Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So Blizzard apparently made over USD 3.5 million from selling the Celestial Steed mount at US$25 a pop over two days. That’s probably more money than what most AAA-rated games earn and since it’s just a silly mesh, nearly all of that is pure profit. What surprised me even more is that there was actually a queue for them because Blizzard simply can’t take their customers’ money fast enough. At its peak, the queue was over 140,000 according to WOW Insider.

Anyway, it’s been over two years since I last played World of Warcraft. In fact I didn’t buy Wrath of the Lich King and never even reached the level cap in Burning Crusade. But I’ve been keeping an eye on the announcements about Cataclysm and there’s a good chance that this will be the expansion I’ll come back for. One thing is that the class revamps will completely change the way they’re played. Hunters for example will lose whatever melee abilities they have left but will now start with a pet right from the first level. The mana system is being overhauled so that mages will do more damage with Arcane Missiles depending on mana level etc.

But the main reason I’m interested is because all of the old zones on Azeroth are supposed to be updated and altered to reflect in-game events. Darkshore for example is going to be partially flooded and the Barrens are going to be split in two. Most of the old quests are also going to be redone and new ones made. As Blizzard explains, they’ve learned a lot about quest design over the years, so there’s currently a perceptible disparity between the quality of the old quests and the ones in the expansions. This should mean a more consistently enjoyable experience for anyone rolling a new character.

This lead me to think about what a proper WOW style dungeon crawl boardgame would be like. The premise and presentation would be similar to Descent with board pieces to build dungeons out of, lots of miniatures for monsters and heroes and cards to represent items and powers. The mechanics and strategy involved however would be completely different. For starters, it would enforce the “Holy Trinity” of MMORPGs: tank, healer and damage. Each character class would have abilities that enable them to contribute in a specific way within the mold and absolutely no character would be able to solo any boss class monsters. Bosses can only be defeated if the entire group works together and do the right things in the right order.

For example, the warrior would be the archetypal tank class with lots of life and lots of damage mitigation, but he would only be able to do very modest damage and that only in melee range. He should have an area taunt power that forces all enemies adjacent to him to attack only him and perhaps a longer ranged taunt ability that targets a single enemy. The use of all these special abilities should be rationed in some way but I’m not sure what. Having a boardgame try to replicate rage and how it’s generated in WOW would be far too complicated.

The priest would be the basic healer class. He would be able to do very modest ranged damage and is extremely fragile but has the ability to cast various spells. He might have a medium range single target heal that restores a lot of life for example and a weaker one that heals all heroes adjacent to him and so forth. The rogue would be able to do lots of melee damage. He’d be tougher than a priest but much more fragile than the warrior. To simulate the backstab ability, you might give him bonus damage against enemies that have already been taunted. Mages might be even more fragile than the priest but would be able to do both ranged damage and area of effect damage.

Then you have the hybrid classes. The paladin would be able to both tank and heal but can’t fill these roles as efficiently as the pure classes. He might also tank in a different way. Instead of taunting enemies, he might activate an aura that deflects part of the damage received by adjacent allies onto himself for example. Hunters will be able to do good ranged damage plus have a pet that can act like a weak tank. Shamans can do decent melee damage plus have some limited healing ability. Druids would be able to do a little bit of everything due to their ability to shapeshift but I think implementing that in a boardgame would be very complicated. You’d certainly have to make shapeshifting very costly in terms of resources.

In addition to these core abilities, each class would have additional utility abilities that could be accessed as they gained levels. Druids for example might be able to cure poison effects while mages can dispel the buffs on minibosses and bosses. Priests might be able to shackle undead monsters, effectively stunning them for a short time while rogues can stealthily enter a new room and maneuver himself into a good strategic position before the rest of the party enters and activates the monsters. Warriors could shift stances, sacrificing some of their damage mitigation abilities in order to gain extra damage etc.

The game would revolve around finding and killing the minibosses of a dungeon to gain levels and items in order to be strong enough to take down the final boss. I think going with either a design that has the heroes pitted against another player in an Overlord-like role or playing against just the board would work. In the former, you’d have the Overlord spending Threat tokens to activate the special abilities of bosses and minibosses while in the latter, you’d need to have a script to work out when and how bosses activate abilities.

Of course, I’m not blind to the problems. The most obvious of those is that it’s going to be horrendously long. With all the class-specific special abilities, it’s going to be more complicated than Descent and will take a commensurately greater amount of time to play. To mitigate that, I’d say that encounters should be built and played room by room. Essentially, once the heroes enter a room, they stay in it until they kill the boss in it. Health, mana etc. should be refreshed between rooms so there’s no need to track them. Dungeons should be a series of connected rooms but you won’t need to do a whole dungeon in a single session. You’d do as many rooms as you have time for and continue later, somehow recording your items and abilities gained between sessions, like an old-style RPG.

The second problem is that it’s impossible to balance dungeons other than for a full group of five heroes. If you don’t have enough players, you’re simply forced to have some players control more than one hero, otherwise maintaining the tank-healer-damage distinction doesn’t work. For these two reasons, the game will probably be too hardcore to ever see the light of day but it’s still something I’d like to see happen. The intent is to create puzzle-like tactical challenges in which the players have to consider factors up to and including which classes to pick, which abilities to use on which monsters and when to use them, where each hero needs to stand etc.

The scenarios should call for each room to be unique in some way. In one room, the heroes might need to clear out all of the trash monsters before the boss will spawn for example. In another room, as long as the boss isn’t dead, a new wave of trash monsters might be spawned every few turns etc. The heroes would need to observe how each room works and figure out a strategy to beat it. With all of the dungeon instances in WOW to draw from, there’s no shortage of ideas for scenarios. Who wouldn’t want to enter the boardgame equivalent of familiar dungeons like Deadmines and the Scarlet Monastery?