Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Also, if your punk dog has a mohawk, I bet they can make good money as emotional support for baby cheetahs.

Did not go to the office, did spend a bunch of time helping my colleagues with a customer who was on fire, did not learn any kubernetes.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The motley has 99 problems and vampires are definitely one, even though Thessaly bullied him into slinking off into the night this time. While asking around for advice on dealing with vampires, they stumble on Sir Hiss’s secret torture chamber(?) in the steam tunnels, which hopefully is not another of their problems but probably will be. Fortunately their vampire acquaintance with the changeling partner is up for killing lesser vampires who cause trouble in the wrong turf, Everett makes a deal with Troll for a silver knife, and Siddy carves some wooden stakes in between stress-cleaning. Will Theo have to sell her soul to the Sun to be able to contribute? Tune in next fortnight!

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 142.

I shall name her… Pointy-Bob! (Shrieks of anguish in the distance.)

Tried to go to the office, but failed due to being weak and feeble. Slept in a bit more then worked from home. Sage was extremely helpful.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.8: Yeah, fuck that guy anyway.  Anyway, end of Drum Island arc, but also end of the season. I hope it’s still doing well and Netflix doesn’t cancel it just to avoid paying the writers.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 180:

It’s also less dramatic and more hitpointy to have most conditions be
tiny so we’re back to whittling down the enemy. But now it’s harder to
keep track of, so that’s not a win. Fewer more significant conditions
is both more interesting and easier to play. You can have a defense
that burns away the incoming Entangle or whatever, but it has to be a
technique you paid for specially, or else you have to spend an action
or some other resource to try to do it as a maneuver.

Does the same go for emotional attacks? They’re kind of like physical
attacks but with different conditions and ways to get rid of the
conditions, but tend to affect decisions rather than combat stats,
so even a minor one can be interesting. There’s also the difference
that if you remind someone of her lost mother to make her distracted
but then punch her, the condition is likely to disappear, or change
to “must clobber this jerk who punched her at a time of great
emotional vulnerability”. Also you can’t just take the action “bring
up the villain’s long-lost mother”, you have to figure out how that
ties into their emotional weakness, which has to be written up some
useful way on their character sheet, just like yours.

Speaking of weaknesses, which we postulated as being necessary to get
around the issue of an attacking 12d6 powerset mostly not doing much
against a defending 12d6 powerset, how do those work? How do you find
them, what do you roll to exploit them, is having your weakness
discovered a condition? Technically it only helps the people who know
about it, but we can presume everyone blabs about everything all the
time.

Or is it a positive condition on the people who know about it,
granting them extra power instead of nerfing the person with the
weakness? For something like knowing where the weak spot in someone’s
defenses is, that seems wrong, even if it worked out the same
mechanically (which it probably wouldn’t, since attacks roll and
defenses are flat). There might be other advantages that should be on
the attacker’s side, though, plus of course any buff would be a
positive condition, with ways to apply and remove and effects while
active.

Positive conditions have the same concerns as adjustment powers in
Hero, namely that we don’t want one buffer to make everyone else
unstoppable, or want to make it mandatory to spend ages buffing
before a fight to be competitive. This isn’t a computer game or D&D
3e, or even Ars Magica. Probably you can only boost someone’s
effective powerset level up to the level of the powerset you’re using
to boost, or a minimum boost of +1d6 if your level is at least half
theirs. Or something along those lines.

Probably an Angry Birds tie-in.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some garlic noodles, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (graphic novel): Forgive-Me-Not (Mari Costa): The princess is abducted by a strange butch and told she’s a fae changeling, and things go downhill from there (but in a mostly adorable way, with only some stabbing).

Written (game design): 111.

No, not like that! Well, maybe a little like that. No beaver-shaming.

Went to the office, ate too much falafel hummus shawarma pita, didn’t do too much work.

Read (graphic novel): I Am Not Starfire (Mariko Tamaki, Yoshi Yoshitani): In fact she is Starfire’s round, gay, goth teenaged daughter, who is not dealing that well with having a famous mom who doesn’t entirely understand Earth culture. I’m not sure I really support the way the end went, but okay. At least there were girl-smooches.

Written (game design): 175.

….in SPACE!

Both Manager T and Most Senior Coworker L are out this week, leaving me as the most senior person on the team. I hope nobody is expecting me to pretend to be a manager.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 2 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): The excuse for the conflict was slightly better than aliens coming to Earth to steal our water, but not by much, alas. Humans are so precious about their homeworld.

Written (game design): 123:

If we wanted to keep that range of results meaningful, we could try to
do something like (for the example of blindness), say the effect is a
straight penalty to sight perception rolls, but normally you don’t
have to make perception rolls to do things involving sight, so there’s
still a quantitative cliff there. Or maybe it affects everything that
you use sight for as well, although then we need a rule for using
hearing instead or whatever, putting a floor on the effective penaltyI
from impaired sight. This is not in itself terrible, but how many
conditions are going to need special rules like this?

