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imsobadatnicknames2 · 4 months

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What's OSR? I've seen you mention it several times in your RPG posts. Is it like a genre of rpg or...?

Hey, sorry I took so long to reply to this lol you probably already just googled it by now.

But like. Anyway.

OSR (Old-School Revival, Old-School Renaissance, and more uncommonly Old-School Rules or Old-School Revolution, no one can really agree on what the R means) is less like a genre and more like a movement or a loosely connected community that seeks to capture the tone, feel and/or playstyle of 70's and 80's fantasy roleplaying games (with a particular emphasis on old-school editions of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the Basic D&D line but pretty much anything before 3e falls under this umbrella), or at least an idealized version of what people remember those games felt like to play.

There isn't exactly a consensus on what makes a game OSR but here's my personal list of things that I find to be common motifs in OSR game design and GM philosophy. Not every game in the movement features all of these things, but must certainly feature a few of them.

Rulings over rules: most OSR games lack mechanically codified rules for a lot of the actions that in modern D&D (and games influenced by it) would be covered by a skill system. Rather that try to have rules applicable for every situation, these games often have somewhat barebones rules, with the expectation that when a player tries to do something not covered by them the GM will have to make a ruling about it or negotiate a dice roll that feels fair (a common resolution system for this type of situation is d20 roll-under vs a stat that feels relevant, a d6 roll with x-in-6 chance to succeed, or just adjudicating the outcome based on how the player describes their actions)

"The solution is not on your character sheet": Related to the point above, the lack of character skills means that very few problems can be solved by saying "I roll [skill]". E.g. Looking for traps in an OSR game will look less like "I rolled 18 on my perception check" and more like "I poke the flagstones ahead with a stick to check if they're pressure plates" with maybe the GM asking for a roll or a saving throw if you do end up triggering a trap.

High lethality: Characters are squishy, and generally die much more easily. But conversely, character creation is often very quick, so if your character dies you can usually be playing again in minutes as long as there's a decent chance to integrate your new PC into the game.

Lack of emphasis on encounter balance: It's not uncommon for the PCs to find themselves way out of their depth, with encounters where they're almost guaranteed to lose unless they run away or find a creative way to stack the deck in their favor.

Combat as a failure state: Due to the two points above, not every encounter is meant to be fought, as doing so is generally not worth the risk and likely to end up badly. Players a generally better off finding ways to circumvent encounters through sneaking around them, outsmarting them, or out-maneauvering them, fighting only when there's no other option or when they've taken steps to make sure the battle is fought on their terms (e.g. luring enemies into traps or environmental hazards, stuff like that)

Emphasis on inventory and items: As skills, class features and character builds are less significant than in modern D&D (or sometimes outright nonexistent), a large part of the way the players engage with the world instead revolves around what they carry and how they use it. A lot of these games have you randomly roll your starting inventory, and often this will become as much a significant part of your character as your class is, even with seemingly useless clutter items. E.g. a hand mirror can become an invaluable tool for peeping around corners and doorways. This kind of gameplay techncially possible on modern D&D but in OSR games it's often vital.

Gold for XP: somewhat related to the above, in many of these games your XP will be determined by how much treasure you gather, casting players in the role and mindset of trasure hutners, grave robbers, etc.

Situations, not plots: This is more of a GM culture thing than an intrinsic feature of the games, but OSR campaigns will often eschew the long-form GM-authored Epic narrative that has become the norm since the late AD&D 2e era, in favor of a more sandbox-y "here's an initial situation, it's up to you what you do with it" style. This means that you probably won't be getting elaborate scenes plotted out sessions in advance to tie into your backstory and character arc, but it also means increased player agency, casting the GM in the role of less of a plot writer or narrator and more of a referee.

Like I said, these are not universal, and a lot of games that fall under the OSR umbrella will eschew some or most of these (it's very common for a lot of games to drop the gold-for-xp thing in favor of a different reawrd structure), but IMO they're a good baseline for understanding common features of the movement as a whole.

Of course, the OSR movement covers A LOT of different games, which I'd classify in the following categories by how much they deviate from their source of inspiration:

Retroclones are basically recreations of the ruleset of older D&D editions but without the D&D trademark, sometimes with a new coat of paint. E.g. OSRIC and For Gold and Glory are clones of AD&D (1e and 2e respectively); Whitebox and Fantastic Medieval Campaigns are recreations of the original 1974 white box D&D release; Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord are clones of the 1981 B/X D&D set. Some of these recreate the original rules as-is, editing the text or reorganizing the information to be clearer but otherwise leaving the meachnics unchanged, while others will make slight rules changes to remove quirks that have come to be considered annoying in hindsight, some of them might mix and match features from different editions, but otherwise they're mostly straight up recreations of old-school D&D releases.

There are games that I would call "old-school compatible", that feature significant enough mechanical changes from old-school D&D to be considered a different game, but try to maintain mechanical compatibility with materials made for it. Games like The Black Hack, Knave, Macchiato Monsters, Dungeon Reavers, Whitehack, etc. play very differently from old-school D&D, and from each other, but you generally can grab any module made for any pre-3e D&D edition and run it with any of them with very little to no effort needed in conversion.

