#quickstart? kinda

[trashmuth]

i thought i had you figured out. something's gone terribly wrong.

[overleftdown]

deranged post-canon farleigh speculation

so. archie madekwe said something that makes me question a lot of the other post-canon speculation (often quickstart dynamic post-canon fics, speculation, etc.). Basically, he was talking about how tired Farleigh was getting, in the point in time that the movie is set. This is depicted through his confrontation with Felix, which Archie confirmed was the first conversation Farleigh has had with the cattons about the issue of bias.

a review by hilton als briefly touched on farleigh's possible future, as well. it was a very negative and... honestly understandable idea of what farleigh would grow up to become. aka, someone who exploited and tokenized their race for "brownie points," pun not intended. i see a lot of people crafting stories of farleigh finding different ways to rejoin the ultra-rich class. and i kinda wanna say that i... don't like that. here's an anecdote: my cousin and i had a conversation about his experience moving from a white-dominated, suburban environment. he argues that although racism is still prevalent where he now lives, the racism he experienced in his hometown was so painfully, covertly delivered. it's this sort of "could you just call me a slur or something" mentality.

although farleigh is terrified of change, although farleigh is terrified of losing what he believes is an accommodation for his marginalization (it isn't; you can't buy your way out of racism), although farleigh learned to be materialistic through the ways in which he was raised, although farleigh is constantly running away from something--i think he was reaching a point of genuine hatred for the ways in which racism is delivered to him in this environment. i would also go insane. so freakishly insane. i think his conversation with felix made him understand that maybe the cattons will never even try to change. that the cattons couldn't even acknowledge the problem in the first place. that you can't really win, with people like the cattons. it's always a game of when, and never if. when will they finally, politely discard me?

this leaves a couple options. the first, farleigh learns to be financially independent and very much successful. he would never rely on other people again, especially not white people. this leaves room for hilton als' interpretation, but the fact that farleigh was cognizant of and willing to mention racial bias to felix is evidence for me to assume that farleigh is beyond belittling himself like that. farleigh already experienced so much shame from catering towards the cattons and their whiteness... i don't think he'd keep going with that. not with the way it ended. not after he had the horrible wake-up call that was both his cousins dying. so, maybe farleigh does find his way back to wealth. maybe through fashion, through modeling like his mother, through another form of art, through business, whatever.

the other option is that farleigh just... doesn't acquire that level or even close to that level of wealth again. i kinda like this idea. i kinda like imagining farleigh in a city flat or smaller suburban house, finding a significant other and probably never ever having kids. that, of course, still leaves room for farleigh to go and brutalize oliver out of saltburn. but i'd like to think he wouldn't take saltburn back. as i've said before, farleigh was never greedy. he never wanted to replace or succeed the cattons, nor did he want any form of dominance over them. to be their equal, yes. to be seen and heard and given attention, yes. but never did he play his games to knock felix or venetia down. i feel like farleigh would be the "eat the rich" that saltburn didn't have. not in the corny way, because farleigh is no robin hood, nor is he an innocent and selfless person.

my ideal "sequel" type situation would be farleigh returning to saltburn after living comfortably and humbly for the last 20 years. he's not here out of moral obligation. he's not here to steal back the catton wealth. he's here selfishly, and out of burning hatred. he's here because oliver stole any sense of closure farleigh could've ever had. he's here because oliver never gave farleigh the opportunity to forgive his family, nor to mourn them, nor to visit those memories, nor to make new ones. farleigh is here to wreck oliver's shit. it's not healthy, it's not pretty, it's not clean. i'd imagine 40-year-old farleigh, having matured, returning to saltburn and regressing to the same games he always used to play. lying, people pleasing, pretending, sex, drugs, sass, etc. ahhh. my ideal sequel. a man who found peace without closure and finds closure through a significant lack of peace. and, also, oliver dead as hell.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Learning How to Play Forged in the Dark: Part 1, The Action Roll.

If you have never played a Forged in the Dark game before, picking up one can be intimidating, and that includes Protect the Child. I’ve talked about some general pieces of Forged in the Dark play before, but today I’m going to try and bridge the gap a little more by explaining the basics of the Action Roll, as well as Position and Effect.

The Action Roll.

In most Forged in the Dark games, the Action Roll consists of rolling a pool of 1-4 d6’s and looking for the highest number. Let’s look at the different outcomes.

