Packbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&

Okay, jumping to our own thread for liveblogging our Firelights thoughts.

I think the only way we personally can approach this game is to deliberately break it into a GM and player role.

  • As the GM, we will create each region and its characters as the player explores, generate challenges for the protagonist to face, and resolve questions like "what Approach should you roll for this action?" based on our judgment of the situation.
  • As a player, we will create our Firelight, decide what they are like, and figure out what they should do based on that.

Like, the whole thing feels paradoxically prompt-based and crunchy - we are both telling a story based on vague and evocative prompts and managing resources in a combat-focused indie TTRPG - and those are two wildly different tasks and it does not tell us how to do them both. The only way we can think of to do both is to explicitly turn this into a two-player game where we are playing both roles.

(edit 2: typo fix)

#Firelights #SoloRPGbookclub

Firelights by Fari RPGs (René-Pier Deshaies)

A Solo Metroidvania Condensed RPG

itch.io
Aug 12, 2024 at 4:12pmWeb
Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Aug 12, 2024

I think the other thing we have to lean on is genre.

Firelights is a condensed and open licensed solo/co-op role-playing game about a guided journey across a plagued land. It is a game of exploration, discovery, and challenges inspired by the Metroivania video game genre.

Have we played a Metroid game? Have we played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? No, we have not. But we have watched the entire Super Metroid + Link to the Past Combo Randomizer playthrough on PlayFrame, and that will have to do!

Super Metroid + Link to the Past COMBO RANDOMIZER

YouTube
Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Aug 12, 2024
oh, and also the Information mechanic we were wondering about is used for the hidden path mechanic from "Discover a Region" - so your protagonist is hunting for treasure to get information to unlock progression and yeah, I think as a GM we can make this feel Metroidvanic
Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Aug 12, 2024

okay but actually we also watched at least five minutes (translated: about an hour) of PlayFrame's Hollow Knight item randomizer playthrough so I think we can bring some of that energy too probably

I'm glad we talked this out to get the idea in our head but this is fucking weird

also I think the idea is that new regions are allowed to be nowhere near the cards you roll Discover a Region at, so there's gonna be a lot of "NPCs saying that if you want to reach Vega Island, you'll need to find the tunnel connecting the Shenandoah Sanctuary to Grover Lighthouse" kind of stuff going on

Before you continue to YouTube

Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Aug 12, 2024
actually grabbing musician names off the jewel cases for CDs in our room is a killer way to generate a billion names for shit in our game, maybe we'll do that
Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Sep 7, 2024

I had to call it with three beacons lit. I feel exhausted.

It feels random. It feels very random. And it's hard work trying to make all these random elements gel.

The big things we did were try to create more plot on our own - add risks to face, questions we needed information to answer. Adding risks felt right, but rolling more Treasure to buy more Information to solve unrelated tasks made Curses come more - we fought two on the same damn card.

But the risks thing worked for us - we built enough fatigue to hit two journal entries and ran out of cards to hit a third, and we had one beacon left to find when we quit.

There's just so many details to handle. Every region has four details, and you create so many regions. Forty-something prompts plus the bits of plot we tried to create and tie together plus actually trying to finish the damn game ... it's just a lot.

And the Approaches system feels incomplete - like, what is there to stop us rolling +2 on everything?

It just ... we're tired. We gave it the old college try, though.

#SoloRPGbookclub #firelights

Show threadNora Reed Aug 12, 2024
@Packbat i used to do this in high school for my extremely bad fiction
Show threadPackbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&Aug 12, 2024
@nora it's such a classic technique!
Show threadNora Reed Aug 12, 2024
@Packbat (the badness was not because of the names)
Show threadElectric Keet, SN76489 enjoyerAug 12, 2024

@Packbat It's what I do! Look in the small-print credits on a CD case, the bibliography of book, Patreon scroll, whatever. Pick a couple names at random-ish, swap around parts, do a quick online search to make sure I didn't accidentally recreate the name of a serial killer or political figure, and it's good to go!

Bonus points if the names end up with wildly crossed cultures, like Rashida Petrović or Junko Ndungane.

Show threadlegally distinct octoAug 12, 2024
@Packbat well, I think the most important aspect of metroidvanias is that you will come across obstacles that are literally built for you to be unable to surpass at times so you don't need yo be afraid of both letting it go and doubling back later ans if you got that, I think you can handle pretty much anything of the genre 🤔