Bay 12 Games Forum

For alot of reasons, I'd like to get in shape. You could say this desire has sprung from wanting to be more appealing to the opposite sex, but there's always been a deep-seated longing in my head to want to look in the mirror and be really proud of my own body instead of being the same old kinda tubby, out-of-shape weak guy; essentially a body chiseled into form from the essence of fatty foods, a sedentary lifestyle, and a lifetime of apathy.

However, my quest to better myself has begun!

I've been sporadically doing pushups and situps for awhile now, but while anaerobic exercise is nice, to obtain what I'm seeking I must delve into the world of aerobic exercise, and so I jogged a bit today. I really need to get some shoes made for this stuff, since all my shoes are either old and beaten, or intended to look professional. I did get a good sweat on, and I felt good about it afterwards.

However, I also went swimming today, for about an hour and a half or two hours. That was really exhausting after awhile, I didn't even realize how tired I was getting until I could barely lug myself out of the pool. I think that if I keep that up every day in the summer, since I have access to a large community pool for free, maybe I'll see some results? I'm hoping so.

While swimming around, I remembered something, a dream of mine; a bold, daring, romantic dream that I had forgotten about for years, but it came rushing back to me in my fatigue, my dream to have washboard abs one day. That's a long ways off still, but hopefully one day I'll be able to feel my stomach and not have a hand full of fat.

I'm not precisely comfortable placing my body on display for a progress photo, I've a hairy body, and my camera and lighting is poor so every picture just seems much more unsightly than usual. I'll need to remedy this somehow.

I've also the feeling that I'll need to curb my diet as well, since I feel that alot of my work today was offset by the pizza and ice cream dinner to celebrate my Cousin's birthday, coincidentally also today.

Oh well, onward in the Quest to Fitness!

Assassin Roguelike

SO I just had this awesome idea, bear with me while I straighten my thoughts out, I want to put this onto paper before it shrivels up and dies:

The goal of Assassin Roguelike is simple: Become the best assassin you can be. Earn as much money as you can, for as long as you can, while remaining undetected by society at large until some arbitrary amount of cash is attained or some other tangible goal is achieved, or you get killed or become permanently incarcerated.

Now, this isn't the run and gun type of assassin like you might see in an action movie or in the Hitman videogames, what I'm imagining is you having to personally carry out every single action that an actual assassin would have to do, from getting into contact with clients through any number of methods, researching your hit, planning the method of kill, executing the kill, extracting yourself to avoid capture, taking care to leave no evidence that can be traced back to you (as the crime scene WILL be combed by police after you leave), getting paid, and then repeating the process but gradually taking better paying and more difficult hits as your reputation spreads through rumor in the underworld of criminals that might want your services.

When not doing Hits or other contracts, you can do other things like explore your randomly generated city on foot or car, maintain your hideout or secondary hideouts, buy supplies at stores, speak with locals to become familiar with how to fit in and important things that are going on, speak with felons or members of criminal organizations that you become familiar with while taking contracts, try to recruit partners in crime to help with a particular hit, purchase weapons from licensed gun stores or from black market dealers, or maybe just covertly kill people just for the fun of it.

Your character isn't intended to be a powerhouse, quite the opposite actually. He'll go down as easily as anyone of the people you take down, which is very easily. Just avoiding direct combat isn't enough, you also need to avoid having your identity figured out or leave incriminating/identifying evidence, because even if you escape from a gunfight, it doesn't do any good if the police figure out who you are and come knocking on your door, and you can't walk around in public anymore. In which case, you either need to have a secret hideout prepared to stay in until your face falls out of the public eye (though the cops will always be wary of your identity if they're chasing you for murder), only do hits at night and only with assistance moving yourself around, or just skip town and move to another town or city where police won't think of looking for you, or even better, to another country where police can't look you up either, granted that it also sets you back at square one for accumulating helpful friends and hideouts, and swag.

For this reason, it is essential that to become good at the game, you always blend into society, carefully plan every move, have an escape and backup escape plan, research your target carefully, and choose a method of execution that'll be easy and leave as few pieces of evidence to identify you as possible, if any.

How I imagine the game looking is in traditional ASCII style, ala Nethack or games like that. In this way the game can be detail oriented and precision movement and actions. I'm thinking the game would be Turn-based, since that allows for strategic thinking. Being a roguelike, I would also think it'd be best to have the one-life and your save is deleted when you lose style of gameplay, something I've always appreciated.

Now, you're definitely not alone in this game, you have the many ordinary NPC civilians that would probably have randomly generated names and personalities attached to give the game a bit more character and atmosphere, and any you interact with might be saved so you can build civilian friends that are unsuspecting of your actual profession. Maybe it'd even be prudent to build friendships so you can hide out in their homes for a bit should you ever need to dive into a place.

There'd also be police officers, politicians, criminals, homeless, store owners and employees, you know, not everyone you could possibly think of but would be relevant to your Game Character and to you the player.

