Read the Latest Dreamstate News
Dreamstate Legends Development Progress and New Product Releases
How Equipping Loot is Like Its Own Minigame
First, the Character Progression page has been split into two pages. The first is focused on loot—how equipment items interact with the character sheet. A lot of detail straight from the instruction manual has been added, with diagrams, to provide a more clear picture of how loot tetris-ing works. Check it out. Second, a new…
First look at two enemies early in the campaign
Whenever there’s combat, either in a tabletop RPG or a board game, players are usually expecting some trash mobs to dispatch, but…
6 signficant things we’ve accomplished in the last year
We’re going to do better about keeping the website updated. 1. The second art set of level tiles (out of 3) have been drawn and processed There are 63 unique level tiles in this set. Processing requires cropping each piece of art to the exact dimensions, adding in the details, modifying colors, and then assigning…
Gambit is now Dreamstate
We’ve changed the name of the game, but it’s the same 100+ hour tabletop, dungeon crawl, role playing board game. Some of it was technical, but deep down I felt that Dreamstate was more fitting. There was no reference to the name Gambit within the game, especially not in the lore. Dreamstate, however, is central to the game’s story and the blurb What is the Dreamstate? has been on the website since the beginning.
Preview of some walls from our next art set for level tiles
We’re planning on including 3 different art styles for the level tiles. We may include a 4th since it’s possible to have one art style on one side of a tile, and then flip it over to see a second art style. Since we know we want at least three, it makes sense to include…
Watch How the Rogue faked out the Game Master with Shadows—the Shadow System [Video]
Ditching Stealth When we decided to make the Game Master a competitive player, we had to rethink stealth. Stealth as an RPG mechanic works when the GM operates as a semi-neutral agent. But if a player is competing against the GM, stealth doesn’t work at all. I came up with the initial idea of having…
3+ Minute medley of our first 4-player + GM playtest [Video]
After numerous hours simplifying rules, cutting out complexities, and making significant improvements to Skills and Skill checks, we finally were ready to do another playtest. This was also the first time we ran a playtest with 4 players and a GM. We are very pleased with how the playtest turned out. It felt much more…
Why we made individual Skills into equippable items
Skills are special abilities that provide extra damage when attacking, extra mobility, and/or extra utility when players perform actions or engage in combat. Skills are divided into the following Skill Schools: Cunning, Fire, Hunting, Ice, Legend, Nature, Shadow, Warfare Originally, players had to find a single skill book from which they would immediately receive 4-6…
There was just so much gray—improving 937 high resolution art files
One of the staples in Gambit are the 3×3 inch tiles that are used to build each level—like legos. One thing we noticed right away in play testing was how gray everything looked. The Gray Stone tile set is kind of one and a half sets as we’ve also included dirt floors to break up…
Introducing the Bard Class
Your pack is full of the trapping of a traveling musician: colorful balls for juggling, flutes, even a lute. One of the flutes contains a sharp needle, long as your hand. A flask of a personal recipe is firmly affixed to the inside of the lute. Convincing a group of travelers to share their fire…
Watch this large level assemble in 50 Seconds [Video]
Below is a video of the largest playtest levels we’ve designed so far. It has several standard and special encounters, two secret rooms, and a number of traps. We haven’t covered encounters, secrets, or traps in much detail yet, but they have some unique mechanics we are excited to share with you in the near…
Using two D6 dice to track character attributes up to 43 and three D6 to track up to 99—without pen and paper
If you haven’t discovered this yet, one of the self-enforced design restrictions we’ve adhered to is to build an RPG board game that doesn’t require pen and paper. This presents a number of challenges when dealing with numbers. For one, RPGs usually require a lot of calculations to arrive at all of a character’s various…
Iterating to the right solution and aesthetic: Attribute Squares
Iteration is one of the most significant tools a designer has to achieve the right design solution. The character sheet has undergone more iterations than any single element in the whole game. In the diagram above I show 8 iterations of just the Strength attribute and an equip square from the character sheet, yet the…
The Game Master is out to get you: How the GM equips multiple enemies and items as a competitive player.
One of the major changes as mentioned in a recent post is that we made the GM a hostile, competitive player. No longer is the GM a grand facilitator, they are invested and they earn points every time they kill a player character (death is not permanent). So how did we do this? We gave…
When any loot is good loot: Level 1 Playtest Medley [Video]
Watch a medley of interactions at the start of a level 1 dungeon in this early playtest video. Players are desperate for a weapon.