6 = success. Multiple 6’s (Crit) are like a Nat 20 - you get the best possible outcome!

4 / 5 = partial success. You do the thing, but you also get a consequence or a cost.

1-3 = failure. You likely don’t do the thing - and the situation gets worse.

This is the basic roll for the bulk of Forged in the Dark games, and everything else stems from this rule.

Alright, now let’s talk about two axis of detail that are added to the Action Roll: Position & Effect.

Position

Position is how the GM communicates the difficulty of the thing that you, the player, are trying to do. In other words, it describes how bad things could get if you fail. There are three different Positions: Controlled, Risky and Desperate.

Controlled -> Failure is more like an annoyance, or something you could potentially avoid.

Risky -> Failure is going to suck a little.

Desperate -> Failure is going to suck a lot.

Effect

Effect is how the GM communicates the potential of success. To describe it in another way, it’s a measure of how much of your goal is achievable. There are five different levels of Effect:

None -> As is, you can’t do it.

Lesser -> You can do it… kinda.

Standard -> You can do it.

Greater -> You can do it well.

Extreme -> You can do it with the best possible result.

Position and Effect are combined to communicate to the player the stakes, as well as provide a shorthand to detail the span of possible outcomes based on the roll. The default combination is Risky/Standard - failure might suck a little, but if you succeed, you can do the thing. However, depending on the narrative situation or the rolls that have happened previously, you might be in a fire-fight with just a knife (that’s pretty Desperate), or perhaps an ally has handed you a grenade (that’s probably going to have Greater Effect).

This is a chart that indicates some of the outcomes that may happen depending on the result you get depending on your Position. The bottom row lays out the five possible Effects, and the number of ticks on a clock that they might correspond to.

On my next post, I’m going to explain how you combine Position & Effect with the tools on your character sheet. This is just a starting point - players have a lot of control over what the final outcome looks like!

If you want to start learning how to play Protect the Child, I recommend taking a look at the Google Spreadsheets linked on the store page and flipping through the character tabs. The Quickstart characters are 90% fleshed out and can give you an idea of what different character pieces can look like, and there’s a rules reference for how to roll underneath the stats for each character.

I also believe that playing is one of the easiest ways to learn, so if you want some hands on experience, hop into the playtest discord! There is at least one game happening every week designed to be easy for first-timers to hop into and give it a whirl.

If you want to read more about Forged in the Dark play, you can check out my intro to Forged in the Dark, as well as my explanation of Clocks!

[baltsurn]

fast quickstart (kinda???) sketch

i just had to draw them together in these fits ok kjdsfjksd

[ourloveiselectrifying]

Hello hello! It's me DFP

I'm wondering where you learned/are you learning to Code? I find the structure of your game quite entertaining and I like to take a little inspiration from it (If I'm allowed)

And I tried to make images that are options but apparently I'm still a long way from leaving the beta of my projects So I wanted to seek advice from you

(Also, if this is not the correct account to ask this I apologize, but if you have some very good advice that can help me please feel free to go to my DMs)

Hello DFP! :3 (I'm not exactly sure what you mean by structure sorry, but probably yes haha) 

I didn't learn coding. In fact, the scariest part of my game is the code itself! I would like to take classes in art and coding someday! It's just not a great time in my country to be spending money atm ahahahaha- (cries in national housing and inflation crisis)

If you're using Renpy to make a VN, smart people would recommend giving the Renpy and Python's offcal guides a good look and watching Renpy tutorials on youtube.

For me, I'm the kinda person that only takes in information by dissecting and breaking things, then learning from the mistakes. I looked at the front page of the Python pdf, and it made my ADHD repossess my body despite being on the max dose of ritalin. I immediately closed it then skimmed through the Renpy quickstart, not really taking in any of the information, jumped right into designing the main menu, minced up the code, caught a bunch of errors, and had to check out fourms for fixes.

Have some random tips that may or may not be helpful since I don't know your skill level and I, am infact, not skilled in Renpy, I have no idea what I'm doing half the time! :3

Make new files for everything, don't just put it all in the script or it's going to get ridiculous.

Scripts get LONG use # and add notes, so you can CTRL + F and find stuff easily.

