#it very much is not a zero-player game for those out of the loop

[stingyslegslookweird]

update on the whole sims 4 toku house thing

yeah tbh that’s probably on indefinite hiatus. i made a (honestly kinda bad) kuroto, posted about 3-4 times, and haven’t touched it since. if anyone else wants to make their own version of it i give you my full blessing or whatever would be appropriate in this situation. idk. honestly i’m worried i may be stretching myself a bit thin with all my concurrent projects going on, plus life in general being exhausting and confusing. whatever. i’m probably gonna go play the new minecraft update in an attempt to clear my thoughts and then… idk, maybe i’ll write a new obscure kamen rider post. been a while since one of those, hasn’t it? but yeah. that’s all for now.

[wileys-russo]

can i request something with alexia x reader based off one if the videos post win. the one where olga tried scoring on alexia but instead of missing reader makes it and then copies alexias celebration

goalscorer II a.putellas

you weren't sure whose hand would break first, yours or albas, with the way you both had a death grip on one another as the extra time slowly ticked down to zero and it felt as though the entire stadium held its breath.

then finally, the whistle.

for a brief moment it was like time stood still as the players raced onto the pitch, your body on fire as every hair stood on end and the ground beneath your feet vibrated with the thunderous roar of a stadium full of culers.

then arms were thrown around your neck as alexia's family all screamed happily and exchanged hugs, your own parents sat in the row behind forever supportive of your fiancé since the moment you'd taken her home to meet them.

you blinked and suddenly snapped back into reality, the screams deafening in your ear as you were drowned in affection from the elated putellas-segura family surrounding you.

your heart swelled with pride as you finally caught alexia's eye, a beaming grin flashed your way and both her hands waving before she was called over for the trophy and medal ceremony.

eventually you were all ushered down toward the front of the barrier, eli and alba going first as they engulfed your fiance in bear hugs, both women with tears streaming down their faces as alexia rolled her eyes playfully and squeezed them tighter.

with a nudge in the back from her uncle and a wink you were next, two strong hands helping you over the barrier as your feet touched the pitch and your eyes remained locked with the blonde grinning down at you.

time once more seemed to stop and suddenly it was just the two of you, your congratulations and how proud you were murmured over and over in her ear as finally your arms wrapped around one another and you'd never felt safer than being within them.

you let out a laugh as you were held tighter and lifted momentarily up into their air, spun around for a moment as alexia's forehead pressed against yours, lips just grazing your cheek both of you well aware that despite the intimacy of your embrace it was anything but a private moment.

"taking your captain title to a new level mi amor." you teased, tugging at the barcelona flag draped around her shoulders like a makeshift cape, reeling in the very slight blush which coated her cheeks at your words which you knew if you called her out on she would dismiss as flush from running around.

"captain catalunya, hero of barcelona." you grinned, kissing her cheek and stepping away for a moment to allow some of her childhood friends to rush in and express their own congratulations, dragged away by alba to speak with your own parents and eli.

"no i did not!" you denied with bright red cheeks as your father embellished a story of how the first time you'd watched one of alexia's games with them at home you'd almost thrown the remote through the screen when your girlfriend at the time was fouled.

"stop laughing! you'll just encourage him." you shoved alba who only threw her head back as you playfully shot your grinning father a glare, relaxing as familiar arms looped around your waist and a chin settled on your shoulder.

"hola amor." the soft raspy murmur as a subtle kiss was placed on your jaw and you melted backwards into your lovers touch as praise for her showered down from those around you.

"hermana! we were just talking about the time that-" alba started as you kicked at her causing the girl to gasp and shove you, alexia's hand shooting out to swat her sisters away and a warning look set in her features as alba rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out, turning around to converse elsewhere.

"aye go speak to maría's parents, mami take him away por favor he has had too much sun!" you groaned catching the teasing look on your fathers face and nodding behind them where your second parents milled around happily, your childhood best friend nowhere in sight.

though it wasn't long before she made an appearance, bursting out of the tunnel yelling at the top of her lungs, brandishing her little barcelona flag that had acted like an emotional support throughout her injury.

you'd tried scheming with ingrid to get rid of it after mapi started to sleep with it in the bed and then almost took your eye out waving it around like a mad woman as you sat beside her at a game, alexia almost snapping it herself after seeing the deep purple bruise under your right eye where your best friend had accidentally poked you with it.

but watching the childlike joy twinkle brightly in her eyes as she raced around like an overgrown toddler, chased by lucy's neice and nephew you couldn't help but smile and shake your head.

"maybe she will retire the flag now we are four for four this season and she will be back on the pitch soon." alexia chuckled, still hugging you tightly as you grinned, leaning your head back to catch her eye as she winked.

"at least it has been a distraction from her making us say thank you every time we go out with her and ingrid." you rolled your eyes, turning in her hold to face your girlfriend who hummed.

it had indeed been mapi who introduced the two of you after a game years ago, a friendship blossoming between you and alexia long before a relationship. but despite that the tattooed defender relished in the ego boost felt from telling anyone with ears that it was all thanks to her that you two were together.

"can you imagine her speech at the wedding?" you sighed with a shake of your head, alexia letting go of you to fiddle about with the flag tied around her, picking at the knot.

"i remember the day they first met, because it was all thanks to me that we are even gathered here today! chica's...you are so welcome." alexia mocked making you laugh as she pulled the flag off.

"maybe i can get her so drunk she will pass out before the speeches?" you suggested, your fiancé instead draping the flag around you and tying it loosely over your shoulders.

"a perfect plan cari." the blonde winked, squeezing your shoulders. "who is captain catalunya now?" the footballer teased, tugging at your new cape and glancing over your head where her name was called for more photos.

"go amor, i'll find you later." you promised, squeezing her hands as she nodded and pulled you into another tight hug, lips grazing the side of your head as you softly rubbed her back and begrudgingly let go, her figure retreating into the swarm of people on the pitch.

you were mid conversation with some of the other girls families, stood beside alba and twisting around your engagement ring on your finger when she struck.

"campeones! campeones! campeones!" you hurtled forward nearly barreling over jana's parents as a body launched themselves onto you, legs wrapping around your torso as panos hurried to steady you.

"gracias! lo siento." you thanked the goalkeeper before profusely apologising to jana's parents as the young midfielder was busy doubled over laughing, your cheeks bright red at the disruption.

"mierda!" the brunette swore as you wrenched her legs off, causing her to drop promptly onto the ground with a wince, jana falling to the floor laughing even harder as alba joined in and mapi glared up at you with a huff.

"algunos bienvenidos. is that a way to greet your best friend!" the girl pouted as you rolled your eyes and pulled her back to her feet. "maría!" you groaned as once more she launched onto you, this time in another forceful koala hug but from the front.

"campeones de europa!" the girl threw her head back and screamed, a smile unable to stay off your face as you held her thighs and she grabbed your cheeks, kissing your forehead over and over with a repeated loud mwah noise.

"vale vale!" you laughed, dropping her again though this time she remained on her feet, the two of you hugging normally as you told her how proud you were. "i did not even play idiota!" the older girl shoved your head as the two of you pulled away.

"no, but your contributions to the team morale and being their biggest supporter even not on the pitch mean just as much. you know that, sí?" you promised, tone softening as did the defenders face. "gracias mi chica." the girl smiled, kissing your cheek and waving her flag around which she snatched up off the ground.

"if you poke her eye with that flag again león we are going to have a problem." you smiled as your fiance slotted herself in behind you again, a warning look at the tattooed footballer in front of you making mapi roll her eyes.

"tan dramática her eye healed fine! and she almost broke my flag." the girl cradled the piece of cloth and plastic tenderly in her arms, stroking it like you might a newborn making you roll your eyes.

"oh i am so sorry my poor face nearly broke your stupid flag maría." you shook your head feeling alexia chuckle as her body vibrated against your back. "gracias, now was that so hard?" mapi smiled as you lunged for her and she raced off.

"idiota." you rolled your eyes allowing alexia to lead you away back toward where your families were milling about.

"mi amor." you looked up from speaking with your mother, raising an eyebrow to your fiance who held up a tiny football in her hands with a suggestive grin.

"really?" you chuckled, but sighing in acceptance when her grin didn't drop, gesturing for her to give you the ball as she rolled it to you and backed into goal.

"vamos bebé, score a goal! if you can." the blonde teased in challenge. "what do i get when i score putellas?" you questioned crossing your arms, foot resting on top of the small childrens football.

"if you score, anything you want preciosa." alexia grinned cockily as you rolled your eyes and backed up a few steps. "remember to kick the ball and not the air amor!" your fiance continued to tease.

"vamos captain barça, maybe we will get you a job as the water girl for the team!" you turned to shoot your best friend a murderous glare as her face paled and she scurried off to find ingrid no doubt, her much better other half.

spurred on by the lack of faith from your loved ones, even your own father joining in with alexia's teasings, you took one more step back and lurched forward.

you made sure to do exactly as you'd watched your fiance do a million times in your backyard, driving your foot forward and following through, the ball zooming forward at a pace alexia clearly didn't anticipate as it shot past her.

you let out a cheer and pumped your fist in the air, racing around in a circle and grabbing the bottom of your alexia's jersey intending to tug it off exactly the way the blonde had an hour prior after her own goal.

"ale!" you laughed as a strong arm wrapped around your waist and another swatted your hand away. "mi amor you are ruining my celebration." you tutted with a shake of her head and a sigh.

"my celebration, and you are keeping that shirt on!" your fiance warned as you rolled your eyes and she teasingly flicked your ear. "oh wait-" you pushed away from her as she looked on curiously.

you cleared your throat and took a dramatic bow, a few onlookers clapping and cheering making you grin and alexia now the one to roll her eyes. "mm hilarious princesa."

"i thought so. now cariño...what was that about anything i wanted?"

[lamaison]

Well, I've spent about four days with Zenless Zone Zero (and truly other than my Genshin and HSR dailies it's all I've played in those four days). I'm at the beginning of Chapter 2 in the story, where they soft lock you behind Inter-Knot level 30. I've also played a small about of the Hollow Zero and Shiryu Defense modes.

So time for some non-spoilery thoughts!

In terms of combat, it's very fun! I was worried it would be too frenetic for me, but it does a good job of prompting you. The perfect assist is so satisfying. I appreciate the option to select casual or challenge difficulty. I'm on casual difficulty and I'm starting to get to more difficult content, but the regular story missions are honestly hard to fail on casual.

I know a lot of people have problems with the monitor portions, but I enjoy them. There have been some fun puzzles with these and I love a good puzzle. I had a few problems where it wasn't responsive but that was my only frustration and that might just be my internet connection.

The activity loop is enjoyable too. You can definitely see the inspiration from Persona with the day being divided into sections and actually feeling like time is passing. And there's a good balance between activities that cost energy and those that don't. It's not open world but very similar to Persona there are small areas of the city you can travel to (I do wish these spaces were a little bit larger however, it seems kind of silly to have three fast travel points within the very small construction site area)

THIS is the comedy Hoyo game - they tried to sell HSR as the comedy and it's funny, but this is over the top. I have laughed out loud at multiple points. The animation in the cut scenes works for it too; it has a bouncy quality that fits the tone. They must have their own animation team because the quality of the cut scenes is so different from Genshin/HSR.

I really like that no matter which sibling you chose to play as, both Wise and Belle are present and active in the story. They also have individual rooms above the video shop!

I like the story so far - it's got enough to hook me for the moment. I'm excited that it looks like we might be able to get outside the city in the story that's available now. I'm just not far enough to tell for sure. Also lore players rejoice, they gave us a reason to play the roguelike mode! You're able to pick up lore clues like audio files within these levels so at least for me now I have an actual motivation to play that.

I ADORE the city and NPC design. Hoyo has really struggled with interesting NPC design, reusing the same bodies with different outfits. Here the NPCs have many different bodies and outfits and it adds so much life to the city. You can also run into current and possible future playable characters in the overworld.

Finally, props to ZZZ to be the Hoyo game brave enough to go full furry and not just humans with animal ears/tails. I love the bears that work at the construction company.

Overall, I've enjoyed my time with it so far and I'm going to continue playing.

