Month: July 2025

I’m sure they mean musical instruments, but what if they don’t? Is Uncommon Instruments the title of my new YA fantasy trilogy?

Went to the dentist to have my tooth looked at because it seemed dodgy on x-ray, they said it would have to come out soon so I had them take it out right there. Now my mouth is weird.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.12-13: The one with the mindfuckery and the one with the winery.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 1 (Wataru Mitogawa): She’s a sadistic, horny monster-hunting nun. She’s a free-lance monster hunter looking for her missing sister. Together they play out dom/sub scenes kill vampires. I’d say it’s completely lacking in redeeming social value, but even though it’s secondary world, it makes the Catholic church look bad, so that’s something.

Written (catgirl): 155.

Also other things that are relevant is this dystopia, such as National Support Public Education Day, National Whistleblowers Appreciation Day, and World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. And, as a treat, National Cheesecake Day.

Went to the office, ate some falafal and dolmas and stuff, did a little work, almost fell asleep.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 12 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): The search for the missing person has reached a major plot twist! Also, a cult compound full of creepy interdimensional weirdness is definitely the ideal place for PCs to set up a secret base.

Written (catgirl): 236.

Fortunately, absolutely no one in the entire history of ever has cared what I found appealing, so we’ll concentrate on how this is also International Tiger Day.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: We didn’t have Kelsey or Vivian, so played the evening where Thessaly gets drunk lost  and has to be rescued by Lily, the knight of the evil(?) king who seems to know and like Everett even though he doesn’t remember her. Thessaly brings her back to Stately Sanrio Manor, some information is exchanged, and Thessaly and Theophania bully Everett into going on a date with Lily. Next session, picking out a date outfit for him.

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 4 (Yodokawa): Is it still a landlady/tenant relationship if they’re living and sleeping together? Also lots of drama with the landlady’s old idol group.

Written (game design): 224:

If we’re going to do that, we should do similar for spending MP instead
of rolling a die. Although we still roll random polyhedrals to find out
how much Readiness and MP you have, so we aren’t eliminating that
mechanic entirely. I don’t think we want to, because if you’re looking
for a numeric output, the Action/Difficulty mechanic only gives four
possibilities with uneven probabilities. So let’s keep attack dice and
rolled MP costs.

MP are now called Harmony.

Time to stop and check how complicated a character is. Do we need to
throw some stuff out?

A character has
– Ratings for a dozenish Actions (list still to be finalized)
– List of Backgrounds
– Readiness dice (current Readiness values to be tracked on a postit)
– Harmony dice (values on postit)
– Melee, ranged, and magic attack dice
– Armor and resistances
– Movement rate and modes (swimming, flight, etc)
– Strength
– Size
– Ancestry feats and other abilities
– Physical inventory slots and what’s in them
– Spiritual inventory slots and what’s in them
– XP, unspent and total

Ancestry feats and other abilies, and the things in inventory slots,
will have additional information about what they do, unlike Backgrounds
which are what they say on the tin, so that’s more complexity. Overall,
though, I think that’s not too bad? I’m sure I’ll remember more stuff
that goes on the list later, though.

Fertilize the wetlands with the bodies of the rich.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 3 (Chiyo): You’d think a little light murder among supernatural creatures would be no big, but no, this means war. (As much of a war as it can be when each side fields half a dozen combatants, anyway.) The war is resolved by heroic sacrifice, the end. It was kind of weird all the way through, but it didn’t really live up to the promise of the first volume.

Read (novel): The Library at Hellebore (Cassandra Khaw): You thought that other dark magic academia was dark? It doesn’t even begin to compare. Every student is capable of destroying most or all of the world, many of them would be perfectly happy to, they’re at Hellebore to be made useful, named characters are getting eaten alive by the second chapter and it’s only downhill from there. Do not read if you are at all squeamish!

Spent much of the evening reading OSR blogs, which makes me want to weird stuff that’s probably not actually functional with the gamers I have or useful for my game design, but sounds really cool.

Written (game design): 276:

If we roll HP every round, maybe we should roll MP every round too?
Roll the dice and that’s how much magic you can do this turn,
sustaining ongoing effects and casting immediate ones. “Magic harm”
including curses, overcasting, etc, knock off dice. Think of it as
clogging up the channel through which the energy of the universe
flows. Probably costs would be fixed rather than rolled; one only needs
so many dice in a turn.

