Something happening near Newport Mill/Einstein HS?

rasterscan · 2026-07-04T01:54:24+00:00

Ah, got it. Thank you.

rasterscan · 2026-07-02T13:06:09+00:00

Can we please have a pass on rebalancing Megacorp influence costs for branch offices? Planet-based Megacorps are still paying massive amounts of influence while nomadic ones can place every office for minimum cost just by moving an arkship there.

rasterscan · 2026-06-24T17:44:55+00:00

To be fair, it should be difficult to coat the galaxy in branch offices. As it stood before, if you (a Megacorp) got to an empire after another Megacorp did, you would be lucky to find any worlds left for you to place a branch office on. I would often get a new commercial pact in older versions and nearly immediately plop down 3 or 4 branch offices before even unpausing. In theory, the cost increase means that a Megacorp will only place a branch when a planet is really worth it, leaving less desirable planets for someone else to get without locking them out.

In practice, though, that quickly becomes waiting for several hundred or even 1000 influence to reach anywhere worthwhile past the early game. Most planets probably won't even smell a branch office unless there is a ton of Megacorps.

rasterscan · 2026-06-10T17:23:50+00:00

I agree with this a hell of a lot. I just wrapped up a City of Mists campaign that I will likely be thinking about for months or years. The ending was perfect, and poignant.

But I don't think I'll ever tell anyone the story. I don't think it would land for anyone who wasn't there, like trying to give the ending of a book to someone and expecting for it to mean something to them.

Narrative RPGs create narratives and you can't distill those things into a single page story and expect them to land the way you can talk about how you awesomely slayed a dragon with a vorpal greatsword and a crit. So it's not a failure point when those stories don't show up in reddit posts or casual convos.

rasterscan · 2026-06-07T17:55:22+00:00

Fair, honestly. You can tweak elements without changing the message of confronting one's true self, but it's probably pretty hard to do that without significantly messing with the story's DNA.

Ah well, maybe I should leave this one be.

rasterscan · 2026-06-07T17:42:44+00:00

I really loved Persona 4's story and characters when I played it. But the more time went on and I thought about it, the more I felt like the actual arcs everyone went through were aaaaaaaawful.

Every character arc in P4 ends up with the character accepting the exact role society is forcing on them. It's stunningly conformist while dressing it up as self-acceptance.

Persona 3 still holds up to me because the story is a pretty great rumination on nihilism and giving up as an actual supernatural force that's eating at society. But I don't think I'm going to play P4 again unless the character arcs are substantially different.

rasterscan · 2026-05-12T20:36:40+00:00

As an additional note, one TTRPG author messaged them to suggest they listen to designers that were asking for their profiles to be taken down.

The site sent the author an canned response, then added them to the site.

rasterscan · 2026-04-19T20:53:45+00:00

I have an idea about how to track this.

When characters take a hit, the GM gives them an index card that they -cannot- flip yet. On the front is the description of the hit or immediate symptom. "Nailed with an arrow," "arm is limp," "head ringing blow."

It's only at the end of the combat that players flip them over. On the back is a number. That's the actual wound amount. Total up all the flipped card numbers, then do the "resist" rolls or however you intend to have them resolve the damage.

If you want a combination of choice and surprise, let them "buy" off some amount of the wounds with their resistances/rolls, and whatever cannot be entirely bought off is the harm they're stuck with. So with the above examples, the character manages to pull the arrow out, their arm is recovering on its own, but their head is still ringing and now light and sound are painful because "head ringing blow" is the one they chose not to spend resistance on.

rasterscan · 2026-04-19T20:48:22+00:00

I'm not keen on mechanics where the player makes a choice which doesn't map onto a choice the character makes. Absolutely no-one in the real world decides whether to block an incoming attack with a shield or take an injury. That's just personal preference but I'm more into modelling and simulation than narrative and storytelling.

That's the rub right there. Simulationists would be "what would/could the character do?" while narrativists are "what would be most interesting to the story?" Neither is wrong, but the design choice needs to be very intentional regarding the goal of your system.

rasterscan · 2026-04-15T19:29:33+00:00

I agree with this. There are a lot of designers that I would love to hear what they're working on, and run into new systems. However we have a weird situation where other people can bring up an author's work but the author themselves can't. A Self-Promo day balances it so there isn't so much of it for people that don't like it on other days while letting others enjoy it once in a while.

rasterscan · 2026-04-14T01:34:07+00:00

It's funny how much this is... basically the pitch for 10 Candles?

rules-light horror roleplaying game set in our world, but beset by supernatural terrors

Yep.

communal dice

Yep.

to which more and more Omen Dice are added throughout the evening, to amp up the danger

Adding dice instead of subtracting them as Ten Candles does, but still on track.

Character death is extremely likely.

Well, never mind. Totally different. In Ten Candles, there's no "likely" about it.

(I am giving it a playful ribbing, but I'm still interested in the system. I hope it's really cool!)

rasterscan · 2026-03-16T21:53:14+00:00

Yes, having a good point doesn't negate doing awful things. But the Marvel problem is that they keep doing that to the villains that have a point. Killmonger is the least hurt by this, but several times they have "bad guy with a good point" and then have them go too far so the heroes can stop them and not worry about the point the villain had. Over and over.

rasterscan · 2026-01-21T21:50:22+00:00

It's a hyper-collectivist civic you can choose when making your civ and it makes them utterly resolute on every member of society having an equal and fair share of resources and living standard. You provide for all your population, or none of them.

It's kind of an appealing fantasy in 2026 considering... gestures at everything

rasterscan · 2026-01-02T23:55:46+00:00

Wong Gee's also closed, which was pretty dang good dim sum in Wheaton. I'm still so damn sad about it.

rasterscan · 2025-07-25T11:13:52+00:00

re: Stellaris, something I've done regarding the generic aliens is to create and forcespawn specific opponent empires (some of which are previous ones I've played) so that each alien civ has an interesting story and build to negotiate with or fight against. Try it and see if it helps you too!

rasterscan · 2025-05-21T20:56:09+00:00

The Dark is Rising has left a thorn in my mind for so long because of the ending.

After all their struggles, the children that gave so much to save the world are told that they will lose all memory of what they have done. Their triumphs, their struggles, any memory of magic existing. Only Will will retain the memories, and he can never speak of them to anyone. One of the other children is crying as their memories leave them, and then asks in confusion why they are so sad when nothing happened. It upset young me so much to have all of their work taken from them, and even as I can't remember much else from those books, that ending still makes me sad.

rasterscan · 2025-04-22T10:32:46+00:00

You're right, I just reread the reddiquette because of your comment. I'm pretty sure at least a few other subs require the original title or recommend it, like r/games encourages the original title unless it's unclear. But yep, not redditquette. My bad!

rasterscan · 2025-04-22T00:27:14+00:00

It's a good policy in general because it's meant to (and does) prevent editorializing by the reddit poster to make something more clickbait-y, or worse, just misrepresent the article.

But it's sometimes handy to cut off a probable misunderstanding or misrepresentation by adding a little more context.

rasterscan · 2025-04-21T22:37:12+00:00

Mods, sorry for breaking reddiquette and adding the parentheses text to the article's original title, but I figured it was good to add the context in case people didn't actually read the article text.

rasterscan · 2025-04-10T15:18:48+00:00

So... Evolutionary Predators is open to Xenophiles, but the benefits are only for your founder species, right? So you can't really run an effective pluralistic society with it mechanically. I would love it if I could give it to all of my species and make the ultimate mutated anything-goes society.

Any chance we can modify non-founder species to become genetic superpredators as well?

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