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Petals and Thorns is still on Kickstarter. The second week (eight days, really) was significantly less explosive than the first – as is to be expected. There was one absolutely massive surge, the largest since day one, when an /r/Pathfinder_RPG post really took off. Clearly that Pathfinder conversion stretch goal is paying dividends and going forward I should probably plan a 5e and Pathfinder version from the start, and just bake the extra cost of formatting two .pdfs into the .pdf stretch goal. A second, smaller surge came when I released Petals and Thorns: Hirelings, a one-page RPG, and promised there would be more like it for anyone who backed $5 and above.

Between these two surges, the momentum on the Kickstarter continued unabated even into the second week, but the days between surges revealed a growing problem: The rate at which Kickstarters own community pledged, by far the biggest source of support so far, was slowing down. This was not surprising, and in fact I expected it to happen much sooner. Eventually just about everyone on Kickstarter who wants Petals and Thorns will have already seen it and pledged for it, and apparently we reached that point sometime around day 12 or 13. The one-page surge helped mask this, but by day 15 incoming pledges are barely even balancing out cancelled pledges, not because cancelled pledges are at all common, but because incoming pledges have gotten so rare. The end of the campaign will hopefully bring in a rush of fence-sitters deciding at the last second to support me, which will hopefully more than balance the last-minute cancellations, but other than that surge (which may end up being negative!), I’m pretty sure the rest of the income for this project will have to come from posting it to new communities to try and find untapped reserves of potential backers. Unfortunately, I have no idea what communities might be left to tap.

As of the writing, the Petals and Thorns Kickstarter campaign has been going for a week and thirty minutes. Success has been explosive compared to my expectations. My initial group of supporters was several times more generous than I had anticipated, as were the people who first discovered my Kickstarter and the friends-of-friends my supporters linked it to directly. I was able to hit my initial funding goal in 12 hours. Things hardly budged for another 24 hours after that, but when I feared things might be slowing down and my Kickstarter wouldn’t have much reach beyond the few dozen people who already knew my work, a link to Giant in the Playground brought in several hundred more dollars.

The success of the first two days left me scrambling for stretch goals several days before I thought I’d need them, but this turned out to be for the best, as it allowed me to figure out what stretch goals were in popular demand. I thought that the game being designed specifically for virtual tabletops would be a big selling point and that a .pdf version would be a pretty “meh” stretch goal, probably something I would’ve put near the back because it was both a bit expensive (I need to hire a freelancer for the layout to get anything remotely professional) and I thought it’d be seen as an inferior product to the VTT version anyway. This is not what happened. What happened is that tons of people wanted a .pdf version, I moved that stretch goal up to the top of the queue, and when the surge from GitP carried me over it, that caused a second surge of people backing for the .pdf version.

That surge petered out around $1,250 on day three. It was well below my next stretch goal, the Pathfinder conversion at $1,500. I expected I’d get there eventually with the $30-$60 Kickstarter’s own community brought in each day, but it’d be several days to get there. I kept posting the Kickstarter around the internet, trying one new subreddit each day, hoping to get another surge, while also looking for a way to bring the cost of the Pathfinder conversion down.

I got the stroke of luck I needed to break through when someone started a flame war in the comments of one of my Reddit posts. They were trying to convince people I was a scammer, but it became obvious so quickly that they hadn’t even watched my Kickstarter video that they wound up with like six people yelling at them. The fight drew in attention and I went from about $1,350 to $1,650 on day six. Partly that was from the Reddit thread, but a chunk of it was from getting over the Pathfinder stretch goal and getting that surge. This is also when I sold out my limited $50 reward to get a character of the backer’s design featured as an NPC in the main town Ramshorn, something now only available from the really ridiculous reward levels at $100 and $400.

Day seven has so far reverted back to the ordinary trickle of Kickstarter backers coming in. I did break $1,700, which is a neat milestone, but not an actual stretch goal. Not only that, but I’m out of stretch goals that might prompt a surge. Everything from here ’till $4,200 – and that goal is a stretch for sure – is just more tokens. I think that’ll be a huge improvement to the production values of the adventure, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets people on the fence to donate. I can’t actually show people the tokens until after the Kickstarter is over, I collect the money, and can pay the artists to draw them for me.