No, probably not. If nothing else, it lends itself to confusion
with initiative/HP, which is bad. Unless we combine them, but that
way lies madness. Right? Right.

Maybe rolling MP every day, though? Or something like, MP dice are
all d6s, and every day the GM rolls a single d6 and everybody
multiplies it by the number of dice they have, so it’s universally
a good or bad day for magic.

Initiative/HP is called Readiness, I think.

Not sure what MP is called. As a white guy, I probably should not
look through Asian religious terms for something that means oneness
with the universe. We established there’s no distinction between
secular and divine magic, though, so something religious or
philosophical seems appropriate.

On a vaguely related note (if you scroll up far enough), instead of
having attack dice, we could have an action-like roll where you start
out doing full (fixed) attack and inflicting any special effect of your
weapon, with each bad die knocking off the special effect or half the
attack. This leaves the question of determining Difficulty open, but
maybe it’s cleaner than having a different mechanic for attacks?

I used to really like chicken strips, but I haven’t for a while now. Maybe I should try again.

Slept way in, went out in the sunlight to get Thai lunch, went out in the sunlight to get cat supplies, went out in the sunlight to get unnecessary supplies, sat in front of the fan and listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack again.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 5-6 (Nakatani Nio): A lot more about identity, but then at the end, back to love! I thought this was going to be the end when I started vol 6, but no. Looks like it goes up to vol 8.

Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 1 (NC Lux): Isekai litRPG, MC ends up as a succubus even though it’s not what she wanted, and the mind control powers and instincts to eat souls are also not what she wanted, even though or perhaps because they’re pretty effective. Also, fuck this whole situation, it’s all going down if she has anything to say about it. Probably could have been half the length, though.

Written (game design): 504:

Most or all of the starting abilities also need to be on the advancement
list. If wicked deeds or curses can turn a person into a monster, then
there’s no reason becoming a priestess of Bastet couldn’t get you lovely
whiskers for navigating in complete darkness, or mystic strength
training make you as big and strong as an ogre. (If you use
your strength to push people around, are you not just an ogre anyway?)

In D&D, numeric advancements like hit points and damage per round get
about an order of magnitude larger from 1st to 20th level (a little more
for hit points, a little less for damage, so fights take even longer).
We don’t have levels, so there’s not as definitive a limit to progress,
but that seems like a lot. Maybe 3-4x would be more reasonable? Maybe
I’m hypothesizing in advance of my playtesting and shouldn’t worry about
it? Maybe all players want their characters to transcend humanity and
ascend to the heavens, so every advancement should have a transcendence
value and when you get to 108, time for a new character.

But, maybe we don’t need or want that much in the way of advancement.

As previously discussed, D&D is all about the class powers that you get
when you level, because that keeps characters on the power curve instead
of letting them be all over the graph based on what treasure they got.
Many OSR games, though, keep the characters themselves on a more human
scale and make it more about the equipment. Instead of levelling up to
where you get the class ability of being able to hit incorporeal and
then fighting the ghost just like a goblin, do some research and find
the sword that was used to murder the ghost originally, or get some
shovels and dig open the roof of the tomb to let sunlight destroy the
ghost, or whatever. This is what they mean by “the answer is not on your
character sheet” I guess.

A lot of OSR games have wounds and levels of fatigue take up inventory
slots, which seems good. Some have spells take up slots (maybe as
spellbooks, maybe just conceptually), and a few even have skills and
bonds take up slots, which turns it into more a limited list of things
that can be important about your character. I don’t think that’s
actually bad, it keeps you from having to review a million options
before doing anything, but XZQJY isn’t that conceptual.

We do, however, have the idea of spells as astral tools, so maybe
there’s an astral inventory as well as a physical one? In the
physical inventory, larger and more powerful items take up more
slots, but in the astral inventory (does it need a better name?)
it might be more complex spells/powers, like a spell that can produce
an illusion of anything vs one that just produces a lightning bolt
in the direction you point. Curses and emotional trauma and magical
backlash would fill up slots in the same way as wounds and fatigue.

Maybe a wizard’s magic stick would be the equivalent of a sack: takes
one slot, but holds several slots’ worth that you can access by taking
extra time? That might be too literal.

