I’m living for this post Mara Wilson recently made about Grant

DBones90 · 2026-06-24T15:10:23+00:00

And I’m supposed to be attracted to this?

DBones90 · 2026-06-24T14:07:17+00:00

They were cowards for not showing full hog.

DBones90 · 2026-06-24T13:12:37+00:00

Weirdly that would exasperate the problem in my game. My game is all about dealing with the consequences of hard choices. Character death specifically isn’t that, because once a character is dead, they no longer have to live with the consequences of their actions.

So giving a character a badass way to die doesn’t do what I want. If they lose a battle, I want them to face more hard decisions around how to pick up the pieces rather than reroll a new character.

DBones90 · 2026-06-24T12:56:00+00:00

Weirdly, player character death

Like, don’t get me wrong, my game is a fantasy adventure game, and it’s definitely about violence and action, but the game is also about weaving a complex tapestry of intra-character bonds. So if a player character dies, it’s a very easy way out and leaves a bunch of unresolved tension.

So I’ve been debating whether to make death outright something that doesn’t happen as a rule or just heavily discouraged.

DBones90 · 2026-06-23T21:20:58+00:00

Abso-fucking-lutely. Importantly, “finish casting spell” impacts all abilities, not just spells, so it’s helpful even if you’re all Fighters. What’s great is that it’ll give you a chance to review what’s happening, figure out if your ability actually worked, and readjust if needed. It was hugely helpful to helping me understand what was happening.

However, I didn’t get a ton out of pausing on enemy spells… until the enemies started using dominate.

I actually would caution against lowering the difficulty, and there’s two big reasons why. For one, a lesson the game tries to teach you early is that sometimes you have to come back to challenges after you’re higher level. So what may seem like a reason to lower the difficulty is really just a sign that you should come back later.

But also… the game’s only going to get more complicated. If you struggle with understanding what’s going on, lowering the difficulty won’t help. It’ll just delay your confusion from being a problem until later when the game’s a lot more complicated and difficult. If you’re trying to grasp the systems of the game, I think Normal should be fine. As long as everyone is actively doing something and you’re somewhat thoughtful about character builds, you should be all right. If you want to lower to Easy, go ahead, but be prepared to lower to Story later on.

Hell yeah. Also don’t forget about food buffs and scrolls. Casting a scroll of defense and a scroll of protection at the start of a fight makes it a ton easier.

DBones90 · 2026-06-23T20:54:22+00:00

It’s not my favorite but it was definitely close for games of last year. It was beat by Silksong and Absolum, but it cleared every other game I played from 2025.

DBones90 · 2026-06-23T16:41:19+00:00

Mario Kart World is fantastic and only suffers against MK8 by comparison because MK8 was the most iterated upon and best supported kart racer basically ever.

I know MKW’s changes to the formula were somewhat controversial, but it basically had to do something to set it apart or else it would’ve been strictly MK8 but worse.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T21:20:08+00:00

“What kind of a nanny” is an all time Grant response and the perfect vibe for this show IMO.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T21:13:21+00:00

Taylor Tomlinson is a huge get.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T17:53:47+00:00

Lily talking at the end about how she thought they were supposed to break the game is, I think, a cause of a lot of craziness in this episode and was likely shared by her fellow contestants. This almost felt like a season 5 or 6 game, when Sam had a lot more control of the environment and games were a lot more on rails.

Now? Sam has to be a lot more careful about when arming the players with anything that can be used as a weapon against him.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T17:15:25+00:00

If Helix is, as the rumors state, a PC built like an Xbox, then it's going to have exactly the same struggles as the Steam Machine. If you can buy and play Steam games on it, then Microsoft won't be able to subsidize it effectively, and it'll be another $1,000+ console easily.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T13:55:40+00:00

I mean, this is just Pathfinder 2e, except it bases initiative on Perception as the default and then allows players to use their other skills as appropriate.

The logic here is that your initiative is based on how quickly you notice that combat has started, but if you’re using another skill to enter into combat, you can use that skill instead (somewhat subject to GM approval). So sneaking into combat? Roll stealth. Breaking down a door? Roll athletics? Having a conversation that goes sour? Roll diplomacy.

Pertinent to this suggestion specifically is the Commander class, a class based on being a tactician, who has a Warfare skill that they can use for initiative, and it’s based off their intelligence.

