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  1. Ruin Explorer

    Daggerheart General Thread [+]

    There are - Splendor has stuff that heals Stress for example, and if you roll a crit you recover 1 Stress as well as gaining 1 Hope. There's other stuff too of course. I do think that we'll see more people picking Stress potions given the choice after these sessions - everyone picked healing...
  2. Ruin Explorer

    What do YOU plan on doing with Daggerheart?

    That was certainly how it felt to us having played it - a lot of PtbA games have mechanical elements that could potentially add to the game, but in practice they tend to get swamped by the moves and fictional positioning. Whereas with DH it felt like the mechanical elements, particularly the...
  3. Ruin Explorer

    Daggerheart General Thread [+]

    No we definitely weren't aware of that rule - I'll note it for future! The one thing I wasn't super-clear on was why some abilities cost Stress and others Hope, it didn't seem completely consistent with regards to how powerful or usable they were, and I presume that the designers have some...
  4. Ruin Explorer

    Daggerheart General Thread [+]

    Oh I think they're pretty powerful, he just played very aggressively and didn't back off to drink a healing potion when he should have if he wanted to not die, because he was really getting into the combat! The Rogue, notably, took about as much punishment as him, but did back off, so when the...
  5. Ruin Explorer

    Daggerheart General Thread [+]

    So to add, I mentioned this in another thread, but notably: 1) The combat was extremely fast. This is huge for us - we're using to games where combat kind of drags on, especially in heroic fantasy RPGs. Even 5E, I'm afraid, is one of these. With DH we were resolving mid-size serious combats...
  6. Ruin Explorer

    What do YOU plan on doing with Daggerheart?

    Having played it it really does feel a lot like a mash-up of the best aspects of those two games primarily. This is definitely a child that got the best aspects of both parents - the most stunning example being the replacement of 4E's extremely elaborate and clunky initiative and action systems...
  7. Ruin Explorer

    Daggerheart General Thread [+]

    So, reporting back as promised, ran session zero + 2 sessions of Daggerheart, with my main group, most of whom I've been playing with since the 1990s, and who have played a pretty vast range of RPGs, including all editions of D&D (they notably have a high tolerance for new systems, but two of...
  8. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    Yeah I think that's one thing Larian have done pretty well for three games, and that a lot of developers kind of screw up - including Owlcat. The action point system I think is a bit of a double-edged sword because it's fiddly and rare enough that I think it is less accessible than systems with...
  9. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    True but not an accessible or naturalistic kind of tactics like BG3 has (and actually like DOS1 rather had). Instead DOS2 had really bizarre systems for protection, incredibly steep level/equipment/enemy scaling (far, far steeper than BG3 or DOS1), and very game-y systems that required gaming...
  10. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    No, actually, it was not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livelock_(video_game) Those are, at best, mediocre reviews. They can't hire from Larian because very few people leave Larian, because it's a good place to work. It's not like Blizzard or Bungie or similar, with massive turnover/churn...
  11. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    That's an issue with Larian's games generally, and comes directly from it being Swen Vincke's attitude, essentially, but I feel like you're overstating it as an issue with BG3. BG3 supports playing good very well. It is true that Durge was originally the only way to have a "custom" PC (but this...
  12. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    Definitely not a CRPG in the way the word is used now, even if it is in the way the word was used say, 30-40 years ago (when it was used to mean just "not a TTRPG"). CRPGs are a specific thing - usually party-based, usually stats-heavy, with choices and story, and usually not first or close...
  13. Ruin Explorer

    Critical Role Announces Age of Umbra Daggerheart Campaign, Starting May 29th

    No actually. The book describes best practice - and that's DMing in your own style. And fiction-first doesn't mean dice-first, it means fiction-first. Sometimes that's going to mean paying pretty limited attention to what the dice say, and for some DMs, it's going to mean paying limited...
  14. Ruin Explorer

    Critical Role Announces Age of Umbra Daggerheart Campaign, Starting May 29th

    I agree. I think whilst I would use that playspace a bit more, because I like granular results rather than binary ones, I don't think it's like, "legally required to count as Daggerheart" to go into Hope/Fear based benefits/complications on every roll (beyond the tokens). The book definitely...
  15. Ruin Explorer

    Let's Talk About Short Campaigns

    I think 1 and change or 2 is fairly common because they may take longer than expected, but yeah, 10 sessions isn't a campaign at all? That seems wild to me.
  16. Ruin Explorer

    World of Warcraft: The War Within

    Yeah it's funny because those are from 2 years ago but we basically know nothing more about Midnight now than we did then. And there's no Blizzcon this year! So we won't learn there either! They're planning an early 2026 release (which I suspect they will make) so it'll be before Blizzcon 2026 too.
  17. Ruin Explorer

    Let's Talk About Short Campaigns

    Yeah like the last campaign we ran was a very long Mothership adventure which was comparable in complexity to an SF novel, and took like six sessions, where most Mothership stuff takes 1, or occasionally 2 sessions, and feels like an SF movie or novella or the like, so to me that was a "short...
  18. Ruin Explorer

    Let's Talk About Short Campaigns

    I think it's a lot easier to sell groups on those. Also I'm not really sure there's a clear delineation between "long single adventure" and "short campaign". Personally I quite like short campaigns so long as they have a pretty clearly defined scope, and aren't sold as something they aren't.
  19. Ruin Explorer

    D&D 5E (2024) Wizards of the Coast promises to release more “CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3” without Larian

    For real for real. Like, the same events could happen in the canon of a given campaign, but I think you'd need an awful lot of them to be off-screen/bluebooking, etc. and probably they wouldn't be as er... detailed. I certainly don't think you could write that stuff into an adventure.
  20. Ruin Explorer

    Upcoming AAA/AA CRPGs or story-based RPGs (updated 15/04/2025)

    I am honestly mystified by how they released a campaign as profoundly bad in virtually every possible way as the first NWN's main one. They made basically every mistake it is possible to make when designing a CRPG's story/writing. Mistakes that the same people, working on other games, earlier...
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