November 8, 2024
So one thing where I feel like I don’t have like…authority in but at the very least have thought about is the concept of performance loss (and specifically avoiding it through process optimization) in TTRPGs: the kinds of things that bog down a situation in a process.
WARNING: This post started as me making a little comment on a great, concise post on Fool’s Pyrite. Then I decided to make it a fun little post on its own.
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October 18, 2024
I’ve been meaning to try to post more on my blog/site following the death of Cohost, which made it very easy for me to toss design thoughts out. Writing into VScode and pushing to my site via git has no juice at all by comparison. But we press on anyway.
Phipps23 # On November 27th of 2022 - a little less than 2 years ago as of writing this - Dan Phipps (of Gem Room Games, go check them out, they’re cool folks!
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September 13, 2024
Last time I did a brainstorm session like this was for Persona: 1, 2, 3. This one's way shorter though. The idea is to flesh out some kind of specific JRPG-inspired campaign structure for Valiant Horizon.
So let's say there's these crystals, right? Used to be 12 of them - nowadays there's, uh, let's say 3-5 PCs crystals remaining. Each of them has the power to maintain the last few villages that stand in the world and prevent them from being swallowed up by the darkness that has consumed the rest.
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July 23, 2024
Last time I made a post about mechanics I talked about the Grid. Now I’m…still talking about The Grid, kind of! But it’s a different one this time.
Home-ship construction is something that had been on our minds since the beginning. Originally it was going to be kicked to the final version! But we had a lot of backer items created that we wanted and so this was a good opportunity to make an initial system out of it.
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July 9, 2024
Hi there! v1.1 of Valiant Horizon is out!
This includes:
Tweaked Create an Opening downward because it was Too Good By Far. Clarification of interaction of inverse with resist/vulnerable (it does the thing you’d expect and reverses the step to do less or more Harm respectively). Clarification on if moving to far counts as two near movements for the purpose of anything that cares (yes). Clarification on encounter composition and scaling: Upgraded composition to its own page with an example and some extra advice and dedicated an entire page to scaling to make it clear what’s going on there.
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June 10, 2024
Stamina is a resource I bolted onto both the RUNE engine and the NULL/CIPHER healthless idea for Valiant Horizon Tactics. It’s a very major change to how a RUNE-like does things.
Notably it’s also not really a Valiant Horizon idea, it’s kind of something that came off of neither game. So what’s up with that? One prior that bears notice is that Stamina was in the earliest Total//Effect prototype version I made: it was going to be like 13th Age recoveries/4E healing surges but also usable for restoring used abilities to form a kind of generic “dungeon attrition” resource.
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May 31, 2024
Hi there!
First off, a little update to this quickstart. A few big changes:
Gaining your Background doesn’t give you a smattering of Attributes anymore. Instead, you get to grab another Trait. This can be another Profession’s thing, something from things that hint at a less savory Profession, or things that indicate where you came from. To support the latter two categories, there’s 7 more traits now. More Attributes is something you’ll gain by proper leveling later past this level-0 quickstart.
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May 1, 2024
Hi there!
I added a commentary edition of the game. This is exactly the same as v1.2 except I added 2” of margins on either side and added a bunch of red-text notes, development history, commentary, and self-criticism. Get it in the downloads!
Until next time!
(Read the original on itch here!)
April 23, 2024
(This is a companion piece to Gila RPGs/Spencer Campbell’s recent stream about healthless TTRPGs, which is well worth your time if you have an hour to spend and goes into VH tactics a little itself, because the original impetus was based on his idea of healthless TTRPGs prior to this video. It would probably also be good to be a little familiar with RUNE! But I think everything makes enough sense if you aren’t.
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February 24, 2024
Hi there! I made a big update to how Liminal Void works! You can see some previews of what I did in my newsletter post here. The big changes are:
Static Assets from Profession/Background are out, attribute spending is in. You have 3 Attributes, of which a Profession gives you 5 and a Background gives you 3 more. You can spend them to use them as Assets and regain them by taking various painkillers and stimulants and supplements, which is probably extremely healthy and good for you.
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