If you're like me, check out renpy's reddit/lemma soft fourms, if you're not getting good goog search results, it might be the words you're using, I had this issue a lot, try changing up words in your question (options/preferences/choices/decisions)

When you're learning copy and paste the code/answer, once you know the the code and can type it out fast, then starting manually typing it out.

Always check the dates on posts, there's a bunch of old renpy guides/fourms that don't work anymore.

There is more than one way to skin a dingo (sorry kevin), if you've found a fix that seems ridiculous but it's working, keep it!

If you have anger problems prepare to get fuckin' pissed off! Before you start coding have a coffee/bottle of water/energy drink beside you, so you have to walk away to take angry piss breaks and can clear your head.

If you absolutely cannot figure something out, make a copy, put it aside and work on something else until you're a little more skilled.

I have three copies of olie, the one that works, the one that I'm experimenting on, and the one on a USB I copy when I get drunk and forget which is my "fuck around" code and which is my "don't touch it, it works" code and I annihilate my game. Make regular backups to your USB for any emergencies, houses burn down. Limit your drinking while coding.

Compare code to the game base if you're coming up with errors. Goog the exact error that pops up when the game crashes. (renpy expected statement)

Click the blue text and it'll take you to it. Sometimes it's not very accurate and you need to look a little above or below the line the error happened. 70% of the time your error is a missing space or "," or an extra space!

I also recommend checking out all the shortcuts on your code editing software (I'm using visual studio code!) I was manually adding indents to each line, which was wasting an insane amount of time LMAO ;w; 

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by images that are options, but I'm guessing an imagebutton? If you search "renpy imagebutton" there's a few forums and tutorials that will guide you but it's like this.

You need a screen for your buttons, an image, if you're feeling funky add transforms to the button, else just use a different image for idle/hover!

Add the anchor before you do xpos/ypos because it messes around with the positions and you'll have to re-adjust the xpos/ypos again. You need anchor for the transitions to work properly.

If you want the button to make a sound on click add activate_sound or remove it if you don't want one, it's optional.

This is how you make the transform, you can do a TON of different transforms. This is a simple idle/hover transform. ease is the animation type/speed, alpha is transparency, 1.0 is fully visible, 0.0 is transparent, at 0.5 on idle, it has a dimmed effect. the zoom makes it bigger. Make a new file for this one!

Buttons have a TON of actions to choose from, this is a time I actually would checkout renpy's offical guides. This one does the same as a jump at the end of a label or choice.

If you want your game to not pause when your buttons are visible, just use "show screen nameofthescreenhere zorder 20" (zorder is the layers, 20 is like usually the top, you can go higher though)

If you want your game to pause while the screen is up, use call screen instead of show!

I probably won't do too many of these coding/renpy support things on my tumblr but, OLIE'S discord server has a few game dev channels for coding support if you'd want to join there! :3

I wish you well and goodluck on your game!!! 💖🫡🍀

[soulmuppet]

They keep telling us we’re monsters, but we’ve never felt more alive.

Here is @JohanNohr ‘s cover for our sad gay vampire game, Paint The Town Red.

We wanted to show the duality of vampires in our game, contrasting the monstrosity of feeling dead and the monstrosity of feeling alive.

Creator @JellyMuppet talks about this (and so much more) in our interview with @lincodega from @rascal_news.

We’re going to crowdfunding in September, but you’ll be able to check out a fully playable quickstart/demo for the game coming this Friday! It’ll be available on our webstore, but the best thing to do is to join our mailing list at: https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/pages/paint-the-town-red

