So I've been working on a game where players control archers defending a wall. Monsters emerge from the wood and move towards the wall each turn, all while you and your allies pick them off before they can get to the wall and break it down.
Archery is accomplished with 2 rolls. The game comes with the following dice: 1d4, 1d6, 2d8, 1d10, and 1d12. When you want to loose an arrow, you choose two dice whose sides add to 16 (meaning there are 5 combinations). One die is your "aim" roll, while the other is your "power." The idea here is that having a powerful draw will make your shot more effective, but will mess up your aim, and vice-versa. Most arrows, represented by a deck of cards, have bonuses for one or both values. You could have an arrow, perhaps "Heavy Bolt," which is -2 aim, but +2 power, meaning it is harder to hit something with but more likely to damage the target.
The monsters have corresponding values. The first value is "target," which indicates what aim value you need to roll in order to hit it. The other is "armor," which pretty obviously means that you must roll this power value to hurt (kill, actually) that monster. In addition to this, distance from the wall adds to the "target" value of the monster, which makes sense if you think about it. Hopefully this system will create an interesting experience as players make decisions about who to shoot, what to shoot them with, and which dice to use.
Anyway, that's as far as I've gotten. I'm looking to start making specific monsters and arrows, probably with special effects, but I thought I would get the basic mechanics vetted before I did. Obviously, any comments/suggestions are appreciated.
Yeah, the heroes thing would probably be a good way to open up the action. The thing is that I'm designing this game in order to submit it to the Game Crafter RPG contest, so I'm trying to make sure that each player has an equivalent game experience. I want it to be competitive, but still cooperative. Having all players doing the same thing will ease balancing substantially. I want players to succeed as individuals, but fail as a team. If the monsters win, nobody wins, regardless of personal body-count. Only if the city (or wall, or tower, or whatever) is saved do the heroes get to count up their kills and claim bragging rights.
Something I could have mentioned is that each time a player uses all of the cards in their deck, they must remove two from play, reshuffle and begin again. I'm basically using a reverse-upgrade system in which you choose which skills you want to lose, not gain. This will make your "quiver" weaker when summed, but stronger when averaged. Since you get to choose which cards you remove, you are able get rid of the ones that you haven't liked using. I basically stole that idea from a Zero Punctuation article, but I think it will work well for this.