Month: June 2025

When they’re the same day, that’s probably bad, but maybe better than looking forward to the 2028 elections. Anyway, it’s also National Ice Cream Soda Day, which reminds me that during the summer I could get low-sugar ice cream and diet root beer and make parasite floats.

The construction noise was not as bad tonight. Either having the window open less helped more than I expected, or they were using a smaller jackhammer.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 1-2 (Ajiichi): Reread since I got more volumes and then realized I didn’t remember which high-school yuri this was. Turns out it’s the one with the hot fashion gyaru and the wallflower otaku who don’t really get each other, but are shunned by their former friend groups for even trying.

Written (game design): 406:

If there’s no saving throw vs stabbing because Hit Protection stands for
all the factors that keep a character from getting taken out the first
time someone attacks them, then should there be a saving throw vs
fireball? Probably not, but what about vs batrachian transformation? vs
demonic possession?

Among the things I wanted to get rid of was the two separate systems
for determining whether an attack is successful. (That’s one of the
changes 4th ed made that was superior in every way except reminding
grognards of the old days.) Like ability scores and then abilities,
I then wondered whether we need any attack rolls at all and decided
we probably don’t. There’s already a damage roll, which can make
the attack awesome or lame; requiring another different roll to add
a chance of it being super-lame seems redundant. (Not an original idea;
Into the Odd and other OSR games also skip the to-hit roll, letting HP
turn a bad damage roll into a miss.)

Since HP is not getting hit, rather than absorbing damage one way or
another, the roll is more like accuracy than damage, and probably not
weapon-dependent. I don’t want an attack action to be a single blow
anyway; I much prefer the Dungeon World approach is “so you’re fighting
this guy; how’s that going for you?”. (Various D&D editions have said
various things about what an attack action includes, but bigger weapons
do more damage per round, and monsters with multiple pointy ends get one
attack roll for each, which shows that it really is very close to one
roll being one swing.) This works well for melee combat, but less well
for a single big attack like a spell or a black-powder gun.

Definitely one of the world’s great inventions.

My errands did not go as smoothly as they would have if I were competent, but I did eventually get them all done. Sweatily.

Ugh, nighttime jackhammering on the next block. I put on clothes so I could go find out what their deal was, and they say the jackhammer is only through tomorrow night. After that, they bring in the heavy equipment.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.4: Wow, these people are terrible. I guess it really must be impossible to fire civil servants in the UK.

Read (graphic novel): Rainbow vol 2 (Sunny, Gloomy): I hadn’t read this far in the Webtoon, so it was all new but still cute except for horrible mothers. Also, the end! I was not expecting it so quickly, but two big fat volumes is not that short, and the lesbians and their dog got some happily ever eventually.

Written (game design): 352:

What is a hit point, anyway? In war games, it was how much abuse a unit
could take before it lost cohesion or sank or otherwise became
irrelevant to the battle, which is fine, especially when you have
several or many units to deal with. Not as great when the unit is a
single person you’re allegedly identifying with, which is why early D&D
had the arguments about whether losing hit points meant running out of
luck or getting wounded, and how to square either view with what happens
when a 15th level fighter falls off a 100′ cliff. More recent editions
seem to treat hit points as a video-game health bar, where running out
means you’re defeated but otherwise there’s no meaning to any value or
change in value. Even getting the “bloodied” tag at half hit points has
been dropped.

Several OSR games like Cairn and Into the Odd have redefined HP to be
“hit protection”, which is what keeps you from actually taking a wound,
which is at least implicitly option A. Other games relabel it as
“guard” or “defense” or something along those lines, same thing. I like
this approach in general, although requiring the victim to make a saving
throw vs stabbing to avoid a wound instead is very tempting. It would
make combat way less predictable, though, which is more realistic but
less gameable.

Some games have variable HP: if your class and level give you 4d8 HP,
then you roll 4d8 every morning, or even at the start of every battle,
and that’s what you have. I find this idea entertaining, although
players who always roll below average might not. For extra fun, don’t
roll until the first time you get hit.

I am definitely not going with the suggestion I found on one OSR blog
that you start with a lot of hit points but can never regain them, so
your fate is always approaching. There are games where that would fit,
but I’m pretty sure this is not one of them.

I like tapioca, but I might be weird.

Took four bags including all my D&D3/3.5 books to the used bookstore and got nothing back, yay. Successfully shopped for lunch and groceries and books, which was enough errands for one day. Marith is back from the fjords and also not dead from travel, so we were able to visit people and hear about Ayse’s new job and how humans are the worst part, and also about Jus’s love life and how humans are the worst part.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 19: A new ninja joins the party! Also, dream magic.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 205.

Fuck yeah, Wobblies!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.6: The one with the 70s flashbacks and the twist.

Read (manga):I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 4-5 (Yutaka):The overnight study session episode, which veers more into standard rom-com with accidental contact, unintentionally hot borrowed clothes, jealous fiancees, etc, but then back to doing bad things and fraternal conflict for a bit before the summer festival yukata episode.

Read (novel): A Broken Darkness (Premee Mohamed): Our viewpoint character has not really moved on from his feelings at the end of Beneath the Rising, but that’s too bad for him because the world is in danger again, or maybe still, and the person he hates still has some claim to being the only person who can fix it.

Written (game design): 245:

Something the OSR talks about is “tactical infinity”, the idea that you
can use actual tactics (ie, cheating) and have it be effective. D&D
gives lip service to this, but clever tactics can’t actually be more
effective than the abilities granted by your class levels, or you’re off
the power curve and the level-appropriate encounters aren’t appropriate
any more. This isn’t so much of a problem in a home game, but D&D as a
branding entity wants to have a consistent experience across the
published adventures, Living Whatsit sessions, etc, so no incentive to
encourage going off-label.

