Month: December 2025

Also Bacon Day. I did not eat any bacon, but tomorrow’s fondue festivities may be postponed due to illness, which is pretty last-minute.

Another quiet day at work, since the customers are mostly on vacation or something. Maybe eaten by the Yule Cat.

Read (novel): Beware of Chicken vol 5 (Casualfarmer): Return of some past characters, farm life, not a lot of plot progression.

Read (comic collection): By Night vol 3 (John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern): More and more doom, but eventually the day is saved, the evil board is defeated, etc, etc.

Written (game design): 210.

I ate one of the fancy truffles Marith gave me for Christmas. It was very yummy.

Expected to die on the floor next to my bed when I had to get up for work at the regular time, but probably didn’t. Did spend a long time explaining things to one of the new people. Hopefully she understood my ranting.

Read (shorts): “The Star of the Show”, “Big Box Romance” (William C Tracy): M/M flirting during cyberpunk heists.

Read (comic collection): By Night vol 2 (John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern): The doom only increases!

Written (game design): 116.

But also Lie Abed Forever, Trapped by Cats, Day.

Eventually managed to do some shopping and um nothing else except read.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 5 (Ryan North, Will Murray, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi): Squirrel Girl’s great Canadian adventure! She remains unbeaten, although possibly only because she didn’t have to fist-fight a moose, and also saves the world.

Read (novel): Brigands & Breadknives (Travis Baldree): The ratlady from Bookshops & Bonedust tries to move next door to the orc from Legends & Lattes, but suffers a huge midlife crisis and runs away to have an adventure instead. The goblin from “Goblins and Greatcoats” also makes an appearance.

Read (novel): A Drop of Corruption (Robert Jackson Bennett): Sequel to The Tainted Cup, a new assignment with even more intrigue, client-state politics, terrorism, secret laboratories of transhumanism, foreign customs, unsettling revelations about the past, and also murder.

Written (game design): 379.

I guess the nation has to be the US, since everyone else cooks in metric as the default. Also it’s Festivus.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.5-6: The martial arts delivery contest.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 1 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles): She is unbeatable! She has both punching and talking, as well as squirrels and CS homework and friends!

Written (game design): 173.

Only five days until Chrismas, yikes.

I was trapped in bed forever by the cats, but eventually managed to go shopping. No anime, because Dave is out of town for the holidays. Listened to some Rush from the 80s and almost died of nostalgia.

Read (manga): Super HxEroes vol 1 (Ryoma Kitada): Alien bug monsters are trying to drive humanity to extinction by stealing all their libido. Fortunately a secret(?) government(?) organization(?) has recruited teenagers to use horniness-fueled superpowers to defeat the aliens. It is possibly even more ridiculous than it sounds. All cheesecake without details, no actual sex.

Read (novella): Constituent Service (John Scalzi): A new community liaison for the city district where most of the aliens live discovers some problems that need solving. It is very Scalzish humor.

Written (game design): 295:

Are 2 and 3 equal for purposes of buying ranks with limitations, though?
Are there jumbo ranks that you have to use two limitations to buy, but
can buy for 1.5x points? Is that a massive inconsistency that will make
the frugal character builder seethe with rage, or allow a canny
character builder to get infinite free points? Probably, yeah.

This is the third or fourth time revisting the idea of ranks and
points, ugh. Why are we here, again? Fundamentally, the idea is to
make a superpower 10-12 chunks instead of 50-60, so all the
calculations around buying and adjusting it are simpler. (Possibly
this is ungrateful of me, since early exposure to Champions has
left me significatly above average at mental math to this day, but
I feel like learning to turn imagination into finished works would
have been much more worthwhile. Not that I would have actually done
that with the spare braincells.) Chonky points makes it 20-24 chunks,
but that’s still well into two-digit arithmetic, while 12 is an
honorary one-digit number.

Is it too complicated to have a limitation give points that you can only
spend on that power? Then a limition gives 2/4/etc points, but a rank
can cost 2 or 3 or whatever. Maybe there’s a point left over if you buy
an odd number of 3-point ranks, but whatever.

Next question: how does this work with partial limitations? Do we just
say a limitation is worth half if it applies to half the power, and not
allow fiddling with different limitations on individual ranks? That
aligns with the anti-fiddliness movement. Or buy it as two separate
powers with their own limitations (which only apply to themselves)? That
seems better for things like extra characteristic only for defense.

