NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9636477" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like visual design and game theme have a huge impact on whether things break wide. Shadowdark has strong, distinctive visual design and visual language, and has a fairly straightforward concept, which is to be a fast, modern, well-designed OSR-style game specifically for dungeoncrawling.DC20 doesn't yet have either of these things. To distinguish itself as an RPG it makes 12 separate points, all of which rely on you coming from the starting point of knowing 5E and assuming that as the baseline. The art seems pretty strong, but doesn't seem like it has a specific visual style that makes you say "Aha, DC20" (even Pathfinder, whether 1E or 2E, even without WAR, does have this for example). And I would personally argue that the general styling of the game, with the modern-looking bright purple colour-block together with black/white/red looks like the styling you'd see on a modern team-based FPS or something, not an RPG at all, let alone a fantasy RPG.I'm not saying this to be down on DC20. Reading the points they make, it sounds like they have good ideas and understand what they're doing mechanically, but I feel like, in the real world, a lot of mechanically very well-designed and conceptually-sound games have failed to find much traction because they didn't land the "visuals and vibes" part of the equation.(Also, I would personally say the species they list and how DC20 is using them seem really quite... quaint and 3rd edition-y, rather than forward-looking or modern at all. Feels like 2005, not 2025.)</blockquote>

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