Hey all,
I don't have a good name yet, but that about sums up the game for now anyway.
Components:
6 Class Cards
3 Boss Cards
40+ Monster Cards
80+ Loot cards
STORY
You are all students at the University of Dungeoning. It is a cutthroat school. Students will not play nicely, so beware during your trials.
GOAL
The goal of the game is to be the last student standing or highest ranking student at the end of two rounds; they do not need to be consecutive. Go through a dungeon filled with surprises, collect loot (which is also your health!) and survive the perils of the dungeon! Each student's dungeon takes place in an alternate dimension, but students are well versed in dimensions and have been known to make trades or interfere with fellow students.
GAMEPLAY
So your loot is your health. Start of the game you draw 4 loot and play starts. A room is drawn and everyone follows what the room says, if it's draw a monster and fight it, that's what everyone does. You are all playing in the same dungeon, it's just basically in different phases of reality, so while the rooms are the same, it may not be the same monsters that are fought.
If you run out of loot, you lose that round. You gain loot from defeating monsters, but you lose loot when you fail combat.
COMBAT
Combat is done with rolling dice.
Every class has 3 stats. Physical, Agility, Magic. In a fighters case it's 3, 5, 6 (that is, that it requires you to roll a skill check of 3 or higher in order to do a Physical attack). If you roll something lower than a 3, then you do a glancing blow. So depending on what type of attack you can do from the first roll, you roll 3 dice and keep your highest 2. That is your damage. (In the case of glancing blow, you only roll 2 dice for damage, regardless of bonuses.) Loot can change that, you can choose to equip your loot to make yourself stronger, such as adding more to your damage, or having more dice rolls, or whatever. This does of course lower your health, since loot is also your health. Once a piece of loot is equipped it can not be used as a discard when dropping loot from failed combat, it's as if you've already discarded it.
The reason for the different types of attack, is that some enemies are immune or resistant to types of attacks, let's say physical resistant 2. This means that you would roll 2 less dice during combat, so only roll 1 (without bonuses). But if during your skill check roll to see what type of attack you are going to do you roll a 6, then you can do an magic attack with no penalty since it's resistant to physical. I know it doesn't make much sense, but agility is it's own type of attack, even though it would seem like a physical attack.
NOTES
So I've got all the cards already made and have playtested it a few times. Friends and family say it's fun, but to me there's too much luck involved and not as fun as I'd like it. But I also can't think of what to do to reduce the luck and make it more enjoyable, which is why I've come here.
Does any one have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Beriner
@Orangebeard - I think making cards have a loot value may just add more randomness for someone who doesn't get very high value loot cards. So they may get really lucky and win a round with nice rolls, but maybe end up losing in the end because their loot cards are bad. I did consider the idea though after you mentioned it. I probably should have mentioned the round win conditions. Last person standing wins the round. Round ends when everyone runs out of loot (no one wins) or when one or more people defeat the boss. If multiple people defeat the boss, than whoever has defeated the most monsters wins, if it's still a tie, than whoever has the most loot left over wins. In the unlikely event that there is still a tie, then they duel! Use all bonuses played for your hero, just roll for damage, highest damage wins.
@KAndrw - We just played your Zombie at your Heels game this weekend! We had fun with it. I actually just played a game similar to it a couple weeks ago. The game was Guillotine.
I toyed with the idea in the beginning of having combat resolution "more X than Y wins" but it wasn't working out too well. Though I didn't think to be able to exhaust cards in order to increase X which effectively makes your loot that is useless to you, useful. My main issue with this idea was trying to balance out the monsters so that they were somewhat fair, as of now I have the monsters in different tiers. This allowed me to have a varied amount of monsters in the game but they came out at times that they were not going to obliterate the player. It makes it annoying to get the game ready as you have to shuffle each tier separately so that they are in an order which makes them not too difficult. Though if you think about Munchkin, there's nothing fair about that game haha. Eventually, my game was getting too similar to Munchkin which is why I moved on to the dice combat and different way of calculating damage.
I was able to keep my monsters more unique by not having combat resolution "more X than Y wins" as it would be more difficult otherwise.
Monster abilities:
-Reverse (not the best name but basically, you have to roll equal to or less than the monsters health.)
-Stat Resistant X (reduces the number of dice you roll by X)
-Stat Immune (roll your skill check and can only do a physical attack, but monster is Physical Immune, then you auto lose that combat.)
-Disease (attach to student, only for next combat student rolls one less die for any attack type)
and a few others, but they don't work too well against a "more X than Y wins" combat system. I wish they did cause I could get away from all this luck based winning.
Eventually as I tried getting away from the randomness I started noticing my game going more towards MtG (using allies to help give you "more X then Y" ) or my game going more towards Munchkin combat. The only way I could get my game to not feel like a theme swap was by going with the dice combat, but it's just ended up not being as fun with the randomness.