Traverse Fantasy

This is a little silly, but: Often when I run little dragon games, I will ask people to roll D20 without a specific DC in mind. I feel like usually the result of the roll will be self-evident depending on how the die throws, although at the same time there is no science to it. I couldn't tell you at what point a roll is necessarily good or bad. It probably even depends on a case-by-case basis, like a virtual DC that my brain knows but doesn't tell me. To that end, I made a survey out of curiosity: how do y'all interpret individual results of a D20 if we assume that lower is worse and higher is better? If you're interested, please take my survey below! Survey Here!

Remixing pieces from " Genders Without Number " in a non-game context. This is a blog, not a published work; don't expect it to be perfect or for it to cover every conceivable angle. This is informed by my recent experiences doing volunteer work, as well as conversations with my partner and other women in my life; I dedicate this to all of them in solidarity and sorority. There are also elements of conversations with male friends: I can credit by name Ènziramire who inspired me to put this all on proverbial paper , and John B. with whom I discussed classical Roman notions of gender and sex. Two phenomena characterize the existence of trans people. The first is gender dysphoria, which the DSM-5-TR defines as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and natal gender of at least 6 months in duration, as manifested by at least two of the following: a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex cha

There is a weird gap between armor proficiency and everything else. Armor proficiency just means you get to use the armor without getting disadvantaged on whatever saving throws. Everywhere else, it means you add your proficiency bonus. Let's first imagine a world where dexterity did not improve your armor class: what if your proficiency bonus did, instead? We can use a formula similar to the spell save DC, which is pretty common in other contexts: AC = 8 + Armor + Proficiency The trick is that, at early levels, 8 plus your proficiency is really 10. This means that this is a tricky way of saying your spell save DC is 10 plus whatever modifier, but you also get additional modifiers from advancing your character. This same thing applies to our hypothetical AC formula: if you wear a type of armor with which you have proficiency, your base is technically 10 but increases as you advance. This means a wizard's AC, having proficiency with no armor type, increases from 10 to 14 as they

A bit of a mouthful! I had the thought: why not give each instance of a weapon constant damage, but roll to determine that constant amount? For example, a D6 weapon can deal somewhere from 1 to 6 damage, and one you buy from town might just deal 3 damage. However, if you go adventuring, you might come across special ones that deal even more (or less). Besides reducing the complexity of combat, this also introduces Diablo -style loot where you get just a little meaningful granularity. Plus, check this: on a roll of 1, you increase the rarity of the item and reroll the weapon die. Each point of rarity could map to +1 of some special type of damage if you want to be basic, or it could be an actually special power that triggers on some condition (like rolling a crit or something). You would probably want either a D20 master table of weapons or a smaller D6 table specialized for a specific faction or type of opponent (to make it a general loot table, probably use entries 1–3 for weapons and

Need to write something to stay in the habit. Story's going well, just trying to avoid burnout. There are three separate "problems" I have: making attack and damage rolls separate per se is tedious; attack bonuses are tedious to track separately and can also be confusing, e.g., about whether you also add them to damage rolls; and the set of classic armor class values {10, 12, 14, 16} represents very low probabilities if you assume a typical modifier of 0. How about you use your damage roll as your attack bonus? Meaning:   D20 + D(Weapon) ≥ AC We would get probabilities as follows (notice that each die step adds ~5%): Damage AC 10 AC 12 AC 14 AC 16 d4 68% 58% 48% 38% d6 73% 63% 53% 43% d8 78% 68% 58% 48% d10 82% 73% 63% 53% d12 85% 77% 68% 58% Speeds things up in terms of hitting more often and also treating attack and damage rolls as a singular operation rather than two discrete steps of a procedure (even if you opt to r

My friend Ènziramire shared a paper with me, "Wages against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification" by Leigh Claire La Berge. The author explores decommodification as the obverse side of commodification rather than its opposite (which should really be an expansion of the commons). I agree with this formula in general, but La Berge's case studies were of platform-communities where members directly exchanged goods, services, and favors for the same in return (especially among craft-artisans). Shared these thoughts with him, but also wanted to offer them for consideration and critique. I think there's a tendency for some Marxists to overemphasize the specific influence or centrality of money in capitalism . Like, of course, money as the universal equivalent is what makes the vast abstraction and socialization of labor possible, but money itself is only a metaphor of value which is only expressed relative to another commodity (i.e., as a comparison of socially

Over the last couple of weeks. Features? I'm not confident that features are, in the end, very interesting relative to the 'weight' of understanding and using them. The basic feat model is derived from hard-coded spell descriptions and combat maneuvers. Although they can be extended to other game modes, such as exploration or downtime, they contribute to those modes' increasing mechanization. This means you spend more time looking at what buttons you can press for special moves, and also means by picking one feat you risk de-optimizing your character in other game modes than the one you prioritize. The decisions feel uninteresting, and seem to actively detract from characterization. Let's go over the resolution procedure, and see how it generates character actions driven by players rather than the book: Aspects represent your character’s origin, culture, profession, faction, or any other qualities which make them who they are. When your character tries something u