So, some rambling musings about Ars Magica as an academic. Wizards in Ars Magica have a big time-management minigame, where they try to set aside seasons for study but keep getting dragged into adventures, or having to teach or do committee work. This has a lot of historical verisimilitude, as late medieval scholars were always trying to set aside more time for scholarship; this continues with teaching loads on academic faculty today. I'm heavily overextended this weekend, myself
.The upshot of this is that (in Ars Magica) you distribute members of your covenant to various missions and then play them out. As individual players, this means if you bring your companion instead of your mage on some particular adventure your mage gets to stay home and read or do experiments or whatever, basically. Like many things in Ars Magica, it's a good idea but falls apart in the execution.
Necromunda has a similar conceit, where members of your gang have to be assigned to various missions; so if you want to buy a plasma pistol someone has to go on the black market and try to get one. This works better in a single player game.
So, I want to play a game where you play as a covenant of mages and their flunkies. You have strategic turns which are basically a worker-management minigame - ideally, workers assigned to missions (some of which spawn a tactical combat ala Final Fantasy Tactics) also engage in some home-base or deployment-specific professional development activity.
So on a typical turn, you might assign your rune-master and your amazon to the black market - this involves a fight, because you are ambushed by thieves, but then you can trade for random items; your pyromancer and your lapidary go knock over a chaos node, which involves a fight but then you get more mana income; your astrologer stays home to improve the library and your alchemist makes bugbears out of pumpkins. On the same turn, the rune-master and amazon can take classes in the city, the pyromancer and lapidary can contemplate chaos, and the astrologer and the alchemist can study the stars or read books. So each worker gets two sources of XP each turn, basically, with varying degrees of flexibility (adventure/combat XP being the most flexible?)
I'm thinking that the strategic turns need some kind of escalation mechanic, where fights get harder and eventually start causing you penalties if you don't confront them. Some of your wizards can have diplomatic skills which enable missions to delay or defuse combat situations, and this should be a desirable mechanic when you have access to it.
If you could set this up multiplayer, you'd have an "explore the netherworld" mission that schedules arena combats with whoever else happens to be logged on at the same time (this was originally a concept I had for a Feng Shui video game.)
