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 This is the thread for discussing games designed by Jimbozig, Strike!: Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure plus two newer titles, Ariadne & Bob and Tailfeathers Academy of Magic. Some of this OP will be recycled from the last Strike! thread, but to include info on the other two titles. Click the names below to be magically transported to their respective itch.io pages! Tailfeathers Academy of Magic has the players assuming the role of students at a magical academy, learning to be witches, wizards, warlocks, and all other manners of magical folk. Your table can either use the baked in setting "Tailfeathers Academy" or use the supplied rules for designing your own world and school. Students will attend classes and clubs, delve into personal projects during downtime, and perhaps most importantly investigate the mysteries of the academy and the magic flowing through it. The mysteries of the school represent the meat of the non-combat rules of the game between establishing the function and rules of magic and guiding the students around the academy and between NPCs. When they aren't trying to solve ~magical crimes~ students will get to blow off steam on the court in Kazzam, the official sport of Tailfeathers. A mix of capture the flag, Defense of the Ancients, and chess, the players with clash with other teams both from the academy and from other rival schools to bring home the cup. More on Kazzam later!  Tailfeathers is also [mostly] FREE! You can find the core rules and lore for the setting as well as Kazzam at the above link which includes everything needed to play and then some. Additionally there is the GM's Toolkit available for $12 USD, which will help GMs design mysteries, create new rival Kazzam teams, and much more!Strike!: Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure is a roleplaying system designed for grid-based tactical combat akin to D&D 4e and simple but flexible non-combat resolution that's a unique mashup of Mouse Guard, Burning Wheel, and plenty of its own ideas. Additionally, Strike is setting agnostic; The rules are designed to work equally well for everything from knights to superheros, from sci-fi to urban fantasy. This doesn't mean the game is omnipotent, simply that, as long as your game is about heroes fighting things and solving problems, Strike is an excellent option to consider. Additionally, the combat and non-combat systems are completely divorced from one another, meaning a character who wants to solve problems with magical kung-fu explosions has their combat tools balanced against the person using a dagger and a lute, while letting them keep their unique non-combat options. Ariadne & Bob lets you answer the age old question, "what would it be like to roleplay as Pinky and the Brain, as well as the studio audience?" In this game designed for 2-4 players, players take on the role of the titular Ariadne and Bob, a know-it-all egotistical genius with lackluster social skills and her well-meaning but put-upon assistant respectively. Think Peabody and Sherman, Rick and Morty, or any other number of such duos. Any additional players represent the Chorus, the collective term for minor roles (think of the various NPCs a GM is typically tasked with playing). All roles have unique playbooks that guide the characters and offer different types of task resolution, not identical but similar to PbTA titles. Great for both one-shots as well as shorter campaigns with reoccurring casts.  Characters in Tailfeathers and Strike have skills like in many RPGs, but they also have plenty of other tools to play with outside of combat. They include: Skills: Skills form the backbone of the two games' non-combat rules, and are used in nearly every scene. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons and some other systems, Skills here are specific - No stretching! While not identical between the two games, skills share significant overlap in their purposes in Strike and Tailfeathers. In Strike players will generally create skills unique to their characters, though Tailfeathers features a set skill list with the ability to create unique ones as needed. Skills, and the many systems which work off of them, use this chart:  Tricks: Tricks are like Skills, but you can't mess them up if you don't want to! Think of them as specific applications of Skills. Things like "Case a Joint: You always know the best way to get into a building" or "Fleet-Footed: My character never loses a footrace!" are great Tricks. Each game has slightly different rules for these, but the idea is similar. Complications: A Complication is a character flaw of some kind. Maybe you're really scared of spiders, or your gun has a tendency to jam at inopportune times. In many systems taking similar flaws is, at best, a way to get some extra points during character construction and possibly just a way for the GM to make you worthless. Complications here however are completely in the player's control; You are able to cash them in to "fail", which nets you Action Points that can be used for Tricks and other boons. Fail proudly and fail often. Tailfeathers introduces a few unique systems like these as well, including but not limited to: Tomes and Topics: The students of Tailfeathers all carry a number of tomes, study guides on various magical minutia. These can be used to gain bonuses and give help when performing tasks related to the tome in question. After enough time spent with a tome players are able to master their contents and gain the appropriate Topic to represent their new knowledge, allowing them to keep the tome's bonuses while freeing up space for a new tome on their person. Implements: When creating their characters the players will get to make the first implements for them. These come in a number of shapes (wands, staves, and even swords) and materials, each with their own bonuses for the various parts of school- and sports-life. And most importantly, they're essential when performing... MAGIC!: Unlike Strike, Tailfeathers features numerous list of spells and quasi-magical feats for students to sink their teeth and wands into. Divided by school and difficulty, learning and applying magic is perhaps the most important thing in Tailfeathers, and ultimately frames most of the game's action. Students will be acquiring new abilities as they take classes and seek artifacts, and use these new abilities to solve mysteries, prank each other, and much more.    