Whats more, Actual Play wizard @StellaLunaTV is running the game with a star-studded cast of players on the 26th May over on twitch.tv/stellaluna

~~~

Honestly Zach kinda pops off in this interview but thats what happens when you ask someone what it means to be human.

[karagna]

Hi there!

I saw the game you coded and I think its really awesome!

I've been thinking about making a game for awhile but was always intimated by the fact that I don't know how to code things you said in the post for "A Pound of Flesh" that you hadn't done it before and I was hoping you might be able to point me toward some good resources for learning!

Thank you!!

HIHI!! So for 'A Pound of Flesh', I used the visual novel building system called Renpy to make it! It's basically a free software that streamlines a huge part of the visual novel making timeline and its also the main reason why I was able to develop it by myself in 36 hours.

Renpy uses Python to code visual novels, and when you download it, it immediately prompts a tutorial that teaches you the basics of coding in it which you can replay. It's not too in depth, but it provides enough that I was able to understand the main functions and also some other cool stuff that Renpy can do! Honestly because i only had 36 hours I didnt have time to pour over much resources, a lot of what I learnt came from typing in my questions into google and praying someone had asked it before in either a visual novel dev forum called Lemmasoft or reddit (and it often worked). Most people who help out will also give their own code that worked so I kinda reversed engineered it to learn on my own Tbh I'm sorry I couldn't help more! I kinda just went in hoping the best and didn't think I'd come out with a finished product.

But hopefully the forums and their website I linked down below will help you out if you decide to try Renpy out for developing! It's honestly not as hard as I thought it would be, and if you use Visual Studio Code there's even a plugin which highlights code for you making it so much easier to see what's part of the dialogue and what's actually just code

Forum link: Link Quickstart help website: Link

[owlbear33]

tbh as a way of limiting magic I'm much more interested in risk management than resource management

not how much can you do before you run out of steam

but how far can you push it before it blows up in your face

I think this first occurred to me reading the Shadowdark quickstart a while back

(I don't mean to bash the system, Shadowdark seems well-liked and successful, it's just not to my tastes)

it has an alright magic system, largely roll-to-cast, you can keep casting a spell until you fail to cast that spell, miscast on a natural 1

I had problems with this, at least from my perspective

miscasts are fine, good even, but only happening on a natural 1, that's a flat 5% chance at all times

and IMO this is kinda dull

I won't spell failure to vary based on the situation, how many times has the spellcaster cast today, how many times has a spellcaster cast in this scene, has the spellcaster had a spell failure recently, are there any antimagic entities or objects present, is there something big and magical going on, what is the general health of the caster, and so on

[thevioletscout]

Since enough time has passed I think, highlights from when I played the Fallen London quickstart at the launch party!

(Note I am going to list some spoilers for the quickstart's story so don't read if you haven't played yet lol)

Since I was a last minute addition to the group transferred from a no show DM, I got last pick of characters. I ended up with Pryce, a murderer for hire and the one human of the group, described as well shaved and tattooed. I noticed no gender or pronouns were listed for anyone except Deirdre and Thibert, and asked if this meant we could make up the genders. I was told yes so I decided playing a bald tattooed mama sounded really fun.

Deirdre's player suggested she and Pryce could be toxic lesbians and I was totally down for this. We didn't get to do anything with that though unfortunately, though I did have Pryce use flirtatious pet names while threatening another woman later.

Deirdre's player also gave her this Irish accent that was really nice to listen to. Props for the voice performance there.

For most of the session to keep my hands busy I was drawing Pryce as I imagined her and sharing progress with the group. I asked what kind of tattoos were popular in the Victorian era and they suggested flowers, so I made her tattoos floral themed. Here is the final mockup I did.

At one point we had to investigate a honey den, and the DM gave the bartender lady a voice reminiscent of Roz from Monsters Inc, which cracked us all up. This one character brought us so much joy. Her voice also reminded me of Torbek from Legends of Avantris but I didn't mention it. She didn't like poets as poor clay man poet Christopher learned the hard way.

Pryce had to pickpocket a letter from some guy with a red painted nose, and it was an easy success because he was thoroughly distracted by talking to a clay man, a rubbery man, and a rat. Deirdre was over at the bar talking to knockoff Roz like a regular person.

Said letter was basically the red nosed guy lamenting Miles' relationship with a lady and longing for their "friendship." We spent awhile joking about how obviously gay he was.

