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jennamoran · 3 months

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The Far Roofs: Systems

Hi!

Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. More specifically, I want to give a general overview of its game mechanics!

So the idea that first started the Far Roofs on the road to being its own game came out of me thinking a lot about what large projects feel like.

I was in one of those moods where I felt like the important thing in an RPG system was the parallel between that system and real-world experience. Where I felt like the key to art was always thinking about the end goal, or at least a local goal, as one did the work; and, the key to design was symmetry between the goals and methods, the means and ends.

I don't always feel that way, but it's how I work when I'm feeling both ambitious and technical.

So what I wanted to do was come up with an RPG mechanic that was really like the thing it was simulating:

Finding answers. Solving problems. Doing big things.

And it struck me that what that felt like, really, was a bit like ...

You get pieces over time. You wiggle them around. You try to fit them together. Sometimes, they fit together into larger pieces and then eventually a whole. Sometimes you just collect them and wiggle them around until suddenly there's an insight, an oh!, and you now know everything works.

The ideal thing to do here would probably be having a bag of widgets that can fit together in different ways---not as universally as Legos or whatever, but, like, gears and connectors and springs and motors and whatever. If I were going to be building a computer game I would probably think along those lines, anyway. You'd go to your screen of bits and bobs and move them around with your mouse until it hooked together into something that you liked.

... that's not really feasible for a tabletop RPG, though, at least, not with my typical financial resources. I could probably swing making that kind of thing, finding a 3d printing or woodworking partner or something to make the pieces, for the final kickstarter, but I don't have the resources to make a bunch of different physical object sets over time while I'm playtesting.

So the way I decided that I could implement this was by drawing letter tiles.

That I could do a system where you'd draw letter tiles ... not constantly, not specifically when you were working, but over time; in the moments, most of all, that could give you insight or progress.

Then, at some point, you'd have enough of them.

You'd see a word.

That word'd be your answer.

... not necessarily the word itself, but, like, what the word means to you and what the answer means to you, those would be the same.

The word would be a symbol for the answer that you've found, as a player and a character.

(The leftover letters would then stick around in your hand, bits of thought and experience that didn't directly lead to a solution there, but might help with something else later on.)

Anyway, I figured that this basic idea was feasible because, like, lots of people own Scrabble sets. Even if you don't, they're easier to find than sets of dice!

For a short indie game focused on just that this would probably have been enough of a mechanic all on its own. For a large release, though, the game needed more.

After thinking about it I decided that what it wanted was two more core resolution systems:

One, for stuff like, say ... kickstarter results ... where you're more interested in "how well did this do?" or "how good of an answer is this?" than in whether those results better fit AXLOTL or TEXTUAL. For this, I added cards, which you draw like letter tiles and combine into poker hands. A face card is probably enough for a baseline success, a pair of Kings would make the results rather exciting, and a royal flush result would smash records.

The other core system was for like ... everyday stuff. For starting a campfire or jumping a gap. That, by established RPG tradition, would use dice.

...

I guess technically it didn't have to; I mean, like, most of my games have been diceless, and in fact we've gotten to a point in the hobby where that's just "sort of unusual" instead of actually rare.

But, like, I like dice. I do. If I don't use them often, it's because I don't like the empty page of where to start in the first place building a bespoke diced system when I have so many good diceless systems right there.

... this time, though, I decided to just go for it.

The Dice System

So a long, long time ago I was working on a game called the Weapons of the Gods RPG. Eos Press had brought me in to do the setting, and somewhere in the middle of that endeavor, the game lost its system.

I only ever heard Eos' side of this, and these days I tend to take Eos' claims with a grain of salt ... but, my best guess is that all this stuff did happen, just, with a little more context that I don't and might not ever know?

Anyway, as best as I remember, the first writer they had doing their system quit midway through development. So they brought in a newer team to do the system, and halfway through that the team decided they'd have more fun using the system for their own game, and instead wrote up a quick alternate system for Weapons of the Gods to use.

This would have been fine if the alternate system were any good, but it was ... pretty obviously a quick kludge. It was ...

I think the best word for it would be "bad."

I don't even like the system they took away to be their own game, but at least I could believe that it was constructed with love. It was janky but like in a heartfelt way.

The replacement system was more the kind of thing where if you stepped in it you'd need a new pair of shoes.

It upset me.

It upset me, and so, full wroth, I decided to write a system to use for the game.

Now, I'd never done a diced system before at that point. My only solo game had been Nobilis. So I took a bunch of dice and started rolling them, to see ... like ... what the most fun way of reading them was.

Where I landed, ultimately, was looking for matches.

The core system for Weapons of the Gods was basically, roll some number of d10s, and if you got 3 4s, that was a 34. If you got 2 9s, that was a 29. If your best die was a 7 and you had no pairs at all, you got 1 7. 17.

It didn't have any really amazing statistical properties, but the act of rolling was fun. It was rhythmic, you know, you'd see 3 4s and putting them together into 34 was a tiny tiny dopamine shot at the cost of basically zero brain effort. It was pattern recognition, which the brain tends to enjoy.

I mean, obviously, it would pall in a few minutes if you just sat there rolling the dice for no reason ... but, as far as dice rolling goes, it was fun.

So when I went to do an optional diced system for the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, years later, to post here on tumblr ... I already knew what would make that roll fun. That is, rolling a handful of dice and looking for matches.

What about making it even more fun?

... well, critical results are fun, so what about adding them and aiming to have a lot of them, though still like rare enough to surprise?

It made sense to me to call no matches at all a critical failure, and a triple a critical success. So I started fiddling with dice pool size to get the numbers where I wanted them.

I'm reconstructing a bit at this point, but I imagine that I hit 6d10 and was like: "these are roughly the right odds, but this is one too many dice to look at quickly on the table, and I don't like that critical failure would be a bit more common than crit success."

So after some wrestling with things I wound up with a dice pool of 5d6, which is the dice pool I'm still using today.

If you roll 5d6, you'll probably get a pair. But now and then, you'll get a triple (or more!) My combinatorics is rusty, so I might have missed a case, but, like ... 17% of the time, triples, quadruples, or quintuples? And around 9% chance, for no matches at all?

I think I was probably looking for 15% and 10%, that those were likely my optimum, but ... well, 5d6 comes pretty close. Roughly 25% total was about as far as I thought I could push critical results while still having them feel kind or rare. Like ...

If I'm rolling a d20 in a D&D-like system, and if I'm going to succeed on an 18+, that's around when success is exciting, right? Maybe 17+, though that's pushing it? So we want to fall in the 15-20% range for a "special good roll." And people have been playing for a very long time now with the 5% chance of a "1" as a "special bad roll," and that seemed fine, so, like, 20-25% chance total is good.

And like ...

People talk a lot about Rolemaster crit fail tables in my vicinity, and complain about the whiff fests you see in some games where you keep rolling and rolling and nothing good or bad actually happens, and so I was naturally drawn to pushing crit failure odds a bit higher than you see in a d20-type game.

Now, one way people in indie circles tend to address "whiff fests" is by rethinking the whole dice-rolling ... paradigm ... so you never whiff; setting things up, in short, so that every roll means something, and every success and failure mean something too.

It's a leaner, richer way of doing things than you see in, say, D&D.

... I just didn't feel like it, here, because the whole point of things was to make dice rolling fun. I wanted people coming out of traditional games to be able to just pick up the dice and say "I'm rolling for this!" because the roll would be fun. Because consulting the dice oracle here, would be fun.

So in the end, that was the heart of it:

A 5d6 roll, focusing on the ease of counting matches and the high but not exorbitant frequency of special results.

But at the same time ...

