Month: January 2026

More important now than ever, somehow.

The cats kept me in bed forever, which on the one hand is fine because I have only a little shopping to do today, but on the other hand just makes my sleep schedule worse.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 1-2: A suddenly-orphaned 15-year-old is taken in by her estranged weird aunt (novelist, probably neurospicy, doing her best). No hijinks ensue.

Read (graphic novel): Whistle: A good-hearted schoolgirl gets drawn into a life of crime because her family needs money and crime is how you get money in Gotham City. No Batman or Joker, but she meets several lower-tier canonical villains.

Written (game design): 190.

Hey, maybe that’s what Sage was yelling about! I sure don’t know what else it might be.

I just missed the bus to go shopping, so instead of waiting half an hour, I walked to the store. I really need to do that more when the weather is suitable (ie, not summer).

Lady on the street corner by my apartment was with a sign about increased ICE in San Jose, handing out fliers for the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network. The number is 408 290 1144 if you see any anonymous masked kidnappers.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.15-17: And now all the plot threads are coming back to life at once! Conspiracy! Betrayal! Eunuchs! Genetics! That one guy!

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 1 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Trying to make the move to reading manga on my pad. It works well when I remember to do it, although I have to hold the pad in landscape mode, so maybe I should get used to doing all my other timewasters that way too. Anyway, the anime follows the manga very closely. There is a translator note when Gaoshun starts calling Maomao “Xiaomao” which tells us that the “xiao” means “little”, so he’s basically calling her Mao-chan, which is pretty adorable.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL. But if I can stop adding more paper to the shelf, that’s good, right? Except then I feel like I’m betraying my buddy Doug at the bookstore by not buying anything in paper.

Written (game design): 112:

Now we have three ways to deal with opponents: find their
weakness/overcome their strengths, talk them down, or just punch them.
But, by the nature of dominant mechanics, alternate approaches can’t
coexist: if grinding down their hit points is an option, that’s the one
most players will take unless the other options are so much better than
the complexity is worth dealing with, and then one of them will be the
preferred one. Even if they’re mathematically equal (unlikely,
especially since different opponents will probably have different
susceptibility to each), there’s probably going to be one that looks the
best to players.

Not to buy in to the “dominant mechanics” theory uncritically, but that
does sound a lot like how players work. Having them carefully work out
which approach is best in each scene is also not ideal, since there’s a
bunch of pondering and calculating, and then only one approach getting
used. Although I guess as long as it’s not the same one approach every
time it’s not that bad? But a combination would be better.

It’s an important part of Hero that NPCs and PCs are made using the
same rules, but that means the NPCs should be working on overcoming
all the aspects of the PCs, who also have only 1HP (each? between
them all? hardly matters). This doesn’t work as well because the
GM has only one brain against all the PCs, instead of many brains
against one villainous plot (even if it has many individual villains).
On the other hand, it’s also unfairly easy for the GM because while
every villainous plot can have at least somewhat different obstacles
to overcome, while a team of PCs generally stays very similar from
one adventure to the next (if they’re like typical Hero characters that
have most of their points spent on their own capabilities that can’t be
changed quickly).

Another difficulty is that whatever the GM prepares needs to provide
something for every character to do, or else the players have to be able
to define enough of the situation that they can make opportunities to
stick the opposition with quills.

Put on my One More Chapter Club shirt, did more work than I expected although maybe still not a lot.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 10-13: She punches her way through a war and a dungeon and a flirtation, all the way to the end!

Read (artbook): Magic Knights (Dames Productions): Pictures of magical girls, now with swords! Also spears, dashing uniforms, guardian spirits, fancy dresses, mounts, comrades in arms, etc. Every page is by a different artist, but the styles are in the same genre.

Read (novel): Murder Medic vol 1 (EC Krueger). Someone who manages to die of rabies is isekai’d, steals the demon heart a cultist was hoping to use himself, makes some friends that then find out she’s a demon, gets harrassed by the cultist and various other people, does a lot of murders and LitRPG leveling up while her demon nature heckles her.

Written (game design): 264.

Sage has many questions, but I don’t know what they are!

Had a meeting with our new colleagues in Australia, but we did the lame American thing of just talking about sharks and giant spiders and drop bears. Also I embarrassed myself by forgetting which way the planet rotates.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.17-18: More characters from past arcs make an appearance! Some of them even survive!

Read (novel): Shadow of Mars: Book eighteen, back with the current action heroine on the conquered planet. Action and heroics ensue, mostly unsanctioned.

Written (game design): 202.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 7-9: Religious intrigue! Divine intrigue! Treason, betrayal, crushes! Also punching. Lots of punching.

