A handful of pitches

[Distind]

I have a really bad habit, I can come up with any number of interesting concepts, I can even detail them out to a fair degree, but unless I think anyone else on the face of the earth is interested in them, I rarely finish anything. So I'm going to toss out a few ideas I've got kicking around and see if anyone else likes the ideas. Thoughts, opinions and raspberries are all perfectly welcome. I have names, but i figure a short summary makes a better intro for now.

Post Apoc Sandbox RPG
- Focus on rebuilding and defending what's left of civilization for main story.
-- Most conflict generated from threats, which can be human, weather, political or material concerns.
- Generated worlds, along with varied methods of destroying the old civilizations.
- Simplified crafting materials, with full crafting possibilities.
-- ie: You don't need to find a circuit board, just a certain class of electronics which can be repurposed.
- Story Cast generated on the fly, interact with certain characters enough it forms a relationship and they're more likely to become involved in the story again.
-- ie: You let that one bandit get away, expect to see him again. Helped out some traveling merchant, he may show up when you're out of gas.
- Party members with their own goals, values and the possibility of actually fracturing the party due to cross purposes.
- Former party members have a high incidence of returning to the story.


Anthology RPG
- You create a character with their own set of goals, play that character for 1-4 hours to accomplish those goals and complete that story.
- On completion of one story you open up more goal sets, which can either be used by an existing character or to create a new one.
- Figuring 60ish goals and randomized story players should allow for a fine level of replayability.
- Much of this is a simplified version of the above, but more focused on one character at a time.


Custom Mech Beatem up
- Core game play is a beatem up similar to yakuza or other 3d beatemups that didn't suck.
- Base combo move + Finisher moves replaced with designable weapon sets, which can function largely the same way
-- Standard layout, melee weapon for base combo, ranged weapon as effective finisher.
- Expanded mechanics include researching new improvements, capturing prototype technologies and progressing through a story of either revenge, liberation, or exploitation, none of which are exactly exclusive to each other.
- Customization mechanics include effectively designing your own weapons from gage, recycle mechanism and mounting methods, as well as different sections for the mech to radically alter the way it behaves.
- To balance out the potential for simply grinding your way through research you're character happens to be on the run, moving from location to location to avoid being caught. Spend to much time in one place, or get tracked back to it after a mission and you get to deal with a full on assault. Assuming you don't find out it's coming before hand.


If there's any interest in any of them I do have a lot more together on any of them, but frankly this is pretty long for people to review for interest so I've left it out for now.

[Hades]

That first one sounds really fun. I'm a sucker for both sandbox games and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

[Auri-El]

I agree, the first one sounds really great.

[Cerim Treascair]

concurring with the others.

The anthology RPG makes me geek happy in a way I can't describe, too.

Edit:  800th post.  huh.

[Alehksunos]

Your second idea almost sounds like one idea for a totally different RPG.

My idea involved:

• You take a questionnaire at the very beginning. The questionnaire is based on your personality.
• When finishing the questionnaire, you are given a character based by setting, love interest, and even time-period.
• Because of that, the game is totally different by how you've answered the questions.

Also, I love your ideas. They're very creative, and that's something I'm always happy to see. I almost want to play them when someone finally gets a hold of your ideas and make them real.

[Distind]

Yeah, I have a sizable wiki dedicated to laying out the ideas to the first one. Working my way through the cast generation/tracking system is rather interesting, but the bit about generating reasonable stories off of cast characters, that's got me a tad stumped. I'll have to revisit it, haven't really worked on that part in ages.

That said, there's a unity 2d solution that I'll be looking into since I have someone willing to do pixel literally in house. Plus programmaticly creating towns is easier in 2d.

I'll see how far I can get with pushing my way through the harder logic chunks, Though I have largely conceded to myself that I'd need to have a base world map which is then modified by various conditions, at least until I get into some things I have absolutely no knowledge of at the moment.

Edit:
A few other bits of concept for the first while I'm at it.

HP analog is Fight, a rough measure of how willing the character is to keep fighting rather than their actual health. Thusly simply shooting at the enemy may well be enough to get them to surrender by taking the fight out of them, or make them run and make easy targets out of them. Actual serious injuries are tracked separately, and are a more serious concern. I'm open to better names for it, but I haven't found any that don't overlap with terms used elsewhere.

