Month: July 2025

Friend noodles!

Went to the office, did some work, ate some dumplings, sat on the phone with a customer but contributed nothing. Also made a dumb mistake trying to help another customer, but did get it sorted.

Marith gave me some of her vegetable vegetable vegetable vegetable chicken so I wouldn’t die. Look, vitamins!

Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 1 (Umi Takase): She’s a trans girl who is publicly out for the first time now that she’s starting high school. She’s her childhood friend who is addicted to getting mad on behalf of others and also is in love with her. Together they fight crime gender norms and make friends. Is it just me, or is Yankee flirting with Anger Goblin?

Written (game design): 385:

I was thinking about doing things to enemies in combat besides scoring
hits to wound them, and wondering why you would bother to do that after
taking the trouble to chew through all their HP, except in very special
circumstances. I might be falling into the fine-grained D&D paradigm,
though. In D&D, if someone hits you with a special attack that knocks
you down, you remain motionless on the floor, with the Prone debuff, while
somewhere between 0 and N-2 other units activate, after which you can
spend some of the few footsteps allotted to you to stand up, move to
another square, swing your sword once, etc.

If I haven’t yet been talked out of having a round be a larger chunk
of combat and actions be simultaneous, though, then getting knocked
down is just a thing that happens during the round, and you can get
back up without having to account for every muscle contraction to
the Time and Motion Consultant. Knocking someone down, or throwing
pocket sand in their eyes, or whatever, is just Aid Another, if
it’s much of any action. I think.

Or maybe the key is that rolling your attack die against somebody you’re
engaged in combat with isn’t an action. You’re in weapon range, you get
to just roll your die (but so do they). Your action is something more
interesting like “keep them away from the wizard” or “push them off the
cliff”. I’m dubious about there being a “fight this guy harder” action
even if it’s not clear what else you would do in a one-on-one duel, but
“fight all these guys” so you can attack more than one of them is
probably valid.

Another list that we need: actual actions while fighting somebody.

    • Defend a person/place/thing
    • Push your opponent back or otherwise position them
    • Open your opponent up to attack by your ally
    • Also attack another opponent
    • Intimidate your opponent (force a morale check)
    • Seduce your opponent (got to draw in those Thirsty Sword Lesbians players…)
    • Play to the crowd
    • Knock something away from them
    • Strike at a weak spot

These are the things that you’d roll for if there end up being
combat action ratings; some obviously use another action like Issue
Commands to intimidate or Put On a Show to impress the crowd.

Got it covered!

Did some work, listened in on a twitch stream of somebody I know who was playing a die-horribly-in-a-haunted-house game with some other people, was not very useful.

No gaming, one person is sick and another had to take her dog to the vet. (The dog is fine.)

Spent all evening trying to get support for my phone so I can resume transferring epubs in the manner to which I have become accustomed, but to little avail.

Read (manga): FAILURE.

Written (anything): FAILURE.

 

Sure, they’re handy and probably deserve a day.

Had to get up early for cleaners, who put things in very odd places but did clean the surfaces as I required.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 34 (Tomohito Oda): The cultural festival, featuring lots of ramen. They’re like halfway through senior year, there can’t be that many volumes left for Komi to reach 100!

Written (game design): 290:

Backgrounds are freeform, we don’t need much of a list, but starting
feats (powers? abilities? schticks?) need both a list of options to pick
from, and (eventually, or maybe first) rules for creating new options.
Although it should probably be point-based, I’m not sure we need costs
other than 1, 2, and -1, at least for the basic list, although I might
be horribly wrong.

What goes in this list? Definitely the physical and magical advantages (or
disadvantages) of ancestries: enhanced senses, talking to animals, being
huge or tiny, breathing water, resistance to poison, stuff like that. If
we’re going classless, then the basic enabling abilities like being able
to cast spells would be here. A lot of D&D abilities like being able to
stab people in the back don’t count, because anybody can do them.
Strength, higher starting MP, starting HP, maybe faster movement (or
possibly the inverse of all of these as disads). Maybe a higher starting
rating for an action. Maybe extra backgrounds. If we’re classless, then
a larger or smaller attack die than the default would go here (otherwise
it would depend on your class, like Dungeon World). Maybe separate
attack dice for melee and ranged and magic, but that depends on combat
to get sorted out.

