u/Josh_From_Accounting

Any game you'd say is perfect for a Romance of the Three Kingdoms campaign?

Specifically, a game with:

• army management

• human power level PCs

• lots of social combat rules

• mechanics to management a web of intrigue

Sure, one could say "play whatever and wing it" with the social stuff, but I think TRPGs can learn more from board games, which often find fun ways of gameifying basic concepts.

Minions.

Not the little yellow, one eyed critters that boomers like to use alongside racial slurs on Facebook.

No, the little monsters made to swell the ranks and overwhelm PCs through turn order.

What is the best way to handle them in the F20 sphere?

Pre-4e, you just kind of dragged out combat by putting in low level enemies. They could take a while to die and did little damage. They were just annoying.

4e introduced making them 1hp variants of existing models, allowing any monster to quickly become a minion. By making a hit equal death, it allowed hordes with quick resolution. 13th Age changed this slightly by giving them small health pools that were pooled, with each minion dying when the health pool lost 1 minion of health.

Fantasy Craft did minons through the damage save. Borrowing from Mutants and Masterminds, every Monster had a Death Save Bonus. If used as a Standard Character instead of a special character (which gave vitality and wound point), the standard character rolled a save every time they were hit. 1d20 + save bonus vs a DC equal accumulated damage. If they fail, they died (or subuded with subudal damage).

What would work best? What new novel ways exist?

I can see merits and flaws everywhere.

Minions at 1hp is simple and means enemies don't extend combat length inherently, but also means they will vanish quickly and incentiveize respawning. It also had the teeter tauter that assured hits were reserved for minion popping since it would mean you could guarantee minions vanished when you used it.

An HP pool delays it.

Damage Saves means no one knows when a Minion may drop. Eventually, they'll accumulated damage will be too high to hit outside of a Nat 20, but that's still a 5% chance.

And, outside 13th Age, all those games still had long combat.

An idea I had could be a cross. You group Minions into one large group, giving a +1 damage save for each one over one, added to their base save. Each time they fail, you remove one from the pool and lower their save bonus for the reduced number. This means the horde dies faster as more die. Making a tempo to battle, especially if merged with 13A Escalation die.

What ideas can you see for the minion problem? None of these really fix the bloated turn order.

Not unless you somehow bunched Minion actions together like Fate Core does with groups, but I don't know if that works for F20 games like it does for Fate.

During our previous performance review, there was a sudden push to identify manual processes and begin documenting procedure. We were told our current accounting software is ending and we are using a new one soon. They proudly said "AI is here and we have to adapt" and brought up all the AI features and how our parent company is going to make its own AI to make things "easier."

I brought up concerns about pricing and usage and was basically told "it's out of our hands" and "we got a contract."

To say they're late is an understatement. The honeymoon period of AI is already ending in many places, like Anthrophic usage throttling to Github's sudden push to per token pricing (something shooting costs up from $39 to $5,732 for some users). This software is actually a regular ERP but has AI features its touting but it seems to just let you run a chatbot interface on its regular algorithms and has xAI run that feature.

So, ya know, the software itself is probably fine, but the xAI thing is just a talk feature. It can't automate. You need your own key for that. It is actually clarified in their usage that it can't be used for further development and its just a chatbot tied into its algorithms using xAI.

So, their big push for their own AI system requires either taking an open source model and developing it (massive expense, especially as we would need to rent GPUs from Azure) or taking an API and customizing (an expense that is literally being raised as we speak).

They won't get nearly as far as they're expecting because they moved so late but that also means they won't downsize (likely) and then get sideswiped by the surging cost.

It's just interesting because they even ominously said "your department took on extra work with departutes recently and that will be considered in your favor in case oof any downturns."

Like, we get it: you were told to downsize with AI. Good luck. Average Azure monthly GPU rental costs are estimated at 8,732 per month per user or roughly 104,784 dollars for something needing regular, heavy use. GPT, Copilot, xAI, and Claude have all making moves to end their discounts (copilot's shooting up prices, xAI removing its free tier, Claude and GPT testing the waters on work hour token limits and severe token limit increases at each tier of subscribition). Like, the NVIDA CEO said 3 weeks ago that "the cost of compute currently exceeds the cost of labor."

