lunarbard

[lunarbard]

Part of the problem with charisma/social checks in trad ttrpgs, especially the bluff/deception, intimidation, and diplomacy/persuasion trio, is that a lot of players conflate charisma and rhetoric (and that's not helped by the latter's naming). There are plenty of people in real life who can deliver a well-structured argument with the charm of a wet napkin, know the right lie to to tell but have no poker face to keep it, or try their best to coerce somebody but just can't pull off a good menacing glare.

In these games, a charisma/social check isn't the character solving the entire approach, they answer the question of "how effective is that approach?" Does the target not believe your threat, do they see your tick, do they find you charming enough to listen to? What the player provides is their approach, which is often the rhetoric - what is the character leveraging in this situation aided by this aspect of their abilities? Sometimes the check won't be required if the rhetoric is good enough, or it's just a gauge for the GM of how strongly the NPC responds.

If you follow that paradigm, then charisma checks fall into place alongside those strength and agility checks: the player declares their approach and intent, and a roll may be required to see how far the character jumps and if they clear the ravine. But that same player could instead try to build a bridge with some logs lashed together, and no check would be required.

Regarding your post(s) about investigation checks and the like, there's something that's bothering me, and it bothered me for a while. Not in regard to investigation, but charisma (and similar checks, diplomacy, negotiation, persuasion, whatever the game calls it).

In a TTRPG with skills, those skills are an abstraction meant to simulate a characters actual capabilities. If I want to make a character who can effortlessly jump from rooftop to rooftop, I'll give them high Athletics, Agility, Endurance, whatever. Maybe some feats, abilities, perks, advantages etc that pertain to jumping. Now, if I want my character to jump from rooftop to rooftop, I just roll the dice, and the skills, attributes, perks etc will make sure I have a high likelihood of success. I don't need to prove to the GM or the group that I myself could make that jump.

But now let's talk about Charisma checks. I've often heard stories of groups who say they don't make those checks, they just let the player make the argument, and if the GM is convinced, they "pass." But like... that means the character will always be as persuasive as the player. If the player isn't good at formulating an argument, the character won't be, either. Same with perception, investigation, etc. Sometimes, players just aren't good at picking up on hints and clues and/or they're not good at drawing conclusions from the clues they have. So that means that they can't play as a character who is?

Don't get me wrong, I get your point, I just find this is an issue worth thinking about. Why are things like athleticism, stealth, and combat prowess, or even things like lockpicking, hacking, or repairing stuff okay to abstract away as dice rolls, but deduction, perception, and maybe also persuasion and rhetoric aren't? Or, maybe the better, more constructive question: How would you propose handling a player playing a character whose skills exceed the player's?

I also think it's an issue worth thinking about, but I think "thinking about it" also has to involve asking the questions "why is this a problem?" and "is this ACTUALLY a problem?"

Like this discussion comes with the prepackaged assumption that allowing you to play a character whose abilities exceed yours as a player is both a) a universally desirable thing, and b) something that must be treated as a game design priority. And, with that assumption, it's logical to conclude that a TTRPG has an *obligation* to allow you to play a character whose abilities are not limited by yours as a player in any way, and not allowing you to do so constitutes a failure on the game's part.

But let's question that assumption a little bit. Because, the way I see it "allowing you to play a character who is good at X even if that's something that you, personally, are not good at" is not an inherently desirable design goal. It's a value-neutral feature, and it becomes a good or bad design goal to pursue depending on what X is and whether abstracting X so that the player doesn't have to engage with it benefits or detracts from the desired gameplay experience.

Let's for example, imagine a TTRPG with wargame elements, where, among other things to do, there are situations where your character can assume command of an army to engage in large-scale battles. It's pretty clear that, in such a game, you simply can't play as a character who is a better tactician than you, the player, are. If I'm not a good tactician, I don't get to play a character who's supposed to be the most brilliant tactician in all the land. That's simply not a character concept I get to play unless I am also skilled at tactical decision-making.

Is that inherently a problem to be solved? If we got rid of tactical decision-making as an activity that the players have to engage in, and instead gave the characters a "Tactics" skill and we used a Tactics skill check to determine whether they win or lose a battle, that would certainly allow a player who's bad at tactics the freedom to play a character who's the best tactician ever. But would this be an objectively good change? I'd say no, because it would skip past the entire point of the wargame elements, which is engaging as a player with the process of tactical decision-making, and that's not something that I'd consider worth sacrificing in pursuit of allowing the player to play a character whose skills exceed theirs in this particular aspect.

To name a more concrete example that someone else mentioned in the notes of that post: Mothership has no equivalent of a stealth skill, despite being a game where a lot of your playtime is spent hiding from some flavor of Scary Space Monster, because if the game abstracted stealth that way the resolution to any situation where you're trying to hide from a Scary Space Monster would be saying "I roll stealth" and hoping you roll high enough. Without a stealth skill, you're forced to participate in the narrative conversation of paying attention to the GM's description of the environment, ask clarifying questions if needed, and describe how you try to hide in the space presented to you.

This, once again, presents a situation where your character's skills are limited by your own. It's pretty clear that your character can only be as good at hiding as you are at thinking of places to hide and describing how they hide in them, and that if the game took the "i roll stealth" approach instead, it would solve the "problem" of your character's skills being limited by your own in this particular way. But is solving this "problem" worth sacrificing the tension that the game seeks to create by deliberately refusing to abstract stealth in this way?

So yeah... I think lacking skill checks for stuff such as perception or investigation makes a dungeon-crawling game better because it forces the players to narratively engage with the environment as a real place when they're looking for something, and it's also true that the lack of such mechanics kinda does mean that a player who just isn't good at picking up hints and clues from environmental details simply doesn't get to play a character who is supposed to be good at picking up hints and clues from environmental details. But I think that ensuring a player's ability to play such a character regardless of their real-life skill level is not a design goal that a game has any inherent obligation to pursue, especially not at the cost of skipping over the actions that, to me, are the meat and potatoes of a dungeon crawl.

My answer to "why is it okay to abstract certain skills as dice rolls and not others" is that games are allowed to make decisions about which actions they want to skip over with a dice roll and which actions they want the players to have to exercise direct narrative control and mastery of, and sometimes that's gonna interfere with their freedom to play a character whose skills exceed theirs, and that's okay because sometimes other game design goals are going to have priority over the goal of ensuring the character's skills aren't limited by the player's real-life skills in any conceivable way.

[lunarbard]

While D&D - it's rules & default setting - are overall the worst parts of the game, I do hope that in addition to using their own system & setting Larian takes a look at the structure of Baldur's Gate 3 as a point to improve for their next game.

