Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Only one of those was invented by me.

Apparently I can drop directly into REM sleep in the nine minutes of an alarm snooze. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Socialized too much and only had time for one episode of Anime With Dave.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 1: Ew, smoking. But also, ??!??

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 11 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Genetic coup!

Read (novel): The Sundered Realms (Casey Blair): The start of a different series about a terrifying wizard lady with a traumatic upbringing and her impossibly hot, equally terrifying new boyfriend, in a fractured world where demons are trying to crawl in and eat everything and humans are entirely willing to sell each other out. Magic works by linguistics nerdery, which is always good.

Read (novel): Take Back Worlds (Casey Blair): Conclusion to the trilogy about terrifying lady wizard etc that I started before. Lady wizard manages to get enough people onside, including some of the asshole descendants of the people who caused the problem to begin with, to save three out of four worlds and not actually destroy the fourth (who would have totally deserved it). Marriage, wild magic sex, HEA.

Written (game design): 140:

Or is that only Human Body, and there’s also Human Mind, which
includes skills? It does make sense for powersets to include skills,
since Ninja Training is a canonical source of superpowers. How does
this work? We considered buying ranks in Skills earlier, but never
settled on anything. In most games, a character’s skills have both
breadth (how many things they cover) and height (chance of success)
and it’s usually not a rectangle. Sometimes it’s a triangle (some
FATE implementations), sometimes it’s just a scribble with every
bit of the breadth having its own height. A powerset only has one
dimension– wait, no it doesn’t, some capabilities can be bought
more than once for broader effect. So there are two dimensions
available. But what does it mean to buy Skills as a capability for your
Heat Subtraction 12d6 powerset?

“Mu.” Or, I don’t know, it’s your powerset, you tell me. Start with
the fiction, then buy mechanics to match. I don’t think Human Mind
is actually a powerset, though. Buy a background or training regimen
or whatever as a powerset that has Skills and maybe something else
or maybe not. Talents and Perks are now techniques that have
prerequisites of some number of Skills dice.

Do you need an XXL Pokeball for that?

No gaming, because Ken has family stuff. No extra watching because Marith was asleep.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 10 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The celestial maiden, more consort intrigue, the mysterious shrine.

Written (game design): 217. I feel like I’m getting somewhere with this, but also like I should be writing fiction instead. Probably just the normal self-defeatingness.

Also, For Pete’s Sake, Girls Already Know About Engineering Day.

This morning was full of all-hands meeting. I hope we aren’t betting the whole company on AI.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.10-11: The End! There is nothing to disprove my theory that Froppy and Uravity are married now.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 9 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Getting to the Foreign Dignitaries storyline, plus assorted random mysterious mysteries.

Read (essay): Why All Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Are Historians (Ada Palmer): It’s because they have opinions about how the world changes. Literary people on the slack (so, pretty much the whole slack) had many opinions on this when Marith posted it.

Read (novel): Saints and Monsters (Ellen McGinty): A disabled princess has to save her sister and her Japan-flavored country with the unwilling assistance of a dragon. It was not bad, but could have used 80% less heterosexuality, and probably 30% fewer words.

Written (game design): 192:

It may seem like we’re making techniques into Hero powers, but my hope
is that we aren’t, because techniques don’t let you do anything your
powerset doesn’t already let you do. They just let you do it with fewer
tradeoffs or outright penalties than maneuvers do. Also, they don’t
(usually) grind away at hit points, they inflict conditions, which we
still don’t have a good handle on.

Other vital things we have no handle on: weakness for NPCs/complications
for PCs, skills, normal human abilities, gaining experience. Well, human
abilities are easy: everybody starts with the powerset Human, with
whatever capabilities and dice are needed to get 2d6 strength, normal
vision and other senses, etc.

Also Chocolate-Covered Clam Chowder Day.

Did not go to the office, did do some work, failed to eat correctly.

Watched (internet): Some professional Minecrafters built a lake. It looked like a lot of fun, and makes me want to Minecraft a bit, but I do not have enough brain cells.

Watched (anime): Kill La Kill 1-2: I watched the first couple of episodes long ago, maybe even back when it was still a thing, so when Crunchyroll reminded me I still had plenty of episodes left to watch, I decided to start over at the beginning. Yeah, okay, it’s about as ridiculous as Gurren Lagann, but more naked. (The one male character who might be continuing also takes off his shirt and does romance-cover poses, at least.)

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 8 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Finally the Lakan thing is resolved. He still sucks, though.

Written (game design): 370:

Let’s try this again. Capabilities for a powerset:
– Affects the environment – sounds like it should be mandatory, but
something like Telepathy that only affects people, or Healing Factor
that only affects the character wouldn’t need to pay for this.
– Affects the environment in many different ways – it’s up to the table
to judge this, but we should have examples. Maybe counts double if the
powerset can do almost anything.
– Usable as an attack – anything that affects the environment can do
damage, but that doesn’t mean it can be useful with a half-phase
action.
– Many different attack modes – you get the picture.
– Movement – dice give speed, techniques give things like not falling.
– Normal defenses – everything that would be PD or ED in Hero, plus
whatever the powerset should counter (cold vs heat, etc).
– Unusual defenses – Power Defense, Mental Defense, Life Support, etc.
– Senses – individual senses are bought as techniques, and have a
prerequisite number of dice in the powerset.
– Affect self – for shapeshifting, regeneration, etc. Again, might count
double if it’s versatile.

I don’t know that all of these should cost the same, but that’s a place
to start. We have to handle the Cosmic Variable Power Pool I mean D&D
Wizard, but it should be extremely expensive to have a powerset that
does everything and even more expensive to do everything in a variety of
ways.

When I said individual senses have to be bought as techniques, I was
wrong. If you buy Senses for your powerset, you can half-assedly detect
whatever your powerset involves by spending some time. Techniques will
get you the upgrades like (in Hero terms), Sense, Targeting,
Discriminatory, or 360. Having more than one die of Senses is still a
prerequisite for some techniques, but it seems like it should get you
more than that. Maybe range or general Perception bonuses?

