Dress Up Barbie Dolls in Accessory Mansions... the RPG

[PhoneLobster]

OK. So I've been considering seriously remodeling some of my crappy home brew rules in a variety of ways. Maybe even working on something on a level that could be a substitute for D&D for me and my group.

And along with a raft of my usual ZANY ideas I want to do something a bit different.

So here is an attempt at a vague outline before I start trying to flesh this nut out a bit more.

You Are A Barbie Girl
Yeah, yeah, your skills and innate awesomeness are all like, you know, totally awesome and junk.

But your GEAR is really really important too. Putting on a suit of shiny plate Armour or a pretty low cut evening dress really matters and really does, well, stuff.

The items themselves should be important and potentially do things, but also they should be primary key requirements and resources your character abilities revolve around.

So telling people your character is an Agile Amazon Warrior Princess is important, but it is also really important to add "and she wears Skimpy Goddess Plate Armour and fights with Dual Hooked Executioner Broad Swords". Because her fancy suit and her fancy things she hits things with are genuine defining characteristics that set her apart from otherwise identical Agile Amazon Warrior Princesses who wear Leather Cat Suits and shoot things with Electric Long Bow Arrows.

You Are In A Barbie World
As your kick ass important character defining gear gets more important it rapidly becomes really really demanding. As in your Electric Long Bow needs to spend a lot of time between adventures "Resting" in a special vault where it charges up with electricity, and maybe it needs some attendants to... attend to it, or whatever they do...

And that means your Barbie hero needs a Barbie Mansion. And getting (and keeping) a Burning Sword of Kick Ass means you need to add a new wing to your mansion with a Burning Sword of Kick Ass storage room, and maybe a trap room and/or a locked vault door, and maybe a guard room, and maybe expanded servants quarters and guard barracks for the staff, and maybe a special sword bearer attendant to bring you your sword in a hurry if something important comes up, and maybe even a special Burning Sword of Kick Ass training room.

Indeed beyond a certain point your character may even require training rooms, extended private chambers, throne rooms, a private bathroom, a trophy hall, a trophy wife, a trophy wife hall, and special servants and other junk just in order to grow their skills beyond that of mere poverty stricken mortals. Thus even further expanding their Barbie mansions.

And their Barbie mansions will need wealth, which will need to somehow be stored, generated and managed within the mansions.

And they will need even more guards, and maybe even some extra guards to go kick dirt grubbing mansionless peasants in the face for you while you go and do more important things.

What Barbie Adventures would look like
Low Level - Adventures of Homeless Hobo Thieves
Your party are itinerant homeless Barbie dolls. Your gear is actually pretty much depressingly identical to that of peasants and the low level disposable mooks. You are better than them primarily just on basic HP and Energy type resources, and as you advance in experience you pick up low tier skills.

Many of your low tier skills revolve around having swords and shields and magic wands and junk, but for now those items are still the same shit mooks have and almost all they do is let you use your limited skills. Your means of restoring expended item resources is pretty much always "grab it off a mook I just killed".

Your enemies are homeless unemployed Mooks. And other homeless low level barbie dolls. Your adventures occur in regular peasant houses, on the road and in Ruined or Abandoned Barbie mansions filled with homeless Mook and Barbie squatters and crumbling second rate pickings.

Toward the upper levels of this tier you may start building little barbie mansions but for now they mostly are just places to sleep or store your cash type Treasure where you have a few cheap squads of Mooks to keep the riff raff out.

Mid Level -Raiders of the Not So Lost Barbie Mansions
Your Barbie Mansion and Treasure Stockpiles advance to the point that you start buying magic item vaults and training rooms and crap that start making you more awesome as an individual Barbie hero, unlocking higher tier abilities and items.

These higher tier abilities and items allow you to scale up the sorts of encounters you engage in. For you "an encounter" is now primarily a raid on someone else's entire Barbie Mansion in one go.

Back at Hobo level some small subset of the rooms of a REAL Barbie mansion would have been a whole "encounter" for you, and you had better hope the owner wasn't home! Now you do THE WHOLE COMPLEX (and probably the owners too) as an encounter.

You and your buddies and maybe a handful of your favorite mooks take on the ENTIRE Mook body guard compliment and whatever rival Barbie Lords that might be at home in a grand sprawling fight wandering across the entire complex, the abilities that access to the Barbie Mansion Owner level grant you let you do this sort of crazy shit.

High Level - Masters of the Barbie Mansion International Franchise
You no longer have ONE Barbie mansion, you now have MANY. What would have been your whole mansion for the prior tier of adventuring is now something you just pay some suckers to set up in every major city on the continent that you ever visit for more than five minutes. And you keep a super uber main Barbie Mansion in some city, island, or small country or whatever else you own in the way of your favorite personal real estate.

You now unlock powers of the high tier with super uber mansion upgrades, heck it is entirely possible that in this tier you need an ENTIRE FRANCHISE MANSION per ability/uber cool item or something crazy like that.

Your powers are so vast you go and take on entire individual Barbie Mansions ON YOUR OWN, with minimal care for preparation and stealth. And it isn't even hard unless someone else of your tier turns up.

Proper full scale encounters with elaborate preparations are you and your Barbie buddies and top line mooks executing elaborate simultaneous raids on an entire enemy Mansion Franchise.

What This Means for Administration and mechanics
At hobo level this should mean relatively little. Towards the end of hobo level the party maybe has a spare sheet with a map of a tiny proto-barbie-mansion, some rather slimly fleshed out unremarkable mooks and a pile of unspent loot.

The big marker for hitting Barbie Mansion Owner level is when the group sits down and busts out the more elaborate rules sets for building their mansion, starts spending loot and builds a mansion that is at least as elaborate as one or two of the party characters. Maintaining your Mansion Sheet is as big a deal as running your character sheets because it IS part of your character.

