This episode is quite different from the previous ones — it doesn't talk about rules at all and instead I present how I feel about voice acting, what makes me stress about casting and recording, and what I came to learn about voice acting while working on Dawnsbury Days. For more information, of course, you may be interested in listening to a podcast from actual voice actors, who can go into more detail and have a more general overview.
I've sometimes heard it expressed on social media that PF2E, the tabletop rulesystem that Dawnsbury Days uses, is particularly well-suited for adaptation into a video game. Having worked on such a video game adaptation for more than two years, I give me thoughts on four factors that make me agree with the statement that it's a system well-suited for videogame conversion. I wanted to talk also about what features make it less suitable for conversion — such as its form of bounded accuracy that causes each level to be a significant jump in numerical power — but I ended up running out of time so that will be for another podcast.
When developing the first Dawnsbury Days expansion, the Profane Barrier, an early version of the first chapter involved a noncombat encounter that uses the rules for the Chase subsystem of the tabletop game. It didn't work out and the encounter was scrapped and replaced. In this podcast, I go into details on how it worked, why I think it wasn't fun and needed to be replaced, and what implications that has for other noncombat encounters in Dawnsbury Days, and potentially in other cRPGs.
We go over the two remaining important differences from tabletop in Dawnsbury Days and continue with a smattering of miscellaneous more minor differences that I felt were necessary for Dawnsbury Days.
Dawnsbury Days tries to be as faithful as possible to the tabletop rules that it's based on, but it does make some differences. This episode explains what those differences are, and why they still exist. I would appreciate feedback on this podcast: You can give it on BlueSky where I'm @dawnsbury.bsky.social.
Origins and creation of Dawnsbury Days! The game evolved from my 4e and 3.5e projects, and from a smaller game called Quest for the Golden Candelabra. This episode talks about the context in terms of my own education, COVID-19, and the OGL crisis. I speak about each of the precursor projects, as well as about other projects that inspired me. I sometimes go off on tangents about voice acting and game design.