Going full blog mode: observations from two Discord rants

One of the brilliant, witty, and no doubt handsome members of the Fistoverse had an observation about Shadowrun to share with the Discord:

"Shadowrun's set up for lots of good stories, but is a real ballache to run"

 

And as is typical when a comment catches my eye, I couldn't shut up for a for minutes. I share my bloviation with you all, for what scrapes of insight it possesses:

"Speaking as an elfgame maker; it is SUPER hard to get the broth right

Like you want everything to be this efficient little clock, but anytime you put two systems near each other they flip out start devouring each other like those Japanese fighting fish

God help you if you want to have an elegant core system AND distinguish weapon types AND have tactically meaningful combat. There's a reason most armory style supplements are just walls of minute variations of a handful of weapon types

So I feel for the system crafters. It's easy to fuck up and near impossible to get right

God DAMMIT that was more fun and elegant than anything I just spent four hours writing"

 

But our insightful and gorgeous Discordian had further observations, which enticed me to continue this particular tyrade:

"Main books need to be an evocative treatise on the setting and feel, on top of being a functional technical document

The eternal tragedy of the hobby is that TTRPG's don't make enough money to fund the extended playtesting that most need"

 

To which, I blunderingly replied:

"More than that; conceptually, there's a disconnect between what we would expect to be strategically viable in a fantastic universe versus what is ACTUALLY strategically viable in a fantastic universe

So you have games like Exalted where what we want, aka anime hero big sword magic blade beam, is markedly less viable than "guy who picked up the crimson bow and can kill you from another dimension"

The reality is that, as a designer, you're NEVER certain if a new option ruins the anticipated setting. That's the tactical infinity for you; man cannot stand against the infinite

So you have a disconnect between option-hungry players, and designers who only have a small library of options they're more or less certain result in the game as they sold it

My solution was to make the setting an inconstant nightmare, so you can't possibly make that worse by discovering where the setting breaks because too late, bitch! Already broken!

But you'll note, that IS a copout

I can't hope to run a test on every permutations of every idea I have, in every likely circumstance that I could anticipate (which would, at any rate, be only the barest fraction of what it would actually be exposed to in real world play)

So designers are left with, at best, a remarkably robust core and the hope that their latest wiggle from the mean isn't one deviation too far

That's just the nature of the beast

Wow I am in blog mode today what the hell"

Blog mode indeed, past Joel. Blog. Mode. Indeed.

The Long Road to a Fist Game

 Now that the Lone Wolf Fists hardback is on the near horizon, I finally have a little time to write. God that feels nice.

Next time? I'm hiring a layout guy. This was a nightmare.

Today we're gonna talk about the journey to LWF (and Tian Shang in general; we've got starfaring to do soon...)

The History Of Games I Played

Let me give you the truncated timeline of my exposure to Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Around year 7 of my life, my bestest friend in the world (Matt was his name, awesome kid) introduced me to a few important interests that would define my tastes for the rest of my life:

1. Sonic the Hedgehog

2. Spawn comics

3. Final Fantasy IV (at the time called Final Fantasy 2) on the SNES

Skip ahead a few years and I'm listening to the Car's "Just What I needed" and I hit on this idea of playing a game where you're in charge of a kingdom, and you like, promote the random peasants into knights and wage wars with them. I am very taken with this notion and its physical manifestation, so I go on a trip to the friendly local nerd joint and get a Citadel Miniature's catalog from the staff. One of these bad boys with all the lovely pictures of unpainted metal miniatures. 

I went with the Skaven and picked up an even-then-too-expensive box of Clanrats

I kept collecting them for years, but rarely got the chance to play. When I did, I roundly lost.

Somewhere in here I also got my hands on the fantastic Final Fantasy 7, and played it nearly to completion before my little brother saved over my game with a rental game and I had to play it over from the beginning. It's cool; the second time, I played it with him, reading him all the dialogue and going on the adventure together proved to be a lot more fun.

Pictured: a man less dangerous to my quest than my little brother

Skip ahead a few more years and I'm in my late teens and doing everything I can to get out and socialize. My dweeby tendencies and social awkwardness gets me somehow invited to a D20 modern game where I play (what else) a katana-and-trenchcoat badass who hunts monsters. I also get invited to a Vampire the Masquerade LARP, where I decided to play as my version of Moebius from  Soul Reaver 2.