At Mansion Franchise level things could go to crazy town. But my main focus here is actually "mid" level so screw it, we can worry more about crazy town later. But ideally Franchise mansions are largely reproductions of each other so a party should probably still have just one (bigger) main Mansion to track and then at most one (significantly smaller) Franchise Mansion Template each with a list of sites where they can find their local outlet and what the special one off feature of each site is beside it.

What does this mean for setting and story
It doesn't have to mean as much as all that. But a strong focus around everyone needing a secret fort and rival characters raiding each other's secret forts will certainly be a major upshot of all this.

But all things considered an enemy secret fort is basically a dungeon. So if your adventure is raiding the secret barbie mansion fort of the Orc King and his Knights of the Green Table then really it's just a more organized adventure where if you do it right the mechanics and structure of the whole thing supports you grabbing Orxcalibur off the wall before the Orc King has even been alerted and put his pants on.

The main change is that eventually the adventuring party has to stop being homeless hobos and has to have a mansion of their own and start worrying about the Orc King sending goblin ninjas to take THEIR cool burning sword of ruination from it's vault and stab them with it in their sleep.

What does this mean for wealth as power
Probably bad things, because wealth, and real-estate, is both a byproduct and REQUIREMENT of personal power. And we know aspects of that are actually pretty bad.

On the plus side the requirement of having a whole damn new wing of mansion to house your uber Flaming Doom Sword makes it feel special, and means that there are real costs, tactical options and adventure hooks inherit in such increases in character power.

So what does attacking a Mansion Look Like
Ideally when you attack a rival mansion you would go through a few stages.

1) Gather Intelligence - You use your relevant abilities to sneak in, insert infiltrators in the rival staff, and prepare to bust in through the doors and sky lights. Failure during this stage leads to a premature triggering of the second phase before all your dudes are in the best positions and before you know where the enemy hangs his magic sword and whether his magic sword is currently on it's hanging hook or not.

2) Big fat combat - Either the alarm has been triggered or you have started kicking in doors. With key Barbie Items in their Barbie Vaults you are motivated to scatter your group and lock down (or just plain take and start using) the enemies Death Blade of Death before they can use it while your ally is on the other side of the compound locking down the enemy Fire Blade of Fire, or assassinating their leader, or keeping a bunch of guards pinned in their barracks, or blowing up the throne room during the Barbie King's grand audience. During this phase alarm propogates through the building (or not) based on various rules and the results of the actions of defenders that have been alerted to the attack. A lot of the combat isn't just about killing things, but managing the alert status to split the enemy and continue to catch knots of them about their daily business unprepared for the attack.

What about Defending your Mansion
Well that should look a lot like the reverse side of being attacked.

Enemies fail or succeed their sneaky phase and suddenly a fight is on.

Your characters determine where they are and what they were up to in the mansion based on the success or failure of the enemy sneaky phase and on some nice little rules about how likely it is they caught you naked in the bath or all dressed up in war gear and ready to step out the door.

Your primary means of preparing for such encounters is in mansion design.

Buying a cool training room gives you a good chance of being busy training and coincidentally dressed up in at least some fighting gear during a surprise attack.

Buying a better private bath room means if you get caught in it you have better guards on hand or the turn over time for your luxury bath attendants to kit you up in fighting gear is much quicker.

Hiring a professional sword bearer means you have a dude on hand near your magic sword vault who's primary job is to grab your sword and bring it to you when the emergency alarms go off.

The potential accessories, minions, and mansion extension options multiply at an amazing rate. Spinning blade hazards activated from a central guard room? A giant glass ceilinged Arboretum that does nothing but give you character points, a potential break in point, and a place to keep your man eating tigers with laser vision? Good lord you could even have a shark tank A GOD DAMN SHARK TANK.

What About being on the road, and places that AREN'T Barbie mansions?
OK so first of all you have encounters in random locations where no one is in their barbie mansion. That should work out a lot like standard encounters, only hopefully the support for mansion sized encoutners either trivializes these encounters or allows for damned big ones in fairly complex "neutral territory".

Then you have your Barbie adventures being ambushed while they are in their Barbie Adventure Camp Site. Which should work a bit like a scaled down cheapo travel mansion, and sometime mid mid level you might even start keeping a "Travelling Entourage" sheet which talks about how many weapon polishers and boot lickers you need to keep with you to keep your magic gear and junk trim and proper and your elite assault mooks fed and well dressed while marching between kingdoms.

Then at some point later mid level you should just start not doing traveling encounters any more because you teleport everywhere from your Barbie Mansion teleporting room, or you just fly your mansion where-ever you go because your Barbie Mansion god damn flies or something.

Back in Hobo tier things may have involved crumbling former Barbie mansions and whatever other places unemployed mooks and homeless hobos hang out in. But those would work a lot like Barbie Mansions when it comes to fighting in them only with different and inferior rules on what sort of guys live there, what can be looted, and how well the environment supports defenders.

"Trevor" may have just gotten a bit screwed
Now while we can sort of a lot of mansion components as free extra side effects of becoming a bigger character, and while you COULD get just one or two interested members of the party to do a lot of the shared mansion administration like hiring guards and designing the floor plan and crap...

This set up somewhat screws the guy who wants the easy sit on a pile of loot and be conan style of thing discussed recently. Because if sitting on a pile of loot with wenches scattered around is actually a complex character decision that gives you real loot and wench related powers... well... then there isn't exactly any simple left for you.

But screw it. I want players to get loot and wench bonuses for their Barbie mansions. I want them to care about putting in a sweet new entry hall with it's kick ass security and character skill bonuses. And that means that in order to care more decisions will need to be made and more information tracked, a scrawled note in your character fluff saying "Lolz I has endless loot pile + Wenches inz myz Bat Caves!" is no longer acceptable.

[Username17]

I dunno, Barbies seem a little... big... to do all this with. The Barbie Dream House is nearly a meter long. We're out of the "play on the kitchen table" territory and well into "put stuffed animals all over the living room" territory. Which might be fine, but from more traditional gaming you might want to use Bratz, Strawberry Shortcake, or Polly Pockets.