There's a third category that I wouldn't know how to call. Some people call then Nu-OSR or NSR (short for New School revolution) while a small minority of people argue that they aren't really part of the OSR movement but instead their own thing. I've personally taken to calling them "Old School Baroque". These are games that try to replicate different aspects of the tone and feel of old-school fantasy roleplaying games while borrowing few to none mechanics from them and not making any particular attempts to be mechanically compatible. Games like Into the Odd, Mörk Borg, Troika!, a dungeon game, FLEE, DURF, Songbirds, Mausritter, bastards, Cairn, Sledgehammer, and too many more to name. In my opinion this subsection of the OSR space is where it gets interesting, as there's so many different ways people try to recreate that old-school flavor with different mechanics.

(Of course, not everything fits neatly into these, e.g. I would consider stuff like Dungeon Crawl Classics to be somewhere inbetween category 1 and 2, and stuff like GloG or RELIC to be somewhere imbetween categories 2 and 3)

The OSR movement does have its ugly side, as it's to be expected by the fact that a huge part of the driving force behind it is nostalgia. Some people might be in it because it harkens back to a spirit of DIY and player agency that has been lost in traditional fantasy roleplaying games, but it's udneniable that some people are also in it because for them it harkens back to a time before "D&D went woke" when tabletop roleplaying was considered a hobby primarily for and by white men. That being said... generally those types of guys keep to themselves in their own little circlejerk, and it's pretty easy to find OSR spaces that are progressive and have a sinificant number of queer, POC, and marginalized creators.

#ttrpg #osr

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talenlee · 2 months

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Why Is Druid?

Say that like ‘where is Wizard Hut?‘

I love the 4e Druid. This is a marked change from how much I liked the 3e druid, or how often you might see me playing a druid in a Baldur’s Gate game. Back in 3rd edition, the druid, despite being very powerful, never really engaged me, in part perhaps because I was always trying to find something exploitative and powerful rather than merely accepting the juggernaut of a toolkit the game just left in the Player’s Handbook. You couldn’t get clever with the Druid, you just had to pick it up and use it, like some sort of society of creative anachronisms where one of the anachronisms available to the players was has gun. Valid, but hardly sporting.

The Druid in 4th edition is different. Wildly different. Weirdly different, and different in one of those ways that shows what I think of as a seam in the design between 4th and 3rd editions of D&D.

The Druid was one of 3rd edition’s great mistakes, a full spellcasting class with healer capacity to serve as a pinch-hitter healer in a group that wanted things a little more varied, addressing an enormously complex potential build from its earlier edition, 2e, and all in the process, resulting in some deeply confused mash up of abilities that attempted to address confusion with volume. The druid of 2e had a special unique set of rules compared to the Cleric — for example, at a certain level, you passed into a specific category of Druidic ability and now you were technically a Hierophant, and Hierophants had seven extra spells of every level. Of course there was a limited supply of Hierophants in the world, so there was a question of if you could level up if another one existed, and maybe there’s a one-in, one-out policy? First in, first fired?

Anyway, I can’t speak to how it played, but I am at least aware, on the edges of it, that the 2e druid was odd. It had a lot of things it could do, but much of how it worked, reading the books, seemed to be interesting but challenging to manage. You could wild shape, you could heal, you could cast utility spells, you could even fight with some melee weapons — personally, I didn’t see any of it worth it, because none of the things it could do it could do very well.

3e addressed this seeming difficulty by instead taking all those different options and bringing them all up to the same level. Wild Shape worked by checking traits of monster units, which meant that you weren’t limited to specific reinterpretations of animals and instead could do what a druid feels like it should do — you know, turn into an animal. The spells were rebalanced and shared across different classes, which meant that they tended to work in a more standardised way. Armour rules were aggregated, and weapons were made less terrible.

The result was that the 3e druid went from being ‘decent’ at a bunch of things to ‘good’ at everything it wanted to do. The problem of the druid then became about picking the thing you wanted to at every opportunity, and doing a good job of it — you’d have druids carrying wands of healing so they could dedicate their spell slots to more important tasks, like Flame Striking opponents, or messing up the battlefield with roots. You’d also see druids keeping the ‘best’ list of animals on hand, and every new monster book presented a new chance for druids to develop a new best form.

It also created the strange question of What does the druid do?

The answer was ‘everything.’

The 4e Druid, in comparison and contrast to these designs is something very different that touches, at best, on the periphery of what the 3e Druid could be. I mean it stands to reason, you can only ever touch on doing everything when something you’re working from is so powerful. 4e with its role system of Defender, Striker, Leader and Controller, and its reliable, reusable balance math suddenly was confronted with fitting an elephant into a shoebox.