Nye he he!

I pick up a copy of both games whenever I move out on my own a few years later. I only ever ran either game once or twice, because what my friends wanted to play was Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition.

The unholy trinity; if you weren't running d20 in the early aughties, then you would be MADE to run it

My early forays consisted of my players making clear anime stand-in characters, then me quickly thinking up a cool cutscene-style scene that would have been right at home in a melodramatic Final Fantasy of the time, and ushering them towards making that scene happen. The primary method of interacting with the game rules was combat.

My love of warhammer led me to become increasingly interested in trying to make the big battles happen within the encounter XP threshold of D&D. I was convinced that the creation of a steady diet of balanced encounters was the GM's entire job (The third edition DMG drove this conclusion home like a railroad spike). 

My love of Final-Fantasy-style cinematic storytelling made me think of campaigns as long stretches of "gameplay" that was occasionally broken up by boxed-text "scenes" that progressed the "plot"(the plot being "what the bad guys were doing that would inevitably unleash a big boss for the players to fight in an epic showdown").

My love for Vampire-esque approachable player powers made the restrictive, class-based, on-the-rails, linear advancement of D&D feel increasingly like a straightjacket. 3rd edition had a frustrating habit of giving a a prepackaged character (THIS is the kind of fighter you can be!) and making you wait several thousand XP until you got to play them. Build systems were VERY appealing if you already had a character concept you wanted, with the notable drawback that most of them read like math textbooks.

I misquote Steve Jobs: "There's no SEX in this!"

I didn't have a lot of respect for dungeons at this point in my gaming career. Nor "random" encounters. I didn't see the point in them. I put the stuff in my games that I wanted to be there, and I put it in whenever I felt like it would have the biggest impact. I was a very proactive, editorial style of GM. 

In my quest to find a game that fit my style, I stumbled onto what seemed at the time to be the mother load:

On the surface, Exalted had everything:

1. It had a player-empowering Build chargen system, which let players make the ludicrous anime protagonists that they actually wanted and allowed me to make the even MORE ludicrous anime villains that I wanted to make
2. It had a huge power level that scaled, allowing ridiculous battles against armies and huge monsters as well as over-the-top anime-guy on anime-guy super-duels
3. It was lightweight and usable on-the-fly, eschewing the onerous game-prep of 3rd edition in favor of a breezier off-the-cuff style GMing
4. Most importantly, IT HAD STYLE. The ART and the WRITING were COOL and made me want to enter creation and kick ass. Selling my friends on this was the easiest sale of my life

No more tedious lists of painstakingly balanced encounters! No more frustratingly restrictive character classes! No more linear, boring dungeons, nonsensical hexes! Actual real rules for conquering and running empires and fighting armies! Social rules that made talking as powerful or MORE POWERFUL than fighting?! Yowza!

The promise of Exalted was, and remains, one of the great promises in all of TTRPGdom. Sucks that it was all a goddamned lie.

The Big Difference between White Wolf and Old School D&D

I was about a year into my first Exalted campaign when I really started to feel the system sag. It was a death of a thousand cuts, but all the minor niggling issues can be summarized very well by the following distinction that every White Wolf game has in common:

White Wolf Games expect the GM to actively manage outcomes

Must... Fix... Broken... System!!!

Which I was already doing, but let me tell you why that is the central failure of TTRPG design. Let me tell you the same way I was told; by learning the Oldest Ways.

The Old Testament

Turns out the third edition of D&D was something of a catastrophe in the culture of TTRPGs. It had effectively taught an entire generation how to roleplay wrong, and nearly all of our troubles with D&D stemmed form 3rd's failures of design.

Let's revisit our four points from earlier:

1. Chargen. 3rd multiplied and compiled several decades worth of scope creep into the core books and shrugged about how that would either make a compelling setting or like... Why anyone would want to play a Dwarf Wizard. It led with system options, but didn't consider whether the options it presented were compelling.

