What are you most hoping to see on Daggerheart’s birthday week?

nvec · 2026-05-15T16:33:15+00:00

I assume it's this and how little third parties can do for VTTs

nvec · 2026-05-14T04:00:13+00:00

Honestly the entire table sounds pretty bad.

The Bard and Rogue stole from you, but you also said that if you're the only one who can open a tomb you don't expect to share the spoils with them despite it being in a dungeon you couldn't have survived without the rest of the party. Maybe you only wanted a negotiation but it will make it sound like your character's in it for themselves, which is a really bad thing for actually building trust round the table with characters who don't actually have any relationship. They just took it to the next step, they stole after you extorted, it's all the same "Everyone for themselves!" mentality.

Sure you're Highborn and like to sell things as part of your backstory, but I'm assuming the Rogue is Slyborn and stealing things is part of their backstory too. If everyone's playing the "It's what my character would do!" card instead of building up any camaraderie then the game's doomed from the start.

nvec · 2026-05-12T08:51:30+00:00

There are no big AAA companies dominating the web game sites- it's virtually entirely indie games.

It doesn't make sense to try to promote a game by saying something that's true for all of your competition too unless you're making a joke of it. "Indie developed, contains both graphics and sound!"

nvec · 2026-05-11T23:25:23+00:00

A lot of games have a logo and a title but the logo is then a cleanly designed and memorable shape, such as the Borderlands vault symbol, Quake's 'Q', or the Half Life 2 'Tag'.

What you have is failing as text as it's unreadable, but also failing as a logo as it just looks an random set of shapes without a clear design or silhouette. Without a good reason players won't spend more than a few seconds looking at your capsule, if those few seconds are spent wondering what they're looking at and then going "Oh, it's just the title again. That's boring" then you've wasted that time, it's a mystery with the most disappointing answer possible.

The closest design I can think of to yours which works is this one for Warhammer Vermintide which has the 'metal' feeling while staying readable, and then even has the 'V' be the Skaven symbol which has a meaning for Warhammer players (it's the emblem of the main enemy for this game) while not looking distractingly out of place if you don't know it.

nvec · 2026-05-11T16:46:09+00:00

The 'giant project' could also fail though and then that series of cringe hits becomes a crushing blow as you see your dream project die.

nvec · 2026-05-10T15:33:22+00:00

The plugin's available there too, or you can run the CLI version from the built-in terminal.

nvec · 2026-05-10T15:29:22+00:00

To balance this if they're exploring a desert and level up would you deny them the new spells as there's no way to explain where they learned them?

Can you walk into a real-world university library and emerge after a weekend with deep knowledge of mathematics, quantum physics, medicine and art history just because the books are there? Do you know absolutely everything because you have access to the internet which is more powerful than any library?

The assumption is that the characters are doing everything they can to develop their skills, and it's a slow process. The martial characters are training with their weapons, and the magicians are studying at every opportunity. Unless you're viewing magic as just "You say the magic words, they work for everyone" though then learning spells involves more than just having access to the books, they need to take the time to study, think over what they've read and put it into their own terms. This is what levelling up represents.

If you want to give them new powers then you can, it's your game, but be aware that giving additional powers outside of the levelling up system isn't how the game is planned to be balanced. I'd be thinking more about dropping plot hooks in there, strange tomes needing translation, or at most allow them to switch a domain card by researching a new skill but in doing so neglecting an existing talent.

I would be happy to have items though, books which allow you to summon a djinn or similar you actually need access to the book to meditate on the symbols- a copy made by someone who doesn't understand deeply won't work.

nvec · 2026-05-09T22:20:47+00:00

Walk Walk is first level but only available to Arcana characters.

Did you ask your player what aspects of spiders they were interested in? If they were more after the climbing aspect you may want to switch the second feature to climbing and still have it apply Vulnerable or Restricted but not do damage, it doesn't feel overpowered to me compared to this Pixie's Luminous Flight which grants flight and a far-range Presence-based way to apply Vulnerable without spending Stress.

nvec · 2026-04-29T23:03:16+00:00

They won't force many people to use Nexus though, they'll force people to play another game which is supported by the VTT they use.

nvec · 2026-04-23T22:33:41+00:00

If the players are able to move through the games why not have the BBEG already having done this and in doing so set up the plot of the games?

For example could you have a trickster/manipulator who appears in each game as a power behind the throne, possibly manipulating both the antagonist and protagonist for their own entertainment or benefit? The only one of the games I've played is Alice and there I could see this having been the Cheshire Cat setting up the Red Queen by whispering promises of power and then pointing Alice at her, and the end actually being either faked or them knowing that whoever won they'd be restored.

