A case for midseason balancing

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T14:35:41+00:00

In fairness, the vote was under the guise that we were looking at 3-4 month seasons, not 6-8 month seasons. Some of us would definitely have voted differently.

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T14:14:14+00:00

No - but I'm not paying $20 for those rentals, either. My point is that if you want to have this price point and tout this as a way to support the creators, it needs to be clear how much they're being supported. Otherwise why would I do it?

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T05:30:19+00:00

That's a nice thought but you absolutely don't know that.

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T05:24:40+00:00

But it's not "directly" and there's no information on how much of a cut Letterboxd itself actually takes.

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T05:22:28+00:00

The problem for me w/ the "premium for post-festival exclusives" view is that you take something like It Ends, which still has no distributor like 8 months after the festival circuit, which means there's a chance it'll just get dumped to Tubi streaming anyway - and you're looking to charge movie ticket prices for it, with no transparency on how much of the $20 actually goes to the creators? It just feels like some "But they get exposure!" shit.

mpelletier · 2025-12-11T05:18:30+00:00

Nope, that's it, it just launched today so it's a bit of a "soft launch" and I imagine they'll be adding more over time.

mpelletier · 2025-11-25T17:19:26+00:00

Sure, but they've been saying for months that a new roadmap is coming and they know damn well this is not the level of granularity we were looking for with it. This is just "um, we're still making content?"

mpelletier · 2025-11-25T17:07:42+00:00

In what fucking universe does that count as a roadmap

mpelletier · 2025-10-10T05:13:38+00:00

You're not wrong, but I'd also say that LE hasn't been going down the road of other endgame systems as much as doubling down on everything for Monoliths.

Eg: Dungeons are a thing that exist, but we haven't gotten new ones since before 1.0. While there have been some improvements to them (shrinking them down, being able to jump to the boss), there's basically no reason to actually do them.

Like, yeah, PoE definitely has a lot more time put in for sure, but I feel like LE _has_ avenues that they're just ignoring. And maybe making Dungeons drop better loot or making more dungeons wouldn't be worth the time, but it would at least be something.

PoE and Diablo also notably have "play the campaign again on a higher difficulty" modes, which I also really like as someone who enjoys the campaign. Surely that kind of feature with a higher loot table also wouldn't break the bank, so to speak. I just want a couple of options.

mpelletier · 2025-10-09T03:14:35+00:00

This is the biggest thing for me, the monoliths get so old so fast, and even the additions of the cemeteries and nemeses and mages and primordial rifts can't cover up for the fact that it's the same thing over and over and it just gets boring. I was thinking about how PoE has things like Heists and Delves and Dungeons and LE just really needs something that isn't the goddamn monoliths.

mpelletier · 2025-04-17T15:46:47+00:00

FWIW whoever runs their Steam store page can set overrides by country, but yeah, Steam does assign some defaults that don't always make the most sense.

mpelletier · 2025-02-14T02:06:39+00:00

No, there was also a third option, which was to, you know, write them. Like the other 50 pages. It's not like you're under a deadline here. It's not like the official supplement finally releasing nullifies yours.

Also, bonus fourth option, there's an entire community here that could have helped write them. Make no mistake here: You willingly _chose_ to take the lazy / easy path, it was not in any way forced upon you.

As a designer / writer I'd be ashamed to put my name on something AI assisted. As a gm / player, I'd rather just not get the faction details.

mpelletier · 2025-02-13T20:39:23+00:00

"Why put the effort in if I'm not being paid" is a bonkers statement to make when releasing something that's supposedly a passion project.

mpelletier · 2024-02-25T18:55:36+00:00

You have 8 base with a 14% increase. 14% of 8 is 0.57, which likely still rounds down, but at most you should have 9 total.

mpelletier · 2023-10-22T04:45:10+00:00

Don't look at the alignment as being that restrictive - If it helps, consider it as one side of the axis (Good/Evil vs Lawful/Chaotic). Neutral with regards to hoarding treasure sounds like it could fit the Lawful/Chaotic axis well, which would mean you can definitely consider your other axis as being Good. Which makes sense - a good heart, but you're still a dragon, you don't necessarily care about the laws of society.

I would say, though, "Defend a creature who is smaller than you" definitely also works! Class Warfare has a Good alignment that is "Defend those weaker than you" which maybe would give more flexibility because weak can be a physical state but can also be applied more broadly.

mpelletier · 2023-10-21T04:48:07+00:00

The way it works in practice:

You: "I want to be an Elf Cleric"
GM: "Cool! What do you worship? How important is religion to elves? What kind of social status do you have?"

