Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Reject purity of bloodline! Fuck Nazis!

I think I forgot how to do my job. Playing board games is way more fun.

Read (manga): FAIL. I started a thick one, but did not finish anything today.

Written (game design): 224.

Going on vacation completely disrupted my train of thought (such as it
was), and of course I never talk about game design in person because I
know everyone will think it’s stupid to not just use D&D5E (or possibly
some other set of glossy published rules, but probably D&D). It’s not
that they’re wrong, but I dare to be stupid anyway.

Although I rant against the idea that a -1/4 limitation is always
exactly a 20% decrease in effectiveness of whatever those active
points are doing, or that you can even measure effectiveness that
quantitatively, some rough measure of effectiveness or utility is
all we have to base costs on. Without them, we’re in filthy
story-gamer territory of “write down three superpowers”.

(It occurs to me that the costs don’t have to be fixed by how many
ranks/dice/whatever you get: characters could always have 25 points and
an attack at the campaign limit could always cost 10, regardless of what
the campaign limit is. I don’t think we particularly want to do this,
but we could.)

The reduction in cost (or rebate, or however it’s implemented) just has
to seem reasonable to the players. Ditto for advantages, of course. But
I’ve said this before. I’m just going in circles here, because I am very
dumb and should shut up and play glossy published games.

Can’t do this one.

Did some work. Manager T acknowledged receipt of the project, but is also out this week, so I don’t expect anything to happen until Tuesday week.

Read (graphic novel): The Prince and the Dressmaker (Jen Wang): He’s a prince who likes to wear beautiful dresses. She’s a seamstress with a talent for designing beautiful dresses. Together they take c1900 Paris by secret storm until everything goes terribly wrong.

Written (game design): 343:

Limitations are the hard part of any of this. Advantages are easy. Maybe
we’re back to trying to establish a completely different relationship to
limited powers, which might go beyond just the cost curve if we’re
sufficiently creative. For example, we could say powers just have the
limitations they should by special effect, and global limitations like a
wizard having to be able to say the Words of Power aloud are
Complications. With free-form special effects, this leads to powers with
few limitations, since a simple special effect without complications is
easy to come up with, but that’s not necessarily bad, even if it’s not
very Hero. Or, we could have a list of special effects with their
associated limitations to pick from. Also not very Hero, even if we give
the different special effects different costs (could be either positive,
where you have to have one to have any powers, or negative, where you
don’t have to have one but you can get more powers if you do) based on
how limiting they are.

It seems natural to long-time Hero players that limitations are a
multiplier on the active point cost of a power, but they don’t have
to be. Maybe they’re anti-adders that give you a flat number of
points back. There would have to be a limit of half the cost of the
power, or the cost – 1, or whatever; the perennial problem with
limitation systems is avoiding zero or infinitesimal costs, which is why
dividing by an increasing number works so well.

Of course this changes the relative cost of powers when various
limitations are applied, but it was never more than a shot in the
dark that this power with this -1/4 limitation is 80% as “useful”
(whatever that means), never mind the general case of any power and
any legal -1/4 limitation. This is part of the reason for chonky
points: let’s not pretend to a precision that we not only don’t
have, but can’t have.

We say “limitations”, but what does that actually include? There are a
bunch of ways a power can be limited, including but not limited to:

– Requirements to use the power (gestures, extra time, focus)
– Side effects (reduced DCV, uses resources, attracts attention)
– Only works in certain conditions/on certain targets (under full moon)
– Does less than normal (only body, reduced penetration, turn mode, no range)
– Uses different attributes (mental power vs con, inaccurate)
– Limits mechanical options (can’t spread, can’t push, can’t squeeze)
– Easier to block or interact with (area effect blast is a grenade)
– Interaction with own powers (linked, lockout)
– Like D&D equipment (Str min, encumbrance, hands)
– Unreliable (activation/skill roll)
– Doesn’t activate/deactive at will (always on, no conscious control)

That seems like a lot, but there are 75 power modifiers that are always
or sometimes limitations in Hero 6E, so even this crude categorization
is a big help conceptually.