Really we just need to define absolutely everything in mechanical terms,
since in a simulationist game, the rules are the laws of physics for
the fictional game world. Surely this will be easier than letting the
table use their shared intuitive understanding of the world, or at
least lead to fewer arguments. Right?

I guess we’ll just give each condition a little chart of what each
point of effect gets you. Maybe just one option, maybe more than one
if there’s more than one axis (strength and duration, or whatever).
I’m imagining a set of dry-erase cards to hand out to players, which
is getting way ahead of everything.

Not all conditions should be scaled with points of effect left after
subtracting the target’s powerset, though, should they? Like Entangle;
if it always gets knocked down to just a point or two, it’s probably
not useful. But sometimes the defending powerset should be able to
resist. Is that a technique, Damage Shield or equivalent? What’s the
lesser maneuver equivalent? Does Entangle need the “can’t be tanked”
attack type? On the one hand we should be able to get this all from
the special effect, but on the other, it has to be mechanical and not
a GM hatpull.

Some kind of bringing things back from caves, anyway.

I wanted to sleep in forever again, but somehow I got up and went to do the shopping I failed to do yesterday, and took a shower before going over to Monkeycat Towers for Easter ham sandwiches and deviled eggs and company. Cat and Earl were there, and so was Marith even though she was dead from work. We ate and ate some more and searched for the lost art of conversation and I remembered that I should actually read the “Terra Ignota” books. It was nice.

Read (manga): Someone’s Girlfriend vol 1 (Nikumaru): She should probably dump her boyfriend before throwing herself at his best friend, no matter how horny she is? But then there wouldn’t be enough drama for a whole manga series. Also there’s another girl making another triangle between the two boys, but the two of them should probably run off together, leaving the boys to do whatever boy things in some lesser series.

Written (game design): 128.

Did nothing today because I was on call, but after waking up to take handover, I was able to go back to bed and be useless for much of the day while Nightvale trained his Weight of a Thousand Dead Suns napping technique.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 12-13: We did learn at least some who and why and when, but how was only hinted at. Still, that was a completely unexpected level of doom in the end.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): Everything broke on Y2k and also horrible mutant plagues started, now it’s generations later and the survivors are engaging in conspiracy and rebellion about the mysteries behind it. It has very impractical sci-fi aesthetics.

Written (game design): 162. Still haven’t managed to switch to another project.

I keep wanting to slide into a very abstract system, which on the one
hand is flexible for accomodating all the weird shit players come up
with, but on the other is less grounded. At the very least, we have to
have people establish the special effect ahead of time, and being able
to put everything into a bucket with specific mechanics (physical
object, break by doing Body), even a large bucket, would be better.

If I sucked even more than I actually do, I’d say we should use an LLM
to invent rules for a special effect when the player invents it, but
a) I don’t think that would actually work well, and b) ew no. Someone
else can explore this frontier of game design. (Or, given the pride with
which people put NOAI banners on their games, no one can explore it,
and that’s fine by me. Fuck LLMs and their capitalist wielders.)

Back to splitting up the removal condition, that doesn’t work since
how much Body you have to do is both what it takes and how long it
takes. Or maybe what it takes is more like how much Def? Having to
make a skill roll is similar to 1 Body 0 Def, unless it takes a
long time. (Should we have skill rolls generate effect against some
kind of defense, unifying them with attacks? Probably not.) So maybe
the two factors are how long it takes to wait the condition out
(possibly forever, although that would be kind of expensive), and
what it takes to clear it before then (possibly nothing except an
equally strong power, which would also be expensive).

Leaving this to stew for a while, earlier I was on my usual bullshit
of wanting experience to come from suffering, so maybe taking a
condition lets you mark XP? Or it’s a limitation you can apply to
your maneuver/technique to offset getting more or not getting less?
Should the GM be tracking XP for NPCs? It’s more work, but maybe adds
flavor.

If conditions still have levels, then maybe any condition at the top
level should give XP, but I’m not sure they do, just the points of
effect left over after the defense is subtracted from the roll.
Although not everything needs to be that granular, and sometimes
there’s not an obvious use for it that’s distinct from the removal
condition. Once you’re blind, you generally can’t get any blinder; at
most the blindness could last longer, or take more healing to remove.
At the lower end you could just have poor vision for a while, so
blindess isn’t entirely binary, but for playability I don’t think it
can have very many gradations.

So, mermaids in Pride shirts?

Today started off with an excellent technical discussion of a really complicated bug, but then was followed up by a customer actually encountering the bug. Computers, how do they even?

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.6-7: Oh, that’s who that silhouette in the original crew sketch was supposed to be. And his tragic backstory!

