brisingre's profile

Second test suggests that the character ability really is OP.

The cooperation -x/+x thing is really incredibly powerful. I've got a snake giving me discounts on crafts (his poison resource is an ability and as currently worded triggers Doctor Dolittle) and because it also gives a useless success on crafts it's a 2 discount, it's totally insane. Can't keep this ability like it is. Also we might stop playing with that rule, it makes the game really easy in general, with or without Dolittle.

I might make it just the discount and move the to one of his other cards. That way he isn't quite online all the time in the same way.

I'm not sure how big a deal the card that saves animals is, perhaps he could do without that ability and just sometimes have to lose his companions.

I'm also not sure if he actually needs an unlimited stack of them. It might be better to make him choose a little bit, although I do like the idea of collecting all of them.

First testing suggests he's OP but not incredibly OP.

The animal passive is incredibly strong, but it's supposed to be, that's probably a good thing. Perhaps it could lose the -1 and just give a *, which you can, after all, use the cooperation ability as a -1 instead. That would make him a lot less functional in solo, though -- the cooperation rule's hard to balance around. It's so powerful. Another option would just be "or" but I believe all existing effects like this are "and/or" so that would be very confusing I think.

Being good at hunting is one of the best things to be good at and he's probably too good at that right now. Animal Magnetism is a candidate for changes.

Speak with Animals might see a straight nerf like losing the . It's modeled pretty directly on cards like Yale Graduate and Nomadism, but Hunt and Sneak are both incredible icons for a card like that and it might be doing too much right now.

Friend of Nature hasn't been relevant yet, which is okay with me. It will matter eventually.

Fix It is indeed pretty powerful. I have used it only once, but I got the best-case 3 durability out of it. I haven't tried having a remember party with it to fix all our gear. Such a thing is possible but requires some planning. Fix It is pretty expensive if you don't have the resources on your space and it is much less efficient if you wait too long to use it.

It is also important to note when thinking about interactions with Remember that the only real reasons to remember Fix It instead of remembering an item that matches the top card of the stack you're trying to repair is if that stack is full, or you're saving space in it for something else, or you don't have an item that matches the top card in the discard. If you have space to build an item: it will be about the same price (Fix It is a pretty average cost craft check right now.) It will restore more durability (3 best case for Fix It, pretty easily 4 for an item.) And, best of all, you get new abilities in your item stack (Fix It conserves space in a stack, but doesn't make it better.)

Your suggestions for changing it are interesting.

Changing the stars around is an option, but the distribution of stars across a character's cards is standard. Everybody has the same five star patterns on their five cards--
,
+,
+ ,
+ , and
+ So, if I made it a + card that would just mean swapping it with Speak With Animals, unless I wanted to break the pattern. (Even the distribution of icons across the cards is pretty standardized, for example, 6/7 have their on their item and their + on a hold-in-hand 'mode' card like Speak With Animals. )

Making it banish itself I don't think would work very well. The only character skill card (in my base game, the only skill card at all) that banishes itself is Forbidden Experiment. It provides a permanent bonus, so it banishing itself makes sense. Very hard to feel good about banishing a blue card forever for something as transient as an item durability I think.

Restricting its use with tokens is an interesting notion. I would like to avoid external components like that, 7c's pretty serious about doing everything with just cards and I'd like my mod to respect that -- but that doesn't mean there isn't a good way to do something like this within 7c's system. You could make it so the consequence of Fix It is to take a numbered card, and the numbered cards are a small table that says how much you repair your item for and then discards itself. For example, two green cards (repair 1 and repair 3) and then a yellow card (repair 0). So, you can use it twice before returning the Past, for a total of 4 durability.



My current thoughts on nerfs to Fix It:
-Cut it entirely. His companion ability means his inventory is a little less important, it being a little cloggy would probably be fine. I may have been fixing a problem he didn't really have in the first place.

-Make it more expensive and more difficult to make free, something like 7/0, -3 String, -2 Bamboo, -2 leaves, so you're usually at least spending cards on it. This is probably the very least that has to happen to keep this card.

-Redesign the craft-and-resources check to a small locked check like Examine the Notes, with a fail consequence where you damage your item further.

-Change Double Durability to Set Durability to 3. Double Durability restores 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, or 0 durability to a stack at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. Set to 3 restores 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0. This has a worst best-case, is dead more often, and is worse overall. Unfortunately it also loses something I really like about the current design, which is that it's best to repair gear at half durability instead of minimum durability. If you leave your repairs till the last second, which is when most people will think about remembering a repair card, it's not as good as if you were timely about your item maintenance. Moving that sweet spot to 1 durability, which is the obvious place to use a card like this otherwise, makes the optimal pattern to use it very simple. Just wait until something's at 1 durability, remember Fix It, and repair it. With the sweet spot at 3, whenever you remember Fix It, you have to make a little decision to use your Remember on something that isn't yet an emergency. There's less reason to be prepared.

