It has been a while since I wrote about my solo dungeon crawl project, and to be honest, I've not done a lot of work on it in the meantime, but neither have I been entirely idle, so here's a catch-up on where we are.
You may remember that I decided to try making a solo journalling roleplaying game based on a fantasy dungeon crawl. So you play a character on an adventure in an underground cave complex, the game provides prompts, challenges, and situations to overcome, and you write a record of what occurs in the developing story.
I've been trying to figure out a game system to handle this, and last time I wrote on the subject I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to be light on rules and light on detail, leaving room for the player to fill in details.
Since then, I have been leaning even further into the light touch territory. So here is an outline of the game system as I am currently writing it up. This is going over a fair bit of stuff I talked about in the previous post, but it feels to me like it is getting more solid.
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| If I were to make a dungeon crawl game, I'd be very tempted to go for an unoriginal (some might say classic) "adventurer entering a dark cave" image for the cover. |
As a player, you control a hero and their sidekick. The narrative conceit is that you are actually the sidekick, recording the exploits of your more mighty companion.
Character creation is essentially rolling for (or choosing) some broad skills from a couple of tables, which could result in, for example, the hero might have athletic prowess along with a quick mind and knowledge of natural things, while the sidekick might be good at armed melee combat and solving puzzles. I have tables for generating this, but I don't think I have them "right"; they are, however, something to get started with.
You also have a number of health points (run out of those and the hero dies) and fortune points (run out of those and you can't escape any consequences of things going wrong).
When something happens to your little team, you basically have to decide which of your characters' abilities could be used to overcome the problem and write this into your journal. I won't provide detailed guidance about what is and is not applicable - it's a matter of deciding for yourself. I was previously thinking that there would be a limit to the number of times you can use each thing, but for now, not so much. Each thing that you apply adds a +1 to your ability to overcome it. Then you roll a die, add those modifiers, and if you meet or beat a target number, you succeed and write this up as appropriate. If you fail, then failure by a small amount results in the loss of either health or fortune as you sustain an injury or ride your luck to get out in one piece, or if you fail by a lot, you lose both health and fortune.
I reckon you can probably award yourself additional fortune if you use an ability you haven't used before, or if you are able to write in a thematic link to something that you had previously encountered - in particular, omens, which I'm planning to introduce as part of the journey to the dungeon.
Yes, this can easily be abused, but having decided that this is more about writing up an adventure than it is about detailed Old School style dungeoneering (there are plenty of very good options it that's your jam), I feel freed and able to just go with the flow. Of course, once I share a playable version with other people, feedback could completely blow my assumptions, but we'll see.
Just as a little aside, in board game design I would always advise that it's a good idea to just get something, anything that is even remotely playable to the table as quickly as possible, even if it is just for a solo test, and not spend too long "theorycrafting" and thinking about how best to create everything in the game. So why am I not following that advice in this project?
Well, it just feels like the style of game this is allows me to just think it through and gradually write more stuff down. I can even try rolling on tables I create and think about what I do with the results, so in a sense I am testing as I go, but if I am honest, I am not doing that very much. I feel that what I should be doing is settling down for an evening or two and blasting out a first draft that I can then try playing through, but I think my brain isn't really in the right place for that yet. So I plod onwards, and every entry in every table that I create is a step in the right direction. We'll get there eventually.
I was going to go further with this post, but I feel that I would be better off just posting smaller bites for now and try to get the momentum rolling. Next up: travelling to the dungeon, omens and stuff, and maybe the start of the dungeon itself. And I'd better also actually get my working document into a state that I can share.
