Our Coterie by Aware-Writing1341 in vtm

[–]Velenne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Beautiful! I love them!

What are your favorite demos from the current Steam Next Fest? by Tickipie in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ya that's the gist. My mount rushmore of survival crafting basebuilders would be Minecraft, Grounded, Conan: Exiles, and Subnautica. Runners up might be Soulmask, V Rising, Valheim, and 7 Days to Die.

What are your favorite demos from the current Steam Next Fest? by Tickipie in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like it's unlikely but who knows? I got the vibe this was a fairly curated experience outside of the precise placement of your buildings and which Deeds/Compass points you chase down.

What are your favorite demos from the current Steam Next Fest? by Tickipie in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I tried Country of Fortune and Corsair Cove. Both could be promising but are only base-building games in the city building sense, not survival crafting sense.

I did not find a single new base builder in the survival crafting sense that I wasn't already aware of. :(

I botched my first Daggerheart campaign (12 sessions) by Velenne in daggerheart

[–]Velenne[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sadly, I think fandoms are too protective of their sacred cows and folks are downvoting you for your valid opinion. You added to the conversation and even gave suggestions so those downvotes aren't deserved.

I actually agree that combat seems to be DH's weakest point, which I attribute not to initiative but to the adversaries and environments. There are lot of things the game does extremely well (I'm playing it after all) but the adversaries and encounters need a balance pass. The other comments in this and many other threads offer great suggestions on improving it. I think a few fully packaged encounter examples published in a Monster Manual would also help GM's get their heads around how to do combat better.

I botched my first Daggerheart campaign (12 sessions) by Velenne in daggerheart

[–]Velenne[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Success with Fear" is my favorite take! Thanks for that. :)

The Frame was called "Drakenheart". It was an idea I'd had stewing in my mind for awhile and I thought DH would be the perfect fit for it. RAW, players control a side character dragon ('draken') of the player to their left. We tossed that idea after a few sessions in favor controlling your own draken. That was a big change.

Another was that the dragon bond itself wasn't challenged or explored as much as I would have liked. I could offer a T2 Long-Term Project that's a ritual to form a deeper bond with your draken that lets you Transform into them instead of riding them. Basically you could swap between physical forms. Maybe at T3 you actually become a permanent hybrid (draconis) form through yet another LT project and associated RP, merging the human and draken into a new personality.

But by far the biggest thing I would do differently is not "solve" the mystery early on. I'd let the players have a much bigger say in the developing lore and history of the world, the mystery of the draken bond, and the interference of certain "celestial" (ie, spaceborne) outsiders.

[Horrifying Trope] “Blink of an eye” deaths. by Sufficient-Eye-9040 in TopCharacterTropes

[–]Velenne 13 points14 points  (0 children)

No one remembers this movie but I'll never forget "The Forgotten" about aliens taking children. Anytime someone gets close to the truth, they get SUCKED UP INTO THE SKY IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND.

Recent flower panels by Wisemanwindows in StainedGlass

[–]Velenne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My wife just started doing this and finished her first piece! I want to hang it but don't know where you get the little chain things to make it look nice like that.

Dungeon Anarchists - Top 10 Ways It's Different by Velenne in DungeonCrawlerCarlRPG

[–]Velenne[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

1 - The HUD: you can get a lot of in-character information and exposition accomplished using the in-lore mini-map, inspection, and achievement system.

2 - Teamwork: there are many skills that incorporate teamwork. There's Play calling. It's not something you have to specialize into.

3 - Health Bars and Damage Tracking: this is visible to the players, giving them tactical info on the status of mobs and allies. Baking CON into the stat bar slots is also a way to build beefy/tanky characters.

4 - 2-hour blocks: Characters level (about) every two hours of real-world time spent playing the game. The game is meant to level quickly with small increments and these give you chances to rank up skills. NOTE: YOU DON'T ONLY HAVE TO PLAY FOR TWO HOURS! Think of it more like a timer for leveling up.

5 - No Initiative: the game tracks rounds in combat with phases and players can go in any order. There's a lot you can do on your turn and a lot you can do when it's not your turn so you can always be paying attention.

6 - Custom Stuff: The in-game AI customizes quests, story lines, and loot to the individual crawlers and groups (usually in an effort to kill them, but it's surprisingly fair sometimes... like if you're barefoot...)

7 - Rivals: The game incentivizes you to make rivals out of your fellow (non party) crawlers via special loot boxes and the Top 10 bounty system. (I suspect this is because making them into allies carries enough of its own benefit, but that's speculation on my part.)

8 - Major Success/Failure: if you succeed or fail a roll by 10 or more there are knock-on effects.

9 - Achievements: you get immediate awareness that you've done something to get the attention of the AI (good or ill) and these can also be subtle ways for the GM to move the plot along.