How do you represent something busted that could do everything in the context of a new system that sought to explicitly prevent that? I joked when the game was new that the four roles were Defender, Striker, Leader and Miscellaneous. That any class too powerful, with too much stuff it could potentially do, got thrown to the Controller role as suggested by the first Controller we ever saw being the Wizard. Oh and back in Player’s Handbook 1, the Wizard had a few builds that were pretty ridiculously pushed — the pinball wizard, I’ll talk about it sometime — and that meant that it was easy to feel like the Controller Does Everything.

That impression diluted through experience, of course, and eventually it came to that while yes, the Controller sure has some Miscellaneous vibes, the core of what the Controller was there to do was to attack the enemy action economy. Nice and obvious to a non giga-nerd, right? Okay, how about this: The leader lets you do more things, the controller stops them from doing more things?

And into this space, they poured the druid.

It works beautifully, for my tastes; the druid needs to do lots of things to feel properly druidy, but you need to make sure the doing lots of things doesn’t unbalance the game. Controllers have the widest variety of things they can do and ways they can do them – inflicting status conditions, changing enemy position, preventing specific action types, making areas on the battlefield inaccessible, these are all ‘controllery’ things, and that means there’s a lot of different ways you can flavour them. The Invoker is most famous for making zones in the play space hard to deal with, the Wizard has a build that slides things all over the place, and the psion controls people with immense penalties to their damage rolls.

Obligatory pause where, while reading this aloud, for either Fox or I to comment on how amazing it is that Dishearten is an AOE power.

Anyway, the druid was designed to be a mode switcher class. That is, there are two ways a druid can do things. One is a melee controller that makes a single target’s life harder, the other is a ranged controller that makes a large group of enemies’ lives harder. This mode switching then adds a new element to the class that your powers can interact with, where you now have control powers that can add a mode switching element to them as well. This is your Wild Shape – you transform into some kind of nonspecific beast, which can use your Wild Shape powers. Each form has fewer powers to manage, and you can build your druid to specialise in one or the other or do a mix.

This lets the druid do the ‘a lot’ without letting them actually do everything. You have a lot of choices and a lot of ways to play with those pieces, but even just how often you use the mode switch is part of what the druid does to control the battlefield. When I first played a druid, it was not uncommon to start a fight out of wild shape, use the first turn to make some kind of area control power, then shift into wild shape for the rest of the fight kicking people into that area control power. There are druids builds that work like wizards and only ever shapeshift to get away from problems, and make a hit while scuttling away, or to sit on a specific type of problem. There were druids who focused on summoning monsters and using them as kind of turrets on the battlefield, positioning allies in a way that benefitted them around those summons.

Lone artillery combat encounters, where you have a bunch of stuff in front of a long-ranged attacker? Druids love those. Even at level 1, that artillery is spending their days completely stuck underneath a Fire Hawk power.

Problem is, of course, that if you want to do Everything doing a Lot is going to miss something. That was what led to the subclasses of the druid, the ones that added healer elements to the druid, because the druid back in 3e could do that. It added animal companions, because the druid back in 3e could do that. Now I don’t worry too much about these things because if I wanted an animal companion on my Druid, I’d take a theme for that, but also because these changes were introduced in an Essentials book.

Which is to say, they’re crap.

They’re not crap crap, like I try to defend Essentials as giving players a choice for simplified character builds, but in the specific case of the Essentials Druids, in order to work with the simplified choices, these Essentials druids with their animal companions and their healing powers have to look at all other Druid powers and not use them. The only use they get out of their animal companion is using the specific subset of powers that make them work, and that makes combat more samey. But again: That’s a thing you probably want if you want a simplified build.

Still, it gives rise to my favourite joke – I mean like, funny thing, not really a joke, there’s no subversion of reality or anything here – about the Healer Druid. See, every Leader in the game gets an encounter power, usable twice a combat at level 1, that heals an ally with a bonus. Every class gets their own version that lets them distinguish their class specifically and add some interesting detail that shows how this Leader differs from other Leaders.

The Healer druid build gets Healing Word.

The Cleric power.

Literally, the same power, same name, listed as a Cleric power.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#DnD 4e #Dungeons &amp; Dragons #Games

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txttletale · 1 year

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Because I'm curious now, what are your favorite TTRPGs? One of my personal favorites is the Kids On Bikes system and its variants for their simplicity and ease of access for new players.

so first of all--kids on bikes is very cool. it’s a nice rules-light game with a pick-up-and-play vibe. haven’t ever run it myself but i feel comfortable seconding your recommendation. anyway here’s some of my FAVOURITE TTRPGS.

Blades in the Dark is probably my enduring all-time favourite game. it’s a little flawed in places but its core loop is pure fucking elegance at play. flashbacks (you can spend stress, a metacurrency, to have done something in the past) and resistance (you can also spend stress to evade something bad that happens to you) are two of my favourite mechanics in any TTRPG ever. every player character gets to be a competent badass while also facing real, tangible danger with every moment. not to mention an incredibly well-fleshed out and evocative setting in the gaslamp fantasy nightmare city of doskvol.

