Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="erf_beto" data-source="post: 4747099" data-attributes="member: 47533">Well, this has been a pet project of mine for quite a while. My goal is to have a CO-OP sandbox-like Heroic Tier game that plays like those old Arcade Capcom games, like King of Dragons and D&D Shadow over Mystara. I’ve also taken inspiration from newer games like Etrian Odissey, a couple of MMOs and also, a style of play called “Insert Coin”, that hopes to emulate those games (which I heard from at <a href="http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1130952" target="_blank">Wizards</a> and in a Brazilian <a href="http://spellrpg.foxhosting.com.br/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4252" target="_blank">forum</a>). My version will probably be called “Press Start”, because it will look more like a console, rather than arcade game.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />    Anyway, here are my musings about co-op play.     Monsters.   The Tactics section in the MM and combat roles gives some pointers as to how they fight. So, you can have all players handle the monsters together each time they come up in the initiative order. If there are a lot of disagreements, elect someone to break the ties. If everyone thinks the orc should jump into the lava pit, well, you better get yourself a regular DM. Or rotate your players – and perhaps gives a bonus to the character of whoever takes the DM seat (like an extra Action Point).     Another idea is in the 3.5 Miniatures Handbook. There were some rules in there about giving monsters some kind of a proxy behavior. Something like “Hates elf” (always attacks the nearest elf), “Distracted” (the party decides who it attacks each round) or “Bloodthirst” (attack the nearest bloodied foe). I don’t remember these very well…     Also, I’m really hoping to use this house rule: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/250441-my-grind-fix-half-hp-2-3-xp.html" target="_blank">half-XP, 2/3 XPl</a> . With more monsters and faster battles, the combats will play a lot more like the beat’em up videogames I hope to emulate. I’ve made a few playtests with Kobold Hall, nothing major, but I think it will work.     As for the monster cards, another option is to use the ones you draw as your “monster palette”: you build the encounter with the monsters you want. No need to have a jelly cube, an orc, an owlbear and a zombie in the same encounter, just because those are the cards you got (an all undead, or some orcs and their owlbear pet or a single cube would make more sense). Just make sure you’re within the encounter XP budget!Oh, and having traps and terrain cards mixed with the monsters is a must.Random Dungeons.   The thing about the DMG's charts for random dungeons is that, if you're drawing the thing on the fly, IMO, they're... boring. And if you're not, you could probably have an online mapmaker do the job for you (there's a bunch reviewed <a href="http://inkwellideas.com/?page_id=125" target="_blank">here</a>). But then, that’s not really ‘exploring’ is it?      And yes, you should have an encounter every chamber. Or add a monster card that says “Empty room: discard all monsters for this chamber”, for those rare occasions…  Warhammer Quest used a deck of cards instead of charts to draw the map, and that was a lot more fun. The great thing about that is you can shuffle a quest objective card into that deck and keep exploring until you draw it. And if there's a fork in the road, you split the deck, forcing you to backtrack when the road you chose runs out of cards (and you didn’t find what you were looking for). The thing is, with 4e, I don't think it really matters if it's a 4 or 8 or 12 square long hallway, or a turn left corner or whatever - you gotta fastforward to the action. So a deck of encounter areas would be a better idea. Each card could describe the room (with a picture or a note about general size and stuff like difficult terrain, furniture, hazards, etc), or be a "fork in the road", "cross section" etc to give the option of choosing your path (draw more cards, split the deck, etc), or even a Random Event/Encounter in a corridor (stuff like traps and skill challenges or wandering monsters).  But you don't have to do that, charts are fine, as long as you don't have to roll on a lot of them (I find that boring to do at the table). But IMO you should roll on the chambers table in advance, and shuffle them in a table or index cards before play, to speed things up.    Quests.   Since this is a Co-Op game, with no DM, you can’t have things like murder mystery, because every player knows from the start what they are getting into. So I think it’s best to let them choose their quests among a small group of available ones. Short descriptions each, with really simple development: “go to level 5, kill dude, find item, return”. Think Dungeon Delve, not H1-H3.      Anyway, I’m aiming for a Heroic Tier sandbox feel, so you don’t have to do this, but hear me out. This could require a lot of time to set up, but might be cool to do (if you like world building, for instance).      I've been thinking about a system where characters start as foreigners in a small generic town or village and pick quests from a couple of generic Quest Sources (like the Alchemist, the Blacksmith, the Temple, the Thieves’ Guild, the Nobles, etc): the more quests they complete, the better the relationship between them. This translates into new, more rewarding quests being offered, better services provided and a sense of a growing environment.      Examples: when you start, the Alchemist only sells healing potions, but after taking a few quests and supplying him with magic herbs and dragon’s blood he can sell magic implements and cloth armor. The Temple only offers Cure Disease services at first, but after a few “donations” they might Remove Affliction or even Raise Dead. The Nobles might treat PCs as low-life hired help, being given low payment jobs like delivering a letter, but after completing a few quests for them, the players earned their trust and now are called to protect and escort the baron’s daughter herself or become members of his elite personal guard.      You measure this growing by summing up all XP related to the quests given by that Quest Source. When designing quests, I’d assign them to a particular source and decide the minimum Rank (the level of the source, E, D, C, B, A, and S, the maximum level) the party needs to have in order to take it based on its difficulty. If the Alchemist needs an herb from the creek outside of town that’s a Rank E minor quest, but giving him Dragon’s Blood, might be a Rank A quest.      In fact this is the only time I’d care about XP: IMO, in a Co-Op game, all characters should have the same level, and advance together, even if new characters join the party. (I have some ideas about starting the game with 4 basic classes and then introducing new race/class options through thematic Class Quests. Example. hunt an owlbear in the woods, now you can play a ranger; save the eladrin child that got lost, now you can play an eladrin...)     Anyway, I haven’t given this part much thought but you get the idea. In the end, these ideas might be more troublesome than rewarding.</blockquote>

Verification