#I'm into the matching illustrations for the base game and the expansion

[catastrophic-crisis]

Katamari for freaks.

The Last One and Then Another, an expansion for How Fish is Made by Wrong Organ.

Mouthwashing is planned to release Q1 2024.

[that-house]

wtf is field of white flowers

It's a tabletop roleplaying game system I've been designing on & off for about four months now!

Originally, it was an unarmed combat minigame I made for D&D, with the intention of making unarmed combat, like, actually interesting. Like, with D&D's default set of rules, there's two ways to handle unarmed combat: roll a contested skill check (or series of checks) or punch each other (for minimal damage unless you're a monk) until someone goes down

The way I decided to spice it up was with a series of Moves:

Swing (big damage but risky)

Jab (lower damage than Swing, but is, in fighting game terms, "plus on block")

Guard (weakest but safest move, and very good against Swing)

Taunt (forces enemies to Swing if successful)

Grapple (enters a grappling minigame where they try to escape while you choke them out)

Everything had a multilayered rock-paper-scissors relationship. For example, if I'm remembering correctly, Swing was good against Jab and great against Taunt, but bad against Grapple and terrible against Guard.

Both players would pick a Move simultaneously, then consult a 25-item table detailing all the possible matchups of Moves. Each player would then roll a skill check based on their Move & Matchup, and then the winner of the contested check would get an advantage based on their Move & Matchup: stuff like making progress towards winning, gaining a bonus on your next turn, stuff like that.

If you won the contest by 5+, it would be a crit and the bonus would be bigger, stuff like moves that don't normally hit your opponent now hitting, or moves that do hit now instantly end the fight in certain matchups

We played it once or twice, and it was pretty fun! Then I realized that if I just made it have its own character creation rules instead of using D&D's, I could make a pretty solid little martial arts game

I swapped out Grapple for the more generic debuff-inflicting Afflict, introduced what would eventually become 80 different special abilities to mix and match in the form of Powers, and allowed players to customize their Moves through the use of Modifiers and custom outcomes

It was originally meant to be a 1v1 "fighting game tournament" sort of game, as a sort of combination deckbuilder/rpg where you compete with friends to make the most optimal build, but then I decided that (a) it actually had a lot of potential as a more traditional rpg and (b) introducing allies would open up a lot of design space for more supportive gameplay

the first playtest was an incredibly unbalanced 1v1 test of white-room optimization that showed promise but revealed a lot of deep issues in the system. the second playtest, months later, was a fucking glorious traditional dungeon crawl through the expansive basement of a missing crime lord, and everyone had a blast with that. it still revealed a shitton of issues, because that's how playtesting goes!

it's gone through a shitload of changes in the time I've been working on it, with currently around 12k words of rules text and customization options, compared to the original "one page and a reference table" that I made for a D&D minigame

i'm gonna be running a bunch of playtests with friends over the summer, and hopefully some day the rulebook gets into a sufficiently organized state that I can post a playtest version that DOESN'T require me to be on speed dial to explain anything i forgot to mention in the rules (and hopefully later an illustrated and finished copy for sale)