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lowpolynpixelated · 5 months

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Bloodborne PSX One of the best fanworks on the web

Though the PS4 boasted and still boasts an impressive library of releases, for many (myself included) the system served to be bought for initially one purpose, to be the Bloodborne Machine. Most of the people in my life who had a PS4 during its generation either bought one exclusively to play Fromsoftware’s Nightmare Hunting Adventure or had initially got one solely to play the game and ended up getting more games afterward. It’s a phenomenon the game industry sees time and time again, with previous generations having swathes of fans buying entire consoles for one or two games. As far as games go though, Bloodborne is at the very least worth the price of entry. At the time, it was heralded as Fromsoftware’s most cutting-edge and impressive game to date. A gorgeous gothic world filled with creatures ripped straight out of H.P Lovecraft’s nightmares, a haunting soundtrack showcasing beautifully composed choral scores and a combat system that incentivized aggression and speed to achieve brutal and bloody efficiency. It’s no wonder then why Bloodborne still has such a large following behind it. Fans of Fromsoftware have hoped for a sequel or PC port year after year to largely disappointing results. But where the community shines is in its fanworks.

From fanart, comics, music, animations, and even fan-made video game spinoffs, the game has been shown a monumental amount of love since its debut in 2015. One of these fanworks was released back in 2022 and has since become one of the most famous pieces of fan-made content surrounding the game, this of course, being BloodbornePSX by LWMedia. An incredibly impressive feat of coding and art direction, the game serves as a “Demake” of Bloodborne’s first Yharnam segment, made to look like and play as if it were made on the very first PlayStation console. With some custom-made areas and an entirely unique boss to boot the perfectly paced experience is both a treat to fans who have been orbiting the game since its earliest days and new fans looking for the best and brightest fanworks to interact with.

The game has since gone on to be covered by a variety of news outlets all over the web, along with its creator receiving much-deserved attention for her efforts. One Lilith Walther (AKA b0tster on social media) holds the title of developer for the project. A long-time video game enthusiast and FromSoftware fan herself, she’s had quite an impact on the community I’m sure she’s very proud to be a part of. Later in the article, we’ve got an interview with Lilith herself about both Bloodborne PSX and her current project, “Bloodborne Kart”, but first, let’s talk a bit more in-depth about BBPSX.

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(Official launch trailer for Bloodborne PSX, uploaded January 31, 2022 by LWMedia on Youtube)

Bloodborne PSX:

So, what exactly is Bloodborne PSX? To start, let’s answer what precisely a “Demake” is first. Demakes often have the goal of remaking the likeness of a game either stylistically, mechanically, or both, as if it was developed on retro/outdated hardware. Famous examples of Demakes include “The Mummy Demastered” developed by Wayforward as a sort of tie-in to the 2017 film “The Mummy” in the stylings of a 16-bit run and gun adventure against armies of the undead, and “Pixel Force Halo” by Eric Ruth games which take the prolific XBOX franchise and shrinks it down to a Mega Man-esque platformer reminiscent of the NES’ 8-bit days. Demakes are intensely attractive looking, not only into the past of video games and their developments but just how creative developers can be with games that they love and appreciate. Bloodborne PSX hits as hard as a Demake can in my opinion, blending masterfully recreated graphics with perfectly clunky early PSX gameplay quirks that go above and beyond to make the game not only LOOK like it belongs on the nearly 30-year-old console but feel right at home on it as well.

(A screenshot depicting the player character “The Hunter” facing off against two fearsome Werewolf enemies. Screenshot sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Gameplay:

Starting off with the masterfully recreated clunk in the gameplay, Bloodborne PSX “shows its age” by hearkening back to a time when being seamless just wasn’t an option. Much like adventure action games of the past (and much UNLIKE its modern inspiration), you’ll be cycling through your inventory delightfully more than you’d expect. Equipping keys, checking items, and even the trademark weapon transformations are all done through the wonderfully nostalgic menu and inventory screens. Taking one of the foundational parts of Bloodborne’s combat system and making it such a more encumbering mechanic is nothing short of sheer genius when it comes to ways to really make you feel like it’s 1994 again. On top of this, the Hunter’s movement itself has been made reminiscent of classic action titles. Somehow, both stiff enough to feel dated and fluid enough to make combat that same rush of bestial fun found in the original, it goes a long way towards the total immersion into that retro vibe the game sets out to give the player. Anyone who grew up with Fromsoftware’s earlier titles like Armored Core and the King’s Field series will be very familiar with this unique brand of “well-tuned clunk”.

(A delightfully dated looking diagram showing off the controller layout for Bloodborne PSX’s controls. Image sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Graphics:

Speaking of old Fromsoftware games, though, let’s talk about the absolutely bit-crushingly beautiful graphical work on display. As I’m sure you’ve seen from the videos and screenshots included in the article, BBPSX’s art style and direction are nothing short of perfect for what it aims to be. While playing, I couldn’t help but notice every little detail (or lack thereof) in the environments meant to emulate the experience of a game made on 30-year-old hardware. Low render distances, chunky textures, blocky polygonal models, just the right amount of texture warp, it all blends together to create an atmosphere that I can 100% picture being shown off on the back of a jewel CD case with a T for Teen rating slapped into the lower corner. While playing, something rather specific that called out to me was the new way enemy names and health bars were displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen while fighting. As a big fan of the King’s Field games, this small detail went (probably too much of) a long way toward my love of how everything’s meant to feel older. Other games trying to match the more specific feel of King’s Field, like “Lunacid” created by KIRA LLC, also include this delightful little detail, a personal favorite for sure.

(A screenshot depicting the second phase of Father Gascoigne’s boss fight, showing off the game’s perfectly retro art style. Image sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Sound design/Soundtrack:

But where would a game be without its sound and score? No need to fear, however, because Bloodborne PSX comes complete with a chunky soundscape that will make you want to check and see if your TV is set to channel 3. A haunting set of tracks played by fittingly digital-sounding MIDIs ran through filters to sound just as crackly as you remember backs up crunchy sounds of spilling blood with low-poly weaponry. Original sounds from Bloodborne have been used for an authentic sounding experience, but have also been given the CRT speaker treatment and sound like something you remember playing on Halloween 20 years ago. If you watched the launch trailer featured above then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The Cleric Beast’s trademark screech and Gascoine’s signature howl after his beastly transformation have never sounded so beautifully dated, and I’m here for every bit of it. Even the horrific boss themes we know and love from the original Bloodborne have been brought through this portal to the past. One of my favourite tracks, the Cleric Beast boss theme, might just sound even better when played on a 16-bit sound chip. It really cannot be understated just how much weight the sound design of the game is pulling. In my opinion, the only thing missing is that sweet sweet PSX startup sound before the game starts crackling through the speakers of a TV in the computer room.

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(The Bloodborne PSX rendition of the Cleric Beast’s boss theme. Created by and uploaded to Youtube by The Noble Demon on March 20, 2021)

Interview with the developer:

Before writing this article, I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of talking with Lilith Walther about some developmental notes and personal feelings about inspirations and challenges that can come with the daunting task of being a developer. Below are the nine (initially ten, but unfortunately, a bit of the interview was lost due to my recording software bugging out) questions I posed to Miss Lilith, along with her answers transcribed directly from the interview.

I’d like to start this section of the article by saying Lilith was an absolute joy to talk to. During the interview, I really felt like she and I shared some common ground on some topics regarding how media can have an impact on you and what sorts of things come with video games as an art form. After some minor technical difficulties (and by that, I mean my video drivers crashed), I started off with something simple. The first question posited was: “What got you into video games initially?” Lilith’s response was as follows: “When I was a kid, the family member of a friend had a SNES lying around. I turned it on and didn’t really understand. I was a guy on top of a pyramid, I walked down the pyramid, and some big ogre killed me. Later I learned that was A Link to the past.” and after a brief laugh continued, “A couple years later my parents got a Nintendo 64 with Mario64 and Ocarina of Time and that was it. Never put the controller down since then.”

She then went on to describe what precisely about Nintendo’s first foray into 3D Zelda had hooked her. “I’ve heard this story so many times. It’s like you’re not even playing the game. You’re just in the world hanging out in Kokiri forest collecting rupees to get the Deku shield, and the game expects you to! It was just, ‘run around this world and explore,’ and that really hooked me.” I couldn’t agree more with her statement about her experience. Not just with a game as prolific as Ocarina of Time but many experiences from older console generations that could be considered “the first of their kind”, or at the very least some of the earliest. Lilith also described her first experience with a PlayStation console, stating: “Later on I got a PS2 which played PS1 games. I didn’t end up getting a PS1 until around the PS3 era, so I guess I’m a poser. I remember my sister bringing home Final Fantasy 9 when it was a relatively new game. If it wasn’t my first PS1 game it was definitely my first Final Fantasy game. Of course I went back and played 8 and 7 afterwards.” A solid answer to a simple question.