The campaign has already far exceeded my initial expectations, so I won’t complain if the next week is spent limping over the $2,000 mark, but I’ve also been putting together a Facebook campaign. Maybe that’ll be a dud, but I’ve been told $10 of advertising money can go surprisingly far on Facebook, so maybe it’ll end up with another surge that brings in another few hundred. I’m just about out of cards to play, but the game’s gone pretty well for me so far. And I should get an ending surge in the last week for free, as people on the fence are forced to fall one way or another, and some of them fall on my side. After day one, I decided I’d consider the Kickstarter a success not just for convincing my existing supporters to help me, but for actually expanding my audience if I could get $750 and 45 backers. I’ve already got over $1,700 and 70 backers, so mission very accomplished.

Right now my only real worry is that maybe once people actually have the adventure, they won’t like it. I’m pretty confident in the quality of this adventure, but not so confident as to quiet the gnawing uncertainty about the future that tends to haunt my every action. I mean, I’m really bad at marketing. It’s one of my biggest weaknesses. It would be super weird if I were able to get a Kickstarter campaign 300% funded in a week on the strength of my marketing. But I won’t know for certain until it actually ships.

I should probably drop a link to the campaign in here somewhere. If you play D&D 5 or Pathfinder and haven’t checked it out, give it a look.

Gohan’s transformation to SSJ2 was never going to be easy for DBZ Abridged to recreate. Firstly, it has the issue that all abridged series’ have, which is that everyone already knows the plot, so it’s much harder to execute that plot in a way that’s engaging. Making this particular scene worse, Goku already went SSJ once, and this scene of a good guy saiyan getting really angry and then getting a massive powerup out of the deal as symbolized by his hair getting spikier, we’ve already done that. So, when I say they messed it up, it’s not really a criticism of them as creators so much as it is a criticism of people who are giving them a pass. After over a year with no DBZA episodes, I get the feeling a lot of fans are willing to call episode 60-1 a masterpiece no matter how far out of left field the trigger for Gohan’s transformation was.

And this gets us into the third major obstacle for Gohan’s transformation, which is that its trigger is the death of a recent addition to the team who is an ally of convenience with no special relationship to Gohan at all. Threatening the life of Gohan’s father, mentor, and friends canonically does not trigger Gohan’s SSJ2 transformation, but killing Android 16 does. Team Four Star could’ve written their way out of that one by skipping the Android 16 monologue and letting Gohan transform in response to his family and friends being directly threatened and in immediate danger of death, but what’s special about that? Gohan was on Namek. He fought Freeza. Krillin, Dende, and later Piccolo being in danger of immediate death certainly triggered a sudden flare in power, but he didn’t go super saiyan. Plus, the flaw in the episode was certainly not with Android 16’s monologue to Gohan. That was well-written and well-acted. I am 100% willing to buy that Android 16’s savage attack on Gohan’s pacifism and subsequent callous murder were enough to push Gohan over the edge.

No, the problem is what came before that monologue, or rather what didn’t: Gohan being any kind of pacifist. Android 16 accuses Gohan of being a coward, but he’s not. He didn’t come here to arrange a peaceful resolution, he came here to fight Cell. Granted, he expected Goku to do all the heavy lifting, but Gohan’s been to enough of these things to realize that sometimes your B-team gets called on to kill a minion, or bog down the bad guy while a spirit bomb charges, or whatever. When Gohan fought Cell prior to his transformation, even in his own internal monologue he never said that he was afraid of hurting Cell. He was afraid that Cell would hurt him, but he fought Cell anyway. When Goku stopped fighting Cell and asked Gohan to finish the fight instead, Gohan asserted that Cell was going to win and kill him. When Goku refused to fight Cell anyway, Gohan ultimately acquiesced to the ultimatum of “fight Cell or let him destroy the world” and went to go fight a battle he was convinced was going to kill him. Gohan’s not a coward or a pacifist. He’s been fighting to protect the people he cares about since episode 1 and never expressed any desire to run away. He wishes he didn’t have to fight, but he never considers actually running away or refusing battle.