I'm indie enough that I do really like rolls where, you know, every outcome is meaningful. Where you roll, and there's never a "whiff," just a set of possible meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the time, where I'm leaning into "rolls are fun, go ahead and roll," what it means to succeed, to fail, to crit, all that's up to the group, and sometimes it'll be unsatisfying. Other times, you'll crit succeed or crit fail and the GM will give you basically the exact same result as you'd have gotten on a regular success or failure, just, you know, jazzing up the description a bit with more narrative weight.

But I did manage to pull out about a third of the rolls you'll wind up actually making and assign strong mechanical and narrative weight to each outcome. Where what you were doing was well enough defined in the system that I could add some real meat to those crits, and even regular success and regular failure.

... though that's a story, I think, to be told some other time. ^_^

#the far roofs #jenna moran #rpgs

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hymnism · 15 days

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release the list

(i feel like i should mention these are all games ive personally played so if any of these make you go "why isn't [GAME] on here it's probably cuz i haven't played it. anyway)

(obligatory mention to hades/disco elysium/omori since they're some of my favorite games but im sure everyone already knows about them. they are lovely games and you should play them 👍)

darkest dungeon ($25) - turn based roguelike where you recruit mercenaries and send them on dungeon explorations and make sure they don't die of stress or starvation alongside the regular monster attacks. notoriously difficult. imagine bloodborne but turn based

ftl: faster than light ($10)- real time roguelike where you control a small crew and pilot a spaceship on the run from a rebel fleet. manage power and weapons on your own ship while targeting critical systems on the enemy

loop hero ($15)- a roguelike where your character will automatically walk in a loop while you use cards to add terrain with different effects such as spawning monsters to give you loot or increasing your healing. very unique with a beautiful pixel artstyle and banger soundtrack

moonlighter ($20)- a roguelike rpg where you go dungeon diving and try to bring back as much loot as you can so that you can sell it in your shop

shadows of doubt ($20)- early access. a first person sandbox detective simulator where each case is procedurally generated. randomly generates a town with npcs that all have names and addresses and relationships. put together clues from a crime scene and try to catch a killer before they strike again. work odd jobs between cases to keep yourself fed and housed

ultrakill ($25) fast paced first person shooter with a style system ala devil may cry. you play as a robot fighting through the layers of hell. mankind is dead. blood is fuel. hell is full

crypt of the necrodancer ($15)- a rhythm based roguelike dungeon crawler where you and your enemies are only allowed to move on beat. banger soundtrack goes without saying

everhood ($10)- a rhythm based rpg where you play as a red doll who had their arm stolen and is trying to get it back. battles involve moving between 5 lanes to avoid enemy attacks. if you like undertale you'll like this

spiritfarer ($30)- management and adventure game where you play as a spiritfarer who needs to care for spirits on her boat before leading them into the afterlife. incredibly charming and touching game. you will cry

let's school ($20)- management sim where you build and manage a school and help students graduate by setting up different courses. addicting and has a very cute artstyle

let's build a zoo ($20)- management sim where you. well where you build a zoo. a very silly game that includes a morality system where you can choose to be eco friendly and help repopulate endangered species or you can exploit your animals for their meat and produce. also has an animal splicing mechanic. haven't you ever wanted to make a giraffe with a duck head

the wandering village ($25)- early access. a city builder with the twist that you live on the back of a giant wandering beast named onbu. you help care for onbu as he wanders though different biomes that force you to adjust your resource production as some things become unavailable (such as water in a desert)

frostpunk ($30) a survival city builder where you build around a central core and try to prevent everyone from freezing to death in progressively colder temperatures

monster sanctuary ($20)- a metroidvania style creature collector with a unique combo meter that will continue to build and increase your damage based on the number of "hits" you can perform (healing buffs and shields also count as hits) and each monster has different skill trees that you can upgrade and customize

coral island ($30)- farming life sim with a unique underwater area. you work to help restore the island after and oil spill ruined the surrounding ocean. i should mention that although this game is technically not in early access it is still unfinished and missing large chunks of gameplay/interactions/story. however there is still a healthy amount of content and is still a fun game as it is

apico ($20)- a beekeeping sim where you keep bees to make and sell honey while also breeding and releasing them to help restore their numbers in the wild

spirittea ($20)- a management and life sim where you manage a bathhouse for ghosts and help the townsfolk who think they're haunted (they're right). basically a cross between stardew valley and spirited away

cloud meadow ($20)- early access. this is a porn game ⚠️ a farming sim where instead of regular animals you have anthro characters and you can breed them either yourself or with each other and have them help in combat or on your farm. very cute artstyle and amazing animation work

#looking for a new game ask sunny if their recommendation is a roguelike or management sim i laugh and say it's a good game sir look inside #it's a roguelike #asks

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markrosewater · 2 months

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Echoing what that other guy said, I have felt a rise in complexity recently. With so many new cards that not only make you read and remember what they do, but what the tokens they make do, then what the tokens that that token makes does, it really adds to the mental load. Some examples would be Ring Tempts You, daybound/nightbound, initiative, Venture into the dungeon, stickers, attractions, and many more.

For instance, had a vindicate, and was debating between killing Frodo, sauron’s bane and Nahar, selfless paladin, I would have to read a total of 6 cards. Each of the original creatures, plus the 3 dungeons and the Ring card. And this problem gets worse the more effects you add on, many of which don’t go away as the game continues. If someone introduces the initiative, I now have to worry about nahar exploring the underdark. This scaling complexity as the game continues now means there’s an insane amount layers of the game, which while fun, is also very daunting, and somewhat of a headache.

If nothing else, I’d really like if “reading the card explains the card” was true, not “reading the card, then the three different extra cards that it makes explains the card”

I do appreciate your listening, and generally a lot of the new stuff has been cool. However, this push for many “outside the game” mechanics is not great for paper play, and I would prefer less of it.

Here's the core problem. A huge part of Magic is that we keep making new cards. When we do that, the audience wants new mechanics. (Market research shows again and again that one of the biggest draws to new sets is new mechanics.) We're thirty years in. We've made a *lot* of mechanics, so we have to go to new spaces to make new things. It's not as if there's lots of simple, elegant, non-complex design space that we're actively choosing not to do.

What this means is if you want to play constructed formats that don't rotate, complexity will rise with time. There's literally no way around this. Every new card we create, every new mechanic we make, every set we put out adds complexity to the system.

So if you're finding the mental load too much, there are ways to play Magic where this isn't an issue. Limited formats and rotating constructed formats limit complexity. Or you can choose to build your decks such that you focus on less mechanics you have to track.

That said, I don't think there's a way for me to do my job (aka keep designing new things) that isn't going to raise complexity. We can look at how many things we add to any one set. Maybe slow down the rise in complexity a little. But can we do so in a way that the audience is getting what they want? I'm not sure.

One of the mechanics I get asked most to bring back is mutate, and that's confusing even without the rest of Magic, so there are many forces pulling in different directions.

I do like hearing the specific things that cause you all problems, because it's possible I can figure out the style of designs that cause people problems. But the idea that we just stop making mechanics that reference things not on the card is a tough one given where Magic design technology is currently at.

I do appreciate all the input, and I hope the dialogue helps me better understand what specific things are causing problems.

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level2janitor · 4 months

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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

#ttrpg #d&d #ranger #osr #nsr #l2j archive

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phoenixcatch7 · 3 months

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I'd love to see a time travel/ng+ fic where all the phantom thieves plus the royal/strikers thieves PLUS all the confidants travel back to when the game starts. Everyone's utterly bewildered.