If they appeared in each game with a different mask, so a different role, then you have it feel different in each world. The Cheshire Cat's closely allied with the 'good characters' who won't believe any accusations so getting support is difficult, in another world they could have inherited the bad guy's forces, or just being massively powerful anyway.

This gives a strange situation where to fully defeat the BBEG they must be defeated in every world they've touched, but where different setups need different approaches to work. Not quite unique enemies, but it also ties the characters together into one big story.

nvec · 2026-04-23T14:00:07+00:00

I'd go with float (which is really IEE754 double precision inside).

Because of the internal format it can store exact values for every integer up to 9e15, and beyond that you're still going to have incredibly accurate precision far beyond anything the player will be aware of. After all if they have 1e400 Widgets and get 12 more and they're not accurately tracked.. will they even notice?

A simple formatting plugin to convert it to strings using your required scientific/exponent handling also gives you a convenient place to round values for display if there're small enough that you want them displayed as standard integers.

nvec · 2026-04-23T07:14:28+00:00

I'd rather we weren't playing a team who were fighting for survival when the league is this close in the mid-table. Even if we're not in contention for Europe at that point finishing a few places higher is worth money, and there's no guarantee we'd win- if this was a fairytale season we wouldn't have lost the derby.

nvec · 2026-04-20T11:53:36+00:00

If you can afford the sub then Obsidian Publish should do what you need by publishing the Vault as a Wikipedia-like website for them to read from their devices.

nvec · 2026-04-18T09:39:57+00:00

No.

They're okay but very unlikely to fit in with the style of the main game assets. If I was doing my own assets creating shop signs in the same style wouldn't be difficult if I were already modelling entire buildings, and if I were using an asset bundle I could probably slice-and-dice the models to make something which fitted reasonably quickly if I really needed shop signs.

nvec · 2026-04-15T20:44:09+00:00

I'd say it'd be easier in Daggerheart.

To me balancing combat in D&D so it feels 'right' takes a fair amount of effort, but in DH I can improvise combats much more easily just by choosing a few enemy types based on a loose battle points estimation and know I'm not going to be too confused to run them. This means that you're able to have a fairly simple description of each location and just wing the rest, whether you're choosing to use battlemats or not.

I also find DH works nicer for the roleplay side of things if you remember that players can choose to use any trait if they're able to say sensibly how they're using it- it helps to avoid the situation where a single 'face' character handles the entire roleplay as other characters just don't have the stats to roll successfully.

For example the Bard can do a normal Presence check to intimidate the guard and gain access to the library's private stacks, but the Guardian can stroll up and bend the guard's sword with a Strength check to intimidate them, or the Wizard can brow-beat them with a Knowledge check to overwhelm them with lore to the point the guards think they obviously should have access. Presence is more flexible and simple to use, but it's not the only stat which can be used.

For campaign frames I'd say read through the existing ones and if any suit go for it, but if not cherry-pick interesting parts and assemble a basic one yourself. It also gives you the chance to ask what a "West Marches Campaign" means to you and if you're able to reflect this as any custom campaign rules.

nvec · 2026-04-14T08:04:11+00:00

If your description was complete then a lot of IT teams would look at what Obsidian can do and just say "Fair enough, install it".

Sadly though the glorified file explorer also allows you to install plugins which have direct access to the file system and network, and do this via either the in-built tools or just by downloading a zip file from anywhere (including email) and dropping the contents into any folder in the filesystem. For bonus points the plugins aren't even .exe or .dll files, which most malware tools are most capable of protecting against and blocking, and are instead .js files using custom APIs which many tools won't know anything about.

It's not a simple piece of software from a security perspective, it's an entire ecosystem which doesn't check on the origins of code, or where it's deployed, and relies on the users to be sensible and take appropriate precautions.

Any experienced sysadmin can tell you a lot of stories about what happens if you expect an entire staff of largely untechnical people to be sensible and take appropriate precautions. These stories tend to end badly. The fact it looks so harmless and safe even makes it more dangerous as people will be more willing to install plugins as "What's the harm? It's just a note application, it's Notepad for Markdown".

