Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Double miss.

Stayed home, did some work, listened to some twitch streamers playing Minecraft, ate a salad.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.9: The one where the OT3 foil a terrorist attack. I guess we weren’t as cynical about blowing off the law in the interest of alleged national security in 2012.

Read (manga): She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 5 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): They are still cooking and eating, but also moving in together (despite renting an apartment in Japan apparently being super-obnoxious) and even hugging! Also their friend with the eating disorder finally talked to a professional about it. Go them!

Written (game design): 423:

The problem with reading OSR blogs is then I start wondering if
dungeon-crawling might be fun, actually, and whether resource
constraints and inventory limits might make it more interesting.

D&D doesn’t seem to have dungeon crawling any more, just travel
montages between the set-piece level-appropriate encounters, and
for the most part, the only resources are character abilities (since
of course if you were able to buy resources that meant anything in
combat, you’d be OP for your level). There isn’t even a need to
worry about light, since almost everyone has darkvision and almost
anybody can get infinite light cantrips. Encumbrance is so fiddly that
it usually just gets ignored, too. This is why I want darkvision to not
be on the list of options for PCs, and also slot-based inventory (and
not just because inventory slots can get filled with wounds and fatigue
and maybe curses).

What do we expect PCs to do? (Obviously players can do anything
they want.) I like the idea that being able to spend MP also causes
trouble, the more trouble the more adepts you have and the longer
they stay in one place, so PCs either wander or are based out of a
temple/dojo/fortress that’s warded or remote or both. But what do
they do as they wander around? Or more specifically, since this is
heroic adventure fantasy, what kind of threats do they fight? People
who turned into monsters? 13th Age-style living dungeons and the
things that come out of them? Heretics with wrong magic? Celestials
shirking their afterlife duties in the mortal world? Inexplicable
walking dead? Pre-apocalyptic magic that has curdled over the ages
and now does something only vaguely like supporting a highly-advanced
civilization? Alien invaders? Your mom?

Actually all of those sound fun, alone or in combination. (Renegade
angels from outer space! Heretics worshiping an ancient city spirit so
it builds an ever-growing temple! A PC’s relative who has been consumed
by evil deeds and become a manticore!) Not all of them can be fought
directly, but that’s fine. At least some of them involving going into
sketchy confined areas where the inhabitants hate you, so that’s also
fine.

šŸ™‚ šŸ™‚ šŸ™‚ šŸ™‚

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!

Friend noodles!

Went to the office, did some work, ate some dumplings, sat on the phone with a customer but contributed nothing. Also made a dumb mistake trying to help another customer, but did get it sorted.

Marith gave me some of her vegetable vegetable vegetable vegetable chicken so I wouldn’t die. Look, vitamins!

Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 1 (Umi Takase): She’s a trans girl who is publicly out for the first time now that she’s starting high school. She’s her childhood friend who is addicted to getting mad on behalf of others and also is in love with her. Together they fight crime gender norms and make friends. Is it just me, or is Yankee flirting with Anger Goblin?

Written (game design): 385:

I was thinking about doing things to enemies in combat besides scoring
hits to wound them, and wondering why you would bother to do that after
taking the trouble to chew through all their HP, except in very special
circumstances. I might be falling into the fine-grained D&D paradigm,
though. In D&D, if someone hits you with a special attack that knocks
you down, you remain motionless on the floor, with the Prone debuff, while
somewhere between 0 and N-2 other units activate, after which you can
spend some of the few footsteps allotted to you to stand up, move to
another square, swing your sword once, etc.

If I haven’t yet been talked out of having a round be a larger chunk
of combat and actions be simultaneous, though, then getting knocked
down is just a thing that happens during the round, and you can get
back up without having to account for every muscle contraction to
the Time and Motion Consultant. Knocking someone down, or throwing
pocket sand in their eyes, or whatever, is just Aid Another, if
it’s much of any action. I think.

Or maybe the key is that rolling your attack die against somebody you’re
engaged in combat with isn’t an action. You’re in weapon range, you get
to just roll your die (but so do they). Your action is something more
interesting like “keep them away from the wizard” or “push them off the
cliff”. I’m dubious about there being a “fight this guy harder” action
even if it’s not clear what else you would do in a one-on-one duel, but
“fight all these guys” so you can attack more than one of them is
probably valid.

Another list that we need: actual actions while fighting somebody.

    • Defend a person/place/thing
    • Push your opponent back or otherwise position them
    • Open your opponent up to attack by your ally
    • Also attack another opponent
    • Intimidate your opponent (force a morale check)
    • Seduce your opponent (got to draw in those Thirsty Sword Lesbians players…)
    • Play to the crowd
    • Knock something away from them
    • Strike at a weak spot

These are the things that you’d roll for if there end up being
combat action ratings; some obviously use another action like Issue
Commands to intimidate or Put On a Show to impress the crowd.

Got it covered!

Did some work, listened in on a twitch stream of somebody I know who was playing a die-horribly-in-a-haunted-house game with some other people, was not very useful.

No gaming, one person is sick and another had to take her dog to the vet. (The dog is fine.)

Spent all evening trying to get support for my phone so I can resume transferring epubs in the manner to which I have become accustomed, but to little avail.

Read (manga): FAILURE.

Written (anything): FAILURE.

 

Sure, they’re handy and probably deserve a day.

Had to get up early for cleaners, who put things in very odd places but did clean the surfaces as I required.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 34 (Tomohito Oda): The cultural festival, featuring lots of ramen. They’re like halfway through senior year, there can’t be that many volumes left for Komi to reach 100!

Written (game design): 290:

Backgrounds are freeform, we don’t need much of a list, but starting
feats (powers? abilities? schticks?) need both a list of options to pick
from, and (eventually, or maybe first) rules for creating new options.
Although it should probably be point-based, I’m not sure we need costs
other than 1, 2, and -1, at least for the basic list, although I might
be horribly wrong.

What goes in this list? Definitely the physical and magical advantages (or
disadvantages) of ancestries: enhanced senses, talking to animals, being
huge or tiny, breathing water, resistance to poison, stuff like that. If
we’re going classless, then the basic enabling abilities like being able
to cast spells would be here. A lot of D&D abilities like being able to
stab people in the back don’t count, because anybody can do them.
Strength, higher starting MP, starting HP, maybe faster movement (or
possibly the inverse of all of these as disads). Maybe a higher starting
rating for an action. Maybe extra backgrounds. If we’re classless, then
a larger or smaller attack die than the default would go here (otherwise
it would depend on your class, like Dungeon World). Maybe separate
attack dice for melee and ranged and magic, but that depends on combat
to get sorted out.

Earlier I suggested everybody who can spend MP has a natural talent they
can spend them on, apart from any class or class-like abilities, so that
would be a free pick on a sublist here.

If there aren’t any classes, then everything like combat techniques,
spells, opening locks with ki powers, summoning shadow monsters, turning
undead, etc, etc, would be on this list too, which isn’t bad but we
might need to set up a good system of prerequisites.

Also Embrace Your Geekness Day, which is very fitting.

