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Idea of Cube/Sauer RPG

by Pxtl on 05/03/2004 18:38, 105 messages, last message: 05/26/2004 12:38, 70435 views, last view: 05/18/2024 22:13

I've read a little of the Sauer RPG concept, and was thinking about Sauer as a simple pseudo-MMO. Nothing fancy, more like a 100 player system.

Here's the principle. First of all, you network several servers together, each of them running one or more maps. You set up one as the "metaserver" that holds all the player attributes/inventory, or store them in a distributed fashion. Travel between worlds is by teleport gate. Connections to servers you have left recently are kept live in a minimal, passive mode, free to be broken by the server or client if it should need the resources, so that you can quickly move between servers if you need to. Possibly, when approaching a gate, the connection could be attempted pre-emptively. One barrier would be that different servers would have different player-limits, so locations of high-importance would have to be stored on more robust connections.

Now, the concept: first of all, this is a PK game. When you join the game, you arrive as a "freeman" - you pick your starting selections (depending on the gamestyle, that might be class, race, stats, whatever - details). You are not affiliated with any faction, simply owning your own. You arrive in one of many Temples, which are the spawn locales - they are the non-combat zones - everyone in there is unarmed and invulnerable. At this point you may try to a) build a team from other people or b) join a larger faction. The system is similar to standard Cube's teamplay, except that a) teams are despotic - their founder is in charge, and b) you may only join a team if invited by a founder or one of his appointed lieutenants. Individual players may enable and disable team-damage at will, and killing the team-leader will let you take his place as the ruler of a team, even if you were not previously a member of said team. Team leaders may kick any member of a team off of a team, and lieutenants may kick off any non-lieutenants. At any time a player may leave his team to found a new one, or join an existing team if invited. Thus, backstabbing is encouraged - you may take control by killing the team leader, or you may quickly form a competing faction to a previous team by forming a new team and inviting some of your cohorts into it. So, treason, etc. is part of the game and designed in.

Now, the objective: the only freely available respawn points are in temples. Temples have many exits, both public and hidden, so that leaving them shouldn't be too much of a spawncamp. Alternately there are castles, which work like nodes from UT2k4 - you take a castle standard and thus your team owns the castle and can then spawn there. Ultimately there is the Palace. The palace contains the throne, which is the ultimate objective of the game - whichever team controls the throne is racking up victory points, which represent how successful your team is. The leader of the royal team is the King, and they are getting double. So, there is incentive for everyone in the game to kill the king, but to balance that he has powers beyond those of normal players.

Victory points could come from other thigns as well, such as killing large monsters or important players, or maybe just getting some points to compensate for being a late joiner. Note that victory points aren't experience points - they determine who's the "winner" - not what goodies and powers you get.

So, we have a free-form Domination structure. Next, we base it in a traditional FPS/RPG setting - the landscape is dotted with monsters, ruins, crap like that to explore, so small teams of adventurers can go freelancing and collect stuff and level up, without having to worry overmuch about running into the higher level players. Equipment is divided into two categories - personal items, such as armour, charms, and small hand weapons, and heavy equipment, such as large weapons, shields, etc. Heavy equipment breaks easily and wears out, so it must take constant attention and it comes and goes quickly. Personal items last long, but tend to be weaker. THe idea is that you lose the heavy equipment when you die, but it comes and goes easily, so its not a big deal. Personal items are much trickier to lose, like skills and levels. Things, or specially powered players, can steal them, but its not easy.

The King gets special abilities to damage players to their more sensitive parts (skills, levels, etc) to discourage dissent. Remember, the King can be dethroned two ways - he can be killed and supplanted by an enemy or teammate, or his team can lose the Throne. Plus, the Royal team has another incentive not to infight to much: while they're bickering, someone could take the Throne.

Finally, the lay of the land is such that the best pickings are around the castles - the Palace has heavy artillery to defend her, but not much opportunity for self-improvement. The temples are based in newbie-land. So teams, (or even individuals) do well to find and take the castles and hold them as a base of operations from which to adventure, and hope that a clever thief doesn't sneak in and take it from them while they're out.

Because of the game's focus on defense, hiring and controlling monsters/guards would be a good feature.

And of course, just for the epic-dragonslaying - all the castles/palaces start out guarded by somewhat powerful creatures, so players have to clear them out before claiming them.

Just reset the game once a week, or even every few hours to keep it fresh.

If your wondering where I got the idea for such a mean, backstabbing game, play Munchkin - its a card-game RPG about levelling up and backstabbing your teammates. Also has good balance ideas - the most powerful players are obviously so, and are winning, so losers tend to gang up against them. Also, the weakest players automatically get everyone else's discards. Just food for thought.

This was just a twisted idea I put together from the stuff that players have mentioned about Cube and Sauer.

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#1: sounds cool

by jcdpc@school on 05/03/2004 19:17

like a giant king-of-the-hill match. sounds cool.