Eidolon: Become Your Best Self is a game that dares to ask questions like, ‘what if jojo’s bizarre adventure was good’ and ‘what if persona, also, was good’. characters manifest the power of their souls as weird freaks with incredible powers. the ‘reveal your master plan’ mechanic works much like BiTD flashback mechanic and a smart combat system where enemies get stronger as you fight them really makes this the perfect vehicle for creative character-driven superpower-based combat. if you subscribe to the developers’ patreon you can also get access to the draft of the second edition, which does some really cool fucking things like replacing dice rolls with a tarot draw.

Lancer is the game for people who like grid-based tactical combat. it has incredible tactical depth, well-thought out mechanics that interlace perfectly--and best of all, you get to design and customize your own mech from a truly dizzying array of options to find all sorts of fucking insane synergies between abilities like ‘teleport whenever you attack somebody’ or ‘do more damage the more you overheat’. it also has a very comprehensive suite of GM tools that make it a breeze, and even fun, to create and run a balanced encounter with clearly defined and narrativly interesting goals for both sides. i’m not too into the setting for reasons i’ve talked about elsewhere, but fortunately as long as you can accomodate ‘mech combat’ into your setting, none of the worldbuilding is load-bearing to the game’s core appeal.

Microscope is totally different from a lot of TTRPGs in that it’s noit about playing characters, but about creating a world. it’s a beautiful collaborative storytelling tool with deceptively simple tools that can easily add up into your table creating a world that’s way more intricate and eclectic and fascinating than anything one of you could have come up with on your own. good for creating TTRPG settings but also good just as something to play for its own sake!!

Dream Askew would probably round out my top five, but i’ve just posted about that one here--so instead i’ll give this slot to Nobilis 3e, a game that might not be one of my favourite games to actually play, but is genuinely fascinating to read and sit with, a fucking masterful work of both design and literature, something that so distinctly creates a world and a tone that it’s instantly magnetic. not for everyone, but worth checking out.

#ask #ttrpg #fish-king

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prokopetz · 1 year

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Thank you for the explanation! ❤️ now I’m intrigued, though: Where can I find information on why 4E was published under a more restrictive license?

(With reference to this post here.)

Before we can talk about that, it's necessary to understand what an incredible shitshow 4E's commercial launch was in general. I go over that in some depth here.

Understanding the sequence of events outlined there is important because it dispels one of the most widely accepted wrong answers to your question: that Hasbro and WotC cooked up the 4E Game System License (GSL) because they didn't want a repeat of Pathfinder.

In truth, the 4E GSL is what caused Pathfinder; Paizo was one of a handful of third-party publishers who'd taken advantage of the D&D System Trademark License (STL) to produce officially branded D&D products, and they'd likely have been perfectly happy to continue doing so if WotC hadn't come to them and said "hey, if you want to remain STL-compliant, you need to throw away all of your 3E material and re-develop it for 4E, under a more restrictive license, with zero notice – that's cool, right?"

(It was not, in fact, cool.)

As for why the 4E GSL really happened, there are a variety of opinions on that – a lot of it ultimately comes down to internal office politics, so there may never be a clear answer. As far as I've been able to gather, however, the problem is that the OGL had always served two masters. By all accounts, several of the OGL's principal architects genuinely believed in establishing a creative commons for D&D – but that's not how they sold the idea to the suits at the head office.

Internally, the pitch in favour of the OGL was that it would allow WotC to delegate the creation of D&D supplements and adventures to third parties, allowing WotC itself to focus on core book sales. (i.e., the PHB/DMG/MM trio and the main setting hardbacks.) Core books were always the more lucrative side of the coin, with supplements and adventures serving less as a profit-making enterprise in themselves, and more as long-tail support to drive further core book sales. The prospect of being able to get that long-tail support for free was very tempting, and is likely the main reason that corporate agreed to publish the Third Edition under the OGL in the first place.

The OGL accomplished that, to a degree, but it also resulted in a lot of publishers lifting D&D's rules text wholesale – remember, the OGL allows verbatim copying-and-pasting of rules text, which was its main draw from the perspective of third-party publishers – and stuffing it into their own standalone games. This sort of thing was fairly small-time prior to the Pathfinder debacle, but there was enough of it going on for WotC's new owner, Hasbro, to see it as a thorn in their side.

TL;DR version: in all likelihood, 4E's GSL was an effort by Hasbro to rein in the OGL and return it to the purpose for which it had initially been sold to WotC corporate: an instrument for outsourcing D&D's long-tail support to unpaid third parties while reaping the benefits of that support in core book sales.

(Of course, as outlined in the linked post, what was actually accomplished was to shrink D&D's third-party support practically to nothing while simultaneously creating its own largest competitor; it's a fair question how much of this was due to the GSL itself, and how much of it was due to all the other corporate incompetence and general fuckery attendant to 4E's rollout, but either way, the result was WotC and Hasbro pulling the plug on 4E early, and reverting to the OGL for 5E. It was a learning experience all around – though the present business with the OGL 1.1 leads one to suspect that they didn't learn the right lessons!)