Old D&D was archetypical; the original game had TWO classes, fighting-man and magic-user. And when you really contemplate those two archetypes, they encompass swathes of different characters by folding them into broad approaches to heroics. King Arthur was a lot of thing, but yeah, he was essentially a guy with a sword. So was Conan. So was John Carter, so was Beowulf. "Guy who fights" is possibly THE heroic archetype, which is to say; the detail of HOW and WHY and WHAT YOU LOOKED LIKE was already up to the creator of the character. You totally could look like Cloud and have a big sword, or like Guts and have a big sword, or like Guan Yu and have the Biggest Hittin Stick Ever.

For real though, don't step to Guan Yu

  Same with "magic-user" (archetypically speaking, at least; actula D&D magic was pretty clownshoes). Gandalf and Merlin spring to mind, but "sorcerer" is one of those concepts so woven into all human myth that "weak-seeming guy with mysterious and super dangerous powers" can realistically cover everybody from Odin to Orpheus.

Now, astute game historians will point out that Thief got added to the cannon VERY quickly, as did the OG cross-class Elf and Hobbits and Dwarves and a host of others like Paladin and Bard, Druid and uh, Gnome Illusionist. So the water got muddy early, but the critical thing was the trend towards archetype coupled with a system whose lightness encouraged hacks for more specificity.

2. Scale. I kid you not, old school D&D characters could rise to powers that rivaled greek myth. Scouring battlefields single-handedly was legit a thing that could be done, be it with awesome magic or Achilles-style through sheer asskicking. Since D&D's roots were the Chainmail wargame, mass combat was natural to the system. And as for gigantic monsters; well, what's more gigantic than a dragon? It's even in the name!

The remarkable thing was just how dammed simple the scalability was; it was your Hit Die. that was it. The major character resource was "not dying". Which, when you think about, you pair that with "ability to kill the foe more efficiently" (gained either through increased damage and to-hit, or through a growing library of deadly spells) and you have the engine that scales characters from heroes to gods. Why was your fighter a demigod of battle? Because he refused to die with a hundred arrows in him and laid waste to his enemies, duh. Hit dice and THAC0, people; it's an ingenious little engine.

Third edition added a lot of bells and bobs to this simple, elegant little engine and obfuscated its genius.

3. Lightweight Engine. There's little that's lighter-weight than OG D&D. Clocking in at a whopping 112 pages split over three tiny leaflets, the OG game required you to hack it for it to work. It was hackable by design, approached the way its creators approached it; like a hobby, first and foremost, rather than a game product. Later compilations and revisions would retain this lightweight format for quite some time, with the Basic edition not even cresting 50 pages. It wasn't until Advanced Dungeons and Dragons that we got the heftier hardcovers that would become synonymous with D&D. 

Critically, the rules-light style would be retained even in the hardbacks all the way through Second edition. With core systems and character classes, monsters, etc. taking up very little pagecount. Although dense with options, tables, monsters, magic and the like, the actual systems were bare-bones, flexible and deeply hackable, keeping D&D's signature "archetype" approach that allowed GMs to craft their own monsters, adversaries, special classes, treasure, etc. for their games.

3rd edition replaced this option-heavy, rules-light framework with a nightmare of interconnected subsystems that relied on constant, deep-design tinkering to fir into their "encounter balance" framework of running. I felt like I needed a degree to design a satisfying adventure in 3rd, where in 2nd and before, you just needed imagination and something to draw a map with.

4. Style. This was the most woeful and tragic loss. dungeons and Dragon 3rd edition was where style came to die. I'll let its art speak for it.

And I'll let the OG D&D art speak for it's editions:

Yeah I bet you expected the red dragon, didn'tcha? Fuck you, this is the real shit. This art has a soul. Its compelling and makes me want to run the game.

How you could lay eyes on the unique creative visions of dozens of talented, visionary artists and come away with "You know what WE need? Some brown renfare bullshit with Absolutely The Worst character designs we can come up with!" is a nauseating thought process to attempt to recreate.

You may have ONE Trampier because you've been good

So I'd been mislead; turns out, D&D was fucking radical and already did everything I wanted, just not in a way that I had been trained to think about TTRPGs. Turns out balancing encounters was a joke that should just be thrown out the fucking window; hooray! Most characters could be approached archetypically, doing an end-run around the need for a "build" system! Dungeons and Hexes allowed me to program flavor and setting information into the fabric of playing the game if used correctly! Conquering armies and ruling empires was seamlessly integrated from the base conceits of the game! Social Systems were better handled by talking in character than by rolling dice! Yowza; why didn't anyone tell me what D&D ACTUALLY WAS ALL ALONG?!

