Idea for a game: chess RPG
Transience
Acolyte
Instead of being able to kill 100% of the time just by moving your piece on top of an enemy piece, killing will be based on a probability, with a modifier for the different pieces. For instance, pawns have a low probability, queens have a high probability, there would be a hierarchy based on this. There could even be differences for attacking and defending, for example a rook would have be better at defending than attacking. A checkmate would still be a checkmate though, the king would have to have 0 probability when defending. There would be 3 possible outcomes for an encounter, attacker kills defender, attacker retreats, attacker is killed. Every time a successful kill or defense is made that piece gets experience, which improves its probability for success in future encounters. Surviving pieces could retain their experience over multiple matches, dead pieces would be replaced by new recruits, there could even be a campaign/storyline based around this.
Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions? Has anything like this been done before?
Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions? Has anything like this been done before?
Comments
I think a potential problem for this style of play is that certain pieces could become overpowered while others will be perpetually weak. After all, most kills in chess aren't made with pawns. Perhaps skill points you could gain to buy crazy or strange moves/pieces? I think you have to relinquish the chess idea eventually since you want to introduce that experience aspect. It changes the game and strategy entirely.
I think its a great fuckin idea though. Nice one.
Like, Chess mixed with DnD style RPG play?
That's true, balancing would be the most important part of designing a game like this.
Yeah I suppose. I was actually thinking it would be on a computer but I could see it working with a real chess board, dice, and some pens and paper.
Yeah man. And after the battle with the skill points you earn you can choose to put them into whatever type of piece you like.
And the pieces would each have skills varying in the amount of skill points necessary to buy them.
For example, for the queen would be an instant teleportation to any non occupied space on the board.
Or for the knight one might be extend their L shape by one square in any direction.
And all sorts of crazyness. You would need tons of testing and consultation from actual chess masters.
this
also, people wouldn't throw away pawns. you would be feeding their knights and bishops, it would change the game entirely.
do you really want to try to attack my level 12 knight with your level 2 queen?!
I think that to balance the game, shit pieces have more attacking and stopping power as opposed to stronger peices.
EG; Pawn has more chance to take out an opponent than a queen does.
This will stop pawns from being useless, but at the same time, queens are still valuable because of their movement.
How bout this:
Pawns biggest strength, and one that masters tap into the most, is their inherent ability to be a wall of defense, just like heavy infantry in any battlefield.
What if you gave pawns the ability to be powered slightly when they're grouped side to side? And still going on the skill points idea, what if their ultimate ability could be something like having the WHOLE ROW of pawns move up one line. It will be called "Glorious Battle Charge" or something like that.
The Knights ability I mentioned before could be something like "Mounted Archery Master"
The Queens could be "Assassin Infiltrators"
Of course there would be many more skills available to the different pieces and more than a few for each type of piece, of varying strength according to how you want to spend your acquired skill points.
It would also be great to have cinematic of action happening on the game board.
I was thinking more like KOTOR/Dragon Age Origins meets Chess or something.
My initial idea was for every encounter there would be 2 random rolls, one for each player. Each piece has 2 modifiers which are multiplied or added to this random roll, one for offense and one for defense. There would be 3 possible outcomes following the results, if the attackers number is greater than the defenders by a certain amount then he wins, and vice verse, however if the numbers are close enough together neither would win, attacker would retreat.
Each piece would start out with those modifiers already defined, but as they game goes on they can be improved by successful attacks and defenses. I'm not sure what the actually numbers involved should be for each piece, I simply don't know enough about chess to make it work in balanced manner. I was thinking the queen should have a high attack and low defense, knights and bishops would be the same, but to a lesser degree than the queen. Rooks would have a higher defense than attack, so would pawns but not by much. Kings always have a 100% chance of winning an attack, but 0% chance of winning a defense.