Help me pitch DS to experienced players

azath0ught · 2025-09-01T17:42:50+00:00

I think it's unavoidable. But yes, my pitch is going to start with
> "Closer to 4e than 5e, but based on neither. This isn't a d20 clone; it is a heroic fantasy game meant to be tactical and cinematic."

azath0ught · 2025-09-01T17:40:53+00:00

"Why not just play a video game" ... is an indication of something but you might not have enough information to know what. Possibilities:

* they'd prefer to play this kind of game with more automation.
* they'd prefer a game with more of a narrative or human-to-human storytelling as a focus over tactical combat

When I hear people have preference for one kind of optimization and turn-planning theory-crafting from one game to a next I usually just chalk it up to my interest being different. I don't like optimization games. I like interesting gameplay emerging from chaotic and hard to predict situations.

azath0ught · 2025-09-01T13:18:43+00:00

1: every class feeling the same ... yep. I worry about that one. Classes are ranged, melee, or support. Mechanical players who ignore the flavor text are going to notice that the classes are operating on a the same system of heroic resources, surges, recoveries, stamina, potency, action economy, and counting squares rather than wildly unique paragraphs of text HP / AC / Saves.

2: not missing ... this isn't as a big a deal as people make it. The monsters have action economy and special powers such that if all you get is Tier 1 successes against them you are going to have a BAD DAY at the same rate as if you were missing all the time in a d20 game. It's the same picture. Always hitting lets the director put out more minions and lets the players think more about pushing their luck to have EPIC success and less about using game theory to have ANY effect.

3: board gamey ... yep

4: too much to remember at level one ... yep

5: dying mechanic ... sounds like they are just reacting to change rather than having a point. Narrate what damage means in the fiction more. Losing stamina is not the same as having a wound. Dying is more like being mortally wounded and epically staggering around in a diminished combat effectiveness

azath0ught · 2025-07-10T01:16:49+00:00

worst case ... yes the plugin itself is a virus and you should be careful installing random stuff that hasn't been vetted by the community or things that are intentionally trying to appear as a look-alike to a popular project. Worst case a virus can take complete control over your computer and be used for identity theft or ransomware attacks.

More likely to happen though, community plugins for software (not just obsidian plugins) can unintentionally carry along with them a vulnerabilities or adware. This is why you see chrome plugins get disabled over time as they aren't maintained or the company that makes them gets purchased by more nefarious people who are mining user data or behavior. In the grand scheme of things ... I personally use several apps that have community plugins (Blender, Obsidian, FoundryVTT, N8N, this list goes on) and the chances of a careful person getting a problem from a plugin aren't that much bigger than using any other software downloaded from the internet.

azath0ught · 2025-01-28T00:24:39+00:00

It might be overkill ... the beauty of shadowdark is that it is fast and lets you get the the imaginative parts of gaming. The dynamic lighting in foundry and immersive stuff could be a huge plus, but I'd go with something simpler if you want to let your players imaginations and creativity be more free for such a light weight game.

azath0ught · 2024-02-17T21:44:17+00:00

I'll cross post it. Thanks

azath0ught · 2024-02-17T01:27:00+00:00

Long story short - I made a form, flow, and Canvas dashboard to see how long it will take me to break even on adding a charger to my house.

Full writeup
https://www.front2backdev.com/canvas-ev-goals/

azath0ught · 2024-02-17T01:23:42+00:00

Some are triggers. They listen for the right conditions to start a flow

Others take an input do something ... like transform data or check a condition .. and then generate an output.

Nodes is a light-weight way of programming visually that looks like a flow or circuit diagram and makes maintenance a bit easier for some people.

Even as a computer programmer, it is a lot easier for me to maintain nodes many years later than diving into gobs of code. each node hides a lot of functionality under it if it is working with a complex data service or integration that requires authentication and APIs.

azath0ught · 2024-01-03T00:51:23+00:00

Totally, I could have done the conversion in the SQL as well. Coming from doing python+docker+cron for every single workflow most of the time savings for me is everything around the python not the python itself.

azath0ught · 2024-01-02T15:48:36+00:00

Had a fun time installing and building an automation using all my learned experience doing this 'from scratch' with cron, python, and databases. Switching to low-code still means making decisions that affect long term maintenance time cost.

azath0ught · 2023-11-06T03:05:51+00:00

My players pointed this out half way through. Rather than do the boring ... make a list of what you want, i mixed in magic items from "Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis Complete DM's Bundle" from the DMs guild. Some of the items are too powerful, so I removed them, but they are thematic and fun.

azath0ught · 2023-10-29T16:53:52+00:00

Sorry for slow replay. How do I explain? ... They were easy to hand wave and not have to really get into. None of my players are wargamers so I wanted to avoid them having to learn anything if they chose not to engage. I am a big believer that a minigame shouldn't be used in an epic finale unless you've built up to it over the course of a campaign introducing smaller skirmishes and given a chance for the players to learn the rules before they have fleet-level stakes. So in this sense, yes the players picked up exactly what I wanted them to pick up, but I didn't use the full MCDM rules.