By that logic, being able to attack shouldn’t be a part of the powers.
If you can affect the environment, or some’s psyche or whatever, you
have the ability to inflict conditions on your enemies, but if you want
to bust out the attacks as half-phase actions at full OCV in the middle
of a combat, then you need techniques. This is even more consistent with
multipowers, where the plain 12d6 EB is as much of a slot as the 8d6 AP
EB, etc. However, attacking is a much more significant action than
sensing something, so maybe it needs to cost more? That could be handled
by making the techniques more expensive, though.

(We’ve come back around to my early thought of buying hexes of generic
movement, and then buying movement modes separately. Apparently I will
never not be on my bullshit.)

How about Defenses? If you can affect the environment, presumably you
can put together some kind of defensive measures as appropriate to your
powerset, but maybe not while leaping around in combat. Also, not all
powersets are going to provide generic Def, although hopefully that’s
less of an issue when it’s not just grinding at people’s Stun through
their PD/ED. Maybe Defenses are techniques instead of a powerset
capability as well.

Fortunately Sage was already spayed when she came to live with me.

No office this week, since I can’t miss morning handover due to transit failure. Stayed at home, did some work, learned a little TLS.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1.7: Flum is doing pretty well at filling her house with cute girls, but there are still criminal lowlives and classism causing problems. Also monsters.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 1.7-8: Teenagers are difficult! Adults are difficult! Grief is extremely difficult!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1.7: Another weirdo, also shopping and ninja attacks.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 7 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The large metal beam!

Written (game design): 231:

Setting that aside for the moment, these either let you get something
without the tradeoff, or get more for what you trade (like putting Area
Effect on a power gets you more than just spreading to fill hexes).
Earlier I mentioned needing one to effectively attack, but is that
covered by whether you pay for your powerset to include attack powers?
Probably something as general as that should be at the powerset level,
but maybe those should be techniques instead? If you don’t have the
ranged attack technique, you have to improvise to attack somebody or
something at range, which gives some kind of penalty, I guess? Or you
can’t use all your dice? It would be a maneuver, trading off something
in order to do the ranged attack at all.

For whatever reason, it seems like getting areas of capability in a
powerset should cost per die, so a flat-cost technique shouldn’t be able
to completely make up for that, or maybe not make up for it at all. Of
course you can always save up and add a new capability to a powerset if
you really want to be able to do the thing.

How do we divide up capabilities? And what do you get for each one
as a base without maneuvers or techniques? I still think
offense/defense/movement/chrome is too coarse, but we can split those
up. I don’t think ranged/melee is the right divide for attacks;
normal/special (NNDs, drains) seems better. Defense I’m less sure about
splitting, maybe it stays as one capability. Are mental powers part of
special attacks, or a separate thing? Based on how many special rules
Hero has for them, they probably are their own thing. Movement also
tricky, since the obvious division is speed vs movement modes that give
you extra stuff like Flight. And chrome is not only a grab-bag, but has
things that don’t really correlate with how many dice you have in your
powerset, like Extra Limbs or Enhanced Senses.

If only.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 6 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Jinshi in disguise!

Written (game design): 220:

All of these things need new improved terminology. The high-level
description that has a number of dice attached, like Heat Subtraction
10d6 or Utility Belt Gadgets 7d6 or Druidic Magic 12d6, is called
a powerset. (It could be called special effect, but let’s save that
for the details of a specific action, like whether you’re using
Heat Subtraction to break something by supercooling it so it shatters
under the pressure, or dropping a chunk of frozen air on it.) You
can definitely have more than one powerset. The cost per die depends
on what effects the powerset can produce, so having multiple that
don’t overlap may not even be more expensive than having one that
does it all. This probably needs to be more granular than
offense/defense/movement/chrome, but not necessarily a huge amount
more. Maybe at the level of the Hero 6E powers section where it
groups attack powers, mental powers, sense-affecting powers, movement
powers, etc. We also need to figure out how to apply overall
limitations to a powerset, because this is the monster that never
dies.

The general options of trading off one value against another that
are available to everyone, like spreading an attack (trading dice
for area), pushing (trading side effects for dice or for OCV), or
haymakering (trading time for dice), are maneuvers. This includes
the default maneuver of not trading anything and just using the
power as written.

What do we call it when you spend some points to always be able to do
something even if the GM isn’t feeling it? Are they just applications
because it’s 2026 and there’s an app for everything except tracking
fascists? Not tricks or stunts, since these are the things you pay
points to be able to do reliably. Techniques? Feats? Knacks? Skills is
already taken, obviously.

Right here, of course.

Managed to get out of bed and do some shopping and not much else. The cats have gooshyfood for the next few weeks, though, and that’s what’s important.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 5 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): What, Maomao not in the Inner Palace?! Must be Jinshi’s fault.

Written (game design): 196:

Most applications will use however many dice are in the power, but there
might be some that use less for whatever character reason, so
applications can have at least some limitations on them. This would
include always having a penalty even though you paid for them, but you
would definitely be able to do them since you paid. Another way they
could be limited would be that you can’t use them at the same time,
bringing back multipower functionality, although presumably you still
could do the thing without using your limited application and just
accepting the penalty. Maybe that’s more of a limitation on the power
itself, or a free-standing complication?

What about characteristics? As always, Strength is really a power, so
that’s fine. Def can come from powers, although that might lead to all
characters having the same attack strength and defense strength. But we
want for straight up attacking vs defenses to wear down hit points to
not be very effective against enemies of the same power level, so that’s
fine. What about Presence and Ego, though? Some powers could provide
them, but many wouldn’t. Buying applications to have that be the case is
fine for those powers, but it shouldn’t be the case that everyone else is
fixed at 0. Same for Body and Resilience. I guess most characteristics
need to remain separate from powers, which is fine.