It would probably be ideal if all limitations had the same kind of
effect on cost, but it’s not mandatory. We already mentioned having
“limitations” like powers that can’t be used in strong magnetic
fields, or spontaneously activate when you don’t want them to, be
Complications instead. Limitations that change what a power does
vs ones that limit when you can use it could also be different. If
players can handle the difference between a sale price vs mail-in
rebate vs tax credit vs being entered in a raffle with purchase, a
couple of different ways to reduce the cost of a power shouldn’t
be too hard, right? Right?

Sadly the premade stuffing from Trade Joe’s is not great. Maybe I should get some of the boxed kind. Although really I should not be eating stuffing at all.

I don’t want to make commenting completely open, but anyone I wouldn’t mind commenting probably knows how to get in touch with me and ask for an account.

Possibly I shouldn’t have flaked on the project with a deadline of today. Hopefully Monday will be good enough.

Read (manga): The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor vol 6 (Anko Yuzu, Sarasa Nagase, Mitsuya Fuji): Politics and betrayal and foreign princesses and plain old jealousy.

Written (game design): 109. But that’s more than 100, so I can go to bed.

I did in fact celebrate, although my gender is boring and stupid.

Looks like it’s Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday in the office for everyone starting next year. Possible exemption for the person who has to align with global coverage each week.

Same customer tried to make me stay late again, but I wrote too quickly.

Read (graphic novel): The Sweetness Between Us (Sarah Winifred Searle): He was out of school because he just came down with type 1 diabetes. She was out of school because she had to get turned into a vampire early to recover from a car wreck. Together, they have all kinds of feelings and extremely practical troubles and make out.

Written (game design): 189.

Not only am I not playing Perils & Princesses, I’m not gaming at all! What is wrong with me?

Finally remembered to log in to work half an hour early for the all-hands (everybody’s great except Sales) and then stayed half an hour late to work on the case of a customer who will not accept that the fault is on their side and not ours.

No gaming, Ken had a 5am class today and has another one tomorrow.

Read (TTRPG): Chapter Serf (Zedeck Siew): What’s it like being one of the twenty thousand commoners who keeps the ship running so half a dozen Space Marines can fly around the dark future of only war?

Read (graphic novel): Kirby’s Lessons for Falling (in Love) (Laura Gao): A Chinese-American high-school rock climber has to deal with a broken arm and bad grades and cute weirdos in Newspaper Club and family drama and not being out to her religious family and additional drama.

Written (game design): 352:

Doc Savage against his evil twin can’t stun him, and will knock him out
in about eight hits under either system. So far, so good!

I’m not sure about getting stunned, though. Is it a concept we even
need? Having to skip a turn goes with being able to buy more turns,
but that’s not what we want. Is it? It seems like it just cuts your
Stun in half against big attacks, since once you’re stunned, you
can get taken out with one more of the same. (Even in the old system,
where it wasn’t pinned at half your Stun, it was around there.) Making
every hit after half Stun stun you is the same thing, slower but more
certain. On the other hand, having nothing happen until you fall over
seems meh. We can do better than D&D hit points, right? Right?

Speaking of which, should having taken more lethal damage than half
your Con make you dying? Or just wounded, and not actually dying
until it’s more than your Con? What’s the downside to being wounded?
Take another point of nonlethal damage every time you do something? Take
another point of lethal damage? Make an Ego roll to give yourself a
point of lethal damage in the process of taking an action? Soldiering on
while bleeding out is very heroic, after all.

So about that lethal damage, how does that work? Having all damage be
lethal, converted to nonlethal up to some limit, still seems good, but
it needs to be 1-for-1. How do our test cases do on Body in the old
system?

