Some people might be interested in a game I'm working on. It's called The Jewelled City, and it's going to be an online game heavily based on En Garde, but with its own setting.
When I say En Garde I'm talking about the 1975 semi-role-playing-game of social-climbing in pre-Revolutionary France, not the better-known and more recent sword-fighting card game. A quick summary for those who haven't heard of it follows.
The game works in an
RPG-like way: each player has a single character, whose ability and situation is defined by stats, and you compete to gain levels.
The main difference is that the levels don't represent your skills. They represent your fame and social popularity. Similarly, starting characters are mostly differentiated by whether they're commoners or nobles, how much money they get every month, and so on, rather than their ability to fight or cast spells.
Unlike my other online game Age of Fable (
http://www.ageoffable.net), this is a multi-player, turn-based game. Each turn players will put in their orders, saying what their character will do. The main things characters can do are:
i) Compete for the affections of non-player characters.
ii) Socialise in order to gain social prominence. This includes a system where characters lower on the social ladder can pay other characters to allow them to be seen with them.
iii) Fight duels, occasioned by various conflicts such as two characters trying to court the same person.
iv) Compete for various jobs - mostly military, but also some others.
v) Every so often, get sent away to war. The way this works in my game, though not in the original, is that characters gain or lose divine favour for acting in accordance with their alignment, and these points are 'spent' in trying to survive war and come back with booty.
If anyone would like to help me test it, please indicate interest here.
Also, please let me know any features you'd be interested in having. I'm especially interested in knowing how frequent people think turns should be.