So, anyway, I'll ride this wave of stupdity. Since they're using a large SAAS enterprise software with a 3 year contract, my guess is less "they'll end the xAI feature" or raise our price, and more "reduce weekly usage allotments." I'd be surprised if they just eat the costs themselves as token costs have jumped 10x-100x in the last month. I asked them to review the contract for per API usage clauses and got told to basically shut up because all negoitating was done by the parent company.

Oh well. I have that email saved literally "CYOA AI Intergration Costs" for the inevitable "why is our rate being limited" or "why did we get a massive usage bill" or "they said they won't be renewing the xAI feature" or "all AI features going forward are going to have a BYOK deal" or "they will be moving the Ai to a new provider and our AI features will be disabled as they negotiate."

Like, read the room, dudes. These people never, ever look beyond the surface level and wonder why they get hit with bills.

I am running a game of Dungeon World for a group of people I met on VRchat.

They have been a great group so far. We are using the Plangea setting for 5e and converting to DW and it's gone well so far.

But, one player was noticeably quiet. I spoke to them about it and asked if they'd want to meet one day and discuss it.

So, we met yesterday and chatted about it.

What they said is, essentially, they are having trouble because they are used to 5e and exception based design. Dungeon World, as a PbtA game, is much more open and leaves things open to interpretation. For example, the move elemental mastery was confusing to them because it just says "when you call on the spirits of the elements to perform a task" and just says how to handle the outcome.

I explained to them that DW is a narrative first game with no baseline. In 5e, all characters have the same baseline. Your class provides exceptions. In PbtA, you can do anything that makes sense for your character and then the game either has you resolve with a specific move or just fallback on defy danger...or have the GM make a custom move.

It's a "say yes or roll the dice" game. I explained they can do whatever a druid could do in a game and I'd just tell you how to resolve it. I said I trust them to be reasonable and work with players if they aren't.

That was still confusing to them. They said they are more used to going through rules for specific wordings and sticking to them literally.

I said that's completely fine and many games support that. I then said we could use their familiarity with 5e to ease them into this system.

We went to 5e and found what a level 4 Druid could do. We argued a level 4 druid equals a level 2 DW Druid because DW is a 10 level game. I sent them a snapshot and said "don't look up these spells and abilities, but use their names as a jumping off point. Consider this an idea list you can use when trying to think if a Druid should be able to do this."

I thought that may help by giving them a loose set of rules to adhere to as they said having limits in other games and exact wordings help them.

They then said they had trouble jumping in because it takes a while for them to think and, by the time they decided, the moment passed.

I said they could just say "hey, I want to do something here" politely when they got an idea and the group would wait for to make a decision. Letting us know to wait for them to work it out. I thought that would fix that problem, especially as one player said they were going slower to give them time since they mentioned this prior but never knew when they were thinking.

Lastly, they said they were having trouble with the bonds mechanic because they can't think what their character would think. They can't figure out their guy so figuring out how they think of others was hard.

I suggested that, if they have trouble thinking in character, to maybe just play their character like themselves for now and let the personality develop naturally. Just do what they would do in the situation and see what feels natural. Ease over consistency and essentially a character would form.

I also suggested they could ask the other players for suggestions on bonds and do them backwards that way. Let them give them ideas and let it spark that way. And, eventually, things may click.

After that, we felt comfortable to just chat. They then...told me about Connor.

This is a tangent, but telling me about Connor explained everything. Connor was their first GM and was when they got into D&D during COVID. Connor...was a bad GM and taught awful habits.

Some highlights include

• Awarding the opposite of Inspiration points he called GFY points for being late

• Demanding a player lower their Intelligence for saying something he saw as "dumb"

• Having a character be kidnapped for a 4hr session where their player could do nothing and force the player to stay in the discord call, quietly for a fucking hrs

• Trying to force players to optimize and punishing them for saying no

• This one requires a trigger warning for rape Allowing a Player to sexually assault a lesbian NPC for refusing that player's sexual advances and then allowing that same player to try to ruffie another PC. It is worth noting that the player that was ruffied was the husband of my player character. Adding extra levels of WTF is that my player's husband is trans masc and their character was trans masc and you get the idea. How my player didn't deck that guy, I don't know. I mean it was a discord call, but holy shit. This may be worst horror story I've ever heard.

So, yeah, this chat explained A LOT about why my player was having trouble. I never heard of a worse GM and its no wonder my player was afraid to be spontaneous or take risks. They even said they were afraid to say dumb things because they were told to "play their stats" because of Connor's weird "dropping Intelligence for bad roleplay" thing. So, I told my player to just play however they wanted and let the stats only matter for rolls.

