Game Idea: Adventurer Manager

[monkey]

Thanks, monkey and Gurnard! I'm glad you're so interested!

monkey:

It seems like a good way to take this game is to a board/card game.

Hmm, interesting idea, equating morale with damage. Damage can be abstract, and thus there's less to calculate separately. Bidding would be interesting, too. It would be cool to have people trying to get characters away from their fellow players. In terms of stats reflecting their skill as a certain class, I'm not sure, would you mind supplying an example?

In terms of guilds, I think it could be a cool optional idea to be allied solely with a single guild, but I think the default should be that you are independent managers who can take quests from a myriad of sources. Upon further reading, you seem to support the idea that they can get quests from various factions, as well.

What I'm thinking of for skills for each character are the basics of the stereotypical D&D classes: Fight, Sneak, Heal, Magic.  (Characters possibly also have special abilities and equipment.)  Primarily, characters would only have one of the skills, and a low number.  I was thinking to have no die rolling.  You would determine how a quest goes by drawing encounter cards, specified by the quest card, which each have numbers for each skill.  You go through encounter by encounter, if the totals for any skill from the encounter and quest cards is higher than the party has, the party fails.  They may still get something for the encounters they got through though.

Characters might look like this:
Name             Fight  Sneak  Heal  Magic   
------------------------------------------
Fighter-Knight   3            
Sneaker-Thief           2         
Paladin          2             2      
Debutant                             1   


In terms of guilds or factions, maybe it would be better to have it as optional.  What I was envisioning is that by having a contract with a faction it means you get first pick of the quests from that faction.  If you want it, you take it.  However, if it's something you can't handle, or there's another quest you'd rather take, then you can trade or sell or give the quests around to other players.  That way you aren't tied down, but you gain something.  To balance it, occasionally there would be quests that suck (at least in terms of reward) that must be completed by the player with the contract.

I'm not really sure how to do Morale without a lot of math.  Maybe if you do certain easy things it adds Morale to each character, and then there's some phase at the end of the term where each player eats up a bunch of the Morale.  If they go down to zero then you lose them, but maybe they're still available.  If they go down to zero Morale on a quest, they die or stop adventuring.

One thing I would want to avoid is having to do any writing during the game.  Marking characters with a few tokens, or cards slid half underneath for gear or extra levels seem reasonable, but writing them in feels like a lot of overhead.  A consequence, which I think is good, is that you can't build whatever characters you want.  There is a set of character cards and the players have to compete to get what they want.