Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Like takeout boxes full of brains!

Went to the office, tried to eat a braised pork bowl but it was too fatty, did some work.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 4 (Syu Yasaka): Despite each still not realizing the other is gay, they spend Christmas and New Year’s and into the school ski trip getting closer and closer to either making out or dying of heart attacks.

Written (game design): 338:

We’re not making a time-travel game (I hope), so the present of whatever
our vague setting is does depend on its past. What are our options for
the general trajectory?

Post-apocalyptic and ancient world were already mentioned. They are
similar in that most good (valuable or interesting) stuff comes from the
past, but the aesthetics are different: in one, everything is “normal”
just busted up (nuked, dehydrated, zombie-infested), while in the other
the beaches sparkle dazzlingly because they’re a billion years of wear
from structural diamond girders, the landscape is covered with huge
circular lakes from the Age of Relativistic Bombardment, that mountain
range is a buried arcology, etc. Post-apoc is usually SF because the
previous world is supposed to be relatable, meaning usually our world,
but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. A sufficiently
well-understood fictional setting (generic D&D) would probably work just
as well, and a novel setting that’s fallen apart is just part of the
current setting, which people are fine with being novel. Probably.

Ancient world/deep time settings tend more to be science-fantasy,
with the fantasy usually being psionics and other dubious
science/technology with Clarke’s Law (Numenera), but sometimes real
magic (Ultraviolet Grasslands). The science part is almost always there,
because pure fantasy deep time can be anything, and isn’t more engaging
that pure fantasy that was poofed into existence. Black powder masers
notwithstanding, I don’t think I want to go the science-fantasy route,
but maybe that’s wrong of me. Apparently it’s how D&D started.

If it’s post-apocalyptic but the good stuff is new, and the old bad
stuff has been rejected, I think that’s solarpunk. I feel like that
needs more a link to our world than regular post-apoc, so that we
understand how bad it was. We can tay the ancients’ magic was innately
cursed and that’s why they fell, but do the players care? I guess maybe
if there’s a point in the campaign where they discover what’s in the
basement of the ruins of *m*l*s.

Even though I’m an extremely basic sucker for the OSR Aesthetic, not all
settings have to have apocalypses. That doesn’t mean peace; I’m thinking
of like early China where it was a heap of little kingdoms constantly
conquering each other. It wasn’t much fun for people in the way, but not
everything everywhere was destroyed all at once, so civilization as a
whole carried on. Lower-intensity would be Celts/Sartarites and constant
cattle-raiding skirmishes. Or, everything could be a peaceful utopia,
which is why PCs have to go Anywhere Else. (But that may lead to
colonialism.)

The world could even be improving (see Frieren, where they actually
develop new spells), which again just means less atrocity, not none,
although the improved state does have to be enough better for the
players to appreciate it. Also, if things are already getting better,
what do PCs do? Obviously they help improve things, but this implies
(does not require?) them to be more a part of society than murderhobos
usually are. That might not be a bad thing, but it’s probably more
limiting than D&D.

And of course, on the other side, maybe there’s not an apocalypse yet, but
everything is deteriorating. Probably not what people want to play in
this year 2025, but on the other hand, if the PCs play their cards
right, they could be the apocalypse! Requires a height to fall from,
probably.

Going up one level and then going to the other side, what if something
good happened (euapocalypse? I think that means something different, and
has calamitous koalas)? That can be just as disruptive and exciting as
an apocalypse, although not always as murdery. The biggest one would of
course be the creation of people, by the gods or space bats or whatever.
Maybe the world was created at the same time, or maybe it existed
earlier and didn’t matter because no one was around to see it. This
lends itself to an exploration campaign, which could be light or dark
depending on what they find out there in the world or what people at
home do with it.

Less drastic, but still a pretty big deal would be a sketchy titan
offering mortals a light around the back of the temple, the goddess
Etain bringing the secrets of writing, the wheel, and the double-blind
experiment, or the Okay Sage discovering Zero so you don’t have to herd
pigs any more. People having existed before this and probably gotten used
to how things were, there seems likely to be some social strife, even if
it’s good overall. Also exploration-oriented, but maybe more
competitive, and again, dependent on what possibilities in the world
have opened up.

