lexchxn

[lexchxn]

All YouTubers do is move apartments

[lexchxn]

The real reason your sapient dragon character needs a "rider":

Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.

Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.

In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.

No dragon of any quality would be caught dead without their valet. It's not as though you can announce your numerous long-winded titles yourself when introductions are called for, can you? You suppose next you'll be expected to pick up the spoils of your conquests yourself, like a common brigand. Perish the thought!

[lexchxn]

A Triad for Bosses

The Three S's

I had a realisation about Dark Souls.

This is a design insight, and I think it’s one that’s applicable to TTRPGs.

Some Dark Souls bosses (a lot of people’s favourites), essentially have three methods by which you can beat them: 1. Skill |Just outright pracice and precision letting you take a small enough amount of damage to survive while dealing a large enough amount of damage to kill. 2. Strength | Whether through stats or a power solution (either being 10 levels high enough or using a damage type the boss is weak to). 3. Solution | You “Solve” the combat before it begins, either through an item that trivialises the fight or a puzzle that outright bypasses it. These “Three S’s.” can of course mix and match, and I think the Eldemonsoulsbornekiro games (sorry) lean on Strength as a primary pillar, Skill as a close second, and Solution as a surprise tool they occasionally pull out, but I was considering how these principles could and could not be applied to TTRPGs. So... Do they?

First, they require some adaptation. TTRPGs don’t have the bounding boxes that video games do, nor do they maintain as much of a balance between elements like player skill and character build. What adjustments do we need to make?

Well, while Skill certainly continues to exist in the TTRPG space, dice luck can have a very large dilutive effect on one’s ability to express Skill. Skill also, I’d argue, has much more of a direct impact on “Strength” in TTRPGs than it does in video games. Building a character here has, again, weaker bounding boxes than a preprogrammed game.

Strength can vary wildly depending on the style of the TTRPG, but regardless of the chosen book table play tends to be farther away from insurmountable/trivial encounters than video games due to GM tailoring. If you’re in an encounter, there’s typically both an expectation for you to engage with it and knowledge that it won’t waste your time.

And Solution is interesting. Depending on the GM or the story scenario, this may be all but impossible. But it might also be the primary focus of your game. Every fight you take meant to be solved, every combat a puzzle. Also typically, the higher allowance for Solution expression, the more Skill expression has space to shine. After all, someone’s gotta find those solutions!

With weaker availability for Skill expression, a usually tighter box on Strength expression, and Such a wild variation in Solution expression, what kinds of incentives and rewards can we now build into our campaigns? - We can build in Power rewards for their Skill in character creation. - We can prompt Skill growth by facing our parties with difficult tasks they can still achieve. - We can create narrative or prompt creative focus and reward Skill by putting all of our eggs into the Solution basket, waiting for our parties to “Figure it out.”. - We can create a feeling of immense resistance (or outright despair) by using combats that require more Strength. ...and more! Balancing encouragement and reward between these three pillars to create your style of encounter, I would say, covers just about every design you’ll ever field.

Think about the Three S’s next time you’re building an encounter! Hopefully this can provide a solid framework for your next brainstorm.

[lexchxn]

No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.

Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.

[lexchxn]

Moved all of my blog posts over to Substack (lexchxn.substack.com), and I intend to publish there from now on. I won't abandon my Tumblr, don't worry! I'll be publishing in both locations going forward. Substack lets people get notifications without an account, which I think is a valuable option.

[lexchxn]

Expectations, Descriptions, Names

This is a bit of a shorter one than before, but I've found it interesting how many times I've seen the release of a system or a new piece of content within a system be met with hostility, even long after initial exposure, due to some breakdown in understanding for what something is meant to be.

