How to Be: Lalo Salamanca
I suspect for this one, I’ve given myself something of a tall task to try and justify this one. Because Lalo doesn’t necessarily strike many people as a character who’s a good fit for ‘a D&D game’ or even ‘a player character.’ After all, he’s a villain, and not just a villain, he’s probably going to be one of the iconic villains people are trying to replicate for decades.
4e: Deploying Monster Types
People say that 4e D&D was ‘only good for tactical combat,’ which I don’t agree with, but I can understand the feeling when you consider it was the first time that it made the combat system kinda work. Part of how it worked was that rather than treat monsters as if they were all generic spots on a continuum, monsters were balanced based on general formulas of things they could do and ways they could be represented, and part of that was recognising that some types of monster were best suited to particular types of role.
How To Be: Bridget
We’ve talked about Guilty Gear before on How To Be, when I covered May, and in the intervening time since then the Guilty Gear universe has not gotten more sensible, more simple, or more coherent. It is a silly world, and in that world we get Bridget.
The Yakuza Theme
There’s a chance if you played 4th edition, you never even knew Themes were a thing. They were introduced in a campaign sourcebook as a way to flesh out characters under level 10, to give more of that kind of granularity you might want if you say, belonged to a particular organisation, or had something […]
How To Be: Scorpia
One of my favourite things about media is the way that just because I don’t like a work or a show or a plot or whatever it doesn’t have to mean I don’t like or won’t have a reason to be interested in something in that. Moments, scenes, characters, dialogue, all sorts of small things […]
Class Variance
Alright, so yeah, I may have talked about how terrible a bunch of the 3.5 D&D classes were, but that’s a little bit unfair, right? Rubbishing on bad design in a system I don’t play, that’s ammunition in the edition wars, what about the bad classes in 4th edition? I have thought about that, about […]
Dodge Roll Or Die
If you’ve read my How To Be Series you may have noticed the way that lightly or unarmoured characters present a potential contention for the project. In some cases it’s that characters don’t obviously have much armour on and there’s the counterpoint of characters who definitely don’t have much armour on. What’s the problem? Just […]
How To Be: Sheik
It’s June, it’s Fox’s birthday month, and it’s pride month, which means I have to find a character who’s some variety of queer, and also one of Fox’s favourite characters. The good news is that every single one of Fox’s favourite characters is queer, because they’re her favourite characters, and that’s how that works. I’m […]
How To Be: Kyo Kusanagi
Buckle up Dweebenheimer it’s time to KING THE FIGHTERS! Examining Kyo I’m gunning for a lot of semi-blank slates, aren’t I? Kyo Kusanagi is a character from the SNK game franchise King of Fighters which has been going more or less yearly since 1994. During that time, Kyo has had his father kidnapped, fought his […]
The Misbegotten Identity of ‘Ki’
The origin system in 4th edition D&D was one of the subtler bits of design tech they had. The basic idea was that if you made an overarching term to explain how a bunch of mechanics ‘felt’ you could then reference that term. If something worked one way because of how divine spellcasters worked, by […]