#and then you get to have fun with having the players design their own dungeon

[tenivan]

From the GM side, I've found that this also works really well with D&D. It's not just an "other games" thing. For a while, I had pretty bad writers block for D&D. All problems with the core gameplay loop aside, I couldn't figure out how to justify there being dungeons everywhere, and large numbers of people who would band together in small groups to go and slaughter their way through those dungeons. I just couldn't figure out how to make it line up with any genre of fiction I'd read or any historical event I could think of. What I eventually settled on was getting rid of any idea that the players were "heroes", and instead casting them as mercenaries in a war. With that framing, dungeons don't need to be natural phenomena or remote sites filled with ancient evils that must be stopped -- a dungeon is most often an enemy stronghold that you don't have a large enough army to attack head-on. Deserter hideout? Dungeon. Occupied castle? Dungeon. The literal dungeon beneath that castle? Another dungeon. And this way, it also makes sense why the PCs are going through killing and pillaging and looting. They aren't stopping some supernatural evil, it's not gamified so that they can gain XP and treasure out of character, it's not just handwaved away for the sake of the game -- they're killing the residents of the dungeon because they're at war, and the residents of the dungeon are enemy soldiers who would (theoretically, in the minds of the PCs) do the same to them if given the chance.

one of the most freeing things you can do in ttrpgs is let go of the idea that your player characters should be/are morally good. Once you've accepted that your characters might be bad people or do bad things, the possibility space of what your characters can do opens up wide. Plus, you no longer have to contort your setting into bizarre and problematic shapes to make sure your player characters are always in the right.

a good example of this is combat. The normal approach is:

violence is what our characters will do. therefore we must make it so it is good for them to do violence. therefore their enemies must deserve it. therefore we will create a class of being for them to fight that is inherently evil and deserving of violence.

Which, needless to say, veers into extremely racist territory extremely easily.

Whereas once you no longer need player characters to be in the right, you can instead get:

violence is what our characters will do. killing people is bad, and when our characters kill people they're doing a bad thing.

which is actually a far less fucked up set of ideas to express!

like, okay, a concrete example. Right now, I'm playing in a Vampire the Masquerade game. My character, Molly, follows the Path of the Feral Heart and is in the blurry border between the Anarchs and the Sabbat. What this means in practice is that she's totally abandonned any pretences of being human and instead embraces being a monstrous predator, with no qualms about killing to survive and get what she wants, and who is essentially a Vampire Terrorist who cheerfully murders, sets bombs and massacres humans in order to destabilise the vampire government.

Molly is not a good person. She is, in fact, a terrifying monster! You aren't meant to agree with the things she does and says! And, sure, when she explains her backstory, you can see how she got like this, but that doesn't make it okay, her ending up like this is meant to be itself tragic, because in a better world she wouldn't be like this.

The story becomes more interesting because I can, in fact, play a character who does horrible things and let them be horrible. Playing a sabbat-sympathising path-follower would be entirely meaningless if the game contorted itself so nothing she did was ever actually horrific.

[quadrantadvisor]

I'm trying so hard not to be a hater but the more I learn about other ttrpgs the more the way that people talk about dnd annoys me

[prokopetz]

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

[sprintingowl]

GEMS A Game Of Heists

When you look at a slim, sub thirty pages rpg system, you usually have some expectations. Rules light, story heavy, an emphasis on vibes to guide the spirit of play.

And then there's GEMS A Game Of Heists.

GEMS takes place in a world where evil meteoric precious gemstones have asserted dominance over pockets of society, and the only way to free those pockets is to steal the gems. People who do this are called jewelers.

And that's nearly it for what you get about the lore. The rest of GEMS is a dense, precise, GMless heist board/card game where you use a deck of playing cards to construct an extremely dynamic dungeon layout, where cards flip as players cross them and these flips can have wide ramifications across the board.

You can bypass cards or neutralize them. You can activate class-based powers to wriggle out of difficult skill checks or effects or send them at the other players. You can play competitively or cooperatively, and there's a *great* short designer's section about making your own cards and heists.

Throughout it all, the writing is really concise and clear, and the layout is highly organized. This is an easy book to use.

So, all of this is to say that GEMS A Game Of Heists surprised me. I was hoping for a narrative game, which it is extremely not, but it's equally good at being what it is---a really fun, energetic, customizable board game with some emergent narrative elements that you can whip up in a few minutes.

If you like the mechanics-y side of ttrpgs, you should 100% check it out.

[thydungeongal]

D&D 5e being poorly designed issue #499:

Flesh to Stone requires three failed constitution saves to actually petrify anything, and even then requires ten rounds of concentration to make it last longer than a minute. Constitution is the most common save to have a bonus in in this system, and since it is a sixth level spell, this bonus tends to be quite high. As a result, this spell pretty much never actually does what it is billed as doing.

If the target does make their saves, this effectively translates into 3-5 rounds of a single target being restrained, at the cost of a sixth level spell slot and concentration.

The web spell, meanwhile, creates an area of effect in which any creatures that fail their dexterity saves are restrained. Dexterity saves are pretty common, but they have to keep making them as long as they're in the webs, and it's a strength check (rather than a save, so usually a lower bonus!) to escape. The spell requires concentration, but the maximum duration is an hour.

That's right. Web is objectively and unambiguously better than Flesh to Stone, despite being four spell levels lower. This is because the people making 5e wanted to get rid of save-or-suck effects, but didn't want to get rid of the spell names, and so nerfed them all to the point of uselessness. There is no use case for Flesh to Stone that would not be better served by Web or some other, notably lower than sixth level spell. You could cast Web with that sixth level slot, and it'd be a waste of resources, but it would still be less of a waste than Flesh to Stone, because it lasts longer, is slightly harder to resist, and can affect more than just one creature.

This is your game design on nostalgia and self-reference.

Yeah there's a lot of weird and conflicting ideas going on with spells in D&D 5e because they really lacked a coherent set of design goals: the designers seemed to have lacked a clear consensus on whether they wanted the game to be a balanced (albeit tipped in the player characters' favor) tactical combat game like 4e or an old-school experience with lots of nasty save or die effects. Part of the issue is that at an early point in the design process they decided not to take 4e's lead on monsters effectively having their own unique spells and spell-like abilities, and instead decided that the same spell lists should be available to both monsters and player characters.

And as anyone who's played 3e will tell you, when spells are as readily available and effortless to use as in Hasbro D&D and both sides have save or death spells available, it leads to rocket tag. And rocket tag is really not conducive to a fun tactical combat game that is supposed to be slightly tipped in the player characters' favor.

(Rocket tag is also the name of the game at higher levels in TSR editions of D&D and I feel it does harmonize better with the sheer amount of "fuck you" design in those editions. I think the assumptions written into the rules that combat isn't supposed to be fair or fun affects that very much.)

Anyway, so it's not just pure nostalgia, it's a combination of nostalgia while at the same time trying to copy D&D 4e's homework but not understanding the assignment. The biggest issue with D&D 5e in the context of all the various editions of D&D is that it had the benefit of more than thirty years of design and still ended up without a clear set of design goals besides "let's make the game that's the most D&D!" Like, ultimately as a dungeon game it's fine, but given the context of what's come before it should've been great.

[the-universal-sun]

this is one of my favorite blogs 🥹

during the summer, i think dipper plays dd&md with ford when he is little. Little Ford's characters get super silly but dipper always takes it seriously and works it into the story. Mabel and ford make friendship bracelets and i think she would really help him with opening up and being vulnerable when regressed. Little ford always goes to mabel when he needs time in sweater town...

regressed stan and dipper do a lot of parallel play (for example, Lee watches TV while dipper writes in his journal) but they both like to hang out with each other regardless. Lee and mabel are always getting each other into trouble and making a mess whether it's cooking, glitterbombs, or pranking dipper and ford.

