Author: Trip the Space Parasite

I guess you’d have to do them one at a time? Not that I roasted any chestnuts at all today, or did anything else for that matter.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 5 (Kiyoko Iwami): Wow, Homewrecker has been messed up for a long time, and no wonder. But that doesn’t mean Cheater should be sneaking off to meet her! Again! Not that any of these girls are old enough to do anything sensible

Read (novel): The Siege of Skyhold (John Bierce): Pretty much what it says on the tin. The big enemy makes their big move, we get to see what a war between multiple great powers looks like, there is murder and betrayal and death and more death. I did not actually see that betrayal coming, although arguably I should have.

Written (game design): 185.

Didn’t manage to celebrate this one.

Got up at commuting-to-work time to try to get to phlebotomization ahead of the rush, did not succeed. Fortunately, I have a smartphone, so queues of reasonable length are not distressing. Made it back in time to go shopping and eat pastrami and read Maidens of the Fall at my usual lazy time.

Read (graphic novel): Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (Mariko Tamaki, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell): Another lesbian high-school drama. MC is dating the hottest, most popular lesbian in school. Drama ensues. So much drama. But also opportunities for personal growth.

Read (novel): Hell Hath No Fury (Rachel Aaron): At the end of book 3/5, everything was terrible, the lovers were separate, the villain looked like he was winning, etc. Now in book 4/5, the plan is starting to come together, they’re invading Heaven though the basement, making friends, influencing demons, reuniting, discovering the power that was inside them all along, etc. But Gilgamesh’s plan to crush them once and for is clearly about to come to fruition, because the next volume is the final battle.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.5-7: Finally, the Moon Fairy! Also, genetic infiltration.

Written (game design): 508:

This implies that all ranks have the same cost, so we have to adjust
powers by how much one rank gives instead of cost per rank. As always,
the benchmark will be 1d6 damage per rank. This also means that
characteristics and skills/skill levels have to be bought in ranks,
which might be a little harder. Maybe a rank of Skill gives N skill
points, which are not the same as character points, or something
similar. Depends on how broad or narrow we want to make skills.

What kinds of ranks do we need? One for each power, although we can
consolidate some: Blast, Hand Attack, Killing Attack (already
combined in 6E), and maybe Mental Blast can be combined into Attack;
Mind Control and Mental Illusions can possibly be combined; FTL
Travel and Extra-Dimensional Travel, etc.

I mentioned ranks of damage/effect before, but I think those actually
come from ranks in the power itself. If nothing else, we may need
to have some that only give 1/2d6 (average 0.5 point of effect) per
rank. (1/3d6 and 2/3d6 are also possible, but we’ll try to avoid
those.) I think this may also apply to defense, although I’m less
certain about that. Maybe there is no Armor or Forcewall power, you just
throw a bunch of defense ranks and optionally some area and range ranks
in a bucket and call it a day?

Enhancement ranks? Is that a good name for them? Good enough for
now. We have, obviously, range (0 ranks is melee, then same zone,
nearby zones, distant zones/LoS, usable through mind scan), area
(0: single target or an area of a meter if appropriate, then enough
to block a doorway, cover a room, fill a zone, zone and adjacent zones,
etc), penetration (1 rank knocks off 2 of whatever defense), AVLD/NND,
constant/persistent, affects desolid, affects solid, alternate CV,
cumulative effect, damage over time, autofire, invisible, hardened, hole
in the middle, faster acceleration, more noncombat speed, knockback,
indirect, invisible, megascale, teleport more mass, safe teleport,
resistant, killing, sticky, transdimensional, trigger, usable by/on
others, variable special effect, probably more I missed or will need to
be invented new. A lot of these are only going be available as a
single rank, some will need multiple ranks to be effective at all,
some start at 1 and go as far as you can afford. Some only apply to
certain powers, or even a single power (depending on how we combine
powers).

Then we need to take all the power limitations (which may also only apply to
certain powers) and figure out how many ranks each one is worth. We also
need to list all the requirement limitations, although they don’t need
to be rated in any way: if they come up, you get XP, and if not, you
don’t.