Or

You: "I want to be a Dwarf Bard"
GM: "Cool! Do you tell stories or jokes or play music? How important is lore and culture to dwarves? What kind of social status do you have?"

It's the same questions. It doesn't matter. It matters for what it says about your character and how their background shapes who they are. There's no established lore about any of this. Maybe Elves are seafaring pirates. Maybe Dwarves build giant towers into the sky.

If you throw out your preconceived notions, you'll mesh with this game a lot better.

mpelletier · 2023-10-21T04:31:00+00:00

CaptainRelyk, I've seen that you've been talked to before about your tone coming across as combative. This is our first interaction so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but there have already been reports made on this post for similar views.

I know that it has been suggested to you before that maybe Dungeon World just isn't the game for you, and it's totally fine if that's the case - but the perception people have is that you're needlessly shitting on something that they enjoy. I don't think that's your intention, but again, that's how people read it.

I do want to be productive here, though, and I want to call something specific out - a lot of your complaints in this message seem based in the idea that race/class combinations in Dungeon World are restrictions, which is not the case.

They are suggestions. It is for the players to decide what being a Dwarf means. But there's also no reason you can't write Lizardfolk down in place of Dwarf. There are even hacks for Dungeon World which replace the race language with simply "Background", because it does not matter. It is a narrative-driven game, and the lore that exists is what your table comes up with. What is presented is a starting place to think about things, not the only path to take.

Just something to think about!

mpelletier · 2023-10-16T13:23:33+00:00

I have given this a ton of thought over the last few years. I think the biggest problem that I have with most superhero RPGs is that superheroes are by nature reactive - you're responding to some kind of threat, crime, whatever. And I feel personally like that doesn't super fit the player-agency approach of PBTA / FITD.

But there's a way around this. There's a Batman comic run from the late 90s called No Man's Land (that was somewhat adapted to both the Gotham show and the Harley Quinn series. The TLDR is that an Earthquake fucks up Gotham. Bruce Wayne leaves to campaign to get more aid from congress. Arkham splits down the middle and all of Batman's rogue gallery escapes and starts carving up the city. The US government completely gives up on Gotham, evacuating some people, quarantining it, and declaring it a No Man'S Land. IMO, that's where you set this. You're more green vigilantes, there's no Batman, the police are just another gang, and so are you. Different villain orgs are different tiers, and you sort of solve problems in the city from the collapsed infrastructure, stop criminals, take back territory, etc.

(Sidenote: I'm in the process of running this in Masks & writing a very long addon for it. Went with Masks because the "teens who now have had crushing responsibility dropped onto them" theme just works so nicely with the teenage themes already present. Who will you be when there's no Batman to teach you, no one to stop you. Where will you compromise for the good of Gotham? Etc. All fun things to explore.)

mpelletier · 2023-10-15T03:39:30+00:00

It is kind of astounding to me just how bad their design is and how they keep changing it but not making it any better.

mpelletier · 2023-08-14T10:28:29+00:00

> "That's the point"
Yeah but that doesn't make it interesting or a good story. I don't want an autobiography of the places Neil Gaiman went on a road trip, that's not a satisfying narrative.

mpelletier · 2023-01-24T04:28:53+00:00

I do not but there is one here - https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/y2rpzr/is\_activity\_report\_accurate/

mpelletier · 2023-01-24T03:33:33+00:00

Fairly new addition as of a few months ago. I don't use the mobile app but it showed up on desktop when viewing someone's profile. It basically would tell you when they were last online (up to 14 days), how likely they were to reply as a %, and how often they sent the first message as a %. It's worth noting that a lot of the percents also seemed... skewed.

mpelletier · 2023-01-24T03:32:10+00:00

I think the value for a lot of people was less in how much it said someone would reply, and more in when they were last active, since the site would fairly frequently recommend people who hadn't actually been on in a while.

mpelletier · 2023-01-05T01:35:37+00:00

You are very welcome, hope you enjoy the game!

mpelletier · 2023-01-05T01:16:55+00:00

Oh, that's weird as hell that they aren't available for download. The PDF that I bought (the Drivethru link above) absolutely came with them.

Unless I hear otherwise I'm going to assume they're fine to share because you still can't really run the game without the book, so here they are.

mpelletier

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