The second question I asked was one starting to move toward the topic of Bloodborne PSX and its namesake/inspiration. Or at least the family of systems it was released on: “What PlayStation console was your favorite and why?” Lilith’s answer surprised me a bit. Not because I disagreed, quite the opposite, actually. But with such a big inspiration for her work being games from the PSX-PS2 generations, what followed was a pleasant bit of insight into one of her favourite eras of gaming, to quote: “I can give you two answers here.” To which I assured her she was more than welcome to, but she was set on having something definitive. “No no I’m only going to give you one answer. I can give you the correct answer that I don’t want to admit, but it was the PlayStation 3. It’s so embarrassing but I genuinely was hooked into the marketing of the whole ‘The cell processor is the smartest thing in the world’ and all that. It really seemed like the future of gaming and I was all about it. I think I owned an XBOX360 before but I did eventually get it and really enjoyed it. It took a couple years for some of the best games to come out but I really did.” A few examples she cited as being some of her most memorable experiences on the console were Uncharted 2, Journey, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Warhawk. All games I’ve seen on several top 5 and top 10 lists throughout my life within the gaming space. A delightful show of affection for a generation personally very dear to me as well, in which she ended the segment by declaring “Hell yeag”, a bit of a catchphrase she’s coined online.

Getting into the topic proper, my third question was one about her personal relationship with Bloodborne: “How did Bloodborne impact/appeal to your interests?” A question that received perhaps my favourite answer of the whole interview. From her response: ”Oh that’s a big one. Going to the opposite end of the poser spectrum, I was a Fromsoftware fan before it was cool. One of the games I played religiously on my PS2 was Armored Core.” A statement which made more sense than perhaps anything else said during my time with her. “Then later in the PS3 era everyone was talking about Dark Souls, this was when I was in college. I finally caved and got it and saw the Fromsoftware logo and thought ‘Oh it’s the Armored Core people!’ I played and beat it, really enjoyed my time with it. I skipped Dark Souls 2 because everyone told me to hate it, I still need to go back to that one.”

It’s something I would recommend anyone who hasn’t played Dark Souls 2 to go and do. “Then Bloodborne came out and I thought ‘Alright this is the new one, gotta play this one’ and I was a huge fan of all the gothic stuff in the aesthetic. And how do I explain this, I do really like Bloodborne. I like the design, and the mechanical suite of gameplay, as a video-gamey video game it’s very good.” The tone shifted here to something a bit more personal. “But as well, I was playing it at a specific time in my life. I came out in 2019, I know Bloodborne came out in 2015 but I was obviously just playing it non-stop. It was just one of my ‘coming out games’, you know?” For those who maybe don’t understand the statement there, “coming out” is a very common term used within the Queer community to describe the experience of revealing your identity to those around you. Whether it be to family, friends, or co-workers, almost every queer person has some sort of coming out story to tell. Lilith is speaking in reference to her coming out as a trans woman. She elaborated: “Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I just feel like when you make a decision like that, that part of my life just ended up seared into my brain, you know? Bloodborne was there, so now it’s just a part of me. And it definitely influenced some things about me. It was there because I was working on Bloodborne PSX at the time, but it had an impact on something I’ve heard a lot of other Trans people describe.” She went on to describe the concept of “Coming out a second time” as sort of “finding yourself more within your identity” and becoming more affirmed in it. She described both Bloodborne and her development on Bloodborne PSX influencing large parts of her life, a good example being how she dresses and presents. As a trans woman myself, this answer delighted me to no end. I, for one, can absolutely 100% relate to the notion of media you experience during such a radical turning point in your life sticking with you. There are plenty of games, shows, music, and books that I still hold very near and dear to me because, as Lilith stated, they were there. All the right things at the right time.

Halfway through our questions, we’ve finally arrived at one pertaining specifically to the development of Bloodborne PSX: “What are some unique challenges you’ve faced developing a game meant to look/play like something made on retro hardware?”

Lilith answers: “So there’s two things, two big things. One is rolling back all of the quality of life improvements we’ve gotten over the years in gaming. Not automatically using keys is always my go-to example.” Something as well I mentioned in my short talk about the game’s gloriously dated feeling gameplay above. “That was definitely very very intentional. Because it’s not just the graphics, right? It was the design sensibilities of the 90s. Bringing that to the surface was very challenging but very fun. Another big part was, since it was one of the first 3D consoles, I wanted to recreate the hype around the fact that ‘ITS IN 3D NOW!’ So if you go into your inventory you’ll see all the objects rendered in beautiful 3D while they slowly spin as you scroll through them.” This is a feature I very much miss seeing in modern video games.

She continued, “I think the biggest one was the weapon changes. Bloodborne’s whole thing was the weapon transformations. Like, you could seamlessly change your weapons and work them into your combo and do a bunch of crazy stuff, and I kind of said ‘that needs to go immediately.’ So now you have to pause and go to your weapon and press L1 to transform it, that was extremely intentional. So once I had those three big things down it all just sort of fell into place. Like the clunky UI and the janky controls. You need jank and clunk, and I think that’s why Fromsoft games scale down so nicely, because they are jank and clunk.”

A point I couldn’t agree with more. Despite all the modern streamlining and improvements to gameplay, Fromsoft’s ever-growing catalog of impressive experiences still contains some of that old-school video game stiffness we’ve (hopefully) come to appreciate. She went on to make a point I was very excited to share here in the article, “It was just a lot of trying to nail the feel of the games and not just the look, right? Like I’m not trying to recreate a screenshot; I’m trying to recreate the feeling of playing this weird game that’s barely holding together because the devs didn’t know what they were doing.” In my humble opinion, something she did an excellent job with.

Fifth on the list was a question relating to her current project, Bloodborne Kart, a concept initially drawn from a popular meme shared around social media sites like Tumblr when the buzz of a Bloodborne sequel was keeping the talking spaces around Fromsoft alight: “Anything to say about the development of Bloodborne Kart or its inspiration?”

Lilith answers: “So first off Bloodborne Kart is less trying to be a simulation of a PS1 game and more just an indie game. It’s not trying to be a PS1 game, I just want it to be a fun kart racer first. Starting off of course is Mario Kart 64, that’s the one I played back in the day. But I looked at other games like Crash Team Racing and Diddy Kong Racing, but also stuff like Twisted Metal of course. I always used those as a template to sort of look at for design stuff like ‘how did they handle what happens to racers after player 1 crosses the finish line.” The next portion of her answer was initially a bit confusing but comes across better when you consider certain elements present in BBK’s battle mode. “And also Halo, like for the battle mode. I had to do a battle mode and it kind of just bubbled to the surface. Split Screen with my sister was such a big part of my childhood. Thinking about Halo multiplayer while I was making the battle mode stuff.”

Her answer to the previous question began to dip into the topic of our sixth question: “Are there any unique challenges or enjoyable creative points that go into making something like Bloodborne Kart?”

As she continued from her previous answer: “One of the biggest quirks of the battle mode I had to figure out was how to tell what team you were on at a glance, and that came back to Halo again. I started thinking about how you could tell in that game and it hit me that the arms of your suit change to the color of whatever team you’re on. It was just something I never even thought of because it’s so seamless. So that gave me the idea to change the kart colours, and that’s the most recent example of me pulling directly from Halo. It’s wild how a small change like that can turn your game from something unplayable to something fun.” I would agree. Tons of small details and things you don’t think about go into making seamless multiplayer experiences. Some of which we take for granted nowadays. She then made a point about one of the most challenging aspects of BBK’s development, “The most challenging thing was definitely the Kart AI. AI is just my worst skill when it comes to game development among the massive array of skills you need to make a game. It’s really hard to find examples of people coding kart driving AI, You know? You need to make a biped walk around you can find a million tutorials online but if you need to make something drive a kart, not really. I was really on my own there. A lot of the examples out there are very simulation oriented. Like cars using suspension and whatnot, but I’m making a kart racer. So I started simple, I put a navpoint down and if it needs to turn left, turn left, if it needs to turn right, turn right. And I just kept adding features from there.”

Moving onto our last three questions, we started to get a little more personal. Question seven being: “What’s your favorite part of Bloodborne Kart so far?”

Her answer was concise in what she was excited about most, quote: “The boss fights.” Short and sweet but she did elaborate. “Translating a big part of Bloodborne is the boss fights. So I made a short linear campaign which is basically AI battles and races strung together. Some of those stages are just boss fights which are unique to the rest of the game. When you make a video game you sit down and you make all your different modes of interactions, and then you make a multi-hour experience mixing and matching all those different modes in more complicated ways. I think the most interesting part is when that style tends to fall away and it ends up building something entirely unique to that experience.” An example she gave was the infamous “Eventide Island” in Breath of the wild, it being a unique experience where the game’s usual modes of interaction are stripped or limited, forcing you into a more structured experience that ends up being a majorly positive one. “That’s what the boss fights are in Bloodborne Kart. They do multiple game mechanics like a chase that ends in a battle mode. Like Father Gascoine’s fight where he chases you, and after you blow up his kart he turns into a beast and picks up a minigun.” That sounds absolutely incredible. It’s very easy to see why she’d pick the boss fights as her favorite element when they’re clearly intended to be such unique and memorable experiences.

