Kichae

Touché! A truth I have really started to take for granted.

You’ve triggered my trap card. I’m going to do the special interest info-dump now. Apologies in advance.

It’s good. It’s written a little weird – it uses inheritance, like computer programming, which can be a little more difficult to wrap you head around than it needs to be if you’re not at least a little familiar with coding, and it’s written as if it’s doing everything possible to shut down rules lawyers, so whatever doesn’t read like API documentation reads a bit like legalese – but the actual system is nice.

It’s highly balanced, which is an awful word that its fanbase doesn’t seem to understand, but it means that it totally shuts down winning in character creation, and shifts the power game to one of tactics rather than build. The result is that much of the discussion about the game treats it as if it’s exclusively a tactical combat game (because most discussing the game are crypto-power-gamers), rather than a fantasy RPG, and the most enthusiastic players push back hard against any kind of reframing. But it has a ton of support fo roleplay focused tables, and it pares down easily for casual tables.

Plus, you know, it’s free! And it’s fairly easy to convert from 3.x/PF1, meaning that there’s a whole generation of content out there for it beyond first party offerings, for just a little more effort than standard prep.

Yes, exactly. Consistency is important, because it builds and reinforces trust. The GM just saying “nah” is the other side of the player showing up with a homebrew bullshit build.

I get a lot of pushback from the Pathfinder 2e subreddit for promoting the idea that the system is really great for character-driven, fiction-first tables, because everyone just looks at the number of rules and goes “it’s so obviously a gameist system, why would you ever try to run it as anything else?”, and the answer is it’s a fantastic physics system. The rules provide clarity and consistency where it’s really useful or important, and are easily ignorable where it doesn’t matter.

Thankfully, no one at my table knows what a bugbear is. And that’s also just not the way English tends to work. A bearbug is clearly a small, hairy beetle.

Well, I was going to have the party meet an owlbear, but a bugbear it is, now.

@jjjalljs@ttrpg.network Sigil was a project to double-down on ecosystem lock-in and introduce microtransactions into the game at a time where online play was/is ballooning. And it probably had a lot of potential to achieve those things, if not for Hasbro’s seemingly constant refocusing and shifting short term goals.

It’s good for the hobby that it’s DOA, but being so dismissive of it because it’s not something you personally see value in just kind of sounds like burying your head in the sand to the very real changes the hobby has been undergoing since lockdowns started five years ago.

Sigil had the potential to not just lock players into the D&D Beyond ecosystem (even more so than Beyond already does), but also to be a poison pill against homebrew in general.

It would have been a Curse of Strahd machine. Something that has full support for official moduals and rulebooks, and functionally no support for anything else. And there was a very, very, very real chance that it would have worked.