Dungeon Crawl game idea

Are there any other game designer interested in working together towards designing a "Dungeon Crawl" game...? Feel free to respond and maybe we can design a great product together!

Right now the issue is with STATS, equipment and dice rolling: Combat calculations.

I have 2 stats as of right now: Attack (ATK) and Defense (DFS) with values around 1-10 points.

HOWEVER I don't know how to implement: Equipment, spells (Auras and enchantments).

What I want is to use 1 roll of 4 dice: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, and 1d12.

That roll should determine the outcome of the battle (eg. the number of hit points lost).

I want it KISS (Keep it simple). If you have LOTS of enemies on the board, you don't want to be constantly rolling! It has to be kept to a minimum.

Kris

Perhaps to a novice yes. However it eliminates the need to roll so many times. If you have 12 skeletons in one room, its going to take a lot of rolls to clear the room...

Well I believe that the values will be higher (1-20) if weapons alter your ATK value. So characters start with values between 2 and 7 on ATK. Add a Sword and maybe ATK gets +1 or +2...

It may be nice and simple, however it implies A LOT of rolling. If DFS stat starts around 5 or 6 and goes up to a maximum of 20 by using armor, shield and helm... It guess I would need to use 1d20 instead. I had forgotten about things like swords (skills: Ambidextrous = two hands), etc.

Maybe the ATK and DFS can remain the same (1-10). And weapons affect the outcome not the rolls. Like a +1 weapons does exactly that +1 DAMAGE. The other solution is going to 1-20 and having weapons add to the ATK value...

I don't know if this sounds reasonable, however it reduces the need to have each monster attack the players. Basically when a player attacks, both the monster's battle skill roll and the player's roll will determine who has the initiative in the attack. Both have a chance to be the one on the offensive.

This is kinda realistic, because if a Fighter is standing in the entrance to a room or a door in a corridor, no monster will be able to pass unless the Fighter dies. Also all it would take is one player to block movement.

Second if you are in such conditions, well it's not very likely that you will be attacked by more than one monster...

So battles are more about "dungeon clearing" then they are about monsters attacking players.

If each monster had to attack players, it would take an awfull long time to defeat like 12 skeletons... (Yes - this is a large quantity. If you have 12 rolls that is a LOT, imagine other scenarios with other mechanics. My bet is they will require more rolling...)

Well the reason is rather simple, once you have a Character Set it can be used for ANY Dungeon Set. So basically players buy their OWN Character Set and ONE player buys the Dungeon Set.

But the main motivation for this is to REDUCE the amount of cards you get in a Dungeon Set. Each Character Set comes with about 60 cards!!! If I put each type of character into ONE BOX, that would mean 360 cards plus the cards in the Dungeon Set (45 + Monsters which I have not figured out yet).

So all in all, in ONE BOX you would probably have around 500 cards.

Why this does not work? Because I don't want to overload our artist that will be doing the artwork. If I can divide the types of characters, I can market and sell them separatly. I can also only have the artist produce something like 2 types intially to spread word of the game...

Then it allows the artist the time to work on the remaining types of characters over a period of time.

So the problem is both time and quantity. Will take too much time to try to get the game altogether if everything was included. Second, the quantity is just to high for a single game...

NOTE: If you want to play SOLO, you can. All you do is buy the Dungeon Set and ONE of the Character Sets.

It's kinda the philosophy of MtG (Magic). Everyone has their OWN DECK. In OLNL each player has his OWN Character Set (with appx. 60 cards in it).

That's what is intended. What you need to realize is that EACH MONSTER is a COLORED CUBE. Some encounters are RANDOM, others are BOSSES and other are part of a scenario.

Now how a player gets to do the battle (random, boss or scenario): he draws one cards from the MONSTER DECK. There is 1 deck per Dungeon Set and the monsters fit/match the dungeon.

Then what happens is the CARD will indicate a ROLL of how many of that monster you encounter. This is 1d12, so from 1 (ONE) to 12 (TWELVE)...

Now where the challenge comes into play, if there are 12 (TWELVE) how do you combat this small horde? You need to be able to get through the battle rather quickly. Obviously it's going to hurt the players to do so (hopefully none die - you have a cleric or enough potions)

So REALITY comes into play:
1-Turn based battles are not realistic. Nobody waits for their turn to attack or do battle.
2-Concurrent attack and defense based on skills and parrying are very real.

So the 4-dice combat does this very well. It uses INITIATIVE to determine which of the 2 (Player or Monster) get the upper hand. You could also consider this method a form of parrying. Also I would like to have the dice COLOR CODED. What this means, is that spells and monsters can affect which dice are used...

I will read the "Mutant Chronicles" manual when I get a chance to do so.

When you get an encounter, the player draws a card from the monster deck. Next he rolls a dice to determine how many of this type of monster are there (in the dungeon tile he is in). So let's say he draws a Skeleton and they usually appear 1d6 (up to 6 at a time). He rolls the 1d6 (six sided die) and rolls a 3. Therefore there will be 3 white colored cubes that will be placed on that dungeon tile and one white colored cube to be placed on the Skeleton card he draws and keep in front of him until all the Skeletons are killed.

Basically what happens is the player who "draws" the monster card is the one who "manages" them. By using color cubes for each monster, you have a clear idea of how many of these guys you need to defeat.

Well the idea was to have ONE roll, however of different dice. My idea is to color code the dice:

1-1d4, 1d6, 1d8: Monster's battle skill => RED
2-1d4, 1d6, 1d8: Player's battle skill => BLUE
3-1d6, 1d8, 1d10: # of attacks this turn => GREEN
4-1d12: Special skills (Monster and Player) => YELLOW

For example a player's default battle skill is 1d6 (Blue). A mage casts the "Haste" spell which increases the movement die by 1 (so 1d6 instead of the default of 1d4) and increases the battle skill by 1 (so 1d8 instead of the default of 1d6).

The "Encounter deck" is comprised of 40 cards. 20 are unique and there are dupplicates of certain cards. Each card indicates what die to roll to get the proper number of monsters.

The game is intended for a "Adult audience" not 13 or 14 year olds. 16+ with the graphic artwork maybe 18+.

What will determine if the combat system is too complexe is playtesting. Once I have a working prototype, I can playtest-away and figure out what works best.

There are for example 3 skeleton cards (identical). And they are encountered in groups of 1d6 (1 to 6). Mobs are handles like "Bat colony", which is a large amount of bats. One bat is easy to kill, but a whole colony is much tougher (1d4 in quantity - so 1 to 4 colonies at a time).

Encounters are RANDOM or specified on the reverse of the tile on which the player lands.

I am aiming at a very RPG-ish type of game. There are a lot of pieces but the overall concept is simple: CLEAR THE DUNGEON - COLLECT REWARDS!