Our last two questions veer away from the topics of development proper and focus more on our dear dev’s personal thoughts on the matter. Question eight posits: “What’s your personal favorite part of being a game developer?”

After some thought, she gave a very impassioned talk about something she considers to be the best part of the experience: “When people who aren’t game developers think about game development they think of things like ‘oh well you just get to play video games all day and have fun’ but it’s not! Except for the 2% that is, and it’s near the end of development. When all the pieces fall into place and you start actually ‘making the game.’ Game development, especially solo, you’re so zoomed in on specific parts. Because you’re not making a game you’re programming software that’s what making a game is. You spend months working on different systems and then you actually sit down and make a level, and you hit play and it you go ‘Oh my god, I just made a game’. That part is what sustains me. It’s magical. That’s the best part when it comes to true appreciation of the craft aside from the reception.” An answer that I don’t think I could’ve put better if I tried.

My last question is one that I consider to be the question when it comes to interviewing anyone who works on video games. Perhaps a bit basic, but heartfelt nonetheless: “Anything to say to anyone aspiring to be a game developer?”

Lilith’s answer: “Yes. Just do it. For real. This is what I did and it always felt wrong until I looked at more established devs echoing the sentiment. You cannot plan a game before you’ve started making one. The example I always bring up is the team behind Deus Ex wrote a 500 page design document for the game and almost immediately threw it out when they started development. Just start! You’re going to have unanswered questions and I think that trips people up. Don’t start with your magnum opus idea, start with something simple and achievable. I feel like a lot of people set out with the goal of making a triple-A game, and that’s good! But it can’t be your first game. Game development is creating art, just like any other form of art, and it’s like saying ‘my first drawing is going to be the Mona Lisa’ and it just doesn’t work like that. You need practice and development, and it’s difficult to see that because games take so long and so much, so it’s definitely seen as a bigger undertaking. But it’s still art. You’re still making mistakes and learning from them for your first project. Your next game will be better. View your career as a game developer as a series of games you want to make, and not just one big game.” A perfect response to an otherwise unassuming question.

Lilith’s passion and love for video games were reflected very clearly in every response she gave during my time with her. Her dedication and appreciation for the art form can be seen in every pixel of Bloodborne PSX, as well as the development logs and test builds of Bloodborne Kart. I really do think that the way she answered my final question speaks volumes to the type of attitude someone should take up when endeavoring to make art as intensive as a video game. Whether it’s fanwork of a game that’s important to you or an entirely new concept, do it.

(developer of Bloodborne PSX Lilith Walther, image provided by Lilith Walther via Twitter)

Closing:

If you’d like to check out the positively phenomenal experience that is Bloodborne PSX I’ve included a link to the official itch.io page below the article, as well as a link to the official LWMedia Youtube page where you can check out Lilith’s dev logs, test videos, and animations about her work and other art. Thank you so much for reading, and another very special thank you to Lilith for setting aside some of her time to talk to me about this article. Now get out there and cleanse those foul streets!

Links:

Bloodborne PSX official itch.io page: https://b0tster.itch.io/bbpsx

LWMedia Official Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/@b0tster

Lilith Walther Twitter page: https://twitter.com/b0tster

#my writing #my stuff #writing #video games #bloodborne #bloodborne psx #demake #article #b0tster #bbpsx #Youtube

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anim-ttrpgs · 10 days

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How to Choose Music for a TTRPG Session & Eureka Song Selections

When our own group plays any TTRPG, we always like to have some amount of background music to help with the mood and tone, and if you do too, then here's a post about how best to choose it, because it is a learnable skill!

I am one of the creators of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

and the idea for this post grew out of making a curated list of songs for Eureka sessions, each sorted into different categories for easy access. The Narrator in a Eureka campaign exercises very little control over the story and pacing of the game, so it isn't very helpful to plan for a specific reveal of specific scene set to a certain song. To that end, I have sorted these songs into various types of scenes, tones, etc. for you to grab as the story is emerging.

You can find these lists here:

Session Intro Music (in case you wanna open each session with a musical theme like an episode of a tv show)

Investigation Scene Music (low-stakes) or Meal Scene

Investigation Scene Music (tense/creepy) Part 1

Investigation Scene Music (tense/creepy) Part 2

Foot Chase Music

Vehicle Chase Music

Scooby-doo-ass Chase Music

Investigators Fleeing/Hiding from Monster Music

Unarmed Combat Music

Deadly/Armed Melee Combat Music

Deadly/Firearm Combat Music

Monster Rampage Music

Monster Hunting Music (as in the monster is a PC who is hunting prey)

How to Choose Music for a TTRPG Session

There’s a few things that make a good TTRPG session song that aren’t immediately obvious.

Avoid Lyrics

Lyrics are a no-go 90% of the time. You gotta assume that the players will be trying to read rules and/or do math during the session and lyrics can make that harder.

Avoid Loud, Dissonate, or Disorienting Music

For the very same reasons—and this is especially useful to keep in mind for a horror-themed game like Eureka—it can't be too dissident or grating. A lot of horror video game music is really dissident screechy and offensive to the ears because this induces a tiny sense of panic, but again, like with lyrics, this means it’s hard to actually play a TTRPG while listening to this.

Don't Outpace the Combat

For combat music, a fast-paced “action” song can work, but if it’s too fast-paced it really quickly outpaces the combat itself because TTRPG combat is necessarily kind of slow. I do have plenty of fast-paced actiony songs in those lists, but those are best grouped into a playlist in sequence rather than looped, because then you at least have the rather frequent serendipity of the song changing on a per-turn basis.

The usual better option is something “tense” and “cool” but a bit more understated, usually with a mid-intensity repeating beat. Complex action songs work in other mediums like movies because their notes can be tailored to sync up to the actual actions on-screen, but that won’t happen in a TTRPG 90% of the time, even if just because describing a character throwing a punch takes way longer than a character throwing a punch in a movie.

For Eureka I also had to like make sure there was a good selection of action music in there that wasn’t too “cool” or “heroic.” Eureka characters are not fearless action heroes nor usually trained soldiers. If they are in a fight, it usually isnt cool, it’s scary. If anything, the combat music should be the bad guy’s theme, not the protagonists’, because they’re the ones with the advantage. When a Eureka PC does have the advantage and can be super “cool” in a fight, they’re probably a monster, in which case it’s the other way around, they’re the terrifying bad guy in the NPC’s story, and I tried to pick music to reflect that with “darker,” more “sinister” tracks.

Choose Songs without Shifts in Tempo or Intensity

You want something that is very easy to loop. Lots of cool songs go through pretty dramatic changes in their intensity over the course of their runtime. This is cool like I said when they can be synced up to action in a movie, but they’ll never (or rarely) sync up with anything in a TTRPG session. They’re going to be playing over and over on like a 3-minute loop as you roll dice and occasionally look up rules, and if this loop is really noticeable because of how the song starts out slow and then swells in intensity, that is going to be annoying fast. You want a song that has a relatively consistent level of intensity throughout its whole runtime.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but you can still check out the public beta on itch.io to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, etc.!

You can also follow updates on our Kickstarter page where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more, you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy earlier, plus extra content such as adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

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felassan · 4 months

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"Electronic Arts Inc. and BioWare have provided a first-look at gameplay from the opening moments of the highly anticipated all-new single-player fantasy RPG experience, Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This bold, heroic adventure is built to deliver on what the series is best known for: rich storytelling, fantasy worldbuilding, companions and fellowship, and a world where you matter. In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you’ll embark on a quest to face powerful Elven gods and stop the destruction they’re unleashing on the world. You are known as Rook, battling on the front lines alongside a compelling cast of companions with individual storylines and motivations. In true Dragon Age fashion, companions are central to the experience and as Rook, you must rise up, rally your crew and forge relationships to become the unexpected leader others believe in. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is launching worldwide to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC in Fall 2024. “We want every single moment in the expansive, story-driven experience of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to feel impactful,” said Corinne Busche, Game Director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. “Players will journey to more regions than any other Dragon Age game, where they’ll need to level up and customize deep skill trees to take on increasingly challenging enemies. Additionally, our combat blends fluid moment-to-moment action with the deep RPG strategy the franchise is known for. We’re incredibly excited to offer players around the world a first-look at this experience that embraces BioWare’s storytelling roots of carefully crafted and immersive single-player RPGs.” In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the Elven Trickster god of legend Solas wants to tear down the Veil that separates Thedas from the world of demons, restoring his people’s immortality and glory – even at the cost of countless lives. But his ritual goes awry, and his worst fears are realized, as two of his most ancient and powerful adversaries are released. They seek only to finish what they started millennia ago – the complete and utter domination of our world. Rook’s journey to stop these two powerful deities will span across all of Thedas to bustling cities, lush tropics, boreal forests, fettered swamps and the deepest depths, but be wary of the evil forces along the way like the Dark Spawn, Venatori Cultists and Demons of the Fade."

