I didn’t even make this one up!
Went to the office, ate some yellow chicken curry, did some work, tried to learn some kubernetes but with limited success. Finally managed to get my prescription filled and picked up, go USA.
In case you can stand finding out about the world around you.
Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 14 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): More magic ninja causing trouble because there aren’t any demons and now the humanoids have to cause their own trouble.
Read (novel): Neverthorn (Shannon Mayer): It’s like one of those dreams where you have to go back to high school even though you’re an adult, only the highschool is like Hogwarts with a blatantly evil headmaster and all your bullies are now teachers and the dark lord is coming any month now. Also, het romance subplot.
Written (game design): 259:
Of course the advice to game designers is not to design games for people
who will hate them, and I guess that has to apply even when I’m trying
to take over the position of an existing game. I’m sure there are people
who both could and would make a game even more accounting-conscious than
Hero, but I’m not one of them, even if I once would have wanted to be.
I’m more of a filthy story-gamer.
Anyway, even if we don’t need everything to be priced optimally according
to the laws of supply and demand, rating things in small integers makes
them easy to work with, so we’ll stick with powers generating effect,
and every 3 effect over the defense raising the condition by one level.
A full-on superhero has 12d6 in their best powers, which is on average
four steps above the base, so conditions go from 1 to 5, with 4
being incapacitated and 5 also having spillover into long-term effects.
Maybe the levels should have names: Kinda ___, Definitely ___, Severely
___, Totally ___, Overwhelmingly ___. Presence attacks and mental powers
don’t in Hero, though, they just have Characteristic, Char+10, Char+20, etc,
which would be +0/+3/+6/etc now. Although we did mention powers having a
greater or lesser effect, so maybe it’s sometimes +0/+2/+4 or +0/+5/+10
instead, in which case we do want names for levels.
If power usage is limited only by cleverness and special effect, then we
aren’t buying specific powers like Hero any more, it’s just 12d6 Cold
Powers or 8d6 Brick or whatever. We probably want to charge more for
more flexible special effects, though. Or maybe for specific
applications of the power? Like in Champions Now, where if you pay
points for something, you always have it, but if you try to claim you
should get it for free because of your special effect, the GM can say it
doesn’t seem reasonable to them.