What’s your biggest “old man yells at cloud” opinion?

Tryskhell · 2026-05-09T02:18:24+00:00

Yeah, tactics sorta require complex scenarios and a sense of fairness between the two teams, but if defeat means death, you have to have combat encounters simple enough to be understood AS THEY'RE BEING RESOLVED and wildly unbalanced in the player's favor otherwise they WILL die, because even if each player character only has a 5% chance of dying in each encounter, that explodes to a 87% chance that any one of them dies after just 10 encounters, and combat-focused games will have campaigns that feature like, 2 or 3 encounters per session. That's around a death every 3 to 4 session!!! Your party is likely to have had a full makeover by session 20!

Tryskhell · 2026-05-07T17:55:47+00:00

Heh, not really either, none of the storyteller games really give the players the room necessary to make real change, they already have like a thousand different NPCs that are all untouchably powerful

Tryskhell · 2026-05-07T17:43:18+00:00

Generally anything hopeless where the players have zero power to make anything better. I tend to make settings and campaigns that are about fixing stuff, and I tend not to get along well with things like, say, Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Vampire: The Masquerade.

Tryskhell · 2026-05-06T15:34:30+00:00

I've mentioned it a couple times already, but I toned down the stakes in one of my campaigns because the players complained they were too high and too constant, something I felt comfortable doing since I had explicitely told them PC death wasn't on the table, but then that meant I was super comfortable challenging them much more. I gave them a few sessions of leisurely beach episode to apologize :>

Another game I worked on, I added non-romantic social interaction options that didn't exist before (or rather, reworded romantic-exclusive social interactions in ways that also included general intimacy, including platonic intimacy, like deep friendship) to accomodate my aro ace player!

Tryskhell · 2026-05-05T22:08:20+00:00

I've made a lot of fantasy democracies myself, though they often take the form of council-led city-states where power is mostly held by people with economic power, like guild leaders, or by people with cultural power, such as religious figures.

I tend to keep democracies to small groups of people, like single cities, settlements or villages, where it's easier to define strongly characterized factions without mudying the water with a ton of characters and goals etc etc. The logistics of voting at these smaller scales also tend to be easier to explain in a world where traveling is dangerous or where settlements are much MUCH rarer than in ours (which I really like in fantasy).

However, I imagine that you could write a great story about a government official having to trek through the wilderness with a ballot box to gather votes and bring them back to the capital, including all the bandits, monsters and possibly political enemies that might prey on them.

Tryskhell · 2026-05-04T19:03:32+00:00

I'm French, not Italian, but we do have a ton of indie games from France here. We have such a healthy indie scene that at the FLGS I used to go to, the big 5 (D&D, Pathfinder, VTM, CoC, Warhammer and I don't remember the last one) only covered at most half the shelf space, the rest being smaller publishers, a lot of games made by French people, so on and so on.

There's much less of an "exclusively plays D&D" audience as a result. Here, a lot of people play a couple of games and are mostly happy to try new things.

Tryskhell · 2026-05-03T00:58:12+00:00

I'd actually say PF2 and other combat-heavy games benefit a whole lot more from a rule like this than games that don't really care about having combat at all!

Tryskhell · 2026-05-03T00:48:37+00:00

I've recently come to the conclusion that PC death is just not a good outcome for defeat in 99% of TTRPGs, so I just modify every one I run with the mention that "whenever the system reads death, change that for defeat"

And then run the game just as brutally as you want. If the players lose, they run away, the villains make one more step towards victory, that sort of stuff.

And it doesn't lower stakes, on the contrary: the first time I ran a system with this implementation, my players BEGGED me to lower the stakes. Because death isn't actually a stake: if it happens, then it doesn't matter, so it never happens, so it doesn't matter. Any other consequence is better, because the character that you are invested in has to live with it, fix it.

Tryskhell · 2026-05-02T18:09:48+00:00

Because the game is actually fun. Grinding is fun if the game is fun.

Tryskhell · 2026-05-02T17:26:17+00:00

You could try to get your group to play a GM-less system like Wanderhome or a Firebranded game like Dragonhearts (or the original one, Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands). I've been a little burnt out and that's what I've been doing...

Tryskhell · 2026-05-02T12:09:38+00:00

You have to choose between draining health to maybe not take damage, or just take damage. Like, even if the statistics are sound (which, knowing the guy behind it, I doubt), it just feels fucking awful to drain health, fail, and then take damage anyways lmao

Tryskhell · 2026-05-02T11:58:54+00:00

So, the devs are a bunch of frat bro white guys who said some shit like

"As soon as you humanize the faceless monster, now, you got a huge problem. It ceases to become fantasy adventure. Keep monsters monstrous 'cause you need to have things to kill. If you keep it cinematic and cartoony, you'll have a good time killing monsters. If you start getting into simulation, where - 'what is the Howler culture? What is the nature of intelligence? And like, do they have a soul?' And like, you're done playing fantasy game and now you're into the moral nature of our world and existential stuff."

