Category: Life of a Space Parasite

I typed in a chair instead, which is definitely not as classy.

Went to the office, did some work, learned some kubernetes, ate some beef stroganoff.

Read (graphic novel): Family Force V vol 1 (Matt Braly, Ainsworth Lin): The somewhat (but not very) delinquent daughter of a family sentai team struggles with life, the alien spaceship that gives the sentai teams their powers, new aliens, etc. There is of course a cliffhanger ending.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.11-12: Meh, surely that guy wasn’t an important character or anything. Certainly not compared to Tintin-Face Lad, who has returned to the fray.

Written (game design): 286.

Went to the office, possibly freed the team from an onerous burden, didn’t program anything, ate some barbecue, studied some Kubernetes, did some work.

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 2 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): The world is falling apart even more, and also we get to see what utter weirdos these characters are. Also, criminal cultists are apparently an exceptionally cowardly and superstitious lot.

Read (essay): “These Stories Teach Us How to Fight” (Dawn Xiana Moon): Learning resistance from reading SF.

Written (game design): 163.

Samantha who? Dunno, I didn’t invent the day! Maybe we should have left it at Dry Beans Day.

Did not sleep well, probably because I ate only spicy burrito for dinner last night and then stayed up too late. I’m really not very good at this life thing.

Went to the new office. It is spacious and pretty and has nice views on every side and complimentary hair product in the bathrooms, but the usability might be a bit low because windows full of natural light don’t really go with monitors. Also we no longer get a room to hide in, so I have given up on masking. Probably I should come back to it, since wearing a mask even most of the time is still better than not. Ate some German-style Impossible sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, did some work. Our boss³ sits right next to us, which on the one hand is not great, but on the other hand means we can always get a policy decision when we need one.

Official schedule is now 9-18:00, so it’s a good thing we’re moving gaming to a night when I don’t have to commute. On the other hand, although I did not get home at a reasonable hour, I did manage to do several things with my evening. Bah, how am I supposed to resent commuting now?

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 1 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): Five excessively competent people feel obligated to deal with the weird shit that’s been crawling out of the corners of the world ever since they worked on that project a few years back. Extremely Warren Ellis, but also reminds me of Carl Rigney.

Written (game design): 116:

The smallest skills (familiarity, +1 for a background skill) cost 1
point, so whatever we do with points has to affect skills, probably by
broadening them. As previously established, I’m fine with skills being
more job-like and less individual tasks, but just how broad that is
depends on how chonky points are, so I guess I better decide. One point
per rank is very tempting, although then all limitations have to be one
or more full ranks, no lesser values. That’s if we stick with
limitations that give extra ranks. If we revert to the old fractional
arithmetic system, but with base costs that only go up to 12 or so, is
it not so bad?

I didn’t succeed in talking about whipped cream today. I didn’t succeed in reading anything. I didn’t succeed in writing anything. Apparently even though I have been to a zillion different offices in my life, going to this new office is stressful.

I did manage to spend money, but the comics are being delivered to my lair instead of to the store for pickup. It was enough to get free shipping anyway, though.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (anything): FAIL. Wow, I really suck.

Another of those days that’s every day.

Jeremy and Rachel have a new dog, Bella, who appears to be a miniature dachshund, although when her fur grows back from the rescue shave she will look more poodly. She is adorable.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Field trip! Giant bugs! Another person with past-life memories! The PCs continue their streak of being completely useless and having to be rescued by NPCs so they don’t die, which has lasted for the entire campaign so far.

Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 2 (NC Lux): Person who turned into a succubus when she got sucked into the System’s dungeon because she really really needed the poison resistance is losing her resistance to the System’s idea of what powers and behaviors a succubus should have, but at least she made it back to Earth (briefly) and also found out some of what is going on and why Earth was important.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 103:

Speaking of ranks, it would be good if a campaign limit of X ranks
applied to everything, powers and characteristics and talents alike, in
the way that a campaign limit of 60 points applies across the board.
This means that ranks do need to be pretty similar in utility (to the
extent we can quantify that) which means pretty similar in cost (to the
extent we can correlate those). Put another way, we need to adjust every
power so it’s equally useful as a 12d6 basic attack, then divide that
into 12 equal chunks. And then adjust enhancement ranks until they’re
the same size. Like, is melee/zone/next zone/few zones/many zones/line
of sight/via mindscan the correct number of steps for ranks of range?
Maybe we need to condense it from 6 ranks for the highest bracket to 4,
or whatever.