What do you mean you don’t have a pangolin to read to? (Although my pangolin a) is plush, and 2) has an advanced degree in Animal Feelings, so probably can do their own reading.)

I had horrible heartburn all night after staying up too late, so have not been very useful today. I’m not sure whether the burritos were less easy on my insides than wheat tortillas and chicken should be, the chicken that seemed fine despite being in the fridge for ??? days was not fine, or finally getting organ juice again after being off it for a while (thanks, American health care system) was a bit steep.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.23-24: End of the second season! Does Maomao not know what she wants, or does she know and it’s to frustrate Jinshi to death? It’s a pretty definite end to a lot of plot threads, so I’m curious to see where the third season will go when it comes out.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 4 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Back at the departure of the concubine after the garden party of poisoning and intrigue. Apparently this is the end of the first light novel volume, which I could read but haven’t and may not. But may yet!

Read (novel): Azarinth Healer vol 5 (Rhaegar): OP MC is so OP she’s making the system invent new classes. Also saving entire alien species, gaining a third class of her own, etc.

Read (collection): Consequences (Moe Lane): Four short stories about Edwardian monsters, cryptids, aliens, obnoxious gods.

Written (game design): 231:

We need some kind of tables of environmental stuff, like Hero has Def
and Body of various materials, to provide guidelines for how much
Entangle you do get from six inches of water or waist deep mud, how many
dice of zapping a power substation has, etc. The tricky part is that the
environment has to be enough to matter, not a world of tissue paper, but
shouldn’t overshadow powers at whatever level they’re in play.

Do we also need a system for which penalty and how much of it to apply
when someone’s using an application they haven’t bought, to seem fair
and objective? Or is it enough to have a list the GM can choose from, so
they don’t have to make up something new every time? And possibly some
guidelines for how much of each penalty corresponds to a minor, medium,
or severe penalty. Extra penalties for using multiple
maneuvers/applications?

Speaking of dice and powers, do we need to charge more or less for
broader or narrower powers? Every power is effectively a variable power
pool, so the breadth of the special effect does matter, unlike Hero
where it’s only the powers you actually buy that matter regardless of
what your special effect could possibly justify with unlimited points.
Is this where the idea of cost per rank comes in? Powers are now the
only thing we’re buying in ranks, it looks like.

Check! Also Clean Out Your Bookcase Day, which is not going quite as well.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.7-9: The End! Then some epilogue. More people survived than expected.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 3-4 (Shinichi Fukuda): More cosplay buddies for Doll Boy to dress up. They are cute girls, but Cosplay Gal is clearly the main, and so far only, romantic connection.

Written (game design): 132:

Leaving that alone for a minute, what kind of penalties can there even
be? The first few that come to mind are:
– Reduce dice of effect
– Reduce OCV/skill roll
– Require a skill roll, or flat activation roll
– Lose some Stun/gain some Exhausted or other condition
– Reduce DCV
– Can’t use other powers at the same time
– Takes extra time
– Side effect on you, or backblast on people around you
– Drain the power you’re using

There could also be requirements that you have to provide, like water if
you want to make ice manacles but didn’t buy doing that as an
application. If there’s not enough of it, the amount of effect you can
generate might be capped, like if there’s only six inches of water, you
can only get so many dice of Entangle on somebody’s feet.

Also applies to other forms of plagiarism.

Went to the office, ate some noodles, did some work, learned a little kubernetes. Boss³ commented on how I looked at my phone a lot, so I should probably work on staring blankly at my monitor instead.

No anime, Marith is full of mucus.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 2 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal and Traditional Doll Boy go to a cosplay event. Photography and heat exhaustion and lack of modesty, oh my.

Written (game design): 256:

This brings us back to the implicit multipower, I guess. 12d6 Cold
Powers is the “pool”, and then you can pay a few points for each
specific application you can reliably use: make ice manacles, shoot icicle
spears, stomp around as a glacier mecha, whatever. If you want to do
something cold-based that you didn’t buy, then the GM has to agree, and
you may have to take extra time, or make one or more skill rolls, or
find something appropriate in the environment (EG, water if you want to
make things out of ice). The base power is explicitly not Energy Blast:
doing damage is an application like any other, or maybe multiple
applications if you want to do damage different ways, like the standard
energy projector multipower with plain energy blast, AoE energy blast,
AP energy blast, etc.

Is there a distinction between effects, that in Hero would be different
powers, and maneuvers, that are more like advantages? Sticking with our
cold powers example, do you buy being able to freeze things solid
differently than being able to spread your powers out over a larger
area? They seem like different categories to me, and they can be
combined in different ways, but can we do that on the fly, or do you
have to buy each combination explicitly like a multipower slot? Or even
worse, do you have to buy each application or maneuver individually to
have access to them without a huge penalty, but still have a smaller
penalty if you haven’t bought the specific combination? That seems both
harsh and complicated, but it lets players spend points on a lot of
things. Can we somehow make it optional and only very very slightly
advantageous? Or is that too much like designing for a different
audience?

I didn’t even make this one up!

Went to the office, ate some yellow chicken curry, did some work, tried to learn some kubernetes but with limited success. Finally managed to get my prescription filled and picked up, go USA.

In case you can stand finding out about the world around you.

Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 14 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): More magic ninja causing trouble because there aren’t any demons and now the humanoids have to cause their own trouble.

Read (novel): Neverthorn (Shannon Mayer): It’s like one of those dreams where you have to go back to high school even though you’re an adult, only the highschool is like Hogwarts with a blatantly evil headmaster and all your bullies are now teachers and the dark lord is coming any month now. Also, het romance subplot.

Written (game design): 259:

Of course the advice to game designers is not to design games for people
who will hate them, and I guess that has to apply even when I’m trying
to take over the position of an existing game. I’m sure there are people
who both could and would make a game even more accounting-conscious than
Hero, but I’m not one of them, even if I once would have wanted to be.
I’m more of a filthy story-gamer.