Thank you so much! I try to make the content I want to consume, but don’t have much of! Sorry this is so late, my anxiety and mental health has been really bad lately, and it’s been inexplicably worse these last couple of days haha. So hopefully writing this will make me and others feel a little bit better!

Little Ford does still loved Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons! He can’t do too complicated math, he’s still capable of it when little but he prefers simple math so that he doesn’t have to think so much. Sometimes Dipper will do the more complicated math for his just so Ford isn’t taken out of his headspace. But his characters are always a riot with Dipper, and Mabel and Stan when they can get those two to play, the backstories he comes up with and voices he does always has Dipper riveted, even if Ford’s characters aren’t as complicated and intense as they usually are. He obviously models them after his family members, Stanthar the rogue thief, who swindles travelers of their money and charms the pants off their foes. Diptantic, the elf sorcerer who’s voracious reading lends him knowledge of ancient magic. And Maybelle, the Bars who uplifts her companions and foes in song and dance, also charming the characters they come across with her cuteness. And of course, Ford’s research partner, Dr. Mittens, has his own place next to him, and Ford gives him his own character sheets, too! Dipper sometimes finds it awkward talking to a stuffed cat, but his Grunkle Ford is having fun, and his characters are pretty funny, plus it just makes Mabel and Stan more open to playing, and DDMD is better with more players.

Both Ford and Mabel are pretty creative, and Ford’s more inclined to her type of creativity when he’s little, and she loves making necklaces and bracelets with her little Grunkle! He’s not allowed to knit or crochet when he’s little, but he can still have some input on her designs and colors, he even helped her make their family sweaters! When they presented the sweaters to Stan and Dipper, Stan smiled so brightly, hugging Ford to his chest. Admittedly, Stan’s actions were more due to the happiness and exuberance on Ford’s face as he held up two orange sweaters with boats on them, one for each of them. Mabel’s really helped Ford become more confident in himself when Little. Little Ford does take a lead out of Mabel’s notebook when it comes to sweater town. Sometimes, when he gets bad thoughts about Bill, dimension hopping, or about missing Stan for 40 years, he’ll go find Stan, curl up in the biggest and baggiest sweater he has, plop down in his lap and just stay silent. When this happens, Stan knows that his Poindexter needs some quiet time, and he’ll let Mabel and Dipper know if they’re around, just so they know they’re not being ignored, but just that it’s sweater town time.

Lee’s younger than Ford when regressed, so he can’t play complicated games with Dipper, not that he would when big let’s be real, but that does make it harder for Dipper to find things to do with his Littlest Grunkle. Dipper very quickly finds out that as long as he’s near you, Lee is fine doing literally anything. Coloring, playing with blocks, watching TV, doesn’t matter, just so he’s not alone. Dipper does like doing legos with Lee, though maybe not much how easy and childish they are, but both him and Lee like creating things other than the set out of the Lego bricks. Lee’ll draw pictures of Dipper, of him and Dipper, and give them to him to express his happiness at hanging out with him. Dipper tries to stutter and act aloof, but he’s fooling no one with that blush, try to hide it as he may. Hanging out with Lee is honestly a much needed break for Dipper, too. He has time to just write down in his journal or read a book with minimal distractions, so if he needs some quiet time when his Grunkle is little, he knows he can find it with Lee.

As mentioned before, Mabel and Lee have tea parties with Ford and Lee’s stuffies, spreading the hot gossip going around town. Ford wishes everytime Lee and Mabel hung out could be that cute and quiet. Alas, they are both too mischevious for their own good. He can’t tell who rope who into planting glitter attacks around corners, or why Lee would drink Mabel juice, knowing what he knows about it. He’s just thankful that they both follow the rules of “No Cooking/Oven use without an adult” (and “No Stan doesn’t count as an adult when he’s little, Mabel, that’s not how this works.”). Lee is usually really good about following rules. Too good, Ford doesn’t like it when Lee is too scared to break the rules because he fears getting punished or abandoned, curse their father (and curse myself too!), which is why he’s grateful Mabel gets him to break some rules. The ones that won’t hurt anybody, well nobody important or too badly in any case, are fine, maybe getting a stern warning on not letting the surprise hurt people is the worst of it. Besides, more often than not, when found out, Ford joins Lee and Mabel in crafting a hiding away confetti pouches and sprinkle pits.

Mabel and Dipper just love their Grunkles, whether they’re stern Great Uncle Ford and Conman Grunkle Stan, or excitable Ford/Sixer and sweet Little Lee

:,^,,,,,)

[theresattrpgforthat]

Fantasy Games - And My Struggle With Them.

This might be a surprise, but I struggle with fantasy games, especially high fantasy. I come across them a lot when I’m browsing Itch.io, and after a while, they start to blur together, more so than any other genre. I understand that for many folks, games like D&D were their entry into the hobby, and making a fantasy game is often the first step a game designer makes when they try to develop their own system. But I didn’t get into ttrpgs via a traditional fantasy game, and I think that regardless of the rules that accompany the game, I don’t get very excited about games that have knights and elves and dwarves and wizards.

As you might imagine, this can sometimes make things difficult when folks ask for fantasy-related ttrpg recommendations. Fantasy is a genre that encompasses so many different styles of play and genre, from gritty dungeon crawling to super-powered adventure to sad and tragic epics. Yet, because most of those sub-genres rarely appeal to me, I haven’t looked closely at very many of the games in my Sword & Sorcery & So Much More folder, which means trudging through the items there takes a lot longer when answering fantasy-oriented asks.

That being said, I don’t want to ignore fantasy games completely; I know that so many people find joy and fun in games set in a traditional fantasy world. So I’m going to talk about a few fantasy games that are very different from each-other and have very specific goals in mind, and I encourage people who see this to re-blog with their own favourite fantasy games and tell us what makes them special.

Also - if you have a fantasy game related request, please be kind if my response isn't all that you hoped it would be!

Tacticians of Ahm, by Meatcastle Games.

Tacticians of Ahm is a tactical combat-focused tabletop roleplaying game in the corrupt3d fantasy world of Ahm.

A bit-rotten blight has appeared in the Northern Sea and from it flows the Corrupt1on, fractured light and shattered shapes sowing chaos across the realm. As Tacticians, you alone are prepared to face the darkness spreading across the lands and reunite the scattered peoples of Ahm.

Tacticians of Ahm is for players who like a really satisfying combat, inspired by games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, with grid maps to help you keep track of positioning and distance. This doesn’t meant that combat is long - it’s still fast-paced, using visual indicators like color to help you assess what kinds of things you can do in play: healing, damage, and special effects. Characters have interesting abilities that they gain as they level up, so this game is also probably good for folks who like watching their characters get more and more competent. Right now Meatcastle is grinding away at the game to make it more playable, and more full of art - so getting in on it now means that you’ll get to watch it grow.

Nexalis, by Cezar Capacle.

We invite you to step aboard your enchanted vessel and set sail on the ethereal ocean known as the Nectar. Nexalis calls you on an awe-inspiring journey across a universe filled with countless uncharted islands, each teeming with unique cultures, mysteries, and magical phenomena.

Nexalis is an otherworldly realm where islands drift amidst an endless cosmic ocean of magical plasma, the Nectar. The Nectar, pulsing with vibrant, ever-shifting colors, mirrors the celestial patterns that guide adventurers on their thrilling journeys. At the heart of this sea lies the Celestial Nexus, an entrancing vortex of astral energy that births islands and renews the world in a constant cycle of creation.