Tangent on range: is range worth as much as all the extra moves that
come with Strength? Since Strength includes a ranged attack, that
probably can’t be the case, so how do the costs for Str, ranged attack,
and melee attack work? I guess Str is melee attack with an advantage for
“can do all that other stuff too”, but is that just extra ranks on top
of the 2d6 damage?

It would be entirely within the spirit of paying for what you get
to split Strength into strength for lifting and squishing, melee
damage, and ranged (throwing) damage, so that The Amazing Forklift,
Captain Catapult, and Punch Buggy are all distinct. Like with
leaping, you can still punch and throw using just Strength, in a
half-assed way. I don’t know that we want to do this, but it would
solve some problems at the expense of a longer list of characteristics.
Also it fits with improvised leaping being just throwing yourself,
which is an idea I like more than it probably deserves. We’ll call
it a definite maybe.

I also still don’t know how to work skills into ranks. A level in
several skills, like we’re using to replace Int and Dex, is reasonable
as a rank, and probably just getting that number of skills to 11-, where the
ranks can start adding to them, is a rank, but what about familiarities?
Languages? Weapon or transport proficiencies? Does one rank get a bunch
of familiarities and/or languages? For skill familiarities, do they
somehow count toward getting the 11-? And how should languages work? The
chart with five kinds of lines around language groups and five levels of
each language is probably a bit much, but how far can we trim it down?

I did just read a post from a real professional game designer about sending
your beloved ideas to play in an “ideas to be used later” file out in
the country, so I accept that I may have to give up the notion of ranks,
but not until it’s been thoroughly chewed.

Skills are a bunch of small items that are mostly independent of each
other, so they don’t mesh well with ranks, which are for largish chunks
of even larger items. Characteristics are more like powers in this
respect: there’s a limited set of them, and they can each be pretty
large in terms of points, as large as powers. (Strength really is a
power anyway.) Maybe skills don’t need to be in ranks, they can just be
bought with points? That’s how Mutants & Masterminds works, and that’s
mostly where I’m stealing the idea of ranks from. Well, that and Silver
Age Sentinels/Tristat, which also doesn’t rank skills (or stats, but
they’re more like D&D stats than Hero characteristics).

A tangent about characteristics: Should we combine Constitution and
Ego? D&D established that bodily toughness and mental toughness are
different because they go with different classes, but aside from
D&D, how often do you see a hero whose heroic grit doesn’t keep
them going through all kinds of adversity? Although that’s not
taking psychic power into account, so maybe it’s still two
characteristics, just divided along a different axis. Grit and
Psyche? Psyche is then like Strength for mental powers, which are
analogous to grab, escape, squeeze, etc. But, everyone can use
Strength, even if with a low OCV, while not everyone can use Psyche
at all. Is the default level of Psyche 0d6, and you can use either
Psyche or Grit (default 2d6) defensively? Then all egoists have all
the active powers (Mind Control, Mental Illusions, Ego Blast). The
edges between Mind Control and Mental Illusions are pretty blurry,
and even Ego Blast can be somewhat replaced by Mental Illusions,
so lumping all those together seems okay. Telepathy and Mind Scan
are more sensory powers, though, so even though they’re based on
psychic might (unless they aren’t, because Hero) possibly they need
a different characteristic, or to be lumped in with sensory powers,
however those are going to be implemented.