The core phantoms and kasumi, being already physically close, figure it out pretty quick and regroup, but the rest are left confused and floundering until joker gets there and starts reaching out. But with so many people and everyone so lost and upset, he starts delegating and introducing people to each other so they have more options to reach out in case of emergency and to solidify his own web of connections, and for the better efficiency collaboration brings.

And yes I want to see all the confidants become friends or at least co-conspirators in a grand scheme sharing knowing smiles. I want to see normal people struggling with the reality of having lost a year or two of their lives, the surge of hope or fear as they realise they get to do it all again, feeling confused and alone and with the other confidants and plenty of soul searching build up an eclectic support network with others who share the same goal. As a group they could be so much more, and so many would benefit from joker putting them in touch with each other.

But I mostly want to see people coming to the dawning realisation that the scope of joker's reach he's built up is absolutely insane.

Just about every single named character in this huge game is a tarot confidant. Outside of palace rulers, the (hilariously but sadly rare) acquaintances of friends, and occasional mission target, EVERYONE is a secret member of joker's web. He's got the wildest, 'how did you guys even meet' people in his pocket too.

He's got a sentient AI. He's got a politician. He's got a yakuza guy who sells fake weapons who once took out 50 gang members. He's got a secretly talking cat. He's got a high class lawyer. He's got an underground doctor with like 5 PhDs she got revoked who does human experimentation. He's got a government agent. He's got a fortune teller. He's got a guy running his website and managing public missions for no pay. He's got an up and coming teen model. He's got the second detective prince. He's got a world famous wanted hacker. He's got a ten year old. He's got the REACH baby.

It's so funny. He's got like literally 30 odd people with maxed bonds who all think they're one of very very few who know the secret of the phantom thieves and who would break literal laws for this kid. I just think if they all worked together they'd rule the world. And they'd have a huge support group.

Fortune teller: yeah so then I managed to escape the cult, but it's just been so hard to discover who I am outside of that, you know? And they still want me back, it terrifies me.

Reporter lady: *drunk* girl that's absolutely awful you deserve like sooooo much better listen if I see them sniffing around I'll let you know. You shouldn't have to deal with those guys alone, I know allllllllll about making those kinds of guys sweat.

/Ex yakuza fake gun seller: you remind me of my son. He's a good kid, you'd like him. I can set you up?

10yo gun arcade player: oooh do these have real mechanisms? They look so realistic!

Ex yakuza: joker said you could both do with someone your own age - PUT THAT DOWN-

/Shoji player and art kid (yusuke) from the same school: *sitting in silence doing their own thing during school break, having a fantastic time*

/Akechi: *having a breakdown*

Sae, having hustled him off to an empty room for privacy: you know I can't believe I ever bought your nice act. Anyway do you think I could make a case for getting custody of you?

Akechi, stunned out of his attack: ????? Your sister would murder me.

Sae: yeah but it'd annoy shido and my boss so bad.

Akechi:.... I'll consider it.

/sojiro: I admit it's nice to have an adult to talk to about this... Sometimes I still can't believe it's the kids I know that go out and change the world like this.

Government agent: YEAH even with my own persona it's an absolute Ride. You should be proud. Also your coffee is delicious.

/Government agents daughter and mishima: *having an absolute BLAST designing merch*

The list goes ON its just so many under utilised possible relationships!!! Post games the meta verse is gone and most problems are solved (or dead) but if we put them all together in joker's biggest melting pot it'd be such a ride. All of them just low key scared of how many high ranking connections he has.

Like he just texts someone 'hi I think I know someone you'd like to know. I'm sending them to meet you.' and you're like okay??? I guess we'll see why?? And you round the corner and there's a politician and a previously famous missing teen detective waiting for you and they're here to help you get a restraining order on your stalker if you help predict a lottery number or two. And it just keeps happening. Sometimes you're the 'I know a guy' sent to meet people. Like how does joker even know this many people???? He's just moved here!!

#I just think they'd be so good for each other #And also we need more 'joker could so so easily have been a super villain' realisation lol. Can't get enough of that XD #Most fics obviously don't focus on the confidants but they're a huge part of the game! You spend so much time with them!! They give skills!#Idk I just feel they don't get enough attention #p5 #p5r #p5 joker #persona 5 #akira kurusu #ren amamiya #There'd be some absolutely wack dynamics lol

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crescentfool · 18 days

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i've been doing a bunch of tartarus runs in reload lately, and it got me thinking about how i miss certain ways FES's clunky gameplay can characterize minato… (ramble about the great clock mechanic + leveling up party members in reload vs fes under the cut)

when i got to yabbashah block in tartarus (block 3), i remember commending the developers for adding the great clock mechanic. it's a much more convenient way to keep party members at the protagonist's level- so when you think about p3 from the perspective of trying to make it easier for people to play, the mechanic succeeds in this respect.

but now that i'm in adamah block, and that i've done lots of my once-a-month tartarus runs… i think that i got a little too dependent on it, and the way that i played through reload feels like a vastly different experience from how i played FES.

in reload, my party's levels are very lopsided. minato, yukari, akihiko, mitsuru, and fuuka are all level 90+, meanwhile junpei and aigis are at level 79, and then… poor ken and koromaru are at 71 and 64 respectively. (i never got to have a great clock for them…)

meanwhile, in FES, my party's levels were much more evenly distributed and were at least level 90. i did all of this manually for every monthly tartarus run because i enjoyed having options available for the taratarus guardians and monthly operations.

with how i perceive minato, i feel that the way i played FES feels more in-line with his character than me dawdling around waiting for the great clocks in reload.

FES's gameplay loop left me with the very strong impression that minato has to work twice as hard as everyone else in SEES does. it makes sense because, yeah, he's the leader, but something about having minato run through tartarus multiple times with different groups of people just to make sure that they are adequately prepared speaks volumes about his character, to me.

and while the tired mechanic is present in reload to some degree, most notably with allowing you to freely raise your courage stat when you visit edogawa after school… the tiredness system doesn't hit the same way that FES does, i think.

the way your party members in FES will call it quits when they return to the entrance floor at tartarus when they're tired, versus minato, in spite of all his tiredness and sickness, still pushes through tartarus because it's his responsibility…. idk!!! i miss that! i feel like this really hammers home the difference between minato and the rest of SEES, how minato doesn't really see himself as a human with needs worth respecting as long as he's useful to someone.

i don't think that tartarus being tedious (in FES especially) is not what most people would describe as fun, and i can respect people thinking it's a slog. but, regardless of how it feels to play, it doesn't change that FES's gameplay loop is a fundamental building block in how i perceive minato…

of course, i do recognize that you can just opt to NOT use the great clock in reload (and it's great when players are offered the choice to not partake in mechanics)! i definitely think that if someone really wanted to, they could manually level up party members, but i do feel that kind of playstyle isn't necessarily "incentivized" to the type of people who are into playing games for Having a Good Time. it's kind of like… "why would you do that when there's a much more convenient option available to you."

in any case! despite my woes, i do want to emphasize that i'm glad that reload has a much more smoother gameplay loop than the original P3 did, because it does make the game more accessible to people. having played both FES and reload, it feels very strongly apparent to me how the core gameplay formula of persona has really been refined in the past 18 years (to think og p3 was 2006 and reload is 2024.. time flies!). and reload has made revisiting a story that i love so dearly much, much easier because the gameplay just bops!

at the same time, due to my "i miss characterization informed by weird and dated FES gameplay quirks" woes, i still think that playing FES is worthwhile. (really, i feel this way about all iterations of p3! i think it's worthwhile to see what each version and side media has to say even if it doesn't Land™ for you.) but i also understand why people wouldn't want to play it, so i will keep writing posts about things i liked from FES's gameplay because i'm still very fond of FES (especially in respects to minato. these mechanics are so telling about him!!!) 💪

#lizzy speaks #persona 3 #persona 3 reload #<- specifically mentions of mechanics. no added story content just tartarus talk #minato arisato #today on lizz life: lizz wakes up THINKING about minato for the NTH time and is compelled to write a tumblr post about it #tartarus in reload is excellent looking and fun but i keep thinking about what i liked about how FES characterizes minato so #here i am... LOL... with my 790 or so word ramble... im so normal about the blue boy #i needed to get my feelings out there somewhere i just could not stop thinking about HIM HE IS IN MY BRAIN 24/7 #me playing reload last night like 'minato would not fucking wait for a great clock to make sure that SEES is adequately prepared.'#and yet my sloth brain awaits the great clock... LOL gameplay convenience is not lost on me #i'm stuck in tartarus rn im grinding rubies and stuff trying to get equipment so i can throw hands with elizabeth its going to be fun #im still not done with this game i continue to be haunted by tartarus i fucking love that tower unironically #uh usually id ramble more in tags but. go read my post!! because i like analyzing FES gameplay mechanics!! i am full of passion and love!