Speaking of opening up, maybe the new thing is a region or world to
explore. If it’s not inhabited, though, it might not be very
interesting, and if it is, that can lead to colonialism. Maybe that’s
interesting to navigate?

A popular arguably-good change is magic appearing or returning.
That’s almost always in a modern or future setting, but what if a
psuedo-historic setting suddenly becomes a fantasy setting? Nobody
knows what kinds of magic there are, or what the limits could be. I
think this would need a stronger magic system than a settign that had
always had magic, even if only the GM knows it to begin with. Either
that, or some meta-system for discovering the magic system in play, like
the emergent mystery systems from Brindlewood, Ex Tenebris, etc. This
wouldn’t be a general fantasy-adventure system, but it could be
interesting.

A twist on that would be, surprise, there’s gods now! Could be very
similar, could be more social upheaval depending on what people think of
these gods and whether they had preconceptions.

In case you need to intimidate Monty Python, I guess.

Still on vacation today. It’s like a mix of Saturday (shopping), Sunday (impending work), Monday (laundry), and the Tuesday the calendar claims.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. More time is spent at King Mark’s court, but not much more is learned. Hopefully everyone now has a good impression of Theophania and crew, though. Since Jack of All Asses has already butted in, Lily takes Everett and his friends to a good diner to meet her boyfriend. Apparently she has a type because her boyfriend is (big reveal music) Everett’s fetch. Bogglement ensues. Both of them are Everett, though, so they sit down and calmly discuss having a shared legal identity and how taxes will work and when they diverged. In the meantime, Thessaly, who was interested in Lily and then wanted to set her up with Everett and she’s dating Everett’s FETCH, and Siddy, whose fetch is known to be out there living her life with her family, flee outside for some therapeutic wailing and gnashing of teeth. Eventually, Theophania calms them down enough to go back inside and eat fries and fume while watching to make sure Everett and other Everett don’t explode like matter and antimatter. When Everett-2 has to go back to work, the real Everett goes off to have feelings on his own, and the rest head back to the warehouse to have their own feelings.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 8 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Everybody already knew who was gay, but there’s a lot more coming out in this volume!

Read (novel): The Demon’s Due (Deborah Wilde): 5th and final book, MC and her boy get together, the world is almost destroyed but then saved, etc. HEA!

Written (game design): 306.

Slept in a lot, eventually managed to go to the protest. Hardly anyone was there compared to previous events, probably because of the heat. It was only 91, but there wasn’t much shade on the big open concrete white-people courtyard.

Read (manga): Girls’ Last Tour vol 1 (Tsukumizu): Reread before sending to the used bookstore, since I found the rest of the series that I hadn’t read before. Two girls and a halftrack motorcycle trundle through an abandoned multi-tier industrial wasteland.

Written (game design): 420.

I did that! Fortunately it was not windy, because I hate wind way more than extremes of temperature when eating outside.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: The grand finale! Reshelving Squad Upsilon’s allegedly brilliant plan to lure Walter to a special performance of The Troll Experience where everyone who’s anyone in Waterdeep is there works great, since it’s now actually Walter’s certifiably brilliant plan. All the audience is holding up glyphs, heroes are popping out from under the rings, Martin is chanting the spell that Renwick, 60′-tall gods are tangoing across the battlefield, no one has ever seen anything like it! Unfortunately, Walter (in Hotep-Sally’s body, of course) has retrieved the Bob the shoggoth-book that wandered off with Lilli and is happily using the dark spells within to summon foot-long earwigs inside Grumman’s armor and Flint’s ear. The Squad’s mightiest spells do nothing against Walter, though, as he deflects them onto his hapless bullywug minions, and the metaphysical mason jar Martin is trying to capture him is no better. Things are going pretty badly for the good guys when Bob repudiates her heel turn and knocks Walter into the jar! The world is saved! Promotions all around! Grumman’s mind is even retrieved from the giant earwig and put back in his body!

By next session, Teo will be in the UK getting prepped for an Education, so now we have to have a new campaign. Jeremy says he has an idea, so we’ll probably end up going with that unless he repents.

Read (manga): Yakuza Reincarnation vol 12 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Fight against a horrifying demon, severe long-term soul damage, slightly more information on reincarnators, IMPENDING DOOM.

