Fantasy Hero adventure game

[bpmasher]

As an extension of my other posts and ideas, I've been giving thought to creating my own version of popular board games that place and emphasis on adventure and dungeon crawling. Obviously, playing a RPG with maps is the number one choice, but in the absence of a group and lots of play time, the board game approach is most sensible.

 

I've looked at older games like Magic Realm, Heroquest and newer games like Descent. I'm probably buying a couple of these since they seem like fun games on their own.

 

The other idea I had was using a generic system like Hero to create a framework for playing open-ended board game -type games with more choice and variation built-in. Take the tactical combat of Hero, marry it with board game props like dungeon tiles and miniatures, then set up a beginning scenario and off we go on to an adventuring campaign. 

 

The point would be to challenge the players and the "gamemaster" in a strategic and tactical sense with some luck thrown in to the mix, and allow for developing characters and story. Some tropes from other games would be player choice (concrete actions you can choose between), dangerous combat (preferably) and character creation and character advancement from role playing games.

 

Firstly, defining the options characters would have within the game. Different actions a player can take on their "turn" that would have success rolls tied to them. Another option would be to allow automatic success in whatever action the player chooses to take (to lessen frustration and effect of luck). When it comes to combat, the choices would be to battle it out, where a combat is played out step by step using the initiative system that comes with the system. The combat could be either phased, or played out to completion per character depending on the approach players want to take. In a party vs. horde combat the normal sequence would probably be the best choice. Also, differentiating between minor and major monsters could make the flow of combat different, where a hit dispatches a weak enemy, and stronger enemies would have BODY points as usual.

 

You could also avoid combat completely, choosing to sneak in and out from a dungeon, or choose to ambush monsters and characters within the game when playing a stealth -oriented character. These could be your traditional thief types or wizards with useful spells that allow them to sneak around.

 

A different strategy could be used in portions of exploring a dungeon or a location, so different types of characters would be useful throughout the game.

 

Different levels of play would be another thing I'd like to include in the game. Choose a map or draw it yourself, and place chits representing characters on the map. These are your locations. Depending on the location, you either choose an action to do (visit a tavern for rumors/quests, buy or sell gear, find somebody, rest, etc.) or zoom in if the location is linked to a quest or adventure. All this could be either randomized to create a new map each game, or retain a map for campaign play. You can include things like the time it takes to travel from place to place (and even sending characters to different locations), establishing bases or homes for characters or groups (for bonuses and storage space), time limits on quests and other things like this. Zooming in on an adventure location would begin a dungeon romp, which again could be randomized or pre-planned depending on what the game master has prepared.

 

A lot of the things you could "do" in the game would tie-in with character abilities. Different characters would have different approaches. Traditionally in board games, you have a choice between pre-generated characters. This could be a real option when preparing a game such as this. Another way to create characters would be a series of choices on what abilities the character will have, in a more open-ended RPG structure. Give a set of priorities to players that they put on abilities. It could be as simple as naming a feature "combat", so the character would prefer combat as his approach to problems. Name another feature "stealth", "magic" or "social" and define the character abilities based on these. These could be used as skills, where the name of the skill covers the possible actions, or defined as powers, where the character can do certain things tied with his specialty. At first, pre-generating a set of characters would probably be optimal, and after the game play has been defined further allow for more open-ended characters to be created.

 

Winning. In role playing the journey is the destination. In board games, you can actually win the game. Get the magic ring and you win. Level up your character first and win. Victory can be defined by any meaningful or meaningless factor, but the main fun of the game would still be exploration and adventure. With two players where one is the GM and the other the player, you could define winning as succeeding in quest the GM has created. With several players, the quests would probably be the means to an end, like amassing fortunes to build a castle to win. Characters should have individual goals with different ways of getting there, to keep the game varied for each player. If the goal is the same for everyone, ensure that there are different ways of getting there, otherwise the game is the same each time for every player. The type of game I have in mind would simply be a complex framework to create a fun and varied game experience for every player sitting down to play. I'm taking a basic concept and hopefully creating something a bit more complex than say, a game of Talisman (a fun but samey game) would offer.

 

These are just the initial ideas I've been thinking about, and there's lots of notes and revisions and removals to get to a final stage: actually playing the game. Hopefully someone reads this and finds the concept intriguing enough to add some of their own ideas to this thread.