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.)