[relicsongmel]

Tell me the Pokémon music thoughts??? :000

TWO whole Pokemon music asks WOOHOO!!!!! These past few days I’ve been on a kick of listening to Scarlet and Violet’s OST and downloading my faves (since I wanted to wait until the DLC had been released and then play through it fully before doing so) and it might be one of my favorite soundtracks to date. That being said here are the tracks I’m currently the most feral about:

Battle! (Team Star Boss)

The loop for this one is almost SIX MINUTES LONG which is a smart choice for how long and difficult some of these fights tend to be—and it’s six minutes of pure unadulterated musical goodness. Obviously the killer synths and guitars are a highlight here, but what really makes this theme (and the rest of the Team Star themes) special is how the harsh instrumentation is contrasted with sections containing emotional melodies and harmonies that give a sense of determination and hope—which fits in with Team Star’s storyline as former victims of bullying and doing their best to persevere in spite of that. All their themes are also composed by one of their bosses in-universe which is a fun lore detail (shoutout to my boy Giacomo I love him <3)

South Province

This one basically functions as the theme of the Paldea Region—this leitmotif (composed by our beloved Toby Fox) appears a LOT in various places within the soundtrack, particularly in cutscenes. It’s a great theme for exploring out and about in the game’s open world, and the sunny A major is a great key choice which is always a win in my book. I’m also a big fan of the piano version that plays while you’re walking in the overworld (as opposed to using your mount Koraidon/Miraidon) as well as the beautiful arrangement used at the end of the main story (if I had a nickel for every time a piano theme at the end of a Pokemon game made me cry I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice).

Showdown! (Champion Kieran)

I haven’t had a lot of time to get myself acquainted with much of the DLC soundtrack, but I wanted to include at least one in this list because there’s a lot of quality stuff worth shouting out. This is the last of Kieran’s three battle themes (technically there’s four but the final one isn’t a full battle and is mostly comprised of Terapagos’ motif as opposed to his own so I’m omitting it here) and there’s an interesting transformation that happens across each of them—it starts out mostly with traditional instrumentation and only mild chromaticism (which almost all battle themes have at least a little of) but transforms into something harsher by adding electric guitars/synths and more dissonant, darker harmonies (this one makes heavy use of Phrygian and Locrian elements—Phrygian is a mode that’s very similar to the minor scale but uses a flat 2nd scale degree, so for a piece in E minor like this one that would mean using an F natural as opposed to an F#. Locrian is the same as Phrygian but with a flat 5 added as well, meaning B♭ as opposed to B natural. These flat notes serve to darken the overall sound), which corresponds to Kieran’s arc of becoming bitter and resentful as he suffers repeated losses at the hands of the player. I’m also tickled by the fact that his battle themes are all in E minor which is the softest and gentlest minor to my ears—you can hide under those edgy guitars all you want Kieran but we all know you’re still baby :3

Area Zero

And we’ve saved the best for last because this is hands down my FAVORITE theme from this game; it’s not even a contest. I have such a vivid memory of playing through Scarlet for the first time a year ago and being incredibly intrigued about what was hiding in the massive crater at the region’s center (I tried flying/leaping in with Koraidon and lurking outside the Zero Gate yelling “LET ME INNNN” more times than I can count lmao)—and I was not at all disappointed when I got there because this is straight up one of the prettiest areas in the whole game. However. HOWEVER. NOTHING could have possibly prepared me for the breathtakingly beautiful music that accompanies this place—I remember stopping in my tracks as soon as I heard that low brass kick in, and then the chanting. Oh my lord the CHANTING. Honestly I was sold right then and there but WE’RE STILL NOT DONE MAKING THE MUSIC OF THE GODS BECAUSE SWEET MOTHER MARY THAT SYNTH????? TOOK ME THE FUCK OUT—I lose my everliving shit at anything even resembling an erhu in music because its voice-like timbre is so…raw and emotional in a way I really don’t know how to describe; all I know is it rocks me to my core to the point that I have to watch my breathing when I listen to a piece that has one lest I start hyperventilating (because it’s powerful enough to literally induce a physiological response out of me). Needless to say I was frozen in place for at LEAST ten minutes just to take it all in; that initial experience was utterly magical and I wish more than anything I could go back in time to live that feeling again.

But that very long preface aside, there are a couple other things about this piece worth noting—the first being that E♭ minor is an IMMACULATE key choice in my opinion. In my synesthesia it primarily represents what I call “the crushing black weight of despair,” but it also functions very nicely in any intense, high-stakes situation, which fits beautifully with the circumstances surrounding Area Zero in-game. It’s a walled garden filled with invasive wildlife from the distant past/future that poses an imminent threat to Paldea’s ecosystem should they find a means of escaping to the outside; in fact, we learn from the professor that some species have already managed to do so. I also quite like how the instrumentation is vastly different from every other piece of music you’ll hear in Paldea’s overworld, which has primarily been orchestral arrangements up to this point—but here, it’s a blend of primal and futuristic sounds that perfectly captures the collision of the present and the past/future. So yeah if you couldn’t tell I am so so so so unhinged about everything this theme represents and I fully expect to be just as mentally unwell about it YEARS down the line (because believe me, I’ve certainly got the track record for it).

Scarlet and Violet’s music is just so so good—and again, obligatory “this is just the tip of the iceberg that is everything I love about this soundtrack” but I hope you enjoyed my insights into what makes this music so special!

[yamchaisawesome]

My Dungeon Master Tips

If any of you are beginning your journey as dungeon masters or are thinking about doing it, here are some tips. Note: These are not universal, these are just the things that work for me and the people I have DMed for. If anyone else wants to add something, feel free. Now, onto the things.

Preparing to DM

Know the rules pretty well. I know, no brainer but this is pretty important. You don’t have to know everything, I still use references all the time, just make sure you have a solid grasp of the rules, especially if you’re GMing a different system.

The DMG is a very useful resource. Nothing less, nothing more. Puffin Forest once said “Learning to DM from the DMG is like learning to read from the dictionary”. It’s a great tool to help you out and if you’re asking a specific question, it’s probably in the DMG.

Learn to improvise. This comes naturally to some people, others not so much, but you will need it. Find some online improv classes if you need it.

Understand that everyone is there to have a good time. Don’t let the players push you around but make sure that they’re having fun. DND is a cooperative game.

Getting the campaign started

Find people you like to play with. These could be your friends, your family, your significant other, maybe randos you meet at a local game store who usually become your friends after a while. Heck, you could even get your cat to play.

Scheduling, I hate this part. Find a time that works for all of you. This doesn’t have to be once a week, could be every fortnight or once a month. As long as it is a regular time that you can all plan for.

Tell your players that you’re only planning to do like 2-4 sessions and do the starting quest in that time. Then, if they’re invested, you can continue. People don’t like to do commitments until after they’re invested.

Session Zero. Optional but highly recommended, have your first session not be one where you play but instead one where you make characters and lay out some ground rules. Boundaries, tone of the game, what character options will be allowed, etc. Hopefully by the end you and your players will have gotten a solid grasp of what everyone else wants.

Writing a Campaign

Make sure you have a solid idea of what’s generally going on in the background of the world outside of your characters. This is good for all storytelling but especially TTRPGs. This is due to the teensy weensy fact that your main characters are also the audience and that you are not in complete control. Eventually, something they do is going to throw you for a loop and you have to scramble for what to do next. Having a good idea of what’s going on in the background makes this a lot easier as you can essentially look at the situation the world was in and extrapolate from there.

As a general tip, start off your adventure with a pretty low stakes quest to get the players attached to their characters, subtly foreshadowing future events. Give them some fun NPCs they like, give them a few trinkets and the opportunity for some cool character moments. This makes those big moments that throw everything into peril a lot more impactful. Players can’t really properly visualise the threat of the world being in peril, but if they have something in that world that they care about like an NPC or that tavern they won a dragon chess tournament and have a free drinks for life voucher at, suddenly they have something to fight for.

When writing NPCs, start off with some foundational features. Think about what they look like, some basic personality traits, maybe how they talk. If they’re for more than a quick one off; think about their relationship with the party and other NPCs and something about their past. If you have them as main NPCs, flesh them out even more. These don’t have to be done all at once. If your party likes a random one off NPC with not much planned, just flesh them out more as they go and make them a bit more important to the plot.

Pick up what your party puts down. If they make a joke, maybe think about making it a plot point. If they make a prediction that you think makes more sense than what you had in mind, don’t feel ashamed to do it. If your party gets attached to some random npc, flesh them out more as per the last point. This makes the players feel included and either makes them feel smarter than they are or have an “Oh shit” moment.

As an addition to the previous point, if one of your players told you something they’re uncomfortable with, don’t put it in the campaign. If they tell you this after you put it in, do your best to get it out of the campaign in future. Don’t ruin that player’s experience.

Playing the Game

Set the ambience, get some music on, add on some custom maps and some good miniatures if you have the money, maybe light some candles. Getting the atmosphere right really gets the immersion going. Even if it’s a little thing, it gets them going.

If you’re playing with more experienced players, fuck around with the monster stat blocks. This makes sure to make things interesting for them. If you don’t know how to do it, check the DMG.

Get the right ratio of roleplay, combat, and exploration for your your party. Discuss this in session zero if you can and adjust when necessary.

Account for your party’s strengths and weaknesses in combat. IE: if your party is entirely composed of martials and you haven’t given them magic weapons, don’t put them up against something that’s resistant or immune to non magical damage.

Whether in combat, roleplay, or exploration, use the terrain to your advantage. Make hazardous obstacles and potential booby traps for combat, make interesting challenges and solutions for exploration, and make the terrain in which your NPCs live inform their lives.

Don’t be afraid to take a break if you’re burnt out. Worst case scenario: DnD is off for a couple weeks. Best case scenario: one of your players DMs a one shot for you.

Other Resources

r/DMacademy on Reddit is a place where you can ask other DMs questions.

ZeeBashew on YouTube does great videos on DnD and especially DMing.

World Anvil is an incredible world building tool.

Most* of the official pre made adventures or the DMG are super useful resources.

* The adventures to avoid are Hoard of The Dragon Queen and Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos. Seriously, they are awful. One’s painfully railroady and the other is more barebones than a lich.

Hope these are useful. Have fun DMing

[olderthannetfic]

Sort of in re m/m ships versus mysogyny, I (a man) remember once talking with a friend (a cis woman), and saying that we need more video games with female player characters. My reasoning was that, aside from a tiny handful of very well written exceptions I find it difficult to really get immersed in a female character, and women who game deserve the same immersive experience that's so easy for me to find in game with male protagonists.

And my friend pointed out something I hadn't actually noticed before; most female video game protagonists aren't nearly as engaging and immersive and well written as their male counterparts. She mentioned that a lot of female protagonists don't feel immersive and realistic to her, too, and that she doesn't have much trouble identifying with a male character and getting the same immersion out of it I do. Her point was that it isn't just more female characters that we need, but better written ones. What we want to see people like herself actually portrayed in games with the same quality of writing as people like myself.

Which loops around to the point this ask is making; if people are going to ship the most interesting or well written characters of a random show, those characters are most likely going to be men, and that's a problem with the writing of the source material, not with the tastes of the shippers.

--

I think, also, it's a mistake to treat this as too 1:1 because gender roles are not exactly equal and equivalent.

Millennia of patriarchy mean that "default human" = male. No matter how feminist we personally are, we get fed a fair amount of this attitude growing up. Women have been trained from birth to identify with male characters. Men have not been so trained about female characters.

Exactly how this plays out in a given person's tastes years later and what we should do about it is another story, but I do think women are going to relate more to male characters on average than the reverse.

I don't play a ton of games, and for anything where you choose your player character, I always pick male characters. I think the last thing that really struck me that I played and that had a female player character the whole time was Tomb Raider II.

(TBH, asking me to relate more to a female character feels less like progress and more like bioessentialism, and I think this is true for a ton of women but far fewer men due to that sense of Default Human vs. Marked Category of Woman.)

Not only is Lara usually not very fleshed out, but she's a protagonist you're supposed to want to fuck, not one you're supposed to want to be. I like ladies, and this is no problem for me, but it certainly doesn't make me want more Lara Crofts to identify with.

It's not always even about realism but about the subtle factors that tell you the intent behind the character.

The real change would be to employ teams entirely of people writing for a female audience with zero intention that the game play well to any man ever. A lot of fanfic and a lot of the romance novel industry are like that, and it doesn't mean entirely female characters. It means a certain sensibility.

[deusvervemakesgames]

Project RBH Devlog 0020

You know, this game has a lot of bullets in it. Like, a lot. And explosions. And those rings of bullets. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot of things that can hurt you moving across the entire screen at once and that’s only going to get worse as development continues. The player has zero defensive options besides physically moving, and no way to recover health except for a single powerup based on random chance.

So I added in a way to dodge.