I don’t wear sweaters, although maybe I should change that now that I’m older and less cold-resistant. They would always be covered in cat hair, though.

Didn’t sleep well because of my weird chest thing, but it was mostly gone by alarm o’clock, so I slacked in sick to work for the morning and then was okayish. Still no idea what that was, but it wasn’t Covid, so whatever.

Read (graphic novel): Catboy (Benji Nate): An antisocial twenty-something accidentally turns her cat into a person by wishing on a falling star. Hilarity ensues as he is more successful than her and also looks great in her clothes. There is a little progression from one short chapter to the next, but not any plot, just mild hijinx.

Written (game design): 159:

Adding ranks to get enhancements like “line of sight range” and “targets
DMCV” makes the cost of the first die of (in this example) Mental Blast
disproportionately high compared to the second and successive dice, at
least relative to how it is in Hero. Is this actually bad, or just
different? We’ll assume it’s not bad for now, but maybe we need to have
campaign limits set on power ranks, not total ranks.

A while back, we calculated that a point of Def should cost about 1.5x a
die of attack. How do we handle this? Is it as simple as having to buy
three ranks of Def to get 2 Def? It’s not like 6E doesn’t have costs as
messy.

Or would it be better to have power limitations reduce the cost per
rank, rather than granting more ranks? It’s somewhat the same in terms
of getting more ranks, and scales more evenly like Hero. The
previously-mentioned issue with costs getting very small can be solved
with minimum costs for powers, just as for a power that got all its ranks from
limitations in that system. We could use a minimum cost per level
instead although I’m not sure where to set it. The progression
…3-2-1-1/2-1/3… has the steepest slope at 2-1-1/2, where each of
those steps is a halving of cost, and then it’s less for each step
going outward from that region in both directions. Does this mean
the minimum cost per level should be 2? Although if we have an
easily reachable minimum cost per level, beyond which more limitations
don’t save points, we might as well go with the version where every
power has some number of limitations unless you buy them off with
advantages.

I guess that’s true for limitations giving ranks, as well. Once you have
however many ranks the campaign limit is, there’s no point in taking
more. Although it’s technically true even for Hero, since the minimum
cost is 1 point. It’s hard to get enough limitations to reduce the cost
of a free-standing power below 1.5 (or 1.0 if you’re like that), but not
too hard for an ultra slot in a multipower.

Speaking of which, how does this interact with power frameworks? Well,
with multipower, since elemental controls have been deprecated. Rather
than having a pool and control/slot cost, just say that if you have a
set of powers that are mutually exclusive, they get the Lockout
limitation or something similar, and the minimum cost for the most
expensive one of them is 5 and the minimum cost for the rest is 1 (or
whatever values seem good). This is based on Silver Age Sentinels, where
the most expensive attack power was full price but all the others were
one quarter price or something like that.

Same for movement powers, which fufills the idea I had way back when of
making movement powers an implicit multipower: minimum cost 5 for the
movement power with the greatest movement, 1 for the others (or
whatever).

But, free ranks, or reduce cost per rank? If all ranks cost the same, we
have to have things like 3 ranks for 2 Def and I don’t know which is
worse. In fact, if ranks are variable cost, do they even make sense any
more? We’d still have to figure out how to reduce or increase them
proportionally when adjustment powers come into play. (Which may a lot
less often if we make a better way for people to boost their own powers,
which seems to be the primary use. 6E already allows all kinds of powers
to be increased by Haymaker, so a more general Charge Up maneuver might
obviate the need for self-Aid entirely.)

Is it wrong of me to think adjustment powers, beyond self-boosting
and healing, are not really a thing? I guess it is, because even
if four-color superhero games have too many special effects for it
to make sense, we need to account for fantasy games where everything
is magic, low-power supers where everything is psionics, etc. Even
in four-color, a more coherent campaign than we usually had might
include multiple PCs and NPCs with the same special effect, evil twins,
etc.

If adjustment powers are to work in ranks, then ranks do have to be
pretty even, so we probably don’t want to modify the costs a bunch. No
having some ranks cost 1/2 and others cost 5. But maybe having some cost
2 and some cost 3 is acceptable. Having to buy two ranks to get
something, or getting two of something for each rank, is fine, but 3/2
or 2/3 is obnoxious. (Arguably, fractions are always obnoxious.)

Maybe if I had more maple syrup, my chest would not feel weirdly tight. Bah.

Read (novella): Christmas Chimera (Zoe Chant): I didn’t know Kit did any of the mythical-creatures ones! This one has wilderness survival and extreme awkwardness as well as the usual fated mates stuff.