Anyway, even if we don’t need everything to be priced optimally according
to the laws of supply and demand, rating things in small integers makes
them easy to work with, so we’ll stick with powers generating effect,
and every 3 effect over the defense raising the condition by one level.
A full-on superhero has 12d6 in their best powers, which is on average
four steps above the base, so conditions go from 1 to 5, with 4
being incapacitated and 5 also having spillover into long-term effects.
Maybe the levels should have names: Kinda ___, Definitely ___, Severely
___, Totally ___, Overwhelmingly ___. Presence attacks and mental powers
don’t in Hero, though, they just have Characteristic, Char+10, Char+20, etc,
which would be +0/+3/+6/etc now. Although we did mention powers having a
greater or lesser effect, so maybe it’s sometimes +0/+2/+4 or +0/+5/+10
instead, in which case we do want names for levels.

If power usage is limited only by cleverness and special effect, then we
aren’t buying specific powers like Hero any more, it’s just 12d6 Cold
Powers or 8d6 Brick or whatever. We probably want to charge more for
more flexible special effects, though. Or maybe for specific
applications of the power? Like in Champions Now, where if you pay
points for something, you always have it, but if you try to claim you
should get it for free because of your special effect, the GM can say it
doesn’t seem reasonable to them.

Also Random Acts of Crab Racing Day.

Went to the office, listened to the thunder and rain, ate some underheated Chinese buffet for Lunar New Year, got nothing from my scratch-off lottery ticket, did some work, got most of the way home and was betrayed by the bus.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 3 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Maomao visits home, which has more mysterious mysteries.

Read (short): “Barbershops of the Floating City” (Angela Liu): Classism, unexplained magic hairdressing, generational trauma.

Read (short): “When He Calls Your Name” (Catherynne M. Valente): I figured out what the name was pretty quickly, but still good.

Written (game design): 394:

I see two kinds of maneuvers. One is like Hero maneuvers, where you
modify what you’re doing: charge up your power to get a strong
effect, spread it out to affect more, etc. The other is based on
what you’re trying to accomplish: grind them down, take them out,
disable their abilities, set them up for a teammate, trick them
into doing something they didn’t mean to, temporarily incapacitate
them, etc. These are intentionally broad and like a PbtA move, you
have to say what you’re actually doing. Are you grinding someone
down by getting them to use their biggest attack until they’re
exhausted? Taking them out by machine-gunning a crowd so they faint
from trauma? Et cetera. But the first is mechanical means, the
second is narrative ends, so I’m not sure these even belong in the
same game.

Is it even possible to allow for cleverness instead of grinding hit points
without becoming a story game? It definitely could be if the need for
cleverness was preplanned and rigorously documented as a puzzle to
solve, but when it’s ad-hoc or even based on player input, how are
wargame players going to believe that it’s fair and accurately priced?
Reducing the granularity of points helps by not setting expectations of
careful accounting, but is it enough? There’s precedent for judgment
calls in Presence attacks and mental powers, but those aren’t the
primary way of taking someone out, so it’s not as much of a problem to
have the GM make up stuff on the fly.

No work today, but I did have to get up to let the cleaners in (they were late), and ride the bus (it was also late) to go shopping, and then do laundry.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 6: Six episodes, three demon lords down! Also, for those who were worried whether this might be a pervy anime, Teoritta briefly takes off her coat.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 6: There is some kind of actual problem with corruption and human experimentation (in the FMA sense), but Flum is busy dealing with petty criminals. At least she has a house now.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 5-6: Makio is not free of problems herself.

Read (short): “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” (Rati Mehrotra): Inexplicable events cause lots of trouble for someone.

Read (short): “Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” (Caroline M. Yoachim): Alien temporal architecture from beyond the gates.

Read (short): “The Millay Illusion” (Sarah Pinsker): Men who said a woman couldn’t be a good stage magician get what’s coming to them, probably.

Read (short): “With Her Serpent Locks” (Mary Robinette Kowal): Don’t fuck with the gorgon, no matter how hot shit you think you are.

Read (short): “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” (Samantha Mills): So many dooms.

Read (short): “Six People to Revise You” (J.R. Dawson): Yeah, capitalism would absolutely charge people a fortune for the privilege of being brain-edited into social conformity.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 2 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): It’s hard being Maomao. But it’s also hard putting up with Maomao.

Written (game design): 152:

Speaking of balance, the effect of using a power cleverly on someone
should probably be proportional to the active points/ranks, just as
(presumably) the amount of Grind Down or KO is. But greater cleverness
should also increase the effect, and different effects are going to get
quantified differently if we aren’t just chipping active points/ranks
off. And then there’s defenses against conditions, or maybe against
maneuvers, which also need to have an effect according to cost, however
that works. Maybe there are weak, normal, and strong conditions that are
different divisors on the level of effect, just like moveby and
movethrough need different amounts of movement to get +1d6? That at
least gives something to come to an agreement on, instead of the GM
making it up out of whole cloth. Or possibly it’s split along some other
axis, but we should definitely have a short list to pick from instead of
having to guess at the magnitude of effect from first principles.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. The extradimensional goon is interrogated, and maybe now the squad knows what’s going on, a little, although people keep saying it’s dangerous for them to learn too much, like the previous cohorts did. The overarching plot does seem to be some kind of memetic subjugation by some kind of hive mind, so maybe that’s true, or maybe adults just kind of suck. Then, back at Skyhold, the squad happens to be near the entrance to the labyrinth when more horrifying bug monsters burst out and attack again. They are put down, but not before the surprisingly tough scorpion monster just about snips Mallipattra’s leg off! Fortunately med student May is right there and a fully-equipped trauma ward is just upstairs, so she doesn’t completely exsanguinate, but she is in no condition to go to the Mid-Winter Ball.

Read (comic collection): Sweet Paprika vol 2 (Mirka Andolfo): Oh no, fake dating turned into real feelings! Who could have guessed that Paprika’s heart is not actually cold and black? Also, whether or not opposites attract, some similarities are definitely incompatible. The End!

