tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28176476235011083482024-03-02T03:37:55.242-05:00Lawful IndifferentNickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.comBlogger489125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-5917198377320909632022-11-19T08:59:00.001-05:002022-11-19T08:59:08.112-05:00Looking BackThey say that if you don't look back at who who were from a year ago and cringe that you haven't grown enough.<div><br></div><div>What if I look back five or seven years?</div><div><br></div><div>It's funny to see that some ideas are still rattling around in my head. And it's funny to see what has changed. I've gotten more into Zen and less into roleplaying games, for example. More into Tiktok and less into blogging. I've come to terms with 4e and GURPS, but mostly because nobody plays either of them anymore.</div><div><br></div><div>I've published (and sold!) games on itch- something I never would have dared to do in my 20s. There's a whole scene now, on the possibly soon to be doomed Twitter that makes just exactly the kind of games I used to love playing...</div><div><br></div><div>This thought inspired by finding a blogspot app still installed on my phone. Hello out there, old friends and followers! How have these long years treated you? Do you have kids now? Own a house? What do you think about all this? <gestures wildly></div>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-51684276323819781872019-11-08T04:43:00.000-05:002019-11-08T04:43:38.353-05:00D&D is a game about resourcesSometimes it pretends to be a game about stories, or adventures, but
it isn’t. It’s a game about what you have- hit points, weapons, armor,
spells, gold, and experience points. (It’s also about how good you are
at getting those things.)<br />
<br />
It mostly trades in two currencies- hit points, and spell points.
(spell slots, metamagic points, whatever). There are others, but these
are the most important. D&D asks you to risk those currencies in a
dice game, with the stakes set in the fiction, modified by however good
your character is at whatever you’re doing.<br />
<br />
The rewards are always things you can write on your character sheet-
experience points, gold, items. You don’t have to track anything else.<br />
<br />
You can trade experience points for additional power and utility,
allowing you to earn more experience points, which you always want.<br />
<br />
You can trade gold for additional power and utility, but only to a
point. It’s usually easy to buy all of the best items in the game, with
additional gold being useless. The game doesn’t model economics, or any
mercantile activity, or construction.<br />
<br />
And that’s it. 95% of the game is either about getting resources or
spending resources ( to try to get more resources). Everything else is
window dressing or freeform roleplaying.<br />
<br />
(<a href="https://antiknez.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/dd-is-a-game-about-resources/">From my other blog</a>) Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com82tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-66149235239164655262019-07-07T13:39:00.000-04:002019-07-07T13:39:14.858-04:00Can't Stop Thinking About WeaponsPredictably enough, when I set down to whittle the 5e rules down to something that I'm interested in running, one of the first things that I take a look at are the rules for weapons.<br />
<br />
Have I actually laid out what my issues with the weapons list in 5e is? It's both boring and long, with obvious traps in damage and functionality, and somehow also lacking in anything resembling interest. If you want to do a big long list of weaponry, you can do better by looking at one of the Warhammer 40k weapon lists, with all of its modifiers and finnicky bonii, or you can look directly at FantasyCraft, which takes great pains to make each weapon type distinct through the liberal use of feats and class features.<br />
<br />
5e doesn't do either, which is why I always want to get rid of it. 5e isn't really a game about whether you should bring a sword or an axe or a spear, and I kind of want it to be. <br />
<br />
<br />
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</blockquote>
<br />
So here's a little something inspired by much-maligned weapon speed rules in 1E.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<h3>
Weapon Lengths </h3>
<br />
The basic idea is that, in a melee, those with longer weapons get to strike first. They always make the attack roll first. Unfortunately, longer weapons also need more space to operate.<br />
<br />
There's also a difference between 'thrusting' and 'swinging' weapons.<br />
<br />
Thrusting weapons attack in a straight line, can skewer through enemies to strike enemies behind them, and can pin enemies to walls.<br />
<br />
Swinging weapons, like axes, can cleave through all enemies around them, push enemies away from them in any direction. Unfortunately, if you try and use a swinging weapon in an enclosed space, you suffer disadvantage on your attacks. <br />
<br />
Swords, uniquely, can both thrust and swing. They are much more expensive than any other weapon type, however.<br />
<br />
So now real-world tactics can apply. If you have a spear, you'll want to line your enemies up behind one another, and fight in narrower corridors where your superior weapon length lets you keep them somewhat at bay. A superior fighter will still overcome you, but at least you have the first strike. <br />
<br />
If you're operating mostly on your own, or in disorganized and chaotic melees, you can swing your axe with reckless abandon in a big open area. But tight, confined areas are not great for you. You're at your best with lots of room to manipulate your foes.<br />
<br />
If you've got a sword, you can thrust in tight quarters or swing in more open ones. It's not as long as a spear, of course, but you can't have it all.<br />
<br />
So now there are tradeoffs and benefits to each type of weapon, and different kinds of warriors are going to want to use different types of weaponry.<br />
<br />
I'm still working on how to use skewering, cleaving, pushing, and pinning in 5e. I'm thinking as a bonus to when you beat your enemy's AC by more than 5, you get to use one of your weapon's benefits. So if your enemy's AC is 15 and you roll a 21, you can skewer behind them with your spear, or force them backwards with your axe (possibly off a cliff or into a fire, or whatever). Cleaving lets you hit multiple foes at once. Pinning lets you keep your enemies in place.<br />
<br />
Larger enemies need more space, but also always attack first. A giant is going to need a lot of room to swing its club around. Creatures with natural weapons probably don't need a lot of room- that troll sure is dangerous in a cramped warren...<br />
<br />
Monks should just flat out be able to strike first, since they're movie martial artists and one has to imagine in a world full of swords they've practiced how to step into a guard or whatever. If you have a different conception of monks in your world, feel free to change this. Maybe they strike like a shortsword. Up to you. <br />
<br />
None of this is playtested. Use at your own risk.<br />
<br />
<br />
This also works pretty well with another system I've been working on, and something I've posted here before:<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<h3>
Weapon Damage by Size</h3>
So in this scheme, one-handed weapons do 1d6 damage and two-handed weapons do 1d8 damage. If you're a Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, or Paladin (the warrior-type classes of 5e), then your one-handed weapons deal 1d8 damage and your two-handed weapons deal 1d10.<br />
<br />
Light and/or Finesse weapons drop the size down one die, so a two-handed finesse weapon wielded by a non-warrior deals 1d6 damage, and a Fighter's two-handed hammer toss deals 1d8 damage.<br />
<br />
Light weapons can be thrown, and Finesse weapons allow the wielder to choose between Strength and Dexterity when making melee attacks.<br />
<br />
Weapons are further differentiated by their critical effects:<br />
Swords and daggers critical on 19-20.<br />
Axes step up their die size on a critical hit (so a two-handed axe crit by a Barbarian deals 1d12 damage)<br />
Blunt weapons stun their foes (DC equal to 10+damage). The wielder may also optionally push / knock that enemy prone.<br />
<br />
If you combine the two, I feel like you've got a pretty robust system.<br />
<br />
As a DM, you'll need to be fair with adjucating when various weapons will or won't work. Tight spaces can mess with a sword, but being surrounded is bad news for a spear. People can hide underneath things if a reaver with an axe is coming at them, and goblins might retreat into tight warrens to escape a barbarian.<br />
<br />
<br />
As usual, let me know what you think. I may not respond to many, but I read every single one of them, and it always makes my day to know what people think about what I'm working on.<br />
<br />
I'm going to try and be better about sharing what I'm writing about instead of churning endlessly throught Notepad++ tabs, deleting everything, and starting over like I'm accustomed to doing... if for no other reason than maybe sharing some of my ideas can get them to stick a bit.<br />
<br />
<br />
<script async="" src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com69tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-55333814111857182572019-02-03T17:30:00.000-05:002019-02-03T17:30:03.231-05:00Gervan, Sorcerer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><u>Gervan</u></b><br /><br /><b>Level 3 Sorcerer</b><br /><br /><b>Hit Points</b>: 9<br /><b>Willpower</b>: 5<br /><b>AC</b>: 15<br /><b>Attack</b>: 1<br /><br /><br /><b>Flaw</b>: <br /> Seeks power at all costs<br /><br /><b>Characteristics</b>: <br /> Wise- <br /> Swift-<br /> Willful- <br /> <br /><b>Feats</b>:<br /> <i> Literate</i>- Gervan can both read and write.<br /> <i>Familiar</i>- Kronk the raven. Kronk can speak common and knows Shadow Lore. Can fly. Loyal to Gervan, they are magically bonded and always know where the other one is.<br /> <br /> <i>Sorcery</i>- 6 Sorcery Points. Gervan can spend Sorcery points to cast spells.<br /> <b>Study</b>- Must Study during Rest Phase to recover Sorcery points.<br /> <b> Rituals</b>- Can use Ritual magic during the Rest Phase.<br /> <b>Witchsight</b>- Can detect magic at will. Magic has a distinct shimmering color, indescribable to non-sorcerers.<br /> <br /> <i> Red Lore II</i>- Gervan knows Red Lore, and can cast the following spells:<br /> <b> Power Bolt</b>- 1+. Can throw a bolt of glowing mystical energy at enemies. Ranged attack. Deals 1d8 per Sorcery Point spent. <br /> <b>Catsight</b>- 0. At will, can gain Darkvision and Light Sensitivity. <br /> <b>Barrier</b>- 1+. A field of glowing force surrounds Gervan or a touched ally. It can absorb 1d4 points of damage per Sorcery Point spent before it dissipates.<br /> <br /> <i>Necromancy</i> I-<br /> <b>Speak with the Dead</b>- Ritual. Can speak to the recently deceased, asking them one question per Sorcery point spent before the magic fades. The dead are under no compulsion to speak the truth.<br /> <b>Hide from Undead</b>: 0. For one minute, Gervan cannot be seen or smelled or otherwise detected by the undead. Effect ends if Gervan makes an attack.<br /> <br /><u><b>Items</b></u>:<br /> Grandfather's Skull- Gervan's grandfather taught Gervan magic from beyond the grave. When he died, his skull was attuned to his bloodline through a dark ritual and so the skull itself talks to Gervan in a hollow, reedy voice. It was louder when he was younger. These days, the skull is very quiet, and Gervan must meditate to get any information whatsoever out of it. Gervan doesn't quite know why.<br /> Dead Rat- Gervan's discarded this rat multiple times, but it always ends up in his backpack or under his feet, or wherever, just as soon as he thought he'd gotten rid of it. Gervan assumes it's part of some curse he's accumulated, or something.<br /> Bound Grimoire- This book wants to be opened and read. Unfortunately, it's full of vulgar nonsense. <br /> Ritual Knife- Doubles as a weapon in a pinch. 1d4 damage, melee. Light. Throwable.<br /> The Duke's Permission- Gervan is a licensed sorcerer, with permission to practice from the Duke.<br /> Quill and Ink- Kronk is a good messenger and will carry small belongings to and from Gervan's contacts. <br /> Bag of Bone Dust- An important ingredient in Necromancy rituals.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-62827339244732569942019-01-28T17:30:00.000-05:002019-01-28T17:30:05.720-05:00willpower, sins, and flaws<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
one of the things I liked best about when I was playing the world of darkness games was the way that willpower worked. the basic idea was that your character had a virtue and a vice (based off the seven deadly sins, naturally), and if you wanted to resist your sin you had to spend willpower, usually, and if you acted according to your 'better nature' you'd get some willpower back. you also got willpower back for indulging in your sin, I believe. interestingly, you could also spend willpower to get like, better dice rolls. <br />
<br />
<br />
ok so, world of darkness games. vampire, werewolf, ghosts, mages, they all have willpower. a character's player can choose to spend willpower to get a boost on dice rolls, or fuel magic, or whatever. <br />
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also on a character's sheet are one of the seven deadly sins- sloth, lust, greed, whatever. the character can gain willpower for leaning into their sin, for playing into their darker nature, for showing weakness. the character also has to either spend willpower or take a chance of slipping into bad habits when the target of their weakness comes up. the lustful vampire has a hard time not spending the arms in his or her lover, even when they really should be safe in their stronghold hiding from their hunters... the envious mage has a hard time resisting the opportunity to show off even when they really shouldn't, and etc. <br />
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this does a couple of things- it hooks the character and the player together in a really strong way, by making the player care about what the character cares about. if you take care of your in-game avatar, that avatar is more competent, more resilient, and more able to effectively carry out the player's interests in the game. and it also points the GM towards a conflict that the player probably finds interesting, or at least a conflict that the player has already greenlit. a lot of players don't care to have their characters' father or sister as hostages or whatever, but they've definitely given the GM permission to tempt their character with lots of gold, or give them opportunities to showboat and brag, right? and it also lets the player look for these opportunities to let the somewhat more negative side of their character show through if they've had a rough couple of episodes. and that's interesting! there are always lots of opportunities for player characters to be noble and competent, for them to be clean and respectable. [1]<br />
