New Drill

[talysman]

As those of you who also read the 24 Hour Game forum on 1KM1KT know, I just designed a solitaire tabeltop roguelike dungeoncrawl game, which I am developing further and would actually like to start selling later this year. Without getting into the question of whether solitaire dungeoncrawls can be RPGs or not, I think it's safe to say that a solitaire RPG(-like) game would have to be a drill. So, I'm thinking it over and trying to figure out what my game is "drilling". I think I can isolate at least two , maybe three things.

I designed the game to resemble Nethack one way in particular: I wanted the magical items and scrolls to be discoverable. You find a bubbly white potion and a bubbly green potion. If you identify the bubbly white potion, that offers a clue to what the bubbly green potion might do. If you identify several different color potions, that narrows the possibilities further. This gives you a strategic option: use the potion now to identify it (and possibly not have it when you need it) or go by your guess and use the potion when you think it will do the most good. This is training players in skillful resource management.

Another feature of the game is that you can get extra dice to roll in conflicts by using the environment to your advantage, and you can also use successful actions during a conflict to change the environment to get more such advantages. This is not all that spectacularly new (although it's unusual for a solitaire game, I suppose.) However, it works well for training Gamist strategic thinking, especially in combination with the discovery feature. In particular, it drills players to think not in terms of equipment or skills you can load up on your character at the beginning, but in terms of situations you can create on the fly to give yourself an advantage.

Most of the rest of the game is a design exercise on creating rich details with a small ruleset and so not really relevant as a drill, unless maybe interpreting the randomly-generated descriptors could be considered a drill on on-the-fly creation of Color. This gives us three drills we can think about for future projects: resource strategies, on-the-fly advantages, on-the-fly Color.

Is that helpful?

[Thunder_God]

I find it a bit problematic, who enforces thinking on your feet rather than taking the time to think?
Who decides if the way you change the setting is legit? You're both the changer and the arbiter!
How do you know if you've "Guessed" what the Green potion is correctly?
Also, I'm wondering at the Gamist aspect, since what are you playing against/for? Time, score? Etc.

Which game is yours, by name?

[talysman]

I find it a bit problematic, who enforces thinking on your feet rather than taking the time to think?
Who decides if the way you change the setting is legit? You're both the changer and the arbiter!
How do you know if you've "Guessed" what the Green potion is correctly?
Also, I'm wondering at the Gamist aspect, since what are you playing against/for? Time, score? Etc.

YOU enforce the thinking on your feet. Or your friends, if you decide to play it as a group instead of solitaire (I see no reason why it can't be played that way...) There's no scoring or playing against time: it's a pastime. If you aren't into it and change the setting in ways that strike you as too arbitrary, you won't have fun.

What you get, as far as Gamism goes, is bragging rights. It's like Nethack. You get to tell other players about  how you beat that goblin sorcerer, or about Yet Another Stupid Death. In that sense, even if you play solitaire, other people can become the arbiter of your play when you share your story; if you're "cheating", other people will think your story sounds not quite right.

Which game is yours, by name?

Raiders of the Ruins of Kanthe. Which I plan on shortening to something like Depths of Kanthe for the commercial version. The version on the website is out of date no4w; I already changed the mapping technique and playtested the v1.0 rules, so I have a set of changes for v1.1 I'm going to write out and playtest. If those work with minimal changes, I should be tossing a link and a thread up here on the Forge with a call for more playtesters.

That's the most beautiful part about this game. Since it's solitaire, it's a lot easier for me to playtest.