The highlights of Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 have been their Act 2 and Act 1 respectively, for similar reasons: they're both built around a set of distinct-feeling areas that you can cut off in bite-sized chunks based on your level & gear. This gives them a sense of exploration & progression; the black pits vs bloodmoon island or the swamp vs the goblin camp stand in stark contrast with each other as you move through them. However, whereas DOS2 bulges at Act 2 (with Act 1 acting more as an extended prologue, for what problems that has) and then tapers into the ending, BG3 has sort of an hourglass shape to its content: act 1 (part 1) has quite a bit, the creche, grymforge, and Act 2 are monotone without many quests, and act 3 is massive. This leads the game to taper to a point with the Act 2 boss fight then expand and drag onwards through the back ~third of the game.

I've seen quite a few critiques in the past of Arx in DOS2 for being too small and not really feeling like a city, and Larian certainly seemed to take that to heart with what parts of Baldurs Gate they did get the represent. However, in doing so they missed a significant structural point that the relatively small Arx map achieved: it didn't interrupt the momentum of the game.

Arx basically has 4 main quests - Adrahmalik, Queen Justinia, the Lizard Consulate, and Lord Kemm - to knock out before you head for the Crypt of Lucian and finish the game. 3/4 of those are directly tied to a companion's quest (Lohse, Beast, and Red Prince). The act is entirely about tying up a few loose ends from Act 2 that weren't resolved in Act 3 (typically with a single fight), and as such it gives the game a much cleaner pace as it narrows in for the ending - you don't have much else to do here anyways.

Baldur's Gate, meanwhile, is massive and sprawling, with lots of side quests to resolve (if you can be bothered) and even some new quests popping up. It's good for portraying a city, but it absolutely kills the game's momentum, especially as the last two levels (which you'll knock out rather quickly) don't meaningful add much to prioritize certain encounters over others outside of narrative reasons - if anything its mostly about when you want certain equipment.

(Arx also stagnates in levels, but its small amount of content makes it less noticeable).

BG3's ending sequence exacerbates this further; while yes it has four fights between taking the boat & ending the game (versus DOS2's 2 + puzzle, one of which is a throwaway gimmick encounter), the first is a throwaway intellect devourer fight (that I highly recommend just skipping with some spells) and the second is the slowest damn fight in the game because there are too many enemies (and if you make the mistake of summoning allies, it's even slower!)

I like the expansiveness of the city, but it needed to take up more of the middle of the game rather than the end.

For BG3, that could have meant trimming Act 2 down (it tends to overstay its welcome anyways) and/or having the upper city available as Act 4 but heavily trimmed down (flaming fist securing the city and what not) with just the orin, gortash, raphael, and annals of karthus (/maybe Nightsong) quests to deal with.

For Larian's next game, I hope we get to see their next attempt at a city take up the meaty middle of the game.

[lunarbard]

I've been running WHFRP 2nd edition for the first time, and we just hit our first combat last night.

Even with the whiff factor of new adventurers and a few pains figuring out how things worked, that was easily the most fluid combat I've had the pleasure to run. We knocked out something like 10-12ish rounds of combat in about 40 minutes (with a good portion of that just from learning the rules & hit location + critical hit tables), and the players reported loving the base mechanical choices available to them.

What really surprised me though was how evocative the specific critical hits were when discussing this with a friend. In the final rounds of the fight, the three PCs surrounded the skaven leader and pummeled him - the zealot's flail crushed his arm and his sword fell to the ground (Arm, critical effect 4), then the elven scribe scraped his scalp with her sword and blinded him with his own blood (Head, critical effect 3). He tried to run for it, only for the zealot to catch him again with a brutal flail swing that crushed him into the ground (Torso, critical effect 10 "Killed in spectacular and gore-drenched fashion).

My two main complaints are just that cover is entirely vague (I couldn't find any recommended numbers or reference for it other than the suggestion that "cover should matter") and it's lack of rules for enemy morale.

One of the players had procured a bow for their character and felt that ranged attacks were underpowered (especially with a -20 penalty for firing into melee), but, as we ended up discussing, they're primarily familiar with combat as represented in 5th edition D&D where ranged attacks are significantly lacking in restrictions. I like how the rules for ranged attacks work since they feel more like having them is a tool that you can use to great effect if you employ them well.

I'm looking forward to finishing the adventure and, if the group is up for it, potentially continuing with the system into maybe a short campaign.

[lunarbard]

There's also quite a bit going on with bodily autonomy & corporate ownership/control of personhood in TPS that I should probably dedicate some time to actually writing up in a proper analysis somewhere. However, I feel a critical addendum on the "good" vault hunters in the game is looking at what stage they're all in in regards to being owned by a corporation.

Claptrap was literally made by Hyperion and wholly owned by them, subject to bodily & mental modification regardless of his own desires. The claptrap units through out the game are all ridiculed for incompetence, but that comes from the fact that - unlike nearly every other hyperion bot - claptraps have a clear sense of free will and sentience. Claptraps aren't even afforded the same respect in death - they're "just property," so they're discarded - even the entire remainder of their kind - with little to no recourse or care. Claptrap may have survived Hyperion, but by his very existence he'll never really be free of them.

Athena is trying to find a new life after Atlas effectively owned her for her entire life - they're all she's ever known heading into TPS, and in the game she progresses away from that bound service first into choosing to work for a corporation again and then to actually living according to her own desires & decisions. She tries to just work under Jack with the limited freedom in dictating a few boundaries ("I'm not torturing anyone for you, Jack,") but it takes her experiences in the Eye of Helios & the vault to make the choice and step out from the corporate shadow. She gets to be free; the only thing Atlas or Hyperion saddled her with was trauma and guilt.

Timothy is not so lucky; to the rest of the world he no longer exists (I must give credit to BL3; the casino DLC does mention this, even if it doesn't really engage with it well). To get out of his student loans (which, given dystopias riffing on modern failings, likely would have haunted him his entirely life), he gave up his identity and became a body double for life because the capitalist hell scape needs people like Timothy to be implicitly lesser for its hierarchy to function. Jack is "important" enough to see someone's life erased years before a bullet meant for him finds them instead. Like claptrap, he will never really be free of Jack, even after the bastard dies on Pandora. But he got to know a life before Hyperion claimed it, and that may haunt him for the rest of his days in the handsome mask.

Hi, your borderlands post is super interesting! I got into Borderlands 2 through a friend years ago, but the themes of corpo greed really stuck with me enough to revisit the series even now. Curious, what are your thoughts on the presequel?

I don't have the pre-sequel as memorized as BL2 unfortunately, mainly due to some gameplay issues (side quests being near-required and overall annoying, some of the most nightmarish enemies in the series) I've only really seen Athena's, Nisha's, and Willhelm's responses throughout the campaign. This is particularly an issue for TPS since (unlike 3), each vault hunter's unique responses represent their perspective and therefore build on the game's themes.

While the game has its issues, it feels like Anthony Burch (here using Burch as a synecdoche for the writing team as he was the lead writer for BL2 & TPS) was working through an idea of what the series was about when writing it, and it is an absolute shame we never got to see a BL3 following that line of thinking (in fact BL3 didn't pay any attention to TPS and seems to have read a misinformed spark notes summary).