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"Key Features of Dragon Age: The Veilguard Fellowship: Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s brand new companions come alive with some of the most compelling individual storylines in Dragon Age history. Expansive and dynamic stories navigate love, loss and complex choices that will affect your relationships and the fate of each member of the Veilguard. New companions like the Veil Jumper Bellara, the necromancer Emmrich, and the private detective Neve, come from iconic factions in Dragon Age lore, possessing individual skill trees and specialized gear for advanced team progression. You’ll see familiar faces, too, such as the archer Lace Harding who returns to the series as a full time companion. Choice and Consequences: Dragon Age: The Veilguard builds on the series’ deep role-playing roots, providing extraordinary storytelling and worldbuilding, deep personalities for each companion, meaningful choices and impactful cinematic moments. The bonds you create and the relationships you forge will be affected by your choices made throughout your journey. A Crafted Experience: As a character-driven RPG, Dragon Age: The Veilguard delivers a crafted experience that pays homage to BioWare’s history of storytelling. The Lighthouse provides a central place where you can rest, learn more about the world through conversations, while the Crossroads allows you to traverse to separate explorable regions of the world with your companions. You’ll experience more of Thedas than ever before as your story unfolds across meticulously crafted biomes and beautiful regions including Rivain, Weisshaupt, Arlathan, Minrathous, the Deep Roads and more, each inviting you to delve deeper into the narrative and uncover the mysteries of the land. Fluid, Customizable Combat: Immersive combat blends fluid moment-to-moment controls with tactical decision-making. Players can fully customize their experience to fit their playstyle with diverse skill trees among three different classes - Warrior, Mage and Rogue - each with unique abilities and specializations. Choose two companions to join you on your quests and unleash powerful team combos that can change the tide of any battle. Make strategic choices and direct your allies to fight, heal or stay out of the fray with the newly-added ability wheel. Be the Leader You Want To Be: Dragon Age: The Veilguard features a robust character creation system that allows you to be the leader you want to be with a vast range of customization. BioWare has created the most comprehensive character creator in Dragon Age yet to make this story truly your own."

[source]

"his worst fears are realized, as two of his most ancient and powerful adversaries are released. They seek only to finish what they started millennia ago – the complete and utter domination of our world."

👁️

"All the world will soon share the peace and comfort of my reign" / "Glory to the Risen Gods. They've come to deliver this world." [x]

also:

lush tropics, boreal forests, fettered swamps, the Deep Roads ("the deepest depths")

more regions than ever before

Rivain, Weisshaupt, Arlathan, Minrathous, the Deep Roads and more

fight darkspawn, demons, Venatori cultists

the Lighthouse (our central hub) is a central place where we can rest and have conversations

We will travel around the world via The Crossroads and presumably the eluvians

companions have specialized gear (Fel note: more on companion skill stuff here)

and I love what they are saying here about storytelling and character-focus and everything of that kind here. :)

#dragon age: the veilguard #dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #solas #long post #longpost #video games

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bloodyshadow1 · 4 months

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I hate the people who say the final battle in Ragenarok was too easy. It wasn't easy, it was a hard battle, but the Bad Kids/Intrepid Heroes did everything right.

There were 8 combatants on the field at the start. 6 of the rat grinders, who had low health but the high level abilities of their classes, and 1 high level full PC, and 1 high level paladin/barbarian multiclass with resistance to everything, legendary actions and resistances, who could deal force damage.

On the Bad Kids side, they were level 14 who had just gone through a battle that exhausted a lot of resources, Fig and Fabian used a couple of spells and bardics and their limited amount of spells, Gorgug used a couple of his rages, Adaine used all of her portents and a bunch of spells, and between ice feast, healing, and removing levels of exhaustion, Kristen and K2 were love on spells. Riz was the only one who was looking pretty decent because he can use sneak attack all day, and even he used one of his 2 3rd level spells.

They were smart though, they Ice Feast was a broken ability for the final battle that Brennan didn't think through when he home brewed it for Ally. Not only did it block Porter's stun which would have been devastating, it made them immune to fire damage on a map with a lot of lava. He didn't think it through and the Intrepid Heroes used it to full effect. Still, it was good for them, but Ice Feast is still just a reskin of Heroes feast with better options but more detrimental effects.

As for the battle itself, the Bad Kids played it smart, it was only due to good initiative rolls that they managed to stomp the rat grinders so hard in the first round. If Oisin got a chance to go, if Mary Ann was outside the range of slow, things would have been different since they had low stats, but level 20 abilities and spells could have wreaked the Bad Kids. It wasn't an easy fight, but it was a fight with an intentional purpose, the Bad Kids are good at being adventurers while the Rat Grinders took the easy way out and showed the different between being powerful and being strong. They took out the primary caster first as you should do in big pc vs pc battles like this, they made sure to target groupings of enemies with AOEs and crowd control, they made sure to support each other and disrupt their enemies support. It wasn't easy, but they are good at dnd so they made it look easy.

I've seen people say, 'Brennan should have x' and no he shouldn't have. He created a hard combat encounter, but his players did everything right this season, a DM shouldn't punish or railroad their players just because their players are good at the game. No, the players stop the big bad from being released so they don't have to fight them, the DM shouldn't just make the Ancient God break through the bindings just because they planned for that encounter. The players won before it started and they should be rewarded for that.

'the rat grinders should have had a back up plan.' The Rat Grinders did have a backup plan. The initial plan to get Kipperlily fairly elected failed, and the back up plan, when that didn't work, the backup plan was to get Kristen expelled so she couldn't run. When that didn't work they sent the Bad Kids, their allies, and anyone who would vote for Kristen into the sky, flew them miles away, and sicced a horde of dragons and a goddess on them to kill them or at the very least get them out of their hair for 1 night so their plan could work. The Bad Kids beat their plans every time so no, there was no reason to have a 4th backup plan in the final battle. Brennan is a good DM, he didn't make the Rat Grinders and Porter's plan work because it was stopped before it started with the fake goddess name. He didn't punish his players for being good at the game and their strategy is great.

Things could have gone so differently with a slight change or a big change. If Fig didnt' decide to try and be a paladin on a whim, things would have been completely different, they wouldn't have had a connection with Ankarna. If Adaine didn't take Legend Lore they wouldn't have found out about Porter, maybe they would have still gotten the background on Ankarna, but not about his family revealing the Big Bad early on. If they chose to do something else with the power they got from the pride armor, they wouldnt' have the gem to free Bakur or save Lydia meaning no back up in the final fight. What if Gorgug rolled lower on one of his artificer tracks, they might not have passed the last stand. What if Fabian choose to keep pursing Ivy instead of Mazey, would have have been killed by the Rat Grinders or would Mazey have been compelled to their side if he didn't try and romance her. If Riz ran for president instead of Kristen would he have been less stressed or more inclined to focus on that instead of mystery his true love. What if Kristen didn't eat the eye of the Vulture king at the right time and catch Kipperlily about to murder Gavin forcing her to change her target to Buddy.

And it worked against them too. What If Fig didn't inspire Cassandra and knock her out leading her to become the Nightmare King again? What if Adaine didn't counterspell Grix's disintegrate on Ruben, he might have been a pile of dust that would have been hard to impossible to bring back to life disrupting the Rat Grinder's plan. What if Kristen decided to not get upset at Cassandra forcing the Goddess to recreate Kalina. What if Adaine didn't say Ankarna's name outloud the first time she saw it? What if Fig didn't make the deal to have a second chance sealing the Night Yorb? What if Riz and Gorgug did relationship tracks with their families making it harder to do their other tracks. What if Fabian cleaned his house even once and got rid of the pingpong balls that Oisin enchanted to screw them over. What if Riz had time to focus on mystery from the start instead of running Kristen's campaign for her and taking more stress.

There were so many times that things could have gone so much better or so much worse, but that's what the game is. There is no script that says the good guys have to keep losing until they win. It's decisions and dice, luck and wits that make the game. It was a very hard season, the battles were very hard, just because they made the right decisions to make things easier on themselves doesn't change that. It doesn't make the season bad. You're welcome to not like it, but nothing about it was easy and people shouldn't pretend like it was because they don't like it

#fantasy high #fantasy high spoilers #fantasy high junior year #fhjy #adaine abernant #fig faeth #kristen applebees #fabian seacaster #gorgug thistlespring #riz gukgak #dimension 20 #d20 #long post

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th3b4dk1dzz · 3 months

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The more time passes, the more I'm convinced Dave Balt is trapped in the body of Lucy Santangelo.