Read (comic): Banna: Sky Walkers (Beserat Debebe, Shiferaw Yinessu): A short African fantasy piece. About a boy, but I guess that’s okay.

Written (nothing): FAIL. My brain is completely empty. RIP whatever streak I had (only a couple of months since I went out of town at the beginning of July).

They aren’t real whales, but they are real sharks!

It’s Saturday, but I don’t have work for ages, so I didn’t do any weekly shopping. I did get a sandwich from the very crowded deli; it was pretty good. I did not accomplish anything today

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.9-10: Yosano’s backstory, and a lot more doom that we know was conjured out of nothing.

Read (graphic novel): Doughnuts and Doom (Balazs Lorinczi): A witch who’s bad at magic and a hopeful rock star get off to a rocky start over cursed doughnuts, but band together (SWIDT) to defeat bureaucrats and obscurity and lack of smooches.

Written (game design): 155:

(Every time I see a module that says “easily compatible with OSR
systems”, I wish I could come up with a system I liked that used those
same numbers but in a different way. This certainly isn’t it, though (AC
-> Readiness? Meh, and OSR is all about the stats anyway). Maybe
someday, but probably not.)

Every time I see a game with a post-apocalyptic/ancient world fantasy
(Worlds Without Number, Godbound, Numenera, Ex Tenebris, so many) I
think “I want to do that” but it’s just because I like the aesthetic,
not because I have anything particularly brilliant to do with it,
certainly not compared to those games. On the other hand, apparently
there’s a reasonable demand… On yet another hand, it does have
potential problems with the setting making sense, but that’s nothing new
for fantasy. Argh! I have no idea where to go from here.

There’s one that takes some explaining to the youth!

I took today off to go to Roseville but then that fell through, so now I’m just useless all day.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.7-8: The one with the privacy-destroyer and the one with The Mastermind.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 532:

Other ways to have magic that people know but don’t understand are a
dying earth setting (arguably a subset of post-apocalyptic), which I
like generally but am not leaning toward in this case, and magic being
just plain beyond human comprehension: if you exactly follow the instructions
laid down by the Great Seer in antiquity, you get the miracle, and if
you change them at all, you get somewhere between nothing and disaster.
Incomprehensible magic is arguably what D&D has, since “work with the GM
to make something new that you hope isn’t broken” isn’t a rule. There’s
no question that unalterable menu magic has its advantages, but
admitting that’s how it works in-character is meh for worldbuilding.
(Merely pretending it’s not, as D&D kinda does, is meh in general.) If I
were smart, I would be able to make up multiple magic paradigms and how
each one explains the other, and then everybody could feel not only like
they understood magic but that they were smarter than those other guys.
In the real world, however…

I never explained how people turn into monsters or how monster powers
work, because I have no idea. so at least I’m not as explainy as I could
be?

Leaving this to ferment for a while, back to Actions. I realized that
although I was thinking of the thirteen moves (Act Undetected, Analyze
Something Complex, Befriend Someone, Build, Repair, or Sabotage
Something, Influence Someone, Mingle with the Crowd, Patch Someone Up,
Read Someone or a Situation, Scour a Place for Information, Scramble
Around, Spout Lore, Travel to a Different Place, Work Magic) as
analogous to Dungeon World basic moves, but they don’t have to be.
There’s always Act Under Pressure (maybe needs a better name?) for when
somebody doesn’t have a specific Action. But having the specific Action is
better (in ways to be determined, besides probably getting a higher
rating).

Is this our equivalent to classes? Just like you pick a couple of Traits
based on your ancestry, you pick a couple of Specialized Actions, away
you go with your niche protected? Seems like it could work. Actually,
there might even be Specialized Actions from ancestry, although most of
the ones I can think of are just narrative positioning (if you don’t
have a small body, you don’t have the werewithal to wiggle through the
tight opening, have some +D.)

There could of course be even more specialized Actions with the
regular SAs and appropriate backgrounds as prerequisites, for more
esoteric magical or psychic or martial arts or detective or whatever
abilities. These would include some narrative permission to do the
thing, so characters of vastly different specialties might not even be
able to roll Act Under Pressure for them.

Do we need to split Act Under Pressure into a couple of still very
general Actions? Do The Thing and Find the Clue? But the GM should just
give out the clues, right? Maybe Spout Lore? But I’m not sure Remember
Pertinent Facts Under Pressure needs to be broken out. Maybe Think Under
Pressure in general? How often would that come up? I have no idea!

