Hey gang, I’ve been wanting to set up a sort of RPG way to play commander for my usual group, some way to mary the deck building and commander choice to a character sheet, then periodically use that character sheet and the players preferred cards to do a small dungeon.
Does anyone have suggestions for games this might work with? Something I can use as a jumping off point? I feel d&d probably isn’t the most compatible thing lol
WoTC did release the Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica a few years back. It was supposed to be one of the planes from the MTG universe. Not sure if it would fit your ideas, but it could provide a jumping off point.
There is also Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos and the forthcoming Lorwyn-Shadowmor.
WotC released D&D rules for Planeswalking at one point. IIRC, they’re literally just D&D characters that can planeshift at will, within the MTG multiverse.
My suggestion beyond that is that each magic turn is one to five “combat rounds” in D&D. You’d have to experiment with how many rounds makes a good turn in terms of maintaining fun game play. Probably needs play testing. Maybe every second, third, fourth round or whatever, a Planeswalker PC (during their initiative) can either take MTG actions (I.E. play their turn) or D&D actions (initiate combat, etc). Playing an MTG turn probably eats up that characters round.
If a PC blocks an attacking creature or attacks the NPC Planeswalker, they’re now in D&D combat. If two cards are just interacting, they resolve normally. And if a creature hits a PC planeswalker, they’re now in D&D combat, at least as far as the creature attacking and damaging the PC (instead of losing life).
You could do almost the same thing with GURPS, which IMO, might be more suited for the diversity of stuff going on in MTG. Although it is a very crunchy game system, its probably still my favorite.
If you wanted to like, make the character do stuff in order to be able to put cards in their deck (Like… they want to put Drizzt Do’Urden in their deck, they need to Planeswalk to the Forgotten Realms and actually meet him) that could probably work, but also it might be a lot to keep track of. Maybe I’d just do that with Legendary cards and nonbasic lands? IDK. You could make them explain themselves if they want to use cards from outside their Planeswalker’s primary color alignment or unique to a plane their character has clearly never been to. I probably wouldn’t be TOO MUCH of a hardass about that, but I’d also probably be like “C’mon guys,” if someone makes like a paladin and then puts a bunch of zombies and vampires in their deck.
If they Planeswalk to Bloomburrow, now you’re running a furry game. If they Planeswalk to Sothera, suck it up and just run Firefly.
I am familiar with the d&d magic crossover, but actually I think I did a bad job explaining what I’m looking for. I was thinking we’d have a character sheet and that dictates how you build your deck. And what the commander is, then as you level up either in the dungeon or by playing commander you get either added abilities or more color or something. Like an RPG progression to our card game.
So the plan is kind of like porting GameBoy Pokemon/Final Fantasy game (you walk on the map, then suddenly the combat begins with different mechanic) to a TTRPG?
I’m not very familiar with commander format, but I don’t think it’s one of the fastest ones. So if I were doing this, I would try to minimize the mechanics between the combat. I would take Blades in the Dark, strip all the setting, playbooks, distill it to a bunch of approaches basically and reskin them as it fits the game.
And then maybe take a look at Traveller quadrant(?) generation tools for coming up with map hexes? That one might be a bad advice, I’m not using hexes in generalActually, more the other way around. In short, commander gives you one special guy card that sits outside the game and you can replay it whenever. We want to put a character sheet on that guy that says what can go in the deck, then when we aren’t playing cards, we use that character sheet guy to fight in a dungeon and unlock new cards or something.
Like a game of cards is the commander guy directing who attacks and casting all the spells, then occasionally there’s a boss dungeon where he go in and fights first person.
