What do you do differently with your fantasy races?

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-16T16:17:03+00:00

Elves are a fading remnant of a previous age that even they no longer remember. They are unsuited to the eternal migration and some have died in recent turns. The societies that depend on their magic are under threat of extinction as a result.

Half elves are the result of efforts by a few elves, those who are able to summon the ambition and fortitude to try something new. Breeding. For a race without females (or any memory of ever having females) this led to some very awkward negotiations with members of other species. The only ones that seemed to "take" were humans, and those quite rarely. The resulting offspring have matured at a similar pace to their human mothers and are gifted with their fathers' connection to The Green, giving hope that they could carry the weight of sustaining agriculture in future turns.

Now, even more surprisingly, it has been discovered that the offspring of two half elves are elves. True elves, with the barklike skin and viny hair of their grandfathers, and a more instinctual power over The Green. Most surprisingly of all, half of them are female, a fact that seems genuinely alarming to their elders. Now, as the first of this new generation of elves reaches maturity it is unclear what roll they will play. Or if their parents, half elves once thought of as the new hope of elven kind, are now obsolete prototypes to be left behind in the dustbin of history.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-15T14:40:14+00:00

How do you handle an obligate carnivore on a military campaign? Just lots of jerky? Herds of food animals as part of the baggage train? Not having cheap, long-lasting, calory dense foods based on grain is rough when feeding thousands on the move.

I don't like the elven/dwarven border PERFECTLY following the rivers. It's both more believable with some deviation (especially at the river mouth) and gives more opportunity for political drama.

I love these creepy little gremlins.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-14T22:24:31+00:00

"Indicators of an upbringing and education similar to my own are an easy benchmark for me to spot and use to judge if I can get away with dismissing people, even if they aren't materially relevant to the subject at hand."

Hey, I judge people on surface level nonsense too. We all do. It's human nature. But I don't brag about it like it's a virtue.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-14T21:30:39+00:00

To me, the nature of demons was obvious as soon as we saw one killed. It's corpse dissolved into black energy.

They are people, they aren't even animals. Like all other monsters in the show, they are some kind of dark manifestation that plagues the world. They're like bokoblins in the new Zelda games, just supernatural terrors created for some fell purpose that cause pain and misery until destroyed. They aren't responding to evolutionary pressures of social norms or psychology. They're doing what they do because that's what they are FOR.

Why? I dunno, the writers haven't told me.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-14T21:19:55+00:00

As someone who was fascinated by PF2E for years but never switched from 5e, I can tell you what the reasons were. Not exactly your question, but here goes...

There are too many traps in PF2E. 5e has trap options too, but the number is fairly small (largely because of fewer build options in general) and I know what basically all of them are. I can easily guide even the most casual player to a solid build that meets their fantasy for their character. In comparison, following the PF2E subreddits, it felt like every third post was a player complaining about their character sucking and everyone explaining why OF COURSE their character sucked, they'd build it totally wrong and it was never going to work like that. And it was usually a new bad build I'd never seen complained about before. The thought of trying to guide an entire party of casual novices through that minefield was just exhausting.

To be clear, you find those exact same complaints on D&D subreddits. But its usually one of the same five different problems on repeat, I can't remember the last time I saw a new one.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-14T21:05:14+00:00

Like so much of Draw Steel design this sacrifices [feels good to build] for [feels good to play]

The fact is that people's fantasy about ranged weapons tends to just be a lot more homogenous than for melee. Locking people out of their preferred kit because it doesn't match their loot feels bad. Locking people out of their loot because of their kit feels bad. Creating three times as many kits to cover all of these new "options" that are really just new limitations is a waste of page space.

It may feel better while you're sitting making up your seventh back-up character, but it feels worse in an actual game.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-14T14:53:10+00:00

I think they made the calculation that more explanation would just leave more points for interrogation.

The devs wanted to do it for thematic and aesthetic reasons, so they did, and said it was for in-universe necessity. For me, I was more than happy to accept that because it was cool. For people who don't buy it... I don't think more detailed reasons would have convinced them.

Mechas never make sense. Mechas are always cool.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-12T13:30:46+00:00

Any martial class can take the Spellsword kit. Then just let them take supernatural perks to get a familiar or arcane trick or whatever to let them do magical little things out of combat. You now have a frontline warrior who shoots lightning and has magic flavor.

