Month: March 2026

Also Farmworker’s Day, because apparently fuck Cesar Chavez.

No office this week since I’m doing handover.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 13 (Shinichi Fukuda): And Cosplay Gal absolutely slays at Comiket, but Doll Boy seems to be having some kind of feeling about it.

Read (novel): Butterfly Effects (Seanan McGuire): Back to the telepathic wasp-girl adopted member of the family, and her (and everyone’s) mysterious ancestral background in other dimensions. Lots of trauma and mind control and other heartwarming family stories.

Written (game design): 120.

Or maybe Write With Your Laundry Day.

Did some work, watched some other people do work, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 12 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is still thinking about romance, but Tailor Boy is completely occupied with his art.

Read (novel): Wolf Worm (T Kingfisher):  I was expecting something along the lines of the Sworn Soldier books, but no, this was way more horrific and gross and I understand why people ask what the hell is wrong with the author on a regular basis.

Read (short): Cutting Corners (Yoon Ha Lee): I feel like Asimov did the using-cheap-humans-instead-of-expensive-computers thing first, although of course he was probably sexually harassing some poor woman while writing it.

Written (game design): 135. I feel like I need to switch projects, but then I’d just be useless in a different direction.

Only available at certain addresses, of course.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. The fight that was starting as the credits rolled last time is just as horrible as expected. Bug goo everywhere, and not in the good way. Mal gets knocked out and misses the climactic bug-clobbering finale, but doesn’t die or anything. Teleportation is really handy, though. She needs to figure out more of her Labyrinth affinity.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 12: Season finale! We finally get an explanation for the penal heroes and mindless rampaging guy. Also, apparently not all penal heroes were railroaded by a corrupt court system, some are legitimately fucked up.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 12: Season finale! Several of the cute girls are saved, but the evil plot is by no means thwarted. Flum is going to need some more cursed gear.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 13: The end! Orphan Girl is moving ahead with her life, which is really all that one could expect from this series.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 7 (Kaoru Mori): Wait, where did 5 and 6 go? I thought I had them, but then I realized this volume was 7 so the gnomes must have eaten them. I’ll have to make them come back by ordering new copies. Anyway, this is the first volume I haven’t read before. It’s more of Smith’s journey, although it’s mostly about the lady of the house where he’s staying, and her loneliness and the local custom of married women forming special friendships and the manga-ka getting to draw many scenes at the women’s bath.

Written (anything): FAIL. How does thinking even work?

Also Respect Your Cat’s Drug Stash Day, but that’s every day, right?

Ended up going to a small local rally on a street corner instead of the big one downtown because the timing was better for going shopping. It was somewhere in the couple of hundred to few hundred range, we waved signs and people honked, I scritched a nice dog. Most of the people there were my age or older, with only a few parents and kids, so I’m surprised it wasn’t more bloodthirsty.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 10-11: Now we know who, and can speculate on why, but how is still up in the air, as are certain aspects of when. Is this really going to all get wrapped up in one more episode?

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 4 (Kaoru Mori): Further stories about the people Smith meets in passing on his way to Ankara. This time the marriage-crazed girls aren’t trying to marry him, though. They have their own lives to mess up.

Written (game design): Finally updated my character sheet for Kaiju Academy, which either counts as writing or doesn’t.

Named after the quirkily-titled country song, “Drinkin’ Whiskey at Theatres All Over the Damn World”.

Did some work, learned some kubernetes, got sat on by some cats.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.4: You know it’s an adventure when they get to Dinosaur Island! Which naturally has its own plots going on.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 3 (Kaoru Mori): The random English guy sets out to observe somewhere else and meets a girl. Everything goes terribly, but there are lots of landscapes.

Written (game design): 273:

Is any of this getting us anywhere? Not until we have an actual system
for generating levels and strengths of conditions based on dice in attacking
and defending powersets, and a list of possible conditions and ways to
clear them. And that’s only the start.

Conditions:
– wounded
– dead
– knocked out
– stunned
– immobilized
– stuck in place
– blind/deaf/etc
– power weakened or negated
– disarmed/focus removed
– compelled to do something
– compelled to not do something
– poisoned
– tripping balls
– completely mind-controlled
– floating in mid-air
– growing infinite extra arms
– on fire
– possessed
– infested
– drained of life force
– insane
– turned into a vampire
– petrified
– teleported away

How many of these overlap? Possessed and mind controlled do, and
there are a bunch more horrible fates that are basically the same.
Some, like poisoned and infected, go in the same bucket but include
a huge variety of potential details. Well, except that disease,
like being on fire, spreads, but that’s an add-on, or maybe a third
column to choose something from although I’m not sure what else
would be there. Making a zone full of the effect, perhaps, which can
be combined with making it sticky. There are probably other similar
enhancements that I will think of later.

Sadly I’m not very crafty so I mostly just buy hats. Possibly I should buy more different hats, although then I’d need outfits to go with them, and that way lies madness.

Went to the office, had a lot of meetings, resolved a long-running customer issue by doing a different thing (that’s probably more in line with their policies anyway), officially received my 0% raise for not being a rock star, ate some brisket hash with fried egg for lunch, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.3: Yep, that was just about as doomed as it looked.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 2 (Kaoru Mori): Wow, Amir is so much better off away from her old family.