(For some reason, this GIF is bigger than any of my other ones so I had to tweak it a bit for Tumblr to handle. As such it looks better on my Patreon. Apologies for the inconvenience)

Dodging itself is actually pretty simple: it takes the direction you’re currently moving and moves you that direction at four times your base movement speed. The trick is making sure that you’re invincible while doing this action. Luckily, the easiest way to implement the dodge input solved this issue for me. I turned the player code into a state machine.

A state machine is very straightforward, really. Instead of having all of the player movement and damage handling and attacking code in the player object itself, I turned that all into a function that the player object calls. The dodge input switches over to a different function instead, the one that makes you go fast. Doing this also means that the player movement controls and attack code stop working during the dodge. More importantly, so does the code that makes the player take damage. End result is a functional dodge action.

The particle effect is a little trickier. It’s not technically a particle system that GameMaker has built into the engine, much like the damage numbers that I discussed in the previous DevLog. It’s an object that I repeatedly create during the dodge action. The object itself decreases in opacity, fading away quickly and deleting itself once it’s entirely invisible. The color also shifts over time, rapidly changing from that reddish-purple to a sky blue as it fades. While the code itself was simple enough, the specific numbers that I needed in order to achieve the effect that I wanted took some trial and error.

Oh and then I found another game breaking bug that I wasn’t aware of, because my work is never finished. You might recall the status effects that I added a while back? It turns out that if an enemy has multiple status effects applied to them, when one of those statuses runs out, the game crashes. It turns out the fix for this was as easy as a single line of code once I realized what the problem was. The For loop that runs to make the effects of each status work sets its size by how many status effects currently apply to the enemy. This number, the ‘length’ of the array, is never changed, even if the actual length of the array does. As a result, when a status runs out, the For loop attempts to run code that no longer exists and freaks out. So all I had to do was reset the ‘length’ variable within the For loop and the problem was resolved.

I’ve still got so much ahead of me, and I’m not totally sure what I want to tackle next. I need way more powerups, but to get more powerups I need to expand the current placeholder powerup section system so that it can display the description of each upgrade. I also need a few more status effects. I’m pretty sure there’s a bug in the code that limits how many times any given upgrade appears, and I need to make sure that’s resetting correctly when the player dies. The enemies spawn in pretty much every room with no regards for the player. There’s nothing to find in the dungeon except the exit. And the enemy AI is about as simplistic as it’s possible to be.

Ah well. My work is never finished.

Until next Devlog!

-DeusVerve

Special thanks to my Tier 3 Patrons, Haelerin and Christos Kempf!

Support me on Patreon to get Early Access to builds!

[cant-icle]

let me introduce yall to my new obsession, "arven time travels to the past to punch his dad in the fuckin dick"

spoilers below!

soooo first of all, theres no way turo's research wasn't funded in part by uva academy. it's the single most important building on the goddamn continent. almost everybody cycles through there, even if only for basic education, and there are adult students of all ages in uniform across paldea. it's also sitting right on top of area zero. why would the 805 year old institution of knowledge NOT fund journeys into one of paldea's last great frontiers?

either way you shake it, arven is the child of a certified genius. not only that, he has a way with pokemon to rival certified champion Nemona, who raises a team to champion-level within the time frame that the player character does. he's also undoubtedly been raised entirely at and by the school since turo prime bit the big one.

shit in turo's lab is locked to his ID. is that a genetic lock? it would definitely be the most secure, and the easiest way to loop arven in if/when he'd been old enough. (turo did still think of arven sometimes, pls take this shitty heartwrenching pic from a whiteboard in the lab at the bottom of area zero)

now. I have a lot of trouble coming to terms with what turo did with regards to his research (where the fuck did he get so many master balls). what I also have trouble with is the pokemon that he obtained. like, okay. we have rotom and porygon and magnemite so clearly pokemon can be metal and data and objects but like, that much variance? of that many species? and they're all cybermons?

I'd like to posit that Turo didn't actually end up snapping a link to the future.

I'd like to instead suggest that he may have snapped a link sideways into an alternate dimension.

it just DOESNT MAKE SENSE that all those pokemon could be so similar to their counterparts here but share the same like, sort of machinery. and the same for the past pokemon, like, there's no reason for them ALL to be like feathery and extraneous. they're literally called paradox pokemon too!

we have explicit evidence from past games that there are other dimensions that contain pokemon or pokemon-like beasts, similar enough that slight changes in pokeball manufacturing can capture then. we have explicit evidence from past games that alien lifeforms have come to earth (deoxys, eternatus) and are also pokemon or pokemon-like that they can be captured in a pokeball. how much further is it to jump that whatever created the paldea crater a million years ago or whatever had something in it/planted a seed that eventually grew the Tera crystals etc?

purposeful terastellization only became a thing when the professor figured it out, so it's something EXTREMELY new to the region. still need to figure if like, Tera dungeons and wild Tera pokemon are the same or if they've been there for a while, leading into this next thought>>

what if the tera crystallization is contagious? its very explicitly growing over and into the lab at the bottom of area zero, so there's like, significant growth happening either way. it's not too farfetched to think that one of the braviary or corviknight in the crater made it out and shed a few crystals etc, like a virus.

all this to say that I think after the events of the game, it would be just. fantastic. if during his final treasure hunt arven decides that his treasure is going to be figuring out how his dad's research worked explicitly so he can use it to go back in time and punch him in the dick

[misscaptainbear]

A while back I wrote a blog on how I'd make a soulslike using retro hardware, I'm gonna repost it here :D

I suffer from an affliction many programmers and game developers can sympathize with: We tend to have so, so many ideas and nowhere near enough time to execute them. I'm toying with the idea of making a blog talking about random ass concepts of the above variety, while merging design, programming, and rendering topics. If anyone wants to implement this scatterbrained mess, may god have mercy on their souls. At the very least, I hope it's a fun read.

This idea came from a remark from a designer friend of mine while we were discussing the soulslike games, something to the effect of "Y'know what? Souls games have the gameplay of a Playstation 2 game with better graphics". He was more right than he thought, having said that a year or two before the release of the Bloodborne PS1 Demake, (shoutout to @b0tster!!!) which I will always take the opportunity to share.

But, both the above planted a brain worm that I couldn't shake; what might happen if you pushed it even further? Is a soulslike game even possible on earlier hardware? Say, the SNES?

What is a Soulslike?

Obviously seminal genres mean different things to different people, so I'm going to oversimplify here as a way to define the goals for this thought experiment. I think genres are composed of tropes, so I’ll list a few important ones here that I think any soulslike game would require.

Combat that rewards skill, rhythm, and spatial understanding

Complex world maps that allow progress to unlock shortcuts or alternate routes

Misanthropic lore that puts the players struggle into a larger context

Core game loop of attempting to progress to a checkpoint, either failing, returning, or unlocking the next stepping stone.

What can the SNES do?

Not much, honestly. That’s kind of the fun of the thought experiment. It’s specifically designed for 2D sprite-based games. For example, the background rendering hardware takes a map of tiles and the locations they map to, and draws them on screen using a palette.

There are some additional tricks that aren’t apparent in the system. You can set the hardware to several modes, Mode 7 being the most infamous and directly related to what we’re talking about today. Simply put, it allows the linear transformations of the background [1]. By changing settings for every scanline, it also allows affine transformations, like those in camera projection transformations [2]. This allows for a crude simulation of a 3d plane, similar to Mario Kart or Pilot Wings.

Mode 7 in F-Zero

In addition to background layers, the SNES hardware is also designed to support drawing sprites to the screen. These are also drawn from a table using a palette, and given several attributes, like position and priority [3].

Pixel data and palette data combine to form the final sprite

The SNES can show up to 128 sprites on screen. Those sprites can have up to 15 colors + transparent, and they can be up to 64x64 pixels. There can only be 32 sprites shown on a horizontal scanline at a time.

What Does our Souls Game Look Like?

Since I think it’s important to retain the three dimensionality of both the combat and the world exploration, I feel the game should at least attempt to break out of the 2d hardware a little. Another important part of the games is the situational awareness that the third-person camera affords.

I find that concept of a screenshot really help communicate the intent of what the game might look like.

As far as tone and mood, obviously it should be dark and brooding. For fun and just to pick something, I’ve settled on a biblical, angels-and-demons theme, set in a world destroyed by their war. More on the lore later. The souls games do a really good job at dividing the game into iconic, recognizable sections. Castle corridors, dripping caves, haunted moors, and barren wastelands are all on the table. Here’s some concept doodles illustrating some of the locations.

How the Hell do we Render These?

So, the SNES doesn't have native 3D support, but we’re circling around the concept of a 3D game - we’re in trouble, right? Well, only sort of.

Before 3D acceleration hardware (e.g graphics cards) became common, games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld made do with limited processors, rendering the game directly using software. We’re going to adapt the concepts they used for those games - and we know these things are totally possible, because we’re able to see them in action with SNES Doom [4]. However, this uses the Super FX chip, and I’d like to avoid (hypothetically) using that if possible, so we’ll focus on techniques that aren’t reliant on rendering lots of polygons.

StarFox uses shaded polygons and on occasion texture mapped polygons, but requires the use of the Super FX chip on the cartridge.

We’ll start by talking about the techniques used in Wolfenstein 3D and Super 3D Noah’s Ark [5]. They use a grid-based raycasting renderer. The algorithm for drawing the screen is fairly simple, as follows [6].

Consider a map that is a grid of either floor or wall blocks. For each horizontal pixel in the game, shoot out a ray line into the world, and calculate how far it travels before hitting a wall. Save that distance number and also where along the wall it hits. 

Next, draw a vertical strip of pixels, the height of which is a multiple of the distance the ray for that column traveled. For example, a far away wall should draw a short vertical bar of pixels, and a nearby wall would draw taller. 

You can enhance this by using which wall was hit to look up which texture should be drawn, and by changing the color to draw based on the distance, giving a fog or fade to black looking effect.

Intersection calculations only need to be done on grid boundaries

This technique is possible on the SNES as demonstrated with Super 3D Noah’s Ark, but it also produces uninteresting, repetitive square maps. With just a little bit of adjustment, I think we can tweak it to still be performant, and to display more interesting maps.

First, let’s add a conceptual height to each box. This is a value that adds to the vertical strip of pixels in addition to the distance-height scaling mentioned previously. However, it’s important to only consider this for the upper half of the screen, and to clip the vertical strip when it touches the “ground plane”.

This would stretch the pixels vertically by 2, but I don’t think it’s a big deal for this sort of aesthetic.

This technique works fine as long as the player can’t get above or below the pseudo-polygons enough to look at them obliquely, but since our player and camera are going to be glued to a constant height, this is not a problem.

The other issue is that of the grid. As mentioned, this produces uniformly similar maps that are uninteresting, and since souls games are sustained by complex map design, we need to break that grid. 

Doom uses a technique called Binary Space Partitioning, where the walls to render are pre-calculated per each room (‘sector’), and the walls of the room the player is standing in are drawn first. Then, any doors or windows that link this room to another are filled in recursively, as long as the camera has a view of them [7]. The drawback of this technique is that it is both memory intensive (having to store the pre-calculate sectors and connections), and it is computationally intensive, requiring the use of the Super FX chip onboard the cartridge.

We’re going to use a lower-fidelity version of this approach. Consider a room that can be represented as a list of lines that forms a convex polygon. Each line can either be a wall or a portal to another room.

We’ll assume we know what room the player is in, and the direction they’re facing. To draw a room, we cast a whisker ray from the left-most pixel of the virtual camera, and iterate all of the room’s lines to find an intersection. Do this again for the right-most pixel. This gives us the bound indices, and the lines between those bounds are the only ones to raycast against in order to draw them to the screen. In fact, the line the previous ray hit and the immediate left and right lines are the only ones needed to test for each new collision.

As we iterate the vertical bars, I would also go from the edges of the screen inward - drawing the right and left most pixels first, and ending at the center of the screen. This will become apparent why in a moment.

Portals present a unique case. If we cast a ray that intersects a portal, we re-cast a whisker ray using that new room as the list of lines. If we draw from the screen edge, inward, we can pause this side of the image and wait until the other side “finds” the same portal as we do, and cast another whisker ray on the other side to re-establish the bounds to iterate. Note that this will work if and only if the portals are a single line flanked by two walls, enforcing the case where a portal strictly connects only two sectors. Also, limiting this portal depth to only one would be prudent. Drawing the fog-color for the portals in connecting rooms would probably look fine.