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now that I think about it, though, the world of darkness games are necessarily rooted in a very specific sort of western ethos, that subconsciously christian worldview where pleasures are to be enjoyed in moderation, where you are supposed to congratulate yourself for, essentially, being sober and productive at work and whatever else. that doesn't really apply to the sorts of fantasy worlds I want to emulate. I mean, you can do whatever you want in your world- you can just decide that the seven deadly sins are perfectly acceptable to you. but I don't know- a dwarf is not going to understand that she should limit her gold hoard's size, and elves are notoriously indifferent to the human concept of 'vanity,' let alone pride. halflings don't hold with all that running about nonsense and if you call them 'slothful' you're really missing out on a good understanding of their culture and personality. <br />
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but here's kind of more of what I was thinking- make it more personal. I'd have my players consider and detail a particular failing of their character, something that they really struggle with. and they can just be the sins, too! something along the lines of 'my barbarian has a weakness for violence, the more indiscriminate the better,' or maybe a more subtle issue, something like 'my cleric looks down upon those without divine powers and has to remind herself not to treat other as beneath her just because they haven't been chosen by the gods.' <br />
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personally, I'd take this opportunity to do some world-building too, and give examples of a couple of cultural folk heroes, demigods, and local celebrities, as well as what makes them such exceptional people. maybe a given dwarf king is legendary due to his wisdom, dispensal of justice, and (naturally) his unbeatable wealth, whereas a dwarf wretch is irrational and poverty-stricken and physically weak, unable to defend his stronghold and despised by his family. maybe this particular band of humans idolizes a cleric-beggar-wanderer who used her powers to tend to the sick and downtrodden and gave the ultimate sacrifice and died to save the world from a very particular evil. and then maybe those same humans look down upon a harsh-tongued, impious ruler who frequents the red light district.<br />
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and so if I were going to put something on the character sheet for a dwarf character, I'd go to the part where I describe my character's personality I'd write FLAW in big letters and then write a quick sentence about how my dwarf is arbitrary and occasionally downright cruel, and he struggles with his sharp tongue. and then I'd write some ways in which he's pretty alright, actually. and then by codifying it and making it a big part of my character, by getting an actual bonus for when my character acts up, I make it more than an interesting facet I'm going to ignore in favor of doing what I wanted to do anyways. it goes from an interesting quirk of my character to something that I'm going to invoke at the table, something that I want to have come up. something I'll bring up, if the GM doesn't, because I want to restore my willpower and that's that. <br />
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as far as actual willpower mechanics go, I'd do something like the following:<br />
<b><br />WILLPOWER</b><br />
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assuming you're playing some sort of dnd adjacent game, you can spend a willpower point at any time to add the results of a rolled d6 to any d20 roll. you can't use willpower to increase your damage or healing or anything else that you'd use any sort of smaller dice for. <br />
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willpower is measured from 1-10. characters start with 5 willpower. <br />
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if an opportunity to indulge in your flaw comes up and you take it and make things more complicated for yourself and your party, the GM will give you some willpower. <br />
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if you decide you do not want to indulge in this opportunity, you'll need to roll for it. roll 1d20. the DC is equal to twice your missing willpower. you don't get a willpower point for this.<br />
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you can also decide not to chance it on a roll, and spend a willpower point to automatically succeed at the willpower roll. <br />
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if you're using my rest mechanics from earlier [2], any time the characters have a rest worth at least 110% experience bonus, I'd give them a point of willpower as well. a good nights' sleep does wonders for the human (or dwarvish, or elvish, etc) mind. <br />
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if a character ever runs out of willpower entirely, then they immediately start acting out their flaw, gaining a willpower point. this can make for some pretty erratic behavior, but that's the point!<br />
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an example: a mighty Barbarian has 3 willpower and her flaw is classic for barbarians: lust. so she's in town and she sees a particularly handsome guardsman with really striking eyes- her weakness. she really doesn't have time to introduce herself... the GM decides to force the issue. the Barbarian's player decides that she meant it when she said she didn't have time. since her willpower is sitting at 3, she's missing 7 points, and the DC is 14. not great odds, but she tries it anyways. if she rolls below, then her character's going to go introduce herself to the guardsman, with the intent of a quick liason somewhere discreet. if she rolls higher, then she's on track (ish) and she can maybe keep the man in mind for another time. if the player had chosen to spend willpower, then she would have automatically resisted the temptation.<br />
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it's that simple, really. I'm personally looking forwards to hacking my favorite edition of dnd to include this sort of thing, given that it's relatively self-contained and easy to 'borrow.'<br />
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[1] I know that some people will choose to 'chew the scenery,' so to speak, even when there's no real benefit to doing so. They just enjoy playing a coward who's making bad choices in-game to be more true to their conception of the character. but honestly, it doesn't really work in your stereotypical dungeon fantasy game. there's no reason to be cowardly when you have a full stack of hit points, no reason at all to seduce bartenders or guardspeople or whatever, you know? it can be fun for its own sake but fun is fleeting and when you're done, you basically have a silly anecdote that stands by itself.<br />
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[2] if you're not, I'd give them a point of willpower every other extended rest, or if they pay for good lodgings in a city or something. the whole point of willpower being presented like this is that it is, by design, flexible to the style of play that you and your players are actually participating in. if you have a player who hardly uses the willpower mechanic, that's fine. they're weaker but their experience in the game is going to be a lot smoother. they'll probably get topped up pretty quick and then, since their willpower is high, they won't have a hard time getting Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-28143922872431869122019-01-21T17:30:00.000-05:002019-01-21T17:30:04.751-05:00i want to give bonus experience for camping<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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so how about this: <i>when you earn experience points, you don't get them right away</i>. the DM will write down the experience that you've earned, and <b>you get to wite them down when you get a good rest</b>. <span style="font-size: small;"><b>how much you get to keep depends on how good of a rest it is. </b></span><br />
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because I'm not an asshole, the default is '<b>100% of your experience</b>.' you get to keep what you earned. those goblins are dead and you killed them and you learned how to be better at inflicting violence. keep up the good work. it doesn't matter if you spent your time sleeping in a monsoon under that flimsy tent you wrote on your character sheet when you made the character and that you've apparently been carrying with you while you were being beaten up by ogres and catching arrows with your torso. it still counts. one of the functions of sleep is to help encode your memories and I guarantee you will remember a good chunk of what it is to be scourged by some nightmare acid in two weeks's time. <br />
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but treating sleep and rest like it literally doesn't matter is kind of... odd, isn't it? in real life, you spend like, a third of your day sleeping. you have a whole room in your house dedicated to the art of the snooze. probably. if you ask a hundred real life American human beings if they wouldn't mind trading their warm bed with air conditioning for a night on the streets with just the clothes on their backs, I bet you wouldn't get a single one without offering them something in return. but in fantasy games, I've had my players weigh whether they want to pay the innkeeper a handful of their hard-earned loot or if they'd rather just sleep outside of the city in their tents because, who cares? what difference does it make anyways? we'll set a watch.<br />
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in this world, a soft feather quilt is exactly as good as a threadbare woolen blanket. a king's bed is just as good as a quick snooze on an ooze-slick dungeon floor, or sleeping in a barn. a campfire is where they'll cook food, assuming that they've bothered to bring anything that isn't abstracted to 'rations,' and even then, it's not necessary that they care in the least. rations are rations, you have to eat one because the dungeon master says it's time to mark one off your character sheet, and that's it. let's get back to the parts where it matters, eh?<br />
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well look: if you make a good camp, if you can truly rest well, you get a bonus to your experience. I can think of a couple different things I'd give experience for, personally:<br />
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<b>a)</b> if there's a great big warm fire at night, you get 10% more. <br />
<i>(magic fires don't put off the 'right' kind of warmth, and give a much smaller bonus)</i><br />
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<b>b) </b>if you've got a really nice blanket, or a super cozy tent, or if you paid for quality lodgings, you get 5%. <br />
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<b>c)</b> if you let your guard completely down, that's 5%.<br />
<i>(if your players go for this somewhere they shouldn't, you're absolutely obligated to ambush them. the point is for them to always try and be somewhere safe when they put their heads down. they still get this bonus if they're ambushed, btw)</i><br />
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<b>d)</b> if you sleep through the entire night without fear, that's 5%.<br />
<i>(this is where they get a bonus for being right about letting their guard down.) </i><br />
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<b>e)</b> if you are making merry before bedtime, that's another 5%.<i> </i><br />
<i>(singing, dancing, making love, whatever you like. entertaining descriptions get a bonus) </i>[1] <br />
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<b>f)</b> if you go to sleep with a belly full of real food, that's anywhere from 3 to 7%, depending on how creative you are. <br />
<i>(rations, trail mix, lembas bread- those aren't real food and you know it)</i><br />
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you can make the bonuses per characer if you want, that can be fun. get ready for your characters to ask lots and lots of questions about making camp all of a sudden. get ready for your characters to suddenly be very interested in the local cuisine, or in exactly which parts of a griffon are edible. [2] you can lean into it- maybe pheonix feathers stay warm forever and now your characters are making a fantasy heated blanket. maybe you can distill mushrooms into a decent liquor, and the guy with a background in alchemy now is giving everybody in his party an experience bonus, and now everybody's excited to look into caves because they might find that special purple mushroom that makes the best hooch. <br />
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and the converse is true- now they're going to be grumbling if they have to live off rations, if that goblin shaman's stupid acid spurt spell ruined their blanket, if they're running out of firewood. they're roughing it. now your players care about the same thing your characters care about- and that's beautiful. embrace this feeling, and encourage it whenever you can. exploit it. run with it. have more fun.<br />
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what did you think? I'm trying a new style, a new focus. a little looser, a little freer, a little more like some of my inspirations, a little less self-serious. hope you enjoy it.<br />
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it's been two years since my other posts about camping mechanics, which I can't decide how I feel about. <br />
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[1] I write this knowing that my players, in the past, have often gotten
carried away with trying to seduce NPCs. It might be better, for such
characters, to encourage them to retire early and, maybe replace this
with something like 'if you go to sleep before everybody else and don't
cause any problems you get bonus experience.' your mileage may vary.<br />
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[2] I love Dungeon Meshi and even if you don't normally like manga, you should check it out.<br />
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<br />Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-33632106161274682112019-01-13T13:36:00.001-05:002019-01-14T21:55:18.921-05:00hook em<br />
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one of the things that stock-standard dnd is not very good at is giving guidelines for creating characters that are really a part of the world as it exists<br />
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now, I personally like to sort of create the world with my group of players, when we're first starting the campaign, which means it's usually pretty easy to get players interested in the people and places of the world when they had a hand in it.<br />
