What, you think I make these things up?

Went to the office at the right time, did some work, ate some pig meat on a bun and potato salad, stayed late for a meeting with Boss³ M about how things are going to work differently here in our brave new world of helping customers without other departments.

Read (manga): The Lying Bride and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate vol 1 (Kodama Naoko): A lesbian office worker’s lonely apartment is invaded by an acquaintance who needs a place to crash while on the outs with her husband, which makes her off-limits in two different ways despite being excessively cute. Feelings ensue.

Written (game design): 412:

We can then have defense levels against other skills: Resist Temptation,
Resist Fasttalk, etc, all with the same mechanic. We’re so clever.

What skills are there for attacking? 6E has OCV as a single
characteristic, which you can then increase for specific powers or
maneuvers or whatever. +1 OCV is more expensive than +1 to any
skill, but about the same as a medium-sized skill level (5 points).
Maybe Melee Attack and Ranged Attack are the skills? In 6E, +1 to two
skills is 4 points, although only 3 as a skill level.

How do we even buy skills now? What skills are there? Do we need to be
as fine-grained as Hero? Probably not, but that may be different for
different campaigns. There aren’t characteristics to base skills on, so
maybe it’s all levels. Are levels bought in ranks too? If everything is
actually levels, that might make sense, but if we have individual bits
like familiarities, then maybe only characteristics and powers are
bought in ranks. The main point of ranks is to simplify adjustment,
which doesn’t come up much for skills.

I was thinking we could have backgrounds instead of skills, like Soldier
11- or Mad Scientist 14-, with a cost depending on how much it covers,
quantified in some fashion that I don’t yet know. The system for
quantifying coverage might be an awful lot like asking which individual
skills it gives you. Rolling them together into a background could still
be worthwhile since it would cover any minor bits between the skills.

Maybe break out the different things people do with skills (persuade
people, analyze evidence, use equipment, etc) and for each of those,
rate the background on whether it lets you do that in
no/few/several/most/all circumstances? Then if you just want to do a
specific thing, you can buy a background that does that in all
circumstances and the rest in no circumstances. I like this in theory,
but it may be running into the same problem with pigeonholing all PC
activities into equal-sized boxes that we originally had in the fantasy
game. But the boxes don’t have to be equal, we can charge more for the
bigger ones! But but, how do we calculate the costs with our big chunky
points? Have I failed already?