Normal punching normal: 0 on an average roll, up to 2 if roll up.
Normal punching Doc Savage: 0 no matter what.
Doc Savage punching normal: 2 on an average roll, up to 6 on a great roll.
Doc Savage punching evil clone: 0 no matter what.

Looks like 0 Def/2 Resilience is still appropriate as base values. Is the
human maximum Res 6? Stacked on top of 2 Def, that would negate all
lethal damage from even the best possible 4d6 roll. Seems good.

Don’t worry, I will not make Nightvale go swimming. Sage is more watery anyway.

Also Baklava Day, which I randomly am able to celebrate.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 7 (Nujima): More people from beyond, more eldritch train stations, return of the girl with the string on her finger. Also swimsuit episode.

Written (game design): 356:

Back to the damage system! I want to keep damage rolls and effect rolls
in general at one point per die (plus/minus) if possible, so we need to
adjust what stats the target has and what they mean.

(A feature of the Res-converts-Body-to-multiple-Stun system we were
looking at is that the higher your Res, the more total damage you take,
even if it’s less lethal. It’s good to not die, but this is probably
still not how things should work.)

As we just saw, in the old system, a normal (2 PD/ED, 10 Con, 10 Body,
20 Stun) should be knocked out by an average 7d6 attack (22-23 Stun
after PD/ED). A 6d6 attack (19 Stun) won’t quite do it unless it rolls
up a bit, but will definitely stun them. Either of these will put them
in the ER (average 5 or 4 Body respectively). 2d6 (5 Stun, 0 Body) takes
four hits to knock them out, and won’t even stun them unless it rolls
all the way up (10 Stun, 2 Body). 10d6 (33 Stun, 8 Body) pretty much
can’t fail to knock them out, and is extremely likely to put them in
hospital. 12d6 will on average leave them dying, but even rolling up
won’t kill them instantly. 4d6 (12 Stun) is enough to stun them on
average, 3d6 (8-9 Stun) would have to roll up.

If each point of effect goes through to do a point of Stun (on an
unarmored normal), that suggests base Con is 6; if you take more
than half of it, you’re stunned, and if you take more than all of it,
you’re out. More precisely, every point of damage that ends up with you
being at more than 1/2 Con stuns you, so don’t get hit if you’re already
beaten up. (Is this a good idea?)

Does each point of effect go through? In the old system, normals have 2
PD/ED, but each new point represents 3.5 old Stun, so that’s just over
half a point, which is probably the most incovenient possible value. If
we generously round up to 1 Def, then they get stunned by 3 damage and
knocked out by 6. That’s one more than 2 and 5 respectively, which is
not nearly as felicitous a pair of numbers since we probably still round
in the character’s favor. 2d6 against 1 Def does an average of 1 damage,
so three hits until they start getting stunned with every hit, six until
they’re knocked out. There’s a 1/4 chance of doing nothing (rolling
down), and a 1/36 chance of rolling up enough to stun. That’s more
nothing, but about the same stunning. Obviously we don’t have to match
the results of the old system exactly, but I think the 0-Def option
works better here. Maybe.

Let’s look at some other cases. In the old system Doc Savage (max human
stats, let’s leave out the martial arts for now) would on average stun a
normal with every hit, and knock them out with two hits. The normal
would on average do nothing (2d6 vs PD 8), and at most would do 1/12 of
his total Stun.

In the new system, that would be Def 2, Con 15 (stunned at 9, knocked
out at 16), Str 4d6. 4 damage stuns the normal, another 4 knocks them
out, so that matches. The normal would again typically do nothing, but
could maybe do as much as 2 damage, or 1/8 of his total. Not the same,
but pretty close.

Or you could teach your bear to have better taste in restaurants. Just sayin’.

Did not manage to do anything except get Thai food for lunch and Thai leftovers for dinner.

