Today, I accidentally started the project of using Happy Jak Games's Wyrd Dungeon RPG as the procedural dungeon generator for a GUILD: Sword & Magick For Hire campaign with my 7-year-old son, and we're just going to run with it. Both games are based on the Wyrd Engine by Disaster Tourism Games, so they're eminently compatible, they just need a few stitches to hold them together. Here's my pattern.
Next time, I'll look a little more closely at the procedural generation rules and the specific steps I'm using to build each level of the dungeon!
Design Goals
My big goal with this campaign is to introduce my son to basic concepts of roleplaying games and have a good time with him. This means that the campaign might have to lean more on the "game" part of RPG and a little less on the "role-playing" side. Frankly, it's okay if this game feels like a video game. I want my son -- eventually at least -- to get involved with the dungeon creation, so using a procedural, GMless engine like Wyrd Dungeon is going to help a lot on that front; we can practice balancing the dungeon together and will design challenges that we both want to see, which I really wish I had had the opportunity to do when I was coming up. Many of the subsystems in GUILD support this style of play as well; lots of details exist in a kind of quantum limbo and are rolled for only when needed, which saves a lot of planning time and keeps things interesting.
Play Goals
I want to be able to sit down at the table with my son -- possibly joined by my wife and daughter as well -- and play through a short(ish) dungeon crawl in one session. At the end of that session, you get whatever rewards and make any character changes, buy gear, handle downtime, etc., that make sense. The goal of each session will be to "complete" the level of the dungeon, which is done by finding the exit to the next level; once you've found that exit, the session is over, you get a reward and make your next moves. When the next session rolls around, the group will start at the new level they've discovered the exit to in the previous session. Yeah, it's basically going to be Minecraft Dungeon the RPG. I've made peace with that.
Rule Seeds
Here are the rules that I've been toying with so far:
- Loot the Room: each room contains 1gp per dungeon level in general loot. Since there is no XP in the Wyrd Engine, this allows measured advancement for overcoming the challenge of encounters or bypassing them but still looting the room.
- Treasure: each dungeon level will contain Level d3 - Level (ie, Level 1 is d3-1, Level 3 is 3d3-3 and so on) treasures distributed as evenly as possible across the rooms, preferring Exit rooms.
- Guild Gear: between levels, generate a list of weapons & armor available from the Guild. I need a method for this that isn't too wild.
- Traps: Each dungeon level will have a number of traps determined by the number of rooms in the level. There'll be a chart for this, but I have a rubric. Level 1: 1d6-1 traps. Level 2: 1d8-1 traps. Level 3: 1d10-1 traps, etc. This may move to the Level*d3-Level model used above after some testing.
- Encounters: Every room gets an encounter. They do not have to be combat encounters.
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