TTRPG Articles

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP5OwjeAVBE Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to Eternity TTRPG YouTube, where I go over things going on in the tabletop role-playing community, um, from D&D to Crooked Moon to other games that we see. And this might be, for me, my most exciting one that I've gone over to date. Um, we have some very exciting news. I know if you've watched our channel in the past couple weeks, in the past couple months, um, you've seen videos talking about this card game, Battler, and we even did, um, a bit of an interview style talking about this game and its origin story and why it's so important to us. And the short version of that is my husband has been working on a tabletop role-playing game for 30 years at this point, you know, since he was a boy. And now here we are at the point where we have [00:01:00] something manufactured, published, and ready to sell, and it showed up at our doorstep this week. So we had this 750-pound pallet with 28 boxes of our game show up. Here it is. Sparks of Eternity Emanation. It is here. It is just-- It's better than, you know, we imagined it would be with just... It's just amazing. You know? You always talk about these things happening and these dreams coming true and, like, making a product. And to finally have it is an amazing experience. So, you know, we of course took the time this week to revel in that a little bit and, you know, we took the pictures. We [00:02:00] did the time lapses of everything. We just-- We got to see our dream come true this week. And, you know, this was his dream first, and I got to join in with it. And especially in the past year, um, this game was, you know, an idea from me, and he made it come true with his game. And it's just been a great experience getting to work together on it and play test it and everything. So let's go ahead and get into what is in the box. The guide, of course, you know, the how-to manual, how to play, what everything is, what all the symbols mean. And then of course you have the credits on the back with our artist on there as well as, you know, my husband and I's name, which is pretty incredible getting our name on something. And then you go into the box, and you get to see that there are six dice because it is a six-player game. [00:03:00] It can be up to six players, and you can obviously have more if you have more of the, um, uh, class decks. And then you have your life sparks, the red and the yellow, the red depicting, um, five hit points and the yellow depicting one. So, you know, some characters will start with that five hit points, and some will start with six or seven. And then I've seen hit points get all the way up to twenty-one if the healing ends up going super well. And then jumping into each of the classes that you see in this box, you are going to have the judge, the druid, the oracle, the, um... Oh, gosh You have all these different classes that we decided to put into what is considered the base game. And that is just amazing to see all of this artwork and getting it put together. And then on top of all [00:04:00] that, you have, um, the different effect cards. So your dazed, your blinded, your charmed, um, as well as some additional rules and details and your turn overviews to help you with the, like, getting going and your different turns. So that way you don't have to reference the how-to guide as often, the, um, instruction manual as often. So between my husband and I, because, you know, we've been play testing this for a year at this point, it has been a full calendar year, we have gotten to the point where we can play games in under 10 minutes. Um, however, this does state that it can take up to 30 when you are just learning this game. Um, of course, when you're just learning, you take a little more time with your turns and making sure everybody understands what is going on. Because the goal is to get to play faster [00:05:00] and to dive into this world a little bit quicker, you know? You want to be able to really enjoy this class that you're taking a part of and understand like, hey, this is why the druid is the druid. The druid gets to use these different shapes, the wolf and the griffin, to do more powerful attacks. Whereas the assassin, of course, has different things to help his assassin hit harder and guarantee that it hits and it can't be blocked. Um, so there's just all these little nuances about what you're playing with to see how it goes. So, you know, it's here. We are getting the final touches on everything for shipping, getting the sales page up, um, getting, you know, the different tiers because we are gonna offer a couple different things. Like, yes, we do have the box game, [00:06:00] but we also have a PDF version that has other classes available that you can just print off at home without having to have the box. Um, the other thing is we're looking at putting together a higher tier that is gonna have the box itself, but also a dedicated art book with all of the art that, um, has been used, we intend to use, that our artist has done. And there are a few other things with that tier that you're just gonna have to check out. But with all of that being said, we should be available to ship these within the next week. So we're gonna put that link below and if you don't mind waiting just a little bit longer, you can go ahead and order. However, once we get past this first week, we are gonna be shipping on a more regular schedule and we're excited to see the, uh, demand that these games will have. Of course, we have family and friends that want to see this, but we also want to grow the community with everyone else. So any support that you want to [00:07:00] give is greatly appreciated and it helps us achieve our dreams further and hopefully we can support others on their dreams. Um, so with that, comment, like, subscribe, let us know how we're doing. If you have any questions on the game, please let us know. And if you really would like to, please, uh, hit that button to order now. Thanks so much. Bye.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t2a-i3pyRk Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Eternity TTRPG channel, where I discuss different happenings in the tabletop role-playing universe, as well as talk about the game that my husband and I are actively creating. So one thing I wanna talk about this go around is a bit of the origin story of tabletop, um, as well as where it could be going and what's different about it and all those kind of things, right? So to start this off, when To start this off, I always thought of D&D as just D&D, right? D&D is [00:01:00] the premise of all tabletop role-playing. It's the genre itself. It's what I use to define the genre, is D&D. Because I think it was the first thing, right? It was the first thing where you could sit at a table with this book and go through a campaign and a dungeon and play this way. And then other creators said, "Hey, what if we take this thing that was created, and let's try it this way and go through this dungeon instead and this dungeon instead? And what if we add, you know, other universes now, like Star Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender, and explore those worlds?" And the way that I look at it is that D&D was a way for people to come together and this singular person to lead you through their imagination, right? And now we come into today's day and age, and everybody has a lot of different ideas and imagination [00:02:00] going on. And with that, you have all of these different tabletop role-playing systems coming out and all these different campaigns coming out. But what are we trying to do, I guess? And how does D&D today translate to all of this? So the way that I'm starting to look at it is that these other systems could have just been, you know, the group of friends in the basement that was like, "Hey, I wanna try it this way." And it caught on and they're like, "Hey, my friend's like this. Let's make this an actual thing." And here comes all of these other role-playing games now. And the thing that we hear so much when I hear people talk about their other tabletop role-playing game is, "Oh, well, it's different than D&D. Oh, it does this that's [00:03:00] better. Oh, this is, you know, an easier system." And, you know, that's great and all, but the second you say tabletop role-playing or you say the words D&D, I just think D&D because D&D is the foundation of this entire genre, and it's going to continue to be, even with all of these different tabletops coming in and trying to change the system and all these different things. So when I realize this and everything, and I start to think about the game that my husband has been working on for 30 years and started in a basement, right, with a group of friends, um, I start to think, well, what makes it different? And the thing is we tend to use different in a way to make it seem better than what's already out there, right? And I don't think that's what [00:04:00] we're trying to do, but it's how it comes across in normal society. So with that being said, right- Just because we're different, it doesn't, you know, make us better. It just gives us other options in life. So the thing that I'm seeing the most when people say things are different is you're just getting a different campaign style. You're just getting a different, you know, way to play the game, perhaps a better entry point into tabletop role-playing. And I think in the end, all that we're trying to do is grow a community, right? You're trying to get to be more than just, you know, those 30, 40, 50-year-olds that were growing up playing it in their basement, and you're trying to get the younger generations to continue it. And I will say Stranger Things did help with that. Thank you, Stranger Things, for, you know, bringing it to light a little bit [00:05:00] more. But this thing with imagination is starting to gain so much popularity because we're starting to see so much more of the world, right? So I feel like I'm on a soapbox with this whole news channel because it is just my thoughts right now with this video. But let's just think about this for a second. We really hit... Actually, let's go back When we were in, you know, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, '80s, '90s, we were using libraries and books, encyclopedias, and it was, you know, kind of difficult to travel the world and have the money to do that, and you didn't always know what you were getting into. And it's like the world itself that we lived in held so much imagination [00:06:00] that we didn't know what to do with it, and we were able to go and do these things and strive for these things and just let it all explode and experience it realistically. Now, you hit the 2000s, the '10s, the '20s, and we had technology hit. We had social media hit. And we had access to these places just expand, and now we have everything that we want in this world in the palm of our hand, you know, in front of our faces. We can see it. We can hear it. The only thing we can't do is tangibly touch it unless we actually go there. But with this greater access and faster time to this greater access, w- I feel like our imagination has gone [00:07:00] down. So now, here's where we come into tabletop role-playing and why this connects, right? So we have this big push for tabletop role-playing, other systems, the original D&D system, because that's all the imagination we really have left. Now, I know that's a big statement, and you can rip me apart for that later. But take a moment and think about that. We have everything we could ever want in the palm of our hands except for this world that we can create and never actually see. And now, this is where imagination is coming back, the tabletop role-playing is coming back, because we've already encountered everything else. So now we have to make up these [00:08:00] stories in our heads to create a boost in our brains to just get something else that our phones and our computers and our technology can't give us And that is a lot to take in and think about So with that happening, I know that was a bit of a long soapbox, but with all that happening, we have these people once again that are trying to share their imagination, but they want to be different than the original D&D. But different isn't bad and options aren't bad. So with that in mind, I challenge you to go try a different RPG than you are used to. Get out of [00:09:00] your comfort zone and just give it a try. Because with the world being in the palm of our hands, we have to be exploring different worlds. We have to try these different things because that is the only way that I think we have left to grow. So I know that is some interesting thoughts and I don't know if I'll ever actually post this video, but if I do, comment, like, subscribe, give me your thoughts below and we'll catch y'all next time.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-H39bG14JM Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Eternity TTRPG channel, where I talk about different tabletop role-playing things in the universe, as well as the TTRPG that my husband and I are making and releasing products for. So this time, I want to continue, uh, the Crooked Moon series, talking about the different races, and I'm gonna cover two more. So this go around, I want to talk about two characters that are a bit creepier than what they usually look like or what you expect, right? Um, so the first one I'm gonna go on about is the Silkborn race. So the Silkborn, if you don't like spiders, is immediately creepy. However, um, the lore behind them is what makes me stop and think, "Are they really that creepy?" Okay, so the idea of the Silkborn in Crooked Moon is that they have a whole [00:01:00] underground cave system covered in webs, gemstones everywhere, and they harness their power from these gemstones, which I think is actually a really cool idea, 'cause you get to take this, you know, thing that is, in my opinion, kind of creepy and turn it into something beautiful. I think about, like, g- going on walks and seeing spiderwebs out on my walk, and I'm like, "Wow, the architecture of that is really cool." But imagining it in a cave system, it becomes just another world, right? So with that, I think when you would build a Silkborn race character, you'd really lean into their idea of what's beautiful, what's not, and how would that structure society around them, right? What would they worship? How would their family dynamic be? Because this idea of [00:02:00] this character is that they would just emerge from a cocoon, a web cocoon of sorts, right? And then they emerge, and here is this city built of just webs that is creating these nets going back and forth and these glowing crystals. And then you start to wonder, well, where would their social hierarchy be maybe, right? Is it based on the size of the spider or perhaps the color of the spider? Or if the spider has X number of gemstones or X number of eyes, how do they compare in the world to others? So then we start to wonder about different character concepts that you could go on with these, right? So let's say you have this spider race, the Silkborn, join your D&D party, and they are an architect in their normal underground city, and they come to a human city, and [00:03:00] they're just bored at looking at it, and it feels very sterile, and there's not much natural beauty. Could that be a storyline, right? Or could we talk about maybe the gems and why they're so important to their race, and perhaps the spider is just wanting to collect gemstones, um, to better harness them, right? And then the other perspective you could take is that the spider Silkborn is an alien of some kind, right? So they could be, of course, the we don't know if we want to accept them into our party, but they have this information. Maybe they aren't so evil, so let's try and, you know, use them or accept them and how does that go, right? So the Silkborn is definitely a very interesting idea on a race that I don't think we've seen before and some people could find [00:04:00] very interesting Real quick to interrupt. Eternity TTRPG is releasing a card game battler which emulates combat from the D&D tabletop role-playing genre. Sparks of Eternity: Emanation is fast-paced, easy to learn, and features six classes from your favorite TTRPGs. Each class deck comes with its own set of unique abilities, which everyone plays at the same time, so there's never any downtime at your table. Each turn, everyone's characters levels up, giving players access to even more options. If you're interested in taking a look, we have our pre-sales page live now, packed with details. No payment info needed. Just let us know if you want an email when the product becomes available. Now, back to your video Switching gears, um, I'm gonna talk about the second race that I found, which is definitely a play on cute and creepy. Um , and that would be the threadborn. [00:05:00] So the threadborn, in what I'm finding, is this doll that is created, and they come to life. So I start to think of the classic Pinocchio, "I'm a real boy," and stuff like that, right? Because all Pinocchio wanted was to be a real boy and be living and, you know, work in the workshop and explore the world and all these different things and whatnot. So with that in mind, with the idea of the threadborn, I start to think of, of course, who created them and what are they gonna be like in this world now that they're created? Right? So this gives you a couple of different ideas for character concepts and where to go. The first one being, um, that, of course, as I mentioned, they're made not born. So what happens when the doll that's made outlives its creator? And [00:06:00] are they going to become super heartbroken and always on the search for this family that they lost? Um, and this could go into a whole thing of like, how long do threadborns actually live, and do they decompose after time? Because, you know, I think everything decomposes eventually, even if we don't expect it to. Um, so there's definitely that side of it, and do they meet younger generations of their creator, right, and make that their family? Um, another idea is that they're very helpful because if you're creating something like a doll, you're creating it for companionship, right? You're creating it to help you feel better about the world around you, that companionship, and with that companionship does come helpfulness. And perhaps the character concept is that they're too helpful. They're too willing to jump in. They're just [00:07:00] gonna go straight into battle without thinking because they know that's the thing that needs done. That's where we have to go. So that's definitely another side of it, the too helpful side. And then the other thing is that to some people, and I start to think of when I was younger, and every birthday up until I was eight, my grandmother got me a certain doll, and the doll was like a part of a set, and it was those porcelain dolls with the eyes that I swear would follow me, right? And I had a shelf of them to display them because that's what my parents wanted. I could not wait to take those things down because when you have those eyes following you in the dark, it's actually pretty creepy. Um, but that's the thing is dolls wouldn't know that they're creepy. They're just happy, smiling, eyes always open, watching you, and it becomes a whole question of this is normal for [00:08:00] them, but how does this translate to normal society? And it sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me, no matter how cute they are. So with that being said, I'm gonna wrap this up here. And what do you think? Would you rather play a spider or play a doll? And what kind of character concept would you go with? As always, like, comment, subscribe, and we will catch y'all next time. Thanks

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KgB5C6Wgng Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Eternity TTRPG YouTube channel, where I discuss, uh, different happenings in the tabletop role-playing universe, as well as talk about the game that my husband and I have been creating now. So this go around, um, I wanted to talk more about a new side of the tabletop role-playing community that is gaining traction, I think. Um, Gen Con did something a little different this year that I haven't talked about yet, and I think it's important to bring light to it and bring it up in conversation, you know? So I already covered that D&D itself is going to universes beyond, you know, going into World of Warcraft, Star Wars, all those different kind of things. Um, and that's great for D&D, but I also think they're gonna push a new direction given what Gen Con did, right? So at Gen Con, there is an award [00:01:00] ceremony, right, called the Ennie Awards, The Ennie Awards are where the industry itself picks X number of games for a category, and then fans get to vote on it, and the fans get to decide what's gonna be the most popular and when, right? So it's kind of a big deal for Gen Con to be doing this every year, and they have their usual categories, right? They added a new category this year, and they've been talking about adding this category for years, but I guess it didn't have enough traction until now. The new category was for Best Solo RPG. And immediately my mind goes to, "Wait, why do we need solo RPGs?" And, you know, now we bring up the whole conversation of, oh my gosh, a solo RPG. Um, this could be here because, you know, adults can never get together with a busy work schedule and trying to nail down consistent timing because something [00:02:00] always comes up between work, home, um, kids, you know, just random family emergencies. There's always something keeping you from the game table, so you can't get with your normal group to run a campaign. So solo RPGs. Real quick to interrupt. Eternity TTRPG is releasing a card game battler which emulates combat from the D&D tabletop role-playing genre. Sparks of Eternity: Emanation is fast-paced, easy to learn, and features six classes from your favorite TTRPGs. Each class deck comes with its own set of unique abilities, which everyone plays at the same time, so there's never any downtime at your table. Each turn, everyone's characters levels up, giving players access to even more options. If you're interested in taking a look, we have our pre-sales page live now, packed with details. No payment info needed. Just let us know if you want an email when the product becomes available. Now, back to your [00:03:00] video So with this, um, announcement at Gen Con of having this category, there was five games that the industry decided would be in this, um, collection that fans could vote off of. Um, Odyssey of the Giant was the first one, and it's about escorting a giant, the last giant, across a devastated fantasy world. And then there was Pirouette, which is a solo horror ballet. Um, Song of the Scriptworm is a mystery involving an infinite library. Spine is an experimental RPG about losing yourself in a book. And then finally, The Bonsai Diary is about growing a bonsai tree across different generations. Um, just so you know, Spine took first, and The Bonsai Diary took second, so we officially have winners for the first solo RPG, um, nominations at the Ennie Awards. And I kind of don't know where to go from there. [00:04:00] I mean, I'm gonna admit when I don't wanna play the game that my husband has created and he can't get friends over, he does do solo campaigns. And he has been making the game to where you can do it as a single player or with a campaign group, um, which I think is a great idea, but I guess I just didn't see it as necessary. Um, but apparently it is, because people still want to play the game, but they don't necessarily have access to the friend group that you wish you had. Um, so here we go into our fantasy world after a long day at work, and instead of diving into a virtual video game, you can now do it with a tabletop role-playing game. So now the question lies with having this been created and you have all these smaller creators, you know, taking over this category. And not only that, but at Gen Con you actually have rooms dedicated to solo role-playing [00:05:00] games now. But is the giant communities of like Pathfinder and Wizards of the Coast gonna try and create a product that's gonna be a solo RPG now, um, instead of their usual geared towards groups and everything? So that's definitely a question that comes up in my mind is how are they going to... It's not a combat thing, but how are they going to continue to be in this world, I guess, if we're shifting towards solo RPGs. One thing that was announced, um, by a bigger creator was that Fallout is now coming out with a solo RPG, um, called The Wasteland Wanderer, and it is a standalone game. You create your vault dweller, you create your vault, and you get to explore the wasteland, and it is specifically created for solo RPG. So we already have these bigger companies that are creating, um, these solo games [00:06:00] now. Obviously, it's not the biggest company with Wizards of the Coast or Pathfinder, but we're getting there. So now not only do we have these companies creating these solo RPGs, everyone trying to get in on that, but we also have, you know, the electronic world trying to get on, in on this, and that's where we come into AI-powered systems. And I know that AI is such a curse word in the tabletop role-playing community because, you know, when we think AI in the tabletop role-playing community, it's gonna be your AI art, and, you know, that's such a bad thing. And I agree, I really wanna see, um, real artists, real creators, um, but when you're looking at wanting to have an electronic, like, world, I guess, where it's created by something electronic because you don't have friends to talk to or a campaign to really go at with friends, then maybe having ChatGPT do it for [00:07:00] you isn't a bad idea, right? 