Do you remember? When we moved in September

 Today's post is gonna be short and sweet. We're moving and I need a minute to do something besides pack and binge podcasts.

Today I'm thinking about product accessibility in the ttrpg space. I'm musing about accessibility in textual editing, in conceptual explanations. How digestible is it?

It's on my mind because we've arrived at the last class for Broken Oaths: the wizard. So naturally I'm putting that off til I've moved because I can't be bothered to be creative when I've still got to dump a barrel of bad compost and a 26ft. truck is occupying my drive.

Instead I'm rereading the 5e PHB and comparing it with the One D&D playtest release and my own brain. Here's what I'm noticing:

• It's like 5e's PHB was slapped onto 25-40% too much paper. There's a lot of "dead space," where you could be using metatextual references or combining rules in logical groups. Not white space, dead space. Conceptually thin space.
• One D&D is drifting ever closer to AD&D and 4e. Remember kits, Complete Fighter? What about the primal, arcane, divine categories from 4e? Organizing classes by roles? Any of this sound familiar? But the conceptual density is good, it just isn't super organized. It's a playtest pdf, it gets a pass.
• They stole my ideas after I stole from 4e. Dicks.
• There's a lot of odd design choices that were made and then recontextualized via Jeremy Crawford's tweets. I don't love errata by social media, but I do think you should have a living document. What's the best way to do that for physical printings? 
• I think the best way is to sell a pdf with every physical purchase, with a serial number attached, where you can download free, errata'd copies of the book as they come out.
• Like unarmed strikes and melee weapon attacks? What a headache.
• Why do we talk about ability scores in Chapter One and then wait til CHAPTER SEVEN to tell players what they are? I absolutely hate flipping through the book. It makes understanding the book a chore, especially for the first go (and tbf, the ninth go, the twenty-fifth go...).
• Pro tip: Tell your players how to generate their ability scores in the same place you tell them what their ability scores are and do. Maybe with the character creation rules?
• I still don't like skills. I wish the list were different, but the way I'd change it requires combining Intelligence and Wisdom, and Constitution and Strength. 
• Also! The variant rule for using different ability scores with your skill proficiencies should be standard, not a variant.
• Physique, Intellect, Charisma, and Dexterity. That's all you need. 
• I think the Alexandrian has the right idea here. Tools should be skills. I like a juicier skill list than Justin, though. He recommends a 10-skill list; I like 15, with 10 profession skills.
• I don't love just one "persuasion" skill, because being a great at intimidation doesn't necessarily make you a good liar. I think it works, however, in a system/ group that emphasizes how you make your case and awards bonuses/penalties according to the situation. 5e doesn't do that, it makes everything chancy and random and oowoOOwowOOWWoo d20s!
• Sorry.
• Is it possible to organize class features by Class Type (i.e. Warriors, Spellcasters, Experts) and then have a 5-in-1 (I'm calling 5e/One D&D 5-in-1) game where players can select their abilities from the buffet as they level up? Might be neat.

Mostly musings. Mostly frustrations. The last thing I'll say is that I think the 5e PHB was never meant to be read. I would love to read it. I simply find it frustrating that I'm told to go here and turn to this chapter by page 3. Wouldn't it be great if, for the first 15 pages, I had everything I needed right there? You can restate rules later! You can even tell us when you're restating a rule. Have ability score descriptions in CHAPTER SEVEN(!) and drop a little note that you can also find those descriptions on pages 4-8. It's not hard. 

Put the money shot in the thumbnail.

Picking up where I left off.

 Three and a half years is a long time. Not for elves or giants, but in that time I experienced a plague, a handful of political catastrophes, and the birth of a new universe.

So let's talk about that last one.

Broken Oaths

Here we go.

In three years I've definitely matured. Tragedy and hardship have a way of doing that; changing a person. What they haven't changed is my affinity for purple prose. Expect lots.

I've also dropped nearly every roleplaying game idea I've ever had in exchange for two — maybe three — Big Ideas. The first one is Talamh, Broken Oaths, what have you. It's my hack of 5e and a setting bundled together, Patreon soon. It's hard not to feel despondent about one's obvious homogeneity when compared to titans of old-school blogging and new-school indie gaming. But yeah! Hell yeah! I'm making a setting and I'm going to release it and you're going to love it. Or it'll be another scream into the abyss and you won't care. Either way.

The other is my comfort food, my coffee on a rainy morning, my herb and funk music: Astrarius. A technicolor whirl of disco, drugs, and delinquent spacers set in a glitzy, 70s space-fantasy solar system. It fuckin' riffs, dude. 

This blog is about the first one. Astrarius will crop up from time to time when I need a palate cleanser, but for the majority of our time here you'll be subjugated to the incoherencies of a one-man design, playtesting, and review process. 

The chambers will echo with my delusions.

The blog will retain its earliest posts, too. They're pretty cringe now that I look back — I hate everything I've ever written for an audience — but to delete them would be denying that I've changed a lot of my opinions on running a game and designing a setting. I never want to forget that at one point in time, I legitimately cared about my players having a backstory. I will not be that person again.

To that effect, they're also great records of how a person's perception of what makes a game good, or fun, or entertaining, can shift.

Talamh

Talamh is a world out of time. In an age before humanity, two precursor peoples went to war and their conflict rent the continent of Talamh out of its homeworld and sent it hurtling into the murky beyond.

But now there are just the humans. Some ruins. And a whole lot of people trying very hard to screw each other over. The players of Broken Oaths get to wade hip-deep through all that history and grimy social conflict to carve a name, a home, a reputation for themselves. It's old-school mentality applied to modern gaming conventions. There are henchmen and retainers; there are strongholds; there are dungeons which, when their facades are peeled back, are big Jaquayed noodle piles full of resource attrition. 

I just know that every time I say those two words, Ben Milton shivers in delight. Here's to you, Ben, my treat: resource attrition. (And it's not just him, it's all of you, too.)

To further complicate the messaging, the whole of the Broken Oaths project hopes to engage players in my favorite style of play: emergent storytelling. Don't worry, it's free range and organic.

If I play my cards right, the overhauled character classes will be ten-level packages of mechanics and buttons which, when pushed, generated more interesting results than stacking bonuses or sources of advantage/disadvantage. I really love advantage but I fucking hate how dead 5e has beaten it. No, you get 5th level druid who can cast control weather as a ritual and fighters who have at-will maneuvers, no dice/usages per day. I really want to move away from uses per day as a mechanic for balancing the game.

And I really want to move away from giving any shits about balance.

The Patreon

I'll release more information soon. Right now I'm drumming up the old blog, dusting off the cobwebs, and shooing the crawling hands back into their receptacles. Also moving, which sucks and I hate.

But when it does arrive, it'll be a real bounty of options for those who wish to support the Broken Oaths project. And I'll have a much clearer "mission statement" for those who need a long-winded board room pitch to decide whether my intellectual labor is worth the price of a cheap gas station coffee each month.

That last bit, I beg you realize, was sarcasm. I am a slovenly whore for any amount of support. To be honest, I could do with some light buzz around the project, but I will work my tricks on the corners of the blogosphere day and night*.

*Note: The patient seems to exhibit "simp behavior," doubtless related to the lack of a paternal figure in the formative years of childhood.