Game Pile: Crystal Caves
I will wring anticapitalist blood out of this fucking stone if I have to.
CoX: Swivel
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
In all technicality, the man known once as Vice Swithin doesn’t exist. He never attended public school, never was recruited into the military at a young age, and was never court-martialed. Officially, he didn’t spend over a year in prison being constantly the subject of assault attempts due to his lean frame and youthful looks, being constantly upgraded in security due to his self-defense capability leading to injured inmates.
Such high-risk prisons were certainly not combed for inmates experiencing minimal deviance from a genetic mean to find strong candidates capable of surviving a protracted full-body implant and neuroconnective surgery. Medical records don’t exist for a process that wired him from heart to head, that upped his reaction time, accelerated his thought process and kept the young man wired on a personal basis alongside the firewalls and flamewars of wireless internet.
One life, redacted.
Continue Reading →The Circle Highway in Dal Raeda
Okay, hit the ground running fast: In Cobrin’Seil, I had a quandrary to solve. I knew that Dal Raeda (Big Irish-like Empire) has a section of the King’s Highway in it. This presented a problem, because Dal Raeda is a peninsula, and to have the highway in it would require that highway to connect two parts of the Eresh Protectorates. That meant the only options are:
- The Eresh Protectorate don’t build their highways between their cities and might build one into Dal Raeda for convenience, which I didn’t like
- There’s an Eresh Protectorate city inside Dal Raeda, which would be politically surprising
What follows here is the story that flows from addressing that question and thinking in terms of how pieces of infrastructure get built and maintained.
Continue Reading →The Grasshopper’s Gotta Go Fast
One of the most common academic books you’re ever going to hear me mention, if you hang around me for any meaningful length of time, is going to be The Grasshopper: Life, Games and Utopia, and I’m not double checking the order of the terms in the title. It’s a book published first in 1978, by a guy called Bernard Suits, a lecturer from the University of Waterloo. The book is considered, now, fundamental to the philosophical consideration of games, and is the source of one of the most common definitions of games you’ll hear — indeed, the one I use to be maximally inclusive: A game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
If you’ve listened to me explaining games in any expansive way, you’ve absolutely heard me quote this. Maybe sometimes I’ll say consensual instead of voluntary and maybe you’ll see noncompulsory instead of unnecessary, or restructuring the sentence back to front in some other way. If you only learned one thing from the book, odds are good, it’s this definition, which is useful for a bunch of reasons. It gives you freedom, it’s very inclusive, and it also asserts that you can’t be forced to play, which I found very important to instill in those I teach, that if you’re not choosing to do it, you’re not playing.
It isn’t the only idea in the book, though.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Speedrunning The Swindle
Script outline and thumbnail below the fold!
Continue Reading →Some Sick Speedruns To Check Out
As this article goes up, it’s Awesome Games Done Quick 2023. It’s going to go down in history as Another GDQ, but notable because this one pivoted from a physical event to an online event in response to a Floriday business deciding to Florida very hard and lean heavily into COVID denialism with the wishy-washy ‘well we can’t act like masks are a good idea’ bullshit that really is just a soft landing for ‘people who deny germ theory have enough money that we don’t care about public health and safety.’ Point is, that it’s GDQ, right now, as you’re reading this.
You might not care that much about speedrunning, despite everything I’ve said about how interesting and engaging it is (in general), but are curious about now, how the experience of the event might feel, and what you might want to watch. I’d like to recommend then, a list of five things that haven’t aired yet (as of publication date) that you can look out for, and which I think serve as solid, single experiences (based on, admittedly, only partial knowledge).
These should all be screening, at some point after this articles goes up, on the Games Done Quick channel.
Continue Reading →3e: Haste!
Oh boy you know what’s the most broken spell available in 3rd edition D&D well now you mention it it’s a contentious slot because there are a lot of spells that are really, really broken and third edition had a lot of them flying around but when it got broken you kind of had to start in the core rulebook and see the things that you’d wind up seeing used all the time and nothing was really ever going to wind up being as broken as this one it’s haste it’s haste look it’s obvious I’m talking about haste haste was so very goddamn broken in third edition D&D.
