We are just a short distance away from unlocking the $20,000 stretch goal with one week left in the project. Thank you to all the backers that have helped us get to this place.
We are performing so far similar to my last project which if we keep that up ... it would unlock 3 more stretch goals for us at least. So looking forward to watching the last week.
Wanted to share the history of the evolution of this project with the backers.
History of Tyche’s Pouch of Mixed Fortune / Modified D20s
The original concept was just to make some pre-modified D20s that a DM could hand out to players to represent boons or curses during a game.
The dice can still be used for that, but working on these dice evolved into a concept for a real-life magic item. An item a player can find during a dungeon crawl or being blessed at a temple and the DM hands them a physical real-world item to represent what was found in game.
We wanted the concept to be balanced so that the game item could be used often to get the benefit of paying for it and not just be one off power artifact. The real-world economy is tough on DMs and wanted this to be a find the players could enjoy using more than once without being a in game power balance disruptor.
So, we balanced the math to be positive but not too positive. 3 negative modified D20s and 5 positive modified D20s in the bag. The total of the negative modifiers is -9 and the total of the positive modifiers is +15
To make the concept easier to quickly understand your fortune, we linked the dice to the rainbow. So Black starts the -5 modifier and then you have ROYGBIV order for -3 to +5. Pulling a gem/D20 from the pouch gives you an instant visual for your fortune without needing to inspect the die to see how it is modified.
Next, we needed a good thematic link from where the power of the pouch comes. Researching we found Tyche was a Greek goddess of fortune from real life history. Then we saw the history that was the sealer for finding our power source, Tyche was the goddess controlling both good and bad fortune. Tyche was who you prayed to for luck and also who you spoke of when your successful neighbor has an accident or your lucky streak at gambling ran out. She is the balancer of fortune.
Finally, when playtesting we found some DMs did not like the concept of the -5 and +5 D20s causing greatly expanded Critical Hits and Critical Failures. Some DMs loved that chaos but we understood the desires of some to keep such events to a 5% chance. To help that, we put a star on both the lowest and highest result on the D20 so that it is easy to identify what would have been the 1 or 20 face of a standard D20 for control Criticals.
Enjoy the new dice and magic item … it was a lot of fun to create.
Tom @ Impact!
