Adventure

Most of the gameplay can be separated into three major categories: Adventure, Exploration, and Combat. While exploration and combat are both different aspects of dungeons and quests. The adventure part is all of what happens outside those quests. When the party has discovered a new town and is shopping for near gear or items or when the party is interacting with NPCs both for quest discovery or other side stories. Most of the role play elements and improv take place during the Adventure portion.

Abilities & Checks:
In Persona we went over how you roll and determine your Color Influence and how colors and dual-colors modify your ability scores on several aspects of the game. Now let’s look at how these scores and checks are done in-game.

Because of the nature of combat and exploration, most the time an ability score comes up will be for a basic check. Either while attempting to disarm or avoid a trap or determining if you start a battle with haste, most the time you are simply just rolling a check based on the GM’s narration. It is outside of the more mission like portions of the game that ability checks take on a more freeform approach. Choosing to steal from the villagers or try to trick an NPC into a shortcut on a quest, all of these elements will be determined using your ability scores while adventuring.

Below is a list of the main ability checks, and their situational context:

WHITE: Order & Strength

 * Constitution - Your fortitude against the elements or pain.
 * Investigation - Critically analyzing using established procedure or evidence
 * Knowledge: Planar - Your knowledge of your overall home world and the stories you’ve heard of other planes.
 * Knowledge: Religion - Your knowledge of religions, gods, and their rituals or practices.
 * Craft - Your experience or knowledge at crafting various goods or items.
 * Persuasion - Your ability to convince others to do what you think they should do.
 * Athletics - Your trained technique, both in strength and stamina.


 * Medicine - Restoration of life through care.

Vice and Virtue

 * Perseverance - Strength and conviction.
 * Selfishness - Abuse and isolation.

BLUE: Intellect & Skill

 * Sleight of Hand - Your ability to pickpocket or use your hands undetected.
 * Stealth - Your ability to do things undetected.
 * Knowledge: Arcana - Your knowledge in the skill and ways of magic and mana.
 * Knowledge: History  - Your knowledge of world and social events.
 * Craft - Your experience or knowledge at crafting various goods or items.
 * Deception - Your ability to mislead or trick others into doing what you want.
 * Spellcraft - Your knowledge in the skill and ways of spell casting.
 * Acrobatics - Your technique and mobility when jumping or dodging.

Vice and Virtue

 * Inspired - New innovative thinking.
 * Madness - Irrational thinking and insanity.

BLACK: Charisma & Power

 * Barter - Your ability to haggle or trade.
 * Performance - Your skill at performing an act or talent.
 * Knowledge: Diplomacy - Your skill at governance and the gaining of power.
 * Knowledge: Local - Street smarts, the wisdom of the smaller folk.
 * Persuasion - Your ability to convince others to do what you say.
 * Deception - Your ability to lie and get what you want regardless of the cost to others.
 * Intimidation - Your ability to frighten or encourage others to follow your intent.
 * Survival - Your ability to survive against the odds by any means.

Vice and Virtue

 * Confidence - Hopeful and ready for the path ahead.
 * Paranoid - Scheming and untrustworthy, desperate.

RED: Dexterity & Haste

 * Initiative - Your agility over the actions of others, mostly combat related.
 * Reflex - Your reaction and overall speed to take action.
 * Knowledge: Engineering - Your ability to build and destroy contraptions or structures.
 * Knowledge: Dungeoneering - Your knowledge in adventure and close quarter tactics.
 * Athletics - Your raw physical prowess and power, both in strength and speed.
 * Spellcraft - Your knowledge in the skill and ways of spell casting.
 * Intimidation - Your ability through strength or power to intimidate others.
 * Animal Handling - Your ability to command powerful beast to your will.

Vice and Virtue

 * Courageous - Devoted and prepared for their cause.
 * Impulsive - Act rashly, without thought of self or others.

