Month: April 2026

No gaming, since Dave is also sick, so I slept way way in, took a shower with steam to try to clear out my respiratory system, did a little shopping, was mostly useless. Do I have less coughing, though? That would be nice.

Watched (anime): Dorohedoro 1.7-9: All the plotlines are colliding, plus a neighborhood baseball game in the Hole. It is as gruesome as you might expect. Other than that, things seem to be moving to the sorcerers’ world.

Read (novel): Broken Prince (Glynn Stewart): Nth in the Adamant series, switching to the brother of the previous viewpoint character. Plenty of missiles in space. Also pirates.

Read (from the shelf): SICK.

Written (new project): 175. No alien centaurs, not even any sex.

 

I did manage to go shopping enough to visit my local no-longer-indie bookstore, instead of phoning them, but apparently there is also plague at Monkeycat Towers, so there was no anime.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 15 (Kaoru Mori): Smith and Talas get back to England and are greeted with as much warmth as you would expect for a respectable young man bringing a foreign hussy to meet his family in mid-C19 Britain. Also the manga-ka is distressed that half a century invalidates all her research on Emma. Also also, Ali FTW.

Written (new project): 317.

That’s probably not actually the title of an Olivia artbook, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out otherwise.

Logged in to work, did a few works, still coughing a lot. Marith kindly brought me chicken soup and microwave risotto so I won’t die.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 14 (Kaoru Mori): Like the shōnen manga where a fight takes up an entire volume, except this was a horse race.

Read (novel): Charmed Thirds (Megan McCafferty): High school was one book per year, but this book covers the entirety of our MC’s undergraduate career and numerous mistakes (romantic and otherwise). Not as engaging as the first two, for whatever reason.

Written (new project): 214.

Think how big of a celebration we can have when sapient life arises on Earth!

Couldn’t sleep, still full of mucus and coughing in the morning, so I slacked in sick to work for a few hours and tried sleeping. Then I had to do work, but it was okay. Ish.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 13 (Kaoru Mori): Smith and Talas and their guides make their way back toward Amir’s, but alas the foreigners are invading and their journey is cut short.

Read (short): “Kaiju Agonistes” (Scott Lynch): I don’t think I’ve seen quite this take on Godzilla before, or how it could accomplish its goal.

Read (novel): The Formidable Miss Cassidy (Meihan Boey): A stout Scottish governess takes up a position in Singapore in the late 19th century. Supernatural revelations and conflicts ensue, along with a lot of family.

Written (new project): 185.

One can invent a bigger word than “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, but is it better?

Went to the office, coughed a lot, did some work, ate some Filipino fried chicken and assorted foods but didn’t enjoy them much (definitely a me problem), tried to learn some Kubernetes but didn’t do a very good job, coughed some more.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 12 (Kaoru Mori): Looks in on every group we’ve met so far, but mostly about Smith and Talas and party and their now photography-enabled journey, with a long stay in the house of the guy with two wives who adore each other.

Written (new project): 165.

Or I guess natural face-blindness is okay too.

Read (art book): Terry Moore After Dark… (Terry Moore): Pretty much what you’d think. Mostly sketches or pencil drawings, mostly Francine and Katchoo or other SIP characters, not very high on the raunch scale.

Read (novel): Second Helpings (Megan McCafferty): Senior year, protagonist actually gets together with her on-again-off-again soulmate. Ends in graduation, so could be a conclusion, but there are actually three more books in the series.

Written (new project): 258.

I got up to take work handover at the usual work time, fed some cats, and then went back to bed and didn’t wake up for like four hours. So on the one hand, I wasted almost the entire day, but on the other, sleep.

Read (manga): The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 6 (Iwatobineko): They are finally living together! Also other people are having lives and babies and stuff.

Watched (anime): Tawawa on Monday 1.1-3: You know how it’s possible to make anime about something other than jiggling? These guys neither. The episodes are only half-length, so it didn’t take as long as it seems to give up.

Watched (anime): Dorohedoro 1.1-3: Messed-up people in a messed-up world with other messed-up people and evil magic and copious murders. The aesthetic is post-apocalyptic, but it seems to be more interdimensional. Not that we have much in the way of backstory, except that magic builds up as the environmental pollutant it looks like, and also sorcerers are dicks.