I started running in the OSR style and it fit me like a glove. In the decade I've been running games this way, I have yet to feel the sag.

And that is due to the greatest triumph of early D&D, and the essential Triumph of TTRPG design:

D&D expects GMs to manage setup and Players to manage outcomes

What is the difference here? There are a lot of subtle little pieces that add up to the two divergent philosophies, but it boils down to this:

• In D&D, the game trusts in its predicted outcomes
• In White Wolf games, the game does NOT trust in its predicted outcomes

In other words, D&D builds its engines to reliably produce outcomes that it wants. I cannot fathom the reason why, but White Wolf does not do this.

I suspect it is because White Wolf designers are largely riding off the genius or Mark Reign Hagen, who did design this way, while they lack that capacity.

Let me show you what I mean. Here's the health track from Vampire: The Masquerade. A game in which you are a corpse who is animated by carnivorous magic, whose body is an object, rather than a living vessel for a living soul:

A normal human being's health is about 3 boxes, and the wounds are steeper, as they're crippled by pain and shock. Your "superhuman" endurance is the result of not feeling pain and running your body into the ground like a machine, literally fighting until your bones are pulped or you're burned into ash.

Note that slash, versus the x? That's because you have to go through this tract mutliple times, as bullets and knives which would kill a mortal merely puncture your insensate corpse-form. 

The result is incredible fights where mortals struggle to do meaningful injury to your unfeeling body while you tear apart their bleeding, pain-vulnerable frames with your sick vampire claws.

Here's the exact same goddamn thing in Exalted second edition.

Note that although there are more boxes, you actually start with just the 7 (0, -1, -1, -2, -2, -4, Incapacitated) and the rest are marked out until you get a special power that lets you get more. 

Here's the thing; you don't really deal with damage the same way a vampire does, because you bleed and when you drop, you bleed out instead of entering the mummy-like state of Torpor. So a sword is just as deadly to you as sunlight is to a vampire; effectively, you have seven hit points, and every hit point after the first reduces your capabilities as you're incapacitated by pain and trauma. Finally, most weapons can do enough damage to you in 1-2 hits to drop you.

The result of this is a combat system whose numerous rolls and derived rolls serves the same ultimate purpose as a single attack/damage roll in D&D; its a deadly game where fighting is wisely avoided because a single sword swing can kill you.

But this system doesn't add any new information; its result is a 1hd fighter. It just gets there through a system which was designed with a completely different game in mind!

The real insult is that you never really get any more hit points! Imagine if your 1hd fighter rolled a magnificent 7 on his d8 at first level, then proceeded to roll 3's until he hit his maximum lifetime total of HP he could EVER HAVE.... And it was 19 hit points.

Now imagine if damage scaled up quadratically with each level. That's the system-outcome of EX2. EVERY character is a glass cannon with a lifetime ceiling of about 20 hit points.

EX2 attempts to solve this self-imposed killability nightmare by substituting the game's mana system Essence for your HP. They go about this in quite possibly the dumbest way imaginable; they make you invincible if you use a special defense, aka a "perfect defense".

But because of course that's a terrible idea, they fob off the responsibility of their idiot-design to YOU, the gamemaster! Because you have to judge if 

1. The player even CAN use their system-salvaging band-aid defense, due to it needing to posses one of several flaws that forces them to only use it in certain circumstances. I will remind you that players will absolutely die if you do not say "yes" to their use of ANY perfect defense and it will be entirely your fault, according to the game's designers.
2. If their overwrought description of their actions was "fun" and "exciting" ENOUGH to qualify for a Stunt, which grants them juuuust enough Essence to pull off their perfect defense "for free" if they get it. Again, if they run out of essence and cannot use their perfect, they will die and it will be solely your fault, according to the game designers.