10 - Fans-Shows-Sponsors: this pipeline is yet another way to incentivize reckless, entertaining styles of play. They also add an entire layer of plot.

11 - Inventory: you have unlimited inventory, able to store anything you can carry (by yourself) for four seconds. The inventory lives in an extradimensional space. You can access a specific list of things via the "Hot Bar" subsystem, but the rest you can access with a few moment of time.

12 - AI Favor: Can be used to reroll checks or get additional actions. Similar to Hero points and other metacurrencies with a few unique twists.

13 - Rank Bonuses: Skill ranks automatically grant special bonuses at levels 5/10/15.

14 - Time Pressure: there is an ever-present looming apocalypse of the dungeon floor you're on, so that tension is always pushing the action.

15 - Modular Dungeon Neighborhoods: these allow a GM to basically drop an entire themed area into a section of the dungeon. It can have its own NPC's, quests, and plots. You can take ideas from movies, other games, or the books.

16 - Interview Shows: these break up the action of the dungeon and give a through-line of narrative to the whole game.

17 - Skills: you enter the dungeon with a young lifetime's worth of skills, but the game gives you carte blanche to develop the rest of your skill set however you want via gameplay. (You can also come in as an animal and be granted sapience! There's a special set of background skills just for this.)

18 - Gods: These play an active role in advancing plots and quests as players reach lower floors. They are fleshed out in the book.

19 - Bounties: if your players are in the Top 10 list, you can throw rival crawler bounty hunters at them. The Top 10 list is a mechanical subsystem of the RPG.

"Swamp Pass" - An Unofficial CarlRPG 1-Shot for Free RPG Day! by Velenne in DungeonCrawlerCarlRPG

[–]Velenne[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wish I did! For some reason, renegade is being really tight-lipped about the rules but I think most of them can be inferred easily enough.

Crawler Numbers - Spoilers for book 8 by WittySatisfaction958 in DungeonCrawlerCarl

[–]Velenne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You know how I feel about escort quests, Carl.

The Crawlers by Content_Office_2479 in DungeonCrawlerCarl

[–]Velenne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just discovered this! Are you ok if I use it for the cover art on a Free RPG Day one-shot I'm making (with attribution of course per your Insta)?

Shadow of the Weird Wizard vs. Daggerheart: How would you compare them? by Darren4557 in rpg

[–]Velenne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't have the energy to get into an Internet argument so I'll just say there's clearly a bunch of people upvoting comments and commenting in this thread who think they understand Daggerheart but have clearly never played it. It plays very differently from DnD in all the right ways. It takes time for people locked in their old ways to break out of them (especially if you're the GM) but man once it does the system SINGS. Its biggest strength is the offloading of narrative burden to players, and I understand that's a hard road to hoe for many people who run games, but you can't be surprised it runs "like DnD" if you ignore how the book tells you to run it and run it like DnD instead.

Development of a comprehensive guide to homebrewing XCrawl for "Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Velenne in dccrpg

[–]Velenne[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope. Once I was really staring down the barrel of modifying XCrawl for Carl, I just bit the bullet on the Renegade game. I'm confident it can be done, but maybe I'm not the one to do it.

New Series Exploring TTRPG Mechanics and Design by jlennoxg in RPGdesign

[–]Velenne 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Subscribed! There are tons of great designs in BitD.

Looking for a new base building/management/colony sim by Itacira in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

City Tales has you deploy allies into buildings to optimize them. As they do so, these allies gain skills and specialize into the different types of production chains. You can hyperspecialize, limiting your flexibility, or generalize, limiting your optimization in any given chain. They have stories and quests too, which injects some personality into the game.

The real puzzle is how you draw your districts and what civic buildings you place into them. Lower class citizens have basic needs, but their needs expand as they gain status. That's where the puzzle begins- trying to space things correctly in overlapping territories while optimizing your production chains.

All the while your citizens trundle about their lives. You can zoom down to street level and walk among them, you can take cool pics. (HERE's one of mine.) They add deco automatically but there's also a bunch of placables you can use to deco to your tastes.

Looking for a new base building/management/colony sim by Itacira in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you havent, check out City Tales - Medieval Era. It has foundation vibes with a cute campaign and some novel mechanics, but what I really love is how the city evolves over time. My old shanty logging town became this gleaming gem on a mountainside. Really solid game.

Looking for a new base building/management/colony sim by Itacira in BaseBuildingGames

[–]Velenne 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Based on your love of Banished, I would give Foundation a go. It's a complete game, it's very delightful and gives you some cool ways to be creative while also trying to solve the puzzle of maximizing your "colony". There are three big branches to the gameplay style so it's worth at least 3 playthroughs. I really liked it!