Failed to get up early or be energetic or organized, but somehow made it to Mike’s birthday party in the depths of Palo Alto, saw some people I had not seen for 1d12 months or so (and some people I saw yesterday), ate some party food, watched a game about dragons, eventually got a ride back to San Jose with Ken and Jus.

Jus came up to my apartment and started to make friends with Sage (she received a voluntary sniff!), but Nightvale was not at home to visitors.

Read (novel): Stone and Sky (Ben Aaronovitch): Peter, Bev, and the entire crew including Abigail and her favorite fox try to vacation in Scotland, which of course is full of oceanic skullduggery. Peter opens with “Before we continue, I’d like to point out that a) none of this was my fault and b) ultimately the impact on overall North Sea oil production was pretty minimal.” and that basically covers it. Also Abigail is still the best.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 33 (Tomohito Oda): Sports festival, a very strange college admissions test, various tangential friendship bits. You can do it, Komi!

Written (game design): 464:

That’s actions (which still need a better name, maybe Moves if the PbtA
baggage isn’t too unwieldy?), what about backgrounds? I see three types:
professions, social circles, and regions.

Professions, or maybe better called occupations, since they don’t have
to be profitable, are straight-forward. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,
Spy, Huy Braseal Civil War Reenactor, Woodsman Woodsfighter,
Courtier, Courtesan, etc. Not sure about things like Monster Hunter or
Dungeon Explorer, but that’s a matter for individual campaigns. As
mentioned, this is susceptible to the “Occupation: Literally Batman”
issue, but because it doesn’t give bonuses, only avoid penalties, maybe
it’s not that bad. Alternately, we could make a list that people have to
pick from, but that seems like work. An occupation background is
appropriate for doing the things that occupation does, knowing about
famous practitioners of it, assessing the things it works with, etc.

Social circles are any group where status carries the same markers
and the same jargon is used. Depending on the campaign, this might
be Nobility, Criminals, Horse Tribes, etc, or it may be broken up
more: Nobility of the Central Kingdoms, Nobility of the Coastal
City-States, etc; or even Nobility of This Specific City-State,
Criminals of This Specific City-State, Horse Tribes of the Grey
Banner, etc. The more fragmented the setting, the smaller the
groupings, mostly. A social background is appropriate for dealing
with members of that group socially, recognizing other members of
the group and assessing their status, etc. It also gives you whatever
language is used in that group, or maybe a couple.

Regions are similar in that how much a background covers depends on the
campaign: could be Forests, Forests of the North, This Specific Forest.
Cities also fall under this, but are pretty much each their own region
unless they’re very close. A region background is appropriate for
wayfinding, hunting or otherwise gathering resources, knowing what
resources are available, knowing what threats are there and how to avoid
them, etc.

A starting character should get one of each, and probably a couple of
extra slots to reflect complicated backstories.

I used paper bags to take books to the used book store, but then had to take more than a quarter of them back home. Used reusable bags for grocery shopping and taking watermelon snacks to anime.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 20-21: The party tries to integrate Izutsumi the ninja, with limited success, but then they get to the Heart(?) of the Dungeon(?). Not sure how they’re going to end this, since this like volume 6 of the manga and we’re almost done with the season.

Read (graphic novel): Huda F Are You? (Huda Fahmy): Autobiographical story of a hijabi Muslim girl who moves to Dearborn, which despite being full of Muslims is not any less horrible, because being a teenager always sucks (Had time to read all of this while waiting for my books to be processed at the used bookstore, so I didn’t buy it, but not bringing a book in is as good as getting rid of one, right?)

Written (game design): 343:

Do we need a list of actions? (Eventually.) Do we need a better name for
them? (Absolutely.)

    • Attune to the Flow of the Universe – see the unseen, recharge MP
    • Craft Something – build a shelter, repair armor, smith a sword
    • Creep Around – hide, sneak, grab things when no one’s watching
    • Get Over There – leap chasm, swim moat, climb cliff
    • Heal an Affliction – wounds, disease, poison, curses
    • Issue Commands – lead troops, interrogate prisoners, orate stirringly
    • Mingle with Crowd – blend in, don’t stand out, pick up gossip
    • Put On a Show – bardic performance, distraction for the ambush
    • Scavenge Something Up – search the room, hunt for food
    • Sway Hearts and Minds – make friends, subtly grill people, seduce dragons
    • Tinker With a Machine – pick locks, disarm traps without wrecking them
    • Wrangle a Beast – befriend wild animal, bait for guard manticore

That’s 12, which is about the smallest number I was expecting, so I’m
probably forgetting something. I could add some for doing fancy combat
tricks in melee/ranged/magical combat, but I bet we could fold that into
the attack roll.

These all have an implicit “under pressure” attached, since if you have
an appropriate background, all the needed tools, and ample time (ie, 0
difficulty), you don’t have to roll and it doesn’t matter what your
rating is.

Another thing that makes no difference when coding the video game
version but could matter to players: does every character have a rating
in every action, or is there a default for everything they don’t
specifically have? For that matter, does everybody have the same set of
actions? Maybe some characters have special ones like “Perform Ritual to
Empower Equipment Against Demons” or whatever their special deal is. We
don’t want those to overlap with the basic moves, though; narrative
positioning to use those in weird ways is the province of abilities
(which also need a better name).

NPCs can definitely have just the important actions and one for
Everything Else, to keep the load on the GM low.

Apparently I’m not British enough.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.7: The one with the car guy and the Mafia guy.

Read (manga): FAILED. Because I suck.

Read (novel): The Lies Arcana (Glynn Stewart): Seventeenth or so in the missiles-in-space-with-magic series, following the diplomat we picked up in the last couple of books and the spy ship captain from a while back. Despite the massive undertaking from last book, there is a whole lot that needs to be done, and also some secrets revealed both in and out of character.

Written (game design): 274:

If HP is Hit Protection, is MP Magic Protection? Conjuring up a
lightning bolt to throw at someone probably goes against their HP,
since you’re trying to hit them with something, but trying to put
a curse on them, or otherwise targeting them as a person, could go
against MP. Is using the same stat for defense and fuel bad? On the
one hand, it would cut down on the numbers on a character sheet (or
the associated postit note for numbers that change a lot), but on
the other hand, it would be a weird dynamic in combat. I’m not sure
spending HP for martial abilities is correct when it’s defense and
not health, or ever, so there could be an annoying inconsistency,
but I’m not sure it’s not, so ugh.

An alternate flavor for MP could be synchronization with the flow of the
cosmos, which gets disrupted when you push on the cosmos to do magic.
The hit from overspending might be more wild magic-flavored than soul
damage-flavored, but otherwise the implementation would be about the same,
just less metal.

Another difference between HP and MP would be that HP can be recovered
in combat, or at least pretty immediately outside of combat, since
it’s “just” energy and alertness. I’m not sure how fast MP should
recover, though. Maybe it’s okay to also recover quickly? It depends
on how much you can do with a spell, I guess, that determines how
powerful being able to cast spells all day is. What does “powerful” even
mean when there’s more to life than level-appropriate encounters?

Every day is kitten day, for every nation! [gavel emoji]

Went to the office, had a chat with New BossĀ² A (he did most of the chatting), had a chat with Newish BossĀ³ M, ate a Beyond Meat wrap, finally made progress on the thing I’ve been putting off. The explanation for Former BossĀ² B’s dismissal was kind of sus, but I don’t know enough to refute it.

