gold-for-xp - Tumblr blog

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tweets like this are my pet peeve. just throwing silly words together in a way that’s supposed to sound hyperspecific but does not in fact evoke anything recognizable

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So shes a movie star

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I DON'T KNOW WHY

ONE GAME

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Been running a monthly Blades in the dark game for a group I'm in that mostly just does 5e, yesterday one of my friends just walked up to me and said "hey, I think dnd might be bad" so I'm basically a god, lightning flows through my veins, etc etc

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if your porn or romance story is gonna feature a man (as opposed to the default, which is yuri) then you have to want to fuck the man, at least a little.

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Verified Palestinian Fundraisers

Here are some more fundraising requests I've received from the last day collected into one post to help prevent individual fundraisers from becoming lost. If you have the money, please donate to one or more of these campaigns, or if you don't please share the donation links for the people in need mentioned here.

@ashraf-baker5 - Verified here - GoFundMe (85%)

@ahmadresh - Verified here - GoFundMe (38%)

@aahed-family - The post is gone but this was vetted by association through @mohammedalanqer - GoFundMe (3%)

@m8hammed - The original post was removed but this fundraiser is vetted - GoFundMe (40%)

@anas--basil - Verified here - GoFundMe (17%)

@amalgheelan - Vetted by association - GoFundMe (2%)

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getting to know me for ~5 months or so then on month 6 things start to slowly click for you that ive clearly been trying to manufacture situations where you get struck by lightning

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im stacking extension cords on each other like theyre tinker toys. constructing a tower of babel in the name of the god of electricity. there'll be at least 100 outlets when ive hooked these boys up nice and good. ill never run out again

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mom I frew up

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Reblog and put in the tags if you can remember where you got the shirt you’re currently wearing.

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fuck sake

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tactiquest structure

so i've posted a lot about tactiquest's classes and monsters and everything on here but i haven't really talked about the non-combat subsystems much yet and i wanted to go into detail about them, bc tactiquest has very different goals from most heroic fantasy systems.

tracking inventory, travel time, worrying about actually running out of your adventuring budget, are things a lot of big-damn-heroes fantasy systems throw out because they're just paperwork that gets in the way of your cool fights. that's not the case in Tactiquest! these systems are so core to the experience that removing them will make a lot of classes unusable. the game is built around them.

travel & exploration

tactiquest explicitly assumes you're running an open-sandbox hexcrawl and is designed to support that, including the fact the game is designed around random encounters. this is the sort of thing D&D 3e expected you to do, but people ditched random encounters because they thought they were boring and tedious. so classes balanced around that attrition of resources ended up with a huge spike in power other classes couldn't match.

the boring-and-tedious problem is mostly addressed by trying to make combat really good and resolve really fast. if i fucked that up the whole thing falls apart, but so far people are liking it

the second thing that helps with random encounters is your resources don't fully restore immediately at the end of each day like they do in 3e. resting is less effective in the wilderness and resources expended are a tomorrow problem, not just a today problem. so you don't have to have 3+ fights every single day just to maintain parity - 0-2 fights per day still adds up to difficult resource management.

because the game has such a focus on it, you can have classes like the ranger actually be good at travel and exploration instead of just giving them vaguely-naturey combat abilities.

economy

in most D&D-likes, even usually OSR ones, you accrue so much gold. just as a side effect of adventuring. to the point money no longer actually matters because you can throw piles of it at any problem. this is bad. it's a system that defeats its own purpose; there are no interesting choices involving money when you have so much the only real expense is like, 50,000-gold-piece magic items.

i don't just want players to care about money, i want them to worry about money, like a normal person. you're not batman who's a billionaire as a side hobby, you're spiderman who has to deliver pizzas in between superhero work because he's got bills to pay like everyone else. so a whole lot of effort has been put into actually designing prices and treasure amounts around this dynamic.

i also hate how games will usually go "oh adventuring gives you 900,000 gold for existing but a normal person's living wage is 2 gold a month". i don't want to be fantasy jeff bezos, thanks

inventory

this is something i just lifted from OSR games outright. you can carry ten things (and tiny things don't take up an item slot). that's the whole rule.

tracking inventory can add a lot of interesting decisions to a game and adds a new lever for abilities from classes and magic items. having a character play the merchant class which gets a bunch of extra inventory slots feels really impactful. finding a bag of holding that doubles your carry capacity feels so good when you actually have to watch your inventory.

supply

the only thing i felt was really unenjoyable when running games with strict inventory limits was tracking rations for each character that you eat every night; it felt too much like busywork with not enough payoff. so in Tactiquest rations are abstracted into a single Supply stat that's tied to the party rather than any individual character.

you can only restock Supply in towns, and it drops by 1 each time you rest. you can sleep without resting and this won't cost supply, but you won't regain any HP or other resources. this gives you the impactful decision-making of tracking rations without the annoyance of "okay it's been a day of travel, everyone make sure you dock a ration from your sheet" like twice per session

Supply is one of the things that slowly drains your funds and gives you a reason to keep seeking out treasure, tying back into the economy. it also gives merchants and rangers some extra mechanical levers for their class abilities to pull on.

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As a long time driver and chronically late bitch, speeding doesn’t even get you there notably faster unless you’re speeding so much it’s blatantly unsafe. The real time saves come from running yellows and reds.

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"childs is the thing!" "no macready is the thing" LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER THE CREDITS CLEARLY SAY JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING