Category: Life of a Space Parasite

It me.

I’m backup on-call today, as I often am, but today I used it as an excuse to lounge around home and be completely useless. I supported local business by getting takeout Chinese lunch, I guess.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 1.19-21: I think we have now had enough revealed that we should understand Jinshi’s ancestry and position and general endealment, but I don’t get it. I also don’t get what’s going on with that guy who sucks. Did he think Maomao was not going to figure it out? Was he surprised she took so long and got hurt?

Read (manga): 7th Time Loop vol 3 (Touko Amekawa, Hinoki Kino, Wan∗Hachipisu): The princess combines a few of her many past-life classes to impress people, engineer a better society, and reform someone’s warped personality. Little if any progress on the central mystery of the whole affair, though.

Written (game design): 222:

One other way I just remembered to reduce dice rolling is to only roll
the first up to N dice and the rest add a flat 3.5 Stun and 1 Body each.
I’d make N something like 4, so the normal human range stays variable
but the superheroic range is faster to play. Something like this could
also help with adding extra dice for movethroughs and such for the
previous two ideas, but I don’t think it’s enough to save them.

Can we make a system for beating people up that isn’t hit points?
We only kind of succeeded for the fantasy game, and as said earlier,
superheroes probably need even more abstraction. On the other hand,
nickel-and-diming the brick over multiple turns, while possibly
“realistic”, isn’t that much fun.

As far as getting beaten up goes, the statuses are unhurt, stunned, knocked
out, dying, dead. Plus the intermediate values between unhurt and
knocked out, and unhurt and dying, where you aren’t worse off but it’s
easier to move you to the bad status. This isn’t considering
transformation attacks, mental attacks, entangle, mental paralysis, etc,
etc, although perhaps we should be trying to unify physical, mental, and
presence attacks (which is, yes, getting back to conditions, because I
am a filthy story-gamer).

I don’t have a lawyer, although I probably should.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.8-9: The one where Hurley has to cool the mark, and the one with the Effective Altruism polycule. Parker, or maybe Riesgraf, had way too much fun with that.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 15 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That particular alien invasion might be over, but something is definitely up at school. First, though, the grandma and her metal exorcists have to help a haunted student. It’s still not clear to me whether anyone except the PCs notices any of the rampant destruction. Also, a lead on the missing golden orb.

Written (game design): 246:

Looking at option #2, you could roll 3d6 for any effect roll. If
you make a 8-, great, you do well above average (5 Stun per die).
If not, if you make an 11-, good, a little above average (4 per
die). If not, but you still make a 14-, then a little below average
(3 per die). If you can’t even make that, then it’s well below
average (2 per die). Body is always Stun/3. (For an even distribution
it should be more like 8-/10-/12-, but 8-/11-/14- numbers most Hero
players already have in their brains.)

Or if we wanted to combine with the success roll, say every odd number
showing on one of the dice gives you a bump, and a 1 gives you another
bump. (Or reverse if you think only rolls that were easy to make deserve
to do better.) That’s 4/6 bumps per die, so 3d6 gets an average 2 bumps,
min 0, max 6. That range is too large for 1 per die, so it’s 2.5 Stun
per die plus 0.5 per bump. Body could be Stun/3, or dice-2 +1 per bump
with hard bounds of 0 and dice*2.

These both use a lot fewer dice, and the calculation can mostly be done
ahead of time (except when something like a haymaker or moveby adds
dice), but it’s more table lookups and the curves don’t match that well.

Isn’t that missing the entire point of nachos, though? You need the cheese and sour cream!

Bus was late even though it wasn’t raining. Went to the office, heard through the grapevine that Former Coworker T was fired for poor performance, which is a) bullshit and b) possibly grounds for a lawsuit, ate some green curry chicken, did what seemed like a lot of work. Train was late on the way home.

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.3-4: Wow, Charlie is just relentlessly imbecilic. I think Marith’s right that this is the season where she’s going to drive everyone away. Also, Alastor backstory, much less sympathetic than I expected, and also full of mystery. No songs as good as “Gravity” but the Pentious/Cherri remote duet was nice. Jus will be glad that her waifu Velvette gets more screen time.

Read (novel): Into the Labyrinth (John Bierce): This is the series that Jeremy is stealing heavily from for our current campaign,but he also stole lightly from it for the previous campaign (the book Great Library is cooler, alas), so it keeps giving me flashbacks. It’s very heavily about the magic system. The main character is a boy with low self-esteem, which, yeah, relatable to likely readers, but did we have to? I think this is the same guy who wrote The City That Would Eat The World.

Read (manga): After God vol 6 (Sumi Eno): Still in the non-Euclidian palace, more Obikawa tragedy, some Tokinaga revelations, even some Waka backstory.

Written (game design): 349:

This finally brings us back around to the question of rolling a huge
pile of dice for effect rolls.

On the pro side, we know it’s playable, it produces the 3.5:1 ratio
of Stun:Body we’re used to, and it’s not complicated. It also produces
quantitative (or “quantitative”) numeric damage which is easy to apply
to anything, animate or inanimate.

On the other hand, it’s a lot of rolling and adding (movethrough!) for
results that aren’t particularly distinct, as is usually the case with
hit point systems.

There are a few ways we can approach this. Obviously the downsides aren’t
a complete dealbreaker, so we can just accept them in exchange for the
upsides. Roll between 2 and 30 dice, add up Stun and Body, away you go.