Also World Tofu Day. I’m an uncle and have the consistency of tofu, so I guess that’s why it’s the same day.

I was too feeble to take books to the used bookstore today, but I did the other usual shopping. No anime because Dave is in Roseville.

Watched (animated movie): K-Pop Demon Hunters: Surprisingly awesome! Points off for heterosexuality, but the demon hunters are otherwise great and possibly neurodivergent. It looks like TWICE did at least some of the music, so it’s real K-Pop.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 4 (Nakatani Nio): A loves B, B loves C, nobody thinks their love can go anywhere but that doesn’t make all living in the same room at theater camp and bathing together any less nerve-wracking. Really the focus is on B’s idea of what kind of person she should be and literally nobody else agreeing.

Written (game design): 850:

Speaking of wandering monsters, it’s extremely hypocritical of me to put
in something that requires preparation, given how terrible I am at all
forms of prep and using prep, but the argument that letting the dice
determine events instead of the GM railroading (or quantum-ogring) them
leads to more versimilitude and fun seems valid to me. Also, obviously
I’m going for more randomness in general, since we spurn the notion of
carefully calibrated video-game encounters.

This applies to NPC behavior as well, in the form of reaction rolls and
morale checks. NPCs don’t have to always fight, and fight to the death,
to make sure PC resources get used up at the correct rate, so we can let
them be less predictable, or at least have a wider range of options.

The old-fashioned reaction roll on a scale from “BFFs” to “murder time”
is probably a bit simple. Ideally we’d want to know what they want, and
how far they’re willing to go to get it. Maybe something like Troika’s
Mien mechanic (6 options for what the monster is doing/interested
in/feeling, roll a d6) is little enough prep for the first? Of course a
prefab monster can have a prefab table, but we’re aiming for more
bespoke monsters, since they don’t have to be carefully weighed and
measured for encounter-building. For how far they’re willing to go to
get it, roll another d6. 1-3: they would trade a little bit for what
they want; 4-5: they’d trade a lot or take some risks; 6: it’s a matter of
life and death.

Morale can be a simple pass/fail, check when the first person gets taken
down and when half of them are down, or equivalent setbacks. This should
somehow be integrated with Difficulty of using social skills on them
(since they don’t get bribed with experience).

Is morale the same as HP/initiative? That would be convenient, but I
don’t think it is. NPCs have human weaknesses, including lack of
selfawareness, so combat ability and courage aren’t necessarily
correlated.

And, speaking of advancements, I was thinking about purely diegetic
improvement (if you want to learn a new martial arts technique, you have
to put in the work in-game to find a teacher and mark off the time to
learn it), but then I thought about bribing people with experience
points (pretty sure XP doesn’t mean “experience protection”; need to get
MP a better name so that’s not an issue). I also really like the Dungeon
World thing of getting XP for failing. “Experience is what you get when
you don’t get what you want” and all that. So, there are XP. Not sure if
you get some from every failed roll, or if it’s like the end-of-session
moves where you get XP if you had a significant failure, and more if you
had a major failure. If you completely failed the adventure, you get a
lot of XP, but also emotional wounds.

I was considering also awarding XP for proper behavior, like giving your
slain enemies proper burials, but that might lead to XP for being
heroic, which is wrong. It’s not a moral choice if you’re bribed into
it. XP for a type of action is okay, like Dungeon World’s end-of-session
questions about whether you’ve overcome a worthy foe, etc, but that
would require pinning down what the game should be about instead of
leaving it open, and I don’t know if that’s what I want. Or maybe a list
of possible goals, pick three for your campaign?

For now, I’m good with XP only resulting failure, either rolled or
chosen.

Once you get XP, you can spend it to buy new advancements that you
get in-game. You have to spend time learning them or have them
grafted onto your soul and take time to recover, or whatever: no
levelling up instantaneously in the middle of a battle WoW-style.
You may also need to pay for them in cash or favors.

There may be starting packages for classes, or “classes”, but after that
I think all advancements are available to all characters. If you’re a
spellcaster but want to buy up your melee attack die, go for it. We’re
not here to tell you what your character should be.