Read (anthology): SNAFU (ed Geoff Brown, Amanda J Spedding): Collection of military horror stories, of variable quality, length, interestingness, subgenre, etc. I liked the magical WWII one, but it had plot elements I am weak against.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 111. Ugh.

I really really hate to admit it, because I hate commuting, but I think I do get more work done at the office. I’m not sure this was the case in earlier years, but the second time it is not the same office, and I am not the same productivity unit.

Also did not get Marith a pizza.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.5: Finally they’re done with the assassins on Dinosaur Island, so surely everything will be fine now!

Read (game): Dank & Dark (Philip Reed, Lex Morgan): A complete (though very small) TTRPG published as a board book like little kids read. It’s a hack of Tunnel Goons, which was already quite minimal, so 24 pages with large type and illustrations still contain the whole system, several monsters, and three (small) dungeons. And, it’s okay if your players chew on it!

Written (game design): 122 on the old stupid thing.

What? No, I’m perfectly serious!

Still no office, but work anyway.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 14 (Shinichi Fukuda): Professional opportunities, because Cosplay Gal really did slay at Comiket in Doll Boy’s costume, and finally the two of them talk about the elephant that’s been in the room since about volume 3.

Written (game design): 243. Still haven’t managed to switch.

We’ll come back to these but now let’s think about the other column,
getting rid of conditions.

Countermeasures:
– basic medical care (stitches, meds)
– advanced medical care (specific antivenin, surgery, regen therapy)
– wait it out (usually combined with another way of clearing it quickly)
– remove something
– break something or lift something heavy
– move away from it
– take a moment to refocus or reorient
– use similar power to what inflicted it (mental power vs mind control, etc)
– repair or replace a piece of equipment
– retrieve a lost item
– non-powered rigamarole (exorcism from an ordained priest, etc)

Again, a lot of these are pretty similar, like advanced medical care
and exorcism that both need specialized equipment and expertise not
available on the battlefield. Removing something is like breaking
something, you just have to overcome only 0 Body to do it. Etc. Maybe
it’s enough to have how long it takes to do it, and what it takes to
do it (conflated with how much Body it takes to break or whatever),
and let the details for the two depend on special effect.

Also Farmworker’s Day, because apparently fuck Cesar Chavez.

No office this week since I’m doing handover.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 13 (Shinichi Fukuda): And Cosplay Gal absolutely slays at Comiket, but Doll Boy seems to be having some kind of feeling about it.

Read (novel): Butterfly Effects (Seanan McGuire): Back to the telepathic wasp-girl adopted member of the family, and her (and everyone’s) mysterious ancestral background in other dimensions. Lots of trauma and mind control and other heartwarming family stories.

Written (game design): 120.

Or maybe Write With Your Laundry Day.

Did some work, watched some other people do work, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 12 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is still thinking about romance, but Tailor Boy is completely occupied with his art.

Read (novel): Wolf Worm (T Kingfisher):  I was expecting something along the lines of the Sworn Soldier books, but no, this was way more horrific and gross and I understand why people ask what the hell is wrong with the author on a regular basis.

Read (short): Cutting Corners (Yoon Ha Lee): I feel like Asimov did the using-cheap-humans-instead-of-expensive-computers thing first, although of course he was probably sexually harassing some poor woman while writing it.

Written (game design): 135. I feel like I need to switch projects, but then I’d just be useless in a different direction.

Only available at certain addresses, of course.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. The fight that was starting as the credits rolled last time is just as horrible as expected. Bug goo everywhere, and not in the good way. Mal gets knocked out and misses the climactic bug-clobbering finale, but doesn’t die or anything. Teleportation is really handy, though. She needs to figure out more of her Labyrinth affinity.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 12: Season finale! We finally get an explanation for the penal heroes and mindless rampaging guy. Also, apparently not all penal heroes were railroaded by a corrupt court system, some are legitimately fucked up.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 12: Season finale! Several of the cute girls are saved, but the evil plot is by no means thwarted. Flum is going to need some more cursed gear.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 13: The end! Orphan Girl is moving ahead with her life, which is really all that one could expect from this series.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 7 (Kaoru Mori): Wait, where did 5 and 6 go? I thought I had them, but then I realized this volume was 7 so the gnomes must have eaten them. I’ll have to make them come back by ordering new copies. Anyway, this is the first volume I haven’t read before. It’s more of Smith’s journey, although it’s mostly about the lady of the house where he’s staying, and her loneliness and the local custom of married women forming special friendships and the manga-ka getting to draw many scenes at the women’s bath.

Written (anything): FAIL. How does thinking even work?

Also Respect Your Cat’s Drug Stash Day, but that’s every day, right?