Now, the way I imagine it, there'd be something of a dynamic conversation system, but the only way I could think of it being meaningful is if it was context sensitive, based on what you happened to be carrying, what you're dressed as, what situation you happened to be in, and to whom you're talking to, you'd be presented with a few dialogue choices to give in response if anyone speaks to you, and some things to say to spark conversation if you want to talk to someone.

Now, when I say context sensitive, I want to further elaborate in that you might be given some generic things to say when starting a conversation, like introducing yourself with a real or fake name, asking who they are, what they're doing, maybe giving them compliments or a generic small talk option to increase friendship with that person, and maybe just simple questions to where to “Location name” or what do you think of “person name” and they'd give you an answer. However, when they spark the conversation they may be asking you a question, and you'd be given the options to speak the truth, tell the most convincing lie or one of a range of lies you can tell (context sensitive in how you're dressed, where you are, etc; so it can range from playing dumb to pretending to be an employee, etc), or you can try to change the subject, or if you want to be a showoff, you can oust yourself right before executing your target.

Now I've said a whole lot on the subject of identifying or incriminating evidence, and why it's not a good idea to be leaving it around, but what qualifies as evidence and how to not leave it? Now, when you commit a serious crime, such as murder or attempted murder, and you escape the scene, the police will comb and plumb and examine everything. They'll find where you shot from if you used a gun from bullet hole trajectory triangulation science, what weapon you used, will get records of stores that sold that might have sold that weapon recently, they'll find the fingerprints of anything you've touched barehanded (and haven't wiped them off), they'll find blood if something caused you injury, they'll take note of footprints left in blood you've stepped in, surveillance camera footage will be collected, and most importantly eye witnesses you leave alive will be able to give testimony and a description of you or your getaway vehicle/license plate. It'd be cool if it even went as far as say, if you used the same knife for every Hit, and if you didn't clean it between Hits, you'd leave the residue of previous victims on the bodies of the new ones.

What I'd really like is the ability to dress the scene of the crime up as an accident, or going to elaborate measures to dispose of the body or engineering circumstances where the death just isn't investigated for long periods of time, or even planting evidence that incriminates other people. Like, say, taking something from one of your civilian 'friends' house that has their fingerprints on it and planting it at the crime scene.

I've talked a whole lot about being an assassin, yet almost nothing about actual assassination! I'd like to keep the game as open and unconstraining as possible to give the player a lot of options. Though you might be limited in choices depending on how your Hit protects himself in his day to day life, and your money to buy more elaborate weapons, and you're patience as a player. I think that being an arsonist that sets the Hit's home on fire in the night is a perfectly legitimate way of going about things. If you want to buy a sniper rifle with your hard-earned assassination money, memorize your Mark's path to work every morning, camp at the top of a building and take him out just as he stops at an intersection, that should also be open to players.

To make things more interesting, I think that when you're contracted for a Hit, and because hits are procedurally generated as well, the contractor might request that the Mark be killed in a certain way in return for a significant boost in your reward. This would require you to think creatively, learn more about the limitations of the game and your character, and think on the fly. For example, say a client wants you to eliminate the mark through strangulation, this would requires that you get close to your Mark, eliminate them in this fashion, and then get out. Suppose you follow the Mark, and then find they own a business, and you dress up as an employee to infiltrate it, and then trap him in his office. Maybe even lock the Office door behind you so you have a few hour headstart before anyone questions why he hasn't come out in a while.

That's just an example, there could be any number of things could do. Maybe if you even become part of criminal Family, they'd be happy to provide you with false Alibi's should suspicion ever fall onto you.

It should be mentioned that you don't get infinite tries at a Mark, should a hit on them fail, they'll flee town or go into hiding, and your contract with the client is canceled unless you can find them before some arbitrary time limit, be that through some paper trail you'd have to uncover or stealing files from a government agency or police department.

Performing hits very well though will attract the attention of people hearing rumors of your prowess, and will approach you with increasingly lucrative and increasingly difficult jobs. These scale up from purely domestic contracts, to business owners, local politicians or prominent activists for thousands of dollars, and then the game would transition to other locales as you're contacted to perform Hits on prominent figures in the criminal underworld for hundreds of thousands bordering on millions of dollars, and then to other countries to perform hits on national figures for tens of millions of dollars.

I've also mentioned doing research on your Mark before following through with any plan. Given a car, you can tail them, stake out their home or workplace for information, or given the proper tools, break into their home for documents related to their life, or to set up a trap for them when they return. It might also be cool to dig up information you can use to extort and blackmail the person for additional cash, but that might be detracting from the main focus of being an assassin.

I'm thinking that there'd be a day and night system, with so much time passing for every turn in the game, with everything and everyone focusing on a schedule that's adhered to and you need to become acquainted with it to have an idea of where Marks and other NPC's will be at at certain times of day. When by yourself, it'd also be fair to have a Wait command you can use to pass either large stretches of time until you're interrupted or for until a set amount of time has passed.

