This post is about the various mechanical choices made in Valiant Horizon at a very high level. I group these into three categories: Diceless mechanics (stuff that works), Roll for Magnitude mechanics (stuff that works but you roll to see how much), and Roll for Success mechanics (stuff that works if a roll goes your way).
Diceless
The simplest kind of mechanic. This is what Assets, Exhausting Assets, and Burdens are:
I’ve uploaded the second new Class, made possible by a very generous backer. Meet the Assassin!
The Assassin is a deadly, subtle hero.
It can choose to gain bonuses to its Total against debuffed enemies, with the caveat that the debuffs are removed afterwards.
It’s a great combination of deadly and mobile, with debuffs and “finishers” - moves that cap out at extremely high Totals, but provide incredible rewards if met.
It’s technical and really shines with good teamwork!
It’s in the now-updated backer classes PDF (labeled 7-31), along with the previous backer class, the Adept. Enjoy!
I’ve uploaded the first new Class, made possible by a very generous backer. Meet the Adept!
The Adept is a skilled, highly-trained hero.
It combos off of self-buffing/taking self-targeting utility actions.
It gets a lot out of taking/being given extra actions.
It’s the most mobile class I’ve written thus far!
It’s in that backer classes PDF. Enjoy!
(If you want to up your pledge to get one of these, itch doesn’t really do that unfortunately. But if you just buy Just The Game again, add enough to it to get to the higher tier, and let me know on discord/social media/by email, I’ll count it.)
Ah no I'm writing another dicelessness article by accident oh god help
Off the bat, one of the technological aspects I ran into is that Narrat is very particular about skill rolls. They're binary in nature, you have to define how they work up front, and you don't get the roll value on a check, just pass/fail.
ANOINTED's premise is that you are an immortal warrior (an Anointed) who has been locked away for years following ages of glory, intrigue, war, and disillusionment. When you emerge, you have no memories, but are called/drawn/etc to return to the side of the (long dead) king to whom all Anointed are beholden by ritual bond.
Hi there! I’ve just released ANOINTED v0.2! This has:
A revamped combat system that removes dice entirely. (You can see a preview of my initial formulation here, I changed a few things from there but that’s the general idea.)
At long last, rules for exploration!
A tutorial region. If I did it right, it should hopefully give you some idea of how to play the game!
Give it a play, let me know what you think. It’s solo-friendly!
I don't have an actual cover for this one yet so for now you get a screencap from the SRD title. This one's still at pretty high level. But I did some of that high level work and I wanna talk about it!
Speaking of the SRD, this is the third Total//Effect game I initially proposed/outlined/etc on the Total//Effect SRD. My general (self)-pitch was:
Somehow this one didn’t make the great cohost migration! I’ve converted and back-dated it appropriately, and lightly touched up a header or two, but otherwise it’s intact. - Binary, Sep 22, 2025
So I outlined the problem (as it is) in
part 1. This is the part where I think out loud about what to do about it as a designer.
I’m going to put this as the first thing because it can’t be stressed enough and because I don’t really want to hear about how this isn’t an issue at anyone’s specific table or whatever because that’s not the point. Communicate with your players. If someone’s doing it a little too much you can probably just ask them to cut it out and they probably will. Folks are generally pretty reasonable.
A few typo, bad reference, and bad copy/paste fixes.
Some layout normalization on Frame spreads re: right-page spacing.
I also made a chost about how I’d convert APOCALYPSE FRAME to diceless here. (At some point I’m going to clean that up and add other variant rule ideas I’ve been kicking around. Compiling The Infected World and updating Ballad of Industrial Gods come first though for APOCALYPSE FRAME work.)