Ended up going to a small local rally on a street corner instead of the big one downtown because the timing was better for going shopping. It was somewhere in the couple of hundred to few hundred range, we waved signs and people honked, I scritched a nice dog. Most of the people there were my age or older, with only a few parents and kids, so I’m surprised it wasn’t more bloodthirsty.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 10-11: Now we know who, and can speculate on why, but how is still up in the air, as are certain aspects of when. Is this really going to all get wrapped up in one more episode?

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 4 (Kaoru Mori): Further stories about the people Smith meets in passing on his way to Ankara. This time the marriage-crazed girls aren’t trying to marry him, though. They have their own lives to mess up.

Written (game design): Finally updated my character sheet for Kaiju Academy, which either counts as writing or doesn’t.

Named after the quirkily-titled country song, “Drinkin’ Whiskey at Theatres All Over the Damn World”.

Did some work, learned some kubernetes, got sat on by some cats.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.4: You know it’s an adventure when they get to Dinosaur Island! Which naturally has its own plots going on.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 3 (Kaoru Mori): The random English guy sets out to observe somewhere else and meets a girl. Everything goes terribly, but there are lots of landscapes.

Written (game design): 273:

Is any of this getting us anywhere? Not until we have an actual system
for generating levels and strengths of conditions based on dice in attacking
and defending powersets, and a list of possible conditions and ways to
clear them. And that’s only the start.

Conditions:
– wounded
– dead
– knocked out
– stunned
– immobilized
– stuck in place
– blind/deaf/etc
– power weakened or negated
– disarmed/focus removed
– compelled to do something
– compelled to not do something
– poisoned
– tripping balls
– completely mind-controlled
– floating in mid-air
– growing infinite extra arms
– on fire
– possessed
– infested
– drained of life force
– insane
– turned into a vampire
– petrified
– teleported away

How many of these overlap? Possessed and mind controlled do, and
there are a bunch more horrible fates that are basically the same.
Some, like poisoned and infected, go in the same bucket but include
a huge variety of potential details. Well, except that disease,
like being on fire, spreads, but that’s an add-on, or maybe a third
column to choose something from although I’m not sure what else
would be there. Making a zone full of the effect, perhaps, which can
be combined with making it sticky. There are probably other similar
enhancements that I will think of later.

Sadly I’m not very crafty so I mostly just buy hats. Possibly I should buy more different hats, although then I’d need outfits to go with them, and that way lies madness.

Went to the office, had a lot of meetings, resolved a long-running customer issue by doing a different thing (that’s probably more in line with their policies anyway), officially received my 0% raise for not being a rock star, ate some brisket hash with fried egg for lunch, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.3: Yep, that was just about as doomed as it looked.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 2 (Kaoru Mori): Wow, Amir is so much better off away from her old family.

Written (game design): 210.

Went to the office, climbed some stairs, ate some spicy pork dumplings, did not eat any pecan waffles, spent all day working on TLS certificates.

Read (novel): Jett Jamison and the Secret Storm (Kimberly Behre Kenna): A middle-grade book about being a survivor of sexual assault and books about being a survivor of sexual assault and censorship of books about being survivor and also how much American “Christians” suck.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 1 (Kaoru Mori): It’s been a long time since I read this, but the fabrics and landscapes are still just as amazing.

Written (game design): 282:

Going off on another tangent, from the idea of conditions having
levels, the ultimate condition is Dead With a Body. (Dead Without a
Body is barely worse than Knocked Unconscious.) But does it have
levels? Does the Wounded condition turn into Dead at level 4? That’s a
lot like hit points, although to be fair, having 4 hit points when
attacks can do up to 4 damage is a lot different than having 200 hit
points when attacks can do up to 20 damage.

Probably a lot of conditions can take out the target, or severely
disable them at level 4, although if lower levels reduce the relevant
defenses, then it’s a death spiral. Possibly lower levels of Wounded
or Battered don’t impose any penalties general, because we are
heroic and full of adrenaline, and also just beating on people is not
what we want to encourage.

Even without a death spiral, if every die of a powerset is also 1
point of defense, then with a 9d6 or greater powerset, it’s possible
(though very unlikely) to inflict a level 4 condition against someone
defending with a 9d6 powerset straight up. Against someone undefended,
5d6 is enough to potentially-but-practically-never do it. This
doesn’t seem right; surely Xd6 offense vs X defense should produce
the same range of results, regardless of the value of X? Perhaps we
need Feng Shui/Nexus die minus die, or FATE dice, or something else
0-centered.

If all conditions were invented for the specific situation, we could
dismiss the notion of a condition coming in multiple levels, but if we
have to have a finite set of conditions, that’s a natural way to
categorize them. The effects don’t have to scale linearly with level,
though, so level 1-3 can be penalties but 4 can still be “completely
____”.

Which I celebrated by eating way too much pie. Also Flatmates Day, which I celebrated by having thrown my flatmate into the cold cruel streets to live alone.