GREEN: Instinct & Wisdom

 * Insight - Your ability to read people and their motives.
 * Perception - Your awareness of details and the world around you.
 * Knowledge: Geography - Your knowledge of territories and landmarks.
 * Knowledge: Nature - Your knowledge of the natural world and life within it.
 * Medicine - Natural cure through magic or nature, focused on restoring to original state.
 * Acrobatics - Your natural talent at climbing or rebounding from accidents.
 * Survival - Your ability to use the wilds to survive.
 * Animal Handling - Your ability to befriend or bond with tough beasts.

Vice and Virtue

 * Focused - Concentrated and without doubt.
 * Frightened - Anxious and with a sense of dread.

Though it is hard to indicate in a short description when the right time will be for the GM to distinguish between a black Deception check or a blue Deception check, if the players and GM know the general philosophy of the color pie, I believe the context will be pretty easy to read.

Environments & Domain
Each plane and setting will have a phenomenon and domain associated to it. The phenomenon is unique to the plane that the players are on (works just like planechase) and the domain is more of a terrain that changes between settings in the campaign.

Phenomenon: Each phenomenon will have a static ability or Enchant World like effect and a chaos effect. The chaos effect should trigger based on a player action.

Domain: A domains main purpose is to reflect the setting of the adventure or encounter and to either help or hurt the party based on their own domain. For example a Kor would be more capable on the cliffside than a merfolk, and vice versa for the merfolk in the ocean.

Social & Trade
If you haven’t picked up on it yet this game is meant to be very PvE co-op versus the DM or board. But I want that to go beyond the basics and for certain aspects of the game to reflect upon those ideas. Both in role playing in adventure mode and navigating through dungeons or surviving in combat encounters, diversity will be key to success. Heavy emphasis on needing good, neutral, and evil characters and roles like tank, healer, dps, support in combat.

The social aspects mostly play themselves out naturally between the GM and player choices. However one major component to this game that will always be unique to Game Play is that of trade. We don’t want this to become a dirty feeling “pay to win”, however we want to open up all aspects of magic to this game. Because we are using real magic cards we are using real inventory and value. Because we are wanting the player to have the sense of progress and value we want them to be able to keep their character deck and all the loot they get. We love the idea of bosses dropping sealed booster packs.

But in order to accommodate all of this it comes with a cost. At this point I don’t entirely know that exact cost but it will be pretty small. So with a promise that I will always want the game to be fun and challenging before it is monetized and profitable, let’s go over the real life money aspect of this RPG.

It is important to keep the flavor and themes of both the player decks and the items available at the shop. So we want the extent of any real life currency to start and end with in-game currency. Most likely Gold tokens from Theros. This way we can still curate what items or spells the players can buy from shops and still allow them to purchase in-game tokens. This will never be necessary, similar in the way it isn’t necessary in Hearthstone. It will be there as an option.

The way it won’t be necessary is that players will earn the same in-game currency through playing the game either as rewards or from loot. Players who play enough will actually be able to profit from it and if the card they want for their real-life Modern deck happens to be on the plane they are visiting they can kill two birds with one stone. In-game tokens can be converted into FiveStars points upon retirement of a character.

This is mostly a labor of love, but the time investment is pretty crazy. If someday MTG RPG can be a profitable weekly event offered to all MTG players just like a standard tournament. This project will feel complete.

Copper (cp) : real life value $0.001 (or 10 = $0.01) Silver (sp) : real life value $0.01

Gold (gp) : real life value $0.10 Darksteel (dp) : real life value $1.00

As you can see, I don’t want it to ever be about money both spending or gaining. Player’s would start off with a max real life budget of $10.00, which would top out at $25 at level 30. We could offer $5 card credit tokens you could purchase in-game as a way to cash out a full budget? Slippery-slope.

Questing
There are four major type of quest types, each one representing a different objective for the party members to work towards:  Basic table for quest building:
 * Bounty: A quest involving the need to find and destroy/kill/capture an enemy or item taken by a certain character.
 * Challenge: A multi-part quest that involves finding or doing multiple things, destroying three shrines to continue the journey or
 * Journey: Travel/Escort/Journey To... or Fetch something for a character. Anything that is more about the moving or transport of something than the killing or completion of something.
 * Skill: A quest that has an almost mini-game like feel to it, usually involving a series of ability checks. '''

Resting & Camp: Beyond MTG, D&D, WOW:TCG, Hearthstone, and Hand of Fate. This game is an RPG and I doubt I’ll ever make an RPG without naturally being drawn towards elements of Final Fantasy. In many ways I expect the pacing of the game to feel like a Final Fantasy game, with open world exploration based on character decision, followed by strategic turn-based combat with a emphasis on character interaction.