I don't think there'd be any RPG elements, so your character starts out as good as he'll ever get, though maybe he'll earn distinguishing scars from conflicts maybe. The meter of tangible success would be your bankroll.

Speaking of money, I haven't talked about items yet. I'm imagining your character has a very small inventory, only being the pockets of whatever clothing he is wearing at the moment, and his hands to carry stuff in. Naturally this doesn’t lend itself well to stealth or being prepared, and you aren't going to last very long if every NPC happens to notice you carrying a machete around. This makes carrying a bag or case of some kind around invaluable. A duffel bag can carry a number of supplies, can look inconspicuous being carried around, and can be thrown to inaccessible places for later retrieval. Sniper Rifles and other guns could also come with specialized suitcases just for that gun. The disadvantages to having a case or bag, is that it adds another distinguishing feature to your character that can lead to his identification, and they can be cumbersome.

I'm not sure if it would be prudent to require eating and drinking, but I'm tempted to force the player to go out and make cash if only to eat, and to punish him if he needs to go into hiding for a long time, and his hideout isn't properly equipped with foods to keep him sustained for that time. If there would be, it'd be a very slow draining type of nourishment meter. PLUS, it would add another element of evidence that could be left on the crime scene, say if you hid in your Mark's home for several hours, and drank out of his milk jug to replenish some nourishment and then, OH HEY the cops found some saliva on the rim of the jug! ... something like that.

Now I'm rambling, but let me give an idea of what I think the beginning of the game would be like:

You're just an ordinary guy, down on his luck in this terrible economy.  You don't have a job or girlfriend, and you're just scraping by in your crappy apartment. You go to your favorite sleazy bar to drink your worries away. You take a seat at one of the tables, and just start to relaxes when a feverish looking woman walks in. She stands around for a bit looking around nervously, and then notices you. She comes over and sits opposite to you.

“Are you the guy?”
“...What guy?”
“The guy Roberto said would be here.”
“... Sure, that's me. What do ya need?” You had no idea who this Roberto fella is, but you could yank this lady's chain for a bit. Just for laughs.
She fumbles a picture from her purse, and hands it to you. “This is my ex-boyfriend...”
You stare at it for a moment, just wondering why she sowed you something like this
“And I want you to kill him.”
You restrain your surprise, it took you a second, but you've wrapped your head around the situation. She speaks up again as you take another sip from your beer looking at the picture.
“I can give you 3,000 right now... it's usually half first right? I've never had to do this before and... he just forced me to do this, I don't have any choice. He's backed me into a corner and...”
“Lady,” she stops herself, “You don't need to explain yourself to me.” She quiets up.
You took a long look at the picture, thinking about it. This is a bizarre opportunity, and where an ordinary person might feel repulsed or disgusted at the thought, you feel only indifference, so hey why not?
“Yeah lady, that'll do. Give me the rest of the info.” She looks really relieved, and tells you where he lives and works. “Just give me a couple weeks.” she hands you the three grand, and you finish your beer as she walks out looking like a big burden has been lifted off of her.

It would seem that today is your first day as a hitman, how do you intend to go about it?

Of course, this is just another of my ideas. No real initiative to act on it's creation besides just devoting it to writing so it doesn't feel like a wasted thought.

As some of you might know, I really like this like shows and stories about high stakes gambles, but the games they play are never traditional ones, they're always interesting twists to make things more exciting, so I wanted to think of some myself. These are shows like Liar Game, Kaiji, Akagi, and the like.

I particularly like the idea of taking an old idea and adding a fun spin to it, but my favorite spin is adding a psychological or strategic aspect to things.

Just some of my ideas:

Symmetrical Strategy War

Basically, it's War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_%28card_game%29

but there are a few changes:

1. The deck of cards is divided evenly in half, with each player getting two of each value card. Two aces, two kings, two queens, etc. This is the Symmetric part of the name.
2. Those cards are in that player's hand, and instead of being dealt randomly, they choose which one to reveal for each 'battle'.
3. Cards don't return to the winner's hand. They're placed into a discard pile exclusive to each player.
4. The winning player is the one with the most cards in their discard pile at the end of the game.

These changes serve a purpose. #1 ensures that each player is on equal footing at the start of the game. #2 adds the strategy and need to guess what your opponent is going to play, and also what you should conserve. Similar to the variant listed in the Wiki article. #3 ensures that the game is brought to it's natural conclusion within a short time frame.

Naturally, to make it a bit more exciting a bet could be placed before the game starts and the winner gets the bet at the end. Or more interestingly, that each card is worth a certain amount and the loser pays the winner an amount equal to the difference between the size of his discard pile and the other player's.

So for example: if each card were $1, and you lost, and you had 12 cards in your discard pile, and the winner has the other 40, you'd pay $28.