For some reason I said it was okay for work to celebrate my birthday, but at least I got chocolate cream pie out of it. Also several people said “happy birthday” and I said “thanks” like a functional member of society. Also there was barbecue, although I didn’t get as much as I wanted because Coworker T talks forever on video calls. Not in person, though.

Read (graphic novel): Wallflower (Jasmin Omar Ata): An introverted and probably neurospicy middle-school girl in Florida can see people’s auras? souls? as flowers growing on them. This turns out to be related to why her family is kind of horrible to her and why the new kid at school is so weird. Not that it’s actually explained.

Written (game design): 182.

Obviously the best day ever, and yet it’s somehow also OK Day?

Read (art book): Beauties Beasts (Olivia de Berardinis, Jordu Schell): One page a painting of a pinup girl, the facing page a photo of a monster sculpture. They’re each fine, but I was hoping for some kind of combination. Ah well.

Written (game design): 135:

What about instant conditions like knockback (as separate from the
Prone condition that usually comes with it)? Is position just a
condition? You’re not where you want to be, but you can spend an
action (or maybe more than one) to change that, and someone can use a
power to make you be in the wrong place again. The story does check
out, but that way may lay completely abstract story-gaming like FATE.

Continuing the tangent, we need some way for ending a condition to be
doable over a reasonable time. You might be powerful enough to break
free of the hardened Negagloop in one mighty surge, but if you aren’t,
there should still be a range in which you can chip away it and get
loose in a few actions, and only when you’re way below that power
level should you not be able to do it at all. We know there’s going to
be some kind of overcharge/haymaker maneuver, but that still makes it
all or nothing. Unless you have to roll up a bit, in which case it
could take a few tries…

The other thing about knockback is that it happens with another
condition, so we need rules for inflicting multiple conditions with
one action, and I don’t think just splitting the points of effect
really works since it’s not linear.

Anyway, what we’re looking for is to have the level, durability,
duration, etc of conditions determined by dice rolls and rules. The
player can make a couple of choices from fixed lists, to set the
nature of the condition, but we don’t want them to make things up from
nothing. This is to avoid both a) players taking the Mentally
Paralyzed condition when having to come up with yet another condition
that optimally leads to victory, and b) players feeling like the
conditions system is completely abstract and they can just make up
whatever. Even if conditions are an important mechanic, we don’t want
them to be what play is about. We want play to be about the fiction.

I hear Magnetohydrodynamic Calculations Day was banned due to SAN loss.

Slept in, did a little shopping, ate an enormous quantity of Chinese food and will probably die.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 12: Asa learns just how much of adults’ life advice is pulled completely out of their asses.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 11: Are things not quite as dark as they looked last episode? Flum seems to be turning things around, anyway.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to be a Hero 11: Jeez, Teoritta, have more faith in your knight’s ability to blow up absolutely everything!

Watched (anime): Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody 1: Generic OP isekai LitRPG, probably to include a harem in later episodes based on the credits.

Read (graphic novel): Incredible Doom vol 1 (Matthew Bogart, Jesse Holden): 90s teen BBS culture, saving kids’ sanity from horrible parents and/or luring them into punk music and crime.

Written (game design): 114.

Another day that’s not for me: I’m terrible at poetry and also have no brain! Or maybe those are causally linked. I’m pretty sure poetry is a sign of sapience, or at least whatever it is humans have.

Slept in too much because it’s a weekend, managed to shop a little. I hear Jus is slaying at robot competition, though, because she’s not like me.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 7-9: Do people know things? Or are they just speculating? Either way, it seems like things are closing in. Also, smooching.

Read (graphic novel): Just Between Us (Adeline Kon): Rival figure skaters, one of whom is kind of terrible as a person, taking their rivalry and all kinds of strong feelings all the way to the Olympics.

Written (game design): 169:

It initially seems like we should be able to make a catalog of general
conditions, but players’ weird special effects are going to make
everything unique. Can we just have a condition “Blind”? Sure, that
has some mechanical effect, but are you blind from a bright light?
Pocket sand? Face covered in Negagloop? Crow spirit pecked out the
eyes of your soul? All of those have different defenses, different
durations, and different ways to remove them early, and that’s just
one possible effect out of… a dozen? scores? incalculably many
because players are most creative when it’s least convenient?

Can we do it with a combination of one catalog of effect and one
of how the effect is accomplished? Biological, do some healing or
wait; spiritual, do some magic cleansing or wait; physical, break
it? I guess there are at least three components here: how the effect
is targeted and implemented, which isn’t part of the condition since
it’s all handled at the “attack” time and then we can stop worrying
about it; what effect the condition actually has while it’s there;
and what it takes to get rid of it, both how long it takes to expire
naturally and what kind of powers will end it early and how well they
have to roll.