What do I mean by this? I'll use a couple of examples, one old and one new, from Pathfinder 2e. Funnily enough, they're both from the Cleric class: The Warpriest doctrine, right from the start, focused on being more defensible than its Cloistered counterpart at the cost of some of its spellcasting potency, and was long derided as a cheap, unsatisfying alternative. In what I've heard from those who disliked it, this is mostly due to a miscommunication that starts with the name. People expected a Cleric capable of "war"; a damage-dealer and front-line fighter. What the subclass actually was (and remains, to this day) is a way to massively improve your survivability on the front lines, not necessarily your damage-dealing capability or even combative prowess. Not that it doesn't have any of that, but it's ultimately secondary to the Warpriest's attempt to emulate an old-school mace-and-shield, chainmail Clerical role in a party. You retain your full spellcasting suite, and the fact that the spells are weaker incentivises your focus further towards protective aspects of your character, honing in on a utility and support role without the cloth caster trappings of low AC and health. The Battle Harbinger, recently released in Lost Omens: Divine Mysteries, seems to be going down a similar pipeline, at least if the initial reactions I've seen online are in any way representative of general attitude (which they aren't always). The Battle Harbinger gives up not only their spellcasting potency, but most of their suite, and in return gains combative efficacy- ability to hit enemies with a weapon. But they don't gain any significant damage boosts, and their "Battle Auras" (buffing or debuffing auras they can cast and sustain with their unique feats) are still resource-limited by their spellcasting resources (though retain full, or even better, potency than standard spellcasting). Battle Harbinger's role ends up being one of offensive support, and notably still not damage. They can hit with the best of them, but they don't receive the damage-dealing bonuses that are crucial to the "standard martials" damage-dealing roles- and this is pretty clearly intentional, due to their ability to use scrolls and significantly buff themselves and their teammates. Yet, player reaction has skewed negative. What do you mean the Battle Harbinger can't hit as hard as a full martial?

People end up missing the playstyle and role defined and supported for these subclasses, instead projecting their own desires for the name or the concept onto it and being disappointed when it doesn't pan out. I'm left wondering what's more important here when it comes to player response- the name, the flavour text, or the mechanics themselves. And I think it might be skewed towards name and flavour text more than one would assume. Would the responses have been the same were the subclasses named "Heavily Armoured Support Cleric" and "Rallying Offensive Support Cleric"? They're certainly less evocative names than "Warpriest" and "Battle Harbinger". Where does one draw the line on these things? Ultimately, this will all be up to the writer to weigh and decide. But it's worth thinking about next time you name or describe something- what image are you trying to present? What image might your chosen words conjure? If there's dissonance between the two, is it worth conceding ground to mend that gap?

Little bits of TTRPG and player philosophy like this are what I live for when I'm not considering the mechanics themselves. May your quests be fruitful, friends.

[lexchxn]

Audio version. Runtime: 10 minutes, 21 seconds.

"Rulings not Rules" and Insufficient Design

So I've been considering many aspects of design as I delve back into the OSR (where I cut my teeth as a kid playing ttrpgs, but where I have not been for over a decade and a half), and I've been met with many catchy lingo phrases touted religiously by long-time players. I want to address one of them today: "Rulings not Rules.".

The phrase, at least according to cursory research, originates from Matthew J. Finch's excellent work, "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming", where he describes it as the first "Zen Moment" that can make OSR-style TTRPG click for players. The thesis he sets forth is that the rulesets of old games were intentionally left sparse so as to exclusively be a resource for the GM, an incomplete collection from which to create your own rulings in the moment using some combination of "common sense" and die rolls.

Further, he (and many others) elaborate that in this lack, player engagement with the world is deepened; without a skill to roll for "Disarm Trap", everyone is encouraged to interact with and "solve" the trap as they would were they really there. See Brooks Dailey's "The Danger of Skills" for an excellent breakdown of this design outcome separate from Finch's work- I'm perpetually left considering and reconsidering the phrase "Before the addition of the Thief, everyone was the thief." from that blog post.

But I digress- I've discovered, over the years, that this thesis is immensely successful and informative, foundational really to an entire, rewarding style of play. But I do also find, to my taste as someone re-entering this older style of play, that many games seem to take its words too literally, or misunderstand the core message it's trying to impart.

If the fundamental idea is that a rule restricts the players, I have found some to take this message to mean that as few rules should exist as possible. That rules are a detriment to a game, and only the barest essentials should be provided. And I find, increasingly, frustration with this attitude. Rules are not a nuisance to be excised from the hobby, they are a tool to be carefully considered and wielded, a fine-honed blade that can sculpt the experiental clay of the player experience before the kiln firing of publication.

Let's take some unnamed examples, because I feel as certain that this post will be receieved extremely poorly by some as I do that my conclusion is an important one to some others:

1. Falling is codified in the rules. If you fall X amount of distance, you take some calculable, consistent amount of damage. 2. Being prone is codified in the rules. If you are tripped or otherwise fall over, you suffer some number of penalties and others gain some number of advantages. 3. Your ability to disarm traps is codified in the rules. It's a talent that can be practiced, perfected, and invoked, and it has a consistent outcome, whether chance-based or otherwise. 4. Your ability to carry things as an adventurer is codified in the rules. You can hold only so many things at once, and you cannot hold any more than that.

