Here it is, the game I've poured the last year of my life into. https://anvilofstrife.com/ Anvil of Strife is a class-lite fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. It does, strictly speaking, have classes (which it calls Disciplines), but you must choose two, and as you rank them up you can select the abilities you like the most in your preferred order instead of getting them in a prescribed order. In this game you will never roll to hit. Nearly all the moves have no inherent failure chance, and instead its up to your opponents to spend their resources to defend themselves. No more tripping over your own shoelaces. This version of the game is the first combat, crafting, and character creation playtest available to the public, so I hope you enjoy it and tell your friends. In the future I'll be adding more of every character customization option, more non-player creatures to act as adversaries, and eventually significantly expanded lore information for GMs to use to inspire their encounters and campaigns. I'm looking to get feedback from interested players to inform further development, and I hope my game enchants you. Edit: I want to mention I did have a ton of help from my lovely friends and my codeveloper, check out the About Us page!

Even a Super Sentai gets rejected. 😂

Gekisou Sentai Carranger (Ep 34)

scifi/fantasy rpg: Yeah so when you go outside settlements there are Plunderers. These are like fully-grown human beings whose only purpose in life is to attack people who travel between settlements. This lifestyle is somehow sustainable enough that there's more of them than there are friendly NPCs

Where do Plunderers live? Well in Plunderer Camps, which are often quite permanent-looking settlements, but like. Don't think too hard about why this entire group of people is just considered intrinsically criminal with no attempts to even try diplomacy or trade with them.

Plunderers can be distinguished from Normal People by the fact that they wear distinct Plunderer Equipment and have fully separate aesthetics in how they construct their settlements compared to everyone else.

Hey this is really fucking weird right?

Anyway I was playing Baldur's Gate 1 and there's a quest where a paladin asks you to collect "Bandit" scalps. These are dropped by everyone in the Intrinsic Category of Bandit. Which really struck me as particularly shameless about this whole thing.

the thing is I can't entirely let go of bizarre d&d horror stories where it's clear that nobody at the table has the slightest clue how to actually play the game. it's just so fascinating.

scratches the same itch as recipe reviews where the reviewer substitutes powdered sugar for oatmeal and then complains about the result, you know? except orders of magnitude worse

my fave are the ones that have that trash reality tv appeal of awful and self righteous ragging on each other, where everyone sucks and you're just happy to read them tell on each other while unknowingly telling on themselves

The famous "gazebo" story is really funny as a story, but imagine playing at that table? Your GM just being smug about a player not knowing what a gazebo was. And they probably would NEVER let that dude live that down. It just encapsulates this D&D culture idea around the all knowing and fickle DM versus the stupid Players that there are dozens of memes about.

Wouldn't have happened at my table, I'd be pulling up images of some of my favorite gazebos to share.

as a Restricted skill, honeymaking can only be trained if you have enough ranks in Herder, Exile or Handmaiden to raise the threshold.

it dictates the Depth of your Honey Reserve as well as its Katabasis Threshold.

your reputation with The Departed can never be lower than (honeymaking skill + number of fingers) / 2

choice bit from the most recent episode of schlockmasters

Transcript: I love roleplay, and sometimes, when I. I run a weekly game, and I love roleplay. I could. I could just sit in a room and roleplay and tell a story collaboratively with some bounceback, but, if we're playing a game, and we wanna roll dice, and we want things to not be up to us, you gotta follow the rules a little bit. You gotta be like, well, I rolled shit, so that's gonna go south, cuz that's part of the fun of it. You relinquish control, because it's not just about telling - you're not writing a book, you know, you don't have control over everything, and, uh, you have to like relinquish control to your fellow players, to your GM, to whatever, but also to the will of the numbers and the randomness - the mechanics. The design. It's part of the point. [laughter] I am a designer, so I'm very biased, but also, like, that's what we're doing. That's why we're here.

ask trans girls about their favorite fonts btw

taking the tags as instructions, @in-case-of-grace, what ARE your favorite fonts?

Barlow (And condensed) There's a good reason I use this font so much. It's my "brand" font, even! It's a great, simple sans serif that can feel either friendly or imposing, depending on the weight!

Lexend Deca GREAT accessible font option. Sans serif designed to be hyper accessible, and it has a very friendly feeling about it.

Cooper Black It's a classic for a reason! It dominated a decade, and continues to appear to this day! I don't think I need to explain Cooper Black. It is, however, obscenely expensive, so I use other fonts inspired by it like ZT Chintzy. Messenger This is my favie "fantasy" display font. It still evokes the feeling of fantasy, while being fairly low-key. It's simple, bold, and friendly! Bonus points for having roughened variants! Averia Serif Libre This is a very vibey font that does unfortunately have pretty limited usecases, but I really like it! It's great for newspapery, grimy sorts of projects. It feels like you're writing on a typewriter, where the ink smudges and soaks a little into the page.

チェンジドラゴン

電撃戦隊チェンジマン

Here's something I think is worth saying aloud:

You should make that fantasy heartbreaker. You know the one. The one with an action economy you're *sure* will solve combat slog. The one with that really interesting playable race. The one that uses your favorite dice mechanic.

I don't even mean that you should do it in order to learn first-hand why other fantasy adventure games are designed the way they are - although that it unquestionably a benefit.

I mean you should do it because fantasy games are fun, y'all. They're fun to design. they're fun to write for. They're fun to play!

The fantasy heartbreaker looms large in the culture of this hobby for a reason, and it isn't because of That One Game, despite how it may feel. It's because playing a hero taking down a monster is fun, damnit, and we shouldn't ever let the cynical economics of the genre stifle that.

Realistically, tabletop RPGs are no more capable of emulating the experience of playing a video game than video games are capable of emulating the experience of playing a tabletop RPG, but at least with the former it's fun to see how they fail.

I remember a lot of heated discussions about the WOW-ification of 4th edition D&D.

People have done that for every new edition of Dungeons & Dragons – we just act like 4th Edition was an outlier because it's the only one most of the people engaging in that discourse are old enough to remember. 3rd Edition was dismissed as "just tabletop Diablo" when it was initially published in 2000. Hell, when 1st Edition dropped in 1977, it was roundly criticised by for contributing to the videogamification of a hobby which was at the time only about five years old, specifically on the grounds of making heavy use of random dungeon generation tables to automate parts of the GM's job – you can see letters in contemporary gaming periodicals groping for the phrase "tabletop roguelike", and failing to come up with it because the term "roguelike" had not yet been coined on account of the fact that Rogue would not be published for another three years.

(Given these examples, you might notice the trend that all of these criticisms are just picking a game or genre that happened to be popular at the time the edition in question was published, regardless of the aptness of the comparison. The comparison of 4th Edition with World of Warcraft is no different; the contemporary popular video game that 4th Edition's gameplay is actually attempting to emulate is Team Fortress 2.)

Super Sentai - The Yasuko Kobayashi Teams.

another incredible thing that Avery Alder herself pointed out to me is that in the span of like, a year, she crowdfunded Monsterhearts, she wrote The Quiet Year, and released Dream Askew. Like can you imagine??

I don't unfortunately hammer this hard enough in the end of year essay, but jesus christ the range on that woman. The Bakers fundamentally changed the course of the hobby with AW, but Alder created 3 diverging PBTA innovations that radically affected the field like, within the span of time that Flappy Bird was available on ios