In short, this thread is for ideas for forum games which you've come up with, but haven't had time to use- or alternatively, go ahead and pick up one of these ideas. All the ones in the first post are up for grabs, as is anything else that isn't otherwise stated. Feel free to discuss forum game ideas you do perfectly well intend to use as well.
I hope that this thread can become a nexus of orphaned or half-baked plots, settings, mechanics, characters, and such things that make up a good game. Feel free to post your thoughts here even if you think they can't work or are too piecemeal to be used. Depending on the success of this thread I might try to collate ideas into an organized list in the front post as well. This is for underused or outright new ideas, not to be a compendium of existing forum game tropes (although some of that information might be needed).
Also OK in this thread: "Guys is this a good idea?", "Help me forum games are hard to run!", Etc
Terms you should know:Text Adventure- a game where posters suggest actions for one character. Often uses a "democrabrain" to make decisions. It's a cool word, add it to your web browser's dictionary.
Party- a group of players who work together.
GM- the person who runs the game.
Settings/Openings:Yes, based on the lego models of the same name. Here, the players (who might be workers, adventurers or managers) use mining machinery to dig through the depths of an alien planet which has no air except in massive caverns. They will encounter monsters, cave-ins, magma, and maybe natives or other mining companies. The chief objectives are energy crystals and a stone which releases oxygen when chemically treated. Optionally, the player's space ship is stranded for lack of energy crystals which they need to activate the warp drive and return home, offering a clear win condition. If there are many native creatures, this can be a modern take on the Underdark setting.
You are the crew of a space ship of some sort (ideally one which has weapons aboard but isn't military). A wormhole anomaly sends a copy of your ship back in time from the future (which is not unheard of and normally less spectacular than it sounds). This time however, the ship is badly damaged and unresponsive, the crew (that's your future selves) almost certainly dead. You must board the ship, find out what happened, and prevent it.
In this game, all the players live on the same street, or at least very close by. The game is played in turns, where each turn is 12 hours- so one turn is day and one turn is night. Each day the players build up their houses, and each night they defend against a wave of zombies in their house. Ideally used with the "real equipment" mechanic, wherein each player uses only things they can find in their real life house.
The earth is flat, there is air in space, gravity is constant everywhere, and zeppelins are used for interplanetary travel. British colonialism is at its peak, but the colony on mars is unrestful. It's your job to be sure that British colonialism stays at its peak. Watch out for sky pirates, by the way.
Not the newest idea but I've never seen it in a forum game here. You operate a dungeon, stocking it with traps, monsters, and treasure. Eventually adventurers will come, and they'll try to kill you and take your treasure. Your objective is to kill them and take their treasure.
The players, perhaps with a team of NPCs, compete to go from point A to point B in unlikely contraptions of their own creation. Usually these vehicles will be "new" at the time -for example, the players will compete to be the first to go around the world in an airship- and there will be few places offering repairs/fuel, forcing the players to be creative in keeping their vehicles intact. Foul play between the players is a staple of this game.
An extrapolation of the RPS arena I've run here, this game is a strategy game, not unlike chess. Or, more appropriately, a lot like Taasen, which is kinda hard to play on forums due to the triangular board. Anyway.
The game can be played by (virtually) any number of players, the key factor is the units used. Each player has nine of them, each equipped with an Offense and a Defence. An Offense is either a Blade, a Gun, or a Fist. A Defence can be either a Dagger, a Ward, or a Scourge. Now if you know which is which, you can clearly see the setup - a Blade beats a Scourge, is stopped by a Dagger, and destroyed by a Ward; a Gun beats a Dagger, is stopped by a Ward, and beaten by the Scourge; a Fist beats a Ward, is stopped by a Scourge, and is destroyed by the Dagger. These are equally distributed among the nine units, so that no two units share a loadout.
A unit on a square adjacent to an enemy unit may attack it. Offence and Defence of the two are compared, and damage is inflicted simultaneously on both, if any. If the Offense of the attacker is beaten by the Defence of the defender, the attacker is destroyed. If the Defence of the defender is beaten by the Offence of the attacker, the defender is destroyed. If one of the units survives the confrontation, it is moved into the square occupied by its enemy - even if the attacker was the one destroyed.