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #dungeons & dragons #d&d #hasbro #wizards of the coast #ogl #ogl 1.1 #game design #publishing #swearing

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lutethebodies · 1 month

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"Nobody Cares About Your Original Characters"

CW: earnest middle-aged bewilderment

For a blog allegedly dedicated to my BG3 Tavs, there's a lot of companion- and/or NPC-related content here, because like any rottenbrained fan of this game, I find several of its characters compelling, well written, and frankly hotter than a fireball in Avernus.

But I want to focus this thing back on my Tavs/OCs, because that's why I like D&D and by extension BG3: the game allows me to create my own heroes and play out their stories as if they were as epic as Link's or Aloy's or any other famous franchise hero. Some of these folks have been TTRPG characters of mine for over three decades, so I've lived with them for quite some time and they're as real to me as I'm sure yours are to you.

However, in my brief (and therefore probably unrepresentative) experience with this blog and a few other places, nothing I post about my OCs resonates with very many people. (If it has, thank you and you're very kind). And while being creative for myself (whether in fiction, music, cartography, whatever) has always been about doing it regardless of attention, I'm at a loss for how to do it in this case.

So I'm throwing a few questions out to the ether for the sake of received wisdom and, say, interesting stuff about characters that (mostly) nobody knows about. Help an aging roleplaying fan feel relevant, won't you?

When you find an original character compelling, what usually hooks you?

Once you're interested, what else do you want to know about that character?

I'm guessing researching characterization in general will help, but specifically for this platform, what helps? I was thinking well-made or well-captured images, sure, but also maybe:

their in-game builds/profiles/gear

their backstories (brief, I promise)

their playthrough highlights (romances, unique events, etc.)

their original 5e incarnations (because they're all from my time playing D&D 5e or even 3e)

I'm laughably mid at fic (my only self-published novel is old and likely problematic), I'm passable at "art" (I'm a creative professional but I've never been a "real artist" the way Tumblr probably defines it), and my favorite creativity related to these characters has been music and maps, which probably won't resonate here.

So what should I do? What would be interesting? Seriously.

#my ocs #bg3 #5e #d&d character #dnd oc #dnd ocs #bg3 ocs #bg3 oc #bg3 tav

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3rdeyeinsights · 1 year

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#INDUSTRIES #VALUES #TRAITS #3E-Dedication #3E-Empowerment #3E-Accesibility #3E-Equality #3E-Creativity #3E-Achievement #3E-Inclusion #3E-Motivation.#TENSIONS #3E-Inequality of educational opportunities in rural Australia #3E-Stigma attached to higher education in regional areas #3E-Lack of quality education in rural areas #3E-Attrition rates of students in Country Universities Centre #3E-Accessibility of higher education to underprivileged students in outback NSW.

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darklordazalin · 6 months

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Azalin Reviews: Darklord Camille Dilisnya

Domain: Borca Domain Formation: 684 BC Final Score: 💀💀⚫⚫⚫ (2/5 skulls) Sources: Domains of Dread (2e), Secrets of the Dread Realms (3e), Gazetteer IV (3e)

Ah, Borca, the land of petty noble bickering, backstabbing, and, of course, poisoning. Made up of rugged valleys and small forests, the land of Borca is seeped with poisonous flora and fauna. If you ever find yourself unfortunate enough to travel there, I suggest only partaking in food and drink you prepared or find a way to alleviate yourself from reliance upon such substances for the duration of your visit.

Before the dual Darklordship of Ivana Borritsi and Ivan Dislisnya, Camille Dislisnya was the Darklord of Borca. After Leo Dislisnya’s failed coup during the infamous von Zarovich wedding in Barovia, his descents fled throughout the lands of the Mists until they were able to reestablish themselves in Mordent.

Camille’s story is rather typical of the Dilisnya family as it involves betrayals and their favored method of murder – poison. She married Siegfried Grymig, a boyar from Barovia and after three years of marriage discovered he was having an affair. She created a rather gruesome poison that killed both her husband and his lover by melding them together into a pile of mucus and flesh. Poetic justice, some would say, yet murder is still a crime. Though the Mordentish authorities lacked the skill to discover the culprit, Camille’s family arranged to send their daughter to their relatives in Invidia to ensure their daughter’s continued freedom and perhaps their own freedom from Camille. Likely this clued in the incompetent Lamplighters of Mordent, but it was a bit too late for them to do anything about it. After all, international law is rather messy in the demiplanes of dread.

During her “escape”, Camille was sentenced to a different type of prison by our tormentors. The Mists took her and formed Borca with Camille as its Darklord. Camille quickly spread word to her family of her newfound Domain, taking pride in her gilded cage. She was, so kindly, gifted with the ability to create any poison imaginable, but cursed to always be betrayed by any man she came to trust. This betrayal most often took the form of infidelity until Camille swore off all men, murdering (using poison, of course) any that even attempted to court her. I believe most woman would just turn to other women at this point, but to each their own, I suppose.

Camille ruled Borca from 684 to 711 BC. She did all she could to pass on her hatred of men to her daughter, Ivana, but this only resulted in Camille’s death by her daughter’s poisonous hands and Ivana inheriting the Darklord title of Borca. I shall save this tale for another time and well, another review.

