#it has at least made it a bit easier to pick some of my ttrpg hacks back up

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

update: still 90% soup with occasional bursts of brain cells for either fairly simple things, or more complicated things that burn brain out to Get Into, cannot Articulate into Words, or both. ugggghhhhh

brain is half soup and half eating itself. pokes cautiously at some of my closer-to-being-done solo rpg systems/hacks

[onslaughtsixdotcom]

Heartbreaker vs. Craphack

The difference between a heartbreaker and a craphack is, you think a heartbreaker will be finished.

I started using the word "craphack" a few months ago to talk about my in-progress fantasy d20 elfgame. (This is a separate project from CRAWL, which has entered a process of hibernation. Its no longer in active development.)

I had a lot of names for this thing. It really started when the OGL shit hit the fan and I was already seeing how affordable low-run booklet prints were. The idea of creating a booklet with a bunch of my house rules and favourite tables, and getting it printed, became a kind of cool idea. Simultaneously, WotC quickly jettisoned a bunch of the coolest ideas for 5e 2024. Initially I was like: well, let's compile those ideas and I'll make a home game out of what I liked.

I called this document 5e Killer. This stems from a phrase I said in early 2023: If you are a major TTRPG publisher and you aren't already working on your 5e Killer for release in Fall 2024, you're fucking up.

I am not a major TTRPG publisher. But why not do my own? At least for my home game.

Somewhere I got pissed at the limitations of "sticking to 5e." I also realized I was just tinkering with it. I did finish a version of this doc. We are playing my 5e game with it now. (I do not like the changes 2024 5e, or any other base ruleset, has implemented. I like this setup enough.)

But, this wasn't "done." Many core problems I had with 5e were still sort of there. Unsure of how to solve them, I backburnered it and began looking at other systems. Perhaps I would find someone else's heartbreaker and be able to modify that, or find a perfect beginning point I could launch out of.

I spent most of 2024 experimenting with other ideas and doing other projects, including converting my Dungeon23 megadungeon to OSE, writing it up, and running the Kickstarter. I spent a month and a half making an OSE house rules document and compilation in anticipation of printing that out, both for home use and convention play. While doing this I actually started to solidify some more ideas about what I liked and what I wanted out of...all of this.

While doing this, little bits and pieces have always come into focus. I now have a canonical equipment list for basically all fantasy games going forward. I have a d100 magic item list and I'm slowly working on d100 spells (although Skerples may yet beat me to the punch). And, I found Outcast Silver Raiders, a game I initially called my "forever game," about three weeks after I made my first document compiling info for the latest version of my craphack.

The craphack doesn't exist except in my head. There are like 8 versions of half formed thoughts, in Discord self-messages and Affinity Publisher projects and Google Docs. They are, if anything, a dialogue with myself, wherein I repeatedly ask: What do I want out of the game?

I like the idea of hit die as damage die; weapons shouldnt have variable damage.

I like the idea of saving throws existing separately from skill checks, existing separately from attack rolls.

I like having lots and lots of classes and ancestries. About 10 each is a sweet spot for me.

I like games where you always roll high to succeed. I am not a fan of roll under.

Likewise, I like the DM being able to set a difficulty class/target number for the player to hit, even on skill checks. Some doors are harder to open than others, some locks are harder to pick than others. (The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic exists and is brilliant, but I prefer to use it for situational bonuses: this is an objectively DC15 check but if you do a thing you can have advantage to maybe do it easier.)

I like monsters having simpler statblocks than players do, with their primary stats being hit die and number, AC, and what they can do on their combat turn. I can make them do anything I want outside of that. I'm the DM.

Somewhere I have a table of every monster "type" and their average 5e stats and I want to expand on that to create basically a monster Rosetta stone for this game, combined with established and working power sets, so that I could easily create monsters on the fly during sessions without having to prep them.

I don't mind even the most mundane classes (like fighter and thief) having a few "special abilities," like 5e Action Surge or whatever. But IMO 5e gives you far too many of these, and worse, has too many options. (For my "forever game," I don't think I want subclasses.)

I like OSR vibes for mechanics, but people played heroic games with these same systems for 15 years, and anyone who says otherwise is fucking kidding themselves.

I like and use miniatures but also sometimes use theater of the mind for some encounters, especially against solo non-boss monsters. The system should easily support both.

I like individual initiative. I think there's still some improvement on my "everyone rolls a d6, if the monster beats any players they roll first, btw lower is better" system. I also wish I could use the Initiative Clock but I think it's a little too fiddly.

We don't need bonus actions or minor actions or anything like that. Too much design. You can move and do one other thing.

I like having a defined list of spells and at least semi-Vancian magic with spell slots. I am open to not having spell slots, but spellcasters should still pick from a list of pre-defined spells. No Knave, Cairn, bastards.-style "combine these random words to make a vague spell and work with the DM to figure out what it does" nonsense.