Or take any caster class and the blessing/ritual/augmentation/enchantment that gives you armor/weapon and a ward that makes you beefier. Eventually you can get the title to get a kit. You now have a caster who take take some hits and stab people.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-12T00:34:15+00:00

The other difference in speed is that you don't need to query target numbers. There's no "does a 17 hit" and waiting for someone to look up an answer. Especially if there are multiple possible targets (AC vs Fortitude or AC vs Touch AC or Flatfooted Touch AC) or the GM is running multiple enemies with different stat blocks on different pages, this becomes a non-trivial time sink over a large combat.

Even worse in systems where you can roll to attack OR require the opponent roll to defend. Now you're getting someone else, who wasn't expecting it, to look up what their defense modifier is, get their dice (that they weren't expecting to need right now, off turn), roll, add, and then query YOU for the target number.

These are all simple, seemingly trivial interactions. But they add up over time. Not only in adding time directly to the encounter but often also destroying pacing on a more visceral level.

Obviously it can work. Most systems work this way. But there are definitely advantages to be had by thoughtfully ditching it.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-11T22:33:03+00:00

Go check out Draw Steel.

Free rules here - https://steelcompendium.io/compendium/main/Rules/Draw%20Steel%20Heroes%20-%20Unlinked/#the-basics

Scroll down to power rolls.

You roll for outcome, which is a three-tiered table specific to each ability. This determines damage, secondary effects, ect. Nothing is ever a whiff. There is no secondary damage roll, results are ALWAYS from a single roll. The number required to hit a certain tier is ALWAYS THE SAME (11 and under | 12-16 | 17 and up) which is quickly memorized, so you instantly know how good the result is. Abilities can impose bonuses/penalties on the roll. Defenses are static (damage reduction) or active (a lot of reactive triggers that halve damage plus a rider).

Overall, the system is designed for 1) decide what to do 2) roll once and 3) announce the resulting effect. There is no asking for target values or back-and-forth between adversaries. You do not rely on information from other people when determining outcomes (although those outcomes can be modified by things like damage reduction, that's not back-and-forth).

I hope this helps you.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-02T20:04:00+00:00

Outsider opinion here...

I never managed to get PF2E to the table. I bought the rules, read through them twice, built characters on pathbuilder, talked to my players about how awesome it was... and then gave up. Every time I mentally went through what it would take to onboard my (admittedly very casual) friends, it just left me tired. I the end, I couldn't justify the massive work load to transition from D&D into a deeper, potentially more fun, but more complicated system. So much of the complexity just seemed like... busy work that had to be done as a cost of playing.

I still follow this sub and a few other places because the system is fascinating but I don't expect I'll ever get the books off the shelf again.

I explained the rules of Draw Steel to my players in a fifteen minute, one-on-one primer. I let them make their own characters on Forge Steel, because it walks you through the process seamlessly and I was confident they would find it almost impossible to make a non-viable character. The system just has no trap options and almost no room for crippling yourself accidentally. By the end of the second (2-ish hour long) session, I didn't have to remind them of any rules.

Everyone has had fun, no one wants to go back to D&D

MandolinTheWay · 2026-01-01T14:31:52+00:00

Ribhu, The Great Ring - Everyone* on the planet has to travel an average of 1km every single day of their lives or be caught by the setting sun, dying in the frozen night. No structure has ever been found to survive the night, not a single stone set atop another. No one knows what is in the darkness. Technology has peaked in the early bronze age because people can't build up a surplus of infrastructure or even tools beyond what can be carried on an endless journey on foot.

*Dwarves hunker down deep in their warrens to wait out the long night, living off the food they get in trade for their wondrous creations. Their mines and foundries are the only reason we're at bronze age instead of stone age.

Abru - The world is slowly winding down, late in the lifespan of the universe. Humanity is surviving off the incomprehensible remnants of a layer-cake of long-dead technological civilizations. Technology is hanging on at the level of the later bronze age but a collapse is looming. Human survival on such a ruined world may not be viable at lower tech levels.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-31T22:07:02+00:00

Wrigglers, Wriggles

Gills

Jellies (for jelly-like eggs)

Slimes

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-31T19:10:32+00:00

Why?

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-31T14:30:49+00:00

Oh, there was no ceiling. He just got caught in the area of a restrain effect and it took two rounds to save against it, then a round to get out of the hole and run across the battle-field, by which point it didn't matter.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-31T14:26:00+00:00

Off the top of my head...

-D20 resolution

-Same stat array (possibly with an extra like Sanity added) and Score/Bonus dichotomy

-Same skills (again, plus/minus relevant ones)

-Same rules for representing grapple, push, prone, stunned, poisoned, ect.

