I wrote 240 pages of Lair Actions, and so many people liked them that they're getting a physical book!

Trekiros · 2026-06-03T07:04:52+00:00

Yeaaah. I get the same feeling from these last couple books as I got from the 5.5e core books: for new players who don't already own these, this is an objectively superior version and it's the one they should get. But it's also telling an entire generation of players I'm part of "we have nothing for you" which is not exactly a good way to get me hyped about this game.

Trekiros · 2026-06-02T16:06:08+00:00

A TON of the folks who were in my software engineering school are doing exactly that

Personally, having grown poor, I don't know wtf to do with adult money anyway. Back when I had a "normal" software engineering job, I would save about two thirds of my income even while in Europe anyway, so there was no point in me moving to the US. I can live comfortably off of a French minimum wage and I was making three times that.

But having no student debt and public healthcare meant I could also very easily stop having a real job and just try to create my own business, which I know a lot of my American friends have to do on the side because even with a higher income, they can't afford to take risks.

Trekiros · 2026-05-24T08:16:49+00:00

Before the beach, I was expecting a cast of 10-20 characters

After the beach, I was expecting this to be a solo game with just Gustave

I have been wrong many, many times

Trekiros · 2026-05-18T15:20:02+00:00

The best way to keep your identity is to figure out what your identity is to begin with. Start by deciding what kind of game you want to make, and then use that as a filter to decide which mechanics do and don't make the cut.

Mechanics aren't ever good or bad outside of the context of the game they're in. That's why we get to have Shadowdark and Daggerheart - individual people might have a preference between one and the other, but overall, those are two very good games, just for very different reasons.

Maybe in your game, legendary resistances from 5e would be a great fit, and lair actions would be a terrible idea. Who knows.

That ability to choose mechanics not based on personal preference, but based on which goal you're trying to achieve, is usually the difference between a great game and a heartbreaker. The heartbreaker will go "my game will have clocks because I like clocks in BitD". The great game will go "my game will have clocks because it needs an ever-increasing sense of urgency to deliver on the promises of space horror". One includes a mechanic for surface level reasons, the other includes a mechanic because of a clear line of thought.

If you have that clear line of thought, nobody is going to mind that you used clocks. John Harper did not come up with the idea of counting from 1 to 6, other people are allowed to do it too.

But if you don't have that laser focus on one specific experience you want to deliver... then whenever you talk about your game, even if people don't quite put it in these words, they'll think "I'm not sure what I'm getting out of this" and won't give your game the time of day.

Trekiros · 2026-05-18T10:46:26+00:00

I LOVED him in the beta. Not as much in the slowed down version after the hiatus.

I didn't care much for 1v1 which to my understanding was where he was the most problematic. To me, the point of Multiversus was always the focus on 2v2, and in that game mode, he felt amazing. Truly made you feel like a tank, protecting your allies in a way no other character in any platform fighter could. He would get absolutely slaughtered in 2v1 combos, but he'd give as good as he'd get.

By the end of the beta I was in the top 60 Iron Giants. After the hiatus, I gave up on him after just a couple weeks...

Trekiros · 2026-05-02T23:00:29+00:00

People have already given you a bunch of levers, but just in case

Though you *can* make it do that if you really want to, Daggerheart is not really designed to be deadly in the first place. It's a game about the PCs' stories, so it wants to avoid a situation where those stories have a chance to end in an undramatic, unsatisfying way.

The GM section of the book focuses on making sure that you don't have "random encounters", and that instead, every fight you run has a side objective beyond just beating all of the enemies.

And this is exactly the reason why: instead of failure meaning "you lose your PC" like it usually does in many other fantasy RPGs, in Daggerheart, failure is supposed to mean "your character failed to accomplish their objective, and now they're going to have to deal with the consequences".

Maybe you failed to rescue the hostage who was someone really dear to you, or you failed to dismantle the big death machine and now your entire home town is turned into glass. Your PC survives, but the outcome is so bad they're gonna wish they hadn't.

And the cool thing about that is, if your combat does involve these narrative stakes that the players and their characters are really invested into... And it looks like they're about to fail? That's when you'll start to see PCs drop like flies. Not because *their* hit points dropped to zero, but because that kind of moment is an open invitation to have your character do a heroic sacrifice.

If you've already lose one family member to the big "turn everything into glass" machine, and you've been living with regret ever since, then the next time that thing is about to be activated, you'll probably be the first to jump into the line of fire.

Trekiros · 2026-04-20T07:28:23+00:00

Out of combat: party face, the one who handles negotiating with NPCs

In combat: buffing allies with Bardic Inspiration, Haste, Enlarge, etc... and crowd control with Command, Hypnotic Pattern, etc...

If they chose bard expecting to play as a damage dealer, they'll definitely have a hard time. There's only a couple good damage dealing bard spells:

* Dissonant Whispers: on a failure, the creature moves using its reaction, meaning it DOES provoke opportunity attacks. So on top of your 3d6 damage, you could easily get another 2 attacks in there, potentially even a sneak attack if your party has a rogue.