Written (game design): 133 again:

No, the different between grind down and KO would depend too much on the
target’s defenses. Better to allow grinding down to take them to zero
eventually, but KO is all or nothing. (For all I complain about to-hit
rolls, it seems weird to have an all-or-nothing maneuver, but now it’s a
choice to gamble, so that’s okay.)

Since attacks that aren’t Grind Down or KO do other things than take
away hit points, they don’t necessarily need OCV/DCV penalties, although
of course the better ones might end up with penalties. Although, since
we want to get away from everyone wielding their own chisel at the pile
of hit points and encourage teamwork, maybe hitting should be harder
without help. Or less effective? Depends on what teamwork maneuvers we
want to have.

The most Hero way to do conditions would be to grind away at the active
points/ranks of the targeted ability, which is a lot like hit points but
at least you’re having an effect along the way. However, there is
precedent for multiplying (double Stun when surprised) or dividing (half
Def against AP attacks), not just subtracting, so conditions could do
that, or teamwork. If distracting someone can let your teammate do
double Stun (so, double effect on Grind Down or KO?), there might need
to be some rebalancing.

Monday is a holiday, so I didn’t go shopping today, I just pulsated grotesquely.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.21-22: All the conspiracies and rebellions and other national-level politics are coming to a head around Maomao. I wonder if anyone will make it out alive?

Read (novel): Take Back Demons (Casey Blair): Sequel to Take Back Magic, main character is actually doing pretty great at restoring Earth, making friends, defeating enemies, getting a hot husband, etc.

Read (comic collection): Gotham Academy Second Semester vol 1 (Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, MSASSYK): I thought I read the first arc of this, but I don’t remember any of these characters except Batman. Everything is creepy and haunted and half the adults have questionable fashion sense and obsessions they’re willing to kill for, so it checks out as being in Gotham.

Written (game design): 133:

Hero, like other games from that distant era, treats hits to locations
as things that just happen while hit points are being lost, or if
you somehow have a reason to aim for one location over another, it
boosts the Roll To Confirm You Wasted Your Phase probability. If
there are effects beyond loss of hit points, then they’re similarly
incidental and based generically on the body part. But we don’t want
“oh, I guess you hit her in the leg” because we’re deemphasizing
grinding away at hit points. We want, “you successfully slowed her down,
now maybe your teammates can do something”, so conditions should be
created from that point of view.

If we’re demphasizing the hit point grind, then it shouldn’t be the
standard result of a combat round, maybe not even the default. “Wear
them down” can be a specific maneuver. Maybe it’s the same as “KO them”
(when they have few enough hit points or whatever), maybe those are
separate maneuvers and you can skip straight to KO if you outclass them
by enough, otherwise you have to wear them down with clever maneuvers
and/or emotional damage I mean moral suasion.

Didn’t go to the office, did do a little work, ate some salad.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. How do you even play this game? Despite not knowing, we got our characters and their chicken Petunia to go on a dream-quest to find the Holy Grail. This is probably related to the other quest about contagious dream-apples, and indeed the first place they get to is a sanitarium where there’s an apple that needs flinging out a window. Also a lot of unconscious people who seem vaguely familiar, which is ominous.

Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 3 (Umi Takase): Much more about gender identity and expression than about orientation or romance, even though there are definite Feelings.

Read (novel): Take Back Magic (Casey Blair): A terrifying ex-mage who was exiled from a magic world because Earthlings have no rights manages to get back in the game and starts trying to completely upend the order of at least 3/4 of the known dimensions, with the help of an unnecessarily hot demon. It’s always nice to see a female lead who is unapologetic about being OP and ambitious, even if heterosexual.

Read (???): Sophie and the ARC of Emonglia part 1 (Maryana Rights): I think this was probably AI? Sort of in the same genre as The Phantom Tollboth with conceptual characters in a mysterious land, cuts off suddenly.

Read (novel): Rats (Craig Schaefer): Third in the “Castaways” series. Our magic students have to go behind the faculty’s backs to rescue their friends who were kidnapped at the end of the last book. Interdimensional adventure, pirates, half-naked rat-ladies, actual civilization, multidimensional mobsters, all the good stuff.

Written (game design): 242:

And what about the effects of conditions? Sprained Elbow and Sprained
Knee give penalties to different but overlapping sets of actions, but if
they’re both just part of Clobbered, how do we keep track of that? Just
throwing on general penalties to everything is arguably realistic, but not
interesting. And what does a -1 to using your leg mean when you’re a
speedster with 30″ Running? We need not just the list of conditions and
variables they have, but the list of possible effects and what they mean
for characters at different scales. To be properly Hero, this should be
related to points, like a rank 1 condition knocks off 10 active points,
but a sprained knee could affect anywhere from none to many powers based
on the details of special effect, and reduce their effect or give a
skill penalty or both or something else.

What we need is prefab conditions that cover all the standard things
(punched by a brick, energy-blasted, shot, exploded, crushed by a
collapsing base, mind-controlled, encased in carbonite, turned into a
toad, poisoned, frozen in time, traumatized by the villain
machine-gunning a crowd, etc) that happen to the standard character
types (living human, elf, vampire, robot, alien, ghost, golem, etc), but
also the ability to make ad hoc conditions for creative things
happening to original character types, which all seem fair and easy to
manage in play, alone or in combination. Should be easy.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some carbs and some chicken guys, skipped out slightly early to get home in time to watch anime.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.4-6: Wow, they did it! Well, half of it, leaving five episodes for the other half.

Read (comic collection): Sweet Paprika vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo): Everyone is devils or angels and named after seasonings, although that seems to be purely cosmetic since everything else is the real world with NYC and cell phones and publishing companies and all. Our MC, Paprika, is extremely horny and repressed and rules her department with an iron fist but neither chill nor work-life balance. She falls for guy, continues to make poor life decisions and terrify her underlings, there are R-rated makeouts but not the right ones, etc. Paprika is kind of a terrible person, but a good character.