Like Hero System, advancements are simple and mechanical; if you want
something fancy, you need to assemble it yourself and provide the flavor
text. That said, we should have plenty of examples. Hopefully this will
not spiral out of control into a huge list of advantages and limitations
and power frameworks and modifiers and argh.

Are there even sysadmins any more? It’s all Site Ops or Dev Ops or whatever now, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely makes me feel old.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.10-11: The one with Sophie and the painting and Nate and Sterling while everyone else is in the previous episode, and the one with the big-box store and Elliott’s backstory.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 2-3 (Nakatani Nio): The one who’s in love is getting more in love, the one who thinks she’s aro (not in those terms) has various feelings, there’s kissing anyway, school life happens, there’s a tragic backstory, etc.

Read (novel): All Roads Lead to the Phoenix Princess: Rebirth as a Wind Cultivator (Erios909): Reincarnation cultivation isekai, in the world of a MMORPG but without any game mechanics. Our protagonist does a lot of murders (arguably justified), uses OP game knowledge, attracts the attention of powerful people due to her unusual nature, starts accumulating a harem despite not showing interest in anyone, levels up repeatedly, all the usual isekai protagonist  stuff. There are obviously intended to be many more books, since there’s five years to save the world from the disaster that sets up the game world, but it’s self-published on Kindle Unlimited, so knows?

Written (game design): 438:

Now that we’ve reduced saves down to a single Save (shades of Perils
& Princesses!), back to HP. Losing HP is some amorphous combination
of fatigue, luck running out, and minor injuries (or other effects)
that don’t add up to a wound. It recovers quickly compared to wounds,
but how quickly? After a good night’s sleep? After a lunch break? After
a few minutes of rest?

It may be ridiculous, but I like the idea of rolling HP each time. The
meanest way of doing that would be to roll when the fight (or whatever
excitement goes against HP, like a trap) starts, but that might be too
much. Maybe roll at a reduced die size if you haven’t had a full night’s
sleep or lunch break? If you roll really badly, you can always take
another rest and reroll. Either take the higher of the roll and current
HP, or keep rerolling until you get a higher number. The latter
encourages people to keep resting until they get a really good result,
but wandering monster rolls and resource limits would keep that in
check.

Rolling HP each round is awfully appealing, though. Obviously with
this option the dice would be smaller than with the result of one
roll having to last a whole combat. It would be another roll each round
along with initiative though, unless we combined them somehow. When
we’re going from low to high initiative, are we actually just going from
low to high HP, giving it an element of battlefield awareness? I like
that, let’s try that.

The range of dice for HP depends on the range of dice for attacks, which
I imagine as being d4 to d10 to start with, like Dungeon World.
Increasing the die size, and getting more dice so you can beat up more
people at once, would be power-ups or advancements or whatever we’re
calling them. Getting more dice of HP would also be an advancement; not
sure about increasing the size of them. Or maybe they don’t all have to
be the same size; if you have 3d6 and to buy a d10, sure, go for it.

I’m okay with armor being a penalty on (appropriate) wound dice, but
what about shields? Extra HP is obvious, but then you also get extra
initiative. Is that too weird? Probably. Maybe a shield is a fixed
amount and only rolled HP count as initiative. And need a new name.

But what are you going to tell me?

Went to the office, it was full of coworkers, ate some beef stroganoff which was far from healthy but which I haven’t had in years, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): Two high-school girls who thought they would never find but also never really miss love, one suddenly declares her love for the other, they are in the student council together. I only read two volumes of this back in the day, but have like four more, so I put it in the TBR before sending them to the used book store.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 2 (Chiyo): Pako is definitely a werewolf now, which poses all sorts of problems (some of which may have been made up), Amelie is incredibly pure and innocent for a decapitated vampire, little brothers are obnoxious, everything is a mess.

Written (game design): 291:

Not all saves happen as a result of attacks; some are from environmental
hazards. I think those are handled as hits with +0 on the wound die: no
HP, because you avoid the hit by not going into the dangerous
environment.

The other use of saves in (modern) D&D is to determine when an effect
ends, but that has to be part of the rules for poison/disease/curses,
which will be utterly brilliant as soon they get written.