How To Represent Speed?
When working with videogames, there’s a a lot of different ways to represent speed, and a lot of the challenges they present start out as technical. Infamously on the PC, getting fast scrolling on a room to create the impression of single large spaces the player could move through was a big technical hurdle; outrun used a camera trick and moving single silhouettes, and the VR push of a few years ago (is it reasonable to suggest that VR is now over?) featured a whole host of ways to grapple with the question of duping a human brain that’s very very good at recognising when it’s standing still and convincing it that it’s not.
But that’s videogames, an entire form of games that I don’t really make. I could try, that may be interesting, but anyway for now.
How do we get to represent speed in tabletop game places, with human interlocutors? Have some ideas! Go go go!
Continue Reading →‘Losing’ Bridget
Some of you out there are currently feeling bad about Bridget Guiltygear, about how a character you really liked the way it was now feels unavailable to you, and it’s in the very fraught, very distressing conversational space of Transgender Issues. You’re probably feeling in a way about it and you want someone to talk about it… and there’s nobody to talk to about it, because the conversational space is, as said, distressing.
Basically, if you’re someone who’s feeling a way about Bridget being a trans girl now, but you can recognise you’re feeling sad about you and not mad about the way other people are feeling, I’d like to talk to you. And I’d like to talk to you and offer you advice and guidance from a cohort that you might imagine is kind of your opposite: the trans Harry Potter fan.
Content Warning: I’m going to talk about Bridget a lot, and I’m going to talk about Harry Potter, and I’m going to do so with what I hope will be seen as compassion for people engaging with media. I’m obviously not endorsing or encouraging transphobia. I’m doing this as a good faith engagement with something complicated to talk about, and none of what I should say should be treated as any reason to get mad at people who are expressing their feelings.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Keep The Heroes Out
When I talk about board games I know I’m biased towards talking about small, highly portable experiences that can often be introduced and played interestingly the very first time without any need to reference a rulebook. I’m not prone to having anything to talk about when it comes to campaign games, because those are often long-form, and also, we’re kind of still dealing with minimising your potential social interaction surfaces, you know the kind of deal, and I’ve even written about how strangely impossible it can be to recommend the consideration of games which are otherwise inaccessible to buy.
Keep The Heroes Out is a table-sprawling high-material campaign game by Luis Brueh, about playing the monsters in a classic fantasy dungeon fighting adventurers, it’s entirely based around scenarios you play through from a campaign sourcebook, and as far as I know, it was only available on kickstarter.
Hang on a sec.
Check check check…
Yeah okay, it’s not a conventionally available in stores, at least, not as far as I can see. You can find some copies on Ebay, and Brueh games seem to be distributing other games through other companies, so maybe this will become a commercial purchase at some point. I don’t know. No idea.
Gunna talk about it anyway!
Continue Reading →MTG: Introducing…
The territorial oceans of Achresis, known to the groundlings as ‘the Vast’ are dotted about with islands and estates, each one populated with the landbound lords considered too weak, too poor, too unimportant to command one of the vast, splendid Palace Boats. Great, towering constructs, many storeys tall, liners with whole permanent populations of courts, mages and warriors and spymasters alike carrying the great fist of the Crown of Blood to where it can most exult in its excesses or express its displeasures.
They say vampires can’t cross running water, but it’s another thing entirely when the water moves underneath you. The Crown of Blood, a title inherited by the Vampire who has at the moment, gathered the most of the true royal bloodline, speaks of who gets to wield the authority of the people. Coup after coup after coup, bloody and unreasonable, has set the Vampires of the Palace Boats at each other’s throats for generations, while they gorge themselves on lesser bloods and royal jellies for decadence’ sake. The needs of servants are done by Husks, soulless bodies that work off the debts of the living, and the energies of spirits are put to power great magics. Each Palace has its own character, its own tone, its own rebellions.