Earlier I suggested everybody who can spend MP has a natural talent they
can spend them on, apart from any class or class-like abilities, so that
would be a free pick on a sublist here.

If there aren’t any classes, then everything like combat techniques,
spells, opening locks with ki powers, summoning shadow monsters, turning
undead, etc, etc, would be on this list too, which isn’t bad but we
might need to set up a good system of prerequisites.

Also Embrace Your Geekness Day, which is very fitting.

Failed to get up early or be energetic or organized, but somehow made it to Mike’s birthday party in the depths of Palo Alto, saw some people I had not seen for 1d12 months or so (and some people I saw yesterday), ate some party food, watched a game about dragons, eventually got a ride back to San Jose with Ken and Jus.

Jus came up to my apartment and started to make friends with Sage (she received a voluntary sniff!), but Nightvale was not at home to visitors.

Read (novel): Stone and Sky (Ben Aaronovitch): Peter, Bev, and the entire crew including Abigail and her favorite fox try to vacation in Scotland, which of course is full of oceanic skullduggery. Peter opens with “Before we continue, I’d like to point out that a) none of this was my fault and b) ultimately the impact on overall North Sea oil production was pretty minimal.” and that basically covers it. Also Abigail is still the best.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 33 (Tomohito Oda): Sports festival, a very strange college admissions test, various tangential friendship bits. You can do it, Komi!

Written (game design): 464:

That’s actions (which still need a better name, maybe Moves if the PbtA
baggage isn’t too unwieldy?), what about backgrounds? I see three types:
professions, social circles, and regions.

Professions, or maybe better called occupations, since they don’t have
to be profitable, are straight-forward. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,
Spy, Huy Braseal Civil War Reenactor, Woodsman Woodsfighter,
Courtier, Courtesan, etc. Not sure about things like Monster Hunter or
Dungeon Explorer, but that’s a matter for individual campaigns. As
mentioned, this is susceptible to the “Occupation: Literally Batman”
issue, but because it doesn’t give bonuses, only avoid penalties, maybe
it’s not that bad. Alternately, we could make a list that people have to
pick from, but that seems like work. An occupation background is
appropriate for doing the things that occupation does, knowing about
famous practitioners of it, assessing the things it works with, etc.

Social circles are any group where status carries the same markers
and the same jargon is used. Depending on the campaign, this might
be Nobility, Criminals, Horse Tribes, etc, or it may be broken up
more: Nobility of the Central Kingdoms, Nobility of the Coastal
City-States, etc; or even Nobility of This Specific City-State,
Criminals of This Specific City-State, Horse Tribes of the Grey
Banner, etc. The more fragmented the setting, the smaller the
groupings, mostly. A social background is appropriate for dealing
with members of that group socially, recognizing other members of
the group and assessing their status, etc. It also gives you whatever
language is used in that group, or maybe a couple.

Regions are similar in that how much a background covers depends on the
campaign: could be Forests, Forests of the North, This Specific Forest.
Cities also fall under this, but are pretty much each their own region
unless they’re very close. A region background is appropriate for
wayfinding, hunting or otherwise gathering resources, knowing what
resources are available, knowing what threats are there and how to avoid
them, etc.

A starting character should get one of each, and probably a couple of
extra slots to reflect complicated backstories.

I used paper bags to take books to the used book store, but then had to take more than a quarter of them back home. Used reusable bags for grocery shopping and taking watermelon snacks to anime.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 20-21: The party tries to integrate Izutsumi the ninja, with limited success, but then they get to the Heart(?) of the Dungeon(?). Not sure how they’re going to end this, since this like volume 6 of the manga and we’re almost done with the season.

Read (graphic novel): Huda F Are You? (Huda Fahmy): Autobiographical story of a hijabi Muslim girl who moves to Dearborn, which despite being full of Muslims is not any less horrible, because being a teenager always sucks (Had time to read all of this while waiting for my books to be processed at the used bookstore, so I didn’t buy it, but not bringing a book in is as good as getting rid of one, right?)

Written (game design): 343:

Do we need a list of actions? (Eventually.) Do we need a better name for
them? (Absolutely.)

