Game Idea: Poker Dice RPG

Welcome to a new series of blog posts! Game ideas that we have, think would be cool, but don’t have the time, resources or skill to make. Feel free to use them in your own creations. First up, Poker Dice RPG.

The game of Poker Dice, and games like Yacht, Yahtzee or King Of Tokyo are all based around a similar mechanic. At the start of your turn, you roll a handful of dice. Then, you can choose to “hold” some of the values, and “re-roll” others to get a better result, usually 2 or 3 times per turn.

To see how this works in practice, you can check out our free HTML5 game Rolldyce Clash, where the aim is to get the highest total on your dice without getting any Dragons (they erase your whole score for that round).

So what’s the idea behind a Poker Dice RPG?

The rounds of dice rolling would replace the turn-based battles of a traditional RPG. So the rest of the game would still involve walking around, exploring dungeons, collecting items and progressing the story as you would in a game like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy; but the battles would all consist of rounds of Poker Dice against the enemies.

In the mock-up above, you can see how the screen layout for battles would look. The player would start by rolling their dice, and then they would have the option to hold some, re-roll others, or resolve their current hand. Enemies would also be able to do the same on their own turn.

Adding Variety

In our game Rolldyce Clash, characters always use the same dice with the same six faces. A shield (0 damage), 1 sword, 1 sword, 2 swords, 3 swords and a dragon (lose the round). Because of this, every battle is the same and it gets old very quickly.

To make a Poker Dice RPG more interesting, the player would be able to collect dice and manage their inventory, with each die having different faces with different effects. Some examples could include:

• Healing faces that recover HP
• Status Effects like Poison, which would increment in severity for each die showing the effect
• Coin faces that do no damage, but increase the player’s loot at the end of battle
• Shields to reduce incoming damage

And you could also add elements of risk. A single die might have 2 faces that allow it to do massive damage, making players want to add it to their hand… but what if one of the faces damaged the user? or caused them to lose some of their loot? Adding negative faces to the dice is extremely important for the risk-reward aspect of the game. If players can simply re-roll whenever they want without risking their own health or treasure, the game would get boring very quickly.

We actually created some graphics for this kind of game ourselves, which we will likely not use, so help yourselves to 48 variations of dice for free commercial use in your games and other projects here:

How is this different from Dicey Dungeons?

A flagship game in the dice-battler arena is Dicey Dungeons, and multiple other games have followed in its footsteps. How would the idea in this blog post be different?

For a start, most dice-based RPGs (Dicey Dungeons included) use normal 6-sided dice. The variety in Dicey Dungeons comes from the power-ups and items that interact with the dice, not from the dice themselves. In our idea, the player would be collecting dice, and managing them as if building a deck of cards. This is more complicated in terms of hand management, but more fun for collectaholics and discovery players.

While these dice-based battles could easily be used in an episodic game (like Dicey Dungeons) or a procedural dungeon crawler (like our card game Plunder Dungeons), we also think they would be a great addition to a fully-fledged story-based RPG. A fixed, hand-crafted world with its own cast of kooky characters and varied locations, all with dice-based architecture and punny names.

We hope that this idea may prove useful to you and inspire your own creations, and we hope you enjoyed this first post in our series of game ideas!

Please enjoy using the dice graphics linked above, even if it’s for another project, they’re free for commercial use.

All the best,

Daniel

Need Fonts For Your Games?