There are many things to occupy the royals of the Crown of Blood, of course. There’s a great iceberg burst from the sea but five years ago, and immediately captivated a school of vampiric artisans and researchers, who set to making it a beautiful ice palace, where research into the strange ice’s properties and inhabitants could continue apace. There’s the games of chance at the casinos, or the games of statecraft with the Masqued, the unidentifiable spies of the Crown. There are pursuits on land, exploring the scourged barren lands that were once ‘Outland’ territory, with its scattered barbarians and outcast god, where you could be the first to make a unique kind of Vampire. There’s of course, the fad for romancing planeswalkers in the name of reckless love.
And of course.
In the centre of the ocean, over the vast, dark spiral in the water, there stands on mighty columns, there is the six-sided shape of the Palace of the Dead, whose gates have been held open, and through which spirits struggle to fly, and whose largesse has ensured the steady flow of magic, and the denial of death. The Palace boats do not go near the Palace, knowing it is through respect to its King, their bounty is assured.
Everything is good, if it’s good for you.
And nothing at all is going to change that.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: 2022’s Custom Cards, by The Numbers
Every day of 2022, I shared a Custom Magic Card — a card for Magic: The Gathering that I designed, using art gathered from the internet — on Reddit’s /custommagic Subreddit, My Talen_MTGee Twitter account, and then eventually, on Mastodon and Cohost. With 2022 behind me, I figure it’s now time to collect all the information I can about all the cards I made, and what I learned about myself and my assumptions.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: December 2022’s Custom Cards
Hey, it’s a new year, but there’s still some business from last year to tidy up. No-Effort November yielded a bunch of cards with no themes, obtained by grabbing everything out of my year’s total collected work that I cut from other lists or other ideas. Simply put, you got a grab bag of ‘huh, why not?’ designs.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Game Pile: Three Top 5s Of 2022
Video article goes heeeeereee:
Thumbnail after the fold:
Continue Reading →Prototype 22.12 — The Wrapup
Well, time to take a loss.
Continue Reading →Decemberween 2022: Nice Boys On The Internet
I don’t watch a lot of streams. I have a very hard time engaging with a space like that, where there’s a lot of tangible avenues for human interaction that are all explicitly one way. It’s a byproduct of mostly only seeing and engaging with stream chat when it’s something that’s a big deal, like Desert Bus or Games Done Quick (oh yeah one of those is coming up and one of those just ended). It means that for all that the actual video content is pretty entertaining, when the volume of human engagement is high enough, I just feel like I’m being invited to engage with thousands of people all of whom will ignore me, so I’d much rather watch the whole thing on vod later, possibly at double speed to make up for the lack of crisp editing.
Continue Reading →Decemberween 2022: NixiiiE
It’s another Nixie Posting!
Nixie is of course an influence on my work, partly because she’s my adorable disrepectful internet family, but also because this year has featured some super dope Nixie Content.
I’m not linking to twitter, because
uh
Twitter, right now.
But that’s okay because what Nixie has done this year that excites me the most is seizing the pedagogic means of production. What she’s been doing has included amongst other things, learning languages and that includes things like moving, something which sucks at the best of times.
But twice this year, Nixie has come to me to ask my help making a game. And then when I told her methods and tools I’d use, she did that thing that I always love to see: She went ‘okay, I got it,’ then she went and made the game to her specifications.
These games were then cool enough that she showed them to her teachers and those teachers went and told the class about them.
Twice this year, I’ve watched live-streamed performances of Nixie at choir. One of them was because she wanted me to save a video for her, and one of them was because, well… it was her recital. It was a choir performance she did, and she invited me to come watch, so I woke up and sat back and changed my day’s plans to make sure I was there to talk to her about it.
Is it weird to say I was proud of her? I know I clapped at my computer. That seems weird. Oh well.
Now of course, you already knew I think Nixie is great and adorable and sweet and definitely cool. And I’m really laying it on thick here just so I can bully her with reminding her of how wonderful she is. But the point is the longer this article is, the more of it she’ll have to read as she gets more and more annoyed at me.
See, she’s also a good writer, but without the threads to link to, I’m not about to be able to prove it. So that’s why this year, around when Twitter Looked Volatile, I made a cheeky little move to contact her and ask her to give some input to an article I was writing about one of her favourite movies, Air America.
