Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.
Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.
Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!
Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!
Written (game design): 160:
The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)
(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)
One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.
We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).
How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.
Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.