Author: Trip the Space Parasite

I think that’s one of those jobs that seems way more exciting on the screen than in real life. (Like most jobs.)

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate some jerk pork, did some work, nicked some extra jerk pork to eat for dinner.

Read (manga): There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 7 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Rena and Ajisai finish their runaway episode with Mai’s “help”, Ajisai admits that she loves Rena (to herself, readers already knew), nobody is actually murdered by their family.

Written (game design): 278:

One of the problems with stealing PbtA moves is that they’re completely
player-facing, so we finally have to decide on how to resist social
skills, which may be the impetus need to make a rule for opposed
actions.

The quality of your action, which may only matter for opposed actions,
is the lowest value on any of your successful dice. If you didn’t roll
because you were at Difficulty 0, your quality is the same as your skill
rating. If you rolled and have no successful dice, your quality is 0.
Higher, or highest, quality wins.

Actual harm still goes through Readiness to get to your tender flesh or
soul, but mere blandishments can be resisted with an opposed roll using
“Be a Stubborn Ass” against whatever the other person is using. This is
like a save, but subtly different for reasons to be explained later.

Another question is, why would players choose these more specific
Actions that have to have their own ratings instead of always Acting
Under Pressure and spending all their XP on improving that one rating?
Of course the rule is that if there’s a specific move for what you’re
doing, you have to use it, but never underestimate a player’s
willingness to argue that they’re doing something slightly different and
therefore that rule doesn’t apply. We can make Act Under Pressure more
expensive to buy up, although probably not as expensive as everything
else put together. (But maybe.)

Using the carrot instead of the stick, we can make the outcomes for
using a specific move better (for the player) or more concrete (for the
GM). Or we could if we had any ideas how to do that.

Or maybe it’s pictures by orangutans.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Lily agrees to introduce Everett and his friends at court tomorrow, and also dances with him, or at least they’re both in the mosh pit which is close enough for squeeing purposes. Everybody meets Little Mike and Red and Red’s conspiracy theories (which Theophania is happy to argue with her about). The next morning, the group and Thessaly’s hangover accompany Lily to the Albany Bulb where the king has his castle partly in the mundane world and partly in the hedge. King Mark himself is old and obviously unwell, but has Jack the Despicable to advise him, and a court of a few other changelings. The king sits in a chair at the foot of the throne, which has been rendered non-ergonomic by a huge bowie knife stuck into the back, which is obviously important but nobody is talking about it. Introductions are made, the benefits of the kingdom are talked up, Jack is wormy of tongue, Siddy makes friends with Big Mike the sasquatch(?), Theophania charms everyone with prettiness, no fealty is sworn (although Lily talks like the group is part of the kingdom). Jack, being a little shit, asks Lily if she’s introduced Everett to her boyfriend yet, but this does not break whatever it is between them, so hah.

Read (manga): Rainbows After Storms vol 4 (Luka Kobachi): The beach episode, where one of the main couple gets to show off by being curvy and the other gets to show off by being dashing! Also, return of the senpai who broke one of their hearts last year.

Written (game design): 149:

More things PCs often do:
– carouse and possibly wake up somewhere
– repair or sabotage a machine
– figure out what’s ailing someone
– heal someone up
– follow tracks
– befriend an animal, spirit, or other creature
– vibe check
– make friends

None of these are as great as “Seize or Hold by Force”, which is
probably a skills issue on my part. It’s hard to get too high-level with
fighting or direct conflict and still play it rounds, though, and we’re
not going full story-game. Yet. Probably.

Anyway, once we consolidate these, each one would have its own rating,
and there would be another rating for Act Under Pressure for everything
else. As previously established, not having an appropriate background,
time, tools, environment, etc, will increase the difficulty, so a high
rating on its own is not enough to let you do everything.

Helium, the non-renewable resource no one thinks of!

Ugh, work ends even later than before on Mondays and Tuesdays until the end of the month. That will make Tuesday night gaming a little annoying.

Speaking of gaming, it looks like the 31st is the only remaining weekend that we can play Librarians Errant, so no Labor Day expedition to Roseville for me and Dave (who were probably the only ones who might go anyway). Thanksgiving for sure!

Read (manga): Rainbows After Storms vol 2-3 (Luka Kobachi): The two girls who are secretly dating continue to live their blush-filled lives, manage to go on a real date, and have a sleepover with the entire friend group, who apparently remain completely unaware.

Written (game design): 375:

The Actions are much like Blades in the Dark, but looking at Dungeon
World moves made me think of higher-level actions, and that reminded
me of Apocalypse World, which has moves like Seize or Hold By Force,
Go Aggro, Eye on the Door, and the all-purpose move for a PC’s life,
Act Under Fire. Instead of trying to cover the entire adventuring
experience evenly with 12 actions, would it be more useful to pick out a
few specific things and then have a generic move to cover everything
else? It does lack the crunchy thing where every character has a
slightly different chance of accomplishing each task, but if the ones
that are singled out are the important ones, then no one should miss it.

(This does raise the question of why we aren’t just playing any of
the fantasy variations of AW, to which I reply, shut up.)

So what do adventurers do that deserves special attention from the
players and GM? This is slightly different than when we asked what
is everything that adventurers do, and hopefully has a different
answer. Probably different than the answer for Dungeon World, which at
least tries to be a serious and slightly grim old-school game focused on
dungeons. (Not that I’ve ever managed to run a serious game in my life,
and barely played in any, but we can guess what the designers wanted.)

Leaving combat aside for the moment, PCs often want to:
– sneak past guards
– climb over things
– interrogate prisoners
– craft items, magic or otherwise
– cast magic spells or rituals
– identify magic spells or items
– win a dance-off or rap battle
– library research
– persuade people to help out
– spot trouble before it strikes
– search the scene of the crime
– pick locks
– disarm traps
– travel without getting lost
– get the word on the street
– intimidate people into not fighting them
– know about things
– go shopping
– make a daring escape
– steal anything not nailed down
– seduce all the things

I’m sure I’m missing plenty that other tables love and my tables ignore,
but so far it’s not that different from the list before, which I guess
is not surprising. Bah.

Hurray Nightvale!

No gaming, Jeremy has family stuff. I thought about going shopping today, but didn’t. I sat on the floor with the cats for a while and got chewed on by Sage, though.

Read (manga): A Sinner of the Deep Sea vol 3 (Akihito Tomi): This is a very heroic volume, with lots of sneaking around in disguise and eavesdropping on evil plans for world domination and last-minute rescues. Also, always a good idea to free the thing that looks like a little girl chained to the dungeon wall with enough iron to hold a whale. But, the day is saved! The End!

Read (novel): Starstrike (Yoon Ha Lee): Sequel to Moonstorm. Our heroine is back in her culture of original, with her original mom and her stolen mecha team, and yet everything is still extremely terrible and getting worse in a vortex of manipulation, betrayal, murder, and abandonment. Also, cryptobotany is the key.

Read (short): “With Only a Razor Between” (Martin Cahill): Secondary-world, but could have been set in 3 Musketeers France if they had conquered other European nations. Straight razors, customer service, the art of conversation, and standing up to colonizers.

Written (game design): 291:

Okay, to heck with that, back to the game we’re actually working
on. Or maybe not entirely to heck, because there are worse ideas
than using personality traits. I’m not sure every PC action has a
corresponding personality trait, though, or maybe most of them are
Focus and the rest are Aggression (just like in Hero most skills
are Dex and most of the rest are Int). Those are definitely stats,
though, and even if they’re psychological rather than biological, they
can lend themselves to racism (orcs are aggressive, dwarves are determined,
etc). But, free-form ancestries means no racial stereotyping modifiers,
so that’s every player’s own lookout.

No, I still like Actions better. They might need to be consolidated
though, so there aren’t so many. Dungeon world has eight basic Basic
Moves, which seems like a reasonable number. (Also 13 auxiliary basic
moves, which happen during downtime or in specific situations, not all
the time.) They condense most social interactions
(except carousing and recruiting followers)
into a single Parley move, though, which I’m not sure we want to do. I’m
not sure we don’t, though, since the difference between Sway Hearts and
Minds and Issue Commands can be enforced by which one you have a
background for. Same for Craft vs Tinker, and Creep vs Mingle.

I’m still waffling over whether there should be Actions with ratings
for the combat maneuvers, or whether they just work. This ties in
to how opposed rolls work, I guess. Which depends on whether we
want the dice to be completely player-facing. Maybe this is the
point like in Sudoku where I just have to pick one of the possibilities
and work through it until I find where it doesn’t work.

Loving homes for all rescue animals!

Did the usual lazing-in and shopping and reading Katalepsis and watching anime at Dave’s place.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.5-6: Rampo wraps up the mysterious murder of the murder mystery, and gets a clue for the next plot against the Armed Detective Agency, which turns out to not help very much against them being completely framed.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 128:

Oh, right, Last Breath. That definitely establishes something about the
setting, but I’m not sure it’s inconsistent with everything else we
want, so we can leave it for now.

The other basic moves are arguably the core of Dungeon World, and I
already ripped them off. The whole melee fighting/running to block
somebody/shooting somebody that I spent so much anguish on come directly
from Hack and Slash, Stand in Defense, Volley. We kind of reject Discern
Realities in favor of the GM just telling the players stuff. Not sure
about Spout Lore; maybe it should be automatic like Discern Realities,
but in accordance with “draw maps, leave blanks” maybe it’s fine as is?

None of this feels like it’s getting anywhere with XZQJY. Bah.

Not sure what that’s about, but it sounds spooky!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.3: The one where they ruin the casino emperor’s plans. We’ve had the lawyer guy for three episodes and the new hacker for two, and they both seem good. It’s probably even good from a story standpoint to get Hardison off-screen, since he’s just too powerful. Also, we’re not even pretending Parker was ever neurotypical now, which is an admirable facing of reality.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 3 (Syu Yasaka): I thought for sure I had read vol 2, but I cannot find anywhere I wrote it down, or find the actual book on my shelves. Anyway, there’s a romantic rival, but she cannot stand up to the pure love between our main characters, and also we get to see what the other MC is thinking, which is not really any different than one would expect from the genre. Can they somehow work it out?

Written (game design): 299:

Meh, no need to get into the weeds of specific classes at this point.
What are the components of a DW character in general? Name, Look, Armor,
Hit Points, Damage, Alignment, Abilities, Bonds, Race, Starting Moves,
Coin, Gear/Inventory, Advanced Moves, Advanced Advanced Moves, XP. Also
Basic Moves and Special Basic Moves.

Name and Look being small picklists is sort of like the thing I
mentioned earlier about having some pregens so people can grab a cool
character and get stuck in, which is great, but I have already spent too
much time talking about it. Bonds and Alignment get you XP, also great.
A lot of DW descendants ditch Alignment in favor of Drive or some such,
which I like, because I don’t like Alignment. I don’t want to throw
shade on these important bits, but they’re not really what we’re looking
at now, since they’re already not D&D.

We already stole class-based damage dice for XZQJY and they aren’t D&D
anyway. Hit points have to go. In Apocalypse World, everyone can take an
equal amount of harm, which isn’t all that much (attacks do 1-4, maybe
5, and 4 harm is a fatal wound, IIRC). I’m good with everyone being able
to take the same amount of damage; clinging to life is a function of
heroism, not muscles. There’s a move for beating people up, so keeping
the damage die as actual damage is fine. Hit Protection that refreshes
after every fight, get wounded when you take damage past that, get taken
out if you’re double wounded or if you take X past your HP. Maybe a
basic move to keep going even when you’re technically dead?

Squamate! Squamate! OK!

Went to the office, attended an all-hands where none of the (minor and completely surmountable) problems could be construed as the fault of my team, ate a rice pork burger-shaped thing that made me vaguely queasy, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.2: Still chasing the opiate billionaire, Hardison has to bail to the other side of the world but look! there’s a new hacker that he vouches for. (We knew this was coming, the actor wasn’t able to commit to the whole season.) She has good ideas, though, and an appropriate regard for Parker.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 8 (Hiromu Arakawa): The complicated city-wide murdering scene is over, now all the characters are regrouping. So many characters, who are all these people? But many of them are entertaining people, so it’s okay.

Read (novel): Primer for the Apocalypse vol 1 (Braided Sky): Alien magic and the system will come to Earth, but right now a time mage from after the point has escaped back and is trying to rebuild her power so she can protect her family, without giving away that she will be able to time travel. Bog-standard litRPG.

Read (short): “Trap Line” (Timothy Zahn): An SF story in the old style: a human gets into trouble among the stars and has to figure out the problem and work with some aliens and against other aliens to save the day. In this case, the problem involves astral projection.

Written (game design): 465:

We could do Harmony-based magic like XZQJY. (When you spend a while
in meditation, roll with Mysticism. On a 10+ hold 5 Harmony; on a
7-9 hold 3; on a 6- hold 1 in addition to whatever the GM tells
you.) But we don’t actually have to, there are plenty of other options
for non-battery magic. Like, enchanted or cursed places/objects/monsters
have a Weirdness rating, and you can do any feat of magic (ie, cast any
spell) equal to or less than that Weirdness, but if you roll a 7-9 on
using magic, you can’t use that aura of strangeness against for a while,
and if you roll a 6-, it definitely gets to turn your spell back on you
or possess you or curse you. Or, the gods inscribe spells on the inside
of your skull, but when you roll 7-9 to cast one, it gives you a
concussion and on a 6- maybe you suffer serious brain damage. The
possibilities are endless!

Is it 10+/7-9/6- based on 2d6? It could be 0d6 to 4d6, keep the highest,
6/4-5/1-3, and that’s still officially PbtA. There’s a recent big FitD
fantasy release, Grimwild, though. Let’s stick with 2d6 for now and just
say you can’t roll at more than +/-4.

Back to classes. Cleric and Wizard are the only spellcasters. Druid is
all shapeshifting all the time, which doesn’t need to change. Bards can
spont a few magical effects, but I’m not sure we need bards at all. Any
spellcaster can have singing as their special effect, and any character
can try to seduce all the things.

Actually, can anybody seduce anything? “Hot” isn’t exactly a personality
trait, so there’s not an ability for it. We could make being good at the
D&D stats into moves you can take, though. Brute Force (move and break
things, maybe roll with Aggression), Striking Looks (seduce people,
maybe roll with Focus since paying attention to someone is allegedly
seductive), Educated (you know all about something, like the Bard’s
move), Unkillable, etc.

Back to classes. Do we want thieves? Anybody can sneak up on someone and
murder them without a roll if the fictional positioning is right, but
thieves can have specific moves for it, that’s fine in DW. Not sure
about paladins. Probably not barbarians, they seem OP and/or not really
suited for a party. Having been around since AD&D notwithstanding,
they’re kind of in a different genre.

I keep talking about wizards instead of The Wizard and such, which shows
a lack of commitment to PbtA, but I’m waffling over whether to have
classes like that, or classes at all. Pick one of the major beginning
moves (spellcasting, signature weapon, animal companion, etc), another
from the general pool, and away you go as some unique weirdo?

My own handwriting is terrible, but I admire calligraphy!

Betrayed by one bus, went to the office, ate a weirdly small burrito, did some weirdly small work, raised a concern to my interim manager, attended a training about new mandatory self-criticism reports.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 7 (Hiromu Arakawa): More reunions and murders and escapes and backstories. Basically every character is still more interesting than the MC, though.

Written (game design): 223:

Leaving that to ferment, earlier I mentioned taking D&D out of
Dungeon World, so let’s look at a different part of game space and see
if there’s anything to bring back.