Going back to skills, if the point of all this is to reduce the
amount of fiddling with single points, maybe the standard cost of
a rank should be 1. At the equivalent of five old points (or two
chonky points), that’s a 12- standard skill, a 14- knowledge skill,
+2 to an existing standard skill, +5 to an existing knowledge skill,
+1 with a bunch of skills, five familiarities, a martial maneuver,
a language or even a group of strongly related languages. This would
make a heroic character 20 points, or a standard superhero 70, which
is a lot less to fiddle with than 100 or 350. Is that too few? It
seems good for character creations, but doesn’t support a nice
gradual rate of advancement where individual skills go up by +1 at
a time, even if we award experience in fractions of a rank. Plenty of
systems have different mechanisms for character creation and character
advancement, but I don’t think that’s what we want here. Any character
should be creatable directly, without having to fake going through
advancement.

Also, Earth is at perihelion, which probably doesn’t matter much given the poor quality of spaceships available locally.

I meant to get up early and do all the things, but instead slept way in and did a few of the things. Dave is back in town, so we were able to watch more anime, after getting the AV equipment back in working order (bad cable).

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.8: Time to investigate a curse!

Read (artbook): Bleeding Edges (Danni Shinya Luo): Pretty girls and watercolor. Reminds me of Olivia.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 3: Siren’s Reach (C Peinhopf): Oh god, now there are three of them. Or maybe four. Also ocean-based monster attacks, politics and warfare, excessive pranks, restoration of the proper order of the universe, etc. Not the end, though.

Written (anything): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Hey, I wrote a cats of science fiction that one time! And that other time!

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.9-10: Fights! More fights! Maiming! No murders yet, but it’s coming.

Read (graphic novel): Watersnakes (Tony Sandoval): A girl meets a mysterious girl, they become friends, but when they try to kiss, everything is weird and more mysterious and they have a dream-like adventure. Distinctive art style, extremely peculiar, not actually about kissing.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 2: West Peak (C Peinhopf): The kitsune sisters continue the fight the demons started, with an ever-growing band of allies (including a giant beetle) and the odd volcanic eruption here and there. They remain overpowered and mischevious.

Written (game design): 184.

How is it already 2026? How is it only now that 2025 is over? What, even, is time?

Had to be on call today. There was a customer, so it wasn’t as okay as it could have been, but not too bad.

Read (novel): Fallen Lands vol 1: Vigilance (C Peinhopf): A girl on her way to college gets isekai’d and turned into a kitsune, it’s horrible, but she escapes and makes friends and rescues people and adopts a sister and they save the day with their OP summoned hero classes while giving each other shit.

Read (comic collection): Wicked Things (John Allison, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar): Teen detective Charlotte Grote, of Tackleford, is framed for murder at the award ceremony for Teen Detective Of The Year, rude. Hijinx ensue as she tries to persuade the police of her bona fides by solving a bunch of other cases while until strict supervision. I am doubtless going to hell for how much I like Charlotte’s character design, cartoony though it is.

Written (game design): 129. Of course I would like to write more and better for the new year, but it’s not like I know how.

I had to work today, but skipped out early to take the bus over to Monkeycat Towers for the traditional fondue of our people. Dave is still out of town, and Marith was too overcome with the horror of having to be at work at 5:00 tomorrow, but we had Earl and Cat and also Jus’s current girlfriend and one of their friends. They seemed like nice kids. They helped us eat cheese fondue, but then they had to leave so we old people (and Jus) got all the chocolate. There was conversation and friendship and rainy fireworks and it was a very nice evening and everyone was happy.

Read (manga): A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow vol 1 (Makoto Hagino): A girl moves to a remote town and meets another girl. There’s an aquarium and possibly chemistry, but not really a lot happening.

Written (anything): PARTY.

Also Bacon Day. I did not eat any bacon, but tomorrow’s fondue festivities may be postponed due to illness, which is pretty last-minute.

Another quiet day at work, since the customers are mostly on vacation or something. Maybe eaten by the Yule Cat.

Read (novel): Beware of Chicken vol 5 (Casualfarmer): Return of some past characters, farm life, not a lot of plot progression.

Read (comic collection): By Night vol 3 (John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern): More and more doom, but eventually the day is saved, the evil board is defeated, etc, etc.

Written (game design): 210.

I ate one of the fancy truffles Marith gave me for Christmas. It was very yummy.

