Obviously the best day ever, and yet it’s somehow also OK Day?

Read (art book): Beauties Beasts (Olivia de Berardinis, Jordu Schell): One page a painting of a pinup girl, the facing page a photo of a monster sculpture. They’re each fine, but I was hoping for some kind of combination. Ah well.

Written (game design): 135:

What about instant conditions like knockback (as separate from the
Prone condition that usually comes with it)? Is position just a
condition? You’re not where you want to be, but you can spend an
action (or maybe more than one) to change that, and someone can use a
power to make you be in the wrong place again. The story does check
out, but that way may lay completely abstract story-gaming like FATE.

Continuing the tangent, we need some way for ending a condition to be
doable over a reasonable time. You might be powerful enough to break
free of the hardened Negagloop in one mighty surge, but if you aren’t,
there should still be a range in which you can chip away it and get
loose in a few actions, and only when you’re way below that power
level should you not be able to do it at all. We know there’s going to
be some kind of overcharge/haymaker maneuver, but that still makes it
all or nothing. Unless you have to roll up a bit, in which case it
could take a few tries…

The other thing about knockback is that it happens with another
condition, so we need rules for inflicting multiple conditions with
one action, and I don’t think just splitting the points of effect
really works since it’s not linear.

Anyway, what we’re looking for is to have the level, durability,
duration, etc of conditions determined by dice rolls and rules. The
player can make a couple of choices from fixed lists, to set the
nature of the condition, but we don’t want them to make things up from
nothing. This is to avoid both a) players taking the Mentally
Paralyzed condition when having to come up with yet another condition
that optimally leads to victory, and b) players feeling like the
conditions system is completely abstract and they can just make up
whatever. Even if conditions are an important mechanic, we don’t want
them to be what play is about. We want play to be about the fiction.