I recently had an idea for a card game, and i need a little feedback to keep the development process moving along. My idea is to make a CCG based on RPG's where the players make characters out of character cards, a class card, and equipment, and then fight each other or go through a dungeon crawl type setting.
This may not be anything new or special or anything, but the idea i did have that i need help with is the way i want to do the classes.
There will be 4 generic classes
Fighter
Priest
Rogue
and Mage
each of the 4 generic classes will have a different game mechanic for pulling off class specific moves.
The fighter has 3 different stances, defensive, agressive, and something else i haven't decided yet. There will be 3 slots in each stance, and the fighter chooses what stance to take at the beginning of the round. He can only play cards from that stance and only play cards into other stances. Depending on which stance he is in, the fighter will recieve bonuses to combat.
The Mage will rely on a 3x3 grid and spell cards. The spell cards have arrows on different locations on the card. You place the spell card on the grid, and to cast it, you must fill the spaces pointed to by the arrows on the card. Depending on what cards you fill the spaces with, your spells may take different effects.
The Rogue will rely on getting and playing Poker hands, pair, 3 of a kind, flush, etc. some of the abilites have a minimum requirement (two pair) to play, and some just get better the higher your hand is.
i haven't figured out the priest quite yet, but if you have any ideas, let me know.
There will be an obvious player versus player element, where each character will sqaure off in battle reducing the hit points of their opponent to zero in order to win.
But the part i am exited about is the dungeon play. You can choose to make a dungeon deck where you play monsters, treasure, rooms and traps, and you don't have a certain amount of hit points or mana. You discard cards to get other cards out, and your opponent has to get through your entire deck to beat the dungeon.
The biggest problem, and the reason i haven't developed this further is because there is the daunting question of wheather all of these different mechanics will be balanceable.
I want game play to be very fair and balanced, but is it possible with so many things going on at once?
sincerely confused
andy
I think that it's hard to find a set of ideas that can't be balanced. If you start trying to hold certain values in place, then you can run into serious trouble.
Maybe it's really easy for the Fighter to do damage, but it's really hard for the Rogue to put together a good hand to attack with. Does that make them unbalanced? Not if you fiddle with the numbers a bit. You can just make the Rogue's abilities more powerful (explained maybe as a superior knowledge of his foe's weak points) than the Fighter's. Or if that gets too weird, then maybe you could introduce a sort of Added Effect to the Rogue's attacks, so that even with a Two Pair attack, he still poisons his opponent to wear him down slowly.
The possibilities are endless. I wouldn't wonder so much about the balance, but just get started on it, and play some test battles out to see what you get.
-Peter-[/b]