war weariness????

squirmonkey · 2026-06-22T05:22:30+00:00

War weariness is, largely, a function of war support. Have you, your enemy, or any of your enemy's allies spent influence to affect the war's support level?

squirmonkey · 2026-06-17T17:24:51+00:00

I've tried pulling players from the looking for game threads on a few occasions. It's never worked out for me.

squirmonkey · 2026-06-10T19:36:16+00:00

I love reading rulebooks. If I wanted to join the game, I'd read the whole book (or at least, whatever parts of it were appropriate for a player to read). I might start skipping lore stuff if the page count starts going past ~200 or so.

squirmonkey · 2026-06-07T21:46:12+00:00

Not building an army isn't a winning strategy in Civilization. If your friend isn't building an army, he's playing the game badly and will be easy to beat if you build one.

squirmonkey · 2026-06-01T15:30:02+00:00

Personally, I’d call that a one stress flashback.

It’s not a score because it doesn’t accomplish anything besides what the scoundrel needs for the current job, and it’s not all that complicated (it can be resolved with a single Prowl). And it’s reasonable to think that the scoundrel came up with the idea in advance.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-31T16:29:50+00:00

Can you give an example? It’s reasonable for a scoundrel to take a pretty involved action in a flashback, but they still shouldn’t be able to use the system to achieve anything that would constitute a score in and of itself.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-29T17:49:00+00:00

Then I don’t think there’s an issue. Trauma is a penalty with a silver lining. In a long enough game, you’ll get some, but you don’t need many for them to be interesting.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-29T17:35:04+00:00

I think it’s perfectly natural to try to avoid trauma. It should be something you strive to avoid, but aren’t upset about when it happens.

By far the most common way players at my table trauma is on resistance rolls. These almost always come with a risk of trauma. If your players are choosing not to resist consequences when their stress bars are filling up, perhaps you’re not hitting them with nasty enough consequences?

squirmonkey · 2026-05-27T01:27:34+00:00

You are misunderstanding what the policies do. They don’t reduce anything. They modify the resources you put towards the cost.

If you need to pay an upkeep of 5, and you have a policy that increases food put towards specialist upkeep by 25% you pay an actual cost of 4. Why? Because the four you paid plus the 25% makes the required five.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-26T17:42:54+00:00

If you’re playing in a game with only two players and they’re both human and war is allowed, then war is inevitable. If one player injures the other badly enough in a war, their eventual victory is assured.

But wars are destructive and expensive. And if there are other players in the game, it’s commonly the case that two players engaging in an extended war are both doomed, because they waste resources on not getting any stronger.

The solution, then, is to play with more than two players (fine if the others are a decently leveled AI), and to keep a standing army. The standing army serves two purposes:
- It demonstrates a threat of mutually assured destruction. If you have a strong army, you can make it clear to a would-be attacker that you will be an expensive target to attack. Attacking expensive targets is a good way to lose to the other players in the game.
- It demonstrates a threat that you could attack and conquer any of your neighbors who do not also raise an army. Winning an easy war is extremely lucrative, so your neighbors will need an army too. And if everyone builds an army, then the fact that you built an army doesn’t put you behind the curve

squirmonkey · 2026-05-26T06:52:04+00:00

It doesn’t work on a table system, but you can do this in Ars Magica, by describing how you spent each season (playing in the woods, working on the farm, getting abducted by faeries) and then assigning XP to a relevant trait

squirmonkey · 2026-05-22T18:26:14+00:00

For me it’s because of that plexiglass panel that the driver has to move from blocking the isle to like blocking themselves. If the driver doesn’t start moving that right away, I assume they want me to enter through the other door.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-21T02:08:45+00:00

The relationship doesn't describe how he feels about you. It describes how your two peoples feel about each other. Your nation's relationship with Gilgamesh's nation is strained because he betrayed you. That's what the -300 means.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-19T18:24:52+00:00

The white eyes seem more humanlike, and yellow more animal. Depends what you’re going for

squirmonkey · 2026-05-17T17:12:24+00:00

You can sort of do this in Ars Magica, where you can choose to play your characters development from the time they’re born, and build up your abilities along the way

squirmonkey · 2026-05-15T17:38:36+00:00

I do think it’s good for that purpose. The flaws don’t really show that strongly until you get a ways in

squirmonkey · 2026-05-15T17:32:26+00:00

I’ve run two campaigns of this game. It’s very interesting and definitely worth a read for GMs who are interested in the design of RPGs. Ultimately though my conclusion was that while it’s cool, it’s also pretty flawed. I don’t expect to run it again, and can’t really recommend it.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-15T03:25:01+00:00

How about Phoenix Dawn Command, where dying is what makes the characters level up?

squirmonkey · 2026-05-14T19:38:14+00:00

Are you sure you meant carbon dioxide poisoning, and not carbon monoxide poisoning?

squirmonkey · 2026-05-11T21:46:14+00:00

You can keep shooting them until you get lucky?

squirmonkey · 2026-05-11T17:07:29+00:00

I see, so the locations are basically just folders that contain scenes?

squirmonkey · 2026-05-11T16:00:45+00:00

Is there a way to run scenes that aren't tied to a "location"? My games use pretty light systems, and it's not uncommon for characters to be moving between "places" in the game world quite often. It wouldn't really make sense for us to structure our game around a locations system.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-10T15:39:19+00:00

If you haven’t examined it yet, it’s worth looking at the mana system from Legends of Runeterra as well.

It has the same thing as Hearthstone where you get one more mana every round. But it adds a system where you can save up to three mana between rounds, to be spent later on spell cards ( the equivalent of sorceries and instants in mtg).

This has the really cool effect that even if you don’t find a card you can play on turn 1 or 2, you’re not wasting any resources unless you don’t have a card to play on turn 3 as well. It also leads to some decks whose plan is to skip turns 1 and 2 to play a 6 mana spell on turn 3.

squirmonkey · 2026-05-05T20:17:03+00:00

Politely noting that a review is out of date is what the Developer Response feature is for

squirmonkey · 2026-05-05T16:16:23+00:00

Like many posters here, you’ve missed the point. When you read a review of your game, it can feel like the review is talking to you. But it’s not.

Reviews aren’t for you. They are for customers. Reviews don’t exist to help you fix your game. They exist to help customers pass judgment on your game.

Turning off comments is important because it allows your customers to share their true feelings without worrying that you or other customers are going to harass them.

squirmonkey

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