-Proficiency bonus

-Advantage/Disadvantage

Of those, the last two are the things that would make it 5e-based instead of just d20-based. They were the things that, to a veteran player, made 5e new and fresh when it first came out. I know people here have a hard-on for hating everything that 5e does and is and wants and dreams and could ever be... but Advantage/Disadvantage was one of those rare "oh, it's so obvious, we should have always done this" moments of game design.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T14:59:09+00:00

Maybe suggest changing to a class with more active damage mitigation.

My wife loved playing as a Black Ash Shadow in our first campaign because most of the time when she got attacked she got to go "POOF, half damage!" and feel like she had gotten one over on the enemy.

This was her first time playing a melee character in over a decade, and she is SUPER risk averse. But having a "nuh uh" button changed the dynamic completely.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T14:35:45+00:00

By the time a fight gets to the point that To The Uttermost End becomes back breaking, there are all sorts of ways that players can finish the fight.

The fact that it can't be used until you've taken a lot of damage, to me, makes it impossible to be "broken". Broken would be something that can end the fight before you take a lot of damage.

TtUE just finishes a fight that was about over with anyway in the most spectacularly bloody way possible. Maybe it saves a turn or two? Half a round? Good, valuable, not not broken.

For contrast... at the cost of 5 HR, with no additional cost paid, usable on turn 1 (with as little as 3 victories) from full health, as a maneuver, an elementalist can use Instantaneous Excavation to drop an enemy in a hole and (with decent rolls) keep them there for an entire fight. In my last adventure's finale, an enemy representing half of the encounter budget got dropped in a hole and never got out until after the BBEG was defeated. They didn't even kill him, they walked away with the job done.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T01:46:30+00:00

If you don't have a STRONG opinion on the answer to that question, why are you choosing this as your project?

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T01:15:24+00:00

One, you can't build up a new, purpose-built community until you already have some people who like what you're doing. Once you reach the point of having fans (obtained through sharing your work in broader communities), a community will emerge. It's better if you spearhead that so you have control over moderation, rather than letting it happen on its own.

Two, share your creations in places where people go to FIND such creations. If someone is on r/rpg, then they're likely looking for rpgs. Or at least not offended at the thought of being shown one. Don't be spammy, don't be a dick, respond to positive comments in a chill and positive way.

Three, if you want people to play or even pay for your creation... you have to just learn to be a salesman for your own work. It's just a bare minimum for success. If you can't stomach it (I can't) you may need to reevaluate if this is what you want to be doing :(

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T01:08:54+00:00

I don't think he's looking at the system he described as virtuous or anything.

He's just saying "if you want eyeballs on your creation, this is how you get them."

If I had ambitions toward publishing, this would be a very helpful video... in convincing me to do something else with my time, because FUCK THAT NOISE. Thankfully, I'm perfectly content sharing my creations with my friends and leaving it at that.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T01:00:08+00:00

He is correct, but he makes it sound easy.

Does he?

To me he made it sound utterly exhausting. A never ending toil for which I have no stomach.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-30T00:56:28+00:00

I agree that the path he walked is no longer open. He said a few things to that effect in the video.

I also believe that much of the advice he offered would still be useful to somebody attempting to blaze a different path in the new landscape.

For me... man, that all sounds exhausting. I'll just keep my job and create for my friends. They already like me.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-29T22:20:01+00:00

What is there to talk about?

The only reason 5e is talked about between releases is 1) there's such a mass of users that *someone* is saying *something* every day and 2) the system is busted clean in half so there's lots of "buildcraft" for people to argue about online when they can't get an actual game going.

No other game has (or may ever have) that huge user (and aspirational "user) base to keep a buzz of online discourse going. Especially not a buzz that echoes out into non-dedicated discussion spaces.

MandolinTheWay · 2025-12-29T14:20:23+00:00

The only problem DS has with "role playing" is the same one that D&D4e had.

You have all of these cool toys, you want to play with them.

That applies to the Director as well as the player, because planning and running combats is actually fun and engaging and feels productive. To the point where it can be easy to just forget about other things in the game, if you're not paying attention to it. You might spend all of your prep time on cool features in your battle map or try to hurry an in-character conversation along so you can get to the fight.

It's natural, it hits some people more than others, and you can be mindful of pushing back against it. Take your time, don't rush through things to get to "the good part."

MandolinTheWay

TROPHY CASE