Beyond Meat sounds like it should be delivered by TARDIS from the far reaches of the continuum.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.10: Despite all the changes made for TV, it did end in the same place as the first book, so that was good. There may have been Feelings. Also, set design! I hear a second season has been approved, although no idea when it will come out or what it will cover.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 3 (Sai Naekawa): Rival girl monster makes a strong showing with the dramatic gesture!

Read (short): “Hart-Struck” (Murphy Lawless): It’s an entire Virtue Shifter novella compressed into one scene!

Read (manga): Lonely Castle in the Mirror vol 5 (Mizuki Tsujimura, Tomo Taketomi): The dramatic conclusion, in which we find out what everybody’s personal deal was, and also what the deal with the castle was, and what happens when there’s a wish and everything. The End!

Read (short): ā€œRapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathyā€ (Martha Wells): A non-Murderbot (but ART) story, somewhere between Artificial Condition and Network Effect, where we see what kind of stuff ART’s crew gets up to and also maybe ART has a feeling.

Written (game design): 372:

Other magic I don’t like, even though it does something instead of
plusses, is remove curse/dispel magic. A proper curse should take more
than a single generic spell to get rid of. Likewise, unenchanting
something enchanted should take more than a single abracadabra. We spurn
the level-appropriate adventure, negative (or positive!) consequences
don’t have to be gone by the next morning to keep everything calibrated.

I also dislike detect magic, although that might be a matter of
presentation. We need more enemy mages appearing as hundred-handed
god-monsters in the astral realm and fewer color-coded arrows, but that
may be a lot of work for the GM.

Related to remove curse, I want to unify curses, diseases, and poisons
conceptually and mechanically, but I’m not sure how. It’s either a minor
issue that can be put off, or a key to the entire system.

For that matter, I don’t even know exactly what to do with the kind of
wounds PCs are expected to accumulate. When the enemy’s attack roll
exceeds your remaining Hit Protection, you take a hit, but what does
that mean? Are you out? Do you go through some degrees of woundedness
before being taken out? Should there be something like a roll modified
by how much attack exceeds HP, so that a better attack hurts more? I
like that because it offers the possibility of varying the results based
on whether you’re a huge dragon, or a slime zombie with no vital organs,
or whatever.

A lot of OSR systems have Dismemberment & Disfigurement tables, or
something named very similarly, to roll on when you take a serious
wound, but I may be too attached to my characters being cute to go for
that. We are assuming some kind of healing magic, though, so temporary
disabilities are fine.

I don’t think I want healing in combat, but that opens up the whole can
of worms about what magic is available and how fast it can be cast. It’s
not fantasy adventure without fireballs, but ritual magic is overall
more interesting.

Alas, I am old and useless and only have fictional horizons.

Went to the office after vacation, discovered that BossĀ² T was gone (which I had expected) but also Former BossĀ² B, which was not expected! He was my favorite! Bad company! I am not sure what happened there, but I do not approve! Nothing I could do, though, I have no power and am on a different continent. Ate a burger, did a small amount of work.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 2 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): Our MC accumulates more cute and powerful girls in a way that is not explicitly gay but is suspiciously homoerotic and definitely ridiculous.

Read (novel): The Void Ascendant (Premee Mohamed): Despite the ending of the previous book, our main character is still stuck with existence, and fate isn’t done with him yet, as he will soon discover. Further interdimensional shenanigans ensue, until reaching an even more definitive conclusion than before. Probably.

Written (game design): 176:

Before I digressed, I was going to say that it’s lame for magic items,
or spells, or magic in general, to give plusses. Magic should give
narrative positioning, so you can do things you couldn’t otherwise
(which if we stick with the system from earlier, is expressed
mechanically as dice of Difficulty). As a
side effect, maybe they can give you a higher action rating for
something, but as previously mentioned, it should be a flat value. In
summary:

BAD: this item gives you +2 to Scrounge for doing the thing
MAYBE: this item raises your Scrounge score to 15 for doing the thing
BAD: this item removes 1 Difficulty when you do the thing
GOOD: this item serves as the tools needed for doing the thing
GOOD: this item lets you read any language needed for doing the thing

I guess that’s how languages work now, just +D on social tasks if you
don’t share a language.

Last day of vacation. I took four bags of books to the used bookstore and only had half a bag rejected, got my medication sorted out so hopefully I can both not die and not poop until I want to die, and did some additional shopping that I failed at yesterday. It was a reasonable fake Sunday, but I had no sundae.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Everett is at work, leaving the rest of the crew at loose ends. Siddy declares she needs a walking stick, so everyone goes to ask Troll if he knows where to get one, and he shows them how to use BART tickets to get to the Goblin Market. Poor Siddy has some PTSD flashbacks from having once been sold at a goblin market herself, but manages to buy a walking stick without getting trapped into any unwanted bargains. Thessaly does not put the moves on the stick vendor dryad, although she clearly wants to. Theophania checks out the book stall, but it seems a little sketchy so she decides to maybe come back later when she knows more about this, and comes up with a clever plan to get materials for Siddy to make her some new shoes. Nobody is sure exactly what Longfingers has been doing.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 1 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): An office lady works herself to death and gets reincarnated as an immortal witch who can just chillax in her extremely low-risk corner of the LitRPG world. Unfortunately for her, the XP adds up, and eventually somebody realizes she is the most powerful ever. Now she can’t chillax because cute girls (or monsters in the form of cute girls) keep coming to kill/serve/challenge/entreat her and she has to adopt them all and also fight dragons.

Written (game design): 307:

In OG D&D, one of the main paths for advancement was famously More Stuff, by
which we mean magic items. Equally famously, a lot of that was to get
More Plusses: +1 longsword, +3 plate mail, +6 headband of intellect. (I
like the way 5E does this better: a headband of intellect doesn’t give
bonuses to stack on top of the different-colored bonuses you already
have to Int, it just makes your Int 19. This is an approach I want to
use heavily when we need bigger numbers.) To be fair, there are a lot of
additional abilities as well: necklace of fireballs, lyre of building,
vorpal sword. These days, those are mostly spells that use a dedicated
pool of charges to be tracked separately, but whatever.

If spending magic points is wearing away your own soul, how do magic
items work? Do they have domesticated spirits inside them to do the work
of magic on the user’s behalf? That works with the 5E thing of magic
items possibly breaking if you use the last charge, although working a
spirit to death is a lot darker than just wearing out a tool. It could
also be that the magic item only provides the pattern, and you have to
do the magic yourself to stamp it into the fabric of reality. That’s not
as good for items that just do their thing, like the vorpal sword, but
it does remind me of my idea from long ago where spells were astral
tools that you had to equip, so a powerful mage would look like a
many-armed idol with a different symbol in every hand.

Every day is Chocolate Day!