By the same token, opponents are limited, not just individually to the
actions on their character sheet, but globally to some set of mechanics.
If the GM sets up a battle against ghosts that are immune to physical
damage, that’s not cricket because then everybody’s attacks they got
from their level don’t help and the calibration is off. However, if we
yeet the idea of level-appropriate encounters and having to fight
everything in set-piece battles with only what’s on your character
sheet, it’s fine. If you can’t beat up the ghosts, you can go around them
or come back later with exorcism incense or buy them off with cow blood
or just not go that way, there’s probably nothing interesting over there
anyway.

Hopefully includes air conditioning for our friends on the East Coast!

Went to the office, the train worked out okay going but I need to change it up on the way back, ate some meat and veggies and rice and tea egg, did some work, told other people how to do work.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.8: Uh oh, Murderbot has a plan. And yeah, I thought we hadn’t had the name reveal until now!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.5: The one with the cheerleaders and the federal government. It seems pretty obvious what Nate’s plan is, but we don’t know his motivation yet and there’s probably a twist.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 7 (Yoshimurakana): The unwholesomeness from last volume is still going on in the background, but now Kuroko has an entire terrorist organization to murder, so that should keep her occupied for a bit.

Read (manga): I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 3 (Yutaka): Oh no, someone else has noticed that our heroine is smoking hot and apparently also bi!

Written (game design): 320:

Leaving the primary spell-casting classes aside for the moment, what
other combined classes do we need, if we need classes? Fighter,
barbarian, and ranger are basically the same, they just have different
combat feats/fighting styles. (D&D rangers have spells, but I think
that’s just shoehorned in because as previously mentioned, everything is
spells. Two-weapon fighting and animal companion are more central to the
class.) Paladin and monk are more magical, but again, it doesn’t have to be
spells. Innate powers seem just as fitting, and possibly there’s not a
difference between those and advanced combat feats. Again, I’m okay with
nobody being able to claim punching through a brick wall isn’t magic.

There’s a school of thought that holds that D&D jumped the shark
when thieves were introduced. Suddenly, there’s a class that has
Climb Walls, Read Scrolls, and Backstab on its sheet, which means
all the other classes don’t. 3rd ed somewhat reversed that by
making most of those things skills that any character can have, but
the idea that you can do what’s on your character sheet and can’t
do things that aren’t was pretty firmly embedded.

The major thief ability that didn’t get turned into a skill is Backstab,
which has also gotten progressively genericized until now it has nothing
to do with stealth or surprise or distraction, and just gives a damage
bonus if the thief has a buddy nearby. This is as lame as calling them
“rogues”. It’s not that great to make only one class able to get an
advantage from ambushing people, though. Stabbing your enemies in the
back is a basic tactic, not a superpower. So, thieves are part of the
fighter superclass, differentiated only by the feats they take.

That’s another thing we need a list of, or several lists, or a tree or
something.

Not sure I have anything witty to say about vitiligo.

Finally went in to the office, ate a barbecue sandwich, did some work.

I have not been gastrointestinal since not shooting up on Sunday, so I need to contact my doctor. Ugh.

Trains are weird for at least the rest of this year. I should probably figure out how to take the bus up to the other train station, even though it will probably require me to get up even earlier on commute days. Ugh.

Read (novel): These Lifeless Things (Premee Mohamed): Decades after the stars were briefly right, a young academic reads the journal of someone who lived through those years and tries to find evidence to corroborate it. Humanities researchers get no respect.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 6 (Yoshimurakana): Yikes, that was very unwholesome and completely lacking in redeeming social value!

Read (anthology): Cooties Shot Required (ed Scott Gable, C Dombrowski): Anthology of stories about children in very unusual, often horrific, situations where adults are of no use. Mostly fantasy/horror, some SF. Not all end well.

Written (game design): 298:

Probably due to my exposure to Champions at an impressionable age,
I’m leaning strongly toward building characters (point-buy etc),
but I have an unreasonable fondness for the idea of discovering
characters (random generation). I also like the idea, don’t know where
it started, of using the same rolls that generate, eg, hit points (more
on those later) inversely to generate starting stuff. Like, if you roll
a 1 for HP, you get a giant clockwork dragon to eat your enemies, but if
you roll a 6, you get only an unsightly duelling scar. This needs a
table for every rolled attribute, for every class, so it would be
impractical here with a dozen or more skills times an unknown number of
classes, and it’s not even what I want here. Or rather, I can’t have
everything all at once. Probably.

I’m not sure how many classes we have. D&D has to rigidly structure
classes to make sure every character of a given level can defeat the
same level-appropriate encounter by expending 25% of their resources or
whatever, but if we give up on that, we don’t have to care as much.
(Maybe not none, but definitely less.) Is everyone who learns spells
from some kind of patron the same class regardless of whether the patron
is an ancient tree (druid), a demon (warlock/wizard), or an ineffable divine
presence (cleric/bard)? I would tend to say yes. Then everybody who has
innate powers can be the same class, but are they even that different?
I don’t see why you can’t have a mix. Probably need some way to keep
everyone from becoming a useless generalist, but otherwise maybe we
don’t even need classes.

Excellent day to play Changeling!

Coworker K has returned from vacation, so we are not quite as short-handed. However, boss T is leaving soon, as the new overboss (metaboss? hyperboss?) makes changes to return the larger organization to what it was before new people came in and made their changes. Business, manne. It’s a scam from top to bottom.

