Working on a narrative RPG for sixth history, looking for input
Hey all,
I like the mechanics of Cultist Simulator/Book of Hours and the idea of using cards as both your "character sheet" as well as your possessions. I've been thinking for a while about how this could be used in a narrative roleplay sense, either online or around a table. I don't think I could manage it with physical cards given the complexity of how what cards are slotted dynamically changes what OTHER slots open up in a 'verb', but I've come up with a basic premise.
For those familiar with Storium this is vaguely similar to that.
Basically, you have a GM and players as you'd expect. Players have actions which they can select (contemplate, study, etc). They also have group actions which multiple players can contribute to, which represents group challenges and efforts.
The idea is that you'd narratively describe the scene (in person, in discord, in forums or email, whatever). The GM then issues a "turn." Turns can be one of 2 types:
Downtime (Personal and Group advancement - all long-term actions are available)
Action (Specific Group challenges available only - this is meant to represent when you're all 'in the dungeon' or a similar fast paced scene.
Players submit actions by slotting "noun" cards into "verbs" (actions). They can add an optional "intent" to each action to describe what they're doing.
The GM then goes in and processes each action. They can either accept it as is (if it matches a predefined 'recipe' like "study a book + enough of an aspect = get a lesson"), or modify the output, or just mark it as a failure, negating it, with an option to add commentary as to why whatever happened just happened.
Here's a current look at the (still very rough) interface:
So, questions for you:
Is this sort of gameplay interesting to you?
What sort of features would you like to see in it?
What would you like to see it avoid?
Any general advice or thoughts?
==Brief Technical Details==
I'm currently building this as a docker image with the following stack:
Next.js
Auth.js
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Drizzle ORM
Tailwind / shadcn
The ultimate intent is to publish the codebase to github/github container registry so that someone can just do a docker pull and have a working instance fairly quickly.