It was unclear what his whereabouts were when the PCs were sucked into the movie. Unless someone else picked up on that. He was probably in the same room. Lucy is one of the few characters we know about, but haven't heard speak yet.

Dave is clearly self-conscious about his ageing and is trying to cover his greying hair. Now imagine his reaction to having a young, beautiful body with big volumous hair.

Dave is trying to manage the sinking ship of his business with employees he has no control over. Lucy is based on Holly Gennero, who in the original Die Hard film was the direct line of communication between the terrorists and the other hostages. She was trying to manage, as best she could, her co-workers through an impossible situation. (Also checking the wiki I realised Lucy is the name of John and Holly's daughter. Nice reference)

Dave and Paula hate each other. Picture the two of them as Jack and Lucy, having to pretend to be a strained couple who had something once, but it's gone, to avoid suspicion. (While being played by Izzy and Brennan. It's a comedic gold mine is what I'm saying)

Unlike the PCs, Lucy/Holly isn't an action hero. She's a civilian. As discussed, she can navigate a dangerous situation using her wits and through talking. But she doesn't have any weapons training/combat experience. What this means is that Dave is going to have to rely on the people he believed to be incompetent to survive the environment. In a season of tropes, wouldn't it be fitting to have a shithead boss learn the error of his ways by having no choice but to trust his suped up employees and realise how good they are while constantly being rescued by them?

#dimension 20 #nsbu #never stop blowing up #brennan lee mulligan #izzy roland #dave balt #paula donvalson #jack manhattan #lucy santangelo #d2 nsbu #nsbu theory #nsbu spoilers

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indierpgnewsletter · 3 months

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A Sociology of Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Every once in a while, one must embrace hubris.

Let’s start with play. Play is an important part of life – mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physiologically, grammatically. It has uses. As a child, it helps with learning and growth. As an adult, it helps with not being sad all the time. But people don’t play because it’s useful. People play because it feels good to do – because it’s enjoyable, pleasurable, delightful.

The big joys for me are winning, risk-taking, solving, mastery, socializing, performance, storytelling, humour, novelty and catharsis. If you want a more in-depth list, it’s hard to do better than Levi Kornelsen’s Manyfold, which lists 17 different kinds of fun. But even that list is thinking about RPGs specifically and if you start including stuff like sports or sex or crafting, the list probably gets longer.

What I like about Kornelsen’s Manyfold is that it makes sure to focus on the fact that these are joys, not types of people. Which avoids 90% of the most annoying arguments.

Based on what kinds of enjoyment they’re chasing and what they’re avoiding, people make games. People connect with games that evoke their preferred kinds of enjoyment and fun. This leads to people making games that build on what came before in different ways – specializing, generalizing, forking, mutating, etc.

They also lead to cultures of play. These cultures are social infrastructure – values and practices that congeal around certain places or communities aimed at certain combinations of joys. These cultures develop norms and then expectations. Also, they tend to spawn sub-cultures constantly and immediately, often consciously defined in opposition to their roots. The three that I refer to most in this newsletter are trad, storygames, and OSR.

Trad play culture, the dominant play culture, is best understood as a specific model of player and GM roles and responsibilities. According to Retired Adventurer, “Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen – building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM’s.” In terms of joy, I feel like that the trad play style is defined by not specializing in specific forms of enjoyment and allowing groups to “wander” (as Kornelsen puts it in Manyfold) around from one kind of fun to another.

Storygames and OSR are both usually defined in opposition to trad. The storygames playstyle changes the trad model of GM-player by trying to make the GM more of a player. In terms of joy, the play style clusters around storytelling, performance, and risk-taking with less emphasis on solving or winning.

The OSR is an umbrella term of play cultures that accept older forms of d&d as a kind of lingua franca of roleplaying. They veer away from the trad model by eliminating the GM’s responsibility for a satisfying narrative (and resulting knock-on effects). In terms of joy, there’s a spectrum of cultures that vary in their emphasis on solving, winning, humour, and risk-taking.

There are probably an infinite number of potential cultures of play but some are particularly visible because they lead to design cultures (where games are made for a specific culture) and become markets (where game-sellers target cultures to reach customers).

In terms of design traditions, trad, storygames and OSR have their own norms which create a feedback loop with the play cultures associated with them.

Trad games are often built around detailed settings, involved character creation, and often tactical combat. They tend to avoid specificity in narrative, preferring to let the GM decide or use (often very specific) adventure modules.

Storygames tend to focus on specific narratives or scenarios and rules designed to support those outcomes exclusively. Settings tend to be co-created amongst the player and the GM and are thus, often improvised rather than prepared beforehand.

The OSR has a DIY ethos that values creativity and ease-of-use in setting and scenario design. So while settings are concrete, rule sets, while plentiful, tend to be improvised.

And markets, well, you know ’em.

That’s quite enough from me. I assume this kind of post can do no good but I typed it out anyway.

(This post was first published in the Indie RPG Newsletter.)

#indie rpg #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg design #game design

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shveris · 30 days

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incorrect quotes collection, part 3

today i bring you: things that definitely happened in the canon (trust me i'm gege's pc)

part 1 part 2

megumi: any room can be a panic room if you’d just give me a fucking second

sukuna, during the heian period: i was born for politics. i have great hair and i love lying

noritoshi: poison is a magic transmutation potion that turns people into corpses

miwa: this katana is actually a magic wand

momo: meet me in the inageya parking lot for a wizard duel

mai: *cocks gun* magic missile

kokichi: what the fuck is wrong with you people

yuuji: do you guys hear something?

sukuna: i hear the sound of you shutting the fuck up

satoru: what does 'take out' mean?

shoko: murder

haibara: dating

nanami: food

suguru: it can mean all three if you’re not a coward

shoko, on the phone with suguru: they’re in the kitchen again

satoru, in the background: “beat 3 eggs”… in what? hand to hand combat?

haibara, in the background: must be since nanami banned technique usage in the kitchen last thursday, remember?

suguru: gET THEM OUT OF THERE

megumi: goddamn it, the printer broke while printing out yuuji’s birthday invitations

maki: well, what are they supposed to say

megumi: “yuuji’s birthday”

panda: what do they say instead?

megumi: “yuuji's bi”

toge:

nobara: works out either way

sukuna: do you prefer gendered terms?

yuuji: i guess so

sukuna: fuck you

yuuji: where was the gendered term?

sukuna: in your mom

yuuji:

yuuji: my mom got dicked down by your twin which you ate in the womb

sukuna:

satoru: goodness me, it’s the perfect day for our hiking trip! bless mother nature

megumi, out of breath: mother nature is a WHORE

yuuji: what’s up guys? i’m back

megumi: what the- you can’t be here. you’re dead. i literally saw you die

sukuna: death is a social construct

satoru: died and came back as a cowboy, i call that reintarnation

nobara: wow, i don’t even get the joke but it sounds funny

megumi: that’s nOT. THE. FUCKING. POINT.

nobara: what the fuck yuuji, what are you doing here!?

yuuji: i missed you guys!

megumi: you just survived a car crash

nobara: the doctors said you have internal bleeding

yuuji: yeah, and? isn’t that where blood’s supposed to be?

megumi: i need to sit down…

these two are how yuuji's comeback should've went...

shoko: yeah, i'll smoke a joint tonight, but let's not get too crazy

*4 hours forward to shoko, suguru and satoru getting arrested for blocking the main road in large traffic cone costumes*

nobara: the only thing i'm guilty of is being gorgeous… and also assault with a hammer

satoru, on the night of the war delcaration: suguru, i’m sorry. i can’t keep seeing you anymore

suguru: no shit, you’re always wearing that blindfold

satoru: suguru… no…

nanami: gojo, we have a problem

satoru: what, the fire?

nanami: no, the- wait, what fire?

satoru: oh forget about it, this sounds more interesting

shoko: that was a joke. say ha

nanami: ha

shoko: now do it again

nanami: ha

shoko: congratulations, you are officially the life of the party

satoru: i would let you ruin my life

suguru: sorry, i’m busy ruining my own. you’ll have to wait

satoru, turning to suguru: my dick stopped breathing. it’s in desperate need of cpr

suguru: you’re in desperate need of a beating

shoko: or a lobotomy

suguru: both

shoko: if the beating is hard enough, it’ll count as a lobotomy

satoru: i always knew you guys were homophobic

satoru: none of those words are in the bible

shoko: psalm 119:105. “and jesus said unto his followers, should a manlet incel attempt to mansplain the blockchain to a girlboss, may she waste his time and yassify his blorbos”

suguru: he did not fucking say that

megumi: i taught my dog a new trick *throws ball* fetch!

dog: *just stands there*

noabara: he didn’t do it

megumi: that's because i taught him to ignore social conventions and think for himself

suguru: i’d kill someone if you asked me to

satoru: i’m pretty sure you’d kill someone even if i didn’t ask you to

megumi: if bees can be fish and boys can be girls, then why did my dad sell me to the zen'in clan?