Read (novel): The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage (Hiyodori): F/F romance in a secondary world with an actually slightly non-generic magic system. One of the last survivors of a marginalized group from a terrifying magic forest wants to go home to properly bury her aunt and friend before the dominant culture nukes the entire island, somehow gets a crazy hot mage to go with her as bodyguard if she’ll marry her, there’s military intrigue and zombies and gradual revelation of shared traumatic backstory and also girlsmooches.Apparently a spinoff of a series set in the same universe but a different culture that’s differently D/s with their mages and mage massagers.

Written (game design): 221.

Went to the office, ate more carbs and a barbecue sandwich, got my picture taken, did some work.

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 3 (Sumiko Arai): Oh no, CD Store Girl has gained enough confidence to assert her own style even at school, and now everybody knows she’s hot! Also, music festival! They are edging closer to recognizing romantic feelings now that jealousy is a thing.

Written (game design): 153.

Also Teddy Day, which probably doesn’t mean Kit’s Trail of Cthulhu character but really should.

Went to the office, ate too many free breakfast carbs, did some work, ate some Mayan pork and rice and veggies and plantain, stood around the train station for an hour or two while the train recovered from at-grade crossings.

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 2 (Sumiko Arai): Competition? No, not really. Also school trip. I thought the bonus color would change for each volume, but nope, green. Maybe it’s supposed to be a spring green for blossoming feelings? Not that they are thinking more than very vaguely about romantic feelings, when there is so much good music to listen to.

Written (game design): 166.

Although that may be a little weaksauce in these days of Epstein Files. Maybe it should be Revile and Ostracize Men Year.

Since I had to stick around home yesterday, today (after the cats let me out of bed) I had to do three shopping expeditions, each of which ended up being heavier than the last. Oof. I guess it was better than spending another day as a gelatinous blob, though.

Watched (anime): Burn the Witch 1-2: Much the same as I remember the manga. Was the guy that much of a dipshit in the manga? Probably. What even is the point of male characters?

Read (novel): Threads of Fate vol 1 (invayne_): A schoolgirl in magic AU gets tested for magical power at the beginning of highschool and secretly gets nigh-infinite power, with which she defeats the hardest entrance-exam dungeon. Whatever.

Read (collection): Alien Horrors (Tim Curran): Pretty much what it says on the time. Probably all the stories are in the same universe, which is very 70s blue-collar space travel, and leaving Earth is a great way to find horrible monsters to get murdered/haunted/eaten by. Some are just alien beasts, some are alien ghosts, some are from beyond the Singularity. There are not a lot of plot twists; the exact form of their destruction may not be obvious at the beginning of the story, but it’s never that surprising. Just dreadfully creeping.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 100 exactly, which is literally the bare minimum.

But I wrote no kitten words, because I am way too stupid. Instead I got up to start my on-call shift and immediately got sucked into an hour-long customer call. That was annoying, but did get resolved and I went back to bed to read for a while and got trapped under cats (I and I tiny brain, we never learn). Eventually I become functional enough to connect my new computer to my old computer and let it suck out the brains, but that took hours and hours during which they were both unavailable, so I was forced to watch anime. Forced, I tell you!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 5: Okay, there’s a “hero” who should not be left to wander the world on his own. Still probably better than the people in charge of things. But that’s all there is so far, so I have to wait to find out how they get out of the stupid plan!

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 3-4: Orphan girl doesn’t even know what she feels, she doesn’t need people knowing about her parents and expecting her to perform emotions! Good thing they don’t know she was able to work on cleaning out her parents’ stuff without breaking down.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1-5: The girl with all stats at 0 and one apparently nonfunctional ability gets pushed out of the hero’s party and secretly sold into slavery, but just as she’s about to be fed to monsters for being unprofitable, she figures out the way in which her ability actually makes her OP and escapes to become an adventurer. Sadly she cannot escape the turmoil of what the hero is questing against. I can’t tell if her declarations to the other escapee are platonic or romantic. Possibly they can’t tell either. Also being simulcast, so I have to wait to find out the shape of her doom.

Read (graphic novel): Bounce Back (Misako Rocks!): Japanese middle-school basketball star suddenly has to move to America and learn English and try to make friends and deal with the basketball team being mean girls and generally suffer as middle-schoolers are supposed to. Feels like it’s aimed at readers for whom middle school is imminent.

Written (anything): NO COMPUTER.

Not sure what to say about it, though.

No anime with Marith, she has to work a hundred days in a row.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 3-4: More weirdos! I dunno, the convict heroes seem to be a lot better than the legitimate authorities. But, they’ve taken out roughly half a demon lord per episode, so it’s not surprising the legitimate authorities are terrified of them.

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 2 (Miyu Morishita): After seeing werewolf culture in the first volume, the second is mostly just school stuff, with some other mythfolk being slightly weird.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 156:

Are we back to figuring out what “damage” means? I still really like
conditions instead of hit points, but they definitely aren’t as simple
and therefore fair-seeming as a simple number or track. We can make it a
track by having conditions ranked (even if it’s just 0 or 1) and having
X ranks of conditions at one time knocks you out, but what is the effect
of the conditions? I guess we need a list of common conditions described
loosely enough they can cover most interactions of powers and special
effects, and then let the GM make judgement calls which one applies when
someone uses Hermetic magic on the alien slime monster.

What set of conditions will do this? How specific do we want to be? We
don’t want Sprained Hand and Sprained Elbow to be completely separate
conditions, but do we need to note which one it is when we mark the more
general condition? What is the more general condition for each?
“Temporarily injured limb”? “Sprain”? “Temporarily injured
manipulator limb” vs “…locomotor limb”? “Temporary physical damage”?
How do we divide up how permanent the damage is? Is two categories
(corresponding to Stun and Body) enough? Sprain is intermediate
between a bruise and a burn, do we make a third category, or tag every
condition with the step on the time chart you get to make a recovery
roll at? That last one probably has the most Hero DNA but is another
number to keep track of for each condition.