And then, to my amazement, she and I made one of the same jokes in our writing, without any input from one another, and it’s an obscure bloody joke.
Game Pile: One Page Rules
One Page Rules is a family of tabletop material games with the design principle that the core rules for playing the game takes one page (back and front), and each individual faction you want to play can have all its game mechanical information conveyed again, on one page (back and front).
Once upon a time, this kind of thing would be considered an indie game, an extremely streamlined, microgame style arrangement. But the thing that sets One Page Rule aparts is that it has one of the most remarkable potential scopes of any game of its genre I’ve ever seen.
Continue Reading →Decemberween 2022: Life SMP
Do you like reality TV? No? Oh okay that makes sense. Not saying that none of you do, but on average, I can reasonably assume
What about wrestling? Yeah! Yeah okay, probably, statistically, you do.
What about Minecraft? Yeah, okay, statistically, you also probably do!
The Life SMP is a Minecraft SMP (“Survival Multiplayer”) set up as in Hardcore mode, where you have a limited number of lives. You can die a total of 3 times and then that’s it, you’re out of the game. A bunch of professional Minecrafters get thrown into this space, with rules for each iteration and what you get is kind of a really good single season narrative you can see from multiple perspectives.
The storytelling this presents is really interesting to me — you’re basically getting a mix of reality TV, where players need resources to actually do things to affect the world and make things happen (including violence), but there’s also an element of shared fiction where people are creating things that one another needs to react to. There are grudges (real and exaggerated), there’s kayfabe (real and exaggerated), and unlike other long-form Minecraft content where there’s a sort of timeless vision, the Life setup is very clearly here for a good time, not for a long time.
There are three seasons of Life and it works well that each season gets better than the next. It’s some really good bingeable content for the holiday period – just put the playlist on the TV and let it run because it’ll have that effect where plot points may zip past, but the next video will show you that plot point in a different angle.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Eco Quest & The Cringe of Care
This is a video update of an article I wrote a few years ago!
Decemberween 2022: Magic Documentaries
Okay, Magic: The Gathering content for Decemberween. I know, I know, some of you aren’t into this game and don’t want to watch anything relating to the game made by the company that treated Orion Black terribly. But I do watch content based on this game, I do care about it (even if I feel it’s always appropriate to mention the way the game is made by a company that treated Orion Black terribly), and some of that content is really interesting to me.
Last year I got in the habit of watching a set of daily content creators who just shared videos of them playing the game on camera in a way that I liked. This year I thought I’d highlight some of those video producers that, in my opinion, treat Magic: The Gathering like the sport that it is, and make some really cool game documentaries about it. Liiike this great video by Rhystic Studies on Red Deck Wins, an archetype that kind of taught everyone playing the game early on what math was:
And for a similar long-form, here’s Pretty Deece that I don’t think I’m necessarily always in agreement of, but it’s a good channel for providing this kind of content, more zoomed in on specific periods of time rather than on the history of archetypes and what it means or how it feels.
Want to engage with the game but you’re social distancing this Decemberween, not because you have to or anything but because you’ve realised how awful a lot of the people you were successfully avoiding these past few years were? Well, check out these neat channels!
Game Pile: Jelle’s Marble Runs
Is a spectator playing a game?
Well, they’re doing something, right? If the audience, if the crowd, wasn’t a factor in a sports presentation then there wouldn’t be a meaningful idea of ‘home team’ advantage. We know that spectators in a sport influence the game that’s being played, after all — if nothing else, there are a lot of times in Baseball’s history in particular where a game was concluded, thanks to the actions of the spectators.
Now, hang on, you might argue that that’s not playing the game, and yeah, maybe it’s not. It’s concluding the game, with a different set of priorities. But the knowledge that fans can do that kind of thing, concerns that the reactions of the fans could curtail the game certainly play into the game’s players’ functions. They are an influence on the playing of the game, so we can definitely not say that they are separate from it.