I got really fixated on the missing Miles' door and windows being locked and theorizing what that could mean. The DM later answered this by describing a scene of Miles just leaving his apartment and locking the door behind him. Like a regular person would.

(EDIT: Just remembered the reason I fixated so hard on this was because we were told multiple times no one saw him leave lol.)

When we went to go interrogate the lady Miles was last seen with, the person the other guy was so jealous of, she pulled a cartoon stunt on us by saying Miles is "up there" while pointing at the sky (or "sky" since this is underground), and then running off when we looked up. We then had to chase her for a good while.

She told us that Miles was taken by a deacon named Samuel. As Shazzbaa has already discovered by now, all I could think about was Samuel Ashman.

When we went to go confront Samuel in his basement lair where he was having Miles make weird mushroom drugs and calling him an angel, he and Deirdre ended up in this really long back and forth where they were arguing their ideologies. It was really cool and the DM and Deirdre's player are both really good actors, so I enjoyed listening to it, but Thibert's player did have to leave before we could finish because we took too long. I told them after the session to be a little more careful about getting caught in loops like that and not giving other players room to jump in.

That said it was probably for the best I couldn't get a word in because I just wanted to shoot the deacon.

While trying to snap Miles out of his fungal religious mania, Kingsley wanted to show him the letter I pickpocketed, but I never actually gave it to anyone else in the group and I was busy fighting the deacon alongside Deirdre. I kinda just yelled for Kingsley to come take it out of my pocket which was fairly easy because rat.

Poor boy ended up crying over everyone he missed so we were able to leave without finishing the deacon off. I had Pryce guide him out protectively because mom instincts.

This whole thing was to track down a Jack of Smiles by the way.

Overall it was a really fun game and I have some ideas for plotlines I'd want to run in the future. Also I want to OC-ify Pryce because I love this trying to redeem herself of her deadbeat history mother.

[doolallymagpie]

shit, dude, the expanse tabletop rpg’s almost all the way funded and it’s been up, like, not that long

[overleftdown]

can u talk more abt his apparent affairs w teachers and relationship w sex in general? so many ppl gloss over that bit

of course! i'll link a couple posts for preface, although i'll probably paraphrase some stuff anyways.

[my commentary on sex and consent in saltburn.]

i received an ask regarding farleigh's queerness the other day, to which i tied in this little tidbit about farleigh's affirs with teachers. the explicitly male/male language that felix used when recounting farleigh's sexcapades with teachers was interesting to me. farleigh is pansexual (as stated in the screenplay), but felix uses male/male language exclusively. part of this could be the erasure of pansexual or bisexual reality. people either exclude the homosexual aspect of someone's identity, or the heterosexual aspect. but this could also mean that farleigh did only harbor affairs with male teachers.

that would be an interesting complex to think about. although women in positions of power are absolutely capable of abusing that power and asserting dominance over others, men have a different dynamic within that. the fact is, farleigh does things to gain the affections of other people, because he isn't automatically handed that affection. farleigh does play into teacher/student dynamics, whether it's overtly sexual or not. you can see this in the tutor scene and the brief montage moment where fareligh is sitting on the floor in front of the tutor, while they both ignore oliver. consider it an investment, of sorts. there's always a possibility that a white teacher will have academic bias against you, and the need to mitigate that is strangling sometimes. teachers are also just dicks. i find myself in "teacher's pet" positions for a number of reasons, a few of them are bias related.

where it gets complicated is the sex aspect specifically. if it is true that farleigh has been expelled from an absurd number of schools specifically for harboring teacher/student sexual affairs, then this is can really only be perceived as compulsive. also, can i just say, the fact that farleigh was expelled instead of the teacher being fired is disgusting. i kinda wanna call this evidence of discrimination, as well. queerness and perceived sexual deviancy, blackness and the constant inability to be seen as human and innocent. arghgh. i digress. the fact is, if farleigh truly was harboring sexual affairs with teachers for his own benefit and that alone, then he wouldn't have made the mistake so frequently. he would've recognized that the disadvantages outweighed the benefits and found other ways of playing teacher's pet. archie talked about the quickstart dynamic and said that although it was ambiguously consensual, farleigh is attracted to and aroused by power dynamics. many people are. where that compulsive need to buy into power dynamics comes from, i'm not sure. it could be a lot of things.

