I have been working on 3 separate games on and off. I am furthest ahead on a dungeon crawling game. The game is co-op from 1-8 players all on the same “team”. I game is designed to have multiple different levels of difficulty. I am going to go into a brief explanation of the game.
There are 12 different classes to choose from. Each class has 2 different weapon/gear choices. Right now one of the classes has 3 choices, but that may get cut. A player picks a class and gear choice. Each gear choice has a group of skills/spells/attacks/ect.
The classes are broken down into 5 different concepts: Damage, healing, status affects on enemies, buffing your party members, and damage mitigation and absorption. All of the classes each fall into multiple sections of these 5 overarching concepts.
The difficulty levels goes as follows. There are 3 different levels of rooms. There are 3 different levels of enemies. I have 7 rooms for each level. The players will select a series of rooms and then determine what level of monster they want in those rooms. Example: Medium (level 2) room and medium (level 2) monster. This would be the default difficulty. The hardest would be level 3 room and level 3 monsters. The easiest would be level 1 and level 1. I have also created 4 “Boss” rooms. They are stand alone rooms with a different rule set.
Game play goes as follows. You have the map/room you are going to play. Right now the maps are all square graphs. I was going to use hex but ran into a problem (we will get to that soon). The map will have a few parts. It will have numbers 1-8 at the entrance. The numbers are where players place their characters. The person on spot one takes first action and the numbers determine the order of actions for the players.
One border of the map has 8 rectangles. The rectangles list the monsters for the amount of players. Example: if there are 5 players you look at the rectangle for 5 players and pull the monsters out. The monsters are broken down into 2 basic subsets. Ranged and Melee. The Rectangle also gives the monsters damage type. There are two types of damage Magic and Physical.
Monster cards are assigned to the monsters in play. The monster cards are broken down into melee or ranged. If you have 3 melee monsters and you are playing against med monsters you will pull 3 melee monster cards out. Each card will have data for all levels of monster. The card will also have squares on it to account for health. You start a counter at the max health and move it as the monster takes damage. One side of the card is for magical monsters the other is for Physical monsters.
Example: 5 players are playing. They set their tokens up on spots 1-5 determining their play order. They look at the monster sheet and see there are 4 melee monsters and 4 ranged monsters. The players take 4 ranged and 4 melee monster tokens out and find the corresponding spots on the map for those monsters. They select the monster cards from the list. They place the cards face up showing the correct damage type. They place damage marker on the max health for each monster. At this point room setup is complete. I suspect set will take about 2-3 minutes per room. Players only set one room at a time.
The players always go first. Players have to have line of sight for ranged attacks. Monsters do not need line of site. My thought is to have melee monsters attack the closets enemy and ranged monsters attack the furthest enemy. Ranged monsters are not going to move. If more than one player is at the same distance they will roll a dice to determine who is attacked.
Each player gets two actions a turn. An action is anything and everything. You can move/attack/cast a spell. If you can don’t need to move and want to attack twice you can.
Here is where I run into the problem. For melee monsters to attack they will have to move from time to time. Since this game is purely co-op there is no one playing the monsters. It is up to the players to move the monsters. I am trying to make this as simple as possible for the players to play. I started with a hex map but found my system more difficult on a hex map. That is why I am using squares. I am not tied to any type of graph paper.
Example of the problem: There are two played that are separated by 1 square. There is a monster that is between the two players and one square away. The monster can move two squares forward and be between the two players. The monster can move on square and forward and be cattycorner to both players. The monster can move right in front of the player it is going to attack.
Obviously moving right in front of either player is better. They can only be attacked by one played from that position unless one of the players move, assuming melee.
Inherently the problem I have is with the amount of different options there can be on the board it is difficult to create a rule set that easily explains how to move the monsters. I thought about creating a bunch of images for people to reference. I am not sure I will easily be able to come up with all of the different combinations. That also slows down game play. I want the game to be able to be played where no one ever has to reference anything. I want all players need to be right in front of them.
Anyone have any thoughts on how I can work this out. If more information is needed please just ask.
PS I typed this at work and it was not typed without interruption. There may be some errors or something may not be clear. Sorry if something is hard to understand.
Character movement for both players and non players is a static 2 squares. Damage is static. The only things that are rolled for are if something hits and who a monster will attack if more than one player is at the same distance.
The reason I do not want to combine attack and move, or force combine them, is it takes out some of the aspects of the game that I did not delve into.
There is a risk reward with being able to attack twice and not move. There is also a risk reward with being able to move twice and not attack. Additionally, some classes have movement with their skills so they can attack and move or move and attack as one action.
I like the depth of game play that comes with two actions and being able to spend them how you want. It allows me to create more interesting abilities. It allows players to come up with more interesting strategies. At the more difficult levels players will need some ability to "game" the game. Player positioning will extremely important.
My goal is to have a very simple set of rules that allow for a great deal of depth in game play. Player positioning becomes huge when you play on the harder levels. I just need as simple rule as possible for the Melee characters movement.
I guess you can say I am looking to a game like chess. Chess has a very simple set of rules. Board positioning is everything. The depth of the game play is tied to the board positioning.
Extra explanation. The reason players always go first is it allows them to move their characters to a spot on the board and dictate where the monsters will go and who they will attack. The idea is that it will be almost impossible to beat some rooms if you do not think ahead. You will have to work as a group to position your characters so the monsters will do X and doing X is not beneficial to the monsters as the game moves further along. On the easiest level it won't matter. This is also why I have some many different levels of play.