Disclaimer: Since I haven’t actually done the legwork of implementing this on hardware, I have no idea exactly how (non) performant this would be. My guess is that it’d probably be possible on hardware with some compromises, maybe having to sacrifice texture mapping, fog effects, or walls having different heights. Possibly all three. We would probably also consider halving the vertical and horizontal resolution of the 3D effects, which would speed up rendering significantly. For the sake of having fun graphics in the mockups, I’m just going to assume we get to keep those features, and can render at full resolution, and proceed onward.

From there we can start to have some fun. It’s nigh impossible to draw things like round cylinders and spheres, so I’d recommend the tried-and-true method of using camera-facing sprites to enhance low-poly graphics. Things like the caps of castle towers and roofs of huts, can be added with this method. Other world objects like the player, enemies, trees, and items will also be drawn to the screen this way. (Note: All of the mockups of the game in this blog were rendered in Unity, but strictly followed the rules of the SNES and the limitations described above)

Note that the tree and spire sprites are rendered in world-space, and are therefore much lower resolution. The player sprite would be rendered in screen-space using the hardware supported sprites, allowing it to be much higher resolution.

We can also pull some other interesting tricks. For the floor, we can render out a tilemap using the Mode 7 technique described above. For an exterior, we can scroll the background tiles to line up forming a horizon skybox. For interior scenes, like for castles and caves, we can mirror the floor technique to create a ‘ceiling’. We will have to keep the wall heights all the same for this perspective trickery to work, however.

The pixel art for the player sprite turned out really good and took a while, so you’re going to be seeing it a lot.

Combat Design

To figure out our design needs here, we’re going to start with how Soulslike games play, and work back from there. 

First, to pay off the player’s timing skills, they have long windup and cooldown animations when attacks happen - both for the player and the enemies. This presents a problem for our imaginary console; long animations means lots of frames, and as depicted in the mockups above, we also have a relatively large player sprite (78 px by 88 px). To mitigate these limitations, we’re again going to have to cut back and approach it strategically.

There’s probably a more optimal division, but this was by hand.

For the animations, to store them, we can use a lower bit depth for the images than the SNES natively uses. The console hardware natively uses a 4 bits per pixel, giving 15 colors + alpha. If we reduce the color down to use at most 8 colors per sprite, we can use 3 bits per pixel, and convert when writing to the sprite memory. This does potentially waste the other 8 colors of that sprites palette, but this can be recycled as a different sprites palette. In fact, this can also give us more palettes to work with. Heck, if we were to push it to 4 colors per sprite (2 bits per pixel), we could get 4x the sprites in ROM with 4x the palettes. However, this might result in bad looking graphics, so all the sprites in the example mockups use at most 7 colors + alpha.

There are also some more tricks that can give us more visuals for our memory. We could write tools that identify exact and very close sub-sprites (8 px by 8 px tiles), and simply reuse those when drawing new images to the screen. Again, having fewer colors means these are more likely to occur. This is similar to how the wide array of animations were implemented in Aladdin [9] and by hand in a smaller scale for the NES game Micro Mages [10]. I haven’t found anything confirming this, but I suspect it’s also how large sprite games like Street Fighter 2 manage to fit on the console.

Giving the match algorithm a threshold rather than requiring a perfect match would probably look good enough, too.

Combat design would also have to contribute to saving resources. We would limit the player to fighting one, rarely two enemies at a given time for a location. Fortunately, the structure of the souls games readily lends itself to this, which would reinforce the deadliness of each encounter. We would also probably have to limit the total number of enemies in the game, to further save on memory. To mitigate the feeling of reuse, the enemy’s AI would have to be a primary focus of the programming for the game, so that each would feel like a unique and difficult challenge every time they were encountered.

The other aspect of souls games that needs to be respected is the 3-dimensionality of the combat. Dodging, ducking, and simply moving allows the player to gain tactical advantage. Calculating 3D collisions can be extremely computationally expensive, but I think it can be done in such a way that can easily run on hardware.

The first advantage we have is that we’re likely fighting only 1 or two enemies, so our sword/spear/axe need only check if it’s colliding with those, and nothing else. We can express the collision test as a single point, defined as 3 numbers representing the x, y, and z elements, and the collider as a axis-aligned rectangle defined by 2 points, each with an x, y, and z.

But wait! Players and enemies in dark souls can’t jump! We can probably reduce the collider  hitbox to be expressed as a x and z width and depth, and then a 2d point with a height. And - what if the hitbox is assumed to be square? Then we can remove the depth, leaving us with a 4 byte definition for a box. This might make the collision test inefficient, though, so we might end up wanting to keep the 6 byte hitbox.

So, when the player swings a sword, we look up the pre-authored 3D position of the sword based on the frame of animation, and position it in a world space relative to the enemy hitbox, using as much integer math and cosine table lookups as possible. Then, we test to see if that point is inside the hitbox. If it is, we can tell the player that a hit has occurred, play reaction animations on both the player and the enemy, and deal damage. Since the most expensive part is the transformations, testing multiple points along the swing of the sword to simulate continuous collision detection might be a good idea that would be fairly performant.

A poor man’s continuous collision detection.

From there, we can add in crouching and rolling to the hitbox by lowering the height at runtime, and iframes by marking the player as invulnerable. If we end up using the 6 byte hitbox, we could even implement a jump, raising the lower-bound corner of the hitbox. 

This gives us a relatively expressive combat system - low swings that must be dodged (or jumped), high swings that must be crouched under, and other shapes like slanted or vertical swings that must be identified and moved away from accordingly.

The hard part is making tools to author all the different points to that the weapon would be at.

Controls

Right-bumper and Left-bumper to rotate the camera around the player

D Pad to move the player relative to the screen 

A to interact, and heavy attack

B to light attack

Y to duck, Y + D Pad to roll

X to use equipped item

Start to open the in-game menu

Select to change equipped item

Asset Production

In the era before cgi became cost effective, creating 3d-looking assets was a huge undertaking, especially for large animated sprites. The toolchains for assets were usually custom for each game, and professional tools weren’t widespread, cheap, or accessible.

If I were tasked with directing a game like this, I think my asset pipeline would be very inspired by Doom and Mortal Kombat. Since there would need to be multiple angles of each animation, I would set up an array of cameras around a subject, and then pose them, and take many pictures at the same time to capture the view from each angle.

For humanoid characters, I would probably recommend actual humans with costuming, much like as mentioned previously, Mortal Kombat. The player character could equip armor sets and have their appearance change, but only the entire costume, not each piece individually. This would also allow simple recoloring of the armor by using different palettes, giving even more variation.

Finish him!

For the non-humanoid monsters and possibly even for some of the 2d planar sprites, like trees, I would actually turn to terrain- and miniatures. For Doom, they actually sculpted some of the monsters in clay around wire armatures, and then posed them and captured them on a turntable to digitize them from every angle. However (I haven’t found a source for this) I suspect it wasn’t wildly successful, because about half of the monsters are either drawn from hand or kit-bashed out of other digitized monster parts. Either way, this would give the game non-human demonic characters with flailing limbs and bizarre forms, and provide really detailed props like trees and wells and bushes.

I didn’t have time or the motivation to do the above for this blog post, but this is a really cool way to create assets for old games that might actually be possible. Theoretically, one could also 3D render these back in the day with a Silicon Graphics workstation - much like how Donkey Kong Country was made [11], but that’s not quite as fun, is it.

Lore and Gallery

Look, we all get carried away. Here’s a big lore dump for this imaginary game, both that which would take place before the game, and the events that take place during the game. Peppered in are some mockup screenshots of the game. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing and imagining it!

Eternal War

In the second age, the Divine War began between the Demona of the Underrealm and the Angels On High. Generations of humanity were born and died not knowing if it would ever end. The cycle churned the earth to mud and tore at the gristle of the world, devastating cities, corrupting rivers, grinding down the very mountains that clawed the darkened skies. The godly strength wielded by both sides gutted the world, cutting dungeons deep into the earth, and raising holy strongholds that pierced the continent like barbs.

Caught in the middle, humanity cowered in the fields and beneath their thatched roofs, praying for the mercy of a quick death at best. None believed the conflict could end; it simply was.

Annihilation

None alive know what tipped the scales of balance, but gradually the Demona gained ground. At the Gilded Keep, during the final battle, the Archangel Cassalia sacrificed herself with a dark magick, annihilating the keep and the surrounding armies. The 6 Demona Kings, greedy and impatient in their impending victory, fell to the fiery inferno. However, the other Archangels, the final bastion of Angels, and scores of the Demona legions were destroyed as well.

Men peeked tentatively from their shelters, finding only the battered armor of Angels and mangled corpses of the damned, and cautiously took their first steps into the light of a new era. Crops were planted in earnest, and the sun swept golden hills glowed with new, if wan, light.

Vitality

Centuries after the end of the war, rumors of the return of demon kings or archangels are still exchanged in taverns after too much ale. Humanity struggles and people are starving, but there are more born every year that survive the winters. Occasionally, Demona are sighted skirting towns and haunting roads, feasting on the unwary travelers flesh, but for the most part all is peaceful, if uneasy.

Enlightenment

You are an experienced fighter of demons, and you’ve been summoned to Tarnis, a village near the ruins of the Gilded Keep. You’ve agreed to come after the village scraped together enough gold to convince you to come help. As you arrive, you hear tales of a Demona Prince, a rarer and more devious variant that has a propensity for organizing larger covens and commanding minions.

You delve deep into the ruins of the keep, protecting yourself from the local fauna, ancient Angelic traps, and the occasional lowly demon, until you reach a sanctum far below the loam outside.

You behold the golden body of an Angel - the first seen in living human memory. She has clearly been tortured, and the tormentor, the Demona Prince Z’lek moves quickly to eviscerate your intrusion. Blade flashes against bone and claw, and the creature falls twitching and writhing in it’s own ichor.

You free the Angel, who names herself Ailas, and she tells of the rebirth of the six Demon Kings. She begs of you to slay these reanimated carcasses, and promises the eternal ecstasies of divinity in exchange for your devotion to her. 

King Hunting

Your travels take you to flooded tombs in fetid swamps, to barren desert temples, to deep underground where the air ripples with the heat of the planet’s womb and the ground glows beneath your feet.

Veritas

You limp back to the Gilded Keep, clinging at wounds that refuse to close. Pushing open the door to the throne room, you see Ailas atop her restored place, resplendent and bared in gold. She offers a hand to you, and asks one final question - will you join her? Or will you fight and slay her to take the throne for yourself, and for humanity?

Further Reading

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FVN_Ze7bzw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7gWmdgXPgk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ibhDU2SAI

[4] https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Super_NES

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_3D_Noah%27s_Ark

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhMMK3QLxSM

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=822&v=HQYsFshbkYw&feature=youtu.be

[8] https://twobithistory.org/2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnUITJqRQQ

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTBnzCb6jMM

[monriatitans]

Let's Play Some Demos! - Part 5

Welcome to Part 5 of Let’s Play Some Demos | LPSD! In sum, these videos and streams aim to introduce gamers to, usually, Indie games! For this episode, I, once again, looked through my Steam Wishlist to see who had demos available. For those who are new, the purpose of this video series is to provide commentary and feedback on the games for educational purposes.

Today, I played demos for 4 games:

All-Star Fruit Racing A high-speed multiplayer racer with a unique power-up system! Combine different juices for a range of attacking and defensive abilities. Drift through looping bends. Soar over monumental jumps, and defy gravity around tubular tracks in an explosively colorful racer!

Indivisible Indivisible is a hand drawn action RPG platformer from Lab Zero, creators of the critically acclaimed Skullgirls! Set in a huge fantasy world, Indivisible tells the story of Ajna, a fearless girl with a rebellious streak who sets out on a quest to save everything she knows from being destroyed.

SaGa Emerald Beyond FORGE YOUR OWN TALE The latest standalone entry in the SaGa franchise, SaGa Emerald Beyond, brings together the very best elements of the beloved series to offer each player their own unique gameplay experience.

Visions of Mana Explore a world of elemental spirits and adventure in the latest Mana action-RPG. The protagonist Val and his childhood friend Hinna, the newly appointed Alm of Fire, set off on a journey to the Mana Tree.

All links above are to the games’ Steam pages.