Read (web serial): Maidens of the Fall, arc 1 (Hazel Young): This is the replacement for Katalepsis which ran aground in the second volume. Government magical girls in an alternate-present fascist Britain where the Dreamlands have eaten London, monsters and alien gods sometimes show up, the government doesn’t want you to have strange dreams, and homosexuality has been outlawed again. Our main character starts off orphaned, badly scarred, and disabled, in love with her best friend who is about to be parted from her for university, and full of seething rage that she dare not express in any way. Then things start going downhill. It’s awesome. Five Elder Signs.

Read (comic collection): Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us (Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota): Cute one- or two-page autobiographical comic strips about cats and art and weird flatmates and NYC and family and being weirdos.

Written (game design): 463:

Multiattack can then done either with -2 per additional target, or
spreading, or both. In Hero, the former is the more generic way to do
it, since like in D&D, every attack action is a single pull of the
trigger or similar. A six-shooter has 6 charges and you use one every
time you make an attack. That sort of makes sense when you’re tracking
everything in individual seconds and meters, but we’re moving away from
that. I hope we can move away from it, though, but what’s a fuzzy way to
track ammunition that doesn’t cause grognards to stroke out? (Too late,
you say?)

Setting that to one side for the moment, I do like the idea of using
spreading for multiattacks. No OCV calculations required, just drop
a die for each additional target, or maybe two if they aren’t
adjacent. So if you’re a 10d6 superhero, and you drop into the
middle of a pack of four thugs, that’s 7d6 to each of them, at full
OCV. In the old system, that would be 24-25 Stun, enough to knock
out normals or come close to knocking out lesser agents, and do
like 3-4 Body. In the new system, if they have 3 Res, that’s 6 Stun
and 4 uncoverted body, which is enough to stun them but only halfway
to knocking them out. This is telling us more about the failure of
the new damage system than about multiattack.

Sign of the horns emoji goes here.

Still on handover, still no office. Good thing, too, since there was Weather outside. Gusts of 40mph, according to my phone, although it didn’t seem that bad right around here.

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.5-6: Called it (kinda). But did we know Vox could do that? Did we know Lucifer couldn’t do that? Did we know Lilith did do that? Still no songs to match “Gravity”, but Charlie and Vaggie’s dance was sweet.

Read (graphic novel): Kiss Number Eight (Colleen AF Venable, Ellen T Crenshaw): A high-school girl in a Catholic community has to deal with family drama and friend drama and personal drama and more family drama, much of it revolving around queerness, which even in 2004 was not so popular with Catholics. (Although to be fair, the clergy and nuns (are nuns clergy?) aren’t the ones causing trouble.)

Written (game design): 210:

That seems like it should work, but with some things happening at
Con+1 and some at Con*2+1, have we actually combined Stun and Body
and Con into one characteristic? I mean, sure, Con+1 is both stunned
(in one hit) and dying (accumulated), and Con*2+1 is both knocked
out and dead, but are we gaining any simplicity? Maybe we should
measure Con in dice of effect like Ego and so we can swap it in
directly for Ego Powers Based on Con. Yes, that seems good, but now
Stun and Body are separate from Con, so they might as well be
separate from each other. I’m bummed that we didn’t get to consolidate
characteristics, but at least the mechanics we have for them are better.

This gives us four characteristics that are measured in dice of effect
(Strength, Constitution, Ego, Presence) and seven that are just numbers
(DCV, DECV, Def, Res, Stun, Body, Rec). We haven’t replaced Speed yet,
though, and skills/skill levels (including attacks) need to be concretized.

What do we do about Speed? I mean, we throw it out, everyone gets the
same N full phases per turn, but how does the speedster beat up mooks
faster than the lumbering brick? And how do they do it before the mooks
get a chance to cause trouble? These are separate things, I think.

I hope they don’t have the same kind of genetic crimes committed against them in the name of fashion as dogs.

Doing evening handover this week, so no office.

Read (manhwa): Milkyway Hitchhiking vol 1 (Sirial): A cat with white stars across their back like the Milky Way meets various cats and humans and other creatures in various worlds or times, all lovely and painted and full of feelings but also sometimes alarming.

