#it's crunchier that way no?

[sweetpollyolliver]

You walk a fine line defending characters in the mdzs fandom. Like, on the one hand, I don't think Jin Guangyao or Jiang Cheng or Wei Wuxian or Nie Mingjue (etc etc etc) did everything they are accused of in canon or in the fandom. On the other hand, they all did plenty of questionable things. If you focus too hard on who was right and who was wrong, you make it sound like what matters is what they deserve or what justice they should get.. which is a slippery slope to go down in a story about villains, and frankly, boring. But if you let them off without any fallout from the people impacted by their actions? I don't know , it frustrates me - I don't know about you?

[corruptedcontainer]

Season 1 Jon is here to call your statement a lie

[glamfellens]

SSighhhhhh dragon age 2 just isnt grabbing me like origins did

[arcaneyouth]

i'm starting to think living with 5 other people may simply be a problem

[mariverses]

the white buenos are better than the normal ones and if you think otherwise i think you are lying to yourself

[ladyswillmart]

There's always a good side and a bad side to going back and reading your own writing--for me it's primarily the experience of being absolutely delighted to remember some old things that I'd forgotten about, but on the other hand the work is always, always, ALWAYS

Unfinished, and

Frustratingly better written than anything I'm capable of doing nowadays

I don't know why or what I was doing back then to make it better, or what happened in the meantime to make it worse, but gosh I wish I could still write like that, huh 😩

[bmpmp3]

the thing about me is i adore rotoscoped animation with all my heart

[scarletfasinera]

Fell down the whole staircase AND LIVED 💪

[james-stark-the-writer]

Some music just sounds better crunchy, I'm sorry. Like, whatever the actual sound is that you would hear when something gets like a remaster or whatever like a song from like the 50s or something, will never make up for what your brain thought it sounded like when you first heard it and the crunchiness of the music helps your brain fill in the gaps more and that's why some crunchy music is superior.

[ross-hollander]

The telltale signs...

...that you have been a 'mech pilot for too long:

You stay away from bonfires, barbecues or even opening ovens because feeling more heat on your skin than sunlight sends you into a nervous panic.

The world seems overwhelming and confusing when there is no HUD to look at it through. Your gaze sometimes drifts to where your GPS system should be when you need to find your way somewhere.

You stop thinking in the cockpit. Young pilots can move and think at the same time; the more time you spend, the more you realize you need to just empty your mind. Clean mirrors reflect clearest.

You can tell at a glance how many tons of metal a building could hold up- or, well, should be able to. (Contractors cut corners, after all; you can never be completely certain.)

You start hating cats, or most small and frisky animals, because something moving unexpectedly in the lower edge of your vision has been a 'mech-hunter infantry team too many times.

You go in for crunchier or chewy foods just to be as far as possible from sipping on a nutrient juice pack.

Your actual, physical body hurting from something like stubbing your toe or hitting your head on a doorway has become a bizarre sensation compared to the pure brain-pain of damage feedback.

You can still feel "your" missile pods, or jump-jets, or similar, when you're outside of your 'mech. At times, like that sudden, illusory feeling of falling as you go to sleep, you get phantom recoil from weaponry systems.

You stop aiming for the cockpit. It stops being about salvage money for a mostly-intact 'mech, or giving a clean death to whoever is behind that glass: if you have to shoot off every gun and missile piece by piece to make it out alive, you will.

You have learned what it feels like to crush a human body underfoot. (Gritty and brittle, mostly. Unpleasant.)

[cornflowercanine]

YESTERDAY I LEARNT

MY ONLY TWO WEAKNESSES

SUNSCR33N

CAULIFLOWER

USE THIS INFO WISELY.

[prokopetz]

i love how you break down rpgs and i really wanna try some indie ones, but i really like crunchy mechanics i can sink my teeth into and find that a lot of the popular ones tend to be very rules light (thats not a bad thing! its just not my thing). do you know of some crunchier ones?

It depends on what kind of crunch you're looking for. Indie games tend not to be maximally crunchy in every sphere of activity the rules choose to address in the same way that big names like Dungeons & Dragons or GURPS are because they don't have the ability to throw large teams at the task of designing and writing them, so the rules-heavy ones are typically heavy in one particular area.

For example, Sarah Newton's transhuman space opera game Mindjammer is a Fate Core derivative, so its conflict resolution is fairly light, but it has one of the most baroque character creation systems I have ever seen in a published game – and I'm including shit like HERO 6th Edition when I make that assessment. Everything from a baseline human to a sapient starship to an entire planetary culture can be represented as a character with a character sheet, and you can at least hypothetically play as any of those things.