Save vs Falling isn’t ignoring gravity, it’s holding onto something
(the cliff you were just pushed off, the train you’re riding on the
outside of, etc), which is almost like an action but too simple to be
worth having the full mechanics. Also it seems like it should be
affected by Strength and Size, which otherwise don’t affect d20 rolls.
Is it just a special case of Get Over There (which covers climbing)? It’s
probably not worth it’s own special mechanic, but it’s a reaction, not
an action.

Save vs Restraint is in the same boat. It could almost be an action of
its own, Wriggle Out, but it’s not really enough. Maybe it should be
part of Get Over There as well. I think that’s more justifiable than for
Save vs Falling, but that leaves Save vs Falling still orphaned.

I don’t know what to do with this, and I should. “I try to not die” is a
valid and even common adventurer action. Maybe it’s enough to have a
nonspecific save based on luck (which is not currently a mechanical
entity, so just a die roll)?

I haven’t had any today, but I hope to enjoy vanilla ice cream on many days this summer!

Went to the office, ate some tacos, did some work.

Read (novel): Firebreak (Craig Schaefer): Second volume of highly sus magic school in Schaefer’s multiseries universe, our heroic lesbians continue to be awesome but also have teenager problems to go with their magic problems. Very cliffhanger ending, since this is supposed to be I think five books.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 13 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Now we understand Vamola’s backstory, so it’s time for the heroes to rally!

Written (game design): 520:

Wait, how could I forget about the stochastic variant of door #3? Save
vs Ambush or lose half your HP! Or possibly lose all of them, or the
attacker gets the bonus attack dice. Anyway, this is pretty much exactly
why I thought of Save vs Ambush in the first place.

How do saves even? They’re for situations where the player might
avoid a bad outcome, so dice are appropriate, but it’s not really
an action. They feel like they should be d20 rolls, but are they
like actions? Is there a Difficulty? How would it be set? What does
a failed die do? For saves, failure and consequences are the same,
so that part of the action mechanic doesn’t really apply. Are saves
always D1, so they’re simple pass/fail? Or higher difficulty, to
allow for more granular outcomes like 1d6 attack or one round of
paralysis for each bad die?

How does this interact with HP? Earlier I had a bunch of saves
besides Ambush/Traps (Poison/Sickness, Curses, Possession/Compulsion,
Restraint, Falls, Influence), but where do the saves come in as opposed
to hits at 0 HP? I said earlier that I want to have effects actually
take effect, not fizzle, so a save up front isn’t right. Still thinking
about spell attacks going against MP, but for now let’s say every attack
goes through HP until it gets a hit.

Save vs Ambush or Trap isn’t about taking a hit (in D&D it would be the
Perception check against the hidden pressure plate or the ninja sneaking
up behind you) so it’s fine as-is. Save vs Influence is for resisting
social skills from NPCs, which probably don’t go against HP, so that’s
okay too. The rest I’m not sure about. Would it be nice to have
characters with varying levels of resistance to different kinds of
trouble? I think it would, but are save ratings the way to do it? Maybe they
instead have varying amounts of “armor” to subtract from the wound die
when they finally take a hit?

No, I’m wrong, a save isn’t the correct mechanic for resisting NPC
social skills. This isn’t a game where only the players roll, so the NPC
makes their action, and if they succeed, the PC target gets a bribe of
experience points to play along, which they can turn down if they really
want to. This also works for Possession/Compulsion, but because it’s
less of a choice for the character, they get some negative effect (maybe
just a wound) if they decline the experience points for playing along.

The other saves aren’t about things that affect character behavior
directly, so I don’t think the bribe mechanic fits. Modifying the wound
die is better for those.

Save vs Ambush is not like any of those, so it should be a different
mechanic, probably integrated with however we roll initiative.

(22/7 ≈ π)

No gaming, Ken is unavailable (work, I think), and Kelsey is still sick.

Read (manga): Ghost Talker’s Daydream vol 5-6 (Okuse Saki, Meguro Sankichi): I had not remembered that we don’t even get to the end of the plot by volume 6! Lots more ghosts and suicide and the MC wearing her clothes from one job at the other, which presumably means she’s going to cross the streams and dominate ghosts, but I’ll never know because volumes 7+ aren’t readily available translated in the US and I don’t care enough to really search.

