I don't blame you one bit - it's Kickstarter's problem, not yours. And I fully understand wanting to leverage the good parts of KS and avoid starting all over on another platform.
jkottler
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I had to drop my pledge for your new book because I can't be supporting KS right now. I hate how trying to move the needle at KS is actually having / going to have a bigger impact on small creators like yourself.
However - I want both of these zines and plan to return when the new one is available and pick them both up.
Wishing you only the best!
This is amazing. Love the 1-roll HP / Class chargen. I do feel like save vs HP makes rolling a warrior even more of an advantage than it already seems to be. Also - by sticking to D&D conventions you're gonna have a lot of parties stopping to let their wizards nap (not unlike D&D itself). I say this as someone who's 1st D&D character was a 1-HP wizard who cast magic missile once and then promptly died.
But there's a ton of great stuff in here. I love that you packed a whole system AND a dungeon into this space!
There is so much to love here - the inclusion of movement, the room-position-as-turn-order, wow.
My only problem with this is that it is so far afield of what a TTRPG experience is that I don't understand how this will fulfill the remit of the jam - I don't see how this will onramp new players at all.
I think this is pretty amazing in terms of pushing the limits of what TTRPGs can be but I don't think it's a good way of introducing a new player to what they typically are.
It has absolutely made me want to see the larger project tho.
I like the way you've adapted Zombie World-like card draw mechanics. The drawn card text eliminates a cognitive step. In my game, they have to look at the highest die and then perform a literal table lookup to know how to interpret it. Now granted, the remit was for experienced GMs and any GM worth their salt will do FitD 6/4-5/3- interpretation without a moment's thought but the new players involved might not find it so easy, and even if they do, the elimination of snags / friction here is paramount. Great thought!
Thanks! I wanted to...what do the Brits say..."begin as you mean to go on". I wanted to inculcate in new players the idea that they are creative contributors to the play session, not just reactive pawns within a predetermined fiction. Because that's the kind of play I enjoy, not because the other kind is wrong, or anything.
My solution for this jam was to provide a near-normal setting : "It's the world we live in, but there are monsters now and they can get you." I put the pressure on players to exercise their agency by removing the option to refer problems to authority: "The police and National Guard are busy with big stuff." And then to present a problem that they had to act to solve. "You've got a sick friend who needs medical attention." So it's absolutely a limited scenario, but there are a lot of details, left for the players to author in play - the nature and details of the monsters, the relationship to the sick friend, etc..
My goal was to leverage the familiarity of the real world and tighten the screws with familiar fraught situation stuff that they've seen in movies, on TV, or in books a million times - again, leveraging familiarity - to stay within the 10-30 minute time frame while still offering some narrative authority to the non-GM players.