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wifeswarmacademy · 5 months

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I'm finally joining a lancer game, and I have a lot of thoughts about the system. I gotta say, I feel like the way Ive seen others on here talk about it as a system seems very different from how it appears based on reading the core rulebook (and stats for the free stuff on comp/con). It seems quite limited in terms of what sort of mechs you can create within the system, various prebuilt frames with little room for customization. There are some fun combinations, but its not really building your own guy. (I planning to get an empakaai, grab an impact lance, and get external batteries from tokugawa, so i can melee everyone in a 5 hex line and grapple everyone) In particular im kinda dissapointed that there isnt much interesting for movement. you can run on the ground, with great difficulty you can fly, and you can teleport. Some get some more advanced stuff like blackbeard moving with grappling hooks or deaths head letting you run on walls. As far as I can tell, there is no mechanical support for a mech that moves around as thought they were on rollerskates. Im not joking that this was a major let down when people were talking about being able to recreate their favorite things in mech media, and realizing there wasnt support for this. I understand the lack of rules support is because the way they move with all the different body shapes of the mech is ill defined, but to me it just feels like moving around game pieces when the pegasus in an identical fashion to a raleigh. I just dont get the sensation that my guy is crawling around on the floor in a fucked up way.

I am extremely impressed by how the game handles NHPs. Its rare for a game to get players so excited about the prospect of losing control over something. The mix of mechanical effects and stellar writing makes it just seem really cool to lose control, but I recognize how effective this is is entirely reliant on how good your DM is. The setting is fantastic, and I think there is good reason why when i see people talk about lancer, its so often about the lore. The history of the Union is just great, with everyone ive talked to about it seeming to take different things away from how it operates. In particular, the setup of the game seems to enable just about any type of character people want to play. My friends that made characters vary from over the top and edgy, rogue illegally cloned super soldiers; ironic and amusing, forum lurker turned amateur pilot perpetually hooked into the omninet spewing whatever memes that may or may not be linked to something horrible clawing through to reality; or grounded, a maintenance worker who helped defend a trade ship against pirates and then decided to change profession and receive formal combat training. I would say it is a well done simple RPG with limited options and a phenomenal setting. Simple systems without a lot of numbers are not my bread and butter, but I have to appreciate the style in it.

#lancer rpg

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dailyadventureprompts · 1 year

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Drafting the Adventure: Wilderness and Exploration

For a game with exploration as one of it’s “core pillars”, d&d is kinda shit at producing gameplay conducive to actually making players feel like they’re exploring.If you play it by the book travelling from point A to B often feels like a slog, and a good number of groups are completely justified in skipping it entirely and just getting to the good bits. I think the problem largely stems from trying to cram the hexcrawl/westmarches style of gameplay from d&d’s heyday into the central gameplay loop when really it should be the focus of very particular kinds of adventure. Think of a big exploration adventure the same way you’d run a heist or murder mystery, usually a one off unless you’re running a specialized campaign.

With that said, the base rules for hanging out in the wilderness are IMO in massive need of an overhaul, so we might as well overhaul those along with setting up a good guidelines for running an exploration based adventure. Before we dive under the hood and get into all those storybuilding steps and mechanics, lets look at how my system works from the players’ perspective:

In lieu of any urgent quests or fantastic job offers, a group of adventurers decide they’re going to explore the wilderness outside their settlement and look for some opportunities.

One character chats up the locals, hearing rumours of what might be going on outside the walls. The second does some research on the area and finds a few trustworthy maps to copy. Another checks the local bountyboard for outlaws and monsters it might pay to hunt down.

The party sets out, and the DM asks the party which player wants to be the group’s surveyor: keeping a list of what places the party has visited, what options are available to them, and what might need a bit more exploration.

The DM has divided the area they’re exploring into zones with names like “The forbidden peaks” or “ The merry meadows” which gives each area a strong geographic identity and makes it easy for the party to remember and gives them an idea of what to expect.

Every time the party walks into a new zone, they learn the area’s name, and how many “points of interest” are in that region. A point of interest could be anything from a unique environmental detail to the lead in to an encounter to a monster lair to the entrance to a whole dungeon. The surveyor keeps track of these points of interest, making space to write in whatever details they think are relevant.

Likewise upon entering into a new zone, the party are made aware of “landmarks” striking points of interest that are obvious to the naked eye and don’t need to be searched for. Because this group prepared before they left, they’ll likely have learned of a few more points of interest in the region based off the information they gathered.

When the party have fully explored a point of interest, the DM tells the surveyor to check off the name of that location, indicating that it’s safe and that the party can turn their attention elsewhere

When deciding where to go next, the party has two options: Set out for a specific area (one they know about or have visited before) or to Wander, poking around till they find a location they didn’t know about previously. The DM may ask for checks while the party is traveling based on the difficulty of reaching the point of interest or the particulars of the zone they’re travelling through.

Because the DM has been upfront with how many points of interest are in the zone, the party have an understandable goal of filling in a list and checking off each location. This feels like actual exploration because the party is actually making the decision of where to go and how deep to search, combining those key elements of choice and discovery that make setting out into the unknown so rewarding.

Below the cut I’m going to go into detail about how to BUILD an exploration adventure, everything from designing goals to fit your narrative needs to choosing what kind of points of interest to seed into the world .

First step: Setting Bounderies

When preparing a wilderness adventure, you’re going to settle on an area that the party is exploring and why: are they low level nobodies knocking about the countryside surrounding the starting village till the call to adventure finds them? Are they high level heroes looking to comb a vast wasteland for the location of a forgotten temple? Are they desperate survivors battling the elements as they attempt to find a pass through the deep wilderness? Obviously these will set the scale and tone of your adventure, but they’ll also help you define your boundaries: are your party moving towards a specific goal, or are they fucking around? Are they able to return to the comforts of civilization on the regular, or are they on their own? Is their exploration more of a self driven sandbox, or are they trying to find a route to a particular destination fellowship style.

Perhaps most importantly you need to ask: SHOULD this adventure be exploration focused? These sorts of adventures are a lot of work and if the party is only going to go through this region once you might be better served by just planning some encounters and pantomiming the idea of exploration in your narration.

Second step: Zoning it out

Now that you’ve settled on your region, you’re going to start cutting it up into Zones, large areas with a distinct geographic identity that will stick in your party’s mind: the area around a village might be divided by its cardinal points into fields, swamp, forest, and hills, able to be explored in any order, where as an attempt to cross the mountains might be separated into a sequence of 1) foothills 2) a choice between peaks OR caverns 3) river 4) lake. Obviously you’ll give each zone a striking name as you develop its theme that will help reinforce its identity by the time you present this to the party. I’d recommend three to six zones, as any more than that it gets hard to differentiate them from eachother.

