Newbie designing hoping for help fleshing out idea

Kpres definitely been thinking about your suggestions. One path I'm considering is to have the game played over a number of days (no reason it can't be a week long sale or something). I could then have the game either played to a number of victory points or a fixed number of rounds, depending on which works better for game length.

If I fully embrace the players-as-employees idea, along with the ideas I added to my last reply to you, then one idea would be to have the players compete to fill orders by finding the items needed by customers waiting in line. It doesn't exactly fit the big-box-store model but it fits the feel I was hoping for. The customers would tip on a decreasing scale based on how long they had to wait perhaps. Those tips could then be used by players to buy items themselves and each day they'd be able to try and complete a quest themselves. This is where the rolling mechanic and all your ideas about the players actually performing questions could occur. I would think it's only the points earned from completing THOSE quests that would lead to actual victory points.

That whole setup would at least lead to a deeper game, create a "do A so you have the resources to attempt B" situation, pressure to complete customer tasks quickly and prevent other players from doing the same, add some luck via die roll, etc. The victory points could even be thematically XP and the whole game about reaching "Level 2".

Interesting, I see the value in staggering their tasks but I'm not sure if that needs to be designed into it or if it may occur naturally. I hadn't originally considered tasks to belong to the players, simply be ones they claimed, however, if they were handed a task it might create room for players to trade items each needs.

I do think 'mischief' or some kind of method to slow down other players will be a prominent player interaction though. And random encounters could easily be mixed into the item decks.

It hadn't even occurred to me that if the store is, by my own theme, selling 'discount' gear and such, then items that aren't very durable actually fits nicely. It doesn't work as well if 'real' adventurers are shopping there.

I keep posting my own ideas here but those of you who contributed have helped me out a lot by giving me some great ideas to consider which of course leads to other ideas and so forth. I think my big question right now is whether to center it on employees working at a Super Item Shop, or people shopping there. I see ideas for mechanics flowing more naturally from the employee side. So far for the 'shoppers' side I just don't see enough going on for it to be interesting for very long.

The real genesis for this idea was a play on the old gameshow Supermarket Sweep, where contestants as part of the show were trying to find combinations of items, or particular bonus items, etc. I'm wondering if I could bring any of that in. Sigh, more things to ponder.

Maybe 'feel' frantic isn't the right phrasing. I typically prefer action point allocation games, I don't find 'chance' when moving to be as enjoyable personally, although obviously it works well in numerous games. It would be pawns, I'd pictured a tile/grid layout with aisles and rows, as I was basing it on a big-box-store layout. So turn based action point allocation.

One-point-one-grid-space type movement is what I was referring to when I described it above, but as has been identified this idea is mechanically weak and I appreciate the continued brainstorming, and soon I'm going to have to try and roll some of these ideas into a new summary.

I like the team idea, and it scales well to smaller groups by having players take more than 1 character if needed. It definately puts more moving pieces on the board which would help if frantic is indeed what I'm going for. That works well for a grid-type map layout. I'm debating if a node based movement mechanic might make the game seem faster, so you still have to move through Men's Armor and Accessories to get to Powerups and Potions, but not move a dozen spaces to do so.

I'm also wondering if the market would be better conceived as an outdoor center with multiple booths and such, with the 'real adventurers' in a tavern and the player characters running around collecting items for them, the players could also perform tasks for the shop owners as well, making them more independent contractors, and that would give multiple ways to earn points. I don't dislike the idea, it's taking a big step away from what I thought would be more witty game theme, so I doubt I'll go that direction. It would however make the game more of a pickup-and-deliver game, I may look to that genre for ideas of how to acquire items (the search mechanic).

Because I'm utilizing the concepts of old-school RPG games I was able to make use of a commercial level designer to prototype something quickly. Below is my early conceptualizing of a "big box item shop"

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2842605/superitemshop.jpg

It's likely too big, a square layout would fit on a ~20x20 quadfold board better. It's also extremely symmetrical which will likely lead to boring movement options, but I'm still pretty happy with how these tools are letting me mock things up quickly, and would likely help any artist I commissioned to make the final board.

RGaffney,

I know I said thank you for your input already, but going to repeat my thanks to you and everyone else who took the time to respond. It's kind of surreal that all I have is an idea, and one I hadn't had much time to really think about in a few days, and yet here are other people who have spent time contributing. So again to everyone, thank you.

I go back and forth with tiles vs cards, but ultimately they wouldn't be mechanically much different so I don't want to get hung up on it for now. As far as their use though, you basically summarized how I saw it working. I suspect there will be a 'restocking phase' triggered at some point, whether that's end of each round, odd numbered rounds, whatever. Perhaps with diminishing stock as the sale goes on. I think those are ideas I threw out before.

Reading your list I'm realizing there could be room for variation in the items, for example you only need one weapon but you need to collect and entire SET of armor. Acquiring those items could be slightly different to fit the different requirements.