The verdict? All-Star Fruit Racing and SaGa Emerald Beyond were removed from my wishlist, to my dismay. Fruit Racing crashed 3 times; not much else needs to be said. SaGa, however, wasn’t fun. It looked great, visually, and it had an interesting start, but once I started being able to do things, it went downhill. The music was better than I expected it to be; too bad I had the volume so low. The Timeline mechanic reminded me of Othercide, which made me smile, but that was about it. I was NOT expecting the Scottish accents. If the game depended upon my having prior knowledge to enjoy it, I missed that. The art style was excellent! The animations were smooth! The game looks gorgeous! How they did their turn-based combat, however, left much to be desired. My favorite one was Visions of Mana, to my surprise. It reminded me a LOT of Final Fantasy XV, which makes sense since they’re both Square Enix games. One would expect some familiar elements. The character banter was fun to listen to; the combat was intuitive until the camera got annoying. PUPPY MOUNTS! Anyway, the art style was consistent; if there’s a name for it, I forgot, but the art style was realistic enough to be believable while also being stylized enough to be unique and fun. One thing that annoyed me, but probably shouldn’t have since I wasn’t familiar with the series, was all the exposition in the beginning. It probably had to do with the voice acting being meh. I’ve already forgotten the character’s names, except for Val, the protagonist, but I do remember thinking whoever voiced the Kitty Cat, whose name I regret not remembering because he holds a dagger in his tail when he fights, was trying too hard. I LOVE that game regardless. It’s one of a handful of games I’ve played that made me WANT to explore! Indivisible was a close second, despite the fact it pissed me off in the end. It was trying to introduce how to flee a battle, but, no matter what I did, fleeing didn’t happen, which forced me to end the demo early. However, I was having a BLAST up until that point! Once I got a hang of the combat system, mostly, I was grooving! I had trouble figuring out which party member was being attacked so I could block the attacks, but it didn’t stop me from wishing there were more games like it! When playing with a controller, each party member was attached to a particular button. All you had to do to make them attack was press a button. There was no menu or anything to sort through, just a slight alteration of a turn-based combat system. As their attack recharged, you could press the button once you were able and could either have a couple people attacking or have a barrage of attacks rained down on the enemy! It was SO MUCH FUN to watch! Fun art style, and nice, little touches with the animations! I DEFINITELY want this one! Despite the fact it showed up in the video as a tiny rectangle even though I made it full screen.

And that’s it for Part 5! If this series of videos is something you’re interested in, don’t forget to hit the Subscribe and/or Follow button!

—

“Let’s Play Some Demos!” Playlist

—

The Sunday, October 20, and 633rd, Artist Shout-Out goes to FestivalOfRavens! Check them out here!

—

TIMESTAMPS 0:00 – Welcome Gamers! 1:19 – Artist Shout-Out 3:25 – Demos’ Intro 3:48 – All-Star Fruit Racing 8:21 – Indivisible – Don’t know what’s going on with the small rectangle 44:05 – Be Right Back 1:20:36 – SaGa Emerald Beyond 1:58:31 – Visions of Mana 4:13:38 – Mini Critique 4:17:54 – Thank You/Closing 4:19:02 – Rendezvous Point Bookshop Plug 4:21:14 – Farewell

—

MORE INFO & TO SUPPORT – MonriaTitans Summarized – Rendezvous Point Bookshop – Artist Shout-Outs Criteria – Throne Wishlist – #SubOffTwitch – YouTube – Rumble – Odysee– Twitch

—

[garmmy]

garm’s video game wrap-up 2021

i started this last year (garm’s video game wrap-up 2020), just as a way to do some doodle fanart at least for the games i enjoyed throughout the year!!

through my life i’ve been mostly a portable console player, but thanks to being stuck at home these days i’ve been able to play some of my console/pc backlog. i’m glad!!

as with the previous year, these are just some short (spoiler-free!) thoughts on the games that got me through 2021.

- trails into reverie: technically started last year. super glad to revisit the crossbell gang! and i love the kind of 'sky 3rd' formula. and tbh it's still pretty amazing to see all the chars get together..if i had to choose a most "fun" trails this would probably be the one🤔

- persona 5 royal: i love persona games so it took me long enough to get to p5 😅 i love it!! the presentation is so well-polished, and i got really attached to the phantom thieves as characters..probably my 2nd fave persona game now after p2ep~

- 13 sentinels aegis rim: i think nothing needs to be said, it took over my brain and still hasn’t let go..... the visuals/music are sooo good, i love the characters so much, the story is crazy in the good way. and met some cool people through 13s too so thank you for my life!!

- ai the somnium files: another crazy game that twisted my brain around, i had a blast with zero escape trilogy and aitsf was no different! what a ride!! and i always love these mystery-solving puzzle room things. i need time to regrow my braincells for nirvana initiative...

- stellaris: my first time playing a 4x game (i am so bad at it), i wish i had more timeeee to play it but i enjoy seeing your little aliens expand out into the universe! and the space vibes(?) music is SO good as relaxing/work bgm..faster than light🎵

- ys viii: finally! i think ys8 is a lot of people’s fave ys game so i was excited to get to it? i can see why, the music is amazing, the island exploration is so fun, and...dana 😭😭  ys9 is still my personal fave but this was such a fun adventure i loved it!

- great ace attorney 1+2: i had just started (finally) playing it on 3ds when they announced the localisation T_T anyway i love all the ace attorney games so far and gaa is no different!! gaa2 especially kept me on edge the whole time (still can't top aai2 for me though 😆) 

- mass effect 1: after 1000 years of rotting in my steam library!! i think i was always scared off because shooting game, but i'm so glad i finally got myself to play it. baby's first western rpg..i LOVE space+alien+worldbuilding stuff and this game is everything i ever wanted...

- fuga melodies of steel: another group of kids to adopt and protect 😭😭 i'm so happy it's out, it was worth the wait and it's such a fun little game..i looove the aesthetics and music (i did with solatorobo too) and i really enjoy the gameplay loop this time!!

- a short hike: what a short and sweet game!! i'd love to play more relaxing exploration games like this where you just talk to npcs, do fun stuff without worrying about dying or resource management haha. amazing style and music, i love it ;w;

- night in the woods: a very relatable story to the ‘depressed 20yo dropout’ phase of my life 😂 sometimes we’re always lost but it feels a bit better to be lost with friends. the mood set by the wonderful music and aesthetics is absolutely amazing O: and the dialogue!! love it.

- detention: baby's first(?) horror game😭 i have no reflexes so admittedly those parts are hell, but that aside the aesthetic/sound make a truly amazing atmosphere i really love!! it's set before my time but even then the settings evoke a lot of nostalgia for me;;

- mass effect 2: cries i love this little alien(+some humans) gang...i missed being able to converse with your squadmates anywhere, but i LOVE the loyalty missions and how they flesh out each character, i feel extra attached to this gang. i'll miss exploring the galaxy with them!

- kuro no kiseki: still on chapter 1, but looks like 2021 was a 'start with trails, end with trails' year 😄 i'm rooting for van and friends' gourmet adventures🥞finally i'm done with my 2021 wrap-up, can't wait for new adventures in 2022!!

[belliesandburps]

Here's a weird ask: how does the cast off MHA and TW react to being in first place in Mario Kart only to get blasted with a blue shell?

I see @twistedtummies2 and I share some anons. :P

Twisted Wonderland

Ace: That dumbass would have the worst luck imaginable. He'd get nailed by the blue shell right when he's doing one of those loops, so he'd go crashing down and have to get scooped up by that passive aggressive cloud-flying dickhead whose name I never knew or cared to know. He'd lose a few places in the race, and before he can eve get started, someone would use the lightning to shrink everybody...aaaaand someone else would blast him off the cliff again because they had the Bullet Bill. By the time he can race again, he's in dead last and also a full lap behind. "...Wha...how...WHEN...?!?! O___o; " would be the only his only befuddled response.

Deuce: He'd snap and get mad at what a cheap shot that was, and how he was so close to victory. Then, he'd apologize, go back to playing and acting like he's not super annoyed that he got screwed so badly.

Cater: He's far too busy taking selfies of him and his pals playing video games to actually...PLAY video games.

Trey: He will be in shock for a moment, but when the person who blasted him smugs at him, he'll retaliate by refusing to bake them any pastries for a week. They won the battle. But Trey just won the war...aaaaand broke their spirit.

Che'Nya: Heeee's too busy driving backwards and smiling to himself to ever get blasted by the blue shell. He tilts his head with confusion at the cloud turtle for constantly telling him to go the other way and mutters, "But I like this way! :3 " and keep on playing incorrectly.

Riddle: That controller is going through the TV.

Leona: He'd say his famous catchphrase. "Tch, pain in my ass..." then he'd lazily toss the controller, get up and leave. I imagine Leona isn't actually THAT fond of video games despite being young. I think he only really likes strategic video games that make him feel smart. And anything that has complete random chance to negate skill like that goddamn blue shell just turns him off.

Ruggie: He'd whine and pout. "Awww, whaaaaaaat?! D8> No fair!!" Then he'd sulk for a while, grumble in annoyance, and keep playing, trying veeeeery hard to inch his way back to the top.

Jack: He'd show a flicker of anger, would pretend that it's just some stupid game, then turn away, grumbling about what a crappy, cheap trick that was and that no real wolf would ever need to use...in fact, I'm pretty sure Jack's the type who never uses items because he doesn't think he needs them.

Azul: He will forget all about winning and focus the entire duration of the game to ensuring whoever got him with the blue shell is dead last. He will not rest until he crushes their dreams...

Jade: He'd just nod passively, resume playing like it's no big deal, then he'd wait to hear the smug "Haaaaa!" from the culprit he's playing with, and make a note to exact revenge slowly and embarrassingly once the game is finished.

Floyd: He will immediately turn to whoever blasted him, have pinprick-sized pupils, aaaaaand the other player will immediately restart the race, and Floyd will beam happily at being able to play more and giggle about how his opponent is really bad this time.

Kalim: He's never been hit by the blue shell. He's too busy getting hit by green shells. And red shells. His OWN red shells...which...isn't supposed to be possible...but he found a way...

Jamil: He'd use his magic to immediately force whoever blasted him to keep driving off a cliff again and again and occasionally act as a roadblock for other racers. Why get mad when you can get "cheat-y?" :P

Vil: He'd just huff dismissively and say that this is why he doesn't stream video games like other online personalities. Too uncouth and mindless like that blue shell and whoever lobbed it.

Rook: He'd be too busy focusing on wiping out other players to actually race. He's the sort who would literally drive backwards just so he can kamikaze with all his green shells at any incoming player he decided is his prey.

Epel: He'll sneer angrily, catch himself, and say it's just a stupid game, and keep playing like it's no big deal...then occasionally glare daggers at whoever blasted him when they weren't looking, and contemplate stealing some of Vil's poisons for later use.

Idia: Idia's such a ""pro gamer"" that he knows the shortcuts in every single track. You can hit him with TWO blue shells, he'll still be ahead by half a lap and have time to spare. He'll just grin that rare cocky fang-filled grin and say, "Ohhhhh nooooo, blue shells, I hope I don't lose my entire lap lead... >:D " Then he'll giggle maniacally...aaaaaand immediately whimper at realizing he just giggled in public, then largely keep to himself for the rest of the race.

Ortho: He'll pout and angrily whine that blue shells are cheap...until he realizes how much better the items are when you're in last place...then stay in last place when he realizes how fun the golden mushrooms and lightning bolts are.

Malleus: ...He's never been first place in any video game he's ever played. He's not very good at any video games, but the fact that he's been invited to play at all already has him in a good mood. Also, whenever he plays in a castle level, he's too busy trying to admire the decor to actually race.

Lilia: He's never been hit by the blue shell because he's never allowed himself to be that far ahead. He intentionally eases up whenever he has a major lead so it's neck-n-neck between himself and second place. And once a blue shell has been launched, he'll slam the brakes so second place takes the lead...aaaaaand promptly takes the shell, so he can carry on freely to victory. :P

Sebek: He'll never play unless Malleus is playing, at which point, his only priority is supporting his young master, who is...not gonna be in first place. Instead, he'll stay by Malleus' side the whole time, and be horrified when he accidentally blasts Malleus off the road when he gets green shells and stays too close to his master.

Silver: He fell asleep two laps ago.

My Hero Academia

Midoriya: He'll grit his teeth and just try harder to claw his way back to victory. Can't keep a cinnamon bun down after all.

Bakugou: One angry shout later, and the entire room will explode...

Todoroki: He'll blink with surprise, look around in deadpanned confusion and simply ask, "...Did I win? : | "/

Kirishima: He'll whine and frown, muttering, "Awwwww, blue shell?! That's not manly at all... >:( " Then huff but nonetheless keep on playing through. Also, he'll be screwed if he ever gets the blue shell because he actively refuses to ever use it because he doesn't think it's fair.

