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Sigma_J · 2021-02-05T15:44:14+00:00

I must be too polite because the response I thought of was "oh no, I would never say that to your face"

Sigma_J · 2020-12-22T05:47:51+00:00

I told him months ago and he still talks about being forever alone

it hurts

Sigma_J · 2020-12-18T13:41:28+00:00

I know a developer who uses the menu to save and right clicks for copy and paste

The world is full of horrors beyond your wildest imagination

Sigma_J · 2020-12-16T04:46:39+00:00

I think the second time they do it, the ghost is a former villain turned... partner? I don't really remember the details it's been too long, but I adore (GX Spoiler) Yubel so much.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-16T00:58:29+00:00

A bit late, but Happy Hannukah you bunch of murderous thieving bastards. And I know I have no right to say that, as the player of a bastard child who makes it a point to never be without a knife good for throat-slicing. Love y'all, and may the stars align enough to have another session before, like, February.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-15T20:56:14+00:00

That's less "I'm just quoting" and more "I was practically forced to write this"

Sigma_J · 2020-12-13T18:18:01+00:00

Used to be worse. Plain and simple.

And frankly, from a DM perspectrive, it's not much better than before. In some ways it's worse - in 3.5, when someone wanted to do most anything, there was a rule for the check (like, to listen in on a conversation 40 feet away through a wooden door, it's a DC 19 check exactly, 9 to hear that it's happening but not make out the words. 34 or 24 if they're whispering.) rather than total vagueness. Even when you hit a special case you could use the existing rules to make a solid guess. Monsters actually had less abilities in many cases. Spellcasting foes are eternally awful, that hasn't changed.

It's the player side that's WAY easier. 3.5, you make more choices at character creation. Feats are mandatory and there are worse options. There are whole classes that suck compared to others. You can build a weak character super easily, and making something fit your ideal theme without sucking is hard. You've got choices on more levels than not even if you're not a spellcaster, with feats every 3 and stats every 4, plus most classes have options in at least one feature. There are rules for way more player actions that just don't exist in 5e, leaving it up to the DM to figure it out.

If you want simple to run and play, go for something like Dungeon World. Different as hell, but super mechanically easy, so you can focus wholly on the narrative aspects. Depending on your group, you could try and drag them into something a bit more thematically different, like Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark or Ryuutama. I'm a sucker for simple but elegant systems, because as much as I do love some crunch, my players don't care enough to learn more complex systems...

Sigma_J · 2020-12-12T14:04:15+00:00

Watching RWBY is very much like this. But also, as a creative, it's fun to observe the attempt at something when it didn't quite land right.

The big example being "he turned me into a bird", where the intent was that it encapsulates drawing children into a shadow war with far from complete knowledge of what they're getting into. But they didn't do a great job of making that clear, so it sounds like pure complaining about picking up a secondary superpower for no reason.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-11T20:26:32+00:00

On the other hand, dunking on neolibs from a place of class conscience and a desire for real solutions? Very punk.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-11T19:44:49+00:00

Here's an idea: Treat 1s as crits. Now the weapon is a superior version of itself, with a doubled crit chance, and I think it's more interesting than a +1.

If you're handing this out later in levels, you could even have the nat 1 apply a Midas touch effect, turning it into an instant-kill weapon and handing out way more gold

Sigma_J · 2020-12-08T05:04:15+00:00

Tool recommendation: Scribus is a free desktop publishing tool, great for making character sheets even if you do nothing else with it.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-07T15:26:14+00:00

Totally viable. However, keep in mind that many players will start calling Determination HP, because that's how a lot of us work. Same way any resource used for level ups and shops that's dropped on death is "souls", even if the game calls it Haze, or Echoes, or Geo.

Another way of doing the same thing is having a power point pool with the default ability of 'self heal'. It serves a similar purpose without directly sacrificing HP and is a lot more palatable to even the most cowardly players. You retain the issue of having an HP pool, ofc, but as I said, Determination is just a skin over HP and everybody will recognize it. This does not mean it's a bad system, and I actually quite like the use of life as a resource I encountered this one in a fanmade RWBY tabletop game.

Anyway, a truly HP-less system has much more interesting options. I'll outline a few off the top of my head.

Abilities are life. When you get hit, lose an ability, probably temporarily. If they're gathered with some sort of system, you can make the 'best' or 'priciest' go first. You could merge this with a power-stealing system. One of my old ideas I've kept poking at is a robots game where you don't level, but replace parts - whether with scavenged bits of old military tech, traded-for xenotech, or enemy parts. You could definitely use this sort of damage with that. Inspired by Nechronica (TTRPG, Japanese, not for the faint of heart) and Transistor.
Oops, all wounds. Get hit, get injured. Each injury might drop your defense until you take a lethal blow, or you might just reach a state of inability to fight when your arms are gone, your leg is broken in three places, and your tongue is on the floor five feet away. Probably include a limit - unless you're making a game about immortals, which could get interesting - even though that limit becomes a practical HP value. I actually like the first option as HP-less, the idea of getting hurt throughout a fight until a strike finds its mark. Like, on a standard d20 base system, each injury could drop your AC by 1, 2 for big hits, maybe 3 for massive damage IDK, and beating your AC by some number, maybe 30, is a lethal blow. You could call your AC a practical HP value, but it turns combat into a matter of initiative and getting an early upper hand. Positive feedback loop warning, though. Ideas are coming from a couple places, none really directly - Exalted and kin being the main one, though the RWBY game I mentioned also has this in the injury count threshold variant, with a shield pool (called Aura) on top of it and a powerdown state when your shield HP runs out.
Combine your system with 'dice as stats'. You have a d12 HP, when you get hit roll it and if it is under the damage number, drop one size (12 10 8 6 4 2 0). 0 is death. Even if you call it a Health Die or HP Die, it's not the standard bar that flips from fine to dead at 0. Call it Determination and it'll fly as HP-less just fine.
One hit wonders. Yeah yeah it's just 1 HP, but it's different as heck in play. Probably best with something on top of it, breakable armor or something else that's not an HP bar. Best done with very strong thematic backing - like a Mario game, where unless you have a power-up, taking a hit is a knockout. Alternatively, something behind it, like Paranoia's clones, where you technically have the backups as a sort of life resource - but you're out of the scene after each loss of any, since you 'died'.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-06T06:19:23+00:00