The end of Android 16’s monologue isn’t “stop running away,” though, it’s “stop holding back.” This is incongruent with Gohan’s claim to be a pacifist (itself incongruent with the fact that he’s trying to fight Cell, he’s just losing) and the accusations of cowardice, and it’s not even clear why Gohan’s holding back. From my existing knowledge of the original show, I can guess that a fear of destroying the entire Earth in the crossfire may have been a concern, but 1) if DBZA is going to try and recreate the moment of transformation as a dramatic one and not a gag, then they need to recreate that build-up too, not just rely on their audiences already having it, and 2) Android 16 talks about how Gohan’s “rigid pacifism [is crumbling] into bloodstained dust” and will be “a coward to your last whimper.” This isn’t consistent with Gohan holding back for fear of destroying the thing he’s out to protect. Even if the odds of accidentally destroying the Earth in an unrestrained battle are lower than the odds of Cell winning and destroying the Earth anyway while Gohan is holding back, that’s not “rigid pacifism [crumbling] into bloodstained dust,” that’s being willing to sacrifice the Earth to Cell in order to avoid any possibility of being the proximate cause of Earth’s destruction.

And even that is a flaw that is only very vaguely alluded to in DBZA – in that Goku is so committed to going all out for victory that the other Z fighters think he really is going to sacrifice Earth in pursuit of it. No one ever presents this as being necessary to defeating Cell, though, and it’s not a reference made often enough to work as the thematic core for the arc. It’s a one-off gag that first appeared the episode before Gohan’s transformation, made in a way that didn’t directly reference Gohan at all, and which is so transient that it doesn’t appear to be anything more than a joke, but which is suddenly drafted into being Gohan’s entire character arc from episodes 31-60.

Android 16’s monologue is a spectacular takedown of a flaw that Gohan doesn’t actually have. To the extent that the scene works at all, it’s only because it’s accompanied by a well done cover of an excellent song.

I knew I was forgetting something today.

An update on the Kickstarter, which was originally going to run on tomorrow, September 1st. The illustrator I wound up working with is significantly slower than most of the others I was looking at (she is very well reviewed, however, so I’m reasonably confident she won’t just take the money and run, which is a concern for a lot of the guys on Fiverr), so it looks like I might not have my art ready to go until possibly as late as September 10th. That’s not really enough time to squeeze in a whole other let’s read, so I’m just going to extend the hiatus on those slightly. September 10th should be a maximum, but I’ve never worked with this artist before, so I can’t really guarantee anything.

I’m gonna bust something out of my skunkworks for today (the skunkworks being the folder full of projects I work on with no intention of ever releasing any part of them to the public, but which occasionally produce something that isn’t so mired down in my own niche interests as to be uninteresting to anyone who isn’t me). I like the idea behind things like Darkest Dungeon afflictions, points where a character takes enough psychological damage that they suffer some kind of madness. One fatal flaw that many such systems have, however, is being utterly random. This ranges from the minor issue in Darkest Dungeon itself where a character is varyingly cowardly or suicidally aggressive depending on what dice they roll when their stress hits 100, regardless of what afflictions they’ve had previously, to the Call of Cthulhu problem where characters develop completely random phobias in response to seeing something sufficiently spooky. My solution: Each character, at chargen, selects a specific means of going mad from the stress of it all.

The specific numbers and skills referenced here are in relation to a greater skunkworks project which is mostly compatible with 5e mathematically except in that there are obviously meant to be lots of guns in this setting. You could buff that out yourself, but really, this should be taken as a prototype, an example of how things could work, rather than something that can be copied into an existing game unaltered.

Continue reading “Your Own Kind Of Madness” →

I spent all day today (Sunday) preparing a game for tonight, and it still wasn’t really completely ready, but it was good enough for government work and I can smooth off the rough edges in time for next week (it’s a big ‘ol dungeon that the party has only explored, like, 1/6th of, partly because they seem to have forgotten that this game is starting at level 6 and ankhegs are not really a big deal).