The pre-sequel's portrayal of jack highlights how not every corporate leader in the universe is the kind of villain to scoop out somebody's eyes with a spoon and laugh when telling the story, but they're still awful people. When you meet him, Jack's already pretty bad: he's already locked up his daughter and turned her into a secret weapon and he treats those he has power over like shit (unless he thinks they're useful or "cool" enough). He still thinks of himself as a hero, however, and over the course of the game you watch him make decisions he deems necessary and heroic that are simple cruelties to those who trusted him. I think his interaction with the Meriff is rather telling here: Jack initially lets him live because it's part of his heroic script, then gets angry not really because the man betrayed him, but because it made him abandon his script.

Zarpedon is a fantastic anti-villain, basically a complete inverse of Handsome Jack in BL2. She has set herself to a terrible purpose in hopes of saving the universe from corporate greed, recognizing (rightly) that the moment any of the corporations learned about the vault of the watcher they would never leave it alone. The game basically smacks you over the head at various points about how much she cares about other people, and therefore her decision to destroy Elpis - at the cost of everyone on it - was actually a painful decision for her. She doesn't betray her allies, and doesn't even try to directly interfere with the vault hunters. Instead, she mainly just aids and/or warns people they were trying to kill anyways. Easily her best line is at the end of an early side quest to pay last respects to one of her fallen soldiers she couldn't recover: "You will not have my mercy, but you do have my respect."

They also contrast her with Jack when he protests that she's killing innocent people, she agrees, and he decides she's lost her mind. Jack's death toll in BL2 is likely far more than what Zarpedon would have wrought destroying Elpis, but it all works in his mind since he already decided those people weren't "innocent." Accepting the need to cause harm to someone for a greater good without refusing their humanity is an alien concept to him; he must make everything he does sound morally correct in his head.

I also like how the game explores the identities of what kinds of people serve the corporations with each of the vault hunters. You have the three who enjoy the status quo: Nisha enjoys cruelty in the name of justice, Willhelm is a merc with no morals, and Aurelia got her wealth from her family exploiting people. Then there's Claptrap, who's literally owned by the Hyperion corporation and gets modified without much question of his will (and then scrapped and dumped by Jack, alongside all of his product line). Timothy became one of Jack's body doubles to pay off his student loans, employment that permanently changes his appearance and labels him disposable. Athena needed money, but she also needed a purpose after losing the only one she had known as an Atlas assassin.

Of course, as the narrator, we get a lot more insight into Athena's perspective as one of the many people in this universe searching for a new meaning to their life and their potential. Given the nature of the universe in Borderlands, most people likely end up in the corporate machine because there aren't other evident options. Many of them would have their lives so defined by their role in the corporation, wherever that is, that when they are betrayed or discarded by that corporation they won't know where else to go. Maybe they'll have some vengeance on their mind, maybe they'll just ply their trade wherever they can to keep living, but it's hard to move on from that sort of world-shattering experience for a purpose other than survival. Athena is one of the few with the benefit of training and opportunity to survive that betrayal and find a new purpose. At the beginning of the pre-sequel she took on Jack's offer mainly since she needed money, but I think that line she singles out - "Come to the moon, hunt a vault, be a hero" - clues into how she still susceptible to some of the same concepts of heroism that Jack's obsessed with. By the end of the game she leaves that mindset behind and tries to find a new life with Janey Springs, but as we glimpse in Tales from the Borderlands, the life the two of them try to find - just avoiding all the problems with corporations and vaults - isn't sustainable.

Unfortunately, we never got the last part of that arc because BL3 is a trash fire that ironically cares more about its corporations and guns than its characters, but Athena's natural next step after TPS and Tales would be to listen to her conscience and join the cause of protecting people from corporate greed and its consequences.

[lunarbard]

Hi, your borderlands post is super interesting! I got into Borderlands 2 through a friend years ago, but the themes of corpo greed really stuck with me enough to revisit the series even now. Curious, what are your thoughts on the presequel?

I don't have the pre-sequel as memorized as BL2 unfortunately, mainly due to some gameplay issues (side quests being near-required and overall annoying, some of the most nightmarish enemies in the series) I've only really seen Athena's, Nisha's, and Willhelm's responses throughout the campaign. This is particularly an issue for TPS since (unlike 3), each vault hunter's unique responses represent their perspective and therefore build on the game's themes.

While the game has its issues, it feels like Anthony Burch (here using Burch as a synecdoche for the writing team as he was the lead writer for BL2 & TPS) was working through an idea of what the series was about when writing it, and it is an absolute shame we never got to see a BL3 following that line of thinking (in fact BL3 didn't pay any attention to TPS and seems to have read a misinformed spark notes summary).

The pre-sequel's portrayal of jack highlights how not every corporate leader in the universe is the kind of villain to scoop out somebody's eyes with a spoon and laugh when telling the story, but they're still awful people. When you meet him, Jack's already pretty bad: he's already locked up his daughter and turned her into a secret weapon and he treats those he has power over like shit (unless he thinks they're useful or "cool" enough). He still thinks of himself as a hero, however, and over the course of the game you watch him make decisions he deems necessary and heroic that are simple cruelties to those who trusted him. I think his interaction with the Meriff is rather telling here: Jack initially lets him live because it's part of his heroic script, then gets angry not really because the man betrayed him, but because it made him abandon his script.

Zarpedon is a fantastic anti-villain, basically a complete inverse of Handsome Jack in BL2. She has set herself to a terrible purpose in hopes of saving the universe from corporate greed, recognizing (rightly) that the moment any of the corporations learned about the vault of the watcher they would never leave it alone. The game basically smacks you over the head at various points about how much she cares about other people, and therefore her decision to destroy Elpis - at the cost of everyone on it - was actually a painful decision for her. She doesn't betray her allies, and doesn't even try to directly interfere with the vault hunters. Instead, she mainly just aids and/or warns people they were trying to kill anyways. Easily her best line is at the end of an early side quest to pay last respects to one of her fallen soldiers she couldn't recover: "You will not have my mercy, but you do have my respect."

They also contrast her with Jack when he protests that she's killing innocent people, she agrees, and he decides she's lost her mind. Jack's death toll in BL2 is likely far more than what Zarpedon would have wrought destroying Elpis, but it all works in his mind since he already decided those people weren't "innocent." Accepting the need to cause harm to someone for a greater good without refusing their humanity is an alien concept to him; he must make everything he does sound morally correct in his head.

I also like how the game explores the identities of what kinds of people serve the corporations with each of the vault hunters. You have the three who enjoy the status quo: Nisha enjoys cruelty in the name of justice, Willhelm is a merc with no morals, and Aurelia got her wealth from her family exploiting people. Then there's Claptrap, who's literally owned by the Hyperion corporation and gets modified without much question of his will (and then scrapped and dumped by Jack, alongside all of his product line). Timothy became one of Jack's body doubles to pay off his student loans, employment that permanently changes his appearance and labels him disposable. Athena needed money, but she also needed a purpose after losing the only one she had known as an Atlas assassin.

