Rennaisance Men
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Here is a game I have been thinking about for a long time. I don't know exactly what mechanisms I want to use for it. Most of the games I have played have tried themselves out for potential rules but found themselves wanting.
Your piece would represent a person in a rennaisance town who was trying to be the best there was at three things. Scholarship, Dueling, and Love. You go to different sectors of the town to complete missions and gain victory points. Along the way you woo beautiful women, Poke holes in the logic of others and fight duels of honor. It is kind of "EnGuard the Board Game".
I always thought that the conflict rules from Dogs in the Vineyard felt very right for fencing rules. For those of you unfamiliar, you start with a handful of dice and roll them, putting forward one dice as an attack and using any number off dice to match it as a riposte. If you used more than two dice in defense you take damage. This is an over simplification but is about what I wanted to do. They feel somewhat less right if you know what the dice are at the beginning of the combat. DitV gets around this by allowing you to bring in new dice that wouldn't exist in this game.
I think I would change this by allowing the players to call forth powers from the cards that were their missions. So if you have successfully completed the mission for the sword maker he teaches you the secret of the Spanish Defense which would allow you to defend with an extra dice without taking damage.
I had assumed that there would be victory points for completing the mission and bonuses for the greatest scholar, lover and dualist in the game. I don't know if all of the missions would be open but I had assumed so.
My questions are. Could the same rules be used for scholarly arguments and the wooing of maidens, or would the game be better if there was something else to do and fighting duels was a separate thing?
How do I keep the powers from becoming a power spike making it too easy for the player who gets them from dominating the rest of the game? I think this might be in the form the three arenas. the things which help you be a better fighter would not help you to be a better scholar.
I'm sure I will have more questions as I get further along. -
So here's an idea: get lots of "NPCs" to interact with, that tie the three arenas together. So there's the Count of Tuscany, who has a beautiful daughter and a great library. He will not let anyone use it, though, but if someone woos his daughter, he'll let anyone who defeats the suitor in a duel, forcing him to give up the relationship, to use his great library. And then there's Duke B, who hates the Count, and will give a handsome reward to anyone who breaks his daugter's heart by wooing her and then breaking her heart, and so on.
Yes? No? -
This is a really cool idea for a game (and Simon, board game NPCs are always great and underused).
What if the cards serve multiple purposes? When you start a duel, an argument or a bout of wooing, you draw up a hand from your deck. Each card has a point value that can be used in one arena, a special power that can be used in another, and is useless in the third. So the Count's library might be useful just for sheer points in an argument, or give you the ability to draw a couple extra cards when wooing, but wouldn't help you in a duel.
Each character would start out with a small deck and build it as the game went on by completing missions for the NPCs in the different parts of the city; each NPC might come from one of, say, six Houses, and would give you one known card and two randomly-drawn cards from that House's deck as a reward for completing the associated mission. You can swap out older cards from your deck between missions--it would be a sort of continuous deck-building subgame.
And maybe I've just read too much Ellen Kushner lately, but I think it would be great if both the PCs and the "maidens" were available in both genders--you might just as easily be a dashing swordswoman (or man!) seducing the shy, scholarly son of a noble family. -
Reiner Knizia's duelling game En Garde is charming, and does feel surprisingly like real fencing [as carried out by people who've had a couple of months of lessons, but no more; people who are actually any good at fencing may disagree].
I think it would be good to have duels, arguments and wooing work in roughly the same way but, mm, with the resources you have available to you helping you in different ways in each.
If you stick with players gaining powers through missions, maybe you could keep them from being too powerful by making them liabilities as well - if you try to woo someone with strawberries, that reveals that you've been helping out Count Whatsit (who has a greenhouse), and that might mean that someone who objects to your association with Count Whatsit has grounds to challenge you. It could certainly be fun to have to find some grounds for offense in order to issue a duel.
Seconding "would be good to have male and female maidens and playable characters". -
Maybe, on your own turn, instead of engaging in a duel, you could send an offended duelist to challenge another player by proxy? There could be some card-based rationale for doing so.
I've just realized that we seem to have an unfinished resolution mechanic here. When you take on a mission, how exactly do you complete it? Does another player take on the role of the opposition (the lover to be wooed or scholar to be argued with), or does the game itself provide some sort of mechanical opposition? Is there maybe a GM who always plays the opponent? Is it possible to have multiple duels/arguments/seductions going simultaneously, so that not everybody has to sit around and watch your duel take place? ("Duels/arguments/seductions" is clumsy and from here forward I'm going to call them "challenges.") -
I really like the premise, although I third the non-normative gender allocation thing. It seems to me that the missions and the challenges have been kept separate, so far (with the rewards of missions supporting the ability of the PCs to engage in challenges) - which also suggests that other PCs would not take an (direct) adversarial role in the former in the way that they do in the latter. I don't know whether that's a desirable distinction, but it's one that seems to have been assumed, so I'm going to run with it.
What I'm curious about is this: what effect does the actual board have in this game? I mean, I assume that there is one, but none of the rules or mechanics mentioned so far either imply or require one. What if the missions for the Houses involved a territory-acquiring subgame? The more missions a PC does for a House, the stronger their affiliation with that House grows, and being strongly affiliated with a strong House could have rewards - but there's no hard-wired reason why any PC has to remain affiliated with any House beyond the limits of its usefulness.
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