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Reposted by SprintingOwlDesigns

Jen C Mars @jencmars.bsky.social · 6h

Any TTRPG art friends looking for a quick turn around gig?

Client needs 3 humanoid character pieces (head, 1/2, full body) in a semi-realistic (think TTRPG book) fantasy art style. Full color.

Needs for next week, I’m not available.

Ideal if you have store front you can charge from (eg Etsy)

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Reposted by SprintingOwlDesigns

Jennifer Adcock @jenkatwrites.bsky.social · 6h

OHO did you think I only had ONE spooky Halloween treat for you? The TRICK is that I have TWO, and the second is some HALLOWEEN DOLLHOUSE GIRLIES to add some frightful new fashions to your Dollhouse Drama games! jen-adcock15.itch.io/magic-monsters

Magic & Monsters: Dollhouse Drama Playset Pack 9 by Owl Knight Games, by Jennifer Adcock

Tricks and treats as monster girls, a coven of witches, and unicorn riders!

jen-adcock15.itch.io

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 6h

Fellow can't parry affliction sufferer!

I ended up liking a lot of Sekiro, since you can still kind of cheese your way through a lot of it without parrying, but it absolutely hard walls you at the end.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 17h

Oh, I've got way more patience for jrpg grind than I do for runback. The grind is incremental progress, but the runback is sorta empty space?

If nothing else, I'm happy Silksong's got folks talking in detail about the nuances of design.

Reposted by SprintingOwlDesigns

satah @posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online · 21h

been thinking a lot abt cool ttrpg coverage i can do & facilitate & i think i'm just gonna.... try one.......?

please write ~250-500 words about A SPECIFIC DEATH MECHANIC IN A TTRPG for me to compile into a little webzine! you have until november 13th! that's in a month!

unnamed ttrpg zine project volume one - DEATH MECHANICS

tell me about death mechanics for volume one of an as-of-yet-unnamed ttrpg zine project i'm looking for: 250-500 words (feel free to go under but please don't go over) about a single mechanic or syst...

docs.google.com

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

I somehow still have not played Celeste, but I really like its design philosophy. If I have a lot of tools and some room to think laterally, and if I can test different approaches without huge punishment, I tend to engage a lot more than if the game wants me to Do Things Right.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

A thing that I think is true with Silksong is that it feels way, way better as a game if you're naturally consistent as a player. The fights are only tedious if you have to redo them.

I play like a hedgehog in a washing machine, and tend to do better with games that tolerate my wild flailing.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

Also Ori And The Will Of The Wisps is the best thing I've played all year.

If you take nothing else from this thread, play Ori WoW.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

A lot of my thoughts here are less applicable to ttrpgs---because the difficulty in ttrpgs is generally in learning the game rather than in playing it---but I'm going to be keeping it in mind as I design stuff.

What lavish excesses of player support can I get away with.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

But often, you can give the player a lot more support than you think.

Again, Ori WoW resets you to your last valid platform when you die. You are back in the mix *immediately.* Lost progress is zero. You don't even lose exp. And the game does not feel cheaper for it.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

Sometimes a convenience feature will remove part of a game's charm!

Elden Ring refusing to pause creates emergent gameplay when you've got a visitor at a door or the oven timer went off and there is an enemy just on the fringes of aggro range.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

I think it might be worth trying, if you're making a hard game, to look at what you want the difficulty to do.

Is it meant to be a prestige marker?

Is it meant to force you to engage with the game?

And if it's the latter, can you add convenience features?

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

But its resistance band difficulty *feels* extremely good.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

Ori WoW's difficulty doesn't provide this benefit. Anyone can sandbag it, and it's harder to communicate "I can play Ori very stylishly" than it is to say "I've beaten Ori."

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

Difficulty as a wall makes a game easier to brag about. It makes finishing the game feel like more of an accomplishment. It turns the game, in some ways, into a conversational token. "I've beaten Darkest Dungeon*. I can handle hard games."

*quit on the final boss b/c it was a grind

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 18h

I can say I've beaten Sekiro* and thereby give people a sense of my abilities.

If I say I've beaten Kirby's Dream Land, it doesn't sound as impressive.

*I have not. I quit on the final boss because I can't parry.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

And this means that the overall difficulty is not a wall. It's a resistance band that you pull back as far as you can.

And I think this interacts in an odd way with how people talk about games they've beaten.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

This combination of high challenge, high forgiveness kind of results in a game that kind of meets you at wherever you are.

Once you get into a flow, you can zip through sections and wombo bosses and it feels great. But when you're not feeling it, you can play at your own pace and still progress.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

Ori WoW is also a hard game. Basically every surface is spikes at all times. Attack timing is tricky and enemies are extremely mobile. Bosses have heaps of HP and patterns that can be hard to read and react to. By like an hour in you're doing Path Of Pain jumps routinely.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

Ori WoW is an easy game. Any time you die, you reset to your last valid platform. You can sandbag boss fights and platforming sections with zero downtime, and you get a ton of traversal options and health. You can play sloppy and recover.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

But these are just looking at difficulty as a wall. How hard do you need to try to climb over the wall.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

I've generally thought of easy as "you don't need to try too much, you can switch your brain off and enjoy the game" and hard as "you need to be fully engaged and performing at the level the game expects to enjoy the game".

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 19h

I've been playing Ori And The Will Of The Wisps in something of a trance, and I'm starting to realize that the way I've thought about difficulty in games has been totally wrong.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 23h

This is the osr influence. I'm trusting the GM to figure out how much they're supposed to be there.

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SprintingOwlDesigns @sprintingowl.bsky.social · 1d

This is the ttrpg.

Two houses side by side, one pastel and the other all black.

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