Nexalis is a fantasy game, but it’s an example of setting that feels vibrant and unique from traditional fantasy games - and yet it is also highly customizable. The game comes with oracles and random tables that you’ll use to generate interesting locations and problems to deal with as your drifters move from place to place. Characters are packaged in playbooks, compact tropes that will provide players with everything they need to know on a brochure. Finally, the game uses phases, moving from one kind of storytelling to another dependant on the kind of scene you’re about to play through.

Shadow of the Demon Lord, by Schwalb Entertainment.

The End Is Just the Beginning

Sometimes the world needs heroes. But in the desperation of these last days, the world will take all those it can get: heroes, blackguards, madmen, and whoever else is willing to stand against the coming darkness. Will you fight the demons or will you burn it all down and dance among the ashes? Who will you become when the world dies? 

Shadow of the Demon Lord opens a door to an imaginary world held in the grip of a cosmic destroyer. Enter a land steeped in the chaos and madness unleashed by the end times, with whole realms overrun by howling herds of beast-men, warped spirits freed from the Underworld, and unspeakable horrors stirred awaken by the Demon Lord’s imminent arrival. 

For fans of the grim, the gory, and the gritty, the setting of Shadow of the Demon Lord is post-apocalyptic, chaotic and messy. The presentation is representative of a traditional RPG: a big book with high-end full-colour art and plenty of lore to accompany the rules. You create your character using pieces of Ancestry to help you determine your attributes, and your Profession to determine your skills. The game is based on the d20, and relies on stat modifiers to try and get you over most rolls, and a milestone-like levelling system that ensures that everyone who plays levels up at the same time.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is very clearly a vehicle for horror, so if your table is one that likes being confronted by all kinds of horrible things in a hopeless quest to save… well something of the world, then you might like this game.

Songbirds 3e, by snow.

Songbirds 3e is a tabletop roleplaying game about undeath, supernatural powers, and the blue dreams of the moon. In the game, you create a strange survivor of the world who was chosen (or cursed) by Death. Spirits aren't able to pass on to the afterlife and grow monstrous with each passing day. You know the songs to send them on. You have the abilities that help you find them. You are the canary in the coal mine.

Songbirds is full of danger. It carries with it a tried and true method of OSR world-building in that the world makes itself known in the pieces of the game that you decide to pick up - the character curses you roll for, the ways damage can hurt you, the gear you carry, and the roll tables that answer so many questions about different steps of the game. Combat is meant to be simple but also deadly, and much of the fun of the game is in discovering what’s around the corner or what’s in the treasure chest in front of you. Songbirds takes inspiration from both fantasy and sci-fi, so if you like weirdness mixed in with your dungeon-crawls, you might like this game.

Trilogy, by Ben Moxon.

Trilogy is a tabletop RPG designed for epic fantasy campaigns. Build your world at the table, create characters to explore it and let the adventure commence.

Trilogy is designed specifically for players who want to discover their world in play rather than having to consult settings guides and books of existing lore. A world that lives and grows around you, shared by everyone at the table.

The media listed that inspired Trilogy include series such as Lord of the Rings, Malazan Book of the Fallen, and the Storm-light Archives; vast and detailed worlds full of complex cultural relations and heavy with conflict. The rules are derived from the PbtA framework, which means that much of the action is going to be character-driven and character-focused. This game is least likely to have puzzles a la dungeon-crawl, but what it does have is character arcs.

Character arcs are guiding lights for players, providing them with loose archetypes that they can use to help advance their characters. Each arc comes with positive and negative qualities that you can turn to when your character is at their best or at their worst. It also has an opening moment (which helps define your character to the audience) and a series of checkpoints in the form of narrative moments that generate character growth. I think the Arcs part of Trilogy is what makes it stand out, looking at character development at a new angle, and giving players plenty of prompts to help them get from point A to point B.

Jack Kills Giants, by Andrew White.

There’s no shortage of vagabonds who take coin for killing, but Giant Slayers… they’re a special breed. The coin is unfathomably good, you’d be more or less set for life should you bring one of those colossal beasts down.However, you’re just as likely to find yourself a quick and nasty death and a pauper’s funeral.

Those who decide the reward is worth the risk form up into small companies of strangers, spreading out the risks and sharing the spoils.Brought from all walks of life, those who survive past their first kill and choose to continue on the path grow into tight-knit bands, comrades in arms fighting for gold and glory.

But you aren’t one of that pantheon of successful slayers just yet. You’re just flat broke.

JACK KILLS GIANTS is a game of giant-slaying in the Fantasy Gig-Economy written and illustrated by Andrew White, with valuable contributions from Nakade & Cosmic Orrery Games. In Jack Kills Giants you won't play hardened adventurous heroes, you'll play everyday people, forced by a need to make cash to survive to chase after giants in exchange for generous bounties.

Jack Kills Giants does away with the broad possibilities of a generic fantasy game and zooms in on one particular element that the designer is interested in - a gig economy. Giant-killing is terrifying and horribly dangerous, but life is so brutal that you decide that it’s still worth doing. The game also focuses on the ways a world that has giants in it works that makes it special - for instance, some folks make a living carving up the bodies of slain giants and distributing the fat, bones, and other pieces into products that the world can use. For lovers of thoughtful world-building and purposeful adventuring, maybe check out Jack Kills Giants.

Also...

If you found these interesting, you might also like my Non-Western Fantasy recommendation post, as well as my general fantasy tag.

[aotopmha]

All of the takes from the higher end FFXIV players I've seen recently feel so out of touch/narrow-minded to me.

I see people complaining about healers when I ran the most recent dungeon as one just the other day and we wiped several times.

I already saw someone complain that the FFXI raid is "easier than Aglaia" when every single run I've had has taken a significant amount of timer and at least a one or two wipes on a boss or two (or more).

Compared to all of the other Alliance Raids, I actually feel like the challenge here is to learn faster play, rather than to avoid wiping. It's the first time I've seen an Alliance Raid reach the end tail of the timer.

Granted, this is the first time I've done anything "on content" (and I've only seen footage of older day one runs, so maybe previous first day runs of Alliance Raids were similarly difficult), but to me, all of this stuff at the very least feels so much more unique and substantial than a lot of the encounters in a bunch of the previous expansions; this feels really cool and unique in its own right.

Prishe's proximity attacks, the group fight with the Archangels (which has a pretty cool use of interrupts), and Shadowlord's twists on various AoE attacks themselves are really cool.

And to me difficulty isn't the only value of an encounter.

They just don't seem to understand that not everyone consumes the game the same way they do, don't seem to have the ability to put themselves in others' shoes nor have the ability to understand that only a small portion of players play at their level.

I don't play healer often and I felt challenged by the recent dungeon.

I felt this whenever I saw some complain about Endwalker encounters, as well, but there I got it better because I could understand the complaint about how formulaic some of the encounters felt.

All Dawntrail encounters have felt unique and, most of all, substantial, to me.

And that was my personal gripe with particularly Endwalker's patch content. Many of the bosses did not have mechanics which evolved and/or had quite slow-paced useage/distribution of mechanics.

I suppose a game has the responsibility to entertain players on all levels of play, but this time around I understand the complaints much less as I see a lot of truly inventive encounter design that brings in ideas the game hasn't used much before.

And even after I stepped into harder content (extremes), the normal content never automatically became a bore to me; just different type of content.

In the end, I suppose I just disagree with people's consumption philosophy, then.

I think the game doesn't need to be "hard", just "substantial", so I suppose it's a very specific difference of opinion, which simply clashes with this different perspective and doesn't gel with the reality within the game I've seen.