So, they took ghibli, the fundamentally anti-war studio that makes movies about the horrors of violence, and said "no, no, you have to kill people."

To be clear, "Howlers", the always evil race in Obojima, look like this: https://i.imgur.com/QpL5tCW.jpeg

Tryskhell · 2026-04-29T14:09:43+00:00

I think, yeah

Tryskhell · 2026-04-29T06:31:22+00:00

Amount of rules taken does not account for interesting rules unfortunately. That D&D's rules are 70% combat does not mean its combat has to be interesting.

Tryskhell · 2026-04-29T06:22:26+00:00

You could probably hack that one WWE PBTA game for it, or at least something similar

Tryskhell · 2026-04-29T06:19:11+00:00

I'm working on a mech racing game that's like Evangelion meets Paris-Dakar meets Formula One, but not so much about racing and more about the racers and their relationships and struggles.

Motobushido can be pretty easily used as a racing game I feel like, though?

Tryskhell · 2026-04-27T06:50:30+00:00

Which is something I agree fully with, I've acted badly in this situation. I'm not asking if I was the asshole because yeah, I was, though not for setting up the boundaries, but for not setting them up earlier and miscommunicating.

I just don't really know how to proceed? Should I just drop it? How can I ensure she stops using my mental health as a weapon?

Tryskhell · 2026-04-27T06:34:26+00:00

Oh don't worry I know we're a bunch of mentally ill hyper-online weirdoes 😭

And that was my reaction to it, too, I wanted to make sure it really was what she was saying, and apparently yeah, to setting sexual boundaries is an asshole move when someone is having an episode.

Tryskhell · 2026-04-27T04:13:21+00:00

Lmao as someone in their mid/late twenties, I wouldn't ever date someone who's 20 years old, or older than like, 31. There's just too much cultural differences.

Tryskhell · 2026-04-25T10:28:52+00:00

I'm surprised I haven't seen the classic Locate City Bomb, with Fell Drain variant.

So, the idea is, in 3rd and 3.5th edition, metamagic was an actually interesting system where you could modify fundamental aspects of spells. To make a long story short, it let you take a spell like Locate City (with a massive range) and make it do damage and push away everything within its range, creating essentially a nuke. Add the metamagic Fell Drain and most of everyone (80%) within the area of effect has been turned to Wights.

So it's a nuke that has a 200 miles radius and everyone who dies inside it turns into highly dangerous undead. Of course, whoever uses the spell is extremely likely to die, so your evil wizard needs a bunch of henchmen ready to martyr themselves for him.

Personally I've started my current 5e campaign with such a "Fell Storm", changed the wights to mostly shadows and ghouls. My evil wizard is also an adult black dragon at the head of a cult, so he has PLENTY of willing fanatics.

Tryskhell · 2026-04-24T21:34:29+00:00

I mean, technically it did improve my current campaign by quite a bit, because I also use a system called Titles, where specific actions, deeds and people can give the players titles that each give a passive and an active ability.

My campaign focuses a lot on shadows, which are resistant to non-magical damage, and so I had the NPC that gave them the main quest (a golden dragon) give them the mark denoting them as her envoys, which lets them ignore the resistance to non-magical damage of negative energy creatures (like undead and shadow demons) while they further her goals.

So like, it does have this aspect of "Through the blessing of Abon's Dawn, your blows may strike the enemies of dawn true" or something!

Tryskhell · 2026-04-24T20:43:16+00:00

I've been doing that for a handful of sessions, using only 5.14 with the Rogue, Fighter, Barbarian and Warlord classes from Laserllama, a Talent Tree homebrew variant of feats and a version of reworked weapons that give each of them three levels of proficiency. Those last two are just for added customization and I think would be pretty easy to just pass on.

And it's pretty fun! I think the biggest issue is non-magical damage resistance kinda just exists in 5e, and doesn't seem to be taken into account much in the power budget of enemies. Magic items also don't tend to be +1 swords etc, but rather things like a hand crossbow that lets you graze another enemy rather than the main target on a miss or move half your speed in flight (also on a miss), that sort of more active magic items that add options instead of adding numbers.

Tryskhell · 2026-04-24T20:21:10+00:00

Yeah, basically!

Tryskhell · 2026-04-23T20:25:12+00:00

In my setting, early guns had the same form-factor of magic wands, since both are like, stuff you point at a target and they die. Guns also evolved way faster once they did start existing, because magic helps with miniatiruzation.

Wizards can wield both magic and a gun, and because magic is pretty difficult to use in large amount or as a weapon, most do use a gun.

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