I wish I remembered my dreams better, some of them are pretty good.

Went to the office, ate some veggies and meat and rice and veggies, had too much meeting and didn’t like it, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.6: The one with the Martin Shkreli stand-in and Breanna’s speech about fandom. (Did she come out as queer there, or just allyship?)

Read (manga): Spy x Family vol 14 (Tatsuya Endo): Ski cabin mystery! Then Anya’s first school dance, and a lot of backstory on secondary characters and the horrible war.

Read (novel): Demon in Disguise (Deborah Wilde): Main character has come out to just about everybody she knows, is at least tentatively back together with her ex, time for everything to go bad and end on a cliffhanger.

Written (game design): 328:

So you have the fancy temple wizards, who draw circles to establish
holy domains and write the true names of gods around them and recite
genealogies back to Creation or cite the exact section, paragraph,
and clause of the Celestial Ordinances that applies, etc, etc. They can
make something happen right away, or bless your weapons, or whatever.
Wizards who aren’t so fancy take longer to make spells, but then they
can stash them in their rings or toads or whatever for later use. Some
don’t bother with storing spells and evoke spirits to follow them around
and do stuff for them. Alchemists don’t cast spells at all, they refine
philosopher’s phosphorus or whatever by actually refining it. Mystics
and martial artists also don’t cast spells, but gain special powers over
body and mind by rigorous training and self-discipline. (This is
completely different than the way people get special powers when they
turn into monsters, how dare you.)

Is this too explainy and mechanical? I don’t want to be as completely
vibes-based as some story games (cough DW Wizard’s primary move cough),
because players need to be able to plan in at least a slightly crunchy
way, but it is magic and shouldn’t be boring like D&D. Do I need to go
full post-apocalyptic “we can turn it on and replace the batteries if we
find new ones but no idea how to repair it”?

(D&D is advertised as medieval, but it’s really a combination of
Renaissance (cities, inns, cash economy) plus post-apocalyptic (perilous
ruins, incomprehensible artifacts) plus Wild West (murder-hobos, clear
the subhuman savages to expand civilization). Various editions have
emphasized different aspects: 1e was relatively heavier on the Wild West
since it was supposed to transition into domain play but the
colonialism aspect has faded over time; 4e was more post-apocalyptic
with the “scattered points of light”, etc. I’m also leaning toward the
post-apoc genre, since ancient magic going haywire is a great excuse for
monsters and other problems.)

What do you mean, “why”?

Went to the office, ate a pad thai, did some work.Train was late on the way back, probably because someone was an idiot on the tracks, but not so late that I couldn’t feed the cats on time.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 14 (Yukinobu Tatsu): More huge fight against aliens, some plotlines even got resolved. I’m sure there will be new ones any minute, though, since there’s not danger of running out of weirdos

Written (game design): 256:

Since we’re repudiating any distinction between arcane and divine magic,
drawing circles and burning incense and chanting is obviously prayer
stuff, invoking greater powers to do the thing. What the greater powers
think of this or how they implement it is obviously ineffable. Are these
the same entities from the higher realms that can appear as monsters? I
don’t think so, those are from the cosmic horror side. What humans pray
to are embedded in the same flow of the universe that Harmony harmonizes
with, ex-humans providing an interface that isn’t people any more, but
similar enough to translate between religious ceremony and fundamental
forces of the universe.

(The higher realms aren’t places, they’re states of being in a completely
different way. In theory you could translate someone from the world to
be something in the higher realms, but it wouldn’t be the same person,
probably not even a person at all. Why does it work the other way? You’d
understand after the translation process.)

When I say the gods or ancestors or saints or whatever aren’t people, I
mean you can’t have a conversation with them and get them to just answer
questions or give you that little bit more power for your really good
cause. You do the thing, the flow of the universe is altered (lose
Harmony) in accordance with the opaque rules. In a lot of cases the
thing may be saying what you want to have happen, but you can’t just say
whatever and hope to get anything.

What the fuck, humans? How do you still need this? Just repurpose all the men as reactor shielding, already.

No gaming, Ken has to parent.

Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 13 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Having escaped that side quest, Frieren resumes her main quest of heading northward and finding obscure spells and meeting people who knew Himmel. Also, ninjas!

Written (game design): 420:

More horrible things a monster can do to PCs:
– engulf them
– be immune to certain attacks
– generate strong magnetic fields
– cause a ruckus that attracts other monsters
– make their equipment decay
– turn into a cloud of vapor
– covered in spikes
– electrically charged
– perpetually on fire
– everything’s on fire
– conjure minions
– forcefields
– aura of unnatural fear
– paralyze them

There is so much here, trying to consolidate it would be basically
reinventing Hero System. Which doesn’t have separate rules for every
single forced-movement effect, so could be worse. But also, a lot of
these don’t seem like a wizard could steal them. A vampire’s hypnotic
gaze? Sure. Porcupine quills? That would be weird. Dragon breath? In
between, depending on how exactly dragons get that fire to breathe.
Also, we still don’t want to be saying that some things are natural and
some are magic, because “magic” is natural.

(I think this may tie into the OSR thing of “player skill vs character
powers” because “player skill” tends to mean real-world logic, with
limited specific exceptions unambiguously defined in real-world terms, game
mechanics, or both, so they can be logicked. Not sure where I’m going
with this, since the game world has to be at least somewhat consistent
or players can’t make choices.)

Maybe instead of stealing powers, wizards copy them. Breathing fire
isn’t a magic power dragons have from an astral mechanism, but a clever
wizard can watch the dragon breath fire and figure out how to conjure
something similar. That’s a lot more sensible, but also a lot less
interesting.

Maybe the whole idea of stealing powers from monsters is a non-starter.
It was never going to be the only way to get spells, since not all
wizards are adventuring weirdos. If nothing else, they have to have
something to start out with (unless it’s like clerics in the old days,
where you couldn’t cast spells until level 2).

I guess monsters are in some sense never “natural” since they’re
entities from the higher realms, or humans that have changed, or the
result of one of those two doing something unnatural, so we’re back to
wizards having been altered by the gods to give them powers. Although I
also want ritual magic because glowing circles and ancient languages are
cool. We’re back around to one or more of the previous times where I
couldn’t figure out how magic should be.

Sadly it was last week that our Changeling characters went thrifting. But close!

Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 12 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Due to the unusual situation she was placed in at the end of the last volume Frieren has to fight more demons and also hide her full power for reasons that aren’t that common in D&D-fantasy. At least she has friends with her, because that’s what the manga is actually about, not demon-fighting.

Read (novel): Better The Demon You Know (Deborah Wilde): The romance plotline is proceeding, the demonic conspiracy plotline is proceeding, the coming-out plotline is proceeding, everything is doomed.

Written (game design): 439:

I guess rejecting the standard forms of monsters doesn’t mean we can’t
mine them for ideas of what monsters in general might do. If I were a GM
making a monster to bedevil my PCs, what abilities might I give it?
– big sharp claws and teeth
– breathe/spit/secrete/inject napalm, acid, poison, etc
– turn invisible
– mind control
– create illusionary realms
– appear human
– flight, swimming, climbing, etc
– burrowing
– desolid
– ooze through tiny crevices
– implant larvae
– curse them to turn into monsters
– raise the dead
– impenetrable chitin
– lasers
– track them anywhere
– change shape
– teleportation?

Actually, maybe teleportation shouldn’t be a thing. Ditto things like
plane shift. Sure, everybody likes poofing out of trouble, but
nobody likes it when the enemy poofs away, so it’s a fair trade. That
doesn’t mean there’s no magic travel, just not poof-you’re-gone. Fast
travel on ley lines? Sure. Gates linking distant locations? Absolutely,
but now those locations are linked, and not just people you like can go back
and forth. The phase spider can crawl into hyperspace along its
eight-dimensional web, but the web has to be there, and you could crawl
after it if you weren’t wrapped up and had no sense of
self-preservation. Flash step (speedster teleport) is fine, as is
dissolving into a huge swarm of flies and recondensing somewhere else in
the swarm.

More monster abilities:
– cocoon them in eight-dimensional webs
– turn into a living shadow
– cloak the area in darknes
– strike them blind
– turn them into salt
– curse them with bad luck
– taunt them into a blind rage
– spy on them through the eyes of crows
– poison them with hallucinogens
– infect them with plague

I feel like I must be missing huge spaces of doom, but it’s too late to
think of them now.

