Didn’t go to the office, did do a little work, ate some salad.
Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. How do you even play this game? Despite not knowing, we got our characters and their chicken Petunia to go on a dream-quest to find the Holy Grail. This is probably related to the other quest about contagious dream-apples, and indeed the first place they get to is a sanitarium where there’s an apple that needs flinging out a window. Also a lot of unconscious people who seem vaguely familiar, which is ominous.
Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 3 (Umi Takase): Much more about gender identity and expression than about orientation or romance, even though there are definite Feelings.
Read (novel): Take Back Magic (Casey Blair): A terrifying ex-mage who was exiled from a magic world because Earthlings have no rights manages to get back in the game and starts trying to completely upend the order of at least 3/4 of the known dimensions, with the help of an unnecessarily hot demon. It’s always nice to see a female lead who is unapologetic about being OP and ambitious, even if heterosexual.
Read (???): Sophie and the ARC of Emonglia part 1 (Maryana Rights): I think this was probably AI? Sort of in the same genre as The Phantom Tollboth with conceptual characters in a mysterious land, cuts off suddenly.
Read (novel): Rats (Craig Schaefer): Third in the “Castaways” series. Our magic students have to go behind the faculty’s backs to rescue their friends who were kidnapped at the end of the last book. Interdimensional adventure, pirates, half-naked rat-ladies, actual civilization, multidimensional mobsters, all the good stuff.
Written (game design): 242:
And what about the effects of conditions? Sprained Elbow and Sprained
Knee give penalties to different but overlapping sets of actions, but if
they’re both just part of Clobbered, how do we keep track of that? Just
throwing on general penalties to everything is arguably realistic, but not
interesting. And what does a -1 to using your leg mean when you’re a
speedster with 30″ Running? We need not just the list of conditions and
variables they have, but the list of possible effects and what they mean
for characters at different scales. To be properly Hero, this should be
related to points, like a rank 1 condition knocks off 10 active points,
but a sprained knee could affect anywhere from none to many powers based
on the details of special effect, and reduce their effect or give a
skill penalty or both or something else.
What we need is prefab conditions that cover all the standard things
(punched by a brick, energy-blasted, shot, exploded, crushed by a
collapsing base, mind-controlled, encased in carbonite, turned into a
toad, poisoned, frozen in time, traumatized by the villain
machine-gunning a crowd, etc) that happen to the standard character
types (living human, elf, vampire, robot, alien, ghost, golem, etc), but
also the ability to make ad hoc conditions for creative things
happening to original character types, which all seem fair and easy to
manage in play, alone or in combination. Should be easy.