Now, one of these should stand out to those with a savvy eye for design. Examples 1, 2, and 4 are all foundational aspects of the game system, things that shape how the world responds to being interacted with. Example 3, on the other hand, is a rule creating interaction with the world, it decides how a player can interact with traps. If you can't disarm traps, you can't disarm traps. But a fall is always a fall.

In Beau Rancourt's "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game" (and sorry for the long quote), they state of rules-heavy (sub-)systems "This allows players to reason about the game and make future plans without the sense that they're playing Calvinball. It allows the GM to be fair and consistent when the PCs' lives are on the line. It encourages and rewards system mastery for the folks who seek that (since now there's a coherent system to master).". I would extend this out into interactions with the world- the standard methods through which the world responds to players (the occasional necessities (and unrepresentable through player reasoning) of swimming, climbing, picking locks, falling, and especially combat should be heavily codified and reliable.

Not in such a way that creative engagement is espoused, or that overcodification becomes a problem (as per Arnold Kemp's ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient", where they say "[If I've written] two pages of rules on how to attack tiny animals in your stomach, I've codified the acceptable options and excluded more esoteric solutions."; it takes a delicate hand, yes, but I'd argue a not-too-subjective line of where is "too much" or "too little" to make that decision, and I think I can offer a few considerations and a few pointers to internalise when designing your systems.

1. If the thing is a result of the world's response to players, it should be a rule. Falling damage should be a consistent rule (though how individual players attempt, or don't, to mitigate such damage may not be). 2. If the thing is reliable in how it can be handled, it should be a rule. How swimming does or doesn't impede the movement or survival of characters, dependent or not on their gear varying by your level of simulationism, should be a consistent rule. 3. If the thing cannot reasonably be expected of a player, it should be a rule. Lockpicking is perhaps the most obvious example of this because short of pulling out a real lock and picks and asking the player to solve it, there is no way to reason your way through it. Instead, we either set time, roll dice, or require certain tools. 4. Finally, if the thing is a risk the players can consistently encounter, it should be a rule. This is best exemplified in combat, and re-referencing Rancourt's words above, how ensuring this engagement is consistent creates a game that is fair. How individual players may attempt to interact with, subvert, or succumb to catastrophe within these rules remains a viable avenue of expression, but giving a foundation off which to build pitches the onus onto the players and takes an immense load off of the GM. Rather than someone falling into the waves and the GM having to come up on the spot with some variation on "slower movement", "ditch some things or drown", "you just drown", or "test [attribute] to see what happens", a decision that may end up needing revision or reminding down the road, the decisionmaking is immediately in the players' court; they know the risks at stake, and must imagine a way out of them.

There are pitfalls to this as well though, and while I won't itemise them I will detail my favoured solution as of now: While a rule should create a reliable response from the world, it should also allow for the player to engage in many different avenues. In this way, skills themselves become detestable, but attributes remain important tools, alongside some "other method" of specialisation (without some way to differentiate yourself from your companions, you end up gaming exclusively as players, not characters. perhaps your will to impede or differentiate from yourself through roleplay is stronger than mine, but i prefer when the system can support that all its own). Joshua McCrowell's His Majesty the Worm, I think, exemplifies the virtues I've been espousing quite succinctly. Each character has four Attibutes, which are the simple, physiologically-bound modifiers that are added to many "tests" (the game's term for checks). Each character then also has three Motifs, which are two-word descriptors of your character or their past experiences (say Zen Wizard, Naughty Acrobat, and Fanatical Scribe). These Motifs provide an additional bonus on tests to represent your experiences and specialties. In this way, the virtues of skills (the ability to express specialisation, the shaping of a character with history or talents, nudging towards certain handlings of tasks) survive, with their pitfalls rotting off into the void.

In short, I find that games that provide a reliable route through which the GM can adjudicate as little as possible on the standard things, saving their mind and energy for the inventive and the clever, for the players' imaginative solutions, rather than their mundane actions, have far more virtue on both sides of the screen than those that expect for every table to imagine their own guidelines for swimming, for falling, and for picking locks. I hope to see more games, going into the future of this hobby, embrace what does work with the new and wield it to the betterment of our collective fantasy.

Thanks everyone. All of the cited reading is below for your convenience.

