I picked up Emergent from an ongoing trans fundraising bundle. I struggle to read through all the character options and monsters right away, but...
This game is something special.
It has style, it has neat dice tech, it has fascinating ideas for scripting structure a campaign, it reminds me, in very good ways, of Monsters and Other Childish Things. I'm keeping an eye on this one.
The main thing I hear about Exalted is its maximalism. Your characters are the strongest and the coolest, there's mountains of lore, and there's rules for everything. I check the rulebook (3e) and it's almost seven hundred pages. That's a lot to read, but that's what I'm there for, right?
sorry there's how many expansion books?
hm
They do have an alternative, Exalted Essence. It's basically a parallel edition that covers all the types of Exalted at once, but it sells itself on being simpler... will that still give me the maximalism I'm looking for? It should, yeah, there's still multiple pretty large books.
...the current Essence crowdfunding campaign has some really nice deals on 3e material
...3e won't be so bad if I limit myself to just one type of Exalted, right?
and that's why i'm currently on course to get into Most Of Essence and 3e, But Specifically Dragon-Blooded Exalted
surely only good can come from this
I wrote an article for the new Odyssey zine! It's an intro to the Far Roofs, specially written for people who don't know the game at all.
Enjoy!
I'm a big fan of not having to do work myself, generally speaking. I like that there's people who go out and find cool things, to make it easier for other people to find cool things.
Media gets translated because it caught someone's interest enough to translate. I find that a useful filter. If you miss that it is a filter, that can give you a distorted perspective, but as long as you're aware of it, you can make use of it.
I'm also a fan of this post for outlining different play preferences and the ways they overlap or contradict. You see attempts at this every so often, but very often they fall into the trap of "and that's why THIS particular preference is Real TTRPGing and others are lesser." This accounting avoids that pretty well.
it finally clicked for me that "rpgsite" and "therpgsite" are completely independent websites that should never be confused with each other. walk not in the valley of confusion, as i have
I'm going to tell you about a bunch of games by Jenna Moran!
FOR FANTASY FANS: These are games with complex symbolic landscapes, a million little glimpses into larger stories, and they're literally designed for building OCs with strong personal aesthetics.
FOR TTRPG FANS: These games are largely diceless, with strong narrative infrastructure, and plenty of fuel for drama that can't be simply be solved through combat
You WILL have extended philosophical debates during play. This is a significant appeal for my particular circles.
( These are the stories of the Age of Pain, and the war between Creation and the void... )
( These are the stories of... what comes after. )
The Apocynum Press Itch collection gathers homebrew and fan materials that get posted to Itch.
Karma Chameleon is a pillar of the community. As well as their lovely art, they've made the Quest Set builder for managing Chuubo's and Glitch quests, and an interactive overview of recurring miraculous traits.
Here on Dreamwidth, we have the Jennafans Community!. On Discord, there's the Ninuan fan server.
Jenna Moran herself can be found at her personal site, Tumblr; and on Patreon, where she sometimes posts draft or preview material for the games mentioned. Her older fiction can be found at the Hitherby Dragons wiki
Finally, The Flood is not set in any of these worlds. It's a game about something else entirely (poetry farming). But it does feature its own version of the recurring Arcs scaffolding, so it may be worth a look.
Article on glitches and rumor. I found it in Critical Distance's link round-up so it might get passed around elsewhere too.
Dragonflycave was a pretty big inspiration for my own neocities. it's nice to see them still going
A write-up on turn-based RPGs (the video game kind)
There's a small number of people I follow who I trust with this kind of "basic" game design analysis. Always cool to see more of it.
so i've been in a couple conversations recently about the idea of "playing to win" vs "playing to lose" in ttrpgs. Playing to win means taking the actions most likely to result in your victory (whether that's within a specific scene or within the overall campaign context) and playing to lose generally means taking whatever actions are most in-character, without concern for whether they actually bring your character closer to their goal.
...except, I'm not sure it always means that. Sometimes the way "play to lose" is used, it suggests "be okay with losing" instead. That's a different idea! Your behavior when you're trying to win, but accept the possibility of loss, is different from your behavior when you're not trying for a victory at all.
