kiiyowastaken
recreational abuse of language
he/him. EN, UA, RU, a little SE. I write occasionally. The pfp is my cat, Siri. She's great.
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today it is exactly one year since i leaked the nofly list
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Sunlit Wetlands 25x30
patreon.com/dungeonmapster
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grid-combat sandbox thing!
i get distracted with new projects a lot, but lately my brain's been hyperfocused on one in particular. i wanted to take a crack at combining 4e-style tactical combat with OSR-style sandbox play, which on the surface seem like entirely opposite directions. and they kind of are, but i think i have something
since i started work on it i ended up dropping the words "OSR" and "4e" from my descriptions of it bc i think they end up evoking the wrong image. there's a lot that's core to both playstyles that i'm omitting to make it play nicer with the other playstyle. but it's far along enough now that i can talk about some of the design philosophy and how that manifests.
little to no scaling
the traditional way modern D&D (and to an extent even old-school D&D) handles progression is with big numerical scaling. a level 2 PC has nearly twice as much HP/damage as a level 1 PC. so you scale monsters to match, because the PCs have to get into fights around their level for the game to work.
skeletons are a real danger at 1st-level. they're manageable by 3rd, easy by 5th, and a joke by 7th-level. so you just stop running into skeletons, and when you're nearing the end of that level range any skeleton encounters that do happen will have a lot of skeletons.
this is bad for sandboxes! say i'm preparing a sandbox setting ahead of time and have a dungeon with a bunch of skeletons in it somewhere. i don't know what level the PCs will find it at - depending on whether they go through it as a 2nd-level or 6th-level party, it might be incredibly easy or so dangerous there's little they can do to mitigate that difficulty. or i'll just have to redo my encounter math the moment they find it, and that sucks for both the GM and players.
so, big numerical scaling is out. there's levels, you level up, but most of what you get from that level-up is a new ability. not a big pile of hit points and more damage. there's some scaling, your numbers are like twice as big at 10th-level compared to 1st-level, but it's a small enough range that a hard encounter at 1st-level will stay relevant throughout a whole campaign.
the game's far along enough i can create & fully level a fighter PC, so i made a 1st and 10th-level (max) character and put them side-by-side to get a feel for the scaling.
the warrior class
speaking of, the first class i made is the fighter, obviously. it's always the first thing i want to get right if i'm making a D&D-like system.
this is a good showcase of what each class is going to end up looking like: you start with a few core features & two perks (3 for warrior bc i like them being customizable). warrior perks range from a few unique moves to useful passives that let you resist statuses, strike multiple enemies, move further, equip heavier gear, parry weak attacks, etc.
the two core features, versatile fighter & combat opportunist, are designed to reward you for engaging in core combat mechanics. you get bonuses to attack from high ground, and this increases that bonus. every weapon has a unique special move you can do with it, and this lets you use any weapon you have with no cost to switch.
i've never liked the way most D&D-likes handle weapons, where you design your build around one specific weapon. you invest all your feats into being The Polearm Guy and when you find a cool magic warhammer or dagger you're just like. well i don't want this. it's not a polearm. so this fighter is instead designed to encourage you to carry around a ton of different weapons and use all of them.
exploration & the ranger
i used to hang out in the 5e community a lot, and people hated the 5e ranger. why? cause nobody used the travel rules, and you can't really blame them. the game has rules for how far you can travel each day, for random encounters & whether they ambush you, foraging, encumbrance, different travel speeds.
but most people who play 5e don't want that kind of experience, and 5e half-commits to it by leaving these rules scattered through the dungeon master's guide and making them too tedious. everything's measured in real numbers - miles, minutes, pounds. you track weight with pounds instead of item slots. of course nobody wants to track encumbrance when they have to stop the game to ask the GM how many pounds the macguffin weighs. nobody wants to dig through the DMG looking for the rule that tells you how many miles you can move. it just gets in the way and stops the game, so nobody does.
all of this screws over the ranger class which gives you bonuses to things like travel speed, not being ambushed while traveling, finding more rations, and tracking. people disliked the ranger so much that a supplement came out that replaced all of their exploration features with naturey combat features and some skill boosts, and since then that's the actual ranger when anyone wants to play one.
with that context, here's the exploration features my game's ranger gets.
the feature on the left is inherent while the right two are perks. there's combat features, but they're not part of the point i wanted to make.
the ranger needs to feel useful, and for that, the exploration needs to be front and center. so what better game than one designed for sandboxes?
i don't want this to be the kind of big-damn-heroes game where you skip to the next setpiece because the travel is boring. the travel is the game. that's where the OSR influence comes in.
you track rations. it's important - if a place is far from civilization, it feels like it because there's nowhere safe nearby to restock rations.
you track encumbrance. deciding how much space to spend on arrows and rations, and how much to spend on treasure, means more decision-making.
you do hexcrawling, you track time, and you care how many days a journey takes because the world changes as time passes. enemies & other factions progress their schemes, new developments come up. so sometimes you go, wow, good thing we have a ranger - we can move 3 hexes today instead of 2!
the ranger is better at foraging rations so you can venture further into the wilderness, better at moving your party faster, better at keeping watch. i want that to matter! i can envision it being so satisfying to play a ranger and constantly come in handy. and i want parties without a ranger to wish they had one in a way that isn't just tedious.
so hopefully that gives you a good idea of the sandboxy direction for this game. will be posting about it more as i make progress, and gonna continue to support iron halberd in between this sort of thing
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I know I've posted this thread in the past but it's still like top TTRPG posting of the decade
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craving pathetic wet old women characters. where is the feminism
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lil gift for @cryptotheism !
i maybe love ur sona a lot
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a comic about my name
this is just the way I look at it to feel empowered/at peace with how I'm called different names by different people
obviously it's not the same for everyone but looking at it like this is just what made me happy
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a comic about my name
this is just the way I look at it to feel empowered/at peace with how I'm called different names by different people
obviously it's not the same for everyone but looking at it like this is just what made me happy
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I think one of my favorite things about Tblisi was the street hustlers. I got the sense that if you and the boys were bored, instead of sitting in a pub all day, you all got together to sell pomegranate juice or a shitty little roadside coffee and katchpuri joint.
There were a few times I was desperate for something to drink, only to round a corner on three middle aged dudes just smoking and playing cards at a little stand with some drinks and fruit. I point to a bottle, the nearest one just holds up three fingers. I leave him three lari, take the bottle, and he never even looks up from his game of cards. Excellent system.
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Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. "Remember, it's always morally correct to kill a cop!" "Don't forget to firebomb your local government office!" "Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!"
Okay. But you're not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.
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its kind of a miracle angry birds was able to get as popular as it did in a post-9/11 america
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Rolls to Alarm Your Players
Want to spice the game up? Why not try alarming your players for no real reason? Make sure to make a show out of counting the dice before you roll.
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A crested eagle tangled up with a snake in battle
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"Firefox is Tumblr’s version of Wendys on Twitter" - my friend
wendy’s gets paid
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people need to understand "you can't just declare general strike by telling people on social media to individually not go to work, two days before, without any organization" is not being a party pooper who hates fun it's begging people to do stuff that actually works
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Cute Little Red Bus evolves into Public Transportation System
Concept: monster battling game where the monsters get increasingly abstract and conceptual as they evolve. Like, you set out with a cute little sentient trash can as your starter, and by level 60 you're beating people up with the idea of Public Sanitation.
#monster training#or concept training at this point I guess#what would it even be called#conceptmon?
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