2D Action RPG Pitch

At the beginning of the game you choose what kind of adventurer you want to play as. You can choose from a list of pre-existing characters or create your own. Chose race (if applicable), gender, and class. And you can write a back story.

You're dropped into this world at some starting point. (Probably a tavern because that's a typical place DND adventurers meet up at anyway.) There are quests you can take on that require you to enter the wilderness.

In this game you can create your own adventure. There are a lot of towns to go to, and places to discover in the wilderness, and there are a lot of quests to complete. Some quests lead to interesting plots with many individual quests that chain together; some are simple delivery quests that you can complete for items. (These delivery quests can be completed multiple times, but only after a set amount of time has passed after a completion.)

There can also be an overarching story that the player follows.

While adventuring, you can recruit people to join your party. You can meet people in different towns that you can recruit, and they will have tasks for you to complete before they join you. If you’d like, you can create your own recruit by paying a certain amount of money at a certain vendor that’s available in most towns to “hire” a wandering adventurer.

The limit to your party is four characters. You can dismiss certain characters if you want to make room and they’ll go back to their place of origin.

The battle system

The dynamic battle system will be the focus of this project. In RPGs you typically spend the majority of your time in the field, or in dungeons battling enemies to make your party stronger while you're on your way to complete a quest. That's why we need to focus on making the battle system really fun and intuitive so that players will never be bothered when they encounter enemies.

While traversing the world, the player will see enemies wandering about. If a player gets close enough to an enemy, the enemy will notice the player and run after them. If the player and enemy collide, the game will shift from the world, to a separate battlefield that looks similar to the area the player was just in. The battlefield is a square arena, arranged by a grid, with invisible boundaries. There are obstacles in the arena that are generated randomly. (For instance, if the enemy encounter is in a field, some of the obstacles generated could be things like trees, rocks, and maybe a river. Or if the encounter is in a dungeon the obstacles could be things like walls, and spike traps on the floor that will hurt whoever walks over it.)

The battlefield is divided into a grid. At the beginning of a battle, the player will choose which of their four party members they want to send in to battle. A prompt will come up with info on each character, health, magic, class, level, weapon, etc. Once a character is chosen, they’re dropped into battle. The combat is real-time. There will be multiple different fighting styles based on the player’s class/weapon of choice. Close combat with heavy attacks using hammers or axes, close combat with quick attacks using swords or daggers, long range combat with bows or long range combat with spells. 

Some obstacles can be destroyed by weapons, and some can’t, adding a strategic dynamic to movement in the battlefield. Some obstacles are short, these don’t make your characters invincible when standing behind them, but harder to hit. (Depending on which direction the attack is coming from.)

Characters and enemies also have weaknesses. If an entity is hit by its weakness, it will suffer more damage than it normally would, and it will be dazed, unable to do anything for a certain amount of time. If an entity is hit while in a daze, it will snap back to normal and be able to act.

If the player can daze all of the enemies, they will be given some sort of bonus to their attacks.

Every fixed amount of time in battle, the player is given a “swap point” which can be used to swap out the current character for someone else in the party mid-battle. The reason I say “fixed amount of time” is because it can vary based on the difficulty of the battle. If it’s a regular mob encounter, they can be awarded a point every thirty seconds. But if it’s a boss encounter, they can be awarded a point every minute because the battle would last longer. The max amount of swap points a player can have starts at 2. But this number will go up based on either the level of the player, or the progress the player has made overall. (If there’s an over-arching story.)

I imagine this game having combat similar to that of Ys. The action will be fast paced and hack n slasheque with strategic elements.

Keeping the over-world and battlefield as separate instances would be similar to the way games like Tales of Rebirth or Eternal Sonata do the same thing The presentation of the battlefield would be similar to that of The World Ends With You.

Inspiration for Battle presentation (The World Ends With You):

Inspiration for dynamic battlefields with obstacles and the overall game feel (Ys The Oath in Felghana):

 Inspiration for fields with wandering enemies (Eternal Sonata):