Second, we can try to come up with an easier or at least faster way to get
results in the same range, even if we don’t get every possible result.
(Does it actually matter significantly to gameplay that a 10d6 attack
could do either 37 or 38 Stun? Probably not.) EG, we could roll at most
3d6 and use a table lookup or some other operation to expand that range
of results to a reasonable range for more virtual dice. For bonus
points, we could combine this with the success roll, so 3d6 tells you
everything you know. EG, have a base Stun and Body per virtual die, and
then add a certain amount per die for every 1 you roll on the dice for
the success roll. (Or for every 6; maybe you should only get the extra
effect if the success was easy enough you could roll badly and still
make it.)

Or, we could change what an effect roll does (and probably how it’s
rolled). This probably comes down to conditions instead of hit points,
or maybe a short track of statuses. We need to keep some aspect that’s
strongly but not perfectly correlated with the number of dice (or ranks,
or however we rate an effect) for things like escaping from grabs and
maybe knockback, as well as the usual lethal and non-lethal damage.

Also National Love Your Red Hair Day, which I can no longer celebrate, and for the Brits, National Gunpowder Day.

Traffic was terrible because people already forgot how to drive in the rain. Went to the office, found out it’s Coworker T’s penultimate day, ate some pickled daikon and coleslaw and crispy chicken guys, did some work. Got home and it was already entirely dark, because it’s hibernation season.

Read (manga): After God vol 5 (Sumi Eno): We find out a lot more (comparatively) about gods and their interactions, some of it exploitable by humans but none of it actually good.

Written (game design): 215:

As previously mentioned, I think the idea of getting separate Stun and
Body values from one effect roll and applying them individually against
defenses so that heroes can get knocked out without taking much if any
Body is pretty slick. However, in Hero, Body track is half or less of
Stun, which is a little awkward for combining them into one
characteristic as previously threatened. Not insurmountable, though.

If we track damage by counting up rather than tracking remaining hit
points by counting down, then when the total of getting clobbered plus
getting murdered is more than your Con, you’re out, that’s simple (and
includes the old rule of losing one Stun for every Body you lose). But
then we have to say you’re dying/dead when you’re at half Con or
some other less obvious value. But wait! You don’t actually die until
you’ve taken twice your Body (reached negative Body equal to your max),
so if killing damage is more than half Con, you’re just bleeding. Half
Con is also the most damage (killing + normal) you can take in a single
hit without being stunned, so at least it’s not just a spurious value
used in one place for no good reason. It appears spuriously in two
places, which makes it a real value worth tracking.

Looks like NYC got their socialist! Virginia and Georgia repudiated the fash pretty firmly, too. On this coast, we got retaliatory redistricting and a tax for hospitals, which isn’t nothing.

I volunteered to do a call with a customer even though I could probably have let someone else take it. Their problem was that they didn’t read the docs, and also didn’t do real testing.

No gaming, Ken is worn out and Ash’s beloved kitty Vanilla barfed up most of her liver and stopped being a cat over the weekend. 🙁

Read (manga): After God vol 4 (Sumi Eno): We finally get to find out a bit more about Obikawa and his endealment, which leads to more horror because what manga do you think this is? More death, more Anti-God Institute skulduggery. Tragic backstories.

Written (game design): 497:

Having thought about it, I’m tending toward large hexes. I don’t think
exactly defining the size a superpower’s size is very appropriate. A
superhero doesn’t make a forcefield that’s exactly 4m square, they make
a forcefield that blocks off the hole in the hull, unless they can’t.
Which is what the pushing mechanic is supposed to emulate, but it’s kind
of clunky. (Pushing would work better with ranks, also.)

Large hexes also fit pretty well with the existing system of range
penalties. In your hex is no penalty, 1 hex away is -2, every time you
double it’s another -2.

Speaking of hexes and movement, is the implicit multipower of
movement by paying per-hex for speed and then buying modes as adders
actually a good idea? I think it properly addresses the vast utility
of even a small amount of flight, but doesn’t work as well for the
person who has a huge amount of swimming in a terrestial campaign.
Should different modes be advantages on very cheap basic movement?
Swimming +1/4, Running +1, Flight +2, etc? Should Doesn’t Fall be
a separate power like Doesn’t Need to Breathe? It sounds kind of
goofy when I put it like that, but further down in my notes is
thinking about how to have powers interact with environmental
phenomena that are normally taken for granted or changed only by
GM fiat, like gravity and lighting. We have Life Support for needing
to breath etc, Tunneling and Desolid for not being able to walk
through walls, Night Vision for the dark, so why not something that
negates the normal gravity/falling rules, instead of Flight kind
of implicitly doing it but working in a different way?

Relatedly, I think Change Environment should be able to make regions
that are zero-gee, or vacuum, or whatever, and have the normal rules for
those environments apply, instead of trying to cobble together a similar
effect from other powers.

Less relatedly, but I was reminded, falling speed and damage needs to be
revised to be more reasonable instead of hugely more than any superhero
can do. It needs to be revised for a lack of segments anyway. Somehow.

Speaking of more damage than superheroes can do, what about damage that
superheroes (and regular heroes) actually do? Earlier I said we should
combine Stun, Body, and Con into one characteristic, but how do we use
that to represent getting beaten up?

I normally dislike hit points, but when a fight can involve an astral
projection, a robot, and a mutant with a healing factor, any lesser
level of abstraction might not work. (The last time I tried this, I
wanted to have conditions with numeric ratings, like Clobbered 6 or
Entangled 3, and if any condition was more than X or the sum of all your
conditions was more than Y, you were Out. I was never able to get it to
be both general and specific enough to be good.)

Sadly, I did not contribute this year, and Color the World Orange Day is the first Monday in November, not a fixed date, so we won’t observe this again for years.