Iida: Blue shell him once and he's effectively lost the game. He will immediately jump to his feet, stomp over to whoever blasted him, chops his hands in the air like a robot and proceed to go on a massive tirade about how true heroes should never rely on such unfair trickery...until someone points out that anything goes in Mario Kart, and if it you were a skilled enough player, you could overcome such an unfair disadvantage. At which point, Iida will freeze, hunch over and mull over to himself for a solid ten minutes about what an excellent tool the blue shell is to actively push players to be better, to overcome the odds. Then he'll immediately bow repeatedly and apologize for blowing up, praising the blue shell as the ultimate teaching moment in a video game...not realizing no one is even playing anymore...

Uraraka: She'd go wide-eyed, turn to whoever blasted her, pout and shout, "You did that on purpose, you traitor...! >:{ " Then, she'd try and latch a ride onto the cloud turtle to see if her character has zero gravity powers as well. :P

Momo: She'd never get hit with the blue shell because she's learning how to drive, and is trying to be responsible behind the wheel...meaning she's driving veeeeery slow and avoiding all the collisions everyone else is facing. So even if she's dead last, she'll say, "Well, I may be last, but I'm also unscathed. So I do believe that makes me the REAL winner in this silly game."

Kaminari: "Awwwwww, wwwwwhaaaaaaaaaat....?! <8'{ " He'd just turn to whoever blasted him with this adorably pathetic look of absolute betrayal on his face.

Mina: She'll complain about what a cheap shot that was, then get over it in a second, grinning as she tries to get payback with red shells and banana peels.

Tsu: She'd stare blankly, ribbit, and resume playing, expression unchanged while she deadpan says, "...You suck. : | " while continuing onward.

Tokoyami: He'd mumble that this never would've happened if any of the players knew how to fly, then remark that whoever blasted him must have been pretty desperate if they couldn't best him otherwise.

Ayoma: Heeeee's far too busy admiring himself in the slightest reflection he can see on the screen to actually play the game...

Mirio: "Awwwwwww, looks like I lost, guys! :D " Would literally be his response and his expression...without realizing the game isn't even over yet.

Tamaki: He'd sigh a breath of relief, saying it's so much better not having to be first because now, that's a load of pressure off of his mind...then complain that he's hungry and ask if he can go home yet. :P

Mineta: ...He was too busy perving out over Daisy to actually play, and then Tsu wrapped him up in her tongue and flung him out a window.

[paint-lady]

hey, if you don't mind, i want your advice: i'm going to be running a chronicle set in chicago (i am using the chicago by night 5e book) for players who are new to vampire for the most part in a few days and i can't For The Life of Me to come up with an interesting chronicle hook (yeah i have read the hooks in the book). any ideas/suggestions/general advice?

Hiya! I could talk your ears off on how I write my chronicles- so hopefully I have taken all my processes and reduced it down to a lovely World of Darkness jam. 

Here are two good hooks I just came up with- feel free to use them! The third is what I got for my first chronicle, and I just think its a narrative that works very well for new players.

>Option 1: Guilty Until Proven Innocent ”Chicago is a series of paradoxes and transitions, of ever changing paradigms and whimsy,” (CbN 47). Have your coterie be newbies to the city. Ask why they have come to Chicago. Power? A new start? Perhaps this is a political arrangement between the clan of one city with another. Whatever their reason, they have arrived right when a Primogen vanishes- and guess who is first on the suspect list? The fresh faces on the streets >:) The coterie, having barely settled, has to suddenly prove their innocence. And finding evidence lets them uncover something much more sinister....

This one is ideal for new players as it sets everyone on an equal footing. Even if they create a character that has been a vampire for 50+ years and has amassed several dots of influence, herd, status- whatever, they are still new to the city. And being new means you have to start all over again. (This may be frustrating to a player that invested all those points at character creation- but it is on you as the ST to make sure they have opportunities to use those dots and on them as a player to think cleverly.)

Starting the tale off with defending their innocence is actually a very engaging questline. It effectively sets the stage for the political powerhouses. It lets new players know there are rules- and those in power are watching. It also sets the consequences for failure. Understand that the Camarilla probably isnt going to outright kill the coterie if they fail- always make the punishment just harsh and grueling enough to make final death feel like a mercy. Failure isn’t the end of the story.

For new players- I would be lenient with the time it takes for them to find evidence. But within reason. Think like your Prince and Seneschal. Do you really want this coterie running around for a full week, unsupervised, making more messes? No. You don’t. (You might wanna send an npc with them to watch and keep em out of trouble. Your npc is also able to vouch for them.)

This story lends itself to be a Camarilla Chronicle very easily. You can go Anarch, but an Anarch leader suddenly vanishing and blaming the newbies is much more quickly going to end with blood spilled. Thank your local sweeper.

> Option 2: Containment Breach Blacksite 24 (Loresheet on page 264) was temporarily occupied by Operation Firstlight. It has now been transformed into a medical research facility. While most kindred of Chicago know of Blacksite 24, they have zero clue what happens inside other than bad news for them- the less they know the safer they are. The chronicle opens with a car crash. The captured soon-to-be coterie was in transit to this feared medical facility. The crash did kill the driver and the agent in charge of transporting them. The crash did not fully break their restraints, but it did enough damage that first responders are freaking out. They are all at hunger 3. The chronicle is a hunt. The coterie should have some knowledge of what had happened to them and how lucky they are to have escaped. Operatives are already on their way to recapture them. They must hide in this city- and do their best to survive and stay out of sight.

The point of this story is to invoke dread. I highly recommend one player either being a thin-blood (or an npc) with the Daydrinker merit, or a player to have a ghoul. If they decide to not have a daywatch, they increase their chance of being found.

This story also sets up a feeling of desperation. They would be willing to take shelter from anyone- anyone. Eventually the other kindred will catch on that these guys are on the run from something. Any sane kindred would toss them out to protect themselves. A compassionate kindred who takes them in will suffer the final death as a compassionate fool- or join them in captivity. 

This story lends itself to be an Anarch Chronicle much more easily. This is the time the Camarilla will likely be a bit more paranoid and bloody. While they might not outright kill the coterie- they will send them somewhere that is a death trap. They wont dirty their hands with this. After all, you do not want any evidence to fall into the hands of the SI if you hired the hit.

This story is ideal for newbies without background merits. No allies, no influence, no herd. Let them take more mythic merits such as bloodhound and unbondable (Consider finding some from V20 too! There are some really awesome supernatural merits!). These powers would certainly be more fascinating for a medical team to study- not how many instagram followers they have. This kind of story also lets your players feel more powerful- but out of the loop. It lends itself to them forging alliances and getting caught in one-sided favors a lot more quickly. 

The challenging aspect of this story is that is starts with a masquerade breach. New players may not know how to handle such a blatant breach and thats okay. I would let the crash slide- and the Camarilla in the background handles it. Breaches after the crash need to be handled with proper consequences. 

> Option 3: New Blood This is what my storyteller did to me and my first time players (and its also very close to the plot of CoNY). We were shovelheads. Embraced to make a huge mess for the Camarilla and die quick deaths. We were all thin-bloods. The last thing the pcs remember is the sweet rush of ecstasy washing over them, before clawing out of the earth and driven mad by an insatiable hunger. The thrill of the hunt, and the sweet, warm blood on their tongue, nothing was going to be better. All three will awake next to each other, surrounded by the corpses they drank dry in their frenzy. What a way to play the name game! The players have three nights were they figure out their new condition or coverup their tracks (if they think to do it). They contend with their hunger and hatred of sunlight, wrestle with accidentally drinking their family member dry. After three nights, the Scourge comes knocking. Rather than outright killed, they are dragged to Elysium. For some reason, they are adopted by an upstanding member of the Camarilla- or the Prince orders a political rival care for them (hoping they fail). The players are the errand childer of this kindred, and slowly they figure out what they have been gathering through all these errands....

This one lets the characters all have the moments where they discover their disciplines and powers- and bestial tendencies. It naturally flows to allow players to slowly discover the rules and mechanics as well. All players must play fledglings for this tale. 

This story is much more a personal tale than a political one. Eventually politics makes its way in...but it does not have to be a focus. 

This story has less of a hook and more of a “Figure it Out” survival mode until the errands begin. The story is how the character’s react to their condition. It very quickly lends itself to a narrative of finding your own path in the night, rather than mindlessly obeying.

So here are a few questions that I ask myself when crafting a chronicle story:

1. What kind of story do you want to tell? Not asking for a plot hook, I’m asking for a general concept. Is it a tale of good triumphing over evil? (Not necessarily a wrong answer, but if you wanna play good guys...vampire is not the best game for that). Is this a chase? Is this a race against time? 

2. How do you want your story to make your players feel? Do you want to tell a story that invokes as much dread as possible in your players? Do you want them to feel ultra powerful? Vampire is both a power fantasy and a dread inducing game- it can do both. 

3. If you don’t know what kind of story you want to tell, switch gears to worldbuilding. CbN has so many NPCs with the rumors already written for you. Its your setting, perhaps switch two rumors around with prominent NPCs. Decide which ones are true in your setting- Maybe Primogen Annabell did kill her predecessor. Perhaps the Lasombra are attempting to infiltrate the Camarilla as everyone fears- but no one is able to prove it or stop it. Deciding what is true, false, and undetermined usually blossoms into hooks and stories worth investigating.

4. What is a historical event of the city that the Vampires would have endured/ scars would have remained? For example, in my chronicle set in Richmond, the tale of the Richmond Vampire is true. Depending on who you ask, it is the Camarilla’s best or sloppiest cover up. Have the chronicle coincide with the events and the coterie live through them. No one said this must take place in 2021- you can do 2015, 2008, -hell go back the 1990s. Its actually super fun if you set your chronicle in the 90s and your Malkavian is using phrases from 2020.

5. One of my things I do when writing scenes and moments is play Dread by myself. Dread is a role playing game played with jenga. There are no dice rolls, if you want to attempt something, you have to pull pieces from the tower. If the tower falls, you die. If there is a moment where I really really really dont want to pull from the tower, though the reward for succeeding is so so sweet- I keep the moment. If its really easy to shrug and go eh, I can live without performing that action- go back and rewrite it. If you have no incentive to pull from the tower, why would they?

6. Examine your player’s desires and ambitions- and do not neglect them in your chronicle. The plot wont magically allow all of them to achieve their ambitions. However, provide opportunities for them through the plot. Its on them to strive for what their character wants- its on you to make them struggle but have the path to get there. For example, if a player wants to become a Baron, provide a political opening. Perhaps then by announcing their power, they have made a bigger name for themselves and it has become harder to hide. Perhaps by doing this, the kindred they owe a favor is suddenly much more vocal about it. 

Here are some suggestions for handling new players:

> You are going to have to handhold them through some things. New players to vtm won’t be able to see the cascading political web and how the consequences of their actions will ripple into waves. I like to use Wits+Insight and call it Common Sense. Common Sense was a merit in V20- and damn is it WONDERFUL. All they need is just 1 success (they can take half) to have you explain how whatever plan they just thought of is actually a TERRIBLE idea. 

> Do your RPG consent list. Know what is safe to discuss and what is off the table. I highly recommend utilizing something my Storyteller used for my first chronicle, and subsequently I use for all my ttrpgs now: Invoking the Veil. The metaphor is that you are slowly lessening the intensity of a scene- as if raising the opacity or looking through layers of fabric. Eventually, there is too much fabric and you can no longer see the scene. If something is too intense, the ST or the player may announce they are invoking the veil. Reduce the scene by lowering music, speaking in third person, or avoiding heavy descriptors. You can reduce it further to just dice rolls. Role play stops, and the consequences of the scene are solely dictated by the dice. Or fade to black. If a player is repeatedly fading to black on something- ask to talk to them about it. Clearly something is too intense and they are not having as much fun as they can. Debriefing after a session is also a good idea. Do something silly! Share and check all the memes in the discord chat. Its important to make sure you and your players know that at the end of the night- its all just a game.

> I find the sabbat and new players don’t tend to mix well. You may absolutely still use the sabbat in your chronicle! But the dogma and philosophical ideals of the sabbat can be offputting and downright upsetting to a first time player. You may absolutely build to it- that’s what I did to my players. And in the moment of the truth, they chose to cling to humanity. 

> The taking half mechanic is your friend! V5 says players may announce how many dice they are rolling- and if the dividend is greater than the DC- they auto succeed. This streamlines play. Of course, you as the Storyteller may say this is a roll they are not allowed to take half on. Usually these are contested rolls (combat).