What it means for a requirement to come up is easy for something like
Gestures or Extra Time, but less so for something like Only At Night. If
the adventure happens entirely during the day, does that automatically
count as a single incident for the whole adventure? As many incidents?
Does it depend on how many times you say “I wish I could use that
power”? (I was thinking if a Complication comes up once, you get 1 XP;
if it comes up several times (5?) then 2 XP; maybe if it’s constant for
the whole adventure, you get 3? Is it per adventure? Per session? Is
there some other time period like D&D’s long rest that we use to divide
up play?)

If we give 1 or more XP per Complication per session, then an XP
probably can’t be a full character point the way it is in Hero,
especially if we use chonky points. I don’t think we’re going to be like
Storyteller where points are linear at character creation and geometric
afterwards, just a straight ratio.

Also Ambrosia Day, which fits since it’s forbidden to mortals.

Almost kind of did some work, mostly kind of bleah.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.1-2: Starting off with a bang, but it’s looking pretty bad for the good guys. I feel like Star and Stripe should have done better with that quirk, but she did pretty well.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 144.

I only ate one bagel, though.

No office again, and now the office is closed until after the first of the year, so it’s all WFH all the time. This would be more productive if Sage were less affectionate, but who wants that? Also would help if the online lab site for the online Kubernetes course actually worked.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 16 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Yes, apparently you can find weird magical artifacts on every street corner in this world. I guess two expeditions into supernatural spaces with their own rules in sixteen volumes isn’t that many, although there was an alien invasion in between, which doesn’t seem to have been noticed by anyone except the PCs.

Written (game design): 236:

None of these addresses the effectiveness vs usability issue, so I think
we’re still holding out for the hitherto-undiscovered fourth option.
Unless usability limitations are just Complications, which they might
be. But also none of this is fundamentally changing our notion of what
it means for a power to be limited or advantaged or both or neither.

No, actually, we did reconsider what it means to be a default power
with the second option there, where all powers have some downsides
unless you buy them off with advantages. I don’t know that it works very
well, since it’s not obvious how to apply it to non-powers (ie,
characteristics), but it is at least different.

What else can we say about limitations and advantages that might offer
openings for reconsideration? Why are limitations more of an issue than
advantages? Part of it is because if we peg cost to utility, making the
power (or characteristic or whatever bolus of points) less useful means
reducing the cost and we can’t go below zero or the whole system breaks
down. Another part is that limitations are less constrained, since in
wargaming, it’s assumed everyone wants to be as powerful as possible and
that’s what has to be kept under control, so the ways you can make a
power better have to be carefully enumerated and restricted. I’m not
expressing this well, possibly because it’s not a well-formed thought,
but I think I’m right.

Having a set of powers that cover every operation your system is
interested in, in a basic way, and then a selection of advantages to
make them better but more expensive or weaker but cheaper is pretty
elegant, but not the only way to do things. If your set of “advantages” is
sufficiently restricted, you could not have them separate at all: blast,
area-effect blast, etc. Or, if the system is structured appropriately,
do something like I tried earlier where each power has a slider for each
of the various attributes (number of targets, fatigue, armor
penetrations, etc etc) that you can buy up or down. I didn’t get it
to work, but I didn’t try that hard.

Do limitations even reduce the cost? As previously mentioned, you could
instead get XP when your limitations come up, at least for ones that put
requirements on the power.

Maybe effectiveness limitations, instead of giving points back that you
can use for whatever, directly give you ranks (dice, active points,
whatever) in the power. If you want more ranks than you get from
limitations, you can buy them with points. Minimum cost applies for each
power, although it could be varied to give some of the same effect as
power frameworks (less for attack powers after the first, etc). This is
another one that’s mathematically similar to previous ideas, but might
feel different in play.

(Speaking of ranks, what if instead of ranks in a power, we had ranks of
damage, ranks of area/size, ranks of defense, ranks of penetration (may be
the same as ranks of defense, actually), etc? Then you could make your
forcewall out of ranks in defense plus ranks in area, instead of having
to have ranks all called Forcewall but doing different things. Maybe
you have to have at least one rank in the specific power to get the
basic effect and define what what exactly the other ranks do, or maybe
that’s free.)

