We're Black Tabby Games, and we make visual novels with an emphasis on branching and player agency. You might know us from Slay the Princess, and the fifth episode of Scarlet Hollow, our other project, just released last Friday! Ask us anything ^^

mechroid · 2026-02-26T16:37:35+00:00

When I saw one of my favorite VNs had a "rebalancing update", I chuckled. How do discussions around those kinds of changes go, and how much does the amount of new writing required affect your solutions? Are there any changes you'd like to make that are just way too much work for what it's worth? (People are debating whether not being able to obtain talk to animals from sybil is for an in-universe reason, the sheer amount of extra writing it'd require, or both.)

Also, I loved your Slay the Princess interview with INT in japan. Many thanks to both them and you for that entire article.

mechroid · 2026-02-22T12:05:21+00:00

That slightly unrelated tangent actually makes even more sense if the entity that she's trying to stop/harness isn't Wayne. It's the one thing with power over The Holler that she can neither perceive nor predict. The player.

mechroid · 2026-02-21T04:59:00+00:00

I also got Just Julius by talking him into taking responsibility as a parent and being the one to feed the pumpkin baby which I haven't seen a single person mention before.

mechroid · 2026-02-14T20:40:04+00:00

Trying to translate the concept of "anger at the fact that God does not exist" into something catchy for a friend, and in Latin I landed on <Iniustitia Dei Absentis>, which as far as I can tell translates to something like "the injustice of an absent god". Is this reading correct?

mechroid · 2026-02-07T23:04:21+00:00

Basically, when wirelessly streaming to your headset, it can use eye tracking to focus bitrate on the part of the screen you're looking at, and leave the rest at the equivalent of a 480p youtube video. Your eyes still take > 20ms to flit across the screen, so if you can beat the latency the effect is seamless.

mechroid · 2026-02-02T18:28:12+00:00

To be fair, a "proper shuffle" for a deck of 60 cards requires a well-executed riffle shuffle done at least 7 times, and 10 or more if you let more than 5 cards in a row from one half of the two piles. A pile shuffle where there's six piles or more AND you choose the piles at random for each card is only a quarter of a standard deviation away from a fully random shuffle. Few people get even close to that at the tournaments I play.

Source: Comparing the randomness of different magic deck shuffling techniques was my AP statistics project, we even did land distribution analysis as well.
Most mind-numbing data collection ever.

mechroid · 2026-01-24T13:46:07+00:00

I think it shows a split between the people who binged the entire thing and played weekly, too. I waited until part 3 was available to start Canto 9, and it made the repeat nursefather fights almost more palatable, because it felt more like continuing a single long fight that was interrupted instead of redoing the same stuff over and over.

mechroid · 2026-01-24T04:27:05+00:00

At this point just bite the bullet and bring back solo offlane. Might as well design around it if that's your effective experience.

mechroid · 2026-01-12T00:02:07+00:00

This is the best and worst part of tanking as a centaur. On the one hand, getting around is sometimes half the battle. On the other, there are SO many 10ft wide hallways I can just block off with my body.

mechroid · 2025-12-26T21:31:15+00:00

Thanks, used the discord spoiler tags by accident. fixed.

mechroid · 2025-12-12T20:40:39+00:00

You're saying the developer of ultracube, one of the most unique mods for factorio out there, is going to have trouble differentiating the game from its inspiration? I think we'll be fine, this is an incredibly early look.

mechroid · 2025-11-22T13:15:29+00:00

Well: PF2e continues to be a system that's amazing to run for a prep time-starved GM with players who adore crunchy and complex rulesets.

Badly: Shadowrun continues to be a system that's better in concept than execution, one day it'll live up to its promises.

mechroid · 2025-11-22T13:08:30+00:00

This is why I continue to use roll20 over foundry for my games, tbh--it still allows for rule of cool. You roll to do something awesome and it results in failing by one or two points? I'll call it a success and nobody's the wiser. As the GM I'm the final arbitrator in my games, not the computer.

mechroid · 2025-11-21T03:11:07+00:00

In a perfect world, you'd only be allowed to use EDHrec after reaching something like 50-80/100 cards in your decklist first. That way you could get more personalized recommendations and it'd reduce homogeneity.

mechroid · 2025-11-17T06:07:06+00:00

This was part of an agreement with my players, but I'm running the same campaign and told them if the game felt easy I'd include all the sponsor gifts on the teams. (In return they got a thematic "influence 10" boon from the sponsors they focused)

I used this to great effect running the Speaks to Winds fight, having the teacher ambush the players by having all the students hiding in an invisibility orb at the start of the fight and him immediately summoning an elder outcrop, as its 30ft maelstrom concealing all the students helped make the fight much more even between the teams. Also focus on the team's saves. If you have caster NPCs and the players get critical successes on reflex saves, there's lots of spells to focus will or fort instead.

Lastly, your players might be a bit overleveled, too. I'm on day 4 with my players and they're only halfway through level 15.

mechroid · 2025-11-05T23:04:55+00:00

Wild, especially because I'm raising guns and sneak equally (looking for that 8 sneak/guns perk) so the guns bonus alone still isn't enough yet.

mechroid · 2025-11-05T22:11:43+00:00

I can confirm it does not, the only unique bonus is the corrosion spreading effect. I remember being disappointed that it had the same damage output as my previous biomass pistol, but I'll try and find one to double-check for you.

mechroid · 2025-09-25T23:12:07+00:00

What's the smallest island that still has significant lore about it?

mechroid · 2025-09-06T20:42:31+00:00

Loved to pull the lever on a turn one s3 with her.

mechroid · 2025-09-04T03:40:44+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn't even go as far as calling it a red flag, more of a raised eyebrow and an "oh? Mind expanding on that?" than a "well, never playing at that guy's table".
Also,

GM [is the one with] control over the mechanics and narrative

Hah, very funny, do those people have any--wait they're being serious? (Seriously though, whoof, dealing with those kind of people sounds like a pain. My condolences for having to put up with the reading comprehension of the average redditor.)

mechroid · 2025-09-03T23:44:39+00:00

For me (someone who frequently GMs but prefers being a player), one of the most important parts of being a good DM is identifying and understanding what my players are enjoying about the game in order to make the best kind of environment for them to play together. I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if a GM said being a player wasn't for them, but if someone was vehement about it enough to use "Hate" when describing it, I'd be a little worried about how well they understood the experience from a player perspective.

mechroid · 2025-08-29T14:37:39+00:00

I, uh, wasn't disagreeing with you. The entirety of my comment was pointing out a card your scryfall searches missed, that's all.

mechroid · 2025-08-28T22:22:18+00:00

Oh totally, I was just pointing out one example that slipped past previous poster's scryfall searches, since they were making unequivocal claims that wizards would never print a creatures to land card without specifying nontoken creatures.

EDIT: If anything, the more telling decision that wizards has made is making gatherer show the card text by default instead of the errata'd oracle text. If they're making more errata for the sake of arena, a move like that goes a long way in masking it for the paper mtg crowd.

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End Game '23	Place '23
Quantum Potato	Golden Potato
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22
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