I used to really like chicken strips, but I haven’t for a while now. Maybe I should try again.
Slept way in, went out in the sunlight to get Thai lunch, went out in the sunlight to get cat supplies, went out in the sunlight to get unnecessary supplies, sat in front of the fan and listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack again.
Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 5-6 (Nakatani Nio): A lot more about identity, but then at the end, back to love! I thought this was going to be the end when I started vol 6, but no. Looks like it goes up to vol 8.
Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 1 (NC Lux): Isekai litRPG, MC ends up as a succubus even though it’s not what she wanted, and the mind control powers and instincts to eat souls are also not what she wanted, even though or perhaps because they’re pretty effective. Also, fuck this whole situation, it’s all going down if she has anything to say about it. Probably could have been half the length, though.
Written (game design): 504:
Most or all of the starting abilities also need to be on the advancement
list. If wicked deeds or curses can turn a person into a monster, then
there’s no reason becoming a priestess of Bastet couldn’t get you lovely
whiskers for navigating in complete darkness, or mystic strength
training make you as big and strong as an ogre. (If you use
your strength to push people around, are you not just an ogre anyway?)
In D&D, numeric advancements like hit points and damage per round get
about an order of magnitude larger from 1st to 20th level (a little more
for hit points, a little less for damage, so fights take even longer).
We don’t have levels, so there’s not as definitive a limit to progress,
but that seems like a lot. Maybe 3-4x would be more reasonable? Maybe
I’m hypothesizing in advance of my playtesting and shouldn’t worry about
it? Maybe all players want their characters to transcend humanity and
ascend to the heavens, so every advancement should have a transcendence
value and when you get to 108, time for a new character.
But, maybe we don’t need or want that much in the way of advancement.
As previously discussed, D&D is all about the class powers that you get
when you level, because that keeps characters on the power curve instead
of letting them be all over the graph based on what treasure they got.
Many OSR games, though, keep the characters themselves on a more human
scale and make it more about the equipment. Instead of levelling up to
where you get the class ability of being able to hit incorporeal and
then fighting the ghost just like a goblin, do some research and find
the sword that was used to murder the ghost originally, or get some
shovels and dig open the roof of the tomb to let sunlight destroy the
ghost, or whatever. This is what they mean by “the answer is not on your
character sheet” I guess.
A lot of OSR games have wounds and levels of fatigue take up inventory
slots, which seems good. Some have spells take up slots (maybe as
spellbooks, maybe just conceptually), and a few even have skills and
bonds take up slots, which turns it into more a limited list of things
that can be important about your character. I don’t think that’s
actually bad, it keeps you from having to review a million options
before doing anything, but XZQJY isn’t that conceptual.
We do, however, have the idea of spells as astral tools, so maybe
there’s an astral inventory as well as a physical one? In the
physical inventory, larger and more powerful items take up more
slots, but in the astral inventory (does it need a better name?)
it might be more complex spells/powers, like a spell that can produce
an illusion of anything vs one that just produces a lightning bolt
in the direction you point. Curses and emotional trauma and magical
backlash would fill up slots in the same way as wounds and fatigue.
Maybe a wizard’s magic stick would be the equivalent of a sack: takes
one slot, but holds several slots’ worth that you can access by taking
extra time? That might be too literal.