    • Attune to the Flow of the Universe – see the unseen, recharge MP
    • Craft Something – build a shelter, repair armor, smith a sword
    • Creep Around – hide, sneak, grab things when no one’s watching
    • Get Over There – leap chasm, swim moat, climb cliff
    • Heal an Affliction – wounds, disease, poison, curses
    • Issue Commands – lead troops, interrogate prisoners, orate stirringly
    • Mingle with Crowd – blend in, don’t stand out, pick up gossip
    • Put On a Show – bardic performance, distraction for the ambush
    • Scavenge Something Up – search the room, hunt for food
    • Sway Hearts and Minds – make friends, subtly grill people, seduce dragons
    • Tinker With a Machine – pick locks, disarm traps without wrecking them
    • Wrangle a Beast – befriend wild animal, bait for guard manticore

That’s 12, which is about the smallest number I was expecting, so I’m
probably forgetting something. I could add some for doing fancy combat
tricks in melee/ranged/magical combat, but I bet we could fold that into
the attack roll.

These all have an implicit “under pressure” attached, since if you have
an appropriate background, all the needed tools, and ample time (ie, 0
difficulty), you don’t have to roll and it doesn’t matter what your
rating is.

Another thing that makes no difference when coding the video game
version but could matter to players: does every character have a rating
in every action, or is there a default for everything they don’t
specifically have? For that matter, does everybody have the same set of
actions? Maybe some characters have special ones like “Perform Ritual to
Empower Equipment Against Demons” or whatever their special deal is. We
don’t want those to overlap with the basic moves, though; narrative
positioning to use those in weird ways is the province of abilities
(which also need a better name).

NPCs can definitely have just the important actions and one for
Everything Else, to keep the load on the GM low.

Apparently I’m not British enough.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.7: The one with the car guy and the Mafia guy.

Read (manga): FAILED. Because I suck.

Read (novel): The Lies Arcana (Glynn Stewart): Seventeenth or so in the missiles-in-space-with-magic series, following the diplomat we picked up in the last couple of books and the spy ship captain from a while back. Despite the massive undertaking from last book, there is a whole lot that needs to be done, and also some secrets revealed both in and out of character.

Written (game design): 274:

If HP is Hit Protection, is MP Magic Protection? Conjuring up a
lightning bolt to throw at someone probably goes against their HP,
since you’re trying to hit them with something, but trying to put
a curse on them, or otherwise targeting them as a person, could go
against MP. Is using the same stat for defense and fuel bad? On the
one hand, it would cut down on the numbers on a character sheet (or
the associated postit note for numbers that change a lot), but on
the other hand, it would be a weird dynamic in combat. I’m not sure
spending HP for martial abilities is correct when it’s defense and
not health, or ever, so there could be an annoying inconsistency,
but I’m not sure it’s not, so ugh.

An alternate flavor for MP could be synchronization with the flow of the
cosmos, which gets disrupted when you push on the cosmos to do magic.
The hit from overspending might be more wild magic-flavored than soul
damage-flavored, but otherwise the implementation would be about the same,
just less metal.

Another difference between HP and MP would be that HP can be recovered
in combat, or at least pretty immediately outside of combat, since
it’s “just” energy and alertness. I’m not sure how fast MP should
recover, though. Maybe it’s okay to also recover quickly? It depends
on how much you can do with a spell, I guess, that determines how
powerful being able to cast spells all day is. What does “powerful” even
mean when there’s more to life than level-appropriate encounters?

Every day is kitten day, for every nation! [gavel emoji]

Went to the office, had a chat with New Boss² A (he did most of the chatting), had a chat with Newish Boss³ M, ate a Beyond Meat wrap, finally made progress on the thing I’ve been putting off. The explanation for Former Boss² B’s dismissal was kind of sus, but I don’t know enough to refute it.

Beyond Meat sounds like it should be delivered by TARDIS from the far reaches of the continuum.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.10: Despite all the changes made for TV, it did end in the same place as the first book, so that was good. There may have been Feelings. Also, set design! I hear a second season has been approved, although no idea when it will come out or what it will cover.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 3 (Sai Naekawa): Rival girl monster makes a strong showing with the dramatic gesture!

Read (short): “Hart-Struck” (Murphy Lawless): It’s an entire Virtue Shifter novella compressed into one scene!

Read (manga): Lonely Castle in the Mirror vol 5 (Mizuki Tsujimura, Tomo Taketomi): The dramatic conclusion, in which we find out what everybody’s personal deal was, and also what the deal with the castle was, and what happens when there’s a wish and everything. The End!

