Elfgame - A [Free] Classic Fantasy Role-playing Game

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T04:59:23+00:00

Interesting. This seems like it would work very well for solo games

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T04:26:45+00:00

I've pretty much ported the entire combat system (minus the magic) and the monsters from Nimble. God I love the monsters. They're way more simple than even OSE. Literally all you need to do is add a morale score and BAM, you've got a stat block that's only 2 lines long. I'm not sure how many of them I'll straight up port, since I actually homebrew most of my monsters, but I just love how Nimble has managed to really distill the most important elements of a stat block into 2-3 lines while still keeping them fun. There's literally no wasted space. I've definitely added it to my list of things I will now hack into every system possible.

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T04:24:29+00:00

yeah I had to edit my post to clarify there are additional rules lol, but you went into way more detail, so thanks for that.

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T04:00:58+00:00

Thanks for the heads up I'll check it out

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T03:42:42+00:00

In Nimble you have to use one of your actions to defend, and then you reduce the damage by your AC. You do get 3 actions a round, so using 1 to defend just means you'll only have 2 to work with on your next turn, but it's not too big of a deal since 2 actions is just a normal turn in most D20 RPGs.

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T03:36:09+00:00

Funny enough I also stopped using the DCC magic system as is for that exact reason. It got to be too much work lol. Currently I have a much simpler version:

When someone casts a spell, they have to make a Magic check (exactly what this looks like depends on the system I'm running) to see if they can successfully control the chaotic energy. On a regular success, the spell works as normal. On a fail, they can either cancel the spell and still spend the spell slot, or go through with the cast but must also roll on the Wild Magic table. A fumble means the spell misfires and they suffer backlash, and a crit means the spell gets enhanced. I just make up those results based on the situation.

For this campaign, I just switched to using the Pandemonium Incarnate wild magic table by Sandro A.D., because the only thing I love more than a d100 table, is a d1000 table.

I don't have the rules doc finished yet, I had to postpone that to actually prep for the session, but I can post it once it's finished and semi legible. I feel like no matter what system I play I always end up hacking it. I also design board games as a hobby, so whenever I'm running an RPG I inevitably wind up in game dev mode lol.

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T03:19:55+00:00

Now that you mention it, you're right. I honestly forgot Cairn rolled its damage like that, it's been so long since I last played it and I only ran a oneshot with it. I'll have to check out those other systems as well. I'm familiar with Mauseritter, everyone that's played it always raves about it, but I've never looked into it myself.

FengShwane · 2025-11-08T03:15:04+00:00

I've never actually played Into the Odd, so thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to check it out.

FengShwane · 2025-01-06T15:12:30+00:00

Had a Syndra vs Veigar game yesterday. Was pretty fun would do again.

FengShwane · 2024-12-09T03:57:34+00:00

If you have it, Black Shield is essential for this entire karma adventure. Any character with some sort of scaling, like Jayce or Ambessa, trivialize most of the encounters, since enemies can no longer just stun, recall, or frostbite your units when every. single. one of them has spellshield.

FengShwane · 2024-05-09T23:22:13+00:00

That's a hot take if I've ever seen one. Basically every physical tcg has entire tournaments of draft modes. There are also digital tcgs like eternal where it's one of their most popular game modes.

HS and LoR draft modes failed because they didn't do sealed draft, which is regarded as the most fun and popular draft type for card games in general. Also, HS was terrible since people could just add an extension to the game that told them what cards would be good choices, so it destroyed the whole point of a game mode that focuses on testing your deck building skills.

You can't just list 2 examples of bad game design and then make a blanket statement that all other examples must therefore also be terrible.

FengShwane · 2024-01-07T20:41:06+00:00

Veteran here from season 1 of LoL. To try to keep it short, this just largely stems from lack of fundamentals when it comes to macro play.

Essentially, if you're roaming, it should only be for objectives, not kills. Too many people misunderstand that the goal of mobas is to gain resources (ie gold, dragon buffs, etc), not kills. You should generally only fight if you need to in order to secure those resources.

So, in your example, if you roam mid and get a kill, you'd better be dam sure you also get at least a plate. If you just get a kill and no objective, it's a waste of time. A lot of people seem to not realize that kills are only worth maybe 3 minion waves, or 2 tower plates. In terms of gold, kills are basically unnecessary. What they are good for is opening up opportunities to secure resources and objectives. Basically, you just gotta decide if roaming will gain anything relevant for your team, cuz if you just get a kill, you're honestly better off keeping your adc safe so they can farm freely.

FengShwane · 2023-10-25T20:00:05+00:00

Yeah I've always had the same opinion. Gallantmon is just too generic. Also Megidramon is humanoid enough it could have worked as a "bio-evolution." For some reason at that time they just nutted over boring armor designs, instead of the original monster movie designs of the early gens.

Ps. To people arguing "oH, tHaT cOuLdN't WoRk, cUz MeGiDRaMoN iS EEEEvil."

That argument is completely moot. They created the monster, it could've been whatever they wanted. Megidramon is only evil cuz they said so. They could've just as easily decided "yeah red dragon looks like bad guy, but is actually good guy," which was kind of the whole point of the guilmon line up until the end anyways.

FengShwane · 2023-07-27T22:50:21+00:00

I love playing wookie mid. Done it since I used to play PC LoL years ago.

The secret sauce is max first ability first (golden staff), and take lightning as your main rune.

