Also National Authors’ Day! Hi Kit!
Finally carted the books from the other week’s cleaning to the used book store and got rid of about 2/3 of them. I have few more stacks to sort through too.
No anime this week, Marith had a randomly different work schedule because capitalism thrives on the life force of its sacrifices.
Read (game): Into the Odd (Chris McDowall, Johan Nohr): Apparently I had the fancy orange and turquoise(?) hardcover on my shelves, so I read it so I could move it to the other shelves. McDowall will be having none of this “monsters and magic items should make sense” rubbish. I also really like assigning better starting gear and mutant powers if you rolled worse on your stats (within the context of random character generation, anyway). This is probably where I got the idea of skipping the attack roll and going straight to damage, as well.
Written (game design): 328:
Maybe it’s time to revisit my decision to make points larger and what I
hoped to gain thereby, and whether it’s actually working.
What I want, of course, is to reduce the amount of fiddling with
individual points in hope of squeezing out that last bit to add another
line to the character sheet. Making points larger reduces how much
point-squeezing can happen, to the extent that costs are in whole
numbers of points. Players who keep fractions, or even just a few
decimal places, undercut this somewhat, but the base costs provided by
the system will still be in the larger increments, and the minimum cost
is going to be 1 point no matter how many limitations you pile on.
Fundamentally, making a character in Hero is the same as what we were
looking at for the fantasy game where you pick your five feats (or four
if you want a really good one that counts double): Everything you could
give your character has a cost, you have a budget, buy what up to that
limit. The player experience is pretty different between the two ends of
the scale, though, and I was trying to shift it from one toward the
other. I don’t think I shifted it enough, though. Costs are still
extremely variable and have to be calculated, and it’s still in the
spreadsheet mode of doing all those calculations and summing them up.
There are way too many points involved for it to feel like picking
things to fill slots.
This all being the case, I’m probably better off changing the fractional
advantages/limitations to adding or subtracting cost per rank, which
keeps the costs integeral or simple fractions. Then the cost of 1 rank
of Blast is determined by how finegrained we want the modifiers to be.
If the cost is N, then every +1 to the cost is the equivalent of a +1/N
advantage. Reducing the cost doesn’t map as neatly to limitations,
though.