Ben Rosenbloom's Boring Machine

I just drilled into each of the four classes of Ways and Means, looking at each ability and trying to understand how they combine into the gestalt of a class in Heart, in an attempt to grapple with what is going on in Heart design and what makes that design work for me, or not work for me. As one last design exercise / attempt at fairness / victory lap, I'm taking the boring machine and drilling into the design of the Xanthous Zealot, the class I wrote in Heartsong #1 !

The fourth and final part of my design deep dive into the classes of Ways and Means! This entry concerns the Witness, a bard-alike who just loves to see all the other player characters accomplish their dreams. The goal for this project is to try to isolate the mechanical design from the thematic elements and analyze how the two inform each other, to see what works for me and what doesn't.

Part three of four in my deep dive into the class design in Ways and Means! Today's blog is on the Snail Pilgrim, a holy wanderer with the weight of a world on their back. The goal is to talk mostly about the mechanical design, with some reference to the thematic elements and how the two inform each other, to see what works for me and what doesn't.

Part two of four in my project to break down the design of the classes in Ways and Means! Today's is the Crawler, the ultimate dungeon delver as shaped by the Heart. The goal is to see if I can isolate the mechanical design from the thematic elements and analyze how the two inform each other, to see what works for me and what doesn't.

As I threatened in my big post on Ways and Means, I will be going through each of the four classes and talking about, line by line, what works for me and what doesn't. It's my hope to be fairly generous, but I don't make any claims towards objectivity. I'll be going through the list in order - first up is the Blightborn.

Several months ago, I watched Art, Agency, Alienation , a lengthy video essay with a lofty goal to tackle some persistent questions about games. Without ballooning into my own 3 hour long video, I thought to myself "you know, I like reading ttrpgs! I like writing about them! I think I have something interesting to say about game design!" Thus this blog. I got several drafts deep, exploring a handful of directions, but ultimately I'd seen a lot of the thoughts I'd had about Art, Agency, Alienation  enunciated very clearly and also much more succinctly than I'm capable of. The thing that I haven't seen yet is people talking about Root (: The RPG). This started as a review - "semi-motivated" by the comments Huntsman makes in their video essay, but mostly just because I'm genuinely interested in what makes a PbtA game tick.