Third step: Making lists

Now comes the fun part in designing your points of interest. I’ve found this is a two part process of brainstorming physical locations within each zone and determining what sort of encounters might happen there, though often times the latter comes before the former. It’s important to remember that an encounter is more than a fight, and fights are more than just face to face combat. Here’s some ideas to get your brainstorming started:

Generally you’ll want atleast four and a maximum of twelve points of interest per zone ( though I tend to default to six) this is not only to prevent you from having to make too much content, but also to be able to use a die to determine what random point of interest the party finds when wandering. Every 2 locations they check off your list, decrease the die size.

Between landmarks and information that a party can gather through rumour/studying maps, I’d advise having no more than half your Zone’s content discoverable before the party actually starts wandering. This is to preserve the sense of the unknown which is vital to feeling like exploration means something.

Landmarks are like billboards drawing your party to particular content, ranging from natural features like hills or rivers to ruins or statues. Use them to deliver details the party should know about the zone early.

Trails or other signs of habitation are your friend, as they allow you to tease what an encounter MIGHT be without giving things away immediately; bandit ambushes, lost travellers, local wildlife, all of these could be at the end of a trail, but it’s far easier for you to bait the party with their own curiosity than come with an obvious “this place looks like a trap, do you want to step in it?”

When it actually comes to combat encounters, I’d advise balancing how challenging the encounter is with how much forewarning the party has. Ambushes they walk right into should be easy or very easy, while medium and hard encounters should either be opt in ( seeking out a beast in its lair) or avoidable ( hiding while the chimera circles overhead)

Points of interest can have many things to discover within them, such as frontier settlements, or Structures and Caverns which can be run as small dungeons.

Some locations may act as gateways into different zones. This is particularly useful for overland travel adventures where the party has to find the right point of interest to lead them on to the next phase of their journey.

For longer explorations it’s a good idea to include “safeholds”, places the party can use as a campsite rather than roughing it in the wilderness an being exposed to the elements or the threat of random encounters.

Puzzles and scavenger hunts are amazing activities at points of interest, especially if the party needs to go somewhere else in the zone/area to solve them.

Need to express that one particular point of interest ( or perhaps a whole zone) is difficult to traverse? Have the party roll con saves to avoid exhaustion/survival checks to find a better route. You can likewise do this with stealth checks to avoid the patrol routes of enemies or the hunting grounds of vicious predators.

#dnd #dungeons and dragons #d&d #5e #pathfinder #ttrpg #dm advice #dm tip #dm tips #dm tools #writing advice #homebrew #DnD Mechanics #d&d mechanics #homebrew mechanic #Wilderness #exploration #random encounters

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taupewolfy · 3 months

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can you describe how void stranger is a perfect game? (w/o spoilers of course) i think i get the idea for ghost trick because that game is clean and symmetrical with its ideas and mechanics... and seeing you post void stranger has me curious if i want to invest the time into it

(question is in reference to this post I made)

I'll try my best to do so:

Short answer - I like the game. A lot. I'm picking up what it's putting down. It's the type of design I really quite enjoy - no, not quite the puzzle aspect (how to become a sokoban sicko with one easy game!) although that is really, very good, but rather...the aspect of it almost hearkening to older adventure design. I've grown a steady fondness and appetite for these types of games over the years and I usually like what they do. Throw in some inquisitiveness as to what might be hidden amongst its depths and you've got a healthy dose of perfection (for me).

While this one won't and doesn't appeal to a broad audience both due to it's fairly sizable time commitment and what can become pretty damn difficult puzzles, I think what it does it does so, very, confidently.

It's also something that floats around in my mind frequently...much like most of the titles in that list.

Longer answer down below -

I think Void Stranger is a 'perfect' video game because it is so very...video gamey. It does a multitude of things, both with how it presents itself, reveals its layers to you, and conveys its story through repetition, repetitive play, mechanics and the rules of those mechanics (and how you learn to understand those).

It's a piece of art that knows what the fuck it is, and is fairly unflinching towards that, unwilling to bend to the recipient and asking, inviting them, to understand it. It looks at standardised game design and goes 'fuck that' while still being a fairly approachable (and importantly, well designed) game.

Its a 'tile puzzler' puzzle game with no undo, forcing you to get better at playing it by really thinking your moves through.

Its 'sokoban'* but not really, a dungeon crawler with the guise of a sokoban. And while being both of those, its repetition hearkens to shmups and the repeat play within those...you're score chasing but there is no score...maybe some collectables to acquire but more often then not it is uncovering the secrets of the void. Finding tools that will help you progress and progress - faster and faster. And as you do that, you get better at playing the game. Much like the song that welcomes you into the game as you explore Void Stranger's depths it builds and builds and builds YOUR knowledge of it.

There is a story to it, one that drives your character, who is very much their own character but I took that more as a pleasant surprise. There's no secrets there, if anything the story is pretty straightforward. Without diving into the details much. Again the crux, the core of this game is the gameplay.

And that gameplay is going to ask a lot of you. Most importantly you need patience. Take your time - it is turned based after all. Nothing can act until you move. The store page even says to take breaks.

As for if you're willing to invest the time in it...well that's going to depend. I think there is a great deal of resistance from folks coming into it expecting one thing but getting something else (or just straight up not enjoying it - which is fine! but not so fine if you're forcing yourself to 'enjoy' something you don't.)

Otherwise, Sylvie of sylvie lime fame has made a wonderful and concise guide to finding some secrets - ultimately the guide is there to help you progress. Not individual puzzle solutions, there's plenty of those (and if you are really, really stuck I do recommend making use of them - I sure as hell did) but just the progress through each playthrough. The hints are just right.

*Sokoban, named after the eponymous game, is a type of logic puzzle game that tends to be grid-locked movement, where your choice of moves is part of the puzzle. More well known as 'block pushing puzzles' e.g. Stephan's Sausage Roll and Baba is You.

#ask #neozoid #void stranger #like the most important aspect of the puzzles is movement and directions - hence 'tile puzzler' you're focusing more on those aspects #rather than: 'push block to this point'#i will admit there is 3 specific instances in the game where it deeply frustrated me because of a switch in [redacted] but with breaks #i got it eventually

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molsno · 2 months

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minecraft would need a lot of changes in order to be less colonialist, and I don't think it would even really be possible to completely strip the game of all colonialism (it still fundamentally is a terra nullius fantasy at its core) but I've been thinking a lot about how I personally would redesign it as a developer, and I have so many thoughts that if I were to list them all, this post would go on forever. so I think for now, I'll focus on one particular aspect: villagers and illagers.

as a disclaimer, these are just my personal thoughts. I wouldn't consider myself an expert on decolonization, so my analysis may very well be limited. I have a strong passion for storytelling through the use of game mechanics, and that's the angle I'm approaching this from. if I were planning to make any changes to minecraft (which I'm not), I would consult with people who know more than me about this topic first and involve them in the process. anyway, since this post turned out way longer than I expected, I've put the rest under a read more.

the primary critique leveled against villagers and illagers is that they're antisemitic caricatures. a lot has already been said about this, and I'm not jewish myself, so I don't particularly have anything novel to contribute to that conversation. I think that their models should be changed, and all forms of golems should be renamed. I believe there's a mod that renames them to constructs, so I'll be using that to refer to them here.