Read (short): “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” (Martha Wells): A non-Murderbot (but ART) story, somewhere between Artificial Condition and Network Effect, where we see what kind of stuff ART’s crew gets up to and also maybe ART has a feeling.

Written (game design): 372:

Other magic I don’t like, even though it does something instead of
plusses, is remove curse/dispel magic. A proper curse should take more
than a single generic spell to get rid of. Likewise, unenchanting
something enchanted should take more than a single abracadabra. We spurn
the level-appropriate adventure, negative (or positive!) consequences
don’t have to be gone by the next morning to keep everything calibrated.

I also dislike detect magic, although that might be a matter of
presentation. We need more enemy mages appearing as hundred-handed
god-monsters in the astral realm and fewer color-coded arrows, but that
may be a lot of work for the GM.

Related to remove curse, I want to unify curses, diseases, and poisons
conceptually and mechanically, but I’m not sure how. It’s either a minor
issue that can be put off, or a key to the entire system.

For that matter, I don’t even know exactly what to do with the kind of
wounds PCs are expected to accumulate. When the enemy’s attack roll
exceeds your remaining Hit Protection, you take a hit, but what does
that mean? Are you out? Do you go through some degrees of woundedness
before being taken out? Should there be something like a roll modified
by how much attack exceeds HP, so that a better attack hurts more? I
like that because it offers the possibility of varying the results based
on whether you’re a huge dragon, or a slime zombie with no vital organs,
or whatever.

A lot of OSR systems have Dismemberment & Disfigurement tables, or
something named very similarly, to roll on when you take a serious
wound, but I may be too attached to my characters being cute to go for
that. We are assuming some kind of healing magic, though, so temporary
disabilities are fine.

I don’t think I want healing in combat, but that opens up the whole can
of worms about what magic is available and how fast it can be cast. It’s
not fantasy adventure without fireballs, but ritual magic is overall
more interesting.

Alas, I am old and useless and only have fictional horizons.

Went to the office after vacation, discovered that Boss² T was gone (which I had expected) but also Former Boss² B, which was not expected! He was my favorite! Bad company! I am not sure what happened there, but I do not approve! Nothing I could do, though, I have no power and am on a different continent. Ate a burger, did a small amount of work.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 2 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): Our MC accumulates more cute and powerful girls in a way that is not explicitly gay but is suspiciously homoerotic and definitely ridiculous.

Read (novel): The Void Ascendant (Premee Mohamed): Despite the ending of the previous book, our main character is still stuck with existence, and fate isn’t done with him yet, as he will soon discover. Further interdimensional shenanigans ensue, until reaching an even more definitive conclusion than before. Probably.

Written (game design): 176:

Before I digressed, I was going to say that it’s lame for magic items,
or spells, or magic in general, to give plusses. Magic should give
narrative positioning, so you can do things you couldn’t otherwise
(which if we stick with the system from earlier, is expressed
mechanically as dice of Difficulty). As a
side effect, maybe they can give you a higher action rating for
something, but as previously mentioned, it should be a flat value. In
summary:

BAD: this item gives you +2 to Scrounge for doing the thing
MAYBE: this item raises your Scrounge score to 15 for doing the thing
BAD: this item removes 1 Difficulty when you do the thing
GOOD: this item serves as the tools needed for doing the thing
GOOD: this item lets you read any language needed for doing the thing

I guess that’s how languages work now, just +D on social tasks if you
don’t share a language.

Last day of vacation. I took four bags of books to the used bookstore and only had half a bag rejected, got my medication sorted out so hopefully I can both not die and not poop until I want to die, and did some additional shopping that I failed at yesterday. It was a reasonable fake Sunday, but I had no sundae.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Everett is at work, leaving the rest of the crew at loose ends. Siddy declares she needs a walking stick, so everyone goes to ask Troll if he knows where to get one, and he shows them how to use BART tickets to get to the Goblin Market. Poor Siddy has some PTSD flashbacks from having once been sold at a goblin market herself, but manages to buy a walking stick without getting trapped into any unwanted bargains. Thessaly does not put the moves on the stick vendor dryad, although she clearly wants to. Theophania checks out the book stall, but it seems a little sketchy so she decides to maybe come back later when she knows more about this, and comes up with a clever plan to get materials for Siddy to make her some new shoes. Nobody is sure exactly what Longfingers has been doing.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 1 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): An office lady works herself to death and gets reincarnated as an immortal witch who can just chillax in her extremely low-risk corner of the LitRPG world. Unfortunately for her, the XP adds up, and eventually somebody realizes she is the most powerful ever. Now she can’t chillax because cute girls (or monsters in the form of cute girls) keep coming to kill/serve/challenge/entreat her and she has to adopt them all and also fight dragons.