I slept way in (and had more dreams than when I was sleeping in Roseville, which suggests I need to fix something here) but did manage to go chocolate grocery shopping and read Katalepsis. Should probably have done more shoppings, but whatever. There’s always tomorrow.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.9: We thought there were ten episodes, but nope, looks like the end! Also, Dr Mensah has reached the levels of badassery she started with in the books.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 20 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, finally a new volume! It’s mostly recovery over Christmas vacation for all the characters after the last plot arc, plus small talk with the gods of Britain, foreshadowing of doom, mistletoe smooches and talk of romance, etc.

Written (game design): 366:

One thing I noticed about Pathfinder that’s probably not as annoying as
the others is that you have to recalculate every number on your sheet
every time you level, because level is the most important aspect of your
character. It would be unseemly for a 1st-level character to get more
than +1 in any bonus type, but by mid-levels, you have to be able to
stack bonuses to roll skills at +30 or +40 (or so I hear). Over here in
the land without level-appropriate encounters, we don’t need
ever-increasing target numbers–hey, we don’t even have target
numbers!–so do we even need levels? There are two things that come with
levelling up: bigger numbers, and more/better abilities. And I guess more
uses of abilities, which is a combination. Since we have a single value
for magic points instead of different trackers for every ability, the
equivalent would be reducing the cost.

Since spending MP is doing damage (to your own soul) I was thinking
it should always be random; costs are d2, d3, d4, d6, etc. It’s
magic, you can never be certain how much you can use without hurting
yourself, or whatever taking a hit from overspending MP is. (It has
to be painful, so casting a spell for 1d4 MP when you only have 2
left is a hard decision.)

It’s hard to quantify some aspects of how much D&D characters improve
from level 1 to level 20. Since NPC numbers improve as the
appropriate level for the encounters improves, the chance of success on
a skill or attack doesn’t change much (until you get to things like
expertise in 5E), but they get about 13-15x in HP and something like
5-10x in weapon damage (spell damage is just a mess with area effect vs
various groups, damage types and resistances, etc), which seems like a
lot. HP (Defense? Guard?) and attack dice are more a measure of skill,
though, so I guess it depends how many regular soldiers a hero is
supposed to be able to hold off for how long.

Watch me agonize about how much characters should improve and then end
up recreating the D&D curve.

Continuing my streak of failure for the ten thousandth consecutive year!

Ate waffles and sausage, ran the stuff that Ayse and Ken and kids forgot out to them before the drove off, played Daybreak again and almost lost due to a lack of good cards but barely won, found some more stuff that was left behind, and finally trundled back home in stages. It was a very nice vacation and I feel kind of dumb for not going on Memorial Day. Next visit is probably Labor Day, unless the whole US is doing a general strike that day (which we probably should unless the Nazi fucks implode more quickly than anticipated).

The cats are doing fine because Marith took excellent care of them.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 3 (Chomoran): It’s the culture fair where both leads have to wear a maid outfit, but ML is kind of into it. Also he has just enough time to give some backstory before the next huge monster attacks.

Written (game design): 306:

I spent the long weekend talking to people about Pathfinder, which
seems to be like D&D3E with all the things I hate magnified. Most
classes are spellcasters and also have a bunch of unique powers
that are basically spells but use slightly different mechanics and
each have a completely different formula for how much you can use
them. For a new character (I didn’t work my way through the SRD to
higher levels), most spells give a small bonus to one or more of
the ten thousand numbers on your sheet, which has a specific color
so you have to look up the stacking rules to see if you can get
that other bonus. Some of the spells are worse than that, like the one
that lets you unstabilize a dying creature who’s been stabilized, when
any bozo could throw a rock at them for 1 point of damage. Racial
stereotyping modifiers include penalties to ability scores. The action
economy includes new kinds of actions that you have to fit into your
turn to make sure you’re getting the maximum ROI. There are at least
three different kinds of AC for to-hit rolls. Etc, etc, etc.

I’m sure there was a time in my life when I would have loved making
spreadsheets of different types of bonuses so that I could work out the
largest legal combination, but I no longer care about the difference
between a 75% and 80% chance of success, certainly not enough to spend
more than a single second scrounging for that extra +1.

Ken had a good metaphor: “If people cooked for their friends the way
they game with their friends, they would read ‘add oregano to taste’ and
feed people infinite oregano, meeting any complaints with ‘it’s in the
rules as written, you have to eat it’.”

How is Josh that old?!

Ate butterbraids until my arm robot told me to switch to bacon, watched people play Race for the Galaxy, splashed my feet in the pool, met Jus’s friend Seth who now lives in Sacramento somewhere, played a lot more multicar disasters with the toddler, ate some good chili and also some birthday cake. Kate showed up, which she usually doesn’t do until after we leave. So many people!

Played (board game): Monty Python Fluxx. Only half a game, I did terribly, I couldn’t have won because I had the Knights Who Say “Ni” for the whole time. It’s Fluxx, it doesn’t have to make sense.

Played (board game): Lords of Waterdeep. We had both Kate and Ayse, which was nice. I came in second, but I feel like I actually earned it instead of everyone else dragging each other down, so that was also nice.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Can’t really celebrate Independence Day until we shake off the tyranny of Russia.

For no explicable reason, I am the toddler’s favorite for “Come. With. You.” I would rather hear people talk about gaming, but what am I supposed to do when I’m needed as a backstop for Matchbox car disasters (“Uh oh. Oh! No!”)?

Engaged in important summertime activities like splashing my feet in the pool (forgot my swimsuit, but actually sitting and splashing was pretty nice), eating grilled skewers and potato salad, and watched fireworks.

Marith reports that the cats got into a cupboard and flung some bowls onto the floor. As cat crimes go, this is pretty minor, but sheesh.

Played (board game): Sagrada. As always, I thought I was doing okay at the beginning but ended up with blank spaces and a terrible score.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

I guess I did okay at staying out of the sun today, since I was mostly riding in vehicles and then lurking inside a house.

Specifically, Dave and I rode Amtrak to Sacramento and then Al picked us up and drove us the rest of the way, and then we hung out admiring the cute toddler and his lack of proper indexical usage (tug tug “Come. With. You.”) The other usual suspects were there, we ate Chinese food as is the customer, and then Dave introduced a select few of us to his new favorite game, Daybreak.

Played (board game): Daybreak is by the same designer as Pandemic, but it is simpler, shorter, and a lot more winnable, because humanity could actually solve the climate crisis. It also has pretty nerve-wracking elements, like the tipping points and mystery problems every round, so I can see why Ken considers it too stressful to play, but we won on round 4 with three n00bs.

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

Sadly, all piloted by the Loch Ness monster. In further depressing news, it’s Second Half of the Year Day, which means we are now and forever more closer to 2050 than 2000.

Went to the office, ate some scallion pancakes rolled around meat and veggies and some sesame balls, did some work, got notes in everything that might become active before next Wednesday, set my email and Salesforce to OoO.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.5: There seem to be a lot of guns around for the UK, but I guess most of them are coming from the government thugs. I have definite hopes for who gets shot next.

Read (short): “Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow” (Shveta Thakrar): The power of stories, and also snakes.

Read (novel): The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks): Another in the recent subgenre where part of the world goes weird, in this case Siberia, although it has a Great Train running through it to have steampunk capitalism vs mystic landscape.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 4-5 (Ajiichi): Love confessions all over! Apparently there’s only one more volume in which to get everything sorted.

