Hurray Nightvale!
No gaming, Jeremy has family stuff. I thought about going shopping today, but didn’t. I sat on the floor with the cats for a while and got chewed on by Sage, though.
Read (manga): A Sinner of the Deep Sea vol 3 (Akihito Tomi): This is a very heroic volume, with lots of sneaking around in disguise and eavesdropping on evil plans for world domination and last-minute rescues. Also, always a good idea to free the thing that looks like a little girl chained to the dungeon wall with enough iron to hold a whale. But, the day is saved! The End!
Read (novel): Starstrike (Yoon Ha Lee): Sequel to Moonstorm. Our heroine is back in her culture of original, with her original mom and her stolen mecha team, and yet everything is still extremely terrible and getting worse in a vortex of manipulation, betrayal, murder, and abandonment. Also, cryptobotany is the key.
Read (short): “With Only a Razor Between” (Martin Cahill): Secondary-world, but could have been set in 3 Musketeers France if they had conquered other European nations. Straight razors, customer service, the art of conversation, and standing up to colonizers.
Written (game design): 291:
Okay, to heck with that, back to the game we’re actually working
on. Or maybe not entirely to heck, because there are worse ideas
than using personality traits. I’m not sure every PC action has a
corresponding personality trait, though, or maybe most of them are
Focus and the rest are Aggression (just like in Hero most skills
are Dex and most of the rest are Int). Those are definitely stats,
though, and even if they’re psychological rather than biological, they
can lend themselves to racism (orcs are aggressive, dwarves are determined,
etc). But, free-form ancestries means no racial stereotyping modifiers,
so that’s every player’s own lookout.
No, I still like Actions better. They might need to be consolidated
though, so there aren’t so many. Dungeon world has eight basic Basic
Moves, which seems like a reasonable number. (Also 13 auxiliary basic
moves, which happen during downtime or in specific situations, not all
the time.) They condense most social interactions
(except carousing and recruiting followers)
into a single Parley move, though, which I’m not sure we want to do. I’m
not sure we don’t, though, since the difference between Sway Hearts and
Minds and Issue Commands can be enforced by which one you have a
background for. Same for Craft vs Tinker, and Creep vs Mingle.
I’m still waffling over whether there should be Actions with ratings
for the combat maneuvers, or whether they just work. This ties in
to how opposed rolls work, I guess. Which depends on whether we
want the dice to be completely player-facing. Maybe this is the
point like in Sudoku where I just have to pick one of the possibilities
and work through it until I find where it doesn’t work.