Read (graphic novel): Stutterhug vol 1 (Sam Davies): Brightly colored animals, some anthropomorphic, many stylishly-dressed, dance and flirt and meet and part and sing, usually lovingly, sometimes sadly.

Written (game design): 430:

I’ve been complaining about hit points since at least the previous
game design document, and off and on since then. It would definitely
be better to defeat enemies (and overcome adversity in general)
through in-game action. The one approach I know of is the 1HP Dragon:
the dragon is so large that a sword is but a mosquito bite and its
scales are as impenetrable as an inch of iron plate, but instead
of abstracting those into a large number that you have to grind
down with endless dice rolls of the one optimum power on your
character sheet, they’re factors you have to deal with by planning
and in-game action, just like the dragon’s power of flight, and the
way its lair is hidden deep in the mountains, and the surprise army
of kobold ninjas. (This is phrased in D&D I mean “generic fantasy”
terms, but what is a supervillain but a dragon in spandex?)

The problem with this is that it requires a lot of prep by the GM to
establish all the components of the opposition. Is it too much for
anything except a boss fight/master villain? The amount of detail for a
master villain is probably too much for anything else, but the minor
villain robbing the local bank probably doesn’t need that much. They do
need some detail, though, and every aspect needs to be at least somewhat
interesting, so that’s still work. Also, if one of the aspects is that
the villain has a gang of henchmen, does each of them need to have their
set of aspects to overcome?

(We’re only talking about the end stage of the adventure here, or
at least the combat encounters. The first part of a superheroic
adventure is usually investigation, which works the same way as
before, peeling away secrecy and resources from the villain. Sometimes
those resources are minions, who would have hit points, so do we
fractalize them? What if they’re normals?)

As always with games where the characters aren’t baseline humans
in a mundane world, we need some way to ajudicate what they can do
to or about each other where intuition fails. How does a biotech
suit of powered armor interact with the opponent’s runic array? For
that matter, can this particular rail gun shoot through that
particular adamantium-plated robot? With time to plan and flexible
powers (gadgeteering, magic, any kind of VPP) many things are
possible, but sometimes supervillains are attacking right now.

Even if the players come up with a plan, are there any mechanics
around executing the plan in a rush under field (ie, horrible)
conditions? What if the plan is “get them”? Even Squirrel Girl
punches villains pretty often, so we still need a combat system of
some kind, better than the 1HP Goblin. Have we just put the hit
points inside a puzzle box? Do players want to always open a puzzle
box? I’m sure the GM doesn’t want to make a new puzzle box every
week. It’s 2026, nobody has time for that.

It’s like Monday, only different. I’m doing handover and on-call this week, so I don’t have to get up early to go into the office, I guess that’s something.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 4-6: More punching! Also various people falling in love with Scarlet, which is legit because she’s awesome, but also boys are gross.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 6 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, S finally got it! But I bet they have a lot more mismatched feelings coming in the future, especially once T finds out.

Written (game design): 198:

Leaving attack rolls and damage rolls alone for the moment, the effect
of emotional damage has to be somewhat cumulative, but preferably not
just filling up a track like physical damage. Maybe a Presence attack
has whatever effect it has, and also gives a -1 to defend against
similar moods but +1 against opposing moods. If it reaches an effective
Presence 0, then the target should adjust their psychlims accordingly,
although possibly not until after the fight.

Of course NPCs should be able to do this to PCs, but Hero characters
don’t change unless the player changes them, so any adjustment of
psychlims would need to be optional and compensated with XP.

(Since we’re using points of effect, fka Body on the dice, it’s now Pre,
Pre+3, Pre+6, etc for the steps of effect, rather than +10, +20.)

What effects could be worth doing Pre attacks instead of just grinding
down hitpoints. This is not a novel observation, but players tend to go
for options that are simple, immediate, and reliable, which is why so
many games have combat that boils down to taking away as many of the
enemy’s hit points as possible, even if there are other options. Clayton
Notestine called these “dominant mechanics”. Skill rolls are another
one: when you can get rid of the trap with a roll, instead of describing
how you carefully use your ten-foot pole to pack the gas vent with mud,
what are players going to do more often? A skill roll isn’t reliable in
the sense of always working, but you have X% change of succeeding even
if you don’t baffle the GM with bullshit.

This works fine in a low-tech, low-magic dungeon crawl, but a
superheroic, SF, high-magic, or even just modern game is going to have
characters that are experts in things the players aren’t, or things nobody
in the world is actually an expert in because they don’t exist. At that
point, what can we do except abstraction, or nonsense (technobabble)?

Also known as MLK Day.

