Chapter 187: Another RPG
After finishing the rest of the reports, Ras turned on his computer. He was going to make a game design document.
The game he had thought of this time was a kind of role-playing game. However, it was very different from existing games.
The RPGs Ras had made before already had a fairly high degree of freedom, but this time, he planned to go beyond that and make a game with no fixed story at all.
It was not because Ras was especially obsessed with freedom. He had enjoyed role-playing games on Earth and in this world quite a lot.
The reason he thought of making this kind of game was influenced by the fact that he had recently created and popularized MTC, a card-type board game.
To be more specific, once Ras made a trading card game, he naturally thought of other board games as well. Among those, it might have been only natural that his thoughts reached TRPGs, which were closely connected to his specialty, computer games.
They were originally games that could be called the basis of PC RPGs. If Ras made one, the order would be reversed in this world.
In truth, he had never played a TRPG on Earth. But he was interested in them. And Ras ran a company filled with people who liked games, and he was on fairly good terms with his employees.
When he imagined gathering people at the company or by holding a house party at home and enjoying a TRPG, he thought it would be quite fun.
But when he actually tried to make one, there was something that bothered him. It could become team-killing.
MTC was currently enjoying enormous popularity, so if he pushed out a TRPG now, he felt it would simply be buried.
Even if he somehow made it amazingly well and it became popular, then conversely, it might pointlessly eat into MTC’s share. No, right now, it would be the same no matter what board game he made. At present, MTC practically monopolized the board game market, excluding classical games like chess and card games.
And Ras had the ambition to conquer the world with this. If things went badly and its popularity cooled off, that would be one thing, but for now, he did not want to introduce variables.
So he gave up on it for the time being, but he still felt quite disappointed. Perhaps because of that disappointment, Ras instead began wanting to implement TRPG elements on PC.
Of course, this was the original history of RPGs, but Ras interpreted it in a slightly different way.
He focused on the characteristic of having only basic rules and a world setting, while creating nearly infinite stories depending on the player.
There would be no main scenario given at the start. Instead, he planned to keep changing the world itself through randomly generated events. TRPGs also often had no given scenario, but the story created through interaction between the Game Master and players was one of their important elements, so he intended to substitute that with this system.
These events would be clichés often found in fantasy novels.
A Demon King might be summoned somewhere, a demon might appear, or a black mage, fallen angel, and so on might emerge. Then, starting from that event, they would affect the world in a way similar to a simulation game.
In the case of a Demon King, a demonic army that was summoned periodically would invade the surrounding area. It would gradually occupy the world, and as its power grew stronger, it would summon stronger armies and attack powerful nations as well.
And since one of the clichés that appeared when a Demon King arose was the appearance of a hero or a Holy Knight Order, those would also be added as events.
Of course, since these events would proceed based on calculations, they would not necessarily unfold as dramatically as in novels.
If the Demon King was summoned in a very powerful nation, he might fail to expand his power from the start and remain stagnant. If he was unlucky, the Demon King might also be defeated by a hero or an especially powerful adventurer.
And that adventurer could be the player.
The player would act as an adventurer within the changing world and could make achievements by approaching the advancing Demon King’s army and defeating its commanders.
If a commander died, the army might collapse or weaken, then be destroyed by the Holy Knight Order or the armies of nearby nations.
The same applied to the Demon King. No, since the Demon King was the root cause of the Demon King’s army in the first place, if the protagonist approached the Demon King’s Castle and defeated him, the Demon King appearance event would end there.
But the game would not necessarily proceed in such a standard way.
Ras planned to give this game infinite freedom, so the protagonist could join the Demon King’s army instead of the side of justice. It would not be through a special system. The player would simply go to an area occupied by the Demon King and change their nationality to the Demon King’s Nation through the nationality system included as a basic feature, and that would make them part of the Demon King’s army.
Then they could become enemies of the Holy Knight Order, kingdoms, and heroes and fight them. Naturally, the Demon King’s Nation would be full of demons, so the companions they hired could also be demons or monsters.
And in this game, every character who appeared could become a companion. If they were enemies, the player could capture them alive, and if persuasion succeeded, they could make them party members.
Using this system, the player could capture the Demon King or blood relatives with the potential to become a Demon King and turn them into companions as well. In the hero’s case, since the hero was also an adventurer, the player could go to the place where the hero appeared and recruit them through ordinary companion recruitment.
The player could actively participate in events in this world or simply observe them while living as an ordinary adventurer.
If the Holy Knight Order and hero defeated the Demon King’s army, the world would return to its original state. But if the Demon King’s army conquered the world, then until the player changed nationality, they would have to keep fighting the Demon King’s army in the field and would also be unable to use cities.
And events would occur even in a world occupied by the Demon King. A resistance movement might appear and create a nation that broke free from the Demon King’s power, or events such as a black mage hostile to the Demon King, or even the descent of a heavenly god, might occur.