It's REALLY easy to see where all of these ideas sort of overlap and become relevant to how I imagine playing the game and the flow state that I desire. It's rules that don't get in the way and give all players an equal amount of cool shit they can do on their turn besides attacking. It's also easy to see how many games are outright thrown out by what I am imagining: no Cairn, Knave, OSE, Shadowdark, 5e, Five Torches Deep, etc. etc. (The only one that actually does hit the mark is, appropriately, Outcast Silver Raiders.)

So, where does this all coalesce? As I move around pieces and think about this, it might never coalesce. When I was on Take Flight, Cat and I talked about the idea that you might never finish The System, and That's Okay. It can be the old car that your dad tinkers with in the garage every other weekend and says, one day I'll get it all fixed up, I swear. It's his hobby, the same way game design can be your hobby--even if you are also a professional game designer with other projects that definitely are moving forward, being published, that you're doing the work on.

But my craphack exists and I swear one day I'm definitely gonna finish it, for sure.

[siaanme]

So in 2023 I gave myself the goal of beating 52 video games (aka roughly one a week), and that was maybe too much, so in 2024 I instead decided to focus on a single genre (RPGs) and get through 12 of them. Here's what I played (there are more than 12)

Final Fantasy V - Really good. To paraphrase Dan Floyd, any Final Fantasy with a job system is a good Final Fantasy. Glad to have finally beaten this one, considering I poached two of my TTRPG character names from it

Chrono Cross - A fascinating game as a follow up to Chrono Trigger, and individually. Interesting combat system, an incredible soundtrack, way too many party member options

Xenoblade Chronicles - A NG+ replay. Still a fantastic game, even if mechanically it's my least favourite of the Xenoblades.

NEO The World Ends With You - Another replay. It was nice to experience the story while knowing where everything was going this time. Original TWEWY has a special place in my heart, so I'm still glad it finally has a sequel

Xenoblade Chronicles X - So this was the first Xenoblade game I tried to play, though I originally bounced off it. Now that I have more experience with the series it seemed like a good time to revisit it (I can't tell if that's good or bad timing on my part considering the Switch version coming this year). The world exploration in this is great, I wish that you had a bit more team comp freedom for main story missions, and also that your non-active party members still earned XP, but oh well. Glad to have finally played it, maybe I'll play it again this year.

Bravely Default - I had planned on playing all the Bravely games, but this was the only one I got around to. NG+ again, though I didn't carry over too much. A fantastic job system, but the path to the true ending is still such a slog.

Final Fantasy XII - I can see why people really like this one. Great story, the job system introduced in the Zodiac version is great, and the gambit system is a really cool idea.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - So I did some prep work before this playthrough, specifically making sure I had all the rare Blades available to me so I wouldn't have to do any gacha pulls (which I still think is the worst mechanic in this game). Because of that, I could get wild with my party set-up, which was a lot of fun (see prior comment about job systems). I also played the Torna DLC, which to me confirms my thoughts about ditching the gacha system,

Trials of Mana (remake) - Another replay, still very fun mechanically, though requiring specific items to get to level 3 classes is a bit frustrating, and the extra dungeon added in the remake is also a slog

In Stars and Time - I love me a good time loop, and this game delivered. I also took great delight in actually writing down notes for things to do and remember between loops.

Casette Beasts - I also love me some pokémon, but I've not dipped into a lot of other monster collector/battlers. This was a great one to start with, despite some performance issues on Switch.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - I think this is the game I spent longest on this year. A great job system, and coming off all the other Xenoblade games meant it was easier to pick out the connections, especially the landscapes. Plus its story really benefits from the hindsight of knowing what's going on from the get go

Sea of Stars - I still love this game, and the changes made with the recentish Dawn of Equinox update made it even better. I'll admit, I technically didn't beat this, owing to the game crashing when I was most of the way done with the final boss, but I was beating him so I'm claiming victory here.

Visions of Mana - Okay I still haven't beaten this one but I'm enjoying it as an evolution of the Trials of Mana remake. I especially love the class system here, since unlocking a new elemental vessel unlocks a different class per player character, not all the same one. I don't think I've played any other games that take a similar approach, it makes it really interesting trying to distribute roles.

Unicorn Overlord - I also haven't quite beaten this (I'm like 90% through the penultimate mission rn), but I've enjoyed a lot of it. My quibbles with it are still fresh in my mind though, chiefly I wish you could either have more than ten battlions at once (stored if not deployed), or you could save your favourite layouts. The game encourages you early to experiment and remake battalions, but this is honestly more of a pain than its worth, and as such it meant I ended up with a bunch of units sitting by the wayside, unused. But the build-crafting is still very good, even if it does exacerbate my frustrations of having limited slots.

And that's the RPGs I played last year. With one I left out, but I'll get to that discussion another day. Moving forward, this year I'm planning on a similar goal, but with Metroidvanias. Hopefully that'll be fun.