Another method of betting I thought of would go like this:

Each player chooses and places their card for the battle face down, then before the cards are revealed, a player (the player to bet first would be decided by a dealer chip that's passed back and forth) can place a bet or check, then the opposite player can match the bet/check, raise, or fold and allow the other player a no-contest victory for that battle. In a fold, the cards are flipped to reveal what each player had put down before going to the winner's discard pile. This would add another layer of bluffing and psychology to the game, that I feel would enrich it.

Another idea:

Discard Hold'em

I'm sure everyone is familiar with Texas Hold'em. Well, given the multicultural presence on these forums, that may be an exaggeration, but it's a simple enough game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_holdem

Like in ordinary hold'em each player is dealt two cards, and then there's a round of betting.

Here's the few critical changes:

Instead of cards being dealt out of the deck randomly to make up the Flop, Turn, and River, starting with the dealer, a player draws a card into his or her hand and then chooses a card to discard out of their hand. That card makes up the first community card.

Then there's a round of betting, and the next player to the dealer's left repeats this process, and this process goes around the table until all five cards of the community are made up. Then there's a final round of betting before the showdown.

Rather than being a game of luck with all the skill being placed into bluffing and betting strategy, there's another layer of strategy to make the community cards favor your hand, alter your hand to better fit into the community, and to read your opponents so you're not playing into their hands.

10 Step Landmine Hold'em

This one is inspired by a recent game in the latest Kaiji chapters, but whereas Kaiji is playing Mahjong, we're playing a game similar to Texas hold'em.

I'd like to offer a great deal of critical changes that alter how the game is played.

The game is played much like Discard Hold'em, with each player being dealt two cards, and then drawing and discarding to make up the community cards.

Unlike in normal Hold'em, where you can use five community cards to make your hand, you can only use the last three discarded cards, and the hand can continue until there are 10 cards on the table, but the hand can end when there are only 3.

Starting at the third discard, when a player discards, any OTHER player may declare “Stop” or to be particularly flavorful, “Boom!” and then each player reveals their hand, and the best hand wins.

While I wish I had enough friends to act as players to give it a trial run, just to experiment, how I imagine it is that it becomes a lot more tense, with players trying to avoid dealing into eachother's hand, while also trying to coax them into dealing into their own and end the hand then and there, or even better, deliberately dealing into another player's hand to coax them into ending the hand when in-fact you've dealt into your own hand for the win.

Betting also becomes different, since slow playing with a good hand becomes hard to do in this variant, since the community cards are always changing, and there can be many or very few rounds of betting. Just the meta changes, not the actual act of betting.

I'm currently toying around with a variant of 7 Card Stud in my head.

As you can plainly see, I'm terrible with names. Can't think of a good name to save my life.

SO I was thinking the other day, a small thought, about the typical Final Fantasy-esque airship. I rebuilt it in my head, what I'd ideally like it to look like. Then thought about what sort of world would it would exist in, then the types of characters that would pilot it and how they got about to acquiring it. Before I realized it, I had accidentally built an entire game story and world in my head, from start to nearly finish, and I thought I'd share it with everyone. It kind of takes generic concepts, and mixes them together in interesting ways:

---

In the far future, a world of technology and magic blossoms before intergalactic war breaks loose.


Just to preempt people, this is just the most bare outline for the story. There's obviously alot of gaps to be filled, and alot of places where more detail can be added. I wrote all this up in a single day, which I'm proud of, since it's been awhile since I've done something like this. I'll definitely expand on this, I like this idea just too much.

How many really obvious references can you spot?

So it's no exaggeration that I'm pretty sour about being jobless and living with my Mom.

And it's not like I haven't been looking, but online job searching sites have proven very unfruitful, especially since I live in a terrible area for jobs in general. You can imagine how ecstatic I was when I actually got a call for an interview.

It was for a Bankers Life and Casualty Insurance company, and I did find that unusual since I never applied there. From the call and email I received, it's for an informational meeting, not an actual interview, for something or other. Curious, I type in the name of the company, and google is more than happy to fill in 'is a scam' at the end of the company's name. Exploring these avenues, it would seem that an awful lot of people are pretty unhappy with Bankers Life, and I'm not entirely sure I should entertain the idea of going there, despite my sad situation.

I certainly don't want to be the naive fool, but I'm eager to get out of my sorry lot in life.

So I had an unusual thought while playing Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale...