I think that overall, the biggest problem that villagers have is that you are not incentivized in any way to engage with their mechanics. the most productive and rewarding way of engaging with villagers is to ravage their homes and steal all of their valuable resources, then build slums so that you can shove a villager of each career into a 1x1 hole. to further benefit from this, you can make a zombie effectively kill them, then bring them back to life using a splash potion of weakness and a golden apple. they will then have discounted prices on all of their trades.

there are so many problems with this I don't even know where to begin. to put it simply, you are not incentivized to treat them as inhabitants of the world that are equal to you; you're rewarded for essentially turning them into slaves. this is a fate far more cruel, far more evil, than anything the pillagers do to them (which I'll get to later).

if I were designing the villager system, then the first thing I would do is make them less useful to you if you treat them like this. if you steal the resources from their village, including the items in their chests, then I think that should affect the trades they offer you. think about it: why would they have anything to trade with you if they don't have any resources in their village? if you completely restrict their movement, then they shouldn't trade with you at all; how could they? on top of that, they should fight back! if you start mistreating them, then nearby villages should start taking defensive measures, like building walls around their villages to keep you out and iron constructs to fight you if you attempt to enter. I think this would further humanize the villagers by conveying that they communicate with each other, that they have thoughts and feelings beyond just desiring emeralds. and indeed, having other villages respond to your behavior would demonstrate that they communicate with other villages, not just as trading partners, but as allies.

speaking of trading, it desperately needs to be overhauled. I think one of the reasons people tend not to engage with trades is because villager trades are generally terrible deals, and that's mostly because emeralds are an extremely rare ore. yes, you can obtain emeralds through trading, but the quantity is never enough. the minimum number of emeralds an armorer who hasn't been zombified and healed will ask for in exchange for an enchanted diamond chestplate is 21. given that emeralds are quite literally more rare than diamonds, it makes far more sense to spend your time mining diamonds than mining emeralds to take advantage of that trade. you will likely find 21 diamonds far quicker than you would find 21 emeralds, and with 21 diamonds, you could create 2 chestplates and 2 enchanting tables, and still have 1 diamond left to spare. and most villager trades are similarly worthless! I think that increasing the generation rate of emeralds would help assuage this problem.

another issue I have with villagers is that they're generally depicted as "primitive". they live harmoniously with nature, which is good; considering the fact that the main audience for minecraft is children, I think encouraging kids to see value in protecting the natural world is a good idea. however, the villagers as they are don't really demonstrate this idea, and many of minecraft's game mechanics actually encourage you to destroy nature in order to extract more resources. I think that showing the villagers using more sophisticated technology would demonstrate that it's possible to collect resources more efficiently and sustainably without destroying the environment.

the main way that I would go about demonstrating this is adding redstone devices to villages. perhaps they could have farms that use pistons to release water that automatically harvests the grown crops and delivers them into a chest using hoppers. or maybe they could have houses that are lit automatically at night using daylight sensors and redstone lamps. maybe armorers' houses could have automatic smelting mechanisms. perhaps they could have a redstone clock that rings the village bell at set intervals to indicate the time of day. not only would all of this demonstrate that the villagers are capable of using technology, it would also teach the player what redstone does and how it can be used, which is something that minecraft sorely needs; as it stands, there are almost no uses of redstone in natural world generation. I think this would additionally demonstrate that technology is a very effective tool in making the lives of people easier, without destroying the environment through extractionist practices.

I think this is a good segue to talk about illagers. it seems to me that the primary purpose of illagers is to contrast them with villagers by making them more violent, and in many ways, colonialist. I think that expanding on this would be a great idea!

if villagers had redstone devices, for example, then illagers could have more complex redstone devices that are more destructive and unethical. while these would undoubtedly produce more resources, their negative effects would be made more apparent. for example, they could have automatic chicken cooking farms that produce enormous amounts of pre-cooked chicken, but the meat is of a lower quality - perhaps restoring fewer hunger points and with a lower saturation value, and has a noticeable chance to make you sick when you eat it. perhaps they can have tnt dupers that are used for tree farming, but leave giant ugly craters in the landscape. perhaps pillagers could construct large rail networks that disrupt the landscape and make those areas spawn fewer wild animals. they could have giant, ugly farms for resources like wheat, pumpkins, and iron that produce low quality items in an obviously unethical way.

further, I think that illagers need to be more destructive. they're already an unpleasant sight due to their hostility, but I think that their presence in an area should be felt even when they're not physically there. for example, abandoned mineshafts should have ominous banners hanging at the entrances, and all of the ores that were in them should have been mined out. there should be large, barren fields with empty canals for water where nothing grows anymore, indicating they used it for farmland until the soil was no longer useful. there should be giant holes in the ground that go deep into the stone layer, indicating they used to mine there until they extracted all of the ores they could.

on top of that, I think that making the world more responsive to the players' actions by changing the appearance rate of illagers would do wonders to encourage the player to take care of the world. if the player frequently raids villages, then nearby villages should become more and more hostile until they eventually decide to compete with the player by engaging in more extractivist colonialist methods themselves, thereby turning them into illagers.

essentially, if the player chooses to play the game as a colonizer, then the inhabitants of the world will respond in turn, and begin acting in the same ways to secure power for themselves. pillager patrols would become more common the more destructive the player becomes, and they would become more destructive and powerful themselves, acting as a real threat! if the player has fully enchanted netherite armore and tools and engages with the world in a destructive way, then illagers should do the same and gang up on them in order to take over their home and steal their resources. in effect, colonizing the world would be extremely punishing, as it would make minecraft a more frustrating experience.

it's disappointing that minecraft doesn't have any of these mechanics, because without them, I struggle to see how the message minecraft communicates is anything other than "colonialism and extractionism are good and rewarding". mojang seemingly wants to portray the world of minecraft as a beautiful world of nature, but the game is not at all designed to encourage you to view it that way. every feature in minecraft is treated first and foremost as a resource to be extracted in the most efficient way possible, and it's really troubling. it's not at all surprising, given that the game was initially designed by a white supremacist, but while mojang has attempted to distance themselves from him publicly, his philosophy is still central to the game's mechanics. minecraft is by no means unique in this regard, as many video games are built around these ideals, but as one of the most popular games of all time, I feel it's a grave mistake to reinforce these philosophies, especially in the minds of children. I don't necessarily think my ideas are perfect solutions, but I think that at the very least, it's worth acknowledging the problem and trying to come up with alternatives.

#my writing #minecraft

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skunts-own-truth · 1 year

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I think my favorite character sheet of all time is from Unknown Armies. If you’re unfamiliar, UA is a game where “broken people try to fix the world.” The players are a cabal of everyday folks who have uncovered the secret Magick truth of existence, and are not happy with what they’ve found. Usually, this means the players will do everything they can to dethrone the current order of reality and replace it with one of their liking. Such actions can include battling a demon for the soul of a friend in Super Smash Bro’s, or attempting to dethrone Nancy Reagan as the Ascended Avatar of the Mother- who has been altering reality with the magick phrases “just say no,” and “think of the children.” It’s a fun ass game, and I can’t recommend it enough. That said, the character sheet is great! Take a look here:

It’s a D100 game, my preferred sort of dice engine, but has a delightful character building mechanic of measuring a character’s core stats and testing abilities based on past traumas and personal history in general. Take Helplessness, for example. The more your character feels helpless at the core of their being, in this disturbing setting where high strangeness is causing reality to crack and flutter, the easier it is for the character to dodge- but in exchange their fitness ability becomes more difficult. It forces the player to strike a balance right at the beginning, and aids a player in building a breathing character from the ground running. How do you play this person? Fill out your character sheet and look down. You’ll know exactly how to play them.

