Went to the doctor for a yearly checkup, and apparently all my numbers are great. This doctor is very big on the protective effects of Mounjaro on various organs, so okay. Also got a vaccination, big globs of wax taken out of my ears, and (eventually) pictures taken of my retinas to see if they’re exploding.
Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings try to come up with a plan to rescue Faizal from his bridge, but can’t figure out where to get enough explosives. Then they go to a party, where Melanie recruits Theophania to quest for the Holy Grail and tells her about a dream. Thessaly makes out with a living candle and judges people harshly, Everett hangs out with his fetch and his girlfriend, Gretchen melts into the floorboards, and Siddy wasn’t there at all.
Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 2 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): A is so smitten everybody except S can tell.
Written (game design): 138:
Another thing I got from my blog reading was not giving rewards for
virtuous behavior, because then it’s not virtuous, it’s just mercenary
on the part of the players. So no XP for saving the day, but XP for
getting beaten up while trying to save the day is fine. Not saving the
day is probably worth even more XP (as long as it doesn’t end the
campaign). No XP for beating up others, though. Definitely XP for
getting captured and put in a death trap, following the rule of only
rewarding suffering in the service of genre tropes, not the tropes
themselves.
Honestly, although I’m trying to make a procedure for deciding how
much XP each character gets based on the shape of their doom, the
time-honored method of the GM saying, “You had a pretty hard time
this session, 4 XP for everyone” has always worked acceptably. Maybe
+1 XP for whoever the table votes as having failed the most
spectacularly. An individual character’s complications just provide
the components for a more holistic view of failure, and who are we
to say the table doesn’t know how to award XP?
In this approach, narrative complications are just notes on how to play
your character, or how to GM for them (that is, what kind of adversity
they need to face), and don’t need point values or other quantification.
Unless, that is, we do want to have variable amounts of emotional
damage.