Written (game design): 502:

From what I’ve read, in a real fight, people kind of die randomly.
Obviously you can tip the odds in your favor with all the things you’d
expect, but not as far as movies might lead you to believe. I don’t
think this thing we’re making wants to be the sort of grim where
everybody rolls a survival die at the start of the fight and anyone who
fails is guaranteed to get murdered before the end, but maybe if you’re
the sort of creature who has vital organs and blood that leaks out and
such, the wound die should be exploding (reroll and add on max value)?
Even that might be too grim, but if we’re going to say fighting is not
mandatory, should it be an actual bad idea?

(No idea what this should be called, but if we want it to stand out, the
name should begin with an X. Z, Q, and J aren’t quite as good, and Y
would only do in a pinch. All other letters are overused.)

Obviously a good way to reduce your risk of dying is to ambush the enemy
instead of fighting them toe-to-toe. How does that work in XZQJY (not
affiliated with xkcd)? Hit Protection is what you have to avoid getting
straight-up murdered, so I can see a few ways to modify it for ambushes.

  1. The modern D&D approach would be to not change anything: your HP work just as well against surprise attacks as any other attacks. This is because D&D hates tactics.
  2. At the opposite extreme, HP don’t protect against surprise attacks, or while you’re paralyzed etc. Anyone who attacks you when you’re defenseless gets to skip straight to rolling the wound die and adds their whole attack die to it. Lots of fun when the PCs get to do it, maybe not enough to offset the complaining when the monsters do it.
  3. Exactly in between, when you’re surprised, or get paralyzed or whatever, you lose half your HP. Carry on as usual from that point.
  4. An alternate implementation of the same idea would be that when you ambush somebody, or stab them while they’re blind, they get all their normal HP but you get some extra dice to add to your attack die. Doesn’t help as much against people with lots of HP, but doesn’t require division and is easier to adjust for complete surprise vs a moment of startlement, etc.

Door #4 seems the most promising, until I come up with an even more
ridiculous idea.

wumwumwumwumwumwum

Read (manga): Ghost Talker’s Daydream vol 2-4 (Okuse Saki, Meguro Sankichi): Ghosts and violence and sex and ghosts and sexual violence and obsession and ghosts and hallucinations and suicide and ghosts.

Written (game design): 372:

Magic is hard, let’s go back to murders.

When you’re fighting somebody (in melee range/engaged during the round,
and want to hurt them), you roll your attack die. They have option of
spending their HP (if they have any) to reduce your roll 1-for-1. If
they can’t or don’t reduce your roll to 0, then their Hit Protection has
failed and you hit them.

For a regular murdery hit, you then roll a wound die to find out what
actually happens to them. Coming from D&D or really almost any
simulationist game, it’s obvious to give bigger weapons bigger wound
dice, but no. A hit can be multiple quick stabs or a single heavy blow
from an axe, or anything. The wielder knows how to use their weapon to
good effect, regardless of what it is.

Skill does matter, so whatever of the attack value is left gets added to
the wound die. Armor and toughness get subtracted. Look up the result on
the Universal Chart of Pain to find out whether you inflicted a wound
(probably all results that aren’t pathetically low), or even (on a
really good roll) inflicted two. You might also get an extra effect from
your attack, like knockdown or grab setting them on fire; this is where
the specific weapon could come in, or special techniques that give you
extra options.

Or maybe armor is just extra HP so it was already subtracted earlier?
And maybe having no vital organs means rolling the wound die twice and
taking the worse result? Something along those lines, anyway.

For attacks other than shanking somebody, replace one wound with some of
whatever the primary effect should be, and two wounds with a whole bunch
of the effect. I’m thinking one wound makes you Wounded, two wounds
takes you out, so the effects of other attacks should be comparable. And
maybe instead of having spaces on the chart for 1 Wound + Effect or
whatever, you just get the bonus effect of the attack on any even
result.

Vulnerability and resistance to different damage types would just be
addition or subtraction from the wound die.