Read (novel): A Traitor in Skyhold (John Bierce): Third book in the series, all the main characters are becoming more OP, murders all around. Features explanations of two major setting elements, so we’ll have to see if Jeremy kept those the same in the game. One he probably is, the other one that’s more relevant to my character we’ll have to see about.

Written (game design): 326:

Alternately, the amount of Stun a point of effect converts to could be
determined by the attack. I also don’t know what special effect
justifies the different values here, though. Probably easiest to stick
with a multiple of 2 for now.

Filthy story gamers who steal from Tenra Bansho Zero would make the use
of Resilience optional: do you want to take lots of Stun and get taken
out faster, or take less Body and keep fighting now but have long-term
damage? That is probably too far from the simulationist Hero paradigm,
though.

In the old system, a point of Def (PD+ED) cost 2, but stopped only 1/3.5
of a die on average. Now it stops an entire die, so it should cost 7.
That seems low, but 8 Def, equal to 28 PD and ED in the old system, also
costs 56, which seems legit. Not sure how much Resilience should cost, but
significantly less than 7. In the old system, 1 Body cost as much as 2
Stun, and a point of Res converts 1 Body to 2 Stun, which is no change
so it should be free? That doesn’t seem right. Looked at another way,
one die does 1 Body and 3.5 Stun, for a total of 5.5 points
worth, and a point of Res stops the Body but none of the Stun, so it
should cost 2/5.5 as much as Def, which would be about 2.5. Slightly
over, so rounded to 3, I guess. In new points, which I haven’t decided
whether or not to use, that’s a cost of 3 for Def and 1 for Res.

If 16 is the base amount of damage a character can take, then Recovery
is on the same scale as before, or maybe base 3 instead of 4. Cost 1 old
point per point, or 1 new point per 2 points.

Does Res need a new name because it’s too close to Rec? Hopefully not.

I was a young reader once! And look at me now! No, wait, maybe avert your eyes before they suffer permanent damage.

Read (grapic novel): Pizza Witch (Sarah Graley, Stef Purenins): An aspiring Pizza Witch and her familiar do quests for the Award-Winning Pizza Warlock, but is it getting her any closer to her dream? Or to cute girls? Very cartoony, for a youngish (middle grade?) audience. Speaking of National Young Reader’s Day.

Written (game design): 584:

We’ve been looking at Stun as the major element of attacks, because
that’s what usually gets through Def and moves the fight to a
conclusion, but in a lot of ways, Body is what really represents the
power of an attack, or any effect. Escape vs Grab uses Body vs Body,
knockback is based on Body, hitting anything that’s not alive uses Body,
etc. What if we just look at the Body of effect rolls and then have Stun
happen as a consequence of that if appropriate?

Roll and calculate Body as usual: discard the dice showing 1, count the
remaining dice and add the count of dice showing 6. That’s how much
effect you get. If you’re just escaping a grab or whatever, that’s all
you need. (Maybe have people roll for effect when throwing or lifting,
so it’s not so deterministic? Probably not, since at the upper end it
would be easy to vary by +/-3, which is an order of magnitude in mass.)

If you’re trying to break something or someone, then first subtract
their Def (if any) from the effect. If there’s anything left, that’s
how much effect you have. If the target is an object or something
that doesn’t take Stun, it’s all Body damage. If it is something
that takes Stun (like a person), then an amount up the target’s
Resilience is converted to Stun damage; anything still left over
after that is Body damage.

Mechanically, Def and Res are distinct, but I need to find a way to
describe them so people can give them appropriate special effects. It’s
more or less hard armor that keeps the damage away completely, vs soft
armor that blunts it, kind of, I guess? It’s definitely not
analogous to resistant vs non-resistant Def; either of them can be
resistant or non-resistant. Normal humans don’t have Def at all in this
system, just Res.