D&D abilities still suck, but Dungeon World is not the kind of game that
should have a bunch of skills. Maybe replace the abilities with
personality traits, more like Apocalypse World? Aggression instead of
Strength (not my idea; Into the Odd, maybe?), Focus, Mysticism,
Jitters, Determination? Five is probably enough. Also there should be a
move to fall prey to the downside of each one, although that risks
creating a “roll minus” mechanic. Also no ability scores, just -1 to +3
like the Bakers intended.

Level is just the number of advances you’ve taken, we can swap one term
for the other without losing anything except a few characters. Check XP
on failure and when answering end-of-session questions, that’s all good.

PbtA games are big on playbooks, but allow pretty arbitrary
“multiclassing” for at least a few moves, so going classless wouldn’t be
impossible. Making new classes isn’t hard, though, so it might be better
to just have a whole bunch of classes, replacing the old ones that are
too D&Dish. Wizard and Cleric would go, since we no longer believe in
secular magic.

I mean, World Elephant Day and Truck Driver Day. My version is probably only in the Dreamlands.

There were a lot of customers today. Not sure why, but I could definitely have done without.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: Having decided that they really should go pay their respects to the local king, the changelings visit a thrift store, to get clothes that look respectable without looking nice enough to suggest they have anything worth annexing. While thrifting they run into Troll and his wolfish new friend, Jane. Did they see Jane hanging out with Jack of All Asses earlier? Or was that her sister? They can’t find out because she’s not very talkative. Surely it will be fine: any friend of Troll’s, etc. After some tailoring, they head to Gilman in search of Lily to get an introduction at court.

Read (novel): Big Demon Energy (Deborah Wilde):A secretly half-demon Jewish demon hunter gets stuck working with her horrible hot ex on a mission that will determine whether she gets her promotion from rank and file, but of course everything goes off the rails immediately, they get stuck together in danger, everyone’s secrets come out, globe-trotting serial killers, vampiretown, deep dark plots, magic that at least refers to Judaism although I don’t know whether it’s real Jewish stories.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 6 (Nujima): Interdimensional Sister is warming up  to the writer, but her brother is not doing well either emotionally or structurally. Does he actually like her?! Also, yukata of varying degrees of success because it’s the summer festival episode.

Written (game design): 235:

Before I got distracted by all this, I was trying to decide what to do
about attacks that aren’t fighting with somebody for a round. Many stabs
with a dagger and one swing with a greataxe can even out over a round,
but one shot with a pocket pistol and one explosion of a satchel charge
are less even. How do we account for that? (Do we?) And what if you do
the pirate thing of having a whole bandolier of guns to shoot off in one
round?

We could still have weapons have different dice, but like light
weapons are 3d4, medium 2d6, heavy 1d12. Or maybe 3d8/2d10/1d12 but
you only keep the highest die. There are approximately an infinite
number of ways to give somewhat different curves to many light
attacks vs few heavy attacks, and I’m not sure any of them are
versimilitudinous or interesting. Light attacks get a bonus Attack
die, heavy weapons get to multiply the overage if they do get through
Readiness?

I feel like this is coming back around to square one, which I originally
left for good reasons, but maybe nowhere is better? Nonsense, if we
couldn’t always do better, we’d still be playing Chainmail! We just have
to figure out what’s most better.

I haven’t been to a beach in ages.Or even a sandbox.

Work, why?

Read (short): “Apollo’s Six Arrows” (Catelyn Winona): Whatever they were before, they’re superheroes now.

Read (manga): Flying Witch vol 13 (Chihiro Ishizuka): Terrifying beach elementals, witch skullduggery, deer wrasslin’, magic apples.

Written (game design): 390:

Now that I think about the Wound/Effect die, it feels like we’ve come to
the part where we have to reconsider everything we’ve done. When I
started, even before I was posting any of this, it was “no to-hit roll,
only damage” and the Attack die was just a D&D damage die based on
weapon. That lasted about five seconds before I pulled in Dungeon World
and pictured Attack dice as including at least one die for skill and one
for weapon. At some point I realized that weapon damage for a round of
melee fighting could be considered to even out between fast, accurate,
light weapons and slow, heavy, hard-hitting weapons, and changed Attack
dice to be only skill, which made Readiness (HP then) more like DCV and
here we are. But now we’re back to a to-hit roll and a damage roll.
Sure, it’s not weapon-based, but in 0e, all weapons did 1d6, so that’s
not a cutting-edge innovation.

Rerolling Readiness every round makes it even more like DCV and less
like hit points, so maybe we shouldn’t do that. Roll at the beginning of
combat, and as you get beat up, you have less chance to plan your moves.
You can take a round to recover and survey the battlefield (reroll
Readiness) any time you don’t have something better to do. And maybe a
post-12 recovery I mean get back 1 point per Readiness die or something
at the end of the round, if that seems necessary.

The downside is that if you roll Readiness when you need it, you’re
always at full Readiness for the ambush or the trap or whatever, and
they’ll never succeed, which is why we had saves to begin with. Oh,
right, if you’re surprised you cut your Readiness in half, or
otherwise reduce it.

Does the Effect die also get discarded? We already have a variable in
how much the Attack die exceeds Readiness+Armor, maybe that’s all we
need. If it’s even, it’s a hit for narrative purposes; if there’s any
Attack left it’s a Wound/Effect; if there’s N or more left over, it’s a
double Wound/greater Effect.

Still need to balance Attack dice, Readiness Dice, and Armor ratings to
get the right range of outcomes in all situations, or at least some
situations.

Also, World Duran Duran Appreciation Day. Something for everyone!

I don’t know why, but Nightvale was super-affectionate today.Possibly it’s because he’s a great cat.

I did several shopping expeditions and returned with boons for all catkind. Also some stuff for me.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 3 (Tamifull): Oh, no, they found a new way to be insecure about sex! (Okay, not really that new, but full of baggage.) Relationships, how do they even?

Read (novel): Underland 2 (Maxime J Durand): Our well-meaning abomination learns more and more about how horrible his universe is, but continues to reject nihilism. Mostly he prevails through being a horrifying monster, but also some through not being a complete dick so he has allies. The End!

Written (game design): 414:

Possibly we need a different mechanic for ranged attacks. For melee, the
Attack die represents spending the round, or a chunk of it, fighting
with this guy, with whatever hacking, slashing, punching, stabbing,
tripping, shield-bashing, biting, eye-gouging, etc, etc, so summing it
up at the end of the round is reasonable. Shooting somebody, or having a
grenade blow up next to them, is a singular event that happens at a
specific point in the round. It’s not the worst thing to put the damage
off until the end of the round, since people don’t usually drop dead
immediately (sometimes not even when shot in the head), but if there’s
supposed to be some other effect, what do? I guess that’s not even
restricted to ranged attacks, since a melee attacker could do something
with other effects, like disarm their foe, erase the glyph on the
golem’s forehead, stake the vampire through the heart, or whatever.

I guess we need a new combat maneuver, Cunning Blow. It’s not
Decisive Blow, because it doesn’t do more damage to a normal
opponent; that’s still Attack + wound die – Armor. It’s for taking
advantage of a weakness, like “sword isn’t built-in” or “needs feet to
run”. Special effect happens immediately, Attack dice happen at the end
of the round as usual.

Does Cunning Blow always succeed? We generally lean in favor of things
succeeding (no to-hit rolls!) but it seems like Cunning Blow should be a
risk.

It may be time to revisit what Readiness is used for. When this
started, it was Hit Protection and all it did was keep you from
taking wounds. At some point it became more of an all-purpose
resource for dodging and avoiding trouble, and we got rid of saves.
This is where it made sense (…) to combine HP with initiative as
some kind of general battlefield awareness. But was that really
such a good idea?

Reliably putting off getting wounded until later in the fight lets
combat not be such a terrible idea, and that’s the kind of fantasy
we’re in. But, preventing non-wound effects even for the first part
of the fight makes it less interesting, and removes the incentive
to do anything except pound away.

