Thoughts on multigenerational RPGs

One of my game ideas that I'll never get around to developing is a multi-generational RPG where the initial party of heroes fights some battle against the stereotypical evil force, then their kids fight the next part of the battle, and then their kids finally defeat the evil, where this is driven by a game engine and not a written script. How would this work?

1. The player must be enticed to retire the party.

Possible mechanisms:

• The party defeats the local evil that they see and misses the big picture. With no remaining quests, the party automatically retires.
• In-game full party wipe. Survivors flee.
• Randomly throw romantic encounters at the player until the player accepts the option to marry and settle down, or a limit is reached where the character automatically chooses this option.
• Randomly cause events that cause fighters to leave the party until the player is left with so few fighters that the party is guaranteed to get wiped out if they keep attacking, leaving the player to decide that retiring is the better choice.

2. The next party should have the potential of being stronger than the last.

This follows naturally from the retirement of fighters being a game. Children should have traits similar to those of their parents, plus a little bonus for having been raised by heroes.

3. The evil force regrows strength between generations.

There must be low-level targets for your kids to beat their swords against before they go into the final dungeon. The game engine will randomly generate a series of local villains, missions, and travel mechanisms between continents that open up when previous missions are completed.

4. The game environment changes between generations. Towns grow. Buildings fall into disrepair and are replaced. NPCs have children, get old, and die.

Drawbacks

While the idea is intriguing, there are drawbacks.

Randomly generated content is not as interesting as well-written scripts. If the characters are randomly generated and the mission engine pulls random events out of a bag of tricks, the dialogue cannot be written toward specific characters. The game cannot have all of the little things that make a good RPG stand out from rpgmaker amateur hour.

If the player gets a different randomly generated set of kids on each playthrough, there is no emotional attachment. There will be an emotional backlash on additional playthroughs when the player's kids are different from the ones on their first playthrough, as someone who remembers the adventures of their daughter Sara may be a bit grumpy when they get a son named Fred.

Characters cannot be used as points of reference from which to talk to other players about the game. "You know that character...." they don't know that character. At best, the game can keep a log of events and players can share logs.

Abstraction

There is a freeware flash game called Idle Monster Slayers that is basically Cow Clicker with an implementation of generational improvement. The game's rules are:

1. Gold is produced over time.
2. Click the button to trade gold for an increase in the rate of gold production.
3. Soul Orbs are produced over time at high levels, and increase the rate of gold production when the game is reset.
4. Click the reset button to collect Soul Orbs and zero out the rest of the game.

During any single playthrough:

1. Player strength rises linearly over playing time.
2. Difficulty rises geometrically or exponentially over the length of game content that the player completes.

There eventually reaches a point where it takes more and more playing time to gain the slightest advantage, and the marginal gain of additional leveling up approaches worthlessness. The player may choose to give up at this point, and the game provides a mechanism where giving up will produce a bonus on the next playthrough.

Player strength is modified by a bonus that increases in each generation, allowing the player to reach a further point in the game before gains are stymied.