The addition of “Identities,” let’s you get more specific with what your character is. For example, you could write in something like “backyard mechanic,” and determine the percentage you would be testing with. An identity like that would allow you to tinker with tools, know stuff about cars, and have something to talk about with your step-dad during family outings.

There are actually three versions of this character sheet, given to players depending on what sorta powers they have. This one in particular is for “supernatural characters,” which is left completely vague on purpose. A supernatural character can be whatever you want, from a clone of a dead girl that can read minds, to a werewolf. The player and GM come up with what exactly this means mechanically, but in my games of UA I have never had an issue with letting a player get wild and creative with it. The other types of characters are those that use actual sorcery, like pornomancy or plutomancy, and Avatars of human concepts that can bend reality around themselves based on what type of person the character is exemplifying.

The game rules, and it’s character sheet design rocks. 10/10 forever.

#Roleplaying games #D&D alternatives #RPGs #Unknown Armies #tabletop rpg #character sheets

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danshive · 8 months

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I'm going to start over in Starfield ✨ for two reasons.

One, I want to experience the start of the game again while actually knowing how to use the map menu 🌎

Two, the much more important reason, I think core aspects of gameplay are hidden behind perks I did not take early, and if I start taking them now, it will involve grinding instead of leveling them more naturally.

For example, an NPC once told me to target a ship's engines. "RIGHT! I've seen Star Trek! I'm on this!" I declared, but I couldn't do that. I looked around for a way to do the thing I was told to do, but I was never going to find it. It's locked behind a perk 🤦‍♀️

Bigger for me personally, I didn't immediately unlock the Boost Pack training, and spent actual hours wondering why I couldn't boost using the boost pack I was given and told to use for boosting.

The boost pack mechanic was one of the reasons why I was even playing the game in the first place 🙃

For my first character, I chose the Chef background, because I thought it was a fun background, I figured it wasn't that critical to my first playthrough, and hey, maybe cooking would turn out to be OP or something.

I've yet to find enough materials to cook a single thing (where be the space super market?!), melee weapons that aren't rescue axes seem to be a thing of myth, I don't recall what the other perk even was, and things I consider core elements of gameplay were locked off until I got the right perks without me realizing it.

So... Starting over, and taking what I'm guessing I'll consider to be staple early perks for every character, homogenizing at least the early build for every future character?

I don't think it's a good thing that I feel I need to start over to get what I consider basic functionality, but it's (sort of) fine so long as this results in finding the fun 🤷‍♀️

Like, seriously, I enjoy the Bethesda RPG challenge run community and such a lot. I'd really rather not dislike this game. I'm giving it more opportunities to make me happy than I'd give other games because of that.

Bethesda should send various people on YouTube gift baskets 🎁

#starfield

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lethedwarddavidsonworld-blog · 2 months

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Signalis Doom - 5

Not much today either, it was mostly a mix of overcoming issues with 3d models in doom and figuring out some workflows.

3d models are still considered sprites, so to get models to display properly, it involves a degree of pointing the engine to look at invisible dummy sprites and then swapping those with the model. Odd stuff. There's better formats than this one and i'm going to look into those. That being said, i'm unsure how much i'm gonna commit to 3d, right now it's just experimentation. what I'll prob end up doing is spending a day banging out a buncha mockup sprites to approximate some chars and start mapping. Just enough to get the idea. tbh i could be doing way more mapping to establish a level language than i am, i'm kinda putting it off to play with textures and i gotta diversify.

I'm considering commissioning some artists for some spritework, either on specific characters or UI elements or such. I know i'll want something done for the opening splash. Most of my time today, and the next few days, is going to be spent reacquainting myself with a host of tools. I've been doing gamedev for years, i went to school for 3d animation, and i've spent a great deal of time in alot of art tools. However, i tend to forget how they work very easily. I realized i'm not gonna get anything done unless i take the time to remember how the following tools work; 1. Maya for core animation(could be a problem, iqm is the newest doom format and the community pipeline is best setup for blender, but we'll see how it goes) 2,. Blender for import/export/better compability with some aspects of gzdoom 3. Photoshop for photo manipulation of the existing textures and as a means of either creating new textures, or givng more nuance to ones i create elsewhere. 4. Aesperite for core pixel art. Signalis is a mix of low rez painted works and pixel art, and knowing when to deploy each is a good idea. 5. I'll need to get a proper toolkit up for the model to 2d pipeline, i have options but they need to be tested. 6. FL studio for audio manipulation. 7. and imma be real i don't know how spreadsheets work and i'm gonna need a hell of a spritesheet to organize what assets i'll need to recreate. That sounds like a lot but i've used them all before, and i'd need to more or less do the same thing for any real production anyway.

On the plus side, i think i've figured out how to do the floors. i'll just take elements of the original textures, and build a larger one out of them with built-in variation for tiles and color variation. I'll add more variation as needed in-editor.

I'm realizing i'm spending alot of time in odd spots. To be honest, i've never done a fan project like this before, much less one working with OG textures. I'm having a tough time getting my head around not only the unique nature of doom modding (releasing contnet packs taht can slot into any game) with full game production (Og maps, mechanics, story with bespoke stuff) ontop of fanworks (fanfiction, recontexualization of original assets). part of me wonders if my focus on getting og textures working is a mistake, as it's putting me in a mindset that's not the most useful for my project. But we'll see, I'll get my priorities straightned out, this ain't getting done overnight either way.

#signalis #doom #gamedev

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sabrinahawthorne · 3 months

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JUMP! Devlog, February 2, 2024

Combat - tactics versus drama

I'm not trying to make a tactical combat game. If you want anime games who focus on the moment-to-moment of a fight, there are better options out there for you. I personally recommend DAWN: The RPG, if that's your preference. But I digress.

I'm really happy with the core Bidding mechanic in the JUMP prototype. After a playtest, it proved to work exactly how I'd hoped. The feedback I got was a resounding: more please. So this month, I set about expanding combat.

To keep a long story short, I tried a couple of different things, and they didn't work. I ended up just building a second, different combat that sat on top of the first and didn't interact with it at all. More than that, the design went directly against my design goals. It was tactical, and approaching a level of crunch that I wasn't really happy with.

I eventually found the solution while rereading Aver Alder's Monsterhearts 2: Conditions and GM Moves.

My mistake was trying to tie every piece of the fiction into some discreet mechanical state or interaction, instead of providing a robust imaginative space paired with concrete, narrative goals. Conditions are great for this. I can attach them to some simple mechanical consequence, but their focus is solidly in the story. You don't clear a condition by meeting a numbers threshold, or performing the right bonus action - you build a narrative moment.

GM Moves are also great for this - In giving the GM a toolkit that operates primarily in the fiction, as opposed to their own set of stats and rules clarifications, they enter the role of a director. They can focus more and more on what a fight means for the story - playing to find out what happens, as they say.

Truth be told, I struggle with narrative game design. I like a harmonic system - a clockwork. It feels very easy to me to take the numbers and boxes of a system and build my own fiction around them. Giving the written fiction the same weight as the clockwork is something I'm still working on. Which makes working on JUMP! exciting! It forces me to open up to new avenues of my own design, and to bring in color that I wouldn't otherwise be inclined to be.

2. Playbooks - How Moves Make the Fiction

Give everyone their own Power Up Move. Duh.

I spent a lot of time this month trying to make character features universal. Again, clockwork. But again, the Apocalypse Engine saved me - I got to thinking about Sex Moves, and what purpose they serve (in this case, in the context of Monsterhearts). They're so character specific - they forward the tropes, the imaginative space the table is here to engage in. So I've been leaning in. It's all chicken scratch in a notebook right now, but I have a lot of ideas for how to rework the Playbooks. They're going to end up with a lot more individual toys than they have now. For now, I'll say that I have the words "Hedonistic Hero" written under the Powerhouse Playbook.