No work today, mostly (I was backup to the backup), but I had to get up early to let the cleaners in, and then I was up so I went shopping and did laundry and died in a pit. My computer spontaneously rebooted, so I finally gave Apple a huge pile of money for a new computer and some peripherals.

Watched (anime): May I Ask for One Final Thing? 1-3: The rotten prince publicly breaks off his engagement with our heroine in favor of some chickie who accuses her of awful things, but instead of fleeing the country or dying and reincarnating, she puts on her punching gloves and beats the everliving crap out of the side piece, the prince, and all the members of his faction who are at the party. She then goes on to help her brother the investigator and his boss the crown prince with their work by beating the everliving crap out of a bunch more extremely deserving people.

Read (novel): Demon Queen Wants to Paint vol 1 (Amber Atlas): A young artist from Earth is reincarnated as a baby in the demon realm, which is pretty frustrating because she has tiny baby limbs and all while having her teenage mind, and also the demon realm is creepy and everyone is scary, but she does her best. Things are actually explained

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 5 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, A is really not dealing well with her feelings being different than S’s, or maybe just her feelings at all. Too bad therapy isn’t a thing in Japan, because she could really use some.

Written (game design): 163. Not very much for a holiday, but it’s more than 100.

Also Coffee Is Divine Day.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Finally, after being completely overmatched and having to be rescued by adults or at least older students every time for four sessions in a row, the group finally defeats someone! It’s only combat exercises at the military school they’re visiting, and as guests and juniors they get all their gear and none of the opposition know what to expect, but still! They successfully escape captivity and take out three military academy students along the way, because finally they are awesome! Then the school is attacked and there are giant lizards everywhere and Cedric is going full Darth Vader, so they’ll probably need to be rescued again next session.

Read (blog post): The Chameleon.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 4 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Yep, that childhood friend is definitely competition, although she doesn’t know A even exists. Also, A and S have completely different ideas about that sleepover.

Written (game design): 206:

Story-wise, a master villain’s minions are often an extension of
them for this purpose: punch the minions, then once you’ve shown
you’re worthy of respect, talk down the mastermind. That sure sounds
like doing emotional damage to them, even if it’s expressed
differently. Maybe it just makes negotiations easier, though? Rather
than having a story-game single track for overcoming obstacles,
emotional damage could be an expanded Presence attack, which can
do more than make people lose a phase? It’s okay if it’s a little
simpler (no Def or Res), since it’s orthogonal. But how do skills
work into this? Are there no more of the skills that would have
been Interaction skills, and it’s all Pre attacks, maybe with ranks
limited to only help with your specialty? Or are the skills effectively
attack rolls, and you only get to roll Pre dice if you make the
skill roll? I don’t think we want to undermine the skill system, and
it seems like interaction should always get some kind of reaction, but
does this then make us want to remove attack rolls from physical
attacks? Of course it does, but then we have to come up with some other
way to distinguish between martial artists and bricks.

I guess that’s using AI instead of paying for a support contract.

Monday is a holiday, so I’ll do my shopping for next week then. Unfortunately, this means I had no reason not to let the cats keep me trapped in bed until noon. I spent the afternoon reading journalism about Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) and his Scientology-spawned abuses, which is probably not any better a use of time than slowly dissolving into mulch.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.12-14: The romance plot isn’t going anywhere, but it’s more of a big deal that it’s not. Also, the hot springs bath episode. We passed the halfway point of the season, so there are new credits, and Shisui (bug girl) is a lot more prominent…

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 3 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): S still has no thoughts of romance, but that doesn’t mean this childhood friend isn’t competition!

Read (journalism?): The Cuddled Little Vice (Elizabeth Sandifer): A side piece to the author’s main current work, which is a metaphorical(?) description of Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s comics careers as a magical war a la Crowley. Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) came out of that same British comics scene and was a big deal, so he also gets a long piece on his works (mostly Sandman) and also how shitty he was. I read it all, because my ability to not read things is very weak, but I don’t feel like it has improved my life to read such extensive commentary on Sandman even though I liked it thirty years ago. I also do not feel compelled to read the rest of the larger work, although I bet there are people who find it right up their alley.

Written (game design): 158:

Back to emotional damage! Letting an opponent be defeated by filling
either of two damage tracks is a strong incentive to focus on one,
although which one depends on what the players think that particular
opponent is weakest against. Depending on how much variation there is in
that, PCs might specialize in one track, and let’s face it, that’s
always going to be punching.

Even when a villain gets talked down, there’s often punching first, so
maybe both tracks have to be filled? Although there are plenty of
villains that need only punching, or only talking, so maybe one track is
sometimes zero, or very small. But now we’re back to the players guessing
what the GM set as the way to defeat the villain.