Referenced and Additional Reading: Matthew J. Finch - "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" Brooks Dailey - "The Danger of Skills" Beau Rancourt - "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game" Arnold Kemp - ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient"

[lexchxn]

"Rulings not Rules" and Insufficient Design

So I've been considering many aspects of design as I delve back into the OSR (where I cut my teeth as a kid playing ttrpgs, but where I have not been for over a decade and a half), and I've been met with many catchy lingo phrases touted religiously by long-time players. I want to address one of them today: "Rulings not Rules.".

The phrase, at least according to cursory research, originates from Matthew J. Finch's excellent work, "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming", where he describes it as the first "Zen Moment" that can make OSR-style TTRPG click for players. The thesis he sets forth is that the rulesets of old games were intentionally left sparse so as to exclusively be a resource for the GM, an incomplete collection from which to create your own rulings in the moment using some combination of "common sense" and die rolls.

Further, he (and many others) elaborate that in this lack, player engagement with the world is deepened; without a skill to roll for "Disarm Trap", everyone is encouraged to interact with and "solve" the trap as they would were they really there. See Brooks Dailey's "The Danger of Skills" for an excellent breakdown of this design outcome separate from Finch's work- I'm perpetually left considering and reconsidering the phrase "Before the addition of the Thief, everyone was the thief." from that blog post.

But I digress- I've discovered, over the years, that this thesis is immensely successful and informative, foundational really to an entire, rewarding style of play. But I do also find, to my taste as someone re-entering this older style of play, that many games seem to take its words too literally, or misunderstand the core message it's trying to impart.

If the fundamental idea is that a rule restricts the players, I have found some to take this message to mean that as few rules should exist as possible. That rules are a detriment to a game, and only the barest essentials should be provided. And I find, increasingly, frustration with this attitude. Rules are not a nuisance to be excised from the hobby, they are a tool to be carefully considered and wielded, a fine-honed blade that can sculpt the experiental clay of the player experience before the kiln firing of publication.

Let's take some unnamed examples, because I feel as certain that this post will be receieved extremely poorly by some as I do that my conclusion is an important one to some others:

1. Falling is codified in the rules. If you fall X amount of distance, you take some calculable, consistent amount of damage. 2. Being prone is codified in the rules. If you are tripped or otherwise fall over, you suffer some number of penalties and others gain some number of advantages. 3. Your ability to disarm traps is codified in the rules. It's a talent that can be practiced, perfected, and invoked, and it has a consistent outcome, whether chance-based or otherwise. 4. Your ability to carry things as an adventurer is codified in the rules. You can hold only so many things at once, and you cannot hold any more than that.

Now, one of these should stand out to those with a savvy eye for design. Examples 1, 2, and 4 are all foundational aspects of the game system, things that shape how the world responds to being interacted with. Example 3, on the other hand, is a rule creating interaction with the world, it decides how a player can interact with traps. If you can't disarm traps, you can't disarm traps. But a fall is always a fall.

In Beau Rancourt's "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game" (and sorry for the long quote), they state of rules-heavy (sub-)systems "This allows players to reason about the game and make future plans without the sense that they're playing Calvinball. It allows the GM to be fair and consistent when the PCs' lives are on the line. It encourages and rewards system mastery for the folks who seek that (since now there's a coherent system to master).". I would extend this out into interactions with the world- the standard methods through which the world responds to players (the occasional necessities (and unrepresentable through player reasoning) of swimming, climbing, picking locks, falling, and especially combat should be heavily codified and reliable.

Not in such a way that creative engagement is espoused, or that overcodification becomes a problem (as per Arnold Kemp's ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient", where they say "[If I've written] two pages of rules on how to attack tiny animals in your stomach, I've codified the acceptable options and excluded more esoteric solutions."; it takes a delicate hand, yes, but I'd argue a not-too-subjective line of where is "too much" or "too little" to make that decision, and I think I can offer a few considerations and a few pointers to internalise when designing your systems.

1. If the thing is a result of the world's response to players, it should be a rule. Falling damage should be a consistent rule (though how individual players attempt, or don't, to mitigate such damage may not be). 2. If the thing is reliable in how it can be handled, it should be a rule. How swimming does or doesn't impede the movement or survival of characters, dependent or not on their gear varying by your level of simulationism, should be a consistent rule. 3. If the thing cannot reasonably be expected of a player, it should be a rule. Lockpicking is perhaps the most obvious example of this because short of pulling out a real lock and picks and asking the player to solve it, there is no way to reason your way through it. Instead, we either set time, roll dice, or require certain tools. 4. Finally, if the thing is a risk the players can consistently encounter, it should be a rule. This is best exemplified in combat, and re-referencing Rancourt's words above, how ensuring this engagement is consistent creates a game that is fair. How individual players may attempt to interact with, subvert, or succumb to catastrophe within these rules remains a viable avenue of expression, but giving a foundation off which to build pitches the onus onto the players and takes an immense load off of the GM. Rather than someone falling into the waves and the GM having to come up on the spot with some variation on "slower movement", "ditch some things or drown", "you just drown", or "test [attribute] to see what happens", a decision that may end up needing revision or reminding down the road, the decisionmaking is immediately in the players' court; they know the risks at stake, and must imagine a way out of them.