Of course, as the narrator, we get a lot more insight into Athena's perspective as one of the many people in this universe searching for a new meaning to their life and their potential. Given the nature of the universe in Borderlands, most people likely end up in the corporate machine because there aren't other evident options. Many of them would have their lives so defined by their role in the corporation, wherever that is, that when they are betrayed or discarded by that corporation they won't know where else to go. Maybe they'll have some vengeance on their mind, maybe they'll just ply their trade wherever they can to keep living, but it's hard to move on from that sort of world-shattering experience for a purpose other than survival. Athena is one of the few with the benefit of training and opportunity to survive that betrayal and find a new purpose. At the beginning of the pre-sequel she took on Jack's offer mainly since she needed money, but I think that line she singles out - "Come to the moon, hunt a vault, be a hero" - clues into how she still susceptible to some of the same concepts of heroism that Jack's obsessed with. By the end of the game she leaves that mindset behind and tries to find a new life with Janey Springs, but as we glimpse in Tales from the Borderlands, the life the two of them try to find - just avoiding all the problems with corporations and vaults - isn't sustainable.

Unfortunately, we never got the last part of that arc because BL3 is a trash fire that ironically cares more about its corporations and guns than its characters, but Athena's natural next step after TPS and Tales would be to listen to her conscience and join the cause of protecting people from corporate greed and its consequences.

[lunarbard]

I legitimately think that the first three borderlands (as in 1, 2, & TPS) are good dystopian satire, despite their questionable writing at times. A game/series that took itself more seriously could highlight this better, but Borderlands would lose a lot of its edge if it did.

Handsome Jack isn't just some charismatic villain that garnered a lot of affection from players by some fluke, but rather an excellent personification of the dystopian elements of Borderlands' background setting that make it engaging.

If you look at Borderlands 1, for all its effective lack of plot, the game is about these megacorporation's disregard for the human lives they ruin and their self-defeating obsession with attaining power and control (as seen with Commandant Steele's death). Borderlands 2 took that premise and swapped out the corporate antagonist, but it's not just a new coat of paint/roster of enemies: the motivations change while following similar themes as implied in BL1, now personified in Jack.

In BL1, the Atlas Corporation believes it owns Pandora, and everything (and everyone that primarily DAHL brought), on it is unrealized property they have free claim over. They believe the vault and its contents are owed to them, and it falls on the vault hunters showing up in the nick of time to remedy the potential resulting calamity.

Handsome Jack, meanwhile, has that similar belief that Pandora is "his," just that it's his to "save." He's Hyperion's current CEO because he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he believes he is owed, one of which is respect as a hero of the people. The people he hates the most are those who deny or deprive him of those things: see his treatment of his daughter, after "what she did to her mother." His ego and disregard for the humanity of basically anyone else, treating them as a character in his story to be stepped on and/or discarded reflects an attitude of the megacorporations that makes the backgrounds of Borderlands so dystopian. I 100% believe that the system that makes a person like Handsome Jack could have produced nearly anyone in a similar mold.

Meanwhile, the Borderlands 1 vault hunters in 2 stand in stark contrast to not just Handsome Jack/Hyperion but also DAHL. Unlike Jack, they don't care about the aesthetics of heroism; they're just trying to protect as many people as they reasonably can from the horrors of Pandora. Unlike DAHL, they didn't abandon the planet and the survivors still there when the thing that brought them in the first place didn't pan out.

I think there's also something to the crude city of Sanctuary supporting plenty of residents versus the pristine city of Opportunity that's almost completely vacant of anything except instruments of war.

Of course, Jack's fall is thematically different from Atlas. Atlas gets defeated when it's claimed "property" slaughters the military sent to claim it; Jack gets defeated by watching his notions of heroism fall apart as the vault hunters cut down the calamity he summoned to "save" Pandora.

Then you get to Borderlands 3, which understood nothing but the aesthetic of the preceding series.

The only difference between the corporations you ally with and those you fight is the former have some friendly franchise blorbos (Rhys, Zer0, and Hammerlock). The corporations aren't fundamentally flawed factions that drive the terrible conditions of the setting for their lust for profit, they're just sometimes headed by someone evil and/or incompetent who maybe wants a merger (The "merger war" between Atlas and Maliwan is a good idea in theory, but it's ruined by going "this one is good" rather than focusing on helping those caught in the crossfire).

Meanwhile, the twins don't present a coherent threat as an element of Borderlands' underlying dystopia. They're just bad guys with lore things (derogatory) and their streamer gimmick. What I think is most insulting about them, though, is that they're just an excuse to use bandits everywhere with no though for an underlying point. The bandits of Pandora are the people DAHL left behind on that desolate rock of a planet, many of whom never wanted to be there in the first place. The twins could have shed some light on how receptive the bandits are to promises of salvation by whatever means because they have no hope otherwise.

I feel like a game that was trying to be more thematically coherent with previous entries would have flipped the villain script: the twins should have been misguided/tragic figures actively striving for a new, redeemed life for Pandora, while their corporate allies use them up and discard them.

[lunarbard]

Despite the game being on hiatus for a few months (replaced with Mothership adventures & Root nights in the interim), I've been thinking about my group's 3.5-year D&D campaign as I've been working on my current ttrpg project.

Specifically, I've been thinking about how that campaign has gotten into the psychology of that adventurer archetype of character (in this case particularly leaning towards revolutionaries).

One character feels like the party went of-course and just wants to rescue their mentor & retire, with or without the party.

Another figures the group's done enough for what they wanted (ensuring the safety of their family) and is ready to retire at a moment's notice.

One is going along with it but is ready to retire whenever things calm down.

One can't stand the thought of just lying down while there are others she can help, even at the potential cost of forfeiting her family.

My ttrpg project is built around an expected episodic mission/heist/adventure structure; the crew of vagabonds decide on a mission (via personal incentive or contract), prepares, executes the mission, then returns to their haven for a respite. There's no levels; progression is almost entirely gear & achievement oriented.

Renown, a small form of progression that increases as you complete missions & make notable impacts on the world. Your renown contributes to the group's maximum Moxie, a resource anyone in the crew can use to influence dice rolls.

A Vagabond's saga is mostly just a notes section for their Foes, Exploits, Allies, Treasures, and Scars. Most of these are just to have a nice record on the character sheet of their adventures. Scars have a mechanical effect; whenever you take a wound, you mark the cause; when the wound heals, you record it as a scar, and get +1 to saves against related harm. This part is inspired by Goblin Punch's "Legendarium" post.

Quests track a vagabond's personal goals. Motivating quests answer the question of "why is this character living this life of danger instead of trying to just find some peace elsewhere?"