I hope those who are unhappy will get something that makes them happy, but I also struggle a bit to see what the encounter designers could do to please this perspective.

Just copy Ivalice step by step? Just complete bullshit with bad telegraphing? Because that's where I felt like a bunch of Ivalice's challenge came from. It was challenging because some of the telegraphing could take a bit to parse and at points only made sense if you paid attention to every little tiny detail. It was challenging because it was pretty unintuitive and while I enjoyed it a lot and the bullshit is "funny", it's not "fun".

Math isn't bad because of the math, it's bad because you have to figure out how it works first. It can tell you "vitals", but the first time you do this, you don't necessarily automatically make all of the connections in the short time the fight gives you. And I personally think this is an issue of conveyance/bad design.

How are you supposed to figure out you need to let the sniper shoot you rather than use to shield to shield yourself in the moment? Where is the logic in that?

Even the magnet stuff is actually good.

Good conveyance is vague, but still solvable in the moment, like Prishe's wind-up punches.

But as said, I suppose I consume video games differently than most FFXIV/MMO players because in my mostly single-player gaming experience bad conveyence/design isn't "part of the fun", it's just bad design.

I can love a game despite it having these issues in its encounters, but to me it is an aspect to criticize when it happens and despite the repetitious nature of MMO design, I think this issue shouldn't just be glossed over because I think you can do challenge without these clunky elements.

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Lancer RPG

pfft, your mech is your dead mom's soul? well MY mech is co-piloted by Cthulhu!

Touchstones: Armored Core, General Mech Media

Genre: Mecha, Tactics game

What is this game?: Lancer is a tactical TTRPG focused on mechs, and the folks piloting them, with a sturdy "Gameplay over Realism" mentality to its game design

How's the gameplay?: Lancer is a tactical RPG using primarily d20s for attack rolls and other problem solving, it's primarily based on the tactical combat rules of Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, however it is mostly its own thing, with new mechanics, simple but fun character creation, and a high focus on quick and aggressive combat rather than lengthy and Defensive combat. in effect imagine character creation as going to a subway (of mech parts) and picking your ingredients, with a mech's frame being your choice of bread, and combat as an SRPG of your choosing but everyone is in giant mechs

Out of Combat is a bit different, to the point where I didn't even bring it up during my first draft of this! the Out of Combat rules are deliberately bare bones, you can very easily insert straight up a different game in there, or mod it to be something else. But I wouldn't recommend it, as the rules by themselves are 100% useable, fun, and blend into the combat portions pretty easily, Lancer is fully aware of this, and the lack of out of combat depth is partially covered by the KTB book, which gives characters simple out of character skills

What's the setting (If any) like?: Lancer throws you into a world where mankind's either solved, or is close to solving, most of the issues back on earth... too bad we also colonized other planets 10k years ago! Now, while Earth thrives, planets outside of it struggle with poverty, imperialism, dictatorships, and human and non-human rights issues, Earth tries its best to help, but they're stretched very thin. Lancer also has many small details to its setting that are way too in-depth to get into right now, but a major one is the existance of non-human people, eldritch beings strapped to computers in order to create effective and fully sentient artificial intelligence

What's the tone?: Lancer's tone is generally speaking, hopeful. Empires are mighty, but there are people fighting, and they will be toppled, mankind's horrors have attempted to wipe out entire species, but survivors remain, and secretly thrive. While there is some doom and gloom and grimdark stuff, especially with how the highly unethical and wicked corporations are treated as necessary evils for enterprising pilots, but overall lancer is a setting where no matter how bad things get, there will always be hope

Session length: A few hours, it depends on how mean your GM is, generally speaking however combat heavy sessions will only run you around 2-3 hours, with RP sprinkled in between

Number of Players: I generally like to recommend around 4 or more, but I'm sure you can do it with less

Malleability: While lancer's mechanics are pretty hardset in its setting, the existance of Beacon RPG and how at its core its very much a Lancer hack does show that Lancer can be hacked into differing settings, a very popular one I've seen is Magical Girl Lancer.

Resources: Lancer's primary resource is Comp/Con, it effectively serves as a do everything tool for lancer, allowing you to manage characters, encounter, and homebrew, while also having a very slick and easy to use UI Lancer also has many pre-made modules, of... varying quality, Siren's song and Solstice rain are pretty good, Wallflower is very good but the encounters are of mixed quality, and it's not great for introducing people to the game in my experience

Homebrew is also fairly popular, new frames, NPC types, Bonds, and modules are all pretty popular, my personal favorite being Field Guide to Suldan and Field Guide to Iridia, I also enjoy Field Guide to Liminal Spaces though that one's a bit on the "Be Very Careful" side

Overall, lancer is effectively THE indie ttrpg, being quality, fun, and affordable, with the core rulebook being 100% free if you just wish to see the player-side content, it's a great time, and everyone who's interested in the indie ttrpg scene should check it out at least once

[blazehedgehog]

This is a stand in ask that I lost. It was about Sonic Frontiers. It was a four-part ask written kind of smugly about the open zone areas of Sonic Frontiers, and how all the random clutter (springs, dash panels, etc.) and high level of scripting/railroading doesn't fit in very well with open world design. They suggested Sega would have to go back to the drawing board and really change the design for whatever follows next.

So I wanted to redo this ask because I feel like I had a pretty good response.

I opened this ask jokingly calling the anon out for sounding a little snooty, because it used some big words. But my main opener was: Haven't you played Super Mario Odyssey? Each level in Super Mario Odyssey is effectively its own little open world, particularly something like Tostarena.

it's this huge area dotted with a town, ruins, and other landmarks, with big stretches of empty space between them. The landmarks are where the traditional gameplay is -- platforming challenges, enemies, puzzles, and so on, and you have to traverse across the desert to reach them.

I also think about Jak & Daxter, maybe one of the first open world platformers ever, and how it has kind of a hub-and-spoke system. Generally you are working out of a base, like a workshop or a village or something, with roads that lead out of, around, and back into that base area (or to other buildings that act sort of like self-contained dungeons).

Each "road" takes the place of a level. Now, there's nothing keeping you on the road, which is part of the fun, since you can cross between roads, go around obstacles, and so on. But roads are definitely setup to guide you through a space like a level would.

And as someone who plays a lot of it, I think in the context of Fortnite, which is this huge island covered in a spiderweb of roads and pathways leading to, from, and around POIs (Points of Interest).

It's a system that drives all good open world design, and was kind pioneered in Disneyland all the way back in the 1950's. Disney didn't call them "points of interest", he called them "weenies" -- big iconic areas that you can see from long distances that are interesting enough to make you want to explore them, while also helping you stay oriented in the overall space.

So take this screenshot of the current Fortnite map:

My car is parked at a crossroads. Directly ahead of me and a little to the left is a shack where Gwenpool is roaming around. Further in the distance is the POI of "Reckless Railways", which houses the map's Grand Central Station, where the train rolls through and restocks its supplies. Further beyond that are the snowy mountains and the massive Grand Glacier hotel. To the far left, on the edge of the image, is the forge at Dr. Doom's castle.

Roads are meant for traveling quickly down. They lead you to points of interest, where you slow down and comb through an area carefully. And, obviously, there's all kinds of little landmarks dotted all over the place between major POIs, encouraging you to get off the road and go exploring. Gas stations and ruins and little shacks and stuff.

It's extremely easy to adapt these concepts to a Sonic game, which is what's so baffling about Sonic Frontiers being such an incoherent mess.

Roads should be your boost Sonic zones. It can't be a random collection of junk, it can't be something you unlock as a means of "fast travel." There has to be an identifiable road, a series of pathways leading you around the island. You put grind rails and boost pads and dash rings along this road. This is where players are supposed to go fast. Roads = travel.