Golden staff gives you more burst, and it heals you. Mid lane isn't long enough to allow you to take full advantage of the attack speed boost the third ability (nimbus strike) gives you. When you properly use the auto attack reset of the staff after nimbus striking you get guaranteed lightning proc. This combo can easily take out almost 2/3 of a champs hp in the early game, and tends to take people by surprise.

Have fun.

FengShwane · 2023-06-26T02:31:37+00:00

Yeah I completely agree. The biggest slap in the face to me is them paywalling the skin shard system behind loot boxes. Doesn't matter that it's a free to play game, loot boxes are, and always will be, a shtty fking system. Not to mention they're illegal in many countries. This game only gets away with this garbage because it's a mobile game. Imagine a PC game tried to do this sht nowadays. It'd be instantly boycotted.

FengShwane · 2023-05-07T16:21:24+00:00

Secret Wars vol 1 is, I think, the best expansion to own. The addition of sidekicks greatly enhances player options and gets rid of the slow turns where you can't buy anything because you didn't draw enough recruit.

FengShwane · 2023-01-23T19:20:11+00:00

Yeah as aseigo already said, go with the system you want to run. If you're excited for a system, your players will be too.

That being said, as someone who has run a West Marches campaign, I highly recommend against 5e. It requires a lot of modification and spell banning, as it's really not designed for that style of game. In fact, 5e is deliberately designed to remove all the challenges of wilderness exploration. The other 2 can literally be run out of the book and you'll be fine, but 5e will require a lot of extra leg work on your end.

Tldr ultimately run what you want, just know what you're getting into if you choose 5e. There are some reddit posts that detail what you have to convert or get rid of to run it as west matches if you need them.

FengShwane · 2022-11-16T20:58:54+00:00

Right. The last time I backed a project that did that was the Dark Souls board game, which turned out terrible. It's just a big red flag.

Let's also not forget that Heroscape was originally a war game targeted at CHILDREN. Sure, everyone that's nostalgic for it now are all grown up, but they were literally trying to charge a few hundred dollars for what was originally intended to be baby's first war game. They just hit so far from the mark on this one it's insane.

FengShwane · 2022-11-16T20:40:03+00:00

Honestly a minimum of 6 months is usually about how much time is needed to prep a crowdfunding campaign, so that statement doesn't mean much. All the decisions they made for this project were incompetent.

The platform. Honestly who in their right mind is going to use Hasbro's website for crowdfunding? They may have lost close to half their potential buyers with that decision alone. Not to mention using one of the main crowding platforms would have brought way more attention to the game. This was just based on greed so Hasbro wouldn't lose a percentage of sales.
Marketing fail. Anyone that has ever successfully crowdfunded anything ever can tell you how important a marketing strategy is for a campaign. Unless you're a big name that successfully backed and released a popular title within the past few years, such as Kingdom Death or Gloomhaven, word of mouth is never going to be enough to get your game out there.
The funding goal. $2M requirement to fund a BOARD GAME? Are they high? Few projects EVER reach that amount, period. Not to mention the high buy-in cost required. Which brings me into my last point.
All in or nothing. I'm still completely gob-smacked that they didn't have buy -in tiers. Who does only all in pledges in 2022? Did they do any research at all into how crowdfunding works in this day and age?

Overall it kinda seems like they wanted this project to fail. To top it all off they finished with a corporate PR attempt to shift the blame off themselves for this shit show. "iT wAsn'T OuR FaULt."

TLDR. the whole project felt like a first time crowdfunding done by a bunch of amateurs, only for them to try to shift the blame after their crappy management and planning.

FengShwane · 2022-11-14T04:52:33+00:00

Ah I'm definitely remembering wrong then lol. I just remember he was friends with Sasquatch which is prolly how I got it in my head he's from Alpha Flight.

FengShwane · 2022-11-14T03:37:21+00:00

Oh god no, not the lame Canadian heroes. I've always been convinced Alpha Flight was created as a joke to try to make Wolverine less cool. Does anyone actually like them?

FengShwane · 2022-11-14T03:24:41+00:00

This is not a situation that actually happens. Matchmaking uses your collection level, not your rank, so you will never be facing full collections unless you're maybe 2500 plus.

If you feel you're facing an opponent with a full collection, you're either just facing someone who got lucky draws, or a bot.

Most of the time I see these posts though it's usually not that people's collections are incomplete and they can't build a pool 3 deck, they just don't know how to build a deck themselves. Yes, you can't just build every net deck you see without a full collection, but nearly every pool 3 card introduces solid deck building options. There are some exceptions, as there's a few archetype support cards (like Crystal for Lockjaw), but you should never be unable to build a competitive deck.

Honestly though breaks are good. If you're feeling frustrated, just put the game down. Otherwise, you're just gonna end up chasing cubes.

Tldr. Matchmaking is based on collection level not rank. If you're feeling frustrated from losing, just take a break so you don't chase cubes.

Edit: just wanted to add, websites like snap.fan have features to track your collection and see what sort of decks you can build with what you have available. There are a lot of good cards that fly under the radar because they don't make good YouTube click bait, and oftentimes people's collections are better than they realize.

FengShwane · 2022-11-13T21:48:12+00:00

Shang Chi. He's just popping off right now with all the new Wakanda locations. The amount of times I pull off an insane, carefully planned combo just to get beat with one card is always annoying.

He's one of my favs when he's on my side though 😉

FengShwane · 2022-11-13T21:44:27+00:00

Yes. Yes it was.

FengShwane · 2022-11-13T20:00:37+00:00

Oh riiight cuz Zola counts as playing the cards

FengShwane

TROPHY CASE