Do we have to have ranks on conditions? It’s probably easier to have
Clobbered:5 than five different clobbery conditions. Maybe the rank is
also the step on the time chart? That would be twice as simple. But then
how do we add up multiple instances of similar conditions? The usual
thing where it’s the new value if that’s higher, or increment the old
value by one if not is probably good enough. How similar do conditions
have to be to stack like that? Going around and around, we come back to
the huge variety of terrible things that can happen to a Hero character
being a good reason to abstract, but I don’t want to abstract
all the way to hit points, because bah.

Sounds like a disaster!

Tried some rain and thunder noise instead of fan noise for sleeping. Not sure it worked as well, but it was nice.

Still coughing when I woke up, so I didn’t go to the office to share my potential germs with the office party.

I forgot how to eat food, but Marith saved me with cherry tomato chicken. I put it over microwave rice and ate it and did not die even a little bit.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1-2: The worst and most powerful (and often craziest) criminals are sentenced to the battlefield as expendable special forces units, because their souls can be dragged back mostly intact from hell when they die. Human civilization with Euromedieval aesthetic and some magitech is being driven back by monsters, ancient magical superweapon in the form of a little girl, etc. Lots of gore and explosions and general violence.

Read (comic collection): Harley Quinn and Power Girl (Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Stephane Roux, Paul Mounts): Power Girl has amnesia due to something in another series, so she’s hanging around Gotham with Harley Quinn when some low-level Batman villains use an alien artifact to teleport them to the Planet of Groovy 70s Free-Love Aliens, who are in a war with the forces of repression. The jinx that ensue are definitely high.

Read (novel): The Initiate (James L Cambias): A man whose family has just been killed by a demon is recruited to infiltrate the cabal of sorcerers who secretly rule the world with absolute power and absolute corruption. It’s pretty traditional magic, calling up spirits by chanting in ancient tongues on the right day of the week, etc, and also traditional is the problem with going undercover in an evil conspiracy. I saw the twist well before the main character did, because he didn’t pay attention to the error messages.

Written (game design): 289.

What do you mean, “whose heart?”? Nobody important!

Walked to the nearer train station now that I’ve confirmed it’s back in service, went to the office, did some work, ate some Thai eggplant with purplish rice, coughed a bunch.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2: Angela (Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, Francesco Francavilla, Kevin Maguire): Even more disjointed and now Angela the hunting angel from Spawn (isn’t that Image rather than DC?) is with them and reality is falling apart. I think this may be why I stopped reading big publisher comics.

Written (game design): 190:

What do we do about players that just want to hit things and win? The
old-style absolutist approach would be to let them fail to get any XP,
but we’re supposed to be more enlightened now. If nothing else, a
failure by the whole team (EG, by following one person’s stupid idea) can
get XP for the whole team.

So if complications aren’t what give XP, how do they work? Psychlims are
just susceptibility to particular Presence attacks such that they cause
damage as well as spending the round aghast or whatever? Or can any
diabolical action cause emotional damage, but characters have some
defense except where their psychlims are holes? Even though it sounds
cool, do we really want to PCs to take random damage when their enemies
do something terrible? If it’s heinous enough, can they be knocked out
(faint)? That doesn’t seem very heroic, at least by modern standards of
heroism.

Also National Trevor Day, but I’m hardly a national Trevor. I’m barely even a municipal Trevor.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken tikka masala. Most of the people who were fired were remote, so we only have one less person in the office.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1: Cosmic Avengers (Brian Michael Bendis, Steve McNiven, Sara Pichelli): Seems like these are the GoG parts of a larger crossover event? Or something? Anyway Iron Man is with them, Star-Lord’s Star-Dad is up to something that probably needs a star-guillotine, Rocket Raccoon makes fun of Earth’s tech level a lot.

Written (game design): 117. Plus tried to write a Python script but I don’t remember how regular expressions work in Python.

Also Brown Dog Day, so extra treats for Bella.

No treats for coworkers K, N, and C and remote coworker S, only pink slips. “Aligning skills with the company’s future direction”, my ass. That leaves two people in the North America team from before Boss³ M showed up, so “not here to fire everyone” my other ass. Not sure what I can do about it, though, and this is a terrible year to end up out of work by making a doomed stand anyway. This is why all workers should be unionized, I guess.

In better(?) news, the package containing my new computer escaped the Memphis Blizzard and was finally delivered, but I don’t know when I will have enough brain cells to move all my 1s and 0s over to it. I recall it being kind of a pain last time.

Marith brought sundried tomato feta chicken and root vegetables to eat while watching anime, which was very nice of her and definitely better than me trying to feed myself.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.2-3: Well, that’s one way to restart a heart!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Black Mould (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Wait, Peter’s dad is white? I’m sure we knew that, but I never pictured him that way. Also, further evidence that jazz is the most magical of musical genres.

Written (game design): 133. Also doinked around with trying to rewrite my character sheet adder-up.

Seems way more tempting than an apple serpent.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Big fight! The lizard swallows Cedric and his lightsaber and rampages around while its rider and his goons try to capture our heroines with nets and bug cannons and shock tridents and complaints about how much Mal swears. Mal is awesome with her spores, Irinia is awesome with her fists, May is awesome with extraspacial conduits, Amalia is awesome with wedgies. The Prussian and his goons are not awesome but there are several of them and they’re well-equipped, so things go back and forth for a while until the first lizard’s hindquarters explode, reinforcements arrive, the assault on the military school fails, and Cedric will now be known as Darth Lizardass.

Then we had to stop gaming to supervise RV maneuvering and then it was time to go home. We got to take lots of XP back with us, though.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.21, 8.1: Go All Might! But we stopping the season in the middle of a fight means an episode that’s mostly recap to start the new season.

Read (graphic novel): Crossplay (Niki Smith): Various young and horny and unnecessarily hot con-goers engage in cosplay and makeouts and sex and not really that much drama. Printed in black, grey, pink, and red, to emphasize the blushing.