The question of whether to make these effects (which need a name,
there’s more than debuffs except in video games everything’s a debuff)
automatic is still open, since it includes spells that I already said I
hate seeing fizzle. Not sure players would be good with enemy special
attacks always succeeding, though.

Alternatively, we could undelete saves, possibly in a simpler/more
Action-like way (Evade Your Doom, Withstand Your Doom, Refuse Your
Doom, Ward Against Your Doom?). This is easy to play, everyone knows
what you mean when you ask them to roll to avoid being spleefed or
whatever. It does add more things to keep track of on the character
sheet, and special attacks can still fizzle, which is not ideal.

(By that logic, we probably have too many Actions already and should
consolidate them, or at least group them for ease of finding. It’s not
like there’s not an ease-of-use justification for having a handful of
abilities.)

Earlier I mentioned sacrificing Readiness to counter Attack dice as
being voluntary, but that was just choice-positivity. If we do it on
purpose, though, then it’s the target’s choice whether to avoid getting
knocked down/possessed/turned into a frog, or save the Readiness against a
potentially lethal blow later in the round. An attack might still not
accomplish anything, but at least it’s using up resources the same as
any other attack. We’d use an Effect die (the generalization of the
Wound die), but the major difference would be the Readiness loss and any
effect would happen before the general resolution phase at the end of
the round.

Armor subtracts from the Effect die when it’s doing physical harm (a
Wound die), but all kinds of things could subtract from the Effect die
in the general case. This is where we put in Strength and Size (the Size
10 dragon laughs at your puny Strength 0 throwing knives trying to stop
it) but also we may kind of be bringing saves back in, in the form of
resistances to various mischiefs. The default is 0, though, which makes
things cleaner, and others will use Size or Strength which we already
established.

Humans, huh? Seem sus to me.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.2-4: End of the flashback, Rampo has triumphed and the detective agency can be formed. Back in the present day, Kunikida’s in jail because of the girl who exploded, and the enemy has a paranormal specifically tuned against Rampo. I suspect this will not avail them.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 2 (Tamifull): Well, they figured out having sex, but there are still a lot of people who may not be cool with lesbians, because Japan, and also there’s jealousy and a new friend with a loud voice and no filter whatsoever.

Written (game design): 390.

The best day of all!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.1: Nate’s dead, but they got a new white guy with connections, who seems okay, and a an alternate-timeline Sackler to ruin: so far, so good. Sophie and Eliot look about the same, Parker and Hardison are noticeably older. Parker is still the best.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 1 (Tamifull): Two college girls start dating and then have to work out all the problems of the relationship, like being stuck in the closet door, libido mismatch, being in the same band, past romantic trauma, boys who think they’re lovely, etc, etc. Also they have to go to classes and stuff, which really cuts into their having-feelings time.

Written (game design): 331:

(cont from yesterday)

The second scenario has fewer variations, but is (to me and my tiny
brain) more difficult to begin with: A is moving across the battlefield
to shank somebody, and C is stopping them by shooting them (or
throwing a grenade at them or casting a spell on them or whatever
method that doesn’t involve being physically there). Does this work
at all? I can think of three ways to do it: knocking A down/sending
them flying, forcing them to take cover, or wounding them so they
can’t keep running (including by killing them).

Door #2 is simple to apply: A makes a morale check (however that works).
It can even be added to the others, which opens up the possibility of
everybody who got wounded during a round making a morale check. That’s a
different ramble, though.

Earlier, we said getting knocked down wasn’t a big deal because a
round isn’t a second-by-second accounting of every motion. You get
knocked down, you get up again, you keep running if you still want
to. Maybe if you get knocked down enough it can take until next
round to get up and do anything. Now we need to quantify getting
knocked around and Strength and Size and everything, but honestly
we kind of needed to do that anyway, since fantasy is full of people
getting clobbered by ogre clubs and run over by wagons and crushed
beneath falling portcullises and what-not.

That leaves C wounding A enough to stop them, at least temporarily.
I’m good with taking a wound being enough to interrupt whatever you
were doing, but we don’t know whether A is actually wounded until
we apply all Attack dice at the end of the round. Even if we separate
out the dice from getting shot halfway through the turn (not
impossible, although it’s yet another thing to remember until the
resolution phase), do we then have to discard the others (and any
dice A might have attacked someone with at the end of their move)
and move A back to wherever C was able to shoot them? And how likely
do we want to make it for one attack to be enough to wound someone?
Will ranged attacks be OP then?

I mean, the orcas seem to be doing okay, but if they have buddies, that’s fine.

Did not go to the office. Went to the dentist instead to have my thin layer of new gum tissue certified (no actual certificate received). Put off making any kind of decision on bridge (ugh) vs partial denture (ugh) vs nothing (ugh).

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.15: Nate gets to be an unreliable narrator, but gets closure for his original motivation and exits Leverage in a much less self-destructive way than we expected, leaving our OT3 (as much as there could be an OT3 on TV in 2012) to start diverging the timeline. The End!

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 2 (Canno): Reread. Switches to following some other students with they various love geometries, but the pair from vol 1 are there in the background. They’re not as interesting as the original pair, but it sounds like the next volume will switch back to them.

Written (game design): 523:

There’s two scenarios I’m looking at for moving around in combat
and stopping other people from moving around, that the system needs
to support. (I think, or maybe this is something that would never
happen with real players, but it’s what I imagine.)

The first is the very basic round where Character A is running
across the battlefield to shank somebody, and Character B (with
higher Readiness) reacts by moving to stop them. How does this work?
Our rule of thumb is doing things should work unless there’s a good
reason, and the character with higher Readiness should probably be
in control of timing and engagement, so maybe blocking just works.
A is going to have to deal with B in some way (murder, intimidation
(morale check), whatever).

Does it matter whether A is running down a narrow passage/through a
doorway, or across a wide-open space with room to maneuver? For this
basic case, probably not. B’s in the way, A has to deal with that.

What if B had lower Readiness, but declared they’re going to stop
whatever A is trying to do because they hate that guy? Is that even a
valid declaration? Maybe it’s not; if B wanted to be able to react to
A, they should have rolled more Readiness. But what if B declares
they’re going to get in A’s face? Can A use their higher Readiness to
just run away? That doesn’t seem right: B had to decide first, but the
action is happening at roughly the same time. Opposed Get Over There
rolls, I guess?

What if A is coming out of a narrow tunnel into a wider place and
B is already out there? Or vice versa? In that case whoever has the
better Readiness gets to decide whether they meet in the tunnel or
the open space. (If movement wasn’t always 1 zone, we could have
arguments about how A only has to move 2 squares to get out of the
tunnel but B has to move 4 squares to get into the tunnel to block them
up; good on us for avoiding that nonsense.)

What if it’s all in a narrow tunnel, but A is a big strong human and B
is a weak little goblin? Does B get run over if they try to block? This
is where we need to figure out how Strength and Size work, although we
also have to allow for the possibility of B tripping A or anything else
cleverer than body-blocking.

Once the blocking is sorted, though, at the end of the round A and B can
use their melee attack dice on each other unless they avoided contact
completely.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in the world agreed this was not a celebration?

Went to the office, ate some samosas and chicken biriyani, did some work.

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 1 (Canno): Reread. The girl who is good at everything using raw stats x the girl who put time into developing skills and still comes in second at everything, grrr! With many interludes about other students at Yuri High.

Written (catgirl): 266.

A custom more honored in the breach, etc, etc.

No gaming, Kelsey both still has pneumonia and has too active of a social life to hang with the tappy box.

Read (short): “Delusion and Villainy” (Catelyn Winona): Literally crazy supervillains are the worst.

Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 6 (Tamamushi Oku): Newlywed lyfe and HEA!

Written (catgirl): 165.

Owls! I have heard of those! And their lopsided ears! And their ninja feathers!

Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 5 (Tamamushi Oku): She did recover her memories! And yes, she was just as much of a goof the first time she met and wooed her girlfriend. All other disaster lesbians can go home.

