pretty sure this cat just threatened to bite me if I didn’t continue patting her head, I stopped for a couple of seconds and she bared her fangs at me wtf
Bared her fangs how? Did she just sort of open and close her mouth in your general direction? Because that signifies trust and affection (I think it’s something to do with the extra influx of air helping her smell you better). Could be something else, though, cat language is subtle and I don’t know how much you know.
the truth is out there, and its in the heart of downtown toronto
what the actual fuck
this is toronto’s cultural pride and joy and it is slowly being consumed by an alien spacecraft
A significant portion of the city looks like this actually. Toronto’s aesthetic seems to be “real old buildings being devoured by real new buildings.” And like sometimes you have houses that look like a 12 year old’s first minecraft build sorta jammed between Victorian era stone houses it’s real fuckin weird
Wow, Ramiel sure looks weird in End of Evangelion.
Serve and Receive. Rather than having everyone go on their turn and do any number of things that people can’t respond to, there’s a constant serve and receive going on, with people responding on their next action. Rather than piling up many conditional actions while time stands still, it’s more like a game of wizards playing badminton where, sure, someone might cast a spell to clone the feather ball thing midair or set the pitch on fire or summon a minion to hold the racket for them, but at the end of the day on your turn; you take your action and set something in motion. The ball doesn’t hit until their action when they have an opportunity to respond to it. If they choose to dodge they’ll compromise their ability to counter attack. The “ball” that is, the reaction-applicable action, is in motion between these turns and can be intercepted by anyone. If they fail to respond, it resolves just before the “servers” next action starts. It creates more options for how everyone goes about distributing their actions and forming counter plays.
In d20, you either take no damage because your armour was high, or you take damage, and whetheryou take damage or not it doesn’t change your options one iota since all you really need to do is keep hitting people until either you run out of hit points or they do. Sure your build can put a lot of spin on this and a good DM knows how to set up encounters and parties to create a lot of interesting situations. But I’m inventing my own thing over here that I want to be welcoming to people who’ve not played one of these games before. Having actual thought into how you respond to something means you’re paying attention to your attackers to, and potentially adds more counterplay to the act of being a tank and such.
It also allows for me to implement options such as Area of Effect spells requiring you to move out of their effect or find/make cover to even be allowed to make a Dodge check against them, or to use your spells defensively.
I am slightly worried of this creating defensive options as TOO enticing an offer. Maybe if I have a round where a player does nothing but defend I’ll decrease their Momentum or something. Still haven’t finalised on my Momentum system though, but the basic idea is for it to be a tracker of your tactical/strategic advantage in a fight.
This talk of action and reaction and especially of a momentum mechanic reminds me somewhat of third edition Exalted by Onyx Path, which is presently in a sort of unofficially released mostly-finished beta but should be coming out officially in a few months.
EX3 ties its momentum mechanics into the Initiative count, that is, while your Initiative will start out as whatever you roll at the beginning of the fight, it’ll continually wax and wane during a battle as combatants steal inish from each other using special Withering Attacks. At any time, should a player feel confident enough they can switch their attack for a turn from Withering to Decisive, expending their strategic advantage for a chance to target the opponent’s life points directly.
Less perfectly analogous, EX3 also allows each player several separate defensive values (based on parrying, dodging, etc) letting them choose how to defend against each given attack (though I’ll admit most characters are expected to rely on only one class of defense). Most supernaturally puissant characters (including almost all PCs) can boost both attacks and defenses using powerful effects called Charms, but these draw resources from the same pool, so spending too much on either without knowing what you’re doing can be dangerous.
What I’m saying is look into it. There’s probably something you can steal.
Or you can just ask me more things. I’m kind of excited about this game and have already memorized way too many parts.
Serve and Receive. Rather than having everyone go on their turn and do any number of things that people can’t respond to, there’s a constant serve and receive going on, with people responding on their next action. Rather than piling up many conditional actions while time stands still, it’s more like a game of wizards playing badminton where, sure, someone might cast a spell to clone the feather ball thing midair or set the pitch on fire or summon a minion to hold the racket for them, but at the end of the day on your turn; you take your action and set something in motion. The ball doesn’t hit until their action when they have an opportunity to respond to it. If they choose to dodge they’ll compromise their ability to counter attack. The “ball” that is, the reaction-applicable action, is in motion between these turns and can be intercepted by anyone. If they fail to respond, it resolves just before the “servers” next action starts. It creates more options for how everyone goes about distributing their actions and forming counter plays.