At work, we’re back to the scheme of every-engineer-for-themself case allocation that was in place when I joined more than six years ago. It still works fine since the time hasn’t expanded much, but it’s more proof that management is just making everything up as they go along.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 4 (Hachi Inaba): More reasons why everyone hates dragons, more beasts who hate dragons, more tigers who think Hakurei is the hottest thing ever, more interspecies families.

Written (game design): 459:

Speaking of a new paradigm for limitations, it occurs to me that some of
the “power doesn’t work” limitations (OHID, not in strong magnetic
fields, gestures) could be complications instead. This doesn’t help with
limitations that change the power mechanically, though.

It could also be that all powers have to have a minor limitation, and
then only major limitations count, but I’m not sure that’s concrete
enough to be workable.

I still think we can do better than the existing system of base points *
1+adv + active points / 1+lim = real points, but until I can figure out
how, we’re stuck with it.

So, is making hexes more like 10m or as allowed by the environment
actually a good idea? It eliminates the counting of hexes for every
movement and ranged attack, which can be a considerable timesink, and
positioning can be more narrative. On the other hand, a hex of 1-2m is a
good unit for measuring smaller area effects, and having everyone be
alone in their specific hex removes ambiguity.

Zones/large hexes was the right call for the fantasy game, but that
doesn’t mean it’s right for Hero. Does 6E’s hexless approach actually
get the worst of both here? Or is it the right way to go because
it doesn’t impose any structure on the freedom of the space?

Large hexes also make range not strictly numeric. There’s no range as in
engaged in melee with you (already kind of wonky when you include
Stretching) and no range as in within the same hex, and only then do you
get to a range of 1 hex. It’s not at all unworkable, but it’s not as
clean and granular as counting from your own, unambiguous, hex. Same
with movement: there’s 0 hexes of movement meaning you can’t move,a nd 0
hexes meaning you can move around inside your hex to engage people, but
need to go noncombat to get to the next hex. Or whatever.

It feels like going with large and somewhat indeterminate zones instead
of tight hexes also means other measurements like barrier sizes have to
be vague and descriptive instead of a concrete X meters by Y meters,
which is again a different feel than before. But is that bad? Wargamers
love precise measurements, but I like to think the hobby has moved a bit
beyond that (especially because you can get all the precise measurements
you want from playing computer games). You can even make a case that the
precise measurements are less realistic, since people don’t usually
perform in exactly repeatable ways in the real world. Even robots don’t.

Either way could work, I’m pretty sure, but I’m not sure which is a
better fit for what we’re trying to do.

 

I guess Saturday was Come to Terms With Your Increased Psychic Powers Day and now it’s time to get back in the danger room.

I thought I didn’t sleep in as much as usual, but that’s because the clocks all changed while I was asleep, and actually it was the same time. Whatever. I managed to get and eat a pad thai before going shopping to return with boons for all cat-kind.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 9 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Rae gets to make use of her past-life skills as well as her game-specific knowledge,, but the outcome is still not smooches from Claire, only getting more embroiled in various plots and schemes.

Written (game design): 442:

As we decrement the cost per rank …3, 2, 1, 1/2, 1/3, … it does go
asymptotically toward 0, so it seems like it should be close enough, and
yet.

If the standard cost of a rank is 2, then reducing it to 1 is halving
it, or the equivalent of a -1 limitation. Reducing it another step to
1/2 makes it a quarter the original cost, so a -3 limitation. One more
step, to 1/3, is a sixth the cost, -5 limitation. Etc.

Suppose we make a standard rank cost 4, so each increase is the
same as a +1/4 advantage. Then the first decrease is to 3,
three-quarters of the original, a -1/3 limitation, and the next
step is to 2, half the original, a -1 limitation. This isn’t bad
so far, but then we’re down to a quarter of the original cost, -3
limitation, and then an eighth, -7 limitation; a twelfth,-11
limitation, etc.

Even if the standard cost is 8, so it has to be increased by 2 for each
+1/4 advantage, the effective limitations are -1/7, -1/3, -3/5, -1, -5/3,
-3, -7, etc. Turns out “asymptotically approaches 0” isn’t a complete
description of a function, what the heck?

Okay, so we can’t just port the existing power modifiers system to this
alternate way of reducing the cost of limited powers. Either we need to
come up with a different way of reducing costs, or we need to develop a
significantly different relationship with the idea of power limitations.
Or both.

As little as I think the game is improved by people checking to see
whether one-handed gestures vs two-handed gestures saves a point,
the incentive to have some limitations is a good one, so throwing out
the idea of limitations altogether isn’t the way to go. It’s the piles
of small limitations that I want to avoid. I just don’t know how. Do we
give up on the idea of ranks and just stick with active points?

Buying powers in ranks also does raise the question of how to include
adders. Do they just get turned into advantages? Is that an accurate
reflection of their utility? Since we started, I’ve been assuming that
there is no actual way to quantify utility and the point values are all
handwaved to match what Hero players think they should be, since that’s
as close as anything. This is another reason to not want to be too
finicky with costs, since small variations probably don’t mean anything
anyway. But am I right about this? Of course I think I am, but what do I
know? Not game design, that’s for sure!

Also National Authors’ Day! Hi Kit!

Finally carted the books from the other week’s cleaning to the used book store and got rid of about 2/3 of them. I have few more stacks to sort through too.

No anime this week, Marith had a randomly different work schedule because capitalism thrives on the life force of its sacrifices.