Read (short): “On the Beat” (tangentti): Fanfic for Sapphire and Steel. The course of time is what’s important, not the things living in it.

Read (short): “Something Borrowed, Something Red” (tangentti): Origfic. It was a bad idea to go to the wedding.

Read (short): “A kid, a Killer” (tangentti): Fanfic of “Sharp Undoing”. Things did not actually get better.

Read (short): “A Princess of Impeccable Design” (tangentti): Sleeping Bladerunner? Beautyrunner?

Read (short): “Yellow and the Perception of Reality” (Maureen McHugh): Psh, IRBs, who needs ’em. Any postdoc should be happy to take massive brain damage in the name of science and leave their sister trying to put them back together.

Read (short): “Scarlet and the Seeming of Spiders” (tangentti): Fanfic for “Yellow and the Perception of Reality”, using a fact I totally knew in an unexpected new way.

Read (novel): Underland (Maxime J Durand): The product of cult atrocities tries to save humanity from the underground dystopia they have been driven to by apprenticing to a literal Dark Lord. Everything he learns about the universe from his magical studies makes things worse, but he perseveres because humanity really needs saving and also he finally has friends.

Read (short): “The Job Interview Job” (copperbadge): Maybe having Eliot charm all those women with his handsome and highly recognizable face in the age of the Internet wasn’t actually a good idea, but it seems to have worked out okay.

Written (catgirl): 144.

Hi Marith!

Played (D&D5E): Librarians Errant.Renwick dashes off the new spell tome while his fleshy guests are wasting time in slumber, and sends them back to Waterdeep. As the squad traverses the 920 province of Dewey Decimal Country, they take a break in a mid-stacks coffeeshop, but although the rhino barista is chill, nothing in Bibliospace can ever be easy. An airship made of invisible forcefields full of black pudding and powered by fire elementals is a new one on them, though. Massive destruction,  elementals of caustic flame (hydrogen fluoride?), and crazed biographies ensue. In the middle of that, Grim reads an origami octopus summoning them to a tri-library conclave, so that’s where they slink off to before anyone can make them pay for the coffeeshop. Like all meetings of senior librarians, the conclave is a boozefest, but somehow the next morning everyone remembers that Walter is indeed a threat to knowledge itself and is agreed that the Reshelving Squad should do something about it. Back to Waterdeep for real, but this time, as they cross the savanna of literature, they are set upon by a dragon made of all the text from the Island of Evil Books, as well as the physical structure of the island itself! Things look bad for a bit, but Thaïs uses lightning magic to break the island free of the flying books that drag it through the sky, and without that crashing down on everyone, the squad can concentrate on the word dragon. Victory! And onward to Waterdeep, where they will make a plan to use the hundreds of glyphs produced by Martin to assault Walter from multiple dimensions!

Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 4 (Tamamushi Oku): Horny airhead with amnesia and her girlfriend with a more serious affect continue to try to be actual girlfriends and somehow manage to become wives. Wait, is the airhead getting her memories back? CLIFFHANGER!

Written (game design): 676:

I should probably stop putting off the details of combat as “/* dumb –
fix later */” and think about them.

Since actions and movement are declared in Readiness order but
resolved in a pile at the end, players potentially have to remember
what they were doing for the entire round. This includes the GM,
who may have many characters to manage. So, important rule: no
takebacks! If you declare your action and then the next person
starts declaring theirs, that’s what you’re doing. If what you
declared is somehow not legal (though hopefully the rules aren’t
so fiddly that misplays are common), lose half your Harmony (or half
your Readiness if you don’t have any) and assume you did something
unwise with magic.

Zones are like 10m across, maybe less in cramped caves (but more
in open spaces) and characters can only move a zone or two per
round, so there aren’t many zones on a battlefield (and we don’t
need a battlemat with squares or hexes). It might still be handy
to have tokens to move around because there are more moving pieces
at once than activate-one-unit-at-a-time games.

In addition to being in a zone, a character might be engaged in melee
with one or more other characters in that zone. They might also be at a
specific point in that zone, like blocking a doorway, or near another
character to guard them, or whatever; that can be handled narratively.

Doorways and such seem like obvious places to divide zones, but then
which zone is someone standing there in? Maybe both, since they can be
engaged from both sides, take damage from explosions on both sides, etc.
That seems fine, we’re not on the chessboard.

Technically, I guess someone with Readiness 10 should be able to watch
characters with Readiness 5 and 8 both make their declarations before
deciding which one to react to. It would be easier if reactions had to
be declared immediately, though, and we could move tokens at the time of
declaration (or not move them if the reaction successfully blocks them).

I’m not sure how to handle blocking other characters from moving. In a
narrow space, Strength and Size will factor into it, but in an open
space it’s opposed Get Over There rolls, which I also don’t know how to
handle. And what about blocking movement by shooting them, or casting
any number of different spells on them? I’m pretty sure blocking
movement happens in the declaration phase, while any damage happens at
the end of the round, but if you’re hitting somebody to block them, you
have to roll attack vs Readiness to find out if you succeed, which would
naturally reduce their Readiness right then. Is there a fake attack roll that
doesn’t reduce Readiness or cause wounds, but just determines blocking?
Now I remember why I didn’t solve this problem already.

When attacks are applied at the end of the round, it would be nice
to be able to ignore timing by rolling all the attack dice together,
but then what do we do with any special effects of weapons? And
then we wouldn’t be able to use attack rolls to determine success
of blocking and maybe other actions earlier in the round, unless
they’re fake rolls as mentioned.

Do we use the tokens to show everyone’s intended final position
assuming no blocking or forced movement, and resolve a successful
block by rolling during the end of round and pushing the final
position back as far as the blocker wants/is able at that point? We
might need double tokens to keep track of original position, but that’s
not hard. We then have to keep track of everything somewhere, though,
since we can have situations where A moves to block B on their way to
engage C but D moves to block A from blocking B by pushing them over a
cliff. Argh!

Happy happy Rachelday!!

Went to Rachel’s party, it was full of people I know to varying small degrees (or not at all) and also food. Told some people about my brilliant plan to combine hit points and initiative (although not the person I imagined explaining it to, because he would have mocked it), did not find any new gamers for after the Bertanis abandon us. Mostly talked to Dave.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 24: Dumplings! Also a plan for dealing with Falin’s problem, but it’s the end of the anime, so you’ll have to go to the manga to find out if it works!

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.1: Flashback to when the president and Rampo were starting the agency, with almost-monochrome art so you know it’s The Past.

Read (short): “Sharp Undoing” (Natasha King): What if headware, but with as much security as electronics have today?

Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 3 (Tamamushi Oku): Further life of the horny amnesiac airhead and her girlfriend who she doesn’t remember sleeping with but is overwhelmed by. Also incidental characters, who often try to help, but she is so beyond help.

Written (game design): 295:

The main mechanics at this time are:
DOING THE THING
– Difficulty starts at 0 if you have all of
– Appropriate background
– Proper tools and materials
– Ample time
– Trouble-free work environment
– Difficulty increases by 1 or more for each that you’re lacking
– If Difficulty is 4+, you can’t do the thing until you address some of
these problems
– Otherwise, roll d20s equal to Difficulty and compare to Action rating
– 1 die above Action rating: fail OR succeed with consequences
– 2 or more dice above Action rating: fail with consequences

TBD: opposed rolls

FIGHTING THE GUYS
– Start of round: everyone rolls Readiness dice (d8s)
– From lowest to highest roll (later reductions don’t matter):
– Declare action – attack that guy, defend this guy, steal the
maguffin, etc. Can move one zone to do it, or two zones if running
(halve Readiness)
– Anyone who hasn’t declared yet can declare to help or interfere
– Once everyone has declared, resolve it all
– Assign each of your attack dice to somebody you were engaged with this
turn and roll it
– If somebody attacks you, you can (and probably should) spend your
Readiness 1-for-1 to counter the attack
– If you counter it all, great!
– If there’s any attack left, roll the Wound die (d10). Add the remaining
attack, subtract your armor
– If 1+, take a wound
– If 11+ take 2 wounds
– Wounds go into your inventory, possibly displacing gear
– Every Wound is +1 Difficulty to all Actions
– At 2+ Wounds, spend Harmony every round to not pass out

TBD: ranged attacks, stopping someone with ranged attacks, pushing and
shoving, spells, area effect attacks, Wound die on non-animals, special
effects of weapons

I dunno, manne. Maybe instead of taking D&D out of D&D, I should have
taken D&D out of Dungeon World.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried it. Sounds good, though!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.14: The one with the toys for Christmas.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 2 (Wataru Mitogawa): More girls join the cast, if not Dorothy’s harem. More vampire mooks get murdered, more popes are shady AF. (Okay, really it’s the same number of popes.)