Expected to die on the floor next to my bed when I had to get up for work at the regular time, but probably didn’t. Did spend a long time explaining things to one of the new people. Hopefully she understood my ranting.

Read (shorts): “The Star of the Show”, “Big Box Romance” (William C Tracy): M/M flirting during cyberpunk heists.

Read (comic collection): By Night vol 2 (John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern): The doom only increases!

Written (game design): 116.

In 2025, texting or DMing about chocolate is also acceptable.

I did not do a good job of getting up early like a person who can log in to work on time tomorrow. I did do a shopping, though. Now I have a toothbrush again.

Read (comic collection): By Night vol 1 (John Allison, Christine Larsen, Sarah Stern): Two post-college girls in a small town find something unusual in the abandoned factory, and engage with all the caution and chill expected of John Allison characters.

Read (short): “For a Limited Time Only” (Peng Shepherd): Time travel, but only for Sales and Marketing, not for bringing medical tech back.

Read (short): “A Visit to the Husband Archive” (Kaliane Bradley): A very strange post-apocalyptic world, or maybe the apocalypse is still happening.

Read (short): “All Manner of Thing Shall Be” (Olivie Blake): Time-traveling vampire housemates.

Read (short): “Cronus” (P Djélì Clark): Never let the KKK (or any other white people) get time machines.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.11-12: Spring of drowned duck, and the final(?) defeat of Mousse. End of the season!

Written (game design): 111.

But also Lie Abed Forever, Trapped by Cats, Day.

Eventually managed to do some shopping and um nothing else except read.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 5 (Ryan North, Will Murray, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi): Squirrel Girl’s great Canadian adventure! She remains unbeaten, although possibly only because she didn’t have to fist-fight a moose, and also saves the world.

Read (novel): Brigands & Breadknives (Travis Baldree): The ratlady from Bookshops & Bonedust tries to move next door to the orc from Legends & Lattes, but suffers a huge midlife crisis and runs away to have an adventure instead. The goblin from “Goblins and Greatcoats” also makes an appearance.

Read (novel): A Drop of Corruption (Robert Jackson Bennett): Sequel to The Tainted Cup, a new assignment with even more intrigue, client-state politics, terrorism, secret laboratories of transhumanism, foreign customs, unsettling revelations about the past, and also murder.

Written (game design): 379.

But no, I am happy with my presents!

Forgot today was an official holiday, got up and tried to go to work, then went back to bed and was trapped by cats forever.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.7-8: Still cutting between like four different fight scenes, as the rest of the season probably will continue to do.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 4 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Jacob Chabot, Rico Renzi): Squirrel Girl vs the world of dating! Boys are just the worst, even the ones that aren’t incels.

Read (short): “Amiable Voyager” (Glynn Stewart): Space piracy! In the setting of, and apparently will be a background event in, the “House Adamant” books.

Read (novel): The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett): Fantasy(?) mystery, in a world of bioenhancement where the empire exists to deal with the enormous monstrosities that crawl out of the ocean every year. Our viewpoint character, a junior detective enhanced with perfect memory, has been assigned to work with the crazy senior detective who has been augmented so much she can’t deal with most people, or city streets, or really anything except hiding in the dark being creepy and deducing. No orchids, though. Anyway, murder and more murder and giant monstrosities and skullduggery and dark history and mysterious biotech, it’s great.

Written (game design): 123:

Time for review! What goes on a character sheet?

Every character has a rating in all of Strength, Presence, Ego, and
Constitution. These are 1d6 per rank, with a base of 2 ranks and a
normal characteristic max of 4d6.

Every character also has Defense (base 0 ranks, NCM 2 ranks),
Resilience (base 2 ranks, NCM 6), and Body (base 6, NCM 12), which all
give 1 point of the characteristic per rank. Recovery gives 2 Rec per
rank, base 1 rank and NCM 3 ranks.

The default for Running is 1 zone as a full move, or somewhere else in
your current zone as a half move. Swimming would be the level below
that: move arond in your zone as a full move, take two full moves to get
to the next hex, and ??? as a half move. This definitely needs more
work.

