Re: Basic D&D or T&T with random dungeons

Posted by TheConvenientSkill on Aug 07, 2012; 4:40pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/Basic-D-D-or-T-T-with-random-dungeons-tp7578416p7578427.html

EDIT: I had this ready to copy in and post, but see Mortis beat me to it with an excellent analysis of why I too favour cards, however rather than re-edit I will leave it in its original form (you could of course just ignore Mortis's post )

This is a topic I am interested in too, as evidenced by a previous attempt posted here on the forums (somewhere! AHQ possibly).

I'm now definitely of the opinion that a card based system is by far the easiest, rolling dice soon escalates to a million tables it seems, and even 'just' rolling three dice simultaneously soon seems like a lot of looking at tables when you can easily just flip over a card. This is especially true if you have dungeon tiles, like WHQ, for something more modular like AHQ, admittedly this is more difficult.

After you posted the link to The Game Crafter (on that previous thread) I had a serious think about creating a solo card game and had a couple of thoughts, one a superhero game (called Good vs Evil, needs playtesting) and a dungeon crawl that was in essence WHQ without the board tiles (not really developed more).

Alternatively, as you said above, Wrath of Ashardalon seems to substitute cards with the board sections doubling up as both.

If I genuinely wanted a little more randomness I guess you could flip a card and roll a die, with the results possibly on the card? For example:

Card - Torture chamber
1 - 3 Nothing special
4 Prisoner! - the prisoner is still alive, if you take him with you he has X stats but take the next 2 cards and discard 1
5 Torture! - 1d3 torturers, fight them and save the prisoner as above
6 Troll!

This is a very rushed example but shows what could be done.

With regards encounters, there are a few ways to go here I think, one is to stick with the card theme like WHQ, another is random encounter tables (like AHQ/WHQ battle levels) and the other is in relative strength, as in:

  Number Level
1 quarter 2 below
2 half 1 below
3 party equal
4 party equal
5 double 1 above
6 triple 2 above

Again quickly dashed off with very little thought!

Something you might be interested in, I've been tinkering with off and on for some time now, is a true solo role-playing experience, this probably isn't the post to really bring this up, but Google 'Mythic GM Emulator', if you are interested in it PM me, or start a new thread and I'll explain more, and/or take a look at my blog where I detail a solo RPing session (the Solo tag).