One from column A and one from column B seems doable once we populate
the columns. It has to be explictly not just allowed but encouraged to
make new entries if none of the existing ones match someone’s novel special
effect. We also need to determine what each entry costs: do more
useful ones use up some dice off your powerset if you don’t have a
technique? Or impose some other penalty? It seems likely. Not sure how
Column Zero (attack method) works, exactly, but it also needs to do
something based on whether it’s more or less useful than the baseline.

Also Children’s Plays About Frogs and Sparrows Day, Vanessa Was Abducted by Aliens Day, and Propose to a Panther Day. (No word on whether the panther must be pink.)

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.2: That is a big whale. And note that they did not defeat it by running it out of hit points!

Read (graphic novel): Clubbing (Andi Watson, Josh Howard): Apparently I read this before, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. A teen goth from London gets exiled to the countryside all summer for Crimes, where she meets colorful characters and more crimes. Still not sure if the final bit was supposed to be real or just the MC making things up.

Written (game design): 118. Apparently I’m not very smart.

Got 2/3 of the way up the stairs before having to rest, did some work, ate a bento, met with a customer and did not solve their problem but at least they aren’t stuck in Dubai any more, tried to use awk, did not learn any kubernetes. The trains were all late on my way home, but it all lined up anyway and I was able to feed the cats so they could eat before Marith came to scare them away.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.1: Weren’t all these bozos defeated already? But we have a new foil for Roranoa, so that’s good.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 20 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that happen to the Statue of Liberty.

Written (game design): 295:

Hero does have an array of defenses: PD, ED, DCV, MDCV, Mental
Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Desolidification, Damage
Reduction, Presence, Damage Negation, Deflection, Barrier, probably
Strength, Teleportation, any attack count at least for getting out
of conditions. They usually apply to everything unless there’s a
specific limitation or mandatory gap in applicability like Desolid
or Deflection have, because nobody wants their defenses to not work,
and “I’m a brick!” is enough of a special effect for many of them.
There are three different kinds of defenses here, though: make the
attack roll harder (DCV, Deflection), reduce effect (PD, Presence),
or break out of the effect after it’s happened (Strength or
Teleportation vs grabs, any attack vs Entangle).

If we’re putting more of an emphasis on defense, should we be going
back to the idea of the defender rolling instead of the attacker? I
had a better name for this than “saves” but that’s what they were,
divided by ways of getting out of trouble. They can have different
mechanics, though. Like, you can dodge, which is chancy but negates
the attack entirely if you succeed, or tank it, which is easier but
only gives you extra defenses which might be enough. Ignoring the
attack gives you a bonus to whatever else you’re doing, if you’re
still able to do it afterwards. Slipping the punch is essentially
tanking the attack. If we’re using zones where most movement is within
the same zone, then diving for cover is probably a variant of dodge.
Deflecting an attack to another target is also a variant of dodge.
Diving to shield someone is tank+move in the way that dive for dover
is dodge+move. With an appropriate special effect, you could absorb an
attack or otherwise transform it into a different effect. Emotional
and mental attacks probably use the same options, with varying levels
of metaphor. And then there’s removing an effect that’s already been
applied, like breaking an Entangle, or slipping free of it. (Hero’s
Martial Escape that uses the same mechanics as busting free with
Strength but with a bonus to Strength based on skill is pretty
elegant.)

I have no idea how to handle something like Desolidification in this
paradigm.

But all of this is only loosely connected to conditions, or whatever
we do to track things happening to characters, and how they get
applied.

Walked up some stairs, did some work, ate some falafel and hummus and eggplant even though they tried to hide it from me, learned kubernetes until I died.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 10 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): They’re well into the plot part of the game, so MC’s knowledge is helping her a lot, if not as much as it could have.

Written (game design): 106, because I am stupid and also I had to go to bed.

Climbed some stairs, had a meeting with my colleagues, had a meeting with my endocrinologist, pretended to ignore my phone, ate some soy-garlic chicken guys with crunchy white veggies, did some work, complained about the heat.

Read (comic collection): Mercy (Mirka Andolfo): Pod people in late C19 Pacific Northwest, humans having feelings about monsters, monsters having feelings about Earth, gory murder everywhere.

Written (game design): 135.

Also, No Selfies with Pandas Day.

Got the cleaners to invade at a more convenient time, which I felt a little bad about since I usually just say “whatever” but it’s a work day with meetings.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 37 (Tomohito Oda): The end! 100 friends and Komi and Tadano and everyone make it to college and Komi is still the hornier one (but in a wholesome way).

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 10: Yeah, that’s a problem with slave soldiers, especially when they have superpowers.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 10: Now we know some of what Ink’s deal is, and it’s about as bad as expected.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 11: Adults sure like giving advice. But sometimes they also give chocolate.