So is there just one track, emotional damage counting the same as
clobbering damage? But then there needs to be emotional Def and
emotional Res, and this is getting further and further away from Hero.

Went to the doctor for a yearly checkup, and apparently all my numbers are great. This doctor is very big on the protective effects of Mounjaro on various organs, so okay. Also got a vaccination, big globs of wax taken out of my ears, and (eventually) pictures taken of my retinas to see if they’re exploding.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings try to come up with a plan to rescue Faizal from his bridge, but can’t figure out where to get enough explosives. Then they go to a party, where Melanie recruits Theophania to quest for the Holy Grail and tells her about a dream. Thessaly makes out with a living candle and judges people harshly, Everett hangs out with his fetch and his girlfriend, Gretchen melts into the floorboards, and Siddy wasn’t there at all.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 2 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): A is so smitten everybody except S can tell.

Written (game design): 138:

Another thing I got from my blog reading was not giving rewards for
virtuous behavior, because then it’s not virtuous, it’s just mercenary
on the part of the players. So no XP for saving the day, but XP for
getting beaten up while trying to save the day is fine. Not saving the
day is probably worth even more XP (as long as it doesn’t end the
campaign). No XP for beating up others, though. Definitely XP for
getting captured and put in a death trap, following the rule of only
rewarding suffering in the service of genre tropes, not the tropes
themselves.

Honestly, although I’m trying to make a procedure for deciding how
much XP each character gets based on the shape of their doom, the
time-honored method of the GM saying, “You had a pretty hard time
this session, 4 XP for everyone” has always worked acceptably. Maybe
+1 XP for whoever the table votes as having failed the most
spectacularly. An individual character’s complications just provide
the components for a more holistic view of failure, and who are we
to say the table doesn’t know how to award XP?

In this approach, narrative complications are just notes on how to play
your character, or how to GM for them (that is, what kind of adversity
they need to face), and don’t need point values or other quantification.
Unless, that is, we do want to have variable amounts of emotional
damage.

Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.

Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!

Written (game design): 160:

The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)

(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)

One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.

We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).

How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.

Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.

I don’t make the rules, man. (Narrator: He totally made up those rules.)

Went to the office, listened to an all-hands meeting, ate some yellow curry tofu, did some work, helped some colleagues, learned some kubernetes.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 5 (Chomoran): Road trip episode! Also some backstory for Sachi.

Read (novel): How to Survive This Fairytale (SM Hallow): Hansel escapes his story (with massive PTSD) but is still in a world in which fairytales happen, and a lot of them happen to him, which sucks. But it doesn’t suck forever.

Written (game design): 199.

Mmm, sticky dreams.

Went to the office, listened to a departmental all-hands, did some work, ate some chicken guys and pickled radish, learned some kubernetes.

No gaming, gaming has moved to alternate Fridays, which hopefully will work better for more people.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 4 (Chomoran): The giant school-eating monster is vanquished, but Sachi had to accept a major consequence, so it’s time for a road trip. Also half of Makie’s family has appeared, but they don’t seem that important, maybe because they weren’t actually lost, only misplaced.

Read (short): “Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death” (Charlotte_Stant): Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Probably you have to be at least as online as me to appreciate this.

Read (short): “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” (Isabel J Kim): Smash the corrupt system! Um.

Written (game design): 193:

So how do we decide how many/how much complication a character has?
Negative points aren’t a problem, they reduce the character’s
capabilities just like regular points increase them, but what about
narrative complications? There’s two sides to the this, the number
of complications a player has to manage and the amount of XP generated
per session (adventure? in-game week?). The former needs some minimum
to keep characters from being single-note, but I don’t know what
that minimum would be, and anyway, more can be added over time as
they come up in play, especially reputations, hunteds, etc. For a
maximum, it depends on how we set the maximum per experience cycle.
If it’s per complication, then players are encouraged to take as
many as possible and try to get to them all every cycle, which is
probably not ideal. So, an overall limit to keep play from devolving
into chasing after XP, and also a per-complication limit to keep
players from spamming one annoying psychlim. Numbers to be determined by
playtesting or something.

Also, what counts as “causing trouble” for a complication? Hunteds
are easy: if they show up, you get XP. But how about Watched? Okay,
maybe that’s not even a real complication, but Psychlim, Reputation,
Physlim? Actually, those are two different categories, since Psychlim
trouble comes from the PC’s choices, while social and physical
problems are usually inflicted by the GM. But, how bad of a choice
does it take to be worth XP? Does the GM have to offer a point of
XP for making the wrong choice? But in that case, the PC doesn’t
even need psychlims, the GM just needs to know what they would
usually know better than to do. In that case, psychlims would just be
for taking emotional damage. (You know, like my inconsistent
capitalization is doing to any readers I may have.)

