Marty, You might have a look at how the old HeroQuest board games worked. That might be a model for a roleplaying game that might be a happy medium between your dice/card/board game model of building and the more in depth RPG that people would like.
The brief description is this: in the old HeroQuest games, you picked one of four characters a dwarf, a barbarian, an elf, and a wizard. Then your character navigated a board with passages, rooms, doors, traps, and monsters. However, the board was set up differently for each game by placing elements in different configurations. This could be accomplished by a number of methods: 15 or 25 maps for instance, or a random card/corridor placement that uses some simple rules to avoid dumb arrangements. The characters would use dice to move a certain number of spaces on the board, or to resolve combat. There were very few extras such as spells, or monster abilities to fiddle with, and one could create a fun game by varying up the purpose of the quest: sometimes you had to escape the dungeon, sometimes you hunted a large boss monster, sometimes you had to find a specific item. The game was limited by its format, but I know I played many happy hours of it once our school outlawed D&D groups. This might be a good compromise between Dark's suggestions and something more complicated. It also had a clear set of rules. However, it'd be fairly simple to set up essentially the same system by developing a list of possible traps, spells, monsters, items, etc. Heroes were allowed to keep items from previous adventures. I don't remember if they improved as time went on in some form of experience system, but it would be easy enough to do so. Take care, Jeremy -- In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