Written (game design): 389:

Should we not be doing a meter-by-meter, second-by-second, or at
least zone-by-zone, round-by-round simulation? Having the dice tell
us how the story goes, instead of telling us where each energy blast
lands and letting us create our own story from the mechanical
outcomes is the very essence of story game. Not that Hero is
completely immune to this (Luck/Unluck), but it’s a lot more
emergent-story. Can we have emergent story without simplifying combat
down to hit points, though? Conditions involve a lot of GM judgement, as
does anything like tactics (beyond the very basic ganging up on
somebody), so we can’t get everything from dice rolls. That’s even
before we let players go thinking up new things to do that require GM
calls, or choosing the outcome of a successful attack beyond “reduce hit
points”.

Am I pushing too hard for tactical infinity? It’s the reason we play
RPGs with fighting in, rather than just playing Gloomhaven, but maybe
tactical a few hundred, or a few dozen, would be enough? Heck, people
enjoy playing 21st century D&D, and that barely gets out of single
digits in binary. Can we make do with a list of general conditions after
all? And a set of defenses against them? Although much of the point of
tactical cleverness is to work around the otherwise-impenetrable
defenses… Yes, this is the same question I keep going around and
around, looking at from the same set of angles.

RPGs derived from wargames don’t like tactical cleverness because
they don’t like decisive actions. If your entire game is a fight,
something that can cut that short means less gaming, and nobody
wants that. Or at least that’s one of my guesses as to why so many
games have hit points far in excess of what one attack can do. Hero is
actually not quite as bad as some, since a surprise attack out of combat
does double Stun before defenses and that can actually knock someone
out, or at least stun them.

On another axis, it’s harder to “play the world, not your sheet”
in OSR fashion when the PCs aren’t human, maybe not even remotely
(hello, sentient black hole!), and the world offers entirely different
affordances. Maybe we do need more in the way of structure than your
normal bozos creeping with fire through a cave of rock. That probably
means at least a limited set of conditions instead of a complete
free-for-all. It may also mean paying more attention to how things
happen and not just the end state. Which might bring us back to an array
of defenses, or at least a bunch of ways to avoid/resist different kinds
of things people do to you (dodge it, stick out your chest and tank it,
concentrate on memories of your first love who would be so disappointed
if you let yourself get mind-controlled, etc). It might also bring us
back to all powers having limitations by default, so at least some
openings are written down ahead of time, even if they aren’t known. (You
can still buy off the limitations, but then the limitation is that you
don’t have as many points to buy powers.)

I meant to get up early and go get sampled, but instead slept in forever and then went. I expected the line to be horrendous, but no! Everyone else had gotten up early! So I got sampled expediently and went home and took a nap.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): Finished! That was extremely silly. Also the women were much cooler than the men, even if they were all pretty much tumbrel bait. But earnest tumbrel bait!

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 36 (Tomohito Oda): Wow, multiweek study camp with just the two of them. And yet, so wholesome. Plus, Komi really is good at everything except talking to people, and she’s not bad at that here in the penultimate volume.

Read (anthology): Screams From the Ocean Floor (ed Heather Ann Larson): Assorted horror on, under, around, or vaguely associated with the ocean. Pretty much everybody dies. Variable quality, none of them outstanding.

Written (game design): 132:

Is there even room on the scale for No Big? In wargames, a missed attack
is generally a no-op, because there’s nothing you care about except your
target’s hit points. Maybe you shot up some piece of landscape, but
that’s irrelevant to your victory condition. Sure, the GM could try to
say that you accidentally broke something or someone important, but
that’s practically cheating. PbtA/FitD has only disaster, mixed success,
good success, with no option for nothing to happen, but that’s at a more
zoomed-out scale and player-facing mechanics. Whiffing your attack on
the enemy and getting pasted is entirely within the scope of a PbtA 6-,
even though in D&D it would be a missed attack where nothing happens.

“Realistically”, a lot of failed actions should do nothing much. The
missed energy blast goes somewhere, sure, but there’s a lot that
actually is irrelevant to the fight and can be summarized as general
property damage during the media phase of the encounter. But if we’re
talking about superheroes or supervillains, and we’re not doing a
second-by-second, meter-by-meter simulation of the battle, shouldn’t every
action have a consequence of some kind?

But I write fantasy because I can’t do math!

Went shopping, tried to get quarters, got a hard time for having an expired ID card. I should probably do something about that, but it matters so rarely.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 4-6: Well, now we have Dr Snake’s minion’s theory about what’s going on, but even the characters we thought were in a position of knowledge or power seem pretty confused, and I’m not sure any of this explains what was going on with Blonde Friend. Female Lead seems to be doing better emotionally, so probably it’s all going to come crashing down.

