TFR Game system

TFR Game system notes

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3-2-2023: finalized the rulebook.

It's a really cute game, very focused, fast to setup and play a session. Very happy with the product but it cost me a few weeks of my life I will never get back.

27-1-2023: just realized last night that killed heroes weren't addressed in the roguelite. Effectively you have MIA (need to rerun to defeat boss) and KIA (won but barely).
Reusing revived heroes takes 1 gold, regardless of how decomposed the bodies were. I thought of some refinements but ultimately the game should encourage progress through higher difficulty settings.

Also to put under words why TFR is so cool, it's Pascal's triange essentially. The shorter the road, the more different parts the next play will be, but the longer the road, the more varied the sequence will be of road parts (and as a consequence more variation in the x+y combinations).

24-1-2023: TFR needs as addons:

- ideally 4 thick strips of paper, with text EASY (in green), NORMAL (in yellow), HARD (in blue) and Legendary (in red), with a "locked" sign on one side and an "unlocked" sign on the other. While playing, put the corresponding strip on lux, so when you are interrupted you know what difficulty you are playing on. Very easy is the absence of a strip :-)

- a cool template for the guild card. It functions right now but printing off would be more user-friendly.

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First impressions from Gabe's version:

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+ you can see the consequence of the next location before Rest/Merchant, but again with merchant and the Rest you need luck.

+ laying out the stringed-together road looks cool, and gameplay is smooth and offers interesting choices.

- but: the game's core mechanic is attrition, and it sorely needs a roguelite addition and a score sheet.

  - first game: found the normal difficulty ridiculously hard.

  - single merchant opportunity removes a money sink, so that has either to go, or be restricted to Legendary difficulty.

    -> higher difficulty needs to focus on road length primarily.

- the terms are a bit unfortunate.

- not enough mitigation, too much reliance on luck. Reliance on luck is a very bad motivator.

- No unlockables.
 
Obvious ways to improve for future development:

- for Descend you need to get lucky on die rolls.
- because there is no dice mitigation, allow at least a reroll of some kind to non-bosses.

-> Added Rerolls for Easy, but not for bosses, so players will want to prepare better for a boss.

- games like this need a campaign.
-> for the ks version, the obvious first idea would be to burn through heroes (you have 12).
-> For pnp, tick off the bodies added to the graveyard or something. Eventually such players would want the ks version before long.

- No unlockables. As a substitute I added item cards not used up for future runs. And coins.

- There are obviously limits to the coins and item cards, but only overly prepared players would hit those limits.

? requiring to beat all the road bosses and all the dungeon bosses would be too much, that would feel like a drag. Both bosses are "simply there" and don't embody any kind of actor or persona toward lux or the player so for TFR it's nothing personal.

-> so for this we can make a Roguelite Resettable Campaign mode.

core ideas:

1. your goal is to beat the game on Legendary. As long as you have 3 heroes left you can play roguelite as described below. When you don't have 3 heroes left, you must reset the game, i.e. erase any boons your guild has acquired so far.    

2. thematically farmers nearby find your unconscious bodies and drag them back to your guild in Lux, at the expense of potions you had (the merchant collects these) and 1 coin (if you had any, minus 1 coin per hero). On Normal, they leave you 2 coin (if any), on Hard they leave you 3 coin (if any), and on Legendary max 4 coin (if any). So, if you died on normal with 5 coin, your guild money box gets 1 coin extra (5-3=2, but normal, makes 1).

3. before you play, put 1 random hero from the available hero roster under the Dungeon Boss. When you lost, remove that hero from the game - he is lost forever unless you do a total reset.

4. During a Roguelite campaign:

    - Very easy does not count, no gold boon.

    - Game starts at Easy.

    - A Win is a win, move on to harder difficulty (or play again to farm gold, but at the risk of losing heroes).     

    - You have beaten the game when you won on legendary.

    - Add per run the coins you had at the moment you lost.  Add these next to the score. Next attempt, thematically your corpses were dragged back to town cemetary and the guild collected the gold. Next run that gold is available (up to the provided coin token max, 10x2 + 3x5 = 35 coin.) any surplus remains on the score sheet.

- at the start you have the leftover coins from the previous run at your disposal, cross them out, or not use these but save them.

- needs an extra column to the right, for coin boons result; and to the left a cell for coins at start.

5. You can proceed to next diffi with all heroes rescued but several in stasis. You win the game by winning on Legendary, your heroes in stasis will be resurrected implicitly by the grateful priests as a thank you. So you can safely assume your full roster is ready for the feast.

6. Although you could go to the next difficulty without resurrecting stasis heroes, it might turn out that you're ill-prepared, or otherwise disadvantaged. So it shouldn't be required to have everyone alive and well, but it's something any player would quickly discover. After all, it's just a matter of money.

7. Maybe a system like heroes have to stay on stasis for several games, or increase their defrosting costs, but it would not help addictiveness at all only hinder.