Recent content by Dustin Cooper

I'm running a Sword World 2.5 game now. One thing I've also found is that this is a good way to handle NPCs you want to tag along with the party and take part in combat. You don't get the social part obviously, but my players really liked having the help without the risk of being outshown.

Do you have any specifics about what it is with D&D or Pathfinder that's not working for you or what you're looking for that they don't have? Or is it more just that you feel like you've played them out and just want a new way to approach the same kind of game? One game that might be worth...

While Roll20 is what I use for most games, and that's what I voted for, I also found that PlayingCards.io Virtual Tabletop is a good one to use for those rare games that use playing cards instead of dice. I use that for Princess Wing.

I'm wondering if Wares Blade will get any votes besides my own (my other two are Draw Steel and Daggerheart, but I'm sure those'll both get plenty).

It's a similar situation with their previous Kickstarter, Ryuutama. We got the main book, but the last time we heard about the promised supplement material was a March 3 2020 update where they said they were about a week away from releasing a form of it to backers.

Wares Blade, a localization of an interesting sounding Japanese mecha game from the 80s https://lionwingpublishing.com/blogs/news/japanese-ttrpg-wares-blade-receiving-english-localization-and-remastering-from-lionwing-publishing-in-2025

I've been running Sword World 2.5 for a while. Positives: It's much easier to make a properly balanced encounter than something like 5e, and the 2-3 encounter adventuring day fits the pacing I like better than mainline D&D. Characters are highly customizable. While they use the word "class"...

It's functional, but it's trying to make a narrative game out of old school dungeon crawling, which I feel like is an odd choice. Fellowship is a better game for using the PbtA system to tell a heroic fantasy story.

This probably won't be a popular option, but I'd like more options that aren't human shaped. Creatures like the displacer beast, owlbear, and blink dog are iconic, and while you'd have to do some rebalancing and maybe figure out rules for a character that doesn't have hands, I'd appreciate the...

Can you just be like "Hey, I prefer this edition. Would you all be willing to try like 2-3 sessions with it, and then we can talk about whether we want to continue that or switch to something else?" I got a group to switch from 5e to 4e by basically doing something like that. They loved it...

There's precedent for not being too picky on exact sizes and weights matching between coins, even in a society where the weight of the metal was the basis of the value. In the Roman Republic, it seems like how they produced denarii was that they'd make a certain number of blanks, weigh them, and...

Treantmonk was also pretty open about this, but he also did seem really big on it when he tried it out months ago when he presumably wasn't being paid in any way, so I think he is legit excited about it even if he is also giving out an affiliate link.

The appeal of gishes to me isn't "I want all the wizard stuff and all the fighter stuff," it's "I want to do over the top, unrealistic nonsense with weapon combat." Like my favorite gish class is the 4e Swordmage, where I can do things like teleport an enemy next to me so I can immediately hit...

Yeah, and even out of combat, if all a stat does is boost a specific set of skills, then why not just move that bonus into the skill system? Like if the goal is designing the kind of character you want and not being forced to stick to stereotypes, why even have the skill groups like that? Like...

Justin Lanasa is a nobody who's in a slow motion trainwreck of lawsuits and bankruptcies who doesn't appear to meaningfully be a threat to anyone anymore. He says naughty word things, but virtually no one listens to him. He has no meaningful influence. He is not an existential threat of a level...