-Username17

[TheWorid]

These higher tier abilities and items allow you to scale up the sorts of encounters you engage in. For you "an encounter" is now primarily a raid on someone else's entire Barbie Mansion in one go.

What plans do you have for supporting this concept? You mentioned that raiding mansions would involve "phases", but I'm interested in how you propose to abstract all of the variables involved in essentially taking on an entire dungeon at once.

[Prak]

This concept is greatly amusing to me as it's pretty much the idea I was getting from my friend reading off all the special magic item accessories, something like ten, that the Gloranthan sun god Yelm had (Runequest), including the "Loincloth of Heavenly Modesty" (which I can only assume rolls your dick up in a neat coil to keep it from popping out.

[PhoneLobster]

(Something probably rather tongue in cheek)

Hm. Well I didn't think I would need to point out the barbies thing is just a metaphor for having things revolve around having cool accessories and storing them in your cool accessory mansion.

I mean clearly when I say that you are a Barbie and you gain power from having a Barbie Sportscar, but it in turn must be stored in your Barbie Mansion Garage and tended by your Mechanic Ken slaves...

I really MEAN you are a Wizard King and you gain power from having a Sword of Ultimate Skulls, but it in turn must be stored in your Tower Of Ultimate Doom and tended by your Necromantic Ghost Minions.

...plans...

Well it's not really what I wanted to talk about here since I want to talk about living in accessory mansion land more than that. And we have chatted about "whole of dungeon" encounters before around here.

But anyway...

A whole of dungeon/whole of site encounter system is nice because it's a lot cooler and more exciting than doing individual rooms and pretending they are really separate encounters and all that.

And alot of people, and even many games have this sort of approach already. With smart opponents moving from room to room in a site spreading alarm, getting allies, coming over for dinner at the neighbors dungeon room only to find murderous adventurers on a killing spree and so on.

But, yes, I would like to support this sort of thing some more with more appropriate mechanics. Phases, being pretty vague things as clearly outlined by my INCREDIBLE 2 point phase list... are kinda... well... not really a formal mechanic I was going to insert in this thing.

Here are my specific plans...

1) Insertion mechanics
We need rules, abilities or at least guidelines for getting people INTO the enemy Mansion in exciting ways. That means things like...
a) Kicking in the front door
b) Dropping in through the skylight
c) Busting through a wall
d) Pretending to be someones Aunt and walking into the guest rooms
e) Going in claiming diplomatic immunity before stabbing everyone
f) Appearing in a puff of magic
g) Getting captured (fake or real) and breaking loose
h) Getting hired in disguise along with new staff
i) Replacing a kidnapped or killed existing staff member or barbie lord
j) Bribing the staff
k) Just plain being sneaky

2) Scouting, Planning and Preparation
And the insertion mechanics and other methods like them need to form into a vague and amorphous "preparation and scouting" phase more as a practical emergent thing than as a hard mechanical phase.

And that phase is used to gain intelligence about the site, try and time an attack when the boss enemies are most compromised, or not even home, maybe steal or mess with some of the stuff lying around, remove enemy mooks, insert your own minions, and position your troops and raiding barbie lords in the best places.

3) Synchronizing Watches
And to make this work you need to have abilities, rules or something that let the adventuring party and their minions know when to attack, or not.

So we need rules about synchronizing timing so that the armored battle wizard hiding on the roof knows when to burst in and can (have a chance at least) of timing it accurately to wait until the sneaky barbarian disguised as someones aunt has first stolen the enemy mega wand from it's vault and the agile archer amazon has managed to position herself in that good firing position near the guard barracks.

And as an upshot of that you want things like rules about communicating, communicating over distances, jamming and messing with communications, communicating in secret, using blind synchronized timing and making timing estimates, using gut feeling powas, and allowing attackers to somehow pick up on the hint (or not) that things have gone pear shaped at SOME point after alarm starts spreading among the enemy.

4) Propagating Alarm
We need to have rules about how the enemy can notice various preparation and entry attempts, because sometimes we want your team to be half way in position only to have the Barbarian Disguised As Aunt have his wig fall off and everyone start screaming and waving swords around, and then the attackers need to either fight on anyway or fight their way out and we need to know how fast and in what ways alarm propagates through a mansion population and how that interacts with a battle wizard hiding on the roof near a skylight and an agile amazon sneaking her way through the corridors to the barracks area.

So we need to know how various guards and others in the mansion react to trouble, how fast they can spread the word, and how attackers can desperately attempt to stop alarm from spreading. That means rules and abilities about guys screaming at each other over various distances, sending and intercepting message runners, and activating actual alarms or using psychic communication powas and junk.

5)Where were you when a Battle Wizard dropped through the Arboretum roof?
And you need rules about defining what the various important lords of the mansion, hell even many of the mooks, are up to at various times of day.

There needs to be some way that attackers can either catch off guard or on guard, and that means things like being caught unready in the bath or caught all weaponed up for training and junk. There again need to be mechanics and abilities to define and influence this crap.

6) Combat Mechanics on a different scale
A more subtle aspect but an important one. Mechanics of many games, including say, D&D are far too concerned with rather small scales of action. We don't want grids and tiny squares, we want either large free hand vector based junk or some sort of abstracted zoning system like my good old Big Fat Squares business.

I will be going with some variant of my preferred Big Fat Squares, of course. Which means the combat map of a site is a big old mess of zones measured more in the scale of rooms and their adjacencies than in the scale of problematic little 5 foot squares.

Because "a squad of ten guards bursts into the room" can be an actual mechanical formal description in that system, while in a small square, or even free hand vector based system you need to say "ten guards burst into the room and move here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.". And we really want to do the first one if you are having a complex of maybe up to hundreds of minions running around all at once waving their hands in their air either propagating alarm or responding to it.

And also that means we are probably going to need some streamlining junk for groups of mooks to cut down on decision making, rolling and general resolution time.

And also that means that the barbie lords are going to need abilities that interact with mooks on an appropriate scale so they can clear a couple of squads of mooks relatively easily with only minimal risk and resource expenditure, since the big deal for them should be when they come across the mansion bosses.

