THE GREAT HUNT!: Crunchy Bits

A game is not a game without the crunch to make the mechanics move. So let's begin.

Starting Play:

In The Great Hunt, the game begins with the players selecting the characters, called hunters. This can be done through random selection through each player drawing a hunter, or by having the players simply select the hunters they want to play. Next, the players select a number of "supports". The supports are the hunter's team, the guys who make sure the hunter does what he does best. Each support provides an additional skill for the player to use each turn. After the supports are chosen, the players decide on which areas they're going to use, with up to six areas being chosen depending on the number of players in the game. Hexes are randomly laid on each area from a shuffled deck of tiles with the area dictating the terrain type of the tiles laid down.

The game now begins. The players decide who goes first by rolling a die, and then place their markers on any base camp space On each turn, each player has a number of options, but certain things must be done during the turn. Each player gets a single "Action" per turn. This "action" can be spent moving to another tile of the player's choice, baiting a monster, or resting to regain extra health and arcane. In addition to their action, a player can activate a skill provided by his or her hunter or supports. Certain skills can only be activated if the player has chosen to do a specific action on his or her turn.

Anytime during his or her turn, a player can spend a food to prevent hunger, otherwise the player's hunter takes one damage for each turn he has gone without spending food. If the player rested this turn, he or she does not need to spend food to prevent hunger and does not take damage for not preventing hunger, but he or she does not reset the number of turns without food.

If the Prize Monster is on the board, then at the start of his or her turn each player must roll 1d6 and move the prize monster in the designated direction stated by the roll. This only occurs if someone has drawn the Prize Monster.

So, a player's turn looks like:

• Move Prize Monster if on board
• Take Action
• Use a skill
• Spend food or take hunger damage

The only problems I'm having with these parts of the game are amounts. I can't decide on how many supports I want there to be, how many areas per player, or how many tiles per area. While I want to have the players feel like they're powerful, I also want to limit the options they have immediately available to them. While I want the players to feel isolated in Kulragkh, they also need to overlap and skirmish over territory with various abilities to make the game feel interesting. I'm thinking about giving the players 3 supports, which would mean they have the choice of 4 skills. Most of the time, a player can only use one skill per turn, however there may be some passive skills which trigger upon certain actions. 

For the board, I want the areas big enough to be engaging, but I don't want them to be too huge so that the game goes on forever. Due to the fact that most players will only be able to move one tile at a time and that they will have to return to base camp to restock and such, I can't have a board that's too big and takes too long to get around. I was thinking of having each area looking something like this:

The brown hex is the base camp. The blue hexes are shared between it and one adjacent area, and the orange are shared between this area and two other adjacent areas. The purple are simply tiles of its own and the gray are not part of this area. While I'm somewhat unsatisfied by the size of this area, this is the size I will be using for the initial test. If I'm still unsatisfied after testing the rate of play and how things work, then I'll add more hexes. I'm just worried about adding too many hexes and not being able to find a nice balance.

At this size, I think having one area per player with 3-6 players is reasonable. I kind of want to discourage people from simply separating and farming their own areas, so this will probably change as I work things out. For example, there may be a limited number of base camps, but I'm unsure how to work things.

What I may do is create several different scenarios which can have varied setups and have generalized play times and recommended levels of familiarity with the game. This allows people to learn the game in multiple ways and have a considerable amount of replayability as some settings could be considerably harder than others or have considerably different focuses than others.

Combat and Variables:

I slightly detailed the basics of combat, but I'd like to talk more about it and the parts relating to it. 

Combat is not necessarily complex, as most characters only have one ability that can effect combat, and there's only three stats to worry about, for the most part. You roll your dice, add your attack, compare it to the monster's defense, see how much damage it did, and then he does it back to you. The numbers are a bit of a problem, but they can be figured out with math. Since I'm probably using a d12 to randomize the results of an encounter, the probability of each result is 8.3-ish %. This means that each +1 bonus is an increase of about 8.3% chance of success, provided that the total bonus is not 12 below the check (Always failing) or 1 less than the check (Always succeeding).

So the problem I'm facing here is how far apart do I want to face the challenges stat-wise? The Prize Monster needs to be a large enough threat that you absolutely do not want to challenge it without added bonuses. These will probably come through leveling up and gathering items from various challenges. Certain monsters will drop totems that can provide power-ups to various stats. You can buy some items for boosts in the base camps. Some items will appear in special events that you probably don't want to encounter until you've powered up. You can also spend resources to level up your character, which costs various resources for different characters, but improves their abilities. Leveling up will be talked about later.

I'll probably have to set a basic baseline for stats of the hunters, and the baseline for different tiers of monsters. Prize Monsters should be tough and challenging with different skills that they can lay down on the hunters that they will have to cope with. However, I don't want them to have skills that can only be dealt with items or such things that will only come up at random and then it's easier to stomp them. For example, no monsters that confuse people and send them running in a random direction unless you have some helmet or portion that negates confusion or things touching your mind. That's okay for a random monster, but the prize monster needs to be something your can plan around. So, it would be okay for a Prize Monster to have a pattern of attacks or randomized attack patterns by dice with the hunter having a chance to react. Different reactions may be better at different times, such as trying to finish off a monster before it can get off another attack despite it falling into a defensive stance.

Other monsters can be more tricky and stupid. It's okay for a random monster to have a mind-affecting ability that sends you running to a random hex that can be negated by a random helm. It's okay to have a random sword that boosts its attack against demons of all kinds, or a shield that deflects most attacks from Orc raiders. These things are fine because they're not the main focus and not the main point of the game. You are not guaranteed to encounter all these enemies, and while defeating these encounters helps you complete the objectives of the game, you don't have to do it with the given item.

Creatures and Cards:

I've been considering having "tiers" of monsters which people would shuffle into their monster decks in each area for the first time anyone hits the next level. In other words, when a hunter levels up from level one to level two, you would add the tier 2 cards to each deck. This would allow a control to people not continuously getting stomped by monsters that are just way too difficult right at the beginning of the game, but it still allows people to get some easy resources near the end of the game. 

So, one of the ideas I just talked about that I've forgotten to mention before is the idea that there are different monster decks for each area. The idea I'm having right now is that there will be a single deck of event cards. Originally, I thought to simply have monsters strewn throughout the event deck, but that'd end up with weird monsters in not weird places and wouldn't allow for certain controls of certain areas simply being harder than others, but having greater rewards. So this way, there can be thematically appropriate monsters with controlled difficulties and rewards. I'm not sure if I'll keep this or if I'll have to scrap a lot of my ideas and go back to the drawing board.

Keeping the game entertaining may be my biggest challenge, but I hope to do so by making event cards that are fun and interact with multiple players. For example, cards that make you draw a monster and send it at another player, or having explosive charges set around the base camp. 

I feel like I don't want to get way too complex in mechanics or in the way that cards work. It would be easy to start making really complex and confusing mechanics, and that might be fun for some players, but are going to be hard to deal with at the table and could lead to certain caustic behaviors that I don't want to cultivate. The best way to deal with this is to keep things under consistent terms and not use derived stats. However, I would enjoy having lots of player interactions that people can use to mess with each other and come out on top.

Blah. I'm running out of words. I need to think on this stuff for a bit. Next time, I delve more into the mechanics of cards and player interactions.