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but sometimes, somebody joins later into the game, or they need a replacement character for one that dies, or maybe they just don't like helping to build the world. it's all good, honestly. in those cases, you still need them to hook into the world somehow.<br />
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something I'm thinking of doing for player characters going forwards is asking them to write, like, two things that their character wants that they can't have, and why they can't have it. write it on the front of the character sheet, maybe taking up space where they were supposed to write their gear or whatever. someplace front and center.<br />
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the things that a character wants but can't have are the fundamental core of the character, from a dramatic standpoint. it's less important that Hamlet is a Danish prince than the fact that he wants to kill his dad's ghost. or whatever. when Tom Hanks is playing hide and seek in an airport, it's less important the name of the country he's from and more important that he wants to go home and he can't because of legalistic mumbo jumbo. and on a smaller scale, the fact that he has to survive in an airport that he's not supposed to be living in. once those things are resolved, well, the movie's over because they're not doing the Saga of Tom Hanks' Character (whatever it's named), but you can assume that if he were to go home he'd have a whole host of other issues, too, like 'he wants to get a job but he doesn't have paperwork proving his citizenship anymore,' and 'his family's been displaced by the civil war.' or whatever.<br />
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point being, that's how you get the character involved in the world. it gives the player a chance to declare what they think would be interesting to explore with their character. a dude who wants to play a bloodthirsty barbarian is going to write 'wants to slay the chieftan of Rival Clan but he can't because the chieftan is mighty warrior protected by a magic amulet' or whatever. or how their son was slain by a goblin tribe and he's sworn vengeance against them and won't rest until they've been annihilated.<br />
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some guy who wants to play a diplomatic game might want to be nobility but can't because he's lowborn, or his family was disgraced, or whatever. somebody who'd like to have a redemption arc might be like 'my character did Heinous Deed and wants to atone.' and then you maybe figure out how they atone later, if it's ever interesting.<br />
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if it's not interesting, you can talk to the player and be like 'hey I notice the thing you wrote isn't coming up in play, do you still want to deal with that or should we work on something else that your character wants?' and both answers are fine. in a tabletop game, you have to share spotlights and people have to have their issues dealt with as they come up in the game. and sometimes it's not the right moment. the point is, it lets the players help direct your attention to things that they might find compelling, and a good game runner / DM should seek that input frequently.<br />
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that's it for today, have a nice day. hoping for minimal spam. Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-68522512574132369912018-09-20T08:43:00.001-04:002019-01-14T21:55:28.730-05:005e cultures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What if, instead of just selecting a race, you selected both a race and a culture?<br />
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For example, I've decided that I want to play a Dwarf who survived half-feral amongst the trees. Her parents were caravan guards traveling across the plains when they were slain by a band of orcs when she was only a couple of years old. She hid from them, terrified to even breathe. Her entire life was uprooted. The only thing that remained, the only thing the orcs did not steal, was her father's ancestral axe. She got lost in the woods but, surprisingly, she managed to survive. She lived off morning dew and nuts and berries, which were plentiful in the deep forest she now found herself in. She grew strong, and healthy... and wild. In her wanderings, an old druid took her in. Though she had no particular aptitude for druidry, and though she regarded him as no authority, they had a cordial, familial relationship wherein the druid taught her knowledge, lore, and tricks, and she brought him the joy of companionship and, always, news of the comings and goings of travelers, flocks of birds, and the ever-present orc scouts.<br />
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Mechanically, we can say that she is a Dwarf, but letting her have Stonecunning and weapons training simply doesn't make sense. Rather, imagining her living a life much as a Forest Gnome makes more sense. Imagine her race / background block looking something like this:<br />
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We can say that she still has +2 Constitution, as her Dwarvishness probably makes her pretty tough. She is stout and hardy, no matter where she was raised. Darkvision is probably innate, too, as is resilience. She's probably nearly immune to poisons as a result of her oversized Dwarven liver, for example, and stout lungs, and powerful heart. But she's never been underground and nobody taught her to fight, so those are straight out. And she's more of a hands-on worker. Other than her father's axe, she probably made all of her own tools, and she's almost certainly never tasted a brewer's craft.<br />
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On the other hand, it makes sense that she could have learned the minor illusion cantrip and that she can speak to animals. So we graft together a couple of features of the Dwarf and a couple of the Forest Gnome and get something that looks like this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Forest Dwarf</i><br />
<b>Con +2, Dex +1</b><br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Dwarven Resilience:</b> advantage on saves against poison, resistance to poison<br />
<b>Speak with Animals</b>: Can speak to (and be understood by) normal, non-magical animals. They are not any more cooperative than normal, they just can understand you.<br />
<b>Cantrip</b>: You know the minor illusion cantrip.</blockquote>
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Not bad, right?<br />
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As it turns out, most races are built along the same guidelines- there's an attribute bonus, then (usually) about two bonus features that come along with it. Some features don't really count, like the Halfling's size of Small [1], and most of the Elf's benefits are super marginal so an Elf gets a lot of them. But still!<br />
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Check out my full list:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Half-Orc:</i><br />
<b>STR </b>+2<br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Relentless Endurance</b>: When you would hit 0 hp, instead go to 1.</blockquote>
I imagine that the tough-to-kill aspect of half-orciness is probably innate, but relatively little else in the class writeup was. I especially have a hard time imagining that the stuff about melee combat being ingrained, somehow, into an entire race of being. <br />
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<i>Goliath</i>:<br />
<b>+2 strength</b><br />
<b>Stone's Endurance</b>: reaction to roll 1d12+con, reduce incoming damage by that amount. 1/rest<br />
<b>Powerful Build</b>: count as large for carrying/weight</blockquote>
Goliaths are big and strong, and can absorb a surprising amount of punishment, but not all of them were born on mountains or whatever. <br />
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<i>Elf</i>:<br />
<b>Dex +2</b><br />
<b>Trance</b>: 4 hours sleep<br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Keen Senses</b>: proficiency on perception<br />
<b>Fey Ancestry</b>: advantage on saves vs charm, can't be put to sleep</blockquote>
Elves are willowy, don't need to sleep, and can see in the dark. Since they don't sleep, they are immune to magic sleep. They're also immune to charm spells, because they have weird-ass alien minds.<br />
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<i>Halfling</i>:<br />
<b>Dex </b>+2<br />
<b>Lucky</b>: can reroll 1s on attacks, ability checks, saving throws<br />
<b>Size</b>: small<br />
<b>Nimbleness</b>: can move through larger allies</blockquote>
Halflings are lucky, and you can dart between the legs of larger allies. So you can do the Frodo thing where you stab Ringwraiths by charging from between Aragorn's legs, and also sometimes you don't get totally boned when you do things.<br />
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<i>Dwarf</i>:<br />
<b>Con </b>+2<br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Dwarven Resilience</b>: advantage on saves against poison, resistance to poison</blockquote>
Dwarves are badass and hard to kill. My favorite tidbit is that alcohol is technically a poison, and so you have a good explanation why Dwarves can drink everybody else under the table without being explicit about it. In a more kid-friendly game, this just means that they don't die from giant scorpions like other people sometimes do. <br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Gnome</i>:<br />
<b>Int </b>+2<br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Cunning</b>: Advantage on Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma on saves vs magic</blockquote>
Gnomes are really good against magic, which is good because magic is everywhere in 5e and so gnomes are good. Nobody tell the Elf that gnomes are all smarter than them. <br />
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<i>Tiefling</i>:<br />
<b>Cha </b>+2<br />
<b>Darkvision</b><br />
<b>Hellish Resistance</b>: resistance to fire damage</blockquote>
Tieflings are resistant to fire damage because they're part demon and their skin is rubbery and weird. Tieflings look weirder than Aasimar, despite being basically the same thing, with their tails and horns, but that's not something you can really have mechanics for. They have a lot of charisma, which, according to 5e, means they're all confident, natural leaders.<br />
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<i>Firbolg: </i><br />
<b>Wis +2</b><br />
<b>Powerful Build: </b>Counts as one size larger for carrying / lifting / pushing<br />
<b>Hidden Step:</b> Can turn invisible for a little bit 1/rest<b> </b></blockquote>
Firbolgs are really big and can turn invisible sometimes, because they're big fey. I actually really like Firbolg, but I always forget they exist until I sit down to make a list like this. I feel like they have a fairly fleshed-out culture, despite their writeup being like a page.<br />
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I didn't do Dragonborn because they have the weird coloration thing, and I couldn't figure out where any of the benefits they got were cultural. It's all pretty basic, really- if you're playing a Dragonborn, you don't really have a culture, you were spawned out of an egg and since you're probably only like six years old, you don't know enough to really have a culture imprinted on you like that. Sorry. <br />
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I think there are a couple more races that I could have included, but I didn't really feel like it. Some races, like Kenku, are already good as they are. Use the 'cursed race of thieves' thing and run with it in your game, that's good stuff. Same with Tabaxi and Lizardmen.<br />
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Anyways, I'm still working on creating coherent cultures from the other halfs of the subrace/racial benefit divide. Watch this space!<br />
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[1] As discussed in the weapon chart article, Small seems to have been designed specifically to make Halflings mechanically smaller but without actually making the difference meaningful other than that you can run between the legs of bigger allies. So that's something, I guess.<br />
<br />Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-23878013478096312322018-09-06T11:17:00.000-04:002018-09-06T11:17:03.345-04:005e Weapon List<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Ever taken a good look at the weapon list in 5e D&D? You should. It's a great example of negative design- that is, it's a great example of what you should not do.<br />
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<a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7a/ba/0f/7aba0f5f0ea527d07d7728e1deda4543.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="800" height="288" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7a/ba/0f/7aba0f5f0ea527d07d7728e1deda4543.jpg" width="640" /></a>Consider the handaxe versus the mace. The handaxe costs 5gp, does 1d6 damage, is light, and can be thrown. It's useful for two-weapon fighters, it does decent damage, and is a ranged weapon in a pinch. You can dual wield a battle-axe and a hand-axe, throw the hand-axe, and then two hand grip the battleaxe for extra damage afterwards. How cool is that?<br />
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The mace, on the other hand. It costs 5gp and does 1d6 damage. That's it. Can't throw it, by the rules, and it's of no use to a two-weapon fighter. Hmm.<br />
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Another, quicker example: Is there any reason a trident costs 5x as much as a spear despite having identical stats?<br />
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Even quicker: why does a scimitar cost 25gp when the literally identical (and on the next space down) shortsword cost the same?<br />
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Faster still: Why would anybody ever buy a flail?<br />
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I gotta fix this.<br />
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Ok, so this is what I came up with. This took me like, an hour that I would have otherwise spent doing nothing at all. <br />
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First, I changed up the weapon rules. The light and heavy designations were super arbitrary and just makes it harder for player characters to be larger or smaller than normal without really being much simpler. So now it works like this:<br />
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<i>Light:</i> A light weapon is a weapon that is one size smaller than the creature wielding this. When a creature is wielding a light weapon in its offhand when it makes an attack, it may use a bonus action to also attack with that weapon. Don't apply your ability modifiers to the damage of that attack (unless it's negative).<br />