Anyway, tangent aside, do you think my solutions were a good approach? Never heard of such a bad GM before so I'm not sure if my solutions would help someone who learned such awful habits from that.

I have just launched my new Kickstarter for Petmon. You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/covok/petmon/description

Petmon has been an interesting project that I've been working on for a while. It started in 2017 when I considered using "Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine" to make a Digimon fan hack. I put that aside after just the basic outline and focused on another title of mine, Friendship, Effort, Victory.

Years later, I went back to it and went "wow, this is a great idea." I reached out to Jenna Moran and got approval to go forward. A lot has changed since then -- hence why I now dub it running on the Pet Engine -- but I'm still grateful to Jenna for letting me know it was safe to go forward.

Obviously, I don't have the Digimon license so we moved to a more generic concept of "pet monsters". Originally, it was actually called "My Pet Monster," but that was apparently a line of teddy bears made by Hasbro. Yeah, had no idea. Had to rename the game.

The playtesting started in 2021. We had two campaigns. One was run by me. And, well, it was messy back then. If you've ever made a game, you know that it never works on the first draft. The first few months of playtesting was devoted to constant rewrites. But, eventually, we got something that worked. Once I was confidant, I asked one of the players to run a campaign for the same group with me as a player. Amber was super nice and did that for me.

We had an awesome 1.5 year campaign. There was so many highlights. And seeing the game from the player's perspective helped me fix a lot of problems on the other end. Like, there really wasn't any good reason to call on the power of darkness originally. I had to really make that an attractive option for players to take the risk.

But, we had great moments. My favorite is still when Penny, my character, went all "Jerri from late season Tamers" after forcing her partner, Klank, to evolve and had a Darkness Burst. Basically, Klank became a monster temporarily. The reconciliation we had later that let Klank finally, properly evolve was great. Felt like a moment from one of our biggest inspirations, Digimon.

It's worth noting that it is funny launching the game now. I decided to not update the intro where I discussed the gaming landscape in 2019, but, when I started dev work in 2019, there were only about 3 or so Monster Taming games on the market. I listed all that existed at the time, like Animon. Since then, I'm happy the genre has exploded. It feels like we all independently had the idea around the same time and are all coming to market now. Guess that makes sense, really.

Still, I feel proud of Petmon and I think it has a place in this gaming landscape. It does a lot of things differently. From its focus on being easily hackable to any style of Monster Taming to its very strict focus on the narrative of a child growing up due to their experiences in the monster world, Petmon is something different. It's something that came from somewhere else, but I really feel I made it my own.

I really hope people will enjoy it. I am a lifelong fan of Monster Taming. I remember watching Digimon on Saturday mornings and being the weird "Digimon kid" at schools. I remember Monster Rancher and Medabots and all those other shows that tried to get us to make our parents buy useless toys and games. I wanted something that created the same experience you got following that show, week to week, seeing these kid characters grow.

Like, Mimi my favorite character from Adventure for just how much she changes from a selfish kid into a sincere, caring person. I wanted a game that would help groups have that kind of experience at the table. Yes, I know some will say you can do any story with any rules, but there is always a difference between fighting the system to have your story and having a game that supports that kind of story.

If you are wiling to take the chance, I very much appreciate it if you consider backing Petmon.

Due to the new updates to rule 7 of this subforum, I don't know if I can respond to comments on this post. But, I made the Kickstarter page very honest on a lot of the mechanics. I hope that answers most of the questions.

I have just launched my new Kickstarter for Petmon. You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/covok/petmon/description

Petmon has been an interesting project that I've been working on for a while. It started in 2017 when I considered using "Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine" to make a Digimon fan hack. I put that aside after just the basic outline and focused on another title of mine, Friendship, Effort, Victory.

Years later, I went back to it and went "wow, this is a great idea." I reached out to Jenna Moran and got approval to go forward. A lot has changed since then -- hence why I now dub it running on the Pet Engine -- but I'm still grateful to Jenna for letting me know it was safe to go forward.

Obviously, I don't have the Digimon license so we moved to a more generic concept of "pet monsters". Originally, it was actually called "My Pet Monster," but that was apparently a line of teddy bears made by Hasbro. Yeah, had no idea. Had to rename the game.