There are pitfalls to this as well though, and while I won't itemise them I will detail my favoured solution as of now: While a rule should create a reliable response from the world, it should also allow for the player to engage in many different avenues. In this way, skills themselves become detestable, but attributes remain important tools, alongside some "other method" of specialisation (without some way to differentiate yourself from your companions, you end up gaming exclusively as players, not characters. perhaps your will to impede or differentiate from yourself through roleplay is stronger than mine, but i prefer when the system can support that all its own). Joshua McCrowell's His Majesty the Worm, I think, exemplifies the virtues I've been espousing quite succinctly. Each character has four Attibutes, which are the simple, physiologically-bound modifiers that are added to many "tests" (the game's term for checks). Each character then also has three Motifs, which are two-word descriptors of your character or their past experiences (say Zen Wizard, Naughty Acrobat, and Fanatical Scribe). These Motifs provide an additional bonus on tests to represent your experiences and specialties. In this way, the virtues of skills (the ability to express specialisation, the shaping of a character with history or talents, nudging towards certain handlings of tasks) survive, with their pitfalls rotting off into the void.

In short, I find that games that provide a reliable route through which the GM can adjudicate as little as possible on the standard things, saving their mind and energy for the inventive and the clever, for the players' imaginative solutions, rather than their mundane actions, have far more virtue on both sides of the screen than those that expect for every table to imagine their own guidelines for swimming, for falling, and for picking locks. I hope to see more games, going into the future of this hobby, embrace what does work with the new and wield it to the betterment of our collective fantasy.

Thanks everyone. All of the cited reading is below for your convenience.

Referenced and Additional Reading: Matthew J. Finch - "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" Brooks Dailey - "The Danger of Skills" Beau Rancourt - "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game" Arnold Kemp - ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient"

[lexchxn]

Small thought on probability and mechanics in TTRPGs.

When we play a TTRPG, every mechanic that involves a die roll is just a game of chance. Sometimes we're able to manipulate that chance to our favour, sometimes we're not.

I've seen aversion to the idea of "flat checks" to determine outcomes, and I myself have even had initial distaste for the OSR's attachment to using a d6 in such circumstances (usually calling for a 4+ or 5+)- but I think it's finally "clicked" in my mind, and I've come to appreciate the virtues of simplifying the mechanic as much as is reasonable.

Let's take an example from Pathfinder 2e, since it's a very math-heavy game (and likely what my audience is most familiar with): The creature building rules provide example ACs for monsters at levels -1 through 24, and while it does vary, generally the values are set such that a dedicated martial, fully investing in their ability to hit creatures, will have a baseline ~50% chance to hit. It's basically a flat check.

Now, we have to inspect and appreciate what nuances are allowed by a system before we can deconstruct it. Just because the values in Pathfinder tend towards a 50% success rate doesn't mean we can just start rolling d6s and hitting on a 4-6. With the example of Pathfinder, using a d20 gives us, well... 20 results. A wide spread of numbers that can then be meaningfully interacted with, as each point of bonus or penalty is worth a 5% statistical modification. Additionally, the +-10 critical success/failure system gives these points secondary values in modifying crit chances, and nat 1s/nat 20s a static 5% bump chance.

If we were to try to reduce the to-hit system down to a d6 then, what do we lose? Or more specifically, what changes? Well, modifiers either become much stronger and potentially much more necessary- each point is now worth 16% (over three times as much!), and depending on the game balance, a high modifier may now be necessary to even hit a creature. Critical results too lose something in this adaptation- maintaining the +-10 system makes modifiers the only way to reasonably achieve critical hits, and dumping it in favour of nat 1/nat 6 once again over triples the chances of a crit one way or the other.

In many important ways here, something quite important has been lost. Much agency and much nuance are jettisoned in favour of smaller numbers.