No standard of trade, closest equivalent would be power/batteries. Trade goods do trade for rough(but varied) values, but no standard currency as the value of power would be drastically different in areas depending on the generation potential of the area. That said, those same trade goods are the basis for the abstracted crafting system.

Another of my more complicated ideas, characters can break down when subjected to enough stress. Hero failed to many times, or found out he's been used to destroy innocent people, he may well pop a gasket for a while. The rough mechanic behind this would be that selected character traits modify what stresses out a character, and at a certain stress threshold the character under goes a significant change. Likely disappearing from the party for a bit, when they come back one of the major character traits(weighted toward the largest source of stress) has been altered, though certain character traits can be used to limit exactly the character does during a break down.


What I may very well do is use the anthology RPG as a way of implementing the first idea in a small way, and should I ever finish the both of them allow for character importing from the anthology into the full scale sandbox. Either as cast or part characters, though I likely would allow for any character from the anthology to be picked up into the party at a later point. It certainly would be simpler to be able to limit things to a single character's goals at a time than a living world.

[Distind]

Another call and response portion of the show:

I've got 6 separate ways of ending the world, with varying degrees of destruction and progressive threats in each. I'm trying to pick one to run with for a proof of concept, which is where the response comes in, pick one and help me decide:

Nuclear Exchange
* Your standard Apocalypse, nukes lunched, level lots of cities.
* Any large city is cratered, very little left, what does remain of them is irradiated
* Fallout and background radiation are concerns
* Significant chunks of area denied to anyone who wishes to live
* Suburban + Rural areas less damaged

Conventional War
* World War 3 winds down without lunching nukes
* Large cities have been decimated
* Any population center has largely been depopulated and seriously damaged. Key structures may remain, but likely damaged.
* Isolated bands of soldiers roaming, either continuing to execute orders or raiding for survival.

Cyber War
* A sudden collapse of international infrastructure, anything networked stopped working
* In a world of computerized logistics and automatic fabrication this brings everything to a halt.
* The why is not known
* Systems up for restoration, but there are risks involved
* Minor initial depopulation
* Looting rampant, supplies and loot severely limited

Zombie Pandemic
* Your other standard end of the world
* A viral agent turns humans into apparently mindless cannibalistic creatures
* Significant depopulation
* People far less trusting, due to fears of infection
* Scavenging significantly increases the number of armed NPCs and decreases the easily available loot.
* I've got a few settings for this, Romero, Snyder and Rob. Bonus points for anyone who can identify where the middle came from.

Bio Warfare
* One I haven't seen very much, all those cold war nerve agents, diseases, and other hidden fun stuff was released.
* Massive depopulation
* Relatively little damage to built up areas, just lots of dead.
* Loot ahoy! Assuming you don't kick a stone over with an active bio agent waiting to get back into the air.
* Most normal people are terrified of poking through any ruins due to risks.
* Also, no huffing random canisters.

Geno Warfare
* Altered beasties intended to be used as morale destroyers and shock troops got a tad out of control.
* Lots of mutated critters looking for things to eat, people, normal critters or each other
* Significant depopulation, more so in heavily populated areas
* A crowbar is a feasible weapon here
* Due to humanity attempting to correct the mistake with extreme prejudice arms are relatively rare, but thanks to how well that worked supplies are plentiful.

As rough outlines of each. Though I would like to avoid Geno war as it'd involve a significant amount of art, regardless of how much I like the idea.

Any opinions would move me around a bit, I'm still torn on which I like the most, and is reasonable to implement.

My bigger hook for the game would be mix and match apocalypse, all of the items behind any given end exist in the world, it's just a matter of which happened first, and which is still buried some where. Bio Warfare agents could have been in tanker trucks, military bases loaded with desperate soldiers, labs you really don't want to open the doors to, Suit case nukes sitting out for anyone willing to try to detonate them. So even when you've gotten the world kicking back into gear, something new can whoop you ass. Or you could just toss all six in for the near complete destruction of man kind and the entirely real result of humanity dying out.

From the decision of an end to go with, I have a handful of story archetypes I'll rattle over, implement maybe two goals, two missions and a few follow up complications from how the world ended, and use the lot of it to proof my concepts rather than trying to build everything without having a practical framework to start with. If I get anywhere with the lot of this, I'll need testing victims and I know where to look for them.