Actually, hold up, let me set the mood for you. Recettear is a game where you play as a little girl named Recette, who wakes up one day to find that she's inherited a rather hefty debt from her single dad that went off adventuring and has never returned. If she can't pay back the loan (which curiously, the principle is kept a secret from Recette, and there doesn't seem to be any interest or negotiations in the matter) then her home will be foreclosed on and she'll become a homeless little girl. She's given an option though, which is not really an option, which is to transform her home into an item shop and sell things in order to make enough money to pay back the entire loan in, get this, one month. Then, taking the role of Recette, you make it your job to catapult yourself from bootstrap bread merchant to gold mongering baroness in the span of a month, or be jettisoned into homelessness by the only person in the whole world you can call your friend. I played this game, and actually beat it in my first try without guides, and I have to say that I thoroughly consider it worth the 20$ I spent on it. After entering endless mode, the portion of the game where you may continue building your shop and enjoy the non-mogul portions of the game, which includes a rather simplistic dungeoneering part, which is actually required that you try out as part of the tutorial. It was disappointing though, as I quickly found out that the dungeon aspect of the game is LAUGHABLE in terms of how much money one can make doing it. To beat the game, to conquer the debt laid onto you by your deadbeat dad, you need to focus on your shop 100% of the time or perish in poverty, so there's just no room for adventure.

Enjoying this facet of the game, I allow myself to fall into the den of depravity that is GameFAQ's, and I lap up all the post-game content as fast as I can. I find the most odd, peculiar thing though, while experiencing the game and reading about the background mechanics of the game, and it's that the game PUNISHES you for being greedy! I just can't get that! The game where the motto is "Capitalism Ho!"... it completely disincentivizes you from sticking your hand into the honey pot, and grabbing as much as humanly possible, at the expense of literally everything else... which, I think, was the point of the game, but it would seem that that's not the case.

Allow me to dispense some examples: Early on, the game's tutorial advises you to try to ratchet up the price of items as high as humanly possible to maximize profits. I get this, and it makes me happy. What I don't get is that in the guides I've read, this is actually counter-intuitive. Each of your customers start with a bank roll that starts out small, and gets bigger as you get them "hearts" which is something that you achieve by selling or buying items at the perfect price percentage for that customer. Usually, this perfect price is much lower than the money-hungry pricing that you're advised to do. And you see, Until they have more hearts, they can't buy the more expensive items, and eventually you're drowned in your debt as a result.

Apparently, I got really lucky with the boons and price increases, as well as with Alloutte and Prime, who both start with enormous bankrolls, and I was able to beat the game thanks to whoring all those factors out to their fullest potential.

Another example: In the same vein as the hearts, is the merchant level system. You see, whenever you make a successful sale, or buy something off a customer, you get merchant XP, and with enough Merchant XP, you get Merchant Levels, this is rudimentary stuff. Merchant levels are extremely important, because if you don't get a high merchant as you play the game, then you don't get access to the more expensive items with a higher profit margin, and thus you drown in your debt. What the game flatout never tells you though, is the best way to go about acquiring Merch XP. You see, you're encouraged to haggle with the customer early on, to wring them for as much money as you humanly can, but once again, this is counter-intuitive. You see, one of the best ways to gain experience is through "Pix bonus" which is where you sell something close to it's base price, alot lower than you can get by haggling to get every cent you can out of every customer. Then there's the very significant "Just Combo" which is where for each time you manage to buy or sell something on the first attempt, the amount of experience you get for each successive customer interaction in this manner grows exponentially, capping at 128 XP. So if you charge low, and buy high, you can reap the bountiful XP rewards from your customers, and ultimately, the most profit in the long run. In this way, you're punished for being greedy, while rewarded for being the Nice Guy Businessman...

and again, I seem to have inadvertently found the right mixture of nice guy, and exploitative bastard to let me beat the game on my first try. It was really completely due to luck that I was successful, since I had no idea how the XP system worked until I looked it up after beating the game.

But let me get into the design of the game that irks me the most: the dungeon system. I've mentioned before that the profit you make from being a dungeon crawler is pitiful, so pitiful that you can't even acknowledge it during the main game, relinquishing it to the post-game where you will have both the excessive amount of time, and the incredulous amount of money to fund your expeditions. This is really saddening, since I'd like to pay off my ginormous debt by throwing myself face first into terrible danger, killing all the foul creatures I come across, and carrying the massive amount of treasure I find back up to the surface to crush my creditors with.

It's just not feasible though, the profit is just too pitiful. In the early game, you might find a weapon or something that is above your merchant level, and can thus be sold for more money than anything else you have available to you, but you will quickly find that the reward for your spelunking to be measly compared to just merchanting full time. This is thanks to quite a lot of factors that are inherently problematic with dungeoneering.

The first and foremost, is that adventuring is costly, both in the sense of the amount of capital in weapons, armor, and food that you need to send down with your adventurer in order to ensure their safety and success, but it's costly in a currency much more valuable than the game gives credit: Time. The game postulates that adventuring takes 2 units of time, of which there are 4 units of time in a game day. This is a lie. Adventuring takes 3 units of time, evidenced by the fact that you can only adventure once a day, and even then only in the morning or noon, and at the end of your adventuring, there is literally no more time to do anything else. This is crippling to adventuring's prospects to be used in any practical fashion, since it consumes the entire day, and removes all but one unit of time that you can use to merchant. When the game puts you on the clock to pay back Recette's unreasonable debt, you find that time is more important than... well, pretty much anything else really, because you need time to sell things, make money, visit stores and replenish your inventory, and grow your business. If I could shell out 10,000 or 20,000 moneys a day to put Recette on a caffeine drip, and keep her awake for just a little bit longer to keep her store open for just that much longer, you'd be damned sure I'd do it. That's how valuable time is, and adventuring squanders it like nothing.

