My wife and I have been working on a game of her theme idea.
We are looking for advice/feedback on:
1) More player interaction between each other
2) More robust dice rolling system
Each player starts out as a traveling minstrel looking to gain enough reputation to be invited by the royal court and impress them. You gain reputation by playing (rolling special dice) at towns and villages and successfully completing songs of romantic/heroic/adventurous tales.
Your minstrel starts the game with 7 village/town location cards, 5 red/blue d6 dice (lute dice explained later), the lute "instrument" card, and an "experience" card with 5 counters on it.
The dice work as music notes. The "lute" dice you start with have 3 sides of red, 3 sides of blue.
With coins you can purchase more instruments that unlock other colored dice.
Harp: 4 sides of yellow with harp symbols, 1 blue 1 red
Viol: 4 sides of green with viol symbols, 1 blue 1 red
Drums: 4 sides of grey with drum symbols, 1 blue 1 red
Flute: 4 sides of white with flute symbols, 1 blue 1 red
You start with 5 experience counters that represent the ability to use any combo of five dice (of only the instrument dice you own). So if you owned a harp and lute you could have 5 harp dice, 2 harp/3 lute, all 5 lute etc. You are able to change the combo of dice before performing your songs which will depend on what the town requests (explained below).
Purchasing lessons with coins gains more experience counters and thus more dice. So 6 counters would allow you to roll 6 dice instead of 5, 7 counters would allow 7 dice and so on.
Getting to a turn:
All players choose one of the village/town cards from their hand but do not reveal it yet. Once all players have chosen their card they reveal it to each other. If any player chose the same village as another they have a friendly minstrel duel to determine the better story teller. The winner of the duel takes a few rep from the other player and proceeds to their chosen village/town and the loser has to rechoose an unchosen village/town.
I will first explain how playing songs for a village/town work and then explain the duel system.
Once each player has chosen their village/town they draw from the song request pile. Song request cards will all have different combinations of songs on them. The card will have 4 difficulties of the same song ranging from Simple, Fair, Grand to Epic.
Simple involves 5 notes.
Fair involves 7 notes.
Grand involves 9 notes.
Epic involves 11 notes.
Since each song is different from the next card, so too will the colors of the notes. For example this song request contains;
Simple: RRBBY
Fair: RRBBYYG
Grand: RRBBYYGBY
Epic: RRBBYYGBYGG
In order to gain reputation with that village/town you need to roll (sing) all but 2 notes of that level of tale, anything better gives bonus reputation.
So if you choose to sing a simple tale you would need to roll 3/5 matching dice to receive 1 rep, 4/5 rep would give 2 reputation and a perfect simple tale of 5/5 would give 4 rep.
Each tier of difficulty gives more rep.
Another example, with a Grand Tale, getting 7/9 would give 3 reputation, 8/9 would give 4 and a perfect 9/9 would give 6.
After your first roll, there is an option to reroll any number of your dice but "fatigue" sets in and a penalty of removing 1 die from the remaining dice you wanted to reroll will apply. You may choose to reroll as many times you like but fatigue sets in each time lowering your chances of completing your difficulty.
We have yet to decide what the penalty for failure to perform or roll enough of the matching dice for the difficulty you chose but something along the lines of lost rep or not being able to play at the village anymore.
Duels work the similar to the village songs except both players play songs from the same song request card that one of them draws. Both players roll (sing) for the simple difficulty tale. If they tie, they sing the (next difficulty) fair tale and so on until a winner is determined.
Each minstrel also earns 1 coin for each difficulty each time they play at a village/town, therefore you get 1 coin for simple and upto 4 coins for epic, these coins can purchase different instruments and music/tale telling lessons. Lessons get more expensive as you gain more experience.
Once you have hit a certain rep (decided later on exact number) you can play for the royal court and draw from their song request pile. You must play all 4 difficulties flawlessly to win the game, so make sure you are prepared!
This is just a start to our idea so if you are confused about any rules or gameplay let me know.
I like the dice idea for the song requests but not sure if there is enough risk/reward mechanic or if the different instruments = different colors idea is good or not. I can see a player getting frustrated if they own drums and draw 4 requests in a row that ask for harp or flute in the grand or higher difficulties so they have no chance until that is bought but they hopefully are able to complete most simple/fair tales.
Let us know! Thanks!
Thank you for all your suggestions! We will test and tweak your ideas in our systems and keep working on it.
Another thing I forgot to mention is implementing "Guilds" which were popular amongst traveling minstrels back then. This would basically be a way to help other players or co-op but we are still working on the details.