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<i>Heavy:</i> A heavy weapon is a weapon that's two sizes larger than the creature wielding it. You have disadvantage on an attack roll with a heavy weapon.<br />
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<i>Handedness:</i> You can wield a weapon your size or smaller in one hand. You must wield a weapon one size larger than your own size in two hands.<br />
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Versatile changes, too, but only a little:<br />
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<i>Versatile:</i> If you wield a versatile weapon in two hands when you would normally be able to wield it in one hand, you may increase the damage die by one step.<br />
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This means that if you're a small fighter, you can two-hand a spear but you don't get the bigger dice when you do. Sorry. <br />
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So, that was easy. Now all that's left is to give all the weapons sizes. This is also easy: if a weapon was light before, that meant that it could be wielded in an off-hand by anybody. So we make it tiny, one size smaller than small. If it was one-handed, we make it small. If it was heavy, we make it medium. And if it was two-handed only, we make it large. Note that most two-handed weapons were also heavy, which is 5e's explicit 'no shorties' weapon rule.<br />
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Since we're talking about weapon sizes, I also wanted to cover the odd case where, let's say, somebody gets a giant's dagger. Or a gnomish greatsword. So I just wrote a quick rule that says:<br />
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<i>If you have a weapon that's larger or smaller than the weapons presented here, increase or decrease the damage dice by one step for each size difference.</i><br />
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<i>d2-d3-d4-d6-d8-d10-d12-2d8-2d10-2d12-3d8</i><br />
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So without too much fanfare, here's the new chart:<br />
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Pretty simple, right? For those without formal weapon training, there's all the basics- daggers, clubs, axes, spears. I gave clubs finesse because I like the idea of eskrima warriors (or whatever) running around. Same with staves. I recognize that makes maces slightly worse than staves, but I don't honestly care. Handaxes, clubs, spears, staves, and maces all do basically the same thing.</div>
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One quirk I preserved was that there's no reason for the greatclub to exist, given that the spear does the same thing.<br />
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Now the weapon list is shorter and it's easier to see what weapons you should be going for. It also reiterates how the weapon list is three times as long as it needs to be- even though 5e has almost completely eliminated typed weapon damage (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing) it still occasionally has creatures that are resistant to one weapon type or another.<br />
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If I had my way, either weapons would all do 'weapon damage,' or there would be concrete differences between edged/piercing/blunt weapons a la FantasyCraft. Imagine, swords causing bleed wounds, blunt weapons knocking dudes around, maybe causing stuns, piercing weapons with better crits...<br />
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Anyways, this is probably the list I'll be using going forwards. I have ideas about differentiating weapons further, but that's probably design for another game. <br />
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Side notes: This is a tiny nerf to small fighters overall- by an average of 1 point per hit. (d6 to d8). I'm not really worried.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-16318306069874930682018-09-04T10:17:00.001-04:002019-01-14T21:55:42.591-05:00Dragoncon 2018My, how many things have changed.<br />
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It's hard to write a blog post almost a year after my last without feeling a little bit wistful. It struck me the other day- literally everything in my life is changing. My friend Alex that I mentioned in my last post- we're dating now, and living together. We're quite happy with this arrangement. And we have a couple of shared secrets, too. ;) More on that later. Right now, I'd like to talk about DragonCon, and labor day weekend.<br />
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This year, again, we went to DragonCon together. We had a wonderful time. Neither of us are big parties, so we never experienced the much-vaunted DragonCon nightlife. But we did enjoy the vendor's hall and the artists' gallery and went to a couple of panels.<br />
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My advice- if you find yourself at DragonCon and dislike crowds, show up in the morning to early afternoon. The revelers are still asleep. For a lot of people, that's the main draw of the event. Your mileage may vary. For us, it could be a bit much. She's very petite and so can get lost inside of crowds, and I'm on the tallish end of average so our crowd techniques don't always work together. Plus, the main draw of DragonCon (that it's full of nerds, dorks, and geeks) is also its main issue- nerds, dorks, and geeks tend to have poor self-awareness and will often stop in the middle of crowded sidewalks to gawk, ponder, or stare at their phones. Or they'll decide to swing their backpack on in the middle of a packed room, or they'll barge and elbow into people because they have a laser-focus on a space about five inches behind you. Stuff like that. Individually, it's not much, but over the course of five-six-seven hours, it grates. No wonder people drink so much at cons. <br />
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Anyways, we both picked up some Chessex dice and saw three panels:<br />
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1) Warehouse 13 panel- I don't make it a habit to write ill of people, but one of the male panelist was obnoxious and spent the entire time making weiner jokes and sharing inane anecdotes that were only tangentially related to whatever it is anybody was talking about. The more sedate male panelist and both of the women were wonderful, actually. I've never watched Warhouse 13 but they had some interesting insights into the nature of acting, of civic duty, and a couple other things, besides.<br />
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2) Best Dungeon Ever- with Monte Cook and Jason Bulmahn, who apparently is the guy behind Pathfinder. I don't much care for Pathfinder, but he had some interesting ideas about making dungeons, the appeal of dungeons, and game mastery in general. I don't follow anything to do with Pathfinder (got my fill of 3.5e when it was the current hotness, thanks), but both panelists were in point and intelligent. One interesting thing I noticed was the absolute respect both panelists had to everybody- one person had a fairly common new GM issue (and, to their credit, mentioned that they'd only GM'd twice before) and they both gave honestly insightful answers. [1] <br />
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3) Some panel with Keith Baker and Eloy Lasanta. I'd never heard of Eloy Lasanta before heading to this panel (and in fact, he wasn't even credited on the DragonCon app for some reason), but I found his thoughts on game design and breadth of knowledge of indie games to be on point. Keith Baker seems to only own one hat and spends most of his time talking about how whatever idea you're talking about relates to one of his games. In this case, it was mostly Pheonix Command, which Mr. Baker seems to have greatly impressed himself with. I believe the subject of the panel was game mastery, and they fielded questions from the audience. Fun stuff. There were brief discussions on Lady Blackbird and Hillfolk and Over the Edge and something else, I can't remember what. Sparked off a couple interesting ideas in my head.<br />
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The Chessex dice are very nice. She bought a couple cubes of small d6s, and I bought three sets of dice- some surprisingly affordable <a href="http://dicecollector.com/images/large/ba/9b921dcf358dd1506ad9af9b534661.jpg">full size bronze dice </a>[2], and some black/gold opaque and deep navy blue transparent dice. The navy blue dice look almost black on the table, but in the light they are very clearly blue, and it's a beautiful effect and I had to have a set. Now that I have dice, I'm most of the way towards getting together a group and playing d&d in real life with strangers, something I haven't had much experience with. I'm both rusty at running games in real life and rusty at gathering a group of actual people, so we'll see how it goes. Both Alex and I are introverts but we're interested in meeting people in the area so we'll see how it goes.<br />
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I'm working on setting snippets, too. I'll probably post some of them here for posterity's sake, and to try and get into the habit of writing blog posts again. I haven't had that particular habit in a couple of years, but, since my life has been sort of on track again, I've found quite a bit of inspiration to write again. Life advice: If you ever meet somebody that inspires you to resdiscover the things in life you used to love again, keep them around. Keep them close.<br />
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[1] The person in question had imprisoned his players but had designed a cave dungeon with a demon final boss at the end and wanted to know how to get his players to go there and do the thing he designed. I turned to Alex and said 'have the demon emerge and wreck the town' and Monte Cook said 'have the demon show up and trap them inside of its mind, which is the dungeon,' which just goes to show you that a) nothing is new under the sun, and b) there are about a hundred thousand variations on any way you choose to run a game. <br />
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[2] The quality honestly is a little uneven- the dice are clearly pitted and on my d6, the sealant is too thick on one side, so it's probably going to be a little unbalanced. You can see what I mean in the picture. But they feel great to roll and it was the same cost as those little bitty metal ones you get from like, Norse Foundry or whoever, so I'm pleased with them overall. Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-22868685701315667922017-10-21T11:51:00.001-04:002017-10-21T11:51:37.355-04:00Fantastic Maps: How To Design A TownAbsolutely love this style of design, and love how concise the steps are. Always remember that pre-Industrial Revolution people are living on the land and along the land's contours. Moving earth is hard and slow and won't happen without a great need, and that means that people will mostly just deal with what's there.<br />
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Again, love it. <br />
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http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03/how-to-design-a-town/ Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-72077374717985225582017-10-14T12:56:00.000-04:002017-10-14T12:57:08.313-04:00Mundane ZenSo one of the habits I've picked up in the last couple of years is reading Zen literature. Specifically Zen literature, mind you- I'm not a religious man and I don't really intend on becoming one, so I don't particularly enjoy Buddhist literature.<br />
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The main difference between Buddhism and Zen, as far as I can see it, is that Buddhism is a religion and Zen is not. Buddhism very firmly tells you what you should and should not be doing, and what rituals you should perform to receive enlightenment. There are priests and temples and scriptures, and if you don't follow all of those things you're not really a Buddhist. There are all sorts of magical powers that Buddhists apparently can do- according to Namkhai Norbu, it is possible for a follower of Dzogchen Buddhism to shed their mortal form and turn directly into light. He even claims to have seen this! Daehang Kun Sunim claims to have been able to cure diseases with her mind.<br />
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I have a hard time taking these claims seriously, which means I have a hard time taking these people seriously. I am as uninterested in the claims of people who have claimed to gain super powers by wandering around in the wilderness as I am in the claims of people who claim to cure blindness by shouting the name of Jesus. I believe that a man can turn into light about as much as I believe that all of our earthly ills are caused by the ghosts of aliens.<br />
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I think I'm in good company. The Zen Master Wumen Huikai said:<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Arouse your entire body with its three hundred
and sixty bones and joints and its eighty-four thousand pores of the skin;
summon up a spirit of great doubt and concentrate on this word "Mu."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Carry it continuously day and night. Do not form
a nihilistic conception of vacancy, or a relative conception of "has"
or "has not."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It will be just as if you swallow a red-hot iron
ball, which you cannot spit out even if you try.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All the illusory ideas and delusive thoughts
accumulated up to the present will be exterminated, and when the time comes,
internal and external will be spontaneously united. You will know this, but for
yourself only, like a dumb man who has had a dream.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then all of a sudden an explosive conversion
will occur, and you will astonish the heavens and shake the earth.</span></span></blockquote>
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That other stuff, that's religion. To quote the Zen Master Killer Mike:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If God really exists, I tell you like this: It resides inside.<br />
And anybody tell you different,<br />
Just selling you religion,<br />
Tryin' to keep your ass in line.</blockquote>
Namkhai and Daehang are, by all accounts, wonderful and beautiful people. They have spent their lives trying to make the world a better place. But look- Mother Theresa spent her life trying to make the world a better place, too, and that doesn't mean I'm going to sign up to join the Catholic Church.<br />
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It also means that I'm going to be wary of her when she tries to shift the conversation towards religion. She sure has a lot to say about empathy, but what she believes is based on church teachings. What she believes is based on a religion I don't follow. It's the same with these Buddhists, and that means that I have to be very careful what it is that I'm listening to. Insightful passages about clarity are right next to the passages about how meditation can solve cancer. How am I supposed to know which part is bullshit?<br />