AND that means we need a character resource model for things like HP and Energy and Gear that somehow interacts with all of this on a scale that can last a whole sprawling encounter and still be somewhat fun and interesting.

And for that I like my old cycling Energy and Stuff mechanics I mentioned with minimal notice around here some time ago. So I will be running with some variant of that.


So yeah, those are some of my plans for dealing with "whole site encounters". I probably missed some stuff too.

[TavishArtair]

(Something probably rather tongue in cheek)

Hm. Well I didn't think I would need to point out the barbies thing is just a metaphor for having things revolve around having cool accessories and storing them in your cool accessory mansion.

I mean clearly when I say that you are a Barbie and you gain power from having a Barbie Sportscar, but it in turn must be stored in your Barbie Mansion Garage and tended by your Mechanic Ken slaves...

I really MEAN you are a Wizard King and you gain power from having a Sword of Ultimate Skulls, but it in turn must be stored in your Tower Of Ultimate Doom and tended by your Necromantic Ghost Minions.

To be frank (har) about it, most of the Den would like to play with dolls and is going to be somewhat disappointed that you only intended it as a metaphor. So yes, it was not immediately obvious, due perhaps to initial hopes clouding judgement.

[Dean]

Allright I have tons of stuff and no particular order to say them in so it will just be a list.

#1 Alarm should just be on a broad general mechanic. So it would go something like

No alarm (They don't know your here)
Suspicious (They think maybe something is awry)
Searching (They think you might be here)
Mobilized (They know you are here but not where you are and they are moving in force)
Battle! (They know you are here, have found you, and are pulling out all the stops to take you down)

That way as an individual character did things to raise the alarm level things would get progressively harder for them. Then there would ALSO be a broad distance mechanic like

Close (equal alarm level)
Medium (One lower alarm level)
Far (Two lower alarm level)

So that the further you were away from someone screwing things up the longer it would take for trouble to start filtering over into your backyard. At least until there is MORE trouble and it starts spreading closer to you and now it's your problem just as well as theirs.

#2 I worry that this game might have a lot of downtime between players. In a 5 person party if each persons "turn" is a full "sneaking out of this room and looking around the hall and trying to KO that guard that isn't looking" thing. Then the players are going to be sitting around for a LONG time. This could maybe be helped by abstracting things more heavily during sneak in time. So you just say "I want to move out of this room, make sure no one is coming down the hall, and make my way to the bedroom chamber" and that all just happens in one turn. If you need to KO someone on the way you are told that at the time and you roll immediately.

#3 I don't think you actually want multiple tiers in this game. I think that what you actually want and what it would work better as is a broader tier 2 game. So no hobo's and no mansion syndicates. You just start off as Adventurers (the equivalent of say, 5th level characters) and you get your magical swag and then your sweet manse and then you eventually get your AWESOME magical swag and your flying manse, and end at the approximate equivalents of say.... 13th level characters. I think that once you have a flying multi-towered castle made of Necrostrone then you don't need or really -want- to advance in power. I think this game would work better the tiers were essentially Mid level power. Low Mid level power, to High mid level power as your spread.

#4 Gold: Gold presents tons of problems for you which I will solve ALL OF RIGHT NOW. maybe.
Mansions should be constructed with "Manse Points" which are some amalgamation of character fame, reputation, ability, and monetary standing but really you just get more as you level up and then you get awesome new crazy shit. Money can be spent to make the stuff you buy slightly nicer, but not out of line of the original bonus. So a room write-up would be something like this

Library: Grants you +3 to intelligence checks made within if you spend one hour making the check.
For +1000 gold your library is blah blah blah (queue fancy description to make it seem posh) and grants an additional +1 on the intelligence check.

That makes it so that characters are purchasing a +1 to an intelligence check once per hour for 1000 gold. Fine by me. Money can -improve- your mansion but not make it.

On the subject of money you should absolutely install a Tome style magic item system of minor, moderate, and major magic items. This way money can only purchase minor magic items but you can have a whole goddamn room of different awesome daggers to have your "which one today" scene. This way no matter how you break the money system you can't get a Vorpal sword unless you kill someone who's using it right now so you still have to adventure to gain power.

#5 Characters should be able to group up Mansion points for one sweet team headquarters but still not have to so that Dan can still have his fucking underwater Octopus themed castle that no one else wants but he will die for. Seriously. Dude needs to calm down about octopi. Fucking Dan....

#6 Trevor having his loot pile is totally an option. Have one Manse be called "CAVE" and have it have no upper limit to the points you can put into it. That way Trevors cave full of gold with no protection save those of his comely wenches adds a CRAZY reputation boost (He just fucking keeps it in a cave! It's like he's daring you to take it!) cause of all those character points you spent, and the wenches add some morale bonus when he sleeps there. Sure if it's attacked there is only ONE room and anyone who gets in has found the treasure upon entering but fuck it, Trevor plays a Barbarian and he will go to kill that person anyway after the rest of the party figures out who he is and everyone will be happier for it.

[the_taken]

Sounds to me like Trevor's barbarian class could be switched out for Dragon, and the wenches switched out for Virgin Sacrifices, which are really the same thing...

"That Dragon has a all the town's lovely young ladies in his cave! Let's go rescue them!"

[Neurosis]

Hm. Well I didn't think I would need to point out the barbies thing is just a metaphor for having things revolve around having cool accessories and storing them in your cool accessory mansion.

imho you did. thank you for doing so.

confusion partially alleviated

[PhoneLobster]

#1 Alarm should just be on a broad general mechanic. So it would go something like

I think your list is a little too long.

I think we need states that go a bit like...

1) Worse than just not alert. A variety of states like sleeping, eating dinner, getting drunk at a party or being naked in the bath.

2) Unready. Not asleep or busy, but still less capable of noticing sneaky things, taking no special offensive action, but potentially at least moderately equipped and in the case of guards at their stations or on patrol, but not excited about it.

