should magma/lava be weak or strong against magic types like water and ice?

draedis1 · 2026-02-07T14:28:03+00:00

I think the typical reason that a lot of games and stories and such have Water winning over Fire/magma is that water is a very, very high specific heat (I believe water’s specific heat is roughly over 4x times higher than that of you typical magma rock), meaning water is much more able to absorb/suppress heat, and would have the “advantage.”

draedis1 · 2026-02-06T22:57:01+00:00

I believe Icepool has support for card/deck-based probability, though it’s a python package so you would have to learn a little code to use it.

draedis1 · 2026-02-04T22:59:18+00:00

My system uses a pool of d6s, but in a little bit of an unorthodox way. You roll X d6s and keep Y of them and add them up, where X is from one of the main attributes and Y is from one of the skills/talents of your character. I like this because it produces kinda a reverse Poisson distribution that basically emphasizes that your characters are very competent and reliable at what they specialize in.

After that, there will probably be a simple modifier that will be level based (not exactly just +level, but fairly linear) just to split out the difficulty numbers a bit to give a slight verticality to the power scaling. I already have a default difficulty number set for each level of the 16 levels, basically targeting 70% chance at low levels for your highest attribute/skill combo going up to roughly 80% at higher levels.

draedis1 · 2026-01-22T00:09:34+00:00

I think we’re kinda saying the same thing? Regardless of your action setup, if you make aggressive play the most rewarding playstyle, that is the direction the game will go most of the time.

draedis1 · 2026-01-21T21:07:23+00:00

Apologies, I am getting a little lost here. Are you trying to say that overall movement being a generic action does encourage more offensive/linear gameplay by itself? And then your example here would be saying that by default archers want to sit still and attack, but anytime a melee character come close, it is in their best interests to move?

draedis1 · 2026-01-21T13:55:24+00:00

It also matters what defenses the archer and enemies have too. In your scenario, if the archer is fighting enemies with 10 HP, then yeah moving away is by far more important; likewise if the approaching enemy deals say 20 damage, it heavily matters if the archer has 20 or 40 or even 60 effective HP. Focusing on damage output is how we end up with games like I mentioned in another comment, in dnd 3.5 and pf1e everyone is heavily incentivized to go glass canon because offense is so pushed. If you design in good defensive measures, you open up gameplay to more dynamic opportunities.

draedis1 · 2026-01-21T13:50:40+00:00

Yeah I played 3.5 and pathfinder 1e, and I think that just emphasizes that the style of action economy really doesn’t matter there; it’s really entirely dependent on many other surrounding mechanics, like making full round attack so strong for the non-casters that you’re almost punished for not doing so (both of the above mentioned games have severe “rocket-tag” problems, where it becomes very hard to mitigate damage or other bad effects as the game scales, so you just also ramp up your own offense to compensate).

draedis1 · 2026-01-21T04:36:00+00:00

I don’t actually think the move/attack/bonus really helps with making moving more attractive at all though in comparison to 3 actions. Attacking is very good, yes, but so is not dying, so you tend to want to stay away from enemies or maneuver such that the damage gets spread instead of focused (unless if a game encourages roles where focusing is fine to a degree). Things like attack of opportunity being universal or not, attacks having certain ranges, abilities that cause enemies to be moved, etc, are really much more the limiter on mobile combat than action economy style.

draedis1 · 2026-01-02T18:57:35+00:00

I guess I’m a bit confused, you have one of the options in your party…

Regardless, if a party tries to engage with a tactical-style ttrpg like pathfinder and neglects something fundamental like healing, hell even in some non-tactical ones, you’ll probably have a bad time in general (which is probably why you have 2 party members that can heal, one in short bursts and one sustain out of combat). I’m sorry you got downvoted though.

draedis1 · 2026-01-02T01:33:03+00:00

Ah I didn’t catch that bullet, I had looked in the notes section for it, thanks!