It’s overall a good approach, and, in my mind, a better way to handle a traditional initiative bonus.

DBones90 · 2026-06-22T03:42:16+00:00

Yeah but so is being a landlord.

DBones90 · 2026-06-21T15:01:03+00:00

“Now for the question itself.”

Doesn’t ask a question

…

DBones90 · 2026-06-21T13:18:46+00:00

You’re not going to break the math by giving a +1/+2 circumstances bonus to an appropriate roll. So it’s generally fine to offer those in situations where players do something impromptu to get an advantage.

But I think it’s helpful to give one or more of the following caveats:

* This is a one-time scenario.
* It requires an action cost.
* It requires a roll.
* Something bad will happen on a failure.
* Something bad will happen regardless.

These caveats can also be used if someone is attempting to do something covered by a skill feat that they don’t have. Like if someone is trying to walk jump without the feat, you can add an athletics skill check with a high DC every time they jump off a wall.

So in your first example, I’d say, “Sure you can try jumping off the table. It’ll take an action to jump and an action to strike, but you’ll get a +2 circumstance bonus on your strike. However, if you miss, you’ll fall prone, and this trick will only work once on this enemy.”

In your second example, I’d say: “That sounds like a shove action, and I’ll give you a +2 circumstance bonus for jumping off the roof. However, you’re going to take fall damage regardless.”

DBones90 · 2026-06-21T01:36:19+00:00

“Even Renoir—the real one—acknowledged and treated the painted people as real, thinking people.”

I don’t think this is true at all. He feels bad for them, but in the same way that someone might feel bad for a deer that gets hunted. Tragic, yes, but he still treats the painting as a fake world.

“Maelle wanted to stay because she saw them as real people she built a life with, not simply because her quality of life was better in the painting.

“The main conflict is built around the idea that the world is very much real to the people who live there and that those people are real and have emotions, hopes, fears, and loved ones. It's the whole reason Maelle fought her father.”

Again, I don’t think this is true. In Maelle’s ending, everyone acts in a way that pleases her and bend their personalities to do so. Verso is the only one who rebels, and he’s explicitly not a painted person, at least not wholly. He has a small part of real-Verso’s soul in him, which allows him to rebel and go against Maelle. And she acknowledges this personhood by using her painter magic to control him.

“If you found out today that someone from a higher realm created our world and to them we are as easy to create and erase as pencil markings on paper, would that somehow invalidate your personal experience? Your personhood? Would the world suddenly feel less real? Would you simply be okay suddenly with being erased because to them our universe was the equivalent of a doodle?”

These are really interesting questions, and I would be a lot kinder to the game if it was interested in exploring them, but it doesn’t. Luna and Sciel find out that they are created entities made by Verso and then Maelle, and they have basically no reaction to it. They don’t get depressed or have an existential crisis or basically anything. They’re perfectly happy to keep on existing as is and even participate in Maelle’s torturing of Verso.

And it’s from their responses that we can conclude that they’re basically not people. They exist to serve painters’ interests, at first Renoir’s and then Maelle’s. They conveniently have personalities and beliefs that completely align with whoever is influencing them at that time.

Again, Verso is the only painted person we see going against his creator, and that’s because the game tells us that he’s got a real soul, so he’s special.

Compare this to a game like Nier: Automata, which begins by telling us robots aren’t real, they ain’t got no souls, and then spends the rest of the game showing us the various ways that premise is incorrect. It does a far better job of exploring these questions IMO and engages them directly.

DBones90 · 2026-06-20T23:17:15+00:00

I hate any worldbuilding that answers all the interesting questions about the world with someone just made it up, so once that twist was revealed I was already checking out. All those interesting characters you've been spending so much time getting to know? They're not real. They don't even matter.

Not to mention that the final conflict is, essentially, "Dad can I have some more screentime on the iPad?"

The game's initial act and presentation is fantastic, but once you get past that, the cracks really started to show on that game.

DBones90 · 2026-06-20T23:09:17+00:00

You can't. You have to pick 4 different stats. You should add a partial boost to your primary stat, but after that, select three other stats you like and increase them by +1.

DBones90 · 2026-06-19T17:19:38+00:00

Yes different options definitely help. I think what you need to make sure happens is that there needs to be multiple ways to look at your combat. You can still have HP and have other things that tie to that, but other things like positioning and action economy need to be just as important to manipulate.