Written (game design): 307:

In OG D&D, one of the main paths for advancement was famously More Stuff, by
which we mean magic items. Equally famously, a lot of that was to get
More Plusses: +1 longsword, +3 plate mail, +6 headband of intellect. (I
like the way 5E does this better: a headband of intellect doesn’t give
bonuses to stack on top of the different-colored bonuses you already
have to Int, it just makes your Int 19. This is an approach I want to
use heavily when we need bigger numbers.) To be fair, there are a lot of
additional abilities as well: necklace of fireballs, lyre of building,
vorpal sword. These days, those are mostly spells that use a dedicated
pool of charges to be tracked separately, but whatever.

If spending magic points is wearing away your own soul, how do magic
items work? Do they have domesticated spirits inside them to do the work
of magic on the user’s behalf? That works with the 5E thing of magic
items possibly breaking if you use the last charge, although working a
spirit to death is a lot darker than just wearing out a tool. It could
also be that the magic item only provides the pattern, and you have to
do the magic yourself to stamp it into the fabric of reality. That’s not
as good for items that just do their thing, like the vorpal sword, but
it does remind me of my idea from long ago where spells were astral
tools that you had to equip, so a powerful mage would look like a
many-armed idol with a different symbol in every hand.

Every day is Chocolate Day!

I slept way in (and had more dreams than when I was sleeping in Roseville, which suggests I need to fix something here) but did manage to go chocolate grocery shopping and read Katalepsis. Should probably have done more shoppings, but whatever. There’s always tomorrow.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.9: We thought there were ten episodes, but nope, looks like the end! Also, Dr Mensah has reached the levels of badassery she started with in the books.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 20 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, finally a new volume! It’s mostly recovery over Christmas vacation for all the characters after the last plot arc, plus small talk with the gods of Britain, foreshadowing of doom, mistletoe smooches and talk of romance, etc.

Written (game design): 366:

One thing I noticed about Pathfinder that’s probably not as annoying as
the others is that you have to recalculate every number on your sheet
every time you level, because level is the most important aspect of your
character. It would be unseemly for a 1st-level character to get more
than +1 in any bonus type, but by mid-levels, you have to be able to
stack bonuses to roll skills at +30 or +40 (or so I hear). Over here in
the land without level-appropriate encounters, we don’t need
ever-increasing target numbers–hey, we don’t even have target
numbers!–so do we even need levels? There are two things that come with
levelling up: bigger numbers, and more/better abilities. And I guess more
uses of abilities, which is a combination. Since we have a single value
for magic points instead of different trackers for every ability, the
equivalent would be reducing the cost.

Since spending MP is doing damage (to your own soul) I was thinking
it should always be random; costs are d2, d3, d4, d6, etc. It’s
magic, you can never be certain how much you can use without hurting
yourself, or whatever taking a hit from overspending MP is. (It has
to be painful, so casting a spell for 1d4 MP when you only have 2
left is a hard decision.)

It’s hard to quantify some aspects of how much D&D characters improve
from level 1 to level 20. Since NPC numbers improve as the
appropriate level for the encounters improves, the chance of success on
a skill or attack doesn’t change much (until you get to things like
expertise in 5E), but they get about 13-15x in HP and something like
5-10x in weapon damage (spell damage is just a mess with area effect vs
various groups, damage types and resistances, etc), which seems like a
lot. HP (Defense? Guard?) and attack dice are more a measure of skill,
though, so I guess it depends how many regular soldiers a hero is
supposed to be able to hold off for how long.

Watch me agonize about how much characters should improve and then end
up recreating the D&D curve.

Continuing my streak of failure for the ten thousandth consecutive year!

