Dungeon Punk mix of IdleRPG (mechanics) and Play-by-post RPG (roleplay)

[abydon]

The Game Ad (Playtest of homebrew PbP game)


Welcome to City Conflicts, a Dungeon Punk Grand Strategy game, where you plunder the Hidden Realms of the Underdark to expand the Surface Races' access to magical components for enchanting and creating valuable magical items. It is in this dark place that only Azurite, Spirit Flowers, and Spirit Beasts can be found and collected. A place jealously guarded by the Dead and the Damned, who seek to cut off the Celestial’s supply of magical resources in preparation for the inevitable war that ends the world and determines who charts the beginnings of the next. It is an apocalyptic war with no winners, only the one who loses the least.

That said, the victors write history, and the winner of each Cycle will determine what history survives to inform the next generation of the past. Future generations will only know what the victor decided they should know, and it is through this process the Dead, the Damned, and the Celestials influence the mortal populations in favor of their gods who seek to take full control of the World one day.

The current state of the game is simple and limited. There are 3 conflict types (Espionage, Combat, Magic) that a character can specialize in and 3 very, very limited economic trees (Azurite, Spirit Flowers, Spirit Beasts) that produce items you can wield mechanically to provide your characters with mechanical advantages.

Azurite compasses allow you to influence your visits to the Underdark.

Potions from spirit nectar and beast cores allow you to gain better rolls, better loot, or simply ignore the mana costs of enhancing your other skills with magical power.

These concepts will be expanded on in the next iteration by adding a single Legendary Item per character as something you can acquire (or start within the 3rd iteration, depending on Cycle modifiers) and adding Cycle Modifiers to be chosen by the winner for the next game. For instance, you can choose for every character in the game to start with a legendary item instead of needing to find them.

Mechanically
Mechanically, as befitting a play-by-post game, it's basically an opposed dice roll mechanic for the mechanics required in posts (this comes later since I want to actually make sure the mechanics site works first) and free-form role-playing in a dungeon punk / high fantasy setting.

Players will be divided into 4 parties that will compete for 3 end game quests with 1 player from each party competing in each end game quest.

This is a medium term game with a rough start date of May 18th and a rough end date at the end of September.

Assumption here is people are active every 1-3 days so if you fall outside that range, probably not the game for you (or if you mind rough edges from homebrew experimentation :P)

Game Invite

I'm not running this on Giantitp due to the site issues but I still want to give people a chance to play as I'm trying to recruit a decent sized group of ~12 people to run this properly. If I screwed up, feel free to delete but I see adds for all sorts of offsite games so I think it was fine.

You'll see it being advertised on Myth Weavers basically.

[Greenflame133]

I'm rather intrigued by the idleRPG part of the description. It worrying given idle game have a reputation for halting your progress. Yet, that's not nesserly going to be present if your main mechanic opposed dice rolls. Can you elaborate on what IdleRPG elements mean for your game?

[abydon]

I'm rather intrigued by the idleRPG part of the description. It worrying given idle game have a reputation for halting your progress. Yet, that's not nesserly going to be present if your main mechanic opposed dice rolls. Can you elaborate on what IdleRPG elements mean for your game?

Basically, for instance, you want to "level" your Champion (+25 Combat Ranks; Faster Combat Actions) / Mage (+25 Magic Ranks; Faster Magic actions).

So you send them into the Underdark into a Dungeon Biome (More likely to get conflict encounters such as Combat or Magic).

Then every few minutes, you gain XP in what you encounter in the Dungeon Biome (most likely it'll be in Magic or Combat but you can also get random veins of valuable magic ore or other things).

Over the course of a few RL days (but probably only 1-2 posts at normal play by post rates) you gain significantly mechanically (in the background, without turn-by-turn combat) without needing to spend a couple weeks playing out a combat encounter like you would in D&D play-by-post.

Does that make sense?

EDIT:

So in the play-by-post, you'd then take your "new" mechanical values (i.e. 60 Combat Ranks) when you "fight" someone as your opposed roll for the fight. So it would *roughly* look like 2d6+60 but the +60 has diminishing returns so its not really a full +60 but more like +15 in actual modifier.

[Greenflame133]

I think I get what of are going for. Sounds intrusting.

Not sure about resolving thing by the minutes, as if might get weird given time zones and general asynchronous nature of a pbp.

[abydon]

I think I get what of are going for. Sounds intrusting.

Not sure about resolving thing by the minutes, as if might get weird given time zones and general asynchronous nature of a pbp.

Its automated like an idlerpg

I can't post links due to limited post count but essentially its a webpage where you assign your heroes and it runs in the background. Its not actually pbp to level your characters.

Play by post is purely for the roleplaying portion and opposed mechanical rolls. Its not how you level characters.

Edit

So, say you assign someone to do the above dungeon delving for 24 hours. It performs (roughly) 144 actions to gain 2880 XP divided among the skills it uses to overcome the encounters. There are items you can use (also biomes) to bias what sort of encounters your character runs into.

But you can change the assignments every few minutes or leave it running for like 2-3 days. The timezone doesn't matter since its just duration based rather than related to a specific start/end time in a specific timezone.