3e: The Missing Step
Okay, so it’s a known piece of gamer lore that in 3e D&D, the wizard, cleric, druid and technically-splitting-the-fare sorcerer were all head and shoulders above every other class as a Primary Spellcaster. The argument about which of these four is the best comes down to questions of usability and access and whether or not the real weirdo outliers get to show up like the Archivist and Artificer (which can famously do everything the wizard can do, with pre-planning, making it the Batman of the 3e set).
These four classes represent a polarising point of power in the game system they’re from, and you can tell because every player book had a whole chapter of new spells for them, whereas say, melee characters could sometimes get as much as a new page of possible weapons, of which none would be any good.
They even deformed the way their own player options worked.
How To Be: Tsubaki Yayoi (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be weâre going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that âfeelsâ like the source character
- This isnât meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character âfeelâ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the âfeelingâ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition itâs worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isnât going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things â itâs not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like youâre lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and weâll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
This month we’re doing something I don’t normally do, which is – no, I do fight game characters all the time, but what makes this one special?
She’s got a hat.
Game Pile: Murdle
At its core, Murdle is just a little daily puzzle game in the same vein as Wordle. It’s a game where an investigator gets a bunch of simple logical clues and you put them all in a grid and then you arrive at a solution for the murder mystery that’s coherent, compliant with the clues and often enough, wrong. It’s great fun. I want to talk to you about how much fun I have with a pencil and a tiny silly murder mystery a day.
Privilege Is Without
You might have heard, or read really, at some point, me saying the phrase whiteness is a fog. The idea is that ‘white’ is not, in and of itself, a cultural form, an identity, but rather it is a system of acceptance outside yourself that permeates culture. The fog gets into all the cracks and presses against all the surfaces, but it isn’t, in and of itself, defined by something internal.
I am, after all, white. The system looks at me and goes ‘oh, this guy qualifies for the standard currently.’ Of course, it’s entirely possible for that to be withdrawn. Find the right weirdo and they might (say) falsely claim I’m Jewish and suddenly that whiteness can be withdrawn from me. It’s a complex system that rolls around in its day to day. Go back two hundred years and I wouldn’t get counted. The system is not tracking some inherent, actual, real like chemical detail or compositional detail about me. It is something people socially observe and attribute to me. Some of those attributions are pretty easy but sometimes they’re not.
MTG: Rotating The Roots In My Mind
A new set has come out, Standard has changed, and with it a whole host of new cards that may or may not matter for my beloved Insidious Roots deck.
What am I gunna do?
The notes for this article wound up over a thousand words. I just put them under the fold. It’s hard to work out what I’m gunna do. Here are my thoughts on it, regardless of how good or how meaningful it is as a thought process.
Here’s the lesson up front; three year long standard, with our current landscape has created a niche benefit for me, as a free-to-play Magic: The Gathering Arena player. Decks are changed, a little, with each new release, rather than being overhauled and overthrown by each change. When Insidious Roots rotates out, I will have to change the deck, but at exactly this point, it’s fine. My mono-red deck is fine, and when individual cards go, I can replace them with newer, similar cards in newer sets.
Continue Reading →Number Systems
Here’s a thing for your world building: What do people count to?
If you’re mad, do you count down from ten?
When you’re throwing rock-paper-scissors, do you count to three, then shoot? Or do you shoot on three?
When you think about the game, are you counting zero, fifteen, thirty, forty?
What do you get when you add one to ten fifty nine?
The greatest trick numbers ever pulled was convincing you that they and the ways we talk about them are simple. We know for a fact that math, while following universal rules, is not a universally described practice, and that the way you talk about numbers directly relates to how well you can treat or manipulate those numbers. I am now going to present examples to show I looked things up.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Ronin
The first time I watched Ronin I was sitting on a friend’s sofa down the road from where I was living with my parents. It was the early 00s. I was learning about movies from a fan of movies, seeing things I’d never seen before from someone I wasn’t good at being friends with. The second time I watched Ronin was last night.
1998 was a long, long time ago. 1998 was a time when people who grew up with the cold war in their lives were realising that maybe it was definitely over, and now, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had to come up with something else to do to justify all that spy stuff that was done. You know, all those listening programs and the manipulations and the lies and the counterprogramming and the language skills and peeing in weird places, like, that had to be for something, right?
Right?
Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 4 â Deepest Truths
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This fourh section elaborates on the revelations of the third; and it also directs the heroes on to the final arc, to possibly come to understand what the Necrocalypse is, was, or will be.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 4: The Jatku Outcasts
What would you give up, if it meant you had one more day? What would you consider an acceptable surrender in the name of salvation? What is it about your fundamental assumptions about your own ability to exist, your own continuity of life?