Last of all is retirement and woe. Certain experiences increase a vagabond's woe (losing an ally to death or retirement, every fifth scar, etc). If a vagabond doesn't have a motivating quest, then when they get a respite they need to roll 2d6; if the result is less than or equal to their woe, the vagabond is inclined to retire. You as a player can choose to keep the vagabond going for "One Last Job," but they're doomed until they do retire (which interacts with a seperate Luck mechanic). This is inspired by Goblin Punch's "Death, Trauma, and Retirement" post. Of course, a player can always choose for their vagabond to retire or leave the crew for other reasons.

Since there's little mechanical progression from your actual character sheet, the hope is to encourage players to engage more with the psychology of their characters and let them move on when its personally fitting. Ideally this will also lend itself towards an anthology for the crew as members join and leave at disparate times, building a narrative that's larger than the story of an individual vagabond.

[lunarbard]

I don't think tactical ttrpgs work.

They function as games, they can be enjoyable, but I have yet to see a ttrpg that delivers a tactical experience without a good bit of smoke and mirrors.

For a long time I thought that crpgs could just deliver the tactical expectations of a ttrpg better since they could crank up the difficulty and mechanically highlight more options to actually provide a challenge. But since I've gotten into skirmish wargames, it's dawned on me that what ttrpgs really lack is the real potential for failure that's effectively required to make tactical gameplay rewarding.

In a tactical ttrpg where each player pilots a single character at a time, failure by death can be catastrophic for player's engagement - if not for the entire table in the case of a TPK situation.

A lot of advice & design for tactical ttrpgs try to fix this by emphasizing secondary objectives - "free the captives," "stop the ritual," etc - but the last thing a player can stake regardless is their character's life. If an NPC will die unless the character intervenes, character death is what the player gambles. Some games try to fix this by removing death from the equation, but whether you just eject from your mech or get raised from the dead later, it removes that final stake a player can gamble with.

CRPGs can manage that fail state by giving you save games you can reload from and/or multiple characters to control. If you fail to play well enough, you might need to reload and try again with a new strategy, or you might need to say goodbye to a party member you've grown attached to. In either case, failure isn't a complete fail state - you can in some way keep playing and adapt to the situation.

A skirmish wargame manages this by limiting the lasting impact of the fail state. You're controlling a whole warband/gang/squad and the effects only last for this match or short campaign you're playing. When you gamble a unit's life, intentionally or by blunder, it's main real impact is on your ability to affect the current game, not in a long-lasting narrative or engagement sense. (Tactical board games fall in a similar category)

The majority of ttrpgs - and expected ttrpg experiences - can't deliver those same benefits. Their tactical challenge doesn't work in practice.

However, that isn't to say that ttrpgs with combat systems don't work. What a ttrpg with weapons, combat, and risk of death can deliver better than a CRPG or board game (or matched play skirmish wargame) is improvisation and scheming. Allowing & implicitly encouraging the players to engage with the world to gain the absolute upper hand before the game's combat procedure even properly begins is a strategic level that those other game forms can barely replicate without far more work. This also blends more easily with the rest of the game - the party setting up and executing an ambush is congruent with crossing a hazardous pit or getting into a high-profile social event: the party investigates, then plans, and then employs the game's mechanics in their execution. The combat just gets a bit more detail to its precise execution since it defines a section of the game where a PC is most likely to die.

[lunarbard]

A lot of "how to help the GM as a player" advice seems to come down to some amalgam of "take story hooks & don't be selfish when making a character," which is sort of more some basic gaming etiquette than actually taking on a helpful role.

I have been properly GMing my main group for six years now (though I've often assumed a similar role since my childhood, just without a proper ruleset) and am a player at another table with a campaign going on three years now. Knowing what issues I encountered when I GMed, I decided after a bit to take a more active role in the group and hopefully ease some of the inherent stress of running the game.

With that in mind, here are some things I do for my group as a player that are a general help for our GM & the table in general:

Take good notes & share them. I understand different people have different matters of notes & attention, but notetaking is just a basic skill you can bring to a table to the benefit of yourself, your fellow players, and the GM. The more notetakers at the table, the less likely information will fall down the cracks. I'm one of two notetakers in my second group, and between our two different styles it's typically easy to double check an event from real years prior in the campaign. The first ~15 sessions before we started taking proper notes? Lost to time, fuzzy memory, and context-free notebook lines in the single digits per session.

State your Plans. This applies to a lot of things, but basically boils down to "communicate with your GM." Give your GM a heads up if you have a course of action in mind for your next session (like wanting to visit a specific shop to get some new gear, wanting to investigate a haunted house, chasing down a specific lead in a mystery, etc).

Wrangle Your Fellow Players. GMing can be exhausting needing to run the game, manage the social group, and throwing time at prep that can get chucked down the drain. Again, each group & their needs & styles will be different, but you can ease some of this just by being a bit mindful. If scheduling's a problem, take the initiative on sorting out prime session time with everyone. Engage your fellow players openly on their plans heading into future sessions (and remember to State your Plans for the GM so they can focus their time where it will be of the most use). If your group can get a bit rowdy and/or the GM has trouble getting everyone's attention, give them a hand in returning the group to the game.

Provide Information as Necessary. This will entirely differ depending on group and game, but sometimes the GM might need help tracking a bit of information or looking up a rule (or, if you have good notes, looking up an NPC name or similar past encounter the group has had). GMing can be hectic what with managing the entire game beyond the party in many systems. You can respectfully bring up a forgotten mechanic or the text of a rule (especially if the GM asks for it). Importantly, strive to act as an impartial reminder of information and rules if you aim to perform this facet; you are arguing not to better your case, but to ease some load from the GM. A corollary to this that shouldn't need to be said, but sometimes does: strive to understand the game & how you interact with it. For D&D likes, this means "know your abilities & their functions; read your spells." If something's vague or unclear, ask your GM before or outside of game how they understand it (not that they're necessarily correct, but that you'll be on the same page).

Perhaps most importantly though: take an opportunity to GM if you can. A prime opportunity is if a portion of the group will miss a week or the GM is a bit burned out (or can't run due to not having prep time for a period of time), you can volunteer to run a one-shot or short side campaign until everything's settled. GMing may seem spooky at times, but it can easily be a ton of fun once you get into the vibe of it. Even if you don't enjoy it, taking some time to GM for yourself can give you excellent insights on how to be a better player from the other side of the screen.

[lunarbard]

The Purpose of Fudging Dice

When you hand action resolution over to the dice in a ttrpg, you are not asking for the grace of fate but rather the whims of lady luck. The dice are not dramatic; they are impartial to the limit of cruelty Therefore, your chosen ttrpg system should engage with the dice according to your desire for impartiality.

If you want a controllable story, do not roll dice. There are systems that minimize the impact of dice or don't use them altogether, as well as just other forms of collaborative storytelling.

What dice can contribute to a ttrpg is an emergent story: the unexpected highs and lows that come from the noise of chaos they represent. So rely on them as much as you would rely on uncertainty, and stack the odds in your favor to avoid their rule when you can. If you throw yourself to the dice, expect no mercy in their judgement.

