I'm thinking of the """story""" being a friend group playing a campaign of some unnamed tabletop RPG (because of copyright reasons) that contains procedurally generated levels including towns and dungeons.

Now, the most interesting part about this quest would be save slots, because of a character creator!

The character creator would be based off of miniatures, and use pre-made parts, so for example, the things like your arms would determine what weapons you have, and other things would determine stuff like visibility, speed, defense, inventory size, and magic resistance. Of course, it would be possible to switch out parts.

And the best part would have to be the fact that you should be able to paint these minis! And if there's a cohesive color theme, your character would get small boosts.

Whenever you and your party are out in towns and the overworld, the players would be placed in a basement, with their minis, and they get to move them around via pick up and place, manage inventories, buy parts, get quests, etc.

Now, whenever you get into combat and dungeons, the players would be moved into their minis, taking control of them!

To get more (and better) parts, you have to go through riskier challenges. That dungeon seems a bit scary for your current gear, but you might get that spear that you saw someone else have in a different lobby that you REALLY want.

However, a couple of important things about these miniatures would have to be growth rates and... I'll talk about the second thing later.

You may be wondering "what the heck are growth rates???" And to answer that question, it's an important element in the Fire Emblem franchise that determines the chance of a stat increasing each level.

Now, in FE, these are pre-determined, but due to the nature of a character creator, these would have to be differentiating, but who would want to be a berserker with high intelligence? To solve this, your minis would have a "traits" option in their initial creation. This would determine the base growth rates for this mini, but the game will have to alter these growth rates in notable ways.

Now about that second thing.

I just talked about Fire Emblem, and something that's always been a mainstay in that franchise should be included here as well. If you know Fire Emblem at all, you'll know what I'm about to say.

Permadeath.

When you die, unless there's someone with a revival spell of some kind in your party, your character is GONE, and you are booted from the server (unless it's a private lobby.)

This sounds harsh, I know. But the reason why games like Fire Emblem are so thrilling is BECAUSE of the permadeath. Great success won't feel the same if you know that you can just try again immediately after.

Yep, all those parts you worked so hard to get are gone. I was thinking about maybe saying that there's a "player chest" that would keep your valuable parts from committing not-feeling-so-good, but I think that would end up removing most of the tension entirely.

Oh, right, there's always supposed to be a final boss.

How about this: Once your character gets close to the level cap, they can have the option to go to the final quest.

The final area, and thus, final boss would depend on what kinds of quests the party's characters did throughout the playthrough. Did more fetch quests than the others? Bandit raid. More quests involving smiting demons? Go hunt down the Devil himself. Did more quests involving the war going on between two kingdoms? Well, you'll be joining that kingdom you liked so much in their final invasion against their enemy. More quests involving helping bandits? go behead the local lord and steal his treasury.

Upon successfully doing the final level, your character will be deleted.

If you've done the final level ALONE, you will be rewarded with the ability to get your mini in your dorm room.

That's all.