the neglectful nature of farleigh's upbringing could've resulted in a need for validation and attention from those who are in a position of authority. farleigh's queerness could've resulted in an internalized feeling of perversion that was then externalized through a desire to be taken advantage of. the nature of submission is also often linked to a need for control in other areas of life, and therefore relinquishing control in sexual dynamics. some marginalized people play into eroticization because it can be more validating than exclusion. many people learn to crave their own objectification, and it's often a manifestation of sexual trauma or other forms of trauma. if i get really convoluted and let my angst-fanfiction brain run wild, i start to imagine what environments farleigh was in throughout his childhood. as archie said, farleigh was involved in overly "mature" conversations and situations through his mother. what that could mean for farleigh's perception of sex, nobody knows. i can let my imagination go insane though. i can imagine a lot of weird scenarios. those are all conjecture, of course.

i'm just going to conclude that whatever sexual complexes farleigh has, they're not healthy. i don't think that they should be fetishized or ignored. i think that they're relevant to farleigh and oliver's on-screen dynamic, especially considering oliver was in a position of power over farleigh when they had sex.

[giurochedadomani]

Against all odds and Eddie's doubts, Billy doesn't bully him the first time he approaches him and tries to make friends. However he cuts him off saying that he doesn't take seriously anyone's opinions when they listen to dio, which in Eddie's books is not much better. I kind of picture him left gaping like a fish under the bleachers, kinda outraged. This quickstarts their longstanding tradition of arguing in a very dramatic way with each other about their favourite metal subgenres. However they gang up the moment someone else even has the thought of joining the discussion or reducing it all to 'screamy screamy music' or calling it weird

[theresattrpgforthat]

are there any systems that work for player vs player combat with well-defined characters and broad powersets? street fighter the storytelling game really opened my mind to the possibilities of a potentially purely-pvp tabletop game with full character sheets, but the balancing is kind of a disaster in that game and it kinda restricts you to unarmed martial artist characters (as opposed to, say, mages or weapon users)

THEME: Combat, PVP

Hello friend, so I tried to focus on games that prioritize combat. When it comes to mechanically detailed games that specifically centre PvP, I don’t know very many. Some of these games may fit some of what you’re looking for, but I can’t guarantee that anything on this list will fill all of what you’re looking for. That being said, these games are likely to carry at least something that speaks to you, and you might even be able to combine one or two of them to get what you’re looking for!

Gubat Banwa, by makapatag. (@makapatag)

Gubat Banwa is a  Southeast Asian fantasy martial arts Role-Playing Game, inspired by the refulgent cultures of Southeast Asia. Raise your spears, KADUNGGANAN, you elite warrior-braves and asura-knights who travel The Sword Isles to prove their conviction and dictate the fate of the world. Revel in larger-than-life war drama like in Asian Dramas, ballistic tactical martial arts grid gameplay in the vein of Lancer or Final Fantasy Tactics, and find glory beyond heaven. Wield the Thunderbolt of Liberation! Rejoice! In the Glory of Combat!

Gubat Banwa is all about combat, and it provides you with a wealth of martial options to choose from. The styles include fighting with long-ranged attacks, magic, defensive, offensive, and balanced styles. This means that while the team works well together, each character will have their own strengths and weaknesses. That being said, I can see at least fictional reasons why two players might end up squaring off against each-other - for example, if their convictions clash. I’d say this is worth checking out for the mechanical richness and unique setting: for PVP I think it might have potential, but might require a bit of work on your part.

Vibe Check: Enter the Inversion, by Ostrichmonkey Games. (@ostrichmonkey-games)

Vibe Check is an illuminated by LUMEN tabletop role-playing game for 3-6 players inspired by The World Ends With You.  Players take on the roles of Players in the Watcher's Game - a week long challenge with the prize being another shot at life, while another player takes on the role of the Game's Master to introduce complications and consequences the Players must overcome as they fight to survive the Watcher's Game. 

The idea of competing to come back to life feels like a great premise for some player rivalry. LUMEN games are also one of my go-to recommendations for folks who want some truly satisfying combat, as it lends itself to really impressive combos. In Vibe Check, since your clothing is one way to improve your fighting ability, I can see your combat options being really abstract and unique. The game has a Quickstart that you can peek at to see if it’s your style, so you should definitely visit the link above to check it out!

Arena: Valor and Victory, by The Adventure Co.

Whatever ill fate or delusional promises of fame led you here, your only way out is to fight. Imprisoned with no guarantee of release, you are forced to battle for the entertainment of impressionable onlookers. Using your charm to win their favour or brute strength to best your opponent, your fighting style is yours to choose.