For external complications, it’s even fuzzier. Sure, if Antihero
Lad gets harrassed by the cops, that’s XP, but what if the team
makes a plan that happens to keep him away from the cops because
the place his powers help the most is over there? Does it matter whether
the players think to say out loud that this plan avoids that problem? Is
that even enough trouble to count? The saying is, “experience is what
you get when you don’t get what you want” so maybe avoiding the problem
is its own reward, and the XP only comes when the problem tells you to
assume the position.

Presumably somebody likes fabulous wild men.

Read (novel): Never Send Roses (Craig Schaefer): Seventh Harmony Black book, Harmony and her werewolf BFF (backed up by the rest of their horrifyingly unrestrained black ops agency) join a heist being pulled by one of their greatest enemies, which of course goes horribly wrong, but was horrible from the beginning.

Read (novel): Snake Oil Bullet (Craig Schaefer): Eighth book, with return of some enemies thought dead as well as new enemies, conspiracies, immortality, demons in cages, new magical powers, etc. Also alarming revelations about Harmony.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 248:

We can’t just make a Morale track that parallels the regular damage
track. Splitting effect between two tracks makes it take twice as long
to take someone down, so all the incentive is for the entire team to
focus on one or the other. Either they should share the same track, or
they should have completely different mechanics.

Long ago on Usenet (but I repeat myself) I saw a reference to a
superhero game where villains performing heinous acts like
machine-gunning the crowd would inflict Emotional Damage on the heroes,
with the implication that this was just another damage type like Fire
Damage or Ballistic Damage. Do we want something like that? Since heroes
and villains use the same rules, we’d want to base who takes how much
damage on each character’s Psychlims. That converts Psychlims into
something like Susceptibilities, which is fine. They can still award XP
when the character makes decisions based on them, unless we want to
split those functions.

Which maybe we do, since Psychlims as self-funding Complications don’t
have a level: XP is awarded according to how many times a Complication
causes trouble, not according to how important it theoretically is.
Antipowers like Susceptibilities and Vulnerabilities do have levels
according to how much they hurt, so if these are independent, everyone
is going to buy Psychlims at the lowest level unless there’s some
incentive not to.

(Psychlims, social limitations, hunted and watched, are all
Complications, but are physlims Antipowers? Fewer Limbs is the natural
inverse of Extra Limbs, but it’s probably okay to take baseline human
capabilities for granted. Buying down movement or whatever is still
negative cost. Not sure about buying off senses, though. That could be
both: negative points to use for buying whatever compensatory sense,
plus a complication for not fitting into human technology.)

Successfully did shopping and also made some spots of light for the cats to chase.

Watched (anime): Gachiakuta 1-3: A poor boy from the non-shiny side of a divided and extremely racist city is accused of murder and flung into the pit that encircles the city where all trash and criminals end up, and discovers that his adoptive father’s old story about cherished objects gaining souls was not entirely nonsense. Very shonen, battles against trash monsters, almost no female characters.

Read (manga): Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 3 (Yoichi Abe): After a lot more surreal dream worlds and things dissolving into other things and alter egos of the ML conflicting with each other and drawing new worlds, everything is somehow resolved! Kind of. But it’s like the real world. The end!

Written (game design): 343:

In Hero, heroes and villains are created the same way, which is
appropriate for a wargame, but for superheroics, maybe villains
(and NPCs in general?) should always have a weakness, or it should
be legit to negate their powers through tactics? Even a recurring
villain shows up a lot less than a PC, so they don’t need to be as
consistent. But there are definitely players who would object to
someone getting extra dice of damage just because they asked the
GM, never mind losing some of their precious defenses just because
the GM feels like it.

Is it worse for the GM to decide what the villain’s weakness is
ahead of time, so whoever best guesses what the GM was thinking the
advantage, or have the players come up with the clever plan on the
fly, so whoever sucks up to the GM most gets the advantage? I’d do both:
the GM should have a weakness and a clue to it prepared, but if the
players come up with something else, that’s fine. I may be a filthy
story gamer, though.

Having mechanics for finding or exploiting a weakness would probably
make that kind of player happier. It might even make me happier. Not
sure what the mechanics would look like, though. The minimum would be a
skill check to spot the weakness and maybe a maneuver to take advantage
of it, but what if the weakness isn’t just a thin spot in the
forcefield, and the PCs have to distract the villain so they can’t use
their big attack, or demoralize them until they’re willing to listen to
reason, or whatever?