nobara: i thought i was going to have to yell at you, but now i think i should hug you

sukuna, on yuuji's cheek: the real secret to immortality? not dying. you want to be immortal? okay, that’s easy. just don’t die. that’s it. refuse to die. there you go.

yuuji: but how-

sukuna, ignoring him: “but how” you may ask. well, easy. just don’t do it. refuse to. say “no, fuck you”

nobara: i'm not creepy

nobara: i'm petty

nobara: there's a difference, ya know

waiter: what would you like?

yuuji: a milkshake with two straws

megumi: *blushes*

yuuji: *puts both straws in his mouth* watch how fast i can drink this!

haibara: ieri-san, is that my mug you’re drinking out of?

shoko: no, it’s mine

haibara: it… looks just like the one i have…

shoko: you don’t have one like this anymore

megumi: i'm a witch. i mixed some herbs and crystals together and now all my shikigami know the f-word

nobara: which one?

megumi: what do you mean?

nobara: there's more than one f-word

yuuji, entring the room: you talkin' 'bout faggots?

megumi: why would we talk about cigarettes?

sukuna: i'll offer you some friendly advice-

yuuji: i don't want your advice

sukuna: well, then consider it unfriendly advice

jjk manga ends in 30 days which means i'm gonna nap on the highway after that last chapter drops :muscle:

#jjk #jujutsu kaisen #shveris’ blue spring #blue spring hcs #jjk incorrect quotes #jujutsu kaisen incorrect quotes #gojo satoru #geto suguru #itadori yuuji #shoko ieiri #ryomen sukuna #nanami kento #haibara yu #fushiguro megumi #kugisaki nobara #zenin maki #inumaki toge #jjk panda #satosugu

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dimension20pcbracket · 9 months

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welcome to the ultimate Dimension 20 favorite player character bracket!

now that a new season of Fantasy High has launched and we won't be gaining any new PCs for a hot second, it's the perfect time to subject Dimension 20's 104 existing PCs to gladiatorial combat for our amusement! it's time to use hard math to determine who is the most beloved of all the dimension 20 player characters 🔥

I want to run this as quick and dirty as possible, so here's the rules:

I post when I post

I'll get to it when I get to it. maybe I have a queue and maybe I don't who's to say. there are a lot of fucking polls that have to happen, round one alone has 82 matches

tl;dr don't get on my ass please

the field will go from 104 > 52 > 26 > 14 > 8 > 4 > 2 > our champion

"hang on" you're saying "that math doesn't math"

well, no. the numbers stop dividing evenly by 2 after 26. so in addition to the 13 poll winners who come out of round 3, I'll also let whichever loser gets the most votes of all the losers advance just to keep the numbers nice and round.

repeat as needed to keep numbers even.

edit: because two extra characters were allowed into round 2 to compete against each other (Pinocchio and Amethar), those numbers will actually have to go 104 > 54 > 28 > 14 > 8 > 4 > 2 > winner. virtually the same process, just with slightly larger pools in rounds 2 and 3 before ending up on the same place we would have anyway for round 4.

I will not be posting propaganda on the poll posts but you're certainly welcome to

voting on every poll stays open for a week

don't be dicks to each other come on man it's just a silly little d&d show don't do that

okay kids have fun and be safe out there !!

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pathfinderunlocked · 7 months

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Healthy Boss Template (CR +3)

Wait, why did a giant health bar just appear in the sky?

Artwork by Jeff_Chee_471 on Reddit.

D&D and Pathfinder have a really unusual idea of what a "boss" is compared to, like, any video game ever made. They often tend to just take an enemy that would be part of a group of normal enemies if you were about six levels higher. When they do something more unique, it still tends to be balanced like that. Tons of offense, not that many hit points, but often extremely hard to hit. Adventure designers often try to make up for this design by making a boss weaker but giving it minions, but that doesn't change the fact that there's really no concept of a creature that's inherently a "boss creature" in this game.

And sometimes that's fine. But sometimes you just want a big chunky fight that's balanced more like how a video game boss is balanced: only a little more damage than other creatures, but way more health, and the ability to recover if you do nasty stuff like stun it. Something that lets the players go all-out using their abilities, and rewards them for doing so, instead of having to spend most of the fight just focusing on not getting attacked, because they know one attack can take them out.

This template isn't a global solution. It'll get old, and if you reuse it too much, players will find strategies that bypass it. That's why I design so many different boss monsters that each work differently. But if you want to convert an existing monster into a boss, this is one way to do so without a lot of effort, and without just giving it the advanced template and several fighter levels to max out its offense.

Some of the options for different abilities are there to deal with different kinds of player strategies, rather than because they're appropriate for different kinds of bosses. If your PCs use vital strike, give it vital negation. If they use combat maneuvers, give it reset stance. If they cast a bunch of spells on the terrain, give it undo. If they rely on hungry pit, give it escape to nowhere. Don't feel bad about using this template specifically to counter them, since the inflated HP and the limited uses of these special abilities mean that the players' strategies will still be useful, they just won't instantly win the fight.

Healthy Boss

Healthy boss is an inherited template that can be applied to any creature.

Challenge Rating: Same as the base creature + 3.

Hit Points: A healthy boss's hit points are three times as high as the base creature's.

Initiative: A healthy boss gains a +10 bonus to its initiative.

Defensive Abilities: A healthy boss can never be surprised, and is not considered flat-footed before it has acted in combat.

Special Abilities: A healthy boss gains 1 of the following special abilities:

Bolstering Cry (Ex) Twice per day as a move action, a healthy boss can grant all allies within 60 ft. a number of temporary hit points equal to its new challenge rating. When it does so, it also suppresses the following conditions on affected allies other than itself for 1 round: blinded, confused, entangled, fatigued, exhausted, nauseated, paralyzed, shaken, sickened, staggered, stunned. The healthy boss does not need line of effect to these allies, but they must be able to either see or hear it. Second Wind (Ex) Five times per day as a free action at the start of its turn, a healthy boss can gain a number of temporary hit points equal to its new challenge rating. These temporary hit points last for 10 minutes. It can only use this ability only once per round. Vital Negation (Ex) Once per round, a healthy boss can halve the damage of a single incoming source of damage. It can choose to use this ability after hearing the amount of damage that it would take. This does not require an action.

Additionally, a healthy boss gains 2 of the following other special abilities:

Aura of Recovery (Su) The healthy boss gains a 40-ft. aura. At the end of each of the healthy boss's turns, one of the healthy boss's allies within this aura (including itself) gains a new saving throw against any one ongoing harmful effect that initially allowed for a saving throw. Escape to Nowhere (Su) Once per day, at the end of an enemy's turn, a healthy boss can escape to the ethereal plane, as if using ethereal jaunt. This does not require an action. It remains in the ethereal plane during its next turn. At the start of its second turn after using this ability, the healthy boss returns to the plane it was on, but is staggered during that turn. Legendary Resistance (Ex) Once per day, when a healthy boss fails a saving throw, or when an enemy succeeds on a check against the healthy boss's spell resistance, the healthy boss can expend its legendary resistance to treat the roll as if the healthy boss had succeeded on the saving throw or the enemy had failed on the check against spell resistance. A healthy boss with a total challenge rating of at least 9 gains a second use of Legendary Resistance per day, and a healthy boss with a total challenge rating of at least 18 gains a third use of legendary resistance per day. This does not require an action. Reset Concentration (Ex) Once per day, when a healthy boss fails a concentration check, it can steel its mind against future distractions, gaining a +10 bonus on concentration checks for the next 10 minutes. This does not require an action. Reset Stance (Ex) Once per day, when a healthy boss starts its turn prone or grappled, at the start of its next turn after being successfully subjected to a combat maneuver other than trip or grapple, it can spend a move action to stand up, free itself from any grapples, pick up a single item within its reach, end the effect of a dirty trick maneuver, and move up to its move speed without provoking attacks of opportunity. Upon using this ability, the healthy boss also gains a +5 bonus to its CMD and a +10 bonus to Acrobatics, Climb, Ride, Swim, and Fly checks for the next 10 minutes. Undo (Su) As a standard action, once every 3 rounds, a healthy boss can revert the effects of any number of ongoing or instantaneous magic spells that are affecting itself, other creatures, or the surrounding environment. Each spell effect it attempts to undo must be within 60 ft. of the healthy boss, and must have been applied during the last 10 minutes. Even instantaneous spells can be reverted with Undo, but damage is not reverted. To attempt to undo a spell, a healthy boss makes a caster level check against a DC of 6 + the effect's caster level, using its hit dice as its caster level. If successful, the ongoing spell ends, or the effects of the instantaneous spell are reverted.

#d&d #pathfinder 1e #template

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demifiendrsa · 4 months

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Official Gameplay Reveal

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, formerly Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store in Fall 2024.

