Weekly Update - 336 - 8/17/26 (Patreon)

Alright so! Friday Comic: Solipsus - Page 42

My parents have come out to visit us this week. My dad, who's in his 70s, even went mountain biking with us, and I get to brag about that because those are some life goals. I hope to be able to still go mountain biking when I'm in MY 70s. We went 6 miles (9.6km) in the forest. Half of it uphill.

So obviously I wanna spend as much time with them as I can for the few days they are here. I'm gonna commit to posting a comic but I'm also gonna give myself a little flexibility. If I can't get the comic done BY Friday, I'll post it Saturday or Sunday instead. But I do think I can get it done by Friday.

Then I probably won't get a ton done on the Character Creation image this week, but it DOES have a decent start! Ten characters for that one. I'm going with ten. Trying to show a wide variety of body-shapes and different areas of expertise that are possible in the TTRPG. The rough sketch is pure rough sketch chaos right now, so I blocked it out in blue to kinda better highlight for you where I think all the characters should go. I got some bigs and some smalls, some medium sizes, it's got some different furries, exotics, some chokes, some mutations, a Feral and a scalie. There's a ranger, a swordie, a rogue, a trader, a tinker, a brewer, a tribal... and a crazy lil guy.

Probably gonna need lots of refinement but I'm currently happy with the rough layout.

Um... TTRPG progress? Sure. I think I'm basically done tinkering with combat. If it has any remaining issues, I think it'll need a playtest to highlight them. Combat has been a big sticking point for me throughout this process and I'd been threatening to nuke it entirely for awhile because I wasn't happy with where it was at, but I think I actually found an iteration off the Alpha version of combat that I like.

In the pre-alpha, there was no roll-to-hit. It was simply attack, and if you attacked you hit, and if the defender had energy to spare they could avoid the attack. The idea was just to balance energy and try to lure out the dodges while saving up your stronger hits for when your target was out of options.

But then our very own Quinn brought up the great point that combat didn't use your character's stats at all. And that was a big problem. Two characters with entirely different stat builds were effectively identical through the combat lens. So that system had to go.

The alpha brought in a Hit/Glance/Graze result from dice rolls, which was based on your character's stats, but it was a little weird because you would roll Threat to attack, reduce it by what was effectively your attack score. Then the Defender had a chance to reduce your remaining Threat to get a Graze to receive only minimum damage, but if nobody could reach zero it would result in a Glance, doing half damage.

That system felt pretty clunky. It was clunky to write, it was clunky to explain, it was just clunky. People understood it. We were able to do a couple of playtests with that system. It had some merits, but it never felt... great. To me.

Game design is an iterative process, not every idea is great, but each new idea brings something with it and I think we were starting to tickle the edges of something decent. So for the beta I refined it further instead of throwing it out entirely.

Now it's just, if you attack, you roll for Threat, and that result using your attack score determines if you Crit, Hit, Glance, Graze or Miss. With Misses being basically so rare as to never occur unless your character is particularly low-skilled. The defender can then shift your result from Hit to Glance or from Glance to Graze with their defense score, potentially reducing the damage they take.

To me this feels much cleaner, much easier to explain, and still hits all of my major goals for designing a brand new system from the ground up. It uses the game's core mechanic, attacker and defender stats matter, there are options and choices available on each turn, an attack has a variety of results and a defender can choose to respond to an attack or not. As a bonus, higher level characters should also feel particularly powerful, as their attacks are also much harder to defend against.

Other notable stuffs? I've stripped all Energy from GM-controlled characters (it's too much to track) and I've also added what I'm calling a Death by a Thousand Cuts (DTC) score just for NPCs. Effectively, there's an issue where certain monsters don't feel pain, and as a result won't fall unconscious when they receive a crippling amount of pain. Normally the ONLY effective way to defeat these monsters was to inflict a single massively deadly blow upon them, or to exploit their existing wounds until they reach the lethal threshold. The DTC score attempts to solve that by giving these monsters a second threshold where they've effectively been blended into pulp from receiving too many small injuries and should therefore be declared dead by the GM. This gives me a little more flexibility with monster design (as I delve back into the bestiary) while simultaneously lending more viability to certain combat tactics the players may choose to lean into. Single massive hit, bruiser characters should be just as viable as scrappy little quick pokey stabbies (looking at you, Pharandros and Riyu).

Though again, DTC scores will probably need playtesting to properly find where they feel good.

And I made a billion other changes too, many of which adjusted things to fit the combat changes. But those are the biggest ones off the top of my head right now. The work continues.