#docswiss

(With reference to this post here.)

Could do. The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality’s contents are considerably heavier on video games than tabletop games, and I’ve already covered solo/single-player tabletop RPGs in a previous post (and won’t replicate them here), so this is necessarily going to be a somewhat shorter list than the previous one; hopefully folks will find something in here that catches their eye all the same.

A few personal favourites:

Anomaly - A SCP Foundation inspired investigative RPG based on Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year. Its sequel is also included.  

Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game - A Fate Core-powered RPG based on the webcomic of the same name.  

Blades in the Dark - A tightly engineered supernatural heist caper game that plays a lot like tabletop Dishonored.  

The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze - A Bronze Age tragedy whose dice rules partly inspired my own Olaf Hits the Dragon etc.  

Corvid Court - A game about terrible people doing terrible things. Also, you might literally be birds?  

Costume Fairy Adventures - Exactly what it says on the tin. This inclusion is purely self-serving, as I’m its lead developer!  

The Curse of the House of Rookwood - A gothic urban fantasy game with a focus on family -- for better or for worse.  

For the Honor - A She-Ra and the Princesses of Power inspired setting hack of the Firebrands framework.  

Glitter Hearts - A rare example of a non-grimdark magical girl tabletop RPG. Uses the Apocalypse Engine.  

Godsend - A diceless god-game hack of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins (the base game is not required to play).  

Hello, World - A Blades in the Dark setting hack (see above) about immortal digital intelligences in a post-cyberpunk utopia.  

Ironsworn: Delve - A huge dungeon-crawling expansion set for the free Norse-flavoured travelogue RPG Ironsworn.  

Lancer - A crunchy mecha combat simulator from the creator of Kill Six Billion Demons.  

Mausritter - An old-school D&D retroclone with a novel papercraft inventory system, in which the player characters are all mice.  

Michtim: Fluffy Adventures - An emotionally driven political fantasy game about tiny hamster-like critters.  

One Last Fight - A GMless card-prompt game about a group of heroes on their way to their final battle.  

Stand Up - A lightweight Persona 5-inspired hack of Avery Alder’s Belonging Outside Belonging engine.  

Strike! - A fun little exercise in trying to re-create D&D4E-style tactical depth while keeping the math a little simpler.  

Troika! - Surrealist road trip fantasy with table-based character creation that can easily pull double duty as a prompt generator.  

I believe that it’s called Nordic Winter friend! I’m so sorry for responding to this late! Here are my thoughts…

Honestly, they’d be cute together.

A very underrated ship in my opinion.

Weiss: *is getting attacked*. Nora @ the Attacker: GET AWAY FROM MY GIRLFRIEND!

I’ve noticed that I’ve only done one post for this ship and that is an absolute crime.

I hope that we get to see them interact more in Volume 7.

Great question, thank you!

As my canon review of Donut has progressed I’d like to modify my statement a little further: since bringing Donut back from the dead, none of the writers have known what to do with him.

I wouldn’t change much about Recollections. I like Donut’s role in season 7, in relaying Tucker’s message and giving us a flashback to a debrief with the Counselor. Both of those things are pretty vital to the plot. Even Wash shooting him serves its purpose and delivers the impact it needs to.

Season 9 has no “real” Blood Gulch so we’ll bypass that for the purposes of this post (but ask me sometime how much better it would have been to make Epsigulch a four-part miniseries between seasons and actually show us the break-in mission to retrieve the memory unit onscreen, showing us the reveal that Carolina is alive through Wash’s eyes instead of Epsilon’s with her iconic “You’re gonna help me kill the Director” line delivered to Wash instead). Season 10 is where Donut returns, and by then it’s so late in the Freelancer saga that there isn’t time to do very much with him, though I do like the fact that a) they have at least a cursory explanation for Doc saving his life, b) he and Doc are chilling together in Valhalla and growing vegetables because that’s cute, and c) he does go with them to the final battle.

I do think Donut is underutilized in season 15, but I think nearly all the Reds and Blues (with the exception of, ironically, Grif) are underutilized in season 15, and that’s more a function of making Dylan and Jax the protagonists and letting them drive the plot entirely; more on that here.

Where I really think Donut specifically could’ve been better utilized is in the Chorus Trilogy, and here’s how I think that could’ve been done differently. (Sorry, folks, I’m incapable of brevity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You knew who you were following here!)

So, there’s this extension on Google Chrome called Video Blocker and you can use it to make sure channels don’t show up on your Youtube. It’s great and I’d definitely recommend it.

Side Question: Does Volfred eat?

thats a renora if ever i saw one

Excluding deliberately unplayable joke games (and games that you hope are deliberately unplayable jokes, because the alternative doesn’t bear considering), and considering only basic action resolution (and not, for example, damage rolls, which can involve arbitrarily many dice in nearly any game that uses hit points or something like them), the best-known example of the type is probably Exalted. It uses a success-counting dice pool system, similar to the Chronicles of Darkness game line from the same publisher, but with very large dice pools; exactly how large can vary a lot depending on what sort of character you’re playing and how heavily you optimise, but it’s not out of the question for a starting character to end up rolling 20+ dice to resolve a single action – and to be clear, that’s just to determine success or failure! Fair warning: the mechanics are a complex, TCG-like affair, so it’s not the sort of game that lends itself to casual entry.

For slightly less baroque examples of the type, you might have a look at either of Anima Prime or Mythender. Both games use pool-building mechanics where by basic actions gradually increase the size of expendable dice pools that can be wagered or spent to produce various effects, so the number of dice you’ll be rolling starts out small, then suddenly gets very large when you decide to make a decisive move. It’s harder to crack the 20+ dice threshold than it is in Exalted, but it’s doable if you work at it. Both games are available for free in some form.