Written (game design): 329:

D&D combat is very much putting all the pieces, whose rules are
public knowledge, onto the chessboard in plain view of everyone,
each in their own square, and then taking turns moving exactly one
piece at a time from square to square and applying one of its rules.
There are definite advantages to doing it this way: when the sorcerer
takes her turn, the barbarian is absolutely in this square and the
evil pharaoh is absolutely in that square, so there’s no question
about who’s in the nine squares of the thunderwave. Easy for newbs,
consistent results, no need for judgment calls. But there are board
games for that, some not even explicitly based on D&D.

I want something that’s slightly more like being in a haunted cave
while a giant worm monster and its pet sewer cannibals try to eat
your face. It’s still a tabletop game, it’s not going to be that
much more, but some would be nice.

Instead of having each unit activate, take its turn, and then freeze
again, we can separate declaration and resolution. From worst initiative
upward, each character declares what they’re doing, but they can declare
they’re getting involved (either for or against) in something that’s
already been declared. Then everything gets resolved more or less at
once, which may involve some judgment calls on the part of the GM as to
how far the human charging toward the wizard gets before they get
intercepted by the war bear, or what have you. This does want a new
initiative roll every round, so we might not want to have everyone
do double-digit addition ever time. My hope is to make a round a larger
chunk of the combat, though, so a heavier end/beginning of round
procedure might not be as bad.

Positioning should be looser, not down to the minimum space a
medium-size combatant occupies. I don’t know whether we want to be
as loose as 13th Age, which has zones of one standard move, and
then combatants can be engaged (adjacent) if they’re in the same
zone, or at a specific point like blocking a doorway, or just
somewhere in the zone. Maybe like 10′ zones, so anyone in a zone can
interact with anyone else if they want without having to take a move
action? That might still be too finicky, though.

Happy merry to all my Canada friends!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: This episode, Thessaly and Everett and Longfingers help Black Shuck ambush the lizard-pigs in the Hedge by chucking rocks at them and running away to where Black Shuck can grab one and do something unseen but doubtless horrible. It’s a terrible plan, but it works out okay. Siddy and Theophania have a much less exciting time staying ahead of their lizard-pigs until the bells drive them away. Everyone reconvenes at the coffee shop.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 3 (Ajiichi):Still rereading. Now there are four girls all having feelings at each other, while on the school trip and in the hotel bath.

Written (game design): 284:

Spells that don’t do damage are even more unclear. Having two sets of HP
(physical and mental, typically) is something that’s been tried, but the
advantage to focusing on one track is so great that no one ever bothers
with the other. If we want to use the same mechanism, then it has to be
the same pool of HP, so everyone is as resistant to being turned into a
frog as they are to being fireballed or stabbed.

But on the other hand, what does it mean to cast a spell, or to resist a
spell being cast on you? In D&D, most (non-damage) spells fizzle because
there’s always a save to prevent anything from happening at all, as well
as the save to have the effect end after a round or two. Obviously you
can’t have debuffs ruining the calibration, but we don’t care about
that, and we also spurn the concept of to-hit rolls, so do non-damaging
spells just work, at least initially? When the victim’s turn comes up,
they can try to shake off the effect, which might require a roll or
something, but when you cast blindness on somebody, maybe they’re just
blind. Kind of a lame spell otherwise, right?

It should still be possible to resist a spell, but that can be a
specific thing, like casting protection from magic on someone before
sending them to rush the enemy wizard, or being a fireblooded sorcerer
when someone casts wave of icy death. Possibly ties in with my idea that
anybody can buy an amulet that protects against one instance of a
specific harm before burning out. Naturally, if you carry more than one
amulet, none of them work.

When they’re the same day, that’s probably bad, but maybe better than looking forward to the 2028 elections. Anyway, it’s also National Ice Cream Soda Day, which reminds me that during the summer I could get low-sugar ice cream and diet root beer and make parasite floats.

The construction noise was not as bad tonight. Either having the window open less helped more than I expected, or they were using a smaller jackhammer.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 1-2 (Ajiichi): Reread since I got more volumes and then realized I didn’t remember which high-school yuri this was. Turns out it’s the one with the hot fashion gyaru and the wallflower otaku who don’t really get each other, but are shunned by their former friend groups for even trying.

Written (game design): 406:

If there’s no saving throw vs stabbing because Hit Protection stands for
all the factors that keep a character from getting taken out the first
time someone attacks them, then should there be a saving throw vs
fireball? Probably not, but what about vs batrachian transformation? vs
demonic possession?

Among the things I wanted to get rid of was the two separate systems
for determining whether an attack is successful. (That’s one of the
changes 4th ed made that was superior in every way except reminding
grognards of the old days.) Like ability scores and then abilities,
I then wondered whether we need any attack rolls at all and decided
we probably don’t. There’s already a damage roll, which can make
the attack awesome or lame; requiring another different roll to add
a chance of it being super-lame seems redundant. (Not an original idea;
Into the Odd and other OSR games also skip the to-hit roll, letting HP
turn a bad damage roll into a miss.)

Since HP is not getting hit, rather than absorbing damage one way or
another, the roll is more like accuracy than damage, and probably not
weapon-dependent. I don’t want an attack action to be a single blow
anyway; I much prefer the Dungeon World approach is “so you’re fighting
this guy; how’s that going for you?”. (Various D&D editions have said
various things about what an attack action includes, but bigger weapons
do more damage per round, and monsters with multiple pointy ends get one
attack roll for each, which shows that it really is very close to one
roll being one swing.) This works well for melee combat, but less well
for a single big attack like a spell or a black-powder gun.

Definitely one of the world’s great inventions.

My errands did not go as smoothly as they would have if I were competent, but I did eventually get them all done. Sweatily.

Ugh, nighttime jackhammering on the next block. I put on clothes so I could go find out what their deal was, and they say the jackhammer is only through tomorrow night. After that, they bring in the heavy equipment.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.4: Wow, these people are terrible. I guess it really must be impossible to fire civil servants in the UK.

Read (graphic novel): Rainbow vol 2 (Sunny, Gloomy): I hadn’t read this far in the Webtoon, so it was all new but still cute except for horrible mothers. Also, the end! I was not expecting it so quickly, but two big fat volumes is not that short, and the lesbians and their dog got some happily ever eventually.

Written (game design): 352:

What is a hit point, anyway? In war games, it was how much abuse a unit
could take before it lost cohesion or sank or otherwise became
irrelevant to the battle, which is fine, especially when you have
several or many units to deal with. Not as great when the unit is a
single person you’re allegedly identifying with, which is why early D&D
had the arguments about whether losing hit points meant running out of
luck or getting wounded, and how to square either view with what happens
when a 15th level fighter falls off a 100′ cliff. More recent editions
seem to treat hit points as a video-game health bar, where running out
means you’re defeated but otherwise there’s no meaning to any value or
change in value. Even getting the “bloodied” tag at half hit points has
been dropped.

Several OSR games like Cairn and Into the Odd have redefined HP to be
“hit protection”, which is what keeps you from actually taking a wound,
which is at least implicitly option A. Other games relabel it as
“guard” or “defense” or something along those lines, same thing. I like
this approach in general, although requiring the victim to make a saving
throw vs stabbing to avoid a wound instead is very tempting. It would
make combat way less predictable, though, which is more realistic but
less gameable.

