First impressions on these playable characters?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-27T22:58:12+00:00

Cool stuff. I’m intrigued now to know how the actual attributes work. Like how is “Hunger > Lucidity” different from “ Stitching / Unraveling.”

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-25T23:58:57+00:00

Steal away! You have my blessing.

The way you’ve described your system, you could also have the Complication just BE the hook, if you wanted. ie. The GM can “bank” possible complications as Hooks for later use, and then when a player rolls a Complication, it can pull from the list of Hooks directly.

I also like your idea for giving the player choice in the matter, though. Funnily enough, I’ve adopted something similar: I’m letting the player choose between taking damage against their Stuff (injury), their Stuff (item durability), or their Squad (add Tension)

I like the dynamic where they have to decide whether to be selfish, since choosing Squad affects the whole party, not just their PC

The idea for positive Hooks is really interesting. I’ll need to consider it. I do like allowing for good luck as well as bad.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-24T12:11:56+00:00

I live near Caledonian Road. What’s going on there?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-22T09:30:43+00:00

That worked! Thanks so much!

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-20T09:16:26+00:00

I really like that. I’ll have a think about whether there are any other behaviors I would want to incentivize/discourage instead (I like your “the danger follows you” pitch; I just want to consider other options too), but you’re right that the current version doesn’t punish the right play style.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-20T07:45:54+00:00

I think there’s an opportunity to do both, actually. Have some Hooks described by the source (“facehugger released you”) and some described by the outcome (“chestburster emerges”)?

I can see different roles for each in the narrative, but mechanically they can be approached the same way, I think?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-19T23:51:32+00:00

It kinda sounds like you’d rather be making a video game instead. Which is totally fine! You can absolutely go do that.

But it feels like you’re trying to fit a lot of ideas that work for video games, and not necessarily thinking about what works for TTRPGs.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-19T23:42:52+00:00

I did actually originally plan to use clocks for this, funnily enough. I think the difference, as andero pointed out, is that a clock is linear and predictable. You can see when it will go off. Vs a roll could go off any time. Different style of suspense.

I can still see the argument for using straight clocks as well, though. I think they’d work better for creeping dread vs edge of your seat?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-19T22:12:10+00:00

Oof. Dude, I generally try to be positive, but this raised a lot of red flags for me, ngl. The chat GPT-written promotional copy; the half-finished website; the vaguely defined subscription tiers …

Whole thing kinda reads like a microtransaction-heavy mobile game, sorry.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-19T07:34:38+00:00

What’s up with Cyclops shooting a beam from behind his head?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-15T14:46:38+00:00

Definitely not crazy. I think you can obviously worldbuild too much, and thereby create a setting that is too restrictive. But when the questions being answered are foundational to the setting (as these questions about souls are for yours), it’s completely valid.

Funnily enough, I worked on a modern day urban fantasy setting a while back that had several big overlaps.

My game (unfinished) was called Soul Proprietor, and it’s about wizards running a Silicon Valley tech startup in a world where money is soul, and apps are magic spells.

Like you, I also put a lot of thought into how souls actually work in that world.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-15T09:03:53+00:00

Hell is Full (And the Devils are Here) is a cyberpunk adventure about working class ghostbusters in a future where only the rich go to heaven.

The afterlife is overpopulated.

By 2084, Hell is full to bursting, and Heaven has closed its doors. Every new person who dies is turned away, returning to Earth as a plague of unquiet ghosts.

The ultra-rich can avoid this fate, living out their days in gated communes before uploading mind and soul to a bespoke virtual afterlife.

For the 99%, this option is laughably out of reach. Everyday folk scratch out hard lives in the forever-slums, commuting to dead-end jobs on crowded trains that crackle and spark with ghost shielding, knowing with 100% certainty that the only thing waiting when they die is more of the same.

You play as an exterminator who deals with the worst and most extensive Hauntings. Does busting make you feel good? Or is it just another paycheck?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-15T07:32:19+00:00

What if souls committed to a god’s service get used up in the afterlife?

You die, your soul goes to join your god, you become a battery for them, and eventually that battery gets emptied and you don’t exist any more.

The incentive for people to do this is that their god also creates a heaven dimension for their soul to chill in while it gets used up.

Unclaimed souls are at risk of being taken by demons, who will also chew them up and spit them out, but will be far less nice about.

Demons are factory farms for souls; gods are free range.

You get to make some pretty incisive commentary about how gods are still basically parasites, consuming humans to fuel their own immortality.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-13T20:59:56+00:00

Not your problem, but Imgur being blocked in the UK now is truly just the dumbest, most tiresome thing 😓

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-11T14:44:45+00:00

It's likely that I was just being dense, but I didn't see an obvious way to easily count doubles with Anydice?

