mackfrost

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goes hard

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this oedipal ain't shit

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Sometimes reading a new indie RPG gives you an insight into the principles of game design you'd have never arrived at on your own.

Sometimes reading a new indie RPG gives you a sum-of-2dX lookup table with its entries in alphabetical order.

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7-11 CLERK: lovely day outside, isn't it ME: uhhh ME INTERNALLY: shit. I didn't notice. How do I continue this conversation MY INNER MONOLOGUE: Service workers love it when you tell them the things mortal men were not meant to know, when you speak to them of principalities and powers upon the earth ME: In the sun a wheel, in the wheel another wheel. Do you see? 7-11 CLERK: Yes, I see! ME: For each turn of the outer wheel, one thousandth a turn of the inner wheel. And within the inner wheel a point of perfect darkness 7-11 CLERK: Right, growing, devouring. The death of all light ME: Wanes the light - right - wanes the light and waxes the solar eye. Wanes the day of flesh and blood and waxes the night of crawling beasts. Chewing and swallowing. The name of the night to come is khoshek ha-gibbor 7-11 CLERK: Is that hot dog a quarter pound big bite or a spicy bite. They're priced different ME: Which one is cheaper

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do you ever think about this quote by mary lambert because i think about it all the time

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This was already fucking impressive but then he started making electric guitar noises and I recreated this image in my bedroom

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really love imagining a bunch a kids and teens on their pokemon journeys staying the night on the couches and floors in the lobbies of pokemon centers, having long talks about their experiences and feelings sharing funny and scary stories and myths about legendaries and trading items and sharing TMs along with sugary snacks and pokedex chargers all while their pokemon are out of their pokeballs and all bundled up in blankets sleeping soundly next to their trainers while they stare up at the stars shining through the glass ceiling over their heads

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I and my friends are making a ttrpg for fun, and have come to an impasse. We disagree about the inclusion of an attribute, that dictates the PCs bravery. Therefore I wonder what a gamedev plugged into the TTRPG scene, thinks about mechanics that make PCs act brave/cowardly.

Well if you ask me specifically, I’m going to tell you don’t include anything that can take control of a player’s character away from them, but that does not mean that you can't have any kind of mechanic/stat that governs a PCs fear or stress level.

I personally can’t stand that mechanics that dictate that PCs run away, or dictate that they do anything at all like by falling under mind control, not because I think of the character as myself or some shit like that, I just consider myself to be the person most qualified to know what he or she would do in any given situation, so I’ve never been a fans of passing or failing saving throws or whatever determining if my character takes a certain action or not.

This is not to be confused with, like, regular dice rolls. Rolls to determine if my character can do a certain action well enough to succeed are totally fine, in fact I often want more of those.

This is one of the reasons why the Composure and Tiers of Fear systems in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy work the way they do.

We definitely wanted fear to be something that could affect the PCs and cause them to run away in a realistic fashion, these aren’t supposed to be fearless action-heroes, but I didn’t want it to be just a dice roll and then the GM tells you that your PC has to run away now. So, instead, Composure acts as a “cap” to the PC’s Skill modifiers. Base Skills cannot be higher than the PC’s current Composure level, making them worse and worse at succeeding skill checks the more frazzled and fatigued they are.

This never forces a situation where a player is told “your PC is going to run away no matter what,” but it means that the lower and lower that Composure gets, the more running away or surrender seems like a better and better idea.

That isn’t to say that mechanics that force certain character actions have absolutely no place in RPGs, hell Eureka even has one instance of this with wolfman rampages, but that’s only for one single character type, not a main mechanic which affects all PCs.

It’s well known that I really love AD&D2e, which has tons of that, though I also think that that may be one of the reasons why such a mechanic is so prevalent in TTRPGs in general. I’ve found that for a lot of TTRPGs, if you pick any random mechanic and ask “why is this in the game,” the answer is often some variation of “because D&D did it,” with little thought as to whether it needs to be in this RPG that isn’t D&D, or as to whether it was even a good idea when D&D did it.

Ultimately, study lots of RPGs, and know that there is more than one option besides just "do it the way D&D does it" and "don't do it at all."

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Godzilla Gecko V Mini Mothra

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Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

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Wishing a nice Minilla Monday to all the ugly babies

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the edit itself

this edit is getting taken down from tiktok every time someone reuploads it, its straight up censorship at this point

Im not even american but im having a great time with this

DONT LET THIS DIE

credit to miraculousgastropod for the original