Tsuki
Party Girl
Introduction
So, you might be wondering what exactly this is supposed to be, as the title doesn't lend itself too much to explaining the concept here. First off, Darkest Dungeon is a gritty, turn-based RPG where not only do you have to deal with surviving in combat, but your party members will be subjected to several other factors than just immediate danger. Stress, for one, plays a huge role in the management of your party. I'd describe it almost like a dungeon crawler mixed with a management simulator, in that you have to help your party members and team recover from stress, diseases, personality quirks, and other such nonsense. All that on top of the usual stuff like upgrading their weapons, armor, and abilities, while managing the amount of money you make.
It's a very fine balance of risk vs reward, this game. For those of you interested in reading or viewing the game, you can find it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/
That being said, what's this thread about then? Well, the idea came to me when I wanted to play X-Com: Enemy Unknown / Within. In games where your characters can die after so much investment in them, after you've named and customized them, you can't help but start to feel an attachment to them. What I wanted to do for X-Com, was a playthrough told from a highly narrative standpoint. That is to say, not only would I be playing the game to the best of my ability, but I would put a narrative / story-telling spin to whatever I was doing at the time. However, before getting around to it, Darkest Dungeon came out of Early Access, and I decided to give it a go with this game instead.
So, what will that entail? Well, for starters, I'll be using several mediums of storytelling in order to bring a more fluid sense of action and life to a game that, at its core fundamentals, is simply turn-based. While playing the game, I will note key occurrences and situations that happen, and will use my writing to bring more life to them. A party member that survives a dungeon may have written a Journal entry telling of the horrific death of his friend he witnessed. Or a later party visiting the same dungeon may have found clues that hinted at what happened to the party before them that never returned. Or I may write from the perspective of someone recounting a fierce battle as though it were real time. Many different formats will be used to give the reader a sense of involvement and wonder, thanks to the chaotic nature of this game.
Member Involvement
Speaking of involvement, however, what better way to get involved than to have your party members named and loosely based after real people? The game offers many varieties of classes, each with their own playstyle and skills, each having a certain finesse that they can bring to a dungeon. As such, I've decided to name my characters after both friends, and people on the forum when I inevitably run out of friends. I've posted on my profile, asking brave users to heed the call to adventure, and have a hero named after them. In this game, you start off with two Heroes, and recruit more. Most of the time, the heroes will be completely random which class you get, so for those of you who volunteered, I'll briefly explain how it works. If you were the first one to volunteer yourself as a Jester, in this case, Matsu, the very first Jester that I encounter and recruit will be named after him. If he dies, and he probably will, the next Jester I recruit will be named after the next person who volunteered.
How to get involved in this, you may ask? Well, if you visit this link, http://darkestdungeon.gamepedia.com/Heroes#Classes , you can see the available classes, and see if one strikes your fancy. If you do find one, you can post it right in this thread, with the name you'd like them to be known by. Now then, if you're worried about there not being enough slots in the end, don't worry so much! This game is known for being terribly unforgiving, especially with RNG, and has a unique mechanic known as "Light Level" (Or Torch Level). The higher your light level, the easier the game is. The lower, the harder the game gets, but the more rewards you get. As such, in the interest of making things interesting, I've decided on a few options, putting them in a poll for users to vote on.
This should help to make things both dangerous and interesting. But also worth noting, is the actual end goal of the game. The final dungeon in the game is unique...you have to do 4 different quests there. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, the issue is that when a hero completes a quest there, they will never go back. That means that, at very least, I'll want 16 max level Heroes by the end of the game. And to add another interesting element to this, is I'm playing almost completely blind. I played the game for a few hours about a year ago in early access, and haven't touched it since its full release. There's so much in the game I don't know anything about, things that could probably cause an instant party wipe if I make a mistake on.
What to Expect
Well, I'll be posting pretty regularly here, doing several "weeks" at a time. A week in the game, is literally one dungeon. So every installment I make here will include several dungeons worth of content and story. Not only will I be using narrative tools to illustrate the story and happenings, but I'll also be providing such things as screenshots, snippets, and maybe even videos on some of the more important dungeons / boss fights, so people will get to watch their namesakes suffer or succeed in real time. This first post exists as an explanation to what I'm accomplishing, but the next post is where we get into it. The next post will serve as a general "Progress tracking" hub, where I'll list what goals we've accomplished, the progress of our upgrades, our current party members, memorials for our deceased party members, and more. For now, just sit tight and that post will be up soon...until then, if you feel like joining in, you can visit the previously linked "Classes" page on the wiki, and post on my profile. I have 3 "Weeks" / dungeons recorded that I'm editing and writing, which will also be up relatively soon too. But I won't play any more until these 3 weeks are posted, so it'll very much be a lengthy ordeal.
Just wanted to get the intro post up while working on the second post, and after that, we'll get right into the flesh and blood of the story. The two posts after this will be reserved, one for the "Hub" of our journey, and the next as a very "Super just in case" post, though I don't have any immediate plans for it...or maybe I do and thankfully haven't had to put those plans into effect yet...