Some games have variable HP: if your class and level give you 4d8 HP,
then you roll 4d8 every morning, or even at the start of every battle,
and that’s what you have. I find this idea entertaining, although
players who always roll below average might not. For extra fun, don’t
roll until the first time you get hit.

I am definitely not going with the suggestion I found on one OSR blog
that you start with a lot of hit points but can never regain them, so
your fate is always approaching. There are games where that would fit,
but I’m pretty sure this is not one of them.

I like tapioca, but I might be weird.

Took four bags including all my D&D3/3.5 books to the used bookstore and got nothing back, yay. Successfully shopped for lunch and groceries and books, which was enough errands for one day. Marith is back from the fjords and also not dead from travel, so we were able to visit people and hear about Ayse’s new job and how humans are the worst part, and also about Jus’s love life and how humans are the worst part.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 19: A new ninja joins the party! Also, dream magic.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 205.

Fuck yeah, Wobblies!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.6: The one with the 70s flashbacks and the twist.

Read (manga):I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 4-5 (Yutaka):The overnight study session episode, which veers more into standard rom-com with accidental contact, unintentionally hot borrowed clothes, jealous fiancees, etc, but then back to doing bad things and fraternal conflict for a bit before the summer festival yukata episode.

Read (novel): A Broken Darkness (Premee Mohamed): Our viewpoint character has not really moved on from his feelings at the end of Beneath the Rising, but that’s too bad for him because the world is in danger again, or maybe still, and the person he hates still has some claim to being the only person who can fix it.

Written (game design): 245:

Something the OSR talks about is “tactical infinity”, the idea that you
can use actual tactics (ie, cheating) and have it be effective. D&D
gives lip service to this, but clever tactics can’t actually be more
effective than the abilities granted by your class levels, or you’re off
the power curve and the level-appropriate encounters aren’t appropriate
any more. This isn’t so much of a problem in a home game, but D&D as a
branding entity wants to have a consistent experience across the
published adventures, Living Whatsit sessions, etc, so no incentive to
encourage going off-label.

By the same token, opponents are limited, not just individually to the
actions on their character sheet, but globally to some set of mechanics.
If the GM sets up a battle against ghosts that are immune to physical
damage, that’s not cricket because then everybody’s attacks they got
from their level don’t help and the calibration is off. However, if we
yeet the idea of level-appropriate encounters and having to fight
everything in set-piece battles with only what’s on your character
sheet, it’s fine. If you can’t beat up the ghosts, you can go around them
or come back later with exorcism incense or buy them off with cow blood
or just not go that way, there’s probably nothing interesting over there
anyway.

Hopefully includes air conditioning for our friends on the East Coast!

Went to the office, the train worked out okay going but I need to change it up on the way back, ate some meat and veggies and rice and tea egg, did some work, told other people how to do work.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.8: Uh oh, Murderbot has a plan. And yeah, I thought we hadn’t had the name reveal until now!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.5: The one with the cheerleaders and the federal government. It seems pretty obvious what Nate’s plan is, but we don’t know his motivation yet and there’s probably a twist.

Read (manga): MurciƩlago vol 7 (Yoshimurakana): The unwholesomeness from last volume is still going on in the background, but now Kuroko has an entire terrorist organization to murder, so that should keep her occupied for a bit.

Read (manga): I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 3 (Yutaka): Oh no, someone else has noticed that our heroine is smoking hot and apparently also bi!

Written (game design): 320:

Leaving the primary spell-casting classes aside for the moment, what
other combined classes do we need, if we need classes? Fighter,
barbarian, and ranger are basically the same, they just have different
combat feats/fighting styles. (D&D rangers have spells, but I think
that’s just shoehorned in because as previously mentioned, everything is
spells. Two-weapon fighting and animal companion are more central to the
class.) Paladin and monk are more magical, but again, it doesn’t have to be
spells. Innate powers seem just as fitting, and possibly there’s not a
difference between those and advanced combat feats. Again, I’m okay with
nobody being able to claim punching through a brick wall isn’t magic.

There’s a school of thought that holds that D&D jumped the shark
when thieves were introduced. Suddenly, there’s a class that has
Climb Walls, Read Scrolls, and Backstab on its sheet, which means
all the other classes don’t. 3rd ed somewhat reversed that by
making most of those things skills that any character can have, but
the idea that you can do what’s on your character sheet and can’t
do things that aren’t was pretty firmly embedded.

The major thief ability that didn’t get turned into a skill is Backstab,
which has also gotten progressively genericized until now it has nothing
to do with stealth or surprise or distraction, and just gives a damage
bonus if the thief has a buddy nearby. This is as lame as calling them
“rogues”. It’s not that great to make only one class able to get an
advantage from ambushing people, though. Stabbing your enemies in the
back is a basic tactic, not a superpower. So, thieves are part of the
fighter superclass, differentiated only by the feats they take.

That’s another thing we need a list of, or several lists, or a tree or
something.

Not sure I have anything witty to say about vitiligo.

Finally went in to the office, ate a barbecue sandwich, did some work.

I have not been gastrointestinal since not shooting up on Sunday, so I need to contact my doctor. Ugh.

Trains are weird for at least the rest of this year. I should probably figure out how to take the bus up to the other train station, even though it will probably require me to get up even earlier on commute days. Ugh.

Read (novel): These Lifeless Things (Premee Mohamed): Decades after the stars were briefly right, a young academic reads the journal of someone who lived through those years and tries to find evidence to corroborate it. Humanities researchers get no respect.

Read (manga): MurciƩlago vol 6 (Yoshimurakana): Yikes, that was very unwholesome and completely lacking in redeeming social value!

Read (anthology): Cooties Shot Required (ed Scott Gable, C Dombrowski): Anthology of stories about children in very unusual, often horrific, situations where adults are of no use. Mostly fantasy/horror, some SF. Not all end well.

Written (game design): 298:

Probably due to my exposure to Champions at an impressionable age,
I’m leaning strongly toward building characters (point-buy etc),
but I have an unreasonable fondness for the idea of discovering
characters (random generation). I also like the idea, don’t know where
it started, of using the same rolls that generate, eg, hit points (more
on those later) inversely to generate starting stuff. Like, if you roll
a 1 for HP, you get a giant clockwork dragon to eat your enemies, but if
you roll a 6, you get only an unsightly duelling scar. This needs a
table for every rolled attribute, for every class, so it would be
impractical here with a dozen or more skills times an unknown number of
classes, and it’s not even what I want here. Or rather, I can’t have
everything all at once. Probably.

I’m not sure how many classes we have. D&D has to rigidly structure
classes to make sure every character of a given level can defeat the
same level-appropriate encounter by expending 25% of their resources or
whatever, but if we give up on that, we don’t have to care as much.
(Maybe not none, but definitely less.) Is everyone who learns spells
from some kind of patron the same class regardless of whether the patron
is an ancient tree (druid), a demon (warlock/wizard), or an ineffable divine
presence (cleric/bard)? I would tend to say yes. Then everybody who has
innate powers can be the same class, but are they even that different?
I don’t see why you can’t have a mix. Probably need some way to keep
everyone from becoming a useless generalist, but otherwise maybe we
don’t even need classes.

