Generational RP system

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 19, 2012 10:50 pm

Stubbazubba wrote:
Wait. So...no mysteries and no action scenes? What did you intend for your lineages to do in this game? Own hotel chains? Generational Monopoly? Do you want to play the Belmont clan or not?

The Belmont Clan picks a fight with Dracula approximately once every fifty years. In between that time, I actually do imagine them owning hotel chains or something else somewhat interesting, but not so much you'd want to cover it with more than ten or fifteen minutes of gameplay before the next adventurer comes of age and storms Castlevania.

Most of the named characters in a lineage (you're going to need some kind of random name generator to make this work, because you don't care too much about most of them) are basically just pawns or tokens that can be maneuvered and spent during an extended downtime phase to build up the family's prestige, power, or whatever else.

Obviously, this is less necessary for things which only take place across a century or less, when you only have, like, four generations to work with in the first place.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Sat May 19, 2012 10:59 pm

So you want to have some named characters charge into Dracula's castle, and then you want a downtime phase where other named characters play a completely different game for fifteen minutes? Just clarifying so I can jump in with some ideas.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 19, 2012 11:29 pm

Pretty much, yes. You've got the bulk of the family which is basically a supporting cast, there to build up whatever it is the family draws power from during the downtime and then be tragically killed by the villain when the hero's hometown gets destroyed, and the results of that downtime are used to help power up the one adventurer who goes out to fight the villain. And on the other hand, your adventurer is going to bring back wealth/magical tomes/newly conquered lands to the family, thus making them more powerful in turn. So it's actually up to the player to decide which part of the cycle is more important to them, but the adventuring part is certainly a lot longer, so I imagine that's what most of them will care about.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Sun May 20, 2012 5:52 am

Chamomile wrote:Pretty much, yes. You've got the bulk of the family which is basically a supporting cast, there to build up whatever it is the family draws power from during the downtime and then be tragically killed by the villain when the hero's hometown gets destroyed, and the results of that downtime are used to help power up the one adventurer who goes out to fight the villain. And on the other hand, your adventurer is going to bring back wealth/magical tomes/newly conquered lands to the family, thus making them more powerful in turn. So it's actually up to the player to decide which part of the cycle is more important to them, but the adventuring part is certainly a lot longer, so I imagine that's what most of them will care about.

I can also see a system where the build-up phase is more complex and more important; very roughly, hero-heavy lineages might be to build-heavy lineages as Halo might be to Dominions.