Compare this with D&D

I've got yer Ox-Body Technique RIGHT HERE

For a first-level character, their Hitpoints are determined by the roll of a single die, often a d4 or d6. The damage output of a dagger is d4, and a sword is d6. In other words, the game has explicitly told you that fights are a coinflip and you should avoid a straight-up battle when you can. This encourages caution in players; they ask for detailed descriptions of their surroundings (which are often dark, monster-filled dungeons). They approach foes carefully, lay traps, think outside the box, spring ambushes, light fires, repurpose dungeon traps, make judicious use of arrows and spells, and otherwise play the game like a tense and dangerous death-simulator.

In so doing, they gain player skill. These strategies will continue to serve them well in this campaign and in others, because they work in real life. The advantages of skilled, strategic play are only compounded once they gain and additional d6 hit points... While swords remain static in their damage output.

This means that fair fights become more viable as characters advance in power. D&D characters can be more bold and heroic than Exalts, because their margin of error increases as they gain power. The system's outcomes give you what the game advertises.

The wedding of player skill and character capability is eloquent and effective. By playing the game, you master the strategy of effective combat while your options for what counts as "effective" broaden.

...

The Long Road to Idiot Punch Games

Much like my journey to LWF, this entry has taken longer than expected.

Exalted didn't leave me, even when I left it. I want to be clear on this; for it's failures (which were miserable), its successes were great. It did something that even my newly-discovered OSR simply did not do; it let me play my dumb, overwrought Anime bullshit and it made it rule. 

As much as the combat system was broken, this was true; when you swung around your Buster Sword, the world trembled. When you unleashed your bullshit limit-break Anime magic, something fucking rad happened.

I don't want daiklaves in my game, I need them

Getting the feel of Anime right in a ttrpg was a triumph, however imperfect of an execution it was.

D&D did a lot right, but, to misquote Steve Jobs again, it did not have any sex in it. It had plenty of style of its own, but it was the brusque, pulpy style of Conan, not the grimy, surreal horror of Berserk. It had the mythic heroics of Aragorn but not the stylish brazenness of Utena. It had the cursed heroics of Elric but not the mind-bending scale of Vampire Hunter D. It was The Lone Ranger and I wanted Trigun.

Same guy

The road to my game rose form a desire to wed the sexiness of Exalted to the focus on outcomes of older systems like D&D.

Old Lessons:

1. The system has to give you the outcomes that it promises
2. Character survivability must increase at a greater rate than damage output
3. Elegant, hackable stand-alone rules are to be favored over interconnected systems
4. Generating content (dungeons, hexmaps, characters, monsters, treasure) should be mechanically easy and reward creativity and imagination
5. Appeal to archetype while allowing room for GMs and Players to add specifics

New Hotness:

1. Style Matters. The vision of the game is the cornerstone on which the success of the design rests. It has to look the part.
2. Feel Matters. Its not enough to get to the outcome you want, it has to feel right getting there. Speed and acrobatics should feel thrilling, punches should impact hard. Concrete should crack when you smash an enemy into a building.
3. Solid Things are made up of Lots of Little Pieces. Characters, settings, artifacts, etc. should be made of a collection of smaller bits of design, to encourage modularity and for ease of use. Different mixes of bits will produce different outcomes, which is exactly what we want.
4. Social Mechanics are Explicit. Yeah roleplay is great, but have you ever crushed a political opponent's will under the sheer weight of your dice? It rules and we cannot put this genie back in the bottle. Social Rules are a thing now.
5. The Cool Things You Can Do Are Specific. You can ignite volcanoes with your fist; it specifically tells you how on page XX. You can lift cars with your mind; here's the power that does that. You can punch a tank shell in midair and it explodes and here are the rules for that. The rules have to articulate how you get to the awesome, over and over again, for as many types of awesome as possible.

Fist Game, Arise

Lone Wolf Fists should, ideally, do everything listed on those ten points above (and a lot more I don't have the energy to type presently). Does it? Well, why don't we look?

Can I sell this to my friends?

I have yet to fail to sell the premise of this game to anyone. "You're a super-power martial artist in the post apocalypse"

Can I make my game like (insert nearly any anime)?

surprisingly, not as much as I'd want. I would have had to even further increase the number of kung-fu techniques in the game (and there are over 200 last count) to really go from Astro Boy to Bleach. I'd say its less in terms of bein universal, and more in terms of your options being seriously cool and very specifically letting you do one of a handful of Anime very well.