Written (game design): 210.

Went to the office, climbed some stairs, ate some spicy pork dumplings, did not eat any pecan waffles, spent all day working on TLS certificates.

Read (novel): Jett Jamison and the Secret Storm (Kimberly Behre Kenna): A middle-grade book about being a survivor of sexual assault and books about being a survivor of sexual assault and censorship of books about being survivor and also how much American “Christians” suck.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 1 (Kaoru Mori): It’s been a long time since I read this, but the fabrics and landscapes are still just as amazing.

Written (game design): 282:

Going off on another tangent, from the idea of conditions having
levels, the ultimate condition is Dead With a Body. (Dead Without a
Body is barely worse than Knocked Unconscious.) But does it have
levels? Does the Wounded condition turn into Dead at level 4? That’s a
lot like hit points, although to be fair, having 4 hit points when
attacks can do up to 4 damage is a lot different than having 200 hit
points when attacks can do up to 20 damage.

Probably a lot of conditions can take out the target, or severely
disable them at level 4, although if lower levels reduce the relevant
defenses, then it’s a death spiral. Possibly lower levels of Wounded
or Battered don’t impose any penalties general, because we are
heroic and full of adrenaline, and also just beating on people is not
what we want to encourage.

Even without a death spiral, if every die of a powerset is also 1
point of defense, then with a 9d6 or greater powerset, it’s possible
(though very unlikely) to inflict a level 4 condition against someone
defending with a 9d6 powerset straight up. Against someone undefended,
5d6 is enough to potentially-but-practically-never do it. This
doesn’t seem right; surely Xd6 offense vs X defense should produce
the same range of results, regardless of the value of X? Perhaps we
need Feng Shui/Nexus die minus die, or FATE dice, or something else
0-centered.

If all conditions were invented for the specific situation, we could
dismiss the notion of a condition coming in multiple levels, but if we
have to have a finite set of conditions, that’s a natural way to
categorize them. The effects don’t have to scale linearly with level,
though, so level 1-3 can be penalties but 4 can still be “completely
____”.

Which I celebrated by eating way too much pie. Also Flatmates Day, which I celebrated by having thrown my flatmate into the cold cruel streets to live alone.

For some reason I said it was okay for work to celebrate my birthday, but at least I got chocolate cream pie out of it. Also several people said “happy birthday” and I said “thanks” like a functional member of society. Also there was barbecue, although I didn’t get as much as I wanted because Coworker T talks forever on video calls. Not in person, though.

Read (graphic novel): Wallflower (Jasmin Omar Ata): An introverted and probably neurospicy middle-school girl in Florida can see people’s auras? souls? as flowers growing on them. This turns out to be related to why her family is kind of horrible to her and why the new kid at school is so weird. Not that it’s actually explained.

Written (game design): 182.

Obviously the best day ever, and yet it’s somehow also OK Day?

Read (art book): Beauties Beasts (Olivia de Berardinis, Jordu Schell): One page a painting of a pinup girl, the facing page a photo of a monster sculpture. They’re each fine, but I was hoping for some kind of combination. Ah well.

Written (game design): 135:

What about instant conditions like knockback (as separate from the
Prone condition that usually comes with it)? Is position just a
condition? You’re not where you want to be, but you can spend an
action (or maybe more than one) to change that, and someone can use a
power to make you be in the wrong place again. The story does check
out, but that way may lay completely abstract story-gaming like FATE.

Continuing the tangent, we need some way for ending a condition to be
doable over a reasonable time. You might be powerful enough to break
free of the hardened Negagloop in one mighty surge, but if you aren’t,
there should still be a range in which you can chip away it and get
loose in a few actions, and only when you’re way below that power
level should you not be able to do it at all. We know there’s going to
be some kind of overcharge/haymaker maneuver, but that still makes it
all or nothing. Unless you have to roll up a bit, in which case it
could take a few tries…

The other thing about knockback is that it happens with another
condition, so we need rules for inflicting multiple conditions with
one action, and I don’t think just splitting the points of effect
really works since it’s not linear.

Anyway, what we’re looking for is to have the level, durability,
duration, etc of conditions determined by dice rolls and rules. The
player can make a couple of choices from fixed lists, to set the
nature of the condition, but we don’t want them to make things up from
nothing. This is to avoid both a) players taking the Mentally
Paralyzed condition when having to come up with yet another condition
that optimally leads to victory, and b) players feeling like the
conditions system is completely abstract and they can just make up
whatever. Even if conditions are an important mechanic, we don’t want
them to be what play is about. We want play to be about the fiction.

I hear Magnetohydrodynamic Calculations Day was banned due to SAN loss.

Slept in, did a little shopping, ate an enormous quantity of Chinese food and will probably die.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 12: Asa learns just how much of adults’ life advice is pulled completely out of their asses.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 11: Are things not quite as dark as they looked last episode? Flum seems to be turning things around, anyway.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to be a Hero 11: Jeez, Teoritta, have more faith in your knight’s ability to blow up absolutely everything!

Watched (anime): Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody 1: Generic OP isekai LitRPG, probably to include a harem in later episodes based on the credits.