There are already mechanics for some of this: the big attack could have
Extra Time and Concentration, Presence attacks that play on someone’s
psychlims get bonus dice, etc. They do need to be set up ahead of
time (or retconned in), though, there’s no provision for other
characters declaring them, which is not surprising since Hero is
not much on giving players GM power. Also the mechanics are all
different, but maybe that’s okay.

Presence attacks don’t quite work for talking someone down, though.
They’re mostly immediate and not cumulative, and have enough language
about “the target may consider doing the thing” that the GM can always
weasel out of having the villain surrender. That’s probably for the best
since otherwise all PCs would have Pre 60 and all NPC opponents would
have to have piles of Presence Defense.

 

It me.

I did two whole shoppings today, wheee.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.9-11: Is the romance subplot finally getting somewhere?!

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 1 (Sumiko Arai): High school girl with taste in music gets a crush on the ccool assumed-boy at the music store, not knowing that it’s actually the girl who sits next to her in class. The secret is revealed by the end of vol 1, but neither of them is thinking about romance yet. Printed with acid-green backgrounds, for extra cool artisticness.

Written (game design): 280:

Using the (1+A)/(1+L) system inevitably leads to fractional values,
which means rounding (unless you keep all fractions, which I have no
intention of doing), and rounding 7.5 to 7 is a lot more of a bonus than
rounding 15.5 to 15, never mind 32.5 to 32. Obviously this is just math,
but psychologically it seems like even more somehow. Do we like that?
Maybe not.

Leaving that aside for now, since we will definitely return to it sooner
rather than later, I was reading theory blogs on being mindful of what
kinds of activity a game supports, because players are going to do the
thing that has firm mechanics. Superheroics (or action
movie heroics) is never not going to have punching, but we should have
other ways of solving problems as well. At least Hero has Presence
attacks, which is a lot more than most systems. It might be nice to have
even more support for moral suasion, though. You can’t talk Doom out of
exerting his rightful authority over the whole Earth, at least not
without a lot of leverage, but apparently you can dissuade Galactus from
eating the planet. (And of course criminals are a cowardly and superstitious
lot, but that’s mostly covered by Presence attacks.)

I might be basing this too much on the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it
seems like the main ways for a superhero to defeat a villain are
straight-up punching (especially for agents or minor villains), talking
them down, or finding their weakness/coming up with a clever plan to get
an advantage. Hero combat is usually only the first, and very rarely the
last since unless the GM specifically prepared a gimmick fight, it’s
very difficult to have any tactic be more effective than hitting them
with your main attack. (If you only paid for a 10d6 attack, why should
you get to do more than that? And if they paid for 40 Def, why shouldn’t
they always get it?)

I play like ten word games every day, so hard to deny it me.

Did not go into the office, did get sat on by cats.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.13-14: More fighting in the Sky Coffin, heteromorph riot on the ground.

Read (novel): Cold Eyes (Peter Cawdron): This book annoyed me so much! The entire story hinges on the aliens not being able to get into space because their planet has too high an orbital velocity for chemical rockets and limited uranium, and obviously  what humans knew about in the 1960s is all that’s physically possible. Gaaah! Read a book! Or a journal!

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 5 (Yodokawa): Landlord resolves her troublesome backstory, HEA, the end!

Written (game design): 191.

I typed in a chair instead, which is definitely not as classy.

Went to the office, did some work, learned some kubernetes, ate some beef stroganoff.

Read (graphic novel): Family Force V vol 1 (Matt Braly, Ainsworth Lin): The somewhat (but not very) delinquent daughter of a family sentai team struggles with life, the alien spaceship that gives the sentai teams their powers, new aliens, etc. There is of course a cliffhanger ending.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.11-12: Meh, surely that guy wasn’t an important character or anything. Certainly not compared to Tintin-Face Lad, who has returned to the fray.

Written (game design): 286.

Went to the office, possibly freed the team from an onerous burden, didn’t program anything, ate some barbecue, studied some Kubernetes, did some work.

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 2 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): The world is falling apart even more, and also we get to see what utter weirdos these characters are. Also, criminal cultists are apparently an exceptionally cowardly and superstitious lot.

Read (essay): “These Stories Teach Us How to Fight” (Dawn Xiana Moon): Learning resistance from reading SF.

Written (game design): 163.

Samantha who? Dunno, I didn’t invent the day! Maybe we should have left it at Dry Beans Day.

Did not sleep well, probably because I ate only spicy burrito for dinner last night and then stayed up too late. I’m really not very good at this life thing.

Went to the new office. It is spacious and pretty and has nice views on every side and complimentary hair product in the bathrooms, but the usability might be a bit low because windows full of natural light don’t really go with monitors. Also we no longer get a room to hide in, so I have given up on masking. Probably I should come back to it, since wearing a mask even most of the time is still better than not. Ate some German-style Impossible sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, did some work. Our boss³ sits right next to us, which on the one hand is not great, but on the other hand means we can always get a policy decision when we need one.

