In the past two weeks I protoyped (twice) a game I called 'Beware the Lair!' It was a two player game, where one player played as a Hero and the other player the Monster controller. It took place on a 3x3 grid, with one face down Room Card on each of the 9 spaces. The hero had to venture into each room, looking for a Key card, that would allow the hero to enter the final room. When the hero enters a room, the Room card was revealed (giving a certain bonus to the monsters within) and then the monster player would draw 5 monster cards from the monster deck and place some in the room. Then the hero would battle the monsters.
The hero had a skill-tree of armor cards that represented: Head, Chest, Left Arm, Right Arm, and Legs. To activate the abilities on these armor cards, the hero player would roll X body dice, where X is the hero's current Luck #, and keep Y dice, where Y is the hero's current Reserve #. The six-sided dice had one of each of the 5 body parts (Head, Chest, Left Arm, Right Arm, and Legs) as well as a Wildcard side that acts as any of the body parts. After all the monsters in the room were killed, the hero got to snag a new piece of armor within his current level.
The STRUCTURE of the game is neat, but it actually killed the fun. Because monsters had finite HP, the longer the battles progressed, the more and more obvious the outcome. BUT I think there's something cool about having two heroes battling it out with this same armor structure. I like the body dice, but I don't know how to incorporate them with the armor cards. It would be a simpler, less ambitious design, but that's probably a good thing. My stuff tends to get more and more complex and I don't think I'm adept enough to handle complex yet.
So if you have any ideas, suggestions, or questions, that would be pretty awesome.
I forgot to say that you used the die faces that you kept to activate abilities on the corresponding armor cards. So if you had a Head die face in your reserve, you could activate a Head armor card ability.