Read (graphic novel): Incredible Doom vol 1 (Matthew Bogart, Jesse Holden): 90s teen BBS culture, saving kids’ sanity from horrible parents and/or luring them into punk music and crime.

Written (game design): 114.

Another day that’s not for me: I’m terrible at poetry and also have no brain! Or maybe those are causally linked. I’m pretty sure poetry is a sign of sapience, or at least whatever it is humans have.

Slept in too much because it’s a weekend, managed to shop a little. I hear Jus is slaying at robot competition, though, because she’s not like me.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 7-9: Do people know things? Or are they just speculating? Either way, it seems like things are closing in. Also, smooching.

Read (graphic novel): Just Between Us (Adeline Kon): Rival figure skaters, one of whom is kind of terrible as a person, taking their rivalry and all kinds of strong feelings all the way to the Olympics.

Written (game design): 169:

It initially seems like we should be able to make a catalog of general
conditions, but players’ weird special effects are going to make
everything unique. Can we just have a condition “Blind”? Sure, that
has some mechanical effect, but are you blind from a bright light?
Pocket sand? Face covered in Negagloop? Crow spirit pecked out the
eyes of your soul? All of those have different defenses, different
durations, and different ways to remove them early, and that’s just
one possible effect out of… a dozen? scores? incalculably many
because players are most creative when it’s least convenient?

Can we do it with a combination of one catalog of effect and one
of how the effect is accomplished? Biological, do some healing or
wait; spiritual, do some magic cleansing or wait; physical, break
it? I guess there are at least three components here: how the effect
is targeted and implemented, which isn’t part of the condition since
it’s all handled at the “attack” time and then we can stop worrying
about it; what effect the condition actually has while it’s there;
and what it takes to get rid of it, both how long it takes to expire
naturally and what kind of powers will end it early and how well they
have to roll.

One from column A and one from column B seems doable once we populate
the columns. It has to be explictly not just allowed but encouraged to
make new entries if none of the existing ones match someone’s novel special
effect. We also need to determine what each entry costs: do more
useful ones use up some dice off your powerset if you don’t have a
technique? Or impose some other penalty? It seems likely. Not sure how
Column Zero (attack method) works, exactly, but it also needs to do
something based on whether it’s more or less useful than the baseline.

Also Children’s Plays About Frogs and Sparrows Day, Vanessa Was Abducted by Aliens Day, and Propose to a Panther Day. (No word on whether the panther must be pink.)

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.2: That is a big whale. And note that they did not defeat it by running it out of hit points!

Read (graphic novel): Clubbing (Andi Watson, Josh Howard): Apparently I read this before, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. A teen goth from London gets exiled to the countryside all summer for Crimes, where she meets colorful characters and more crimes. Still not sure if the final bit was supposed to be real or just the MC making things up.

Written (game design): 118. Apparently I’m not very smart.

Got 2/3 of the way up the stairs before having to rest, did some work, ate a bento, met with a customer and did not solve their problem but at least they aren’t stuck in Dubai any more, tried to use awk, did not learn any kubernetes. The trains were all late on my way home, but it all lined up anyway and I was able to feed the cats so they could eat before Marith came to scare them away.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.1: Weren’t all these bozos defeated already? But we have a new foil for Roranoa, so that’s good.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 20 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that happen to the Statue of Liberty.

Written (game design): 295:

Hero does have an array of defenses: PD, ED, DCV, MDCV, Mental
Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Desolidification, Damage
Reduction, Presence, Damage Negation, Deflection, Barrier, probably
Strength, Teleportation, any attack count at least for getting out
of conditions. They usually apply to everything unless there’s a
specific limitation or mandatory gap in applicability like Desolid
or Deflection have, because nobody wants their defenses to not work,
and “I’m a brick!” is enough of a special effect for many of them.
There are three different kinds of defenses here, though: make the
attack roll harder (DCV, Deflection), reduce effect (PD, Presence),
or break out of the effect after it’s happened (Strength or
Teleportation vs grabs, any attack vs Entangle).

If we’re putting more of an emphasis on defense, should we be going
back to the idea of the defender rolling instead of the attacker? I
had a better name for this than “saves” but that’s what they were,
divided by ways of getting out of trouble. They can have different
mechanics, though. Like, you can dodge, which is chancy but negates
the attack entirely if you succeed, or tank it, which is easier but
only gives you extra defenses which might be enough. Ignoring the
attack gives you a bonus to whatever else you’re doing, if you’re
still able to do it afterwards. Slipping the punch is essentially
tanking the attack. If we’re using zones where most movement is within
the same zone, then diving for cover is probably a variant of dodge.
Deflecting an attack to another target is also a variant of dodge.
Diving to shield someone is tank+move in the way that dive for dover
is dodge+move. With an appropriate special effect, you could absorb an
attack or otherwise transform it into a different effect. Emotional
and mental attacks probably use the same options, with varying levels
of metaphor. And then there’s removing an effect that’s already been
applied, like breaking an Entangle, or slipping free of it. (Hero’s
Martial Escape that uses the same mechanics as busting free with
Strength but with a bonus to Strength based on skill is pretty
elegant.)

