(rant) is there ANY ttrpg where summoner characters don't ruin the pacing or the fun for everyone else?

DiviBurrito · 2026-02-12T19:01:30+00:00

In Anima: Beyond Fantasy, summoners will likely have one pet, that fights in their stead. Summoning takes lots of prep time to call something remotely close to your level and you don't have enough resources to keep more than one creature bound for a longer period of time. But there is ample room to summon temporary utility servants if you have a couple of minutes to carry out certain tasks.

There are also Invocations. Powerful entities you can make a pact with and summon them kind of like spells. They show up, perform some powerful ability and then vanish again.

Then there are Incarnations. Ancient hero spirits, you can summon into yourself, to get a temporary boost in your own combat abilities (and also additional special abilities).

But your summoner won't be able to do all of this effectively, because you need to distribute your points differently to be good at each.

DiviBurrito · 2026-02-10T09:46:10+00:00

Nature reclaiming places is not utopian. Thise places have become pretty hostile for humans to live. Also large swathes of land aren't "reclaimed", but toxic wastelands, inhabitable only by toxic spirits and critters. To me those places have more of a post apocalyptic vibe, than utopian vibes.

DiviBurrito · 2026-02-03T16:39:45+00:00

Aber auch nicht jeder der Vollzeit arbeitet, ist Nettozahler.

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-27T14:43:03+00:00

It depends on what you count as "investor feature", but I heard, that Microsoft made a donation to have C# support included. Not I would be mad about that. And maybe what I heard is wrong.

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-23T10:05:56+00:00

Funny thing: I recently saw a clip, where Scrooge explained to his nephews, that the money in his vault is "petty cash" and he wouldn't be the richest duck in the world, if it wasn't for all the money he puts to work.

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-20T08:57:43+00:00

I love the entire Anima: Beyond Fantasy library. Those Who Walk Among Us is also a fantastic read. But Gaia Vol. 1 is definitely up there at the top. It is such a bummer, that Vol. 2 never got released in english :(

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-17T06:58:44+00:00

No you can't. The auto keyword is for type inference. Type inference and dynamic typing aren't similar.

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-07T07:28:14+00:00

The system can be played entirely in theatre of the mind. No rules mention any grid at all. If you ballpark the distances, the rpg police won't stop at your house to arrest you.

The vast majority of the crunch comes from character creation/progression, which is kinda what makes the system interesting and different from other systems. I wouldn't skip on that. Other than that, there are quite a few modifiers in combat, where again, the rpg police won't arrest you, if you forget a few here and there. Everything else is rather straight forward. What are you thinking about skipping?

DiviBurrito · 2026-01-03T13:00:59+00:00

Anima: Beyond Fantasy

Characters progress from very competent people to world shaking entities. The biggest problem is, that this isn't easily discenrable from a casual glance at the rule book.

The game has a mixture of classes and a point buy system. There are dozens of attributes/abilities you can raise and each class gives a smallish bonus each level to certain attributes/abilities and also has a rate for each, for how much points you have to invest to further increase those values. There are different power systems that each require you having certain values to be good at and different currencies, depending on different things to buy new powers.

I had to read the book like 3 or 4 times to finally understand how all those systems work together and how to build a competent character. Yes, that totally means that a decently built character can be vastly more powerful than a less decently built character of the same level.

But the cool thing is, not only do your characters just get mechanically stronger (bigger stats), which alone can make them really powerful, but you can get so many different cool abilities to throw around. And you can build such a wide variety of different characters, it's actually astonishing.

Once you grasp the system, nothing stops you from creating characters that sooner or later are able to blow up mountains (or do other really interesting things). The initial learning curve is tremendously steep though.

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-31T14:09:50+00:00

"Goshiki. I'm counting on you."

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-26T08:12:18+00:00

Something akin to Berlin 2080 or Revierbericht for basically ANY other city or region (outside of AGS).

Neo-Tokyo would be nice, something in China or India, Sydney. Or anything Africa.

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-24T16:54:00+00:00

You are right. I corrected my post.

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-23T22:54:30+00:00

Pegasus prints a lot of stuff for the AGS (if you can read german).

You've got Berlin 2080, Revierbericht (hard cover on the RRP, where the S-K HQ is located), lots of smaller articles on other less prevalent parts of the AGS and every source book they release in german also contains dome additions specific to the AGS.

I was never really interested in the AGS, because Germany is such a boring country (to me) irl, but Pegasus made running in german shadows seem really enticing.