Read (short): “First of June” (Max Lavergne): A short crime piece. Or maybe anything involving the cryonics industry is automatically horror.

Read (webcomic): Death-Head’s Deal archives (Niuniente): Secondary-world non-fantasy crime(?) drama. If you make a deal with a Death-Head, they’re permitted to do anything to fulfill it, but then you have to give them whatever they say. Nevertheless, people ask for a lot of things.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (anything): FAIL.

I think probably the cats get more rights.

Read (online short): “How Sussie Got His Hat” (CE Murphy): K-Pop Demon Hunters fic!

Read (novel): Tongue Eater (John Bierce): Finally, after hearing about other words accessible through labyrinths and their alien magic and everything, we get to see them. Possibly in too much detail; the travelogue is a traditional fantasy bit, but there was already a plot going on and I’m not sure we needed to spend that much time away from it to admire exotic scenery and watch the PCs be ridiculously overpowered on side quests.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 112.

I guess you’d have to do them one at a time? Not that I roasted any chestnuts at all today, or did anything else for that matter.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 5 (Kiyoko Iwami): Wow, Homewrecker has been messed up for a long time, and no wonder. But that doesn’t mean Cheater should be sneaking off to meet her! Again! Not that any of these girls are old enough to do anything sensible

Read (novel): The Siege of Skyhold (John Bierce): Pretty much what it says on the tin. The big enemy makes their big move, we get to see what a war between multiple great powers looks like, there is murder and betrayal and death and more death. I did not actually see that betrayal coming, although arguably I should have.

Written (game design): 185.

I only ate one bagel, though.

No office again, and now the office is closed until after the first of the year, so it’s all WFH all the time. This would be more productive if Sage were less affectionate, but who wants that? Also would help if the online lab site for the online Kubernetes course actually worked.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 16 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Yes, apparently you can find weird magical artifacts on every street corner in this world. I guess two expeditions into supernatural spaces with their own rules in sixteen volumes isn’t that many, although there was an alien invasion in between, which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by anyone except the PCs.

Written (game design): 236:

None of these addresses the effectiveness vs usability issue, so I think
we’re still holding out for the hitherto-undiscovered fourth option.
Unless usability limitations are just Complications, which they might
be. But also none of this is fundamentally changing our notion of what
it means for a power to be limited or advantaged or both or neither.

No, actually, we did reconsider what it means to be a default power
with the second option there, where all powers have some downsides
unless you buy them off with advantages. I don’t know that it works very
well, since it’s not obvious how to apply it to non-powers (ie,
characteristics), but it is at least different.

What else can we say about limitations and advantages that might offer
openings for reconsideration? Why are limitations more of an issue than
advantages? Part of it is because if we peg cost to utility, making the
power (or characteristic or whatever bolus of points) less useful means
reducing the cost and we can’t go below zero or the whole system breaks
down. Another part is that limitations are less constrained, since in
wargaming, it’s assumed everyone wants to be as powerful as possible and
that’s what has to be kept under control, so the ways you can make a
power better have to be carefully enumerated and restricted. I’m not
expressing this well, possibly because it’s not a well-formed thought,
but I think I’m right.

Having a set of powers that cover every operation your system is
interested in, in a basic way, and then a selection of advantages to
make them better but more expensive or weaker but cheaper is pretty
elegant, but not the only way to do things. If your set of “advantages” is
sufficiently restricted, you could not have them separate at all: blast,
area-effect blast, etc. Or, if the system is structured appropriately,
do something like I tried earlier where each power has a slider for each
of the various attributes (number of targets, fatigue, armor
penetrations, etc etc) that you can buy up or down. I didn’t get it
to work, but I didn’t try that hard.

Do limitations even reduce the cost? As previously mentioned, you could
instead get XP when your limitations come up, at least for ones that put
requirements on the power.

Maybe effectiveness limitations, instead of giving points back that you
can use for whatever, directly give you ranks (dice, active points,
whatever) in the power. If you want more ranks than you get from
limitations, you can buy them with points. Minimum cost applies for each
power, although it could be varied to give some of the same effect as
power frameworks (less for attack powers after the first, etc). This is
another one that’s mathematically similar to previous ideas, but might
feel different in play.