Written (new project): 258.

Several of the audience survive every performance!

I slept in incompetently, but eventually went shopping and stuff.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.3: And away Coco goes, to certain death in the trial she’s not at all qualified for.

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.1: The first episode is all backstory and establishing vibes, so following the manga pretty close so far.

Read (manga): The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 5 (Iwatobineko): They’re getting mushier and introducing each other to their parents and even moving in together, but not having sex or anything like that.

Written (new project): 219.

Are bats themselves seasonal, or do they need a separate season reference?

Kind of did some work, I guess. Having energy and being awake is hard.

Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.1: Marith’s right that it has Dr Who energy with the cheesy verve, but it’s really really not Leverage, and I can’t help comparing them since it’s the same director and some actors.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 11 (Kaoru Mori): All Smith and Talas and company this volume.

Read (novel): Sloppy Firsts (Megan McCafferty): High-school drama, but even though the protagonist is straight (ew, boys), she is charmingly misanthropic. Written as her actual diary entries and letters to her long-distance best friend, so there is some unreliability to the narration, or at least a lack of strict chronological ordering.

Written (new project): 264. Sage helped by deleting a paragraph so I had to write it again.

Cue tumblr classic post. “You cannot kill me in any way that matters.”

Planned to WFH today, so got some sleeping in, but not enough to make up for having stayed up until 343569 o’clock reading. Did do some work, failed to meet with the customer again, didn’t learn any Kubernetes, did get piled on by cats.

Watched (movie): Glass Onion: Janelle Monáe definitely stole the show, but all the characters were good characters. Plus, lack of respect for the capitalist class is always refreshing. I liked it quite well.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 10 (Kaoru Mori): Karluk with his inlaws learning archery and falconry and general manliness, Smith traveling and arriving in Ankara.

Written (new project): 294.

Honestly, it’s probably One Piece.

Went to the office, tried to meet with customers but failed, ate a burrito, did some work, learned some kubernetes.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Read (novel): The Faith of Beasts (James SA Corey): The humans are kind of fitting into the imperial alien ecosystem, but that doesn’t stop them from getting into trouble and learning things that are surprising and possibly upsetting to them. More upsetting than everything else in the galaxy, that is. Interesting idea for the “deathless enemy” of the imperial ecosystem.

Written (anything): FAIL. I did catch up quite a few days on my journal, which doesn’t count but is what I was doing all evening.

Went to the office, ate some miscellaneous Asian food, did some work, learned no Kubernetes.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 9 (Kaoru Mori): This volume is mostly about Amir’s friend Pariya and her boy and the fifteen years’ worth of embroidery she has to redo before they can get married. Do you think the manga-ka might like drawing fancy embroidery?

Written (new project): 178.

Peach cobbler is good, and librarians are good, but does this make up for it being Monday the 13th?

Did some work, had some cleaners in.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 8 (Kaoru Mori): A little more with the two sworn sisters from volume 7 and their new married (to some guy) life, and then back to Amir’s new family for rebuilding after her old family shot the town up.

Written (new project): 189. I don’t know how to write, or maybe how to do things at all, but I have started the new project I set up.

 

No gaming, Jeremy is dead from capitalism. I slept and did nothing instead, which was not really a satisfactory replacement.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 6 (Kaoru Mori): Oh, these assholes again. They should have known better than to annoy Terror Granny’s family.

Read (novel): Metaworld Chronicles: Of Monsters and Magic (David J Wuto): Not-really-LitRPG isekai, a businesswoman from something like our world reincarnates as her teenage cognate in a world of all magic all the time. Is extremely cute, displays mysterious extra OP magic, befriends the most terrifying battle wizards, gets hunted by conspiracies, saves the day, etc.

Written (game design): Complained a little bit about how stupid I am, and set up the infrastructure to work on a different project, so I’ll call it enough.

On call today, so I slept in next to the phone after taking handover and only eventually went shopping. Because last weekend was weird, I had bonus Maidens of the Fall, which is always nice. Also a support cast, which was less nice, but not a big deal.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1-2: Pretty much the same as the start of the manga, but now in color with swooping!

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 5 (Kaoru Mori): Wedding day for the twins Smith met in the last volume. Their husbands are already long-suffering. Then back to Amir and Karluk for a sad falconry story and a terrifying granny interlude.