'Cause you have someone that can bounce ideas off of, and you can have someone else create them. Because although imagination is limitless, maybe in those moments you don't have enough. So with that in mind, there are AI-powered systems that have already been created. Um, Wonderhold is the one that comes to mind, and it launched in May of this year. And it, of course, you know, creates the campaign for you. You get to type to it, talk to it, and figure out where you're going to go with your campaign. So where do we go from here? Do we need game masters, game designers when we're using AI, when we're going the solo route, when friend groups can't get together because of life? So with all of that in mind, let me know what you think, from the Ennie Awards to checking out these solo RPGs, um, to figuring out what's next. Comment, like, subscribe, let me know. Have a good [00:08:00] one.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wu7xicNd6k Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to Eternity TTRPG YouTube channel, where I cover different happenings in the tabletop role-playing universe, as well as just other topics that I find interesting. Um, this go around, I wanna go back into The Crooked Moon. So my husband did a little bit of coverage on this a while back, but I'm gonna circle back to it. Um, and I wanna look at a couple of their races. So the thing about the character you pick and the class, the race, all of that stuff lends itself to building the story around your character and how they tie into the party, the world, and what their, like, internal goals could be. So three of the races that are in Crooked Moon, in my opinion, can make some really terrifying characters. So to jump in with these three races that I found through Crooked Moon, it's gonna be your Curseborn, [00:01:00] Graveborn, and your Plagueborn. Okay? So all three of those already have a very interesting ring to it, and immediately I started thinking is how can these races tie into an overarching story and a personal story? So jumping right into the Curseborn, and my idea with the Curseborn, and I'm pretty sure it's very accurate, is with a Curseborn, I'm thinking the classic, like, werewolf story, and under a full moon, I turn into a terrifying monster and that kind of thing. So with that , um, I wonder is what is this relationship with the character to the curse? So how is the character potentially using their curse, and how is the curse affecting the people around them? And there are so many ways you can take that. So for example, they could be actively [00:02:00] suppressing their monstrous nature and trying to work against it and being ashamed of it. And the other side of that is what if they embrace it and think that everyone is wrong for fearing them, and there, there's no reason to fear them? Um, other side, you know, is when they take on their cursed form and everything, what if they've hurt someone before and are terrified they're gonna hurt someone again? Um, what if they don't actually have any recollection of what happens when they transform? And then what if their family, like it could be a familial curse, and their family has taught them that their curse is something to be ashamed of and not something to embrace. So you have a lot of interpersonal drama going on there, um, that can just lead to overarching stories in the party. Like, what if there's a lot of distrust from the party because of your curse? What if villagers and townspeople refuse you entry somewhere because you have some kind of mark of the curse? And then what [00:03:00] if the party has to decide if they're gonna defend you or not based on all of that? And then on top of that, what if you become the person that everyone expects to betray them? So what if you play into that, or you spend your entire campaign deciding, like, "Hey, I'm not the bad guy. Quit thinking I am." Real quick to interrupt. Eternity TTRPG is releasing a card game battler which emulates combat from the D&D tabletop role-playing genre. Sparks of Eternity: Emanation is fast-paced, easy to learn, and features six classes from your favorite TTRPGs. Each class deck comes with its own set of unique abilities, which everyone plays at the same time, so there's never any downtime at your table. Each turn, everyone's characters levels up, giving players access to even more options. If you're interested in taking a look, we have our pre-sales page live now, packed with details. No payment info needed. Just let us know if you want an email when the product becomes available. [00:04:00] Now, back to your video Moving on to Graveborn. So the way that I think of Graveborn is, like, someone has already passed and they're rising from the dead. They're, like, undead in my mind. So with that going on in your head, you could have this whole idea of, what if I already died? Or maybe they just were never cognizant of that in the first place, and they think that this skeletal form is all that they are. Um, maybe they aren't afraid of dying because they've already died, right? Um, so then you start to ask questions about your past life like who-- what happened so that they passed, right? Who did that to them? Did they deserve it? Were there loved ones that buried them? Were they mourned? Why did they come back? How did they [00:05:00] come back? Um, so really cool ideas with this kind of race is maybe they become, like, a grave keeper, and now they protect all of these different grave sites. And as a party, you're trying to convince this, um, Graveborn to come with you for some greater plan, right? Um, another idea that we can look at is this whole I'm not supposed to be here. I already lived my life, so what do I do next kind of thing. Why did I come back, right? So definitely some different ideas there with the Graveborn, and I think it's a really scary idea when you're like, "Hey, I already lived my life. Why am I here again?" Um, last one I'm gonna cover is the Plagueborn, and in the back of my mind what I have playing is, like in World of Warcraft, there is the Abomination that has like the stench that comes off of them, and then that stench kind of infects everything [00:06:00] around it, right? The plague. Um, so this is definitely a horror concept, right? And it's this idea of disease, contamination, and fear spreading, right? It's something you can't control. You have no control over it happening, so what do you play them as? Because if you have no control of the bad thing, are they really evil? And do you play them as evil? Okay. So different concepts with this could be like a plague doctor and the Plagueborn could become the healer, okay? Because they're so used to being around these diseases, they can't catch them, and that kind of idea, so how do they help everyone else with this contamination going on? Um, of course, there's the idea of the immune one, um, because you're the one spreading everything, how can you get sick, right? Um, and then of course there is, like, a walking biohazard going on where everywhere you go, you're gonna [00:07:00] infect the people around you. So how do you work with a party with that going on? Um, because the people are gonna get sick, animals are gonna behave strangely. And then you could potentially create items in the world that you're constantly trying to find to suppress the contamination, right? Um, but where do you go from there, right? So if you're not really evil but your existence hurts people, what do you do? Okay. So with all three of those, right, you have the Curseborn, which is fearing what you might become with the monster inside you. You have the Graveborn because you fear what you already are. You're already gone, past, right? And the Plagueborn is you fear what you might be doing to others, so there's a monster that's spreading within you, around you. So with all of that being said, that's why I think these three are so much more interesting than just being these, like, [00:08:00] monster races. They have these really in-depth stories that you can flesh out in a campaign, and it's a really, a terrifying character that could potentially be really misunderstood. Um, with all of that being said, I know there are some more, um, Crooked Moon races that can be covered, and I will be making my way through those. Um, you can always check what we've already covered, and we're gonna just loop around and get through them all eventually. So after all of that, would you trust any of these three characters to do anything for you, stand with you, resurrect you, heal you? Um, or would you just be, like, an ignorant villager and do nothing for them? Let me know in the comments. Like, comment, subscribe. Let us know how we're doing. Give us any ideas you'd like to hear about, and we'll catch you next time. Bye.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://youtu.be/XjrHg-Eexds Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Eternity TTRPG YouTube channel, where I cover different happenings in the tabletop role-playing universe, as well as talk about the game that we have been working on, um, with the Eternity TTRPG. So we have been covering all nine of the races that are in the Eternity world, and we only have two left, so I'm gonna cover those two today. It's gonna be the Esper and the Stoneborn. These two are my personal favorites because they were the races of my first two characters. So hopping right in with the Esper. The Esper can actually be any race, um, because they're a part of a world incident. Okay, so this world incident is that a star fell to the world of Eternity. And when this star fell, it let [00:01:00] off all of this magic stardust and just covered the skin of the beings that were there. So if you were a human that was there, you would be covered in now these, like, runic constellation kind of tattoos, right? So that could happen to humans, Jadori, Treants, um, Aeteri, Empyrean, if you've been following along for a while and know those other races, right? So the thing about Esper is because they're covered in all of this magical stardust, they have really high magic casting abilities, right? So they're gonna be really good in your classes that focus on that casting. I personally played a summoner with this class the first time, which a summoner, you get to have a familiar with you, and I chose a dragon, and it was all about, like, buffing that dragon. So my idea was that this star being [00:02:00] was channeling all of the stardust energy into the dragon and making it stronger, bigger, faster, and hit harder. Um, it was a really fun character to play and a really cool take on an idea, right? Um, of course, there are a lot of ideas that you can go with with this, um, star incident that happened and how to interpret that into your world, into, um, how your character roleplays and everything, because maybe you're an astronomer that wants to understand what happened and why did the star fall from the sky. Real quick to interrupt. Eternity TTRPG is releasing a card game battler which emulates combat from the D&D tabletop role-playing genre. Sparks of Eternity: Emanation is fast-paced, easy to learn, and features six classes from your favorite TTRPGs. Each class deck comes with its own set of unique abilities, which everyone plays at the same time, so there's never any downtime at your table. Each turn, everyone's [00:03:00] characters levels up, giving players access to even more options. If you're interested in taking a look, we have our pre-sales page live now, packed with details. No payment info needed. Just let us know if you want an email when the product becomes available. Now, back to your video switching gears to the Stoneborn. So like I said, this was the other class that I played right when I first started playing this roleplaying game. And Stoneborn, like the Esper, can be any existing race. So they had a world incident happen to them, and they can be any existing race because of this world incident. So once again, human, Jadori, Treant, Ateri, Empyrean. Okay? So with Stoneborn, what happened with them is think of like this group of miners went into a cave near a volcano that they didn't realize was a volcano and they're [00:04:00] mining, mining, they have their different veins of, um, geological items that they're going after and one of them strikes just right into one of these veins and makes the volcano erupt and in this eruption there is this, um, organic material that explodes out and this organic material embeds itself into these miners that were there and along with the miners anybody that was in close proximity, um, just outside of this dormant volcano, right? So what this does now is that these people that were infected with the, um, organic stone material is now they crave eating stones, they crave eating rocks, okay? Any kind of rock and based on that rock is what their [00:05:00] being turns into. So if one of these races, people that decided to eat rocks decided to have volcanic rocks, they would have this volcanic kind of monstrous body. Um, however, let's say that a human thief wanted to eat the diamonds they were stealing, they would start to have diamonds appear all over their skin and eventually turn into a diamond. So it's a really cool idea that you can work with, with this idea of shape-shifting and how does the rock change my body and then it leads to the storylines of like, well, how far can this go with the rocks and did I have to be there at that volcanic eruption to become this or does it pass down through generations and what happens towards the end of Stoneborn's life? Um, it is speculated in lore that they actually become statues [00:06:00] based on all of the rock that they've consumed. Um, so is there a reversal for that or is there just a completely different story that needs to be fleshed out? Um, with the Stoneborn being, um, you know, made of rock, like a box of rocks, um, they have very high strength because rocks typically are very hard to break, right? So this idea with really high strength makes them very good as like your berserker classes, your thief, your assassin. Um, I personally played this, um, race as a, um As a mixed class, that was a caster/um, melee fighter, and it turned out really good. It was really fun. It's actually one of my favorite characters. I always thought that my, um, Stoneborn was a human that ate, like, icy rocks, so they were blue and frosted and really cool, right? I can still picture that in my mind, and that was a campaign that I wish had finished, [00:07:00] but it didn't. Maybe someday I will go back to that character, though. So that wraps up all nine of our races that we have in the world of Eternity. Um, in upcoming videos, I do hope to go over all of the classes now. There are 30 classes in this game that I will have to get through, so it's gonna take a while, especially with sprinkling in other stuff going on in the tabletop roleplaying community because I know you all aren't here just for the Eternity game. You're here for other tabletop news. So stay tuned, comment, like, subscribe. Let us know how we're doing, um, and we'll keep you updated. Have a good one. Bye.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CgZalFW8U8 Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome back to Eternity TTRPG YouTube channel, uh, where I sometimes go over the happenings with Eternity, but I also cover things in the tabletop role-playing world. If you saw our last video, I was talking about the World of Warcraft leaks related to Dungeons and Dragons. Um, Gen Con did happen this weekend, and it turns out that is now confirmed. D&D is having a crossover with World of Warcraft, but this also brings up a lot of ideas that were revealed and what is happening now in the Dungeons and Dragons universe. So with that in mind, let's hop right into it, okay? So as you know, in the last video, I covered the leak with the World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons crossover, and that was a leak from Roll20, which obviously is very ingrained with what Dungeons and Dragons is doing, and it ended up being very accurate, um, [00:01:00] being that we are going to get a campaign setting from World of Warcraft. We're gonna be getting all 13 original classes from World of Warcraft, and we're gonna see what happens there. From everything that I saw in my research that I was doing, is that we're gonna be seeing a campaign from the Icecrown Citadel, which is gonna be, you know, Arthas' world, um, Arthas being one of the big world bos- bosses from Wrath of the Lich King. So I think that'll be something really neat to be looking into. I think we're also gonna be getting some minis that are gonna be, um, supportive in that, um, seeing all the classic, you know, Alliance races, Horde races, and all of their classes. So not really what I was necessarily hoping to see because I think they could have done a lot more with it. But I also think it's gonna bring in a lot of people that [00:02:00] are World of Warcraft fans and, you know, really liked the classic feel of Wrath of the Lich King. Um, the other thing that I saw was a miniature for Illidan. So I don't know if we're gonna be getting anything from his time in the World of Warcraft lore. But given that we saw minis for it, I could see something happening there too real quick to interrupt. Eternity TTRPG is releasing a card game battler which emulates combat from the D&D tabletop role-playing genre. Sparks of Eternity: Emanation is fast-paced, easy to learn, and features six classes from your favorite TTRPGs. Each class deck comes with its own set of unique abilities, which everyone plays at the same time, so there's never any downtime at your table. Each turn, everyone's characters levels up, giving players access to even more options. If you're interested in taking a look, we have our pre-sales page live now, packed with details. No payment [00:03:00] info needed. Just let us know if you want an email when the product becomes available. Now, back to your video so with this crossover of D&D into World of Warcraft, it brings up the idea of the Universes Beyond initiative. So I've seen this in Magic: The Gathering. I think they've-- Magic: The Gathering has done this the most, if not the only one that's done it so far, is this, um, crossover of worlds, right? So Magic: The Gathering did a crossover with Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, and it brought in those crowds as far as the collecting side of it. I think the playing side of it a little bit too, because, you know, you see your classic characters that you like. But Magic: The Gathering did it and now it looks like D&D is doing it. So D&D obviously did it with World of Warcraft, and they're talking about doing it with Star Wars. Um, [00:04:00] so if you're a big Star Wars fan, this is gonna be another way to get into D&D, I guess. Um, what we know about the Star Wars, um, products that are coming to D&D is that details are super limited, but we know that it's focusing on the Rebellion era. So if that is your thing, that is great for you. Um, personally, I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I've watched the movies. I don't feel like I know enough about that universe. Um, so also from D&D, we had the idea that some of the classic settings are returning, like Grayhawk and Dark Sun. Um, once again, I don't know much about D&D because tabletops, uh, were first introduced to me five years ago, mostly through my husband's game, Eternity. So, you know, I read this stuff, but I don't personally know much about it. Um, so you have, like I said, Universes Beyond coming. You have some of these classic settings returning, but you don't really-- [00:05:00] I mean, until we see it, we don't really know what it's gonna be. Um, so with not being able to actually see what's going on and just having this speculation, right, I think it's creating a divide in the community of tabletop of D&D because you have, you know, your fans that are excited to see the crossovers happening with their classic things that they like, like World of Warcraft, Star Wars, right? But then it calls into question of are we running out of ideas? Is the tabletop world running out of ideas or are we just redefining what tabletop is? I was having a conversation, um, just a couple days ago about what tabletop really is and what I see it as. And, you know, I see it as the great idea of imagination. Um, SpongeBob reference there if you didn't get it. But [00:06:00] um, you're just getting to have your imagination blossom as an adult rather than keep it all when you're a kid playing with your, you know, Barbie dolls or race cars or monster trucks, you know? So as an adult with D&D, you're just diving into these other worlds that maybe you wish were real or you wish you could be a part of. But it feels strange because you're an adult, so you call it D&D, and it makes you feel a little bit better, right? Um, but anyway, that's... I just, I think D&D is all about this idea of getting your imagination to roam wild. So if you're gonna be doing that, then let it roam. And if you enjoy it from the World of Warcraft standpoint, Star Wars standpoint, or as I mentioned, the, uh, Avatar: The Last Airbender or Final Fantasy, then let it roll and [00:07:00] let it happen. And if it makes you happy, then great. Um, because I just, I think there are so many things in this world that has already been thought of, but if you get to think about it from your standpoint, then there's more that you get to do. So go be in those worlds and go have fun with it, and we'll see what happens with all of these new releases coming out and what D&D is trying to do for the community. As always, thank you for watching. Um, make sure you drop any questions below, comments, uh, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. Um, let us know what you wanna hear, if you wanna know more opinions, um, and just we'll try to keep it going with all the happenings in the tabletop universe, you know. Have a good one. Bye.