If you are tempted to fudge the dice "for a better story," then you must reconsider why you pretend to live under their tyranny. As a GM, any time you call for a roll you must ask yourself if you are equally willing to run with success and failure. If not, then adjudicate the results as the informed and partial arbiter you are meant to be.

[lunarbard]

I think Metroid Dread's Super Missile is the worst upgrade in the 2D series.

The Super Missile in metroid games is typically a separate weapon from normal missiles, accessed via weapon select in Zero Mission, AM2R & Samus Returns, and Super Metroid, or via charge beam combo in the Prime games. In all games it functions as a hard key (it opens locks it's specifically designed to bypass), and in the mentioned 2D games it's a super weapon with far more limited ammo than normal missiles. Prime's super missile is primarily useful in combat for single-shot burst damage, especially against mobile targets, versus the barrage you'd normally use in a 2D game.

The super missile in those 2D games is a rather rewarding upgrade to collect expansions for, since with enough of them you can dispatch a boss with minimal worry. It's basically the epitome of Metroid's self-selecting difficulty, where the more you collect the easier the end game gets.

Fusion & Dread, however, both opt for super missiles as just "upgrades" to basic missiles, so they don't have a separate ammo count. This effectively means that the developers don't need to account for how many normal missiles a given boss or enemy will take to kill, so they mainly just function as hard keys.

Despite their similar function, however, Dread's super missiles just feel superfluous, while Fusion's don't. Some of that comes down to design, some of it to the context the upgrade gets collected in:

There are basically no super missile doors in the game. There's no point prior to getting the upgrade that you see a green door and resolve to come back with super missiles, except for the door that forces you to head in their direction in the first place.

Immediately following the super missiles in the normal route, all enemies in the world get upgraded and account for you having super missiles.

The game just sort of shoves you in the direction of the upgrade with a bunch of points of no returns.

If you grab the super missiles early, they'll benefit you for one boss before you're back on track

Fusion, despite its super missile serving a similar point (and not having an equivalent sequence break as far as I'm aware), feels better because of the narrative surrounding it.

In Fusion the computer provides the super missile to Samus as a counter measure to the X taking on more resilient forms to seal off areas. It's more of a narrative beat than an upgrade (especially with the BOX fight following it), similar to the diffusion missiles in the same game.

How effective that narrative element is will vary from player to player, but Dread simply lacks it while trying to not-too-subtly shove you after an upgrade without explicitly telling you to grab it.

Honestly, Dread could probably have cut the super missile and funneled Samus directly into Elun without it and nobody would have batted an eye (and it would make the constant point-of-no-returns make a bit more sense).

Alternatively, the super missile could have been given more weight and put as a "reward" for Samus in a chozo combat shrine in Ghavoran or something to that effect. Maybe have a Mawkin Torizo as a mini-boss there (with Samus defeating it being the moment that Raven Beak decides to push her to Elun and unleash the X, deeming her "strong enough" to need them to awaken her Metroid DNA further now).

[lunarbard]

So my group finally ended up playing a major combat encounter since I decided to switch us to side-based combat resolution, and it's just better in basically every way from the initiative style of modern D&D.

Easily the biggest benefit is it immediately got the party thinking more as a team than just trying to maximize their individual turns. The players were discussing how they should distribute their focus to deal with major threats efficiently and aid each other, like the paladin deciding to deal with the demons next to the ranger so they could get a clearer shot on the enemy mage.

It also removed a lot of the lull of standard RAW initiative, since if someone needed time to think about their turn, I could easily shift the focus to another player and come back to the first player when they were ready.

There was a bit of swinginess - namely in the first round when the fighter tried to brace against the entire first wave of enemy soldiers, forgot about the benefit the Eternal Elite would get against an isolated enemy, and nearly fell in one turn, or when the party dealt with the Cerebic Hellhound before it dealt any damage to them (but not before it could summon some demons). However, nothing broke, and when the party finally broke through & routed the enemy, they reported enjoying it a fair bit more than our previous style of combat (and lamenting the enemy mage who had fled the field with some of his force, to fight again another day).

This also coincided with the first time the party's used healing potions since we changed how they work. I run drinking a potion as a BA for 5e, and decided to scrap the normal dice of healing potions for just a %hp restoration. So Lesser healing potions restore 1/4 of max hp, greaters restore 1/2, and superiors restore the entirety of a creature's hp. Bit simpler and worked well in practice.

[lunarbard]

I realize this is influenced by it being one of my favorite media series, but I have a firm belief that most Metroid games have a lot of design elements to look to for inspiration when designing an adventure-oriented ttrpg campaign, especially one with anything resembling a dungeon in structure.

While scenario design that facilitates exploration is vital for those types of games, I also think that Metroid has another gameplay element in the upgrades for some of its games that offers an avenue of solution to a problem in specifically D&D 5e campaigns: beam stacking.

Metroid: Zero Mission & Super Metroid especially are generally designed in such a way that once you get a strong enough beam upgrade (especially the plasma beam), they make back tracking easier because you can just sprint down a hallway firing away and you'll deal with any enemies before they can hurt you. It makes backtracking easier & rewarding.

AM2R easily has the best take on this with how it gives you the ice beam last and made it the super weapon of the game for clearing out corridors as you move about. Prime 3 is a close 2nd with how the x-ray visor + nova beam explicitly let you one-shot certain enemies.

Metroid Dread is the antithesis of this, since the main damage upgrades you get for your arm cannon are immediately followed by every enemy in the environment getting buffed. Dread also has the problem of sucking to backtrack in since enemies are designed to be killed by countering (requiring you to have to wait to bait out their counter-able attack), rather than just the "run down with your arm cannon pointing up and kill everything" style of a game like ZM. (I enjoy Dread, but Mercury Steam seems to really struggle with the exploration element of Metroid).

Before we apply this to D&D though, a disclaimer: I do not hold any of my encounters or monsters as precious; I do not hang my sessions on a single combat for how "cool" I think it will be. Combat is just one procedure for overcoming an obstacle, and a risky one at that; it is more often than not the fail state of the party's primary plan going awry.

In a lot of D&D games & off shoots, the game incentivizes a power treadmill as players go from killing goblins at level 1 to dragons at level 10. Throw those same goblins at a level 10 5e party though, and your barbarians, fighters, rangers, and paladins will feel like shit as in 10 levels, while their wizard friend can fireball a horde 8 times before needing a back up plan, they have barely doubled in their effective ability to reduce the enemy's numbers. Throw something bigger, like a bugbear, and it might only be an improvement to 2 turns instead of 3 needed to slay it.

So, beam stacking: as the party explores the world, they can improve their weapons (and implements) to more effectively deal with previously troublesome enemies. Vital to this element is that foes are components of a recurring faction, rather than one-off fights. This has no effect if the party never fights the same type of foe and so never sees how much more effective they are against them.