Read (novel): Bunny Girl Evolution vol 1 (Sir Bedivere the Mad): Isekai LitRPG, MC is incarnated as a cute bunny, violence and conspiracy and predation and evolution ensue. Meh.

Written (catgirl): 235.

I’m sure they mean musical instruments, but what if they don’t? Is Uncommon Instruments the title of my new YA fantasy trilogy?

Went to the dentist to have my tooth looked at because it seemed dodgy on x-ray, they said it would have to come out soon so I had them take it out right there. Now my mouth is weird.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.12-13: The one with the mindfuckery and the one with the winery.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 1 (Wataru Mitogawa): She’s a sadistic, horny monster-hunting nun. She’s a free-lance monster hunter looking for her missing sister. Together they play out dom/sub scenes kill vampires. I’d say it’s completely lacking in redeeming social value, but even though it’s secondary world, it makes the Catholic church look bad, so that’s something.

Written (catgirl): 155.

Also other things that are relevant is this dystopia, such as National Support Public Education Day, National Whistleblowers Appreciation Day, and World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. And, as a treat, National Cheesecake Day.

Went to the office, ate some falafal and dolmas and stuff, did a little work, almost fell asleep.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 12 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): The search for the missing person has reached a major plot twist! Also, a cult compound full of creepy interdimensional weirdness is definitely the ideal place for PCs to set up a secret base.

Written (catgirl): 236.

Fortunately, absolutely no one in the entire history of ever has cared what I found appealing, so we’ll concentrate on how this is also International Tiger Day.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: We didn’t have Kelsey or Vivian, so played the evening where Thessaly gets drunk lost  and has to be rescued by Lily, the knight of the evil(?) king who seems to know and like Everett even though he doesn’t remember her. Thessaly brings her back to Stately Sanrio Manor, some information is exchanged, and Thessaly and Theophania bully Everett into going on a date with Lily. Next session, picking out a date outfit for him.

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 4 (Yodokawa): Is it still a landlady/tenant relationship if they’re living and sleeping together? Also lots of drama with the landlady’s old idol group.

Written (game design): 224:

If we’re going to do that, we should do similar for spending MP instead
of rolling a die. Although we still roll random polyhedrals to find out
how much Readiness and MP you have, so we aren’t eliminating that
mechanic entirely. I don’t think we want to, because if you’re looking
for a numeric output, the Action/Difficulty mechanic only gives four
possibilities with uneven probabilities. So let’s keep attack dice and
rolled MP costs.

MP are now called Harmony.

Time to stop and check how complicated a character is. Do we need to
throw some stuff out?

A character has
– Ratings for a dozenish Actions (list still to be finalized)
– List of Backgrounds
– Readiness dice (current Readiness values to be tracked on a postit)
– Harmony dice (values on postit)
– Melee, ranged, and magic attack dice
– Armor and resistances
– Movement rate and modes (swimming, flight, etc)
– Strength
– Size
– Ancestry feats and other abilities
– Physical inventory slots and what’s in them
– Spiritual inventory slots and what’s in them
– XP, unspent and total

Ancestry feats and other abilies, and the things in inventory slots,
will have additional information about what they do, unlike Backgrounds
which are what they say on the tin, so that’s more complexity. Overall,
though, I think that’s not too bad? I’m sure I’ll remember more stuff
that goes on the list later, though.

Fertilize the wetlands with the bodies of the rich.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 3 (Chiyo): You’d think a little light murder among supernatural creatures would be no big, but no, this means war. (As much of a war as it can be when each side fields half a dozen combatants, anyway.) The war is resolved by heroic sacrifice, the end. It was kind of weird all the way through, but it didn’t really live up to the promise of the first volume.

Read (novel): The Library at Hellebore (Cassandra Khaw): You thought that other dark magic academia was dark? It doesn’t even begin to compare. Every student is capable of destroying most or all of the world, many of them would be perfectly happy to, they’re at Hellebore to be made useful, named characters are getting eaten alive by the second chapter and it’s only downhill from there. Do not read if you are at all squeamish!

Spent much of the evening reading OSR blogs, which makes me want to weird stuff that’s probably not actually functional with the gamers I have or useful for my game design, but sounds really cool.

Written (game design): 276:

If we roll HP every round, maybe we should roll MP every round too?
Roll the dice and that’s how much magic you can do this turn,
sustaining ongoing effects and casting immediate ones. “Magic harm”
including curses, overcasting, etc, knock off dice. Think of it as
clogging up the channel through which the energy of the universe
flows. Probably costs would be fixed rather than rolled; one only needs
so many dice in a turn.

No, probably not. If nothing else, it lends itself to confusion
with initiative/HP, which is bad. Unless we combine them, but that
way lies madness. Right? Right.

Maybe rolling MP every day, though? Or something like, MP dice are
all d6s, and every day the GM rolls a single d6 and everybody
multiplies it by the number of dice they have, so it’s universally
a good or bad day for magic.

Initiative/HP is called Readiness, I think.

Not sure what MP is called. As a white guy, I probably should not
look through Asian religious terms for something that means oneness
with the universe. We established there’s no distinction between
secular and divine magic, though, so something religious or
philosophical seems appropriate.

On a vaguely related note (if you scroll up far enough), instead of
having attack dice, we could have an action-like roll where you start
out doing full (fixed) attack and inflicting any special effect of your
weapon, with each bad die knocking off the special effect or half the
attack. This leaves the question of determining Difficulty open, but
maybe it’s cleaner than having a different mechanic for attacks?

I used to really like chicken strips, but I haven’t for a while now. Maybe I should try again.

Slept way in, went out in the sunlight to get Thai lunch, went out in the sunlight to get cat supplies, went out in the sunlight to get unnecessary supplies, sat in front of the fan and listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack again.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 5-6 (Nakatani Nio): A lot more about identity, but then at the end, back to love! I thought this was going to be the end when I started vol 6, but no. Looks like it goes up to vol 8.

Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 1 (NC Lux): Isekai litRPG, MC ends up as a succubus even though it’s not what she wanted, and the mind control powers and instincts to eat souls are also not what she wanted, even though or perhaps because they’re pretty effective. Also, fuck this whole situation, it’s all going down if she has anything to say about it. Probably could have been half the length, though.

Written (game design): 504:

Most or all of the starting abilities also need to be on the advancement
list. If wicked deeds or curses can turn a person into a monster, then
there’s no reason becoming a priestess of Bastet couldn’t get you lovely
whiskers for navigating in complete darkness, or mystic strength
training make you as big and strong as an ogre. (If you use
your strength to push people around, are you not just an ogre anyway?)

In D&D, numeric advancements like hit points and damage per round get
about an order of magnitude larger from 1st to 20th level (a little more
for hit points, a little less for damage, so fights take even longer).
We don’t have levels, so there’s not as definitive a limit to progress,
but that seems like a lot. Maybe 3-4x would be more reasonable? Maybe
I’m hypothesizing in advance of my playtesting and shouldn’t worry about
it? Maybe all players want their characters to transcend humanity and
ascend to the heavens, so every advancement should have a transcendence
value and when you get to 108, time for a new character.

But, maybe we don’t need or want that much in the way of advancement.

