Thursday, February 21, 2013

Dun-Jin is a fantasy map building game that uses the HitDice gaming engine.  The objective of the game can be randomized or selected, in either case all players know what the goal is at the beginning of the game.  Everyone starts in the entrance/exit chamber and may proceed in any direction that is available.


The game uses random Hex shaped tiles, that are broken into two decks, Halls and Rooms.  When exploring a Hero typically draws a Hall tile, but if there is a door they may draw a door card and is successfully bypassed, then they get to place a Room tile behind this door they explored.

I'm currently torn right now by using a Random Token system to be drawn after a room tile (which is the current implementation) or to implement this directly on the Room Tile cards (which would improve the art), but also increase the size of the Room Tile deck and lock the number of entrances to that particular room.  The current implementation is to Draw a room, and then Draw both Room Token and Contents card.  The token must be drawn first as some room types don't get a contents card, but rather have their contents specified.

The game objective is recommended to be chosen by player consensus, or possibly voted on, but many different schemes can be applied here.  For first time play the one of the co-operative objectives are recommended, where the party is playing as a team to "Win" the scenario.  There are a number of different types of these as well, but the common goal is to "Defeat the Boss" or "Pay the Toll".  In every type of game there is always an "End of Game" that is based on the number of turns or collapsing corridor mechanism, if this occurs then all players lose.

I'm playing with the idea of a "class-less" basic version where, essentially your skills are weapon dependent, so changing to a different archetype is essentially as easy as switching weapons.  That said, I do have classes or more correctly character types created, that probably will make it into the base version, which will make different characters more adept at different skills, these also have different starting items.

The heroes in the game can advance using a number of different methods, by exploring tiles the hero earns exploration tokens, these can be spent to improve various abilities.  By defeating monsters a hero earns Experience, which can be used to learn different skills and abilities.  By finding various support characters in the dungeon they my buy different items from them or learn different skills at the cost a gold, possibly with an exploration token or experience point cost as well.

Other ways to improve your hero is by finding items or materials to craft your own items out of, or by finding a shop in the dungeon one can buy (or even steal) items from these locations.

This game is designed as either an intro to a fantasy RPG with definite loss/win criteria, with some elements of role-playing mixed in.  The game is much more mechanical than a traditional RPG, but could be used as an introduction as to what an RPG feels like, as far as having a character with equipment and skills, and using these to the best of your ability to accomplish a goal.

The game also has the concepts of character advancement, shopping for items, crafting better gear, and a few other mechanics such as traps, puzzles and decisions that one would find in a typical RPG, but again these have a much more game-mechanical feel then what they would find in a full role-playing system.

I'm working on a number of different expansions to this game, which will allow it to be played as a 1:1 skirmish style or team vs team for more than two players, as well as an Overlord expansion where one player will setup scenarios for the other players, which will get even closer to a traditional RPG, but still bound many of the rules in more of a board game "feel".
The ultimate "end of the rainbow" idea here being, the full release of the HitDice RPG engine, with essentially everything learned in each of the other games will now fall into the Game-Master (GM) and Players realm, in which the story is told by the GM and players each control a hero in a fully open game system.  This was actually the first thing that I created, but have been working to fit it into a "step by step learning framework", that could be mastered one expansion at a time, as a road map for kids or introduction to adults that haven't played an RPG before.

All of these games will exist in the same "Game Universe" which is the already created world of Kraterra, the land of the Crater.  Which will not only help solidify the link for one expansion to the next, but provide increasing world knowledge from those that progress from "Dun-Jin" to ...

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