Written (game design): 217:

I have dozens of notes for other points that have to be considered, but
possibly none of them matter at all if we can’t establish mechanics for
how characters affect each other, because that’s the core of superheroic
conflict. Or, really, any conflict, and thus most RPGs except Golden Sky
Stories (which is a great game, but not what we’re going for here).
Obviously I’m making some kind of mistake here, but what is it? Should I
not be worrying about making all results come from written rules, even
though some (most? all? few?) players don’t like GM judgment calls?
Should I not be worrying about how to make things seem fair because they
never are? Just let the table decide who should get fewer dice because
they’re too clever with the ones they have? (Self-serving, because I’m
always the least clever.)

(As previously established, the fundamental flaw is almost certainly
thinking that I can do better than real game designers at anything. I’m
not standing on the shoulders of giants, I’m barely even stepping on
their toes. But that’s too bad, because what else am I going to do? Just
play one of the thousands of games I’ve bought? Pfft.)

Also, if your punk dog has a mohawk, I bet they can make good money as emotional support for baby cheetahs.

Did not go to the office, did spend a bunch of time helping my colleagues with a customer who was on fire, did not learn any kubernetes.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The motley has 99 problems and vampires are definitely one, even though Thessaly bullied him into slinking off into the night this time. While asking around for advice on dealing with vampires, they stumble on Sir Hiss’s secret torture chamber(?) in the steam tunnels, which hopefully is not another of their problems but probably will be. Fortunately their vampire acquaintance with the changeling partner is up for killing lesser vampires who cause trouble in the wrong turf, Everett makes a deal with Troll for a silver knife, and Siddy carves some wooden stakes in between stress-cleaning. Will Theo have to sell her soul to the Sun to be able to contribute? Tune in next fortnight!

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 142.

I shall name her… Pointy-Bob! (Shrieks of anguish in the distance.)

Tried to go to the office, but failed due to being weak and feeble. Slept in a bit more then worked from home. Sage was extremely helpful.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.8: Yeah, fuck that guy anyway.  Anyway, end of Drum Island arc, but also end of the season. I hope it’s still doing well and Netflix doesn’t cancel it just to avoid paying the writers.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 180:

It’s also less dramatic and more hitpointy to have most conditions be
tiny so we’re back to whittling down the enemy. But now it’s harder to
keep track of, so that’s not a win. Fewer more significant conditions
is both more interesting and easier to play. You can have a defense
that burns away the incoming Entangle or whatever, but it has to be a
technique you paid for specially, or else you have to spend an action
or some other resource to try to do it as a maneuver.

Does the same go for emotional attacks? They’re kind of like physical
attacks but with different conditions and ways to get rid of the
conditions, but tend to affect decisions rather than combat stats,
so even a minor one can be interesting. There’s also the difference
that if you remind someone of her lost mother to make her distracted
but then punch her, the condition is likely to disappear, or change
to “must clobber this jerk who punched her at a time of great
emotional vulnerability”. Also you can’t just take the action “bring
up the villain’s long-lost mother”, you have to figure out how that
ties into their emotional weakness, which has to be written up some
useful way on their character sheet, just like yours.

Speaking of weaknesses, which we postulated as being necessary to get
around the issue of an attacking 12d6 powerset mostly not doing much
against a defending 12d6 powerset, how do those work? How do you find
them, what do you roll to exploit them, is having your weakness
discovered a condition? Technically it only helps the people who know
about it, but we can presume everyone blabs about everything all the
time.

Or is it a positive condition on the people who know about it,
granting them extra power instead of nerfing the person with the
weakness? For something like knowing where the weak spot in someone’s
defenses is, that seems wrong, even if it worked out the same
mechanically (which it probably wouldn’t, since attacks roll and
defenses are flat). There might be other advantages that should be on
the attacker’s side, though, plus of course any buff would be a
positive condition, with ways to apply and remove and effects while
active.

Positive conditions have the same concerns as adjustment powers in
Hero, namely that we don’t want one buffer to make everyone else
unstoppable, or want to make it mandatory to spend ages buffing
before a fight to be competitive. This isn’t a computer game or D&D
3e, or even Ars Magica. Probably you can only boost someone’s
effective powerset level up to the level of the powerset you’re using
to boost, or a minimum boost of +1d6 if your level is at least half
theirs. Or something along those lines.