Ranks gained from limitations can’t exceed whatever the campaign limit
is, of course, but can be any kind of rank. With requirement limitations
being Complications, is this a system at last? I’m still worried that
we’ll end up with all powers at minimum cost, but maybe the only way to
resolve that issue is to move forward.

Also Human Rights day, like humans aren’t animals.

No office, because I’m on handover this week, but up early for all-hands meeting anyway. Nothing very interesting this time.

Read (manga): eV vol 1 (Alfa Robbi, James Farr, Papillon Studio): Another reread from the distant past to confirm that I don’t need to reread it any more.

Written (game design): 277.

Also National Techno Music in the Crematorium Day.

No gaming, Vivian is in an awkward time zone (South America sticks out more to the east than I thought) and Ash’s dog had to go to the emergency vet but is fine.

Read (novella): Owl Be Home for Christmas (Zoe Chant): One of the non-spicy ones, with a shifter movie star coming back to Virtue. Not enough dinosaur shifter shenanigans, or really anything except the two leads making goopy eyes at each other.

Read (graphic novel): How Could You (Ren Strapp): College lesbians who are old enough to sleep around and not nearly mature enough to be involved in any relationships. Crushes, betrayal, escaping to France, escaping from France, the desperate quest for girls they don’t already know, etc.

Written (game design): 114. Also fiddled with my Kaiju Academy character a bunch.

But that just makes me want to return to the glorious future of Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 13 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): Of course once you’ve been to the Otherside, you can never escape weird shit. Also Kozakura’s scorn for the two leads and their hot spring adventure plan is 100% justified. I completely understand about wanting your own space and not liking being in other people’s space, though.

Written (game design): 283:

Back to the drawing board again. We can reduce the cost of individual
powers, we can give extra points separately, we can make powers with
fewer than some number of limitations cost more, or an
as-yet-undiscovered fourth option. Or, of course, a combination.

Giving points separately would something like this. You have your
powers each with their base cost, say a plasma-based flying energy
projector package:
– Plasma bolt (blast)
– Plasma shield (forcefield + damage shield)
– Plasma rocket (flight)
– Magnetic Sense

Then there are limitations that apply to these, each with a base value,
and then a multiplier for how many of the powers it applies to:
– Doesn’t work in strong magnetic fields – applies to all, x4 base points
– Too bright to hide – applies to most but not sense, x3 base points
– Backblast – applies to only flight, x1 base points

The important thing here is to not make the extra points larger
than the cost of the power(s) being limited, to avoid a runaway
spiral of infinite power(s). But, the points have to be enough for
limitations to be tempting and roughly balanced. Sticking with the
idea that a limitation gets a multiplier depending on how many of
your powers it applies to (per power, or few/some/most/all), we can
obviously say that if the total cost of the powers that a limitation
applies to is X, then you can’t get more than X-1 points for the
limitation. That can lead to recalculations of multiple limitations
every time you change a power, instead of only recalculating that
power, which is obviously not great but might not be too bad since
you only have to add up the integer costs, not do any fractional
arithmetic. The upside of this scheme is that it encourages common
limitations, which a character with a strong concept should have.
(I think. I might be basing this too much on the current game, where
everyone has the same power source.)

For increasing cost for powers that don’t have X limitations, we have to
pick a number of limitations to be the base, say 4. Then with the same
powers and limitations, we have
– blast – not in magnetic fields, bright, needs 2 levels of unlimited power
– shield – same
– flight – not in magnetic fields, bright, backblast, only needs 1 level of unlimited power
– magnetic sense – not in magnetic fields, needs 3 levels of unlimited power

This is easier to calculate (only advantages), but it means having
more than four limitations never gives any points, which could be
good or bad depending on whether the massive limits on the power
are legit. It also allows counting limitations (obviously some can
count double or triple) instead of working with fractions like 11/4.

Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages and I’m really not
sure whether either is better than the existing system. They do, maybe,
solve the problem of fiddling around with piles of -1/4 limitations to
shave fractions of a percent of a character budget, but is it worth it?

