Monday is a holiday, so I didn’t go shopping today, I just pulsated grotesquely.
Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.21-22: All the conspiracies and rebellions and other national-level politics are coming to a head around Maomao. I wonder if anyone will make it out alive?
Read (novel): Take Back Demons (Casey Blair): Sequel to Take Back Magic, main character is actually doing pretty great at restoring Earth, making friends, defeating enemies, getting a hot husband, etc.
Read (comic collection): Gotham Academy Second Semester vol 1 (Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, MSASSYK): I thought I read the first arc of this, but I don’t remember any of these characters except Batman. Everything is creepy and haunted and half the adults have questionable fashion sense and obsessions they’re willing to kill for, so it checks out as being in Gotham.
Written (game design): 133:
Hero, like other games from that distant era, treats hits to locations
as things that just happen while hit points are being lost, or if
you somehow have a reason to aim for one location over another, it
boosts the Roll To Confirm You Wasted Your Phase probability. If
there are effects beyond loss of hit points, then they’re similarly
incidental and based generically on the body part. But we don’t want
“oh, I guess you hit her in the leg” because we’re deemphasizing
grinding away at hit points. We want, “you successfully slowed her down,
now maybe your teammates can do something”, so conditions should be
created from that point of view.
If we’re demphasizing the hit point grind, then it shouldn’t be the
standard result of a combat round, maybe not even the default. “Wear
them down” can be a specific maneuver. Maybe it’s the same as “KO them”
(when they have few enough hit points or whatever), maybe those are
separate maneuvers and you can skip straight to KO if you outclass them
by enough, otherwise you have to wear them down with clever maneuvers
and/or emotional damage I mean moral suasion.