Read (game): Into the Odd (Chris McDowall, Johan Nohr): Apparently I had the fancy orange and turquoise(?) hardcover on my shelves, so I read it so I could move it to the other shelves. McDowall will be having none of this “monsters and magic items should make sense” rubbish. I also really like assigning better starting gear and mutant powers if you rolled worse on your stats (within the context of random character generation, anyway). This is probably where I got the idea of skipping the attack roll and going straight to damage, as well.

Written (game design): 328:

Maybe it’s time to revisit my decision to make points larger and what I
hoped to gain thereby, and whether it’s actually working.

What I want, of course, is to reduce the amount of fiddling with
individual points in hope of squeezing out that last bit to add another
line to the character sheet. Making points larger reduces how much
point-squeezing can happen, to the extent that costs are in whole
numbers of points. Players who keep fractions, or even just a few
decimal places, undercut this somewhat, but the base costs provided by
the system will still be in the larger increments, and the minimum cost
is going to be 1 point no matter how many limitations you pile on.

Fundamentally, making a character in Hero is the same as what we were
looking at for the fantasy game where you pick your five feats (or four
if you want a really good one that counts double): Everything you could
give your character has a cost, you have a budget, buy what up to that
limit. The player experience is pretty different between the two ends of
the scale, though, and I was trying to shift it from one toward the
other. I don’t think I shifted it enough, though. Costs are still
extremely variable and have to be calculated, and it’s still in the
spreadsheet mode of doing all those calculations and summing them up.
There are way too many points involved for it to feel like picking
things to fill slots.

This all being the case, I’m probably better off changing the fractional
advantages/limitations to adding or subtracting cost per rank, which
keeps the costs integeral or simple fractions. Then the cost of 1 rank
of Blast is determined by how finegrained we want the modifiers to be.
If the cost is N, then every +1 to the cost is the equivalent of a +1/N
advantage. Reducing the cost doesn’t map as neatly to limitations,
though.

Not sure what nation that’s from. Atlantis? Shangri-La?

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.1-2: It’s finally here! 2.1 is the equivalent of the episode 14 recap in anime, which is fine, it’s been a while since season 1. 2.2 is where it gets going, with Sir Pentius in Heaven, which has some definite flaws. Also there’s obviously no continuing moral education requirement, although “Gravity” is a banger of a song and video. And WTF is up with Lilith?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 19 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Death! Dismemberment! Trauma! Disappointment! Hand jobs! More trauma! More death! Conceptual warfare! It is all extremely fucked up, both in how the world is and what people are doing to cope.

Written (game design): 259:

The skill levels from old Hero would, in our new system, be 1 point
(either one skill or a couple of skills), 2 points (all skills based on
a single characteristic), or 4 points (all skills). An overall level
that can be used for combat as well would be 5 points, and attacking is
just skills. So we could say a background that’s boring, I mean not so
useful for adventuring, costs 2 per +1, one that’s pretty useful costs
3, and omnicompetence (my background is that I’m Literally Batman) is 4,
leaving the decision of what’s less useful and more useful in a given
campaign to the table. Likewise, conflicting views of what’s included in
the same single-word descriptor can be settled by reasonable players.

But, is it Hero? Maybe it’s not. We consolidated characteristics, but
they’re just as concrete as before. Maybe making skills looser is the
wrong approach here and we should leave the skill list as is.

The base 11- for a skill costs 1 point regardless of what kind of skill
it is (except attack), but another point would get +1 for a full skill
and +2 or arguably even +3 for a knowledge or professional skill, which
is a little awkward if a skill level covers some of each. Do skill
levels not include knowledge skills? Just pay 1/2/3 points for a
11/14/17- with a specific skill? Is it bad to not have the intermediate
values? 6E only has even values for Stun and multiples of five for End,
so maybe it’s fine.

What, you think I make these things up?

Went to the office at the right time, did some work, ate some pig meat on a bun and potato salad, stayed late for a meeting with Boss³ M about how things are going to work differently here in our brave new world of helping customers without other departments.

Read (manga): The Lying Bride and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate vol 1 (Kodama Naoko): A lesbian office worker’s lonely apartment is invaded by an acquaintance who needs a place to crash while on the outs with her husband, which makes her off-limits in two different ways despite being excessively cute. Feelings ensue.

Written (game design): 412:

We can then have defense levels against other skills: Resist Temptation,
Resist Fasttalk, etc, all with the same mechanic. We’re so clever.

What skills are there for attacking? 6E has OCV as a single
characteristic, which you can then increase for specific powers or
maneuvers or whatever. +1 OCV is more expensive than +1 to any
skill, but about the same as a medium-sized skill level (5 points).
Maybe Melee Attack and Ranged Attack are the skills? In 6E, +1 to two
skills is 4 points, although only 3 as a skill level.

How do we even buy skills now? What skills are there? Do we need to be
as fine-grained as Hero? Probably not, but that may be different for
different campaigns. There aren’t characteristics to base skills on, so
maybe it’s all levels. Are levels bought in ranks too? If everything is
actually levels, that might make sense, but if we have individual bits
like familiarities, then maybe only characteristics and powers are
bought in ranks. The main point of ranks is to simplify adjustment,
which doesn’t come up much for skills.

I was thinking we could have backgrounds instead of skills, like Soldier
11- or Mad Scientist 14-, with a cost depending on how much it covers,
quantified in some fashion that I don’t yet know. The system for
quantifying coverage might be an awful lot like asking which individual
skills it gives you. Rolling them together into a background could still
be worthwhile since it would cover any minor bits between the skills.