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3YOVDF4dMs Transcription [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back to Eternity TTRPG. It's been a little bit since I've been on with you as, uh... But today we have back Mildred the Monk, who is a friend of the channel. Uh, we had a great conversation last time. I have reviewed Final Fantasy Legends Edition, and you guys really liked it. Those are some of our most viewed videos, and we just wanted to bring you back on today. Thanks for coming on. Excited to talk. Thank you for having me. I enjoy being had So we're gonna be talking a- about a couple different things today, but let's start with, I think, the thing that the most number of people will be interested in who follow your work, at least as of recently as well, but jobs and classes for Final Fantasy Legend Edition. Do you wanna give people, like, a quick intro for those who don't know about this edition? So Legend Edition I started about [00:01:00] five years ago as originally it was an idea that kind of up, that kind of showed up in my head and wouldn't leave. Um, that idea of, um, taking Legend System, which was a three, a D&D 3.5 hack, um, that was part of the Test of Spite Arena Challenge on Giant in the Playground years and years ago, taking its track system that I thought was very interesting and applying the job system to, that's in Final Fantasy to it. That was the, that was a two-part stream that I did, that I did five years ago. had to be two parts because midway through, um, Mother Nature intervened we said, "All right, we'll do part two when, when, when things clear up tomorrow." Oh gosh. And when we-- And after that, the idea wouldn't leave my head, and I started working on it and working on it, [00:02:00] uh, until Legend Edition formed, which very much is its own beast. Um, there's been a few people who've looked at the fact that I use six ability scores and a D20 as a, as a core mechanic and say, "Oh, this is a D&D derivative." Um, it isn't... It's only that if you look at the barest surface, but looking at the surface is also very, um, shallow. I mean, by... I mean, if you're gonna g- if you're gonna go that low, then, um S- than say the Black Hack is a, is no different than playing D&D even though one's a, one's an aim high, one's an aim low. a better example is, and I've brought this up in the past, that'd be like saying Fading Suns is no different from D&D because they both use a D20. Even though Fading Suns is what I, is what I like to call D20 blackjack because it's about aiming high but also [00:03:00] aiming low Like you're trying I think un- you're trying to get under a threshold, but you're trying to get as close to it as you can Gotcha. Sure. I mean, yeah. I mean, people call tissue paper Kleenex, right? Like, that's just kind of, it's like the shorthand so that people know what there's talking about. But when you dive into it, every TTRPG is different, and Mm-hmm. this is the best version of Final Fantasy TTRPGs that's out there. So for players who wanna play Final Fantasy, yeah that was to estab- that was to establish a, that was to address a pet peeve that I had. And I, Oh? this the last time we talked about, but I have covered multiple Final Fantasy TTRPG projects, it Mmhmm games in all but name like Fabula Ult- like Fabula or Aegis, or direct fan projects like The Returners series of projects and the things that spun from them. And a pet [00:04:00] peeve that I had was a lot of them entirely on the SNES era. Now, don't get it wrong, like four, five, and six. A little bit mixed on Mystic Quest, but that's another story. But I know there's whole generations for whom they have more of an attachment to the PS1 era or the PS2 era. There's a whole generation for who- for whom 13 was their entry point. They speak on that as fondly as you or I might speak on six. There's gonna be a whole generation for whom 14, 15, and 16 have been their entry points. And those people, "Just house rule it," didn't sit with me. So I wanted Legend Edition to be a agnostic affair that draws upon the recurring mythos of Final Fantasy. Um, the exact kind of thing that MJ Gallagher has written several books about. [00:05:00] if you don't know, MJ Gallagher has written books on the mythological ties to multiple Final Fantasy entries. done two on seven, one on 16, and he's currently writing one for Tactics. Oh, nice uh, one on Tactics is going into, is going into things that I think even a lot of Tactics fans have overlooked. Things like ear- things like early Gnosticism, the c- the, um, idea of medieval demonology, and a lo- and a lot of, um, a lot of mythos about Be- about the story of Beowulf and story of the Knights Templar Mm-hmm. As well as the church relationships between Eng- between England and France and, of course, the Hundred Years' War. Taktics is a great game. There's a lot packed into it There's a lot packed into it. A lot Yeah especially the more [00:06:00] Shakespearean parts, is directly Matsuno's doing. And I've had a bit of a theory that the Cid in that one, Cidolfus Orlando, meant to be a nod to, um, um, El Cid, AKA El Campeador, the pr- the Prince of Valencia, who is kind of a national hero in Spain Okay. Yeah, I'm not familiar Mm-hmm. Oh. He was somebody who f- who fought on the side both Christians and Muslims during hi- during his time. Oh. Interesting especially in Valencia, kinda has this, kinda has the same heroic figure status that you'd see of a l- a lot of other medieval legends Mm-hmm. Uh, know if that's actually the case, but when I look at the position of that character, um, I can see the parallels[00:07:00] Sure But I wa- but the idea was I wanted something that was just as viable if someone was doing the high f- the, um, fantasy approach like in, um, like in the ori- like in the original or in three, the steam- the steampunk approach like in six, uh, or the futuristic approach like in eight or 13. Sure There's gonna be some house ruling, but minimal house ruling. Um, I've always held the belief that house ruling should be a spice and not the main dish Yeah, I mean, it's nice for people to be able to play the games the way they want to play. I think that's one of the main pillars of TTRPG is giving people the ability to customize, but also enough here that they can take something and work with it as is. [00:08:00] Uh, 'cause I, I don't wanna customize everything. That's why you're buying the game, right? So should we dive in maybe for some examples? Like, you- there's... What, what was it? Is it 56 classes? Jobs, I should say? around com- combining these, combining the ones from the, um, core book and the Ultima expansion, Yeah about jobs and four classes. Four pluses, right? Okay I do have to... Now, a lot of times job and class are interchangeable. In Yeah, I like the way you did this. Go ahead. Yeah things, and this is somewhat of a nod to the, to the delineation of jobs from the old Returners project that started in the mid-'90s. But it comes, it comes down to there are only four classes, and your class is basically a chassis. This is [00:09:00] what determines how well you develop HP and MP, what stats you're gonna be using for physical and magical combat, and how many skills that you have trained. Um, there are four of them. There are four classes as mentioned. Each of them corresponds to one of the original four crystals. Um, corresponds to the earth crystal, which is basically the per- basically everything physical combat is under that. Um, expert is kind of the skill monkey and corresponds with the wind crystal. Mage is self-explanatory and corresponds with the fire crystal, and adept, which is often the in-betweener, corresponds with the water crystal. There are also there are also a dozen or so jobs that are independent. These are jobs that are not associated with any of the four classes because when you're building a character, you're picking three [00:10:00] tracks. one that has fast progression, one that has medium progression, one that has slow progression. Any of the jobs are available. The only rule is at least one of them has to be associated with your class, and each, um, each class has about 11 or so jobs that are associated with it It doesn't have to be the first pick, it just has to be one of them. Oh. For ex- for example, um, the jobs associated with warrior are berserker, dervish, dragoon, fencer, fighter, knight, monk, samurai, sentinel, sniper, and weapon master. Oh. So if you take warrior, you gotta have one of them And this also means that you can't build a character out of nothing but independent jobs Hmm. I see Oh. Independent jobs are, I guess that, I guess I put them in the same category [00:11:00] as, like, prestige classes because they do re- they do re- not in the sense of you need to a bunch of stuff in order to qualify for them like you did with prestige classes back in the day. knows I'm not doing that. I did, I didn't like how some of those prereqs worked. more that th- they, the kit that they have demands a slightly higher system mastery, like a slightly hi- a slightly higher understanding of the way the mechanics work. And within the book, I have a disclaimer say basically saying, "You can pick th- you can pick these as your first character if you want to, but we do not recommend it." I see. Sure Of course, if you do do it and then you complain that it's too hard, don't come crying to me about it because you were given fair warning I love how when we were playing, [00:12:00] um, there are so many options. Mm-hmm. I think the replayability factor is gigantic with this game, 'cause even I hadn't thought about it too until you just mentioned it, but like I could be a warrior and then have the same three classes, but then I could play a different, um... Or, I'm sorry, the same three jobs, right? So I, I could have like a warrior class and then three jobs, change my class to something else with those same three jobs, and my play experience could be s- substantially different just based on my hit points, mana difference, skill difference. Not even to mention... um, weapons Yeah, and, and limit break. So the way that you play even the same three combination of jobs could be completely different. And I mean, not to mention the fact that you already mentioned there are 60, six- like a big, 6- 60 of them, right? So [00:13:00] I mean, it, it's, it was cra- it was... One of the hardest things was choosing what I actually wanted to play. Yeah also love that because it's like if you don't like it, just, you know, next time you create a character just build something different. Like I consider this the better form of analysis paralysis. Like a lot of Yeah, sure is in a game, it's more of wanting to pick a dis- to make a pick that's going to screw you over two or three sessions down, Mm-hmm. uh, or having to pre-plan your idea multiple levels in advance, which just creates false choice, which is also not ideal. Yep it's there are so... Instead, there are so many really good options that you could do that Right. is a good problem to have. That's a great problem to have a lot of the jobs are gonna be very familiar to people who have seen the job system as it's been presented over the years. Mm-hmm.[00:14:00] there are a few that aren't n- there are a few that are from adjacent games like Bravely Default, and there were a few that aren't in any of the video games, but I wanted to fill certain niches or certain motifs that I felt didn't quite fit any of the existing jobs Yeah Oh. And some of them are, the name is there where, where that name has been in past games, but the way it's executed is different to give it its own identity. Oh An example that comes to mind is the Arcanist. Um, I think one of the, one of the, of, one of the cases where Arcanist showed up is in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. But ultimately it was just a black mage with a couple extra tricks, I Sure. Mm-hmm Then I looked [00:15:00] at the, um, Japanese version of the Arcanist job and it, and the translation for that is basically witch. Um, and I thought, "You know what? Let's build one around curses." So we Yeah, that's cool Um, and since you mentioned limit break, I will touch on that. Yeah conscious choice to not have limit break be some sort of uber attack Yeah I know that those w- I know that those kind of things are a staple Final Fantasy ever since VI. Um, VI technically first introduced it, VII obviously popularized it with a limit break gauge instead of it being a hidden mechanic. But at the end of the day, those are just jumped up versions of attacks, and for a tabletop system where you don't have the flashy effect to give a, Yeah signpost, that's not all that interesting[00:16:00] Not really. Yeah Especially since if I were to do it as a gauge, I would have to calculate out how the rate of gain for that gauge for any potential kind of attack. And to reference Batman Forever, it just raises too many questions Yeah, that's a dark hole of game design for sure. Mm-hmm. It's easy to miss something. You're dealing with a lot of interchanging pieces here with all the different jobs you can combine. I see the problem. Yeah So instead, I took inspiration from the game breaker rule that Fantasy Craft has. Fantasy Craft is one of the games I've listed as inspiration. It's one of... It is my favorite take on the 3.5, um, of the D20 system. I put it even above Pathfinder, that's how much I like Fantasy Craft in terms of sheer volume of flexibility. [00:17:00] But At a certain level, in- classes in Fantasy Craft have what is in turn, what is called by a lot of the homebrew community a game breaker, something that the class can already do just at a hi- just at a higher level. Sure Um, you sort of have something like this in video game form with the two-hour ability that was in Final Fantasy XI, which was this, um, improved version of what that job could already do. You just couldn't, you just could only do it once every two hours. Not once every two hours, it would've had a two-hour cool down. And the approach with this is you can activate a limit break when you're below half health. It lasts until the rest of the encounter, and is essentially an improved version of what that class already does. Uh And the catch is you have four limit breaks, three from your jobs and one from your class[00:18:00] Yeah Each of the... And when you activate one of them, you are locked off for the rest of the encounter from the other four, or from the other three, I should say So to use warriors as example, their limit break is action surge, which lets you make a weapon attack without using your action. You just can only do it once per round. Could you do this to do two attacks in the same round? Yes. You could also do other combinations if you want to as well Oh. You're just getting one weapon attack for free for the rest of the encounter, but some of the other stuff from your, from your job combinations you won't be able to do Uh, and I do wanna, I do want to touch on a moment for, um, the design philosophy we had when it came to feats Because one of the things that I tried my absolute best to avoid when introducing feats was feats that were just number go up[00:19:00] Sure The... There are a couple that are like that, but not in the same, but not exactly. A lot of times it was built on feats are little tricks that you can do to fur- to further personalize the character, and said tricks don't necessarily fit into any one existing Mm-hmm. And I f- I always felt that was the intent with feats when it was introduced in third edition D&D, of little tricks to personalize. somewhere along the l- line, the memo got lost or was put into forms I don't think it was designed for. You know, the whole feat chain problem or the feat tax problem as has been discussed plenty of spaces elsewhere. Um Yeah And to, and to that end, I don't really have a extensive amount of [00:20:00] prerequisites when it comes to feats. of times it's ju- it's just on three feat chains. Usually those ones have some kind of Roman numeral attachment I think a lot of what we're kind of talking about too, back to sort of the d- overall design of things, is that for almost every game out there, there's like ... I don't know if it's just the advent of the internet or now that, you know, all of us who grew up playing games are now adults and we kind of get games more, but there ends up being like the meta builds, right? And so you talk about like D&D and Mm-hmm. there's like this huge problem of like you can't play a rogue anymore in D&D 5.5E 'cause it's just terrible compared to the damage output of so many other classes. Oh, And a lot of people- on rangers. Yeah. Right. Right. And then a lot of people play as if combat or damage per turn or whatever is like the key factor, and if you aren't pumping out damage, then you aren't having [00:21:00] fun, right? But I, I think it's interesting that you've taken this approach with feats where it's like it's about things that you can do for your character. It's about the, the role play and the character building more than just the optimization. But I also think that just the sheer s- way that you've made this game makes it really hard to create any kind of like meta build. Like, maybe if, you know, a hundred thousand people were playing this game every week, there would start to be some patterns emerge, but it seems to me as if you've gone to really great lengths to give every class its own personality, Mm-hmm. I think that y- people would have a very hard time finding anything that's gonna be like super busted basically. It's more about having the fun playing the character you wanna play instead of optimizing every little thing. Yeah. Now, there's a, there's a couple things I can say on that. One,[00:22:00] Sure I will be flat out honest, whether it be in tabletop games, in video games, in war games, in board games, in card games, any kind of game period, loathe meta Me too. Because Me too I am, and I s- I have done my fair share of t- of tournaments, whether it be in, um, card, whether it be in card games. I w- I, I'm not great at it , but I did dabble in tournament scenes in, um, fighting games growing up. Cool I certainly don't do it as, as much these days, but I... But something I did. the reason I hate meta so much is I'm, I grew, I grew