3) Alert. Information has propagated to this unit that there is an attack of some form going on. They can notice sneaky things more easily and will now actively do whatever they are supposed to do in an emergency (lock the doors, turn on the traps, charge to the action, hold their ground, secure the vault, deliver the magic sword to their boss, whatever)

Being in battle can just be something you do when you are already alarmed and which in turn automatically alerts you once it has started.

Becoming suspicious and actively searching for "What Was That Noise Over there? Lets Check It Out!" moments should just be part of whatever mechanic transfers us between not unready and alert. It doesn't need to be a state within or part of the alert propagation rules. It can just be (at most) an intermediate step while resolving the action "I'm hiding have they seen me?"

That way as an individual character did things to raise the alarm level things would get progressively harder for them.

I am not inclined to run this like the wanted stars on GTA.

The guards respond to you as follows.
1) Don't know anything is wrong anywhere, lets relax.
2) Alarm has arrived something is wrong somewhere, high alert! Follow emergency protocols!
3) Hey you! I see you! Lets Fight!

The big deal then is how this state and information propagates to the rest of the guards in the complex. How far can these guards yell out to spread alarm? Have they got an alarm device or power to increase the range or inform specific locations, back up troops or a central command? Will they send runners to inform other guard squads or bosses, and if so how long will those runners take to get there?

We don't however really want detection of stealth to get progressively harder for a sneaky character every time someone somewhere becomes alarmed.

Either the alarm propogates and it gets harder, or it doesn't and no difficulty changes occur. It is challenging enough for stealthy scout if they are going to have to make a bunch of stealth checks in series, making them get harder in series is wrong and having a mechanic that expects them to fail, raise the GTA stars, but then have a discrete encounter before moving on to harder stealth checks is somewhat counter to the whole of site combat plan.

Then there would ALSO be a broad distance mechanic like

Close (equal alarm level)
Medium (One lower alarm level)
Far (Two lower alarm level)

Guards will never think they are safe because they are on the other side of the complex that is on fire or under attack. Once alerted they are as alert as they can get, and will also immediately execute whatever orders they are supposed to based on the information they receive, up to and including things like "go to the site where the alarm came from then find and kill the intruders".

And while the guard squad who is alerted might have the orders "hold and secure your site!" once they know there is an attack in the offing they do so with all the benefits of being alert and don't do some sort of "well I am 1/2 alert because the alert came from in excess of 3 rooms away!".

That's just too much effort for too little pay off and a bit too much "doesn't that sound a bit silly?'.

So that the further you were away from someone screwing things up the longer it would take for trouble to start filtering over into your backyard.

For that the idea is that alarm will propagate a certain distance with yelling, message runners and bells on strings and junk rather than radiating scaling range based bonuses/penalties.

So each turn after the alarm goes off because Barbarian Disguised As Aunt got revealed and started fighting runners move X rooms and alert everyone in their path, and those might spawn more runners and so on.

Meaning that if Agile Amazon is in the middle of sneaking to her attack point on the OTHER side of the complex she still totally has Y turns until alert runners reach the barracks she was setting up to pin down the contents of. But Battle Wizard waiting to burst in to the sky light might only be 1 or 2 turns away and find alerted guards streaming out to perform their standing alert order of "secure the roof" much sooner.

It is a simpler, more exciting and more dynamic way of propagating the same ranged based shared risk that a scaling bonus/penalty would. It also makes a bit more sense for guards to say "A fight on the other side of the complex, LETS GO!" than "A fight on the other side of the complex? Move one step up on the we give a crap scale!"

In a 5 person party if each persons "turn" is a full "sneaking out of this room and looking around the hall and trying to KO that guard that isn't looking" thing.

If everyone is sneaking in some form this should be OK. If everyone cares about the intelligence and lay out of the map that is being gathered, this should be OK.

Further KOing one unalerted guard should ideally be like a two roll action. Also it should be at least moderately discouraged by lone guards being rarer than 10 man guard squads and taking the additional risks entailed in KOing a guard (or squad!) would be less desirable than the easier action of sneaking past and getting to a more strategic location before starting to attack.

Then the players are going to be sitting around for a LONG time.

Imagine a longish scenario like this for the sneaky phase.

1) Players bribe former employees to get a vague and outdated layout of the target site.
2) Players gather information in the local village to learn the site is hiring 20 new guards. They insert their disguise specialist and 19 of their own mooks and manage to get them hired on.
3) Players outside the compound recieve a secret message via trained rat giving them more information of definite layout and staff movements within the areas accessible by the infiltrators.
4) Players have agreed on attacking that evening at a specific time. So remaining player forces start sneaking around and into the compound just before that using gathered intelligence to move more easily or more towards things they regard as prime targets. Various stealth checks start occurring.
5) Infiltrated forces, knowing the appropriate time is approaching start moving to new positions and readying to attack, some deceptive and sneaky rolls may be in order.
6) More information on layout is gained from the sneaking. A room with a magic sword and a guard squad is located and a player and some men are left to hit it the moment the alarm goes off. Once successfully placed with a sneaky roll the hidden characters won't have to roll for stealth again until or unless there are alerted enemies nearby.
7) Even more information on the movements of the site bosses is found. The enemy Necro Barbarian is having a nap in a garden by the infiltrator and his infiltrator squads. They stay there to gank him and his vampire wenches before they can get their abandoned weapons and armor when the alarm goes off or the arranged attack time rolls around.
8) the remaining characters get spotted deep in the complex and alarm goes off, guards flood in their direction, runners propogate the alarm well in advance of the arranged attack time.
9) Alarm reaches the Necro Barbarian and he and his vampires awaken. Placed gank squad responds as well and start fighting unexpectedly, but still with some sort of drop in favor of the lurking infiltrators.
10) By means of some communicative ability the placed characters at the magic sword vault learn that the attack is on BEFORE alarm propagates to the vault guards, they drop in and gain full surprise and easily deal with the guards.
11) From then on you are really in combat phase proper, but alarm is still propagating from various flare up points to isolated or distant guards and bosses in the site delaying their arrivals or other responses to the various points of conflict.