Not sure what to do with Leaping. Possibly the default is 0 ranks of
Leaping power and you have to fake it by throwing your (awkward,
unaerodynamic) self at the destination with your own Strength? If you
buy any ranks of Leaping, that’s how far you can leap without having to
make a roll. As with Swimming, normal human values are going to be less
than one zone. Do we end up mixing zones and meters? Ew.

DCV and DMCV are sort of like skills, or at least they affect enemy
skill rolls, and are like defensive combat skill levels in 6E. But,
defensive (and other) combat levels in 6E can be specialized to ranged
or melee or some other specific subset of combat, which means a
limitation, and how does that work here? Each limited tranche of DCV
would have to be a separate power, with a separate minimum cost. Then
there’s no point in buying only +1 DCV against thrown knives or
whatever, since the cost after all limitations might as well be the
minimum cost. This has the effect we said we wanted, so now we have to
decide if it’s what we really want.

Converting from 6E to chonky points, each +1 of DCV would cost 2pts.
Even if we are trying to avoid futzing around with the equivalent of
-1/4 limitations, making something work only half the time is probably
worth at least two standard ranks of limitation, so 4 points. The
minimum cost for a power is probably one standard rank, so 2 points,
which means spending 2 points on DCV only against ranged attacks gets +3
DCV. Every additional 2 points is only another +1, since we obviously
don’t allow buying multiple instances of the exact same power with the
exact same limitations. So instead the obnoxious player buys DCV only
against fast-moving ranged attacks and DCV only against thrown objects,
which are each probably 2 points for +4 specialized DCV. That’s a total
of +7 DCV against ranged attacks for 6 points, which is close to half
the cost of all-purpose DCV. Buying +7 DCV without that cheese costs
10pts, so there is a definite cheeseward incentive. Bah.

Note that I’m assuming in all this that DCV that only protects against
half of attacks should cost half as much, which is obviously the Hero
paradigm, but really hard to argue with in such a simple case as this.
I’m not sure what alternative would seem as intuitively correct,
especially to players already familiar with Hero. Are we back to that
first idea where powers are bought in ranks that cost whatever based on
power and/or advantages, but limitations are applied to the total of the
final cost?

(Another asymmetry between limitations and advantages: there are times
when it’s easy to say a limitation is making a power half as useful, but
it’s hard to have an advantage that makes it twice as useful, unless you
count buying twice as many dice of attack as an advantage. Which gets us
back to buying ranks of range or whatever.)

But not actually Newtonmas because he was a weird heretic of some kind.

Went to Monkeycat Towers for Christmas dinner. Gave few presents, got slightly more presents. I think this chocolate may be too good for me. It was all very festive and nice, though, so I am happy. Everyone is alive and plans to reconvene for New Year’s Fondue.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 3 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles): The time travel run. 60s fashion and violent grannies!

Read (short): “Castle, Anima” (CE Murphy): A short story several years after the Urban Shaman series. Joanne defeats completely unexpected evil magic while severely handicapped.

Written (game design): 197.

After staying up way way too late, I got up to get pills and accept the handover baton. Fortunately it had no additional presents, so I was able to go back to sleep forever.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.5-6: The spring of drowned man, and the dojo destroyer.

Read (novel): Broker vol 3 (Derelict Presence): Possibly the MC has bottomed out on sanity and started improving. The final boss still seems to have no weaknesses unless they can make him rage-quit at life, but his future minions are getting taken off the board.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 2 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles): Still 50% squirrel, still 100% girl, still unbeatable! Also, Thor fanfic.

Read (short): “Making Space” (RF Kuang): Yikes.

Read (novel): The Casket Girls (Bonsart Bokel): Steampunk mecha girls against interdimensional rifts, needed more editing and/or was not meant to be read without first experiencing some other multimedia facet.

Written (game design): Technically 600 but maybe really 355.

I guess the nation has to be the US, since everyone else cooks in metric as the default. Also it’s Festivus.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.5-6: The martial arts delivery contest.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 1 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles): She is unbeatable! She has both punching and talking, as well as squirrels and CS homework and friends!