For my current campaign, the general structure I have in place is that magic weapon enhancement ranges from +1 to +5. At each even number (+2, +4) the weapon gains an additional die of damage (so a +2 mace deals 2d6 damage, instead of 1d6). The heroes' weapons will also improve when they accomplish legendary deeds, increasing the renown of the tools they carry (and thus the power of those tools).

A weapon can bind a number of additional special properties up to 1 + its enhancement bonus. Properties can be granted by obscure magic or by an arcane smith forging special materials into the weapon.

Monsters have a lot of tags - see an Eternal Ogre, which is a mutant brute in the army of demon-magic soldiers in this campaign:

fiendish & monstrous apply for a ranger's favored foe, while the miasmic and metamorph tags indicate its type for vulnerabilities.

Metamorph creatures are those who have been wholly mutated by magic. Weapons infused with lunarium are twice as effective against them.

Miasmic foes are those who have been infused with or made of dark energy, such as demons & undead. Radiant damage is twice as effective against them, and weapons infused with Celestine are thrice as effective against them (the radiant component a paladin's smite with a celestine weapon would deal x4 of its normal damage).

The party has been skirmishing with eternals a fair bit in the area they're currently solving, and after fighting some eternals, including an ogre, they managed to get some of their weapons infused with lunarium. The next time they faced eternals, they required fewer resources to deal with the ogres (which was good, since they needed those resources to deal with the hellhounds & Eternal Elites in the fray).

Eternal soldiers are the occupying force of the dark lord in this campaign, so the party will be dealing with the many soldiers of their ranks throughout the campaign. As the heroes become legends and find ancient magic & materials to improve their equipment, they'll have a progressively easier time cleaving through the forces of evil.

[lunarbard]

Minor spoilers for Chapter 1 of Rogue Trader (currently on Chapter 2), as well as Baldur's Gate 3's ending.

Baldur's Gate 3 gave me a terrible save scumming habit. For all Larian talks about "failing being fun," the learned experience is "failing locks out content (whether quests or loot) and/or leads to combat in an awful position." Or a permanent debuff (I reclassed lae'zel to a wizard in my first playthrough and promptly learned that was a mistake). Or even just taking the wrong dialogue option veering in the wrong direction.

I've kept the habit of quicksaving before major decisions in Rogue Trader, but I have yet to reload a save outside of a tactical blunder (not prioritizing the right targets, downing an ally by overpenetrating an enemy, etc).

I've also managed to not fail many checks thanks to the game using the highest skill rating in your party for a given task (even in cases where it may not necessarily make sense, but I'm fine with it).

There are two more important parts to the difference in my experience though, I think - where/how skill tests are employed in dialogue and how consequences are telegraphed.

Baldur's Gate 3 dialogues generally feel gated behind a swamp of excessive rolls just to get to anything resembling a choice. And typically your "choice" is just a way to minimize the bullshit the game throws at you if you succeed on a die roll. Where the writers try to shove anything like a moral choice into the game, they force the player to pick between choices that are shitty not by the nature of the situation but the artifice of the writers. I'm specifically thinking of Astarion's quest's decision point of "you need to immediately use the vampire lord's staff right now, you can't talk to anybody, and everyone complains about your decision no matter what." Or the fucking awful strongarm into making someone undergo ceremorphosis before the final stretch (or jump through a bunch of hoops with dialogue and sacrifice Gale). "Decisions" that just make you curse the devs & writers instead of engaging with the world.

I'm still just working my way through Chapter 2 of Rogue Trader, but that game has already provided so many moments where I have to really debate with myself about the best course of action morally. The ending of Chapter 1 and the decision on Rykard Minoris had me stuck for a good hour trying to decide the fate of unnamed people on the planet and I loved it in a way because the game established the stakes in the world and left me to choose.

A large part of what makes the decisions work though is that when you make a decision, generally tests will do one of a few things:

Provide more information for your decision.

Make a certain path of argument/dialogue easier

Take a risk for a potentially less compromised path.

I need to actually evaluate my decisions in dialogues for this game and think about who I'm talking to and what people expect of me as a Rogue Trader. The context of the world is well-established, and where you might need more information, your companions will often weigh in - with their own biases to bring into account.

The game doesn't have all the fancy polish and cinematics of BG3 but it has the proper soul I've been hungering for in a CRPG.

[lunarbard]

I just started Chapter 2 of the Rogue Trader CRPG, and so far I feel like this game is a great example of what an "alignment" system can do for a game when structured well. I'm not too versed in 40k, so this game (and some reading I've been doing since starting it) has been my main introduction to its universe outside of knowing generally what space marines look like.

Rogue Trader has three primary "paths" available to the player: dogmatism, heresy, and iconoclast.

Dogmatism is about order, discipline, and adherence to codes & traditions. Authority is absolute, and punishment swift (several Dogmatic dialogue options are just ordering someone executed for stepping out of line).

Iconoclast is about freedom, compassion, & human life. It's about forgiving people for their faults & weaknesses; its dialogue options are the most heroic of the game.

Heresy is about embracing the warp, and all the cruelty included. Most of its dialogue options are just reveling in chaos & suffering (and I believe joining the standard antagonist if you go that route); pretty 1-dimensional evil.

What makes Heresy work in this game (where the generic "evil" options in BG3 fail) is that its juxtaposed by these two philosophies to surviving in this doomed universe (and you can actually join the villains & there's an argument for it of complete self-preservation by just trying to become a powerful force of chaos instead of wearing yourself down fighting it).

The real philosophical conflict of Rogue Trader is Dogmatism versus Iconoclast. They're about what you're willing to risk and sacrifice in the face of such an immense evil as chaos. Dogmatism will sacrifice/execute anyone necessary to prevent chaos from gaining a crumb of influence. Iconoclast will continue believing in people at the risk of harm to themselves.

And companions have explicit stances on these things too! They weigh in on your decisions and give their viewpoint (and context), and they meaningfully clash.

These three alignments / paths set a frame for the player to engage with the narrative even where the tags don't appear. At least for my playthrough where I immediately knew I wanted to lean Iconoclast, it's provided context for what my Rogue Trader is striving against. When dialogue is tagged as Dogmatic, it makes me consider who that choice might sacrifice.

Best of all, due to the nature of 40k, playing Iconoclast feels like a Sisphysian task. Every companion I've met fights you on your decisions, finding them a sign of weakness or a course misbeffiting someone of your rank. Ironically it makes playing a hero actually feel satisfying, because your character must exhibit true conviction and vigilance to tend the dwindling flame of hope in the grim darkness of the future.

[lunarbard]

When Capcom revealed that Monster Hunter Rise was removing hot & cold drinks and automatically tracked monsters, quite a few people got worked up about how they were "removing the hunting from monster hunter." Despite the fact that the drinks were mostly just busywork in new monster hunter, and "tracking" has only ever been running around like a chicken without its head until you either spot & paintball the monster or, in world, find enough glowy tracks the game skips the pretense and just lets you follow it.

