Dungeon Temp Agency

This week we had a playtest of Dino Resort that went pretty well.  The main action in the game -- proposing cards that you think the active player will like -- works well in the sense that you're torn between offering them something good, which will also pay you well, and offering something poor, which won't help them but also they probably won't pick it.  The economy is a bit too tight -- players could benefit from more money to spend and an easier time acquiring cards to have more options to propose.  It might also not hurt to have a bit more diversity in what the cards do -- maybe some offer income, others offer simple bonuses or discounts or something like that.  Still it's off to a good start.


This week I revisited an idea I had recently that frankly I'm surprised no one else has already come up with.     Players represent employment agencies trying to find workers gainful employment, but these workers aren't looking for office jobs:  rather, they're adventurers looking for interesting quests to join.

I think there would be a deck of cards representing the different adventurers, which you draw and which you then have to assign to different quests; I suppose there are several quests available at any time.  Other players will be proposing cards to those same spots.  There needs to be some simple way of evaluating whose proposed card(s) is/are the 'best'.  When the adventure is full the quest begins, dice are rolled and we see whether the quest succeeded or not.  If it did, you get a share of the loot, if it failed...something bad happens.

To me the toughest thing about this design is that it's probably supposed to be a bit of a send-up, but I'm not nearly well enough acquainted with or affectionate toward D&D to be able to pull this off very well.  So the game might end up being functional but not very funny.  On the other hand, Munchkin already exists so there's no need for a game that's just a box full of jokes.

I guess the idea should be that each quest should be represented with a card and should say something about the skills that it requires and the difficulty it will take to pass it.  So you want to propose cards to complement the skills that are already represented by the cards in the party.  But where do those cards come from?  Instead maybe everyone is putting forward one member of each party and so you're deciding which quests to really invest in and which ones you think are likely to tank. Maybe there are, say, 6 quests open at any time, and a quest runs when it gets 5 members, and then a new quest is put in its place.  So each turn would consist of placing a card from your hand onto one of the quests.  (Maybe there's also a way that 'NPCs' are added via a random die roll).  This would mean that the rewards for the quest are divided asymmetrically based on the number of cards each player invested, and perhaps on the quality of those cards as well.

Of course it's a dungeon game so you have to roll dice to see whether a quest succeeded or failed.  Maybe it's as simple as there are a few types of icons, and each icon on a character card means a die that character gets to roll of that type against the dungeon/foe.  But some skills aren't useful against certain foes.  Roll the dice and compare against the required level for that skill, and then if it succeeds pay out rewards, but perhaps the dungeon also can deal out damage or something.

Obviously like all of these ideas this needs more thought but I think there's a simple and perhaps slightly silly game in here somewhere.