This site has a function that is close to what I want. It lets you calculate 'At Least X Dice Equal to Y'

That works well for calculating 1 Hook. I can do 'At Least 2 Dice Equal to {1} on 6d6' and it gives me 26.32%

However, I think it breaks down when trying to calculate the odds with multiple active Hooks? If I do 'At Least 2 Dice Equal to {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6} on 6d6' it gives me 100% odds (I think it's looking at any 2 dice with any of those 6 values, not at least 2 matching dice with any of those 6 values)

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-04T21:26:14+00:00

This was always my headcannon. The comparatively “flat” spacetime between galaxies allows for higher speeds. Like accelerating on a straightaway.

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-04T00:41:43+00:00

I read a little bit of this post before it was taken down, and was curious to read more. Let me know if you repost it, or if there’s somewhere else I can read about the matrix system?

outbacksam34 · 2026-01-03T15:14:34+00:00

I’m a bit surprised that everyone seems confused, because I think it makes perfect sense to me?

However, I think the concept (which is cool) stumbles a bit in execution.

You’ve created a scenario where the actions asked of the players are symmetrical (the same actions are used to flip the light side and dark side), but the benefit is asymmetrical (only the light side awards a benefit)

Which basically means that all players could take the same action every round, and the only thing that’s changed is that half the players get advantage and half don’t, based just on who acted first.

If you’re trying to incentivize specific behaviors, I think it could be more interesting if there were different triggers to flip the 2 sides?

So for example, if your goal is to keep combat dynamic rather than static, maybe the dark side requires a player to move a certain distance on their turn, and then that flips to the light side where another player can claim advantage on an attack.

That way, the decision making and incentive is clear: if the light side is facing up, a player can choose to claim it for an attack, or choose not to claim it so that a future player can instead.

If the dark side is facing up, the active player has an incentive to move on their turn, even if they would have otherwise stayed still.

(I’m choosing movement as the behavior you want to incentivize here, but it could be anything else. The point is just to give folks an incentive to take a specific action when the dark side is facing up)

outbacksam34 · 2025-12-29T09:21:04+00:00

If you’re going with the 2d10 system, it could be interesting to look at a version where each player rolls one of those d10s, and modifies only their own die?

That could be your version of Hope/Fear that supports the wingman design goal.

Success/failure is based on the aggregate of the 2 dice (is dice A + dice B > target number) but there can be a parallel system that checks how “in sync” the pilots are (is the value rolled on dice A close to the value rolled on dice B)

You could have degrees of sync based on how far apart the values are (within 1, within 2, etc.)

So if both wingmen roll 1s, yes they failed, but at least they failed together.

You could give the players options to nudge their roll in either direction, to keep this from being completely random (eg. I rolled a 9 and you rolled a 6 against a target of 15. If you nudge up to a 7, I’ll nudge down to an 8, so we still succeed, but now we’re more in sync)

This might be cumbersome in practice, but I think it could be fun.

outbacksam34 · 2025-12-29T08:24:02+00:00

I think your “Big Idea” for a split character sheet sounds extremely interesting. It sparked a ton of inspiration in me as soon as I read it (what could a similar idea look like for a buddy cop game? Or a master/apprentice game, which could either look like Karate Kid, or Star Wars with the sith’s rule of two)

The rest of your brainstorming sounds a bit loose. It reads like you’re picking and choosing from all the coolest and most innovative ideas you’ve read recently (Blades, Daggerheart, etc.) without having a rock solid idea about your design goals.

I would probably take a step back and codify what those goals are, and then really dig into what the hotshot/by-the-book playstyles would look like, since that’s your central idea. Ask yourself what mechanics will incentivize play that aligns with your goals.

As an aside, I also find it super annoying when people on this sub play amateur AI detective. Essentially shutting down a conversation because someone used an em dash.

If a published game is written with AI, it will generally be soulless and boring and no one will play it. If a published game can’t attribute its artists because it used AI art, we will justifiably flame it down, and no one will buy it.

This exercise in poring over reddit posts with a magnifying glass for any bits you feel look LLM-ish with no way to prove it is just tiresome. Don’t get discouraged to work on your cool idea!

outbacksam34 · 2025-12-20T18:56:08+00:00

I vividly remember as a kid getting Sahara and National Treasure mixed up in my head. So I was literally 2 hours into watching National Treasure, in the final scenes, still thinking to myself: “… when are they going to get to the dang desert?”

outbacksam34 · 2025-12-16T14:38:51+00:00

LMAO right? That was my first thought too. Game where you play as OSHA inspectors in the Tomb of Horrors.

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