The Iacon have stitched steel to their skin. The Kraivh turn bones into machines. There are worse and older things hiding in the deep. What the question lingers, what would you do to live, survive, and thrive in a world where the air itself can become poison?
Thus is the question of the Jatku outcasts. The Jatku who stand outside of the Emperor’s forces. The Jatku whose Process is considered heresy, and whose very name is considered a swear. The Jatku who the Emperor refuses to refer to as a faction, claiming they befoul the name of his daughter and her mother – the great mage researcher Jatku herself. The faction that calls itself The Million Eyes.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Eureka: Urban Investigative Fantasy Kickstarter
Hey here’s the video and here’s the kickstarter!
Thumbnail and credits below the fold
Continue Reading →The Mormon Shelf
The first thing you learn about that’s a problem for your faith, you can put it aside. It depends on how it gets put aside; sometimes they’re solved, sometimes they’re explained, sometimes they’re harrumphed, sometimes it’s a thing you’ll get around to later. The point is, you have a shelf, you have a place for all those doubts, all those ideas that you know are a problem and that have never been satisfactorily dealt with. Eventually, the shelf becomes overburdened, it creaks, and then…
One day, when you put something new on it…
It breaks and it all comes tumbling down.
This is about doubt.
Continue Reading →Custom Magic: Whybrid
Time to time, we will see in the custom MTG community, a card that is hybrid, pulling together effects that are out of type for one of the two colours in the cost. This is a real tricky challenge to explain conveniently because at its heart, it’s an idea that once you get it, is very obvious, but before you get it, it’s opaque. What makes it okay for some cards to be hybrid when they seem the push the colour pie for one of their colours?
April 2024 Wrapup
The way this month has ended has coloured most of everything else happening within the month, none of which is stuff I consider meaningful content for the blog in general. Suffice to say this is a month in which I was trying to save money and do my best and by the end of the month I am extremely frazzled and uncertain as to how I’m doing what I’m doing. But you didn’t come here for that, you came here for posts! Posts about Spiderman!
Story Pile: Oshi no Ko
With 2023 over, there comes an inevitable wave of conversations for those of us who watch anime slow, to ask: Hey, what was good back then? What anime was there, now fully complete, that is worth going back and watching again now there’s a full set of episodes to engage with? And that brings with it a ranking system and a conversation about best and worsts. I tend to think of this in terms instead of favourites – of what thing was it that I liked the best, or spoke to me the most deeply. I figured I’d talk about that in April, in my month.
One of the anime that was considered in contention is the anime Oshi no Ko, which is a – it’s about – it’s –
Hm. Hang on.
If it is time for me to talk about Oshi no Ko, a manga and an anime and technically a movie and a music video clip, then it is time to set up some basic boundaries for the audience. It is an anime with a pretty pervasive and well-defended culture regarding spoilers and their importance, though, and while I think having access to information about this series is one of the best ways to keep from giving up on it, I want to make sure you know good and clear up front that I am going to be doing spoilers about what’s included in Oshi no Ko. Not a lot – but definitely stuff from its first episode onwards, where the big twist of the series – as much as it can be considered that – is explicitly and clearly spoiled. If I’m going to talk to you about this series, I need to talk to you about this series and not about what the series pretends and implies it might actually be.
Problem with that is that brings with it its cousin, the content warning. And while normally, I can kinda just smooth things over with the phrase ‘oh lords, there’s a lot of anime bullshit going on here,’ I think it’s best to be a bit more specific in the context of Oshi no Ko. That means I’m going to talk about:
- Death of a parent, particularly directly experienced
- Murder, but you know, this is very low key and it’s allowed, as a treat
- The ongoing experience of stalking and its ramifications
- Cyberbullying and suicide attempts
- Uncomfortable age gaps we summarise as ‘anime bullshit’
- Sibling and parent-child incest
How To Be: The Animorphs (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be weâre going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that âfeelsâ like the source character
- This isnât meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character âfeelâ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the âfeelingâ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition itâs worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isnât going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things â itâs not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like youâre lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and weâll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
One way or another, I’m going to find a way to make a build for How to Be that involves the druid, and if this is how we do it, this is how we do it. See, I can’t tell you who these characters are, or where they’re from. All I can tell you is that we’re going to do our best to make builds for them, and one of them is definitely going to be a druid.
Talen’s Birthday, 2024
Somehow this one feels less of a big deal than last year. I dunno, maybe it’s because turning forty has been a big monument in my mind, turning forty-one feels just like turning forty again.