These roads will lead you to points of interest and other landmarks. A POI, like in Super Mario Odyssey, is where puzzles, platforming, and exploration are mostly done. I do not mean "four stone buildings" like in Sonic Frontiers. I mean a place that feels like a place. A location that feels like it has character. Personality. Something you work your way through, absorb, and conquer. Again, like Odyssey.

And then you stash little secrets and landmarks off the beaten path for players who want to go offroading.

2-3 islands per game, 2-3 biomes per island. You can have specific race or time trial missions to and from different landmarks, you can have POI exploration missions, you can have missions to change the state of these POIs like blowing up power plants or unlocking gates. Maybe Eggman has a giant pipe he's using to pump toxic chemicals into the water, so you have to turn off the pump and then you get to run down the inside of the empty pipe like an F-Zero GX track.

It's easy to design this game. You don't even need cyberspace levels. Heck, remember GTA5? Most missions had bronze, silver, and gold medals. You can still have a ranking system in an open world game.

Look, I even drew art of this concept, what, four years ago? five?

Somebody should pay me a livable wage for this kind of stuff

[azems-familiar]

my thoughts on dawntrail

alright, now that it's been a couple days since i finished the 7.0 MSQ, and i've had time to get my thoughts in order, i wanted to write up my overall thoughts and impressions on the expansion. beneath the cut there WILL BE MAJOR SPOILERS for plot points, zones, and dungeons/trials through the whole expansion, so be warned.

so i'll start with the positives.

first of all, i obviously can't stress enough how much i love the graphics update and how beautiful everything looks now. i really appreciate several of the QoL things they added in, like dual dye channels and the adjustment to the follow missions that make it easier to see when you might fail. i loved the first 4 zones - the designs, the cultures in them, the way they were developed. i think my favorite group was the Yok Huy. the dungeons and trials are also all REALLY fun, for the most part, although a couple of the fights suck balls on caster - Vanguard's second boss is aoe hell taken to a new extreme. i did have some troubles with seeing mechanics on the final trial, but i managed it, at least.

i overall liked the rite of succession. i liked Wuk Lamat's character arc, and i liked Koana's as well, and i wasn't too bothered by how much of a back seat in the story the WoL took, although i was disappointed we didn't get many chances to bond with the Scions or Erenville and the WoL's relationship with Wuk Lamat was centered over everything else (and sorry, but Lelesu is not going to think of her as family that quickly), especially with Erenville being the expansion's narrator. it did a little bit annoy me that it mostly felt like we were there to be a camera from which to let the player watch the story, but it wasn't too egregious. i wanted more of the rivalry between the Scions that we were teased, but overall it was an enjoyable little vacation with some really beautiful worldbuilding.

that said.

to me the second half of the story felt like someone trying to emulate shb without really understanding what made shb so good, while also trying to shoehorn Wuk Lamat in as the protagonist when by all rights she should no longer have been. the WoL was given no agency despite the fact that we were dealing with another reflection and a star-wide threat; frankly, the idea that Lelesu would have sat back and been perfectly content to wait for Wuk Lamat to challenge Zoraal Ja to single combat and whatnot is kind of ridiculous, considering the harm he could cause to not only the Source but the other reflections as well. i disliked that there were hardly any mentions whatsoever of past worldbuilding - we have no opportunity to talk to Sphene about how her shard's shift towards lightning was definitely intentional and caused by Ascian manipulation, we don't get to interject that we can cure the levin sickness (something that genuinely bothered me, since that was a MASSIVE PLOT POINT in the shb patches). our accomplishments are almost never brought up at all.

moreover, this expansion was supposed to be character development for Krile. i would not have minded the WoL remaining in the background so much if during the second half of the story, Krile took the fore, especially since her parents are from this unknown shard - but as it was, we barely got anything from her at all, except a couple cutscenes in Living Memory. the Scions also weren't particularly centered - they were all present, but all the emotional moments and connections were focused on Wuk Lamat and on Sphene, even Erenville fading into the background most of the time, and the WoL is constantly made to follow Wuk Lamat around to let the players watch what she's doing instead of working with their own team of people to ascertain what's going on and put a stop to it.

(this is very much a personal thing, but i also did not like Sphene; she gave me the utter creeps the moment she showed up onscreen, which would have been great if they'd been trying to play into that, but it felt like we were genuinely meant to Like Her and personally she made me want to claw my skin off every time she opened her mouth or did an animation, lol.)

despite my interest in another reflection, all of those issues above definitely soured me on the second half of the plot quite a bit. i also really did not like Living Memory - it felt somehow directly antithetical to the themes of endwalker, while trying to copy, again, the end of shb. like the opposite of Ultima Thule, which was incredibly cathartic even though it was very heavy. Living Memory just honestly was a bit triggering to me and left me upset in a bad way, and i had to force myself through the end of the msq there. especially considering that no one living remembers these people, since they all had their minds mass-wiped constantly...it did not feel very good. though i did like that we got some focus on Erenville there, finally.

the cutscene prior to the final trial i honestly did really love though - getting to pull out the Azem crystal and do what we do best made me HAPPY, since we'd gotten so little of that this expansion. so you can imagine i felt incredibly frustrated and...cheapened when Wuk Lamat burst through the literal fourth wall to trigger the boss's phase change. also the fact that no one is bringing up dynamis when "the power of emotion" is repeatedly mentioned is ANNOYING, because come on, we just had a whole arc about this, i guarantee you it's still fresh in everyone's minds. we also didn't get called the Warrior of Light at all this expansion, which just made me kinda go :/ because that's our title, even if Hydaelyn is gone. i am very interested in why the Key has Azem's symbol on it though, and looking forward to what kind of arc this might kickstart. i also liked the final scene in which Erenville asked the WoL what drives them - the answers we were given to choose from felt like a really good indicator of the growth our characters have gone through since we were first asked why we became an adventurer to begin with.

another little thing that does irritate me is - why does no one in Tural seem to have any familiarity with the global events in the past? such as the Final Days, primals, the Echo, the concept of a Warrior of Light - Hydaelyn spoke to everyone and since the Echo is a manifestation of an ancient soul, it makes no sense that only people in Eorzea would have it. it also makes no sense that the Ascians would just completely ignore one of the major continents, especially since Emet-Selch has clearly been to Tural before. i definitely didn't expect them to recognize us, but idk, it was kinda weird that there was just no mention of this stuff.

my overall impressions is that i will probably enjoy doing sidequests and things in the new zones, and running the content, but i probably am not going to replay the story at all and i'm holding out hope for better writing in the patch quests. before anyone comes at me with "well of course the wol wasn't the protagonist we can't be saving the star all the time-" i'm perfectly fine with lower stakes, i just wish it felt more like we were relevant, especially in the latter half of the story. there's an easily-achievable happy medium, you know? same with there being a happy medium between "continuing the previous plot arcs" and "ignoring basically all past plot events and worldbuilding".

if you've read all the way down here, have a happy Lelesu for your trouble:

she looks amazing in the rdm artifact gear!

[rpgsandbox]

If you’re not familiar with 5E rules, don’t worry! Roleplaying games are about letting your imagination run wild as you create your own characters and stories. The rules provide support for your imagination and structure for your hero, but take a back seat to the FUN play at the table.

For those new to roleplaying games entirely, we are providing Jake’s Shmowzow Guide to Roleplaying Games with every copy of the Core Book exclusively on Kickstarter. It’s a simple guide to get any person started having fun with the Adventure Time RPG. Written by Ray Winninger, co-designer of the DC Heroes RPG and former Executive Producer of Dungeons & Dragons, the guide includes the needed core rules from the 5E OGL, a simple step-by-step explanation of the simple ideas you need to understand to begin play, and finally a walk-through of the character creation process. All guided by Jake!