Maybe break out the different things people do with skills (persuade
people, analyze evidence, use equipment, etc) and for each of those,
rate the background on whether it lets you do that in
no/few/several/most/all circumstances? Then if you just want to do a
specific thing, you can buy a background that does that in all
circumstances and the rest in no circumstances. I like this in theory,
but it may be running into the same problem with pigeonholing all PC
activities into equal-sized boxes that we originally had in the fantasy
game. But the boxes don’t have to be equal, we can charge more for the
bigger ones! But but, how do we calculate the costs with our big chunky
points? Have I failed already?

Technically it’s International Internet Day and National Cat Day, but the Internet is for cats.

Also it’s Republicans are Bad for the Economy, Actually, Day. 96th anniversary.

Betrayed by transit, eventually made it to the office, nobody was there, ate an Indian food, did some work.

Finally logged into Kit’s Discord, immediately ran into people from the Old Old Days. For whatever reason, they don’t hate me.

I need to learn to manage being on multiple discords. Reading everything is a lot!

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 7 (Aki Irie): We do get a small cutscene to Lilja in Iceland, but mostly it’s still Kei in Japan, looking into Michitaka’s backstory, and it’s just as messed up as you might expect.

Written (game design): 176:

(Yes, I am aware that making the cost of a generic power 4-5 points
would make a +/-1 cost change a lot like a +/-1/4 modifier. But I
invoked the gavel emoji, so we’re stuck doing this way until the
appeal.)

Looking at other signature Hero things, what exactly should be done
about OCV vs DCV? Ideally we’d have one mechanic for resolving attacks,
skills, and any other success roll, but do we want the simple roll-under
version, the complicated target number version, some other version?

A compromise would be to have an attack skill, or skills, that you roll
under, with each point of defense being a -1 penalty to the skill (or
add 1 to the roll, whatever). Attack 11- would be the equivalent of OCV
3, 0 defensive levels would be the equivalent of DCV 3. This frees the
malicious GM to apply penalties to other skill rolls, but there’s an
obvious and easy default of -0, which might cut down on the handwaving.

Observed.

Closed some long-running cases, talked to New Boss T about training budget.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94:

Lacking leads in the material world, Thessaly decides to scry for
the Lost Queen of Winter’s box under the cypress trees, using a
crystal pendulum and a map. Since Longfingers, Everett, and Theophania
all have jobs (in fact, Everett is busy with work for this entire
session), they are easily able to obtain these things.

After a moment’s thought, it is realized that the best place to perform
this divination would be the Winter Queen’s old grotto. This means
sneaking back through the upstairs of the bookstore next to the old
department store, which means Siddy feels her obligation to return the
bag of weed she swiped some time ago. Fortunately the budget will
stretch to a few boxes of brownie mix.

When Thess tries to divine the location of the box (technically, the
lock to which the key they have belongs) in the Berkeley Hills, the
pendulum refuses to give a location. When she lets it swing freely,
though, it settles on a street in south Berkeley that she knows very
well, because it’s where Sean lives.

No one can think of a good reason for Sean to have that particular box,
and Thess refuses to believe it could be coincidence, so in a fit of
unchangelinglike reasonableness, they decide to go ask him about it. On
the way out, Siddy drops off the special brownies for the bookstore
guys, but then in a rookie mistake she sticks around to harvest some
Glamour from them.

With the now completely baked Siddy, the group make their way to
the apartment where Sean lives and was having a pretty good day
until a gang of weirdos showed up to give him shit and ask about
his sordid romantic past. It turns out he knows exactly the house
with cypress trees everyone is looking for, because he had a brief
affair with James, the (once and future?) Prince of Spring.

James is probably not the kind of person they can just walk up to and
ask about Secret Changeling Monarchy Stuff, so they spend the rest of
the afternoon chilling at Sean’s while Siddy braids Theophania’s hair
like a particularly stoned spider weaving a web.

 

Read (graphic novel): Princess at Midnight (Andi Watson): A small girl’s dream picnics with dragons and pretty dresses are interrupted by Military Adventurism.

Written (game design): 363:

There were a lot of maybes in all that waffle, let’s try to sort some
out.

I had put the cost of 1d6 damage at 2 partly because I wanted to leave
the option of buying 1/2d6, but if we do go with ranks, then is one rank
of Blast going to give 1/2d6? That makes the standard 10d6 superheroic
attack 20 ranks, which is a lot. I think increments of 1d6 are fine,
even if I did initially buy my Kaiju Academy character 1 1/2d6 Str. Does
that mean a rank of Blast costs 1 point? That might be too chonky even
for me, but we can leave the decision until we figure out whether
there’s anything that costs half as much per rank as Blast.

Do we even really want ranks instead of active points? It makes
adjustment a lot easier, but you can’t really put a -1/4 limitation on
the 2 point cost of a rank without going back into fractional points.
Either the limitation has to be on the total cost, in which case it’s
not that different from active points, or we have to add/subtract the
cost per rank, which is a lot like having only +1 advantages and -1
limitations (though not exactly).

Do we need +1/4 advantages and -1/4 limitations? Maybe that
can be swept under the skirts of special effect, but +1/2 or -1/2
(armor-piercing, costs End) is big enough that it should be accounted
for. Even if we put the modifiers on the whole cost, identifying ranks
as the units to be adjusted is still worthwhile, though, right?

What about powers like Barrier, which in 6E have multiple attributes to buy
(size, Body, Def)? Does one rank get you X, Y, and Z of the different
attributes, and if you want less than that, take a limitation? That’s
pretty much how Entangle already is in 6E, so sure.

Gavel emoji. Buy powers in ranks, apply modifiers to the overall cost.
(What do you mean, “what about adders?”?)

