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E5Burrito

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A member registered May 06, 2021 · View creator page →

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This is beautiful. Thank you. I was unwilling to run RR&F for my group because I didn't think I'd get the buy in on the hefty manual for what might end up being a one shot, but you've solved that issue for me.

For newcomers, I'd still advise that the GM get the full version from Kumada1's page, but this wonderful write up is almost certainly sufficient for the other players to fully engage.

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I'm not familiar with the creepypasta, but the USSR sure tried to kill off the idea of God. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Unio... )

Glad you enjoyed the read! If you try it out at the table, let me know how it goes.

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Thank you for your review, and especially for pointing out what stood out as tension points! 

I need to rework the presentation of OOC at a minimum, for sure. It's ambiguous right now if 'pushing through' just makes you vulnerable for the rest of the scene or for the rest of the session.  (Edit : My post jam version now reduces the recovery time from a few hours to a few minutes of secure, peaceful recouperation.)

Re : The Director, that's a specific NPC rather than another title for The Referee...which I should probably look for a way to emphasize early on. Given that they're forced-retirement age in 1991 (heavily implied in the cover letter's background text), and three-letter-agency recruitment typically cuts off in one's early 30s, they've been in the field since the late 50s or so. Anyone but a male would have almost certainly hit the glass ceiling before being put in charge of the Agency.  Pushing the game even a decade into the future would have allowed me to use gender neutral terms, but then I'd miss the sweet spot between the Cold War and the (openly acknowledged) War on Terror.

This game has about four months of playtesting behind it, but I've had to reassemble it mostly from memory.  I'm interested in your opinion, but ESPECIALLY about things that don't make sense or seem incomplete.  I've tried to err on the side of brevity and leaving some fruitful voids, but suspect that'll come with being overly ambiguous in places.

Corrupted Flesh feeds the Cleaning Ritual, which lowers Corruption.  Corruption goes up each Horde level, and if it's in the positive (IE you haven't been able to keep up with it via the Cleaning Ritual or other Corruption lowering perks) the enemies gain a bonus to their attack and defense.  If it gets high enough they start getting bonus special abilities.

So, Corruption is a pacing mechanic to keep rapid-repeat prestiging from being super-viable.

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Still a quite lovely game.  My favorite non-ending idle / incremental on the site thus far.

Equipment mastery gain, as displayed in the tool-tip, is wrong.  I'm seeing things like 681 pts for a boss a level, and 3.55 pts (5%) for a miniboss.  5 percent of 681 is 34.15, significantly higher than advertised. Minibosses are either giving approximately (but not exactly) tenth of the intended mastery points or the tooltip is misdisplaying the income rate.

I'm pushing through this right now.  Given that you posted about two months ago, you've hopefully blown through the blockade.

Good cards help A LOT.  There's a +3 equipment card that's perfect for leveling up gear in the Tainted World pack.  The extra pieces of gear outclass the x1.25-type bonuses most other cards provide and ought to buy you an extra level or two.

There are a few pieces of gear worth getting to LVL 2 as a priority - Star Shield, Longsword, and Fire Orb spring to mind.  The lvl2 boost lets you gain a 50% bonus to the passive, which buys you a lot of division shields and critical hit power.  I'd advocate having those active on the "way up" to the levels where you're struggling, since the boss fights grant the most XP fastest.  In fact, I'd consider a handful of taunt-heavy no-card runs since the point where these early equipment items start gaining XP is so low.  Those extra rounds without damage from the division shields and pushing Crits above 100% chance has a HUGE advantage - you'll soon find one in six hits or so doing over quadruple damage, which beats any of the active equipment attacks.

I burn most of my school bonuses on Horde.  It helps - a bunch of extra levels to things you only need to buy once and you've got another x2 or so to damage and health.  Gems spent on tripling the efficacy of heirlooms are generally well spent, too.

