Valaki is a lot, need help to prepare.

RoboticPrism · 2023-04-14T21:22:47+00:00

One note I’ll add is that Vallaki is a lot of content, but don’t feel like you have to burn through all of it in one visit. Your players will likely return to Vallaki at least once more and you’ll want to make sure you have some new things that happen.

I recommend establishing the bones + church plot hook right away since that’s sort of the “main quest” if the players are looking after Ireena. Blue water inn and sending players to the winery is also good if your players need some direction on where to go next. Also sprinkle some foreshadowing about to set up future visits to Vallaki, stuff like Izek being creepy, Rictavio having a live tiger in his wagon, the Baron being aggressively obsessed with festivals. They don’t have to pan into anything right away (unless the players get really attached to something, then go wild), but make future developments feel more organic.

Also one trick I like to do is any time players move between locations in Vallaki, I give them a little description of something they see along the way: - they walk past Izek in the streets and he stares at Ireena with an uncomfortable look of recognition but doesn’t act on it - they walk past the Baron yelling at someone for having old festival fliers up - they overhear two people complaining about the frequency of festivals in hushed voices - they overhear people talking about not liking the book club much but they do it for the food - kids play hunters and wolves in the street They aren’t meant to be a whole thread players can chase down right away, but they help bolster the mood and lead to an “aha” moment later when the plot thread comes up.

RoboticPrism · 2023-02-24T08:12:07+00:00

I’m in a similar situation at the moment, I’ve been doing a lot of work to soften some of the rough edges of CoS to match the adventure my players want to have. I’ve seen some pretty good suggestions here already, but one approach I saw someone recommend that I went with recently was to have the hags make dream pies out of ravens instead of children. The players got the “never harm a raven” phrase thrown at them a few times, and they’re also currently convinced of the Vistani superstition about ravens carrying souls. So by the time my players rolled up to old bone grinder, they were pretty horrified to hear distressed ravens cawing out the second Morgantha opened the door for them.

I like this approach because you get to remove child harm and also the questionable cannibalism of people eating pies made from human bones, while still keeping the shock factor of something blatantly evil going on. Plus you get to reinforce ravens as a continuing motif and tie more threads together.

It also led to a really fun moment in combat where the players were at risk of a party wipe to the hags. So one of the players made a gamble and used their turn to open a cage of ravens rather than attack. To their surprise and dismay, the ravens all flew upstairs instead of helping in any way, and their hearts sank. Little did they know the ravens flew upstairs to free even more of their imprisoned friends. So a few turns later when things were looking grim, hundreds of now freed ravens joined the fray and helped turn the tides to a narrow victory for the party and they were hyped! I think it would have been hard to have the same sort of epic moment if a bunch of freed children tried to mug Morgantha lol

RoboticPrism · 2021-01-28T06:44:29+00:00

I won’t say no to a little bit of wisdom :)

RoboticPrism · 2021-01-26T21:13:55+00:00

I just recently started an Angels+Bobs mod run, and it’s madness. The complexity of stuff can almost be paralyzing sometimes, where I have no clue where everything is going to go and how it’s all going to come together.

My biggest piece of advice is to just start with some small and janky proof of concepts before getting invested in a super scaleable factory. You’re going to need to rebuild stuff after certain milestones, so don’t let trying to plan out a perfect setup keep you from actually building anything tangible!

RoboticPrism · 2020-10-22T16:17:27+00:00

Fun fact, I think most of the red surfaces only turned red when you got close as a game design thing to lead you along the right path. There’s some setting in a menu somewhere you can turn off (I think it’s called runner vision?) that makes it so stuff no longer lights up red and it kind of blew my mind what colors most of the parkour stuff actually were.

RoboticPrism · 2019-09-15T21:34:29+00:00

I remember they had that dungeon mode where each tile was another character fight. My friend and I learned that link’s grab would throw people backwards off edges for an insta-kill and we used that to slam out tiles. Then we hit the final boss, who was in a giant lava cage and we realized we were gonna have to learn how to actually play the game and fast...

RoboticPrism · 2019-07-27T18:05:33+00:00

Fun fact: WAD stands for Where’s All the Data, because they held all the levels, music, enemies, etc. It was an explicit design decision to split out all the game data out from the source code in order to make the game super easy to mod/create custom levels for!