I guess that one pushed most of the other holidays off the 7th, since there aren’t very many listed.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy session 3.All Champions teams have to play some variant of Queen of the Hill when the GM hasn’t prepared enough. But that wasn’t enough testing, so they had to get beaten up by a grad student’s plant golems. In between, they had to make sure the tappy spiders weren’t eating kittens (they weren’t, all sophonts want to be friends with kittens) and Amalia got attacked by a Prussian ninja, which is not a normal part of trig midterms even in Skyhold.

Read (graphic novel): The Girl From the Sea (Molly Knox Ostertag): A teenager who lives on a small island is rescued from drowning by a very cute and very strange girl. Awkward romance and messy friendships and closets and ecological disaster and sealskins ensue, but it is all okay in the end, mostly kind of.

Written (game design): 232.

That sounds even more repulsive than plain vodka.

Did not manage to get up early to go get blood drawn, or even get up at a reasonable time. Eventually I did get out from under the cats and go shopping, though.

After cancelling my Spotify account and spending a few weeks listening to music on Youtube which is not ideal, I signed up for Qobuz on the recommendation of a pocket frond. So far, so good. I was able to magically port over my Spotify playlists (I still have an account, I just don’t use it or give them money) with Soundiiz, although they did not magically become better organized.

My blog is up to three whole comments! All by one commenter, though.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.4: So who are these mysterious envoys and why are they setting puzzles for Jinshi/his mysterious advisor? Also, I feel like the mirror should allow us to date when the show is set, but Wikipedia is only giving me “later than the 1500s” since although metal-backed glass mirrors were available in Italy at that time, they were less than a meter square.

Read (novel): Broker vol 2 (Derelict Presence): The continuing adventures of trying to save the world despite superpowers and dungeons and monsters having spontaneously appeared to disrupt everything. It looks like most of the people who were monsters in MC’s future are pretty monstrous even early on.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 118:

This would bring back minimum costs, since to buy the equivalent of even
1d6 Blast from 6E, you’d also have to buy up range from melee to hex to
few hexes to many hexes, buy up sustainability from “does lethal damage
when used” to “does nonlethal damage when used” to “will tire out user
eventually”, buy up targets from “one target ever” to “can spread”,
penetration from “stopped by any amount of defenses” to “reduced
penetration” to “normal”. Okay, this isn’t going to work. Most powers
are far from the greatest limitations on multiple axes, so merely being
at the default level takes up a lot of points and a lot of space
on a character sheet. Bah.

Also maybe Day of the Ninja, but you didn’t hear it from me.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 5 (Sai Naekawa): What? The story the monster has been feeding her isn’t complete and possibly isn’t true at all? You don’t say!

Read (short): “Slaying the Dragon” (CE Murphy): Urban Shaman short after the end of the series. Not sure I approve of killing randomly-encountered monsters, but magical power is probably as good a reason as food to kill a nonsapient.

Written (game design): 195:

One of the things I like about incrementing/decrementing the cost
per rank is that instead of having to perform two separate calculations,
it’s just sliding up and down a chart, which is way easier. However,
that loses the distinction between active points and real points,
which we still may want to keep. The real distinction is between
modifiers that affect when a power can be used (not at night, 0
End) and how effective it is when used (reduced knockback,
armor-piercing), which even 6E doesn’t differentiate, but it’s still
probably not great to be able to get a 24d6 attack even if it only
works at night.

This is making the problem worse, since now we have power level separate
from cost, and modifiers on both axes, but I’d rather have that clear
than muddled, even if I’m not sure how to implement it yet.

I would also like to be able to count limitations in integers, rather
than floats. Even if it’s just a matter of scaling, I’d rather not
pretend we have that much precision when we really don’t.

If we say one limitation is about equal to a -1/4, so 80%, and multiply
that for each one, then the multiplier goes 4/5, 2/3, 1/2, 2/5, 1/3,
1/4. That seems simple, but the LCD is 1/60. Bah.

