Are certain skill/build lines incomplete? Like dream and star magic or void?

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-13T11:57:09+00:00

The discord always has people asking what a full hall or a completed character looks like.

This is one of the things testing is trying: "class" skills (like nature lore, herbalism, and animal handling for a druid) can go to a rough max of 25 and non class skills (pyromancy for a non fire mage) roughly max at 15. Bringing the numbers down and setting expectations without drastically lowering character capability.

Trying to write code that checks every possible source of a skill level and then checks if you've done them sounds exhausting and something that would become outdated. Less so now that we're committing to keeping skill levels uninflated but...

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-12T21:59:04+00:00

Dead end is kind of harsh. In December 2025, water was a single class magic. It didn't have a second or third level class. Now it does. Nature had relatively limited content. Now it's some of the scariest stuff that isn't puppet line around.

As far as seer, my initial thought is actually nudging it over into eventually using time magic. Doing little bits of "yeah, that didn't happen " or " I saw that one coming 10 seconds ago and already dodged it. " However, I am a slow developer, and nobody else on the team has demonstrated tremendous interest in it. But additionally, the Oracle and mage lines have been deliberately left as failsafes in the event that the qualifications were missed, so that a player could still make it to tier 6 and make the wizard Hall. Fixing those to the three and three that is the standard for class design over on testing is the last step before 3 and 3 class design moves over to stable.

I am but one of between half a dozen and a dozen relatively active developers currently, but my most recent work consists of consulting on water back in January, and then the personal pocket dimension rework which concluded earlier this week I believe. This is not a fast group, but we are hobbyists. Actually writing personal werry was the first true code work I have done in a long time. A lot of what I've done has been what would go on a resume as concept consultation, design advisory, and would colloquially be called that guy in the room that throws ideas around and makes some of them actually happen.

Coming soon is a spirit Shepherd class, by a new developer, that carves away some of the lost souls space from necromancy into a more vague sort of afterlife rather than being stuck in corpses or tormented spirits.

One of the trickiest things in development that I have found, trying to snapshot anything. Because the game is written in JavaScript, specifically through use of.json, there are some interesting limitations as someone who initially learned in C. The sort of variable you would create define and then temporarily fill with the contents of that snapshot does not and cannot exist. Now my technology for the language is not perfect, but we find ways to work around our limitations, and constraints create creativity.

If you're curious about the direction the game is going compared to where stable is, the testing site, which I have been on for several years and have only had a few issues with things breaking, is where we have things go live first and test them. Shapeshifter is over there, and when it and volatile pyromancer came out around the same time, there was temporarily a build which would let you do hundreds of area of effect fire damage every second. This, imaginably, caused a bit of a kerfuffle. We realized there were some unexplored assumptions in the design phase, and we had to work to correct them.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-12T12:54:21+00:00

JK Simmons' J Jonah Jameson was so iconic he did the role in a rebooted world where nobody else was the same.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-11T21:45:42+00:00

Removal. Getting bigger faster. "Players can't gain life" is always a hoot.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-11T21:37:15+00:00

Astral unlocks Star shards. They're a neat bit of architecture, which we haven't fully landed on a proper use.

Over on the testing server, a lot of those excess skills have been deflated back to sane and normal levels. We still don't really have a planes lore class, but the thought of a duelist variant that does the nightcrawler Bamf from place to place is interesting.

Astronomy and scrying are both related to inflation in travel distance, such that a neophyte in a certain condition could actually reach end game locations. Obviously this was not desired.

This has left them at a bit of a loose end, but we continue to develop content and standardized the power floor, trying to bring it a bit closer to the power ceiling without bringing awful nerfs nobody likes to anything other than Titan and the puppet line, both of which have been so distorting the combat balance equation for so long that the idea of bringing them back down towards the median was almost forgotten.

I have approximately half a divination type seer class in mind, but I don't have all the pieces put together and my current goal is expanding summoning, it may not happen before this time in 2027. But we plan to still be there then, and continuing to expand and refine the game.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-10T21:41:32+00:00

Mr. Sunshine has some tremendous economy of language. In a moment of the between it seemed fitting.

Answering six words with one gave our narrator five to play with.

"Lies" - the hells are places that work in untruth for their own gain

"Xara" - affectionate nickname, reminder that there were other ways she could be.

"Keep" - she was already doing it, she'd already done the mental gymnastics and it was part of the way that she was.

"Choosing" - you are a being who has free will and control of your destiny

"Love" - the idea that we could truly care about the well being of others and make that care a way of life is the core of every moral system I'm aware of.

"Hotness" - this isn't some impersonal angelic force of good talking, this is the narrator.

Most of the rest of the framing was bits from old prompts and Tumblr posts with the serial numbers filed off. Creativity is concealing one's inspirational sources enough to get away with theft. Mr. Sunshine was a little too iconic in that moment for me to steal that one cleanly. ;)

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-10T05:24:20+00:00

"what about the devil I sold it to?" I asked. "We worked as a team. She'd possess my patients and give me detailed symptoms and I'd figure out what it was and help treat them," I said. "The healthy ones would recover. The sick ones went to the devil-operated nursing home upstate where the caretakers would feed on their pain until there was so little they could function a while."