You should be able to get the Corrupted Soul Capacity up to seven to ten days worth with a bit of patience.  Then, with MORE patience, cap it once at that ridiculous value.  Now your Cryo will be vastly more productive than being active, at least for a while (this is what I'm working on at the moment).  While you're waiting for the CS to hit cap, remember : Minibosses at any level have the same CS drop, based on your highest Horde level hit (since prestige, I think).  So if you can barely squeeze through to a high-nineties value level, then back off to a lower level where you can comfortably get 1-hit-kills.  That way you can use all your equipment that boosts Miniboss spawning and drops and still wipe them out reliably.  Every day or two, check to see if you've got enough bones to squeeze out another level, each of which should cut a day or so off the time-til-max-CS.

Reviewed by the Dice So Nice We Said Dice Twice folks over on their wordpress site, which brought me here. (https://dicesoniceisaiddicetwice.wordpress.com/2024/01/07/horrid-mysteries-is-th...)
Their summation is roughly : Conditionally better than DREAD for your one shot spooky gaming.  High praise!

Awesome!  That's exactly the info I'm looking for when I'm searching for assets.  I hope that helps with sales / drawing interest.

Hey Brother! When people are digging around for music for their game, the Terms of Use and Copyright status are super important considerations. You might get better uptake if you put those on your page. 

You have a lot of individual pages, so maybe just a quick note about attribution or use limits on your user profile page?

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You might want to check out 1,000 Blank Cards and Dvorak (they're on Wikipedia). Hoyle makes blank-faced playing cards, you could put a deck together with some friends easily enough.

I "Activate(d) Bonus".  It changes the button to indicate that the Bonus is Activated.  That's good, I guess?  I'm not seeing additional options, or a change in production, or anything that might indicate what this "click five thousand times to access" button actually did.

- Generally speaking, you never want a player to be more than a few seconds from making an interesting choice or shifting their attention to a new game element.  Even in a visual novel, where there's plotted fiction unfolding to pay attention to, you don't want to go more than maybe 40 seconds without offering the player at least the impression of a choice. Starting with 302+ clicks to make the first change, which just ups the click return, without any secondary gameplay elements, is a killer.

- Scaling in idles and clickers tends to be something like "Press the Button, gain resources at the speed you were plus one.  Also, the cost of Pressing the Button again goes up by the power of 1.17".  What you've got here is a tripling of expenses each time, which is incredibly fast cost progression - it's times three to the power of two, as is.  Again, a killer when coupled with the lack of secondary gameplay elements to focus on.  If there were another co-running game that reduced the upgrade requirement cost, or also upped the click return, or whatever, then ~maybe~ a tripling of costs might work.

- The player's displayed money need to be adjusted when they make a purchase, not just when they make a sale.  If I spend $270 of my $300 on an upgrade, it'll still show me as having $300 until the next time I make a sale, at which point it corrects to $30 + (Sale amount)

- As noted by ikegotti, having employees kills the manual 'create snapback' button.

- Is there ever a reason not to sell your entire inventory?  Why does the bulk sale option require quantitative adjusting if the player is never going to not sell everything?

- Fundamentally, the gameplay loop is "Click a single button A LOT, then click another two buttons, then repeat again on a longer cycle.  Eventually hire employees and replace clicking that single button with waiting."  You need some choices or strategic depth or particle effects or something to push this beyond the entertainment value of watching a leaky faucet slowly fill up a drinking glass.

It seems like clickgrape has figured most of my issues with this entry out, since a lot of these problems are resolved in his next clicker game (NFT Hustler).  I'd recommend a hard pass on this SnapBack entry, and to look at their more recent entry(ies?) instead.  [Issues attached to this post as a comment.]

I once had an old half-broken F150 that wouldn't die.  The solenoid kept going out on me, so I'd jump-start it by shorting out the unit with a big ole' screwdriver.  Sometimes instead of starting the engine would freeze up and refuse to turn over and I'd have to crawl under it and, reversing my grip on the screwdriver, use the handle to bang away at specific parts of the undercarriage to free the frozen components.  The steering wheel was a little loosy-goosy, so I kept a spare ViseGrip in the glovebox - if the wheel ever fell off, I could clamp onto the exposed shaft and shove the screwdriver into the loop at the end of the ViseGrip, driving home with the screwdriver handle in hand, something like forklift-style steering.  I kept that screwdriver squirreled away in a dry part of the truck's bed, so if I ever locked my keys in the car I could smash the window easy-peasy.

