I have an idea rattling about for something akin to Division. Want to call it 'The Waters of Babylon' (based on the short story I read as young teenager). It mostly came about because I started thinking of the actual factions that would exist in a lot of major metropolitan centers post-apocalypse and so want to do something like a survival RPG. You get a fixed amount of points in character creation. You use points to buy skills and handicaps. You must spend as many points on handicaps as you did on skills. You cannot earn more points when you are done, but you can receive skills and handicaps after.
The main antagonist is the world, which the year prior went all to Hell. Viral pandemics, mass rioting, natural disasters, manmade disasters, the whole nine yards. The long story short for the limited system is that most characters have completed their initial development as survivors. It's assumed they're able to outright collect the basics to live, but not thrive. There's enough shelters and encampments around that most who survived, can eke out a living working as a manual laborer or farmer tending to crops and livestock in the ruins of civilization.
The primary goal is to achieve a set of objectives and quests which are being put out by the various factions beginning to rise to power and how the players decide to assist or detract from those efforts. Players could eventually look to create a faction of their own, but that's not the goal of the story, which is moreover a look into how the survivors want the civilization they're a part of to develop. Using preexisting cities cuts down on the need to make maps for me and enables me to look into simply developing the underlying story that came about after the initial events.
Because there's not an actual need for players to look for food (given that they are assumed to have the basic skills to do so already and there's plenty being provided for), the loot system looks more like scavenging for boosts to base stats. The base stats are Strength, Health, Speed, Vision, Capacity, and Damage.
Strength is used to accomplish a physical feat, Health enables a character to suffer more negative status effects before going unconscious or dying. Speed determines how far someone can move, usually in terms of metric distances. Vision determines from what distances items, encounters, and locations can be seen and starts at base 6. Capacity enables more items to be carried in the inventory, though certain items can take up multiple inventory slots. Damage is a fixed value, generally inflicted during combat. During combat, skills and weapons used can be the difference between life and death.
Some items could hold drawbacks in their stat when they deplete or have a special requirement for use. A basic loot table for a journey into an old apartment looks like:
A character's status page would be used to keep track of what they have and find. It'd look something more like this:
I'll post a little more later when I feel like formatting. But there's also a skills section to the Status table and an effects section, both of which have a bit more mechanically to do with the game. This is not a turn-based RPG or chance-based RPG. The values are set and fixed. A player with 1 Vision can still find the same things as a player with 8 Vision, but the player with 8 Vision takes 1/8th the amount of time doing so. If an item has a set rarity in a loot table at an apartment building of 8, the player with 8 Vision finds it within an hour of Scavenging. A player with 1 Vision spends about 8 hours to do the same.
Combat works the same, both sides go in with the only determining factor being their skills and equipment. A player with the 'Camouflage' skill, can get closer to another player before starting the encounter, which is to the advantage of an ambusher, but it also allows that same player to also move away from potential engagements or remain unseen. The Camouflage skill has a timer though, saying something like "A close player must spend a minute or more looking for you. A near player must spend ten minutes looking for you. A far player cannot find you."
Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 1:52 pm
