These ideas are completely free for any and all uses, although if you try to sue someone else for developing ideas you found here I’ll try to fight that.
Class-Play ARPG
What I really enjoy with ARPGs is trying out different classes, so I thought what it would look like to make that a good long-term play strategy.
- Classes’ skills are determined algorithmically from a very large pool of possible effects
- Lineage: each character inherits abilities/powers/something (I’m especially thinking “the ability to carry over skills or otherwise influence the random class generation”) from the previous character that you retire to create it
- You get more benefits the longer you play the character, with the optimal peak of time vs. reward being around the point where you unlock all the class skills.
Life Simulator + RPG
I’ve often noticed that the time scales with CRPGs seem weird; like in the Elder Scrolls games you become head of the mage’s guild in like a couple of game-time months, which is just absurd.
I’d like to see a disjoint-time system applied to that problem, like the Total War series, where there’s a split between map-time and battle-time, or the Persona series (and presumably other Japanese life simulators), where some actions take up hours and some occur in real time.
I’m imagining that the game occurs in chunks of, say, 3 months, and in that time you decide what major skill you’re going to be working on (i.e. studying magic), but you might also have more real-time things occur, such as quests or whatever.
In this sort of time flow, the idea of a less-than-40-year-old grandmaster would just be absurd.
Writing a game plot to work with this sort of thing would be interesting and probably somewhat strange.
Nice World
Conquest-style city-builder (a la Black & White 2), but The Spirits destroy the whole city if violence occurs, internal or external.
Each angry citizen is therefore a ticking time bomb that must be solved immediately, as angry citizens tend to eventually form mobs to either lynch local perceived problems or attack the other cities.
This means that the only way to conquest is to entice people to move by how awesome your city is.