Although Camille’s methods of poisoning are elaborate and quite creative, she is still an accomplished poisoner who was murdered with poison. When one uses such a tool all the time, you think one would be a bit more careful around everything they touch and consume. The ability to create any poison she can think of is quite formidable, but besides that one tool, she is nothing more than another petty noble. Like a spider, while hidden in the shadows and webs of protection she builds around herself, she is a worthy appointment, but once exposed, she is easily destroyed.

#Camille Dilisnya #poison #ravenloft #darklordreviews #azalin rex #dnd #borca #If this one has a picture its not hanging in castle avernus's ball room

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vivi-the-goblin · 8 months

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You know what I adore about new groups? Absolutely no meta. When mine started we made our own meta during 10 hour one-shots and 2 or 3 session campaigns. In our first major campaign, we gained a very experienced person. 8 or so levels in, he found out the hard way that in a party with a sorcerer, cleric, druid, and paladin, NOBODY had dispel magic. Or even detect magic. I've never seen someone so shocked IRL, with us feeling silly and our GM having to explain that he just never really used casters so it never came up. But what about finding loot? Well, at the time he had believed that if we ever NEEDED to buy something he had failed as a GM to give us what we needed. The offer of a 100 gold loan at the start of a campaign had the rest of the party practically running away, as the entire group probably hadn't gotten 100 gold in the previous 2 years combined. We had someone jump off a bridge twice in an attempt to get a handful of silver, because losing most of his HP was SO worth it. Shocking to most, especially in the 3e/PF1 days. To us it was fine though. We just got creative with what we had, we bumbled and recovered, or failed and tried someone new. I was shocked reading all the metas and optimizations later when I got into homebrewing. That's why I like running for groups of new people. They come with spells I barely remember existed. They try to grapple the giant centipede, they have new perspectives I'd never think of. They try to flush an encounter away with water, or sneak around without fighting. Or throw my plans for a loop when they boldly attack, then actually RUN AWAY when the whole base starts winding up for a counterattack. They don't have ways to be set in yet! Especially if you partner them with a creative or chaotic older player who will egg on thier wild ideas or have accomplices ready to assist thier wild nature.

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princess-prettyboy · 1 year

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I've heard a lot of people shitting on 4e, is there a reason you recommend it?

the main things i really like about it are powers and enemy design.

powers are basically your class features and spells. you have at-will powers, which you can do whenever you want; encounter powers, which you can use once per combat; and daily powers, which you can use once per day. player characters generally have access to the same number of powers as each other, and they’re pretty fairly balanced, meaning a wizard will never outshine a fighter to the degree you might find in 3rd and 5th edition. lots of 3e players really hated this, so they ditched it in 5e.

enemies are just really cool in general. every enemy falls into a “role” that determines what purpose they serve in an encounter. a Brute enemy is a big dangerous sack of hit points, a Soldier is a tank that protects its allies, an Artillery enemy hangs back and blasts spells or arrows, etc. almost every enemy has at least one cool unique ability that makes it fun to fight. also, 4e has “minions,” which are like normal enemies but with only a single hit point. you’re supposed to use them in big horde fights or to compliment more important bad guys. basically any situation where a single strike from a player character should be good enough to take down one basic enemy is where minions come up. one ogre at level 3 is a tough boss fight. ten ogre minions at level 15 is a badass cinematic power trip.

other than how combat works it’s basically normal dnd. you explore, talk to people, find creative solutions to fantasy problems, and roll initiative when enemies happen. normal fun stuff

oh, it also invented skill challenges, which are amazing and should be used all the time

check out matthew colville’s “Dusk” campaign on youtube if you want to see how it plays in reality. he also talks about 4e design in a bunch of his “Running the Game” videos

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bismuthwisdom · 1 year

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GakuDynamics Day 3

*literally dies trying to find some compatibility*

First off, 5m distance between him and Okajima. Shuu knows his reputation and doesn't dare be near him.

Secondly, he ofc has to put him in his place. He is used to scolding Ren all the time, but at least that one isn't as perverted. Okajima is on a whole other level. And he will show him how much of a menace he is.

Def will rile him up and even suggest that "everyone has these thoughts" while being hit with a book by Shuu. 😭

And when the day is over, Shuu has these thoughts about a person he likes and the next day Okajima isn't safe from his wrath.

This def took some time to write cause its SO HARD to make a dynamic with Okajima anyway, besides the Creative Group in 3e and other like-minded perverts. So have this at least.

