Light Weight Dungeon Crawler

I'd play a game like this. I enjoyed the good old Hero Quest and such games, but I like the idea of having a customisable deck of cards rather than a class+dice. It's the old "class-based" vs "skill-based" rpg discussion, and I think the customisable card deck could be used very well to represent a skill-based rpg.

As for levelling up, you could do that through the use of advanced cards vs basic cards. Essentially you create a skill tree with the different level cards. E.g. A starting character can take any combination of basic action cards, one of which is the Melee Attack card. After completing an adventure, he can add 2 "Advanced" action cards, such as the Cleaving Attack. After completing a campaign, he can add 1 "Master" card such as the Vorpal Attack. This gives the player the feeling of advancement because he gets better cards in his deck, and also gives the player a feeling of control over how his character specialises their skills.

For the "quick character creation" version, just shuffle all the basic actions and deal X cards to each player as their starting deck (i.e. random character creation). At end end of each adventure, you can discard up to 2 cards from your deck and add up to 2 basic cards (within some min and max deck size). So you don't have to keep the same number of cards in your deck, and you can gradually specialise (or generalise) to suit your play style.

As for strategy... I'm not sure that there is much (if any) strategy in a GM-less dungeon crawl. Even less in a randomly generated GM-less dungeon crawl. With a GM, you have the players vs GM interaction. With a pre-set scenario, you have the players vs the scenario designer interaction, where the enjoyment for the game is influenced to a large extent by the skill of the scenario designer. But in a random scenario without a GM, you have neither.

So you can focus on players vs "the system", or player interaction. Player interaction can be encouraged through a combination of group and individual rewards. E.g. If the players win the scenario everybody gets 100 gold, but if you grab the magic sword you get to keep it regardless of whether the players win. Another player interaction tool is the use of combos. E.g. To open a particular chest requires the use of the "Logic", "Climbing", and "Lockpick" actions in that order, the cards can be played by any combination of players, but the player who plays the final card gets all the loot. That's where you find out who your friends are.

As an aside, and it may be completely irrelevant to your game, but I was imagining a system where traps (and even monsters) are randomly generated. Each dungeon has 3 types of traps. At the start of the adventure, deal random 2 action cards to each trap type. These are the actions which a player must perform in order to beat the trap. During the game you just generate traps as type A, B, or C. For example, in this dungeon all the A traps require lockpick and notice, while all the B traps require climbing and dodge. Thus each dungeon is unique, but it simplifies record keeping and keeps the number of different types of tokens to a minimum. Same system could be used for monsters; rather than pre-set monsters you randomly generate 3 different monster types for each dungeon, so you only need 3 different types of monster tokens to put on the board. As a further opportunity for player interaction, at the start of the dungeon players can add cards from their deck to the random traps / monsters. So if I am a master thief with lots of Lockpick cards in my deck, I add a Lockpick skill to Trap type A to make it harder for the other players and thus more likely that I get the loot instead of them.

Regards,
kos