Written (game design): 173.

Haikubot only communicates with radio waves.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.3-4: Big duel with Mousse and Cologne’s obnoxious interference. I can’t blame her for thinking Ranma would be a less terrible grandson than Mousse, but that’s a low bar.

Read (graphic novel): Ignition City vol 1 (Warren Ellis, Gianlucca Pagliarani): As Earth of the 1950s withdraws from the pulp spacelanes, a grounded pilot goes to the last spaceport to find out what happened to her estranged father. Every background is mostly rusting rocketships, and I mean rocketships, none of this antigravity or advanced composites. Also aliens and goons.

Written (game design): 185.

Also the winter Solstice, so a spiffy solstice and a yahoo yule to all!

I didn’t sleep in as much as yesterday, but I did stay in bed being useless for quite a while before going out to get Pakistani-Indian Fusion lunch. Then I came home and was useless in a chair for the rest of the day.

No gaming, Dave is out of town and most people are busy with holidays.

Watched (anime): Ranma 1/2 (2024) 2.1-2: The return of Mousse, and Ranma’s great weakness to the results of Shampoo’s training accident.

Read (novel): Magica Riot (Kara Buchanan): Trans magical girl in Portland. It has all the standard tropes: the team is a band when they aren’t fighting monsters, they have music-themed powers and transformation phrases, etc, but they come across a lot differently in text than in an anime. I guess the flashy animation really is a crucial part of the experience. But, trans magical girl FTW.

Read (manga): The White Cat’s Revenge as Plotted from the Dragon King’s Lap vol 1 (Aki, KUREHA, Yamigo): Our heroine, a pretty, intelligent, kind anime schoolgirl, nevertheless has a cursed life in the orbit of the Cutest Girl Ever who everyone worships and thinks the heroine should obey at all times. Then they get isekai’d and CGE is hailed as the hero while Heroine is exiled. Without the inimical presence of CGE, Heroine is free to make friends and learn magic and generally prosper.

Written (game design): 646 words of Mage Errant summarization for  Kaiju Academy, possibly of no value whatsoever.

Only five days until Chrismas, yikes.

I was trapped in bed forever by the cats, but eventually managed to go shopping. No anime, because Dave is out of town for the holidays. Listened to some Rush from the 80s and almost died of nostalgia.

Read (manga): Super HxEroes vol 1 (Ryoma Kitada): Alien bug monsters are trying to drive humanity to extinction by stealing all their libido. Fortunately a secret(?) government(?) organization(?) has recruited teenagers to use horniness-fueled superpowers to defeat the aliens. It is possibly even more ridiculous than it sounds. All cheesecake without details, no actual sex.

Read (novella): Constituent Service (John Scalzi): A new community liaison for the city district where most of the aliens live discovers some problems that need solving. It is very Scalzish humor.

Written (game design): 295:

Are 2 and 3 equal for purposes of buying ranks with limitations, though?
Are there jumbo ranks that you have to use two limitations to buy, but
can buy for 1.5x points? Is that a massive inconsistency that will make
the frugal character builder seethe with rage, or allow a canny
character builder to get infinite free points? Probably, yeah.

This is the third or fourth time revisting the idea of ranks and
points, ugh. Why are we here, again? Fundamentally, the idea is to
make a superpower 10-12 chunks instead of 50-60, so all the
calculations around buying and adjusting it are simpler. (Possibly
this is ungrateful of me, since early exposure to Champions has
left me significatly above average at mental math to this day, but
I feel like learning to turn imagination into finished works would
have been much more worthwhile. Not that I would have actually done
that with the spare braincells.) Chonky points makes it 20-24 chunks,
but that’s still well into two-digit arithmetic, while 12 is an
honorary one-digit number.

Is it too complicated to have a limitation give points that you can only
spend on that power? Then a limition gives 2/4/etc points, but a rank
can cost 2 or 3 or whatever. Maybe there’s a point left over if you buy
an odd number of 3-point ranks, but whatever.