Ate waffles and sausage, ran the stuff that Ayse and Ken and kids forgot out to them before the drove off, played Daybreak again and almost lost due to a lack of good cards but barely won, found some more stuff that was left behind, and finally trundled back home in stages. It was a very nice vacation and I feel kind of dumb for not going on Memorial Day. Next visit is probably Labor Day, unless the whole US is doing a general strike that day (which we probably should unless the Nazi fucks implode more quickly than anticipated).

The cats are doing fine because Marith took excellent care of them.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 3 (Chomoran): It’s the culture fair where both leads have to wear a maid outfit, but ML is kind of into it. Also he has just enough time to give some backstory before the next huge monster attacks.

Written (game design): 306:

I spent the long weekend talking to people about Pathfinder, which
seems to be like D&D3E with all the things I hate magnified. Most
classes are spellcasters and also have a bunch of unique powers
that are basically spells but use slightly different mechanics and
each have a completely different formula for how much you can use
them. For a new character (I didn’t work my way through the SRD to
higher levels), most spells give a small bonus to one or more of
the ten thousand numbers on your sheet, which has a specific color
so you have to look up the stacking rules to see if you can get
that other bonus. Some of the spells are worse than that, like the one
that lets you unstabilize a dying creature who’s been stabilized, when
any bozo could throw a rock at them for 1 point of damage. Racial
stereotyping modifiers include penalties to ability scores. The action
economy includes new kinds of actions that you have to fit into your
turn to make sure you’re getting the maximum ROI. There are at least
three different kinds of AC for to-hit rolls. Etc, etc, etc.

I’m sure there was a time in my life when I would have loved making
spreadsheets of different types of bonuses so that I could work out the
largest legal combination, but I no longer care about the difference
between a 75% and 80% chance of success, certainly not enough to spend
more than a single second scrounging for that extra +1.

Ken had a good metaphor: “If people cooked for their friends the way
they game with their friends, they would read ‘add oregano to taste’ and
feed people infinite oregano, meeting any complaints with ‘it’s in the
rules as written, you have to eat it’.”

How is Josh that old?!

Ate butterbraids until my arm robot told me to switch to bacon, watched people play Race for the Galaxy, splashed my feet in the pool, met Jus’s friend Seth who now lives in Sacramento somewhere, played a lot more multicar disasters with the toddler, ate some good chili and also some birthday cake. Kate showed up, which she usually doesn’t do until after we leave. So many people!

Played (board game): Monty Python Fluxx. Only half a game, I did terribly, I couldn’t have won because I had the Knights Who Say “Ni” for the whole time. It’s Fluxx, it doesn’t have to make sense.

Played (board game): Lords of Waterdeep. We had both Kate and Ayse, which was nice. I came in second, but I feel like I actually earned it instead of everyone else dragging each other down, so that was also nice.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Can’t really celebrate Independence Day until we shake off the tyranny of Russia.

For no explicable reason, I am the toddler’s favorite for “Come. With. You.” I would rather hear people talk about gaming, but what am I supposed to do when I’m needed as a backstop for Matchbox car disasters (“Uh oh. Oh! No!”)?

Engaged in important summertime activities like splashing my feet in the pool (forgot my swimsuit, but actually sitting and splashing was pretty nice), eating grilled skewers and potato salad, and watched fireworks.

Marith reports that the cats got into a cupboard and flung some bowls onto the floor. As cat crimes go, this is pretty minor, but sheesh.

Played (board game): Sagrada. As always, I thought I was doing okay at the beginning but ended up with blank spaces and a terrible score.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

I guess I did okay at staying out of the sun today, since I was mostly riding in vehicles and then lurking inside a house.

Specifically, Dave and I rode Amtrak to Sacramento and then Al picked us up and drove us the rest of the way, and then we hung out admiring the cute toddler and his lack of proper indexical usage (tug tug “Come. With. You.”) The other usual suspects were there, we ate Chinese food as is the customer, and then Dave introduced a select few of us to his new favorite game, Daybreak.

Played (board game): Daybreak is by the same designer as Pandemic, but it is simpler, shorter, and a lot more winnable, because humanity could actually solve the climate crisis. It also has pretty nerve-wracking elements, like the tipping points and mystery problems every round, so I can see why Ken considers it too stressful to play, but we won on round 4 with three n00bs.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Sadly, all piloted by the Loch Ness monster. In further depressing news, it’s Second Half of the Year Day, which means we are now and forever more closer to 2050 than 2000.