But let's take another look at Pathfinder now, and specifically its flat checks. Pathfinder has a variety of actions, effects, and miscellania that rely on the roll of a flat d20 to determine their results, usually at DCs 5, 11, and 15 (75%, 50%, 30%). As far as general play is concerned, these DCs don't shift and players don't get modifiers for them, so they function purely as statistical values. In this case, replacing them with a d6 system may in fact function fine. Setting the ranges to 3+, 4+, and 5+ (66%, 50%, 33%) results in nearly identical mathematics, and a functioning game system nonetheless. Flat checks, additionally, do not have critical successes, which leaves the other primary benefit of a d20 system out of the equation.

So why, then, does Pathfinder use a d20? I'm sure there are plenty of reasons. A d20 still has more manipulatable results, allowing for potential DC variance a d6 cannot emulate. A d20 is the primary chance die used elsewhere in the game system. A d20 is iconic.

But to circle back and round out my thoughts here, die rolls are, ultimately, nothing but chance. Without other systems interacting with (and creating results off of) their values, the method of delivery by which you achieve your chance is all but irrelevant. In such cases, what's most important is how easily one can access and adjudicate the levels of chance. A d20 with 5% per value might be quite intuitive to some, while others might prefer the more pie-like 16% of d6s. A 1 and a 20 are relatively rare on a d20, while a 1 and a 6 on a d6 are relatively common.

Always examine the tools you use, what they're doing for you, how they interact with your systems, and how you might be able to better achieve whatever goals you seek out at your tables. It makes for easier, better games.

[lexchxn]

It’s me the kineticist fiend back again to ask, what would you consider either strongest/your personal favorite element combination?

That's a rough one. I think each element is the strongest in a certain regard. Air does mobility, Earth does defence, Fire does damage, Water does control, Wood does healing, and Metal is... frustrating, to me.

Overall though, I would say Water and Wood are the strongest elements- the things they do are things they truly excel at, that are universally valuable, and that they have very little competition for ability to do.

My favourite element "combination" would have to be mono-fire actually, I just love a good pyromancer and with the aura junction and Thermal Nimbus it's a fiend at putting out constant damage.

[lexchxn]

I find your class insights pretty interesting, any plans to do a dive into the kineticist soon Id like to hear your thoughts on them.

I've been trying to do some of the least covered/most complex classes first, but I'll definitely give Kineticist a second look when I make the next one.

[lexchxn]

I've got an amazing infrastructure for my Wizard supplement but I'm really struggling to finish out filling the book itself. Might just end up cutting a few concepts and including a guide on how to create your own, as ease of customisation was a huge design goal for the project that I believe I accomplished well. Stay tuned!

[lexchxn]

The playtest is astoundingly fun and well-crafted. It has its holes, but nothing that I wouldn't expect from an early draft- really, how balanced, unique, defined, and fun everything is already is astounding. Huge shoutout to the entire team for their hard work, I think I'm in love.

accidentally very enthused by the Starfinder 2e playtest and now impatient for the full release (despite my lack of time for new games, lack of group willing to play SF, lack of GM if I'm going to play a PC, backlog of games I already want to bring to a table,,,,)

[lexchxn]

Alchemical Specialists and Oddities | Full Release

Check it out- we all love a Bomber, Chirurgeon, Mutagenist, or Toxicologist- but what if you could be something more? A… specialist in more niche categories of alchemical items? Introducing Alchemical Specialists and Oddities, a project that I've been working on and off on for like two years! With the remaster of Alchemist giving me that final push, I hope you enjoy everything this ten-page supplement has to offer, including:

Four new Research Fields!

20 new feats, some for the new fields and some for all alchemists!

And the Potion Mixer class archetype, which allows you to utilize potions and some limited magic using your deep understanding of science! Best of all? It's free! Please give it a peep, and I hope it encourages creativity in your games and your artistic endeavours.

[lexchxn]

[lexchxn]

Just a heads up- I'm intending to release a week 1 expansion to the Player Core 2 Alchemist called "Alchemical Specialists"- including several new research fields dedicated to the use of more niche collections of alchemical items, rather than spreading their focus across an entire group.

It also includes a class archetype for a magic focused Alchemist called a Potion Mixer. Expect a little more detail than just exchanging the word "alchemical consumable" for "potion"!

[lexchxn]

I finished Pathbuilder support for this project! It's also free, check it out here!

Inventor Retooled Full Release

I've been working on a homebrew variant and additions to the Inventor class for a while now, and it finally hit full release! It may receive updates, alternate support, or new content down the line, but for now? It's 100% usable and in PDF form. Also 100% free~

Find it here!