Give us the Astro Boy RPG, you cowards!!!

For example I'm not sure specifically how you'd do Goku; a lot of Kame Senin style is in the Brotherhood of Freaks styles, while your Kaokens and Genki Damas are sprinkled in other styles. But of course, Goku has been gaining new Techniques since he started his career; it seems like he started as a relatively straightforward Strong Hero with the notable ability to turn into a giant ape during the full moon (a power which is NOT present in LWF, but WILL be present in All Above Heaven).

Pictured: The future!

But Kenshiro? Yeah you could do him. He's the archetype that the Five Star Spirits were built around. Likewise, most of Ken's allies and even most of his adversaries can be built with minimal fuss.

They put the building-battleship in the poster!

So, can you build THE EXACT anime character you want? No, not from concept; a lot of Anime characters, especially the best, are built out of their history and are first-in-class heroes which would be best created with scads of XP and with unique powers not appearing in this game.

But could you do almost everything in:

• Trigun
• Vampire Hunter D
• Fist of the North Star
• Akira
• Princess Mononoke
• Nausicaa
• Castle in the Sky
• Berserk
• Demon City Shinjuku
• Ninja Scroll
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (not an anime, but made The List)

I feel like that's a pretty decent swathe of badass stuff to have realized.

Does it feel like anime?

Yes; It feels awesome to do that stuff. When you fistfight a tank to death with ancient, extinct kung-fu, it feels like you did that. It's not so abstracted that it's just an attack roll and it's HP hits 0. There's enough mechanical realization of the affair that the interaction feels consequential. Also, the interaction is fucking consequential because it's main battle cannon has explicit, detailed rules for demolishing buildings and reducing battalions of troops to chowder. So sweeping that off the battlefield is an actual victory that can turn the tide of battle.

Floating around with an airbending-style martial art feels and plays very different from the rock-lobbing, stone-cracking earthbender-style kung-fu.

When your sword sinks into your opponent's flesh and they erupt into a cloud of shrieking, clawing bats, that feels way different than their skin hardening into stone, or them parrying with impossible speed or vanishing ghostlike as your blade hits a stump.

Tink!

It's aesthetics and the feel of the rules are synchronized. This thing sings in play.

This book is huge! How much boring system crap do I have to learn before I get to the cool?

Actually, almost none. One of the biggest points I learned from old school systems is that simpler is better. 

Things like the move-and-act action economy and initiative should be immediately familiar if you've played any version of D&D. The pain points, ie the stuff you won't find in D&D, winds up either being fun, intuitive, or both.

Effort AKA Matching Dice: Instead of the d20, you roll a pool of d10s and match like numbers into sets. This is the basis of your actions

Health Levels and Aura: A combo of Health Boxes and Hit Points; a box filled with HP, when its filled with damage, you take a wound called  Imbalance. aura is the same thing but doesn't wound you as it fills up; kind've a magic force-field.

Techniques: Your powers, work a little like spells. Do something for a cost in magic go-go juice. Linked to certain limbs or items, you have to keep those limbs/tools working to use the powers.

Chakra, Prana: Yadda yadda magic. Everyone has seven Chakra, which produce Prana, which you spend to make your Techniques work. You can flair up to get access to more Prana, but it attracts attention (dangerous in the post apocalypse!)

Imbalances AKA wounds: When you take enough damage you get an Imbalance, which takes out one of your limbs so that you can't use it to wield weapons, or move, or use Techniques. 

Another thing that's not strictly unique to the game but diverges a bit from oldschool design are the Effect Charts. But these will be immediately familiar to fans of FASERIP, or most modern skill-system games like 3rd edition onward, or even Exalted 2nd edition if you look at the right bits:

All these do is benchmark what you can accomplish with a set of sufficient size. So like, three matching dice are clearly better than two matching dice, and the Power Effect Chart gives you what those dice can do if you're using them for strength, while the Agility Effect Chart gives you what you can use them for in terms of speed and dexterity.

Techniques can be used to boost this use of your Effort, so your kung-fu can allow you access to superhuman feats. This is one of the "intuitive and fun" bits of design; players love looking up how heavy of a thing they can lift, or how powerful of a ghost they can summon. The lists are poppy and neat, and one of the real gems of the game's design.