Strike also has several non-combat modules that work with the above tools to offer fast, novel ways to approach a conflict that isn't worth breaking out the tactical combat grid for. They're basically mini-games, and each one is a conflict resolution system that keeps short cinematic moments from simply becoming a single skill check: Chase: The Chase rules are for those times where the players are barreling through the crowded CyberStreets of Neo New Detroit in hot pursuit of a fleeing data dog hacker, or when their caravan is being chased by another caravan with flames painted on the side. During a Chase, the Runner team secretly pick an action from a list of things like Flee, Double Back, and Hide, and the Chaser team attempt to guess which option the Runners selected. Each option offers different rewards and its up to each side to choose which will best get them what they want (or which the other side is least likely to guess). After everyone has made their choices, results are revealed and each group rolls appropriate skills to see if the Runners have gotten further away, if the Chasers have closed the distance, or if something else entirely happened. Chases are very quick and are perfectly appropriate for a single player to participate in if it doesn't make sense for the entire squad to be involved. Team Conflict: Designed for quick fights or other situations where two groups would be butting heads like a debate or a heist, the Team Conflict rules break a challenge into multiple rounds where the players must declare what their character is doing from a set of choices which modify skill rolls for attack and defense. Once everyone has explained what they're doing and rolled the appropriate skills, the totals are tallied and compared against the GM's "team." Depending on how well or poorly each side did, the situation changes in some way and the next round happens until one group withdraws or is soundly defeated. Tean Conflict also works well when you want the group to act as a single unit but to contribute individually, like 5 heroes in a giant mech cockpit each working different stations.  Based heavily off D&D 4e's combat, Strike's tactical combat streamlines the process while retaining the tactical depth and, more importantly, the fun of getting to control a specialized character in a fight with your friends. Unlike 13th Age and other retro-style games which seek to streamline combat by adding systems like "Close, Near, Far" ranges or abstracting the battlefield in some other way, Strike instead simplifies the math. Characters begin the game with 10 HP and 6 Speed, and that number never changes short of a very small list of feats or bonuses that will modify them. Similarly, while characters have at-will and encounter powers ala 4e and roll to see if these abilities hit, that roll never changes:   No matter what level your character or the enemies are, you'll always know exactly what happens as soon as the die hits the table. Powers, similarly, generally don't grow as your character levels up (though you do get more of them), and small bonuses have been replaced with a much faster Advantage/Disadvantage system. Combined with the static attack rolls, combat moves exceptionally quickly in Strike without sacrificing anything. In fact, the addition of glancing hits means players are often making more decisions over the course of a fight. Character combat growth is handled through additional Powers, passive abilities, and Feats, the last of which are more rare but significantly more potent than their D&D counterparts. Combat also features the titular Strike system, where winning a fight isn't merely ending it with your party still on its feet. Characters receive Strikes for a host of things over the course of a fight, and ending over a certain threshold changes the effects the fight has on the situation as well as each individual character's physical and mental state. For instance, getting 3 Strikes will get a character a Minor Condition, something akin to being winded or angry, and these conditions can affect events going forward. And if the party itself has a certain amount (based on how big the party is), even the fight itself may have different results. A decisive victory against the prison guards results in a clean escape, but taking a few too many Strikes may result in the fight being overheard by people on the next floor, or perhaps the party has difficulty navigating the prison itself. Monsters are also very easy to make on the spot, or you can plan elaborate setpiece battles with unique powers and environments. The monster creation rules make it very difficult to have situations where parties are fighting appropriately-leveled monsters and getting trounced (or the opposite, the fight just being too dang easy). There's even rules for "Adversarial Play" which keeps both players and GMs honest and fair instead of simply hoping everyone Games With Honour.  