Written (game design): 170:

Even if it’s not new, I really like awarding XP for failure and misery,
but maybe it doesn’t have to be done according to explicit
complications. You get XP for making bad decisions, and what those bad
decisions are is up to you and your sense of the character, or perhaps
to the GM offering you a point to play along/you asking the GM for a
point for a playing along. Still need a cap per session, so that the GM
can’t just pick on one person. You don’t get XP for your hunted showing
up, you get XP for getting ambushed regardless of who it is. XP for
losing a fight in any of the ways mentioned earlier, definitely a bonus
award for getting put in a death trap. Maybe you do get points up front
for having a Hunted, or for any equivalent contribution to the campaign
(if it’s that sort of campaign, but if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be
getting to make up a Hunted any way).

Is it really okay for experience to be free-form? I guess it really is
in Hero, it’s just based on how much the GM thinks you won, by vibes,
with maybe an extra point for somebody if the GM (really, the table)
thinks they were extra cool. We could be actually be more organized than
that, and give the GM a small pile of XP tokens for each character,
showing both the cap per session and who has/hasn’t been earning their
XP by engaging with adversity. They could even be different colors if we
cap awards for different kinds of woe.

Also Hell is Freezing Over Day, but none of the things that are supposed to happen on that day seem to be happening. Seems sus.

Didn’t go to a protest on short notice, just went shopping.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.18-20: Looks like it’s time for Jinshi to sack up! So to speak.

Read (webcomic): Accidentally stayed up until a million o’clock reading Questionable Content archives.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 194:

But what about morale? Or trauma from taking too much emotional damage?
Again, could be separate items for the various traumas (this time on
individual sheets), but is some kind of overall value worth keeping?
Probably only in specific kinds of campaigns, since this is more or less
SAN (although it comes from the specific issues instead of them being
manifestations of it). If you get taken out by emotional damage, you get
a temporary psychlim, that decrements with a speed appropriate to the
campaign.

Long-term consequences, even if not permanent, make character sheets
more fluid and not always balanced at a specific point level. This is
definitely contrary to the wargame approach of always building your unit
out of N points fresh before every battle, but entirely fair for an RPG.
And there can be a nominal point value that you relax toward between
sessions, possibly keeping recent changes while getting rid of older
items if that seems better to you.

Good/bad karma should not be a consequence (sorry FASERIP), that’s too
much like bribing the PCs to be good. Favor or disfavor of a specific
supernatural power for specific reasons could be, though.

Speaking of emotional damage inflicted in proportion to psychlims,
should there be a default psychlim, Empathy or Humanity or whatever, so
that everyone can be horrified when Godzilla steps on the kindergarten
even if they don’t have “protective of children” written on their sheet
in so many words?

How do we even implement these psychlims? The old way of doing it,
with how often a complication comes up and how much trouble it
causes when it does, rolled into one number, risks having a bogus
value if the player guesses (or “guesses”) wrong on how often it
comes up, and possibly also if the effect isn’t mechanically enforced,
but it does produce a single value that can seem fair to everyone.
The new way is self-adjusting in terms of how often complications
come up, and puts the burden of bringing them up on each player
instead of all on the GM, but is less quantifiable, which makes it
harder to integrate with the rest of the system. If complications
only give XP, then there’s no obvious place to put a level of effect
for calculating emotional damage.

Are we back to needing an entirely new paradigm, on the level of
“everything has a point cost based on its utility”? Hopefully not
as anti-anticapitalist. Also completely new paradigms are hard, I’d
rather cobble together a game out of these parts I found in this
series of tubes. If only I had an adapter…

There’s an xkcd about this.

No gaming, Ken has surprise inspections at work. No anime, because I am dumb.

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Night Witch (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Same art style, alas. Varvara and her Russianness and other Russian expats who might come to the attention of the police.

Read (manga): Blade Girl vol 1 (Narumi Shigematsu): A teenager despondent over the loss of her foot encounters Paralympians and the running blade prostheses and takes up running.

Written (game design): 398:

PCs need to be vulnerable too, though, and unfortunately the GM already
knows all their weaknesses. I’m not sure what to do about that, since I
feel like PCs and NPCs being written up the same way is important.

PCs and NPCs being written the same way suggests that they should have
the same potential outcomes from a fight, which is technically true and
practically false. The heroes almost never lose a fight, and when they
do, it’s by getting beaten unconscious. NPCs usually get knocked out,
but sometimes surrender or run away.Very rarely, everyone stops fighting
to have a standoff or negotiation, or the entire battlefield gets
upended by a larger villain or erupting volcano or whatever. Ideally,
whatever new system we come up with should have these other
possibilities happen more often, especially the PCs surrendering or
fleeing. Losing and then coming back with a better plan is a classic,
right?

Possibly by definition, having weaknesses makes you stronger than
your point value against opponents who aren’t taking advantage of
them (EG, heroes who haven’t figured them out yet), but weaker
against ones who are. This is pretty much what we want for NPCs
that appear once, cause trouble, have their weakness uncovered and
exploited, and slink away again until they come back with a new
plan. PCs who star in every session can then have relatively fewer
weaknesses (making up for it with other complications, probably)
so their performance is more consistent.

It would also be good to have possible long-term consequences,
non-wargame though that is. Wounds, loss of confidence, curses, unstable
powers, broken foci, broken alliances, bad press, etc. Of course
this should apply to both PCs and NPCs, although it probably will affect
PCs more since they appear in every session, while an NPC can go
off-screen for as long as it takes to recover. Unless the PCs hunt them
down while they’re weakened, and player-driven plots are good. But of
course turn about’s fair play.

How do we mechanize these longterm consequences? Is Reputation a
characteristic that adds with Presence? Probably not, since it can vary
so much depending on who you’re talking to, so it should be multiple
items for all the people who have opinions. Possibly on a team sheet,
rather than individual character sheets.