I have no idea how to handle something like Desolidification in this
paradigm.

But all of this is only loosely connected to conditions, or whatever
we do to track things happening to characters, and how they get
applied.

Walked up some stairs, did some work, ate some falafel and hummus and eggplant even though they tried to hide it from me, learned kubernetes until I died.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 10 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): They’re well into the plot part of the game, so MC’s knowledge is helping her a lot, if not as much as it could have.

Written (game design): 106, because I am stupid and also I had to go to bed.

Climbed some stairs, had a meeting with my colleagues, had a meeting with my endocrinologist, pretended to ignore my phone, ate some soy-garlic chicken guys with crunchy white veggies, did some work, complained about the heat.

Read (comic collection): Mercy (Mirka Andolfo): Pod people in late C19 Pacific Northwest, humans having feelings about monsters, monsters having feelings about Earth, gory murder everywhere.

Written (game design): 135.

Also, No Selfies with Pandas Day.

Got the cleaners to invade at a more convenient time, which I felt a little bad about since I usually just say “whatever” but it’s a work day with meetings.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 37 (Tomohito Oda): The end! 100 friends and Komi and Tadano and everyone make it to college and Komi is still the hornier one (but in a wholesome way).

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 10: Yeah, that’s a problem with slave soldiers, especially when they have superpowers.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 10: Now we know some of what Ink’s deal is, and it’s about as bad as expected.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 11: Adults sure like giving advice. But sometimes they also give chocolate.

Written (game design): 389:

Should we not be doing a meter-by-meter, second-by-second, or at
least zone-by-zone, round-by-round simulation? Having the dice tell
us how the story goes, instead of telling us where each energy blast
lands and letting us create our own story from the mechanical
outcomes is the very essence of story game. Not that Hero is
completely immune to this (Luck/Unluck), but it’s a lot more
emergent-story. Can we have emergent story without simplifying combat
down to hit points, though? Conditions involve a lot of GM judgement, as
does anything like tactics (beyond the very basic ganging up on
somebody), so we can’t get everything from dice rolls. That’s even
before we let players go thinking up new things to do that require GM
calls, or choosing the outcome of a successful attack beyond “reduce hit
points”.

Am I pushing too hard for tactical infinity? It’s the reason we play
RPGs with fighting in, rather than just playing Gloomhaven, but maybe
tactical a few hundred, or a few dozen, would be enough? Heck, people
enjoy playing 21st century D&D, and that barely gets out of single
digits in binary. Can we make do with a list of general conditions after
all? And a set of defenses against them? Although much of the point of
tactical cleverness is to work around the otherwise-impenetrable
defenses… Yes, this is the same question I keep going around and
around, looking at from the same set of angles.

RPGs derived from wargames don’t like tactical cleverness because
they don’t like decisive actions. If your entire game is a fight,
something that can cut that short means less gaming, and nobody
wants that. Or at least that’s one of my guesses as to why so many
games have hit points far in excess of what one attack can do. Hero is
actually not quite as bad as some, since a surprise attack out of combat
does double Stun before defenses and that can actually knock someone
out, or at least stun them.

On another axis, it’s harder to “play the world, not your sheet”
in OSR fashion when the PCs aren’t human, maybe not even remotely
(hello, sentient black hole!), and the world offers entirely different
affordances. Maybe we do need more in the way of structure than your
normal bozos creeping with fire through a cave of rock. That probably
means at least a limited set of conditions instead of a complete
free-for-all. It may also mean paying more attention to how things
happen and not just the end state. Which might bring us back to an array
of defenses, or at least a bunch of ways to avoid/resist different kinds
of things people do to you (dodge it, stick out your chest and tank it,
concentrate on memories of your first love who would be so disappointed
if you let yourself get mind-controlled, etc). It might also bring us
back to all powers having limitations by default, so at least some
openings are written down ahead of time, even if they aren’t known. (You
can still buy off the limitations, but then the limitation is that you
don’t have as many points to buy powers.)

I meant to get up early and go get sampled, but instead slept in forever and then went. I expected the line to be horrendous, but no! Everyone else had gotten up early! So I got sampled expediently and went home and took a nap.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): Finished! That was extremely silly. Also the women were much cooler than the men, even if they were all pretty much tumbrel bait. But earnest tumbrel bait!

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 36 (Tomohito Oda): Wow, multiweek study camp with just the two of them. And yet, so wholesome. Plus, Komi really is good at everything except talking to people, and she’s not bad at that here in the penultimate volume.

Read (anthology): Screams From the Ocean Floor (ed Heather Ann Larson): Assorted horror on, under, around, or vaguely associated with the ocean. Pretty much everybody dies. Variable quality, none of them outstanding.

Written (game design): 132:

Is there even room on the scale for No Big? In wargames, a missed attack
is generally a no-op, because there’s nothing you care about except your
target’s hit points. Maybe you shot up some piece of landscape, but
that’s irrelevant to your victory condition. Sure, the GM could try to
say that you accidentally broke something or someone important, but
that’s practically cheating. PbtA/FitD has only disaster, mixed success,
good success, with no option for nothing to happen, but that’s at a more
zoomed-out scale and player-facing mechanics. Whiffing your attack on
the enemy and getting pasted is entirely within the scope of a PbtA 6-,
even though in D&D it would be a missed attack where nothing happens.