Adventure Time has its roots in the older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, with episodes and story arcs that grew from the pastiche fantasy adventure that the second and third editions laid out so beautifully. We believe that the high-quality design of 5E—and its very nature—are well-suited to capturing the open-ended excitement and sense of wonder that are at the core of Adventure Time. If Dungeons & Dragons gave birth to Adventure Time, using 5E for Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game brings everything full circle and is true to the spirit of the series.

We believe that we can craft and implement the world of Ooo and the features of the Adventure Time RPG best in 5E, empowering you with the feeling that you can be any person you want to be and that anything can happen when you step out your door for adventure!

But how, exactly, do you explore Ooo? This is a tabletop roleplaying game built using the Dungeons & Dragons rules, basically. In fact, if you are familiar with those rules, you already know all about how to play Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game.

If you’re not familiar with those rules, you don’t need to worry. Dungeons & Dragons is a game about letting your imagination run wild; it is a game that is played through conversation, is moderated by dice, and takes place in your cranial. As you adventure through the amazing land of Ooo, stuff will happen. There is a player, called the Dungeon Master, who will tell you about that stuff. 

As a brave adventurer, you will want to respond to your Dungeon Master with awesome heroic actions. Your character will have a set of attributes and some skills and powers that provide options for those reactions. But you can respond however a person could respond (if that person was a Wildberry Person, with an axe!). However you respond, you will tell the Dungeon Master what you want to do.

Once you choose your action, it’s time to get mathematical with it. You will roll a twenty-sided die and add a bonus number to it, based on the attribute (or skill or power) that is most applicable to the action. If the total number is high enough to equal or exceed a target set by the Dungeon Master, you will succeed, and the skill or power will dictate the results of that action.

And that's all there is to it! Imagine what the Dungeon Master tells you, have a conversation with the Dungeon Master about what you want to do, and roll a twenty-sided die to see if it works. Three simple steps to exploring (and loving!) the Land of Ooo.

And we’ve got some sweet new mechanics to enhance your awesome RPG experience and fill it with Adventure Time!

Kickstarter campaign ends: Wed, May 15 2024 8:00 PM BST

Website: [Cryptozoic Entertainment] [facebook] [twitter] [instagram]

[mamthew]

Some thoughts on Metaphor: ReFantazio. I avoid spoilers for the most part.

It’s maybe impossible to overstate how much I love Persona 5. It’s my favorite game of all time, and directly started me down the path to being a radical. It’s got some flaws – many of which were fixed in its rerelease, Persona 5: Royal – but it’s such a fantastic package in terms of story, gameplay, art design, music, and thematic resonance that it’s hard to fault it for them. I’ve played and enjoyed subsequent P5 material, but none of them are nearly as devoted to a political message as the original, meaning that even though they’re all good, they ultimately fall short of what I love about the initial game.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a 2024 RPG by a good number of the folks who made Persona 5, and you can immediately tell. It has a very similar art style, uses many of the same sound effects, has a similar battle system, and is built around the calendar/social links/social stats system that the Persona series is known for. It is essentially a Persona game, but set in a fantasy world rather than contemporary Japan, and without Persona’s emphasis on Jungian psychology and the tarot. It’s also thoughtfully political, but in a way that’s maybe less engrossing and blisteringly relevant than Persona 5. That said, what it does have to say is worth engaging with, as it uses its more traditional fantasy setting to comment on the ideological underpinnings of RPGs as a genre and games more broadly, as both an artistic medium and an industry.

In many ways, Metaphor is “Persona does Final Fantasy.” It’s clearly an homage to Final Fantasy at its core. It may have Persona 5’s battle system, but it’s got FFV’s job system, and it’s reworked the “one more” mechanic to feel more like the Brave/Default system from Bravely Default, or the Conditional Turn-Based system from Final Fantasy X. The job system is especially interesting. There are 14 basic jobs, with each job having 1-3 class change upgrades that unlock at specific Social Link levels with the job’s corresponding character. Every party member can use any job, but have very individualized stat spreads that make certain jobs more viable than others. For example, Strohl starts with the Warrior job, which hits hard and doesn’t do much else. He could use the Mage job, but his physical attack is like double his magic attack, so that would probably be a waste of his massive attack stat. That said, some players might opt to train him through Mage anyway, because at level 20, Mage gets a skill that increases MP by 15%, which they could equip to Warrior so he can use more of his big hits that spend MP. I, on the other hand, trained him in Pugilist, which has powerful physical moves that spend HP instead of MP. It’s a bit more risk/reward, but Strohl has considerably more HP to spend. And that’s one of the seven party members, each of which has their own unique stat spread.

That customizability is fun and rewarding, but limited by the use of a Persona calendar system. I’m less inclined to experiment and try training characters in weird directions when I only have ten in-game days to reach the end of the current dungeon and only have about an in-game year to reach the end of the game. Due to the FOMO brought on by the time constraints, I spent about eight hours just mindlessly bashing enemies in old dungeons in order to unlock all the jobs, which was pretty decidedly unfun, and I ultimately only got to play around with maybe half the fully upgraded jobs in the end. Persona’s time-management (which often translates to some occasionally brutal resource management in dungeons) has always ratcheted up the games’ tension and forced a level of deliberateness in decision-making. That works fine in Persona, but dampens the freedom of choice I associate with job systems. The calendar generally feels like a weird thing to keep. On one hand, the narrative and mechanics have been built around it, but on the other, part of what I enjoy about the calendar in Persona is the mundanity of it. The changing of the seasons, interspersed with real-world holidays, as experienced by a protagonist who is attending high school and therefore at the mercy of the calendar, all help to complement the familiar contemporary setting of a Persona game. In Metaphor, there are no seasons or holidays, the weeks have five days instead of seven, and the one-year cutoff for the action is arbitrarily enforced by a spell rather than by familiar societal norms, so the days tend to blend together. This calendar has all of the anxiety of Persona’s system with none of the novelty, and that’s not a great place to be in.

That said, what Metaphor loses in variety from the calendar it gains from its much larger world and its travel mechanics. Each chapter of Metaphor is set in a different city, and the characters must travel to each city using their gauntlet-runner, a land-based version of the classic Final Fantasy airship complete with a pilot who’s clearly Atlus’s take on a Cid. Each city has several dungeons, landmarks, and surrounding towns that the party can travel to and explore as side-jaunts to juggle as options within the time-management system. Some of these can take several in-game days to reach, but traveling has its own activities that raise social stats, craft items, or even develop social links with party members. In Persona 5, many of the side activities had their own unique content but wasted precious days to do, and travel-time feels like a way to alleviate some of that sense of waste, by limiting you to just “bedroom activities” like reading books, cooking, tending to plants, doing laundry, cleaning the floor, bathing, or inviting party members to hang out. You have to go to the extra dungeon either way, so you’re stuck on the gauntlet-runner either way, so you might as well raid the pantry, use the shower for a small Exp bonus, cook some fermented meat with Hulkenberg, do some laundry with Heismay, and then read a fantasy novel while you’re there. Much of the traveling system feels like an iteration on the central premise of Persona 5: Strikers, allowing the characters to go on a road trip and see a bunch of cities but without the dearth of things to do outside of dungeons from which Strikers suffered.

