So the concept for this game actually developed from the title. In this case, Origins. The general concept was a game that as you played would tell the story of how a person who develops a super power, travels the path either to becoming a villain, or a hero. The board would be divided into city blocks with key places located in various blocks, moving to a block with one of the key places (ex: church, morgue, power plant, etc) results in an encounter and depending on the response to the encounter, results in equipment or development towards a new power, as well as pushing the character either towards the villain side or the hero side; right now I'm calling them Victory Points. The characters starting in the middle of the bar and working one direction or the other. Victory being decided by the first to reach either full villainy or full heroism, and then reach the city square on the board. That's kind of the general overview.
The concept I like, the mechanics I'm a little fuzzy on, specifically I'm not sure how to go about creating specialized encounters without writing a big book of encounters (I'm thinking some use of cards, but how to specialize based on the key place the character is at?) I'll gladly except any suggestions, but that's my general concept.Let me know if there were pieces I wasn't very clear on I'm sure its somewhere in my notes.
Do players get to choose which direction they go? Maybe each card has two or three or four different solutions, with differing levels of risk, worth differing numbers of Hero or Villain Points if successful.
That is what I was intending when I began developing the game, and after the suggestions something clicked for how to go about instigating this while limiting the number of cards involved. Tell me if its too round about; however, what I'm thinking is a deck of general encounters and two or three specialized encounters for each place, then use tokens or chips of some sort labeled 1,2,3 or general in some way thus telling whether to use one of the three specialized encounters or pull from the general deck.
Another story element is whether you want a single axis of Hero-Villain, which offers clear goals to the players, or something that allows vengeful heroes and utopian (in their own mind) villains at the cost of putting a lot more on the players' shoulders for weaving a coherent story.
This concept is interesting, I'll need to think for a little while to figure out how to implement it. I'll get back to you if I come up with something that allows me to balance the "story" with play.
Krone I like the idea of adding "complications" to the encounters, and Fox your idea for inadvertently moving the wrong direction are both interesting concepts- I'm wondering if I could merge them in some way; though, at that same time I'm wondering if it might be biting off more than I can chew, and I'd really prefer not to choke the game by trying to do too much.