A Gashapon RPG

[GoodSelf]

I had an idea similar to a CCG, but weaved into the gameplay of a traditional RPG. I was hoping to get some ideas or feedback to see if this is something the community would be interested in playing.

The idea is that you can only buy booster packs. These packs contain four cards of varying rarities (Common, Rare, Mystic) and come in 4 different types:

Hero Cards
These are the actual Heroes you use in battle each comes with their own small set of skills, unique equipment slots, and unique play style.

Equipment Cards
These cards contain swords, Shields, chest plates, and other accessories that can be equipped onto your hero cards.

Item Cards
These cards include potions, battle items, and any other useful thing an adventurer might need.

Gem Cards
Gem cards come in three types. Common, rare, and mystic. You can combine three gem cards of the same type to receive a random card equal to that gems type. You can also exchange them for gold to purchase more packs.

The player will be encouraged to try different Heroes and different weapon combinations throughout the story, constantly switching out their Heroes for new ones they unlock in packs to find their own unique play style with the many different combinations.

I'm hoping the Gashapon system will breathe new life into the tried-and-true formula. Or perhaps it's too basic to change anything at all? I wonder what your ideas are.

P.S. when referring to the system, keep in mind there will be no in-game purchases with real money. Everything can only be obtained with in-game currency.

 

[Superior Manchild]

That would take a HECK of a lot of planning. I suppose you could start with each deck and play the game through to balance it. Would probably be best to start with the hero deck and treat them like summons. Would they be permanent or temporary? Are they unlocked during certain parts of the game? How easy it to buy them? Get gems?

I think the hero cards should be treated like weapons and armor in a regular game. You don't want the player to have the chance to win a game breaking hero. Develop your catalog and see where you run into trouble if the game seems too easy.

Great idea, though. Leaves a lot of room for adaptation. You could easy do this for a monster fighting game or for a game about battling robots. Super cool.

 

[Rayhaku808]

As a general question, what's the progression like?

 

[GoodSelf]

@Superior Manchild it would function almost exactly the same as the regular battle system. Your deck is simply you swapping out Heroes in between battles and equipping them with weapons and such. A starting deck might include a warrior, healer, and Ranger. Later on in the game, you might unlock The Bard and The Wizard, and want to swap those in for your other Heroes.

As far as the heroes are concerned, although some will be harder to obtain than others, those would be niche heroes with unique abilities - the idea is to be able to find the team you like and win with that team, rather than obtain all the best heroes and go through the game without ever changing them.

I intend to give enough for awards at the end of each Mission or tournament battle so you can obtain new cards at a steady rate. You can also craft cards, and sell duplicates of cards you already own.

I want the player to be able to obtain enough cards to play through and enjoy the game, but also be able to obtain every card in the game if they want to do extra side missions and grind a little.

@Rayhaku808 as of now I'm not too sure, but the idea I'm latching onto is at tournament style where you progress through multiple stages each progressively harder than the last. Another idea is to have a Super Mario World style world map, and you progress along, following a small story.

One early idea is that the main character opens up a pack of these cards, and one of the Hero cards resembles his father, who went missing years ago. This is the driving force behind the character wanting to find the creator of the card game, and find the truth about his father.

 

[Wavelength]

Sounds like a lot of fun to me!!

If I understand correctly, the "cards" essentially represent randomized loot (including new Heroes as loot, which is neat), and the unique nature of this loot in "card" form doesn't create any extra randomness in combat (like it would in Yu-Gi-Oh! or Baten Kaitos), right?

Because you are presumably adding a lot of variability to the player's resources (for example, I assume that Mystic items are more powerful than Common ones), you are never going to be able to precisely pinpoint the player's power level as the designer. This means that balance-wise, you have to design mechanics that allow you to miss the balance target a little bit without ruining the player's fun. I recently wrote a list of ways you you can make your balance target really big and wide so that you can afford to miss the mark by a little.

Also consider whether a system like this might fit better into a nontraditional RPG gameplay structure - for example, the Pokemon TCG's video game version (where your loot from winning matches was quite literally booster packs) , and the balance started out hard and became easy as you gained more cards and more skill. This would be terrible design in a standard RPG, but it worked in this game because it set the expectation that you weren't going to win every battle (losing wouldn't get you a Game Over or take away your cards; it would simply get you an encouraging line from the rival trainer and you could come back to try again any time you pleased), and also because the whole game operated as a slow-burn power fantasy where you eventually get good enough to beat everyone but it's still fun to do so because every game of the TCG will play a little differently and you can make all kinds of neat decks. I'm not saying you necessarily need a nontraditional structure to use Gachapon-type rewards; it's definitely possible to make it an interesting and fun mechanic in a traditional RPG. But consider whether the nontraditional structure might be the thing that really lets it shine.

One additional type of Booster Pack that might be fun would be "Skills" cards - skills that you can equip onto your heroes (maybe they don't have any innate skills, or they have just a couple that are very unique to them). Each hero can equip different types of skills (for example a barbarian couldn't equip magic, and a mage couldn't equip shamanistic rituals), perhaps represented by different colors or keywords. This creates a really nice middle ground between full customization versus fixed skillsets.