International Tabletop Day

Happy International Tabletop Day! I hope you all were able to play (or are still playing) some game today. My 5-year old and I played some Talisman (4th edition) today, we're going to continue tomorrow. We started off with Castle Ravenloft, but he just' not quite ready for such a reading-intensive game just yet. He was really enjoying playing his knight for a while until he rolled a 1 on the City's Enchantress Table. Let's just say he wasn't happy about being turned into a Toad... My Troll wasn't faring much better as I kept drawing tough Psychic Combat encounters, which are really, really hard when you only start with 1 Craft.

While playing Talisman, I think I've found how I want to build my own dungeon crawler game. The mechanics will be very similar to Talisman. Characters start with a base score in four categories. These numbers can be raised (and lowered) by various means. These totals are added to a single D6 roll against a certain target number. Characters are built as static classes that can be modified a bit with the player's selection for the character's race. Characters won't level-up beyond the gear they get. This seems to fly in the face of what I've mentioned in other posts, but the way I have it working in my mind even spellcasting characters would get a chance to learn new spells that they find in the dungeon. After the dungeon, there will be events and places to visit that will offer more opportunities for stat changes.

There's still a mountain of details to iron out, but the way it's working out in my head is a game that has some depth, but still plays quick and easy like Heroquest. We'll see how it goes.