Arena is a combat-based TTRPG run by and for two or more players, that rewards good roleplay and planning, forward thinking and those who choose to get back up when they are knocked down. This is a specifically PvP-focused game, in a gladiator-style arena that relies on a grid to track your combat. I’m not sure if the rules allow more than two players in the arena at a time, but the game also provides a role for anyone not currently in the fight, as members of the crowd. A player whose fighting spirit is reduced to 0 can no longer fight - this allows you to avoid character death and bring a character back for revenge in a future bout! And rewards (apart from status) come in the form of pay, allowing your characters to avail themselves of food, a place to sleep, and better weapons for future fights.

I could see you re-flavouring this game and pairing it with something like Gubat Banwa for moments when your characters want to fight each-other, rather than a slew of enemies.

Guardians vs. Kaiju, by Kormar Publishing.

In the future of 21xx, kaiju threaten the existence of humanity. Emerging from the earth, sea, and cosmos, these gargantuan monsters can only be stopped by GUARDIANS, human piloted mechas and Earth’s last hope.

GUARDIANS vs. Kaiju is a tactical tabletop micro-game that simulates battles between giant robots (mechas) and giant monsters (kaiju). One player takes on the role of a GUARDIAN and one takes on the role of a kaiju as they customize their avatars and battle for supremacy. 

If you want PvP, two-player games are the most popular ways to go about it. This game is an example: each character is thematically unique, with their own method of attack. It also allows the player characters to feel reasonably balanced, as it’s a lot easier to make sure two opponents are evenly matched than it is to balance five or six different move-sets. I don’t know if this really scratches the itch of broad power sets, but it does allow you to tell an epic story about well-matched opponents on a grand scale.

[binarystargames]

Liminal Void rambling: ships, ship combat, and ship "combat".

Thinking out loud about Liminal Void ship stuff because that's on my docket alongside Valiant Horizon (a fantasy game I'm making). And since Valiant Horizon is mostly in the "the thing's constructed, just gotta tweak it around the edges" stage I'm back to thinking about Liminal Void. (If you're not familiar with Liminal Void - and why would you be, this account is basically new and the game's not out yet - basically it's a space game with an Expanse-ish level of hard-sci-fi-ness, give or take a bit, but more centered on survival in shit space capitalism than interplanetary politics as such. I have a free quickstart here for ground-level, Level 0 rules if that sounds like your thing!)

Ships

As part of the core concept of the game, past that Level 0 conceit (which is defined as "the time before you have a ship and become capital-P Protagonists") I'm assuming you have a ship at all times. (My toxic trait as a designer is I think I can be the one designer who makes vehicle and not-vehicle interactions that actually work and make both parts of the game good/interesting and inseparable in a good way.) In general ship stuff is supposed to be one of the major sources of advancement, but that's a later problem.1 Right now I'm thinking about ship combat.

My general concept for ship-on-ship combat is that it's not some cool dogfight even at the Expanse level (where fighting ship-to-ship is still insanely dangerous and a bad idea) so much as "two sets of assholes in tin cans desperately trying to poke holes in each other before the other one does, escape, and/or board the other one". My concept for this was to use my Clashes and Dueling rules - you can see a sample ship there, even. In this system each combatant picks an action and both are revealed at once, a priority is determined based on classification of the ability picked (Aggressive < Defensive < Indirect < Aggressive), and effects resolve based on that priority. I think it seems like it'll be cool in the abstract. I have two problems to solve at the high level though which intersect.

Combat

My first problem is that I definitely designed this dueling system first with a different game (Machinations of Court and Frame, which you can see referenced in that page, and which is only in pre-pre-production, and not tested in the slightest) in mind. Machinations is conceptually a troupe-based game where players have a few characters working for various noble houses on all sides of a war, so odds are any duel is going to be between two PC characters and players who aren't directly involved get drafted and split up out of character to give advice to players who are for a usually-1v1 fight between two noble house-representing pilots, while the GM/fifth wheel/etc acts as a referee (online this feels like a "both parties send a secret message to the ref who reveals both at once" situation, at a table this is "both people scribble actions on cards or have action cards and flip at once"). I think it works best in that case: each character in the fiction is a mech pilot who can mostly focus on taking one action at a time, and you don't have as many players sitting around bored because you're splitting the PCs into two camps or running two parallel duels or whatever once that starts.