Since I’m short on time, though, here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m gonna write a quick article about my first impressions of the Champions of the Spheres system the party is using, and then on Tuesday I’ll publish the Dungeon Born update that normally would’ve gone on Monday.

Champions of the Spheres is a rules supplement for Pathfinder that completely replaces all classes with three sets of spheres, magic, martial, and mixed, along with a few classes whose primary abilities is that they get to pick a number of talents from these spheres. Skills and feats are still a thing, but spells have been completely replaced by these spheres. This gives a ton of flexibility in creating characters, but I can also see why the group wanted to start at level 6: Low levels are even more punishing than normal Pathfinder here. When making NPC mooks with a couple of class levels to help familiarize myself with the new system, I found that my level 3 guys were consistently unable to pull enough talents together to get a respectable tactical doctrine nailed down (except for the hobgoblins using the Conscript class, which gets a plethora of bonus talents). That’s fine for NPC mooks, who can rely on unit diversity to form an interesting encounter overall even if they’re little more than a sack of HP with one interesting trick up their sleeve on their own, but as a player you do not want your only trick to be knocking someone one square back so that they have to provoke an AoO from your buddy with the reach weapon to get to you again.

Casters run on spell points, which can be expended to maintain an effect without concentrating on it, so when casters run dry they become more limited by being able to only concentrate on one thing at a time but they can still do something level appropriate. The vastly more limited spell libraries (generally speaking, one caster talent gets you what would’ve been one spell in regular PF) reign in casters a lot, although I haven’t taken a close look at caster abilities much, as the dungeon I built focused mainly on martials since I felt I needed to limit my scope in order to have any hope of finishing on time (and I was cutting it close as it was, so that was definitely the right call), but from the one caster I did build (three casters if you count the lower level gimped mook versions, but really, they’re just the same guy but at levels 3, 5, and 7 – level 3 guys to show up frequently as trash mooks, level 5 versions to pose a threat but only a bit, and the level 7 version who could be serious trouble, especially when encountered with level 5 versions of the heavy infantry and ranger builds) it seems like casters are mostly reigned in but still noticeably cooler than martials. Casters get to make illusions and throw people around with their mind and dish out tons of healing, martials get to bull rush without provoking and can allow enemies to auto-hit in exchange for getting an attack of opportunity on them when they do.

Still, overall this is a system that preserves the biggest appeal of Pathfinder – a million little options that allow you to build a character unique to you, whereas in 5e every Oath of the Ancients Paladin tends to feel like the other, regardless of race or feat selection – while still helping fix the most egregious of the system’s balance problems. Tiers do appear to still exist, but they are not nearly as severe as in vanilla Pathfinder.

I like ARPGs. Y’know, “Action” RPGs that are now totally misnamed because most RPGs have at least as much real time action as they do, and which are instead defined by the dungeon structure, ability trees, and especially loot system introduced by Diablo. As an alternative to gushing about XCOM even more, I’m instead going to tackle the question of how to translate Diablo loot to the tabletop.

Before getting into that, the concern of whether or not this is even a good idea should be addressed. Because making a direct and obvious translation of Diablo looting to the tabletop is a terrible idea. You kill a rat and a treasure chest pops out, you pop that open and you find gauntlets of ogre strength and 27 gold. That’s literally a joke. It works in ARPGs because we all get that verisimilitude isn’t high on their list of priorities, and that the looting is mostly abstract in the context of whatever the greater story is (which is itself better off being just present enough to provide necessary context and stakes – Diablo 3 suffered for too strong an emphasis on a story that wasn’t very good). In a tabletop RPG, you actually have to narrate out that the ghoul was apparently carrying a vorpal sword that it didn’t feel the need to use over the rusty scimitar it’d been attacking the party with while still animate.

