The basic idea that I have is some sort of a simulation where the player control a guild/clan in a fantasy world. I originally thought of this when I played FFTA, and I really like the part where you send out units on mission and they grow as they do more missions. The idea reappear when I started reading the manga "Fairy Tail". I did my research and also posted a thread here to ask for similar games. I couldn't find anything close to what I want. The idea was put aside for a while as it seems too big for me to tackle as a newbie back then. Now that I am a bit more "experienced", I kind of want to visit this idea again.
The basic experience I want the player to have is to manage the members of the guild. The core experience lies at managing who to send out on mission, managing the "financial" aspect of the guild, like expansion, forging of new weapon etc. This game is not meant to be a challenge for players, but an experience like that of dwarf fortress.
Basic Limitation of the game
I first set out the ground limitation/features for the game. Here are some that I have and explanation for them.
Mission success/failure is not random, but heavily based on who you send out and how many you send. (Duh ?)
In additional to this, I also want the player to have minimum decision when the party is executing the mission. FFTA make it such that you totally have no control over the success of the mission the moment you decide who to send. I kind of want the player to know why the party fail to complete the mission and how to improve on the success rate in the future.
Combat should also be fast and simple
Since I want the whole experience to be about managing the guild, and not combat, the time the player spend on combat should be relatively shorter than the time he spend on deciding what to do, planning the training schedule etc.
Evolving world
The world must evolve based on the player decision. For example, evil guilds may pop up and you may want to stop them from growing. If you don't they might start to kill off other good guilds or even assassinate your party while they are on missions. You may decide to help a town build up their farm by sending a few members to help out, and in return they provide you with some foods.
Story generating
What I want is a game where people can share their story on what happens in their world. Like how one of their members became so strong that he destroy the entire evil guild single handedly, or how the guild leader was assassinated by someone within the guild etc.
These are the general ideas I have on the game, and here are some ideas on the mechanics that I want to try. They probably don't work as well as I think they will but perhaps I can get new ideas from you guys.
Missions
This is the main reason why I am revisiting this idea. I was on a very long bus trip and wonder what is a good alternative to a "send and pray" method when you send people out for mission. I kind of came up with a simple die roll idea and evolve it to this state.
So mission are basically series of "stats check". Let me start with an example.
Say for example, your mission is to explore a dungeon that the people believes that someone is performing dark magic in. So say you send out 3 party members. When the party reaches the destination, the mission begins. In this case, the mission will be a series of "events". Each event will look something like this.
[Event : Trap] : Perception check > 5.
This means that it check if any characters has a perception value of higher than 5, if it does, the trap is not trigger.
However if no one has a perception more than 5, then the trap triggers.
[Event : Trap triggers] : Roll Dexterity > 5 , else take 5 damage.
This means that each unit in the party needs to roll their dexterity, and if it is less than 5 that unit will take the damage.
Rolling a stats means converting their stats to a 1D(S) die, where S is the value of the stats of concern (i.e. if the unit has dexterity of 8, it will roll a 1D8 die).
Some events do not have a negative impact, but required them to clear it before the player can proceed. For example :
[Event : Boulder in the way] : Roll total strength > 20
This requires the player to roll a total strength of > 20 using all the roll from the party. In this case, sending out additional members would help in this event. However, sending too many members will waste valuable manpower.
There are many other type of events, checks that can be thought of. I am just stating some of the basic ones that came to mind. Some events can also be combat instead of checks. In order to complete the mission, the player must complete all the events in the mission. Some missions have partial rewards if the player couldn't complete the mission.
To allow the player to have some agency in the stats check, I thought of implementing a energy system(not the kind in mobile game). Each unit will provide a certain number of energy, which can be used to do many thing. One of which is to allow the player to reroll a specific die, like in the case of the event "boulder in the way", the player needs to reroll the dice until they succeed. If the energy runs out, the player has no choice but to abandon the mission. In the first Trap event, you could also use energy to reroll the dexterity die to try to prevent the damage.
I am not really sure how fun this system for mission is but it seems to be better than any "send and pray" mechanism.
Combat
Now this is something that has been bothering me for a while. I can't think of any short and fast combat that has agency. I want it to be related to the mechanics I used in mission, to make it more consistent for the player to follow.
World
There are 2 problems with the world that I am concern. The first is whether to craft the world or generate it. The second is whether to use a grid style world or a graph style. Since they have no effects on the other systems, this problem can be discuss independently.
The reason that I am posting here is to get some inspiration for the combat systems and to see if this game idea in general appeals to any one. If there are anything that is unclear, let me know.
