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’.”