#what end of the 'i'm gonna die before my partner' scale are you? are you trying to make them let go before you're even gone

[drawsmaddy]

[ID: A digital line drawing of Caleb Widogast and Vax'ildan from Critical Role. Caleb is drawn with wrinkles and he's saying "Okay babe I'm getting old, time for you to move on." Text underneath what Caleb says reads (Essek does not want to move on while Caleb is still ALIVE). Vax'ildan is drawn with the raven skull mask he wears as the Champion of the Matron of Ravens and he is holding his left hand up in a peace sign. Text above him reads "been dead for 30 years and still sending ravens" and below that (Keyleth can't move on) is written. End description.]

They both suck at this (affectionate)

[quarterlifekitty]

Which obsessed! 141 character is most likely to harm their kidnapped partner? Is the harm minor like a smack or broken bones? I'd like to see a most to less likely scale👉👈

cw: kidnapping, dark fic, physical violence, emotional manipulation, serious wound/blood, minor amputation, description of parental abuse (does not occur in writing, just a personal anecdote). Also sorry I did the scale in reverse!

So I'm gonna say Soap is at the bottom tentatively. It depends on how well you can handle pain. I think he's almost overly empathetic-- he's the type who will cry if he sees someone crying, and wince when he sees someone in pain. So if you're easy to reduce to tears, he won't do very much, if anything. However I can also easily imagine a scenario... Stay with me here.

(So there's a style of corporal punishment, which I'm not going to say is good, but I can see Soap subscribing to it. My grandfather used to put his hand on the top of my fathers head and hit that. This is so that whenever he was giving him corporal punishment, my grandfather hurt himself as well, maybe more so, and wasn't able to forget how much force was being used. Again, not gonna say it was a good thing to do, but there's an amount of logic behind it.)

Anyways, I can see Soap doing that. Any injury he inflicts on you, he'll do to himself. It's almost like he's making his own soulmate style bond. It's another effort on his part to build up a connection between you-- a sort of camaraderie.

I think John cares too much about image to be able to hurt you very much. He won't do anything that will leave marks-- I also think he's the one most likely to take you on outings, so he can't exactly have you looking like an abused spouse. Anything he does is open palmed, nothing that leaves cuts or bruises.

Gaz prefers not to resort to violence, but he's not shy, either. He's more likely to put you in scenarios where its up to you not to get hurt, so less of the burden is on him. Things like holding a knife to your skin so you have to stay completely still. Also in situations where he'll grab, and tell you to say what he wants you to say or he'll just keep twisting.

Ghost is fully willing to hobble you. Not in a permanent way, but if you like running, like fiddling with things you shouldn't be fiddling with-- he will break bones and cut tendons. It is not in a way that causes more pain than needed. He isn't cruel, he doesn't want you to hate him and associate him with pain. So he'll dutifully care for the wound, make sure everything is setting correctly and that you have everything you could ever want while you recover. But it's possible he's only making sure it heals well so that he'll be able to do it again later if needed.

Nikolai's physical punishments will come without warning, without gradation. He'll basically let you rack up sins, offenses, bad behavior-- all while you don't know he's keeping a tab and fully intending for you to pay up when he's ready. And he will do permanent damage. Nikolai will have never once laid a hand on you in violence, and suddenly one day one of your tirades of screaming and calling him a monster ends with your pinky wedged in his bolt cutters, right at the middle knuckle, all while the look on his face doesn't change. And he makes you beg for him to help. Tell him you need him, that you always needed him, that you were being stupid and you didn't mean what you said. If you tell him what he wants to hear? Suddenly he's like a big cuddly bear again, doting on you and cooing poor thing while he neatly bandages and cleans everything, feeds you your favorite meal, doses you with plenty of painkillers and cocktails.

If you refuse to beg? Well, he won't let you die of gangrene or anything. He'll pour the nearest bottle of liquor over a kitchen knife and hold it on the stove for a minute before cauterizing the wound.

When all's said and done, months and months from now, he'll probably get you a decorative silver cap for what remains, finely engraved, with you new last name, perhaps?

[woethehero]

Wyrd RPG Blog Post #1 !!! - Introduction to my Project

Hey Hero (: Thanks for taking a look! If you'll have me, I'd like to share a TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) project I've been working on for a bit after finally taking a plunge, and I wanted to document it in a fun way. So far, it's been about 2+ weeks of brainstorming and prototyping with my partner, so we're talking super early stuff.