Title Logo

Key visual

Screenshots

Overview

About

From the storytellers at BioWare comes Dragon Age: The Veilguard, an all new single-player fantasy RPG experience. This bold, heroic adventure is built to deliver on what the series is best known for: rich storytelling, fantasy worldbuilding, companions & fellowship, and a world where you matter. In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you’ll embark on a quest to face powerful Elven gods and stop the destruction they’re unleashing on the world. You are known as Rook, battling on the front lines alongside a compelling cast of companions with individual storylines and motivations. In true Dragon Age fashion, companions are central to the experience and as Rook, you must rise up, rally your crew and forge relationships to become the unexpected leader others believe in.

Story

Solas, the Dread Wolf and Elven Trickster god of legend, wants to tear down the Veil that separates Thedas from the world of demons, restoring his people’s immortality and glory—even at the cost of countless lives. But his ritual goes awry, and his worst fears are realized, as two of his most ancient and powerful adversaries are released. They seek only to finish what they started millennia ago – the complete and utter domination of our world. Rook’s journey to stop these two powerful deities will span across all of Thedas to bustling cities, lush tropics, boreal forests, fettered swamps and the deepest depths, but be wary of the evil forces along the way like the Dark Spawn, Venatori Cultists and Demons of the Fade.

Key Features

Fellowship – Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s brand new companions come alive with some of the most compelling individual storylines in Dragon Age history. Expansive and dynamic stories navigate love, loss and complex choices that will affect your relationships and the fate of each member of the Veilguard. New companions like the Veil Jumper Bellara, the necromancer Emmrich, and the private detective Neve, come from iconic factions in Dragon Age lore, possessing individual skill trees and specialized gear for advanced team progression. You’ll see familiar faces, too, such as the archer Lace Harding who returns to the series as a full time companion.

Choice and Consequences – Dragon Age: The Veilguard builds on the series’ deep role-playing roots, providing extraordinary storytelling and worldbuilding, deep personalities for each companion, meaningful choices and impactful cinematic moments. The bonds you create and the relationships you forge will be affected by your choices made throughout your journey.

A Crafted Experience – As a character-driven RPG, Dragon Age: The Veilguard delivers a crafted experience that pays homage to BioWare’s history of storytelling. The Lighthouse provides a central place where you can rest, learn more about the world through conversations, while the Crossroads allows you to traverse to separate explorable regions of the world with your companions. You’ll experience more of Thedas than ever before as your story unfolds across meticulously crafted biomes and beautiful regions including Rivain, Weisshaupt, Arlathan, Minrathous, the Deep Roads and more, each inviting you to delve deeper into the narrative and uncover the mysteries of the land.

Fluid, Customizable Combat – Immersive combat blends fluid moment-to-moment controls with tactical decision-making. Players can fully customize their experience to fit their playstyle with diverse skill trees among three different classes—Warrior, Mage, and Rogue—each with unique abilities and specializations. Choose two companions to join you on your quests and unleash powerful team combos that can change the tide of any battle. Make strategic choices and direct your allies to fight, heal or stay out of the fray with the newly-added ability wheel.

Be the Leader You Want to Be – Dragon Age: The Veilguard features a robust character creation system that allows you to be the leader you want to be with a vast range of customization. BioWare has created the most comprehensive character creator in Dragon Age yet to make this story truly your own

#Dragon Age The Veilguard #Dragon Age Dreadwolf #Dragon Age #Bioware #EA #video game #PS5 #Xbox Series #Xbox Series X #Xbox Series S #PC #Steam #Epic Games Store #long post

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anim-ttrpgs · 5 months

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Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and Themes of Disability, Mental Illness, and Criminality.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

Verisimilitude, What Would a Person Do?

To understand Eureka’s themes regarding disability, mental illness, and criminality, you first have to understand its verisimilitude.

“Verisimilitude” is defined as “the appearance of being true or real,” and it is a big part of the core design ethos behind Eureka. It is a very realistic game.

We aren’t necessarily of the opinion that “realism” is a better design choice than stylization overall for RPGs, but it is a better design choice for Eureka, because we want the PCs to be very normal, believable people who make believable, organic decisions in extraordinary situations. No matter what anyone says, the mechanics of a TTRPG strongly influence what kind of stories are told with it, and what characters do in those stories. So if we want characters to make realistic decisions, the world they inhabit and interact with must be constructed of realistic rules.

Even though there is a small chance that they may be a supernatural creature, PCs in Eureka are still not fearless action heroes, chosen ones, or anything of the sort. They’re normal people with jobs, friends, and families who get mixed up in mysterious and/or dangerous situations, often against their will. They are fragile, vulnerable, imperfect, and they, largely, know it.

“Composure” is a mechanic that helps you know it too. I’ve given a deeper explanation of the Composure mechanic in the post linked here, but I’ll give a very very very condensed version in this post. Composure can sort of be thought of as “emotional/fatigue HP,” (and no, it is NOT “sanity”) it acts as a guideline for how well your character is handling the situation, and when it gets low enough, it starts to have serious mechanical effects as well, because a character’s stat modifier can never be higher than their current Composure level. Fear, hunger, and fatigue all lower Composure, and eating, sleeping, and bonding with one’s fellow investigators can all restore it, at least for normal people. More on that further down. All you really need to know for now is that when Composure gets below zero it starts eating into HP, so characters can even pass out or die from loss of Composure, and also one single bullet is enough to permanently cripple a character, and the rate of Composure loss during combat reflects how serious that is for the characters.

Grievous Wounds

It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, whereby in character creation you can give your PC “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere, and these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

Critical Role’s Candela Obscura, the whole document of which is one of the most egregious examples of liberalism and toxic positivity I’ve ever seen in the TTRPG space, takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly asserts that to make any mechanic which functions otherwise is ableist. I think you can probably tell what I think of that from this sentence alone and I don’t need to elaborate. Getting bogged down in all the failures, mechanical and moral, of Candela Obscura would make this post three times as long.

I actually do think that as long as you aren’t moralizing and patting yourself on the back this hard about it, “flaw” systems in character creation are a pretty good idea in most cases, it allows for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better at anything—if anything, they probably made me stupider, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going by trying harder with a less efficient body, and rely more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

Denying that a disabled person is, by definition, less capable of doing important tasks than the average person is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help.

This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP, which by design can result from a single hit from most weapons, they may become incapacitated, or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Think twice before getting into a shootout.

Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, didn’t you read the above section? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG, and this character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters

Just like mundane people in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, monsters are playable, because they are regular people. I’ve gone over this in other posts and also you can just read about it in Chapter 8 of the Eureka rulebook, but the setting of Eureka doesn’t have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding or separating supernatural people from normal society. They exist within normal society, and a lot of them eat people.

Most RPGs consider monsters to just be evil, they do evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this post will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with monsters in general.

I mentioned Composure above, and how it can normally be restored by eating food and sleeping. Well, vampires can not restore their Composure this way. They don’t sleep, and normal people food might be tasty as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned for them, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to restore Composure is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether they’re happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you don’t literally have to eat food, but they do and you do if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, or else they’d eventually just sit at 0 Composure and not be able to effectively do anything.

There’s a reason that this is a numerical mechanic and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” and that is to emphasize and demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harmfulness as resulting from something of an intrinsic evil, but in my experience and observation, people do not just wake up at like age 16 and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Through their life circumstances they have been barred from the opportunities that would have given them other options. People need food, food costs money, money requires work, work requires getting hired, but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clean clothes, a charismatic attitude, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without, criminality is something they are funneled into, which becomes harder to avoid the longer they go without consistent access to their basic needs. The choice will be between taking money from others by force or trickery, or running completely out of money.

As the Composure counter ticks down, a vampire, or other playable monster, is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is little to no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have some money. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire get into sex work is like one step removed from telling every girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a man and be a housewife that gets taken care of if they want their needs met.

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

“Oh well then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people i just described above? See this post for answers to all the other arguments people are going to make to try and absolve vampires of causing harm.

Society not being set up for that brings me to next reading/theme: Monstrousness as disability, and monsters as takers.

Mundane human characters restore 2 points of Composure per day just by eating food and sleeping, but vampires do not, they can’t. To restore their Composure they have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating (blood). No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the world.

Even in so-called “progressive” spaces, there is a tendency to consider takers, people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people, as something that needs to be pruned, with the mask over this being the aforementioned total denial of the fact that disabled people take more than they can give.

In this way, vampires and other playable monsters are, inarguably, “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right beside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to at least reckon with the circumstances that make them this way, as well as acknowledge their inner lives. You have to acknowledge two things: That they are dangerous, harmful people who take more than they can give, and that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist.

One final point is that of monstrousness as mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above about disability can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to restore Composure without drinking blood. Eureka! moments can restore Composure, and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When I was writing the rules for how monsters regain Composure in accordance to these themes, I came to a dilemma where I wasn’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for them to be able to regain Composure in these ways, but ultimately I decided that yes, they can. It works with themes of mental illness, which is mental disability.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but study after study, including my own observation, has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and agency allowed to them to handle tasks are much less likely to enact harm, be that physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. So that’s why I kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes the harmful person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

I couldn’t really figure out where to fit this paragraph in so I’m sticking it here right before the conclusion: Vampires are especially great for this because they’re immortal, and because they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” They’re a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem. The question is how you will handle them, not how you will get rid of them.