Went to the office, ate some scallion pancakes rolled around meat and veggies and some sesame balls, did some work, got notes in everything that might become active before next Wednesday, set my email and Salesforce to OoO.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.5: There seem to be a lot of guns around for the UK, but I guess most of them are coming from the government thugs. I have definite hopes for who gets shot next.

Read (short): “Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow” (Shveta Thakrar): The power of stories, and also snakes.

Read (novel): The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks): Another in the recent subgenre where part of the world goes weird, in this case Siberia, although it has a Great Train running through it to have steampunk capitalism vs mystic landscape.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 4-5 (Ajiichi): Love confessions all over! Apparently there’s only one more volume in which to get everything sorted.

Written (game design): 329:

D&D combat is very much putting all the pieces, whose rules are
public knowledge, onto the chessboard in plain view of everyone,
each in their own square, and then taking turns moving exactly one
piece at a time from square to square and applying one of its rules.
There are definite advantages to doing it this way: when the sorcerer
takes her turn, the barbarian is absolutely in this square and the
evil pharaoh is absolutely in that square, so there’s no question
about who’s in the nine squares of the thunderwave. Easy for newbs,
consistent results, no need for judgment calls. But there are board
games for that, some not even explicitly based on D&D.

I want something that’s slightly more like being in a haunted cave
while a giant worm monster and its pet sewer cannibals try to eat
your face. It’s still a tabletop game, it’s not going to be that
much more, but some would be nice.

Instead of having each unit activate, take its turn, and then freeze
again, we can separate declaration and resolution. From worst initiative
upward, each character declares what they’re doing, but they can declare
they’re getting involved (either for or against) in something that’s
already been declared. Then everything gets resolved more or less at
once, which may involve some judgment calls on the part of the GM as to
how far the human charging toward the wizard gets before they get
intercepted by the war bear, or what have you. This does want a new
initiative roll every round, so we might not want to have everyone
do double-digit addition ever time. My hope is to make a round a larger
chunk of the combat, though, so a heavier end/beginning of round
procedure might not be as bad.

Positioning should be looser, not down to the minimum space a
medium-size combatant occupies. I don’t know whether we want to be
as loose as 13th Age, which has zones of one standard move, and
then combatants can be engaged (adjacent) if they’re in the same
zone, or at a specific point like blocking a doorway, or just
somewhere in the zone. Maybe like 10′ zones, so anyone in a zone can
interact with anyone else if they want without having to take a move
action? That might still be too finicky, though.

Happy merry to all my Canada friends!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: This episode, Thessaly and Everett and Longfingers help Black Shuck ambush the lizard-pigs in the Hedge by chucking rocks at them and running away to where Black Shuck can grab one and do something unseen but doubtless horrible. It’s a terrible plan, but it works out okay. Siddy and Theophania have a much less exciting time staying ahead of their lizard-pigs until the bells drive them away. Everyone reconvenes at the coffee shop.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 3 (Ajiichi):Still rereading. Now there are four girls all having feelings at each other, while on the school trip and in the hotel bath.

Written (game design): 284:

Spells that don’t do damage are even more unclear. Having two sets of HP
(physical and mental, typically) is something that’s been tried, but the
advantage to focusing on one track is so great that no one ever bothers
with the other. If we want to use the same mechanism, then it has to be
the same pool of HP, so everyone is as resistant to being turned into a
frog as they are to being fireballed or stabbed.

But on the other hand, what does it mean to cast a spell, or to resist a
spell being cast on you? In D&D, most (non-damage) spells fizzle because
there’s always a save to prevent anything from happening at all, as well
as the save to have the effect end after a round or two. Obviously you
can’t have debuffs ruining the calibration, but we don’t care about
that, and we also spurn the concept of to-hit rolls, so do non-damaging
spells just work, at least initially? When the victim’s turn comes up,
they can try to shake off the effect, which might require a roll or
something, but when you cast blindness on somebody, maybe they’re just
blind. Kind of a lame spell otherwise, right?

It should still be possible to resist a spell, but that can be a
specific thing, like casting protection from magic on someone before
sending them to rush the enemy wizard, or being a fireblooded sorcerer
when someone casts wave of icy death. Possibly ties in with my idea that
anybody can buy an amulet that protects against one instance of a
specific harm before burning out. Naturally, if you carry more than one
amulet, none of them work.