I wonder if that would be any good? Pistachio chocolate seems to sell at twenty bucks a bar for no obvious reason.

I hate self-assessment forms. Also I have to write an upward assessment for my manager, which will be read by her manager and cohort, so it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in putting anything in it.

Read (manga): The Fed-Up Office Lady Wants to Serve the Villainess vol 1 (Nekotarou): Right after getting fired from her first job, a dedicated but hapless office lady gets summoned to be the minion of the villainess of her favorite fantasy game. She really likes her new job, that’s why her heart is always going dokidoki, right?

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 1 (Miyu Morishita): A high-school boy falls in with a werewolf girl who is oddly going to school instead of staying in werewolfville. Cultural exchange and hijinks ensue.

Read (novel): The Regicide Report (Charles Stross): Back to Bob and Mo for what seems very much like the last book of the Laundry series. Many plot threads are resolved, much humanity is cast away, some old enemies show up. The world is still completely fucked up, so there could be more books later, but it doesn’t seem likely, even though it would be interesting to see what things are like after a generation or two of the Black Pharaoh’s rule.

Written (game design): 157:

With all of this, I probably don’t even need to say that I don’t plan on
completely removing the combat system in favor of having the players
talk through plans to overcome each aspect of the opposition that the GM
tells them about. (I think that’s what FKR is.) We want dice to make
things go wrong in a nominally fair way, and we need to quantify
all the crazy stuff from comic books that’s not in the players’ everyday
experience. Quantifying it in SI units is almost certainly the wrong
approach for telling comicbook stories, but we need some way to make
judgements that everyone accepts aren’t pulled out of the GM’s hat and
don’t take people too far out of the game.

As discussed, Hero powers are very inflexible: your 10d6 energy blast or
37 resistent PD does exactly what it says on the character sheet, never
more, and only less if you’re trying to save End or if someone bought
just the right adjustment power (or similar, like Find Weakness). Okay,
this is not quite true, since there are things like Haymaker, but for
the most part, what you have on your character sheet is exactly your
options during combat.

Out of combat, there are skills, which are still pretty tightly
defined, but still more flexible than powers, and players mostly trust
the GM to make reasonable calls about the scope and effect. Is that just
because they know the GM is obligated to get them to the fight one way
or another? Anyway, that’s probably more along the lines of what
I’m looking for.

(I’m being a little unfair to Hero. Unlike D&D, at least you can push
someone off a cliff without needing a class feature, there’s some chance
of being able to intimidate people in cmobat, etc. But I would like more
flexibility, even if I’m unsure what direction to bend in.)

The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what kinds of flexibility we
need. What clever plans will PCs come up, and how can we accomodate the
maximum number of them with the minimum number of mechanics? The plans
are obvious (kinda) in the moment, but absent concrete situations, what
are they like? Using the environment, of course, but that needs to be
either stronger than just punching, or get around defenses somehow. (Do
we have to accept that falls doing up to 30d6 is actually a good thing?
I hope not! Anyway it should be at most three hits of 10d6 or
whathaveyou as the ground gives way.) Psychological warfare I mean moral
suasion. Sneak attacks? Precision attacks? Nonstandard use of powers,
like spreading or haymakering, but modifying them in other ways, like
concentrating an energy blast to get armor-piercing, or something like
AP in the same way spreading is like AoE. Deception, distraction,
bamboozlement? Demoralization? Being demoralized should make you less
effective, but how do we express that mechanically?