Read (manga): FAIL. Tomorrow for sure, since I have to commute.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94.After surviving a night in the Grotto, the changelings split up to try to find some more information on this Queen Salome of Winter. Thessaly, Gretchen, and Everett head up into the Berkeley Hills to try to find the Cypress Yard where Salome buried something. Up in the actual hills, above the eccentric but mundane Berkeley architecture, they find an ancient stone wall ending in a spiral that is definitely a gate into the Hedge, but they have not managed to open it when Everett spots a black dog sneaking up on them. Remembering Black Shuck, the anti-gate-usage terrorist activist they met immediately after returning from Faerie, he gets everyone out of there, but Black Shuck intercepts them further down. Luckily he does not feel the need to punish them for messing about with gates, but he does warn them off the gate, which is particularly dangerous today because a hunting party came through it. Then he recruits the three of them to help him get one of the hunters. Meanwhile, Siddy and Theophania have snuck into the UC Berkeley library through the steam tunnels to see if they can find out what became of Salome. Before they can find very much, though, some of the scaly faerie cops invade the library, with dogs and also a picture of Theophania. Theo and Siddy combine their magic powers to get a senior librarian to throw the lizard-pigs out for not having a warrant, but it’s time to beat feet. They meet the fabled white alligator of the steam tunnels (his name is Sir Hiss, he’s kind of nosy but a fellow nerd) who tries to help them escape, but everywhere they see the outside, those damn lizard-pigs are there.

I got to try to turn people on to The Ancient Magus’ Bride, because it has a church grim, so that was good.

Written (game design): 222:

If there’s a curse associated with being able to spend magic points,
then it needs to bother bystanders; if only affects the adept, then
there’s no incentive for The Man to not forcibly initiate an army of
adepts (need a better name here) and just let them suffer between doing
40-person raids on dungeons or whatever. It should probably also get
worse the more there are hanging around together, so they don’t go off
and form their own miserable cursed society away from everyone else. But
what is the curse? It has to be pretty generic, maybe just attracting
monsters and meddling deities.

If large groups can’t form, though, that makes it hard to have dark
academia wizard schools/temples, though, so maybe fixed locations can be
warded. They’re also a known place people can come and bother you if
they need help, though.

Speaking of meddling, in Kala Mandala the PCs aren’t members
of an adventurers’ guild or anything like that, they belong to the
Bawan Meddling Association. Should adepts be treated like
tricksters/holy fools? That’s probably too much setting for the game
itself, but could go in a default setting (equivalent of Forgotten
Realms, but again we’re way beyond any feasible planning horizon).

Not that typewriters are used much any more, but I wonder what the original inventor of QWERTY would think of how ubiquitous keyboards are today?

Having two people out is super-annoying, although it’s not actually too much work. I’m just lazy.

I have accumulated enough manga that I need to start reading one every day, I think. Or rereading, as the inevitable has happened when I started going through books to get rid of.

Read (novel): This Princess Kills Monsters (Ry Herman): A whole bunch of (original, Grimm) fairy tales overlapped, but mostly the Twelve Huntsman, from the perspective of the bride who gets rejected in favor of the previous bride (this is not a spoiler, the book starts with a recounting of the fairy tale up to that point). It has so many great characters, it has so much fairy tale nonsense, it is great. Also more people should listen to their talking lions, although maybe with several grains of salt.

Written (game design): 330:

In D&D every monster is a member of species. The wicked witch who
lurks outside the village? Just one member of an entire species of
monsters that look like creepy old ladies, whose natural habitat is dark
woods near cultivated farmland. (There’s a closely related species that
lurks in foul swamps near villages.) This red dragon may have specific
plans and goals to play its part in this adventure, but it’s much the
same as any other red dragon of the same instar. Etc. Obviously this
works well with needing a lot of standardized monsters to build the
level-appropriate set-piece battles, but it goes back to the beginning
of geeks playing D&D (so, all the way) because geeks love classifying
and explaining things and writing dungeon ecology articles in Dragon
magazine. I can’t say it’s not a valid approach to fantasy, but for a
game, it seems insufficiently fantastical. (This is more a reflection on
me than anything else, obviously.)

I wouldn’t go so far as the suggestion of one OSR blog to replace every
instance of “a” monster with “the” monster, probably. It’s more
important that monsters not be natural, because if they are then they’re
animals or foreigners or maybe aliens, which aren’t monsters. (Yes,
earlier D&D had foreigners as monsters, but we don’t need that; we have
White House press releases.) A dragon that hatched from an egg laid by
another dragon and hunted for food until it reached the Young Adult
stage is not as interesting as one that was human until the lust for
gold overcame it. There was another blog (or maybe the same one) that
recommended having monsters be somehow the result of social conditions,
so killing them doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Yay! It’s a day for me! I’m a stupid guy thing!

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: The sending to Renwick’s grad student doesn’t produce any results after an entire fifteen minutes, so the Reshelving Squad sets off into Bibliospace. Somewhat later, as they cross the vast empty savanna of young adult romance, they see giant scavenging books circling in the sky way over there. It seems like a long walk, but Lilli conjures a divine meerkat that indicates that’s the way, so they go, and find a grad student, half-dead from the lack of serious literature, crawling across the landscape. This is Hannibal, Sophia Sharpe’s research subject assistant, who has been sent to find them and lead them to Renwick’s. This works great until, while fording the famous Stream of Consciousness, they are all swept away by a surge of best-seller nonsense and washed into a deep cavern on another plane. Which plane? The Library of Sobek-in-Chains, where Bob the Mummy sits on his throne, lording it over his army navy of crocodiles, and dominated in turn by the dark overlord Walter, of course! The fight is not much fun, because Bob has very annoying magic and everything is difficult terrain, and poor Lilli gets death-rolled, but Grimm can subvert the other crocodile, and Walter is only there in the form of seventeen books in a trenchcoat, which Lilli’s shoggoth is optimized against, so eventually Pergamum prevails. Finally, the Squad arrives at Renwick’s. Of course he can work out a variant on the spell that will trap Walter forever, but of course he needs someone to go fetch the fourth book of a famous three-volume set first.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.6-7: Well, this is going quite far afield from the books! Also, the armor is giving SecUnit black-bordered word balloons.