Probably an Angry Birds tie-in.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some garlic noodles, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (graphic novel): Forgive-Me-Not (Mari Costa): The princess is abducted by a strange butch and told she’s a fae changeling, and things go downhill from there (but in a mostly adorable way, with only some stabbing).

Written (game design): 111.

No, not like that! Well, maybe a little like that. No beaver-shaming.

Went to the office, ate too much falafel hummus shawarma pita, didn’t do too much work.

Read (graphic novel): I Am Not Starfire (Mariko Tamaki, Yoshi Yoshitani): In fact she is Starfire’s round, gay, goth teenaged daughter, who is not dealing that well with having a famous mom who doesn’t entirely understand Earth culture. I’m not sure I really support the way the end went, but okay. At least there were girl-smooches.

Written (game design): 175.

….in SPACE!

Both Manager T and Most Senior Coworker L are out this week, leaving me as the most senior person on the team. I hope nobody is expecting me to pretend to be a manager.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 2 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): The excuse for the conflict was slightly better than aliens coming to Earth to steal our water, but not by much, alas. Humans are so precious about their homeworld.

Written (game design): 123:

If we wanted to keep that range of results meaningful, we could try to
do something like (for the example of blindness), say the effect is a
straight penalty to sight perception rolls, but normally you don’t
have to make perception rolls to do things involving sight, so there’s
still a quantitative cliff there. Or maybe it affects everything that
you use sight for as well, although then we need a rule for using
hearing instead or whatever, putting a floor on the effective penaltyI
from impaired sight. This is not in itself terrible, but how many
conditions are going to need special rules like this?

Really we just need to define absolutely everything in mechanical terms,
since in a simulationist game, the rules are the laws of physics for
the fictional game world. Surely this will be easier than letting the
table use their shared intuitive understanding of the world, or at
least lead to fewer arguments. Right?

I guess we’ll just give each condition a little chart of what each
point of effect gets you. Maybe just one option, maybe more than one
if there’s more than one axis (strength and duration, or whatever).
I’m imagining a set of dry-erase cards to hand out to players, which
is getting way ahead of everything.

Not all conditions should be scaled with points of effect left after
subtracting the target’s powerset, though, should they? Like Entangle;
if it always gets knocked down to just a point or two, it’s probably
not useful. But sometimes the defending powerset should be able to
resist. Is that a technique, Damage Shield or equivalent? What’s the
lesser maneuver equivalent? Does Entangle need the “can’t be tanked”
attack type? On the one hand we should be able to get this all from
the special effect, but on the other, it has to be mechanical and not
a GM hatpull.

Some kind of bringing things back from caves, anyway.

I wanted to sleep in forever again, but somehow I got up and went to do the shopping I failed to do yesterday, and took a shower before going over to Monkeycat Towers for Easter ham sandwiches and deviled eggs and company. Cat and Earl were there, and so was Marith even though she was dead from work. We ate and ate some more and searched for the lost art of conversation and I remembered that I should actually read the “Terra Ignota” books. It was nice.

Read (manga): Someone’s Girlfriend vol 1 (Nikumaru): She should probably dump her boyfriend before throwing herself at his best friend, no matter how horny she is? But then there wouldn’t be enough drama for a whole manga series. Also there’s another girl making another triangle between the two boys, but the two of them should probably run off together, leaving the boys to do whatever boy things in some lesser series.

Written (game design): 128.

Did nothing today because I was on call, but after waking up to take handover, I was able to go back to bed and be useless for much of the day while Nightvale trained his Weight of a Thousand Dead Suns napping technique.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 12-13: We did learn at least some who and why and when, but how was only hinted at. Still, that was a completely unexpected level of doom in the end.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): Everything broke on Y2k and also horrible mutant plagues started, now it’s generations later and the survivors are engaging in conspiracy and rebellion about the mysteries behind it. It has very impractical sci-fi aesthetics.

Written (game design): 162. Still haven’t managed to switch to another project.

I keep wanting to slide into a very abstract system, which on the one
hand is flexible for accomodating all the weird shit players come up
with, but on the other is less grounded. At the very least, we have to
have people establish the special effect ahead of time, and being able
to put everything into a bucket with specific mechanics (physical
object, break by doing Body), even a large bucket, would be better.

