Are there even sysadmins any more? It’s all Site Ops or Dev Ops or whatever now, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely makes me feel old.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.10-11: The one with Sophie and the painting and Nate and Sterling while everyone else is in the previous episode, and the one with the big-box store and Elliott’s backstory.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 2-3 (Nakatani Nio): The one who’s in love is getting more in love, the one who thinks she’s aro (not in those terms) has various feelings, there’s kissing anyway, school life happens, there’s a tragic backstory, etc.

Read (novel): All Roads Lead to the Phoenix Princess: Rebirth as a Wind Cultivator (Erios909): Reincarnation cultivation isekai, in the world of a MMORPG but without any game mechanics. Our protagonist does a lot of murders (arguably justified), uses OP game knowledge, attracts the attention of powerful people due to her unusual nature, starts accumulating a harem despite not showing interest in anyone, levels up repeatedly, all the usual isekai protagonist  stuff. There are obviously intended to be many more books, since there’s five years to save the world from the disaster that sets up the game world, but it’s self-published on Kindle Unlimited, so knows?

Written (game design): 438:

Now that we’ve reduced saves down to a single Save (shades of Perils
& Princesses!), back to HP. Losing HP is some amorphous combination
of fatigue, luck running out, and minor injuries (or other effects)
that don’t add up to a wound. It recovers quickly compared to wounds,
but how quickly? After a good night’s sleep? After a lunch break? After
a few minutes of rest?

It may be ridiculous, but I like the idea of rolling HP each time. The
meanest way of doing that would be to roll when the fight (or whatever
excitement goes against HP, like a trap) starts, but that might be too
much. Maybe roll at a reduced die size if you haven’t had a full night’s
sleep or lunch break? If you roll really badly, you can always take
another rest and reroll. Either take the higher of the roll and current
HP, or keep rerolling until you get a higher number. The latter
encourages people to keep resting until they get a really good result,
but wandering monster rolls and resource limits would keep that in
check.

Rolling HP each round is awfully appealing, though. Obviously with
this option the dice would be smaller than with the result of one
roll having to last a whole combat. It would be another roll each round
along with initiative though, unless we combined them somehow. When
we’re going from low to high initiative, are we actually just going from
low to high HP, giving it an element of battlefield awareness? I like
that, let’s try that.

The range of dice for HP depends on the range of dice for attacks, which
I imagine as being d4 to d10 to start with, like Dungeon World.
Increasing the die size, and getting more dice so you can beat up more
people at once, would be power-ups or advancements or whatever we’re
calling them. Getting more dice of HP would also be an advancement; not
sure about increasing the size of them. Or maybe they don’t all have to
be the same size; if you have 3d6 and to buy a d10, sure, go for it.

I’m okay with armor being a penalty on (appropriate) wound dice, but
what about shields? Extra HP is obvious, but then you also get extra
initiative. Is that too weird? Probably. Maybe a shield is a fixed
amount and only rolled HP count as initiative. And need a new name.