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It might be less exciting, but I'll take mundane Zen any day. At least those folks aren't trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Any Zen master worth his shit will tell you there are no super powers, there's no special messages, there's no supernatural insight. All of the stuff they're telling you is shit that you could have figure out on your own. Of course, you didn't, and that's part of the problem. Zen masters tend to look at you like you're an idiot, because they literally don't have a message for you but you seem to be following them around anyways. Why is that? Why do people keep copying down the words of these weirdos with no message, no external goal, no superpowers, no nothing?<br />
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Isn't it obvious? Mundane Zen.<br />
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Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-26358972294945469552017-10-08T12:01:00.001-04:002017-10-14T12:29:43.598-04:00Video Games Are the Worst Take<br />
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David Shimomura's article <a href="https://unwinnable.com/2017/10/02/the-game-take-is-the-worst-take/">The Game Take is the Worst Take</a> is short and to the point. It is saying "quit shoehorning video games into other kinds of writing."<br />
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In this particular article, he was talking about being able to relate to people outside of video games. It's really honestly obnoxious to read half-baked pandering articles about how thing Y is important because video games. I can relate to the real world through normal people ideas, thanks.<br />
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This reminded me of a very sad, strange article I'd read earlier but never had the time to discuss. Entitled "<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-09-26-a-dog-has-turned-my-life-into-an-rpg">A dog has turned my life into an rpg</a>," we discover that the author, Christian Donlan, has discovered that you can't take your dog into stores, and that you can talk to people. Just like in your favorite RPG! Did you know that passersby (what you and I, fellow gamer, might call NPCs,) are fully fledged humans with their own unique life stories? That's right- just like in RPGs. Isn't that interesting? Did you know that you can do repetitive things in real life? You can grind IRL!<br />
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Christian: get out more. I know it's a cliche but if you find yourself experiencing life through the filter of video games, you know that's not healthy. Talking to people and walking about town with a dog shouldn't inspire you to write a video games related article where you talk about how real life is just like a JRPG. <br />
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At its core, the article is a Facebook post or two worth of information. "Today, I walked my dog and met an old man who told me his life story! Super interesting! Good luck (Man's name)." or "Bringing a dog with you is a good way to meet people who like to pet dogs."<br />
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Not every article needs to be video-game related. I promise you. Try writing an article that doesn't mention video games once in a while. Try experiencing some media that isn't video games, even! [1]<br />
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I don't really mean to single out Christian, because this exact thing is basically what "writing about video games" is. If it's not just marketing, that is.<br />
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I don't know, I'm genuinely not trying to be mean. This sort of thing makes me a little sad. Can you imagine a life where you have conversations so seldom, where you walk so little, that the first thing you think of when you step outside to walk your dog is to think about sitting at home looking at a computer screen?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wow! This looks just like video games!</td></tr>
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[1] Can you imagine a film critic writing about how talking to people is just like dialog scenes in movies? Can you imagine a book reviewer doing something like that?<br />
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<br />Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-26813016145873191562017-09-16T18:22:00.001-04:002017-09-16T18:22:56.473-04:00An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/">An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's <i>Society of the Spectacle</i>.</a><br />
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Instead of writing tabletop games or kludging together an rpg-making software system into a form that I find usable, I have been reading about philosophy. The best thing I've read today is a summary of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, an incredibly influential and important work written when I was a child, and now summarized for your reading convenience here. I haven't read the actual book, either, but I enjoyed the article.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-34246211024070168482017-09-04T10:59:00.001-04:002017-09-04T10:59:02.754-04:00Dragoncon 2017!I've lived in Atlanta for the past couple of years and I always meant to go to Dragoncon but I always manage to talk myself out of it. Not this year, though!<br />
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I went with my good friend Alex, and we saw a lot of cool stuff. A couple of her friends were there (including one of the designers of a game called <a href="http://legionthegame.com/">Legion</a>,) and it was neat. My highlights:<br />
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1) Keith Baker held a panel, and it was kind of cool. I'm a respectful admirer of Eberron, and it was interesting hearing him speak about the things he'd made, why he made them, and the ideas that were behind them. He intentionally made Eberron kind of different [1], but what was really interesting was hearing him talk about Gloom. One day, so he was saying, he saw a deck of transparent playing cards and he thought to himself "I didn't know you could print on transparent plastic!" So he took a bunch of those overhead projector sheets and set about making a game with them. He basically went around asking a bunch of companies if they could make this into a game, and so they kind of did. That sort of process is enormously inspiring to somebody like me- it's not that he had some grand idea, it was just sort of a process of building successive prototypes of game and then trying to figure out afterwards if it could be made. [2]<br />
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2) The panel "Board games! Board games! Board games!" We were actually late to this one (we met some friends and so we had to traverse the streets while the parade was setting up [3]. As a result, I have no idea who the speaker was- we arrived after he introduced himself, plus we left before he was finished (I had to go see Keith Baker, which meant walking a couple of blocks through the super crowded streets), plus the Dragoncon app doesn't actually list anybody as a speaker? But anyways, this was a guy who spoke at length about, basically, how to make board games. He spoke about the process at Fantasy Flight, about how many games there are out there, how many are coming out, and what it takes to be a success. Mostly in business terms- he seemed to assume that everybody there knew how to design a decent game, and honestly, if you don't then nobody will publish your game. He did talk about the elevator pitch idea, and how the board game community is learning different skills- like how deckbuilders have sort of progressed since Dominion came out [4]. I thought that was interesting. Sometimes I fantasize about designing board games instead of just writing roleplaying rules in my head all day and so now that fantasy is a little stronger.<br />
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3) Creativity 101 on Sunday was interesting, if vague. The best thing, honestly, was being in a room full of writers, if that makes sense. I had forgotten what that was like! I spend most of my waking hours either by myself or alongside tradespeople, and while I get along quite well with electricians and plumbers and framers, they're a different type of person. This panel actually kind of sucked, but in fairness, it was labelled as a "101" style class. They'd ask questions about their process, and literally every time somebody said something that worked for them, somebody else would say they did the exact opposite. One guy stops in the middle of sentences so he's got something to finish up tomorrow morning and once he's writing, he gets right back where he was. Another lady doesn't stop until she's finished the chapter or paragraph and when she leaves her writing area, she's done. One person starts with the characters and builds a world to challenge them, another thinks of a situation that's interesting and works backwards to figure out who the people involved in it are. And so on, and so on. But it was fun, anyways. This is the panel where Alex and I decided it was time to get serious about writing, and so we both decided to do national novel writing month this year for real, and that we were going to meet up and talk about writing more often because even though we're both busy as shit with our real lives, if you don't make time for the things that are important to you then you'll never do it. And I know that as for me, personally, writing is part of who I am. <br />
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4) The best panel by far was the panel "Historical Influences in High Fantasy," which features Micheal Livingston, Van Allen Plexico, and Constance G. J. Wagner. The highlight for me was Micheal Livingston who I don't actually think I've ever mentioned on this blog but who is a person I highly admire and respect and he always had some extremely interesting things to say about whatever the topic was. Not to diminish the other panelists, of course- Constance is clearly a knowledgeable scholar in her own right, and Van (?) seemed like a pretty cool dude. I think Constance is a philosophical idealist, but I think that's common for Tolkien scholars and especially students of folklore and mythology- she seemed to think that the Game of Thrones TV show somehow spawned a movement towards grimdark, death, intrigue as a step away from Tolkien, whereas I'd argue that the fans of that show existed before the show came out, and that there's a pessimistic and cynical thread in storytelling in general that's very in vogue right now and has been popular for a while. [5]<br />
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Anyways, it was a very good panel and now I know a little more about what I need to do.<br />
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5) I missed out on seeing Alton Brown live (the line wrapped around the hotel for probably a mile, but I should have expected that) and so instead I went to hang out with Alex to talk to a write for the show Warehouse 13, which I'd never heard of but seemed pretty cool. She explained it to me over dinner, although we also both had some fairly strong drinks so my memory is a little fuzzy. But it's basically "what if a magical warehouse full of artifacts?" and I'm into that.<br />
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6) I love seeing artists and I bought some beautiful prints at the show from people that I thought were very cool. I'll probably write more about this later (I know I will,) but long story short, I have a bunch of beautiful art for my walls and I desperately need to get some frames. And one art book, by the very interesting Naomi Vandoren, who I am very jealous of. I tried not to seem to jealous in person when I was looking at her beautiful art and listening to how she painted all of this stuff while cruising across central Europe and Ireland and all of these other places but it was also inspiring. It made me feel like could, and should, be a better person. And that's what art is about! The things she paints and the landscapes she creates are so inviting. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that art is a conversation across time, and it's honestly wonderful. I did my best not to take up too much of her time at the convention but there is something genuinely inspiring about talking to certain people. I didn't mean for this to turn into a short essay about why I love art, but there you go. Best part of Dragoncon was seeing the artists. [6]<br />
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7) The guy who makes the Legion game is actually very nice and even though a military science fiction wargame based on the d20 system is literally the last thing I'd ever design, I do have a soft spot for that kind of system. I don't know if I'd go as far as trying to find out a way to get a place at his table, but it's certainly something I'll try and keep flexible on. In the meantime, if you do like that sort of thing, please check out Legion and see if you care for it, because it seems reasonably well made and I can assure you on a personal level that its creators are decent people.<br />
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[1] I don't really like things that are different for the sake of being different, but the thing about Keith Baker is that even if I don't necessarily agree with the things he says / thinks, he's a fairly intelligent man and an accomplished creative and I strongly respect his creative vision.<br />
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[2] It was like looking at how the sausage was made- he basically said that he had no idea if what he was trying to do was possible but he wanted to do it anyways, and also that he sort of made up the game based off what works when you're stacking transparent cards, which I thought was great.<br />
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[3] The streets were absolutely packed and it turns out the people of Atlanta walk a lot like they drive- distracted as shit and not paying attention to hardly anybody but themselves. There were multiple occasions where somebody would be walking through a narrow path about as wide as their shoulders and then just sort of stop where they were standing, which boggled my mind. At one point, there was about enough space for a single person to pass but people were trying to go in both directions, so I rubbed bellies / asses with quite a few of my fellow con-goers as we all crammed our bodies sideways and tried to make the best of it.<br />