Written (game design): 235 of rambling nonsense:

D&D defines a broad genre, but only a few elements of setting: wizards,
elves, swords, drow, dragons, dwarves, taverns, gods, ancient ruins,
orcs. (Maybe this is why it’s become the default Generic Fantasy setting,
although being amplified like a virus in video games and being adjacent
to LotR probably helped too.) It leaves open who the PCs are, at least
in theory, although somehow being an adventurer usually overshadows any
background and everybody starts with the same 3d6x10gp or standard class kit
or whatever. Is having the PCs set apart by their ability to use magic
consistent with this or not? They usually set themselves apart by their
behavior anyway, even if the GM has some idea of Renaissance social
roles (D&D hasn’t been medieval in decades).

The overarching question is, what do we need in order to replace D&D?
(Not worldwide, I don’t have that much hubris; just at one table.)
Anti-canon ancestry covers most of elves, dwarves, orcs, drow, etc,
unless someone is deeply attached to a specific feature from a specific
D&D edition that I don’t like (ie, darkvision). Any game can have kings
and castles and swords of one shape or another. I guess we’re back to
figuring out what wizards, gods, clerics, etc are like. Oh, and dragons,
because I also have opinions on how everything in D&D is a species
and/or one of an unlimited number of the same.

Also Mermaid Day. Now I’m picturing mermaids riding giraffes, which seems like it could be a Dali painting.

I am feeling better today, so I went shopping and ate a sandwich and read the new Katalepsis chapter, as is my custom. I didn’t try to get up early and take books to the used book store, but that’s a newer tradition and not as strong.

Went to see Shakespeare in the Park’s interpretation of The Tempest as a D&D game, complete with bad dice rolls and Final Fantasy battle music. It was amazing. I managed to get tasty olives from the deli that I rarely go to because it is very busy, despite it being very busy so we could picnic delightfully, and also like a million people from the Palo Alto wing of the social circle were there because Rue (who was in my Scum and Villainy game a million years ago) was working tech.

Read (collection): No One Will Come Back for Us (Premee Mohamed): Collection of horror shorts, many with Lovecraftian monsters but also more Earthly old gods that still require sacrifice. Horrible things under the sea, a crossover with Beneath the Rising, lots of doom.

Written (game design): 245:

If it’s possible to give people the ability to use magic on purpose, why
doesn’t everyone have it? They could, it works for Runequest, but that’s
a long ways from D&D. Depending on how hard it is to learn a spell (or to
manipulate an element, or however we divide up magic), maybe it’s not
unreasonable for everybody, or at least most people, to have their one
thing they can push with magic. But, I sort of want PCs to be set apart
by their weird powers, so let’s go with only a few people have magical
ability. Some possibilities (which could overlap):
– magical initiation is difficult/expensive/classified, so only an
established temple/magic school (again, is there any difference
there?) can do it
– magical initiation is unreliable, so most people of the appropriate
social class do it but only those “blessed by the gods” succeed
– magical initiation has to be intense/traumatic, so most people
don’t want to try (although young people are notoriously foolhardy,
so maybe that doesn’t work)
– magical initiation is dangerous and there’s a good chance of
ending up cursed/crippled/dead
– undergoing magical initiation puts some obligation on you, either
socially or magically
– there are downsides to being able to use magic (attract monsters,
poltergeist effect, surrounded by a creeping aura of dread, etc)
Any of these would tilt the balance of magic wielders in favor of
weirdos who got their magic points the hard way.

Or Winter Solstice on the other side.

Still gastrointestinal, bah. I do have to eat and drink to sustain life, but nothing seems much like food or beverage.

Marith has returned from the fjords, un-be-whale-eaten.

Read (novel): Beneath the Rising (Premee Mohamed): He’s a normal teenager, she’s an incredible prodigy who is revolutionizing the world and may have just destroyed it. Together, they have a globe-trotting monster-fighting adventure where he mostly has no idea what’s going on but doesn’t like the SAN loss (along with many other extremely reasonable feelings given the Cthulhoid circumstances). It’s hard being a sidekick.

Written (game design): 254:

I listed academic magic and divine magic separately, but I think that’s
actually something that started with D&D. John Dee, pretty much the RL
archetype of “wizard”, used his ancient Aztec scrying mirror to talk to
angels. Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistes weren’t secular either. In
fiction, Merlin was half-demon; Gandalf and Saruman were maiar, angelic
creatures. Even in swords-and-sorcery stories, the sorcerers have
ancient tomes of forbidden lore, but they get power from worshiping
extraplanar prehuman abominations.

In original D&D, clerics were lightly reskinned Christian priests, and
certainly there’s precedent for Christian paraphernalia warding off
magic, but that’s usually faeries and pagans, and there isn’t really any
of that in D&D, just a generic protection theme to clerical magic
(except against the undead and literal demons). I’m good with discarding
Christianity entirely from any game that’s not explicitly historical
anyway.

Not sure where this is going. Before, I had divided the spellcasters
into wizard-type and cleric-type, but maybe it’s actually warlock-type
and sorcerer-type, depending on whether the greater power teaches you
spells or modifies you to have innate powers.

