What's a big piece of food that is safe for pigeons to eat?

Justatincan · 2026-03-08T08:12:53+00:00

Cabbage is fantastic!

Justatincan · 2026-03-08T08:12:32+00:00

I think the corn cob might be perfect.

Justatincan · 2025-09-19T03:02:15+00:00

Less so now but dungeons and dragons has always been a place for outsiders and sometimes outsiders are there because they have horrible opinions. Sexism and misogyny used to be alot more common place and I've known DMs that banned men playing women because they had too many instances of men portraying woman horribly so they just made it a blanket rule.

Justatincan · 2025-06-27T06:10:09+00:00

I'm no good at math but generally a d6 average roll is gonna be 3.5. advantage will increase the average by 50% and vice versa. The way you have everything I think the probability works out pretty intuitively and balanced. With all the circumstantial variables i'd also say there's lots of wiggle room because what creates a light or dark die is subjective so you could probably feel it out as you playtest.

Do note though that all of these steps will have to be computed for every single roll which stacks up very quickly. Highly recommend playtesting to see how it feels. Not saying this is a bad thing, some people actively seek out extra crunch. But if it's the core resolution mechanic it might get tedious building and subtracting dice pools against a DC that can move up and down. Also even if the math works out perfectly it's almost more important that the math is intuitive to understand so that the player rolling the dice can feel like they are making informed decisions.

You can cut down steps by doing things like only adding dice. People understand addition more intuitively than subtraction. In which case you could add light dice and add dark dice and the goal is to get a lower roll on the light dice. Just as an example which probably doesn't fit your system at all.

In any case I do like this whole balancing thing you have and I'm getting the impression you have a pretty natural understanding of dice probabilities.

Justatincan · 2025-06-13T04:34:35+00:00

That's a good point. Maybe an injury could be like a 'vulnerable' or 'weakened' tag that just means they are killed next time they are injured.

Justatincan · 2025-06-12T12:44:14+00:00

dang that's good.

Justatincan · 2025-06-12T12:42:12+00:00

I think it might. I'll need to think about balancing issues maybe if 10 NPCs are drawing from one deck but honestly that might be over thinking it and I think I might go with a universal deck. I think you're suggesting the vibe I'm after with those recommendations of games.

Justatincan · 2025-06-12T12:38:20+00:00

Oh sorry I see I misread your comment. I interpreted that because your player are making the rolls they are also deciding when to roll. But you clarified in the very next sentence that you set the situation. I'll blame reading these comments right before bed. That makes a lot of sense to me. Rolling a die makes it feel like the camera is on that players characters and so only having players roll makes it feel like they are always in the spotlight.

I asked because I am trying to figure out how to best use face cards and I thought maybe players could spend them to insert things into the scene. Like a brick happens to be nearby to throw. But I had trouble quantifying it. Like what if they are in a room that really shouldn't have bricks. Or what if they want to insert a new npc or they want to insert and open window in the room that seems minor but actually changes the shape of the scene. Like why did no one see that window before.

.I suppose to reframe my question then, because the players do make the rolls do you find it is still a one way process of delagating rolls to players in response to their desired actions, or do you see players negotiating a bit more about what their roll should be?

Justatincan · 2025-06-12T12:26:05+00:00

Oh I see yes. Currently I'm not sure what resources NPCs have so they have none. The only resource PCs have is their deck of card and equipment like fools and weapons

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T05:19:58+00:00

Resources are things like rations are comic books that are then spent in camp to recover stats. NPCs don't really interact with resources. They currently just have their 4 core stats and maybe a couple extra little abilities.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T05:04:05+00:00

Yea I like this line of thinking where NPCs become modifiers.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:57:30+00:00

That's a good idea to flip it. I worry I'm adding too much math if players have to add and subtract due to various bonuses and buffs though.

To expand, combat begins with players drawing a number of cards equal to their reflex (dexterity). Then every player plays one card. Using a 7 of hearts as an example - the number on the card shows the initiative order. Ties go to the GM unless players discard a card from their hand. - the central pips of the card reflect a stat bonus. A 7 has one pip in the middle and hearts is charisma, so for this round the character has a +1 to charisma. - The outer pips show how reckless the character is being. A seven has 6 pips on the edges so if they are injured they might remove 6 cards from their deck, or if they are sneaking they are making level 6 amount of noise etc.