“Realistically”, a lot of failed actions should do nothing much. The
missed energy blast goes somewhere, sure, but there’s a lot that
actually is irrelevant to the fight and can be summarized as general
property damage during the media phase of the encounter. But if we’re
talking about superheroes or supervillains, and we’re not doing a
second-by-second, meter-by-meter simulation of the battle, shouldn’t every
action have a consequence of some kind?

But I write fantasy because I can’t do math!

Went shopping, tried to get quarters, got a hard time for having an expired ID card. I should probably do something about that, but it matters so rarely.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 4-6: Well, now we have Dr Snake’s minion’s theory about what’s going on, but even the characters we thought were in a position of knowledge or power seem pretty confused, and I’m not sure any of this explains what was going on with Blonde Friend. Female Lead seems to be doing better emotionally, so probably it’s all going to come crashing down.

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 14 (Kamome Shirahama): And that is why every field needs both young whippersnappers and experienced elders, but no field needs dogmatic zealots.

Written (game design): 209:

Earlier I said there would be three outcomes from a disaster roll:
everything works as intended; partial or conflicted success; disaster.
The middle one is the most effort for the GM, who has to invent a
setback that doesn’t negate the success, so that should come up the
least often for playability, even if outright disaster should be the
least common for plausability. Which do we value most highly? If it’s
playability, then partial success comes up when you make the roll
exactly; if it’s plausibility then a disaster happens on a natural 18 or
something. That’s if we want to keep the Hero 3d6-roll-low. Something
like PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ or FitD’s 1-3/4-5/6 more naturally gives a
three-way outcome, but the range doesn’t feel as large as would match
the 1-12d6 of powersets. They’re completely different rolls, they don’t
have to match directly, but having, for example, skills that only go
from -1 to +4 feels too constrained.

Although, a disaster roll isn’t exactly a skill roll, and definitely
isn’t a to-hit roll. It definitely is more like a PbtA/FitD “how’s that
going for you?” roll, which once again is veering into filthy story game
territory. In the interests of our already-stated goal of not being as
hard on the GM as a full-fledged story game, can we make a list of the
possible results of a disaster roll? Obviously if you make the roll,
then you apply the condition you intended to the target(s) you were
aiming for, or as close as possible, and determine the level of the
condition with an effect roll using powerset dice.

The other obvious two-bit values are right condition wrong target (you
didn’t melt the Despairmech(tm), you melted the bridge truss), wrong
condition right target (you didn’t gently incapacitate the criminal
goon, you crushed them like a bug), and wrong condition wrong target
(you didn’t freeze the villain’s feet in ice, you made the road slippery
under the mayor’s car). There are always infinitely more ways for
something to go wrong than to go right, though, so I’m not sure this is
helping. Even having to pick a point on the scale from No Big to
Complete Disaster is a pain.

Also the second of three Friday 13ths this year. Apparently 2026 is particularly cursed. :looking around at the world emoji: Yep, story checks out.

Did not go to the office, did get my performance review. Apparently since the previous management and the current management, I have become much less satisfactory.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Our motley continues to explore the Dreamlands, which have a very symbolic ruined temple and another island easily accessible by eggshell boat (Petunia is the best chicken) that turns out to be where King Mark’s court dreams. No sign of a grail, though.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 11 (Shinichi Fukuda): Not just cosplay, not just group cosplay with almost everyone they’ve met so far, but horror group cosplay.

Read (novel): Tear Down Heaven (Rachel Aaron): The dramatic conclusion to the war against Gilgamesh, whose plan is indeed universe-shattering in scope and horror, but not quite a match for unexpected demon power and witchcraft.

Written (game design): 146.

That sounds ominous.

Went to the office, climbed the stairs with only a few breaks, ate some jerk pork and plantains, did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): I had not seen or read this before because I have no culture. It is very silly, although I can’t help thinking that all these people should be in a tumbrel. We only watched up to the intermission because I was sleepy, but will definitely finish sometime when Marith is not dead.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 10 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is going to have to be a lot more assertive than that if she wants to actually get lucky. I guess first she would have to decide whether she wants to.

Written (game design): 216:

I think they probably do. As I learned from reading the Internet, rules
and dice are for the uncertain parts of the game, where you need some
divinatory power. If you can just say what happens and it’s obvious, no
dice needed. So thrilling heroic battles, sure. You can come up with a
plan, but can you execute it correctly while someone is shooting you in
the face with a railgun? Roll for it!

But roll what? Hero has both to-hit and damage rolls, because D&D.
We’ve been talking about powersets in terms of dice that we roll and
count the Body on to determine the magnitude of effect, but should there
be a roll to decide whether you can even make that roll? We’re basing
this on Presence attacks (which don’t have a to-hit roll) and mental
attacks (which do). Since actions are now to inflict conditions, not do
some random amount of Stun and Body, we need some roll to determine
whether an attack goes overboard, or otherwise awry. Maybe it should be
called a disaster roll instead of a to-hit roll, since a bad roll
results in the wrong condition, wrong target, or both. Then the rule can
be that if the table can see a way for the action to go horribly wrong
without the character performing it having to be an incompetent schmuck,
there has to be a disaster roll.