Even if we’re not in the UK, Nightvale can have a day.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 6 (Aki Irie): Nobody was expecting that! Also, instead of LiljaxKei, we get Japan.

Written (game design): 198:

FIXING CHAMPIONS

Before I tried to improve D&D, I was working on improving Hero, so some
of this may seem familiar. Most of it will seem stupid, of course. But
things I want to do:

Make points bigger. If we keep 1d6 Blast/HA as the fundamental unit,
make it cost 2 points instead of 5. Maybe even 1, but that might
be too chonky. This may be very unpopular with people who like to
calculate to fractions of a point.

Along with that, instead of an active points value that can be
whatever arbitrary value, buy powers in ranks, like M&M. This makes
adjustment powers easier, and adjustment in general easy enough to use
more generally (you’re underwater, knock two ranks off your fire
powers). Cost per rank could be done in 1+Adv/1+Dis like existing Hero,
or a simpler method where advantages just move the cost per rank up or
down by one, and go into 1/2, 1/3, etc below 1.

Apply this to characteristics too. It was the 80s, nobody had a better
idea how to define characters than D&D’s model of numbers that give
benefits or penalties at certain points according to a table lookup, but
we can do better now.

Now that 6E has ditched figured stats, we can get rid of characteristics
that are just pre-defined skill levels (Int, Dex, Con, parts of Pre
and Ego). Make them actual skill levels, let the player pick what
skills go in them. The characteristics that have effect rolls (Str,
Pre for presence attacks, make Ego analogous for mental attacks),
or that don’t have rolls (OCV, PD, Stun, etc) can stay.

Except End, which is unnecessary. Use Stun for major fatigue, ignore
minor fatigue or abstract it into post-12 antirecovery. (Also get rid of
post-12 recovery, it just makes fights drag on. Adjust other values to
make fights take a reasonable amount of time.)

Con rolls don’t come up much, and it would be easy to say that you’re
stunned if you take more than X% of your Stun in one hit, so maybe Con
can go too, or be combined with Stun and Body in some way.

Do we need both Stun and Body? Again, it’s the D&D model, derived from the
wargame model where the difference between being able to withstand 3 or
5 volleys of grapeshot was an essential stat for your unit. Hero isn’t
nearly as life-or-death, even in the non-Champions games, but there are
still murders. Maybe we can combine them and Con all together into one
characteristic, which again you can buy with limitations if you really
think you should have a disproportionate amount of one vs the others.

Regardless of how we implement this, there shouldn’t be different
mechanics for killing attacks or other kinds of attacks.

1d6 of damage costs 2 points, but 1d6 of Strength costs like 3 or 4,
because it gives you so much more than just punching.

Combine PD and ED into just plain Def. If you have a special effect that
should give you more Def against certain attacks, buy it with a
limitation like you would anything else.

Get rid of Spd entirely: no paying character points to get to play more
of the game! Multiaction rules are where it’s at.

Complications don’t give a wodge of points up front that you hope (or
fear) are justified by how often it actually comes up, they give XP when
they do come up in play. This may or may not be the only way to get XP.
Strictly mechanical advantages (Susceptibility, Vulnerability) may be
exempt from this.

Remove the 11+OCV-3d6-DCV thing for attack rolls. Possibly OCV+3d
vs DCV+10, although that opens the door to target numbers for skills,
and as previously established, I don’t like that since it usually
gets handwaved instead of being used in any consisten or rigorous
way, so why bother? It might be okay if we give characters a “DCV”
for every domain so rolls are rarely uncontested, but it might not.
Needs more thought.

Stun being the total of the dice and Body being the number of dice plus
the number of 6s minus the number of 1s is elegant, and
I can’t deny that rolling a million dice is fun for the person doing it,
but waiting on them to add those dice up in two different ways
is much less fun for the rest of the table. Can we somehow make
success rolls also determine the effect? Like, Stun is 3 per die, plus 1
per die for every 6 that’s showing on the success roll? Does this remove
more total fun than it adds? The can of worms that is rich dice
mechanics was already cracked open by counting Body.

Like the fantasy thing, I want to move away from individual 5′ squares
for movement and positioning, and have zones instead. Full move gets you
to an adjacent zone, half move gets you somewhere inside your own zone.
Super movement can get you multiple zones away. Within a zone, you might
be engaged with one or more people, in which case their no-range powers
can affect you. Otherwise they need a power with range of same zone, or
with 1 or more zones of range.

Possibly instead of buying X zones of this movement mode and Y zones of
that one, you should buy the maximum number of zones you can
move, and then adders for each movement mode. Most of the utility of
Flight comes with its minimum cost, after all. If a mode has less
movement than the max, its adder gets a limitation.

Yes, intersex people do in fact exist! Fuck off, gender binary essentialists!

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Our characters mostly did get finished over the past two weeks, so we were able to play the first day of school, find mysterious drafts in our rooms, get our clocks cleaned by horrible bug monsters, and get send to remedial ass-kicking lessons. It’s Hero, so we don’t level up, but we got 10 XP, which was pretty sweet. Mallipattra did get to lick someone, but was not really enough of a horrible little goblin. Also she flashed the entire dorm because there was a huge venomous bug (maybe also poisonous, she didn’t lick it) in her nightgown.

Read (manga): Wakaba Won’t Give Up! vol 1 (Konkichi): I’m sure this is an unfair opinion, but it mostly seems like a knock-off of Tomo-chan is a Girl!, which was mid to begin with.

Written (game design):  758. This is stuff that I have been thinking for a while but had not written down in a way that got counted.

Pretty sure a pastrami cheese melt counts.