I had a fanciful idea that I could do something with the fact that 41 is a prime age; that I have turned 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37 and now 41, and then I thought it’d be interesting to see if I ever turned a prime age in a prime year. Now, if you’re at all good at math you’d be able to point out that by being born in 1983, every year I turn an odd age, the year is even and vice versa, meaning that for roughly half the population at any time, they’re never a prime age on a prime year, since no even number is a prime.
It’s not a complicated math puzzle here.
Game Pile: Sheriff of Nottingham
Sheriff of Nottingham is one of my favourite games that I will probably never get to properly play.
Bluey’s Diggers
The Australian character, it is said, was shaped by World War 1. The diggers, the soldiers we sent to Turkey to buy breathing room for Russia so it could push on Germany and reduce the impact on France. That is a good and comforting myth to have in which we get to do something cool and impressive and tough (partake in a war) while also thinking everyone involved is stupid (because they were) and conveniently ignore the complete lack of our own agency in it (why didn’t we say no?). It sort of crystallised the Australian character as liking and being impressed with war and death, accepting death as a potential consequence, and all that good grim military fantasism that paints us as hardworking even to the point of death, and also quite stupid in that we didn’t once consider if maybe the people we should be shooting at are the ones telling us to get shot.
But thing is, I have complicated feelings about Bluey.
T-Shirt: Hazbin The Hotel
Hey, turns out that new cartoon for cool youths is something I really like. But I couldn’t just draw fanart of sometihng, no, that would be too sensible and good, noooo, so instead I decided that what it really needed was a reference to a 35 year old videogame logo from a time when that game was not yet a punchline.
I am so happy with how this looks? It’s simple and crisp and I really like how Vaggie looks with her happy smile at Charlie like ‘oh, that’s my idiot.’ If you want it on something, you can get it on a sticker, or coasters, or a t-shirt, or, you know, normal Redbubble stuff.
Fundie Fucking
Imagine you have a jar for jellybeans. I want you to imagine this jar, and it starts out empty. Now, what happens, when you get married, right, is that the first time you have sex, you put a jellybean in that jar. Then, the next time, you put another jellybean in. Another, and another, and another. You keep this up for the first full year of marriage. And then, in the second year, whenever you have sex, you take a jellybean out. You do that for every single time you have sex after that first year.
By the time you die, you won’t have emptied that jar.
Content Warning: I’m going to talk about things I was taught about sex as a Christian fundamentalist.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Lords and Ladies
From time to time I talk about Discworld books, and I will usually say that there’s no reading order. I operate on the assumption that readers have a degree of object permanence, that they are capable of telling if a story happens before or after sometihng and that if you find a story of a character that includes a former drunk in one book, and then find a story of a drunk in another book, you will be able to put the sequence of events in a meaningful order without being overwhelmed by the challenge of the book. The Discworld books are contained stories for dedicated readers capable of managing the complexities of understanding that I could reach when I was twelve years old and in a cult, I do not doubt any adult curious about them will do fine without an authoritive reading list to ensure they do not miss any of the lore.
But.
Ugh I hate that.
But but but but. But! There is a single Discworld Book that I know of (now) which opens with an author’s note that you need to be at least a little bit aware of previous stories in order to appreciate the events of this book. And then it tells you those events.
If I did this more often, I imagine I’d introduce these things by hey, let me tell you about my favourite Discworld book. But let’s do that anyway. Don’t worry, no major spoilers, just a sort of vague gesturing at the plot that’s already covered by the book jacket.
Your Time Is A Gift
I want you to understand how I treat you.
Not you in the general; you, in the specific, who are my friends.
There are people who read this who don’t consider themselves my friends, who have never had a conversation with me. That’s okay. I want you to read this, too. I want you to be able to see how I think of my friends, the mindset I have that helps me handle my friendships and maintain good habits.
But you, the person reading this, this is how I think of treating you, as my friend.
I have two basic ideas here:
- Nobody is trying to be a problem
- Time is a gift
That’s it. Those two ideas guide all my friendships and my behaviour. Let me, as much as I can, explain it.
Continue Reading →The Laewaes Dramaturgists
Arcane magic represents the most important discipline available to us in which people across all the world can come together to share our notes and experiences in order to construct a vision of how this system functions that is coherent and precise and replicable and also probably in some way, fundamentally wrong.
Archmagus Laewaes I
Look I just want to tell you about a cool adventure site and backstory hook from Cobrin’Seil that’s about something I care about a lot recently, which is a university system in-setting. It just takes a bit of a walk to get there because it involves understanding Arcane magic and how it differs from Divine magic, Primal Magic, and Psionics in the setting.
Game Pile: Planetfall (Kinda)
Script and thumbnail below the fold!
Continue Reading →Planar Lensing
How many wheres are there?