A girl needs a knife!

I ran four whole errands this afternoon. Surely no one has ever been as busy and sweaty as I!

Read (manga): Rainbows After Storms vol 5 (Luka Kobachi): Oh no, now the other one’s past is returning, but in a longer-term way that could lead to actual conflict!

Read (novel): Demon on Deck (Deborah Wilde): Further adventures of the Jewish half-demon magic cop and magic crimes and her super-vampire ex who has some kind of master plan he’s not telling her about. The more she learns, the more likely it seems that her mom, head of Vancouver magic police, is going to be the master villain.

Read (short): “My Evil Mother” (Margaret Atwood): The tribulations of a woman raised by a witch(?) in the 1950s. Is it magical realism? Is it suburban fantasy? It’s a mystery! Or not.

Written (game design): 489:

More things PCs might do in combat:
– make an opening for a ally to exploit
– charge!
– break the environment
– reshape the battlefield
– disarm them
– throw sand in their eyes
– make a fighting retreat
– push them off a cliff
– turn undead
– kiss them
– swipe something from them
– attack without regard for your own safety
– forgo attacking for better defense
– drive them back
– wrassle
– throw them
– fling them away
– too cute to kill
– take a prisoner
– get an ally back in the fight

I’m assuming any attack magic will be treated similarly to shooting
guns/bows and throwing bombs, although I still don’t know whether we
even want direct attack magic. Nothing says “fantasy adventure” like a
bolt of lightning to the face, but can we do better? Maybe we can’t,
because D&D has taken over the entire genre, but what about magic that
only transforms things, or only enchants items, or only summons
spirits? This is one of the major places where we can establish setting,
so of course I must die of indecision rather than doing anything useful.

Actually, what I should do is decide what unnatural things monsters can
do. Magic PCs have access to doesn’t have to be the same, but should be
in the same genre. We already established people can turn into monsters,
or be turned into monsters, and perhaps becoming able to spend Harmony
is just the first step on that path. That’s probably not the only source
of monsters, though. There should definitely be entities from the higher
realms, animated things (corpses, plants, golems), interdimensional
incursions, ghosts, what else? But we reject the D&D mindset of
pigeonholing everything, which throws us back onto vibes. Which is fine,
actually. We just need to establish the vibes. And maybe some kind of
cosmology? Are there gods? Is that just a mortal attempt to put a face
on impersonal workings of the universe? Is there an afterlife? If so, it
definitely shouldn’t be Heaven and Hell. In fact, if there even is a
difference between “angels” and “demons”, it shouldn’t be perceptible to
mortals.

If we keep my earlier idea of spells as astral implements, which you can
get from monsters and other mages (one way or another) then PC magic is
even more strongly tied to monster powers, although it doesn’t have to
be absolute. Some powers are too large or strange to be stolen and used.

Based on how I come up with lists of actions, possibly I should run down
the list of generic monsters (dragon, werewolf, vampire, manticore,
etc), but I want to avoid the standard movie monsters. There may be
things that sometimes look like humans and sometimes like wolves, but we
don’t need the rest of the Hollywood baggage. But that leaves things
still wide open.

Happy happy Ken-day!

I did some regular shopping, but then we went out for an early dinner at a restaurant Ken likes, saw the rare and elusive Non-beast, went back to their place so Marith and Dave and I could watch some anime while digesting, then had cake and very bad singing and very good friendship.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.7-8: Oh, right, they’re being framed and hunted, but all of it may be the result of reality manipulating artifacts. Not that that helps.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 243:

I consolidated most of the actions mentioned earlier into:
– Act Undetected
– Analyze Something Complex
– Befriend Someone
– Build, Repair, or Sabotage Something
– Influence Someone
– Mingle with the Crowd
– Patch Someone Up
– Read Someone or a Situation
– Scour a Place for Information
– Scramble Around
– Spout Lore
– Travel to a Different Place
– Work Magic

Analyze and Read could be consolidated, but technical vs social may
be a distinction worth preserving, so we’ll leave them separate for
now. Scour is also in that space but again, distinct enough we’ll keep
it for now. “Go shopping” doesn’t need to be an Action; looking for stuff
is Scour, haggling is Influence or Befriend, buying things from the
standard equipment list at the listed price is whatever. So that’s
thirteen Actions, plus Act Under Pressure.

