For those unfamiliar with the title, TMQ is an action RPG/dungeon builder that is currently in development. Those two elements of gameplay are what really make this game ripe for the picking (of RPG ideas) and provide us with the first two ideas to take: dungeon delving and dungeon building.
“We already have those!”, you say? True, many (if not most) RPGs do have those concepts. There is a slight difference here though -- every player in TMQ participates in both parts. The gist of the game is building a dungeon to protect your treasure horde from other players, while also invading the dungeons of other players to raid their coffers. And that leads straight to the central idea to take from it -- each player designs their own dungeon, and they go through all of their rivals’ dungeons. In the case of tabletop, this would most likely be a gaming group’s worth of people -- each designing and running their own dungeon in turn, the rest of the group using their characters to run through them as far or as fast as they can.
That’s all very basic though, isn’t it? Something that gaming groups have had to of tried before. Well, it’s after that general idea that things get a teeny bit more interesting, and the part where the computer game aspects start to come through a bit more.
There are limitations on the dungeon building -- limitations put in place to help keep things reasonable. Now, I know that limitations are often the bane of some tabletop gamers, but in this case it really is for the greater good. The limits here largely deal with the number of monsters you can place within your castle, the density of monster placement, the density of trap placement and the number of rooms allowed. Rooms in this sense being more like geomorphs -- which actually helps immensely with converting that part to tabletop.
Explanations ahead, followed by immediately by the potential tabletop applications and ideas:
Starting with the monsters, the cost works a bit like armies in war games or building encounters in the newer D&D titles. Every monster is worth a set amount of Defense Rating and your dungeon has a hard cap on how much Defense Rating you can use at a particular time. For the monster density, each monster has a zone around it that merges with other monsters to form an encounter and each encounter has a set maximum Defense Rating that can be placed within it (with the special Boss encounter being a bit higher). While this does put a cap on how big an encounter can be, you have free reign over what you can put in it, so long as it fits within the cap. For TMQ this provides a core for the dungeon building strategy -- making encounters as challenging as possible within the limit.
Bringing the monster rules to the tabletop should be fairly easy, depending on the rules you would use. I mentioned D&D in the previous paragraph and for good reason -- the encounter building rules in that game make it very easy to use with this style of play. Just set a maximum amount of XP for the entire dungeon, along with the maximum XP in any particular encounter and you have most of it already finished. For other rules, such as OSR-type games, you could use things like Hit Dice to set limits. Other limitations that the game tends to place is by applying a level to every monster in the dungeon -- this helps give the dungeon an overall level rating and helps prevent the abuse that might come with throwing in one single, very high level monster that, while fitting the limitations set, would still wreck the players.
Traps have no hard cap on the number you can place. Instead they also have a zone around them that prevents them from being built too close to other traps -- so you cannot stack a bunch of traps to instantly destroy the players. You can, however, place traps and monsters on the same area -- making synergies between the two very useful.
The traps in tabletop tend to be a bit more deadly than in TMQ and, as such, the usage of them might have to be looked at differently from the monsters. It’s perfectly reasonable to use them as they are, just spacing them out a bit more than you usually would. The best means of doing so might would use a certain number of squares/hexes or feet/meters buffers from other traps.
And, lastly, the rooms -- or geomorphs, as mentioned. Each of the dungeons in the game have two particular rooms that must be included -- the entrance and the boss room/treasure room combo -- but the amount of rooms and the types you include can be customized after that.
Rooms are the easiest to rule in -- just have the group create a pool of geomorphs to draw from and set a limit to the number of them that can be used. The actual make-up of the geomorphs can vary depending on taste, but, for reference, TMQ tends to have around one large room or up to three small rooms in one geomorph. Though, the dungeons are deliberately made small in order to encourage faster dungeon runs and to better accommodate the solo hero. Alternatively, you could easily set a total number of squares/hexes, set number of individual rooms, etc.
The last issue to concern ourselves with is that of resources. In TMQ you have two primary resources -- Gold and Life Force. These are what you try to protect in your own dungeon and what you try to steal from other players. Using these resources you upgrade your character and your dungeon.
Once again, there are mechanics here that can be taken nearly whole-cloth to the tabletop. Gold is generally used in the same way that gold is already used in tabletop RPGs -- to buy equipment and potions. It is also used to level your hero up, but leveling up can just be done as normal, per your rules. Life Force is primarily what you use to buy and upgrade monsters. Both of these resources are also used to upgrade various machines and tools within TMQ’s dungeons, but I don’t think that system is terribly necessary to convert to the tabletop.
Anywho, in TMQ you obtain these resources in two ways -- the good old fashioned way of dungeon delving/slaughtering monsters and by having mines in your dungeon that generate them over time. In the second case, I feel a decent conversion would be to have a set number of resources given per session or per rotation of dungeons. For dungeon delving, the resource drop rate off of monsters should be a little random or set in a per encounter manner -- basically like how you might do it in a normal game. The drop rate will probably be the harder part to convert over, though, as the amount should scale to provide for a little bit of improvement in the players’ own dungeons each run, with upgrades for their characters coming once or twice per dungeon rotation. Though all of that should be tweaked for preference -- I’m mostly comparing it to TMQ and trying to replicate it, to then tweak from.
And that about wraps it up, I think. Below you should find a video featuring the game and some commentary to give some visual references to what I mentioned above. I’m still working out the format and functions of this type of article, so please let me know what you think -- critiques and comments are welcome!