If I sucked even more than I actually do, I’d say we should use an LLM
to invent rules for a special effect when the player invents it, but
a) I don’t think that would actually work well, and b) ew no. Someone
else can explore this frontier of game design. (Or, given the pride with
which people put NOAI banners on their games, no one can explore it,
and that’s fine by me. Fuck LLMs and their capitalist wielders.)

Back to splitting up the removal condition, that doesn’t work since
how much Body you have to do is both what it takes and how long it
takes. Or maybe what it takes is more like how much Def? Having to
make a skill roll is similar to 1 Body 0 Def, unless it takes a
long time. (Should we have skill rolls generate effect against some
kind of defense, unifying them with attacks? Probably not.) So maybe
the two factors are how long it takes to wait the condition out
(possibly forever, although that would be kind of expensive), and
what it takes to clear it before then (possibly nothing except an
equally strong power, which would also be expensive).

Leaving this to stew for a while, earlier I was on my usual bullshit
of wanting experience to come from suffering, so maybe taking a
condition lets you mark XP? Or it’s a limitation you can apply to
your maneuver/technique to offset getting more or not getting less?
Should the GM be tracking XP for NPCs? It’s more work, but maybe adds
flavor.

If conditions still have levels, then maybe any condition at the top
level should give XP, but I’m not sure they do, just the points of
effect left over after the defense is subtracted from the roll.
Although not everything needs to be that granular, and sometimes
there’s not an obvious use for it that’s distinct from the removal
condition. Once you’re blind, you generally can’t get any blinder; at
most the blindness could last longer, or take more healing to remove.
At the lower end you could just have poor vision for a while, so
blindess isn’t entirely binary, but for playability I don’t think it
can have very many gradations.

So, mermaids in Pride shirts?

Today started off with an excellent technical discussion of a really complicated bug, but then was followed up by a customer actually encountering the bug. Computers, how do they even?

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.6-7: Oh, that’s who that silhouette in the original crew sketch was supposed to be. And his tragic backstory!

Read (anthology): SNAFU (ed Geoff Brown, Amanda J Spedding): Collection of military horror stories, of variable quality, length, interestingness, subgenre, etc. I liked the magical WWII one, but it had plot elements I am weak against.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 111. Ugh.

I really really hate to admit it, because I hate commuting, but I think I do get more work done at the office. I’m not sure this was the case in earlier years, but the second time it is not the same office, and I am not the same productivity unit.

Also did not get Marith a pizza.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.5: Finally they’re done with the assassins on Dinosaur Island, so surely everything will be fine now!

Read (game): Dank & Dark (Philip Reed, Lex Morgan): A complete (though very small) TTRPG published as a board book like little kids read. It’s a hack of Tunnel Goons, which was already quite minimal, so 24 pages with large type and illustrations still contain the whole system, several monsters, and three (small) dungeons. And, it’s okay if your players chew on it!

Written (game design): 122 on the old stupid thing.

What? No, I’m perfectly serious!

Still no office, but work anyway.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 14 (Shinichi Fukuda): Professional opportunities, because Cosplay Gal really did slay at Comiket in Doll Boy’s costume, and finally the two of them talk about the elephant that’s been in the room since about volume 3.

Written (game design): 243. Still haven’t managed to switch.

We’ll come back to these but now let’s think about the other column,
getting rid of conditions.

Countermeasures:
– basic medical care (stitches, meds)
– advanced medical care (specific antivenin, surgery, regen therapy)
– wait it out (usually combined with another way of clearing it quickly)
– remove something
– break something or lift something heavy
– move away from it
– take a moment to refocus or reorient
– use similar power to what inflicted it (mental power vs mind control, etc)
– repair or replace a piece of equipment
– retrieve a lost item
– non-powered rigamarole (exorcism from an ordained priest, etc)

Again, a lot of these are pretty similar, like advanced medical care
and exorcism that both need specialized equipment and expertise not
available on the battlefield. Removing something is like breaking
something, you just have to overcome only 0 Body to do it. Etc. Maybe
it’s enough to have how long it takes to do it, and what it takes to
do it (conflated with how much Body it takes to break or whatever),
and let the details for the two depend on special effect.