I'm making a solo game. More a simulator than a game. It's something like Majesty (that old PC game, remember?) meets How To Host a Dungeon (the Dungeon Sim by Tony Dowler). In a few words, it goes like this: the game it's divided in ages, a Primordial Age where you generate the landscape and terrain features (its played in a hex map), a Precursors (or Ruins or whatevs) Age where you get to know who used to inhabit the land and what they built and where (a now vanished empire, a dwarven kingdom, two warring free-cities, etc), a Settling or Kingdom Age where you quickly find out where the main posts of civilization are (a city, a fortress, a couple of villages), and finally the Adventuring or Heroes Age where the actual game takes place.
It's divided in seasons: in the fall monsters spawn from the darkness or arrive from the edges of the map and settle in the crumbling ruins or in the gnarled woods, in winter they patrol their domains, raid and pillage trade routes and settlements and maybe fight with each other, in spring civilization recovers their resources, heals their wounded, and recruits adventurers, and the summer the adventurers fight back, explore the land, fulfill quests, and crawls dungeons.
Right now I've got the basics of the first two ages ready, and lately I've been toying around with the actual mechanics of character generation and the combat system. I pondered a few different methods but none of them really worked.
First of all, as the player might be handling from two to eight or such different adventuring parties, the combat system has to be quick (and simple) enough not to slow down the game. Second, it has to offer a minimum of granularity, because chars are expected to grow in levels and obtain magic items (and this means that each character is and independent and not just "Party A, Party B", an approach which I considered for some time), and both things have to reflect in the encounter mechanics. Third, I've got a specific idea of the power level of the adventuring parties: a first level party should handle an encounter with kobolds easily, might suffer some wounded with goblins, even maybe a dead Magic User or Thief, and should consider an encounter with an orc raiding group a fairly lethal affair (quite old school).
Some time ago I got my hands on the Dungeon World book and despite not liking the game as a whole, I kinda liked the basic mechanic: roll two d6 + bonus: 2-6 bad things happen, 7-9 good and/or bad things happen, 10+ good things happen (and the odd 12+ great things happen). I was thinking of something like this:
When an adventuring party faces a monster or a group of them, each char makes the roll. If they get a 6 or less, they suffer damage (most monsters do 1 hp dmg, but I’m thinking dragons and such could deal two or three), if they get a 7-9 they suffer and deal damage to the monster as well, on a 10+ only the monster gets hit. Fighters, being front liners, roll first, then thieves or clerics (flankers and second liners, right?), and finally magic users. This way, if a party defeats the monsters before its the M-U turn, the guy with the pointy hat might survive because the strong guys took the brunt of the damage.
Oh yes, there are four kind of adventurers: Fighters (they deal more damage than the others, they have more hit points), thieves (they deal more damage in the first roll of combat because they backstab, or maybe they can’t fail a roll befote dealing damage first, to represent the fact that they wait for the perfect time to ambush and THEN dive into battle), clerics deal more damage against undead and demons and can heal other party members, and magic users get to re roll once and take the best result because MAGIC!
In case you didn’t notice, monsters don’t get to roll. Only the adventurers do and their roll triggers all the action (which I like, because it acomplishes the desired effect with half the rolls, if I were to choose a more classic DnDesque aproach).
As I already said, the characters are supposed to advance in levels (1-10) and get some rare magic items. Adventurer lethality should be high, most of all at first to third levels, but after an adventure or two they can get some hirelings that act as meat shields and give them a good chance to survive a potentialy fatal encounter (I was thinking hirelings would look like extra hp for the adventurer that hired them, they get hit instead of you but get killed in the process).
About monsters stats: they should depict what they are, how much damage they deal, how much hits they can survive before being killed (or being routed in case of groups). Monsters groups, like bandits or goblins only have one HP score and dmg stat instead of many. If they double the party members in numbers maybe they get a +1 dmg (until reduced to half their hp) or impose a -1 to the adventurers rolls, to represent the fact that many goblins with short swords are more dangerous than only one ogre with a really big club.
About gold, I was thinking that every spring, the kingdom collects its resources, which are based on the amount of relatively safe villages that year maybe, and then puts a reward over the monsters that attacked the bastions of civilization, or those that are dangerously near, and the first adventuring party that destroys the menace gets the gold, which translates (as it should be in a classic DnD inspired game) into XP points!
Monsters that have a bounty on their heads are more likely to be hunted down and found than those that do not. As the player cannot choose what the adventurers do, they must roll to find out where the parties go right? Well, if the monster has a bounty placed, the adventurers will have a higher chance on their roll or rolls (I haven't decided the exact "path finding" system yet) to find said monster. Monsters have their own hoards too, of course, which give adventurers a chance to win XP without having to work for the sovereign.
Edit: Also, hello to all. Some time lurker, first time poster. Hope to become a bitter old guy like all of you, with time.