Since the disaster roll determines who gets to decide on the nature of
the condition and where it goes, we still need the effect roll to
determine the level of the condition. Some conditions should be higher
level based on accuracy rather than (or in addition to) sheer power, but
I think we’re okay wrapping that into powerset dice as a measure of
effectiveness, not just raw joules of energy beam. There will also be
maneuvers/techniques that let you have more dice of effect for whatever
tradeoff, and you can probably have a limitation on some dice of your
powerset that you only get them if you can make a skill roll.

No, not like that! I mean, unless that’s your thing, no kinkshaming.

It turns out the building keycard lets me into the stairwell from the bottom, so I took the stairs instead of the elevator. That’s a lot of stairs, but I did eventually make it. Did some customer meetings, ate some freekeh with falafel, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 9 (Shinichi Fukuda): What? How dare bodies change?

Written (game design): 196:

It’s not like we won’t have a bunch of different ways to remove a
condition, or different circumstances under which a condition can be
removed. Automatically at the end(?) of the next turn, with a free
action as soon as you get a turn again, with a free action if you make a
roll or an action if you don’t, with an action, with an action if you
can make a roll, with an action from somebody else, after some noncombat
length of time unless somebody has an appropriate power, after ending
enough turns, … I’m not sure we’re actually simplifying anything here,
although since we are placing more emphasis on conditions, we do need
more structure.

Does getting rid of a condition depend on what level it is? It seems
like it should, but is, EG, the “Strength” of a grab or the “Body” of an
entangle based on the level of the condition, or the dice of power (or
environment) inflicting the condition? Or a combination of both, but how
so? I think we’re back to wondering whether to-hit rolls have any place
in this game.

Lame bagpipes can be left behind, or thrown willy-nilly into the cargo pit.

Went to the office in the slightly-less-illuminated morning, had some meetings, did some work, ate some tiny pies for Pi Day (Observed), ate an emergency brisket sandwich, learned some Kubernetes. The pies were from a place I walked past on my way to the train, which seems silly, but Car Culture is like that.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 8 (Shinichi Fukuda): Conclusion of the Cultural Festival arc, Cosplay Gal successfully crossplays as a girl passing as a host despite being notably not boy-shaped, she has it bad for Doll Boy.

Written (game design): 201:

We can mitigate the first problem by saying that a duplicate condition
(same type and level) doesn’t do anything. If you’re already Lightly
Electrocuted, getting lightly electrocuted again doesn’t do anything;
Zapstress has to somehow get to 3 above your defense to make you
Moderately Electrocuted. That way at least it has to be a variety
of conditions to nickle and dime someone. For the second problem,
maybe you can buy extra condition slots as techniques, that only
take appropriate conditions? They would have to be pretty expensive,
and maybe it’s not worth implementing. If you should be tough against
something, buy the technique that lets you use your full defense
against it or whatever.

Not sure how to handle removing conditions from the bottom or middle of
the stack. We can’t have conditions just fall down to the lowest open
slot, or rolling up and getting a level 3 condition on someone right off
is meaningless. Maybe it only triggers when a condition is removed? Or
we keep track of the level a condition was originally at before it
rolled it, and it can only fall down that far? That’s more notekeeping,
but maybe not unworkable?

Or of course we could just not have conditions roll up. If you want to
take somebody out, you need to take advantage of the effects of
conditions to inflict a level 4 condition straight up. Or maybe you can
boost a level 3 condition to level 4 with a maneuver or a technique
that’s good enough to inflict another level 3? But either way, it
doesn’t roll up automatically.

As always when I have an idea, it’s time to stop and look at whether
we actually need this time. Hero characters can get grabbed,
terrified, set on fire, blinded, etc, but without a unified system
for conditions. The mechanics are scattered all over the book with
the powers that are likely to inflict them, which is possibly more
organic, but means there are a lot of different rules for these
conditions and how to get out of them, like a grab having anywhere
from 1 to 24 Body that you need to overcome with your own Str, Flash
absolutely removing a sense and sticking around until a certain
number of segments have elapsed, being prone reducing your DCV by
exactly half until you spend a half phase, etc, etc. Again, charmingly
old-school, but is that better than having a unified system? I mean,
maybe it is! That’s why people like OSR, right? [citation needed]

Lina Inverse, presumably.

Work is the same today as every day, but the world of musical instruments is not, because people keep inventing new ones!

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 7 (Shinichi Fukuda): Start of the School Cultural Festival arc, which naturally has a potential cosplay component for any main characters who might be so inclined.

Written (game design): 136.

Boo, I wanted to keep saving my daylight! Did not manage to get out of bed at any reasonable time, but whatever. Did manage to eventually get more gooshyfood for the cats. Sage is super yelly and demanding, which I guess is a good sign. She does not like the mouth squirts, though.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 10: This is so slice-of-life that it’s hard to say what an episode is about, but I was right about the best friend. Also yeah, once somebody’s their kid, they don’t stop being your kid.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 9: Yikes, that is not what I expected to happen!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to be a Hero 9: That is pretty much what everybody should have expected to happen when they let fantasy PCs into their city.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 6 (Shinichi Fukuda): Back to cosplay techniques and fellow cosplayers, but also extremely fraught questions.