As you say I'd include more items, but I think I'd need to still have classes. Suggesting players get a specific item when there may only be a couple in the set would be difficult, but saying 'a ranged weapon' and having a few different models in there would work. They could come with modifiers to differentiate them. I could, if the game needed it, at a 'synergy' system. So there's ultralight armor and enchanted armor, and ultralight weapons and enchanted weapons, and while you can have either, having multiple items in a 'set' provides some bonus.

As for my discussion with my gaming group, ended up only being one person, but he's the biggest gamer and only role-player of the group so it worked well. A few things that came of it:

- I'm leaning heavily towards the game being cooperative. This may have been tainted by the fact that we mostly played coop games the day he was here, so perhaps it was just on our mind. Either way I still, detatched from the day, think an adventuring 'group' may be thematically better than a bunch of individuals competing. I could also explore two rulesets but I'm not sure that would work well and it would be confusing which was the 'real' game and which was the variation.

- To borrow the RPG cliches, I need to involve dice in some fashion. My own preference is for diceless games so I ignored them on my initial brainstorming, but I think it's a good point that was raised on my gaming day.

- The idea was raised to have both major and minor quests. Minor quests could be completed by a subset of the whole party during the day. The major quest would need to be completed by the party as a whole at the end of each day. There may be some trouble 'scaling' the quests to the number of players, but that seemed doable. Minor quests might take players out of the store for some period of time.

- Just today I started to picture the major quests being, maybe this is corny, but mad-libs style 'stories'. Imagine a story written out with some blanks, such as: "The troll approached, [player] raised his trusty [melee weapon, d6 > 4]". The "d6>4" notation would indicate the player must roll a d6 and get above a 4 to 'accomplish' this piece of the story. A failure to roll could be countered with some kind of ability cards or the 'sentence' could be completed by another player instead. Successful attempts would place the item token (and I'm realizing I'd need player color tokens or something similar if I'm going to have blanks for player) on the storyboard such that if the group is successful it would be a complete telling of the groups adventure. This is a very new idea, has MAJOR issues with scaling to the # of players, but it's not something I've seen done, although that could be it's unnecessarily complex.

- Related to the above but from a mechanical standpoint, rolling dice to determine success of an action gives the players incentives to 'overprepare'. If I incentivise them to get what they need and get out of the store as quick a possible it would create an interesting tension. It's not entirely dissimilar to the system used in "Hooyah", players can spend more time preparing but it leaves less turns to complete tasks, and can even cost them hit points.

- I think one of the initial things I wanted to capture was a crowded store. If the game is cooperative (or even if not) I think I should have other 'people' in the store. This led me to the idea of having other shoppers (colored cubes, standees, miniatures, whatever) come onto the board. I'm seeing it as shoppers being in the various areas of the store and in order to grab the item you want off the shelf you need to shove your way past them. More shoppers requires more shoving (which may be die rolls), with bonuses for other players being in the same area of the store (e.g. roll 1 die + 1die for each other party member in the same area, or something like that). Some mechanic would move people around the store to various areas.

- I'm mentioning areas above because I'm also basically set on using zone based movement, letting players be in say 'men's clothing and armor' as a zone and being able to move to adjacent zones, without the grid I'd previously illustrated.

Okay well, that's a long update.

I ended up solo-playtesting a npc version of my idea using munchkin quest standees, I agree it just didn't feel fun. If I incorporate this idea it will be in a simpler form, a little closer to pandemic/defenders of the realm with units simply 'filling up' an area, although I really want to avoid being too derivative of those games. I think at most, the # of units in a part of the store would add to the difficulty of getting an item from that area.

And I don't think I'd use a d20, just dice in some limited fashion, perhaps just for placing crowd pieces, I'm otherwise much more inclined for euro style gaming.

At this point I have so many good ideas I just need to spend some time in excel and photoshop mocking up an initial implementation that I can play through myself or with my playgroup as a real game and not just brainstorming.

Skancke,

Thank you for registering to add your thoughts to my thread, please know it's appreciated. I actually stepped away from the idea for a couple weeks but am looking forward to trying out some of the mechanics soon. I still go back and forth on the cooperative vs competetive, and am still undecided. I may have to 'lightly' design two versions and see what I think works better.

The competetive version would be about manipulating items/other customers in the store to make it harder for opponents to get items while trying to collect the items you want.

My cooperative idea is working out to be more 'collaborative'. A cooperative game with a heavy emphasis on 'group' actions. I'm going to try it as action points where you need other players to join in your action. Like grabbing an item on a shelf costs 1AP but if there's 3 other shoppers you may need +3AP to shove them out of the way. If you don't have enough, another player in the same zone could help. In this way each 'round' would involve every player getting their allotment of AP reset, and instead of going around the table like most games, the players could take actions in any order they agreed on, continuing until all players had exhausted all their AP. It's an idea I haven't seen (doesn't mean it isn't out there) but it could be interesting. I dislike cooperative games with little player interaction (such as Elder Sign) so going the extreme opposite may be fun.