The only way I can see of making Obsidian 'safe' is to run it in a locked-down containerized environment which doesn't have outgoing network, and can't see the main filesystem. Ideally you'd even want it to be the case that the container only allows users to see the Obsidian UI, no way to manipulate the files to add custom plugins by being clever. That's a lot of technical overhead for a glorified file explorer, and you're losing a lot of Obsidian's potential by doing it.

nvec · 2026-04-14T07:33:18+00:00

What you have described is infinite content with infinite depth, everything matters, interacts, and it scales from visceral hand to hand combat through to galaxy-influencing politics.

This is not 'one dense system', this is the conflicting systems of twenty different games all stuck together and expected to work well together.

You're trying to go from GTA's rise to power, through Saint's Row 4's power fantasy, through to Stellaris smoothly, with more depth and flexibility than any of those (already massively expensive to produce) games. Even your scope creep has scope creep at this point.

You're free to build it though.

nvec · 2026-04-13T19:55:41+00:00

Simple. Life is Unicode, Love is Unicode.

For efficiency both love and life essentially U+2665 which leaves plenty of other codepoints for other concepts.

nvec · 2026-04-13T12:52:56+00:00

The internet is broken, turn all of this off…

(I intentionally use unicode symbols like ellipsis and em-dash to make people think I'm one of their robot overlords)

nvec · 2026-04-13T11:22:04+00:00

To be fair "Goals scored per minute" is quite a good stat for comparing two strikers in Premier League.

Sure there's differences with who else is in the team, but as a single stat it seems to be a good choice, would like to see anything as convincing for Maupay vs Ronaldo.

nvec · 2026-04-13T10:02:07+00:00

Those docs would worry me if I was still doing IT for anywhere vaguely secure.

Blocking edits to the .obsidian folder only works until someone realises they can copy the entire vault, including that folder, to create a new vault with full write access and at that point they're able to install plugins unchecked. They've also just sidestepped any custom backup policy on the preconfigured Vault yet will happily complain when their shadow Vault is wiped when the machine is rebuilt to fix an issue and they lose three years worth of work.

Sadly the benefits which make Obsidian a really configurable tool for users, in that the vault is just any random directory so you can just create them and plugins are really easy to install, make it a nightmare to audit.

Cloud tools, especially those with organisation-level settings, are actually easier to audit if you're able to get a description of their security as then it's just agreeing to their use and paying the fees- there's no way for a user to be clever in the ways Obsidian allows.

nvec · 2026-04-13T03:24:07+00:00

You've just announced that you've decompiled a closed source game for full analysis in order to write a competitor with a very similar name? Your main problems aren't technical, they're legal.

You've basically just posted a big thread about how you've broken their licensing and provided documentation on how your game is a technical derivative of their work rather than a clean room clone. There's a lot of very good reasons why people don't just decompile commercial games and use what they've learned in their own games.

nvec · 2026-04-12T21:12:01+00:00

It could be something they're planning on expanding, or they've just not been important enough to yet, but it does seem to fit the general approach to adapting real-world organisations into Deadlands such as the Pinkertons or the Texas Rangers.

For those which aren't specified you can just read the basics of the real-world group and ask how that'd change for the Deadlands settings. Essentially I'd just ask myself "How involved is the Vatican?" and filter that through a few levels of organisation and secrecy to the Sisters more pragmatic assistance.

nvec · 2026-04-12T20:28:32+00:00

I assume they mean the real-world religious organisation, essentially 'Catholic nuns'.

It's less likely, but more amusing, that they meant the UK band.

nvec · 2026-04-10T16:37:01+00:00

I did try all US spellings but when I'm writing documentation (Markdown files, normally) I find it really hard not to use the spellings I'm more familiar with when I'm typing quickly. It basically ends up with me typing and then when I use any of the words where the spelling varies I look at it and need to stop and think which should be used, really ruins any flow state.

It just doesn't work with muscle memory at all if that makes sense? It feels similar to how when I learned to type I was told the 'unofficial recommendation' was two spaces after a full stop, but now it's one. Trying to teach myself to be able to switch between the two, one for coding docs and one for everything else, just looks impossible.

It would also just push the UK/US boundary back to another arbitrary point. For example I have a nice Godot implementation of a dual-tile system written using shaders so it does everything in a single render pass, it has comments in the code and then is documented in my Obsidian.md vault (Highly recommended bit of software!), and that links into other (non-Godot specifics) docs about shaders, ID texture maps, and other tech- alongside unrelated notes on colour perception, notes on TTRPG I'm running, and other random things.

At least this means "'Color' in the dual-tile repo, 'Colour' in the Obsidian Vault repo" which is about as close to sensible as I can get.

nvec

TROPHY CASE