ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/18846279

worldbuilding

Ok, so I've been hammering away at my homebrew ttrpg-wargame and I decided to give clerics the ability to conjure troops. Different alignments get different things. So far, I've given clay golems to the good alignment, flesh golems to the evil alignment, and awakening plants to the chaotic alignment. I am unsure what to give to the lawful alignment.

To clarify the vibe I am going for, here's a a paraphrased version of each one's fluff text:

• "This clay golem you have given life to is a person. It is, by its nature, inclined towards kindness, helpfulness, and generosity."
• "The flesh golem you have constructed is a person with a different alignment from yours. They respect you as their creator, but may rebel if you do not discipline them, or if they feel disrespected, or if they disagree with you strongly enough."
• "You grant sapience and mobility to a number of plants of your choice. They may or may not appreciate this."

Vibe-wise, whatever I give to the lawful alignment should be obedient, predictable, and honest. My first thought is to give the lawful alignment stone golems, as in animating statues. However, i think it needs to parallel the mass troop creation i have granted the chaotic alignment. I have a number of ideas, but everything I've come up with either doesnt seem to follow the Lawful vibe in at least one way (Animating armor seems very scary and somewhat evil) or doesnt seem sufficiently exceptional or awesome (You have a class feature that lets you rally a peasant mob? Watch me do that with a Persuasion roll.)

I am also very averse to giving them the ability to call down angels, as I think creatures that powerful or abstract should never be easy to call upon unless the DM wants them to be easy to call upon.

For a last bit of context, lawful-aligned clerics are basically paladins. So, a better version of the question would be how you think paladins would conjure or fabricate troops if they had a class ability to do so?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49854495

Came across the Bunnies and Burrows ttrpg, and it made me wonder if there was a wargame equivalent. I mean, the Warriors series is still super popular, sk there's gotta be a cat-bases wargame somewhere!

Came across the Bunnies and Burrows ttrpg, and it made me wonder if there was a wargame equivalent. I mean, the Warriors series is still super popular, sk there's gotta be a cat-bases wargame somewhere!

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided.

I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours.

The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work.

The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice.

In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?