Work continues, I dinner to make. Check out JUMP!, and keep an eye out for more logs and milestones!

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #jump! shonen battle roleplay #devlog

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addgg-taylor · 1 month

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MTG: The Unstable Ground We Stand On

The year was 2013. Gatecrash had just come out to mixed reception, but I didn't even know what Magic was. I was in high school, and my best friend (at the time) was on a vacation to Disney World. So, I went to sit with my second best friend, but couldn't find them. That's when I found an old friend of mine playing a card game with them, and that game was Magic. I learned about it, looked into it, played Duels of the Planeswalkers (remember when that was a thing?), and decided it was for me! Now, I could have gotten a starter deck, but I was laser focused on one thing: A box that said Core Set. This was the M14 Deckbuilder's Toolkit, and I got it because that's what all my friends started Magic with. Granted, that probably wasn't the smartest idea, but I'm the type to jump off the deep end; if I'm getting into a hobby, I may as well make sure I'm prepared for the long haul. The Deckbuilder's Toolkit had everything I needed, the start of a collection, and most importantly? Lands. It had lands. You didn't need to buy them from a game store for up to (or even exceeding) a dollar a pop. You didn't have to rely on people liquidating their collection to stock up. You could just buy a box and have land cards to build decks with, and I remember buying toolkits just for lands and boosters. Now, you can't do that. If you're just getting started, you either have to borrow them, switch them between decks, open them in packs, or buy them on the secondary market. (That last one is pretty ironic, because Wizards of the Coast has a rule against acknowledging the secondary market.) And, yet there's no reasonable, mainstream way to get land cards. Some game stores will let you keep them after an event, but I've only been to one store that did that. (Read: did. They don't anymore because people weren't saving enough for others.)

Back on topic though, long time players probably made note of the time I started Magic; I started with Magic 14, which came between the Return to Ravnica block... and the Theros block, widely regarded as one of the most heavily unbalanced and mechanically awkward blocks of its time. So, after that, people reasonably wanted a palette cleanser, and they had it. The Tarkir block was amazing despite being chronologically confusing, but in the storm of chaos, there was warmth. The Core Sets would always be there to serve as the foundational building blocks, and get this; they gave players a moment to see where the main characters were on their journeys. These weren't just foundational gameplay wise, but story wise, and gave WotC a moment to show everyone what's going on in the background. They also ensured that, between the sets with heavy mechanical ties or complexity, there was always solid ground to stand on. New players could seek out these Core Sets as a good starting ground, and experienced players found themselves in familiar territory with highly desired reprints. However, despite no reasonable player protesting against Core Sets, the vocalization of players wanting more of their favorite planes was taken in a way that was bad for everyone (in my opinion).

After Magic Origins, the game switched to a two set block system, and suddenly lost the Core Set. From a game design standpoint, this is doomsday. This is how TCGs die if they don't have a dedicated, permanent selection of cards, and yet Magic somehow survived to realize their mistake. In the background, however, they were still making a more gross mistake, trying to capitalize on Elder Dragon Highlander. Around the time I got into Magic, they'd begun making Commander decks, and at first these weren't too problematic. They were once a year drops that let players get into this entirely different casual format. While Standard was limited on card selection, and Modern and Legacy a coin flip simulator, Commander allowed players to throw their collection into the ring without regard for the hottest cards. The general consensus was that you could play what you wanted, whether you had a few Standard sets worth of cards or flocked to Modern, Legacy, and Vintage.

Fast forward to War of the Spark. Now, the two block system was dying. The war on blocks had begun, with Mark Rosewater practically blowing off anyone that critiqued the change with the same "this is what you wanted, right?" Players really wanted to see previous planes, but instead of Wizards trying to revisit them in earnest, they shifted into rapid fire mode. With only one set per plane now, they began spitting out half-baked revisits that barely touched upon older planes, and tore through new planes and major events without putting much thought into them. Stories would begin to go undercooked, and with every "you wouldn't want to be stuck on a plane you don't like" from MaRo, an interesting plane or event is left unexplored past the surface level. Additionally, to add more ammo to this machine gun of mistakes, they threw the Core Set in the trash. They tried to kill it off once and realized their mistake, but after Adventures in the Forgotten Realms it was dead for good. Looking at things now, this has all caused Magic to fall apart.

Magic is the worst it's ever been for any player that isn't wholly invested in and unwaveringly loyal to the game. The beginner has the worst footing in many years, with the Local Game Store forced to leverage all the responsibility for getting new players into the game. Players who want to learn can do so for free, but the first step into the door beyond learning is a brick wall. Starter Kits have finally made a resurgence, which is a step in the right direction. However, you likely wouldn't know they existed if you didn't look online, which is antithetical to the fact that you'll usually have to go to a game store in order to play in events anyway. Additionally, with MSRPs being stripped off many products, it's the most expensive (even relatively speaking) it's ever been to start playing. As for experienced players? The story is the hardest it's ever been to keep up with, thanks especially to the fact that an entire plane's story has to start and end in one set. Players should be able to get the gist simply by looking at the set, but instead, hastily written stories with declining storytelling aspects do most of the talking (and it's assumed you've read them). This problem is becoming painfully obvious now; basically everyone that's died recently has been brought back to some extent, making it apparent that the folks in charge of story direction are leaning on old planeswalkers instead of innovating with new ones. Mu Yangling and Jiang Yanggu, Basri Ket, Niko Aris, Calix, Kasmina, Davriel, Dack Fayden, and Wrenn have either been ignored or cut from the story. Meanwhile, every member of the original five planeswalkers has completed their story arc and suffered some major fate that should have ended their tale, and yet they've all come back; Ajani and Jace were compleated, Garruk was corrupted by the Chain Veil, Liliana was hunted down, and Chandra was forced to face her corrupted fling Nissa. All of them are now totally fine, with Jace set to appear in Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

That's just scratching the surface of problems plaguing veterans. From a gameplay perspective, Standard is the most complex it's ever been, thanks to a three-year cycle being introduced and a constant torrent of increasingly complex mechanics. From a financial perspective, products aren't just the most expensive they've ever been, but there's basically a new product every single month now. Unless you stick to a single format (which can still be wallet-busting in its own right), you're bombarded with new content. Experimentation is great, but with the constant output, Wizards is forced to compete with itself; this has led to the worst level of power creep in many years. (You could probably reprint the Mirrodin block into Standard at this rate and only have to ban Skullclamp.) Every format has been turned on its back by the creep, from evoke elementals plaguing every deck in Modern to companions haunting Legacy and Vintage; worst of all, however, has been the fact that Standard is incredibly difficult to innovate in because of just how many blatantly busted cards are being printed. Oko was the thunder in the distance, and a storm has been pelting the format at increasing intensity since. We've reached a point where many blatantly powerful cards are considered fine in the format, because Wizards would rather keep bombs like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse legal than go on a banning spree for every seriously problematic card.

The worst part about this is that we likely wouldn't have reached this point if we still had a Core Set every year. The intentionally dumbed-down power of Core Sets is part of what helped keep power creep in check, as they couldn't go too far if they wanted to make the cards relevant. The ability to reprint many cards back into Standard gave players a comfortable baseline, let new players enter the game more easily, and made it easier to acquire classic cards. The break in the story allowed us to get a better look at where planeswalkers were and what they were doing, or it let us step back to see their history. It let Wizards introduce new characters more freely, not having to worry about their immediate implications. And, most importantly. if it was still around, there'd be far less arguments for one set per plane.

#magic the gathering #mtg #tcg #vent #vent post #rant post #game design #game development

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