GAME: Whom Fortune Favours

Game where you are a dice who judges the players based on good/bad deeds that they do throughout the day and lands on the side of justice

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 23, 2013

The game I ended up with is a mobile app with two games in one: an asynchronous, turn-based, menu-operated, multiplayer RPG with a major ethics/morality emphasis (lots of Fable-like aesthetic consequences for the player’s actions, plus the player’s actions would unlock or close off future quest lines) and a die-rolling physics simulator that uses the phone's accelerometer motion control. Bear with me, this does make sense eventually.

On the RPG side: the player is presented with a world map, clustered with people in need and dungeons to plumb (plus merchants, skill trainers and whatnot), and they can commit to a quest by selecting one off of the map (à la Kingdom of Loathing). Once engaged in a quest, the player is presented with a succession of multiple-choice scenarios, based on their skills and the context of the situation, not unlike a text adventure. All of the player’s options are substantial choices; there’s less “go north” and more “take the long route, avoiding trouble”; not so much “cast fireball” as “incinerate enemies with impunity”. Every decision has a serious impact on the quest, creating observable consequences, or even taking the player down a completely separate branch of the quest-line.

Every decision also involves some element of chance (how badly do you get hurt while incinerating enemies, how much of your food does taking the long route use up, et cetera), but instead of a random number generator producing those results, we have the second major component of the game: Once a player makes a choice in a quest scenarios, their progress locks, and they are taken to a physics simulation of a twenty-sided die rolling down a ramp (think Rock of Ages), controlled by the mobile device’s motion detection. Whatever number is rolled will be used as the “randomly generated” number for some other player’s quest choice. The roll would not only affect the outcome of that player’s action, but might also be used to generate “random” events to procedurally complicate their quest-line.

Right before performing a roll, the player would be given an anonymous briefing about the recipient character: their current choice and the consequences of the roll; and a set of statistics like altruism/selfishness, cruelty/mercy, and bravery/cowardice of that character based on their history. During the roll, obstacles, power-ups, and modifiers could be hit to affect the die’s momentum and modify the final number, giving the rolling player extra control over the result. Players might earn single-use momentum boosts for the rolling game as rewards for quests, and in the rolling game there might be collectible XP bubbles to pick up, just so that the two components of the game feed into one another more.