> The three turns and out rule keeps combat intense but not too lengthy. It actually streamlines encounters super super well. 

> My ST used a phrase, “The quickest way to kill Cthulhu is to give it a healthbar.” If Methuselahs and Elders are involved in your game- avoid giving them stat blocks. This cultivates a conflict that new players must find a way to overcome without brute force combat. It makes them think critically and defy these super old antagonists through narrative means. This also gets the notion out of your and their heads, “if they die, its over.” Its never that easy. Never. 

[brazenautomaton]

Fixing Afterlives: Bastion, Pt. 1

As it is, Bastion doesn’t work. The Forsworn don’t just have a point, they are obviously, objectively correct. Kyrian discard all their memories and attachments in a way that is horrifying, in order to perform a job that a robot could do, in order to aspire to be something lame and boring. There is nothing cool about what they do and nothing good either; every single time they tell you about what they do it’s supposed to make you sad, not proud. A little of that is fine, it’s Death. But come on. The anima diverter daily for Bastion is a test where you judge if souls should pass on or not, and on WoWHead, the adequate summary of the right answers is “If one of the answers seems more evil or horrible, that’s the one you pick.”

In fact, Bastion can’t work as it is right now, because of Maldraxxus. The Maldraxxi are the defenders of the Shadowlands, right? So all the courage and martial prowess and avenging angel-ness Bastion wants to have cannot be what they are About, the presentation wants them to be glorious and valorous warriors but they don’t have to fight anyone. And the presentation wants them to be wise and impartial but their job requires no discretion, they’re ghost UPS. They can’t be About anything cool, and to be wise and impartial, they can’t be DOING anything at all!

So here’s the fix to their concept: Maldraxxus is the afterlife of warriors, the endless skeleton war, the unending conflict where there are always an infinite supply of fighters willing to leap to the defense of the Shadowlands. Maldraxxus is the Shadowlands’ defensive team. Bastion is the offense.

Bastion does not engage in army-against-army conflict, they have individual heroes. And they are out there in the mortal world, invisibly, serving as guardian angels, inspiring as muses, fighting invisible forces, tipping the scales of Fate to have the right outcomes. Fighting extra-dimensional beasts who prey on the mortal realm to invisibly protect them, fighting down incarnate ideas of malice and ruin, but also influencing things directly or by subconscious example. Every Spirit Healer is from Bastion and they are the ones who decided “your time is not yet up”. When we get really lucky to allow ourselves to triumph over the Legion or the Scourge, it’s because Bastion was ensuring it happened, fighting for us. Bastion is supposed to be affecting things out there, making things turn out Right, instead of being powerless observers. They are the muses of artists and the muses of battle. They inspire. They lead, invisibly.

That’s why they need to be wise and free of bias -- you cannot favor one side of mortals over the other. Mortal beings need to beat the Scourge, but the Horde does not need to triumph over the Alliance and vice versa. Your job is not to punish mortals for being bad, you damn well need to be boosting both sides when there are champions and the valorous in both. You cannot go out there and say “these Orcs up here in Redridge are all evil and shit and the Alliance deserves the win so I’m just gonna go all in on defending them,” that’s not how it works, you reward individual valorous efforts on both sides. How Fate Should Go does not include taking sides in purely mortal conflicts.

So obviously you cannot be biased. You are something Beyond the mortal realm which means you can’t take sides. You actually do have to discard these attachments, and while we’re here, we need to actually make that process empowering. Right now all it does is show you “hey, happy memories, well, fuck you, gotta get rid of them.” Make more than zero effort to make this make sense. Show the aspirant in pain and yearning because of those memories and the fact they can’t come back. Don’t make them forget who they were, make them become at peace and move on.

Now obviously that won’t be convincing to everyone. And that’s fine. It just means there’s some ambiguity instead of the Forsworn being obviously right about everything.

There are four races/types in Bastion: Kyrian, Forsworn Kyrian, Stewards, and Constructs. Only two are represented in Soulbinds: you have two Kyrian and a Steward. 

Kyrian are the expression of what Bastion IS, so we already covered their changes.

Constructs are anima robots. Why are there anima robots here? It’s really bad in the current version because the Kyrian job can be done by a robot so why not just make them do it? Instead, we take that idea and we make it About something: these machines aren’t Constructs, they are Principles. A Principle is a robot made of rules and ideals, the things that are thought by mortals but bigger than any mortal. Codes of honor and ideas that work beyond any of us as individuals. There, that’s it, that change of presentation is all you need to do to justify why robots are there. The changes to Bastion’s fundamentals are what makes them fit in.

Stewards are creepy. Really creepy. They serve the same role as dredgers, but the fact that dredgers bitch and moan and complain all the time lets us see them as individuals with goals and not creepy brainwashed victims. A dredger isn’t a slave, they are a worker; but work sucks and they wanna be at the pub. A steward, with one exception (Forgelite Prime Mikanikos who is busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest and also by far the best Bastion character) appears to have no personality and is a brainwashed slave. 

So, first off, make it clearer that they are helpful because they are The Desire To Aid, that’s the thing they’re About. With the way they speak and act, I think what they are supposed to be in story terms is lightly comic relief, also similar in role to Dredgers but with opposite implementation. The creepiness and one-dimensionality make this fail, all their hoots and hoos and silly talk isn’t funny. They need to be cheesier. They need to be 90’s Saturday morning cartoon sidekicks. They need to be a (much) less obnoxious version of Snarf.

They need to tell awful, awful dad jokes. Just the worst. The kind that are so bad they loop back around to funny again but you’re still groaning and they’re just there like “Eh? Eh? Geddit? Geddit?” By doing something that is helpful, that we recognize as an attempt to help and that some Steward characters can explicate to us really does help (it dampens anger and fear because all of your negative emotions are refocused to that HORRIBLE pun), but that clearly NOBODY would brainwash them into doing, now we can trust their helpful efforts are borne of sincere desire and carried out to the best of their ability by their own personal interpretation.

Forsworn Kyrian, right now, are only antagonists. The ideological change of giving up on the law of Bastion makes you turn a darker indigo color scheme (which is actually really good because these are creatures of Beyond, creatures who are on a fundamental physical level About something, their beliefs changing their physical makeup makes sense!) and then become a bad guy. Forsworn are all only antagonists. We’re going to change that. Kleia is going to become Forsworn. And still be a heroic character and your Soulbind, even though this isn’t a game balance thing and so Pelagos will still probably outclass her in every way seriously that Mastery buff is fucking bananas for anyone who cares about Mastery.

Not when you meet her, though. The existing storyline of Bastion is you go there because “hey what the fuck are these Kyrian doing in the Maw serving the Jailer” but in Bastion itself nothing much is happening other than kicking pebbles down the street. You get the intro from Kleia, you go see some very low-importance things, then the Forsworn attack for the first time, and you spend the rest of the zone quest on hold with the Archon’s hotline to tell her “hey there are Forsworn this is a problem”.

Now, when you get there to ask “hey what the fuck”, Kleia is still not doing much more than kicking pebbles down the street, bored off her ass, extremely enthusiastic about someone new so she can DO something. But the Forsworn conflict already exists: it’s just not relevant to her because she stays out of it, figures that it’s above her pay grade, and she hangs out at the Welcome Center which nobody gives a shit about because there’s nobody to get welcomed so it isn’t relevant. She just knows there’s been some discussions. 

We get the anima drought reinforced the first time we enter Bastion because we have to power down the other cores to get enough juice for the greeting machine, but then it isn’t really a good way to sell it because that’s the kind of thing we do all the time even when there’s no shortages of anything, that’s how WoW PCs interact with machines. So we have the player scrounge up anima from the other Principles to power up the greeting machine, and it’s not enough, it runs out of juice halfway through, and Kleia gets embarrassed and tries to finish the rest of the process by reciting it from memory (and not getting it all quite right, which is another chance to show us things about her).

Kleia is excited to have someone to run through the orientation process, and she explains that FIRST there was an anima drought, and then as if that wasn’t bad enough, THEN the Arbiter got conked out and the flow of souls to Bastion stopped. This is important, because in the story as is, the anima drought appears to be completely explained by the flow of souls all going to the Maw, since they are presented at the same time and the flow of souls is the flow of anima. When you find out the drought is because of ol’ Denny hoarding it, you go “wait how does he have any to hoard when it all goes to the Maw?”

So for right now you need to walk the Aspirant’s path to get an audience with the Archon because right now things don’t seem desperate and urgent. You go to Aspirant’s Rest and get the flight point, and you go to meet Kleia’s soulbind, Pelagos. Two things need to change right here.

One: something more needs to be happening here than “Pelagos was a dipshit and tried ascending alone despite that being not how it works at all, go in there and fight the monsters,” so do something instead of almost-nothing.

Two: Loath as I am to say something actually needs less representation compared to its original, Pelagos can’t be transgender. You find out later on, in the Kyrian covenant quest line maybe? That Pelagos’s mortal body was a woman, but his true spirit is a man. That’s great, that’s something that should come up. The problem is, Pelagos is also the fuck-up, the one we see fail all the time so he can (ostensibly) show resolve and get back up again. But Blizz didn’t show barely any details about Pelagos’s life for fear of backlash -- we don’t even know who played him -- and whether or not it is valid or invalid or that was a cover to avoid admitting this was to not offend China, Blizzard still won’t DO it. So we have this character who is battling this doubt and failure in his past but we’re not allowed to know what they are. Pelagos is cisgender so we can go into detail about what he fucked up. Kleia might be trans instead (why she is so gung-ho about Ascension), or we can have Kleia sell the Ascension process as good by mentioning that the Paragon of Wisdom, Thenios, was born a woman in life but Ascension made him into a true ideal. This can also justify a bit more screen time for Thenios and then something for Tim Russ to do. He was already Tuvok, he doesn’t need more humiliation. But whoever it is, their gender only comes up once and never again because now they’re the right way around and the former body doesn’t matter.

So what’s happening at Aspirant’s Rest? It’s a holding pen for souls. See, as it is now, you find out about the flow of souls into the Maw right away, but then all the way through the main quest and into the Kyrian campaign quest they apparently don’t know, and you don’t tell them, and then it’s a surprise when you finish the quest where you follow the guy in Redridge and have to take him to the Maw, and that’s dumb, they should know, you should have told them.

So now the Kyrian know that everyone is default-judged to the Maw. And they know this is what has to happen, this is the machinery of fate that drives the universe, but they are compassionate and know these souls do not deserve it. So they’re scamming as much as they can. Whenever possible (which they lament is not often enough, not nearly often enough), they find some loophole or corner case to count someone as not ready to be judged, and stick them somewhere in Bastion so they can wait until the Arbiter’s awake again to judge them. They can’t do much, but they can do a little, so they do that.

This guy, okay, you died, BUT, there’s a necromancer just two zones over, and your body is still intact since I dragged it to safety, and, I mean, he’s PROBABLY going to call back your soul and bind it to your body in service, so there’s no point in having you judged, you’re just coming back, right? And you, Night Elf! Okay, you got your head blown off, but, remember that angelic voice shouting “NIGHTELVESEVOLVEDFROMTROLLS!” a moment before your demise? And you know, Trolls who worship Bwonsamdi go straight to De Otha Side without being judged. Maybe you would have wanted to pledge yourself to older gods, but you never got the chance to make that decision, so, hey, you know, it would only be right to let you make that choice before you are given your judgment! And you, guy, did you know that all those patrons from the Slaughtered Lamb across the street who came into your business were warlocks? Yup, all of them, and they didn’t wash their hands either. Fel contamination. Can’t, ooh, you know, hey, might be a demonic stain on your soul, demons don’t have an afterlife like us, gotta be reborn in the Twisting Nether! Going to have to consult some demons to figure out where you go. Better wait here.

Aspirant’s Rest and the temple beneath are a soul refugee camp, and the souls within are scared and angry and don’t know what is going on and the Kyrian can’t explain it or they will all completely flip out. The Kyrian are trying as hard as they can in the limitations they have and this sells it. 

Pelagos is down there. The risk is not that he will be killed -- he is not mortal, he does not die -- the risk is that his well-meaning attempts to keep things calm might ignite the powder keg down there. And those souls can’t die but they WILL go directly to the Maw if fatally injured, which is why they have to be kept penned where Larion won’t eat them and Principles won’t drag them off. Pelagos fucks up here and you have to fix it but it’s not a suicidally stupid error while doing something that has no relevance to the player, it’s an understandable mistake biting off more than he can chew while doing something the player understands. Player, Kleia, and Pelagos go down to Aspirant’s Crucible to get certified as an Aspirant and get in line to talk to the Archon. 