Quadrants are a popular way of pulling open problems. Will they help
here? We have advantages vs limitations, and modifies effectiveness vs
modifies usability. The first is a hard dichotomy (probably, although I
guess there could be a modifier that’s both good and bad without being
an advantage and a limitation in one trenchcoat), the second might be
blurrier. But let’s say the axes have only two positions for now.

Is an advantage that increases the effectiveness of the power
fundamentally different than another 1d6 of attack or 1 Def or whatever
the power gives? We can say that making the attack armor-piercing makes
every die armor-piercing, but what if instead a rank of piercing lets
the attack ignore 2 of the target’s Def? Or a rank of range increases
the range from melee to same hex to adjacent hex etc? Every square meter
that we increase an Barrier’s area by in 6E gets the full Def and Body,
but it’s a flat cost rather than an advantage.

Actually range should go, melee -> same hex -> couple of hexes based
on active points/ranks -> many hexes based on active points/ranks
-> line of sight, so maybe it’s not a good example. Or maybe it
shows that every advantage that increases effectiveness is different.
Either way, we see that Hero includes charging by both advantages
(multiplication) and adders (addition) for increasing effectiveness.

Instead of scorning powers that have multiple ways to absorb points
spent on themm, like my favorite example of Barrier, maybe we should be
embracing them. Put points separately into damage, range, penetration,
area, defense used against it, Def, Body, sense groups, everything that
applies to the power. Every aspect starts at minimum for 0 points, so
there aren’t many limitations that apply to effectiveness.

This would make everything a flat adder, so you’re not paying for each
die of your NND attack to bypass Def, you’re paying to negate the
target’s Def.

This is simpler in that everything is explicit, but now you have
to list everything that’s not minimum as one of potentially many
line items under each power. Is this simpler or cleaner than the
existing 6E system? Unclear.

Went to the office, ate some jerk pork and bean rice and friend plantains, did some work. Only Coworker K was there, but I was able to foist off the macadamia nuts on her.

I don’t have to go to the office next week, and after that the office is closed for the rest of the month, so this is my last visit to the office for 2025. It’s also my last visit to that office, since after the first of the year we will be in a larger space on the 7th floor, the better to RTO us all.

Watched (anime movie): Fruits Basket ~Prelude~: Despite the title, it’s the end of the manga with Kyo’s feelings and Tohru’s mom’s backstory, and then a little bit of epilogue.

Read (manga): Unearthly vol 1 (Ted Naifeh, Elmer Damaso): I’ve read this before, but it was on the shelf, so reading it and moving it to a different shelf counts. Two girls discover the boy they like has been kidnapped by aliens and set off to find him with the help of an alien jerk. It is very 90s, and apparently never made it into the future, as it was cancelled after one volume.

Written (game design): 218.

Seems a bit late, most people had green bean casserole almost a week ago!

Successfully went into the office, ate some beef and gouda dumplings, did some work, probably didn’t die. Even managed to pick up prescription on the way home.

Read (graphic novel): Flip (Ngozi Ukazu): He’s a rich, athletic white guy at a private boarding school in Texas. She’s an introverted black scholarship girl at the same private school. They mysteriously switch bodies sometimes, much to their consternation.

Written (game design): 223.

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.

Or maybe mysterious lights beneath the ice that lure researchers into the snow. I’m sure it’s fine.

Got trapped in bed by cats, eventually woke up and did some shopping and Maidens of the Fall and laundry and tried to do more shopping but Marith made me wait for delivery food instead and then it was cold and dark so I couldn’t do anything.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Wizard’s Blue vol 9 (Makoto Sanda, Isuo Tsukumo, Kore Yamazaki): Penultimate volume! Betrayal, dark magic, mysterious spirit realms, unexpected aliiances! Buildup to the final showdown!

Written (anything): VACATION.

Another one that should be every single day.

Did not manage to play any more board games or watch any more TV, but made it to the train and then home. Cats were fine, thanks to Marith’s excellent work feeding and watering them while I was out. Very glad I got tomorrow off so I don’t have to go back to work immediately.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

They can’t all be funny.

Ayse and Ken and Jus and Non went back home this morning, because they have to do work and school and all kinds of things on Monday. Dave and I stayed to entertain our hosts, or at least help Halloween Toddler throw more things down the stairs.

