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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February 11, 2024
Liminal Void quickstart coverLiminal Void's quickstart has been around a little more than a year now. It's the first Total//Effect thing I put out and it's...fine. It's fine. Total//Effect is a strong backbone, the vibe carries it pretty far in my opinion, and again in my humble opinion, my two quickstart scenarios are decent. (Read it yourself and see if you agree. It's free. Click that little liminal void tag at the bottom if you want to see me everything I've written about it here, which is quite a lot.
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February 4, 2024
So we started poking at turning Valiant Horizon into Persona in Part 1 by establishing initial premises of what even this kind of game is like. It's got a lot of the DNA of urban fantasy/masquerade style games (WoD, Unknown Armies, etc) but with a very different emphasis, and especially the fact that there's a harder divide between the two "halves". Now we start digging in to what we want to do with that.
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February 4, 2024
*Before I release the extra edition that tacks on like 2 more posts.
In Part 1 we established what kind of game we're using. In Part 2 we tied together Valiant Horizon's class system with the tarot thing Persona has going on. In this final installment (because at this point more beyond what I'm covering here would involve just making the thing) we're gonna think about using what we set up in part 2 for a session and campaign structure.
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February 3, 2024
I'm thinking about Persona* a lot lately, partially because P3 Reload is out and I kind of want to play it but also it's $70 so fuck that shit. But partially it's because I realized while putting together the playlist for Valiant Horizon how well the two concepts overlaid with each other with only a little reflavoring/stretching:
Normalish people given extraordinary power Powers come from discrete beings with archetypical distinctions that are intended to match with the character Huge emphasis on relationships and building both towards understanding that archetypical power better and being closer to the person who wields it, is associated with it, etc.
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January 2, 2024
Written for Prismatic Wasteland's "make a new mechanic and give it a name" challenge.
You have two approaches to a situation on either side of a spectrum. For example, let's say... Soundwaves and Emotions. Decide which is "high" and which is "low", then define your Number between 1 and 10, inclusive. A number skewed towards one side means that you'll have high chances of success but also high chances of consequences for the other side, and vice versa.
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December 19, 2023
Make something that you'd want to play. Or wouldn't want to play, I guess, if that's your goal. Basically try to make something that holds your interest. Just feel it out, you know? You probably know what you want to do, practically speaking. Trust your instincts, they probably came from somewhere. Unless you don't have any clue where you're going which is fine too. Sometimes it's about the journey. Sure helps to have a destination in mind though.
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August 3, 2023
Valiant horizon logoThis 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:
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