up ar- I grew up around a lot of, a lot of freestyle artistry. You know, whether it be Hmm import, the, um, the whole import tuner craze of the early [00:23:00] 2000s, the go- or listening to, listening to early hip hop in the golden age of sampling, j- or just remix culture with, um, music. Or j- or just the idea of freestyling when it came to building, um, stuff with Lego as a little kid. That's awesome. Yeah that idea of expression of building the style that, that fits y- that fits you, not necessarily is the best numbers. And Yeah what really helped hammer this home for me was when I was spending a bit of time revisiting, um, various shooters. And especially re- especially, um, getting an understanding for what the intent of the perk system in, say, early Call of Duty was Mm-hmm Because if you look at the perk list in say Modern Warfare or Mo- or Modern Warfare [00:24:00] 2 or Black Ops or whatnot, it's not about raw numbers. It is about, it is about picking ones that best fit a certain play style that you're trying to go for. Yeah Uh, like for example, somebody who picks scavenger probably gonna be using a light machine gun, because scavenger lets you get more ammo on ammo pickups so that, so you have more bull- you have more bullet per bullet. And if you're using an LMG, you're gonna be eating through that ammo pretty fast Oh. It's not really, it's not really about the numbers per se. And I've s- a similar thing to an extent with some of the unlocks in games like Team Fortress 2, where not picking them for numbers or percentages, you're picking them for a certain style. Uh, like a common build when I would play Pyro in was [00:25:00] having things like the flare gun and the Axtinguisher. The flare gun is a secondary, lets you set people on fire at range. It's just on an arc so it is a little bit tricky to use. And the Axtinguisher auto- always does critical hits if you're hitting somebody while they're on fire. So you can see how they feed into each other. And there were certain combinations that we saw where we thought this could be a particular annoyance or this could be a particular pest in combat, but it was funny so we kept it. one of the early examples of that that we've brought up and that we've brought up plenty of times over the years is somebody doing Arcanist and Fencer. Because Arcanist is all about incubating a curse within themself and then transferring that curse as a debuff to the next person who hits them. Fencer is all about taunting an enemy to force th- to force them in a duel where both sides get bonuses to hitting each other and penalties to [00:26:00] hitting anybody else There's good synergies for sure Mm-hmm. when it comes to the... There's been no end of arguments about game balance. seen, I've seen it talked Sure f- back and forth. I've seen people talk about balancing issues with this game back and forth. A Yeah me to, a lot of the balance arguments puts me to sleep for the same reason the, um, math breakdowns of classes back when I would follow the brilliant GameZologist forums put me to sleep. Even if I did rip off the whole Godzilla thing as a this is what I don't want. But The, but the, To bo- to dial myself back a bit, um We take an, we take a policy called Brawl Minus when it comes to game balance. The attitude being if everyone's potentially broken on all sides of the fence, no one is. So for a bit of context, Brawl [00:27:00] Minus was a response mod, some say a meme mod, to a mod for Smash Brothers Brawl called Brawl Plus. The intent with Brawl Plus was to nerf a lot of the overpowered elements in Brawl. Um, Meta Knight, I'm looking right at you. know what you did. Brawl Minus took the opposite approach of instead of nerfing the overpowered stuff, just make everybody ridiculously overpowered That sounds like a lot of fun Like, like a fully charged warlock punch from Ganondorf in Bro- in Brawl Minus could be a one-hit, um, knockout. And as ridiculous as that is, still the signposting and still the tells that can be punished if someone knows what they're doing. So as, as overpowered as everything is, there is still an internal logic of if you got hit by something like that, you were ignoring the very obvious tells and that, and [00:28:00] you're getting punished for that. Mm-hmm. you know, in the s- in the same way that I remember when I would, when I would play a lot of Halo 2, and a lot of people hated the glitch, um, BXR. And I had defended it because I, because at the time I had said the timing window for it is very specific, and if you don't get it right, you are going to get punished you just left yourself wide open and you can't hit back Yeah. Things that are strong come with a downside or they're projected so it's defendable against it Mm-hmm. And there is the concept in game design called signposting, where this is where you have those very obvious tells about what you should stay away from or what you should be wary about 'cause something's gonna come. Uh, and when you have the, when you have th- when you have that particular signpost and then you [00:29:00] ignore it, then it becomes your own fault, and you gotta deal with the consequences of that. Uh, think of any video game RPG where you've seen where the, where the game is telling you the enemy's preparing for a large attack, then you don't shore up your defenses and you get wiped Oh, it's the, it's the same principle. And I never want... I, be- I remember being so annoyed when I would see certain game developers take combinations that the community had discovered on their own that were, that added to the fun factor of creatively overcoming obstacles and take that away from them. Uh Yeah, it's kind of a lame approach for sure It's not only a lame approach, but I feel like it sends the wrong message. To me, it sends the message of don't bother getting better at the game because we're just gonna take away your tools. Yeah. Don't be creative yeah, [00:30:00] a big example of this would be Mercy hopping exploit that was found early on in Overwatch, where people figured out that with the right timing using Mercy's movement mechanics, they could clear a lot of ground very quickly. About less than a week after that was discovered, it got patched out Sure. Yeah, I, I, uh, it's a tough thing as a game designer too, because I do also feel you have a vision Mm-hmm. how you want the game to be played, and there are just some things where you didn't imagine it being used in a certain way, and it wasn't intended. And if it does become the situation where it's like, now that we know this exists, Mm-hmm. who does wanna play for the optimal meta build now must do this. Yeah That can take away from the fun as well, but I, I think it depends on, like, your priorities as a game designer. Like, is it is it around the fun? Is it around the [00:31:00] creativity? Is it around your original vision? And y- I often find you have to balance all of those things actually, so th- there have been some times where I've taken away toys from other people as well. Um, but yeah Legend Edition, because it's built around being, being a sandbox, having whatever my specific vision is, is not as important. The only time that I've really modified something so that it ta- so to take away certain tools that I f- I felt were, um, stepping over the line is if, is if I felt it was undermining other things. Um, the, the, um, benchmark that I use for this sort of thing is I don't want a knock spell. Um, I was never a big fan of spells like knock or teleport Hmm or oth- other games. I wasn't a fan of knock because I f- because I [00:32:00] felt it completely undermined the presence of having a rogue in the party. Like, Yeah, sure. why have Right all the time rolling to pick a, to pick a lock when you, when the wizard can cast knock and the lock is no longer a problem? Have the wizard be a rogue, yeah And I didn't like spells like teleport 'cause that, 'cause I felt that r- that took away from the narrative control of the Sure GM. Um, especially if you can tel- especially if you can just teleport right to where the dungeon is instead of having to Sure. thing of fi- of trying to find out where it is. Yeah and in the same vein, I also wanted to avoid things like CODZilla. Uh, CODZilla is something that came out of the tier sys- the tier system of effectiveness that the Brilliant Gamesologist forums, um, devised, where somebody re- the COD is short for cleric or druid, and it was a reflection Okay that somebody who [00:33:00] knows what they're doing with either of those classes is an entire party by themself. Yeah and to that end, when it came to designing the jobs, something that I tried to avoid was the idea of a single job being multi-role. Um, Yeah. I was impressed by that really quick as well. You know, when I was reading through the first time, and I mean, every time I go into it, Mm-hmm. it is very crystal clear what each class does. Mm-hmm. it, it, it's so focused that if it was only one... You could only play one class at a time, it may feel a little narrow, but I actually love that because you're mixing. Mm-hmm. think you, you really lasered in on what each job does and what they're about Yeah. Like for, for example, um, I had, I had gotten a bit of pushback over the fact that with the paladin, unlike s- [00:34:00] unlike plenty of the games, I did not give the paladin access to white magic. Um, part of that was had to answer the question, well, what do, what do you do if you have a paladin and white mage as part of your job trio? now Sure. things that would overlap. You're both... Yeah two, I felt pal- I felt the identity of paladin more centered around covering allies and taking the hits for them rather than white magic. Plus, I've never been a fan of, um, of half casters Interesting. Yeah. 'Cause they end up doing both things poorly in most games. Yes. Yeah. Oh Yeah, they're like half people basically. Yeah, the, the big pr- the big problem with, the big problem with it is doing that s- doing that sort of multi-role is gonna run into conflict when y- when class systems in general are about [00:35:00] specialization. Having a generalist in a b- in a game built around specializations has an inherent contradiction. feel like this is Sure why in D&D, um, the ranger has been cursed since the days of AD&D. Yeah, th- there's no identity there. I mean, I, there's no identity, and I, I think that's probably another big thing, right? Like, they, they don't know what they want ranger to be. You're just like a ranged fighter, but then you're not. But the things that you can do, anybody can do. It's not really that interesting. Yeah, I had... The funny thing is the one edition that I'm supposed to hate but I don't because the check bounced actually solved that issue Um, the fourth edition ranger, I don't have that problem with Oh yeah, I actually like fourth edition. Mm-hmm. It's kind of a bum that nobody else did I, I've, I've been a fan of fourth edition since it started out in 2008, and I have routinely taken the piss out of people [00:36:00] who go with that MMO argument, and I basically tell them, have no idea how MMOs actually work if that's your, um, main ar- if that's your main argument." Um, and Especially s-since, um When it comes to, when it comes to the po- when it comes to the power setup, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that, that so many of us had reference index cards And nowadays you can get whole spell decks for casters Sure But I r- but the Ranger in fourth was one of the premier, one of the premier examples of the striker. real problem that it had was one infamous daily power that got, um, errated out that led to the meme of Kenshiro Orcaslayer, because if you hit, you could keep hitting until you missed. Oh. Um It's like [00:37:00] Thunderfury weapon or whatever it's called in WoW. Mm-hmm. The first- Yeah Yeah, and Orcus was one of the big high-level monsters in the, in Wind theory. Manual. Got it somebody who had the l- had the luck of the dice gods on their side could ju- Yep. keep Just one shot it. Yeah. he runs out. So Yep the And becau- because of that I w- I wanted... Now, with a lot of games, they can have multi-role effects with their classes because you're only picking that one class for the most part. Here, the multi-roleness comes from the combination of your class and jobs, also Yeah the fact that there's plenty of characters throughout Final Fantasy that don't quite fit one particular job exclusively Also because jobs changed between iterations. So, I mean, your solution makes a world of sense Yeah, like the, the knight in the original [00:38:00] Final Yeah. Right ultimately a proto-paladin. Right. Yeah. When you mentioned cover, that was the first thing I thought of Yeah, I th- I think the, when people think of the paladin in the classic sense, the first version they're gonna think of is Cecil in IV. Um, and in that s- in, in that same vein, there were s- there were some casting lists that were easy to design for. The hardest one was Blue Magic because, um, Blue Magic goes literally all over the place in every iteration, and when I That's like the point of it, yeah. Yeah a specific thing was important Right Ah. And I will, I will note that, um, with the ones that I took liberties with, those ones still that rule of I need to answer what exa- what exactly its [00:39:00] big, for lack of a better term, gimmick is. Um, now some got r- some were under other names but got renamed because of things I wanted to avoid. Dynamo was Gunner originally, um, meant to be a bit of a nod to the g- to the Gunner dressphere in X-2. Um, Mm-hmm. that and I said I wanted a John Woo-like, um, job. But of the fact that the job system is divorced from required weapons, which was something I wanted to do from the word go, um, I felt that calling it Gunner or calling the sniper, it was originally Archer, would Hmm Yeah from that So I went with names that were a little bit broader in that sense. and the other reason One of the things I'm obviously the most proud of is the weapon system and the fact that it is divorced from your choice [00:40:00] of job. So you could play a bl- you could have Black Mage as part of your combo and use a long sword, um, and still make it work because in addition to that whole not m- not fitting thing, there's If I were to do a standard weapon list that you see in a lot of fantasy games, there are so many weapons within Final Fantasy that don't fit that Yeah. Yeah, there's so many, yeah. Um, whether it the pinwheel for Noah, yeah yeah, the weird pinwheel thing that Rinoa has, Yeah um the, over- the oversized, um, shurikens that Yuffie has, the fact that hair accessories are the weapon of choice for Red XIII. Um, the Plus the, plus, um, I'd, I would, I'd think of certain unorthodox weapons that I would always pick in [00:41:00] other fantasy games. like I was I think I was m- I think once I was, um, like I was playing a character in an Eberron campaign that involved the desert elves, which are an interesting beast in and of themselves. I said, "You know what? It would fit that, it would fit that my character uses a khopesh instead of a long sword." Um- And isn't anything in the rule set for a khopesh, obviously, so we had to make that up Yeah And I've also mentioned that no matter what, there's gonna be some that has some weapon that ha- that has the same cool factor as when people first saw the Buster Sword back in 1997. Mmhmm instead of telling them, "Just house rule it," which is like pushing them off the deep end and saying, "Swim, damn it." Uh, I w- I wanted to, I wanted to provide a framework where people could make those unorthodox weapons[00:42:00] That's awesome instead, instead of just being Sisyphus having to constantly make new and bigger weapon lists. Uh, and again, for example, I, I know that the... There's the, um, common motif of the monk uses unarmed weapons, except when it doesn't. But I remember in the past pitching, "Okay, instead of, instead of using unarm- instead of using just bare hands, um, why, why not use a... why not use something like, say, a rope dart or a, um, sansetsukon?" Uh, a sansetsukon is a three-section staff Hmm. Okay. Yeah And obviously a rope dart is, well, exactly what you think it is. And I have, I have plenty of players who are firearm enthusiasts, much like me, and I know that they would come up with some unorthodox suggestions, [00:43:00] and I'm like, "Go, go right ahead with it." Um, I know one It's awesome who, who was playing this giant character, he said, "I wanna lug, I wanna lug around a m- a slightly miniaturized version of a punt gun." I'm like, "I'll let you do it, but, but you're... But, um, you can only fire it every other round because it's a punt gun. Those things weren't meant to be carried." Like, for context, a punt gun was a type of ridiculously oversized shotgun for m- for commercial duck hunting that was supposed to be mounted on a small boat, a punt They eventually Yeah, players won't do that good at their job Players will do that. They'll try to do the things that they shouldn't be doing. And, We-- I was gonna say we, we have a little bit of time left. I don't mean to cut you off on that thought, but, uh, once you finish that thought, I would love to go through some more of the classes and like just the, the most broken or [00:44:00] insane or fun stuff that people have come up with so far Um, I will note that from a design perspective, I like giving players powerful but unsafe equipment. benchmark for that kind of thing is if you remember the Noisy Cricket from Men in Black, that, Oh yeah, that was... I love that. Yeah. Oh. You know, That's awesome a hell of a lot of damage, but every time you fire the thing, you get sent flying Mm-hmm. Yeah. Why not? oh, this As far as cl- as far as some of the individual class, some of the individual classes and jobs, as far as some of the ideas, um, I remember being really proud of the way, um, fighter turned out. So a lot of times the fighter has the selling point of, "Oh, you can equip any weapon." But most people are gonna pick one way they equip their character and stick to it Yeah And I, I built [00:45:00] the fighter based on Firion's appearance in the Dissidia games, he's carrying around 10 different types of weapons That's awesome using all, and using all of them in his combos. So like, all right, the fight- the fighter is the walking arsenal. The weapon master is the opposite end. Um- Ah There was also the f- there's also, um, I think there's, there's some jobs that I think got slept on, that get slept on by people. Um, one of them that especially comes to mind is the Spiritmaster. Um, Spiritmaster is a def- is a defensive favoring support, um, But their Spiritism ability is, for those, those of, those who have used it properly, um, have caused a lot of salt because it doesn't remove debuffs, it moves them. It moves buffs as well from any Nice to another participant[00:46:00] That's awesome So it's a really great way to screw over the, B-beg that just put a bunch of buffs on th- that just put a few buffs on themselves. You know, you can have the B-beg go, "I'm, I'm conflicting, I'm inflicting paralyze on one of your a- on one of your allies," and somebody who's got Spirit Master can say, no you don't, and congratulations, now you're paralyzed." Sure. Yeah, it's really incredible Mm-hmm. Uh, and the l- something I tried to av- I tried to avoid was giving h- was giving whole new s- there's plenty of, there's plenty of, um, charac- there's plenty of characters and builds that have some sort of sub mechanic, like some sort of resource or the like, which Mmhmm reason I avoided doing the whole limit gauge thing because that'd be one more thing to track. Uh, but I wanted [00:47:00] to avo- I wanted to avoid, um, a setup that might pigeonhole a particular build or a particular, um, job. Um, like for, for example, somebody wants to just slightly dip into magic, you have multiple ways to do it. You could do it through a spell casting enhantment- enhancement from a magic weapon. could do it by get- by getting scrolls and be- because of the way consumables work, you are gonna be able to use that spell for the rest of the in- for the rest of the in- of, um, that adventure until you hit downtime again. But you do have access to it. just... And that can pair very well with something like ma- with something like Magic Knight, which has more in common with the Magus class in Pathfinder than a lot Hmm the traditional ma- a lot of the traditional Magic Knight approaches. Uh, and [00:48:00] it wasn't long before, it wasn't long before that came up that the idea of a caster build out of Outlaw Star came to be. Um, there's... I've s- I have seen pe- I've seen people, um- Go com- go completely s- go completely support based using c- using a combination of general and, um, and squire. So that they, Yeah able to do a lot of attacks, but if they're patient, they're let, they're gonna let their, um, party do a lot of attacks, especially with things like blade work. Um really liked the looks of Squire. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, in fact. Squire was a hard one to write for because I bet it was couldn't use a lot of the t- I couldn't use the techniques as is for Squire in tactics because it's meant to be your starter. Um, and instead I built it around the idea that it is this, this ultimate [00:49:00] pocket pick. And think... I will note that th- that, um, a lot of the design with the classes and jobs starts to click if you look at them like you would look at positions on a team sport Yeah, I agree with that Because any team sport, whether it be hockey, whether it be, whether it be rugby, whether it be football or other football, you don't really have a jack-of-all-trades position You have several multi-role positions and usually a, a secondary role as a backup for when the play breaks down, and it will. But you don't have somebody who's supposed to be good at everything Oh. And that was, that was how, that was that was a design, uh, goal that I, that I had. Um, I think you hit that. and- Yeah, it, it's fun too. I'll just interject really quick because I think a lot of modern game design is [00:50:00] about being able to do everything, and every class starts to feel the exact same. Mm-hmm. Um, I've even, you know, played a lot of different games out there that are classless and messed around with them myself with my own design in the past, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards the same things. They're like, "I wanna be able to fly and have invisibility and invincibility." And I actually like it a lot more when you're like, "Look, this is what I do, and then everything else I suck at," because it gives specific spotlights for everybody in the party to be able to jump in and do their thing. You're not always good, and that's part of, I think, the fun Mm-hmm. Ah. And for, for me, I wa- I always saw the high skill floor when it came to people really being able to explore the [00:51:00] potential customizations with s- with job design, and also Yeah of that, that sameyness in some of the more freeform ones. And Yeah. Yeah. games, pe- the selling point that people give me is, "Oh, you can build just about anything." The problem is a Not really. And Yeah. one th- And, And, meta builds. to mind yeah. to go for it especially with, um, false choice as I call it, is Shadowrun agree with it. Yeah, yeah, the idea of false choice is a big one, and I think people who aren't game designers often overlook that. But there's a lot of things out there, it's like, "Oh, you have 1,000 choices," but really it's like, yeah, but do you... Like, do you really? No. It's usually only a few things that are, like, the best. And oftentimes too, if you take something, it's either actively bad or it's so much worse than something else that you actually can't choose it, so it's, it's not a real choice [00:52:00] And I think of, um, I think of Sha- I think of Shadowrun where it ends up having a class system while trying to pretend it doesn't Sure. Sure, sure. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, so I un- I understand exactly what you're saying. Mm-hmm. And on, on the other Yeah um, you know, some g- some designers try to build these traps for some reason. Um Yeah To tr- to try and encourage system mastery. But the pro- I've always ha- I've always had an issue when games have the, try to have this hard divide between the people just learning the system and the people who've been at it for years, with not an Yeah pathway from one to the other I agree And whenever I've talked about that, s- some have con- have equate- have equated that to wanting ha- wanting the handheld, [00:53:00] and that's not the case. it's more, it's more about establishing where, where the li- where the lines are. Um, Mm-hmm. and I feel like what I've tried to do with Legend Edition is those lines end up being created organically because instead, instead of looking at character creation of, in the sense of, "Oh, we, we need a bl- we need a black mage for the party, so who's g- who's gonna be that?" It's more about I have a character concept in mind, and I'm using the tool set to try and get as close to that concept as I can It's awesome Uh, and there's nothing wrong with the idea of, oh, you're building a c- you're building a character class first and then going around it. That's how early D&D works, in a sense. Sure it's not something I think is compatible with f- with, um, Final Fantasy as s- as the series progressed[00:54:00] Yeah Because there are plenty of characters, even in games that are explicitly class-leaning, like say, IX, where they end up fit- they end up fitting the niche of multiple jobs instead of just one. Uh, at, say, um, Amarant in Final Fantasy IX I was thinking of him as well He's basically a hybrid between monk and ninja. Or in Final Fantasy X, look at the territory of, um, say Tidus on the, um, lic- on, not on the license grid, in the, um, sphere grid. Mmhmm a lot of it leans into time mage and squire-like effects. Uh And you have that, you have that sort of asterisk where in a lot of class-based games you're picking this one thing and that's it. But a lot of Final Fantasy characters, [00:55:00] you can't really fit them into that one thing And that's not even getting into the idea that some people might wanna go off the beaten path Right? For sure So with wrapping up, I have a couple more things to cover. Um, one class, for example, that I really wanna play some point coming up for a very specific reason is the Oracle, and that reason is because I can self and-- self-damage myself to get myself to a limit break faster. Are there other classes that, that use self-damage for a bonus of some kind so that, you know, somebody wants to, like, limit break as often as possible? So Lim- because limit break is a bu- is a buff, um, and the f- and the fact that between, that you do full heal between encounters, um, trying to, trying to race to limit [00:56:00] break all the time isn't as beneficial as it may sound. Um, I just wanted to try it at least one time And any sort of... There are some ef- there are some effects that, aside from Oracle, that let you do that kind of, um, that kind of risk thing. Um, obviously one of the big examples is gonna be Dark Knight, who Okay when they're using Soul Eater, they can add a die of any size, aside from D20, their d- to their damage. However, whatever that additional die rolled, they ta- they take in direct HP reduction Yeah, I love it Oh In the s- in the same... There's a similar thing that works for, um, paladin when it comes to cover. Or not when it Right when it comes to paladin's oath. They can add that Oh, okay to their defenses, but the next t- but the next time they're targeted with an attack and that [00:57:00] attack is a miss, whatever that bonus they got from that die was, they take in, um, reduction Which I felt the theme of sacrifice that's a, that is key to the paladin identity I think so too. I also like that it's a foil, in a sense, for Dark Knight. There's a lot of threads in these classes that are really fun to pull at when you start getting into it. I can tell a lot of heart and passion has gone into making this. Mm-hmm. So I guess the next question with that, this is probably my last question, or it's like a little series of questions. But have you thought... Because Final Fantasy, like when we played, the story was great, and the adventure was super fun, and everything that you made I really loved. Also, though, Final Fantasy is like often thought of as a very combat-heavy series. Have you thought about [00:58:00] doing some kind of like PVP tournament where it's just like build your biggest, baddest team and fight against people online? And, you know, you've, you have, you have like a tournament series that's, you know, like you schedule once a week to you and your party fight somebody else. Or having that kind of thing, but then like for bosses, where it's like you and your friends build a team, you know, once a week you fight against some mega boss. You're not really intended to win, but, you know, it can be like a little bit of a competition thing for the community sort of thing. Just curious if you thought about these kind of things. I have given them some thought, and the idea of, of, um, PVP I, I would not advise because it really is built with the idea of the party has its own particular set of mechanics and the NPCs and their, Got it have their own particular set of mechanics opposite them. It's... I've, I [00:59:00] remember, I remember going through a bunch of, a bunch of games in the mid-2000s that ha- that did the whole PCs and NPCs are built the same way, and I, I don't wanna do that, um, Sure, sure becau- because it... I feel like it would fall back into that same n- into that sameness that we talked about earlier. Mm-hmm. Mmhmm on the other hand, the i- the idea of competitively going up, going up against a certain boss, um, that I'd be a, that'd be a little bit more willing to go with. Um, it would certainly, it would certainly fit alongside some of the um, style video games that we, that we've seen over the last few years, stuff like, um, stuff like Dead by Daylight or the Friday the 13th game, for example. Or even the battle mode, uh, multiplayer entry that was in Doom Eternal. [01:00:00] Uh This i- this idea of asynchronous play. And the approach that I'd probably do is not a, "Oh, this is a, this is a, um, this is a near impossible bo- because I don't wanna revisit the trauma that people have had to deal with with certain hidden bosses in RPGs, Sure. every Tri-Ace game I've ever played. Or the, um... Are you familiar with, are you familiar with the infamy that was Absolute Virtue in Final Fantasy XI? No. No, I'm not familiar on record as one of the mo- as one of the hardest raid bosses of all time. Uh, like, it, it's just a long, long slog. Got it. I mean, that's no fun either. Yeah of course when people figured out how to beat, how to do exploits to beat it, they're like, "All right, we're gonna make him even harder." Got it. I have a special level of [01:01:00] hatred towards, Ozma as a hidden boss, mostly because he cheats. that's not Yep that's not me exaggerating. There's parts in his AI where you can completely jump his, um, ATB gauge depending I see. which is Yeah, I'm not surprised. why I Yeah the same way AI in, um, some RTS campaigns cheat Sure In, mostly in the they have unlimited resources and you don't kind of way Yeah, that's a pretty big cheat Oh. But what I'd prob- what I'd probably end up d- what I'd probably end up doing is some sort of, some sort of raid boss like enc- like encounter where beat, where, um, it's not just be- it's not just about beating the opponent, but also beating the opponent, surviving, and d- doing certain additional challenges Yeah[01:02:00] There's, I like there lot. Um, Yeah obvious- so think, think less of a raid boss in WoW and think more of, um, say a mission in Monster Hunter Yep, I'm tracking Oh. And 'cause I f- 'cause I f- I feel like doing a, doing a PVP thing is something that doesn't... It, it's certainly there in PVP. It has been in FF XI and XIV. But I feel like getting the coliseum part of the identity, you know, the coliseum mini-game that's been in multiple games, uh, the way to go about that would be to would be, would be to do something beyond just PVP, whether it be escalating monster types or, um, something that I just came up on the fly, a wager [01:03:00] system like you see in some ARPGs, where you can intentionally nerf yourself to potentially get better loot Yeah, yeah. It just comes to mind, I, and I think maybe you're totally right about this too, I mean, PVP can kinda be a feel bad thing sometimes as well. Mm-hmm. Whereas if you are even loosely competing against somebody, or maybe not even competing, but just, you know, competing against yourself to try and do X, Y, Z thing, fighting, like, a boss. I personally like competition a little bit, so maybe that could be fun. But, um, yeah, I hope you try something like that, 'cause I would, I would be in for it. I could get, I could get three other guys together, to be and we would, you yeah. see me build a s- build a separate, um, say c- say card game or s- or skirmish war Sure lean in- to lean into that instead Sure, sure Um, 'cause I feel like that would be- that would better f- fit that since [01:04:00] obviously I, even in those ca- even in, um, something like that, I still don't wanna have to deal with meta. I, Sure if you, I want, I would want to, um, I would wanna have it le- less akin to the flag or team deathmatch, and more akin to, like, big team battle in H- in Halo, for example. Sure a way, a way to experiment with the sa- with the sandb- with given sandbox, but not necessarily building it arou- around one, around one particular meta. Yeah. as I get it as- a bit of an aside, there wa- there was a incident at a, um, Yu-Gi-Oh tournament years ago where somebody in with a random ass deck and completely embarrassed everybody, and it was his first tournament. Because Oh, that's awesome. for, they were all planning for this very, very specific meta at that [01:05:00] tournament, and he wasn't playing that, so they ha- so they were basically coming in completely blind and had , and had no I love that no strategy at first to prepare for, and only got one as they adapted ov- over the, over subsequent rounds. Mm-hmm Um, it's ... Imagine, imagine a football coach spending hours watching film, only to realize he's watching film for the wrong team he's playing against Yeah, totally Oh. And I've I think that kind of thing's hilarious. I love that. yeah, I've always appreciated, um, I've always appreciated people pulling dumb stuff in games I agree. Yeah, I think it's part of the creativity and the fun and that, that's what we're talking about, right? Like, that's-- it's a role-playing game, so you can role play a character you want, not to optimize. But, Yeah um, yeah, I th- I guess we should probably wrap up here, Mm-hmm.[01:06:00] but I feel like we'll have more conversations coming up in the future. Is there anything else you want to wrap up with? Um, Or final things you wanna say, I, I should say? I will note that while it is gonna be a slow process, I am in the early stages of writing world books for Legend Edition. Cool. Um, Good to know been working on a, in a, um, not necessarily a default campaign setting, but a potential campaign setting, um, that I've codenamed Project Gaia. Um, which is do- is doing th- is doing a bit of, um, of steam pu- of steampunk with magic. It was my answer to the question of the magic versus technology motif that's often in steampunk and other speculative fiction. The answer I give is and technology are two sides of the same whole and feed into each other So, Well, that's great. mm-hmm Yeah, I'm [01:07:00] looking forward to that Oh yeah And, Well, thank you so much for coming on today then, Mildreth. It's always a pleasure. Oh, yeah I hope everybody, if you haven't tried out Legends Edition yet, you really need to. Um, I'll make sure to include a link. It is a free download for anybody who's been listening in and, you know, doesn't know anything about the project yet. Uh, it's a great game. I think you should take a look, find what class and jobs you wanna try, and, uh, yeah, let us know what you're having the most fun with with your group Mm-hmm. Oh otherwise, we will catch everybody later then Stay frosty Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's funny you said w- um, 45 minutes. We ended up going an hour and seven. Uh

