One of the two game ideas for this weeks should be an “impossible” game by deconstructing a genre. The challenge is to reduce such a genre to it’s core mechanics and then remove one of those, essentially making it “impossible” to adhere to the genre-as-is. Examples would be “RTS without units”, “Beat Game without Music” or “RPG without playing a character”.
“Destinies” results from the last of these primary generators. instead of playing a character, the two players play disembodied forces of luck and misfortune, triumph and defeat. A rather dim-witted hero stumbles through a dungeon in an attempt to get the loot and rescue the world. The player of luck plays cards to see them succeed, whereas misfortune tries to make their life harder.
The simplest mechanic for moving the hero would be, to have them follow the right-hand rule―while prohibiting circles in the dungeon. If they meet a challenge, they role 3dFudge (dice with ‘-1’, ‘0’, ‘+1’), sum them and add their relevant stat and compare it with the difficulty of the challenge to see if they've made it. If they fail, they take the challenges consequences.
Stats and challenges:
- “Combat” vs monsters
- “Reflexes” vs traps
- “Intelligence” vs puzzles
Cards
Most cards should have trade-offs, e.g. harder monster yield more treasure to the hero that makes them better in tackling later challenges.
For card-draw, per default draw-one-play-one should be tried out. Either both players draw from the same deck and there’s a mechanic for discarding cards, or both get their separate decks.
Card-ideas for Luck:
- Level-up: Improves one of the heroes stats
- Item: places an item in a room. The hero picks it up, if they wander into that room. The item-card specifies when it will be used and what benefit it brings, e.g. heal, add a one-time bonus vs a certain challenge type, teleport the hero,…
- Shift rooms (think “mad labyrinth”)
- Place rooms
- Hidden Door: a sufficiently aware/intelligent hero can find it and take short-cut, possibly skipping some dangers.
Card-ideas for Misfortune:
- Place traps, e.g. poison that decreases a stat, a fireball that deals damage
- Cursed Item: works similiar to the Luck-players ‘Item’-card but with negative effects
- Shift rooms (think “mad labyrinth”)
- Place rooms
- Place (wandering) monsters
- Place puzzles, e.g. they might block off a dead-end (read: non-critical path) that contains treasure
- Place alcohol: the trusting, short-sighted hero drinks it and some stat decreases
- Cave-In: Blocks one of several paths to the goal. This card shouldn’t be used with a hero following the right-hand-rule.
- Overlooked Door: this door is ignored for the next application of the right hand rule. Remove the condition after that.
Feedback
Most people thought it was too complicated, respectively hard to understand.
It might be interesting if the hero’s position is unknown (“Mr. X”-style). It probably would be better if both used the same deck and fortune needs to play misfortune cards in a way that the hero can beat them easily and reap the treasures. Also a labeled die that in most cases causes a movement towards the goal might be more interesting.
Lev, however added, that the game has potential if these challenges are tackled and clarified.