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 14 (Kamome Shirahama): And that is why every field needs both young whippersnappers and experienced elders, but no field needs dogmatic zealots.

Written (game design): 209:

Earlier I said there would be three outcomes from a disaster roll:
everything works as intended; partial or conflicted success; disaster.
The middle one is the most effort for the GM, who has to invent a
setback that doesn’t negate the success, so that should come up the
least often for playability, even if outright disaster should be the
least common for plausability. Which do we value most highly? If it’s
playability, then partial success comes up when you make the roll
exactly; if it’s plausibility then a disaster happens on a natural 18 or
something. That’s if we want to keep the Hero 3d6-roll-low. Something
like PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ or FitD’s 1-3/4-5/6 more naturally gives a
three-way outcome, but the range doesn’t feel as large as would match
the 1-12d6 of powersets. They’re completely different rolls, they don’t
have to match directly, but having, for example, skills that only go
from -1 to +4 feels too constrained.

Although, a disaster roll isn’t exactly a skill roll, and definitely
isn’t a to-hit roll. It definitely is more like a PbtA/FitD “how’s that
going for you?” roll, which once again is veering into filthy story game
territory. In the interests of our already-stated goal of not being as
hard on the GM as a full-fledged story game, can we make a list of the
possible results of a disaster roll? Obviously if you make the roll,
then you apply the condition you intended to the target(s) you were
aiming for, or as close as possible, and determine the level of the
condition with an effect roll using powerset dice.

The other obvious two-bit values are right condition wrong target (you
didn’t melt the Despairmech(tm), you melted the bridge truss), wrong
condition right target (you didn’t gently incapacitate the criminal
goon, you crushed them like a bug), and wrong condition wrong target
(you didn’t freeze the villain’s feet in ice, you made the road slippery
under the mayor’s car). There are always infinitely more ways for
something to go wrong than to go right, though, so I’m not sure this is
helping. Even having to pick a point on the scale from No Big to
Complete Disaster is a pain.

Also the second of three Friday 13ths this year. Apparently 2026 is particularly cursed. :looking around at the world emoji: Yep, story checks out.

Did not go to the office, did get my performance review. Apparently since the previous management and the current management, I have become much less satisfactory.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Our motley continues to explore the Dreamlands, which have a very symbolic ruined temple and another island easily accessible by eggshell boat (Petunia is the best chicken) that turns out to be where King Mark’s court dreams. No sign of a grail, though.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 11 (Shinichi Fukuda): Not just cosplay, not just group cosplay with almost everyone they’ve met so far, but horror group cosplay.

Read (novel): Tear Down Heaven (Rachel Aaron): The dramatic conclusion to the war against Gilgamesh, whose plan is indeed universe-shattering in scope and horror, but not quite a match for unexpected demon power and witchcraft.

Written (game design): 146.

That sounds ominous.

Went to the office, climbed the stairs with only a few breaks, ate some jerk pork and plantains, did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): I had not seen or read this before because I have no culture. It is very silly, although I can’t help thinking that all these people should be in a tumbrel. We only watched up to the intermission because I was sleepy, but will definitely finish sometime when Marith is not dead.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 10 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is going to have to be a lot more assertive than that if she wants to actually get lucky. I guess first she would have to decide whether she wants to.

Written (game design): 216:

I think they probably do. As I learned from reading the Internet, rules
and dice are for the uncertain parts of the game, where you need some
divinatory power. If you can just say what happens and it’s obvious, no
dice needed. So thrilling heroic battles, sure. You can come up with a
plan, but can you execute it correctly while someone is shooting you in
the face with a railgun? Roll for it!

But roll what? Hero has both to-hit and damage rolls, because D&D.
We’ve been talking about powersets in terms of dice that we roll and
count the Body on to determine the magnitude of effect, but should there
be a roll to decide whether you can even make that roll? We’re basing
this on Presence attacks (which don’t have a to-hit roll) and mental
attacks (which do). Since actions are now to inflict conditions, not do
some random amount of Stun and Body, we need some roll to determine
whether an attack goes overboard, or otherwise awry. Maybe it should be
called a disaster roll instead of a to-hit roll, since a bad roll
results in the wrong condition, wrong target, or both. Then the rule can
be that if the table can see a way for the action to go horribly wrong
without the character performing it having to be an incompetent schmuck,
there has to be a disaster roll.

Since the disaster roll determines who gets to decide on the nature of
the condition and where it goes, we still need the effect roll to
determine the level of the condition. Some conditions should be higher
level based on accuracy rather than (or in addition to) sheer power, but
I think we’re okay wrapping that into powerset dice as a measure of
effectiveness, not just raw joules of energy beam. There will also be
maneuvers/techniques that let you have more dice of effect for whatever
tradeoff, and you can probably have a limitation on some dice of your
powerset that you only get them if you can make a skill roll.