[As an aside: some of the games I focus on most are games with dedicated combat scenes where "do what's in-character without concern for victory" is either counterproductive or a false distinction. So I'm leery of descriptions of "play to lose" as fundamental to the hobby]
"Play to lose" is really weird advice to give when your game's player-side mechanics consist of ways to win, and ways to make winning easier, flashier, or more effective. It's mixed signals, at the very least. On the other hand, "don't be a sore loser" makes perfect sense in that situation. Even while players are trying to win, they need to accept the possibility of loss, or else, when they inevitably do, they won't be able to pick themselves up again
[As another aside: TTRPGs have such a weird relationship to loss in general. lose a video game you usually just try again, lose a board game, you shake your head and try again next week or decide to play a different game instead, but loss in a TTRPG often a permanent change in play or gets removed as an option completely in response to those kinds of permanent changes in play]
So as I'm thinking about "don't be a sore loser," I realize that, this isn't language I hear very frequently in TTRPG spaces? We very rarely talk about these things in terms of sportsmanship, and I'm not sure why. Off the top of my head:
1) culturally inherited aversion to sports, even as a turn of phrase
2) TTRPGs tend towards such high emotional and social investment that we avoid talking about them as "just a game" like the concept of sportsmanship leans on
now I won't act like sportsmanship is a single coherent and legitimate phenomenon we can talk about without any chance of miscommunication, but like, this is an already-existing idea that's extremely relevant to a lot of talk about social expectations at the table. So it's very weird that I don't see it invoked more often!
Am I missing something? Is it just a vocab difference I've missed? has "do what's good for the story" somehow replaced the concept of sportsmanship???
Drapline is just a demo, but a very funny one. Raise your dragon-daughter and tell her if it's okay to eat expensive meals, scenery, named NPCs, etc. It reminds me of Mushroom Musume in terms how it handles randomized events, but it feels like its own thing overall.
Cute Bite is from the team behind Cute Knight and Long Live the Queen. This time, the subject is a vampire attempting to regain her former powers. It cleaves closely to the Princess Maker/Cute Knight lineage, but it's a very well-executed version of the formula. I like the minigames!
Only after playing both of them in one day did I realize "who do you choose to eat" is an important gameplay decision in both of them. two nickels.
i have finished the Heaven's Feel route of the visual novel Fate/stay night
...I feel like any kind of summary/thinkpiece I attempt will be insufficient, so I'll just say, I completely see how this would kick off a twenty year franchise. I was already getting inspired by it partway through, so I expect this to stick with me for a long time.
however it is unfortunate that finding interesting fanworks or discussion for this means sorting through the fanworks and discussion for the rest of the franchise, which I am less interested in. also 8tracks is down so i can't find fanmixes easily ;_;
so uh if anyone has songs they associate with various Fate characters lemme know
I ran a homebrew jam! I feel accomplished. It was fun to write my own work and fun to see what others came up with, like the Pied Piper storyline or Strigoi. I got entries from beyond my immediate circle of contacts and honestly that was my measure of success.
Will I do something like this again? Probably depends on if I get inspired enough to write something myself again. But I won't rule it out. I'm glad I got to do this.
The project from my last post hasn't run out of inspiration yet, turns out knock-off grail wars are a lot of fun
It is the law of the world that miracles may only appear at the darkest hour.
When your strength has been spent, when your hopes have been crushed, when your spirit cries out in desolation, then, and only then, can fate be turned aside.
This law of the world, like so many others, has been tried, and tested, that humanity might learn its secrets and make the law their servant.
The Magiamachy exists to produce a miracle.
My Far Roofs campaign is closing down, but the obsession doesn't stop!!!
The dramatic conflict rules create a series of back-and-forths, escalating as you try to outbid your opponent's cards, then ending on rolls for both offense and defense. This creates a lot of opportunity for dramatic reversals and oh hey what's that other thing I've been getting into with a lot of dramatic reversals...
( Drabble )
( Commentary )
Lair Land Story first run complete, our girl became a doctor
there's something really interesting about this version of the raising sim formula
Princess Maker 2 went all-in on emergent narrative. there's random events, some events in the "dungeons" to discover, but most of the endings are determined purely by the numbers. Long Live the Queen, by contrast, is basically navigating a very large dialogue tree with stat gates every so often (that kill you). There's different endings sure but they're slightly(?) less stat-dependent and more reliant on how you navigated the script
Lair Land has a script that forms the spine of the gameplay, but there's also like a million discoverable events. I did a whole sidequest about finding out who invented grape wine. Had to spend the daily time resources to follow that, would have been entirely possible to get through the game and miss it completely. It really made the game feel alive somehow.
I did this first run blind but now i definitely want to see a wiki to figure out what's going on under the hood but information in English is prohibitively rare so i'm going to have to heat up Google Translate for the Chinese guides
You can blog through Itch! People have begun blogging through Itch. Here are people I personally know who are now blogging through Itch.
And here's people I don't know, but whose blogs I now follow
blog moment
working on a post to map different ways TTRPGs tell you what you're supposed to do with them, the stories and settings they're supposed to work with. That's... a big topic, but I'm trying to fit it all in the term "scenario."
This post focuses on the rules-y parts. The other ones will also probably talk about rules but in different ways.
( Read more... )
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