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[4] He didn't like Dominion, which is almost heresy in my eyes. Not that he's wrong- some sets of kingdom cards are kind of boring (especially the base set, with duds like the <a href="http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Chancellor">Chancellor</a>, a card which is both weak and boring... although to the designer's credit, he did end up removing quite a few of the most boring cards in the second edition.)<br />
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[5] Breaking Bad, for example, is a show about a sociopath and it was huge before Game of Thrones came out, and not to mention that GRRM's books have been out at least a decade before the TV show came out and they have been fairly popular throughout their entire run... Leaving aside the fact that Warhammer Fantasy has been a mainstay of the "grimdark" style of fantasy since the late 90s (where it began transitioning from goofy parody fantasy to over the top violent fantasy).<br />
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[6] I have mixed feelings about it sometimes because some artists have built up this big cage and it's just like, their face poking through so they can talk to people through this cage. One artist who I was very impressed by, Sam Guay (and who I bought art from, and will buy art from again), had almost a wall that she stood behind and I remember she looked at me with the strangest look in her eyes. I have learned over my lifetime that I am extremely good at reading people but a convention is not the place for me to try and spark a conversation with an artist at a convention booth when she probably just wants me to buy her art and go. But still. I hope she is ok. Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-12498791475311568382017-09-01T16:46:00.000-04:002017-09-01T16:46:44.812-04:00Imperial Quest Elements<br />
Water conducts electricity.<br />
Fire is quenched by water.<br />
Earth is burned by fire.<br />
Thunder is grounded by earth.<br />
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In gameplay terms, that means that you want to use lightning attacks on watery foes, water attacks on flaming monsters, fire attacks on earthen beasts, and earth attacks on air-type enemies. [1]<br />
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In addition, elemental effects affect your vulnerability to other elements. [2] If you have a fire blessing on you, you take extra damage from water attacks. If you have an air mage granting you haste, you might want to be careful that you don't get slammed by an earth attack. Since the RPG Maker AI is fairly primitive, it might not matter too much- but it's extra important for player characters, since they'll probably need to take advantage of these kinds of openings to make the most of their spells and abilities.<br />
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On the other hand, a fire blessing gives you resistance to earth attacks, so putting a quick fire shield on an ally is a good way to make sure they don't get ravaged by earth elementals. <br />
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In addition, there's a second "primal" wheel that's completely unconnected from the first- the cycle of light, darkness, and void. <br />
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Light banishes darkness.<br />
Darkness fills the void. <br />
The void consumes light.<br />
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These have the same effects, but within their own limited scope- if a monster has a magical void effect on them, they'll take extra damage from a darkness attack. Dark-type monsters take extra damage from light attacks.<br />
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It's very possible for monsters to have one elemental type and one primal type. Candice the witch, for example, is a void spellcaster who also dabbles in water magic.<br />
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Anyways, that's the basics. I haven't had much time to work on anything super interesting due to long work hours, but I'm doing my best. Watch this space!<br />
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[1] In this schema, earth is wood, dirt, stone, and it's all equally vulnerable to fire. Similarly, air is lightning, wind, and flying-type beasties. This means that you can use root-based attacks on flying creatures, which if this was a Pokemon game would be a big no-no but in this case, I simply don't care. Maybe it deals extra damage because the magical roots reach up super high and slam you down, or because air creatures are fragile and therefore vulnerable to being bashed by rocks- I don't care. Pokemon has too many types and abilities and interactions and it's a giant pain in the ass to keep track of it.<br />
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Similarly, I know that ice doesn't conduct electricity, but it doesn't matter. Keep it simple, silly.<br />
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[2] ;)<br />
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[3] This mostly matters in terms of what kinds of abilities they get- human beings (and human-type characters) are balanced both primally and elementally, and are equally vulnerable to all magical effects.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-26189538665236198612017-08-29T03:00:00.000-04:002017-09-01T16:21:10.027-04:00Imperial Quest: Dialog<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/HcmPQ1v.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="800" height="318" src="https://i.imgur.com/HcmPQ1v.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I don't really have any artistic skills, so I'm mostly just saving art from the internet and using it wherever I can. Since I'm not drawing any of this stuff (and I don't particularly want to use the default tilesets or character art or whatever) it means that I have to take a couple of measures to try and maximize what I do have.<br />
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Dialog screens, so far, look a lot like this. The characters who are talking stand over top of a scene, and then the messages display below. I've actually got a bit of branching dialog going already.<br />
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A lot of this stuff is pretty simple. I've been DMing for a long time and I used to write for money, so this sort of thing comes pretty easily.<br />
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In this scene, Andol (the warrior on the right) is meeting Thalia (on the left) for the first time. Andol is still injured from the introduction battle, so you'll get an opportunity to rest. This is still basically the tutorial. Andol is a Captain, which means that she's got party buffs and decent physical damage. Thalia is a Rogue, so she's got both damage and utility. They're designed to work together- Thalia can spend TP to do a double attack, and Andol can spend TP to buff the entire party's Attack and Defense. So a good strategy is to save up your TP and have Andol shout and Thalia go to town double attacking. Andol can also just Power Attack if she needs to do damage, and Thalia can Throat Punch to silence annoying casters. <br />
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After you rest, Andol will gain experience, and then Thalia joins the party. I think that you'll also gain some items, but I haven't implemented that. It makes sense that Thalia might have some potions or something that she'll share with the party (such as it is.) I haven't decided what Andol gets at level two, other than stat point increases. I actually wrote a pretty simple script that lets you (the player) decide what she gets as she levels up. I'm not sure if that's something I'll let you do for every character, or just for Andol (who is basically your avatar.) [1]<br />
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The party continues on after this, and will go towards the tomb where Cawain is busy disturbing the dead and searching for forbidden artifacts. You know how wizards are. This is also where you'll meet the next member of the party- a sorcerer named Bevior. As a spellcaster, Bevior interacts with a couple of systems that we haven't touched on yet, so that should be fairly interesting.<br />
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[1] I'd like to add Dragon Age inspired conversational options to the characters throughout the game, and some sort of stat tracker to see how well you're getting along with your fellow party members, because I think that sort of thing is a lot of fun. Social systems are pretty cool, even if Bioware tends to make them pretty weird. I don't plan on having the characters sleep with you if you give them enough gifts or anything.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-17132655376114303282017-08-27T13:48:00.001-04:002017-08-27T13:48:38.334-04:00Imperial Quest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/iFSEoQJ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="800" height="508" src="https://i.imgur.com/iFSEoQJ.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I got my hands on RPG Maker MV and I've been having a little bit of fun with it.<br />
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By default, it's set up to let you make a fairly traditional JRPG, but honestly I've never been much of a JRPG fan. I get lost wandering around their big sprite worlds, and I don't really like random battles. [1]<br />
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But I do like game engines, and RPG Maker MV has quite a lot of plugins that let you redefine pretty much anything. Javascript is apparently easy to code in, not that I would know. But it does mean that I can assemble the game I want and then keep on rolling forwards.<br />
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In this case, I've been borrowing still images I found on the internet and using the magic of the game engine to paste things together. As an example, you can see that Andol and company have started a battle with a Manticore. You can't see it from this screen, but they all have unique items equipped, and a variety of skills. Andol can Shout, giving her entire party an attack and defense buff for a couple of turns. Thalia is a Rogue with double attack- for a mere 5 TP she can attack twice in a row.<br />
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Bevior is the Sorcerer, and he knows a fire spell that applies a damage-over-time burn effect sometimes. Since he's level 5 (something else you can't see on this menu screen), he also knows Thunder Storm (multi-target air element damage spell), Cauterize, and Energize.<br />
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Randal is an Elvish Cleric, and he knows Sunbeam and Armor of Light, and he can spend 5 TP to cast Prayer, which heals the whole team.<br />
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The Manticore, for its part, is pretty dangerous. It can actually take multiple actions per round and has two attacks- Double Attack (the mirror image of Thalia), and Spike Volley, which launches three attacks at random enemies. Each attack deals damage and has a chance to poison. Oh, and it can also Howl, which is an Air element attack that also lowers its enemy's damage.<br />
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I plan on continuing to tinker with the game- what I have so far is the product of my screwing around with it after work and on the weekends. Once I have the battle system nailed down, my next step is to figure out a way to move the party from location to location. I don't want to use the standard JRPG convention of moving a little walking figure around, so I'm thinking a location menu? I haven't gotten that far yet.<br />
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My current sticking point is the lackluster item investigation screen, which only shows a handful of stats and is hideous, to boot. I need a system that lets me show the traits that I've given to items, if nothing else. <br />
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[1] Too much ludonarrative dissonance, plus the idea that violence is something that anybody can stumble on (and that even intelligent foes fight to the death) is really weird. Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-75459120562166335742017-07-12T21:20:00.001-04:002017-07-12T21:20:39.818-04:00Iteration 2: Hero Plus MinionsThis is related to the idea I posted the other day, where this one turns into a combination of card and skirmish game. You pick out a hero and then you get a handful of cards unique to that particular hero. If you're playing the Dwarf King, you get cards about how your dudes are really resilient, and cards that make the Dwarf King good at fighting. If you're playing the Elvish Sorcerer, you get cards about throwing fireballs and having had really good planning. And so on.<br />
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And then the other half of the cards come from the units you select. Units have a cost, and come with their own special cards. Some cards might only boost their own powers, but some might have unique benefits. Some cards benefit their entire team, or part of it, or maybe care about card types.<br />
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I imagine, especially, a low cost Peasant unit that only does a little bit of something- maybe the Peasants just have a card that says "Discard this card and draw another card," so if you have an army of Peasants they're not doing much, but it leaves more room for your Hero to do stuff all the time.<br />
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All the heroes and all of the cards have their own health, armor, and damage values. They also have a range, which just tells you what row they can attack from. Everybody's in two rows- frontline or back. Ranged units can attack into the frontline from the backline, where they are mostly protected from harm. It's difficult to attack the backline, but backline units always have minimal health so they need to be protected. On your turn, you can play a card and attack with any of your units that aren't exhausted. [1] Units that are in combat deal damage to each other equal to their attack values minus the other unit's armor. Health is not replenished except by special effects. Armor applies to each attack- if you are attacked for 3 four times and you have an armor of 2, you take 4 damage. If you took all 12 damage at once, you would take 10 damage.<br />
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Play passes back and forth between the units. Each slain unit is worth its cost value. Heroes are worth their supply value (the currency you buy units with). [2] The side with the most points at the end of the game wins. The bigger the difference in score, the more one-sided the game was. <br />
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Other Ideas:<br />
Scholars card that has really good card draw but sucks in actual combat.<br />
A monstrous creature that has negative cards that must be played, and then their other cards are excellent. Balancing the risk of having dangerous creatures around that can turn on you... Probably cost 6-8 or so, the Dwarf King and his pet dragon makes for a pretty cool encounter on its own.<br />