-Restrict what kind of stacks it can be used on. This feels sort of arbitrary, I like that he's keyword-neutral right now, but I could. I'd probably change the name to something that reflected the flavor of whatever stack I picked for it to work on -- probably Serenity.

-Require successes. It's rare for a craft action, but not unheard of. To me, this seems to run against the basic idea of collecting all the required resources, though, so I don't like it very much, but it's out there.

Yes, that is my intention.

If you eat food from the stack, it consumes a durability from the stack to eat the food anyway, so the canteen activation is "free."

If you eat food from anywhere else, you'll have to consume one durability from the canteen for each piece of food you want to eat, which empties the canteen pretty fast. It's still "worth it" in terms of cards saved if you got decent discounts on crafting the canteen, but it sucks compared to eating out of the same stack.

Glad you like him! I'm looking forward to testing him in the next few days.

New Thread:

https://the7thcontinent.seriouspoulp.com/en/forum/topic/3983/fan-made-wip-john-dolittle-character/page/1/289559/#289559

That's a great choice of color. It's beautiful.

Conveniently, blue-green makes a lot of sense for one of the hacks you probably need to do to mod the adventure deck -- you need a color that you pull before greens if it is present, like you pull greens before yellows. That lets you inject things before existing cards, which gives you access to extremely powerful structures like

-A version of an existing terrain card, accessed from existing numbers, with new arrows pointing to your new numbers.
-Cards that check if you have your a new curse symbol -- if you don't, banish this and take another card of the same number.

I've already had my font question answered, so I guess I'll fix that pretty soon. I think probably after my first playtest though, these are good enough to test with and I want to know if they work.

Thanks so much!!!

He's done! A first draft, anyway.



Dr. Dolittle travels to distant and unexplored regions in search of new animal species. He uses his gift of animal languages to make contact and learn more about them. He never goes anywhere without at least some of his menagerie of animal friends, but, when he awakes on the shores of the seventh continent, he is alone. I suppose he'll have to find some new companions.

Mechanically, he's meant to gradually build up a collection of animals over the course of the game, and gradually increase in power as he does so. Companion animals are usually pretty underwhelming on their own, so he gets a solid bonus on top of what other people get for them -- any action where he can use a companion, he can use his own ability for


The Gift action is a heavy specialty. He needs it to catch his animals, and he's just a nice person, anyway.

Sleep discounts are nice but not too powerful -- I like them a whole lot on Frankenstein, and I thought they made some thematic sense here, so I'm trying them.

The gourmet effect is his heal. It is significantly better if you can eat food in the same stack -- it chews through durability quickly otherwise.

Serenity-Stamina is a good flexible stack. He can make good use of things like Woven Basket and Protective Cover.


His 'mode' is his most straightforward card. I pretty much picked skills that have to do with catching companions and otherwise interacting with animals, but it's fairly strong I think -- Gift action is narrow and redundant but important to him, hunt is one of the best action types to have bonuses on period, and sneak is one of the best to have bonuses like this on, because the stealth stack is so awkward.


I thought this was important to have, because mostly when you lose an animal they're gone for good and some of them are quite easy to lose at random. Testing will tell us for sure how important this is, but I think it's good to have it. It also lets him play another little collection mini-game with his animals -- as he collects animals that die from different states, this card gains more states it can block.

I don't think the wording on this card is quite right, but I'm not sure what it should be. Thoughts?


Dr Dolittle doesn't usually eat animals in the books I don't think. But, on the seventh continent, he has very little choice.

This one is also questionable in wording. The intention is that if you don't draw an empty-handed you don't get to draw a replacement.


Without a character ability that discards cards, Dolittle will have a much harder time with inventory management. This is my attempt not to leave him without tools in that part of the game. It's tough to design a good repair card, it seems -- I very much do not want it to become a one-stop solution for all your inventory-related problems, and if it were too reliable it would be. Hopefully this design avoids that, it's pretty poor at repairing items in emergencies, it's best if you're prepared (with Fix It and ideally string ready) and use it as soon as your durability hits 3. String is my favorite resource. I like the way botany cards expand it so much.






I still have a lot to do, in order of priority:

1. Play a game with him and see what's working and what isn't. I haven't playtested this character at all yet.
   
2. Find a font that matches better. Does anyone know what fonts are used in the actual game?
   
3. Higher-resolution backgrounds, especially on the item and character cards.
   
4. Find or more likely commission some art that matches the style of the game better

This is great news! Thank you for passing it along.