Perhaps having access to a copy of Strike's combat rules, the ancient wizards of Tailfeathers devised a sport for students to play where they can bash each other's domes in with spells and swords, without causing too much damage - Kazzam! Kazzam is a fundamental part of Tailfeathers, both the game and the academy, and the average 4-year academic campaign of Tailfeathers will feature dozens of matches (including rematches against friends and rivals). Using the core tactical combat rules outlined above players will match up against an equal number of NPC opponents to attempt to score 10 points first. Points are gained primarily through two means: capturing orbs and punching nerds. Each team has a handful of team-colored orbs which must be protected as the other team attempts to squirrel them away back to their own base for points, but you can also unleash hell and get points by attacking the opponent (and some neutral units called "creeps") directly, either banishing them to the Dungeon to respawn next turn or destroying them outright, respectively. Students use their favored implements to modify their abilities as well, replacing Feats in Strike with something more thematically appropriate. A sword-user will deal extra damage up close and deflect enemy sword-users, a staff-wielder is able to snipe enemies from afar though lacks mobility, and a wand-haver has mobility in spades. As the characters level up these will blossom into more extreme and esoteric versions, such as letting wands choose between parrying swords or applying Effects when those would normally be blocked. Tailfeathers includes a good number of sample enemy teams and creeps for GMs to use, as well as different maps with their own unique traps and hazards, such as the example below. And of course you can find rules for creating your own in the GM's Toolkit.   In both tactical systems the traditional combat roles have been cleanly separated from classes, resulting in, well, Classes and Roles. When you make a character in either game you choose one of each, with your Class determining what sort of mechanics you use to beat up the bad guy and your Role telling you what your position within the party itself is. In Strike, Classes and Roles are also setting agnostic, and the names for them and their powers are more an organizational tool than any concrete statement about what you do. People here often call this "Reskinning," and it's an incredibly important part of Strike's identity. Reskinning is taking a Class, Role, Kit, or similar mechanic and changing its flavor to meet your needs. “Martial Artist” is a class, but it doesn’t mean you must use it if your character is a monk. Instead, Martial Artist is for characters who want to switch stances in combat and modify their basic attack. This could be a monk, a shapeshifting druid, a bender controlling multiple elements, and more. Similarly, your monk may be better served as a Duelist, or perhaps a Warlord, depending on how you want them to act in combat. Tailfeathers ties its Classes closer to the baked in lore of Kazzam, but you are still able to reskin them as is appropriate! Each game contains 10 Classes and 5 Roles, though Roles are handled slightly different in Tailfeathers. You're encouraged to use Tailfeathers' Classes and Roles in Strike, though Strike's aren't recommended to be used in Tailfeathers. Please note that at the time of writing this Tailfeathers classes/roles only go to level 6, though levels 7-10 are being worked on for later. Strike's Classes: Necromancer, Duelist, Archer, Martial Artist, Warlord, Magician, Bombardier, Shapechanger, Summoner, and Buddies. Strike's Roles: Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller, and Blaster. Additionally there are two other classes available on Jimbozig's itch.io page, The Rogue and The Ogre, the latter designed by yours truly and also something you get for free with Ariadne & Bob. As Tailfeathers' Classes and especially Roles function a bit differently from Strike's I wanted to provide some more information here. Unlike Strike you are only allowed a single player per Role, and each Role has four specializations available. They are: quote:
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 Below is a list of miscellaneous resources. I'll be adding to this list over time, so feel free to suggest additions if I missed anything! Jimbozig's Itch.io page and The Strike! homepage - Just what it says on the tin. Guide for Strike character creation and leveling chart - I made this for my irl play groups and they found it helpful, so I'm sharing it here. The previous Strike! thread and The thread before that - The first one has some useful info, though the latter is mostly here for historical purposes. Using Roll20 for Strike! and setting up macros - A more elegantly formatted version of my guide from the last thread. Roll20 is, in a lot of ways, one of the best avenues for playing Strike, and this should help you make the most of it. Highly suggested for online play.Fillable black-and-white Strike! character sheet - Created by megane. Strike Core Book Errata - A few changes to core book mechanics. Strike! Enemies Spreadsheet - Handy list of monsters that can be copy/pasted to your heart's content. Created by Gort! Also shoutouts to Ferrinus for his gorgeous art used in both this thread and the various games' manuals.
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Jan 16, 2023 16:23
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 21:46 |
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If you're starting a new campaign you should definitely download Tailfeathers (it's free/pay what you want on Itch currently) and steal the Roles from that first, imo they're just a straight upgrade in terms of fun factor. The Tailfeathers classes also work for Strike though they're a bit more esoteric, and if you do end up using some of them they use Implements instead of Feats (explained in the book)
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Feb 27, 2023 15:58
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Juggernaut uses Ward, which is fairly common in Kazzam but absent in Strike, so you'd probably want to make sure players are familiar with how that works. Additionally Kazzam assumes no role overlap, so that's probably worth considering as well - pretty easy to do too since the various subroles tend to bleed onto each other (ie. Smasher Defenders being Striker-ish).
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Feb 27, 2023 21:04
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