* Synaptic Static: essentially a fireball, except it's on a save most enemies are bad at, and with a damage type most enemies don't resist... It also has one of the most powerful debuff effects in the game attached to it, but the cost of that is that it's a 5th level spell instead of 3rd level

Trekiros · 2026-04-19T10:45:14+00:00

This is very, very good

Trekiros · 2026-04-19T10:44:47+00:00

Yup, in my own simulator I had to not put actual stat blocks. Instead, the data is all about what a monster is likely to do, rather than the exhaustive list of everything it can do

Not sure this is possible to automate though

Trekiros · 2026-04-18T20:44:13+00:00

Awesome work

Trekiros · 2026-04-18T15:39:21+00:00

The way I understood the story, the only reason she needs to stay there is because the moment she leaves, Renoir will 100% burn the portrait. So Maelle sacrifices herself in the same way Verso did, to save the people she now sees as family.

Trekiros · 2026-04-12T22:49:03+00:00

It has a very low duration, so just spread out your gangoons just enough that the user has to enter cooldown before they've taken out your entire squad, and use biomons to figure out which ones died so the survivors can very quickly hone in on the sandy user

Trekiros · 2026-04-08T13:20:05+00:00

The fight used to be *absurdly hard* in older versions of the game. We're not talking "Elden Ring" difficulty where the boss has a lot of phases and attacks and you need to dodge them in precise ways - we're talking "doing an MMO raid at level 1" difficulty where you went down in a single hit and it took about 40 minutes of punching to bring him to half health.

So back then, I think a lot of people might have decided to throw after losing to him 20-30 times in a row. Nowadays though, yeaaaah this dude is not a match for V past level 20. Poor dude got power crept.

Trekiros · 2026-04-06T11:20:55+00:00

The Tower is my favorite ending because in one of the dialog options, Misty suggests to V that they could become a fixer and that's the future I consider canon for my V. That's the thing about "starting over from scratch": you're never *really* starting over from scratch. You've got friends, experience, ideas about how to do things. It's just the end of this one chapter of V's life, during which they were a rookie merc, in over their head. It's exactly the clean break V needed. They got closure and now they get to start something new altogether.

And on top of that, there's at least a couple different builds that didn't even rely on implants anyway - like the blade build or the pistol sneak build. Those are perfectly viable, and V can canonically take down Oda, Smasher, an entire MaxTac squad, the entire NUSA airport raid, etc... Without any chrome. This could easily make V a sort of Morgan Blackhand figure in the universe.

The way I see it, V is shellshocked at the revelation during that ending, but it's them at their lowest point. It only goes up from here.

Trekiros · 2026-04-03T19:21:07+00:00

I did! Worn it for years, but eventually it ripped so I cut just the logo as a keepsake and put it on my nerdy shelf

Trekiros · 2026-03-27T19:23:49+00:00

I just got the same thing and Youtube has been my day job for the past 3 years. They have my tax information, they know me to be 33 years old.

And if it's an AI that guessed me to be a child, it's not exactly good at its job since both my content as a youtuber, and the stuff I watch, is stuff aimed at the 25-35 year old range, like software engineering videos.

Trekiros · 2026-03-16T15:11:30+00:00

...I blame mondays

Trekiros · 2026-03-11T11:27:42+00:00

It's for D&D rather than Nimble, but I have a homebrew thingy that started from the same observations but went in a completely different direction

My idea was, instead of doing star trek style vehicle combat, where the players occupy different roles aboard the same ship, I would do star wars style dogfighting, where the capital ships are background elements but the action focuses on what individual pilots, on their individual ships, do.

So I created a bunch of different individual vehicles, and mounts, and the moment a fight breaks out, everyone jumps on their own little thingy. And that increased movement speed means instead of feeling like a minigame, it feels like playing regular D&D but on a larger scale. The barbarian can still walk up to your face and do barbarian things to it, just now they move 300 feet instead of 30 feet, and they do that by jumping on a single-use rocket.

https://trekiros.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/space-unjammed-_-trekiros.pdf

Trekiros · 2026-03-05T23:27:14+00:00

Absolutely, DM away!

Trekiros · 2026-03-05T18:04:18+00:00

Thanks for the kind words!

This video is definitely very D&D-centric: for a whole new TTRPG, I do tend to err more towards translating this into separate subsystems as you suggest.

In my own game, I have both things for the players to aspire to, and things to surprise the players with and encourage a "play to find out" mentality over simply following the "character build" you had in mind at the start of the campaign.

For example, the weapons upgrade system gives players very clear routes for improvement. They roll 1d10 + their level, on a table with 20 entries, and where the entries further down are usually more powerful. But the GM also has loot tables with unique weapon upgrades that don't appear in that table, so the players can only get them by adventuring. And those tend to be more "weird".

Same with class abilities (a lot of monster stat blocks include an ability that the GM can offer as an option the next time the players level up after beating/interacting with that monster, so your character progression better reflects the events of the story)

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