Sprinting Owl's stuff reminds me of my old screwdriver.  Tight packages with just a billion little mechanics, inspirational bits, microsystems and hacks that can keep your TTRPG endeavors running, interesting, and vaguely threatening.  I've bought a bunch of the items included in this bundle separately already, and it's still a steal for me at $13.  It's probably something you should buy too.

They're pretty mild - I unlocked two cards, could have gotten a 10% increase in the amount of grain my farm put out.  I wouldn't sweat it.

These are nice!  I dropped a link on the FIST TTRPG discord channel, hopefully that sends some clicks your way.  Trifolds are becoming the gold standard for mission/scenario design over there.

Ahhhh, that makes sense.  Thank you for the clarification and the link!

Great tool, folks.  Thank you for putting it out.  I like how flexible it is regarding users making new elements for it if they're decent code wranglers, and how button monkeys like me can manually tweak their SVG exports in Inkscape to get any poses we want that haven't been officially implemented yet.
Two requests!
1 - The poses of the example characters shown at the main menu are a nice addition, but when the user 'Open This Sample' the default positioning of features / pose is booted up.  I can _kindof_ intuit how to go from Baseline Default to the example shown on the main menu, but it'd be illuminating to have the Sample load pre-calibrated for their more emotive positioning as initially seen.
2 - Do you guys know there's an "AR14GAMES" account on itch?  It looks super shady and has a 2022 link to "the demo version of Mannequin".  I haven't done a hash comparison or anything, but from the comments about it not running properly I'm guessing someone's using your title to push spyware/viruses.  

This is fantastic.  Good unlock pacing, nice AFK / Active loops, good spread of ~idle sub-games (that are surprisingly well developed given the number of them), excellent attributions in the Info section, lots of thought clearly given to ease of use. 
If there were a Support button, I'd throw some money at this free game.  The designer deserves it for achieving so much more than the average Itch entry.  Top 2% for sure, possibly a contender to steal Trimps's mantle.

Extremely evocative. It's hard, seemingly impossible, to simultaneously have a single person both playing and directing a game AND to drive a strong sense of being out of control, subsumed within a situation beyond your understanding. This pulls it off, and on a bookmark sized piece of media. 

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Consider re-exporting this : I'm seeing a significant portion of the edges clipped off in the PDF, to the point that I can not discern some of the vital text. Image file seems okay though.

The use of literal voids in the bookmark to direct the player with just enough guidance to help them build a story into the fruitful void you've left? Brilliant design.

Nice use of art, too. A real challenge with such limited space.

Alternate Idea  : Solo play, same ~general~ trope/talent list on one side, story prompts on the other.  Player places the bookmark randomly, then has to narrate how they overcome the prompted challenges using a skill / talent that is aligned next to a vowel.

Different bookmarks for different PCs in different dramatic circumstances, with different traits and different prompts.

Very clever.  The kind of thing that's obvious once it's seen, leaving one wondering "Why did I never think of this?"
Easily hacked, too.  I think making "C" equal to -1 x N! (subtracting the factorial of the unused letters) would add tension.  (-1 for 1, -3 for 2, -6 for 3, ... N! for N)

This is probably a bit late for anyone to utilize, but there's an interesting variation of bookmarks from the medieval period that had a rotating element and were the body of the bookmark was mounted in a sliding way on a string or ribbon.  That would add a selector / exclusive text and another variable for ribbon positioning, if'n anyone feels like they're not seeing enough ways to use a bookmark for tracking variables or introducing randomness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_bookmark

Quality game!  Good art, excellent musical accompaniment. I had one "dang it!" moment with a puzzle, and I suspect Cosmic Void has aggressively playtested this because the hint I needed is in the Itch page images.  

Congrats on making Itch's front-page, this game deserves it!

May I humbly recommend Vincent Baker's website, "Anyway" at http://lumpley.com/ ? The conversations there have moved to his private patreon-walled forum (which is worth  checking out if you have a few extra bucks) but there's years worth of insight on TTRPG design from an acknowledged master of the art.  The newest "article" at the top of the page is an index with highlights from the site's history categorized for rapid access.