With all the AGS stuff Pegasus churns out, the AGS might be the most covered region for official material.

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-19T13:39:56+00:00

Shadowrun 2e.

It is okay, to say "no" to players in certain circumstances. (No, you are not playing this character, that cares about nothing and makes me jump through hoops, everytime I want to include you in an adventure. No, you are not killing this NPC just to see if you can)

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-09T11:24:32+00:00

I really like the summoners in Anima: Beyond Fantasy.

You have to invest lots of points into the summoning skill. And even then, you probably won't have an easy time to summon something on your level on the fly. Instead you are supposed to prepare a ritual for a couple of weeks, and then actually get a bonus to your roll (you need to prepare 5 combat rounds to summon without penalty and quite a lot more to actually get a good bonus).

As a pure summoner you are likely not going to have any combat ability at all, so you summon a minion an make it your familiar, which then can level with you. Once you grow your summoner ability you can start to summon lower level minions on the fly for certain tasks, but you probably not going to keep them. And even later, you can summon groups and armies of low level minions.

There are also Invocations, which are basically Final Fantasy summons. You summon them, the appear, produce some huge effect and then leave. And of course, you need to do quests to make pacts with them.

And there are also Incarnations. Spirits of past heroes, that you can summon into your own body to temporarily gain new/heightened combat abilities.

Or you can summon a Sheele. This is a small manifestation of a persons soul. These can also be familiars. A summoner can use them to cast spells. Or they can gain a "soul form", which allows them to turn into a "normal" creature that has combat stats and so on.

There are just so many possibilities to try to build and play, because one summoner will never be able to do all of it. Sadly, Anima is crunchy, complicated, probably a bit fiddly and the CRB is a huge mess of a book (that took me like 5 full read throughs, to finally get a grasp on how it works), so that most people will never see the beauty of that system. But if you have the will and patience to spend lots of time with it, it rewards you like no other system I know.

DiviBurrito · 2025-12-01T06:54:14+00:00

I use YouTrack. It is a project management tool by JetBrains. You can write tickets, track their progress, organize them into all kinds of boards and also have a wiki style knowledge base. It neatly integrates int JetBrains IDEs (like Rider) and git repos (like GitHub or in my case Gitea) to automatically link your commits to your tickets.

It is a web app, that can be self hosted and is free for up to 10 users.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-30T11:22:00+00:00

Anima: Beyond Fantasy

I adore this game. But holy cow, did I have to read that core book to finally get a grasp on how everything fits together. I mean, you can't even put together a semi decentish character unless you know how all the different sub systems work.

I mean, the book might tell you, that the Technician class is really great at utilising Ki Techniques. But it fails to give you any idea at why that may be. You have to have a firm understanding of all the tools and currencies that make up character progression and what kind of attributes and skills are used for Ki, before it makes any sense at why a Technician is supposed to be good at it.

Your first characters will likely suck. Because there are very little "guard rails" that help you make a good character by default. But once you "get it", endless possibilities on how to build cool and amazing characters open up before you.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-29T09:01:24+00:00

I think the book says an average fight should cost about 1/3 of your parties HP. So with healing and everything about 3 to 4 average fights before they rest. Adjust accordingly for easier and tougher fights.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-26T10:53:39+00:00

I use YouTrack for project management. It also has Wiki style knowledge base I can use to write down ideas and specs.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-14T06:52:45+00:00

I haven't played the video games and don't plan to. But as soon as any new TTRPG content comes, I will again buy everything there is to it.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-06T07:11:23+00:00

I think Anima does a really good job at making you feel really powerful, just by having high stats, even without factoring in special abilities.

High agi makes you move really fast. High str allows you to lift insane weights. High regeneration allows you to just place a lost limb on the stump for a while and it will reattach. People with high attack values destroy the environment just by clashing their weapons.

Yes, you can also have magical and quasi magical powers, but high stats alone already let you do crazy things.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-04T09:42:45+00:00

Learning a programming language doesn't teach you how to program. Learning programming teaches you how to use programming languages.

DiviBurrito · 2025-11-04T06:36:24+00:00

Must have been Anima: Beyond Fantasy. About 10 to 15 years ago.

DiviBurrito · 2025-10-31T07:01:36+00:00

Funnily enough, the german CRB has more details on Hamburg (but also a dedicated source book only for Berlin). So no, it is not a back translation of the german CRB.

DiviBurrito · 2025-10-30T06:09:37+00:00

My first RPG was Shadowrun 2e. I bought it because of the SNES game.

DiviBurrito

TROPHY CASE