There is a lot of prep work and rolling before you start punching things there. But it is engaging, important and fun.

This could maybe be helped by abstracting things more heavily during sneak in time.

Well, of course. Among other things...

1) Having a really good sneak expert up front should somehow help you when sneaking in a group.
2) If sneak and infiltrate experts are going to bring along squads of 10 or more mook buddies or something stupid like that then they need abilities that let them drag along their followers without further sneak checks and minimal if any increased difficulty for both speed and effectiveness reasons.
3) Sneaking past unready guards should be pretty easy. And ideally fairly fast. Even if there are a lot of observers.
4) You should not have to roll sneak rolls to "hold a position" once you have already sneaked there and gone into stationary hiding while waiting for an alert or synchronized attack time. Doing so would be annoying and counter productive for encouraging complex simultaneous master attack plans. You can start rolling each turn to maintain a stationary hide if opponents are suddenly made Alert, though why you would do so is anyones guess.

#3 I don't think you actually want multiple tiers in this game.

High tier is a largely theoretical exercise in wankery that gets worked on with the lowest priority if ever, and I do want mid tier to be the bigger and better one.

But the low tier has real importance. It is a place to hammer out a number of basic mechanics and dynamics before rolling in the more complex mansion junk. It is a place to also get side kicks and Mook abilities from for the bosses of the next phase up to employ. It is a place for your characters to look back on as their early days before they had two vast treasures to rub together. And it is a minimum "you must be this tall from finishing hobo phase" set of abilities you can expect any guy in the next phase to have as a base before progressing further and trying to compete at all on the larger stage.

#4 Gold:

This does seem like something that needs abstracting.

Currently my plan was to pay for most palace building with Treasure.

As in you would get Treasure Points. Which each represents an actual shiny pile of actual Treasure that you need to keep in a Treasure Vault or Treasure Pile when not in use.

And at the pre mansion level you would run around instead with Small Change points, which represents the scale of currency used by unemployed mooks (and by employed mooks when buying whatever they trade in that isn't supplied by their employer).

And once you have even one Treasure Point in your pocket you pretty much no longer care about Small Change points anymore.

Then later for the high tier there would be some sort of Ultra-Mega-Treasure unit. But that doesn't matter right now.

The problem is deciding exactly how Treasure Points interact with the separate and somewhat oppositional decisions of "Should I Buy More Power For Me?" or "Should I Buy More Mooks To Guard My Mansion?".

And that is really unclear. I can't decide if "power for me" is something you should earn and that gives you free bonus rooms to your mansion that need guarding with your Treasure investments, or if "power for me" is something you then need to pay for (at least in part if not entirely) with Treasure investment AND then you need to guard it with MORE Treasure investment.

I mean in this case both could work. It doesn't in a game world where wealth = power OR wenches OR guards for your wenches it doesn't work.

But in a world where wealth=wenches=power and wenches=requirement for guarding or you lose them (and your power) that means that players will have to make a trade off between personal power and the security of that personal power. Especially if some portion of their personal power is actually lootable and not just destructible by opponents. And it should be.

So current plan is probably leaning towards wealth=wenches=power-requires-wenches-require-guards-requires-wealth. If players only buy power wenches and no guards their place becomes a plump fruit ripe for the wench looting, if they get enough guards they can potentially protect their power base from anyone interested in loot of that scale.

In other news that means that what you take with you on mansion raids shouldn't be nearly as valuable for resale as what you leave at home. Stealing someones Treasure&Wench Piles should be totally better loot than taking their magic sword off their body when they fail to steal YOUR Treasure&Wench Piles, otherwise everyone only ever invests in Treasure&Wench piles and sits at home profiting from all the raiders coming to THEIR door, we don't really want that, not too much anyway, fighting off an attack should never pay off altogether more than you actually need to spend to repair the Wench Damages it causes.

Another thing I was thinking was that those Treasure Points should be usable not just by being Spent but ALSO by being sat on. Some things should cost an actual Treasure Point or several, but other things should simply require you to HAVE a certain number of Treasure Points in your pile without spending them.

So for instance purchase costs for things should generally be spent treasure, meaning you need to gain new Treasure to grow larger, but maintenance and repair costs should generally be in unexpended "My Treasure Pile is This High!" values, so you don't need to acquire new treasures all the time in order to tread water AND so that it motivates you to have a big giant permanent treasure pile to sit on for genuine gain.

Mind you sitting on your treasure pile should probably also give you bonuses of some form directly to your character, but only if you buy a throne to stick on top, a big showy throne room to pile your treasure in and a liberal sprinkling of wenches for the whole thing.

Library: Grants you +3 to intelligence checks made within if you spend one hour making the check.

I need to do a post on the sorts of mansion components and the sorts of benefits I would expect them to give you. But this one is running long enough as is, so maybe later.

This way money can only purchase minor magic items but you can have a whole goddamn room of different awesome daggers to have your "which one today" scene.

Pretty much. Small change buys you crap gear everyone has. Treasure buys you cool stuff you care about AND the vaults and attendants required to keep it in working order. Super Treasure buys you the high tier crap that may or may not get around to existing.

And in the mean time you definitely can at least buy whole armory rooms PACKED with pretty much countless Small Change level weapons and armor for Treasure costs, and indeed such a room should probably be pretty damn cheap.

#5 Characters should be able to group up Mansion points for one sweet team headquarters but still not have to so that Dan can still have his fucking underwater Octopus themed castle that no one else wants but he will die for. Seriously. Dude needs to calm down about octopi. Fucking Dan....

Pretty much yes. Though it might help if he at least installs his octopus mansion in the private lake/waterfeature on the grounds of the shared mansion so that they can share back up reinforcement mooks and stuff.

Splitting your mansion in various ways could also have real security benefits and trade offs, so it's probably cool. Mind you most players will still sensibly want a big shared mansion and just dominate their own wings of the thing, and shouldn't be punished for that in anyway, so no extra bonus mansion points/Treasures for Dan just because he ran off on his own!