Written (game design): 260:

What about getting rid of conditions? Some disappear as soon as they
aren’t being maintained (psychokinetic grasp), some last until action is
taken to break them (frozen in carbonite), some naturally fade over time
and can possibly be removed faster or prolonged by action (poisoned,
wounded).

I’ve been rushing ahead with the FitD model of conditions, because it has
definite advantages. There’s no calculation, just find the lowest open slot to
put the new condition in, and if it’s on level 4, that’s a KO. It also
puts a limit on the number of conditions a character has to manage. It’s
not all good, though: as long as you can inflict any condition, you’re
guaranteed to be able to take someone down eventually. It also doesn’t
distinguish between types of conditions, so the regenerating werewolf
can’t take more physical conditions or whatever. Also also, even if your
buddies get rid of a condition for you, or you regenerate it, there’s
not an obvious way to recover from KO if it wasn’t the level 4
condition.

Failed to get up early, but did eventually get up and get Sage’s medicine and do some shopping.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 2-3: Okay, so maybe she’s [SPOILER]? But what about the guy? Is this all the fault of Dr Snake? (He’s not a real snake, but he is a real doctor.)

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 5 (Shinichi Fukuda): This volume is less about cosplay and more about the two of them doing stuff together, although taking cosplay pictures leads Doll Boy into a new world of embarrassment.

Written (game design): 206:

Duplicate conditions probably discard all except the highest one,
otherwise it’s too easy to get spammed with a bunch of copies of the
same condition and that’s boring even if they stack (which they probably
shouldn’t).

We’re trying to move away from the computer-game paradigm of “select
Attack from the menu, let the RNG tell you what happens”, which now
that I think about it solves the problem of how to determine whether
getting punched is doing Stun or Body. If you make your “attack”
roll, then you inflict the condition you want on your intended
target, or as close as possible given the circumstances; if not,
the GM decides what target gets which condition. Miss with your
fireblast, and the villain won’t be on fire, but something will! Or miss
creasing the criminal’s skull with your .45 and, well… I think we
need three levels of success: you get what you want; you have to choose
between getting what you want with a side of what you didn’t want OR
nothing much happens; or you get a full serving of what you didn’t want.
Which is more like a filthy story game than a wargame, so we need the
guidelines for the GM to make choices that seem fair.

Sadly, I have no cheesecakes.

Did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Got test results back for Sage, looks like a UTI so I have to go pick up antibiotics tomorrow. I am sure she will not appreciate the additional mouth squirts, but it is actually for her own good!

Watched (videoed stage musical): Act II of Firebringer: Now that fire has been brought, everything can go to hell with social commentary and plot twists and surprising plot twists and everything. Sadly, all the wisdom they gained was lost in the intervening millennia, which is why the social commentary is relevant.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 6 (Kiyoko Iwami): Okay, even the manga-ka thinks Cheater Girl is being a dumbass. I think they should all break up and try again in about five years, but on the other hands, nothing’s being broken except hearts and that’s what adolescence is for, right?

Read (novel): Wayward: Running (TA Star): Isekai litRPG, a terminally ill, bedridden, trans girl gets to be a real girl with totally OP powers and only a moderate amount of getting murdered in the fantasy realm. She is extremely special in several ways, in fact, but she doesn’t seem to be actually saving the world on a daily basis, that’s more of a long-term plan the gods have.

Written (game design): 273:

List time!
– Reduce a powerset’s dice for some time
– Make some action require a skill roll, or worsen an existing one
– Make it harder to resist something
– Reduce defenses, overall or against specific attacks
– Apply a limitation to some powers or powersets
– Prevent certain actions, or all actions (IE, incapacitation)
– Apply another condition if certain actions are taken or not taken
– Compel certain actions
– Make them produce some effect (EG, everything they touch ignites)

That might be vague enough to cover most things, although it’s also too
vague to assign even relative costs yet.

What about levels of conditions? It seems natural for some of these
that just reduce dice in a powerset or skill rolls, or whatever,
but less so for others. The ones that are just numbers to subtract
from other numbers want as many levels as the numbers that are being
reduced (so up to 12 for the ones that reduce dice in powersets),
but the more qualitative ones only naturally have like two or three,
minor/major/overwhelming effect. We could reduce the others to fewer
levels by having each level give more than -1, but then they probably
have to be scaled to campaign power. Or maybe not, since the points
of effect do scale with campaign power and one level per point of
effect is natural for those conditions. It’s not natural for the
others, though, so then they would have to be scaled. I don’t see
a way to have both of them work naturally at all levels.

Of course we can have “penalties” and “conditions” as different kinds of
things with different rules, but it would be better to have the same
rules. It also makes it more difficult to add them together for a total
hosedness level beyond which you’re incapacitated. Maybe instead we
should give each level of a condition a stress rating, and when the
stress rating of all your conditions adds up to more than X, down you
go. Probably at least two stress tracks, physical and mental, and a
condition can count 0 or more toward each. That works with any number of
levels in a condition, but it’s another guideline we have to provide
for ad-hoc conditions.