(Speaking of ranks, what if instead of ranks in a power, we had ranks of
damage, ranks of area/size, ranks of defense, ranks of penetration (may be
the same as ranks of defense, actually), etc? Then you could make your
forcewall out of ranks in defense plus ranks in area, instead of having
to have ranks all called Forcewall but doing different things. Maybe
you have to have at least one rank in the specific power to get the
basic effect and define what what exactly the other ranks do, or maybe
that’s free.)

Ranks gained from limitations can’t exceed whatever the campaign limit
is, of course, but can be any kind of rank. With requirement limitations
being Complications, is this a system at last? I’m still worried that
we’ll end up with all powers at minimum cost, but maybe the only way to
resolve that issue is to move forward.

Also Human Rights day, like humans aren’t animals.

No office, because I’m on handover this week, but up early for all-hands meeting anyway. Nothing very interesting this time.

Read (manga): eV vol 1 (Alfa Robbi, James Farr, Papillon Studio): Another reread from the distant past to confirm that I don’t need to reread it any more.

Written (game design): 277.

Also National Techno Music in the Crematorium Day.

No gaming, Vivian is in an awkward time zone (South America sticks out more to the east than I thought) and Ash’s dog had to go to the emergency vet but is fine.

Read (novella): Owl Be Home for Christmas (Zoe Chant): One of the non-spicy ones, with a shifter movie star coming back to Virtue. Not enough dinosaur shifter shenanigans, or really anything except the two leads making goopy eyes at each other.

Read (graphic novel): How Could You (Ren Strapp): College lesbians who are old enough to sleep around and not nearly mature enough to be involved in any relationships. Crushes, betrayal, escaping to France, escaping from France, the desperate quest for girls they don’t already know, etc.

Written (game design): 114. Also fiddled with my Kaiju Academy character a bunch.

But that just makes me want to return to the glorious future of Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 13 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): Of course once you’ve been to the Otherside, you can never escape weird shit. Also Kozakura’s scorn for the two leads and their hot spring adventure plan is 100% justified. I completely understand about wanting your own space and not liking being in other people’s space, though.

Written (game design): 283:

Back to the drawing board again. We can reduce the cost of individual
powers, we can give extra points separately, we can make powers with
fewer than some number of limitations cost more, or an
as-yet-undiscovered fourth option. Or, of course, a combination.

Giving points separately would something like this. You have your
powers each with their base cost, say a plasma-based flying energy
projector package:
– Plasma bolt (blast)
– Plasma shield (forcefield + damage shield)
– Plasma rocket (flight)
– Magnetic Sense

Then there are limitations that apply to these, each with a base value,
and then a multiplier for how many of the powers it applies to:
– Doesn’t work in strong magnetic fields – applies to all, x4 base points
– Too bright to hide – applies to most but not sense, x3 base points
– Backblast – applies to only flight, x1 base points

The important thing here is to not make the extra points larger
than the cost of the power(s) being limited, to avoid a runaway
spiral of infinite power(s). But, the points have to be enough for
limitations to be tempting and roughly balanced. Sticking with the
idea that a limitation gets a multiplier depending on how many of
your powers it applies to (per power, or few/some/most/all), we can
obviously say that if the total cost of the powers that a limitation
applies to is X, then you can’t get more than X-1 points for the
limitation. That can lead to recalculations of multiple limitations
every time you change a power, instead of only recalculating that
power, which is obviously not great but might not be too bad since
you only have to add up the integer costs, not do any fractional
arithmetic. The upside of this scheme is that it encourages common
limitations, which a character with a strong concept should have.
(I think. I might be basing this too much on the current game, where
everyone has the same power source.)

For increasing cost for powers that don’t have X limitations, we have to
pick a number of limitations to be the base, say 4. Then with the same
powers and limitations, we have
– blast – not in magnetic fields, bright, needs 2 levels of unlimited power
– shield – same
– flight – not in magnetic fields, bright, backblast, only needs 1 level of unlimited power
– magnetic sense – not in magnetic fields, needs 3 levels of unlimited power

This is easier to calculate (only advantages), but it means having
more than four limitations never gives any points, which could be
good or bad depending on whether the massive limits on the power
are legit. It also allows counting limitations (obviously some can
count double or triple) instead of working with fractions like 11/4.

Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages and I’m really not
sure whether either is better than the existing system. They do, maybe,
solve the problem of fiddling around with piles of -1/4 limitations to
shave fractions of a percent of a character budget, but is it worth it?

Also maybe Day of the Ninja, but you didn’t hear it from me.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 5 (Sai Naekawa): What? The story the monster has been feeding her isn’t complete and possibly isn’t true at all? You don’t say!