The next, and I can't repeat this enough, is that the rewards are just too pathetic for the amazing amount of capital and time invested, and the risk of your adventurer dying (and thus losing all but 1 or 2 items) is always there, looming over your head as you pick up nigh-worthless item after nigh-worthless item. As I said, you'll occasionally hit upon something that is actually quite valuable, but just merchanting and raising your Merchant Level is a far more profitable and useful method of getting access to better equipments and items. These valuable items you hit upon though, you find that they don't scale right for the difficult of dungeon you find them in. After I beat the game and could devote 100% of each game day to adventuring, early on I found that I was coasting through the early dungeons as I could afford to just send him flying through them with literally the best equipment that money can buy. I discovered though, that with the amount of time I was putting in, the rewards for the sections of game that I'd have access to them was, as I said, nil in comparison to the amount of money I'd be needing to pay back. It was only on the second to last dungeon did I start to find items that were actually worth my time to wrestle out of the treacherous, randomly generated hellscape, and even then they were few and far between. Even in the last dungeon, 3 months of game time into the post-game, I'm hardpressed to find anything that would have helped me in the last two weeks of the first month, which is where paying back the debt was most relevant. You can't even find actual money in dungeons, only items with which to sell, and that's just too disappointing.

Thirdly, the dungeoneering, the most foolishly risky venture that you can take in the game, disincentivizes risk-taking. It does this in two ways: very limited inventory space, and frequent exits. Adventuring is very simple business: Go down into dungeon, kill monsters, reap whatever rewards you can extract from chests and corpses, then get out while the getting's good. You only have 20 spaces (later, 25, then 30) of inventory space to make your claim on the monster filled holes in the ground, and you're advised to get out get out getoutgetoutgetout while the gettings good, with an exit that's made available to you every five floors. And trust me when I say that five floors is enough to fill your entire inventory. Unfortunately, it's only filled with junk most likely, since 95% of all items you find will be some useless, inexpensive weapon or armor, food item (which helps your adventurer, but not your bankroll), and "Ingredient" items, which are used for a game mechanic referred to as 'Fusion', which I'll get to later. The remaining 5% is actually valuable items that can be sold for a profit. It's more than possible to rush through dozens of floors at a time, aiming for only that 5% to make a profit, but once again, even the most valuable items are not that valuble, and you're just wasting your time in the long run, and once again, you're destined to falter and fail if you try to adventure your way out of your extravagant debt.

And all this is a shame, because for something that boils down to simple dungeon-crawling, it's actually pretty fun. There's a plethora of characters to use, each with their own special quirks and abilities, and the dungeons themselves make themselves interesting with randomly given statistical buff and debuffs to your characters or the dungeon monsters, or even to the dungeon itself. Each floor is it's own gamble in that way. Each five floors, before you're allowed to leave, there's a guaranteed boss fight or 'gauntlet', and gauntlets are SO FUN! What they are, basically, is just a normal floor, except instead of randomly spawned creatures, it's jam packed to the brim with predetermined creatures, and instead of having to find an exit, you have to kill them all to progress. If there were a mode to just face 50 gauntlet stages back-to-back, I'd definitely do it. But I digress...

For a moment, I'd like to talk about the Fusion mechanic. When thinking about what to say about it, my first thought was to type "Man, fuck fusion. Fuck fusion. Fuck fusion. FUCK fusion!", and while that sums up my opinion pretty succinctly, I think I should go into a little bit more detail. Fusion is where you take your ingredient items, and maybe some other items, and combine them to make new items. This sounds innocent enough, but the reality of the situation is that the fusion mechanic is designed from the ground up, not to help you make useful items, but to suck weeks from the lives of hardcore completionists as they grindgrindgrind to get the rare ingredients that practically every recipe calls for. From what I can tell, there are five ranks of fusion items, and I'm on the last dungeon in the game, and I'm struggling to make rank 2 items, despite hauling as many ingredient items as I can back to town in every expedition. Even making simple stuff requires ALOT of things!

What I'm trying to get at, is the dungeon system's last flaw. You can only get ingredients from killing monsters in the dungeon. It's the only way. I don't know what it is about making dungeon crawlers, but game designers seem almost instinctively compelled to make them boring grindfests in one way or another. The very fact that my adventurer is a nigh-invincible, armed-to-the-teeth god-killing lunatic, and he still has to waste his effort on collecting 'fur balls' from killing the bunny monsters, that can't even hurt him, is a disgrace, both to him and to the player personally. There's so many benign and mundane things that shouldn't even be a concern, but stand in the way of the game's last challenge, conquering the fusion mechanic, and that brings down the fun factor significantly once you become acutely aware of this like I have. Combined with a very limited inventory, requiring many individual expeditions hauling ingredients back to town, then waiting an entire game day before you can go back to the dungeon to repeat the process, and I'm sure you can tear your hair out in frustration just imagining it.