Excellent day to play Changeling!

Coworker K has returned from vacation, so we are not quite as short-handed. However, boss T is leaving soon, as the new overboss (metaboss? hyperboss?) makes changes to return the larger organization to what it was before new people came in and made their changes. Business, manne. It’s a scam from top to bottom.

Read (manga): FAIL. Tomorrow for sure, since I have to commute.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94.After surviving a night in the Grotto, the changelings split up to try to find some more information on this Queen Salome of Winter. Thessaly, Gretchen, and Everett head up into the Berkeley Hills to try to find the Cypress Yard where Salome buried something. Up in the actual hills, above the eccentric but mundane Berkeley architecture, they find an ancient stone wall ending in a spiral that is definitely a gate into the Hedge, but they have not managed to open it when Everett spots a black dog sneaking up on them. Remembering Black Shuck, the anti-gate-usage terrorist activist they met immediately after returning from Faerie, he gets everyone out of there, but Black Shuck intercepts them further down. Luckily he does not feel the need to punish them for messing about with gates, but he does warn them off the gate, which is particularly dangerous today because a hunting party came through it. Then he recruits the three of them to help him get one of the hunters. Meanwhile, Siddy and Theophania have snuck into the UC Berkeley library through the steam tunnels to see if they can find out what became of Salome. Before they can find very much, though, some of the scaly faerie cops invade the library, with dogs and also a picture of Theophania. Theo and Siddy combine their magic powers to get a senior librarian to throw the lizard-pigs out for not having a warrant, but it’s time to beat feet. They meet the fabled white alligator of the steam tunnels (his name is Sir Hiss, he’s kind of nosy but a fellow nerd) who tries to help them escape, but everywhere they see the outside, those damn lizard-pigs are there.

I got to try to turn people on to The Ancient Magus’ Bride, because it has a church grim, so that was good.

Written (game design): 222:

If there’s a curse associated with being able to spend magic points,
then it needs to bother bystanders; if only affects the adept, then
there’s no incentive for The Man to not forcibly initiate an army of
adepts (need a better name here) and just let them suffer between doing
40-person raids on dungeons or whatever. It should probably also get
worse the more there are hanging around together, so they don’t go off
and form their own miserable cursed society away from everyone else. But
what is the curse? It has to be pretty generic, maybe just attracting
monsters and meddling deities.

If large groups can’t form, though, that makes it hard to have dark
academia wizard schools/temples, though, so maybe fixed locations can be
warded. They’re also a known place people can come and bother you if
they need help, though.

Speaking of meddling, in Kala Mandala the PCs aren’t members
of an adventurers’ guild or anything like that, they belong to the
Bawan Meddling Association. Should adepts be treated like
tricksters/holy fools? That’s probably too much setting for the game
itself, but could go in a default setting (equivalent of Forgotten
Realms, but again we’re way beyond any feasible planning horizon).

Not that typewriters are used much any more, but I wonder what the original inventor of QWERTY would think of how ubiquitous keyboards are today?

Having two people out is super-annoying, although it’s not actually too much work. I’m just lazy.

I have accumulated enough manga that I need to start reading one every day, I think. Or rereading, as the inevitable has happened when I started going through books to get rid of.

Read (novel): This Princess Kills Monsters (Ry Herman): A whole bunch of (original, Grimm) fairy tales overlapped, but mostly the Twelve Huntsman, from the perspective of the bride who gets rejected in favor of the previous bride (this is not a spoiler, the book starts with a recounting of the fairy tale up to that point). It has so many great characters, it has so much fairy tale nonsense, it is great. Also more people should listen to their talking lions, although maybe with several grains of salt.

Written (game design): 330:

In D&D every monster is a member of species. The wicked witch who
lurks outside the village? Just one member of an entire species of
monsters that look like creepy old ladies, whose natural habitat is dark
woods near cultivated farmland. (There’s a closely related species that
lurks in foul swamps near villages.) This red dragon may have specific
plans and goals to play its part in this adventure, but it’s much the
same as any other red dragon of the same instar. Etc. Obviously this
works well with needing a lot of standardized monsters to build the
level-appropriate set-piece battles, but it goes back to the beginning
of geeks playing D&D (so, all the way) because geeks love classifying
and explaining things and writing dungeon ecology articles in Dragon
magazine. I can’t say it’s not a valid approach to fantasy, but for a
game, it seems insufficiently fantastical. (This is more a reflection on
me than anything else, obviously.)

I wouldn’t go so far as the suggestion of one OSR blog to replace every
instance of “a” monster with “the” monster, probably. It’s more
important that monsters not be natural, because if they are then they’re
animals or foreigners or maybe aliens, which aren’t monsters. (Yes,
earlier D&D had foreigners as monsters, but we don’t need that; we have
White House press releases.) A dragon that hatched from an egg laid by
another dragon and hunted for food until it reached the Young Adult
stage is not as interesting as one that was human until the lust for
gold overcame it. There was another blog (or maybe the same one) that
recommended having monsters be somehow the result of social conditions,
so killing them doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Yay! It’s a day for me! I’m a stupid guy thing!

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: The sending to Renwick’s grad student doesn’t produce any results after an entire fifteen minutes, so the Reshelving Squad sets off into Bibliospace. Somewhat later, as they cross the vast empty savanna of young adult romance, they see giant scavenging books circling in the sky way over there. It seems like a long walk, but Lilli conjures a divine meerkat that indicates that’s the way, so they go, and find a grad student, half-dead from the lack of serious literature, crawling across the landscape. This is Hannibal, Sophia Sharpe’s research subject assistant, who has been sent to find them and lead them to Renwick’s. This works great until, while fording the famous Stream of Consciousness, they are all swept away by a surge of best-seller nonsense and washed into a deep cavern on another plane. Which plane? The Library of Sobek-in-Chains, where Bob the Mummy sits on his throne, lording it over his army navy of crocodiles, and dominated in turn by the dark overlord Walter, of course! The fight is not much fun, because Bob has very annoying magic and everything is difficult terrain, and poor Lilli gets death-rolled, but Grimm can subvert the other crocodile, and Walter is only there in the form of seventeen books in a trenchcoat, which Lilli’s shoggoth is optimized against, so eventually Pergamum prevails. Finally, the Squad arrives at Renwick’s. Of course he can work out a variant on the spell that will trap Walter forever, but of course he needs someone to go fetch the fourth book of a famous three-volume set first.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.6-7: Well, this is going quite far afield from the books! Also, the armor is giving SecUnit black-bordered word balloons.

Written (game design): 235 of rambling nonsense:

D&D defines a broad genre, but only a few elements of setting: wizards,
elves, swords, drow, dragons, dwarves, taverns, gods, ancient ruins,
orcs. (Maybe this is why it’s become the default Generic Fantasy setting,
although being amplified like a virus in video games and being adjacent
to LotR probably helped too.) It leaves open who the PCs are, at least
in theory, although somehow being an adventurer usually overshadows any
background and everybody starts with the same 3d6x10gp or standard class kit
or whatever. Is having the PCs set apart by their ability to use magic
consistent with this or not? They usually set themselves apart by their
behavior anyway, even if the GM has some idea of Renaissance social
roles (D&D hasn’t been medieval in decades).