As previously discussed, D&D is all about the class powers that you get
when you level, because that keeps characters on the power curve instead
of letting them be all over the graph based on what treasure they got.
Many OSR games, though, keep the characters themselves on a more human
scale and make it more about the equipment. Instead of levelling up to
where you get the class ability of being able to hit incorporeal and
then fighting the ghost just like a goblin, do some research and find
the sword that was used to murder the ghost originally, or get some
shovels and dig open the roof of the tomb to let sunlight destroy the
ghost, or whatever. This is what they mean by “the answer is not on your
character sheet” I guess.

A lot of OSR games have wounds and levels of fatigue take up inventory
slots, which seems good. Some have spells take up slots (maybe as
spellbooks, maybe just conceptually), and a few even have skills and
bonds take up slots, which turns it into more a limited list of things
that can be important about your character. I don’t think that’s
actually bad, it keeps you from having to review a million options
before doing anything, but XZQJY isn’t that conceptual.

We do, however, have the idea of spells as astral tools, so maybe
there’s an astral inventory as well as a physical one? In the
physical inventory, larger and more powerful items take up more
slots, but in the astral inventory (does it need a better name?)
it might be more complex spells/powers, like a spell that can produce
an illusion of anything vs one that just produces a lightning bolt
in the direction you point. Curses and emotional trauma and magical
backlash would fill up slots in the same way as wounds and fatigue.

Maybe a wizard’s magic stick would be the equivalent of a sack: takes
one slot, but holds several slots’ worth that you can access by taking
extra time? That might be too literal.

Also World Tofu Day. I’m an uncle and have the consistency of tofu, so I guess that’s why it’s the same day.

I was too feeble to take books to the used bookstore today, but I did the other usual shopping. No anime because Dave is in Roseville.

Watched (animated movie): K-Pop Demon Hunters: Surprisingly awesome! Points off for heterosexuality, but the demon hunters are otherwise great and possibly neurodivergent. It looks like TWICE did at least some of the music, so it’s real K-Pop.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 4 (Nakatani Nio): A loves B, B loves C, nobody thinks their love can go anywhere but that doesn’t make all living in the same room at theater camp and bathing together any less nerve-wracking. Really the focus is on B’s idea of what kind of person she should be and literally nobody else agreeing.

Written (game design): 850:

Speaking of wandering monsters, it’s extremely hypocritical of me to put
in something that requires preparation, given how terrible I am at all
forms of prep and using prep, but the argument that letting the dice
determine events instead of the GM railroading (or quantum-ogring) them
leads to more versimilitude and fun seems valid to me. Also, obviously
I’m going for more randomness in general, since we spurn the notion of
carefully calibrated video-game encounters.

This applies to NPC behavior as well, in the form of reaction rolls and
morale checks. NPCs don’t have to always fight, and fight to the death,
to make sure PC resources get used up at the correct rate, so we can let
them be less predictable, or at least have a wider range of options.

The old-fashioned reaction roll on a scale from “BFFs” to “murder time”
is probably a bit simple. Ideally we’d want to know what they want, and
how far they’re willing to go to get it. Maybe something like Troika’s
Mien mechanic (6 options for what the monster is doing/interested
in/feeling, roll a d6) is little enough prep for the first? Of course a
prefab monster can have a prefab table, but we’re aiming for more
bespoke monsters, since they don’t have to be carefully weighed and
measured for encounter-building. For how far they’re willing to go to
get it, roll another d6. 1-3: they would trade a little bit for what
they want; 4-5: they’d trade a lot or take some risks; 6: it’s a matter of
life and death.

Morale can be a simple pass/fail, check when the first person gets taken
down and when half of them are down, or equivalent setbacks. This should
somehow be integrated with Difficulty of using social skills on them
(since they don’t get bribed with experience).

Is morale the same as HP/initiative? That would be convenient, but I
don’t think it is. NPCs have human weaknesses, including lack of
selfawareness, so combat ability and courage aren’t necessarily
correlated.

And, speaking of advancements, I was thinking about purely diegetic
improvement (if you want to learn a new martial arts technique, you have
to put in the work in-game to find a teacher and mark off the time to
learn it), but then I thought about bribing people with experience
points (pretty sure XP doesn’t mean “experience protection”; need to get
MP a better name so that’s not an issue). I also really like the Dungeon
World thing of getting XP for failing. “Experience is what you get when
you don’t get what you want” and all that. So, there are XP. Not sure if
you get some from every failed roll, or if it’s like the end-of-session
moves where you get XP if you had a significant failure, and more if you
had a major failure. If you completely failed the adventure, you get a
lot of XP, but also emotional wounds.

I was considering also awarding XP for proper behavior, like giving your
slain enemies proper burials, but that might lead to XP for being
heroic, which is wrong. It’s not a moral choice if you’re bribed into
it. XP for a type of action is okay, like Dungeon World’s end-of-session
questions about whether you’ve overcome a worthy foe, etc, but that
would require pinning down what the game should be about instead of
leaving it open, and I don’t know if that’s what I want. Or maybe a list
of possible goals, pick three for your campaign?

For now, I’m good with XP only resulting failure, either rolled or
chosen.

Once you get XP, you can spend it to buy new advancements that you
get in-game. You have to spend time learning them or have them
grafted onto your soul and take time to recover, or whatever: no
levelling up instantaneously in the middle of a battle WoW-style.
You may also need to pay for them in cash or favors.

There may be starting packages for classes, or “classes”, but after that
I think all advancements are available to all characters. If you’re a
spellcaster but want to buy up your melee attack die, go for it. We’re
not here to tell you what your character should be.

Like Hero System, advancements are simple and mechanical; if you want
something fancy, you need to assemble it yourself and provide the flavor
text. That said, we should have plenty of examples. Hopefully this will
not spiral out of control into a huge list of advantages and limitations
and power frameworks and modifiers and argh.

Are there even sysadmins any more? It’s all Site Ops or Dev Ops or whatever now, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely makes me feel old.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.10-11: The one with Sophie and the painting and Nate and Sterling while everyone else is in the previous episode, and the one with the big-box store and Elliott’s backstory.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 2-3 (Nakatani Nio): The one who’s in love is getting more in love, the one who thinks she’s aro (not in those terms) has various feelings, there’s kissing anyway, school life happens, there’s a tragic backstory, etc.

Read (novel): All Roads Lead to the Phoenix Princess: Rebirth as a Wind Cultivator (Erios909): Reincarnation cultivation isekai, in the world of a MMORPG but without any game mechanics. Our protagonist does a lot of murders (arguably justified), uses OP game knowledge, attracts the attention of powerful people due to her unusual nature, starts accumulating a harem despite not showing interest in anyone, levels up repeatedly, all the usual isekai protagonist  stuff. There are obviously intended to be many more books, since there’s five years to save the world from the disaster that sets up the game world, but it’s self-published on Kindle Unlimited, so knows?

Written (game design): 438:

Now that we’ve reduced saves down to a single Save (shades of Perils
& Princesses!), back to HP. Losing HP is some amorphous combination
of fatigue, luck running out, and minor injuries (or other effects)
that don’t add up to a wound. It recovers quickly compared to wounds,
but how quickly? After a good night’s sleep? After a lunch break? After
a few minutes of rest?

It may be ridiculous, but I like the idea of rolling HP each time. The
meanest way of doing that would be to roll when the fight (or whatever
excitement goes against HP, like a trap) starts, but that might be too
much. Maybe roll at a reduced die size if you haven’t had a full night’s
sleep or lunch break? If you roll really badly, you can always take
another rest and reroll. Either take the higher of the roll and current
HP, or keep rerolling until you get a higher number. The latter
encourages people to keep resting until they get a really good result,
but wandering monster rolls and resource limits would keep that in
check.

Rolling HP each round is awfully appealing, though. Obviously with
this option the dice would be smaller than with the result of one
roll having to last a whole combat. It would be another roll each round
along with initiative though, unless we combined them somehow. When
we’re going from low to high initiative, are we actually just going from
low to high HP, giving it an element of battlefield awareness? I like
that, let’s try that.