Liminal Void is...not that kind of game. You're playing one character, or possibly one of several characters in a crew, but either way everyone involved is on that ship having probably one of the worst days of their lives so far. Splitting the party up in that way feels weird given that - designating half the party to be in charge of Random Dipshit Corporate Police Cruiser kinda sucks, and saying the party can only do one kind of thing at once feels weirdly limiting and feels like it will mostly lead to one person quarterbacking and everyone else just along for the ride. But also I don't want the traditional "battle stations" idea where everyone just Does Their Thing every round because that sucks and I don't think anybody really likes that!

I'll give it a think. Given that the actions are typically a lot simpler and each shot is intended to matter way more than in Machinations (after armor is stripped away, each hit has the potential to deal systems damage, which I suppose gives characters who aren't the pilot something to do but more importantly has lasting implications until they can get legit-repaired) maybe it's tense enough to be fine.

"Combat"

The thing about Liminal Void is that it's a game where I wanted to emphasize not-just-combat as being interesting and worthwhile. You can mostly take jobs that involve salvage/repair/exploration if you're into that, and even in the quickstart scenario you can "win" without ever getting a proper weapon or firing a shot. That way, when combat happens, it's not "casual" in that sense: it's quick, visceral, tactical, intense, and someone you like is very likely to walk up kind of messed up if not dead. So given that, how do we represent ship encounters where it's not like a fight to the death? Or even an encounter with another ship?

If you think about spaceship stuff, off the top of my head there's a lot of cool scenarios that aren't dogfights: navigating asteroid/debris fields, trying to take another ship intact, trying to get away from a ship trying to board you without shooting at it, chases, flying through highly populated areas like local station traffic, flying close to an emplacement that's shooting at you. In a lot of cases it's a safe assumption your ship doesn't even have a weapon: like it's very possible you have a luxury cruiser and your main strategy for getting attacked is to speed up and either get out of acquisition range so they can't find you. Or maybe you have a space big rig and your main strategy is to ram them and board them because you're twice their size.

I think this is mostly doable by designating scenario events as "actions" in that Aggressive/Defensive/Indirect enemy attack sense: like for an asteroid field, they could come in the form of rocks in the way of the ship (Aggressive), rocks with enough minerals in them that they deflect sensors (Defensive), and rocks that are coming towards the side because they were deflected off something else (Indirect). Instead of aiming to deal enough Harm to take down some kind of Health/Integrity so the opponent dies/explodes/is destroyed, we could re-use the idea of Rolling for Progress and define various actions in a scenario as adding X Die Progress (like moving towards a goal, or lasting long enough in a chase that you get to a part where your pursuer has to turn around, or finding the proverbial needle in a haystack in a ship graveyard where the black box signal is coming from).

Conclusions

I have none, honestly, I just gotta make some stuff and see how it feels.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far!

My general thought is as you make more money you can install more storage, add workbenches and armories to maintain increasingly expensive sets of equipment for various tasks, etc. Personal advancement as opposed to ship advancement is probably going to be a mess because right now most Total//Effect advancement I've written is "get more powers per level"2 and that doesn't work as well here because those kinds of abilities are equipment-locked but that's a problem for future me and I have some ideas already. ↩︎

Also I need to figure out the best way to make Reactions exist fluidly. Again, a problem for future me. ↩︎

[frankenjoly]

Extralucide

spotify wrapped writing challenge: ittorou + 55

la seine (og french version)

Je ne sais, ne sais, ne sais pas pourquoi

On s'aime comme ça, la Seine et moi

“Gotta say, you’re kinda familiar. Have we met before?” That question quickstarted a ton of alarms inside Gorou’s head, and not for the reason it may be almost everyone’s first thought. Luckily, Itto seemed blissfully unaware of 1) where he could have seen him and 2) the reaction those words had in him.

It’s not like the reason was some sort of big secret he was incredibly embarrassed of… alright, maybe a bit, but again not for what could be the most common conclusion. Gorou’s masculinity wouldn’t crumble for having to pose as a woman, he didn’t really care about that; the problem stemmed from Guuji Yae not letting him have his own choices on the matter and everything related to it.

Besides, would Itto think any different of him if he knew? He had heard how he talked about Miss Hina, would knowing the truth disappoint him?

“Well…” Gorou stuttered, doing his best to think about a convincing response, and soon. “Wouldn’t have forgotten you?” As awkward as it had sound, and as improvised it had been… it was actually, technically true.

“Oh. Wow. Wow!” Itto, meanwhile, was smiling. Something he decided to take as a good sign. “You flatter me, general. And I wouldn’t have forgotten you either.”

[trans-mouse]

is there like. a player quickstart for glitch? because like. I like this but oh my GOD is the rulebook dense, and rules are kinda just. spread throughout.