Traverse Fantasy

I have been writing and printing one-page leaflets. Above is a template; basically you fold the page into eighths, and cut along the dotted line; then you can re-fold and staple the page into a small booklet. I learned this from DIY/indie TTRPG hobbyists, but found it very useful for its info density relative to cost in pages and ink. On average, if I use 7 out of 8 pages for actual text content, I can fit ~790 words per pamphlet or a little over 100 words per page (eighth), using a 10-pt font. It's a challenge to write complex ideas in such short spaces, especially when you assign each page to one topic, but it's also a good exercise to make sure you're writing clearly and concisely. These are more like elevator pitches than anything else. In comparison, for digest booklets I can fit ~360 words per page using 12-pt font (since 10-pt font would feel too small for a page of that size). This means I can fit up to either 3,600 or 5,000 words per booklet depending on whether I ...

People have praised the bastion rules from the One D&D playtest materials for massively simplifying the complexity of building and running strongholds or other establishments (especially compared to previous D&D versions, including the 2014 version of 5e ). It's definitely abstract and not a spreadsheet. Just also seems like a pain. Here's my complaints and a rework. As Written (Ew) Here's a summary of the bastion rules: 1 bastion turn occurs every 7 days by default, though they can also occur at longer intervals. You can spend 1 bastion turn to order 1 bastion action. Each bastion action triggers a special effect and generates bastion points (via die roll). A few bastion points are also generated if no bastion action is taken on a turn. The number and types of bastion actions available to you depends on your class and level. You need to construct facilities to unlock bastion actions, if they are available to you. You can spend bastion points to: Receive magic ite...

We got 100 responses ! This makes it very convenient for us, so let's work with it. Bitch. Results & Analysis Below are the five basic tiers or grades of results: Grade 50C 67C 80C 90C Terrible 1–3 1–3 1 1 Poor 4–8 5–8 5–7 — Okay 9–13 10–12 10–12 11–12 Good 14–17 15–16 15–16 — Excellent 18–20 19–20 20 20 On the table above, each ' xx C' column represents confidence of xx % over a certain interval. This means the 50C column indicates ranges with which at least 50% of people are confident; since the union of all ranges is from 1 to 20, this column covers all possible results of D20 and could be used as a table if you were nasty. The 67C column has gaps at the inflection points. The following values are missing, meaning that they have less than 67% agreement: 4, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18. Some of these values just barely fall short of the cut-off; however, 4 and 9 are very relatively contentious with less than 60% agreement. The 8...

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...