The range of dice for HP depends on the range of dice for attacks, which
I imagine as being d4 to d10 to start with, like Dungeon World.
Increasing the die size, and getting more dice so you can beat up more
people at once, would be power-ups or advancements or whatever we’re
calling them. Getting more dice of HP would also be an advancement; not
sure about increasing the size of them. Or maybe they don’t all have to
be the same size; if you have 3d6 and to buy a d10, sure, go for it.

I’m okay with armor being a penalty on (appropriate) wound dice, but
what about shields? Extra HP is obvious, but then you also get extra
initiative. Is that too weird? Probably. Maybe a shield is a fixed
amount and only rolled HP count as initiative. And need a new name.

But what are you going to tell me?

Went to the office, it was full of coworkers, ate some beef stroganoff which was far from healthy but which I haven’t had in years, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): Two high-school girls who thought they would never find but also never really miss love, one suddenly declares her love for the other, they are in the student council together. I only read two volumes of this back in the day, but have like four more, so I put it in the TBR before sending them to the used book store.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 2 (Chiyo): Pako is definitely a werewolf now, which poses all sorts of problems (some of which may have been made up), Amelie is incredibly pure and innocent for a decapitated vampire, little brothers are obnoxious, everything is a mess.

Written (game design): 291:

Not all saves happen as a result of attacks; some are from environmental
hazards. I think those are handled as hits with +0 on the wound die: no
HP, because you avoid the hit by not going into the dangerous
environment.

The other use of saves in (modern) D&D is to determine when an effect
ends, but that has to be part of the rules for poison/disease/curses,
which will be utterly brilliant as soon they get written.

Save vs Falling isn’t ignoring gravity, it’s holding onto something
(the cliff you were just pushed off, the train you’re riding on the
outside of, etc), which is almost like an action but too simple to be
worth having the full mechanics. Also it seems like it should be
affected by Strength and Size, which otherwise don’t affect d20 rolls.
Is it just a special case of Get Over There (which covers climbing)? It’s
probably not worth it’s own special mechanic, but it’s a reaction, not
an action.

Save vs Restraint is in the same boat. It could almost be an action of
its own, Wriggle Out, but it’s not really enough. Maybe it should be
part of Get Over There as well. I think that’s more justifiable than for
Save vs Falling, but that leaves Save vs Falling still orphaned.

I don’t know what to do with this, and I should. “I try to not die” is a
valid and even common adventurer action. Maybe it’s enough to have a
nonspecific save based on luck (which is not currently a mechanical
entity, so just a die roll)?

I haven’t had any today, but I hope to enjoy vanilla ice cream on many days this summer!

Went to the office, ate some tacos, did some work.

Read (novel): Firebreak (Craig Schaefer): Second volume of highly sus magic school in Schaefer’s multiseries universe, our heroic lesbians continue to be awesome but also have teenager problems to go with their magic problems. Very cliffhanger ending, since this is supposed to be I think five books.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 13 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Now we understand Vamola’s backstory, so it’s time for the heroes to rally!

Written (game design): 520:

Wait, how could I forget about the stochastic variant of door #3? Save
vs Ambush or lose half your HP! Or possibly lose all of them, or the
attacker gets the bonus attack dice. Anyway, this is pretty much exactly
why I thought of Save vs Ambush in the first place.

How do saves even? They’re for situations where the player might
avoid a bad outcome, so dice are appropriate, but it’s not really
an action. They feel like they should be d20 rolls, but are they
like actions? Is there a Difficulty? How would it be set? What does
a failed die do? For saves, failure and consequences are the same,
so that part of the action mechanic doesn’t really apply. Are saves
always D1, so they’re simple pass/fail? Or higher difficulty, to
allow for more granular outcomes like 1d6 attack or one round of
paralysis for each bad die?

How does this interact with HP? Earlier I had a bunch of saves
besides Ambush/Traps (Poison/Sickness, Curses, Possession/Compulsion,
Restraint, Falls, Influence), but where do the saves come in as opposed
to hits at 0 HP? I said earlier that I want to have effects actually
take effect, not fizzle, so a save up front isn’t right. Still thinking
about spell attacks going against MP, but for now let’s say every attack
goes through HP until it gets a hit.

Save vs Ambush or Trap isn’t about taking a hit (in D&D it would be the
Perception check against the hidden pressure plate or the ninja sneaking
up behind you) so it’s fine as-is. Save vs Influence is for resisting
social skills from NPCs, which probably don’t go against HP, so that’s
okay too. The rest I’m not sure about. Would it be nice to have
characters with varying levels of resistance to different kinds of
trouble? I think it would, but are save ratings the way to do it? Maybe they
instead have varying amounts of “armor” to subtract from the wound die
when they finally take a hit?

No, I’m wrong, a save isn’t the correct mechanic for resisting NPC
social skills. This isn’t a game where only the players roll, so the NPC
makes their action, and if they succeed, the PC target gets a bribe of
experience points to play along, which they can turn down if they really
want to. This also works for Possession/Compulsion, but because it’s
less of a choice for the character, they get some negative effect (maybe
just a wound) if they decline the experience points for playing along.

The other saves aren’t about things that affect character behavior
directly, so I don’t think the bribe mechanic fits. Modifying the wound
die is better for those.

Save vs Ambush is not like any of those, so it should be a different
mechanic, probably integrated with however we roll initiative.

(22/7 ≈ π)

No gaming, Ken is unavailable (work, I think), and Kelsey is still sick.

Read (manga): Ghost Talker’s Daydream vol 5-6 (Okuse Saki, Meguro Sankichi): I had not remembered that we don’t even get to the end of the plot by volume 6! Lots more ghosts and suicide and the MC wearing her clothes from one job at the other, which presumably means she’s going to cross the streams and dominate ghosts, but I’ll never know because volumes 7+ aren’t readily available translated in the US and I don’t care enough to really search.

Written (game design): 502:

From what I’ve read, in a real fight, people kind of die randomly.
Obviously you can tip the odds in your favor with all the things you’d
expect, but not as far as movies might lead you to believe. I don’t
think this thing we’re making wants to be the sort of grim where
everybody rolls a survival die at the start of the fight and anyone who
fails is guaranteed to get murdered before the end, but maybe if you’re
the sort of creature who has vital organs and blood that leaks out and
such, the wound die should be exploding (reroll and add on max value)?
Even that might be too grim, but if we’re going to say fighting is not
mandatory, should it be an actual bad idea?

(No idea what this should be called, but if we want it to stand out, the
name should begin with an X. Z, Q, and J aren’t quite as good, and Y
would only do in a pinch. All other letters are overused.)

Obviously a good way to reduce your risk of dying is to ambush the enemy
instead of fighting them toe-to-toe. How does that work in XZQJY (not
affiliated with xkcd)? Hit Protection is what you have to avoid getting
straight-up murdered, so I can see a few ways to modify it for ambushes.

  1. The modern D&D approach would be to not change anything: your HP work just as well against surprise attacks as any other attacks. This is because D&D hates tactics.
  2. At the opposite extreme, HP don’t protect against surprise attacks, or while you’re paralyzed etc. Anyone who attacks you when you’re defenseless gets to skip straight to rolling the wound die and adds their whole attack die to it. Lots of fun when the PCs get to do it, maybe not enough to offset the complaining when the monsters do it.
  3. Exactly in between, when you’re surprised, or get paralyzed or whatever, you lose half your HP. Carry on as usual from that point.
  4. An alternate implementation of the same idea would be that when you ambush somebody, or stab them while they’re blind, they get all their normal HP but you get some extra dice to add to your attack die. Doesn’t help as much against people with lots of HP, but doesn’t require division and is easier to adjust for complete surprise vs a moment of startlement, etc.

Door #4 seems the most promising, until I come up with an even more
ridiculous idea.