Metaphor is in most ways an improvement on Persona 5. It’s a much bigger game, with a more strategic battle system and prettier visuals. That said, its dungeons are generally a bit less interesting. They’re more straightforward, without the verticality that made especially Persona 5: Royal’s dungeons shine. They’re also less colorful, less surreal and – I guess a bit ironically – less metaphorical. That makes sense, since all the dungeons are actual locations within the game’s world and must therefore follow the world’s logic, but it’s weird infiltrating a giant fantasy airship and being struck by how much duller it is than Persona 5’s Diet building – a real-world place known for being boring. The music, too, is less interesting than Persona 5’s. It’s still technically solid, and there are certainly some bangers, but because the soundtrack is aping Final Fantasy in genre and instrument choices, it’s much less engaging than the acid-jazz of Persona 5. Metaphor also has less to do than Persona 5 or especially Royal. The game doesn't require that you grind up relationship points with social links, which cuts out a lot of the frustration of the social link system, but also means that there's no reason to take characters on dates or to the movies or to play darts. The world feels less varied because the activities are much more clearly laid out by which social stat they increase.

Both this game and P5 are punching way higher than their weight class in terms of budget and team size. They’re both essentially AA games that have been catapulted into the AAA space, and both are a generation or more behind in terms of actual graphical power. Both games made up for that discrepancy with stylish artistic flair, and while that papering over succeeds in both games, the stylizing of Metaphor feels less relevant to the game than with Persona 5. Persona 5’s intentional use of color and effects make it feel both pulpy and like agitprop material, which are two of its major artistic influences. Metaphor’s stylings, however, mostly make it feel like Persona 5, which clashes a bit with its more classical fantasy setting. I’ve seen a number of people complain about the game’s graphics being outdated, and I think the fact that it retreads so much stylistic ground is why the unimpressive graphics are more noticeable this time around, even though it’s much better graphically than any previous Atlus entry. The game’s reuse of many Persona sound effects aggravate this issue. Those sound effects feel punchy and contemporary, and work great in the context for which they were created: a game that turns rpg genre conventions on their heads by using a contemporary setting. Here, in a game that’s purposely leaning into more classic genre conventions, they instead feel lazy and out of place. The game clearly had great sound designers; there are plenty of new sound effects as well as the old. I wish they’d had those sound designers replace the reused sound effects as well. The game's localization, however, does set it apart from Persona 5. Metaphor is another JRPG to outsource its localization and English voice work to the UK, rather than the states. Most of the characters are voiced by UK voice actors, and they all do an outstanding job. Honestly, the weakest link voice-wise is the protagonist's voice, which was clearly directed to try to be fairly flat and unaffected. Still, I'm just so happy to have a voiced protagonist that I didn't mind all that much.

Metaphor opens by posing a question to the player: does a story have the power to change the world? I figured when I started the game that this question was referring to Persona 5, and the difficulties of creating a story with a specific, clear political message and having to deal with its audience agreeing with the message and longing for that change but not working to bring it about – or even worse, a chunk of its audience refusing to acknowledge it as political at all. While Metaphor was clearly inspired by that initial tension, it addresses a much broader question than that: why do video games – works in a medium that tends toward fairly radical political theming – seem to attract audiences that refuse to engage with their theming? Much of the game’s use of Final Fantasy elements is in service to this question, since Final Fantasy is sorta the seminal RPG. The game’s antagonist, whose name is frustratingly spelled Louis and pronounced Luis, represents in some ways the ideological underpinnings of Final Fantasy and is even designed to look like the FF1 Warrior of light, with long flowing white hair and curved horns. The main plot of the game involves a powerful spell that forces the kingdom to hold a democratic election. When the king is assassinated, his voice thunders down from the sky that the crown will go to whomever the most citizens believe in their hearts should be the next king in about a year’s time. The protagonist enters the race because he opposes the two frontrunners – Louis and the head of the very racist Sanctist church.

The protagonist often reads from a utopian novel and communes with the novel’s imprisoned author, a man named More, probably because he represents the demand that society improve and offer us more. The novel discusses the workings of an idealized version of our contemporary liberal democratic system, and all the party members fight in some way to try to realize that system. The novel itself was banned and all its copies burned, while More was arrested and sentenced to exile for writing it. While both the protagonist and Louis love the book, they had vastly different takeaways from it. The protagonist and his party see the book as calling for a society built around caring for its citizens, protecting and providing for those without the means to protect or provide for themselves. Louis, on the other hand, sees the book as calling for a society built on “true equality,” where all are forced to fend for themselves and only the strong survive. In both cases, the circumstances of one’s birth theoretically don’t matter, and leadership isn’t decided by a bloodline, which makes both visions look preferable to the world of the game: a heavily racially stratified monarchic theocracy. With the crown up for grabs, both characters have the opportunity to try to realize their visions of this utopian system, if they can convince the populace to back them.

This conflict is, deliberately, the conflict at the center of liberal democracy: is our system meant to be more individualistic or more collectivistic? Does the “liberal” mean that individuals must fend for themselves without a societal support structure? Does the “democracy” mean that the strongest must sacrifice the fruits of their advantages to provide for those without the same advantages? That the game takes the side of the whole over the part is unsurprising, given that it was made by the folks who made Persona 5. And hey, that’s the side I agree with more, so no skin off my back. But, using liberal democracy as the basis for its core theming makes Metaphor feel considerably less radical than Persona 5 did. Most of the oppressor/oppressed relationships in Metaphor are ones for which we have answers, which stands in stark contrast to the real-world-inspired conflicts in Persona 5, and when the characters look to the utopia of the novel for a solution, they’re looking to the answers we already have. And as Persona 5 already told us, those answers are insufficient.

That said, what feels backwards about the game’s theming becomes more interesting when we consider it instead as a metacommentary on the politics of RPGs. Louis, the villain who looks like the Ur-FF Protagonist, is an individualist to the extreme. His vision for a perfect world is one where all compete to live and only the strongest survive. That’s barbaric to most folks whose brains haven’t been poisoned by weird sectarian internet communities, but it’s also pretty much how RPGs operate: you keep fighting guys who are weaker than you to make yourself stronger until you’re the strongest, and then your character uses that strength to change the world the way they want. This is – crucially – also how this RPG operates. The protagonist might oppose Louis’s vision, but he still has to do so on Louis’s terms. It turns out that the conflict at the heart of liberal democracy is also the conflict at the heart of many power fantasies: we imagine ourselves being strong enough to make the world fairer, but in doing so, we engage with an individualistic framing. When looking at the metaphor of Metaphor, we can think of the protagonist as the story of a game and Louis as the narrative told through its mechanics; ultimately, what a story says is still constrained by what the game does. So the question of whether a story has the power to change the world is complicated by the introduction of the constraints placed upon a story by its medium. Why didn’t Persona 5 change the world? Metaphor implies it’s because its audience is primed to see its brand of power fantasy as apolitical – not even about the world to begin with.

I think increasingly often about a time I got into an argument with the admin of a Persona 5 Facebook meme page. He’d posted a meme complaining about people’s need to inject politics into Persona 5, an otherwise apolitical game. I found this absurd. The game in which you infiltrate the Japanese Diet building to stop a fascist from stealing an election is apolitical? The game where the personification of humanity’s tendency toward rebellion leads the party into battle to destroy the god of wealth at the center of a panopticon? It was beyond comprehension. But an art form that constrains most of its narratives to center around accruing power through conflict in order to elevate oneself as an individual has maybe inevitably attracted an audience that’s allergic to the idea that fiction can and usually does say something about the real world. And when I say “allergic,” I don’t simply mean “unwilling.” We’ve crossed into a political moment where the arbitrarily-defined level of “woke” in a piece of media determines whether a chunk of people will deign to engage with it at all, but based on my googling, Persona 5 is hilariously considered “not woke” (though Royal is simultaneously both “woke” and “anti-woke,” the remake of Persona 3 is too “woke” to bear, and Metaphor ReFantazio is under scrutiny but they seem to be leaning toward “not woke”). So the line in the sand is whether or not a game comments on the real world, but that line is drawn by people with shockingly low media literacy.