Conversely, Erika Chappell's flying-ace drama Flying Circus is an Apocalypse Engine game, and outside of aerial combat it plays roughly as you'd expect, with a handful of lightweight player-facing moves and a whole four stats to remember, but then you get into an aerial dogfight and your combat tracker sheet looks like this:

So it's really a question where you need to be very particular about what you mean by "crunchy"!

[utilitycaster]

Daggerheart Character Build thoughts!

I am actually out at work and haven't checked the version that's since come out, but I did participate in the character build beta, and the NDA is officially lifted, so here's my thoughts from that! It's definitely limited since I just made a L1 character and didn't go through gameplay, though I surmise about some aspects of gameplay.

Overall, it clearly seems to be made by people who love a lot of things about D&D 5e but wanted both more flexibility and more simplicity, which is difficult. I think they succeed.

To that end, it takes away some of the crunchier aspects (precise positioning, exact amounts of gold) and I think for some people that will be a problem, and that's valid, but ultimately this game wants to both allow for interesting mechanics in and out of combat while also not being terribly math/map/resource management heavy. It is a hard line to walk; most systems either go hard crunch or go entirely gooey.

The dice mechanic (2d12, Hope and Fear system) is fantastic; look it up but I think it handles mixed successes more gracefully and interestingly than a lot of games.

The playtest was not super clear on armor and evasion choices (or indeed what evasion means; it seems to be sort of initiative but sort of dex save, or maybe more like the Pathfinder/old school D&D varying ACs by scenario?). It was much, MUCH clearer than D&D on weapon choices (part of why I play casters? Weapon rules in D&D are annoying and poorly explained and many people rightfully ignore them) so I'm hoping this becomes clear when there's a full guide rather than just the character creation info.

The character creation questions by class were fantastic and in general, and this is a theme, this feels like it guides people towards collaboration. FWIW I feel like D&D has that information, but the way it's presented is very much as flavor text rather than a thing you should be doing. Daggerheart makes this a much more core part of creation. The Experience mechanic is particularly clear: you better be working with your GM and really thinking about background, rather than slapping it on as a mechanic.

The other side of character creation questions is that it really encourages engagement with the class, which is something I've talked about. I think either subversion for the sake of subversion, or picking a class for the mechanics and aesthetic but not the fundamental concept, will be much harder to justify in Daggerheart, and I think that's a good thing because when people do that, their characters tend to be weaker.

The downtime is designed for you to write hurt/comfort fanfic about and this is a compliment. There are a number of mechanics that reward RP, particularly one of the healing mechanics under the Splendor track. I feel like a weakness of D&D is that when you try to reward RP it's really nebulous because there's not actually a ton of space to put that - you can give inspiration, but, for example, the empathy domain Matt homebrewed actually feels kind of off because it's based on such fuzzy concepts amid mechanics that are usually more rigid. Daggerheart comes off as much cleaner yet still RP-focused, and I'm excited to see it in action.

A judgement of Candela and I suppose Daggerheart might be that it's designed for actual play. I've mentioned before that I know people who are super into the crunch and combat and numbers of TTRPGs and are less story-oriented, and again, that's valid, but actual play is just storytelling using a ttrpg and so yes, a game that encourages RP while also having mechanics to support that and influence it is an extremely good goal. I am not an actual player, but I do like D&D games with a good plot and not just Go Kill Monsters, and I want to play this. (I also have some real salty thoughts about how if you modify an existing game for AP purposes that's staggering genius apparently, but if you make your own game how dare you but that's another post).

And now, the classes/subclasses. I am going to sort of use D&D language to describe them because that's a point of reference most people reading this will understand, but they are not one-to-one. A couple notes: everyone can use weapons and armor. HP is not totally clear to me but it seems to be threshold based - everyone has the same HP to start but people have different thresholds and armor, so the tank classes have the same amount of HP but are much harder to actually do damage to.

All classes are built on a combination of a subclass and two domains. There are 9 classes and 9 domains. This technically means that if you wanted to fuck around and homebrew you could make up to 36 classes (27 additional) by just grabbing two domains that weren't otherwise combined, which is fun to consider for the potential. Anyway I cover the classes and briefly describe domains within them. You can take any domain card within your domain, regardless of subclass.

There are six stats. Presence, Instinct, Knowledge, and Strength map roughly to Charisma, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Strength. Dex is split into Agility and Finesse; Agility covers gross motor skills (jumping, most ranged weapons, "maneuvering") and Finesse finer ones (lockpicking and tinkering, though also it does cover hiding). The really big wins are first, no CON score, so you don't need to sink stat points into something that grants no skills but keeps you alive. The second one is that the "hybrid" classes spellcast from their physical stat. This is fucking fantastic. The thing about ranger or paladin or the spellcasting subclasses of rogue and fighter in D&D is that if you don't roll pretty well you're locked into the core stats and CON and nothing else. (This also doesn't have rolling for stats: you assign +2 to one stat, presumably your main, and then distribute two +1s, two 0s, and one -1.)