If the total Stun and Body damage (do these need new names?) in one
hit is more than your Con, you’re stunned. If the accumulated total
is greater than Con*2, out you go. If the accumulated Body is greater
than Con*2, you’re dying as well. Or maybe you can make a roll of some
kind to stay conscious? Fighting on while bleeding to death is very
heroic. Or maybe you’re dying if Body damage is more than Con? That’s
more fragile than in the old system, which might be okay for a

If generic person has 0 Def and 2 Resilience, a 2d6 strike still does
0 Body on an average roll, but rolling up will do 1 or even 2. The average
strike does 2 Stun, so for four hits to take someone out, basic Con*2 would
need to be 7, which doesn’t quite work with integers, but making the
basic Con 4 should be fine. Average Body is 1/3.6, so in five hits,
that’s 1-2 Body damage, which is a lot if dying is at Con, but not so
much if it’s at Con*2.

We could have a point of Res turn one point of effect multiple points of
Stun, if we wanted things to work out more like the old system. It’s
more complicated, but not enormously so. If a point of effect is 2 Stun
or 1 Body, then Stun from a 2d6 attack would be average 4, so we’d put
Con at 8, and KO would be at 17 (4 hits plus 1). Then dying wouldn’t be
until 9. A multiplier of 3 means 6 Stun per hit, Con 10 or 11 to be
knocked out in four hits and hardly be dying at all.

In the spirit of everything being adjustable, maybe the multiplier
should be adjustable by a modifier on the Resilience, although I have
even less idea what special effects would justify the different values.
Is it just heroicness, with larger values meaning you’re an easily
knocked out wimp, and smaller meaning you have to be half-dead before
you go down? The default Con wouldn’t scale, obviously.

I don’t even need to mash this one up, Sesame Street is an unalloyed good in the world.

Since Former Coworker T was forced out, someone else has to cover Christmas Day, and apparently it’s going to be me.

Read (graphic novel): Over My Dead Body (Sweeney Boo): An orphan witch at witch school disappears, and her senpai mentor tries to find out what happened to her despite the discouragement of basically everyone. It’s pretty to look at, but the story is mid, and the spell rhymes are pretty bad. Like, I might be able to do better poetry.

Read (novel): Jewel of the Endless Erg (John Bierce): Second book in the series our current Fantasy Hero campaign is based on. The terribly shy and self-deprecating hero continues to display that he is in fact completely OP. Also, dragons. And intrigue. And smooches.

Written (game design): 435:

Of course this all falls apart as soon as we look at a number. The
2d6 Str of a normal person only has a range of 2-12 Stun, so can
only ever reach two effect levels, and we have to make the default
Con 0 to even get to Con+10 (and it’s still never going to happen
twice). It would sort of work if we said any hit above Con bumped
the level, so that four hits in a row would get the target to Con+30
(same as 2d6 vs 2 Def and 20 Stun), but what about Body? In old
money, we’d expect to inflict about 2 Body out of 10, but now we’d
expect the target to end up at the Con+10 level of wounded. Since
we haven’t defined how hurt the levels are, maybe that can work.

When we look at 12d6 against 2 Def, Stun is okay: 40 takes the
target to a level beyond Con+30 if base Con is 0. Body is only
Con+10, though instead of dying, and we established that as being
the result of a regular fistfight. That makes throwing around
full-power energy blasts a lot less fraught, which is no good.

12d6 against 30 Def gives Con+10 on average, assuming Con 0, but only
Con+0 against a moderately higher Con. Maybe not even that against a
much higher Con, which suggests we need to make Def or Con or both more
expensive, so that 60 points in attack and 60 points in defense balance
out appropriately.

I’m still not sure if I like it, but I guess that didn’t fall apart
as much as I expected, if we’re willing to have any hit at Con+0
or more bump up the level (meaning, four hits until unconsciousness
at most, not counting recoveries taken, which need to be worked out
but are probably just one action to move one step down the chart)
and also willing to have normals hit by 12d6 attacks get pasted. We’ll
set it aside for future consideration.