Then we have to figure out what spells are and how they work. Ritual
magic, enchanting or creating tools that can be used fast enough to be
helpful in combat? Vancian casting, which is kind of the same thing?
Summon spirits and keep them in cages until you need them to eat your
foes? Of course not all spell usage is combat, but usually out of combat
you have time to do the whole ritual.

I shouldn’t underrate it, but Juneteenth would be a more compelling holiday if the 13th Amendment didn’t legalize slavery to this day.

Working so everybody else can take the day off, which is why I didn’t have to work last Friday. Looks like a lot of customers also have today off, though, since there is not a lot of work coming in.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.3: Unsurprisingly, the person in charge of spies is Too Clever By Half (the extra half is thinking that nobody else is clever at all).

Read (fanfic): Take These Tower Stones (hermitknut): Non-canon sequel to The Goblin Emperor, covering the next year or so of Edrehasivar’s reign, from various points of view. It did not entirely please me for reasons that are hard to articulate. I think it’s that the author clearly wanted to get the AO3 tag and the other AO3 tag in there, and did, but they were just events without much of a narrative arc? Which obviously is an example of noticing most readily in others the faults we ourselves have.

Read (short): “The Name Ziya” (Wen-yi Lee): An antimetaphor (reification?) of the colonized giving up their identities for success in the colonizers’ world, and seeing their culture appropriated as fashion.

Written (game design): 223:

There’s no such thing as an hereditary ability to use magic. Anybody
can learn to do magic if exposed to the supernatural: cursed by a
sorcerer, near-death experience, lost in the cursed wood for three days
and three nights, haunted by ghosts, kidnapped by faeries, even
deliberately inducted into a wizard school or priesthood. Most people
don’t have an experience like this (and don’t want to), which is why
they aren’t PCs.

Everybody who can spend magic points (soul points? attunement? mojo?)
has something they can spend them on to push their natural abilities,
chosen at character creation. Extra movement or talk to animals or see
ghosts or something, not fireballs. Again, could be due to your ancestry
if you want to spin it that way, or a leftover from your origin story,
or whatever. That’s another list to create, along with actions, starting
feats, and saves. We haven’t even gotten to classes yet.

Earlier I was complaining about all classes casting spells the same way,
so how do we fix that? What spellcasting classes do we even want? Since
spellcasting is no longer how all powers are implemented, we can ditch
ranger and paladin, leaving wizard, warlock, sorcerer, bard, cleric,
druid. Four groups: magic from a higher power, a weird power, being
part monster, or actually learning spells with your actual brain.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Still gastrointestinal, so I didn’t try to commute. I suppose eventually somebody will complain, but so far no one has.

Written (game design): 397:

D&D makes everything spells. Gnomes can talk to forest animals?
They cast speak with animals once per day (keep track of that
separate). Tieflings need spooky powers? They can cast, uh…
hellish rebuke, it has “hell” in the name! And darkness, that’s
spooky. (Track them both separately.) Dragons should be magically
powerful? They can cast these pile of spells three times a day each
(track them each separately), these other spells once a day (yep),
and these spells whenever (hope you like flipping through the PHB). It’s
not hard to see why they do it that way: the spell list is the closest a
game like D&D has to a catalog of powers. It’s still a list of spells
for Magic-Users, though, gibbering and gesticulating and waving around
eye of newt. Clerics and druids and everybody are shoehorned into the
same paradigm, because that’s the most generic and least interesting
option.

Actual Vancian casting for wizards isn’t completely flavorless,
although D&D hasn’t had that since 3rd ed at latest, but the current
system with spells known and X slots of Y level and then possible
additional powers that refresh on a different cycle or use a pool
of points with a refresh cycle and yadda yadda is a lot of bookkeeping
for no flavor at all. I’d rather go with a single pool of points that
spells, ancestral powers, random class powers, etc, all draw from, like
Runequest MP. This does strongly imply that all abilities that draw from
the pool are magic, but I’m okay with a fighter slicing through stone
pillars or a martial artist leaping ninety feet in the air
not being completely mundane. I don’t think we need to draw a strict
line between magic and not-magic in any case.

I also don’t want magic to work like electricity with batteries that
discharge and recharge, which is pretty much the only other paradigm
besides spell levels (and even those often get translated into charges)
that we find outside of squishy storygames. My best thought so far is to
say that magic damages human souls, and magic points are how much you
can use before it starts really hurting you. Recovering magic points
(which now need a new name) isn’t recharging, it’s healing. Also this
opens the possibility of taking actual damage to do more magic than you
really can, which is always nice.

Not things that normally go together, unless maybe they mean the shoes?

Not as much work today as yesterday. Got the really smart guy to look at the mysterious problem, but he doesn’t understand it either, which is both good and bad.

Feeling gastrointestinal again. Is this related to the change in dosage of my meds? But I was taking the higher dose for a month without any of this!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings explore the grotto of the Queen of Winter some more, using various poorly-understood magical powers, which confirms that someone is still supporting the grotto, and gives them a lead on a lockbox full of documents buried… somewhere (possibly involving cypress trees). Thessaly attunes herself to the grotto, so it’s partially hers, and Theophania tries to use her magical-security-suborning power to take over the rest of the lease, which results in alarming icy manifestations that feel like the faeries who kidnapped her to begin with. Nobody comes to eat them, but it’s still ominous.

Written (catgirl): 154.

Success!

Cleaners somehow jammed my balcony door. It looks like it’s on the rails, but doesn’t move. On the other hand, when I can get to the balcony, there’s a hummingbird nest near it now.