But let’s say that that’s a material concern; that the game is agnostic of the spectator behaviour, and that the game is only defined by the rules that they experience. This is a great big discussion, something you can delve into at length through The Philosophy Of Sport, but that mighty tome is built on the work of Bernard Suits, the author of the Grasshopper, Life Games And Utopia. In that work, Suits forwards a definition of games that I think has achieved widespread academic adoption, which is that a game is The consensual overcoming of unnecessary obstacles.
Now I’ve written about this in the past, when I ruminated on the question of whether Carlos Santana truly ‘played’ SIlent Hill with his controller of Rob Thomas. But that’s about streamers and an engaged audience; an audience, like the spectators, who are present to the player, who are in a way connected to the scenario. They influence the game by dint of engaging with the player.
What about an audience who are completely disconnected? What if we took the audience completely out of the sport, let’s put them in a remote location, where they can’t say or do anything to the players, like the esports community of South Korea’s Starcraft channels. For lower-tier matches, outside of code A (at least ten years ago when I was paying a lot more attention), players weren’t getting a live audience, but their games were being broadcasted to satisfy a bottomless demand… and we know in that case, that nerves, choking, all are factors that the audience’s existence can impose on the players.
Okay, so what if we remove the ability of the audience to influence the players. What if the players are somehow, emotionally, unaffectable by the attention of an audience? What if they were cold, efficient, and entirely automated in their play experience in a way that could be equalised and fair? And in order to make sure they’re not too complex, let’s make these game players as simple as possible such that they can’t fail or break or be otherwise impacted, meaning the game can operate in the purest possible way, without any psychological influence of the audience.
Are those spectators playing a game?
Yes.
In that simplest possible definition, there is a goal, and the spectator is trying to achieve the goal, with a consensually-chosen unnecessary obstacle: Specifically, the goal is to get their chosen simplified actor into a victory position, with a control mechanism that is completely deprived of all functional agency.
The spectator wants a player to win, they want to succeed, but the only means they have to influence the game are by cheering and by wanting. They negotiate, they pray, they plan, they strategise, they try to find a way to see their chosen player win, or get better results, or wind up where they want them to be, all through no means at all, through the least effective means possible.
Oh yeah, and uh, Jelle’s marble runs is a super sick youtube channel with lots of long-form, child-safe content that is watching marbles being run through races, with just enough fictional structure to treat these marbles like teams and players, that you can get attached to a particular marble, go Goose. If you want something engaging and interesting, it’s super fun to watch. Hell just writing up this article took longer because I was too busy watching the videos of the marble runs.
The How To Be Covers of 2022
Once more we make our way to an end of a year, and I take an opportunity to reflect on my monthly How To Be articles. Or really, I show you all the covers again because I’m really proud of them, in part because they’re funny and in part because I worked hard on little details and you will appreciate them.
Continue Reading →MTG: November 2022’s Custom Cards
Ah, No-Effort November is over. But the cards of the month were made the month earlier, which is why despite it being No Effort November, there was, in fact, effort for these cards! How dreadful! But the theme of the month – I’m sure you’ve already worked it out, right?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Prototype 22.12 — The 2022 Prototypeapalooza
Just wait someone’s going to tell me ‘palooza’ is racist or something.
This year each month I dedicated some time – varying in scope and effort – to prototyping a new game. Of these games, two of them got to what I consider ‘made prototype’ stage, where I have a physical game that I can hold in my hand and share with people for proper playtesting. And that’s cool!
But I decided what I wanted to do this month, this December, was to look at the games I got, in what stages they are at, and determine what can I do with them in this last month to place orders for the rest in the hopes they’ll be available and my decks will be clear for next year to continue this process.
Presented then is a list of the games, based on the order I want to talk about them.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Rod, Reel, & Fist
The oxford comma is part of the title, don’t bully me.
If you want the thumbnail, below the fold:
Continue Reading →Prototype 22.11 – DIY Touhou
Doing something different this time.
I am first up going to tell you what I wound up making and show you some examples of it. I’m going to explain where it’s at, and that’s all going to come before the fold. The full diary, which is a repost of material written over on my Cohost, is going to follow after. And we’re going to talk about sites like Cohost at some point in the next month or so, wew lord.