Transcribed content from our recent YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RnO-Se1ols Transcription [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back to Eternity TTRPG. It's been a little bit since I've been on with you as, uh... But today we have back Mildred the Monk, who is a friend of the channel. Uh, we had a great conversation last time. I have reviewed Final Fantasy Legends Edition, and you guys really liked it. Those are some of our most viewed videos, and we just wanted to bring you back on today. Thanks for coming on. Excited to talk. Thank you for having me. I enjoy being had So we're gonna be talking a- about a couple different things today, but let's start with, I think, the thing that the most number of people will be interested in who follow your work, at least as of recently as well, but jobs and classes for Final Fantasy Legend Edition. Do you wanna give people, like, a quick intro for those who don't know about this edition? So Legend Edition I started about [00:01:00] five years ago as originally it was an idea that kind of up, that kind of showed up in my head and wouldn't leave. Um, that idea of, um, taking Legend System, which was a three, a D&D 3.5 hack, um, that was part of the Test of Spite Arena Challenge on Giant in the Playground years and years ago, taking its track system that I thought was very interesting and applying the job system to, that's in Final Fantasy to it. That was the, that was a two-part stream that I did, that I did five years ago. had to be two parts because midway through, um, Mother Nature intervened we said, "All right, we'll do part two when, when, when things clear up tomorrow." Oh gosh. And when we-- And after that, the idea wouldn't leave my head, and I started working on it and working on it, [00:02:00] uh, until Legend Edition formed, which very much is its own beast. Um, there's been a few people who've looked at the fact that I use six ability scores and a D20 as a, as a core mechanic and say, "Oh, this is a D&D derivative." Um, it isn't... It's only that if you look at the barest surface, but looking at the surface is also very, um, shallow. I mean, by... I mean, if you're gonna g- if you're gonna go that low, then, um S- than say the Black Hack is a, is no different than playing D&D even though one's a, one's an aim high, one's an aim low. a better example is, and I've brought this up in the past, that'd be like saying Fading Suns is no different from D&D because they both use a D20. Even though Fading Suns is what I, is what I like to call D20 blackjack because it's about aiming high but also [00:03:00] aiming low Like you're trying I think un- you're trying to get under a threshold, but you're trying to get as close to it as you can Gotcha. Sure. I mean, yeah. I mean, people call tissue paper Kleenex, right? Like, that's just kind of, it's like the shorthand so that people know what there's talking about. But when you dive into it, every TTRPG is different, and Mm-hmm. this is the best version of Final Fantasy TTRPGs that's out there. So for players who wanna play Final Fantasy, yeah that was to estab- that was to establish a, that was to address a pet peeve that I had. And I, Oh? this the last time we talked about, but I have covered multiple Final Fantasy TTRPG projects, it Mmhmm games in all but name like Fabula Ult- like Fabula or Aegis, or direct fan projects like The Returners series of projects and the things that spun from them. And a pet [00:04:00] peeve that I had was a lot of them entirely on the SNES era. Now, don't get it wrong, like four, five, and six. A little bit mixed on Mystic Quest, but that's another story. But I know there's whole generations for whom they have more of an attachment to the PS1 era or the PS2 era. There's a whole generation for who- for whom 13 was their entry point. They speak on that as fondly as you or I might speak on six. There's gonna be a whole generation for whom 14, 15, and 16 have been their entry points. And those people, "Just house rule it," didn't sit with me. So I wanted Legend Edition to be a agnostic affair that draws upon the recurring mythos of Final Fantasy. Um, the exact kind of thing that MJ Gallagher has written several books about. [00:05:00] if you don't know, MJ Gallagher has written books on the mythological ties to multiple Final Fantasy entries. done two on seven, one on 16, and he's currently writing one for Tactics. Oh, nice uh, one on Tactics is going into, is going into things that I think even a lot of Tactics fans have overlooked. Things like ear- things like early Gnosticism, the c- the, um, idea of medieval demonology, and a lo- and a lot of, um, a lot of mythos about Be- about the story of Beowulf and story of the Knights Templar Mm-hmm. As well as the church relationships between Eng- between England and France and, of course, the Hundred Years' War. Taktics is a great game. There's a lot packed into it There's a lot packed into it. A lot Yeah especially the more [00:06:00] Shakespearean parts, is directly Matsuno's doing. And I've had a bit of a theory that the Cid in that one, Cidolfus Orlando, meant to be a nod to, um, um, El Cid, AKA El Campeador, the pr- the Prince of Valencia, who is kind of a national hero in Spain Okay. Yeah, I'm not familiar Mm-hmm. Oh. He was somebody who f- who fought on the side both Christians and Muslims during hi- during his time. Oh. Interesting especially in Valencia, kinda has this, kinda has the same heroic figure status that you'd see of a l- a lot of other medieval legends Mm-hmm. Uh, know if that's actually the case, but when I look at the position of that character, um, I can see the parallels[00:07:00] Sure But I wa- but the idea was I wanted something that was just as viable if someone was doing the high f- the, um, fantasy approach like in, um, like in the ori- like in the original or in three, the steam- the steampunk approach like in six, uh, or the futuristic approach like in eight or 13. Sure There's gonna be some house ruling, but minimal house ruling. Um, I've always held the belief that house ruling should be a spice and not the main dish Yeah, I mean, it's nice for people to be able to play the games the way they want to play. I think that's one of the main pillars of TTRPG is giving people the ability to customize, but also enough here that they can take something and work with it as is. [00:08:00] Uh, 'cause I, I don't wanna customize everything. That's why you're buying the game, right? So should we dive in maybe for some examples? Like, you- there's... What, what was it? Is it 56 classes? Jobs, I should say? around com- combining these, combining the ones from the, um, core book and the Ultima expansion, Yeah about jobs and four classes. Four pluses, right? Okay I do have to... Now, a lot of times job and class are interchangeable. In Yeah, I like the way you did this. Go ahead. Yeah things, and this is somewhat of a nod to the, to the delineation of jobs from the old Returners project that started in the mid-'90s. But it comes, it comes down to there are only four classes, and your class is basically a chassis. This is [00:09:00] what determines how well you develop HP and MP, what stats you're gonna be using for physical and magical combat, and how many skills that you have trained. Um, there are four of them. There are four classes as mentioned. Each of them corresponds to one of the original four crystals. Um, corresponds to the earth crystal, which is basically the per- basically everything physical combat is under that. Um, expert is kind of the skill monkey and corresponds with the wind crystal. Mage is self-explanatory and corresponds with the fire crystal, and adept, which is often the in-betweener, corresponds with the water crystal. There are also there are also a dozen or so jobs that are independent. These are jobs that are not associated with any of the four classes because when you're building a character, you're picking three [00:10:00] tracks. one that has fast progression, one that has medium progression, one that has slow progression. Any of the jobs are available. The only rule is at least one of them has to be associated with your class, and each, um, each class has about 11 or so jobs that are associated with it It doesn't have to be the first pick, it just has to be one of them. Oh. For ex- for example, um, the jobs associated with warrior are berserker, dervish, dragoon, fencer, fighter, knight, monk, samurai, sentinel, sniper, and weapon master. Oh. So if you take warrior, you gotta have one of them And this also means that you can't build a character out of nothing but independent jobs Hmm. I see Oh. Independent jobs are, I guess that, I guess I put them in the same category [00:11:00] as, like, prestige classes because they do re- they do re- not in the sense of you need to a bunch of stuff in order to qualify for them like you did with prestige classes back in the day. knows I'm not doing that. I did, I didn't like how some of those prereqs worked. more that th- they, the kit that they have demands a slightly higher system mastery, like a slightly hi- a slightly higher understanding of the way the mechanics work. And within the book, I have a disclaimer say basically saying, "You can pick th- you can pick these as your first character if you want to, but we do not recommend it." I see. Sure Of course, if you do do it and then you complain that it's too hard, don't come crying to me about it because you were given fair warning I love how when we were playing, [00:12:00] um, there are so many options. Mm-hmm. I think the replayability factor is gigantic with this game, 'cause even I hadn't thought about it too until you just mentioned it, but like I could be a warrior and then have the same three classes, but then I could play a different, um... Or, I'm sorry, the same three jobs, right? So I, I could have like a warrior class and then three jobs, change my class to something else with those same three jobs, and my play experience could be s- substantially different just based on my hit points, mana difference, skill difference. Not even to mention... um, weapons Yeah, and, and limit break. So the way that you play even the same three combination of jobs could be completely different. And I mean, not to mention the fact that you already mentioned there are 60, six- like a big, 6- 60 of them, right? So [00:13:00] I mean, it, it's, it was cra- it was... One of the hardest things was choosing what I actually wanted to play. Yeah also love that because it's like if you don't like it, just, you know, next time you create a character just build something different. Like I consider this the better form of analysis paralysis. Like a lot of Yeah, sure is in a game, it's more of wanting to pick a dis- to make a pick that's going to screw you over two or three sessions down, Mm-hmm. uh, or having to pre-plan your idea multiple levels in advance, which just creates false choice, which is also not ideal. Yep it's there are so... Instead, there are so many really good options that you could do that Right. is a good problem to have. That's a great problem to have a lot of the jobs are gonna be very familiar to people who have seen the job system as it's been presented over the years. Mm-hmm.[00:14:00] there are a few that aren't n- there are a few that are from adjacent games like Bravely Default, and there were a few that aren't in any of the video games, but I wanted to fill certain niches or certain motifs that I felt didn't quite fit any of the existing jobs Yeah Oh. And some of them are, the name is there where, where that name has been in past games, but the way it's executed is different to give it its own identity. Oh An example that comes to mind is the Arcanist. Um, I think one of the, one of the, of, one of the cases where Arcanist showed up is in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. But ultimately it was just a black mage with a couple extra tricks, I Sure. Mm-hmm Then I looked [00:15:00] at the, um, Japanese version of the Arcanist job and it, and the translation for that is basically witch. Um, and I thought, "You know what? Let's build one around curses." So we Yeah, that's cool Um, and since you mentioned limit break, I will touch on that. Yeah conscious choice to not have limit break be some sort of uber attack Yeah I know that those w- I know that those kind of things are a staple Final Fantasy ever since VI. Um, VI technically first introduced it, VII obviously popularized it with a limit break gauge instead of it being a hidden mechanic. But at the end of the day, those are just jumped up versions of attacks, and for a tabletop system where you don't have the flashy effect to give a, Yeah signpost, that's not all that interesting[00:16:00] Not really. Yeah Especially since if I were to do it as a gauge, I would have to calculate out how the rate of gain for that gauge for any potential kind of attack. And to reference Batman Forever, it just raises too many questions Yeah, that's a dark hole of game design for sure. Mm-hmm. It's easy to miss something. You're dealing with a lot of interchanging pieces here with all the different jobs you can combine. I see the problem. Yeah So instead, I took inspiration from the game breaker rule that Fantasy Craft has. Fantasy Craft is one of the games I've listed as inspiration. It's one of... It is my favorite take on the 3.5, um, of the D20 system. I put it even above Pathfinder, that's how much I like Fantasy Craft in terms of sheer volume of flexibility. [00:17:00] But At a certain level, in- classes in Fantasy Craft have what is in turn, what is called by a lot of the homebrew community a game breaker, something that the class can already do just at a hi- just at a higher level. Sure Um, you sort of have something like this in video game form with the two-hour ability that was in Final Fantasy XI, which was this, um, improved version of what that job could already do. You just couldn't, you just could only do it once every two hours. Not once every two hours, it would've had a two-hour cool down. And the approach with this is you can activate a limit break when you're below half health. It lasts until the rest of the encounter, and is essentially an improved version of what that class already does. Uh And the catch is you have four limit breaks, three from your jobs and one from your class[00:18:00] Yeah Each of the... And when you activate one of them, you are locked off for the rest of the encounter from the other four, or from the other three, I should say So to use warriors as example, their limit break is action surge, which lets you make a weapon attack without using your action. You just can only do it once per round. Could you do this to do two attacks in the same round? Yes. You could also do other combinations if you want to as well Oh. You're just getting one weapon attack for free for the rest of the encounter, but some of the other stuff from your, from your job combinations you won't be able to do Uh, and I do wanna, I do want to touch on a moment for, um, the design philosophy we had when it came to feats Because one of the things that I tried my absolute best to avoid when introducing feats was feats that were just number go up[00:19:00] Sure The... There are a couple that are like that, but not in the same, but not exactly. A lot of times it was built on feats are little tricks that you can do to fur- to further personalize the character, and said tricks don't necessarily fit into any one existing Mm-hmm. And I f- I always felt that was the intent with feats when it was introduced in third edition D&D, of little tricks to personalize. somewhere along the l- line, the memo got lost or was put into forms I don't think it was designed for. You know, the whole feat chain problem or the feat tax problem as has been discussed plenty of spaces elsewhere. Um Yeah And to, and to that end, I don't really have a extensive amount of [00:20:00] prerequisites when it comes to feats. of times it's ju- it's just on three feat chains. Usually those ones have some kind of Roman numeral attachment I think a lot of what we're kind of talking about too, back to sort of the d- overall design of things, is that for almost every game out there, there's like ... I don't know if it's just the advent of the internet or now that, you know, all of us who grew up playing games are now adults and we kind of get games more, but there ends up being like the meta builds, right? And so you talk about like D&D and Mm-hmm. there's like this huge problem of like you can't play a rogue anymore in D&D 5.5E 'cause it's just terrible compared to the damage output of so many other classes. Oh, And a lot of people- on rangers. Yeah. Right. Right. And then a lot of people play as if combat or damage per turn or whatever is like the key factor, and if you aren't pumping out damage, then you aren't having [00:21:00] fun, right? But I, I think it's interesting that you've taken this approach with feats where it's like it's about things that you can do for your character. It's about the, the role play and the character building more than just the optimization. But I also think that just the sheer s- way that you've made this game makes it really hard to create any kind of like meta build. Like, maybe if, you know, a hundred thousand people were playing this game every week, there would start to be some patterns emerge, but it seems to me as if you've gone to really great lengths to give every class its own personality, Mm-hmm. I think that y- people would have a very hard time finding anything that's gonna be like super busted basically. It's more about having the fun playing the character you wanna play instead of optimizing every little thing. Yeah. Now, there's a, there's a couple things I can say on that. One,[00:22:00] Sure I will be flat out honest, whether it be in tabletop games, in video games, in war games, in board games, in card games, any kind of game period, loathe meta Me too. Because Me too I am, and I s- I have done my fair share of t- of tournaments, whether it be in, um, card, whether it be in card games. I w- I, I'm not great at it , but I did dabble in tournament scenes in, um, fighting games growing up. Cool I certainly don't do it as, as much these days, but I... But something I did. the reason I hate meta so much is