#assassination classroom #assclass #ansatsu kyoushitsu #💜

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pissfizz · 1 year

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ik nothing abt assclass but please elaborate on your au if you would like to👁️👁️

OK YES OFC!!!!! Sorry for late response I was waiting until school got out lol

Ok so the premise of assassination classroom is as follows: kunugigaoka junior high is a private college prep school notorious for having an extremely hard curriculum and extremely smart students. It is a school of the elite minded, and all the students are faced with an aggressive pressure to excel. The school has a class for third years called 3-E, dubbed the “End Class”. If your grades drop too far, or you show behavioral problems, or disobey school protocol even, you will be shipped off to this class, which is located in the old rickety school building up a mountain and surrounded by forest, just off the main campus. These children can’t participate in extracurriculars, are given no facilities or accommodations, and are faced with intense discrimination and bullying from other students and teachers. They are used as a threat to keep the other students motivation high. You don’t want to end up in E class. And then one year, the moon explodes. The next day, class 3E’s teacher is gone, and replaced with a giant yellow octopus. This is korosensei, the being who blew up the moon, and can travel at Mach 20 speed, can regenerate limbs, and has plans to blow up the earth in exactly a year. His one request was to the teacher of this class for unknown reasons. The government allowed this, since they would then have tabs on him for most of every weekday. They want to kill him before his deadline, and so they tell the kids that since they’ll be around him every day until then, they will be tasked with the job of killing him. However, his teaching and the assassination motivation gives these kids hope and they actually begin to grow and progress. He genuinely cares about these kids and is an amazing teacher. With help from government agent tadaomi karasuma and assassin irina jelavic (aka professor bitch), these kids attempt to assassinate their teacher all while balancing their hellish school life and trying to overcome hardships.

My au is about toya if he were in this class. He is just beginning his rebellion against his father, and is just learning how to navigate it. He begins to do whatever he can to defy his father, and so he purposefully starts failing classes to distance himself from the image of what his father wants him to be. A lot of his personal development comes from realizing that he is his own person, and he doesn’t have to sacrifice things that he loves or that is a part of him just because it’s related to his father.

Also I am going with that white hair from stress hc I saw awhile ago because I LOVE it, so as the year goes on his hair lightens a lot until it’s almost at the point it is in canon by the end of the year. And also. Toya is interesting. Especially in middle school and as a child. I think his time with tsukasa and saki is very formative to him, and he really internalizes a lot of what tsukasa says since he idolizes him so much. He’s very… pure of heart for lack of better term. He believes at first that they can convince korosensei not to blow up the earth by showing him love and friendship, and is almost optimistic in a lot of ways. He clashes a lot with the more realistic and pessimistic members of the class due to this. Also, at one point the class learns parkour to aid in their assassinations, and I like imagining toya because of his fear of heights lol. I think he’d be really good with both knives and guns, but is a sucky sniper because he gets scared when he’s up on the perches. He has relatively weak bloodlust, at least when compared to someone like karma or nagisa, but he’s very talented at channeling what he does have. He can think of spectacularly creative assassination plots but a lot of them aren’t very… realistic and thus are near impossible to pull off. He’s one of the smartest in the class, but stays as one of the lowest ranked for a very long time until he finally decides to put his father behind him and not let him ruin his future like that.

I have. A lot more thoughts but they’re kind of everywhere and hard to explain without the context of the show lol

#asks #toya assclass au

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makeshiftcoop · 6 months

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Misfits - Core Tapes (or my first attempt at game blogging)

Disclaimer: I will update this text with some frequency, and it will be fixed here. I know it's a mess right now, sorry!

So, for a while, im kind of making a game.

Something that can mix my obsession growing up with comics and the newfound success of media that deals with powers and mutations and subverts the "Marvel Style".

So, Misfits is my Post-OSR-Resistance attempt to that. Inspired by stuff that i like from the OSR and Post-OSR corners of the ttrpg designsphere (like Bastionland, Mothership, Songbird 3e, Eco Mofos and Lost Bay), by things from Rowan, Rook and Decard and they Resistance games, and by a myriad of other influences on rules lite games like 24XX, Offworlders, Lumen and etc etc etc

I expect to post more about it here soon but, for now, those are the bones of Misfit. I have to shout it to the void before making other stuff. Hope someone enjoys it's initial vibe:

1. MISFITS MUGSHOTS (Character sheet):

Stats (1 point each and assign 5. No Stat can get to 6):

- Body (Physical experiences, agility, strength, throwing punches, jumping between buildings)

- Vibe (Social experiences, charisma, etiquette, flirting, bluffing)

- Weird (Unreal experiences, spirit, soul, sixth sense, your PWRZ, searching metaphysical insight, harming extracorporeal entities)

- Brains (Intellectual experiences, logical thinking, riddle solving, not falling for bullshit)

Moodboard: Pick a few and expand on it's vibe (coming soon, but it's basically a style section. it's important to look cool and pretty)

Stuff: Important stuff to use or carry around. Things that cause harm have a stress die attached. Other stuff can be used contextually to gain an extra die, success on a action, clear stress, etc.

PWRZ: Cool powers. They usually have a stress (damage) tier, a flavor description and a mechanical effect. (Pick a passive PWR and one for each weird point)

- Passive

- D4

- D6

- D8

- D12

- D20

Quirk (Some different mechanics of the Mugshot):

2. ACTING

- When attempting an action with uncertain outcomes or where complications could be interesting, roll d6s with the most approriate stat (I think as ways of doing or feeling things).