The playtesting started in 2021. We had two campaigns. One was run by me. And, well, it was messy back then. If you've ever made a game, you know that it never works on the first draft. The first few months of playtesting was devoted to constant rewrites. But, eventually, we got something that worked. Once I was confidant, I asked one of the players to run a campaign for the same group with me as a player. Amber was super nice and did that for me.

We had an awesome 1.5 year campaign. There was so many highlights. And seeing the game from the player's perspective helped me fix a lot of problems on the other end. Like, there really wasn't any good reason to call on the power of darkness originally. I had to really make that an attractive option for players to take the risk.

But, we had great moments. My favorite is still when Penny, my character, went all "Jerri from late season Tamers" after forcing her partner, Klank, to evolve and had a Darkness Burst. Basically, Klank became a monster temporarily. The reconciliation we had later that let Klank finally, properly evolve was great. Felt like a moment from one of our biggest inspirations, Digimon.

It's worth noting that it is funny launching the game now. I decided to not update the intro where I discussed the gaming landscape in 2019, but, when I started dev work in 2019, there were only about 3 or so Monster Taming games on the market. I listed all that existed at the time, like Animon. Since then, I'm happy the genre has exploded. It feels like we all independently had the idea around the same time and are all coming to market now. Guess that makes sense, really.

Still, I feel proud of Petmon and I think it has a place in this gaming landscape. It does a lot of things differently. From its focus on being easily hackable to any style of Monster Taming to its very strict focus on the narrative of a child growing up due to their experiences in the monster world, Petmon is something different. It's something that came from somewhere else, but I really feel I made it my own.

I really hope people will enjoy it. I am a lifelong fan of Monster Taming. I remember watching Digimon on Saturday mornings and being the weird "Digimon kid" at schools. I remember Monster Rancher and Medabots and all those other shows that tried to get us to make our parents buy useless toys and games. I wanted something that created the same experience you got following that show, week to week, seeing these kid characters grow.

Like, Mimi my favorite character from Adventure for just how much she changes from a selfish kid into a sincere, caring person. I wanted a game that would help groups have that kind of experience at the table. Yes, I know some will say you can do any story with any rules, but there is always a difference between fighting the system to have your story and having a game that supports that kind of story.

If you are wiling to take the chance, I very much appreciate it if you consider backing Petmon.

This is something that happened recently when we had a promo game just now.

For context, we have kickstarter soon. I can't self-promote so I can't say the date or what it is. But, it is important for this note.

So, we're doing some promo stuff on podcasts and trying to get the word out.

Anyhoo, the game has already been edited. Layout hasn't begun, but the layout person has looked at it. It has been proofed. It has art being worked on for it. Playtested finished in early 2024. I'm already writing new projects.

One of the demo players didn't like the order of the chapters and thinks two should be swapped. To try and help, I got approval to just add in a quick 2 pages on key terms at the front of the book to just to try to ease this concern. Since it's 2 pages exactly, it didn't cause issue for layout. And 2 pages and less than 100 or so words, the editors were able to check real quick, given comments, and I fixed it. Didn't throw anything out of budget.

But swapping two chapters just seems risky at this stage since I'm afraid it will break things.

But, after the promo, they pushed again on it and I could tell this really affected because they really tried to push for it. Not rude, but you know "as a potential backer", "it shouldn't be hard," etc. I wasn't sure how to handle it in the moment, so it felt I came off a bit rough. After wards, I sent a message to make sure I wasn't being rude, but just that it can be a bit of issue to swap chapters around when you got a KS in less than 2 weeks. And you're already playtesting your next project and rewriting that. And you would have to ask your editors and layout people to make sure just swapping the order of 100s of pages doesn't break something.

I'm also just big on turnaround being fast. I plan on like getting out something as quick as possible to backers. In my mind, once I'm paid, I'm on clock. It's got to be done right and on time. It's why my last KS fullfilled within 6 months. I wanted everything done as much as possible before we went live. And, honestly, we are going live with a bit less this time because it's a much bigger project and I couldn't commission all the art for a 200 page book before knowing what the return would be. So, I'm already worried a bit about the delay that may come from the pieces I'll commission after the KS is done and how that may affect the game's release.

Have you guys ever had this happen? How do you handle it? Was I wrong? Should I consider it more thoroughly? Is there a really polite way of explaining things?

Any advice is appreciated. Never had this before and it left me kind of nervous.