Jesus_666

I hope Vic drives the BBEG insane by continually addressing him as "pally" and insisting they're either in Vegas or in an entertainment holoprogram.

Other lessons from the sign:

• You may send radio broadcasts to origami birds.
• We encourage you to dip your hands into any glasses of sparkling water.
• Do not swing progress bars around.
• Violence against butterfly skewers is forbidden.

"Tiefling" looks like a German word, "tief" meaning "deep". As a matter of fact, that's exactly where they got the name from, referring to their "lower planes" heritage. And it's in German because, well, no idea. Maybe Sigil has a significant German minority?

The same is roughly true of games with a more broad skill system, e.g. The Dark Eye with its dozens of skills. However, those systems tend to spread out abilities between party members by making it impractical to have all skills but affordable to have some. I actually like that a lot since skills can give depth to a character and can tie in the backstory in little mechanical ways.

To construct an example party:

The warrior is, of course, a good fighter proficient in several weapons, but also has good knowledge of strategy, tactics, and the history of warfare, knows how to treat wounds and maintain his equipment, and has the leadership skills to maintain morale in combat. As the son of a vintner he has a surprisingly refined palate regarding wine.

The wizard has detailed knowledge about the arcane, astronomy and astrology, speaks several languages (especially ancient ones), and knows his way around myth and legend. Coming from a culture of sailors, he has a basic understanding of how to operate a boat and navigate on the sea.

The social character is a formally trained courtesan. Along with weapons-grade charisma, she has skills in seduction, rhetoric, games, singing and dancing, plus a broad but shallow education that ~~ahead~~ allows her to maintain light conversation on any topic. A weak fighter, she excels at any kind of social interaction.

The last character is a dwarf who lists his occupation as "craftsman". He likes to take things apart. Like locks, traps, mechanisms, doors, or people who get handsy with the courtesan. He also knows how to treat wounds, diseases, and poison, stemming from when he was a healer's apprentice.

I mean, I can kind of understand the perspective. Having one party member being responsible for non-combat skills is suggestive of an extremely combat-focused game design. I come from systems where having skill monkies isn't practical due to the breadth of the skill system; someone doing the job of a rogue in D&D would have to wildly outlevel the rest of the party.

Then again, those systems are typically more grounded than having PCs become powerful enough to butt heads with demigods after a year of adventuring, so D&D having a bit of a cartoonish vibe to it is very much in character. It's not a flaw, it just feels different. I still think it's kinda funny, though.

"Here's Joe, he hits things with a sword and is athletic. There's Bob, he gets angry and hits things with an axe and is athletic. Over there's Jim; he turns into animals and hits things and knows stuff about nature, plus he's athletic. Lucy here hits things with a blessed mace and can heal people and is athletic. And that's Wayne, our salesman locksmith armorer medic seaman carpenter commando."

That's probably where I'd plan for a later twist where the GMPC was actually the BBEG at one point but got replaced by the current, more ruthless BBEG. There'd be a whole succession of people of varying evilness sharing the same name and title. Kind of like a Dread Pirate Roberts situation.

I remember a one-shot that had a twist like that - followed by the twist of the recently disarmed fighter removing his armored gauntlets, pointing at the traitor, and casting the system's equivalent of Magic Missile. As he pulled his magic sheet out of his pocket he explained that he'd just been a misleadingly strong and well-armored wizard all along but hadn't told anyone but the GM.

That was a fun little moment.

DSA (aka The Dark Eye, as it's international release is called) does tend towards a low power level so magic is severely limited compared to e.g. D&D. You can throw fireballs but not as frequently. High-level magic can take days to recover from. I have my own criticisms of how the magic system works but it does work if you accept that a high-level TDE caster is at a lower power level than a mid-level D&D caster.

The overall complexity was insane in the 4th edition; 5th ed did a lot to fix that. There are still a lot of skills but it actually feels manageable now.

I actually like that the system can model mundane professions; it can be pretty cool to play a regular person who gets forced into adventure but is still competent at something, even if that something is not generally applicable to adventuring.

Oh come on. It's not that complicated.

If it's 3rd edition you just do basic skill checks on any ones of the 30-odd ~~should~~ skills for everything. Yes, including leveling up.

If it's 4th edition you run a spreadsheet program to track the five dozen skills you selected and curse yourself as you have to walk down a stone stair but you only have points in walking up wooden stairs.

If it's 5th edition you basically play it like 3rd ed but with a point buy system that allows you to accurately construct an artistically inclined vintner with a large bladder.

(Yes, having a large bladder capacity is an official perk from an official rulebook but few DMs are going to be insane enough to actually play with that rulebook.)

The live-action version of The Enigma of Amigara Fault is surprisingly adorable.

I think you'd like how Exalted handles money. (Note: I'm talking about second edition here; I never got familiar with third edition.)

In Exalted, wealth is represented by a Background called Resources. Backgrounds are essentially stats that represent useful things your characters has in a general sense like wealth, fame, contacts, or a mentor. They go from zero to five.

Resources is a vague representation of wealth. At Reduces 1 you're one meal away from total poverty. At Resources 5 you have something that passively generates substantial amounts of money for your character, whether that's ownership of a lot of land or an army of accountants maintaining your investment portfolio. Whatever is is, it works without you having to deal with it.

In terms of game mechanics it's easy to use: Prices are expressed as Resource scores. If you want to buy something you just compare your score to the item's.

• If yours is higher, you just get the item as the price doesn't affect your wealth significantly.
• If both scores are the same you get the item but have to reduce your Resources by one. This represents you having to liquidate a large amount of your assets to cover the price.
• If your Resources score is lower than that of the item, you can't afford it.

It's a nice system for a game that doesn't want resource management to get in the way of epic adventure.

C#. Until semi-recently it was only used for value types (as reference types are supposed to be nullable by default) but these days you can enable explicit nullables, which means that you have to explicitly specify nullability even for reference types.

I like explicit nullables. It's not much more work to type those question marks and it adds a safeguard against null showing up where it shouldn't.

I specifically ~~inspired~~ insisted on it for this picture because the code on the sign uses capitalized names for something that isn't a class, which is a very C# thing to do.