- Always roll at least one dice. If in advantage or disadvantage add or subtract dice as seem fitting. If disadvantaged below zero, start to roll and pick the worst.

- Stats are meant to be flexible and open to creative problem solving.

- Misfits can throw a knife with their Body, their Brains or even with their Weird after using the knife for years, getting attached and naming it Poco.

- Stuff and people can have complex relations with Stats (seeing status as ways of feeling) that may allow creative interpretations.

- Nothing just fails. Something always happen in the world.

- If an action is too complex to be solved with a single roll or take space and time to develop it's a PLAN. A complexity will be defined in a CLOCK format between 4 and 12 segments, where the Misfit will be able to act to advance those segments until completion. Failing in actions related to the PLAN can start an opposite clock with consequences, expand it's segments or even collapse the entire PLAN with approriate (and possible disastrous) consequences (I see PLANS as a way of extending actions into sequences, helping to streamline the play and also raising the stakes. It's a way I enjoy to play especially solo)

3. DICE RESULTS:

1-3: A failure. But more than that, an outcome that didn't met the expectations. Some complications arrived, the competition was fiercer than it looked like, the stakes are now higher, the context changed. Stress can be suffered.

4-5: A success with complications. A twist, new element or context can enter the situation as well.

6: Success. Clean success, the narrative moves forward as intended

More than one 6: Critical success. More stress dealt, more favorable circumstances, sunshine and rainbows.

4. STRESS:

A track that goes to 10 that stores all the Misfit's misfortunes. Everytime you receive stress from any source unless your PWRZ (be it physical harm, a very embarassing interaction or mental overload from a paracausal entity) fill the track and roll a D10. If the result goes under the current stress value, the Misfit suffer a Strike. A concrete manifestation of consequences related to one of the stats. 4 Strikes and you are OUT. If the stress comes from your PWRZ you just fill the track withou rolling for strikes. Your PWRZ themselves can't take you out but they will make you frail.

5. HURTING THINGS (AND GETTING HURT)

- The combat is dynamic, focused on player facing rolls.

- The Misfits always go first, unless taken unprepared.

- Enemies attacks come with results of Failures or Success with complications.

- The turn goes on in Vibe order. Any action can be attempted. Failing actions in combat usually leaves the Freak exposed to being hurt.

- Foes have particular behaviors as described on UNEASY THINGS (future zine with threats). When the resistence of a foe hits 0 it's dead. Most will not fight until that point. But some will.

6. THE EVERYDAY AND THE SANDBOX (It's in a new post!):

- What you do?

- Conspiracies and Happenings (to gain Fame)

- Spend FAME to create PLANS and make your Happenings, Factions and know more Faces

- PLANS: Complex actions that require time and multiple efforts (Flirting, Making Friends, Organizing a Party, Creating a Bowling Club, Investigating a Murder, etc)

- MESSY SCENES!: Complex moments with big stakes that deserve narrative spotlight. Like: A Chase, Fighting Big Things, Fucking, Karaoking, Dueling,

- The game can be played with as many complexities as wanted. Some PLANS and MESSY SCENES can be easily diluted to one rolling, simple combat or just roleplaying without dice. But i think those are nice procedures to Solo play and also for some types of Group Play, easing players into narrative control within their MESSY SCENES and framing clearly objectives with the PLANS

7. FAME (you guessed right, coming soon):

- Solving Conspiracies and helping FACES out in Happenings grants FAME.

- FAMOUS Misfits can really alter the Everyday, starting factions, throwing up legendary ragers, becoming marketable capers or even starting an revolution.

8. CREDIT/GETTING STUFF

- Misfits always have enough to get by. Some start with a little more, as can be seen by their Mugshot or Moodboard.

- Credit is abstracted in 6 tiers that follow the PWRZ tiers and can be used to buy stuff, define "loot" and payments.

-Acquiring things that are into your credit tier is mundane and simple. Everything above your credit tier requires either some valuable stuff or you will be In Debt

- While In Debt you can't buy nothing above the misfit tier, and have to get some loot to sell, win some reward for a happening, or go to The Board and find some Job

-To change your Credit tier you don'thave to hoard riches, but get known. The only way to upgrade your credit tier is investing Fame.

TIERS: 1. Misfit/simple (resources with no die value. worthless in trading/selling) 2. Working class (D4) 3. Degree haver (D6) 4. Up and coming (D8) 5. Money mover (D12) 6. Filth rich (D20)

9. WRONGDOING - Every Misfit has already beem accused of some kind of wrongdoing. It can be true or it can be made up. Fact is, a Misfit can't really stay put and live a normal life cause they already have been stripped of the normality.

10. PATH - Also a future exploration here, but the idea is having another layer of personality and a goal beyond "live life, make friends, fight the system" for Misfits. My idea here is to eventually get to something like Beats from The Heart, turning Paths as ways of getting more powerful:

An exploratory list of Paths: - Hedonist - Communitary - Explorer - Revolutionary

#ttrpg #rpg #game design #indie rpg

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