We have two people out this week, so I have to actually the do the work. Tragic.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.2: Draco Malfoy, MI5 agent (the one who framed our hero, naturally).

Read (novel): Seekers in the Void (Glynn Stewart): New series, jackbooted corporate goons who control all FTL travel and the xenoarchaeologists who need them to get to the dig. Doom ensues, along with a subplot that shows (IMHO a little too strongly) that the author has read Murderbot.

Read (fanfic): The Stairs Beneath the Heart (hermitknut): Fanfic of The Goblin Emperor, various bits behind the scenes of the events in the book, about secondary characters and their adapting to all the changes and the new emperor’s eccentricities &c.

Written (catgirl): 267. No game design today.

Electricity is good. We should stop wasting it on bloated autocomplete, though.

I usually don’t like going shopping on Sunday, but it wasn’t too crowded today.

Written (game design): 271:

No XP for defeating enemies! There’s a plausible school of thought
that D&D jumped the shark when monsters became the primary source
of XP. Now the PCs always have to go through monsters, every fight
has to be carefully calibrated to be guaranteed survivable (whatever
that means in a game with readily available resurrection magic) and
easy to win, but not so easy that it’s boring. This means we need
a huge pile of standardized monsters to build the level-appropriate
encounters from, with a strong need the harder it is to make a monster
of a specific CR. (Obviously you can get some distance with reskinning
existing monsters, but that usually takes about one round for a player
to spot and start calling the reskinned monster by the original name.)

PCs also have to be standardized: if an encounter (especially in a
module or a Living Greyhawk session or some other standardized
adventure) is calibrated for five 5th-level character, it has to work
with any (non-pathological) party, regardless of their particular
histories. I’m pretty sure this is why magic items were nerfed in 4E,
level drain was abolished, all buffs and debuffs are short-term, etc:
combat strength is supposed to be based on character level and nothing
else.

Modern D&D has probably embedded the idea that all enemies must
be fought toe-to-toe in a set-piece battle too deeply to be overcome,
but we can try.

For that matter, do we need XP at all? Even if we do, it should be
Dungeon World style, where experience is what you get when you don’t get
what you want. More on that later.

Because, seriously, fuck that guy and his sycophants.

I did not get a lot else done today, but I did not melt from being in the sun or die of datastarve from leaving my phone behind, so I guess it was somewhat successful? Also apparently there is someone known as “Batman of San Jose”, who is an advocate for the unhoused, which comes as news to me.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.1: MI5 agents who fuck up get sent to Slough House to do meaningless busywork until they give up and quit. Our hero is of course not quitting or even keeping his nose out of trouble. Plus he was totally framed.

Read (novel): Afterlove (Tanya Byrne): It’s hard being a high-school lesbian, and even harder finding true love and then dying. Fortunately(?) the story doesn’t end there.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 5 (Yoshimurakana): Serial killer of the week, no match for Kuroko. It probably was actually smart of the police to suspend her sentence as long as they can keep her on a leash, horrible though she is.

Written (game design): 234:

Race in/near D&D is complicated along a lot of axes. At least without
stats, we don’t have “orcs are dumb” or “elves are naturally criminal”,
but without stats, do we even need predefined ancestries? Why not go
full anti-canon and let players make up their own ancestries? You want
to play an elf, great! Tell the table what elves are like! Pick a couple
of feats from this list, and explain them as being from your
ancestry, or not, as you find appropriate. (Do you have the Strong feat
because you’re a dwarf and all dwarves are strong, or are you just
swole?)

Tangentially, no darkvision! Seeing by starlight, okay. Navigating caves
by feeling the airflow around walls and obstacles okay. But no casually
ignoring darkness. (This goes back to the bad ideas about combat.)

The downside to this is that making a character takes more effort when
you can’t just pick from three lists and slam them together, but of
course there can be a list of examples, with multiple types of elves
(Tolkien, D&D, Elfquest, …) and GMs that have a world already designed
can make the list for their players to choose from.

(This is far beyond any planning horizon, but an idea I’ve seen is
to have a selection of pregens with good character art for first-time
players instead of making them engage with character creation, so
they can go “that one looks cool” and dive in.)

It’s certainly not my fault it’s Friday the 13th! It’s my fault I’m on vacation today, though, since I volunteered to work on Juneteenth.

Took some books to the used book store, Got some tasty Thai lunch, did some shopping, bought a blood pressure machine.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 4 (Yoshimurakana): Absolutely no one was surprised by how Kuroko succumbed to the lesbian cult’s brainwashing, but it was surprising that Yakuza Princess went to some lengths to get her back. Maybe she actually likes her!

Written (game design): 255:

That’s simple actions sorted, but what about opposed rolls, social
skills, NPCs rolling, etc? NPCs do get to roll, this isn’t a completely
player-facing system. We’re not going that story-game. But *mostly*
player-facing is fine. Since there aren’t target numbers,
directly-opposed rolls or using the opposing skill as the target number
or whatever isn’t viable; the GM sets the Difficult as usual. Most
social actions will often get the +1D for having someone working against you
because a lot of people are ornery and self-interested, maybe more if
you’re being extremely unreasonable.

What about when the NPCs try to bamboozle the PCs? Save vs Influence!
Rolls are mostly player-facing, so you make saves instead of opposed
rolls. We could do Fortitude/Reflex/Will, but that’s
not as interesting as the old-school named saves. The names could be a
little less opaque, though, so we have something like
Save vs Influence, Save vs Ambush or Trap, Save vs Poison or
Sickness, Save vs Curses, Save vs Restraint, Save vs Falls, Save vs
Possession and Compulsion. Or maybe some other way of dividing up the
vicissitudes of the adventuring life, but those seem to cover most
things and it should be obvious which one to use for novel problems.

