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.