I finally got around to playing through Freedom Unite earlier this year with a friend (having started with 4U and played every game P3rd and later), and had a ton of fun with it despite a rather different experience from 5th gen.

That experience fully elucidated that Monster Hunter exists in a sort of tension with itself, between "preparation matters" and "co-op boss battler." Recent games, especially 5th gen, have leaned hard into the latter, especially with the massive boost to player options & monster health to compensate.

Every 4th and 5th gen game has made managing items less important, with automatic farms, item loadouts, and 5th gen's in-quest restock. Power & defense charms/talons are just small speedbumps you're waiting to pick up (Rise tried to make this somewhat interesting by making you constantly starving for funds so being them had an impact), but once you have them you stick them in your inventory and never worry. 4U added item loadouts so you rarely needed to check your inventory; I remember going back to 3U, I hated the lack of item loadouts, and would constantly forget to restock stuff.

Freedom Unite I was checking my box before every quest, and the only times I forgot items were because I wasn't thinking ahead when I did so. You have 24 inventory slots in that game, with no field or gunner pouch. My friend and I started carrying herbs around with us for additional healing, and in high rank added combo books so we could make mega potions without worry. Eventually they became rarely necessary, but it was still an active choice for how we used those inventory slots.

Traps, flash bombs, and tainted meat took up precious inventory space, but, if used well, could make our hunts far more successful. Bombs weren't just a thing we carried around for when a monster went to sleep, but saved for breaking parts like shogun ceanataur claws.

Every fight felt like a ticking clock on our available inventory, and it was riveting. Since monsters generally died without too many hits, we had less of a rush to just do damage like in 5th gen but rather were focusing on surviving while getting in the occasional necessary blow.

4U approaches the feel of the latter element, but inventory doesn't play as large a part. And the health bloat of 5th gen monsters, plus longer tells allowing for more reactive, rather than proactive, play is a completely different feel. Iceborne Fatalis gets the closest to that feel, but that's one fight in a massive game.

5th gen is fantastic to play with friends and just cycle through fights without much worry, and Sunbreak is the most fun I've had as a lance main in the heat of a fight, but there's just that little bit missing to achieve that.

I would love to see 6th gen try to revisit that feeling, but a big part of "preparation matters" is allowing monsters to get locked down with good prep. I remember in 4U with an SnS I could fully lock down a g-rank rathalos for 90% of the fight to help with farming. With sonic & flash bombs getting their capacity & effectiveness reduced (though sunbreak at least made flash bombs always work but provide fewer free hits, which I appreciate) and monsters falling / getting exhausted less, preparation can't really matter as much. And Rise's Endemic Life, "prep" is just running around the map before you run at the monsters; it approaches that feel, but you have the whole map at your disposal, instead of making choices.

I think the game could really make prep matter again by taking Rise's endemic life and instead making equivalents in hunting equipment you bring with you to hunts, in a similar slot to mantles. Provide a few big, punchy options that have specific effectiveness and reward knowing a monster & how to exploit it beyond just when it'll do which attack.

[lunarbard]

It's probably fair to at least have a record somewhere on here of where my particular interests in fantasy, ttrpgs, & fantasy ttrpgs largely stem from. Mainly because I have rather strong opinions on various bits of the hobby that stem from how I was introduced to it.

My dad played AD&D when he was a kid. When I was a kid, the computer room closet had a few boxes full of artifacts from that time, including the core rulebooks and some lead miniatures (several of which my dad & his brothers had casted themselves using other minis to make the molds). I spent many elementary school nights once my homework was done (or forgotten) sitting on a stool behind my dad in that room as he played Temple of Elemental Evil or Baldur's Gate, and when he was done my dad would pull down the boxes and show me some of the stuff he had encountered in the game in those rulebooks.

Shortly before my dad was reassigned to Boston for a few years (while the rest of us stayed put for the school system), he offered to run some D&D for the ~11yo me. I agreed enthusiastically, and he rolled up a party for me: paladin, fighter, ranger, cleric, thief, and wizard. Then we sat down and he started Against the Cult of the Reptile God.

Nothing about the adventure is too important here (other than my irrational love for rangers originating in everyone but my ranger and wizard failing rolls and fleeing from a zombie in the dungeon), but two things my dad said have stuck with me ever since:

At the very beginning, my dad greeted me as the innkeeper, and I asked him what I could say. His response was: "What you say is what your character says."

At one point I got hyper-paranoid about traps. My dad rolled everything (including attack rolls) behind his DM screen, and after I checked a door for traps he rolled and said I saw nothing. I claimed that since he rolled dice, there must be traps. He just said "I roll dice to roll dice."

Some years later I attended a week-long coding summer camp a few years in a row. One of those summers, a bunch of the campers who were staying over multiple weeks had started running a D&D game. Several of the other campers thought that sounded fun, and I, being the only one among them who had anything close to an experience playing D&D, volunteered to run something for them.

Mind you, the mechanics of any edition of D&D had been a complete black box for me by this point.

So I got everyone around the table, someone found a dice app we could all download, people got paper, and I went around and asked people what they wanted their character to be. I took someone's idea and told them some weapons they might have and two or three abilities, like the dwarven berserker had a rage of some kind. Then we just played theater of the mind off of d20 rolls plus some basic stats I don't recall, and had fun with that for the three remaining nights.

I eventually picked up 5th edition, and after some false starts through highschool I found Matt Colville's Running the Game videos in college and started a 5e campaign for my friends. We had far too many people at the start (coming out as trans cut the number to a reasonable amount), the first encounter was a near-tpk, the game was linear as hell, and none of us fully knew what we were doing, but in a year the party hit level 20 (spending 75% of that time above 10th level) and slew an evil god.

It's been four years and several partial campaigns since. I've basically got the rules of 5th edition D&D memorized, and have spent most of my time struggling against them. A mountain of systemic 5e homebrew docs lie in the wake of my attempts to shift the system just a bit to fit what it felt like watching my dad play those old crpgs & playing AD&D with him.

In that time I also joined a second group where I got to be a long-term player, which honed in my opinions on what I want from a system as a player. The biggest impact was tactical combat getting massively demoted in my priority list.

I have no loyalty to any mechanics or editions, only to that rose-tinted experience. As I've had time to really step back and evaluate what I enjoy now and what I chafe against, I really started looking into other options for a solution.

I've browsed a lot of ttrpgs for something that scratches the itch, but most tend to fall on one side or another of gritty heroism, either leaning too far from the heroism or too into narrative mechanics. Although, honestly, attribute functions have been far too much of a factor (in second place: existence of classes/playbooks, inventory systems).

That leads to the two years I've spent tinkering with various ideas for yet another fantasy heartbreaker. I call it a heartbreaker because it's nothing too special, but this game isn't meant to sell to anyone. I'm making it for me, and trying desperately to make it teachable to my friends.