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You might have missed under "Uses for vigour" that you can spend vigour to increase a combat roll by the number of vigour you spend. e.g. if you fight a Wyrm and you roll a 5, you can spend 3 vigour to increase it to an 8, which does 1 damage to a Wyrm at full health. After that the number you need to roll goes down as the Wyrm's health lowers.

Does that make sense?

I'll update the rules to make it clear that you can increase the combat roll past 6.

I like the line between d6 result and HP, as a way to communicate HP but keep word count down.

If I understand your post and JavaScript correctly, the "+1 damage" is only supposed to last for the next fight, and only affects the player. The equivalent of e.g. a strength potion.

It would be interesting to try to introduce some choice into a solo 36-word dungeon crawler. So that it couldn't play itself.

it is a masterpiece. Thank you. And feel free to submit to the jam. I don’t have a problem with it, though I guess they might.

I create solo TTRPGs, so along with a setting I'd need rules/mechanics for play.

Does that fit with the theme of the jam? e.g. if the <8 pages was both a description of the world, and the rules for how to play? Or is that moving away from the intention?

This is fantastic. Thank you. If you try a different method of keeping track of effects, I’d like to see it.

Glad to hear it. I’m interested to see your current equipment, if you can write it out or take a photo?

And do you find it easy enough to keep track of everything in combat, or is that a chore?

If you want to dedicate your life to a project like that, I won’t stop you.

Be careful with that sword afterwards. It’s pretty dangerous.

Despite how all of my games look, I’m a designer in my day-job.

I think what I had in mind was that I’d work with you to produce a more polished layout, and probably change some text slightly to make things clearer where there’s any potential for confusion.

Mainly I’m interested because you’ve hit on a good mix of simplicity and variety here, and I think you could charge a little money for it if the first impression grabbed people.

Having said, I don’t charge money for any of my games, and if we did work together on it I have no idea how the money would work, so I haven’t thought about this practically 😂

I've tried it, it's great. The extra words paid off.

Playtest comments:

1. The character creation says "Roll 3d6 3 for…". I assume the "3" is not supposed to be there, and I only roll 3d6?
2. I love the generated names, and the fact that the names are tied to rewards. This is the sort of casual world-building that doesn't come naturally to me.
3. The horizontally stacked d6 tables are clever. They save space and are fun to look things up on.
4. In the level up section it says "level up costx", which I assume is a typo.
5. I noticed there are some assumptions needed. e.g. "kick down door" is an action, but I could not figure out what that related to until I saw the doors on the third room type. I assume the only way I can enter that room is to kick down the door.
6. Once I recruited a goblin, combat became much safer, though I never fought a boss because I didn't play for long.
7. Exploding dice feel great.

There's lots of variety here for so few words. I think there's a few places where the rules could be made slightly clearer, but I don't mind that it assumes the reader isn't stupid.

If you ever want to collaborate on a slightly fancier/shinier/more polished version of this (still one page, still few words, still lots of variety), let me know. Could sell it for $1.

I haven't checked all 36 words so let me know if you find any typos. Thanks.

Thank you. The eight years of hard work really paid off. Glad to have finally released it.

The starting max health is 15, so a "rest" action would be wasted since it wouldn't have anything to restore (e.g. you wouldn't go up to 20 HP).

But you can always return to that nothing hex to rest in it later, to use the one-time rest.

Really glad to hear you like it. Let me know if there's anything you think I could improve.

macOS didn't flag it as an untrusted app, so I couldn't allow in that way. I used this command in the terminal to remove the "damaged" flag from the app:

"xattr -cr /path/to/application.app"

After that, I was able to open the game, but as soon as I click "Start" the app crashes.

I assume this means the game doesn't work on macOS (at least not the most recent version).

Amazing. I'll watch this happily.

Thanks for these questions. You're right that the rules aren't clear, so I've updated the PDF to 1.2.

To answer your questions:

1. The omega-drive adds one extra move and attack, for two of each, total.
2. It's assumed that the mech docks between sectors, but you don't need to do it manually. Because of this you choose a launch zone at the start of each sector.
3. Once you've defeated the last enemy in the sector, you can move on to the next immediately: no new enemy, and no event.

I downloaded the macOS version.

I am running macOS Sequoia 15.2 on a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip.

When I run the .app file I see this message in a macOS dialogue: '"Not Actually a DOS Game.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin.'

I think it's a little bit of "obsession", and a lot of "I keep the games as easy to produce as possible". Which might be a problem: I assume good art and high production values mean more people will try the games.

Thank you for your kind words.

Yes, that's right. There's only one die roll per character in combat, and there are no decisions to make per-character. It would be a boring game played co-op, I think.

Best to think of it like a JRPG, where you might have e.g. 4 characters in your party, but are playing solo.

These are great, thank you

Thanks, I've sent you an email with a proposal for a first piece.

Still interested in other artists, if anyone looks at this and thinks I don't need any more help.

I design free TTRPGs and publish them here on Itch. I think some art would help improve them. I am happy to pay, but since my games are all free I need to get a sense of what people charge and how much art I could afford.

If you are a new illustrator and do black and white/pen and ink art, and you have a portfolio I can look at, please let me know. If you also give me a sense of your costs I'd appreciate it. This is not for a one-off piece, it's for an ongoing relationship, so I don't have a budget in mind.

The work would probably include enemy illustrations, maps, images for the covers on Itch, etc.

Got it, thank you. It's relatively easy to change the letters to numbers, so if anyone else brings it up, or if you find it makes things harder to manage, I can change it.

Good question. I decided on letters early on and then I assume the reason I wanted letters stopped being true at some point. e.g. I think I wanted to make the first letter relevant to the entry at some point?

Do the letters cause you an issue?

Ha, I'm not sure how I'd fit the explanation for the split 1-in-6 roll on to the page. Do you find that one of them happens too often? And what do you think should be more common out of the remaining 5 options?

Yes a d8 for the item list. I forgot to add it in parentheses. Also the two rolls means you roll the die twice to get two items. I’ll make that clearer.

That’s correct. But that is a mechanic I could add to make it more dense.

Did you find that you didn’t get much loot with the 1-in-6 chance?

Hey, thanks for the comment. Let me know if you have spot any issues.

Thanks for both of the latest typos as well. I've fixed them both and included them in 1.2.

Well spotted again, thank you. I've updated the PDF.

Thanks for the comment. I did a quick play test myself, and I think it’s got just enough structure to make it interesting. Interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for this thoughtful feedback. I’ll think about how to address some of this.

Well-spotted, thank you. I've updated the PDF. Let me know if you have any other feedback about the game.

Thank you. If you play it and have any thoughts, let me know.

Thanks. Because of all the maths involved I never tried to figure out how the enemy scaling/equipment effects compare to each other.

I think at least I’ll lower the maximum stats you get from equipment names.

I’ll also think about ways to make enemies respond to your strength/scale differently as the floors get deeper.

Love to see photos of play-throughs. Especially for a game like this, where it’s hard to keep track of everything. Looks like it requires a lot of notes.

Thank you. It's designed as a solo game but I've realised there's not much to stop you from playing it with 3 other people, since there are 4 team-members. Please let me know if you play, and how it is. It's not had as much play-testing as it should have done.

Luckily the hard work was done for me in terms of the research. I bought a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore a while ago, and flipped through it and noted down all of the myths that might work.

Thanks, this is great feedback. I'll make a note to add alternating backgrounds. I assume the blue outline was added by you to keep track of what you had?