The overarching question is, what do we need in order to replace D&D?
(Not worldwide, I don’t have that much hubris; just at one table.)
Anti-canon ancestry covers most of elves, dwarves, orcs, drow, etc,
unless someone is deeply attached to a specific feature from a specific
D&D edition that I don’t like (ie, darkvision). Any game can have kings
and castles and swords of one shape or another. I guess we’re back to
figuring out what wizards, gods, clerics, etc are like. Oh, and dragons,
because I also have opinions on how everything in D&D is a species
and/or one of an unlimited number of the same.

Also Mermaid Day. Now I’m picturing mermaids riding giraffes, which seems like it could be a Dali painting.

I am feeling better today, so I went shopping and ate a sandwich and read the new Katalepsis chapter, as is my custom. I didn’t try to get up early and take books to the used book store, but that’s a newer tradition and not as strong.

Went to see Shakespeare in the Park’s interpretation of The Tempest as a D&D game, complete with bad dice rolls and Final Fantasy battle music. It was amazing. I managed to get tasty olives from the deli that I rarely go to because it is very busy, despite it being very busy so we could picnic delightfully, and also like a million people from the Palo Alto wing of the social circle were there because Rue (who was in my Scum and Villainy game a million years ago) was working tech.

Read (collection): No One Will Come Back for Us (Premee Mohamed): Collection of horror shorts, many with Lovecraftian monsters but also more Earthly old gods that still require sacrifice. Horrible things under the sea, a crossover with Beneath the Rising, lots of doom.

Written (game design): 245:

If it’s possible to give people the ability to use magic on purpose, why
doesn’t everyone have it? They could, it works for Runequest, but that’s
a long ways from D&D. Depending on how hard it is to learn a spell (or to
manipulate an element, or however we divide up magic), maybe it’s not
unreasonable for everybody, or at least most people, to have their one
thing they can push with magic. But, I sort of want PCs to be set apart
by their weird powers, so let’s go with only a few people have magical
ability. Some possibilities (which could overlap):
– magical initiation is difficult/expensive/classified, so only an
established temple/magic school (again, is there any difference
there?) can do it
– magical initiation is unreliable, so most people of the appropriate
social class do it but only those “blessed by the gods” succeed
– magical initiation has to be intense/traumatic, so most people
don’t want to try (although young people are notoriously foolhardy,
so maybe that doesn’t work)
– magical initiation is dangerous and there’s a good chance of
ending up cursed/crippled/dead
– undergoing magical initiation puts some obligation on you, either
socially or magically
– there are downsides to being able to use magic (attract monsters,
poltergeist effect, surrounded by a creeping aura of dread, etc)
Any of these would tilt the balance of magic wielders in favor of
weirdos who got their magic points the hard way.

Or Winter Solstice on the other side.

Still gastrointestinal, bah. I do have to eat and drink to sustain life, but nothing seems much like food or beverage.

Marith has returned from the fjords, un-be-whale-eaten.

Read (novel): Beneath the Rising (Premee Mohamed): He’s a normal teenager, she’s an incredible prodigy who is revolutionizing the world and may have just destroyed it. Together, they have a globe-trotting monster-fighting adventure where he mostly has no idea what’s going on but doesn’t like the SAN loss (along with many other extremely reasonable feelings given the Cthulhoid circumstances). It’s hard being a sidekick.

Written (game design): 254:

I listed academic magic and divine magic separately, but I think that’s
actually something that started with D&D. John Dee, pretty much the RL
archetype of “wizard”, used his ancient Aztec scrying mirror to talk to
angels. Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistes weren’t secular either. In
fiction, Merlin was half-demon; Gandalf and Saruman were maiar, angelic
creatures. Even in swords-and-sorcery stories, the sorcerers have
ancient tomes of forbidden lore, but they get power from worshiping
extraplanar prehuman abominations.

In original D&D, clerics were lightly reskinned Christian priests, and
certainly there’s precedent for Christian paraphernalia warding off
magic, but that’s usually faeries and pagans, and there isn’t really any
of that in D&D, just a generic protection theme to clerical magic
(except against the undead and literal demons). I’m good with discarding
Christianity entirely from any game that’s not explicitly historical
anyway.

Not sure where this is going. Before, I had divided the spellcasters
into wizard-type and cleric-type, but maybe it’s actually warlock-type
and sorcerer-type, depending on whether the greater power teaches you
spells or modifies you to have innate powers.

Then we have to figure out what spells are and how they work. Ritual
magic, enchanting or creating tools that can be used fast enough to be
helpful in combat? Vancian casting, which is kind of the same thing?
Summon spirits and keep them in cages until you need them to eat your
foes? Of course not all spell usage is combat, but usually out of combat
you have time to do the whole ritual.

I shouldn’t underrate it, but Juneteenth would be a more compelling holiday if the 13th Amendment didn’t legalize slavery to this day.

Working so everybody else can take the day off, which is why I didn’t have to work last Friday. Looks like a lot of customers also have today off, though, since there is not a lot of work coming in.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.3: Unsurprisingly, the person in charge of spies is Too Clever By Half (the extra half is thinking that nobody else is clever at all).

Read (fanfic): Take These Tower Stones (hermitknut): Non-canon sequel to The Goblin Emperor, covering the next year or so of Edrehasivar’s reign, from various points of view. It did not entirely please me for reasons that are hard to articulate. I think it’s that the author clearly wanted to get the AO3 tag and the other AO3 tag in there, and did, but they were just events without much of a narrative arc? Which obviously is an example of noticing most readily in others the faults we ourselves have.

Read (short): “The Name Ziya” (Wen-yi Lee): An antimetaphor (reification?) of the colonized giving up their identities for success in the colonizers’ world, and seeing their culture appropriated as fashion.

Written (game design): 223:

There’s no such thing as an hereditary ability to use magic. Anybody
can learn to do magic if exposed to the supernatural: cursed by a
sorcerer, near-death experience, lost in the cursed wood for three days
and three nights, haunted by ghosts, kidnapped by faeries, even
deliberately inducted into a wizard school or priesthood. Most people
don’t have an experience like this (and don’t want to), which is why
they aren’t PCs.

Everybody who can spend magic points (soul points? attunement? mojo?)
has something they can spend them on to push their natural abilities,
chosen at character creation. Extra movement or talk to animals or see
ghosts or something, not fireballs. Again, could be due to your ancestry
if you want to spin it that way, or a leftover from your origin story,
or whatever. That’s another list to create, along with actions, starting
feats, and saves. We haven’t even gotten to classes yet.

Earlier I was complaining about all classes casting spells the same way,
so how do we fix that? What spellcasting classes do we even want? Since
spellcasting is no longer how all powers are implemented, we can ditch
ranger and paladin, leaving wizard, warlock, sorcerer, bard, cleric,
druid. Four groups: magic from a higher power, a weird power, being
part monster, or actually learning spells with your actual brain.