From there, a plethora of rules can be selected. Opponents can move either one or three units per turn. Moves can be done to either one or three cells at a time, in a straight line or freeform, in 4 cardinal or all 8 directions. Attacks may or may not be exempt from the move rule. The playfield and initial setup can vary greatly, by default I was thinking a 3x9 field with opponents in 3x3 blocks on either side. The winning conditions can also be anything from simply obliterating the opponent to getting one of your units to the opposite side of the board. I haven't done any real testing with the concept, because it's too complicated to play against yourself. If anybody tries, let me know, I can participate.
In the original idea, there would be one player - this is obviously a bad idea for forums, where democrabrains can utterly ruin any attempts at coherent play. Many players can participate instead, though there will probably be a bit of fighting for best parts.
The premise is thus. A suspiciously natural world - or to be precise, a suspiciously natural island in an otherwise unexplored world - is populated by all kinds of robots, a full robotic society. The robots have legends of "humans", that once were but are no longer. And one (un)happy day, all hell breaks loose. Something crashes, the sky darkens, sparks fly from places they're not supposed to fly from, and suddenly a giant something is floating in the sky above the island, which is no small feat considering the robots never got the hang of "flying". Very disgusting, but vaguely robotic creatures begin to descend from the something, and terrorize the populace. Amidst all this, a tiny maintenance robot (or a group of tiny maintenance robots) in a faraway part of the island decides to stand up and do something. That's pretty much it.
The robot starts out on three rubber wheels, with a flimsy plastic body, a single manipulator, a basic engineer's sensor package, and a blowtorch. With this and a handy steel beam just thin enough to cut through, he takes out an invader scout and scavenges his remains for a basic gun. He encounters an NPC carryall bot who agrees to help lug stuff around, and so the liberation of the odd island begins. Along the way, the robot discovers the not-quite-absent humans, amasses a wealth of knowledge, goes where no bot has gone before, becomes nothing short of a tank, later flying tank, and leads a massive attack force of robots onto the floating invader stronghold, beating them (presumably) and earning one of several endings of varying sadness.
The gameplay is characteristic by the main hero(es) being robotic, which implies two things - no gaining supernatural skills by wishing very hard, and nothing preventing rampant looting of parts from fallen enemies for upgrading. This'll require some carefulness on the GM's part, specifically not allowing the player(s) to gain equipment sufficient for flight until it's appropriate, and no letting him(them) get away with stealing parts from living townsfolk. Or killing townsfolk for parts, for that matter. There are guards, and as a rule, they should be better armed than the player(s).
The island is a sort of wild jungle, interspersed with odd areas such as an underground glacial cave system and an active volcano smack dab in the middle. Not to mention various robotic cities. Apart from the robotic invaders and the robot inhabitants, there is precious little machinery around, which is kinda odd and would've ticked off any human that something's amiss, but thankfully these here are robots, and don't concern themselves with such trivialties.
The robot, primarily, consists of its chassis, its "self" housed in a hardened tungsten baseball-sized device, its powersource, its sensor package, and its movement-capable devices. In a pinch, the motorics, the sensors, and even the chassis can be sacrificed. The powersource keeps the robot conscious, so without it, it "dies", losing recent memory. If the "self" is destroyed, then it's permanent death.
Upgrading, for the players, can be achieved in different ways. Firstly, there is programming. Engineering is with them from the start, but additional expansion modules must be downloaded from somewhere in order to improve or gain new skills. Usually, this is done via module chips sold in shops. Less commonly, it can be done with a deactivated robot "self", though it requires special hardware.
Secondly, parts. Although you could probably allow players to just weld stuff onto their chassis, I think it'll be better if the players instead attempt to "craft" whole replacement parts out of various things they collect along the way. This way you won't have to think "how much defence would that iron plate on his crotch add?", but would operate in terms of "chassis", "limb", "armor package", etc. Parts can be obtained in shops, or custom crafted by specialists.