This is excellent!  A tactical brawler with additional combat options as a reward for exploration and puzzle solving.  Simple but nuanced combat mechanics make gear selection the primary component of fights. Brilliantly, the player can shuffle gear around in the small space between having enough information to extrapolate what they should be doing and the moment where said plans start to manifest / fall apart.  
I particularly love the mechanic where the player can choose to play out a fight or just take the damage they suffered in their best previous fight against that enemy type. It's perfectly suited for a puzzle game like this, but I think I'd like to see that migrate into RPGs with levels/grinding.
Last bit of praise - Going into a fight blind means losing, but winning doesn't mean playing "Guess What The Designed Was Thinking".  The hint section on this page gives advice on the final fight, and it's not at all in line with how I managed it... and there were a few fights like that, where a couple of varied tactics work.  That's the sweet spot of needing player engagement without punishing them for lack of telepathy.

Fast Talker took 23.  Bug : "Now do it in one life" message still displays, despite having done the ultimate ending in a single shot.

Lucky Luke, in practice, took 21 wins.  It's possible that it could be knocked out quicker, I didn't do by-the-day, mathematically optimized play.  Fast Talker still being tested.

Groundhog Life community · Created a new topic Achievements
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Has anyone actually unlocked "Lucky Luke" or "Fast Talker"?  I haven't done the math in full, but it seems like you'd need to win the entire game hundreds of times over for it to even be possible.. (UPDATE : It takes between 20 and 30 wins.)

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I had reservations about fully embracing your "incoherent manifesto", but open adoption of New-School Kitbashing (by that or another title) would provide a proof-by-practice of most of your argument as I understood it.  Adequately communicated there would be a lot of lessons learned and shared, probably in a more parsable / exemplar-driven-rather-than-theory-driven model than The Forge usually provided.

How does one Tulpa this into being?  I think you're really on to something here.

"Hyperinflation Simulator" - The mandatory cyclic expenses increase at a fantastic (and accelerating) rate. Even cheating, using an autoclicker, I was just barely able to pay off my bank debt before the skyrocketing costs were impossible to  meet, in a literal sense ( [Allowable Clicks Per Cycle] x [Maximum Per Click Income] + [Maximum Background Income] < [Cyclic Expenses])
The victory condition doesn't trigger - even having paid off the debt I was left just going through the motions until the (mandatory) fail condition was met.

Fun concept, excellent writing.  Needs either a win condition or retweeking to make winning impossible if that was the design intent.

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"Stacklands" plays like Cultist Simulator without the cult, or like Don't Starve if the designer didn't hate you. A resource accumulation/maximalization/exploration game of combinatory analysis with a fun Adventure Time esthetic. 

Hours of fun. Worth the eight bucks, easily, presuming you have the free cash.

Finally got a game in with a big group (6 first time players) and it quickly descended into 'introduce character and describe how I stabbed them' in four near-consecutive beats. Very little extraneous to the core mission of killing the fisherman. The whole thing took maybe four minutes. I'd call it a success though, everyone had a look of panic or amusement on their face the entire time. It'd be interesting, and I hope to test this out, to see if the same group of players start getting long winded or complicating each other's play on repeated exposure now that they're at least passing familiar with the game...

Sounds like fun! Are the mysteries "fair play" (the reader can figure them out early if they pay attention and think it through) or "investigation procedural" (the entertainment comes from following the character's struggle rather than figured out the riddle)?

This was fun!  It gets just complicated enough to never become intuitive or let the player get entirely confident what certain pairings will do.  Well paced, doesn't overstay its welcome, real pretty too.  Thank you for making this!

Nice!  Well paced, good background art, has an actual conclusion (which is a huge bonus on this kind of game).  
Two quibbles : "Welcome" is spelled "Wellcome" (with one extra L) in the intro speech, and the currency goes 9999k + 1k = 1 Million.  1000k is a million, but there's an extra *10 in there and the game treats 10,000k as one million.