Quick important foreword please read, I don't want anyone confused! I am exploring designing an RPG as a way to express my art, but I am not a professional game designer and can not promise this will become a full, polished, amazing new RPG at the end of the process. That'd be super sick, but this is primarily just a creative way for me to document exploring my interests of game design and writing alongside my art. I've wanted to do something more long term and dreamed of playing an RPG in my own art world, and no ones gonna try to make it but I.

TLDR: No promises of an actual game. Exploring for fun, documenting to share. Yay!

Now on to the post!

In this first post, I wanted to talk about my design goals, scope, expectations, and what I'm looking forward to so far!

Major Design Goals:

A singular core dice system of d12's being the most used die to determine the success of actions and their outcomes.

Player Characters take on the roles of Aspiring Champions, adventurer-types that wish to make a name for themselves. You are what you do. Your actions, the skills you focus on, and the people you walk with all have an impact on who you become as you grow in power and status.

Asymmetrical combat for GM's and PC's. Player Characters have a much deeper experience

Provide the tools needed for GM's and Players to create custom "home brew" content for their games based on templates so they grounded to the system but unique to the player.

Encourage GM and Player collaboration as much as possible

Classless Characters, characters comprised of Skill Levels and Traits that make up their core identity and capabilities. No EXP, No Levels. Character progression is awarded through play and during the Downtime Phase.

Different modes of play to break up the pacing of a game, examples being Combat, Exploration, Downtime, Social, and Meta.

Quick and lethal combat experience. Fighting directly isn't always the best solution, clever action to shift the odds more in your favor should always be preferred.

Dang Woe, that's pretty ambitious.

Uhh yeah lol. I tried to imagine my dream game for my art and it came out huge. I think it's just gonna be fun to try and explore a lot of different things and learning how to "gamify" things. Digital game dev has just too many barriers for me to explore, but I know my way around a TTRPG! I can't imagine having all these ideas written into mechanics and tested and everything flowing perfectly, but it's gonna be fun to try.

d12 System Yeehaw

The biggest thing I want to cover right away in this post is explaining the d12 action die pool system and how they work. Every Player Character will have a pool of d12s that make up your Effort.

What is Effort? Effort is your "action points," your Stamina, your Energy. You can give something your all, but you can't do it all the time. Effort is broken down into Regen, Stored, and Exhausted, which will be explained later in this post.

Internalize this now before moving on, in the context of rolling dice, 1 is good. 1 is the new slay. 1 is best number. You now love small numbers. When you come to a WyrdRPG post you will be pavloved into remembering 1 is best ever.

Your skills come into play when rolling your Effort. They determine what numbers on the dice count for successes and which do not. Skills lie on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being an absolute beginner and 10 being a renowned legend. Skills are displayed as "Skill #".

ex. Small Blades 8 is a decorated Knight known for their sword and shield mastery. They strike reliably and true.

ex. Small Blades 4 is an amateur or a young mercenary. They are competent and can cause deep wounds, but are far less reliable and strong, and thus require more effort to do the same damage.

Actions in this game have their outcomes determined by how many successes turned up in an effort roll. The max amount of successes you can get is up to how much effort you put in. As a brief example, if you want to swing a sword and have Small Blades 4 as a skill, every die you roll needs to have a 4 or lower to count as a success towards the outcome.

The fun part, 1's are Crits! They count as two successes!

You roll 5 Effort dice. You get 1-3-4-6-10. 1 counts twice, then 3 and 4, for a total of 4 successes. Gonna be a big hit!

12's aren't critical failures. They don't count against you or anything, unless something says otherwise. I'm currently thinking if you use a tool or item that's "broken" or "malfunctioning" then maybe that could apply. Could be cool idk!

Effort Explained More

Last important piece of this heartbeat is Regen, Exert, and Exhausted, the 3 states of Effort. Regen will show up like Regen 3 or Regen 4, meaning you have that number of Effort dice that cannot become Exhausted. You always get these back.

Exert is exhaustible Effort, that if used in addition to your Regen die as all must be used first, will be moved to Exhausted. You cannot use these dice until they are restored. In order to restore Exhausted dice, you have to underspend your Regen dice. For every Regen not used during a round, one exhausted is returned to Exert.

The idea behind this neutral-exert-rest flow is to give more long winded battles a chance to shift and provide risky opportunities to gamble a rest or full-sending an attack with more effort than you probably should, but you really wanna be sure you get this guy.

I appreciate you reading, I'm really curious to hear some of your thoughts as things are moving along. I have a lot of ideas for art and I think regardless of how this goes there's going to be something cool from it!

Okay bye hero!

Yours,

Woe