What this means is resting and camping!

So it’s important to note that many characters will have anywhere from as low as 10 to 15 starting life for large portions of the game. Also as we will explain in Encounters and Combat, players do not heal after traps or encounters. While adventuring players can Rest mostly anywhere, depending on the relative comfort of the spot they’ll regain health and abilities at a reasonable pace. However basic rest isn’t easy or at times possible while exploring or in between encounters. On certain dungeon cards players can use items to set up camp to regain life based on provisions.

Players can also get certain curses, afflictions, or other ailments that can cripple them or even slowly kill them. Most of these things cannot be healed at camp unless accompanied by a gifted healer.

Depending on the story you want to tell I encourage you to come up with your own stories and origins, however there will be a three-pronged story system put in place to represent the overarching story I have in mind for the entire multiverse. It is a story of the use of power and those who wield it without wisdom, it involves the characters the Wizard’s of the Coast has introduced but puts them in a different light. This will be call the Third Path system.

The Third Path
This is a tabletop RPG and therefore creativity and exploration with storytelling should always be encouraged, however due to the limitations of using cards instead of our imagination and notes like in D&D as a storyteller and game designer we have to have a few restrictions. This led to the Third Path system, which is meant to represent three possible approaches to each campaign and setting.

The First Path: This is the story of the protagonist of WotC’s story, in Battle for Zendikar this would be considered the planeswalkers who make up the Gatewatch. Many of the heroic moments depicted on cards are of these characters and much of the flavor text will point to this being the “moral good” on the compass. This path will generally lead to more generic storytelling, however it will not be the first path in mind when it comes to design (more on that later), expect the First Path to be a good easy or beginners way of exploring a plane.

The Second Path: This is for all you edge lords out there, it’s fun to play the bad guy sometimes. This path is mainly for the Antagonist side of the WotC story line. With the Battle for Zendikar story we could approach this either through the Eldrazi (like Ayli of the Eternal Pilgrims or Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet) to represent a chaotic evil story; Or you could go for something involving Ob Nixilis, of which I like the idea of setting up a larger story of his plane of titan planeswalking conquerors (perhaps involving Oloro and Vish Kal on their Thrones) - AKA THE BAD GUYS! “ LIKE SOME KIND OF SUICIDE SQUAD?”

The Third Path: Obviously given the title of the system… this is totally the main story to this game and my world. It’s just a natural spin and alternative to the traditional story told by WotC. The Third Path is the story of the wiser and older planeswalkers, like Ugin and Karn who have both lost their lives to their arrogance or recklessness. Possibly Sorin. But more importantly it is the story of how planeswalkers are bad for the multiverse and the innocent people who get in their way. When a planeswalker appears they bring danger and interplanar politics with them, they bring the Phyrexians or awaken slumbering Eldrazi, but worst of all they use the world and it’s mana for their own gains, returning nothing to theses planes, siphoning them like a leech. Regardless of the color of their mana they all use the essence of these worlds to accomplish their own means, they are no better than the meddling god-like planeswalkers before the Mending, just this time they are too weak to realize it.

Example: When the planeswalkers go to kill the titans of which they know nothing about, Ob Nixilis follows his own personal agenda, the Third Path exiles the eldrazi and replaces them with magnificent illusions for the Gatewatch to “destroy”. They have the awareness and foresight to understand how their actions will affect not only their plane but all planes and all timelines.

The Third Path was of course inspired by Feldon of the Third Path, a scholar who chose to stay out of the endless bloodshed of Urza and Mishra in the Brothers’ War. Feldon lost his love to Ashnod and the hatred born from the Brothers’ War and vowed to avoid greater conflict through foresight and wisdom.