In the existing story, you go and peer into a memory flame thing and have echoes of your heroic battles drawn forth, and you fight them while a character narrates your heroic deeds. They might be based on what expansions you played in, or might be random? Anyway, in this case, you gaze into the flame of memory, she starts to narrate your heroism, and… nothing. “Ah, there are supposed to be visions conjured here, so you can display your valor against them once again. It… it doesn’t… hang on, I might know what the problem is…”

A voice comes. “Then how about you display your valor against me, champion? A little sparring wouldn’t hurt, and I’m eager to see what you can do.”

It’s Uther, hell yes it’s Uther.

[sirpoley]

On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, Leg 3: Character Creation

In part 1 of this series, I described how Mongoose Traveller's spaceship mortgage rule becomes the drive for adventure and action in a spacefaring sandbox, and the 'autonomous' gameplay loop that follows.

In part 2, I talked about how Traveller's Patron system gives the DM a tool to pull the party out of the 'loop' and into more traditional adventures.

In this part, I'll talk about Traveller's unique character creation system, and how it supports the previous two systems.

Brief Overview of Character Creation

Traveller's character creation is weird, and it was the first thing house-ruled away by my old DM—and I can see why.

Traveller character creation is a minigame of sorts, in which you first generate ability scores (much like in D&D), then pick a career. You make a stat check to qualify for the career, one to 'survive' the career (more on this later), and one to advance. Every time you qualify for the career and/or advance, you get a random skill or stat boost from a table related to your training. In the Army and Marines, for example, you're very likely to get combat-related skills, while as a Merchant you're more likely to get something like Broker or Admin (which tend to be more useful, surprisingly).

You also roll once on a life event table, in which your character might fall in or out of love, make friends or enemies, study abroad, and so on.

You then advance four years in age and try again, and continue for as long as you want. If your character gets too old, they start suffering physical ability score consequences, though these can be bought off with semi-legal anti-aging meds, the consequence of which is starting with high amounts of medical debt.

Rolling to Survive

If you fail a survival roll, you're permanently expelled from your career (but can start another one), and often suffer major debilitating injuries in the form of sweeping permanent ability score damage, though this can be bought off by going deep into medical debt. It's technically possible to die in character creation if your physical ability scores are reduced to zero in this way, in which case you would start over. For that to happen, the player would have to decline treatment—basically, they're making a choice to give up and start over. This is a kind of extreme "safety net" against playing truly worthless characters, I suppose, though I haven't seen it happen yet.

Why is this Good Again?

This way of creating characters is shockingly different from any that I've seen before. The character that you end creation with might not have any resemblance at all to what you sat down and intended to create, which was a huge source of frustration, as a player, in my last two campaigns. It's more common than not to, for example, come up with a concept for a dashing space pilot and end up with a 98 year-old-that-looks-34 white-collar office worker who's got a laundry list of grievances against various corporations who have fired him over the years.

When I've seen this system work well, it's because players went into it with different expectations that they would in D&D. For a D&D campaign, you usually come to the table with a more-or-less fully-fledged character concept, then roll stats (or point-buy) and fill in the boxes. In Traveller, it's more like spinning a wheel and seeing what you'll get.

For the kind of campaign that Traveller assumes, however, this is perfect, and here's why.

First, it sets the tone of the campaign. Traveller is very different from most D&D-esque RPGs. It doesn't provide any guidance for or benefit from, for example, balanced encounters. By creating mechanically unbalanced, unpredictable characters, it is telling the players from the start that there are sharp edges to this game and they have to stay on their toes.

Second, it generates crucially important NPCs for the campaign. Those life events—and some fail-to-survive rolls—often create allies, enemies, rivals, and contacts: NPCs that are guaranteed to be met during the campaign. The book provides tips to the DM to ensure that these NPCs have access to spaceships, as they can be found on the random encounter tables. But here's the fun bit: the Player will be just as pissed at their rival, Captain Morgensen (or whatever) as their character is supposed to be, as he was (according to the events table) instrumental in getting them fired from their career as a space scout. By generating these characters during character creation's life-simulation, it gives them a real, emotional connection that leads to a lot of fun during play. These NPCs can easily function as Patrons (which, as explained in part 2, are the keys to adventure), or can provide paths to Patrons.

Third, it has the potential to start the characters massively in debt. The clear optimal path in character creation is to pay off any injuries by going into medical debt, and chug analgesic anti-aging pills like they're Skittles in order to keep advancing down your career paths, or start new ones. As explained in part 1, Traveller's 'loop' functions best when the PCs are swimming in as much debt as possible. The more debt, the more motivation to travel, and thus the more space pirates and space dragons and space princesses and whatever that they'll meet.

Fourth, it familiarizes them with the setting. The book provides quite a few career path options to the Players, and uses the same to generate its NPCs. Thus, just by reading through the career path options available to them, Players learn a lot about the world of Traveller and the kinds of people they might meet, without having to read lengthy setting handouts or pages and pages of lore or anything like that.

Fifth, it creates gaps in the party's expertise, which encourages hiring NPCs. It's virtually impossible to end up with an adventuring party that can cover every skill required to operate a spaceship, for example. This encourages hiring NPC crewmembers to fill in those gaps, which really helps make Traveller 'work'. A lot of the party's time is going to be spent on their spaceship, so the more people who are on there, the better from a roleplaying standpoint. Also,  

That said, it's not perfect, as…

There Are Some Real Limitations

Mechanically, the main issue that's come up with Traveller's character creation is that it's entirely possible for the party to be missing one or more vital skills, or for a character to be lacking something that would be key to making them 'work'. Traveller's basic dice mechanics harshly penalize untrained skill checks compared to attempting even slightly-trained ones, and some roles can't be easily filled in by NPC crewmembers. If your character never rolls to learn the Gun Combat skill, for example, they'll more likely than not miss every attack they make in the whole campaign. The party can overcome this by hiring marines, for example, but the player might still be bored every time a gunfight starts.

This can be mitigated by, say, letting that player control their hired NPCs in combat directly, but as the game doesn't really provide a lot of guidance for who plays hired NPCs (the DM? the player that hired them? The party as a whole, by vote?), the DM and player will have to come up with their own solution. Since they might not even realize that there is a problem that needs to be solved, this can easily lead to traps (for example, if the DM assumes full control over hired NPCs, many battles will lead to the DM just rolling checks against himself/herself over and over in front of an audience) that generate frustration.

Mechanics aside, there are some narrative implications for character creation that might strike many Players as quite weird. Most D&D Players default to making their adventurers whatever their races' equivalent of early-20s is. Sometimes there's an old wizard thrown in to spice things up, but I'd say 9-in-10 characters I've seen are 'college-aged.'  

Traveller strongly rewards old characters. Sometimes very old. Don't be surprised if the average age of the Traveller characters is the same as the summed age of all of your Players. This isn't necessarily bad—immortal, eternally-young sci-fi characters are kinda neat—but it's also pretty limiting, and may not be within the Players' expectations. If a Player wants to make a character who's a young hotshot just starting out, the rules will punish them severely. They'll have virtually no skills, no money (or debt!), no ship shares (units that track ownership of the spaceship), and no NPC connections.

Making it Work

I'm not going to change these rules until I'm more familiar with the system, but my gut says that many of the game's skills (such as Computers, Comms, and Sensors, or the two skills that govern two different, but similar, kinds of environmentally-sealed armour) could be consolidated to reduce the odds of a missing skill torpedoing a character. I also think flexibly passing back and forth control of hired NPCs between the DM and Players will solve a lot of problems, but deciding on the fly who is in control in a given scenario will probably take some experience as a DM. I’m vaguely aware that there’s a second edition of Mongoose Traveller, which may have done some of these things, but I haven’t played it and as such can’t comment on it.

I think for a satisfying experience, you have to make it clear to your Players not to try to build their characters to a pre-imagined concept, but rather come up with a concept as they play through their character's life. Also, tell them upfront that, in this particular sci-fi universe, anti-aging technology has allowed for the rich and powerful to stay eternally young, and that they can expect to have already retired from one or more full careers before the campaign even begins.

Next up, how this all ties in with random encounters.

[keycrash]

so i just finished the zero escape trilogy blind and i absolutely loved iiit tho i am seriously annoyed at the lack of epilogue for d team and the fact that kyle's importance was totally dropped (i get that the another time pov was supposed to be the player an dpossibly the 'god' of free the soul/delta that akane had revealed to her but that doesnt explain kyle's absence)

i’m glad you liked it!! i’m surprised you managed to stay unspoiled if you followed me beforehand lmao. but yeah those two critiques were really common following the game’s release-- as for the kyle thing, i will add that part of uchikoshi’s explanation for that was that the “another time” part of vlr was added fairly last minute (it wasn’t even voiced in japanese) as a means of creating a more ‘hopeful’ ending in the wake of the tsunami that hit japan, iirc. it was never made clear to english fans until after the fact, but it was meant as meta-commentary rather than actual events taking place in the game, apparently. a lot of us were still disappointed, but. yknow.

rest of the messages:

carrying on my previous message im not disappointed a lot was lef tot figur eout e.g. that delta was probably lying about the nuclear war (unless he caused it himself) in line with the 'fanatic bio r = fabrication' thing, and the fact the 'final choice' is solely up to the player i.e. Delta's god, and that the 'way for clover and alice to return from the another time ending in vlr' is implied to be the transporters Akane recovered in the VLR timeline

yeah i actually did really like the fanatic bio r/fabrication thing being ambiguous in isolation, i just felt a little weird about it in the context of delta’s motives; it seemed like the game was intentionally as confusing as possible about his motives in order to make them appear complex instead of actually building them logically

wrt the last thing, this made me come up with a theory that i think is sound but is like HOLY SHIT, i.e. alice and clover get sent via transporter thousands of years into the past and then Alice becomes the original priestess of amen-ra who via ~shenanigans~(involving antarctic ice?) then becomes all-ice and either via clover (transported) or delta/phi shes saved in the 20th century and eventually leaves the mandrake root for hongou to manufacture soporil-b and make all three ZE games possible

i had this theory too before ztd came out!! that alice was gonna get sent back and become all-ice. since it was never touched on in ztd i just kind of dropped it but it’s still fun to think about

last note, i am soo conflicted on akanes portrayal in ztd, on the one hand it is sort of a nice synthesis of her pragmatic self and her bubbly self, on the other hand i feel like it severely undercut how awe inspiring she became in both the 999 and vlr endings that felt like she was a being that existed supeceding timelines and was on par with delta/brother (phi shouldve also had a similarly pivotal role in ztd too tbh)

oh trust me i hate how akane was portrayed in ztd; i think showing a bit of her everyday personality & banter with others would be a great idea, but when i imagine that kind of akane i imagine more like the akane of end or beginning-- she’s practical, pragmatic, a bit morbid, teasing. not the hyper-emotional impulsive reactions that ztd akane had. taking away any sense of power or control from her without even justifying it made her jarringly different from her past two iterations. it didn’t even seem like she had a plan going in to save the world!! and yeah, phi was totally dropped in ztd; she was in character for the most part, but narratively her arc led nowhere, she was painfully absent in the latter half of the game, and the developments we got concerning her had more to do with the material state of her existence/past rather than any emotional trust or opening up by her.

uhhh overall on ztd its weird because with both 999 and vlr i found them kiind of tedious and full of stuff i hated for a large part of the game, and then as they got to the end with the last few hours everything came together so perfectly it blew my mind. zts lacked that completely, but it was also more enjoyable the entire way through, so maybe i cant say i enjoyed it less than the others

for this one it’s more personal taste (i found 999 very fun to play through, though i DEFINITELY agree it gets tedious if you’re playing the original and can’t skip puzzles you’ve already done, but vlr is very much tedious either way); i will agree though that ztd is actually fun to play all the way through with the fragment system, even if the fragment system both adds to and detracts from the story A Lot in different ways

vlr is prooobably the best game i think, which makes sense bc my four favourite characters are akane (no.1, incredible metafictional mastermind ascends to ultimate self), sigma ('congratulations. you played yourself' on loop for 45 years), diana (principled will of steel, "do no harm" even if it creates the apocalypse), and phi (i need so much more phi content), 2 of which are from VLR jfieofuefji. yes D team is my fave

you’re valid, i loooove the vlr characters & story even if the actual experience of playing it knocks it down a few points below 999 for me-- d team is a beautiful little mess and they deserved better treatment in ztd kasmdflaksjdf