Also Space Exploration Day, although that’s become decreasingly cool over the past few years. Nazis ruin everything.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant:In search of the fourth volume of the three-volume set of texts, On Ethereal Matters, Reshelving Squad Upsilon makes a journey through Bibliospace that will definitely have been harrowing when they tell this story later. In due course, they come to room or demiplane with many warning signs, and ghostly apparitions swarming over a labyrinth of shelves packed with books on the transmigration of spirits and similar matters. Flying over the labyrinth to shortcut it is obviously a bad plan, but it turns out that ground level is not much better, what with the possessing ghosts and haunted library carts and shifting paths and Dewey Decimal shelving. Also there’s somebody further back in the stacks carrying on, which probably doesn’t mean anything good. Despite Thaïs getting the life sucked out of her, Lilli and Flint getting possessed multiple times, and everyone getting run over by haunted library carts, they eventually make it almost halfway into the room, at which point the ankylosaur librarian shows up to scold them for making so much noise. The librarian is also upset about the noise caused by the How To Get Published seminar being run in the back, though, so Lilli agrees to shut them in exchange for not getting slapped around any more. And there’s the book! Victory! They quickly return to Renwick, who says he now understands how Walter got out of the previous trap and how to keep him imprisoned forever.

Looks like we have two or maybe three sessions left. No progress on finding new gamers.

Read (manga): Ghost Talker’s Daydream vol 1 (Okuse Saki, Meguro Sankichi): One of the series I put back into the TBR pile before taking to the used bookstore. Still raunchy and sordid and morbid, because people who die peacefully in bed don’t need ghost talkers to get them sorted.

Written (game design): 354:

I thought we could establish a couple of rules for magic based on what we’ve already established, but I’m not sure they hold up, except for “no plusses”. Magic can’t change an action rating, but it can provide tools, knowledge, and maybe even time to reduce the difficulty. A spell might be a really good tool that makes everything faster and has a larger effect, but if you don’t have the background, or do have adverse circumstances, you can be at 1D or more and still have to roll. This mostly applies to buff and environmental reshaping magic, I guess. Okay, let’s look at the six types of magic mentioned before.

  • Buff – As just mentioned, a lot of buff magic provides faster/more powerful tools for actions. Could also increase non-action stats like HP, damage, and movement, where plusses are not as objectionable.
  • Debuff – Absolutely something magic should be able to do, but any details have to wait for combat rules to be finished.
  • Environmental reshaping – Mostly similar to buff, but for the Craft an Object action, since it’s all about making new things or destroying old things, so this is fine.
  • Healing – Again, needs the rules for getting beat up and/or cursed to exist before we can say anything concrete.
  • Transportation – Immediate stuff is buffs for Get Over There, but larger-scale stuff like flying ships and teleportation gateways is probably just things you build?
  • Divination – I forgot about this one before, possibly because it’s messy. Historically divination is very common and very diverse, because everybody wants to know things, but it’s a pain in a game. Needs more attention later.
  • Attack – Again, fine for magic to do this, but most attack magic would be ranged, rather than melee, so we need those combat mechanics before we can go anywhere with this.

But just because we can put in magic to do all these things, doesn’t mean we should.

Blehhhhhhhhhhhh.

Took four more bags to the used book store, but got almost two bags back. On the one hand, I am starting to scrape the bottom of things they want, but on the other hand, I think the new buyer both rejected more and paid less for what they did take compared to what the regular buyer would have done. Not sure if I should bring these books back when the regular buyer returns, or just store them with the rest to dispose of in some other fashion.

Started reading The Horror From the Hills (Frank Belknap Long) while waiting for my books to be processed, because it’s allegedly an important Cthulhu Mythos work, but it was so horrifying racist I did not want to spend even a couple of bucks on it.

Also shopped for groceries and read Katalepsis and got sweaty and stupid.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 22-23: Senshi’s backstory, at long last! Also mushroom transformation shenanigans.

Read (manga): When the Villainess Seduces the Main Heroine vol 2 (Kasai Fujii): Our loving couple continue to be absolutely mad for each other, and also meet a couple of other beautiful women who incidentally have beef with them. Still ridiculous.

Read (novel): Dungeon Spiteful (Melissa McShane): LitRPG from the perspective of a local companion of the isekai’d Earthling, who at least also has her own stuff going on with getting a class that everyone thinks is useless. She figures out its utility in just a few chapters, which makes me think the people of this world are not that bright overall. First book of a series but I doubt I care.