Instead, we could have something like FitD harm, where there’s a fixed
number of slots for a character to have conditions of each level, and
if an attack inflicts a condition at a level that’s already full, it
rolls up to the next open slot. When the X+1th slot is full, the
character is taken out. This would need a fixed number of levels for
each condition, which is probably fine since we already had the
thresholds of def+0/3/6/9 for levels of effect for things like Presence
attacks and mental powers and that generalizes nicely. So we have four
levels of conditions.

Some conditions might not be able to take someone out even at level
4, but I think that’s probably rare enough to be a special tag on
the specific conditions.

Poutine wants to be free!

Sage was still hanging out in the litterbox, so I skipped going to work, called the vet that’s only a couple of blocks away, hauled Sage in, got her tested and praised, etc. Most things except a UTI have been ruled out, which is good, because we know how to treat that. She is still eating and drinking and patrolling her apartment.

Watched (videoed stage musical): Act I of Firebringer: A very ridiculous musical about early humans discovering important things about their world, like what’s edible and how much the previous generation lied to them. Not even slightly chronistic.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 8 (Nujima): Writer Lady seems to have done something to Red String Girl, but it’s not clear what. Also we know more about the siblings now. Nothing good, though.

Written (game design): 215.

I haven’t run anything in ages, so good work, world!

Didn’t go to the office since I had meetings during all the time I would be commuting in. Did some work anyway.

Sage is sitting in her litterbox instead of a cat bed or the floor. Dr Google DVM says this can be stress, urinary issues, or intestinal issues. She’s not barfing and doesn’t seem in distress, but I’m going to worry a lot anyway.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 14 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Hey, put that back! You don’t know where she’s been!

Written (game design): 105. I blame capitalism, but only as a distract from my own uselessness. (But thinking of people as useful is a capitalism thing, right?)

Went to the office, ate a bowl of food, had a meeting, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 13 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Bathhouse episode of appalling nakedness, and ice cream.

Written (game design): 280:

I had been thinking that inflicting a condition the target already has
but at a lower level would increment the level, so they can’t just tank
hits forever, but maybe we should limit that to only happening if the
difference in levels isn’t too great. That way, if the attacker can’t
up their game enough to get within X of a disabling level of the
condition, they can’t take the target down by spamming that attack.
Since we want conditions to be actual effects, not just colorful hit
points, a condition that doesn’t reach the level of disabling could
still open up possibilities for other conditions that could.

Which still leaves us trying to come up with either a set of generic
conditions that cover everything possible, or a set of usable guidelines
for making up new conditions on the spot without them seeming
ridiculous. Is what we need a list of possible ill effects, from the
smallest penalty to a skill roll through being taken out of the fight to
being turned to the enemy side, and how much effect (in the sense of
Body rolled on the dice minus appropriate defenses) it takes to get each
one? Earlier we considered what kind of penalties using a
maneuver might cause as a trade-off, and some of those might apply here
as useful things to force on an enemy, but that’s just a start.

Hurray for Nightvale, master of carpet-derping! And all of my other cats, but Sage just got a day.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 12 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The expedition where Maomao finds a frog. Just a frog. Nothing that would disrupt her life.

Read (anthology): Contact! (ed Chris McInally): Military vs monsters (actual monsters, not just other soldiers or spy assholes) in a variety of settings, including New Zealand which I would normally expect to be monster-free.

Written (game design): 263:

In the larger sense, a limitation is a weakness, that’s why it’s worth
points, but the kind of exploitable weaknesses that NPC opponents should
have are different. I mean, they can have limitations too, but weak
spots or ways to shut down parts of their power or ways to inflict
emotional damage are more what I’m thinking of there. I’m not sure how
to quantify them with points, though, especially since some of them
won’t be known until the players discover/assert them, and others will
just be part of the NPC’s powersets. And what if players want them for
their PCs? I expect this to be rare, because who wants their character
to get hosed the same way every session, but PCs and NPCs need to be
written up under the same rules even if they don’t make equal use of the
rules.

Tangential thought, but are weaknesses obvious/inobvious and
accessible/inaccessible the way Hero foci are? Inaccessible wouldn’t
necessarily mean not affectable in combat, or maybe it would: maybe
you have to retreat or let your opponent escape so you can come
back prepared next time. That means there have to be ways to prepare, if
your powersets won’t do the job straight up. Build a gadget, set an
ambush, recruit someone with the right powerset, lay traps, etc.

Since we are trying to not have hit points, weaknesses aren’t just
“x2 Stun from vinegar-based attacks”. However, there are almost
certainly some that make it easier to inflict certain conditions.
There are probably also ones that allow for different conditions
to be inflicted, depending on how we set up the conditions system.
If you’re a mechanical robot, you can’t be literally poisoned with,
EG, curare, but maybe being infested with devourer nanoswarm is still
the Poisoned condition? Or is it different? Vice-versa, if you’re human
(and not a cyborg), you can’t get the condition Plastic Joints Melted,
but is that on the list of conditions, or do we have a generalized
Hampered? And I still have no idea what to do for getting punched
several times until you pass out, which would just be hit points by
another name.