This pinned Post serves two purposes: 1) Content Editing/Reviewing Clarification; 2) Villain Arc Cataloguing.
1: Content Editing/Reviewing
For anyone who clicks on my blog after I find your TTRPG that you are writing and read me screaming at 5e; please know that I will not do that to your game lol. We are comrades in pursuit of doing something we love. You are beautiful and I Iove you.
That being said, obviously I will give feedback. I promise that it will be positive, constructive, and generally focused on larger design principles instead of nitpicking grammar and whatnot.
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
I should be doing more to appreciate the lack of marvel movies in today's popular culture. I once yearned for marvel movies to have this level of irrelevance. They used to feel almost ozymandian, like an empire that had no beginning and no end. and now tony stark iron man is naught but two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.
The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--
I bet this Talarico was never featured on MTV's Cribs nor is the legendary pioneer of the roblox "oof" sound. I doubt his mother is even proud of him, in particular.
There are three-and-a-half "Bars" to manage in the game.
First are the two health bars: "Active" and "Passive". Damage reduces both healthbars, but the Passive healthbar's damage cannot be healed. In effect, the passive healthbar is your maximum health, while the active healthbar determines your ability to act in the moment.
Say you take 100 points of damage. The active healthbar drops by 100 points, but the passive bar will drop by 20 - so a heal afterwards will restore only 80 HP at maximum.
Second is the Stamina bar which reduces for every attack perfoemed. This is not a finite resource by any means, and restoring it is quite easy
Thirs is your MP (Magic Points) and acts functionally as the stamina bar for spellcasters, with a few minor changes.
Restoration
When you lose a chunk out of any bar, it is always a good idea to restore it.
Active Health can be restored by any number of potions and spells. Heal spells always have negative priority in the queue, while potions are positive. Most heals are flat.
Passive Health is only healed through explicitly resting, and therefore avoiding combat for an as-yet inderminate amount of time. However, Passive health is an all-or-nothing heal, and so you are guaranteed to return to 100% after the timespan regardless of previous level.
Stamina is resotred by taking a turn of either complete inactivity to fully restore stamina, OR selecting a non damaging skill or move which restores it in percentages.
MP is restored through potions ALONE. There is no other way to restore MP. This is so to keep mages from running away with any encounter with absurd damage output they are capable of.
The Consequences
Not having Active Health is a straightforward way to Die. Respawn mechanics following in some other update.
Passive Health loss is a huge deal though. Dropping below 10% PH will lead to being "Exhausted". This Prevents healing of ANY form, unless restored immediately.
Not having enough Stamina stops you from being able to perform actions with high stamina costs, but more importantly perhaps, will cost two entire dormant turns to restore below 5%, and three if zeroed out.
If I took 100 damage, would I be able to heal it back if I ran a triple marathon everyday for a year, assuming at no point I never got into what can mechanically be considered "a fight?"
Soo, I heard you wanted more updates on the TtRPG? You're in luck!
Weapons
A "Weapon" first is classified as any item whose primary purpose is dealing damage. A piece of wire can Theoretically be used as a garotte, but that isn't its main purpose. Conversely, a dagger is equally capable of cutting cake, but that isn't why you'd use a dagger mainly.
Now, every weapon requires a certain combination of stats to wield. Not having them isn't career ending, but it does halve your damage and double your stamina cost.
Meetings the minimum is, as the name suggests, the floor to using a weapon. Usually, your stats add a ascale factor to a weapon, and so would your class - a fighter for example gets a slight boost to shields.
Moves
You have a set of moves a weapon can use not accounting for your creativity with using them.
Take for example the (placeholder) Iron Greatsword:
The attacks to it would be, say,
Light Jab [30,10,1,0]
Lunge [12,4,1,1]
Reckless Slam [45,20,2,0]
The numbers after the name are the following properties [Base Attack, Stamina Cost, Execution Turns, Priority]
What this tells you is that some attacks can take more than one turn to execute - Reckless Slam here deals damage on turn 1 and mandates turn 2 for recovery. 45 BA is pathetic for a two-turn attack, but excuse the example.
The interesting part comes from how you use the moves at your disposal - Lunge, being a priority move, can be used to set up for a teammate, say someone requiring damage for a power boost.
The power of a weapon is also determined by how many moves they have at their disposal. A more conventionallly powerful weapon may have the following:
Cross Slash [30,12,1,0]: attacks adjacent enemies
Prayerful Strike [25,10,1,0]: restores 50% of damage dealt as HP
Benediction [0,3,1,-1]: Raises all defences of chosen ally by 2 stages (2x)
A status move may also be a part of your kit.
I haven't worked out the details yet, but I hope to be able to design entire attack trees as part of a single weapon, so entire playstyles can be dictated in "sets" for a particular weapon even.
Final Damage = (Base Damage
Pinpoint Volley [var,5,1,0]: Attacks a chosen point
Scattershot (n) [var,2*n ,1,0]: Fires n arrows at chosen enemies. N is equalk to upgrade stage
Bows (And other ranges weapons) do not have individual base damamges, but inmstead have a base damage per bow, with attack modifiers being a function of the arrow.
Tentative Damage Formula:
Net Damage = {(Base Damage)*[ Σ(Attack Stat * Scale Factor)] }
So all you're doing is taking the base damage and multiplying it by all your damage modifiers in play.
Resistances are multiplied into the scale factor. A resistance value is the amount multiplied by. So a resistance of 80 is a 0.08 multiplier on the attack stat, say.
So every attack - and I realise I haven't written them down - have damage split into multiple components.
The component splitup is attack dependent - so Lunge is purely piercing, while Prayerful Strike might be 15 Holy to 10 strike.
So when you run the damage calculations, you do them by component and then sum the final values.
I'm doing most of the background stuff on Excel, so the calculations shouldn't be a problem - I've written up some rudimentary code to handle the splitups and suchlike
I realise I didn't include it in the formula too - in my head, resistance is a factor on your stats, though on second thoughts, it would be too large a penalty
Yeah, doing it that way, you're likely to trip onto either the DS1 or DS2 split damage problems, being that it is either too bad or too good based on the math. I'm not an expert on the coding of those games, I just know that some fuckery happened there.
Okay, so excel. Would players/GMs need to own a Microsoft Office licence to play your game?
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