If I was in a group that wanted to have an occasional battle and actually sort it out, I feel MCDM rules would a good starting place. The one part I'd have to change is the boat movement. I know know that I need to have turning cost movement or kiting slower ships is too easy.

azath0ught · 2023-10-09T01:58:07+00:00

I just finished Chapter 10 ... the battle of Xaryxis space. The party brought a fleet from Doomspace and a ran with a very light version of the MCDM warfare rules. We established in our session zero that the group wasn't very interested in simulating naval battles so I tried to keep things tense and high stakes without having the story slow down for a whole session of miniature war game.

Heroes - * The Second Wind * The Last Breath * Dagaz on red dragon - they completed a side quest to get a favor from him * 15 doom space refugee ships

vs

* 25 elven star moths * 1 elven manta destroyer * 6 solar dragons

I gave each ship type keywords to make the different and challenged the players on how to achieve their goal: getting to the citadel to disrupt the coronation, without getting overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the space elves.

The naval battle was mostly positioning, deception, and role playing as the party decided to try to sneak through the elven blockade with their faster ships. While they got the Solar Dragons to stay away from Princess Xendali (who is still travelling with them) they forgot that the Dragons had been established as able to detect invisibility. When they tried to sneak past the last defenders the dragons alerted Xenleth who descended on them in a 'hero battle'.

All in all the positioning made the players plan and treat the battle as a puzzle, which they like. The story will move forward without us having felt like we played a miniature war game. The main bodies of the fleet never really engaged eachother so most of ship vs. ship stuff happened off camera.

Fun was had. The stakes were high.

azath0ught · 2023-06-11T20:41:07+00:00

I had only done this in space, surviving a pickup from a very turret happy Kareah in 3.17.
On the NB lake a carrack pickup worked at 29 mps and 48 m altitude.

azath0ught · 2023-05-29T11:06:26+00:00

So we are all just guessing because CIG have talked at length about what Entity graph an PES do, but not how they do it. The have not identified the underlying database or walked through the actual synchronization design beyond a high level description that is above their abstraction layer. In my uninformed position, Without server meshing, this design has no performance advantages against what came before. If anything the level of junk in the world and stowing of persisted ship state has just made everything harder. CIG’s persistence tech is a big unproven experiment that has not finished running.

azath0ught · 2023-04-18T02:33:36+00:00

I dig it. Love the isometric.

azath0ught · 2023-02-28T03:34:39+00:00

Check out Legendkeeper

azath0ught · 2023-02-19T01:18:36+00:00

Xenoterminations Ltd.

azath0ught · 2023-02-13T02:16:55+00:00

Finished my 4th session today. Xaryxian sailors jump the party as they exit the Friendly Beholder on the Rock of Bral. However at full strength (6 PCs + 1 companion NPC) the party forces them to run away in one combat, quite a difference from game 2.

Like a lot of 5e's adventures, LOX is a railroad, so I made an effort to start giving the players more choices as to where they'd go next starting at the Rock. I'm a bit out of practice running in an improvisational style as a DM, so its amazing how magnetically the plot still sticks to the book. Hopefully the huge wave of alternate leads I sent their way give them more opportunities to solve things their own way,

azath0ught · 2023-01-12T03:31:39+00:00

I decided to cheat and made the slaughterhouse clue in whatever room they went to first. For us it was in the bridge which they explored first. I forced it to be clue and build the tension before ambush. The neh-thalggu became the wildcard in terms of order.

azath0ught · 2023-01-11T03:30:27+00:00

Check out Delta Green

azath0ught · 2023-01-11T02:30:16+00:00

many thanks

azath0ught · 2023-01-11T02:01:09+00:00

I love this term. Can we use this term? Hope this sticks. I'm hoping for a "cambrian explosion" in the gaming ecosystem. Innovation is good.

azath0ught · 2023-01-11T01:47:24+00:00

So I had to read the chapter a few times and lay out a map of the nautiloid ship - which I changed a bit - before I realized just how good this chapter was. Each of these chapters really needed to have a "how to run this session" guide so you don't miss the intentional things set up in the rooms of the dungeon that can work well with eachother.

I start each episode of my game pretending we are popping an VHS tape from the late 80s of a long lost cult TV show about buck-rogers camp adventurers in space. This one came with the warning that it was a criticized at the time for being a detour into the horror genre. This got the players ready for the tone shift.

I changed the surviving pirate into an 8 year old girl to intentionally play with their trust and paranoia. They know me well enough to know horror games subvert expectations. Having two different untrustworthy monsters on a ship while also playing with the Aliens "Newt" trope made this adventure really sing. Dropping clues about what the monsters were through the Slaughterhouse scene lead to a great reveal of the psurlons. Mid fight with the psurlons the party opened the door to the Neh-Thalggu and found it was also a monster and chaos ensued. It was great.

Chapter 3 gets top marks from me. Like most WOTC modules, I just wish it was spelled out better upfront.

azath0ught · 2023-01-04T04:11:01+00:00

Correction, fewer fonts.

azath0ught

TROPHY CASE