Clerics/Paladins that are good melee warriors with a strong heal. Probably just 2 sets of doubles: A card that heals a little and draws you a card, and then a card that heals everybody without the card draw. Cost 4.<br />
Horse Archers unit that can negate an attack while dealing minor damage, making engaging them frustrating to deal with, plus cards about removing enemy resources. Cost 3 maybe?<br />
Heavy Knights who have a big benefit from additional heavy mounted allies, making a valorous charge, plus they have cards about making all their attacking allies better if they're not attacking. Probably cost 5 or 4.<br />
Backline archers that do more damage with other archers. These guys should cost 2, I think, they are effective but taking too many is risky.<br />
Ranger unit that can shift between front or back line, with their ability cards split between defensive frontliner and aggressive backliner.. Cost 1, but he's got two cards. <br />
Berserker unit that gets stronger when it's alone and outnumbered. (like "Berserkers gets damage bonus minus two for each friendly frontline unit," and "Berserkers gains X armor for the turn, where X is the number of enemy frontliners," and then something where they take damage to land a big attack.<br />
Militia- are frontline, but can attack from the backline with a card. Their other card heals them, since there's never a shortage of Militia. Cost 2<br />
A real dwarfy dwarf who likes other dwarfs. Maybe a captain or something. He comes with its own sub-unit of two dwarfs, who do not have cards. Cost 3 or 4.<br />
Dwarf warriors because you have to have them. Cost 3, they can look at the enemy's cards and gives everybody armor for a turn if you're being attacked.<br />
An elf captain, this guy is 1 more than the Dwarf Captain because he's more of a solo hero. Has a team attack buff, a personal defense buff, a decent AoE attack, and something else.<br />
These are elf commandos, so they have a good attack but bad armor. They have evasive cards though.<br />
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This is mostly brainstorming for my own benefit, but if anybody reads this then hopefully you can see what I'm talking about, lol<br />
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[1] Exhausted units can't attack. Exhaustion mostly comes from special effects- it's not like tapping in Magic where you tap to attack and all that.<br />
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[2] Heroes have 10 supply value by default, but there's no real reason they can't have less.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-77322193258645256802017-07-09T10:00:00.001-04:002017-07-09T10:00:36.945-04:00Paralyzing PerfectionThe title is taken from <a href="http://doomslakers.blogspot.com/2017/05/paralyzing-perfection.html">this blog, Doomslakers!,</a> which I just discovered this morning but quite enjoy.<br />
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It discusses the fear that whatever we create won't be perfect, and won't live up to the ideal, therefore it's not worthy to be shared. Or created, or whatever. You get disappointed in how your project isn't shaping up to be quite right, and therefore you abandon it.<br />
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In this vein, let me share the nugget of the idea I've been thinking about.<br />
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I haven't been playing a lot of roleplaying games [1], and so to fill the time in between working and sleeping, these days I've been playing video games instead. One of these video games is Heroes of the Storm. I'm an old hand at these kinds of games- I've been playing proto-"MOBAs" since their generation in the Warcraft 3 customs scene, and I've played nearly everything since. But Heroes of the Storm is my absolute favorite, for the time being. The characters are well designed, the different maps makes a different set of heroes stronger or weaker, and the focus is on actually playing as a team all game long.<br />
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One of the things that the Heroes team does is make a shifting rotation of minigame maps available to play. One of my favorite features two teams battling arena-style over two enormous AI-controlled warriors called Punishers. A team gets 3 points for killing an enemy hero, and ten points for killing the powerful Punishers.<br />
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Punishers spend about half their time attacking each other, and half their time attacking whatever hero is the closest to them. They are about an even match for two heroes, but can be defeated fairly quickly by an entire team. Of course, the enemy team wants to kill you and your Punisher, so it's a balancing act.<br />
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I was thinking of making a game based around similar conventions- a short team-based tactics skirmish game. I decided to borrow the action system from the wonderful Space Hulk: Death Angels boardgame, and so when you pick a hero you get three or four cards that you add to your action deck. You have 5 heroes, so you have a total deck size of 15-20. Each turn, you can move each of your heroes and you also get two actions. With an action, you can play a card or draw a card.<br />
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Heroes also have health, armor, movement speed, and attack values. A hero can move up their movement value each turn. A hero adds their attack value to the damage of any attacks they deal, and subtracts their armor from each instance of incoming damage. When they're out of health, a hero dies and comes back later. [2] <br />
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Mostly, I thought of heroes that would be interesting in this context. Such as:<br />
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Storm Priest-<br />
Chain Lightning- Deal medium damage to a single target, then light damage to a nearby enemy, then light damage to a nearby enemy<br /> Energize- Heal + bonus on next move<br /> Teleport- Move to a nearby location and deal damage to all adjacent enemies<br /> <br />Wolf Shaman- dash attack, selfheal + draw, purge effect<br /> Lunge- Dash and deal light bonus damage. Deal more damage if the target is bleeding.<br /> Adrenaline- Heal light damage and draw a card<br /> Purge- Remove all cards from a target and deal light damage<br /> <br />
Dark Crusader- <br /> Gathering Shadows- deals medium damage to all adjacent enemies<br /> Drain Life- Medium range damage + self heal<br /> Block- Discard to reduce the damage from a single attack<br /> <br /> <br />Iron Knight-<br /> Block- Discard to reduce the damage from a single attack<br /> Crash- Dash and stun an enemy<br /> Burning Blade- Deal bonus damage and ignite enemy <br /> <br />
Grey Monk-<br /> Kick- Counter a card played by an adjacent enemy<br /> Flurry- Make three attacks with a single attack action.<br /> Adrenaline- heal light damage and draw a card<br /> <br />Beastmaster Sergeant-<br /> Hounds- heal all hounds. if there are less hounds than two, summon hounds adjacent to beastmaster until there are two.<br /> Hounds are fast but not tough. They deal light damage.<br /> Sound the Alarm- discard a card, then draw a card. an ally may move.<br /> Lacerate- Attack, and apply damage over time<br />
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There's still a lot of work to be done with this one, obviously enough. But it's a lot of fun writing this stuff anyways!<br />
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[1] My last attempt at running 5e failed because I am apparently unable to learn that I don't really like running 5e. Plus my group had no chemistry- everybody was laid back, and everybody appreciated the way I ran the game, but there was nobody to bounce my ideas off of!<br />
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[2] I actually haven't decided what to do about this part, honestly. In the HotS minigame, dying gives the other team points and you come back in a somewhat short period of time. The map is smallish, so it doesn't take you long to get back into the fight- you can sometimes even jump back into the same extended skirmish if both sides are playing cautiously enough.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-89558561281698058642017-04-16T12:19:00.001-04:002017-04-16T12:19:39.635-04:00This BlogThe thing about this blog is that it's kind of past its purpose. I've had this thing for years. In its heyday, people would come by and read it, but that was when the idea of talking about old-school D&D was sort of a niche thing.<br />
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These days, it's not even particularly interesting. There are a half dozen retroclones out there, including an official reprint. 5e D&D was intentionally made to try and recapture some of the building steam from people like me, who quite enjoyed D&D the way it was and didn't particularly need to play a detailed tactics game every single session.<br />
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The other part of the mix is that I just don't play roleplaying games as much as I used to. A big part of it is that I'm taking better care of myself these days. I've come to grips with the fact that I have depression, and that means treating a disease that I've ignored for almost 30 years now. Part of the way I used to deal with my depression was roleplaying games- they really are a lot of fun, they provide a good source of social interaction to somebody with a strong tendency to self-isolate, and they tend to attract people who are a little offbeat (my favorite kind of people). It also helped kill time when I was an unemployed alcoholic.<br />
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These days I've mostly stopped drinking, and I spend a lot of time at work. I'm an electrician now, so I spend a lot of time thinking, and being social, and walking around. So when I come home, I'm tired of thinking so hard, and I'm tired of having to talk to people all day. I'm also tired of moving, sometimes- so I play a lot of video games, now. I write little minigames now, and am more interested in board games. You know, something I can play in a couple of hours as a self-contained unit.<br />
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I'm still thinking about game design, though, and about critical theories and stuff. I've become a little more well read, politically. I still write all the time (on the weekends now, mostly), so there is that.<br />
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I've been thinking of starting with a clean slate on another blog, with a new name. I know nobody really reads this, but when that happens I'll make an announcement and see what happens. It's really not hard to be part of a blogging community (even though the phrase doesn't make as much sense as it did almost ten years ago when this blog started), and I think that something a little different will be a nice change of pace.<br />
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Yes, indeed. Everything's changed. Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-53736861482848435402017-02-26T09:35:00.001-05:002017-02-26T09:35:19.584-05:00Making a Character in The One Ring<br />
There are five races in the game, but as I'd been reading about the Woodsmen in order to learn the rules, the more I knew I wanted to play the frontier norsemen fighting for their lives against the encroaching darkness.<br />
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Woodsmen all get a cultural blessing, in this case, Woodsmen use their favored wits score as their Parry rating when in the woods. In other words, Witty woodsmen are exceptionally hard to hit in combat when they're in forests. Sounds good to me- characters with high Wits are pretty cool anyways, so I'll keep an eye out for it.<br />
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Next, the skills. Every member of a culture has these minimal skills by the time they are an adult. (1) You just write them down on your character sheet. You get a chance to customize it a little later. The underlined skill is a favored skill, and uses the favored attribute rating instead of the base (usually a couple of points better).<br />
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You choose from between two groups of weapon skills- in this case, it's asking me if I'd like to be better at bows or axes. I choose Bows, since it seems more versatile, and write down the scores. This character has a skill of two in all bows, and 1 in long-hafted axes and daggers. Every character gets at least a 1 in Daggers, but it's nice to be able to use a good weapon, too.<br />
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I choose two specialties from a list of six: My character is good at Herb-Lore, Beast-Lore, and Leechcraft. Clearly he's got an interest in healing, which I figure come in handy.<br />
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Backgrounds next. They're numbered one through six but I'm cheating a little and just picking the one that catches my eye: The Seeker. My character's basic attributes are now Body 2, Heart 5, and Wits 7. Each attribute can be used with roughly 1/3 of the skills sometimes- spend a point of Hope and get a decent bonus. My attributes make spending Hope for Wits challenges pretty useful, but Body not as much.<br />
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I also gain a favored skill of Athletics, which I note.<br />
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I choose Bold and Determined as Features. Features are a subset of Traits, but they're all personality related and can't be gained during play. All Traits let you get automatic successes on some events that would otherwise require rolls. They also let you gain Advancement points- if you can invoke a trait while rolling a skill roll, you can get points that you improve your character.<br />
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The next step is choosing a calling. Each calling has two favored skill groups, a shadow weakness, and a free trait. Warden, the calling I'm choosing for this character, has favored skill groups of Survival and Personality, a shadow weakness of Lure of Power, and the trait Shadow-Lore. From the personality group I choose Awe, because I think it'd be interesting in the future and none of the other options appeal to me, and from Survival I choose hunting.<br />
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Next, I decide on my favored attributes. I decide to give my highest bonus to Heart, since I want this Woodsman to be a little more balanced. Wits gets plus two, since I'd like to benefit from the Parry bonus in the woods. Body gets a mere plus one, even though I have two favored skills there, because I'm hoping not to use it<br />
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My character sheet now looks like this:<br />