#6 Trevor having his loot pile is totally an option.

I'm really not so sure about this, I mean SOMEONE is going to have to administer the mansion to character power conversions at the very least...

Sure if it's attacked there is only ONE room and anyone who gets in has found the treasure upon entering

This is pretty much exactly what I don't want. It does bad things about motivating players and NPCs to have stupid sites that aren't any fun to raid.

And, among other things, rules about minimum zone sizes for mansion improvements/treasure and wench storage etc... really need to prevent it. Even if you DO build your mansion as one giant room it is going to have to be one giant room made out of an ever growing number of discrete combat and patrol zones.

Trevor MAY be in his cave, he MAY be awesome, but if he is 9 zones away from where the enemy is shoveling loot and wenches into sacks he may not even see them over the mounds of cash and wenches, and may not hear the insane giggling at that range.

That Dragon has a all the town's lovely young ladies in his cave! Let's go rescue them!

I am this close to wanting to find a way to add "Wench Points" as a resource similar to Treasure points. THIS CLOSE.

[the_taken]

That Dragon has a all the town's lovely young ladies in his cave! Let's go rescue them!

I am this close to wanting to find a way to add "Wench Points" as a resource similar to Treasure points. THIS CLOSE.

[PhoneLobster]

That picture alarms and disturbs me. I shall propagate that alarm with runners moving two zones a turn down the eastern and northern corridors towards the back up guard barracks and the Wizard Priestess's private meditation room.

While waiting for reinforcements lets look at this again...

Library: Grants you +3 to intelligence checks made within if you spend one hour making the check

So I need to discuss a bit what sort of room benefits and effects I want.

The current trend of my thoughts leads to this sort of thing.

As you advance your character's skills in mid/main tier basically EVERY ability will have an "unlock" requirement, which needs to be met by something provided by your luxurious accommodations. Which you buy with Treasure.

Right now I'm not sure if the actual skill advancement itself should be some sort of XP business or in turn should be provided by Luxuries purchased with treasure AS WELL. I mean it is entirely possible that this could be better off if the luxury "unlock" requirements were the ONLY requirement for skill advancement. But, well, whatever.

Now the unlock requirements on an individual ability could look like either "Have Item/Room/Minion X" or "Have X Points of Luxury". Or maybe even both with stuff like your entire "Gadget Monster" ability set requiring a Gadget Monster Workshop specifically and then requires various Luxury points to unlock its individual abilities.

So XP vs More Luxury aside what many rooms should look like would be something like...

Vault Of the Magic Sword
Cost : 1 Treasure
Maintenance : + 1 Treasure Pile
Staff : Requires 2 Maintenance Staff
May Have 1 Sword Bearer
Luxury Points: +1 to owner
Magnetism : Browsing Trophies site for owner
+1 Chance for owner to be found "Browsing Trophies"
Zone Details : (notes about maximum capacity, crowding capacity, security doors, zone hazards, limits to attached halls or neighboring zones, likely furniture, special entrances, the sword hanging rack, security risks etc...)
Looting : (Occupied and Restaffed) Functions as normal
(Extended Site Looting) Fittings stripped for 1/2 a Treasure
Special : The vault of the magic sword houses, recharges and maintains one magic sword item, such as a Burning Sword of Burnination or a Sword Of Ultimate Skulls, or a Sword of Divine Angelic Music.

Or a nice shared luxury room that encourages people to have some shared parts of their team mansion? ...

Magical Garden Fountain
Cost : 6 Treasures
Maintenance : + 1 Treasure Pile
Staff : Requires 1 Maintenance Staff
May have 5 Luxury Staff (ornamental fountain wenches?)
Luxury Points: +3 to ALL owners.
Magnetism : Relaxing site for all owners
+1 Cumulative Chance for all owners to be found "Relaxing" for each owner ALREADY found relaxing here.
Zone Details : (definitely includes furniture notes for throwing people into the fountain)
Looting : (Extended Site Looting + 1 Treasure Rebuild Cost) Strip site and rebuild it back at your mansion.
(Capture Staff) kidnap any available Luxury Staff
Special : This site just looks pretty and is really nice to hang around in and chat with each other or just watch the fountain wenches.

Or a themed luxury/hazard/terrain advantage room for your fire themed guys...

Bubbling Lava Pits
Cost : 2 Treasures
Maintenance : + 1 Treasure Pile
Staff : None
Luxury Points: +2 to Owner
Magnetism : Wandering site for all Fire Themed owners
Zone Details : (definitely includes hazard notes for throwing people into the lava, and mentions of precarious narrow bridges and abominable lack of safety railings)
Looting : None
Special : This site is a favored luxury site for Fire Wizards and Lava Priestesses, it's zone hazards also make it an interesting defensible or hazardous point in a raid. Especially if the opponent here is a Lava Priestess or some Lava Minions.

Or a private luxury room that also mitigates risks for one of the worse "what I was doing when the mansion was attacked" states...

Luxurious Private Bath Room
Cost : 2 Treasures
Maintenance : + 2 Treasure Pile
Staff : Requires 1 Maintenance Staff
May have up to 4 Luxury Staff (bath attendants?)
Luxury Points: +3 to owner
Magnetism : Bathing site for owner
Backup Equipping site for owner
+1 Chance for owner to be found "Bathing"
Zone Details : (definitely includes furniture notes for fighting or throwing people in the bath)
Looting : (Extended Site Looting) Fittings stripped for 1 Treasure
Special : Building your own private bath gives you a nice place to modestly bathe somewhere deep in your private quarters well behind all your mansion's security measures and guard posts.

Or a fairly basic security option like...

Basic Guard Post
Cost : 1 Treasures
Maintenance : + 0 Treasure Pile
Staff : May have One guard squad + attachments
May have One messenger
Luxury Points: None
Magnetism : None
Zone Details : (Defensible reinforced doors? Arrow slits? Alarms? Mook weapon and gear racks?)
Looting : (Pick Up) Mook weapons and gear
Special : A handy room to add to any location or path in your mansion that needs some lookouts and light defense.