They probably mean adopting humans, but have you considered cats as a furrier and more portable alternative?

Since I was useless yesterday, and gaming was canceled this fortnight, I had to go shopping today. I meant to get up and do it at a reasonable time, but the cats trapped me for hours. Then I did some shopping and became useless again. So useless.

Read (manga): 7th Time Loop vol 4 (Touko Amekawa, Hinoki Kino, Wan*Hachipisu): They might be catching feelings, even though she knows that in just a few years he’s going to become a genocidal monster. Also, the mandatory dressing up as a boy to taken royal knight training.

Written (game design): 320:

The existing system has like 20-60 states between unhurt and knocked
out, and 10-20 between unhurt and dying, although it tends to skip
over a lot of them in any given phase. There are only a few states
for mental and presence attacks (Characteristic +0/10/20/30), which
is much nicer, but they don’t increment: each effect has whatever
level it rolled (or nothing if the roll wasn’t high enough for the
desired mental effect). Can we make clobbering people work like
this too? Con+0/10/20/30, with +30 being knocked out, and if you
get a hit of the the same level, the level goes up by one. If the level
goes to Con+20 (so a first hit at +20 or a second at +10), then you’re
also stunned for a phase (round, whatever). If the damage is less than
Con, ignore it.

Is this too few states? Two hits at Con+20 and you’re out, but a hit
that stuns someone is probably around half their Stun in the old system,
right? However, if you can only do Con+10 to someone, you can keep them
stunlocked but never knock them out. Maybe if you have to spend two
consecutive phases recovering from being stunned, you go unconscious, or
something along those lines. If you can only do Con+0 to someone, you
can’t even ever stun them, but that’s normal for a weak attack.

But that’s all Stun. How do we do Body? Same way, but it’s about 2/7 of
Stun, so likely to be less than Def+Con? We’ll have to balance defenses
and Con against attacks, so that it works out properly, with a 2d6
strike being able to sometimes hurt a normal person, and a 12d6 strike
likely to mortally wound them. That sounds like work, but we have to do it.

Looks like NYC got their socialist! Virginia and Georgia repudiated the fash pretty firmly, too. On this coast, we got retaliatory redistricting and a tax for hospitals, which isn’t nothing.

I volunteered to do a call with a customer even though I could probably have let someone else take it. Their problem was that they didn’t read the docs, and also didn’t do real testing.

No gaming, Ken is worn out and Ash’s beloved kitty Vanilla barfed up most of her liver and stopped being a cat over the weekend. 🙁

Read (manga): After God vol 4 (Sumi Eno): We finally get to find out a bit more about Obikawa and his endealment, which leads to more horror because what manga do you think this is? More death, more Anti-God Institute skulduggery. Tragic backstories.

Written (game design): 497:

Having thought about it, I’m tending toward large hexes. I don’t think
exactly defining the size a superpower’s size is very appropriate. A
superhero doesn’t make a forcefield that’s exactly 4m square, they make
a forcefield that blocks off the hole in the hull, unless they can’t.
Which is what the pushing mechanic is supposed to emulate, but it’s kind
of clunky. (Pushing would work better with ranks, also.)

Large hexes also fit pretty well with the existing system of range
penalties. In your hex is no penalty, 1 hex away is -2, every time you
double it’s another -2.

Speaking of hexes and movement, is the implicit multipower of
movement by paying per-hex for speed and then buying modes as adders
actually a good idea? I think it properly addresses the vast utility
of even a small amount of flight, but doesn’t work as well for the
person who has a huge amount of swimming in a terrestial campaign.
Should different modes be advantages on very cheap basic movement?
Swimming +1/4, Running +1, Flight +2, etc? Should Doesn’t Fall be
a separate power like Doesn’t Need to Breathe? It sounds kind of
goofy when I put it like that, but further down in my notes is
thinking about how to have powers interact with environmental
phenomena that are normally taken for granted or changed only by
GM fiat, like gravity and lighting. We have Life Support for needing
to breath etc, Tunneling and Desolid for not being able to walk
through walls, Night Vision for the dark, so why not something that
negates the normal gravity/falling rules, instead of Flight kind
of implicitly doing it but working in a different way?

