I'm thinking of running a short game with a set end point - a game that will actually be finished and not abandoned, if you can imagine such a thing. It'll be the great, the phenomenal, the wonderfully randomized
GALACTIC DEATH RACE, continuing the legacy of various RTDs built around the same premise and heavily inspired by the film Redline. In short:
The players will take the role of racers in the
GALACTIC DEATH RACE, a grand and deadly contest of Man and Machine through space and time, where borderline-suicidal racers face off in largely random-generated vehicles and compete to win glory, immortality and the prize of ten quintillion Space Bucks, or something like that.
The cars will be composed of various components randomized using
Fniff's wonderful generators. You could roll an Engine with [37] Berzerk and [537] Ivory, for example, resulting in an ivory-plated engine housing the spirit of a slain bull elephant, who will occasionally go into a rage and superboost the car's speed for a time. Or maybe your roll for a Weapon and get a [464] Crab, [4] Earth, [227] Sociopath: a flood of ground-scuttling psycho crabs who'll snip-snap another car's wheels to scraps when you launch 'em. Or a Frame of [37] Gas and [566] Decomposition, resulting in, uh, your car actually being built around an organic envelope, the rotting gas-bag of some alien creature. This could mean a lightweight but vulnerable car, or maybe one that can get a last-ditch burst of speed by bursting its own envelope and jetting out gas.
Each part of the track, which goes through mysterious World Gates and so may radically change with every section, is also random-generated, with the effects received determining what it's like. So a [616] Primeval, [61] Sharp and [543] Ice section would see you driving around the feet of mammoths and dodging giant falling ice spikes in the distant and frozen past.
Basically, built around the same idea as my
previous random generation RTD, now with RACING and A DEFINED LENGTH.
Each length of the track is random-generated and has a Difficulty rating, affecting how easy it is to control your vehicle - a straight flat plain is much easier and allows for safer high speeds than a twisting rocky canyon, which in turn pales in comparison to an active warzone or a sudden underwater section full of alien predators. The sections may also have special hazards or environments, such as a constant fall of acidic rain that benefits high-Durability vehicles but may lead to the end for lighter ones. No section is intended to be an instant fail for any car, though. Other sections might have surprise power-ups or repair teams or beneficial terrain, in turn.
Each car has a number of stats determined by the car's components. These are:
-Control: a measure of how manouevrable and easy to drive the car is. Control is also used for dodging attacks. Track Difficulty and your car's Speed modify Control rolls.
-Max Speed: a measure of how fast you can get when you gotta go fast. Higher Speed gets you onwards faster, but penalizes your Control, while slower boosts it - it's easier to drive a car going 60 miles per hour than one going 600 miles per hour, after all. You can usually choose to slow down and go at a lower speed than your Max Speed.
-Durability: how much damage your car can sustain and how easily it comes apart.
-Weapon Systems: how accurate and effective you are with the Weapons you possess.
-Specials: Special stuff your car can do, based on the random-generated traits it gets! Maybe it can fly, bypassing difficult-terrain tracks entirely. Maybe it can self-repair, or summon NPC allies to help you out. Maybe it contains a self-destruct. Maybe it can attach to another car and be dragged happily in their wake. Or maybe it's so hideously ugly all enemies will target it over anything else, or maybe the engine overheats and might blow up, or maybe your weapon systems can't tell friend from foe.
Cars in turn are composed of Components: Frame (the general hull/main bulk/frame of the car), Engine (a steam engine, a jet thruster, a propeller, whatever goes), Wheels (which are not necessarily wheels, but can be tracks, anti-grav generators, hopping legs, what not), and Weapons (where the possibilities are again as endless as my imagination), plus Gimmicks, whatever little bits and special things you want to attach to your vehicle. These determine the stats of your car.
Players will navigate the track, speeding up and slowing down as needed (only losers ever slow down, by the way), choosing their paths, attacking their fellow racers, dying horribly live for the whole galaxy to see, etc etc.
The whole thing would last for, like, ten different track sections, or until everyone was dead.
Probably, before the start of the race, the players would be free to bid on/pick and choose/mess about with Components for their cars from a list of generated ones. I'm not entirely sure yet. Maybe I'll have Sponsors, too, who can throw power boosts or new Components at the racers between rounds, or just sadistically throw new hazards onto the track. I dunno. The basic idea is clear, though!
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Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 744339 times)