💭 Ideas Scratchboard

[kenjinp]

For brainstorming!

[kenjinp]

Vertical Slice: Serf Background

I'm trying to be creative and come up with game play via vertical slice snippets. Headcanon that can help lead to features and point development in a direction.

---

Main concept: Serf escaping to become a freiburger.

You've left your home with the clothes on your back. Now you need to achieve freiburger status before you're caught by the law.

Freiburger status, basically citizenship to a town, requires some things:

• money
• a residence
• faction reputation

Quests:

• you're beaten up, get medical care to resolve your status effect
• gather or steal items to scrounge up enough for a place at an inn
• gain enough city faction rep
• fix up an abandoned dwelling by acquiring resources

Characters have starting backgrounds, which define the first "quests" (need to have quest tracking / persistence per character)

Features highlighted,

• city
• npc
• player residences
• items / item collection / item persistence
• buy and trade
• factions / faction rep
• character status effects / persistent status

[kenjinp]

Theorycrafting / Game loop musings / meant to be evocative / boost inspiration

Let's combine an action-RPG with deck-building, dice mechanics, and rouge-like characteristics such as permadeath.

Progression

Progression could be measured in many ways

• Skills acquired (can do more and more impressive things, unlock features and content)
• Items acquired (items are the core resource for performing actions based on a skill)
• Faction Rep
• Fallouts: significant buffs/debuffs that act as narrative markers that change a character fundamentally (like...slowly being consumed by a curse, or losing an eye), may be permanent, can lead to permadeath, etc.

Skills

Skills are things your character learns through the game. Something, like "Fishing" might enable you to perform an action. Other skills are flavor oriented and may provide aid in performing an activity, like maybe doubling dice in certain conditions. Perhaps skills can be learned by reading books (which are then consumed?) or as a reward for completing certain Rituals / Actions. Performing actions and rituals is one way to advance up a skill tree, but beware, more advanced rituals have a higher cost and /or risk.

Skills are like cards that are added to your limited deck?. You might have more cards then you can use, there should be a mechanic that forces you to choose between cards somehow, perhaps like memorizing spells or so.

Actions / Rituals

represent some risky, expensive, or time consuming activity. They trigger a sort of challenge. The challenge will always have a good outcome and a bad outcome. Usually the failure condition is to roll a stress (such as fortune, blood, mind...) (I'm not sure if all these rolls are a good idea, they might make sense on a TTRPG but in an actionRPG it might be annoying). The action will succeed if you're able to use your action die to inflict "damage" on the action? Or just simply reach a number (like 7-10) after modifiers have been applied??

Examples:

• picking a lock on a treasure chest [skulduggery?]
• attempting to coerce a fey spirit into a vessel [religion, arcane]
• trying to bribe a priest to let you into the forbidden sanctum of the God of Travelers [social]
• forging a technological golem out of the parts scavenged from a dead machine god

Combat

Combat is an action / ritual with extra spice. It's Turn-Based???. Each turn will essentially be a challenge with good and bad outcoms, where you normally want to deal damage to the creature instead of the "challenge" health.

...todo

[kenjinp]

Some theorycrafting about character creation:

Whats a good fantasy trope? the camp!

• spawn campsite in-world (away from others, using some poisson disc sampling server-side), but without being connected
• once character has been initialized, let's plop them into the real world, start streaming in server activity
• first moment of game involves understanding basic game mechanics by collecting campsite.