I shall make one. I'm probably going to revise these cards after playtesting and I'm still looking for a better font match, so they aren't a final version or anything, but I guess it won't hurt anything to post them as a work-in-progress. (By the way, what are the fonts used in The Seventh Continent?)

I used accatitippi's templates to make some cards:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=16wIiVmIcMYzcZKTmNMOyWc5eOe0MJyhn

Thank you! I will check out this thread.

Those 'smilies' are very convenient!

If you are interested, the Pyramid Arcade folks were in the same boat. They thought it was a great idea to release a resource pack for fan creations, but they were already doing a thousand things at once and didn't have the time. So, they just sent me the raw InDesign files for the rulebook, which used all the icons they had and let me do the rest -- I pulled all the icons out of it, made new ones where there was something missing, and compiled into a large symbol library (over 300 symbols!) and an icon font.

I would be delighted to get the chance to do the same for the 7C community. If you sent me whatever file you use to lay out new cards, even if it's a crazy disorganized mess like most such files, I can organize a resource pack and send it to you for release.

I'm like 50% done with a custom character card set for Dr. Dolittle. Is there, perhaps, a zip with all the icons somewhere I could use, to save myself an hour or two in photoshop messing with the PNP cards? If not, is that something you'd consider releasing? I'd be happy to help compile them if you wanted, I've done a similar project for the Looney Pyramids/Pyramid Arcade community recently.

(If anyone's curious about the fan character, this is the current state of his 6 cards:)

I guess worst-case, if we are stuck going the third party route, and they don't match, it won't kill me to just replace the sleeves I already have...

I'm pretty sure you're right. I think the stricter one causes bigger problems than I first thought.

Doesn't that make it pretty much impossible to use the brown box abilities on botany cards with it?

If I have the Fragonia card that gives a hunt success, that card would only allow me to use Keelan's ability during hunt checks on Fragonia spaces. But the only other effect that I can use during hunts (I think) is that Vampolina effect -- swapping to a botany card that helps with different kinds of checks, or provides a resource, or is an action won't help me.

Likewise, in order to usefully use that card in place of another botany card, I would need another botany card that could be used during hunt checks. A hunt discount when I could take an action, or a hunt discount when I could use a resource, or a hunt discount during some other kind of check won't help me.

So there'd actually be no way to use it with Brown Box abilities unless you happened to have 2 that can be used on the same kind of check from different plants. There might be one or two such pairs? I'm not sure.



That's my gut feeling as well but I can't think of any for the handful of free-timing abilities I know.

I'm correct about my basic premise, right?

That is:

There's three basic kinds of ability, all of which can be activated on cards in your hand, inventory, sachel & journal, terrain card, and attached events.

- White Box Actions can't ever be initiated in the middle of another White Box Action.
- Brown Box Abilities can be activated during a matching White Box Action.
- Any ability not in a box has no inherent timing restrictions. Abilities with printed timing restrictions, like Forewarned is Forearmed, use that restriction. Abilities with no printed timing restrictions whatsoever, like can be used literally whenever you want.

Another similar question pertaining to Keelan's ability:

It seems self-evident that you can use it mid-check to use an ability that could normally be used mid-check, like It seems equally self-evident that you cannot use it mid-check to use an action ability like

Assuming that's correct, it doesn't have a timing restriction of it's own, but it inherits the timing restriction of the card you wish to use. Does it also inherit the timing restriction of the botany card you're using to satisfy the "If you could use a botany card" requirement? That is, if I'm in a space with a Fortiflore and my only fortiflore card is , and I've just drawn the cards for a check and want to use can I do that? Or is it the case that, because I couldn't use my Fortiflore card right now (can't take actions during other actions), I don't fulfill the "If you could use a botany card" requirement during a check?

Yah, I could see how that note doesn't make it totally clear. Definitely supposed to read all the text you're shown though.

Read them. If a consequence is supposed to be a surprise it'll just tell you to draw a numbered card and the actual consequence will be on that card. (There's a note on Page 14 about this.)

A response in my BGG thread pointed out that trading item stacks to another character is in a similar situation -- it isn't an action, and doesn't specify when the ability can be used. So, potentially, it could be done during action resolution.

He and I agree that the answer is most likely no, but: can you trade items during the resolution of a check?

It would have very limited use if you can, because in general anybody who could trade a relevant item into a check could just get involved in the check at the beginning. (It is only useful to trade items at the very beginning of the check, because after the item step you won't be able to use them. You could use it to sneak items from non-involved characters into red-bordered checks, that's about it.)