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Since I can't underline, I've chosen to mark my favored skills with an asterisk.<br />
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Next step, I decide what to spend my ten "free" advancement points on- either skill groups or weapon groups. I'm cool with my weapon selections, but I would like to be a little better at the axe, so I'll spend 4 points to increase that. Next, I'll increase my Awe by 1 (for 1 point), leaving me with 5 points. I don't have any good Custom skills, and I'd like this character to be well-respected. I decide to give him a boost to his Riddle, spending 3 points to raise that skill to 3. Two points left- let's make our Battle 2 while we're at it.<br />
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Next, Endurance and Hope. These are determined by your culture- mine are 20 and 10.<br />
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You start with gear appropriate to your culture. It's separated into travel gear and war gear. I don't know what time of year it is- but if it's cold, I have 2 base encumbrance. If it's warm I only have 1. This traveling gear includes food for a week- if I'm away for longer than that, I'll need to either seek civilization and get more supplies or rely on my skills as a hunter. Luckily, my character is a decent hunter and his hope bonus should ensure that we'll have food if we really need it.<br />
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Since I have a song of 1, I can choose to bring an instrument. I'm going to give this character a flute- obviously it's wooden, but I imagine he makes them himself. He's no musician, but he dabbles.<br />
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I can have a weapon for each weapon skill I have. I will choose to be fully-armed with a Great Bow, a Long-Hafted Axe, and a Dagger. That's 6 encumbrance, which I write down. I may not have a shield, but a Long-Hafted Axe can be used in two hands, so as long as I'm careful I should be ok.<br />
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In The One Ring, you choose what "position" each round to fight in. The further forward you fight, the easier it is to hit and be hit, and if you're traveling with a team that can screen for you, you can even continue to use ranged weapons in combat. Otherwise, you're limited to a volley before the battle engages, and then you're in pitched melee.<br />
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You can carry an amount of encumbrance equal to your Endurance rating, When get hurt, your Endurance score lowers and you can carry less. I'm at 6/20, however, and I think it'd be reasonable for my character to have some armor. He has a Leather Corslet, for 8 encumbrance and 2d protection. 12/20 is plenty of maneuvering room for my character- he's not especially durable but with a little care, it shouldn't matter.<br />
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Next, Valor and Wisdom. 2 points in 1, 1 in the other. Every time you increase your Wisdom or Valor score to 2 or higher, you get a Reward or a Virtue.<br />
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Rewards improve a single characteristic of any item. Qualities are the sorts of items that any culture can (and may) produce, like an especially sharp sword or a well-made helm. Cultural Rewards are a little different- only a shire-hobbit can have a King's Blade, and it would be odd for a Beorning to use a Dwarf-Wrought Hauberk.<br />
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Virtues are special skills or abilities. Woodsmen may have a special hound, and Elves may know how to speak with animals and trees. This particular Woodsman is going to have Hunter's Resolve, which lets him recover Endurance equal to his favored Heart rating (8) once per day by spending a single point of Hope. Very durable!<br />
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Up next would be company creation, but this is the part where the character hooks into the rest of the party (and the world) and since I'm just developing a single character for now, that's a little overkill. But I like what I've got.<br />
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He's a Warden, at home in the deep forests. He knows a thing or two about the shadows, even among his people. He knows the secrets of the forests, and fears little. He is scrawny, apparently, or at least not strong, but his mind is sharp.<br />
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For my last step I'll give him a name: Barald. I've decided that he's a young man, no more than 22, and that he'd go well in almost any company- he'd make a good guide, a good healer, an all around solid woodsman. He doesn't have much in the way of social graces (although he might enjoy hanging around scholars and trading riddles), and when it comes to actually traveling long distances he's at a bit of a loss. At least he's got sharp eyes!<br />
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(1) There's no way that I know of to start with less built-in points and play, say, a woodsman who was physically frail (lower athletics) or some such.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-75005447169245732702017-02-25T09:45:00.000-05:002017-02-25T09:45:03.884-05:00The One Ring<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I dissolved my 5e group over the weekend. (1)<br />
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In its place, I want to run The One Ring.<br />
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Now, I'm not the biggest Tolkien buff in the world- but I have watched the old Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie so many times that I've memorized all of the songs. I obsessed over Peter Jackon's movies when they came out, and have had discussions over what, exactly, the Uruk-Hai are. I have an opinion on Feanor and on Elrond.<br />
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I've been reading Njal's Saga, as well, and if there's any way to emulate old Germanic / Norse sagas, it's with The One Ring. In those tales, some men were highly regarded warriors. Some were skilled craftsmen, wise judges, or learned scholars. None were considered lowly, except the craven or the dishonorable.<br />
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In The One Ring, you might not have any real combat capabilities, but that's absolutely fine because even the warriors don't really want to fight. And most characters have some combat skill anyways- it is not uncommon for Dwarfs or Woodmen to have to defend their homes, and spears aren't that different from pitchforks anyways. An axe is both a tool and a weapon.<br />
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But every character's got mostly non-combat skills, too. Dwarves are generally good at crafting, and singing. The hobbit is great at diplomacy, sneaking, and riddles. The Woodsman is a sharp healer and can ready body language. These skills take up most of the space on your character sheet- there are 18 of them, and every character has a handful, and gain points in them when the skill succeeds or fails in a distinctive or memorable way. So you're encouraged, in-game to do interesting things with your abilities. It doesn't matter if you always pick locks- pick something interesting! You're a good singer but you can't be great until you do something truly daring- like charming an uruk-hai with your tunes! Your characters quickly become distinctive and memorable in a way that is actually unique to the player, which is just great.<br />
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Characters have both physical stamina and emotional resilience. They can lose Endurance by getting hurt, both in combat and out. Losing Endurance eventually makes you Weary, which is a status condition that doesn't go away until you take an extended rest. While you're Weary, your low results are simply discarded, so you're more likely to lose close rolls. You can lose Hope by picking up Shadow points, which you gain by interacting with nasty things in the game. You can gain Shadow points by witnessing carnage, by simply interacting with truly horrific sites (a necromancer's tomb, a massed army of orcs, that sort of thing,), or by simply being awful to people.<br />
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The more Shadow points you have, the worse things get for you. You picked your character's Shadow Weakness when you made the character: You chose in what way the stress of adventuring would bring them madness. And so when you have more Shadow than Hope, you become Miserable. When you're Miserable and roll the eye symbol on the dice, you suffer a bout of madness. (2)<br />
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When you're mad, you act out in the way that you chose that you would, but it's the GM doing it for a little while. And he's supposed to make things worse, or at least a little more tense.<br />
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You can spend Hope to get a bonus on your die rolls. You restore Hope by draining the party's shared Fellowship pool. This pool restocks when you're in the resting Fellowship Phase, but otherwise is mostly static. You can get Hope for free if everybody agrees you can, but if every single person doesn't agree then you have to spend Shadow to gain it. 1 point of Shadow for each point of Hope.<br />
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If your Hope hits zero, you can't do anything- you can merely passively exist. If your Endurance hits zero, you drop unconscious. If you become Wounded, the rules change a little. If you're Wounded and you get Wounded again, you're unconscious. If you're Wounded at zero Endurance, you begin to die. If you're dying, another Wound will kill you. Otherwise, you can last about 12 hours without treatment.<br />
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There are a lot of other interesting mechanics in the game, too. Traveling is its own special set of rules (called a Journey). There's a Fellowship phase where the adventurers are resting for a while while the players spend their points and decide what happens to them in their breaks.<br />
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It's a cool system, and I hope that I can find some good players to enjoy it with.<br />
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(1) It just wasn't working out- the players had no real cohesion or drive, and everybody was too laid back. The system is flabby in the only parts I cared about, and skeletal in the interesting parts. The game is mostly combat focused, but the combat is mostly uninteresting. The default setting is both bolted strongly on and extremely boring; it doesn't really correspond with any sort of fiction I've ever enjoyed, and there aren't really any stories to tell. I would have had to make my own 5e campaign setting, which wouldn't be so bad except that, again, the system isn't interested in the stories I have to tell. It cares about a party of warriors who overcome a series of violent encounters engaging in a level treadmill all the way up. I could write more about how I dislike this style of play, but I'll just leave it at that.<br />
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(2) If you're using regular d12s, the 11 is the eye and the 12 is the gandalf rune. On the 6 sided die, there's an elvish "t".Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-36041936518898959752017-01-06T16:38:00.000-05:002017-01-06T16:38:33.416-05:00The Only Accurate Alignment Chart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/817479283350368256<br />
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I know I usually post more substantive things but this popped up on my Twitter feed and I didn't want to lose it. This really is the only accurate alignment chart that I've seen! \<br />
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I mean, what would <i>you</i> change?Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817647623501108348.post-69195295889697425912017-01-03T13:30:00.000-05:002017-01-03T13:30:04.048-05:00Campfire Mechanics, Part 2The other reason I'm thinking about campfire mechanics is because of one of my favorite games of the past couple of years: Renowned Explorers. If you haven't played it, here's the general conceit:<br />
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There are a large number of characters- choose one to be your expedition leader (this gives a unique bonus) and then two to be expedition members. Each character has one of a number of skills and abilities, and also approaches. Central to the RE experience is the idea of attitudes; that is, the effect of your actions on your opponents. Your attitude can be Friendly, Devious, or Aggressive, and so can your opponent. Each adventurer has three moves (and gains more); one each of Aggressive, Devious, and Friendly. Also important are moods and spirit- a mood can be either negative or positive. Whether it's negative or positive matters for the moods that can be applied by moves. Moods take the place of standard fantasy buffs or debuffs- for example, Excited characters have +25% speech and Enraged characters have 25% less defense.<br />
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In the middle of an adventure, you are allowed to build a campfire. The three characters relax around the campfire and you draw from a deck of cards. Each character has different campfire cards, and there are some basic generic cards that round out the deck.<br />
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As you can see from this screenshot, the presence of Yvonne has included a unique card of hers, which provides certain benefits- in this case, a bonus when you recruit a certain hireling. (Renown are "victory points" and accumulating renown is how you the high score and a good ending.)</div>
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Pedrinho (the bald black man) also has a unique card. Every character does- every character has something that only they can do, and only when resting. Some cards are not particularly interesting- Yvonne's just gives you a bonus for something you were probably doing anyways, and it's not often practical to try and recruit many Journalists. They're limited in number, for one. But still, it's a decent bonus.</div>
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One of my favorite cards is for a Russian fighter named Ivan- his card halves his attack but gives him a significant bonus to speech, turning him from a formidable brawler to a defensive speaker (sort of). Once used, this change lasts for the entire game, with no way to turn back. It's a powerful bonus, but you have to have been ready for it. You have to have built your party around it!</div>
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It's a series of very cool decisions by a very savvy group of game designers, and I love it. I wish I could see more of it. </div>
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Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08596442998967851832noreply@blogger.com0