None of these saves are “miraculously take half damage from the fireball
while standing still at ground zero” because I don’t think that should
be a thing. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the area of effect!

I have a whole lot of bad ideas about combat.

We could really use some more heroes to humiliate the KKK. They’re getting uppity again.

Intestines better this morning, but not overnight, so I slept in and didn’t go to the office.

The cupboard above the fridge isn’t deep enough for the pans I have stored there, so I put a twist-tie on the handles to keep it shut. Today the cats figured out how to undo it and get into all the cabinets on that side of the kitchen. This is definitely a cat crime, but I don’t actually care that much about what’s in the cupboard because I am incapable of remembering that cupboards contain things (even drawers are iffy), so after trying extra-twisty securement and being defeated, I gave up. It’s their apartment, I just live in it.

Written (game design): 318:

1990 me would probably find this the most upsetting thing about this
timeline, but I’m going with a roll-under-skill-rating system. In
theory, something like modern D&D’s skill+die vs target is great: it
allows for variation on sides, it’s not too complicated, etc. It even
does work for attacks and saves, because the target number is right
there. It might even work for prepared adventures, where the designer
can put the target numbers in everywhere. When the PCs inevitably go off
whatever rails there are, though, the GM ends up ignoring target numbers
and deciding the outcome of the roll based on Vibes. (It’s not just our
table, it seems to be pretty common across the Internet.) At that point,
why do you even have a system?

Something like Lancer’s skill+d20 vs 10 for success and critical success
on a total 20+ would also work, but at the moment I’m not feeling a need
for critical successes. Getting what you want and moving on to the next
problem seems like plenty to get from a roll. (Although this reminds me
of a different D&D variant I thought of, where you don’t add anything to
your d20 rolls: on a natural 1, it’s a horrible fumble; on a natural 20 it’s an
amazing crit; and on a 2-19 whatever the normal expected thing is,
happens, because after the game people only want to hear about the crits
and fumbles.)

Rather than adding and subtracting (much), your rating for each action
stays the same, but Difficulty is how many d20s you roll. Every one
that’s over your Action rating knocks off one of Success or No
Consequences. Not sure what the level of Difficulty that makes a task
impossible should be; if there are two good results to knock off then
maybe it should be 3, but that seems low. 4? 5? With extra failed dice
optionally making the consequences worse.

Pretty sure this one is also every day.

Intestines still sus, did not go to the office.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 3 (Yoshimurakana): Look, another girl for Kuroko to mack on! Also a cult.

Read (novel): Strange New World (Vivian Shaw): It is way more fallout from the previous book (Grave Importance) and way less road trip than the blurb led me to believe. Still Greta being competent and not too judgmental about who she treats.

Written (game design): 306:

If everything is skills, then we need a set of skills that covers
everything PCs do (that they might do under pressure and have to roll
for, anyway), something like Scum & Villainy’s twelve actions, although
it’s probably fine for there to be more of them, maybe up to twenty or
so.

(Is this really just stats by another name? No, because a) these are the
skill ratings, not just extra numbers that go into calculating the
ratings, and b) framing them as things you learned to do instead of
things you just are is different to the human players.)

Every character has to have ratings in all these skills (except maybe
special ones like magic or flying, for capabilities not all characters
have access to), even if it’s default/+0/8-, so we can’t use that for
determining whether somebody knows what they’re doing for purposes of
not getting more Difficulty when doing the thing. We could set a
threshold, like if you have 11- or better you count as knowing what
you’re doing for anything within that field, but having a low value is
already its own punishment. Knowing what you’re doing depends on your
history: what did you learn to do? This can be like 13th Age
freeform backgrounds: jobs, hobbies, raised by giant spiders,
whatever. If you have at least one that applies to what you’re
trying to do, you don’t get the extra Difficulty for being clueless.

Allowing freeform backgrounds can be fraught, because there’s always
somebody who will take “Literally Batman” and somebody who will
take “Worst Hockey Team Mascot Ever”, but at least here they don’t
give bonuses: how good you actually are at getting things done
depends on your skills. Also, like in 13th Age, every character can
have a few, so it’s fine if one is only for flavor.

Meep.

Still not feeling great in the intestines. Bah.

Read (novel): Renaissance Bear (Murphy Lawless): The boolean returned by bear.isFatedMate(person) is always correct, but that doesn’t mean things can’t be very confusing!

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 4 (Kiyoko Iwami): The big reveal! And yeah, I usually am in favor of the poly option but these characters are barely emotionally ready to date a single person each, if that.

Written (game design): 202:

No stats! The essentialism is bleah, and it only gets worse when you add
in racial stereotyping modifiers. They’re also an extra two hoops to
jump through on the way to getting the value you actually use in play,
instead of just buying the skill you wanted directly. Plus, it’s much
better for a character (as opposed to a wargame unit) to be described by
what they learned to do rather than by some immutable potential their
elementary school teachers saw in them. (Not that ability scores are
even that in more recent D&Ds, since they constantly increase; they’re
just bonuses to predefined skill groups.)

Strength has only a few skills, but it does have other aspects (damage,
encumbrance, lift bars and bend gates, etc) that make it worth keeping.
Without other stats to line up with, though, it doesn’t have to have any
particular shape; it could be less granular, like a feat with a couple
of levels.

Constitution has even fewer skills, only saves (which come up pretty
often unlike Strength) and hit points.

Hi Earl!

Also Writer’s Rights Day, not sure what that entails. Probably just copyright.

