the boss room is at the beginning of the dungeon. In order to prevent this, I though of some system where players needs to reach a series of check points which could be expressed as doors locked with keys of a certain color.

For example, you could have a set of rooms where one of the room as a key and one of the room has the door. When moving through the door, players now use a second stack of room and tokens that also contains a key and door of another color.

Repeat the process a certain number of times, and in the last segment, the boss room is hidden. So in worst case scenario, each room with a door will be aligned in a row, but players will still need to explore to find the keys to progress. Again in worst case, the keys could be in the door room. But the odds for such dungeon to be generated is very low.

Zodiak Team
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Joined: 09/09/2012
Just some out of the box

Just some out of the box thinking here but. What if the monster/Boss was only revealed under blacklight (which you would provide). You might have some more options for hiding him and it would make your game really unique.

Shpee
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Joined: 09/18/2012
Thanks guys! The game is

Thanks guys! The game is still in its infancy and I was avoiding fleshing it out until I could nail down the exploration mechanic. These ideas are just the 'shake up' I was hoping for. The tokens ideas seem ideal for ensuring the boss isn't found too early, but Chegra's 1 card per room mechanic fits nicely with some other dynamics I'd like to explore.

The concept I have in mind is starting to take shape, so hopefully I'll have a detailed description to run past y'all pretty soon!

Shpee
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Joined: 09/18/2012
Re: zodiac team ^

I really like the "out of the box"-ness! Most of the ideas I was coming up with myself involved some sort of, relatively, unique contraption or tool. But I'm afraid that the game will seem 'gimmicky' if it relied on something like a black light. So I'd like to keep the tools involved limited to tried-and-true cards, dice and tokens.

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