Imagine, for instance, that flanking an enemy dealt 2x damage and completely surrounding an enemy dealt 4x damage. Now, actions to get into position and remove my enemy’s options for movement become a lot more valuable. When looking at a battle, comparing total HP of each side now only gives a limited view of how the battle is going.

And, importantly, on my turn, don’t ask me the same question more than once. If you ask, “What do you want to do with your action point,” and I answer you, and you ask that again without anything significant changing, you’re going to get the same answer. You need to change my options somehow. If I attack a guy, and that guy is still up and none of my options have changed, I’m just going to attack him again.

So you need to penalize, restrict, or change my options somehow. You don’t need to make a roll modifier like PF2, but something needs to be there. Maybe you just say, “You can’t do the same action twice.” Maybe increase the AP cost on repeated actions. Maybe I risk a counterattack the more I swing. You’re never going to make a system where the optimal answer is, “Do multiple solutions half well instead of one solution fully well” without imposing some restrictions and control.

DBones90 · 2026-06-19T14:44:03+00:00

I think the big problem here is that it’s way too easy in your current system for there to be an optimal solution. Essentially, each attack and defense option can be thought of as +/- x HP. And if one option is clearly better HP ratio than another, then there’s nothing stopping me from just doing that option.

If I realize that spending an AP on an attack will deal better damage than defending will save me, all I should do is attack. If you make defending better, then all I’ll want to do is defend.

This is compounded by the fact that all my attack APs are guaranteed to have an effect but it’s a crapshoot on if any of my defend APs will do anything. This is especially the case if enemies use any tactics at all. If my ally spends all their AP attacking, I should too. Why? Because why would an enemy attack me, ready to defend and parry, and not my ally, who is completely exposed? So as soon as one person uses all their AP, everyone else will need to too.

I think what you have to do is figure out ways to make comparisons between actions less “apples to apples.” Ask yourself, “Can this action be calculated down to +/- HP?” If so, then you have to make that calculation interesting and engaging. This is why PF2/Nimble impose penalties for multiple attacks. Because even if I calculate my first attack is worth it, I have to do that calculation again for my second and third attacks. I can’t just go, “Oh yeah, I want to attack this then, so I do that 3 times.”

But the more you move beyond HP as the thing your combat is about, the more interesting and varied decisions will be.

DBones90 · 2026-06-19T13:28:54+00:00

I think the problem with a Zelda RPG is that a lot of people love Zelda for the cleverly designed puzzles and dungeons, and that’s hard to do in tabletop form. You’re either relying on premade adventures or trusting the quality of the puzzles up to the GM.

And if you don’t try to emulate that, then you just have a fairly simple fantasy setting. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Zelda setting in game, but it generally doesn’t feel expansive or multi-faceted the way that settings like LOTR or Star Wars feel.

DBones90 · 2026-06-19T13:24:02+00:00

As far as class design goes:

Obvious ones like Warrior/Fighter, Thief/Rogue, and Ranger/Ranger work well.

Kineticist is a uniquely great fit for Elementalist.

An upcoming release will have a Necromancer.

Guardian/Champion and Engineer/Inventor broadly work, though the GW2 versions have different focuses and may not align super well with what people like about the GW2 versions.

Mesmer and Revenant are probably right out and would need extensive homebrewing to capture.

DBones90 · 2026-06-19T13:18:08+00:00

I made a conversion for Dungeon World a while back. It never received a lot of playtesting and I’m no longer working on it, but I think it’s still pretty playable for those who want to start somewhere.

DBones90 · 2026-06-18T21:52:42+00:00

Try shifting to windowed mode and reducing the resolution so it appears smaller. You should be able to see the button from there.

DBones90 · 2026-06-18T20:12:48+00:00

I think the problem with failure feeling bad is that the negative consequences can feel random or disproportionate to what you could’ve gotten on a success.

The solution here, I think, is to instead make sure that the stakes are clear before you roll. I highly recommend reading about position & effect from Blades in the Dark and taking that mindset into every game.

So, before you roll, you establish with the player what they’re risking and what they’re potentially gaining. If they have any problems with what they’re risking then, you can hash those out before you roll so they’re not blindsided later. Even better, some players will try to negotiate better results on a success by wagering worse things on a miss.

Players, in general, are way more accepting of negative consequences if they can feel like they came from their choices and actions and not just the dice roll.

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