….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.