Okay, there are only so many things that can keep my attention for so long. Right now I have: work training, electric cardboard mayhem, landscaping and prepping our car for sale, and TPK again. I find that I am enthused about one at a time and then my interest wanes and I need to move around to keep them all fresh.
Right now, I'm back to TPK (for awhile)!
I haven't read through any of the past posts to re-familiarize myself with just what the hell TPK was about before, particularly the dice incarnation (which went no where...), so I'll again post some new barebones idears about how I'm thinking the new version will play.
TPK: The Deckbuilder!
Much like I was enamored by the preconstructed decks from SotM, I'm now enamored by the deckbuilding and 'combo' mechanics of Star Realms and Legendary combined with the shared deck of cards to build your deck a la Ascension and Shadowrun, topped off with some role based cards, also from Shadowrun, my brain has sort of taken this in a new direction. Let me braindump:
- Standard deck building mechanic: draw your hand, play your hand, discard your hand, buy cards, put them in discard pile.
- Each role (tank, healz, dps, ranged dps, magic dps) will have their own deck. The deck will have cards that are themed for that role but also have 'combo' icons on some of them (most of them?). These combos will proc when you play them in the same hand. ex. each card will have a base ability: +1 damage. Then it will have a proc: (tank icon) +1 damage, pull damaged target.
- All the character decks are shuffled together to make a single Party Draw Deck. The PDD is used to fill out the line of cards that players can purchase with XP (the gold/resources of this game).
- Each character card will have some combo icon(s) on it, along with other abilities, that will essentially mean that character auto combos a level one combo when that character plays that card. So when players have the option to buy cards from the PDD, they can of course buy cards that are not their combo icons, but they will be BETTER suited to purchase those cards since they will proc more often. This should allow for some interesting dual-classing sorts of situations and not everyone should feel like they can only do one thing (healing kind of healer, etc.)
- There will be a dungeon deck that contains all the baddies and crap the players need to defeat to win the game. I'm thinking along the lines of LotR where there are certain themes of cards that interact well together and are bundled together, so for example "Greenskins" or "Undead". Each dungeon will have a collection of these mini-decks shuffled together along with some specific cards to make the bad guy deck.
- Bad guys might also have XP tied to it that if you defeat it you can add it to your deck as XP.
- Each turn you flip X cards depending on scenario or player count. The cards could have flip abilities that take effect immediately or they just sit there for the round. Then the players each take a turn to try and defeat them before the next round where more cards are flipped from the baddie deck.
- When it's the baddies turn, whoever they attack whomever they have been pulled to. If they are still unengaged, they go to the person with the preference listed on the baddies card. Attack abilities will be listed on the card or maybe the Dungeon Deck rules... or something.
- On a player turn, they play the cards from their hand to build pools of resources. Likely only XP and Fight, where XP is used to purchase PDD cards, and Fight is used to fight, maybe purchase additional abilities listed on cards, etc.
- When a mob takes damage, the player that does the damage puts a threat counter on the mob= to the highest threat listed on the cards that are doing damage, or abilities proc'd, etc. Then, pull that mob infront of the character card. If another player damages the mob and the threat is higher, then the card moves to the character damaging it, etc.
- Maybe a damage threshold needs to be met before any wounds are suffered.
- Character Damage Idear: When a character takes damage, they take x damage cards into their discard pile. Maybe each character will have a level where if they get x damage cards in their hand at once, they either lose a turn from fatigue, or outright die. So maybe a wiznard has a threshold of 2 and a tank has 4 or something. No idea how that will playout in the long run and maybe there will be so many wound cards in teh deck, but not enough to die, that the game will just degenerate into a slow march to death. Dunno.
That's all for now, folks!
Two first things that pop into my mind.
ReplyDelete1. No threat counters. If we do cards, we should keep to just cards. Maybe monsters other than trash mobs can have 3 tiers of damage on them, meaning you need to generate damage multiple times to kill them. Monsters stay in generic field until someone is able to attack them at their first damage threshhold. Then, boom, they're pulled to that person. If someone is able, or needs or wants to damage at the next tier, boom, the monster can move to that other person, unless their's a rage or SOME mechanism in place that keeps the monster stuck to the first player.
2. Too many wound card type things can be a total drag, like you said. Maybe each player has a "strain" level which lets them absorb so much damage a turn that is gone when they redraw (not put into their discard pile). If they get damage past a threshold, THEN they'd get something like a wound card. This way, during a turn, maybe there are combos/special abilities that proc only when you've taken so much temp damage. Another thing to work in would be a healers role in dealing with wound damage. Maybe THEY get the cards? That could be a weird interesting twist.
I feel you on the threat counters, but didn't know what else to do about damage. The ugly alternative I see is that when you play a wound on a mob the card stays on the mob, but then say each player played one card, it would then have 5 cards on it, and then if someone pulled that mob, it would need to travel with all of those cards, and then if the mob lasts a few turns, the players would be without those cards as part of their deckbuilding decks (which might be a cool part of the mechanics, I'm not sure.)
ReplyDeleteI just thought that rather than keeping track of piles of cards that then need to be sorted out, using a threat counter(s) would keep it a little simpler - always up for discussion, tho!
I'll need to think about the damage cards. It might be that damage is tracked with counters, but some effects are wound cards, not sure.