Next question: how does this work with partial limitations? Do we just
say a limitation is worth half if it applies to half the power, and not
allow fiddling with different limitations on individual ranks? That
aligns with the anti-fiddliness movement. Or buy it as two separate
powers with their own limitations (which only apply to themselves)? That
seems better for things like extra characteristic only for defense.

I don’t wear sweaters, although maybe I should change that now that I’m older and less cold-resistant. They would always be covered in cat hair, though.

Didn’t sleep well because of my weird chest thing, but it was mostly gone by alarm o’clock, so I slacked in sick to work for the morning and then was okayish. Still no idea what that was, but it wasn’t Covid, so whatever.

Read (graphic novel): Catboy (Benji Nate): An antisocial twenty-something accidentally turns her cat into a person by wishing on a falling star. Hilarity ensues as he is more successful than her and also looks great in her clothes. There is a little progression from one short chapter to the next, but not any plot, just mild hijinx.

Written (game design): 159:

Adding ranks to get enhancements like “line of sight range” and “targets
DMCV” makes the cost of the first die of (in this example) Mental Blast
disproportionately high compared to the second and successive dice, at
least relative to how it is in Hero. Is this actually bad, or just
different? We’ll assume it’s not bad for now, but maybe we need to have
campaign limits set on power ranks, not total ranks.

A while back, we calculated that a point of Def should cost about 1.5x a
die of attack. How do we handle this? Is it as simple as having to buy
three ranks of Def to get 2 Def? It’s not like 6E doesn’t have costs as
messy.

Or would it be better to have power limitations reduce the cost per
rank, rather than granting more ranks? It’s somewhat the same in terms
of getting more ranks, and scales more evenly like Hero. The
previously-mentioned issue with costs getting very small can be solved
with minimum costs for powers, just as for a power that got all its ranks from
limitations in that system. We could use a minimum cost per level
instead although I’m not sure where to set it. The progression
…3-2-1-1/2-1/3… has the steepest slope at 2-1-1/2, where each of
those steps is a halving of cost, and then it’s less for each step
going outward from that region in both directions. Does this mean
the minimum cost per level should be 2? Although if we have an
easily reachable minimum cost per level, beyond which more limitations
don’t save points, we might as well go with the version where every
power has some number of limitations unless you buy them off with
advantages.

I guess that’s true for limitations giving ranks, as well. Once you have
however many ranks the campaign limit is, there’s no point in taking
more. Although it’s technically true even for Hero, since the minimum
cost is 1 point. It’s hard to get enough limitations to reduce the cost
of a free-standing power below 1.5 (or 1.0 if you’re like that), but not
too hard for an ultra slot in a multipower.

Speaking of which, how does this interact with power frameworks? Well,
with multipower, since elemental controls have been deprecated. Rather
than having a pool and control/slot cost, just say that if you have a
set of powers that are mutually exclusive, they get the Lockout
limitation or something similar, and the minimum cost for the most
expensive one of them is 5 and the minimum cost for the rest is 1 (or
whatever values seem good). This is based on Silver Age Sentinels, where
the most expensive attack power was full price but all the others were
one quarter price or something like that.

Same for movement powers, which fufills the idea I had way back when of
making movement powers an implicit multipower: minimum cost 5 for the
movement power with the greatest movement, 1 for the others (or
whatever).

But, free ranks, or reduce cost per rank? If all ranks cost the same, we
have to have things like 3 ranks for 2 Def and I don’t know which is
worse. In fact, if ranks are variable cost, do they even make sense any
more? We’d still have to figure out how to reduce or increase them
proportionally when adjustment powers come into play. (Which may a lot
less often if we make a better way for people to boost their own powers,
which seems to be the primary use. 6E already allows all kinds of powers
to be increased by Haymaker, so a more general Charge Up maneuver might
obviate the need for self-Aid entirely.)

Is it wrong of me to think adjustment powers, beyond self-boosting
and healing, are not really a thing? I guess it is, because even
if four-color superhero games have too many special effects for it
to make sense, we need to account for fantasy games where everything
is magic, low-power supers where everything is psionics, etc. Even
in four-color, a more coherent campaign than we usually had might
include multiple PCs and NPCs with the same special effect, evil twins,
etc.