There are three major media franchises these days that all work with the idea of multiplanar worlds. Sometimes this involves creating a huge and complicated network of just coincidentally competing brand merchandise lines, where two companies bickering about a contract results in a storytelling direction that explains why Uncle Ben is a different guy, but sometimes it’s a direct choice and it’s done because you want a new place to be, a new whole world to play with.
When building worlds, adding these ‘alternate worlds’ – referred to as planes hereon out – can be a great way to continue the ongoing need of the worldbuilder, which is where am I going to put all this stuff? What I’d like to present here are just some ways to talk about how you’re using planar spaces in your worlds.
Continue Reading →Create Tension when You Can
You don’t know how to write well.
Well What if I Was In Charge Of Pokemon If I’m So Bloody Smart?
No matter where you are on the internet, whatever the fandom is, someone is always going to ask about what you’d do if you were in charge of it. For example, a lot of Bible fans are very convinced that their fanfiction is actually factually true. Whether it’s fantasy Wrestlemanias or ideal outfit compositions in Pretty Little Liars, there’s always an urge to take a thing you already know and make your version of it.
Also, people who like Pokemon routinely talk about what stupid idiots the designers are and how they could do a better job of running the game. I don’t think I could, because I know there are competing factors and I think that everyone who opens their mouth to talk like that sounds like a tool.
Still, if I think those people are silly, it’s easy to say that if I don’t put myself out there, right?
Here! A bunch of opinions about what I think should be done in Pokemon as a game franchise. Nothing like ‘open world matters’, I think the game should always be a competitive 2v2 Bo3 format and the rest of the game can follow from that. I also don’t think that this would make the game better. It’s very important that I put it out there, on my sleeve, that none of these changes are based on deep insight into the game or the way that it should be. No. This is a centering of myself, as a designer, and as a player of games. This is how I want it done. Also note that none of these changes are simple or oblative, like, this isn’t all that I think should happen, there would need to be specific changes and fine tuning for all these pushes.
There, preamble done, here’s how and where I’m right.
Story Pile: 16 Bit Sensation (And Another Layer I Guess)
Ah, Talen month, Talen month! A month where I celebrate media I love, or maybe media I really want to talk about. Media I want to talk about possibly because I think it’s a topic I would normally find too mean, or too cruel to focus on. After all who wants to hear me vent or complain or just drag something for being mediocre.
I do!
It’s Talen Month, and this time around I’m going to do something different in that I’m going to talk about something amazing, something I love, a manga that I think is genuinely, wholeheartedly excellent that you can blitz through in an afternoon, and also, uh, the anime spinoff of it that serves in my mind as one of the examples of how 2023 just was a mid freaking year for anime. I want to talk to you about one of my favourite genres of media, ‘people making things from an insider perspective, with a dash of economic structures,’ and then one of my least favourites, ‘spinoff that is embarrassed to be associated with a much, much better piece of media.’
Up front before I dive in, I’m going to talk about both the manga 16 Bit Sensation and I’m also going to talk about the anime with a similar name, 16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer. I’m going to spoil details about the storyline of Another Layer, which I don’t think should be a problem because I don’t think it’s any good and it’s not like spoiling it would be in any way a diminishment of your enjoyment of it.
Because I don’t find it very enjoyable.
Continue Reading →The Brilliant Fool
Normally when I write here about a Transformers character, itâs a character who has some significance to me as â well, honestly, as an example of a kind of person I could be, growing up. Blades gave me a lesson about quelling the want for violence inside me and also how defensive violent bf /softboy medic bf was a top tier pairing, and Dinobot gave me lessons about dying well in the face of oblivion, a lesson that I thought I needed really soon when I got it. There are Transformers I love because of jokes, Transformers I love because of association with toys and there are some Transformers that I love because they are, through no fault of their own, completely useless doofuses.
Letâs talk about Wheeljack
3e: Objection to Formula
When I started on this article, the plan was to talk to you about the magic item system in D&D 3rd edition, and let’s put a pin in the word ‘system’ there. But engaging with it meant looking at a place in history and a realisation of how I’m not just talking about stuff from an earlier edition of D&D I’m talking to you about an earlier version of myself.
As long as there has been an online, it seems, I have wanted to make things and put them on there.
Game Pile: Gazillionaire
In 1994, the videogame company Lavamind released the game Gazillionaire, which was in its purest form a sort of spreadsheet software with a random number generator built in. A bunch of trading companies kick off at the same point in time engaging in transport and trade. You go to a planet, which has its own weirdo economy and its own current supply and demand of goods, buy what you want, sell what you want, and head off to a new location to make a profit on those goods. There are all layers of complexity here, with things like warehousing and random events along the way, and every planet has its own specialised services and its own stock market you can use to invest in.
And it looks
like
this.
