[JimKurth]

I'd like opinions on what you guys/girls think as far as an RPG story for an Indie-RPG:

Setting: 2350 AD. Mankind lives in underwater domes due to a comet that skimmed across the planet's atmosphere, polluting it with radiation and reducing oxygen level. Now the comet is headed back towards the planet on a collision course and mankind seems to be doomed.

Characters: Kaire, Natalie (both 23-years old)

Storyline: 2 characters find out about this threat and also discover a time machine developed between the years that have passed since the comet's first fly-by. As they find a special radiated and crystallized stone required to operate the time machine, they come across the idea of traveling back in time to give the people of the past some studies on this comet and ways to destroy it with weapons that were non-existent at their time. However, they go back in time and find their solutions to their current problems in the past reside even farther in the past; even to a time when magic was recognized and used. These 2 characters from the future will meet and join forces with other characters throughout time to fight for their own causes, but the ultimate fight is not for saving themselves or saving the planet; it's for saving the future.

Ideas: Using Life Points, Fatigue Points, and Magic Points in battle. Life Points is your main life. It goes up the longer you play in the game and once it's down to 0, you're dead. Your FP is similar to the usual HP except, if it goes to 0, you wake back up and health recovers but only to a percentage based on your maximum FP and current LP level (e.g. if you're LP is at 30% of your maximum LP and you lose consciousness (FP=0), then your FP will recover after a few turns in battle but only to 30% (LP) of your maximum FP and, of course your LP goes down). LP can be raised by sleeping in beds, duration of the game, and gaining experience from battles. FP can be recovered by sleeping, eating, using special items, and relaxing.

There are a few uncommon ideas to make this RPG worthwhile and interesting to play, which I'll disclose at a later time.


Let me know if this sounds interesting and would be something you'd be looking forward to.

[Terry]

The FP system sounds a little over complicated for my liking, though I'm sure everyone else will disagree with me there.

It's a good start, but it's missing something... I don't really know what - a hook, I suppose. I guess it's too early to really make a call on the game's quality from your description. If Kaire and Natalie are likable characters, it could work. I'd play it, anyway :)
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[cowgod]

The whole thing's a little bit too complicated. FP doesn't seem to serve any particular purpose.

The storyline is a good basic idea, but it would be good to have some development of the characters. It depends alot on what happens in each time period.

Farbeit for me to give advice about the storyline (given that I know nothing about writing), but the quality of the story depends alot on the interactions between the characters. You basically just gave a setting.

[Rainer Deyke]

Regarding the story: A paragraph-long blurb isn't enough data to judge the story. I have no ideas what events are in the game, how they relate to each other, who the characters are (and by "who" I mean their personalities, goals, and roles in the story, not their names and age), who the villain is (if any), or even what the main conflict is about. In other words, there's nothing there to comment on...

... except, nothing kills suspension of disbelief faster than time travel. A world where 2 + 2 = 5 is more plausible than a world where what happened doesn't stay happened.

Regarding FP: I think it could work to enhance the game. It depends on how it's implemented. Personally I'd rather see a game with a few very complex and very hard battles than yet another game where you have to beat up the same random monsters by repeatedly choosing "attack" from the combat menu again and again and again and again and again and again. Pointless battles suck. And by "pointless", I mean any battle that can be won using a strategy that already worked for a previous battle. The only way to make battles less pointless is to make them more complex.

[cowgod]

To make time travel be believable, all you have to do is the following: make it so that you can't change something that you already know has happened.

Whether time travel is believable or not, it can still be cool.