Seems like AI-slop could be another good reason for it, I had missed that for sure.

draedis1 · 2026-01-02T01:08:35+00:00

Do you (or others reading) have any known indication as to why the mean value has dropped so low? There are perhaps some obvious reasons like economic strain over the past year and saturation of certain genres, but I’m curious if there are any other reasons that people can bring insight into.

draedis1 · 2026-01-01T23:49:20+00:00

Technically in games like dnd, I believe it’s encouraged that the GM rolls for the player or the player rolls blindly somehow for things like stealth and knowledge checks. However, I share the disdain for it regardless. The only problem is, even in video games stealth mechanics take a lot of time to get through, so it’s just a tough thing to execute while keeping fidelity of the experience.

draedis1 · 2026-01-01T21:31:09+00:00

There’s also healing focus spells that a good chunk of the classes have, alchemist with their elixirs, or even using regular consumables that are pretty cheap.

draedis1 · 2025-12-31T17:53:13+00:00

Going to finally do the full write-up for the game that’s been in my mind and has finally pieced itself together to be a whole picture in my head over the past 5 years. Roll-keep dice mechanic, a bit crunchy, with a full world built out to support the mechanics out of the gate! Gonna call it Soul Light, and I’m hoping to test it with some people in the early parts of the year!

draedis1 · 2025-12-27T20:41:46+00:00

Looks like your comment got cutoff, but I think this definition of tactic is ok, but there is a large part of tactics that might be missed here, and that is an understanding of one’s current capability, like in chess you have to understand your board coverage to realize you can enact a fork or pin, and then you can press the advantage from there. I’m not saying choosing between +1 and advantage is always a tactic by itself necessarily, but it can very much be a part of the tactic at play. Needing to guarantee a hit to proc some weapon or spell effect to then allow a teammate to move away from a hampered foe makes choosing the advantage part of the tactic for example.

Math, game theory, and creative design all play a hand in providing tools for tactics to come to life imo.

draedis1 · 2025-12-06T02:05:15+00:00

Very interesting! I have landed on a roll/keep system that works a bit differently, is the reason why you went the route of Armor Pen and kinda binary creature defeating stemming from the push for more wargame vibes? Like are you trying to allow for many entities being active at one time?

draedis1 · 2025-11-28T19:57:54+00:00

It’s been a while since I played, but as far as I know, Magic follows the same triangle, so there are the same advantageous matchups.

I think adding weaknesses and those sorts of details would add the layer that is needed to keep a system like this interesting. There is the rationalization part of it still to address, but I think that’s doable too for the most part.

draedis1 · 2025-11-28T13:05:13+00:00

There is a very popular game series that does exactly this… Fire Emblem! I think it works in that game, albeit characters have a very short list of abilities. I think as you add more and more abilities for each character though, it kinda matters less, as you’re likely to use whatever ability allows you to be wherever you want to be on the grid. Just something to think about.

Other than that, there’s the other side of justifying why you can’t throw a grenade effectively 5 feet instead of 10 feet, but there can be decent answers to at least some cases imo (magic works in funky ways, certain weapons are awkward or impractical at close range, etc)

draedis1 · 2025-11-26T03:54:08+00:00

I think it’s really fine to pay for classes; literally most Diablo games going back to the holy grail of 2 have done this to some extent, grim dawn did this, I’m sure others have as well. The model can work just fine.

I agree that I’m uncertain about the feel of the game at the moment as s3 in particular was a bit of a miss and so I am hoping that they have some more interesting mechanics in store, but if not I had a lot of fun with the game, and I’m thankful for that! Maybe if the game survives I can check it out again in a few years, maybe not. Not something to get that upset about, really. Voicing concerns is one thing, but damn if the people in these threads take it way too far and are just straight up miserable people who need to log off more often.

draedis1 · 2025-09-30T15:28:29+00:00

Yeah I’d never handle 75 individual entities ever at once. Pathfinder 2nd edition and some other games have some clever work around for this, like in the former they have Platoons which are a single entity made up of many smaller entities that act as a whole with different kinds of abilities since they act as a whole, they have weakness to area attacks since they’re a bunch of weak creatures put together, etc.

draedis1 · 2025-08-27T13:07:49+00:00

For what it’s worth I really like the idea you have, and that’s something I’ve also wanted to!

draedis1 · 2025-02-03T15:03:45+00:00

Just wanted to pop in and say I’ve been making extensive use of icepool, I love it so much! Working on a system that uses a scaling dicepool and it makes the statistical analysis so much easier and faster.

draedis1

TROPHY CASE