Your HP, Evasion, and Thresholds are set by class, and there's a core ability; the rest is all from the cards you take for subclass and domain.

Leveling up is very much based on taking more domain cards (abilities) but has a certain degree of flexibility. It's by chunks: in leveling up anywhere levels 2-4, you can, for example, increase your proficiency by +1 once, so if you wanted to do that at level 2 but your fellow player wanted to wait until level 4 and take something else at level 2 instead, they could. It allows for more min-maxing, but also everyone has the same level up rules and differs only in the abilities on the cards, which is very cool.

Bard: Grace (enchantment spells) and Codex (learned spellcaster stuff; the spells available are definitely arcane in vibes) based, Presence is your main stat. The two subclasses map roughly to lore-style stuff and eloquence. Core class ability is sort of like inspiration but not entirely. It's a bard; I like bards a lot, and this is very similar vibes-wise to your D&D bards. If you like D&D bards you will like this.

Druid: Sage (nature spells) and Arcana (raw magical power spellcaster stuff), Instinct is your spellcasting/main stat. The two subclasses are elemental but frankly cooler than circle of the moon, and a more healing/tranquility of nature focused one. I really think Marisha probably gave feedback on this one, because the elemental version is really strong. You do get beastform; it is quite similar to a D&D druid under a different system, as the bard, but the beastform options are, frankly, better and easier to understand.

Guardian: Valor (melee tank/damager) and Blade (damage). Strength based for the most part (Valor mechanics assume strength) though you could go for like, +2 Agility +1 Strength to start. This is barbarian but like. 20 times better. It is, fundamentally, a tank class, and it is very good at it, with one even more tank-focused subclass and one that is more about retaliatory damage. You do have a damage-halving ability once per day, but really guardian's questions are incredible. I think Travis and Ashley likely gave feedback. Also rage doesn't render you incapable of concentration as that doesn't seem to be a thing, so multiclassing seems way more possible (you are, I think, only allowed to do one multiclass, and not until you reach level 5 minimum, which I am in favor of). Yes, you can be a Bardian.

Ranger: This is what I built! It is based on Sage and Bone (movement around the field/dodging stuff) and it is Agility-based, including for spellcasting, which is a MASSIVE help (as is, again, the fact that CON isn't a thing.) The subclasses are basically being really good at navigation, or animal companion. Most importantly to me you can be a ranger with a longsword and you are not penalized; Bone works with either ranged weapons or melee.

Rogue: Midnight (stealth/disguise/assassination spells and skills) and Grace-based. Yes, rogue is by default a spellcaster, which does help a LOT with the vibes for me. One subclass is basically about having lots of connections (as a spy or criminal might) and the other is about magical slinking about. Hiding/sneak attack are also streamlined. I will admit I'm still more interested in…almost everything else, but I think it evened out a lot of rogue weaknesses.

Seraph: Splendor (healing/divine magic) and Valor. This is your Paladin equivalent. It is strength-based for casting, again making hybrid classes way less stressful. Questions for this area also incredible; you do have something not unlike a lay on hands pool as well. Your subclasses are being able to fly and do extra damage; or being able to make your melee weapon do ranged attacks and also some extra healing stuff, the latter of which is my favorite. Yasha vibes from this, honestly. Single downside is this is the only class where they recommend you dump Knowledge. I will not, and I never will. Now that I don't have to make sure CON is high? I am for REAL never giving myself less than a +1 Knowledge in this game.

Sorcerer: Arcana (raw nature of magic/elemental vibes) and Midnight based. Yes, sorcerers and rogues now share a vibe, for your convenient….less enthused feelings. Instinct-based, which intrigues me, and the core features are in fact really good. The two subclasses are either one that focuses on metamagic abilities, or one that is elemental based. I would play this for a long-running game, though it's not my favorite, and I can't say that for D&D sorcerer (except divine soul).

Warrior: Blade and Bone, and the recommended build is Agility but you could do a strength build. Fighter! One subclass is about doing damage and one is about the hope/fear mechanics core to the game that I have NOT talked much about. I will admit, the hybrid martials and Guardian are more interesting to me but you do have good battle knowledge.

Wizard: Codex and Splendor. Wizards can heal in this system; farewell, I will be doing nothing else (jk). Knowledge-based, and you can either go hardcore expertise in knowledge, or be a battle wizard.