Not only that, but Diablo looting operates on having tons of fiddly little numerical increases in different stats. Damage. Accuracy. Rate of attack. Elemental damage. Even in a TTRPG designed to include all of these things (i.e. attacks per turn is a function of weapon, not character class and level, weapons provide significant accuracy bonuses or penalties, and so on), these just can’t have the same diversity as Diablo gives them because the numbers have to be smaller because the game isn’t run by a computer. Number inflation is already a problem in RPGs (especially with regards to hit points), and that’s with the numbers within any given level generally being pretty reasonable (i.e. the difference in to-hit bonuses for level 5 characters and their level appropriate opponents tends to be within maybe ten points from one end to the other). In Diablo, a key part of the system is that it’s possible for this weapon to be 7% more accurate but deal five fewer points of damage and attack only 95% as often. And at the end of the next encounter, you’ll have found another weapon with equally tiny fiddly bonuses. Players cannot be reasonably expected to update their character sheets that often.

So why, then, do we want to make some means of making it work anyway? What’s the benefit we’re trying to salvage? The Diablo loot lottery triggers the same reward centers as an actual, legit lottery, scratch card, or slot machine, but it does so without pumping anyone for money. It’s all the thrill of gambling without the cruel exploitation of the hopeless and/or mathematically illiterate. Most drops are trash that can be rendered down into gold as a consolation prize. Every now and again you get a solid upgrade that will keep you on track for level appropriate foes. A very rare few will be powerful weapons that give you a significant edge over the opposition. The chance that you might get that awesome weapon makes each drop exciting, even though most of them are going to be rendered down into gold and used to buy healing and portals.

Continue reading “Translating Diablo Loot to Tabletop” →

This one came with the caption “I’m a paladin, not a doctor!”

Seeing as how the last thing I posted before going dark for two days was broody and sad, people might be worried about me. No worries, I’m doing perfectly alright, funerals just take up more time than I’d anticipated and I was unable to get any blogging done. I might’ve been able to squeeze out the usual Sunday YouTube posts since the real work of running and recording a game session was done in advance, except that this week’s Iron Fang Invasion requires some editing before posting, so I’m doing that on Monday (should go up just a few hours after this post), I’ll figure out an article for Tuesday, and we’ll be back to Dungeon Born on Wednesday.

I have mentioned at least once over the last few months my grandmother’s failing health, and also mentioned the death of my grandfather last year. Later today (provided this posts on time), I will be pall bearing my grandmother, at which point I will have run out of grandparents to bury. These occasions give me a generally morbid attitude, but I wasn’t close enough to either of them to be grieving too badly. I do get sad about it. I can see elements of both of them in my creative ambitions now. My grandfather’s art was music, specifically the oboe, rather than anything as nerdy as game design, but I like to think I’ve inherited something of his single-minded dedication to that art. He played in several orchestras and taught music at a reasonably prestigious university, and most of his expressed opinions on the world were informed by metaphors to music, in much the same way as mine tend to rely strongly on game theory and other board/video game metaphors.

My grandmother had an undaunted sense of independence. When I was a teenager, she was still in good enough health to visit our house, and survivor of the Great Depression that she was, she hated using more cups than was absolutely necessary, and would hide the first cup she used in the guest room so my mother wouldn’t put it in the dish washer and give her a new one the next meal. She’d wash the cup out, of course, but use the same one all day. As her health declined, she still insisted on doing as much as possible for herself. When I was watching her throughout this year (which happened only occasionally, as there are plenty of others able to help in the area), I’d offer to make every meal for her and she would refuse every one and do it herself, moving at a snail’s pace, but under her own power. I can see some elements of that in my desire to get away from having to answer to a single boss, who can threaten my livelihood whenever the whim strikes them.

I should also add, despite a general attitude of mild melancholy, I’m not that broken up about it, so I’ll mention in advance that an outpouring of sympathy isn’t really necessary. I’m typing up some brooding thoughts on this because yes, it has been on my mind, but also because I’m out of other article ideas (since my grandmother died I have written and published two different articles on how much I like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so clearly the grief isn’t overwhelming), and the funeral and wake are taking up some of the time I’d normally be spending on brainstorming these things. It certainly didn’t help that I spent most of the afternoon (Thursday, as I’m writing this, not Friday, when it will go live) heading to my grandparents’ old house in response to an evacuation notice which, it turned out, had been sent to me and every other person in the county in error. They didn’t deserve to die, but they lived fifteen years longer than most people get.