Official schedule is now 9-18:00, so it’s a good thing we’re moving gaming to a night when I don’t have to commute. On the other hand, although I did not get home at a reasonable hour, I did manage to do several things with my evening. Bah, how am I supposed to resent commuting now?

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 1 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): Five excessively competent people feel obligated to deal with the weird shit that’s been crawling out of the corners of the world ever since they worked on that project a few years back. Extremely Warren Ellis, but also reminds me of Carl Rigney.

Written (game design): 116:

The smallest skills (familiarity, +1 for a background skill) cost 1
point, so whatever we do with points has to affect skills, probably by
broadening them. As previously established, I’m fine with skills being
more job-like and less individual tasks, but just how broad that is
depends on how chonky points are, so I guess I better decide. One point
per rank is very tempting, although then all limitations have to be one
or more full ranks, no lesser values. That’s if we stick with
limitations that give extra ranks. If we revert to the old fractional
arithmetic system, but with base costs that only go up to 12 or so, is
it not so bad?

I didn’t succeed in talking about whipped cream today. I didn’t succeed in reading anything. I didn’t succeed in writing anything. Apparently even though I have been to a zillion different offices in my life, going to this new office is stressful.

I did manage to spend money, but the comics are being delivered to my lair instead of to the store for pickup. It was enough to get free shipping anyway, though.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (anything): FAIL. Wow, I really suck.

Another of those days that’s every day.

Jeremy and Rachel have a new dog, Bella, who appears to be a miniature dachshund, although when her fur grows back from the rescue shave she will look more poodly. She is adorable.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Field trip! Giant bugs! Another person with past-life memories! The PCs continue their streak of being completely useless and having to be rescued by NPCs so they don’t die, which has lasted for the entire campaign so far.

Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 2 (NC Lux): Person who turned into a succubus when she got sucked into the System’s dungeon because she really really needed the poison resistance is losing her resistance to the System’s idea of what powers and behaviors a succubus should have, but at least she made it back to Earth (briefly) and also found out some of what is going on and why Earth was important.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 103:

Speaking of ranks, it would be good if a campaign limit of X ranks
applied to everything, powers and characteristics and talents alike, in
the way that a campaign limit of 60 points applies across the board.
This means that ranks do need to be pretty similar in utility (to the
extent we can quantify that) which means pretty similar in cost (to the
extent we can correlate those). Put another way, we need to adjust every
power so it’s equally useful as a 12d6 basic attack, then divide that
into 12 equal chunks. And then adjust enhancement ranks until they’re
the same size. Like, is melee/zone/next zone/few zones/many zones/line
of sight/via mindscan the correct number of steps for ranks of range?
Maybe we need to condense it from 6 ranks for the highest bracket to 4,
or whatever.

Tangent on range: is range worth as much as all the extra moves that
come with Strength? Since Strength includes a ranged attack, that
probably can’t be the case, so how do the costs for Str, ranged attack,
and melee attack work? I guess Str is melee attack with an advantage for
“can do all that other stuff too”, but is that just extra ranks on top
of the 2d6 damage?

It would be entirely within the spirit of paying for what you get
to split Strength into strength for lifting and squishing, melee
damage, and ranged (throwing) damage, so that The Amazing Forklift,
Captain Catapult, and Punch Buggy are all distinct. Like with
leaping, you can still punch and throw using just Strength, in a
half-assed way. I don’t know that we want to do this, but it would
solve some problems at the expense of a longer list of characteristics.
Also it fits with improvised leaping being just throwing yourself,
which is an idea I like more than it probably deserves. We’ll call
it a definite maybe.

I also still don’t know how to work skills into ranks. A level in
several skills, like we’re using to replace Int and Dex, is reasonable
as a rank, and probably just getting that number of skills to 11-, where the
ranks can start adding to them, is a rank, but what about familiarities?
Languages? Weapon or transport proficiencies? Does one rank get a bunch
of familiarities and/or languages? For skill familiarities, do they
somehow count toward getting the 11-? And how should languages work? The
chart with five kinds of lines around language groups and five levels of
each language is probably a bit much, but how far can we trim it down?

I did just read a post from a real professional game designer about sending
your beloved ideas to play in an “ideas to be used later” file out in
the country, so I accept that I may have to give up the notion of ranks,
but not until it’s been thoroughly chewed.