Played (card game): Buffer Time. After realizing we had been cheating before, we started playing correctly (it wasn’t a lot of difference) and eventually won a game. Losing the other games was approximately as fun, because it is a ridiculous and random game.

Watched (animated TV): Star Trek: Lower Decks 1.4-5: Still pretty great. Also, brain-sucking alien parasite!

Played (board game): Nippon Rails. A long and narrow crayon rails game. I am still very bad at these, because I cannot keep enough thoughts in my head to plan out a run more than one contract long. Also I forget to keep enough money in reserve to make all the rails I need and get stuck redrawing for four turns in a row to get a contract I can fulfill. Also also I suck.

Played (board game): Daybreak. We won on turn four, go us.

Played (board game): Codenames. It was very late, and we were not very clever.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Also Buy Nothing on the Blue Planet, which we violated only slightly by patronizing a FLGS and not buying very much. I would have bought some Fluxxes for Sherilyn, but I didn’t know which of the more than 37 varieties she doesn’t already have.

Played (card game): Buffer Time. Al got a copy of the Star Trek: Lower Decks card game for his birthday last spring or something but finally broke it out. It was surprisingly fun for a cooperative game where everyone usually loses.

Watched (animated TV): Star Trek: Lower Decks 1.1-3: Dave and I wanted to know what all the jokes were referencing, so Al showed us the first three episodes. It was pretty good! I’m not fannish, so I probably missed 90% of the references to the 900 other episodes of Star Trek-related material, but it was funny in its own right. I suspect all my characters are actually Boimler.

Played (board game): Lords of Waterdeep with Skullport and Undermountain expansions. I did okay, but came in– wait, I came in first?! I think I successfully dipped into the blue corruption skulls to get a bit ahead and then shed them, so I got all those extra points. Dave went heavy into blue skulls, and zoomed ahead during the game but then lost 84 points in the final accounting. Ouch.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Also many other desserts and non-dessert foods and more foods and more desserts and even more foods. All of them right into my face om nom nom nom. There were four husbands in the kitchen, each of whom’s wife wanted a different kind of stuffing, so there were four stuffings. Also two kinds of mashed potatoes, three kinds of yams, two kinds of Brussels sprouts, and five desserts (only two of them pumpkin-based).

My contribution to the cooking was sitting with Halloween Toddler while he rolled tiny cars around, which people were nice enough to say was important. The people who made food gave me some of it, anyway. Later, I watched HT throw a plastic bin of balls down the stairs, because he goes to sleep at a ridiculous hour.

Played (ridiculous card game): Holiday Fluxx. Fluxx is great for when you wish you could win, but are too tired to make a plan to win, because sometimes it just happens anyway.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Another technology destroyed by the clutching talons of capitalism.

Successfully (barely) rode the train up to Sacramento with Dave to get picked up by Sherilyn, because it’s okay if somebody else is traveling by car and I can tag along. Everyone is doing well, especially Halloween Toddler, and there was Chinese food until we burst.

Played (board game): Thurn and Taxis. I didn’t do great, but I got some carriages and bonus tiles and stuff.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Also Shopping Reminder Day.

I slept in some, because I’m on vacation and also there was a cat on me, but eventually I had to get up and let the cleaners in. Hopefully Marith will not die of the danders when she comes to feed the cats.

There is finally a comment on this blog! Also I think I managed to get the link for comments to appear on each post in the list, so you don’t have to click through on each one to read or post them.

Actually watched a YouTube video today, which I hardly ever do (although I let music videos play in background now that I’ve canceled my Spotify account). Sleeping Beauty Deserves a Better Ending.

Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 2 (Umi Takase): Trans girl is not getting accepted, even by her family, boo. Ally girl is meeting more people who turn out to be queer, but is still figuring herself out.

Written (game design): 175:

If we accept that price breaks for limitations are only roughly
correlated with reduced utility (consider putting the -1/4 limitation
“limited range” on an attack when you have 50″ move vs when you
have 5″ move), and are to a large extent bribes to make more
interesting powers, then a “limitation” doesn’t even have to be
associated with a specific power. Limitations could be their own
section on the character sheet, and each one gives 1/2/3/4x the
base points if it applies to one/some/most/all of your powers.