Relatedly, I think Change Environment should be able to make regions
that are zero-gee, or vacuum, or whatever, and have the normal rules for
those environments apply, instead of trying to cobble together a similar
effect from other powers.

Less relatedly, but I was reminded, falling speed and damage needs to be
revised to be more reasonable instead of hugely more than any superhero
can do. It needs to be revised for a lack of segments anyway. Somehow.

Speaking of more damage than superheroes can do, what about damage that
superheroes (and regular heroes) actually do? Earlier I said we should
combine Stun, Body, and Con into one characteristic, but how do we use
that to represent getting beaten up?

I normally dislike hit points, but when a fight can involve an astral
projection, a robot, and a mutant with a healing factor, any lesser
level of abstraction might not work. (The last time I tried this, I
wanted to have conditions with numeric ratings, like Clobbered 6 or
Entangled 3, and if any condition was more than X or the sum of all your
conditions was more than Y, you were Out. I was never able to get it to
be both general and specific enough to be good.)

Sadly, I did not contribute this year, and Color the World Orange Day is the first Monday in November, not a fixed date, so we won’t observe this again for years.

At work, we’re back to the scheme of every-engineer-for-themself case allocation that was in place when I joined more than six years ago. It still works fine since the time hasn’t expanded much, but it’s more proof that management is just making everything up as they go along.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 4 (Hachi Inaba): More reasons why everyone hates dragons, more beasts who hate dragons, more tigers who think Hakurei is the hottest thing ever, more interspecies families.

Written (game design): 459:

Speaking of a new paradigm for limitations, it occurs to me that some of
the “power doesn’t work” limitations (OHID, not in strong magnetic
fields, gestures) could be complications instead. This doesn’t help with
limitations that change the power mechanically, though.

It could also be that all powers have to have a minor limitation, and
then only major limitations count, but I’m not sure that’s concrete
enough to be workable.

I still think we can do better than the existing system of base points *
1+adv + active points / 1+lim = real points, but until I can figure out
how, we’re stuck with it.

So, is making hexes more like 10m or as allowed by the environment
actually a good idea? It eliminates the counting of hexes for every
movement and ranged attack, which can be a considerable timesink, and
positioning can be more narrative. On the other hand, a hex of 1-2m is a
good unit for measuring smaller area effects, and having everyone be
alone in their specific hex removes ambiguity.

Zones/large hexes was the right call for the fantasy game, but that
doesn’t mean it’s right for Hero. Does 6E’s hexless approach actually
get the worst of both here? Or is it the right way to go because
it doesn’t impose any structure on the freedom of the space?

Large hexes also make range not strictly numeric. There’s no range as in
engaged in melee with you (already kind of wonky when you include
Stretching) and no range as in within the same hex, and only then do you
get to a range of 1 hex. It’s not at all unworkable, but it’s not as
clean and granular as counting from your own, unambiguous, hex. Same
with movement: there’s 0 hexes of movement meaning you can’t move,a nd 0
hexes meaning you can move around inside your hex to engage people, but
need to go noncombat to get to the next hex. Or whatever.

It feels like going with large and somewhat indeterminate zones instead
of tight hexes also means other measurements like barrier sizes have to
be vague and descriptive instead of a concrete X meters by Y meters,
which is again a different feel than before. But is that bad? Wargamers
love precise measurements, but I like to think the hobby has moved a bit
beyond that (especially because you can get all the precise measurements
you want from playing computer games). You can even make a case that the
precise measurements are less realistic, since people don’t usually
perform in exactly repeatable ways in the real world. Even robots don’t.

Either way could work, I’m pretty sure, but I’m not sure which is a
better fit for what we’re trying to do.