These days it seems the every RPG is using terms like epic and massive. But I’ve begun to wonder why go big and empty when you go small and interesting? What I’ve come up with is a non traditional RPG that I’ll call an Adventurer game. The core of the idea is that instead of single major quest you play through a characters lifetime of the course of a number adventures. For now forget about things like plot and quest generation, we will assume there is no plot and all adventures are scripted. During a character lifetime there is only so much time, as such they can only embark on a certain number of adventures let say 5. Each adventure is more of an arena then a mission with many degrees and aspects of success and failure. The player can never die during an adventure they can be mortally wounded, which ends the adventure and causes future health problems and may reduce the number of adventures they have left. At the start of each cycle a number of adventures are available with varying objectives, rewards and risks the player chooses one of them to pursue that cycle. At the start of the next cycle some or all of the available adventures may have changed and during the course of one adventure it might be possible to open up a future adventure. Connected adventures would be called serial adventures and could serve as a way to add plots to the game.

Quote: So what is an adventure and what do you?

Well I’m glad you asked. Let’ use an example adventure of the Lost City of Gold, which is the search for fabled lost city deep within the jungle and filled with great riches. Naturally being a lost jungle city it is filled with deadly booby traps and head hunter cannibals, but then that is to be expected besides you don’t have to worry about it until you get there. The first metaphase of the adventure we’ll call preparation where the player prepares for the task ahead. In this case that consists of gathering a group of allies with the necessary skills and equipment to help you succeed. Gathering allies is simple enough you recruit them at various places in the capital, certain special character might require special effort to acquire, which consists some of combination of mini-games, social engineering, and trading of treasures collected previously. You want Nanoc the Barbarian to join you on your adventure? Then you’ll have to best him in three rounds of bare knuckled camel boxing, either that or get him drunk and convince him that you already did. Then comes, the next metaphase journey that consists of the perilous journey through the jungle where you try to navigate the through dense underbrush using the clues from the ancient legend about the city before you run out supplies or are mortally wounded in some fashion. Then comes the next metaphase in the adventure the discovery, you’ve found the city and succeed in completing the adventure. But wait, why stop there? Sure you could go home and tell your friends “yup I spent three months in the jungle until I finally found the lost city and then I went home.” But what fun is that? Since you’ve gone to all the trouble of finding the city you might as well brave deadly traps and head hunter cannibals to see what secrets you can uncover within the city and home much treasure you can bring back. Depending on what you do while you’re in the city you may reach the 2nd last adventure segment know as the climax this is where you would battle the evil witch doctor who seized controlled of the tribe using ancient mystical powers. So that you can put the rightful king back on the throne and the chance to obtain the amulet that gives the witch doctor his powers may also be some small motivating factor for you as well. The final metaphase is the epilog that describes the results of your adventure and what you’ve gain and the effect of how things worked out. For instance if you bathed in the fabled fountain of youth you would be able to go on two additional adventures in your life time, while if you succumbed to a flesh eating disease in the jungle your remaining adventure would be halved. If you found the obsidian tablet it would open up a new adventure that you could undergo in future cycles. Also your reputation, wealth, and abilities will have changed depending what you did and how well you did it. In between adventuring cycles there would be an opportunity do some character, relationship, home and city building. Through a number of different meta-games which in turn will impact your character, the world, and the adventures available next cycle. In the end once your character has finished their last adventure you shown a bio describing your characters exploits, the amount of fame and infamy they acquired, their accumulated wealth and status, the rank they achieved and various other interesting pieces of data. This could be tied to a legacy system to let you continue as one of your descendents. In the end the whole idea of the game is to trim away all the fat from an RPG and condense what would normally be an entire RPG into a single 1-2 hour session, by removing most the character development, fedexing, rummaging through people drawers, traveling around, etc… and focus entirely on the adventure aspect. Incidentally why is it that in so many RPG, saving the world always involves rummaging through peoples possession and taking whatever seems valuable along the way? Lastly this sort of game would work just as well in sci-fi or fantasy setting.

Quote:Original post by Argus2
Interesting concept. Although by introducing long-term positive and negative effects, you do have the problem of:

"For instance if you bathed in the fabled fountain of youth <SAVE> you would be able to go on two additional adventures in your life time, while if you succumbed to a flesh eating disease <RELOAD> in the jungle your remaining adventure would be halved."

I hope to create the game such that saving and loading arn't nessary except for breaks between playing sessions. Hopefully the relativly short length of an entire play through and the non binary results will mean that players who catch the flesh eating disease will continue playing. Perhaps injuries could add to an awe factor and reputation. "Sure I fell victim fleshing eating disease while in the jungle but a few year later after I had recuiperated I still managed to scale the unscalable peak and slay the beast of the Gods."

Some forms of failure could be used to add to the mythos surrounding your later achivement.

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Best part is that if you make the preparation a major part of the game, then you can skimp on graphics and still come out with a very playable game.

Being able to skimp on graphics is a major plus in any modern game development.