Tried to take books to the used book store, but the Internet said it was likely to rain and I can’t make my wire granny cart full of paper bags of books at all rain-proof, so that will have to wait. Did the usual shopping, got many new volumes of manga to read because I still haven’t converted to digital for that.

Ayse is sick again, so no cake this week. Maybe next week, if she can recover her health.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.16-18: Maomao solves a puzzle with Deduction instead of PS: Apothecary, then some more of her mysterious past gets dug up (although she doesn’t know it yet). That one character really needs a lingering, painful, and incurable accident.

Read (manga): Monster-Colored Island vol 1 (Mitsuru Hattori): She’s never been off the island and has no friends. She’s just run away to this remote island and is a total tsundere. Together, they awaken a mysterious supernatural force by making out in front of its shrine.

Written (game design): 347. Making a Hero 6E character reminded me of all the things I want to fix in Hero.

Holy crap, stop giving them ideas!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.6-7: The one where Harry has to charm a dude, and the one where a speed trap catches more than the corrupt mayor bargained for. Bonus points for the villain in ep 6 being bisexual without any particular comment, and Harry going out with him without any comment, but points off for, well, villainous promiscuous bisexual. More points with no deductions for OT3.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 35 (Tomohito Oda): 97/100! Everyone would befriend again!

Written (Fantasy Hero): Finished up a 100-point character, sent it off to be picked apart.

Happy Happy Ayse Day!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.5: The one where Tara helps them steal a Sophie Devereaux.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 5 (Aki Irie): The three legs of this series are Icleand, Lilja/Kei, and Michitaka’s crime drama, and in this volume we get all three. Also some shorts from the PoV of non-Kei characters.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Fiddled around some more. I’ll say it counts, but it wasn’t much.

YEAHHHHH!

No, too loud.

Doing evening handover this week, so didn’t go into the office. Did some work, though. Caught up on journaling (hi, Rachel!). Processed the one last box from under the table next my work desk, it was mostly books.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 4 (Aki Irie): Some creepy Michitaka stuff, and then a bunch of Kei and Lilja being ridiculous at each other.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Mostly completed a character sheet, and wrote 154 of past-life explanation. These points are too small and fiddly.

I, on the other hand, did not babble, because I barely spoke except to the cats, and that’s too mushy to be babbling

The apartment manager finally replaced my janky doorknob with a nice new one that just… turns. It’s so nice.

Cleaned out some more boxes, recycled a bunch of VHS tapes from the last millenium, put more things in bags, and felt accomplished even though it was a tiny amount of work. No idea what to do with all these digital circles, since the used bookstore doesn’t want them. If I were smart, I would get a DVD/CD drive and a bunch of external storage and a new computer, and then rip them all, but I’m probably not.

No gaming. Next week for sure, I hear.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 17-18 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Cult implosion! Riots! Tax-funded murders! Vivisection! The end of the world (prophesied)! Looks like the disads that paid for Denji’s power weren’t free points after all.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Finally put the pieces together into the start of a character sheet. The file is 472 words, but some of that is from yesterday and a lot of it is boilerplate, so I wrote “some” today.

 

Or maybe sloths just don’t write because they keep putting it off? No, that’s Procrastination Day, which is tomorrow.

Did some work, but also was inspired by pocket fronds talking about cleaning out elderly relatives’ homes to clean out my own home. I got rid of a few bags and boxes, and transferred the contents of others to bags for the used book store. Maybe I’ll even do more tomorrow!

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 4 (Rem, Bikkuri): This is finally getting past where I read online. Kaiko isn’t the best, but she’s okay. Methia is horrifying, and maybe also so is Elliott? Clarence finally gets to be cool.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Spent all evening trying to remember how Hero works enough to write up a character for Kaiju Academy. I’m not sure how many words were actually created, since it was mostly scribbled notes, but it was a creative endeavor that I focused on for a while, so I’m counting it as a successful day.

It me.

I got up to take my morning medicine and make sure the cats had food, then tried to go back to bed, but it didn’t really take, so I was up earlier than I resigned myself to, if not as early as would have been ideal. I put on my dorky clothes and did some errands and some other errands, so I guess that was good even though I was mostly pretty useless.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 3 (Rem, Bikkuri): Also Hitomi is great. So is Echo. Everyone else is ridiculous, if sometimes murdery. So maybe if TFOS had killing attacks instead of only cartoon attacks, but also mad biotech medicine. And was more metal.

Written (catgirl): 117.

Exactly what kind of person is scared of anti-fascism?

Slept in excessively, but still went to the protest. The newspaper was saying 10k people in San Jose, 7M nationwide. That’s like 2% of the entire country!

Also managed to run a couple of errands including haircut.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.13-15: Recap episode! New credits! (I liked the old OP better.) Back to the skulduggery, this time including fuel-air explosions to go with the poisonings.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 2 (Rem, Bikkuri): Still rereading what I originally read as webcomic. There is an ongoing plot now, but it’s still extremely ridiculous. Not as fluffy as TFOS, but still that energy. More characters are getting spotlight, but Pandora is still great. Ricket is also great.

Written (catgirl): I finally deleted the stuff I commented out, and also added a little more, so technically today was 1445, but that number feels extremely bogus.

Learning is good!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.3-4: The cryonics one and the pool one. I like that they’re showing everyone has been cross-training all these years. Also, Parker is apparently all-in on the transhumanism, so I have my next Eclipse Phase character. (Yeah, like I could play that.)

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 14-16 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Denji is becoming more of a major character, but the other main character for this arc is just as hopeless at humaning as he is, so of course they have to go on a date and also get attacked by devils a lot. Really creepy horrible devils that show why 35% of all deaths in Japan are due to devil activity.