“Spot trouble before it strikes” isn’t an Action because it’s reactive,
based on Readiness. “Make a daring escape” is mostly a combat Action, so
maybe it’s time to think about those.

– make a daring escape
– strike at a weak spot
– stand in defense of someone
– block passage
– stop someone in their tracks
– recover and reorient
– push through an obstruction
– strike from ambush
– snipe from a distance
– blaze away
– team up on someone
– terrorize someone into flight or surrender
– stop the fight to parley
– take cover
– duel someone one-on-one
– form a shield wall
– push someone around
– use the environment as a weapon
– take out a bunch of mooks at once
– blow up an area
– curse an enemy
– bless an ally
– move around while avoiding attack

I’m sure there are more I’ll think of later.

I really should do that soon, once I figure out how to decide which vet to go to.

Spent all day being sleepy, but did a little bit of work anyway. Will I manage to avoid staying up too late tonight? Magic 8-Ball is skeptical.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.4-5: This time Amazon tried to throw us into S3, but we were wise to its trickery. Back in the days when Breanna and Harry were still trying to fit into the team, bringing justice to a crooked real estate developer and also haunting the crap out of some guys. Who needs boys, anyway?

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 4 (Mai Naoi): Hey, look, an example of a functional relationship that’s not a traditional Japanese upper-class marriage! But they have a huge house and everything! Will our poor MC get the hint? Probably it will take more life experience, but she’s moving in the right direction.

Read (novel): Hemlock & Silver (T Kingfisher): Not as horrifying as A Sorceress Comes to Call, but far from horror-free. A scholar who specializes in poison antidotes is drafted by the king to investigate why the young princess is ailing after her mother and baby sister were murdered, because royalty always have to suspect poison, but no, it’s all so much worse than that, and only the main character’s T-Kingfisheresque practicality saves the day.

Written (game design): 251:

Another way of doing resisted rolls for social skills would be to let
people have levels of resistance to various kinds of influence, which each
add +1D (the materials the person doing the influencing has to work with
are not as suitable). This would be extra complexity because we still
want the general opposed-Actions mechanic for general opposed Actions,
but it would let us get rid of Actions that only exist to oppose others.
That is probably a win, since adding Difficulty isn’t complicated.

Speaking of Difficulty, I should make explicit that lacking any of the
(ever-increasing) requirements, background, tools, materials, time, work
environment, physical and mental faculties, etc, etc, can give you +2D
or more if you’re very far from what you need, like trying to do an
hours-long task in moments.

They Frolic.

Went to the office, ate mild masamun meatball curry, did a work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.1: Amazon, what are you doing?! But that explains why some time seemed to have passed. The one with the dictator and his debutante daughter.

Read (novel): Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe (CB Lee): Interdimensional meet-cute, followed by more cuteness but also impending doom which ties into one girl’s family backstory and there are feelings and conspiracies but overall it’s really pretty cozy.

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 3 (Mai Naoi): Yuri-fantasizing girl continues to be extremely traumatized by the existence of this man-thing she has to marry, although other people seem to be able to deal with him just fine and he’s drawn with a face when she’s not there an everything. Also, scenes from the very gay lives of the women she sketches. Best Friend is kind of sus, but I think we saw that before.

Written (game design): 221:

We can definitely come up with lists of potential consequences for
the specific Actions, since they’re more constrained than “Act Under
Pressure”. Another possibility is allowing partial success: “They’re
your friend now, but only as long as you keep the presents coming,”
or whatever. “Act Under Pressure” is by definition for things that
aren’t as interesting to play out in detail, so it can be pass/fail.

Now we’re back to having to construct the list of Actions, because the
one before wasn’t good enough. And we haven’t even gotten into actions
for fighting a guy.

Oh, another possibility for the results of Actions is that you could
give the GM some kind of metacurrency, which they can then spend to give
you a failure later, or some stroke of horrible luck. GM metacurrency is
tricky, since it has to be distinct from what the GM can do normally
according to the rules of the game, but on the other hand, how great is
it to have a stack of Quantifiable Doom to taunt the players with?

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.