So those are some general ideas on what some rooms could look like there (at least from the mansion administration stand point).

[Grek]

So, building a bathroom makes it more likely that you'll be taking a bath and safer to have been doing so? It seems like it would be a pretty reasonable strategy to build the world's biggest bathouse ever with a cumulative +10 to "taking a bath" and all sorts of benefits for when that comes up.

[PhoneLobster]

So, building a bathroom makes it more likely that you'll be taking a bath and safer to have been doing so? It seems like it would be a pretty reasonable strategy to build the world's biggest bathouse ever with a cumulative +10 to "taking a bath" and all sorts of benefits for when that comes up.

Well...

A) Kick ass, bath themed mansion. And if it is so heavily bath themed then you had better be pretty damn likely to have bath themed encounters by virtue of being in the bath. Of course then it would be better if there were more exciting bath related extensions to include than just a giant chain of private bath rooms.

B) Actually, as cool as Bath Mansion is... I'm probably going to have some limits on stacking the same room over and over. Note some vaguely sketched out references to "Owner" and "Owners" in certain parts of the sample write ups? Well only the guy in the shared mansion who "owns" the Private Luxury Bathroom is effected by it, and somewhere we need a no stacking rule or flag where he doesn't get any particularly special benefit from having two of them. While you might want to let them stack some other rooms, like bubbling lava pits or something, but even then might want to have some sort of a maximum or proportional stacking cap so that entire palaces aren't just bland empty volcanoes with an all powerful Lava Priestess in the middle. Of course things like maintenance staff and treasure pile requirements are going to mean there are at least SOME minimal diversity requirements (as you will need places for those staff and treasure piles to live and such), but that isn't enough and you would still have to be careful of those lower maintenance, low risk, low loot value, defensible rooms like Lava Pits becoming some sort of obviously over spammable power mansion build.

[Dean]

No, it honestly makes sense to build no bathroom's ever if they give you an increased chance of being caught with your pants down per bathroom.

[Ice9]

Does that mean that if you built a "Spartan War Shack" with nothing but training rooms, you would always be found training?
Of course, there could be a minimum base chance to be bathing / relaxing / eating, even with no dedicated rooms. Probably a good idea.

Or maybe something like:
X% chance - Necessities
Y% chance - Leisure
Z% chance - Work (training, planning, diplomacy)

And then within each category, what rooms you have determines what you're likely to be doing. So if you build "all training rooms", then when you roll 'Work' it will almost always be training. But if you roll 'Necessities', then you're still eating or sleeping - on a pile of training mats, if necessary.
Some rooms would count in multiple categories - a Grand Banquet Hall could be in all three, if you have some entertainment and use it for meetings.


It occurs to me that being an unusual creature type (Lich, Fire Elemental, Floating Head) would have some pretty significant defensive advantages. Difficult for people to surprise you in bed when you don't sleep, or sleep in a pool of lava. Or everything in your house is coated in contact poison.
Not sure if those should just not exist, or have some counterbalancing requirements / limitations. But we do want to avoid the "my house is entirely made out of fire and skeletons, so there's nothing you could steal even if you got in" thing.

[PhoneLobster]

No, it honestly makes sense to build no bathroom's ever if they give you an increased chance of being caught with your pants down per bathroom.

The basic sample bathroom allows you to control WHERE you are caught with your pants down, since there is a chance of being caught bathing even without the bath room and it's benefits. The inklings of that were in the magnetism description, but it really should have been better explained.

The idea is that when the enemy turn up at the compound you have to determine where everyone is. This doesn't happen when the enemy turn up at your bathroom this happens when they turn up at the entire SITE.

So if the alarm goes off, somewhere, and you are in your private bathroom in your private rooms behind all the outer layers of security you have less chance of the enemy being right next to you with your pants down than you do if you were bathing in the shared public bathroom down at the open to the public section or in a tub or river out the back of the complex entirely outside of most of the security (which is probably going to be the default place if you don't build something else).

The enemy is going to be revealed at some point, and often that is going to be somewhere OTHER than the deepest most protected parts of your mansion. So if you build your private bathroom in the safest bits, being "caught" there with your pants down when the alarm goes off somewhere in the outer layers is BETTER than being caught with your "casual" gear on wandering around the outer corridors. Because you will be less likely to face an enemy without significant lead time to gather some or all of your battle items.

Add to that additional features in your bathroom like staff which speed up equipping times or interfere with bath tub assassinations and buying a private bathroom is a plus, and being more likely to be caught there is potentially also a good thing.

[Sir Neil]

... the barbies thing is just a metaphor....

Oh.

[PhoneLobster]

I'll take a brief moment of this thread's exciting and yet ultimately uneventful resurrection to point out I am running a semi formalized version of this for an "Evil Genius" style game I am running at the moment.

Players seem to love the formalized base/criminal empire building aspects and the current version even has research project advancement and other crazy junk.

[Sir Neil]

Sorry about that. It showed up as a new thread for some reason.

Do you have the details fleshed out anywhere?

[sabs]

Isn't this basically what Original D&D looked like though?

You hit name level (10th) and you start building your Wizard's Tower, Frontier Keep, etc. There were rules for how many followers, and what type, how to build keeps.

it's perhaps admitting more directly that equipment is everythign, but it's basically the design of D&D.

[Zherog]

Sorry about that. It showed up as a new thread for some reason.

Do you have the details fleshed out anywhere?

[the voice of tech support]

It showed up as new because a spambot posted in the thread right before your post. I assassinated the spammy spam and the spambot that posted it. I generally don't call attention to deleted posts. Sorry for any confusion my stealth assassination caused.

--Z
[/the voice of tech support]

[Sir Neil]

Ah. That explains several things.

[echoVanguard]

This thread is very strange, but hilarious.

echo

[Dean]

Actually PL you may be satisfied to hear that I too am running a game based on this thread. You absolutely did strike on something here and things are going well so far.

I would be quite interested to hear about your more formalized revisions