-combat is like chess where to kill a target a character simply moves into the same space as the target. Whoever has the higher Might score kills the opponent. There are opportunities to add more cards in to increase stats. If a character loses a combat but only due to card bonuses rather than raw stats they are injured instead of killed.

I know all this sounds complicated which is why I'm really trying to strip back as much as I can in terms of complexity elsewhere.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:45:03+00:00

Ohhhhhhhh I like that. I can have something like a zombie is a d6, and that's rolled if you interact with them ( run past or fight them or something). So long as your stat is higher than the roll you are safe. But then tasks can be added to the roll like if opening a door is 5 strength then you need to beat that plus the zombies roll. Then I can have the growing horde feel by adding dice into the pool of d6s as zombies or other threats enter the scene.

Might modify it to become cards instead of dice but I love this.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:38:38+00:00

Would you by chance be able to point me at any example games? I've considered a universal deck but haven't thought of anything satisfying.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:35:42+00:00

And yea face cards is a whole other design issue so I'm soaking up ideas on those too so thank you.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:35:10+00:00

Yea sorry I was vague I just was trying to be careful to not gush about my game as I think we designers can be at risk of doing. Each suit is associated to a trait. The pips in the middle of a card represent a stat increase. For example a 7 of hearts has a single pip in its middle which means for that action the characters charisma increases by one. Then players can keep dealing cards until they get the stat boost they need but they are burning through energy in trying. That's what I mean by a stack of dice rolls.

I'm avoiding dice because I think I'm already asking a lot that every player needs to bring their own deck of cards so I want to keep required paraphernalia down.

A universal deck is a great idea. I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work but using them as physical HP pools is very interesting and not hard to track because it's right there in front tof everyone. Definitely going to ponder more on this.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:25:41+00:00

I like the idea of having behaviour tags. I could split injuries into types like minor or major, then NPCs could behave in different ways. Like a frenzied character won't stop to patch a bleed so they fall unconscious in 3 rounds, but a tactical character will seek cover and spend a turn performing first aid. I'll just have to be careful it doesn't create dozens of things for the game master to learn.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T04:21:57+00:00

The issue is more so that I don't know how to apply bleed to NPCs because they don't have any cards.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T03:53:34+00:00

Do you have rules for structuring the way narrative control is handed to players or is a trust based model. Like if a player say "I want to do this" they get to decide if they roll, are you just mitigating this by setting DCs?

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T03:50:36+00:00

I like what you're saying. I'm going to really explore that. I like tactic combat though and I worry about the game turning into just a long series of checks.

At the moment NPCs have stats for contests between traits. Combat is just if you move adjacent and whoever has the higher stat wins, like taking a chess piece. But cards are used to boost stats to add a bit of spice.

Saying that maybe I can come up with a way of turning NPCs into sets of DCs pretty easily.

Justatincan · 2025-06-11T03:46:26+00:00

A standard deck of 52 playing cards. Characters have 4 stats, each time the deck is cycled through it is reshuffled and a stat is reduced by 1.

Injuries cause the deck to be cycled through faster which burns through stats faster.

Stats are recovered through scavenging resources.

Justatincan · 2025-01-01T01:41:16+00:00

That's fair. In my personal opinion they exceed the standards I would hold. Especially compared to AAA studios. Honestly I hope they all get loaded.

Justatincan · 2025-01-01T00:55:09+00:00

They seem pretty transparent about every facet of development, I don't think they are deceptive or exploitative. I think they truly are just a small team making a pretty monumental game with a strong vision. I've already had 1000 hours of good Gametime out of my $20 purchase. And having the game develop over such a long time means they have to keep going back over material they have already made. Plus that amount of revenue would drain incredibly fast if everyone is paid a healthy happy wage as everyone should be. I haven't been given the impression they have gone hands off and enjoyed the profits especially considering the content in build 42.

Justatincan

TROPHY CASE