Other scattered thoughts: healing is not as big a deal here; there is no pure cleric class! There is also no monk, warlock, or artificer. There is not a way to do monk as a weaponless class really though you might be able to flavor the glowing rings as a monk weapon and play a warrior. Wizard, meanwhile, with the right experiences and high finesse, would allow for some artificer flavor. Cleric and Warlock are the two tough ones and I will admit those are tricky; I feel like you'd have to multiclass (which you cannot do until level 5) between perhaps seraph and a caster class and you're still going to come off very paladin.

[crossdressingdeath]

A 3 AM thought: Wynne's dynamic with Alistair vs the Warden really is so much crunchier if you're playing Surana/Amell. With the former Templar Wynne is every inch the doting grandmother: she nags him lovingly, she mends his clothes, she fusses over him, he can get basically anything out of her just by acting pathetic until she gives in. She comes across as... for lack of a better word, harmless in a way that's a little uncomfortable when you remember where she grew up. There's an element where I get the sense she's trying to manage Alistair and keep him on her side the way a Circle mage might try to manage a Circle Templar to keep themself safe.

But with the Warden she's very different in a way that doesn't make sense with most Wardens, given that at least on paper they and Alistair hold basically the same position? With the Warden Wynne is harsh, demanding. They have to get everything right, no distractions, no missteps, no fumbles. They can't fall in love, they can't hesitate, they must in short be the fairytale, knight in shining armour image of a "perfect" Grey Warden. Which... y'know, isn't how the Wardens work? But if you're playing Surana/Amell and looking at their conversations with Wynne through the lens of a senior Circle mage speaking to a much younger and less experienced Circle mage... that's basically the advice that that senior mage would give in the Circle. If you want to live, be perfect. You can't slip, you can't fall in love, you must be the very best you can be to the point of inhumanity (for lack of a better term in a setting where not everyone's human) because anything less is unforgivable. No one wants you to be a person, just a tool; that's a feeling that I think both mages and Wardens would understand. The way Wynne treats the Warden makes the most sense with Surana/Amell by a mile, because she is in a way treating the whole situation like being in the Circle!

[goblincow]

Rascal News is well worth your money:

Well it's been a month. I waited and watched and thought ah you know if the lowest sub was less than $5 then maybe just maybe. But I did want to support because Rascal is setting a course for the direction TTRPGs as an arts industry can be steered in, whether I personally am on board or not (though my funds would certainly help).

Like I said, it's been a month, and they've now implemented pay-per-article if there's something you want to see or you can't justify $5 – which is a pretty smart move considering "paywall tho" is the thought terminating refrain in the twitter replies and one of Rascal's stated intents is to do more Real Important Journalism in an industry rife with corporate exploitation and abuses of power, which is the sort of news that needs both funding and low access to entry.

It's also worth saying that their articles are a good read.

"While there are still some crunchier elements to the final product (exemplifying what AP scholar Dr. Emily Friedman refers to as the medium’s “ambitious middle”), the subtle production details and the highly intentional performances in GUDIYA are a beacon of what is artistically possible for video-born actual plays."

"GUDIYA (the Hindi word for doll) overwhelmingly plays into the horror of not only its source material, but the horror of being both a woman and South Asian in the highly gendered and xenophobic world of the English Empire."

I've now signed up at $50 for the year, or £3.29 each month which is Really Quite Good, so for your consideration I wanted to share the article that made me commit (above) plus a couple of choice picks for tumblr:

[thydungeongal]

Going to run Quietus today, so far it's the best horror RPG I've found for my purposes (one-shots where a bunch of regular people go into a Spooky Place and see some Spooky Stuff and maybe Die). Previously I'd been using Call of Cthulhu but the madness mechanics in that are a little goofy if you aren't running a Lovecraftian narrative.

Any recommendations for other games that meet the above criteria? I haven't run it yet but so far my two biggest concerns are that Quietus isn't well suited to groups with more than 2 other players, and the emphasis on accommodating prep-free play also means that using it to run a session with a premise you decide beforehand is a bit tricky.

If you want something a bit crunchier but that works well for horror, I'd recommend checking out Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by @anim-ttrpgs. As the title suggests it is meant for investigative gameplay, but urban fantasy has a lot of overlap with horror as a genre. Eureka's Composure mechanic emulates the loss of one's nerve and the stress of encountering horrific things (both mundane and supernatural), and the way it works is that once a character's Composure goes down it effectively acts as a cap on their skill ratings. Characters don't just go Lovecraft mad because they've seen something they don't understand, they become emotionally and mentally strained and become unable to operate at peak capacity.