One element of the story that confused me clicked into place once I considered this angle. The game’s world is plagued by huge and brutal monsters called “humans.” In the game's world, the word “human” refers only to these monsters, while the sentient denizens of the game’s world call themselves “people,” or refer to themselves by their fantasy races. It’s bizarre to hear characters talk about “humans” and mean big weird giants that massacre towns and aren’t recognizably human at all. But when we consider this through the lens of a metacommentary on games, this choice comes to make sense. In an RPG, the player is a human roaming through a world of non-humans. They’re infinitely stronger than everyone around them, and in the end, only the human’s decisions matter. Everything exists to placate the human, and if the human refuses to engage with a story on its terms, then that pretty much destroys everything the story is trying to do. Those characters who exist solely to make the human feel something become fodder, to be ground up and discarded by the human. If we look at the relationship between art and audience from the perspective of the art, the audience becomes something like a kaiju, applying its own warped reading to the text, forcing it to submit to that reading. A story only gets to change the world if it first wins that battle with the human, and humans are getting increasingly combative. Obviously, there’s story reasons for the word choice that I won’t spoil here, but they align pretty nicely with my reading.

I really enjoyed Metaphor. It took me 110 hours, and I managed to complete all the social links, beat the extra boss, and unlock every class with the protagonist. A run that doesn't do those things probably could finish it in like 85-90 hours. Either way, it's shorter than Persona 5. I still prefer Persona 5; its politics are much sharper, obviously, but it also has a much bolder and more unique style. But anyone who really enjoys Persona or old-school Final Fantasies should give Metaphor a shot, since it's a pretty fascinating merging of the two, and it uses those associations to comment on the video game medium, the purpose of art in fomenting societal reform, and the shortcomings of liberal democracy. And if you haven't played either, it's a long, complex, standalone RPG in a new ip, which makes for a pretty good jumping-on point to Persona, from which it takes many of its mechanics.

[prokopetz]

Do you happen to know of any games that are like Zelda II and are top down for world exploration and side scroller/ 2D platformed for dungeon exploration? I feel like I'm the only person who enjoyed that format.

The only really prominent example of the type that's come out recently is probably Phoenotopia: Awakening. It's actually a bit too true to its Zelda II inspirations in some respects; the negative reviews that cite stiff controls and player-hostile combat mechanics as the reasons for their thumbs-down aren't wrong. Still, if you can get past a combat system that hates you, everything else about it is excellent.

In terms of older titles, you've got stuff like Elliot Quest and Super Chibi Knight, though they each have their own issues; the former has numerous unpatched gameplay bugs, and the latter was designed by an eight-year-old (yes, seriously) – which is a fun gimmick, but it doesn't always result in the most well-considered gameplay structure.

[ostentenacity]

not a wolqotd more a player-qotd. my friends and i have something we call "Favorites Roulette", which is where we queue up for 5 normal-mode trials/raids that we like and do whichever one we get just for fun. i'm curious to know what other people's "Favorites Roulette" would be! no need to limit yourself to just 5 though, that's just an arbitrary limit because you can only queue for 5 individual instances at once.

any criteria goes! i usually pick fights that i think have fun mechanics but you can pick them for any reason - story relevance, music, sentimental value, etc. no need to stick to 8-player content either if you like dungeons better, my friends and i just do trials and raids because they tend to take 5-10 minutes each whereas dungeons are more like 10-20.

(my own personal favorites + musing on boss fight design under the cut. spoilers ahoy!)

my personal Favorites Roulette (if i could pick more than 5 lol) is:

e11/Anamorphosis (Fatebreaker)

Seat of Sacrifice (Warrior of Light)

Voidcast Dais (Golbez)

o12/Alphascape 4.0 (Omega M/F)

Castrum Marinum (Emerald Weapon)

p10/Anabaseios Tenth Circle (Pandaemonium)

The Final Day (Endsinger)

honorable mentions:

e5/Fulmination (Eden!Ramuh)

e4/Sepulture (Eden!Titan)

Dark Inside (Zodiark)

Storm's Crown (Barbariccia)

once they are no longer current (because we don't typically tend to put very recent things in Favorites Roulette, it's more for revisiting old favorites) i think m1/Black Cat and the final trial of Dawntrail may end up in the mix as well.

in story-mode content i don't tend to like add phases very much, and when they do happen i much prefer an interesting miniboss rather than a crowd of mobs. (this is why Hades didn't make the cut even though i love the rest of that fight.) i tend to like fights which are (to me) mechanically interesting, especially ones which are similar to their higher-difficulty versions - but that's not everything, because Endsinger normal is pretty different from the extreme mode and I prefer the normal one way more, and p9 normal isn't a favorite despite the fact that its one of the most mechanically intricate normal-mode raids in the whole game. i also don't tend to pick a lot of mid-expansion trials, or anything from under level 70, because both of those make doing my rotation feel Weird.

i think it's super interesting to consider what makes boss fights fun for different people! for me personally i tend to value "game feel" a lot and i'm curious if that's the case for anyone else or if i'm an outlier.

[scampir]

Shopping Mall Dungeon Design Sucks

(A repost from my Cohost Page)

Brad Kerr has this great summary on the "kinds of DnD" shared on the Between 2 Cairns podcast:

Door DnD: it's about doors! Going through them, figuring out how to open them, wanting the treasure that's behind them, being scared of what's behind them, sometimes fighting what's behind them but you're more likely to run away or try to outsmart them

Fighty DnD: it's about fighting guys! You wanna fight those guys on the other side of the door! You wanna get real strong and use cool abilities and get those sweet +2 modifiers so you can fight things better

Sticky/Messy DnD: you don't care about the doors unless it makes things messier! Success, failure, no! partial success is what it's all about, anything that makes things more messy and tangled! Kiss who you aren't supposed to! Get in trouble! It's messy!

I remember reading bottom-tier advice fodder on twitter that suggested you could use a map such as this as a template for a dungeon. However, there is one key flaw in the design that I have encountered before, and that's the single access corridor that takes you to all the rooms.

I ran a dungeon in ICON last year which was a 5-story staircase with rooms around the sides of the massive central chamber. In the center was an open pit. Two npcs broke into the dungeon as the players opened the door, and the players immediately went down all the stairs to the bottom to the bossfight. It was one of those moments where I had to grit my teeth and accept that emergent storytelling is in fact emergent, and this was fun and cool actually. Now, I know what my failure was. It was making a Shopping Mall Dungeon.

Here are 3 things presented in my own words that stick out to me about the process of a dungeon crawl:

Everything happens "Indoors" where the structure of the place restricts movement

It's tricky to define where someone is when they are in a corridor (revealing their liminality), but you move through corridors quickly and fluidly to get to different rooms

Rooms enclose relatively self-contained ideas for players to interact with, though players are free to subvert this by taking one self-contained idea and using it to influence another (this is intentionally broad, but you can take fire from one room to burn a rope in another).

These three qualities are the criteria of a "Shopping Mall Dungeon" to me. Something so simple ought to be interrogated! As it turns out, having a long corridor is like having one big room, and when that room is the hub for multiple single rooms that only connect to the center, you lose that sense of depth to the dungeon that stokes the magic of the crawl. Instead, you get a list of doors to work through.

And you know, that's what shopping malls are built for. They aren't built for you to solve or navigate. They aren't built for you to explore. They are built with super-wide corridors for maximum imagined traffic and to expose you to as many storefronts as possible. There is no puzzle to it. Only content.