All of this is to say; there are a few things to learn, but they're not much heavier than their introduction here. MOST of what the book does is serve as a guide and reference document to answer questions in play, so the initial read is really quite light.

The End...?

Lone Wolf Fists was never meant to balloon into as a big a project as it became. Originally it was going to be a svelte 70-page post-apocalypse version of All Above Heaven. Man, I wish I'd known it was going to turn into a 320 page tome All Things Fist.

But much like this blog entry, which meandered crazily and ate an entire day of my precious spare time, Lone Wolf Fist had to grow to the size it had to be and do what it had to do.

The wedding of Exalted's newschool sexiness with Old School design sensibilities meant research, it meant lists of options, it meant much more robust testing of the core system (and some overhauls that I wasn't anticipating). It eventually meant a successful Kickstarter (right after a totally failed one). And now?

Well, its a few years past when it would have been some hot sexiness to release a game like this. In the intervening time, 5th edition came by and swept up the entire gaming scene. Critical Role came and went and came again, to the point they have their own cartoon series that clearly stole a bunch of Avatar's talent.

People don't really talk about Exalted like they used to; the scene is not thriving. Third edition went in a very different direction from previous editions, and it's clear that although its built-up goodwill was enough to clear early sales hurdles, that its struggling more than its predecessors. 

The new wave of 5e players confuse me as to what they want; this is an actually new generation, approaching the game with sensibilities that are alien to me. They seem to like the idea of the game, and appreciate its revolutionary sentiment, but these people don't have the gamer background that my audience had. They came swept in on the winds of theatre-kid-style shows and remarkably different media consumption habits.

For better or worse, my unwashed weeabu culture of gaming has changed into this glittery cottagecore version, where everyone is super queer and colorful and saying things like "Vibes" to one another. Also, I guess "queer" isn't a slur now? That shit would get you punched back in my day.

Does Lone Wolf Fists have a home in all this glam and good vibes? I honestly have no idea. I've been in a cave of dedicated design for the last few years, and I've emerged into a changed world. I thought we'd have a ready audience of hungry Exlated players, still jilted by the story-gamey approach of EX3 and ready to get their fists on something more in line with EX2's sensibilities. I thought we'd have more weebs weebing it up, sperging as one does about all these anime' references and excited for a really good Fist of the North Star game. Nobody cares Fist of the North Star anymore! Apparently My Hero Academia is the new hotness? Jesus I fell off around Bleach, how long was I out? HOW LONG WAS I OOOOUUUUUT

So, I dedicated a not inconsiderable chunk of my life to a game that totally succeeds in doing wat I set out to do.... And I'm not sure that there's an audience for it anymore

But, maybe I'm wrong.

The other option is that my optics have eroded in the last few years. The idiot culture war (which I guess is still raging, but I care even less now than I ever did) did a number of TTRPG players; splitting us into political camps introduced a horrible tribalism to the already elitist and factitious culture of sneering elfgame players. I've been decried as both a communist and a fascist, called a racist, called a chud, called a brainless snowflake, and otherwise had my good name dragged through the mud by every tinpot rpg-pundit who decided political bloviating was more important than, y'know, playing fucking elfgames.

(Ironically NOT by THE Rpgpundit, who has always been a super swell guy to me)

Maybe I just need to get better at talking to elfgame players in their elfgame spaces. Well friends, this is my first little handshake to you in a while. Hi. I make punch-games. And also I'm not any of those awful things. I'm not a bio-essentialist (whatever the fuck THAT is), I don't hate gay people. I'm not a communist. I don't like Nazis. I'm certainly not a racist (except against Canadians, but they know what they did).

I just make games. And maybe you're in the market for one of those. Well my gender-non=specific buddy, have I got a hell of a game for you.

Maybe grab the free version first, give it a pick-through, maybe try it out. I'm going to upgrade this with the newest design soon, but this will stay the same link and at the same low-low-price of nothing except what you want to shove in my tip jar.

And if you want the full monty, it's super cheap right now and it'll answer all the prayers that EX3 failed. Go ahead; Gamble a Stamp on the sickest game you'll ever run!

Disclaimer: hair on chest may vary