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.