In conclusion,

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a harsh, but compassionate game, that argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have needs which drive their behavior, many people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, and failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

And Candela Obscura sucks.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

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If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

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felassan · 4 months

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EA Press Release. [source link]

"Unite a Team of Heroes to Defeat Rampaging Elven Gods in Dragon Age™: The Veilguard Arriving in Fall 2024 June 09, 2024 Meet the Most Captivating Companions in the Franchise with New Cinematic Trailer; Official Gameplay Reveal with More Game Details Coming Tuesday, June 11 REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) and BioWare premiered a new cinematic trailer showcasing a brand new cast of companions who will join players in their journey through Dragon Age: The Veilguard, an all-new single-player fantasy RPG experience coming to PlayStation®5, Xbox Series X|S and PC in Fall 2024. Dragon Age: The Veilguardbuilds upon the pillars the iconic series is best known for, delivering a bold and heroic adventure guided by rich storytelling, fluid and strategic combat, companions and fellowship, and choices that matter. Tune into the official gameplay reveal of Dragon Age: The Veilguard featuring more than 15 minutes of gameplay from the opening moments of the experience on Tuesday, June 11 at 8:00 a.m. PT at the Dragon Age YouTube channel. In this next chapter of the critically-acclaimed saga, players will step into Dragon Age’snewest fully-customizable hero, Rook, battling on the front lines alongside an extraordinary cast of heroes known as the Veilguard. Fellowship is central to the experience of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with each companion entering the fray with their own storylines, motivations and skill trees. In this tale that will decide the fate of Thedas forever, Rook must rise up, rally a team and forge relationships to become the unexpected leader others believe in. “Dragon Age: The Veilguardfeatures some of the deepest companion storylines in Dragon Agehistory, navigating romance, tragic loss and complex choices that will affect relationships with players and the fate of The Veilguard,” said John Epler, Creative Director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. “BioWare’s storytelling roots shine through every chapter of this adventure, and we are incredibly excited for Dragon Age fans as well as those new to the series to experience this crafted, character-driven narrative that is so intertwined with our studio’s DNA.” Each companion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard brings their own expertise to the field of battle, summoning the grit to stand together and face impossible odds. Throughout their adventures, players can mix and match different team combinations of two of the game’s seven total companions at a time, to adapt to certain challenges and link powerful combinations that can turn the tide of any battle. The game’s cast of companions includes: Bellara, a creative and romantic Veil Jumper obsessed with uncovering ancient secrets. Davrin,a bold and charming Grey Warden who has made a name for himself as a monster hunter. Emmrich, a necromancer of Nevarra's Mourn Watch who comes complete with a skeletal assistant, Manfred. Harding, the dwarven scout, returns to the fray as a companion with her big heart, a positive outlook, and a ready bow – as well as unexpected magical powers. Lucanis, a poised & pragmatic assassin who descends from the bloodline of the House of Crows, a criminal organization renowned throughout Thedas. Neve, a cynic fighting for a better future, both as a private detective and a member of Tevinter's rebellious Shadow Dragons. Taash, a dragon hunter allied with the Lords of Fortune who lives for adventure and doesn't mind taking risks. Fans can add Dragon Age: The Veilguardto their wishlists on PlayStation, Xbox and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. For additional information and to stay up to date on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, visit the official website, like Dragon Ageon Facebook, follow the franchise on Discord, TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), and subscribe to its YouTube channel."

[source link]

#dragon age: the veilguard #dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #long post #longpost

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level2janitor · 9 months

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grid-combat sandbox thing!

i get distracted with new projects a lot, but lately my brain's been hyperfocused on one in particular. i wanted to take a crack at combining 4e-style tactical combat with OSR-style sandbox play, which on the surface seem like entirely opposite directions. and they kind of are, but i think i have something

since i started work on it i ended up dropping the words "OSR" and "4e" from my descriptions of it bc i think they end up evoking the wrong image. there's a lot that's core to both playstyles that i'm omitting to make it play nicer with the other playstyle. but it's far along enough now that i can talk about some of the design philosophy and how that manifests.

little to no scaling

the traditional way modern D&D (and to an extent even old-school D&D) handles progression is with big numerical scaling. a level 2 PC has nearly twice as much HP/damage as a level 1 PC. so you scale monsters to match, because the PCs have to get into fights around their level for the game to work.

skeletons are a real danger at 1st-level. they're manageable by 3rd, easy by 5th, and a joke by 7th-level. so you just stop running into skeletons, and when you're nearing the end of that level range any skeleton encounters that do happen will have a lot of skeletons.

this is bad for sandboxes! say i'm preparing a sandbox setting ahead of time and have a dungeon with a bunch of skeletons in it somewhere. i don't know what level the PCs will find it at - depending on whether they go through it as a 2nd-level or 6th-level party, it might be incredibly easy or so dangerous there's little they can do to mitigate that difficulty. or i'll just have to redo my encounter math the moment they find it, and that sucks for both the GM and players.

so, big numerical scaling is out. there's levels, you level up, but most of what you get from that level-up is a new ability. not a big pile of hit points and more damage. there's some scaling, your numbers are like twice as big at 10th-level compared to 1st-level, but it's a small enough range that a hard encounter at 1st-level will stay relevant throughout a whole campaign.

the game's far along enough i can create & fully level a fighter PC, so i made a 1st and 10th-level (max) character and put them side-by-side to get a feel for the scaling.

the warrior class

speaking of, the first class i made is the fighter, obviously. it's always the first thing i want to get right if i'm making a D&D-like system.

this is a good showcase of what each class is going to end up looking like: you start with a few core features & two perks (3 for warrior bc i like them being customizable). warrior perks range from a few unique moves to useful passives that let you resist statuses, strike multiple enemies, move further, equip heavier gear, parry weak attacks, etc.

the two core features, versatile fighter & combat opportunist, are designed to reward you for engaging in core combat mechanics. you get bonuses to attack from high ground, and this increases that bonus. every weapon has a unique special move you can do with it, and this lets you use any weapon you have with no cost to switch.

i've never liked the way most D&D-likes handle weapons, where you design your build around one specific weapon. you invest all your feats into being The Polearm Guy and when you find a cool magic warhammer or dagger you're just like. well i don't want this. it's not a polearm. so this fighter is instead designed to encourage you to carry around a ton of different weapons and use all of them.

exploration & the ranger

i used to hang out in the 5e community a lot, and people hated the 5e ranger. why? cause nobody used the travel rules, and you can't really blame them. the game has rules for how far you can travel each day, for random encounters & whether they ambush you, foraging, encumbrance, different travel speeds.

but most people who play 5e don't want that kind of experience, and 5e half-commits to it by leaving these rules scattered through the dungeon master's guide and making them too tedious. everything's measured in real numbers - miles, minutes, pounds. you track weight with pounds instead of item slots. of course nobody wants to track encumbrance when they have to stop the game to ask the GM how many pounds the macguffin weighs. nobody wants to dig through the DMG looking for the rule that tells you how many miles you can move. it just gets in the way and stops the game, so nobody does.

all of this screws over the ranger class which gives you bonuses to things like travel speed, not being ambushed while traveling, finding more rations, and tracking. people disliked the ranger so much that a supplement came out that replaced all of their exploration features with naturey combat features and some skill boosts, and since then that's the actual ranger when anyone wants to play one.

with that context, here's the exploration features my game's ranger gets.

the feature on the left is inherent while the right two are perks. there's combat features, but they're not part of the point i wanted to make.

the ranger needs to feel useful, and for that, the exploration needs to be front and center. so what better game than one designed for sandboxes?

i don't want this to be the kind of big-damn-heroes game where you skip to the next setpiece because the travel is boring. the travel is the game. that's where the OSR influence comes in.

you track rations. it's important - if a place is far from civilization, it feels like it because there's nowhere safe nearby to restock rations.

you track encumbrance. deciding how much space to spend on arrows and rations, and how much to spend on treasure, means more decision-making.

you do hexcrawling, you track time, and you care how many days a journey takes because the world changes as time passes. enemies & other factions progress their schemes, new developments come up. so sometimes you go, wow, good thing we have a ranger - we can move 3 hexes today instead of 2!

the ranger is better at foraging rations so you can venture further into the wilderness, better at moving your party faster, better at keeping watch. i want that to matter! i can envision it being so satisfying to play a ranger and constantly come in handy. and i want parties without a ranger to wish they had one in a way that isn't just tedious.

so hopefully that gives you a good idea of the sandboxy direction for this game. will be posting about it more as i make progress, and gonna continue to support iron halberd in between this sort of thing

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

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