Written (game design): 404:

So magic, what does it even? Or rather, since we’ve established
that there is no distinction between magic and non-magic, what does
an adept get in exchange for falling out of sync with the universe,
or abrading their soul, or whatever? It’s definitely how they can
slice a giant tree in half with a single sword stroke, or absorb
the impact of any fall by rolling once, or walk on new-fallen snow
without leaving footprints, or any of that stuff. What about wizards
(spell-casters? magicians? sorcerers?)? We don’t need them to throw
death rays or fireballs, at least not primarily, since we have guns
and bombs and aren’t even measuring a character’s worth by whether
they can meet the damage-per-round quota. (At least, I hope we’re
not, but perhaps that’s wishful thinking.)

Even setting aside damage-dealing spells, most D&D spells are for
casting in combat, taking just a single eye of newt and a few seconds
of abracadabra and lasting for seconds or minutes (maybe hours if
we go back to 3E). Some buffs, mostly to combat power; lots of
debuffs likewise; reshaping the battlefield (durations mostly too
short to be useful otherwise); healing both HP and statuses;
transportation; and utility spells to get rid of obstacles (locked
doors, darkness, uncooperative NPCs, etc). How much of this noncombat
stuff we want available to PCs affects all the earlier blather about
resource limits: when a wizard can duplicate the effects of any normal
tool with magic, allocating inventory slots to tools is less
interesting.

Are we starting with already too many assumptions? Do we want wizards
who cast discrete spells, each with a specific effect? Or ones that
have more free-form control over an element? Summon creatures to
do things? Nothing but telekinesis? Only enchanting objects, nothing
on the fly? Do we want them to do it with a quick abracadabra or
harsh look, or full magic circles with candles and lunar phases?

Digressing because there are too many options for wizards and I
can’t pick one or even a finite number: is “adepts” a good name for
people who can spend MP? It reminds me of Earthdawn, which uses it
pretty much exactly that way, so could be either good or bad.
“Magic-users” is taken, alas. “Initiates” since being initiated
into a magical society is the socially-acceptable way of becoming
one?

Double miss.

Stayed home, did some work, listened to some twitch streamers playing Minecraft, ate a salad.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.9: The one where the OT3 foil a terrorist attack. I guess we weren’t as cynical about blowing off the law in the interest of alleged national security in 2012.

Read (manga): She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 5 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): They are still cooking and eating, but also moving in together (despite renting an apartment in Japan apparently being super-obnoxious) and even hugging! Also their friend with the eating disorder finally talked to a professional about it. Go them!

Written (game design): 423:

The problem with reading OSR blogs is then I start wondering if
dungeon-crawling might be fun, actually, and whether resource
constraints and inventory limits might make it more interesting.

D&D doesn’t seem to have dungeon crawling any more, just travel
montages between the set-piece level-appropriate encounters, and
for the most part, the only resources are character abilities (since
of course if you were able to buy resources that meant anything in
combat, you’d be OP for your level). There isn’t even a need to
worry about light, since almost everyone has darkvision and almost
anybody can get infinite light cantrips. Encumbrance is so fiddly that
it usually just gets ignored, too. This is why I want darkvision to not
be on the list of options for PCs, and also slot-based inventory (and
not just because inventory slots can get filled with wounds and fatigue
and maybe curses).

What do we expect PCs to do? (Obviously players can do anything
they want.) I like the idea that being able to spend MP also causes
trouble, the more trouble the more adepts you have and the longer
they stay in one place, so PCs either wander or are based out of a
temple/dojo/fortress that’s warded or remote or both. But what do
they do as they wander around? Or more specifically, since this is
heroic adventure fantasy, what kind of threats do they fight? People
who turned into monsters? 13th Age-style living dungeons and the
things that come out of them? Heretics with wrong magic? Celestials
shirking their afterlife duties in the mortal world? Inexplicable
walking dead? Pre-apocalyptic magic that has curdled over the ages
and now does something only vaguely like supporting a highly-advanced
civilization? Alien invaders? Your mom?

Actually all of those sound fun, alone or in combination. (Renegade
angels from outer space! Heretics worshiping an ancient city spirit so
it builds an ever-growing temple! A PC’s relative who has been consumed
by evil deeds and become a manticore!) Not all of them can be fought
directly, but that’s fine. At least some of them involving going into
sketchy confined areas where the inhabitants hate you, so that’s also
fine.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!

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.