Read (short): “Slaying the Dragon” (CE Murphy): Urban Shaman short after the end of the series. Not sure I approve of killing randomly-encountered monsters, but magical power is probably as good a reason as food to kill a nonsapient.

Written (game design): 195:

One of the things I like about incrementing/decrementing the cost
per rank is that instead of having to perform two separate calculations,
it’s just sliding up and down a chart, which is way easier. However,
that loses the distinction between active points and real points,
which we still may want to keep. The real distinction is between
modifiers that affect when a power can be used (not at night, 0
End) and how effective it is when used (reduced knockback,
armor-piercing), which even 6E doesn’t differentiate, but it’s still
probably not great to be able to get a 24d6 attack even if it only
works at night.

This is making the problem worse, since now we have power level separate
from cost, and modifiers on both axes, but I’d rather have that clear
than muddled, even if I’m not sure how to implement it yet.

I would also like to be able to count limitations in integers, rather
than floats. Even if it’s just a matter of scaling, I’d rather not
pretend we have that much precision when we really don’t.

If we say one limitation is about equal to a -1/4, so 80%, and multiply
that for each one, then the multiplier goes 4/5, 2/3, 1/2, 2/5, 1/3,
1/4. That seems simple, but the LCD is 1/60. Bah.

Quadrants are a popular way of pulling open problems. Will they help
here? We have advantages vs limitations, and modifies effectiveness vs
modifies usability. The first is a hard dichotomy (probably, although I
guess there could be a modifier that’s both good and bad without being
an advantage and a limitation in one trenchcoat), the second might be
blurrier. But let’s say the axes have only two positions for now.

Is an advantage that increases the effectiveness of the power
fundamentally different than another 1d6 of attack or 1 Def or whatever
the power gives? We can say that making the attack armor-piercing makes
every die armor-piercing, but what if instead a rank of piercing lets
the attack ignore 2 of the target’s Def? Or a rank of range increases
the range from melee to same hex to adjacent hex etc? Every square meter
that we increase an Barrier’s area by in 6E gets the full Def and Body,
but it’s a flat cost rather than an advantage.

Actually range should go, melee -> same hex -> couple of hexes based
on active points/ranks -> many hexes based on active points/ranks
-> line of sight, so maybe it’s not a good example. Or maybe it
shows that every advantage that increases effectiveness is different.
Either way, we see that Hero includes charging by both advantages
(multiplication) and adders (addition) for increasing effectiveness.

Instead of scorning powers that have multiple ways to absorb points
spent on themm, like my favorite example of Barrier, maybe we should be
embracing them. Put points separately into damage, range, penetration,
area, defense used against it, Def, Body, sense groups, everything that
applies to the power. Every aspect starts at minimum for 0 points, so
there aren’t many limitations that apply to effectiveness.

This would make everything a flat adder, so you’re not paying for each
die of your NND attack to bypass Def, you’re paying to negate the
target’s Def.

This is simpler in that everything is explicit, but now you have
to list everything that’s not minimum as one of potentially many
line items under each power. Is this simpler or cleaner than the
existing 6E system? Unclear.

Reject purity of bloodline! Fuck Nazis!

I think I forgot how to do my job. Playing board games is way more fun.

Read (manga): FAIL. I started a thick one, but did not finish anything today.

Written (game design): 224.

Going on vacation completely disrupted my train of thought (such as it
was), and of course I never talk about game design in person because I
know everyone will think it’s stupid to not just use D&D5E (or possibly
some other set of glossy published rules, but probably D&D). It’s not
that they’re wrong, but I dare to be stupid anyway.

Although I rant against the idea that a -1/4 limitation is always
exactly a 20% decrease in effectiveness of whatever those active
points are doing, or that you can even measure effectiveness that
quantitatively, some rough measure of effectiveness or utility is
all we have to base costs on. Without them, we’re in filthy
story-gamer territory of “write down three superpowers”.

(It occurs to me that the costs don’t have to be fixed by how many
ranks/dice/whatever you get: characters could always have 25 points and
an attack at the campaign limit could always cost 10, regardless of what
the campaign limit is. I don’t think we particularly want to do this,
but we could.)

The reduction in cost (or rebate, or however it’s implemented) just has
to seem reasonable to the players. Ditto for advantages, of course. But
I’ve said this before. I’m just going in circles here, because I am very
dumb and should shut up and play glossy published games.