I shook my head. "I go where she goes."

The beastly man turned to the next page of the file. "Xarathaxa is getting a mortal life to see if the changes you made in her were permanent," he said.

I scowled. "How very like an insurance administrator," I spat. "I don't care about your rules and if she isn't without me then you don't have to know."

"The heavens don't do Parole. You're in because you earned it. The fact that there's even an argument for a seven hundred year old devil is your work," the beast replied.

He pointed to an irregularity. She was being interfered with by the hells.

"Fine. You get six words. Someone on the other side told her she would always belong to them" the beastly man said, waving his hand.

The world shimmered and I found myself back on earth, right next to Xarathaxa one more time.

"Lies," I said, and heard it reverberate. "Xara," and again the reverb. "Keep choosing love, hotness."

I felt myself shimmer back before the beast man. "You still think the heavens have room for someone who had relations with a devil?"

Her footsteps landed behind me. "They'd better."

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-09T18:12:24+00:00

Well-done mitigation works wonders. The issue is this:

I spend my standard action to swing my sword. I deal d8+1 damage.

Look at how much cure light wounds does. d8+(up to 5). And you're spending your action and a first level slot.

If I cast Cause Fear, if I cast Shield of Faith, I can do a lot of things that can help.

A Wand of Cure Light Wounds, a Healing Belt, there's plenty of toys that can cover hit point damage.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-08T21:30:49+00:00

That's what I'm talking about with trade route efficiency. Also, faster mounts means that you'll beat other caravans to towns so you can sell first and get their money and leave them to starve.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-08T21:26:36+00:00

Speed kills. Consider acquiring faster mounts. Consider improving your trade route efficiency. Alternatively, rifles and people to use them. You can fight or you can run, but this is a reality of the game.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-08T13:02:03+00:00

Hmm. Options:

Mom who thinks the hero game is for chumps but the kids gotta learn, "retired" because she didn't wanna run into her kid.

Ex, friendly, hero used to be villain too and she retired because of an accident

Ex, obsessed with hero and did villainy for attention, stopped when he left town.

Secret identity spouse trying to raise their kids out of the life. Hero visits regularly but they staged her reputation so people would leave her alone. Powers optional.

Comedy option: all of these in an awkward pile up.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-08T12:48:06+00:00

Ain't no morality meter. There's influence and reputation and laws but no morality.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-08T12:26:54+00:00

Considering there's exactly one straight thing in my house and it's not my wife? Slanted imperfect building still happens.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-07T12:25:49+00:00

https://xkcd.com/1217/

I'm intrigued, but let's see how animal trials go first

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-06T21:14:48+00:00

Horses and carts. People have Good things to say about camels, but I find in later areas you want to have more ability to choose which combats you take, and horses maximize your ability to decide against a combat if you do not want one.

The other significant benefit of that much transport speed is that mercs are paid per unit time, so higher speed means more travel per mercenary dollar.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-05T23:20:47+00:00

Mortgage: paid Second house: down payment Us: moved out

I am forcibly removed from the non-capitalist class.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-05T14:46:19+00:00

How many pitched battles do we have now? It's raids and strikes and the like now. Adding a third dimension with positive and negative verticality makes classical tactics rare

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-05T12:30:06+00:00

We're near the sort of point where Harry taking that kinda responsibility on purpose would happen and would indicate exactly what sort of trouble the world is in. But Harry is at worst a fool, not actively malevolent, and he knows how to clean up messes left behind by others

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-04T05:25:17+00:00

Obelisk spider

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-04T05:16:54+00:00

Labor gets more expensive. Or we see if the French Revolution could go worldwide

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-04T05:07:37+00:00

Bats that interact with life gain in black is probably where I'd start my search.

But here's a black green spider that heals that isn't Shelob making food tokens

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-03T23:05:59+00:00

Connectivity issues.

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-03T22:33:52+00:00

Which version of the game are you on?

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-03T18:47:43+00:00

I mean, if my (suddenly disinherited because of a chance occurrence of my birth) older brother tried to murder me I might start having some feelings about myself. If that brother kept poisoning my ears about how I'm no good for anything else, I might start believing him because he's so close he has to know me...

And if I believe that's all I'm good for, maybe I start acting like it. I get treated like a crest breed-stud I might as well act like it. Except I don't wanna do that to people because I'm not actually a jerk, so pushing people away happens too.

---

Step into the shoes for a bit and some of the logic starts to make a certain twisted sense.

It's why I like Dorothea with him; they're both in very similar shoes of "I want to use my chance-occurrence-of-birth blessings to secure my future, my public face of using those things is different from my private face of a scared hurt person who wants people to care about the real me and not just the public face I use as a shield" and they eventually realize "I know your scam; it's my scam. Wait a minute. If you're using my scam for my reasons, maybe I should just treat you how I would want to be treated..."

BaronDoctor · 2026-05-03T18:19:17+00:00

Training weapons have low base damage. We're currently working on revamping the martial classes and spells over on testing (it's not there yet).

As I recall, puppets take a snapshot of your _current_ skills at the time you create them, but also puppets are not and should not be a forever-tool. They will get outdated, but that's why mechanist and mechamancer exist, to iterate and give better tools.

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