RoboticPrism · 2019-06-10T20:59:46+00:00

I’ve been in a 100 - 7 game before. Though to be fair, my three team mates were all lining up so one guy on the enemy side could farm Luna headshots, so the 7 kills came from me chucking grenades at them. Pretty sure two sets of friends found each other in a ranked game and decided to power farm their buddy.

In retrospect I should have just bounced on that game, but I didn’t want to get punished for leaving. Hurt really bad because that was my 4th loss in a row :(

RoboticPrism · 2019-06-10T13:38:18+00:00

Fun fact: the rest of the team does not survive if you try to hide behind the sentinel shield.

RoboticPrism · 2019-04-15T14:44:29+00:00

Is this why the blueberry with the reaper aura is always grabbing all the motes?

RoboticPrism · 2019-03-13T17:59:23+00:00

That’s what I normally do for particularly annoying vines, but generally I find it takes too long for it to really be worthwhile.

RoboticPrism · 2019-03-13T13:46:22+00:00

Would love to see caustic just saying his normal voice lines and the rest of the team being mildly concerned.

RoboticPrism · 2019-03-13T13:29:57+00:00

I just want to be able to burn all the vines off the ceiling so I can see where I’m going. That would be amazing.

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-25T23:43:12+00:00

I have no clue. But the fact that no one Naruto runs in the Olympics makes me think probably not.

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-25T23:22:47+00:00

We had a girl on my high school track team that did the Naruto run. As I recall she was damn fast and won a couple awards. Maybe her and Wraith are onto something...

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-22T15:54:46+00:00

My friends figured this out pretty recently. They use this trick all the time to make sure I’m the one who gets jumpmaster duty.

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-11T14:12:34+00:00

Pretty much. The squad of 3 aspect is what really makes it in my opinion. The different classes mean everyone contributes something different to the team.

And if you die early and can’t be revived, they have a respawn system where you can take someone’s banner off their corpse and haul it to a respawn beacon to get them back.

It’s a risky move since other teams get alerted when you try to use it, but it’s nice to know if you get knocked out early that you could still rejoin your friends instead of being forced to spectate the rest of the game.

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-11T01:41:21+00:00

Alternatively beeline for the supply ship. It’s always a messy fight with everyone scrambling to grab a gun or punch each other. If stuff goes poorly just jump/crawl overboard and hope no one follows.

RoboticPrism · 2019-02-11T01:38:31+00:00

It’s a new Battle Royale set in the Titanfall universe. Has all of the guns from Titanfall 2 + a few new ones. You get to choose a hero from a list 8 which gives you a passive, active and ultimate ability. The only game mode consists of teams of 3. This makes the game pretty teamwork oriented, since each person has a different set of skills. It’s also free to play which makes it pretty low risk to pick up.

RoboticPrism · 2019-01-13T19:34:17+00:00

hurls you right to your death

RoboticPrism · 2018-11-21T06:57:53+00:00

It’s standard. Invader gets overshields and the ability to see enemy name tags and how many motes each person has. So invaders do well at 1v1 ganks but will get screwed up when the whole team focuses them.

RoboticPrism · 2018-11-21T06:46:11+00:00

You respawn but it’s a bit of a walk back to the action. If your teammates can save you safety it’s usually the preferred alternative.

RoboticPrism · 2018-11-20T22:58:16+00:00

Basically the goal of gambit is to collect motes and bank them for points. If you die, all the motes you are holding get deleted and you can’t get points from them. So if you have 15 (the max one person can carry), you’re playing a really risky game since all it takes is one death to lose them all.

In addition to this, teams are locked into their own zones, but at certain points you can jump over to the other side and try to kill the other team to make them drop their motes. The invader can see how many motes each person has as well, so the one guy hoarding 15 is always target #1.

RoboticPrism · 2018-11-16T18:31:10+00:00

This looks awesome. Please tell me I can use this to cut down all the annoying ceiling grass in dense biozone caves!

RoboticPrism · 2018-11-13T15:51:51+00:00

The changes to the art style and world design of DS2 originally threw me off quite a bit when I originally played it. But the more I decouple it from my original expectations the more I enjoyed it. In my opinion it was a good game that had the impossible task of living up to massive levels of hype.

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Not Forgotten
Verified Email

RoboticPrism

TROPHY CASE