Or, since advantages aren’t a problem, rather than powers starting with
no limitations, maybe every power starts with four limitation slots, and
if you don’t want to fill them all, you can buy them off with
advantages. This removes the possibility of powers with a zillion
limitations, but is that really a loss? The base cost for powers has to
be pretty small, though, since it’s the heavily limited cost, so this
might not work with chonky points.

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?

Also Fibonacci Day, I guess because 1-1-2-3.

Played (Hero 6E): Finally, another session of Kaiju Academy! This time, our students engage in planned vandalism to find out where the draft in Irina’s room is coming from. The answer is spiders from dimension X (who know the Fibonacci sequence). Mal is never going anywhere without her armor and rollerskates ever again. Also maybe some kind of organophosphate item, since she keeps getting assaulted by arthropods. At least these ones didn’t get inside her clothes, but 2 Body of venomous stab wounds is nothing to sneeze at.

Did some more of the work writing project. Now I have something for each of the three sections, which is enough to submit to get feedback.

Read (manga): Noss & Zakuro vol 2: Further slice of spooky life with tall slinky vampire and tiny adopted vampire daughter in monstertown. They have friends.

Written (game design): 246.

Pretty sure leaving your aura behind when you go for a ride is a second level D&D spell.

I was on call for the middle of the day, so I had to drag my work laptop with me, but I did succeed in buying shoes and going grocery shopping and reading a new chapter of Maidens of the Fall. I also worked on the project that was due Friday, and made some progress despite with Sage’s help.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.1-3: Picks up right where the first season left off, with Jinshi and mushrooms and murders and conspiracies. Also the great literacy project.

Read (novel): Snake-Eater (T Kingfisher): It is very Kingfisher, despite being about roadrunners. Also about the desert and awesome old ladies and getting away from shitty men. There are some scary bits, but it’s not actually horror, I would say.

Read (graphic novel): Leap (Simina Popescu): Roommates at dance school in (not very queer-friendly) Bucharest try to deal with gay romance and unwise gay crushes and burnout and familial expectations and being 16 and everything. They do not end up dating, they do end up being great friends.

Written (game design):

One of the arguments for ranks is that it makes adjustment powers
easier, but they aren’t that common. Maybe they would be if they were
easier in play, though. Also, the problem of adjusting a power that has
multiple dimensions is still there with active points. If I spent 12
points making my Barrier wide and 19 points making it tall and 9 points
giving it more Def, what happens when someone Drains 13 active points
from it? 6E just says to apply the increase or decrease as
proportionally and reasonably as possible, which seems like a lot of
work to do in the middle of a combat round.

I’ve been picking on Barrier, which has five different aspects you have
to spend points on (length, height, thickness, Def, Body) in addition to
possible adders. Even if we collapse the three dimensions into a single
size rating, and Def and Body into a single toughness rating, it’s still
two dimensions that have no particular reason to be correlated. Change
Environment is just as bad, with size and strength of effect, without
even getting into the possibility of multiple effects. Does the number
of ranks give the area, and the cost per rank the power? Or vice versa?
How does that square with area being an advantage on most powers? 6E has
some powers where you buy size directly and some where it’s an
advantage, but should it? Or should we throw out advantages and make
them ranks, so your 12-rank power has 8 ranks of effect and 4 ranks of
area?

That sounds more promising than doing advantages as cost per rank, at
least in general, but it’s not very adjustable. It would be back to
removing ranks proportionally and reasonably, but that’s easier with 12
ranks than 67.5 active points. Although limitations were more of a
problem than advantages, and this doesn’t help that at all.

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.

No idea what that might be. Maybe aliens will bring it to us when they invade.

Went to the office, ate vat sausage and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, did some work.