In d20, you either take no damage because your armour was high, or you take damage, and whetheryou take damage or not it doesn’t change your options one iota since all you really need to do is keep hitting people until either you run out of hit points or they do. Sure your build can put a lot of spin on this and a good DM knows how to set up encounters and parties to create a lot of interesting situations. But I’m inventing my own thing over here that I want to be welcoming to people who’ve not played one of these games before. Having actual thought into how you respond to something means you’re paying attention to your attackers to, and potentially adds more counterplay to the act of being a tank and such.
It also allows for me to implement options such as Area of Effect spells requiring you to move out of their effect or find/make cover to even be allowed to make a Dodge check against them, or to use your spells defensively.
I am slightly worried of this creating defensive options as TOO enticing an offer. Maybe if I have a round where a player does nothing but defend I’ll decrease their Momentum or something. Still haven’t finalised on my Momentum system though, but the basic idea is for it to be a tracker of your tactical/strategic advantage in a fight.
This talk of action and reaction and especially of a momentum mechanic reminds me somewhat of third edition Exalted by Onyx Path, which is presently in a sort of unofficially released mostly-finished beta but should be coming out officially in a few months.
EX3 ties its momentum mechanics into the Initiative count, that is, while your Initiative will start out as whatever you roll at the beginning of the fight, it’ll continually wax and wane during a battle as combatants steal inish from each other using special Withering Attacks. At any time, should a player feel confident enough they can switch their attack for a turn from Withering to Decisive, expending their strategic advantage for a chance to target the opponent’s life points directly.
Less perfectly analogous, EX3 also allows each player several separate defensive values (based on parrying, dodging, etc) letting them choose how to defend against each given attack (though I’ll admit most characters are expected to rely on only one class of defense). Most supernaturally puissant characters (including almost all PCs) can boost both attacks and defenses using powerful effects called Charms, but these draw resources from the same pool, so spending too much on either without knowing what you’re doing can be dangerous.
What I’m saying is look into it. There’s probably something you can steal.
Or you can just ask me more things. I’m kind of excited about this game and have already memorized way too many parts.
I have been taking some notes from Exalted 3e actually, I sat down for a session of that lately/ I’m kind of afraid to steal too many ideas, but I’m not robbing the mechanics wholesale I like to think more like.. I’m so used to the limited scope of d20 that its really inspiring to see that other systems would even consider certain other things to be options. Like “wait, we can have explicit rules for such and such a thing?”
I split defensive actions into Evade and Block. So get out of the way or intercept the attack, you can dodge or you can use your weapon/shield to block a weapon attack, or you can use magic to teleport to evade or to summon a giant wall to block an attack. Evade to dodge the bullets, shoot the bullets out of the air to Block. Some attacks might have particular complications that make them harder or impossible to block/dodge, prefering one method of defence over t, or alternatively have consequences depending pon which option you use. For instance if someone attacks you with a weapon with a magical enhancement to rust and break whatever it touches, you’re going to want to straight up dodge that otherwise you’ll end up getting your equipment wrecked trying to block with it.
Nice to know I have a bit of a fan :D
Er, I’m a bit of a fan of Exalted. I honestly don’t know that much about your game, though it sounds pretty cool.
You can’t even find good data on which planeswalkers are most popular (apart from Jace being the most popular) or why they are popular (apart from Jace being Blue) so there’s absolutely no way to even have this argument about non-humans planeswalkers not being popular.
[waves hands hypnotically while strange smoke fills the room]
The goal is simple - we thank Hussie for everything he’s done for us. For all the updates, all the people he’s met, everything he’s had to deal with - for making Homestuck. He made something far bigger than he could have imagined. I think it’s time we thanked him.
Everyone who reblogs this will have their URL added to a text file. At the end of April it will be emailed to him along explaining that these are all the people who want to personally thank him for what he does.