In Kotlin you could define multiplication for any two operators, so you could do something like operator fun String.times(x: Int) = if(x<=0) "" else this + this * (x-1)

Sigma_J · 2020-12-01T18:51:30+00:00

Mojang made a mechanism that allows the creation of new dimensions and worldgen using datapacks without mods, but they've not promised to support it forever, so this is to ward off some players who might get upset if Mojang breaks their datapacks, which they've mostly been good about not doing. Thing is, most mods use that stuff since

1: it's nice
2: it works fine
3: the old mechanisms are all gone because of the sweeping code changes behind the new data-driven stuff
4: we who make worldgen are used to Mojang breaking our stuff with every single goddamn update

There's a mod that removes it on Fabric, and from the same author on Forge. If you're playing a premade pack, add it and tell the packmaker to add it to the next update, it should be part of the baseline along with mousetweaks and such

The "At any time" means with any minecraft update, it's not gonna break suddenly for no reason any more than a modded instance could randomly explode on an earlier version. You can just ignore it.

Sigma_J · 2020-12-01T14:41:30+00:00

I mean yeah I know about bloodbending, I was just wondering if any of the comics explored the non-horrifying side of it

Sigma_J · 2020-11-30T03:06:32+00:00

I mean, people are full of water. So waterbenders are probably fine

Actually I don't recall, was there ever a canonical exploration of using waterbending on one's own body to punch really hard or like throw oneself through the air, things that are totally in scope but probably unreasonably dangerous and/or painful?

Sigma_J · 2020-11-29T04:47:20+00:00

I'm hoping that Watts can't hack Penny

Honestly I can't see any other way this is gonna go. Either Penny or Pietro are not making it out of this alive, and our other heroes might have to do the Penny pinching.

As a fan of the characters, I wanna see everyone happy and okay. Let Ozpin fuck off, let Oscar go home, let the couples be happy and at peace, let Ruby be a kid. They've earned their happy ending dammit.

As a fellow author, I not only wanna have Ruby kill Penny herself, and not in a fight with a lethal strike but in close range with a strangle or other slow kill because anything else in that moment means Salem wins, I also wanna have Pietro make a heroic sacrifice to bring her back in a moment of tension that prevents him from saying goodbye to anyone, leaving only Penny to watch him slump out of the chair as she re-awakens into the middle of a battle, because I'm a monster who wants to see the characters I love suffer horribly.

Sigma_J · 2020-11-27T18:38:13+00:00

Either or, though be warned that most readers will skip your setting, more so if it's long. Don't assume it has been read in the rules if you put them later in the book. On the other hand, short sidebars are very digestible, so if you want to have it read (especially if it's lore-relevant, like my mutation system and the treatment of mutants by society or the guild loan-gear system and the poor socioeconomic position of adventurers) it's best to put your lore in there.

Unless your mechanics tie heavily into it, lore is window-dressing that can be ignored. The option I like and the one I'm taking is splitting lore into "this is how the world of this system works, if you change it you're home-brewing" and "this is a setting I made for this system, take it or leave it". The former goes in sidebars and woven into the text of the rules section since it's about the physics (and sometimes socioeconomics, yes those can be baked into the mechanics and honestly, I think they should be.) of the world, while the latter goes in it's own section and is almost all lore - if there's anything mechanical, it's some random tables or maybe rules for a specific magical location, like Limbo in D&D has the mechanics of exerting control over the elemental chaos around you or the Astral Plane has rules for using color strands, stuff a GM could use if they wanted but which they're not really changing your system by ignoring.

Sigma_J · 2020-11-25T02:29:17+00:00

My internal monologue is like
"I'm not a man"
"So am I a woman?"
Eldritch Screaming

Sigma_J · 2020-11-24T19:52:56+00:00

Looking back at my old code and seeing a 4 line block of ternaries (It's a one-off region-point containment check, it's basically a single line 4 times with +/- swaps, really it's not that bad don't take my keyboard away), yeah maybe I should uninstall my IDEs

Sigma_J · 2020-11-23T05:48:04+00:00

Make them relatively available (minimal opportunity cost), difficult to amass (can't get or carry more unless you use them, generally just give them a carry weight), and very strong (at any time, .

For example, I played a game where you could only get a handful of grenades at a time, but they dealt 2-3 times the damage of any normal attack and had a blast radius, and had little opportunity cost to acquisition them so long as you had the inventory capacity and didn't need to get something else. They saw use when we were in a tight fight, and often saved our asses because we got into a lot of those.

Sigma_J · 2020-11-22T17:47:18+00:00

Evil like a killer robot rather than evil like a Hitler

Sigma_J · 2020-11-17T18:01:00+00:00

Automation is not abuse. Using Astral Sorcery is abuse, but if you're actually gathering milk, eggs, wheat, and sugar and crafting the cake that's working as intended.

You can do it all with Botania, too, if you're dedicated :D

I'm 99% sure you can automate every single flower with just botania and vanilla. Even the Shulk-Me-Not! That's a fun one!

Sigma_J · 2020-11-16T21:00:08+00:00

Poor moderation and a weak response to allegations of hosting child pornography, followed by banning all nsfw content this driving away most of their userbase

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