If these events overlapped, an interesting power structure could once again form, such as black mages, the Demon King, kingdoms, and holy states.
And in this game, the player would not be immortal.
They could die simply by failing in an adventure, and even if they grew without mistakes, they would die according to their race’s lifespan and the separate lifespan value held by the character.
But dying would not end the game. Here, another important feature was the bloodline system.
During the game, the player could marry and have descendants. Marriage could be done through a proposal system, which operated based on affection.
This value would rise by giving gifts or fulfilling requests generated through events, and success would be determined probabilistically after applying values such as racial compatibility, religion, and nationality.
Like companion recruitment, this marriage could also be done with any character, as long as the genders matched.
And if the player married another race, a half-blood would be born. A half-blood’s potential would be determined by mixing half of each race’s potential.
It would work like Half-Human (Elf) or Half-Elf (Gnome), with the base race being the player’s race and the race inside the parentheses being the spouse’s race. Unlike actual scientific reality, mixed blood with monsters would also be possible.
Naturally, mixing with races like Demon Kings, angels, and gods would also be possible.
And since a descendant’s potential would be determined by adding random elements to the ancestors’ potential, creating powerful descendants would be one kind of fun.
In any case, when the player died, he planned to make it so they either selected one descendant or continued with one determined at random. Or he might simply make both options available.
Aside from the spouse the player personally married, the bloodline would automatically continue through descendants. If the protagonist died without descendants midway, the game could continue through one of the automatically continued collateral relatives.
When starting again as a descendant, stats would return to the bottom, but equipment could be inherited to some extent through the inheritance system. However, it would not remain exactly as it was. Some gold and equipment would be lost as inheritance tax, and what remained would also be divided among the children, so having many children meant receiving less equipment.
But if the player had only one child, it would be difficult to create a good character, so this was an issue that required quite a lot of thought.
And in the inheritance system, the player could designate one piece of equipment to pass down directly, so at least one item could be secured.
“And...”
Ras passionately struck the keyboard. He had already roughly set up the framework in his head, so once he started pressing the keys, the contents flowed out endlessly.
Aside from the keyboard, there were also wildly scribbled drawings and writing on his desk, along with a pen rolling carelessly over them.
A design document could not be made with text alone, but drawing on a computer was still not easy, so it could not be helped.
He was writing about the fame and status systems.
Since there was no scenario, the system had to provide as much fun and purpose as possible, and these were also important systems in terms of freedom.
But when it came to implementing them, he suddenly hit a wall.
If he thought simply, he could arrange them according to medieval classes, such as commoner, knight, lord, and king. But simply attaching titles according to fame would not mean much.
To give it a realistic feel, he would have to give the player a territory. That was the problem. It would be meaningless to simply attach a name label to a village, so he would have to let the player do something in that territory. But then the system would become too complicated.
This game was ultimately a role-playing game where the protagonist became an adventurer and enjoyed the world. But suddenly collecting taxes, developing cities, raising armies, and waging wars felt somewhat strange.
Of course, some people might like that kind of thing, but there was a possibility that it would become a bizarre game that was neither one thing nor the other.
“Hmm... Should I make it so quests can be received differently?”
One method Ras thought of was to allow special quests depending on status and add quests that could only be received in territories the player owned. Another thing that came to mind was allowing the player to select people of different classes as companions or spouses.
It also seemed fine to reward status by adding buildings or areas that could only be entered after reaching a certain class.
If he thought a little more about freedom, it also seemed fine to add legal and illegal approaches. If the player approached legally, they could talk to characters there and experience events, but if they approached illegally, they would be ignored or combat would break out.
This is good.
Still, after thinking it through, decent answers seemed to come out. In that way, Ras filled in the game’s missing parts one by one as he created the design document.
In the past, he would not have been able to include such a complex system because of insufficient resources, but now that he no longer had to worry about that, it was truly convenient.
Of course, the new computer would certainly have limits too, but systems centered on simple calculations like this were the most efficient way to use the new CPU. Unless something extreme happened, it should be able to handle them well enough.
“Ras.”
“Huh?”
He had been focused on continuously writing the design document, so only after Ella called his name several times, came right beside him, and her voice reached his ear together with her presence did he finally recognize it and turn his head.
There, he saw Ella looking worried with her orange eyes.
“Huh? What is it?”
“What do you mean, what is it? Aren’t you getting off work?”
“Getting off work?”
At Ella’s words, he looked out the window and was startled. Before he realized it, it had grown dark. When he went closer and looked down, the streetlights were not on yet, but the sun was already hanging on the ridgeline, and lines of people leaving work continued along the streets.
Footnotes
Translator’s Notes
TRPG — Tabletop Role-Playing Game; a role-playing game played through conversation, rules, dice, and a Game Master’s narration rather than primarily through computer software.
Game Master — The person who manages the rules, setting, events, and narrative flow in a tabletop role-playing game.