Written (catgirl): 117, and even that took staying up until forever o’clock. I’m not good at this writing thing, am I?

AKA Feral Cat Day, so good day to donate to rescue orgs.

No office today, since I went on Monday. No TV, Marith isn’t up to it. No brain for me. Only a new mindless pad game.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 1 (Rem, Bikkuri): I originally read this as a webcomic. Despite being secondary-world fantasy where everybody is monsters, it has very strong TFOS energy from all the wacky high-school high-jinks of goofy students.

Read (novel): The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone): Kaiju Academy have to have their past life memories be those of the protagonist of a story Jeremy could in theory read or watch, so I picked Vivian Liao from  Gladstone’s transhuman-SF retelling of The Journey to the West. Not only is she super-gay, she arguably saved the galaxy, and one of those two is what the GM asked for. I don’t remember the last part where it gets very mystic and Buddhist, and also it’s weird, so maybe the end of the past-life memories should be right at the first encounter with the Empress. Anyway, every book needs the Monkey King as a terrifying cyborg pirate queen.

Written (catgirl): 115.

Also National Fossil Day and Hagfish Day, so Underappreciated Things in general.

Went to the office, ate meat and vegetables and rice, had a half-yearly review with my boss² who is in town this week and my boss³. Apparently I was supposed to come up with more to say on the mandatory self-criticism form, but they didn’t fire me, so whatever. I know I should care more, but it’s 2025.

I think my character for Kaiju Academy is going to have mushroom (well, fungus) magic to go with her dungeon magic. How can you go wrong with mushroom summoning?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 13 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Our new MC almost made a friend, but then there was a devil contract and some more mass murder. Also Denji is completely failing at getting chicks.

Written (catgirl): 188.

i’m not great at lowercase, but when i take notes and stuff i often don’t bother with the shift key.

no gaming, ken is unavailable in some fashion. probably audit-related.

read (manga): chainsaw man vol 12 (tatsuki fujimoto): starting a new plotline, with a new main character. denji is a secondary character, and exerts his dim influence on the world, but lots of other people get mixed up with devils and get powers and have everybody they know murdered and so forth. actually, denji may have gotten the best deal of any we’ve seen so far.

written (catgirl): 171.

Got it covered.

Despite this being Monday the 13th, the most cursed day, the surprise meeting was not that bad. Yes, Boss³ M thinks we suck, but he’s not firing all of us or even putting us in solitary for not understanding Boss T’s explanation of the plan. In fact, the plan sounds a lot like what we were doing before upper management started changing middle management all the time. Fancy that.

Ate Indian food with sufficient naan, did a work, almost drowned trying to cross the street on my way home. Why is drainage such a foreign concept to North California?

Read (manga): Alice & Zoroku vol 1 (Tetsuya Imai): A semi-feral young girl with vast psionic(?) conjuration powers escapes the lab and is adopted by a lawful good old guy and his granddaughter. Other psionics pursue, etc.

Written (catgirl): 243.

We celebrated by announcing that we could possibly be induced to give people copies of PDFs if we thought they should have them.

After cancelling gaming a couple of times, we finally reconvened. Chrisber is here, so we still have a table of five and don’t need to feel bad about failing to find new gamers. Well, not more than usual, anyway.

Jeremy explained his vision for how magic works and our characters have memories of past lives and there was much discussion but only Dave and Chrisber started writing up characters on the spot (conduit magic and fiber magic respectively, many Best Jeanist references were made which only Dave and I got; this is why we need more players). Do I even remember how to write up a Hero character?

Read (manga): Sanda vol 1 (Paru Itagaki): In the 2080s, due to the horrible state of the world and dearth of children, Christmas has been forgotten. The power of Santa is only sleeping, though, and a schoolgirl uses mysterious knowledge to awaken it in her classmate, so he can use his Santa powers to help find her missing friend. Said powers mostly seem to consist of turning into a huge old dude, but more powers are developing. By the same person as Drip Drip, which was also very weird, so likely to get even more cracktastic.

Written (catgirl): 178.

Specifically, it’s Marith’s party!

We celebrated with the traditional bowling, although there were only four of us because everyone else was sick or busy or introverted. I was not the absolute worst at bowling, at least! Then we went back to Monkeycat Towers to see Ayse and Jus and Non, and eat DoorDashed Cheesecake Factory and choco mousse cake. Jus was on her way to HoCo (that’s how they say Homecoming this year) and looked very nice. All that took so long that Marith had to go home because tomorrow is work, so although it was happy, there was no anime.

Read (manga): Evil-ish (Kennedy Tarrell): Villains who are not necessarily evil in a modern/fantasy world, kind of like Nimona. Our nonbinary protagonist tries to join the organization of villains, because it’s way cooler than being a potion barista, and succeeds through an improbable series of events, along with the annoying person who has actual magical power. It’s not as great as they hoped, and they have to face the consequences of their actions and their friend’s past and ancient curses and everything.

Written (catgirl): 144.

 

Also National Family Bowling Day, which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Squid & Cuttlefish Day. (That’s like Frog & Toad, only with more tentacles.)

New Manager T tried to explain the brilliant plan she received from above, but we didn’t understand, so suddenly we have a mandatory in-office meeting on Monday with Newish Boss³ M. This is not filling me with optimism. How do resumes work again? (It’s 2025, they don’t work.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.1-2: The weekend in Paris, and the one with the crooked judge. I know they try to not do murders, but that house in France would have been an excellent site for an orbital bombardment, if only Hardison hadn’t wasted all of S2 failing to set up an orbital domination array.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 107.