#foramen

I study TTRPGs, right. I also study wargames. I sort of have to, for me to be able to proudly call me a TTRPG dev. This means I've read a lot of good. I've also read a lot of bad! And I try to understand why these things are good, or bad, or just ok. Part of that is seeing the developer's intentions behind reasons for things being the way they are. In my own game, I'm adding segments of me, maybe not justifying, but explaining my thought processes behind why I wrote things to be the way they are. Doing this has also made me more deeply think about Vat's intended play style. Vat isn't universal, in any sense of the word. It's heavily tied to its setting, for one thing. For another, players play groups of characters, not just one. That automatically brings a significantly different style and tone to the table than what most people would be used to in the modern scene. I give plenty of tools to the players and handlers, and it's ultimately up to them to figure out how they want to do things. But the specific tools given flavor the end result, right? I don't have an extremely central and pivotal and narrow play style and genre in mind for Vat. It's really just... this game is meant for this world, to explore this world. The elements surrounding genre are more attached to the world. Idk. I'm just thinking, you know? Vat can contain multitudes. I think I lost the point of what I was trying to say. Study games, folks. Especially games you play. Think about why you enjoy things. System mastery is cool.

I just went through recent posts and didn't realize how many of them were vatposting... so here's a Normal Post! With the pivot in module writing, playtesting is coming much sooner than I thought! I have made a fairly basic enemy grouping, the Wormrot Warriors, and they are statted out and ready for stress testing in combat. All I REALLY need to do now is set up a basic Battle Law arena in Tabletop Sim and port everything over, and that will legitimately be all! Just need to get a group of players ready and with their teams rolled up, and then we'll be golden! The Wormrot Warriors are right now really simple, only having items equipped that are directly used for combat. I don't think that's going to be the norm for actual campaign play, I want NPCs to also have more rp-focused items equipped just like players, but right now for combat playtesting that's not strictly needed. Last but certainly not least, another pivot regarding the world at large. It's not anything major, more taking the foundation I've been building and extrapolating that to it's logical extreme. The giant corpse that forms the world? Actually just a giant curled up corpse in form. Gravity and oceans and whatnot will basically be shrink wrapped to the form. It's also the only fucked up planet in the system, the rest are normal. This brings plenty of opportunities for things to Get Even Weirder, which is great. I've already had a lot of fucked up biomes planned out like mold fields and meat forests so.