Feeling somewhat gastrointestinal. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten Thursday’s pizza on Sunday? I’m not sure what else I have eaten recently that was sus.

Read (short): “The Thing About Ghost Stories” (Naomi Kritzer): Academia plus ghost stories that insist on not remaining mere oral tradition.

Written (game design): 190. In fact, these 190 words right here:

IF you’re trying to do something and you
– know what you’re doing
– have the tools and capabilities you need
– have enough time
– don’t have anything else in your way (goblin attack, blizzard, etc)
THEN
– you succeed
– there aren’t any unforeseen consequences

Obviously, this is where you want to be with everything you do, but
that’s not going to happen. The more of these factors you lack, the more
Difficulty you have. If the Difficulty is too high, then you just can’t
do it; you need to get more resources or eliminate some adversity.

When there’s some Difficulty but not enough to make the job impossible,
that’s when you have to roll. If you roll well, you still get
consequence-free success, but if you roll less well, you have to give up
one or the other, and if you roll really poorly, you may lose both.

Knowing what you’re doing needs to be as binary and easy to judge as
having the appropriate tools, not something like D&D where the GM is on
the hook for inventing a target number and never does.

I have some friends, but I’m not sure who is my best friend. Maybe Marith, maybe Ayse?

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant. Cut to the Temple of Sobek-in-Chains on the Demielemental Plane of Egyptology! Grim, having ended up in the trash compactor with the beautiful high priestess and her roguish love interest (but no wookie or droids), is fleeing the over-armored and under-trained Stormcroc Troopers down one corridor, and the rest of the Reshelving Squad is fleeing a quartet of literal giant crocodiles along the intersecting corridor. They’re reunited, but they have to make a stand! Fortunately Grim’s fey-granted power of animal control is extremely effective when the only significant threat is giant crocodiles, and the day is saved. The restored priesthood of Sobek will not be dismantling the giant sun-cannon on top of the temple, which surely will not be an issue. Decorations and rewards for all (including sweet crocodile tattoos of protection for Thaïs so people will stop teasing her about being unarmored), level UP! And now, back into Bibliospace to finish the journey to Renwick’s laboratory for advice.

We have to bring this campaign to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the summer, as two of our players are moving, and also figure out what to play next. Apparently people actually read this page? So maybe I should have something to playtest by then? And figure out how to explain all the D&Disms I want to get rid of in positive terms.

Read (novel): Like Cicadas (Fiori Manni, tr Emma Sayers): A girl goes to summer on the coast like her family always does, but this year all the girls her age are having puberty and making eyes at boys instead of wanting to do anything fun, and there’s a new girl who is completely amazing, and no one in 1990s Italy knows what lesbians are so great confusion and also great adolescent drama ensues.

Written (catgirl): 268.

I probably eat about the right number of donuts (hardly any), but wish I ate a few more. I never see a donut shop when it’s donut o’clock, though.

Marith has zoomed away on her vacation with her mom. I hope she is not eaten by whales or vikings or the Newark airport.

Read (novel): System Collapse (Martha Wells): Immediate followon to Network Effect, it’s still hard being Murderbot. Its humans are a big help, though. Corporations still the worst.

Read (short): “The Repairer of Reputations” (Robert W Chambers): One of the OG King in Yellow/Yellow Sign stories, an extremely sus young man tries to become king of a sus future (of the time of writing) America based on The King in Yellow and the advice of a mysterious creepy person. Nothing goes well for anyone.

Read (short): “The Yellow Sign” (Robert W Chambers): The other seminal Yellow Sign tale. An artist and his model/muse are afflicted with a ghastly apparition. Nothing goes well for anyone.

Written (catgirl): 222.

That’s every day, for humans!

Went to the office, did some work, ate a torta or at least picked out the insides.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 2 (Yoshimurakana): More horndoggery, more crazed killers, a murder mansion, still no redeeming social value.

Read (short): Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells): Murderbot solves a murder mystery and is still the best.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.5: What’s up with this new character?! Marith and I suspect different things about them, which could both be true.

Written (catgirl): 270.

Insert mockery of the current regime here.

Missed my train stop but still made it in to the office, Coworker D is on vacation, ate some popcorn chicken, had my first 1:1 with Boss T.

Watched (live action TV): Leverage 5.3-4: The one where Nate doesn’t listen, and the one where Eliot helps Parker have an emotion.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 1 (Yoshimurakana): A mass-murdering lesbian horndog kills criminals the police can’t handle in a city named R’lyeh. It’s over-the-top action-horror, not cosmic horror despite the Lovecraftian words scattered around, and all the monsters are nominally human, but it’s not surprising SAN is in generally short supply. Very unwholesome, zero redeeming social value.

Read (novel): Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky): It’s not a Hal Clement novel, but probably as close as we get in 2025. Two unfortunate explorers from a von Neumann corporate dystopia are stranded on a world that’s a cross between Venus and Titan and have to trek across the alien terrain full of alien creatures to get off. It’s more xenobiology and xenopsychology than chemistry and physics, though.

Written (catgirl): 198. Oh, that’s what was behind that door.

Well, Dinosaur Day and National Animal Rights Day, but the combination is obvious.

Read (novel): Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me (Django Wexler): I thought this series was going to take longer, but nope, Davi and her sexy orc girlfriend figure out what is going on (possibly by getting hit in the face with it), avoid breaking up too much, and generally save the day despite what’s going on being utterly terrifying.

Read (short): “Asymmetrical” (Garth Nix): Not a failure mode of demon-summoning I had previously considered.

Written (catgirl): 162. That’s not very much.