If adjustment powers are to work in ranks, then ranks do have to be
pretty even, so we probably don’t want to modify the costs a bunch. No
having some ranks cost 1/2 and others cost 5. But maybe having some cost
2 and some cost 3 is acceptable. Having to buy two ranks to get
something, or getting two of something for each rank, is fine, but 3/2
or 2/3 is obnoxious. (Arguably, fractions are always obnoxious.)

I presume they mean people who never manage to accomplish things.

Why do I have weird chest tightness? It doesn’t seem like a heart attack or anything, just weird and annoying, especially when I bend over. I do not approve.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.3-4: Finally, that plot thread from a million seasons ago is explained! Also, more about Navel Laser Boy’s backstory, which is surprisingly relevant to the current disaster.

Read (collection): The Gorgon Incident and Other Stories (John Bierce): Short stories in the world of the “Mage Errant” series, decades or centuries before the main series. We get to see a lot more mages and their weird affinities and how they use them cleverly to gain vast power, so good source material for Kaiju Academy.

Read (manga): MADK vol 1 (Ryo Suzuri): A teenager with extremely depraved fetishes summons an Archduke of Hell to satisfy him, because it would not be okay to do those things to a human. One thing leads to another and he ends up in Hell as a pet/apprentice of the archduke. Despite the violence and depravity of demons, it’s actually kind of wholesome, because the main character’s personal journey is learning is to stand up for himself and his honest (if horrible) desires.

Written (game design): 154.

Maybe if I had more maple syrup, my chest would not feel weirdly tight. Bah.

Read (novella): Christmas Chimera (Zoe Chant): I didn’t know Kit did any of the mythical-creatures ones! This one has wilderness survival and extreme awkwardness as well as the usual fated mates stuff.

Read (short): “First of June” (Max Lavergne): A short crime piece. Or maybe anything involving the cryonics industry is automatically horror.

Read (webcomic): Death-Head’s Deal archives (Niuniente): Secondary-world non-fantasy crime(?) drama. If you make a deal with a Death-Head, they’re permitted to do anything to fulfill it, but then you have to give them whatever they say. Nevertheless, people ask for a lot of things.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (anything): FAIL.

I guess you cover the anything in chocolate after you deep-fry it?

Played (Changeling: the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings hypothesize that Mark’s unending reign as the King of the Summer of 69 is connected to the legendarily disastrous Altamont Free Concert in December of 1969. It’s surprisingly hard to find contemporary sources, but eventually they track down a copy of the documentary Gimme Shelter at a small video store run by a changeling and take it back to Shaun’s to watch. SAN rolls for everyone as they see the Queen of Winter get murdered on camera and fall at the feet of their Fae enslaver!

Read (novel): The Last Echo of the Lord of Bells (John Bierce):The final battle! Things get turned inside-out, people get killed, cities get destroyed, great powers go mad, more people get killed, things that do not spark joy get yeeted, rumors are greatly exaggerated, the end!

Read (graphic novel): Mamo (Sas Milledge): A small town is having trouble with the fae, so a teenage girl goes looking for a local witch. She is only sort of successful, but nevertheless they do find out what’s going on with hauntings and generational trauma and sus birds and kisses.

Written (game design): 187.

I think probably the cats get more rights.

Read (online short): “How Sussie Got His Hat” (CE Murphy): K-Pop Demon Hunters fic!

Read (novel): Tongue Eater (John Bierce): Finally, after hearing about other words accessible through labyrinths and their alien magic and everything, we get to see them. Possibly in too much detail; the travelogue is a traditional fantasy bit, but there was already a plot going on and I’m not sure we needed to spend that much time away from it to admire exotic scenery and watch the PCs be ridiculously overpowered on side quests.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 112.

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

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

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

Written (game design): 185.

Didn’t manage to celebrate this one.

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 508:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 144.

I only ate one bagel, though.

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

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

Written (game design): 236:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 277.