Skills are a bunch of small items that are mostly independent of each
other, so they don’t mesh well with ranks, which are for largish chunks
of even larger items. Characteristics are more like powers in this
respect: there’s a limited set of them, and they can each be pretty
large in terms of points, as large as powers. (Strength really is a
power anyway.) Maybe skills don’t need to be in ranks, they can just be
bought with points? That’s how Mutants & Masterminds works, and that’s
mostly where I’m stealing the idea of ranks from. Well, that and Silver
Age Sentinels/Tristat, which also doesn’t rank skills (or stats, but
they’re more like D&D stats than Hero characteristics).

A tangent about characteristics: Should we combine Constitution and
Ego? D&D established that bodily toughness and mental toughness are
different because they go with different classes, but aside from
D&D, how often do you see a hero whose heroic grit doesn’t keep
them going through all kinds of adversity? Although that’s not
taking psychic power into account, so maybe it’s still two
characteristics, just divided along a different axis. Grit and
Psyche? Psyche is then like Strength for mental powers, which are
analogous to grab, escape, squeeze, etc. But, everyone can use
Strength, even if with a low OCV, while not everyone can use Psyche
at all. Is the default level of Psyche 0d6, and you can use either
Psyche or Grit (default 2d6) defensively? Then all egoists have all
the active powers (Mind Control, Mental Illusions, Ego Blast). The
edges between Mind Control and Mental Illusions are pretty blurry,
and even Ego Blast can be somewhat replaced by Mental Illusions,
so lumping all those together seems okay. Telepathy and Mind Scan
are more sensory powers, though, so even though they’re based on
psychic might (unless they aren’t, because Hero) possibly they need
a different characteristic, or to be lumped in with sensory powers,
however those are going to be implemented.

Going back to skills, if the point of all this is to reduce the
amount of fiddling with single points, maybe the standard cost of
a rank should be 1. At the equivalent of five old points (or two
chonky points), that’s a 12- standard skill, a 14- knowledge skill,
+2 to an existing standard skill, +5 to an existing knowledge skill,
+1 with a bunch of skills, five familiarities, a martial maneuver,
a language or even a group of strongly related languages. This would
make a heroic character 20 points, or a standard superhero 70, which
is a lot less to fiddle with than 100 or 350. Is that too few? It
seems good for character creations, but doesn’t support a nice
gradual rate of advancement where individual skills go up by +1 at
a time, even if we award experience in fractions of a rank. Plenty of
systems have different mechanisms for character creation and character
advancement, but I don’t think that’s what we want here. Any character
should be creatable directly, without having to fake going through
advancement.

Also, Earth is at perihelion, which probably doesn’t matter much given the poor quality of spaceships available locally.

I meant to get up early and do all the things, but instead slept way in and did a few of the things. Dave is back in town, so we were able to watch more anime, after getting the AV equipment back in working order (bad cable).

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.8: Time to investigate a curse!

Read (artbook): Bleeding Edges (Danni Shinya Luo): Pretty girls and watercolor. Reminds me of Olivia.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 3: Siren’s Reach (C Peinhopf): Oh god, now there are three of them. Or maybe four. Also ocean-based monster attacks, politics and warfare, excessive pranks, restoration of the proper order of the universe, etc. Not the end, though.

Written (anything): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Hey, I wrote a cats of science fiction that one time! And that other time!

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.9-10: Fights! More fights! Maiming! No murders yet, but it’s coming.

Read (graphic novel): Watersnakes (Tony Sandoval): A girl meets a mysterious girl, they become friends, but when they try to kiss, everything is weird and more mysterious and they have a dream-like adventure. Distinctive art style, extremely peculiar, not actually about kissing.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 2: West Peak (C Peinhopf): The kitsune sisters continue the fight the demons started, with an ever-growing band of allies (including a giant beetle) and the odd volcanic eruption here and there. They remain overpowered and mischevious.

Written (game design): 184.

How is it already 2026? How is it only now that 2025 is over? What, even, is time?

Had to be on call today. There was a customer, so it wasn’t as okay as it could have been, but not too bad.

Read (novel): Fallen Lands vol 1: Vigilance (C Peinhopf): A girl on her way to college gets isekai’d and turned into a kitsune, it’s horrible, but she escapes and makes friends and rescues people and adopts a sister and they save the day with their OP summoned hero classes while giving each other shit.

Read (comic collection): Wicked Things (John Allison, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar): Teen detective Charlotte Grote, of Tackleford, is framed for murder at the award ceremony for Teen Detective Of The Year, rude. Hijinx ensue as she tries to persuade the police of her bona fides by solving a bunch of other cases while until strict supervision. I am doubtless going to hell for how much I like Charlotte’s character design, cartoony though it is.

Written (game design): 129. Of course I would like to write more and better for the new year, but it’s not like I know how.