Really, the game had the opportunity to take man's most decadent sin, greed, and ratchet it up to 11, but it just didn't. Why? Maybe the designer just didn't want to invest that much effort in what amounts to a secondary portion of the game? Maybe he just didn't have the insight to hammer out it's problems? Maybe he honestly finds crushing repetition to be the best thing since sliced bread... but for whatever reason, the dungeoning mechanic could use some features to make it more profitable in game terms, and profitable in the amount of fun it gives to the player for time invested. I would like to personally put my ideas for these features.

Now, to sum up my ideas, it boils down to adding 2 things to the game:

1. To incentivize the player to stay in the dungeon longer.
2. To reward the player for taking risks, with larger risks paying more.

I'd like to take a moment to allude to DoomRL (Doom Roguelike) and how it handles risks/reward. The entire game is a dungeon, basically, but optionally there are secondary floors you can visit. These floors are usually much more dangerous than what the normal game has to offer, but completing them will reward the player guaranteed benefits to their character. Then there's the game 'Binding of Isaac' which also takes place exclusively in a dungeon, and while I could lampoon the game all day for it's shameless lack of sanity checking, it offers alot of choices to the player, mainly in the form of standardized risk-taking with the slots and cup games, but also with more visceral risks in the form of it's own guantlet levels, which you may just to claim a prize sitting out in the open, but doing so triggers three waves of enemies to attack you.

These are inspirational points, as the dungeons in Recettear already have alot of mechanics to put the pressure on the player, and reward him accordingly, it just needs a few more to fully take advantage of them. What I have in mind is the addition of 'Dungeon Credits', a Dungeon Businessman, and a magical Joker character. Also, changing it so the player is more aware of the Will-o-wisp clock and it's subsequent tightening to be less forgiving, but also to make it possible to interact with it. I'll get more indepth on that later. Also, a revamp of the combo system, to make it more rewarding for the player to indulge in it. I'll also get into that later.

Now, what do I mean by Dungeon Credits? It would be it's own currency, except can only be found and used in the dungeon you're in... Now, I'm already sick of typing the word 'dungeon', so I'll just refer to them as DC's. You will start every expedition with zero DC's, and when you stop the day's adventuring, all DC's you've accumulated in the Dungeon is converted into the game's money (pix) automatically, let's say, at a one to one ratio. This is to prevent the player from hoarding them over the course of many expeditions, and allow them to profit from their journeys, but also to give the impression that each adventure is it's own clean slate. Now, how does one acquire them and what are they used for?

Simply put, DC's can be acquired by killing monsters. Creatures already explode into a treasure trove of jewels upon death, albeit only for the benefit of giving your adventurer EXP, I don't think it's that large a stretch to also have them explode into a few things that look like poker chips, representing the DC's you're getting for killing that creature. Also, you can get DC's by dealing with the Businessman, an indestructible NPC That would appear in the Dungeon either at random or preset intervals.

It's simple, you deal with him, and you can sell anything you find to him for one half of it's base value, in credits. Why? Just to make carrying your own valuable things into the dungeon to sell not profitable. This would serve as a way to loosen up space in your inventory, squeeze some usefulness out of the many useless useless things that you'd ordinarily drop on the ground to make room for better things. Also, for a small fee, he'll teleport items out of your dungeon inventory to your store inventory, giving you both space in your inventory to adventure for longer, and relief to know that your items are safe. This would incentivize you to adventure longer and seek to make more progress in a single sitting.

Also, just because getting alot of ingredients and rarer treasures is a pain in the ass, he could sell them to you for so many DC's, and bam, they're yours. No need to spend hours upon hours grinding for them.

Next, one thing that would make the game better is the addition of the joker NPC I have in mind. Basically, he's the one you'd speak to for accepting large amounts of risk for large amounts of reward. What I have in mind is that you would find him, or he'd approach you randomly, and offer some deal.

"100,000 DC's say you can't beat these monsters I have... Yes or no?"
"Think you're tough? How do five Guantlet levels in a row sound? How about for these fabulous items I have *show items*... Yes or no?"
"I'll throw down 50,000 DC's right now, but the stats of every monster on this level are tripled. Yes or no?"
"Good job beating that boss! How about double/triple/quadruple/etc or nothing? Multiply the boss, multiply the reward! Yes or no?"