The currency of the game is CC, "C2", or "Crystalline Chips". These are tiny blue tetrahedroid microprocessors that can be melded and made to perform tasks of varying complexity. They can be utilized by players directly - any part they craft will cost some CCs, for electronics involved - or they can be traded to shops, since shop owners will use them similarly. There are also rare CCs, called C3, CCCs, or even "Citri". These are "Composite Crystalline Chips", utilizing some unknown method of processing to be roughly a hundred times more efficient than CCs in any electronics they are a part of. Specifically, robot "selves" are made of Citri, encased in tungsten alloy balls.
Both CCs and C3s are, quite impossibly, a purely "natural" occurence, forming in the fruits of some species of bushes and trees. They have a tendency to accumulate inside indigenous lifeforms, so while the robot society cannot efficiently reproduce the process and can't farm the plant species involved due to extremely delicate nature of the plants, the ample wildlife is the most reliable source of CCs everywhere. Yes, this is an excuse to have the players collect "money" from groundhog corpses, but hey, it works!
Aand... did I forget anything important? The system, probably. I don't think it's viable to run this game as an RTD, so a classic RPG approach will probably be best, with ability scores and skill values and such. Probably using the d100 as the main die.
One day, for reasons unknown, every one and thing became epic. Not merely the players, but everybody, has any previous skills they held, or even wanted to hold, become absolutely perfect, and reality itself bends towards plot convenience. Of course, any adversaries the players had made are as badass as can be without being literally impossible as well. The course of the game takes place as the players try to survive the chaos ensuing from the Epic Event, and possibly try to find out what's behind it- or even what happened at all.
A tabletop game merchant is you! The players must deal with mentally unstable competitors, mentally unstable fans, and possibly mentally unstable superiors or even mentally unstable selves in an attempt to stay afloat in the niche gaming market. Players try to sell rulebooks, miniatures, paraphernalia and host tournaments- as well of course, as make up a cool tabletop game.
Death Himself has pressed you into his service. You are either a ghost, having chosen not to go to the world beyond, or a a living person having convinced Death that you are worth sparing- for a time. You are dispatched to times and place where people don't die when they're bloody well supposed to -usually as a result of some sort of magic- and make sure they do their job. Usually simply shooting or stabbing someone is not a valid option, either because they've become immune to it or because it would create too much public attention- like Kennedy's magic bullet or Elvis' mysterious disappearance, which of course were botched jobs. Your first task will probably be to convince someone to part with a philosopher's stone. In the case that there are multiple players, you must compete with eachother to earn Death's favor- is not good to be one he disfavors, as he has a quota to meet...
Wizards (or "Spirit Sorcerers", heh) gain spells-per-day by drinking. Originally concieved as a D&D class, which could cast more spells per day than regular classes at the risk of unwanted effects due to drunkenness. Each level (if the game you're in allows levels) increases the wizard's tolerance to alcohol, and going higher than a certain amount of drinks involves a gamble. Does not have to prepare spells. Alternatively the wizard casts a spell when they have a drink- whether they want to or not.
Successfully used in a roll to dodge game. Players post songs, and the GM derives all player statistics from it. A freeform way to play that doesn't get players bogged down in the numbers and is conducive to characters which aren't min-maxed.
That's right folks, one of you is a traitor- kill him before he kills all of you! The GM sends a private message to the traitor(s) of their status. For bonus fun, make none of the players traitors in a situation where it's clear they have to hunt down the traitor, or all of them traitors where it's not given that there's a traitor after all.
In this situation, players have to make do with items available to their real-life selves.
Instead of outright rolling for actions and outcomes, a pregenerated string of numbers is used, created by, for example, random.org, based on the character's name or some other seed. This changes nothing in the game it is applied to, but adds a different kind of feel - the Dice Gods have no force here, with everything being predetermined from the start of the game.
Go ahead and post your own ideas.
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Topic: UFGI: Unused Forum Game Ideas- Post, Discuss & Use (Read 2690 times)