Seems way more tempting than an apple serpent.
Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Big fight! The lizard swallows Cedric and his lightsaber and rampages around while its rider and his goons try to capture our heroines with nets and bug cannons and shock tridents and complaints about how much Mal swears. Mal is awesome with her spores, Irinia is awesome with her fists, May is awesome with extraspacial conduits, Amalia is awesome with wedgies. The Prussian and his goons are not awesome but there are several of them and they’re well-equipped, so things go back and forth for a while until the first lizard’s hindquarters explode, reinforcements arrive, the assault on the military school fails, and Cedric will now be known as Darth Lizardass.
Then we had to stop gaming to supervise RV maneuvering and then it was time to go home. We got to take lots of XP back with us, though.
Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.21, 8.1: Go All Might! But we stopping the season in the middle of a fight means an episode that’s mostly recap to start the new season.
Read (graphic novel): Crossplay (Niki Smith): Various young and horny and unnecessarily hot con-goers engage in cosplay and makeouts and sex and not really that much drama. Printed in black, grey, pink, and red, to emphasize the blushing.
Written (game design): 170:
Even if it’s not new, I really like awarding XP for failure and misery,
but maybe it doesn’t have to be done according to explicit
complications. You get XP for making bad decisions, and what those bad
decisions are is up to you and your sense of the character, or perhaps
to the GM offering you a point to play along/you asking the GM for a
point for a playing along. Still need a cap per session, so that the GM
can’t just pick on one person. You don’t get XP for your hunted showing
up, you get XP for getting ambushed regardless of who it is. XP for
losing a fight in any of the ways mentioned earlier, definitely a bonus
award for getting put in a death trap. Maybe you do get points up front
for having a Hunted, or for any equivalent contribution to the campaign
(if it’s that sort of campaign, but if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be
getting to make up a Hunted any way).
Is it really okay for experience to be free-form? I guess it really is
in Hero, it’s just based on how much the GM thinks you won, by vibes,
with maybe an extra point for somebody if the GM (really, the table)
thinks they were extra cool. We could be actually be more organized than
that, and give the GM a small pile of XP tokens for each character,
showing both the cap per session and who has/hasn’t been earning their
XP by engaging with adversity. They could even be different colors if we
cap awards for different kinds of woe.