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.7-8: Season finale! Clever plans were executed, we got revelations about some characters, the day was saved, there are still plot threads unresolved, and of course a cliffhanger to keep the fandom buzzing until next season drops. Charlie shaped up a little, but still not great.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 21 (Kore Yamazaki): “Hey, Chise, can you help us investigate the mysterious dragon that appeared a couple volumes ago? You know about dragons, right?” And that’s how Chise became Red Dragon Queen of Wales.

Read (TTRPG supplement): SLIME beta (Mikey Hamm): Beta version of a Slugblaster supplement. Includes signature “devices” that are actually alien biology (including Monster Out, which reinforces my opinion that Slugblaster is the new TFOS), a few monsters, a few possible runs, and an all-purpose slime table.

Written (game design): 184:

We calculated that Def should cost 7 per point, but how about Res?
It’s like Def but only stops Body (which hasn’t been compressed)
so 1, but each point of Body is a bigger chunk of the whole, so
maybe it’s more like 2. (Should Def’s cost be changed? It’s based
on a ratio of 3.5 for Stun, which is roughly right, so it’s fine.)
That gives a brick who spends 60 points on defenses something like
7 Def (49 points)and 5 Res (10). A 12d6 attack can still do a little
lethal damage if it rolls up, which seems fine even if it wasn’t that
way in the old system.

Those costs are in old points, of course. If we make points bigger, then
it would be 3 for Def and 1 for Res. But I still don’t know if that’s
the right way to go. Which I guess means we should try it and see if we
run into problems later.

I still don’t know about ranks. It is an idea I really like, but
it makes converting some existing Hero powers hard. Maybe this is
a sign that those powers are poorly implemented? The ones that seem
like they would be most difficult to convert/need the most improvement
are Barrier, Change Environment, Clairsentience, Darkness, Enhanced
Senses, Entangle, Flash, Images, Invisibility, Shapeshift, Summoning,
Teleportation. That’s the ones that can be improved in multiple
ways independent ways, and the ones that deal with senses and sense
groups. (Senses and sense groups are another Hero thing that’s good
if you want to be micromanagey but not if you don’t.) I definitely want
to fiddle with Barrier to have better support for both forcewalls and
real objects, which may or may not require splitting it into two powers,
and as already mentioned, I want to make Change Environment more able to
change the environment, like making zero gravity regions. It may combine
with Darkness and/or Images, and we might also have to change how
environments are implemented outside of powers.

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.

 

Yet also Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

Not being imprisoned, I went grocery shopping. I didn’t even have an ankle monitor.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.22-24: Lakan is still not great, but now we have a version of the story where he’s not so bad, and he did pay for his screwup, although it didn’t fix much. End of season! Still no word on whether Maomao and Jinshi are ever going to kiss!

Read (manga): The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor vol 5 (Anko Yuzu, Sarasa Nagase, Mitsuya Fuji): Preincarnated MC is trying to keep her emperor from losing SAN due to isolation and becoming a monster, and maybe it’s working? Also they’re kind of cute, although not too romantic since she’s still in her 10-year-old body.

Writing (game design): 293:

Making the -2 penalty per action beyond the first the only limit doesn’t
work, because then even Jane Normal can do an unlimited number of things
that don’t require rolls. In a human-scale game, the GM can set reasonable
limits and everyone can agree on what a person can do in 6 seconds or
whatever, but what about superspeed? And we don’t even have just one
kind of superspeed; every speedster has their own special effect.

We could say things that “don’t require a roll” are actually 17- (18 is
always a failure), so trying to do two things makes them both 15- and if
you fail the first you also fail the second, but that’s still pretty
likely to succeed. We could increase the penalty to -4 so it’s 13- even
for things that don’t normally require a roll, which is still fairly
good odds but more of a risk. Also it would make multiattacks much less
viable out of the box.

Alternately, we could make a new Superspeed power, or Speed
characteristic, that’s how much non-attack stuff you can do in a phase.
Or rather, how many steps more on the time chart a phase counts for, for
purposes of doing noncombat stuff/making skill rolls that take time.
It’s still going to be a GM call in a lot of cases where you’re limited
by equipment (keyboard only accepts so many WPM) or whatever, but it’s
reasonably quantitative without having the kind of number that suggests
you should be getting 4 or 32 or 250 attacks in a phase.