On reconsideration, Dungeons of Carcassonne could be almost playable (if not very good) pretty soon.
Some thoughts from today:
- Danger of a room is equal to the number of tiles in the room plus the number of dead meeples (dead meeples means the room is clearly more dangerous than its size suggests). May also be modified by the amount of loot (shields and trade goods) present.
- To explore a room successfully, roll 1d6 + modifiers.
- If you roll under the room’s danger, you chose poorly. Your meeple dies. Add him to the mound of the fallen in the room and start another one outside the dungeon.
- If you roll over the room’s danger, you chose wisely (or were lucky). Grab the loot and add the danger value of the room to your score.
- If you roll the room’s danger exactly you bit off more than you could chew, but the room didn’t do the same. Your meeple escapes lootless to a location one step away (you can even run out the other side, why not?)
- Once a room has been looted the treasure is gone (no more shields or trade goods) but you can still score the danger if you explore it again. There are rewards for being first.
- Loot helps!
- If you would lose a meeple but have enough shields you may spend them to bring your exploration roll up to the room’s danger and escape. The shields are gone but your meeple isn’t. You may choose to let your meeple die. Shields cannot be combined with trade goods to successfully explore a room but may be combined with trade goods to escape.
- Trade goods can let you do extra stuff — additional moves, add to your exploration roll directly (so you can successfully explore the room, or escape it), one or two other things I haven’t decided yet.
- Once used, loot is gone. Each shield or trade good is consumed.
- Score at the end of the game is equal to the exploration score (gained by successfully exploring rooms) plus the total loot (shields and trade goods) unspent at the end of the game. Meeples count too, probably at a multiple (x5 feels right so far).
This seems like a really simple customization, and I think it’ll work. I’ll try to find time this weekend to try it.
Can anyone spot anything missing? I could use some suggestions for specific uses for the trade goods (I’m pretty happy with shields), but is there anything else I’m going to feel stupid for missing?
I don’t know if you’ve looked at it, but my “Crawl d6” game might give you some ideas. I designed a dungeon crawl simulator to play with a handful of d6. I offered it to the Dungeonmorph Dice project as a free game to send out with their dice, but the objection raised was, “you could play this with ANY d6.” Well… okay. It’s up on my site, anyhow. I have had great fun with it even with people who don’t play D&D.
http://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/cool-stuff/
I took a quick look, but honestly I’m really tired this morning and will need to reread it when I’m more alert in order to understand the detail.
Thankfully, I’m off work next week, don’t go back until April 10, so I expect I’ll actually have time.
Also, some of the other stuff on your Cool Stuff page is going to get a visit as well. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.