And it'd be fun if you could approach him for things. Like say if you could pay him such-and-such amount he'll randomize the level effects (so if you don't like that all monsters have double defense for the round, you can spin the wheel and hopefully get something better, like double attack power for you!). I think it'd also be pretty alright if he had more traditional games you could participate in, like Shell game, high/low, slots, the dice game from spelunky, just things that have very simple rules, and can be played without having to leave adventurer-perspective. Of course, DC's are the only currency he accepts. The joker's purpose is to give the player further incentive to traverse the dungeon, in the hopes of finding him and hitting upon some massively profitable deal, and it adds an additional layer of thrill and excitement to the experience.

Now, I mentioned earlier about tightening and flushing out the 'will-o-wisp' timer. You see, in the game, if you spend too much time on any one level of a dungeon, terrifying balls of hate and fire start appearing all over the place. They deal tremendous damage and never stop spawning all over, though they'll never appear on a boss stage or a gauntlet level. In a way, they're like the ghost from Spelunky, and that's a good thing. Thing is, it's a crapshoot to figure how much time you have before they start appearing, but in all but a few cases, it's a such a long time before they appear that you might as well have all the time in the world. It'd be a good idea, I think, to actually let the player KNOW how much time they have, in the form of a literal timer present somewhere on the screen at all times. This would give the player a good reason to hurry, as they see the clock ticking down. This adds an additional layer of excitement. To compound that though, I'd like it if the amount of time given to the player were decreased significant, so that threat of the wisps is always there. The sense of danger is intoxicating.

What I'd want, ideally though, is to have the time on the clock to act as it's own currency. You could strike deals with the joker, and interact with the clock in special ways.

"I'll give you 100,000 DC's for one half of your clock... yes or no?"
"If you pay me 50,000 DC's your clock won't tick down for this level... yes or no?"
"I see your clock is almost run out! If you pay me 200,000 DC's though, I'll give you one minute. Yes or no?"

and maybe the businessman can get in a little bit of that action too, although maybe at a reduced rate since he's more shrewd and reasonable.

"Hmm, I'll give you 250 DC's for every second of your clock that you're willing to sell me. How many would you like to sell?"

And I like to think that the rates for both would fluctuate depending on which dungeon you're in and which floor you're on, so the buying and selling of time would be either much more profitable in later dungeons, corresponding to where the phase of the game that you're in demands that you make more money quickly.

Other than that, I'm undecided on what other changes to make to make to the clock. In my head, I played around with the benefits of giving the player bonus DC's for extra time left on the clock when they leave the dungeon, but that incentivizes rushing through the floors, which I don't think is something that'd be worthwhile. I also toyed around with the idea of a 'static' clock, or a clock that doesn't reset on every floor, but receives a time bonus at the start of each floor, and while I think that would add another layer of strategy and thrill to the game, it might be excessively punishing to the player that just wants to be thorough.

Of course, the number of DC's you have, and the amount of time on your clock, is rendered moot if you happen to die in the dungeon, where then you'll only have your adventurer's unconscious body, one or two items, and your personal shame to carry back to the surface. It's what I'm talking about when I say I want the game to exemplify the mortal sin known as greed. Enticing the player into throwing away their own safety, to ignore common sense, to risk everything for the sake of incredible profit, and to climb out of the outrageous debt you've been placed in. That's the feeling I want the game to impart onto me and others, the feeling of desperation that is to be placed into a terrible situation, and to know that the only way to get out is to be willing to resort to the most extreme echelons of personal risk to dig yourself out. It becomes a humbling and insightful experience to the people that fail, while enlivening and euphoric to the people that succeed.

Now I mentioned earlier about 'revamping' the combo system. This is hardly a necessary change, but I would personally find it alot more fun. The way it stands, and it actually took me awhile to find out how this worked since it's so non-intuitive, was that you got so much bonus EXP for your adventurer for every successive kill of the same creature. I just don't think that's particularly rewarding of player skill, since it's completely up to the Random Number God whether or not multiples of a creature spawn in the same place, and it's just a pain to ignore different types of creatures as you look for the ones that will increase your combo score. Really, the best strategy is to ignore combos altogether and just kill everything you run across willy-nilly, which is a shame since that just makes it a throwaway mechanic, and there's no reason for that.

An improvement would be the far simpler, more intuitive, and personally rewarding system of "number of kills in a row without getting hit". It's not that hard, and it's a pet peeve of mine when something so simple and effective is ignored for an inferior system.

I have no idea what came over me to write this massive thing, I was just playing the game, and then decided to exit out, and then I sit down and write for maybe 10 hours, this giant post.

Magic the Gathering, as everyone probably knows, is a Trading Card Game that's been somewhat relevant for the last 20 years or so. The last MtG Thread kind of died, and so I thought I'd make a new one, give a fresh start to it so that people can talk about it.

I'll copy my post in the happy thread to start:

I'm happy about the number of cool new cards coming up in the latest MtG set, Innistrad. The theme for this set is Gothic Horror, and while I really hate the newest gimmick they have going on, DFC's (Double-faced cards), there's some amazingly cool cards that I want to bust out at the multiplayer table right now.

Here are some of what I'm talking about: