Mechanics for a Gamer Fic
Never really done this before, but thought I'd write some ideas for gamer mechanics for anyone who might want to write Gamer stories. Just experimenting a bit with the concept and thought I'd write it for others.
So, the basic mechanics include inventory, quests, stats, items, and so on. I thought I'd get those out of the way first. They're usually the basics, so I'm not sure I need to go into too much explanation.
For shops, you can do a couple of interesting things.
You could give players an exclusive shop that they might unlock after helping a merchant expand the system. The shop can sell incredible items to the player, specifically, even if they're nowhere near due to the interface, and bought items just teleport to them like a delivery service.
You could also do random shops. Shops that suddenly appear for the player in areas you might expect, but are still a surprise, like a vending machine being a shop.
The shop might also use an exclusive currency that appears only within the system, like points. To get more points, you could have the player turn their real-world currency into points if they don't, or, along with them, get points for completing missions.
To go with shops, there might be peculiar items people can acquire through special means.
These means include item sets, where a person has to collect a certain number of items to unlock the full effects or a hidden one from the items. For example, needing a full set of dragon armor to use the dragon's abilities when it was alive.
There can also be item fragments, fragments from a destroyed item the player can find to repair an item, either automatically or with the help of someone like a blacksmith or alchemist. This one could connect with item sets.
Hidden elements include hidden quests, which are special quests that a person can unlock at random. They're ones either blanked out by the system as an extension of a particular quest, or they could be completely hidden altogether, and a complete announcement can occur at random for the player.
There can also be hidden stages, unique stages that a player could accidentally find or get dragged into for clearing a hidden, special, or side quest. These areas can grant boons of benefits for the player, like massive XP or a treasure trove of items.
Players could potentially see a difficulty ranking for their quests to give them an idea of what to expect and build anticipation.
The rankings could be a certain number of stars, a rank from F to S, or even just 1 to 10.
Extra Lives and Save Points
To go with difficulty, players might even have ways to save their current place as if they were in an actual game. However, there's only a limited number of times they can do it.
They get more of these chances through acquiring extra lives. They can do this from missions, maybe killing certain people, or possibly even as a random, lucky drop.
Learning abilities from things like books is pretty common in stories sometimes. But you could also have ways of combining abilities without the player having to experiment as much through training.
There could be a certain item in a player's area that lets them combine items, like a desk or box you place items in/on.
Or combining them could be another hidden option for players if they refuse to override something they're studying and the new subject has good synergy with that subject. For example, archery and poison making make poison archery.