I'm, I grew, I grew up ar- I grew up around a lot of, a lot of freestyle artistry. You know, whether it be Hmm import, the, um, the whole import tuner craze of the early [00:23:00] 2000s, the go- or listening to, listening to early hip hop in the golden age of sampling, j- or just remix culture with, um, music. Or j- or just the idea of freestyling when it came to building, um, stuff with Lego as a little kid. That's awesome. Yeah that idea of expression of building the style that, that fits y- that fits you, not necessarily is the best numbers. And Yeah what really helped hammer this home for me was when I was spending a bit of time revisiting, um, various shooters. And especially re- especially, um, getting an understanding for what the intent of the perk system in, say, early Call of Duty was Mm-hmm Because if you look at the perk list in say Modern Warfare or Mo- or Modern Warfare [00:24:00] 2 or Black Ops or whatnot, it's not about raw numbers. It is about, it is about picking ones that best fit a certain play style that you're trying to go for. Yeah Uh, like for example, somebody who picks scavenger probably gonna be using a light machine gun, because scavenger lets you get more ammo on ammo pickups so that, so you have more bull- you have more bullet per bullet. And if you're using an LMG, you're gonna be eating through that ammo pretty fast Oh. It's not really, it's not really about the numbers per se. And I've s- a similar thing to an extent with some of the unlocks in games like Team Fortress 2, where not picking them for numbers or percentages, you're picking them for a certain style. Uh, like a common build when I would play Pyro in was [00:25:00] having things like the flare gun and the Axtinguisher. The flare gun is a secondary, lets you set people on fire at range. It's just on an arc so it is a little bit tricky to use. And the Axtinguisher auto- always does critical hits if you're hitting somebody while they're on fire. So you can see how they feed into each other. And there were certain combinations that we saw where we thought this could be a particular annoyance or this could be a particular pest in combat, but it was funny so we kept it. one of the early examples of that that we've brought up and that we've brought up plenty of times over the years is somebody doing Arcanist and Fencer. Because Arcanist is all about incubating a curse within themself and then transferring that curse as a debuff to the next person who hits them. Fencer is all about taunting an enemy to force th- to force them in a duel where both sides get bonuses to hitting each other and penalties to [00:26:00] hitting anybody else There's good synergies for sure Mm-hmm. when it comes to the... There's been no end of arguments about game balance. seen, I've seen it talked Sure f- back and forth. I've seen people talk about balancing issues with this game back and forth. A Yeah me to, a lot of the balance arguments puts me to sleep for the same reason the, um, math breakdowns of classes back when I would follow the brilliant GameZologist forums put me to sleep. Even if I did rip off the whole Godzilla thing as a this is what I don't want. But The, but the, To bo- to dial myself back a bit, um We take an, we take a policy called Brawl Minus when it comes to game balance. The attitude being if everyone's potentially broken on all sides of the fence, no one is. So for a bit of context, Brawl [00:27:00] Minus was a response mod, some say a meme mod, to a mod for Smash Brothers Brawl called Brawl Plus. The intent with Brawl Plus was to nerf a lot of the overpowered elements in Brawl. Um, Meta Knight, I'm looking right at you. know what you did. Brawl Minus took the opposite approach of instead of nerfing the overpowered stuff, just make everybody ridiculously overpowered That sounds like a lot of fun Like, like a fully charged warlock punch from Ganondorf in Bro- in Brawl Minus could be a one-hit, um, knockout. And as ridiculous as that is, still the signposting and still the tells that can be punished if someone knows what they're doing. So as, as overpowered as everything is, there is still an internal logic of if you got hit by something like that, you were ignoring the very obvious tells and that, and [00:28:00] you're getting punished for that. Mm-hmm. you know, in the s- in the same way that I remember when I would, when I would play a lot of Halo 2, and a lot of people hated the glitch, um, BXR. And I had defended it because I, because at the time I had said the timing window for it is very specific, and if you don't get it right, you are going to get punished you just left yourself wide open and you can't hit back Yeah. Things that are strong come with a downside or they're projected so it's defendable against it Mm-hmm. And there is the concept in game design called signposting, where this is where you have those very obvious tells about what you should stay away from or what you should be wary about 'cause something's gonna come. Uh, and when you have the, when you have th- when you have that particular signpost and then you [00:29:00] ignore it, then it becomes your own fault, and you gotta deal with the consequences of that. Uh, think of any video game RPG where you've seen where the, where the game is telling you the enemy's preparing for a large attack, then you don't shore up your defenses and you get wiped Oh, it's the, it's the same principle. And I never want... I, be- I remember being so annoyed when I would see certain game developers take combinations that the community had discovered on their own that were, that added to the fun factor of creatively overcoming obstacles and take that away from them. Uh Yeah, it's kind of a lame approach for sure It's not only a lame approach, but I feel like it sends the wrong message. To me, it sends the message of don't bother getting better at the game because we're just gonna take away your tools. Yeah. Don't be creative yeah, [00:30:00] a big example of this would be Mercy hopping exploit that was found early on in Overwatch, where people figured out that with the right timing using Mercy's movement mechanics, they could clear a lot of ground very quickly. About less than a week after that was discovered, it got patched out Sure. Yeah, I, I, uh, it's a tough thing as a game designer too, because I do also feel you have a vision Mm-hmm. how you want the game to be played, and there are just some things where you didn't imagine it being used in a certain way, and it wasn't intended. And if it does become the situation where it's like, now that we know this exists, Mm-hmm. who does wanna play for the optimal meta build now must do this. Yeah That can take away from the fun as well, but I, I think it depends on, like, your priorities as a game designer. Like, is it is it around the fun? Is it around the [00:31:00] creativity? Is it around your original vision? And y- I often find you have to balance all of those things actually, so th- there have been some times where I've taken away toys from other people as well. Um, but yeah Legend Edition, because it's built around being, being a sandbox, having whatever my specific vision is, is not as important. The only time that I've really modified something so that it ta- so to take away certain tools that I f- I felt were, um, stepping over the line is if, is if I felt it was undermining other things. Um, the, the, um, benchmark that I use for this sort of thing is I don't want a knock spell. Um, I was never a big fan of spells like knock or teleport Hmm or oth- other games. I wasn't a fan of knock because I f- because I [00:32:00] felt it completely undermined the presence of having a rogue in the party. Like, Yeah, sure. why have Right all the time rolling to pick a, to pick a lock when you, when the wizard can cast knock and the lock is no longer a problem? Have the wizard be a rogue, yeah And I didn't like spells like teleport 'cause that, 'cause I felt that r- that took away from the narrative control of the Sure GM. Um, especially if you can tel- especially if you can just teleport right to where the dungeon is instead of having to Sure. thing of fi- of trying to find out where it is. Yeah and in the same vein, I also wanted to avoid things like CODZilla. Uh, CODZilla is something that came out of the tier sys- the tier system of effectiveness that the Brilliant Gamesologist forums, um, devised, where somebody re- the COD is short for cleric or druid, and it was a reflection Okay that somebody who [00:33:00] knows what they're doing with either of those classes is an entire party by themself. Yeah and to that end, when it came to designing the jobs, something that I tried to avoid was the idea of a single job being multi-role. Um, Yeah. I was impressed by that really quick as well. You know, when I was reading through the first time, and I mean, every time I go into it, Mm-hmm. it is very crystal clear what each class does. Mm-hmm. it, it, it's so focused that if it was only one... You could only play one class at a time, it may feel a little narrow, but I actually love that because you're mixing. Mm-hmm. think you, you really lasered in on what each job does and what they're about Yeah. Like for, for example, um, I had, I had gotten a bit of pushback over the fact that with the paladin, unlike s- [00:34:00] unlike plenty of the games, I did not give the paladin access to white magic. Um, part of that was had to answer the question, well, what do, what do you do if you have a paladin and white mage as part of your job trio? now Sure. things that would overlap. You're both... Yeah two, I felt pal- I felt the identity of paladin more centered around covering allies and taking the hits for them rather than white magic. Plus, I've never been a fan of, um, of half casters Interesting. Yeah. 'Cause they end up doing both things poorly in most games. Yes. Yeah. Oh Yeah, they're like half people basically. Yeah, the, the big pr- the big problem with, the big problem with it is doing that s- doing that sort of multi-role is gonna run into conflict when y- when class systems in general are about [00:35:00] specialization. Having a generalist in a b- in a game built around specializations has an inherent contradiction. feel like this is Sure why in D&D, um, the ranger has been cursed since the days of AD&D. Yeah, th- there's no identity there. I mean, I, there's no identity, and I, I think that's probably another big thing, right? Like, they, they don't know what they want ranger to be. You're just like a ranged fighter, but then you're not. But the things that you can do, anybody can do. It's not really that interesting. Yeah, I had... The funny thing is the one edition that I'm supposed to hate but I don't because the check bounced actually solved that issue Um, the fourth edition ranger, I don't have that problem with Oh yeah, I actually like fourth edition. Mm-hmm. It's kind of a bum that nobody else did I, I've, I've been a fan of fourth edition since it started out in 2008, and I have routinely taken the piss out of people [00:36:00] who go with that MMO argument, and I basically tell them, have no idea how MMOs actually work if that's your, um, main ar- if that's your main argument." Um, and Especially s-since, um When it comes to, when it comes to the po- when it comes to the power setup, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that, that so many of us had reference index cards And nowadays you can get whole spell decks for casters Sure But I r- but the Ranger in fourth was one of the premier, one of the premier examples of the striker. real problem that it had was one infamous daily power that got, um, errated out that led to the meme of Kenshiro Orcaslayer, because if you hit, you could keep hitting until you missed. Oh. Um It's like [00:37:00] Thunderfury weapon or whatever it's called in WoW. Mm-hmm. The first- Yeah Yeah, and Orcus was one of the big high-level monsters in the, in Wind theory. Manual. Got it somebody who had the l- had the luck of the dice gods on their side could ju- Yep. keep Just one shot it. Yeah. he runs out. So Yep the And becau- because of that I w- I wanted... Now, with a lot of games, they can have multi-role effects with their classes because you're only picking that one class for the most part. Here, the multi-roleness comes from the combination of your class and jobs, also Yeah the fact that there's plenty of characters throughout Final Fantasy that don't quite fit one particular job exclusively Also because jobs changed between iterations. So, I mean, your solution makes a world of sense Yeah, like the, the knight in the original [00:38:00] Final Yeah. Right ultimately a proto-paladin. Right. Yeah. When you mentioned cover, that was the first thing I thought of Yeah, I th- I think the, when people think of the paladin in the classic sense, the first version they're gonna think of is Cecil in IV. Um, and in that s- in, in that same vein, there were s- there were some casting lists that were easy to design for. The hardest one was Blue Magic because, um, Blue Magic goes literally all over the place in every iteration, and when I That's like the point of it, yeah. Yeah a specific thing was important Right Ah. And I will, I will note that, um, with the ones that I took liberties with, those ones still that rule of I need to answer what exa- what exactly its [00:39:00] big, for lack of a better term, gimmick is. Um, now some got r- some were under other names but got renamed because of things I wanted to avoid. Dynamo was Gunner originally, um, meant to be a bit of a nod to the g- to the Gunner dressphere in X-2. Um, Mm-hmm. that and I said I wanted a John Woo-like, um, job. But of the fact that the job system is divorced from required weapons, which was something I wanted to do from the word go, um, I felt that calling it Gunner or calling the sniper, it was originally Archer, would Hmm Yeah from that So I went with names that were a little bit broader in that sense. and the other reason One of the things I'm obviously the most proud of is the weapon system and the fact that it is divorced from your choice [00:40:00] of job. So you could play a bl- you could have Black Mage as part of your combo and use a long sword, um, and still make it work because in addition to that whole not m- not fitting thing, there's If I were to do a standard weapon list that you see in a lot of fantasy games, there are so many weapons within Final Fantasy that don't fit that Yeah. Yeah, there's so many, yeah. Um, whether it the pinwheel for Noah, yeah yeah, the weird pinwheel thing that Rinoa has, Yeah um the, over- the oversized, um, shurikens that Yuffie has, the fact that hair accessories are the weapon of choice for Red XIII. Um, the Plus the, plus, um, I'd, I would, I'd think of certain unorthodox weapons that I would always pick in [00:41:00] other fantasy games. like I was I think I was m- I think once I was, um, like I was playing a character in an Eberron campaign that involved the desert elves, which are an interesting beast in and of themselves. I said, "You know what? It would fit that, it would fit that my character uses a khopesh instead of a long sword." Um- And isn't anything in the rule set for a khopesh, obviously, so we had to make that up Yeah And I've also mentioned that no matter what, there's gonna be some that has some weapon that ha- that has the same cool factor as when people first saw the Buster Sword back in 1997. Mmhmm instead of telling them, "Just house rule it," which is like pushing them off the deep end and saying, "Swim, damn it." Uh, I w- I wanted to, I wanted to provide a framework where people could make those unorthodox weapons[00:42:00] That's awesome instead, instead of just being Sisyphus having to constantly make new and bigger weapon lists. Uh, and again, for example, I, I know that the... There's the, um, common motif of the monk uses unarmed weapons, except when it doesn't. But I remember in the past pitching, "Okay, instead of, instead of using unarm- instead of using just bare hands, um, why, why not use a... why not use something like, say, a rope dart or a, um, sansetsukon?" Uh, a sansetsukon is a three-section staff Hmm. Okay. Yeah And obviously a rope dart is, well, exactly what you think it is. And I have, I have plenty of players who are firearm enthusiasts, much like me, and I know that they would come up with some unorthodox suggestions, [00:43:00] and I'm like, "Go, go right ahead with it." Um, I know one It's awesome who, who was playing this giant character, he said, "I wanna lug, I wanna lug around a m- a slightly miniaturized version of a punt gun." I'm like, "I'll let you do it, but, but you're... But, um, you can only fire it every other round because it's a punt gun. Those things weren't meant to be carried." Like, for context, a punt gun was a type of ridiculously oversized shotgun for m- for commercial duck hunting that was supposed to be mounted on a small boat, a punt They eventually Yeah, players won't do that good at their job Players will do that. They'll try to do the things that they shouldn't be doing. And, We-- I was gonna say we, we have a little bit of time left. I don't mean to cut you off on that thought, but, uh, once you finish that thought, I would love to go through some more of the classes and like just the, the most broken or [00:44:00] insane or fun stuff that people have come up with so far Um, I will note that from a design perspective, I like giving players powerful but unsafe equipment. benchmark for that kind of thing is if you remember the Noisy Cricket from Men in Black, that, Oh yeah, that was... I love that. Yeah. Oh. You know, That's awesome a hell of a lot of damage, but every time you fire the thing, you get sent flying Mm-hmm. Yeah. Why not? oh, this As far as cl- as far as some of the individual class, some of the individual classes and jobs, as far as some of the ideas, um, I remember being really proud of the way, um, fighter turned out. So a lot of times the fighter has the selling point of, "Oh, you can equip any weapon." But most people are gonna pick one way they equip their character and stick to it Yeah And I, I built [00:45:00] the fighter based on Firion's appearance in the Dissidia games, he's carrying around 10 different types of weapons That's awesome using all, and using all of