What I made this month is a prototype game design for a simple card game with a homogenous play form, focusing on hand management built on a classic mathematical puzzle you might see in the games Spot It and Dobble. The game has room to expand mechanically if it needs it, with each card having room for a rule or game mechanic to add to each character.
The game is composed of a deck of functionally similar cards; each card has a unique front and back. Each front face shows an alchemical summoning circle that describes a reading of a calamitous time, and a description of that in a set of keywords. The back face shows a magical girl from a mystical other realm (with art from the Touhou AI art bot) who represen two of those alchemical symbols and two of those key words.
The first turn of the game, you deal a number of these cards so their summoning circle faces are visible to the table, then deal each player a hand of magical girls, back-face-up. The deck is passed around from player to player, who get to do things to manage their hands, while they try and build a hand of cards that lets them ‘claim’ one of the quests as done.
That’s the game play experience, and cycle. I like that this needs no special components, and if it’s put in to a tuck box, it won’t need tons of setup. I also like that this prototype has room to develop: Each card could have a unique mechanical rule, a flavour or name joke, and the list of adjectives and alchemical symbols gives a lot of room for non-meaningful differentation.
Good idea, I like it, I did not get the time to order a prototype, but thanks to practice on Straight Outta Tucson, I have a tool available to me that can make turning this from ‘list of filenames’ to the actual cards very conveniently.
Dev diary follows!
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Straight Outta Tucson
Desert Bus was last week! It’s a cool event that raises money for the Childs Play charity, by playing the game Desert Bus. The more you donate to the event, the longer the event runs, and that means they have to play the game longer and if you weren’t aware, Desert Bus is a shockingly boring game.
What this means is that the whole streaming event is someone playing a dreadfully boring game and doing anything they can to be less bored – with their friends in the room. It’s a festival of events of busking, comedy performances, dramatic readings, a few D&D games, quiz games and also kinda a long-reaching slow-rolling combination of a con and a podcast. And mixed in amongst that there’s other events, including a game jam!
And I submitted a game to it this year!
The game is called Straight Outta Tucson, and it’s a simple little affair; it’s completely free to download and play, and we may be seeing about putting it up on some print-on-demand services as a cost-and-shipping-only option if you want a professionally made copy.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about what was involved in making it.
Continue Reading →Saving The Galaxy By Doing An Abortion
I like Star Control 2, a lot. I like it so much I like to talk about it in terms of the vastness of its world and individual factions and events rather than like a whole game. It’s too big, it’s too fast, there are too many little science fiction stories woven together that you can engage with — and some of those stories can be completely missed if you play the game non-exhaustively.
But when I talk about Star Control there’s this unfortunate cousin of it, the dead end sequel that did so badly it killed the franchise. I don’t like Star Control 3 nearly as much as I do 2 – but there’s still a lot of weird ideas that I like and you may never experience if you play the game.
Because you won’t play the game.
Because Star Control 3 isn’t a lot of fun, and it’s kinda hard to extract the interesting bits.
Let me then present to you one of these threads that makes up Star Control 3, where you Do An Abortion For The Good Of The Galaxy.
Content Warning: The subject kinda sets this one up? It’s a sci-fi context, but if Abortion is a heated topic for you I’m going to continue using it to describe something when talking about this 90s game full of angry muppets.
Continue Reading →Big Pile Of Bookkeeping
I make a point of trying to write about what I’m experiencing and thinking about and feeling, not because it’s some grand pcinriple but because it’s a lot easier and I’m not particularly creative about why I write, just that I write. The result is that when I’m not partaking of much that I think makes interesting writing subject matter (‘not making content’) I tend to trail off about it. Sometimes that’s things that I think ethically, I should not share, like spending a lot of time taking care of my niblings, or students’ work and input.
Sometimes it’s like what happened today.
Continue Reading →How To Be: The Very Best, Like No-one Ever Was (Dun Dun D-Dun) (In 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re 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 ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t 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 ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t 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 – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
You know, it might just be because I’ve been thinking about pets and subordinate characters, what if the inspiration for your character in a 4e campaign is being someone who has for some reason, a monster that works at their side? What kind of character can produce monsters out of nowhere – like they can just pull them out of their pocket?