them in his combos. So like, all right, the fight- the fighter is the walking arsenal. The weapon master is the opposite end. Um- Ah There was also the f- there's also, um, I think there's, there's some jobs that I think got slept on, that get slept on by people. Um, one of them that especially comes to mind is the Spiritmaster. Um, Spiritmaster is a def- is a defensive favoring support, um, But their Spiritism ability is, for those, those of, those who have used it properly, um, have caused a lot of salt because it doesn't remove debuffs, it moves them. It moves buffs as well from any Nice to another participant[00:46:00] That's awesome So it's a really great way to screw over the, B-beg that just put a bunch of buffs on th- that just put a few buffs on themselves. You know, you can have the B-beg go, "I'm, I'm conflicting, I'm inflicting paralyze on one of your a- on one of your allies," and somebody who's got Spirit Master can say, no you don't, and congratulations, now you're paralyzed." Sure. Yeah, it's really incredible Mm-hmm. Uh, and the l- something I tried to av- I tried to avoid was giving h- was giving whole new s- there's plenty of, there's plenty of, um, charac- there's plenty of characters and builds that have some sort of sub mechanic, like some sort of resource or the like, which Mmhmm reason I avoided doing the whole limit gauge thing because that'd be one more thing to track. Uh, but I wanted [00:47:00] to avo- I wanted to avoid, um, a setup that might pigeonhole a particular build or a particular, um, job. Um, like for, for example, somebody wants to just slightly dip into magic, you have multiple ways to do it. You could do it through a spell casting enhantment- enhancement from a magic weapon. could do it by get- by getting scrolls and be- because of the way consumables work, you are gonna be able to use that spell for the rest of the in- for the rest of the in- of, um, that adventure until you hit downtime again. But you do have access to it. just... And that can pair very well with something like ma- with something like Magic Knight, which has more in common with the Magus class in Pathfinder than a lot Hmm the traditional ma- a lot of the traditional Magic Knight approaches. Uh, and [00:48:00] it wasn't long before, it wasn't long before that came up that the idea of a caster build out of Outlaw Star came to be. Um, there's... I've s- I have seen pe- I've seen people, um- Go com- go completely s- go completely support based using c- using a combination of general and, um, and squire. So that they, Yeah able to do a lot of attacks, but if they're patient, they're let, they're gonna let their, um, party do a lot of attacks, especially with things like blade work. Um really liked the looks of Squire. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, in fact. Squire was a hard one to write for because I bet it was couldn't use a lot of the t- I couldn't use the techniques as is for Squire in tactics because it's meant to be your starter. Um, and instead I built it around the idea that it is this, this ultimate [00:49:00] pocket pick. And think... I will note that th- that, um, a lot of the design with the classes and jobs starts to click if you look at them like you would look at positions on a team sport Yeah, I agree with that Because any team sport, whether it be hockey, whether it be, whether it be rugby, whether it be football or other football, you don't really have a jack-of-all-trades position You have several multi-role positions and usually a, a secondary role as a backup for when the play breaks down, and it will. But you don't have somebody who's supposed to be good at everything Oh. And that was, that was how, that was that was a design, uh, goal that I, that I had. Um, I think you hit that. and- Yeah, it, it's fun too. I'll just interject really quick because I think a lot of modern game design is [00:50:00] about being able to do everything, and every class starts to feel the exact same. Mm-hmm. Um, I've even, you know, played a lot of different games out there that are classless and messed around with them myself with my own design in the past, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards the same things. They're like, "I wanna be able to fly and have invisibility and invincibility." And I actually like it a lot more when you're like, "Look, this is what I do, and then everything else I suck at," because it gives specific spotlights for everybody in the party to be able to jump in and do their thing. You're not always good, and that's part of, I think, the fun Mm-hmm. Ah. And for, for me, I wa- I always saw the high skill floor when it came to people really being able to explore the [00:51:00] potential customizations with s- with job design, and also Yeah of that, that sameyness in some of the more freeform ones. And Yeah. Yeah. games, pe- the selling point that people give me is, "Oh, you can build just about anything." The problem is a Not really. And Yeah. one th- And, And, meta builds. to mind yeah. to go for it especially with, um, false choice as I call it, is Shadowrun agree with it. Yeah, yeah, the idea of false choice is a big one, and I think people who aren't game designers often overlook that. But there's a lot of things out there, it's like, "Oh, you have 1,000 choices," but really it's like, yeah, but do you... Like, do you really? No. It's usually only a few things that are, like, the best. And oftentimes too, if you take something, it's either actively bad or it's so much worse than something else that you actually can't choose it, so it's, it's not a real choice [00:52:00] And I think of, um, I think of Sha- I think of Shadowrun where it ends up having a class system while trying to pretend it doesn't Sure. Sure, sure. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, so I un- I understand exactly what you're saying. Mm-hmm. And on, on the other Yeah um, you know, some g- some designers try to build these traps for some reason. Um Yeah To tr- to try and encourage system mastery. But the pro- I've always ha- I've always had an issue when games have the, try to have this hard divide between the people just learning the system and the people who've been at it for years, with not an Yeah pathway from one to the other I agree And whenever I've talked about that, s- some have con- have equate- have equated that to wanting ha- wanting the handheld, [00:53:00] and that's not the case. it's more, it's more about establishing where, where the li- where the lines are. Um, Mm-hmm. and I feel like what I've tried to do with Legend Edition is those lines end up being created organically because instead, instead of looking at character creation of, in the sense of, "Oh, we, we need a bl- we need a black mage for the party, so who's g- who's gonna be that?" It's more about I have a character concept in mind, and I'm using the tool set to try and get as close to that concept as I can It's awesome Uh, and there's nothing wrong with the idea of, oh, you're building a c- you're building a character class first and then going around it. That's how early D&D works, in a sense. Sure it's not something I think is compatible with f- with, um, Final Fantasy as s- as the series progressed[00:54:00] Yeah Because there are plenty of characters, even in games that are explicitly class-leaning, like say, IX, where they end up fit- they end up fitting the niche of multiple jobs instead of just one. Uh, at, say, um, Amarant in Final Fantasy IX I was thinking of him as well He's basically a hybrid between monk and ninja. Or in Final Fantasy X, look at the territory of, um, say Tidus on the, um, lic- on, not on the license grid, in the, um, sphere grid. Mmhmm a lot of it leans into time mage and squire-like effects. Uh And you have that, you have that sort of asterisk where in a lot of class-based games you're picking this one thing and that's it. But a lot of Final Fantasy characters, [00:55:00] you can't really fit them into that one thing And that's not even getting into the idea that some people might wanna go off the beaten path Right? For sure So with wrapping up, I have a couple more things to cover. Um, one class, for example, that I really wanna play some point coming up for a very specific reason is the Oracle, and that reason is because I can self and-- self-damage myself to get myself to a limit break faster. Are there other classes that, that use self-damage for a bonus of some kind so that, you know, somebody wants to, like, limit break as often as possible? So Lim- because limit break is a bu- is a buff, um, and the f- and the fact that between, that you do full heal between encounters, um, trying to, trying to race to limit [00:56:00] break all the time isn't as beneficial as it may sound. Um, I just wanted to try it at least one time And any sort of... There are some ef- there are some effects that, aside from Oracle, that let you do that kind of, um, that kind of risk thing. Um, obviously one of the big examples is gonna be Dark Knight, who Okay when they're using Soul Eater, they can add a die of any size, aside from D20, their d- to their damage. However, whatever that additional die rolled, they ta- they take in direct HP reduction Yeah, I love it Oh In the s- in the same... There's a similar thing that works for, um, paladin when it comes to cover. Or not when it Right when it comes to paladin's oath. They can add that Oh, okay to their defenses, but the next t- but the next time they're targeted with an attack and that [00:57:00] attack is a miss, whatever that bonus they got from that die was, they take in, um, reduction Which I felt the theme of sacrifice that's a, that is key to the paladin identity I think so too. I also like that it's a foil, in a sense, for Dark Knight. There's a lot of threads in these classes that are really fun to pull at when you start getting into it. I can tell a lot of heart and passion has gone into making this. Mm-hmm. So I guess the next question with that, this is probably my last question, or it's like a little series of questions. But have you thought... Because Final Fantasy, like when we played, the story was great, and the adventure was super fun, and everything that you made I really loved. Also, though, Final Fantasy is like often thought of as a very combat-heavy series. Have you thought about [00:58:00] doing some kind of like PVP tournament where it's just like build your biggest, baddest team and fight against people online? And, you know, you've, you have, you have like a tournament series that's, you know, like you schedule once a week to you and your party fight somebody else. Or having that kind of thing, but then like for bosses, where it's like you and your friends build a team, you know, once a week you fight against some mega boss. You're not really intended to win, but, you know, it can be like a little bit of a competition thing for the community sort of thing. Just curious if you thought about these kind of things. I have given them some thought, and the idea of, of, um, PVP I, I would not advise because it really is built with the idea of the party has its own particular set of mechanics and the NPCs and their, Got it have their own particular set of mechanics opposite them. It's... I've, I [00:59:00] remember, I remember going through a bunch of, a bunch of games in the mid-2000s that ha- that did the whole PCs and NPCs are built the same way, and I, I don't wanna do that, um, Sure, sure becau- because it... I feel like it would fall back into that same n- into that sameness that we talked about earlier. Mm-hmm. Mmhmm on the other hand, the i- the idea of competitively going up, going up against a certain boss, um, that I'd be a, that'd be a little bit more willing to go with. Um, it would certainly, it would certainly fit alongside some of the um, style video games that we, that we've seen over the last few years, stuff like, um, stuff like Dead by Daylight or the Friday the 13th game, for example. Or even the battle mode, uh, multiplayer entry that was in Doom Eternal. [01:00:00] Uh This i- this idea of asynchronous play. And the approach that I'd probably do is not a, "Oh, this is a, this is a, um, this is a near impossible bo- because I don't wanna revisit the trauma that people have had to deal with with certain hidden bosses in RPGs, Sure. every Tri-Ace game I've ever played. Or the, um... Are you familiar with, are you familiar with the infamy that was Absolute Virtue in Final Fantasy XI? No. No, I'm not familiar on record as one of the mo- as one of the hardest raid bosses of all time. Uh, like, it, it's just a long, long slog. Got it. I mean, that's no fun either. Yeah of course when people figured out how to beat, how to do exploits to beat it, they're like, "All right, we're gonna make him even harder." Got it. I have a special level of [01:01:00] hatred towards, Ozma as a hidden boss, mostly because he cheats. that's not Yep that's not me exaggerating. There's parts in his AI where you can completely jump his, um, ATB gauge depending I see. which is Yeah, I'm not surprised. why I Yeah the same way AI in, um, some RTS campaigns cheat Sure In, mostly in the they have unlimited resources and you don't kind of way Yeah, that's a pretty big cheat Oh. But what I'd prob- what I'd probably end up d- what I'd probably end up doing is some sort of, some sort of raid boss like enc- like encounter where beat, where, um, it's not just be- it's not just about beating the opponent, but also beating the opponent, surviving, and d- doing certain additional challenges Yeah[01:02:00] There's, I like there lot. Um, Yeah obvious- so think, think less of a raid boss in WoW and think more of, um, say a mission in Monster Hunter Yep, I'm tracking Oh. And 'cause I f- 'cause I f- I feel like doing a, doing a PVP thing is something that doesn't... It, it's certainly there in PVP. It has been in FF XI and XIV. But I feel like getting the coliseum part of the identity, you know, the coliseum mini-game that's been in multiple games, uh, the way to go about that would be to would be, would be to do something beyond just PVP, whether it be escalating monster types or, um, something that I just came up on the fly, a wager [01:03:00] system like you see in some ARPGs, where you can intentionally nerf yourself to potentially get better loot Yeah, yeah. It just comes to mind, I, and I think maybe you're totally right about this too, I mean, PVP can kinda be a feel bad thing sometimes as well. Mm-hmm. Whereas if you are even loosely competing against somebody, or maybe not even competing, but just, you know, competing against yourself to try and do X, Y, Z thing, fighting, like, a boss. I personally like competition a little bit, so maybe that could be fun. But, um, yeah, I hope you try something like that, 'cause I would, I would be in for it. I could get, I could get three other guys together, to be and we would, you yeah. see me build a s- build a separate, um, say c- say card game or s- or skirmish war Sure lean in- to lean into that instead Sure, sure Um, 'cause I feel like that would be- that would better f- fit that since [01:04:00] obviously I, even in those ca- even in, um, something like that, I still don't wanna have to deal with meta. I, Sure if you, I want, I would want to, um, I would wanna have it le- less akin to the flag or team deathmatch, and more akin to, like, big team battle in H- in Halo, for example. Sure a way, a way to experiment with the sa- with the sandb- with given sandbox, but not necessarily building it arou- around one, around one particular meta. Yeah. as I get it as- a bit of an aside, there wa- there was a incident at a, um, Yu-Gi-Oh tournament years ago where somebody in with a random ass deck and completely embarrassed everybody, and it was his first tournament. Because Oh, that's awesome. for, they were all planning for this very, very specific meta at that [01:05:00] tournament, and he wasn't playing that, so they ha- so they were basically coming in completely blind and had , and had no I love that no strategy at first to prepare for, and only got one as they adapted ov- over the, over subsequent rounds. Mm-hmm Um, it's ... Imagine, imagine a football coach spending hours watching film, only to realize he's watching film for the wrong team he's playing against Yeah, totally Oh. And I've I think that kind of thing's hilarious. I love that. yeah, I've always appreciated, um, I've always appreciated people pulling dumb stuff in games I agree. Yeah, I think it's part of the creativity and the fun and that, that's what we're talking about, right? Like, that's-- it's a role-playing game, so you can role play a character you want, not to optimize. But, Yeah um, yeah, I th- I guess we should probably wrap up here, Mm-hmm.[01:06:00] but I feel like we'll have more conversations coming up in the future. Is there anything else you want to wrap up with? Um, Or final things you wanna say, I, I should say? I will note that while it is gonna be a slow process, I am in the early stages of writing world books for Legend Edition. Cool. Um, Good to know been working on a, in a, um, not necessarily a default campaign setting, but a potential campaign setting, um, that I've codenamed Project Gaia. Um, which is do- is doing th- is doing a bit of, um, of steam pu- of steampunk with magic. It was my answer to the question of the magic versus technology motif that's often in steampunk and other speculative fiction. The answer I give is and technology are two sides of the same whole and feed into each other So, Well, that's great. mm-hmm Yeah, I'm [01:07:00] looking forward to that Oh yeah And, Well, thank you so much for coming on today then, Mildreth. It's always a pleasure. Oh, yeah I hope everybody, if you haven't tried out Legends Edition yet, you really need to. Um, I'll make sure to include a link. It is a free download for anybody who's been listening in and, you know, doesn't know anything about the project yet. Uh, it's a great game. I think you should take a look, find what class and jobs you wanna try, and, uh, yeah, let us know what you're having the most fun with with your group Mm-hmm. Oh otherwise, we will catch everybody later then Stay frosty Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's funny you said w- um, 45 minutes. We ended up going an hour and seven. Uh