Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Apparently I’m not British enough.

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

Read (manga): FAILED. Because I suck.

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

Written (game design): 274:

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

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

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

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

Went to the office, had a chat with New Boss² A (he did most of the chatting), had a chat with Newish Boss³ M, ate a Beyond Meat wrap, finally made progress on the thing I’ve been putting off. The explanation for Former Boss² B’s dismissal was kind of sus, but I don’t know enough to refute it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 372:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Went to the office after vacation, discovered that Boss² T was gone (which I had expected) but also Former Boss² B, which was not expected! He was my favorite! Bad company! I am not sure what happened there, but I do not approve! Nothing I could do, though, I have no power and am on a different continent. Ate a burger, did a small amount of work.

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

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

Written (game design): 176:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 307:

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

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

Every day is Chocolate Day!

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

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

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

Written (game design): 366:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 306:

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

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

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

How is Josh that old?!

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

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

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

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

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

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

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

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

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

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

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

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

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

Read (manga): VACATION.

Written (anything): VACATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 329:

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

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

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

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

Happy merry to all my Canada friends!

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

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

Written (game design): 284:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 406:

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

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

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

Definitely one of the world’s great inventions.

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 352:

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

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

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

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

I like tapioca, but I might be weird.

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

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

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 205.

Fuck yeah, Wobblies!

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

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

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

Written (game design): 245:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 320:

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

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

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

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

Not sure I have anything witty to say about vitiligo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 298:

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

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

Excellent day to play Changeling!

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 222:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 330:

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 235 of rambling nonsense:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 245:

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

Or Winter Solstice on the other side.

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

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

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

Written (game design): 254:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 223:

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

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

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

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Still gastrointestinal, so I didn’t try to commute. I suppose eventually somebody will complain, but so far no one has.

Written (game design): 397:

D&D makes everything spells. Gnomes can talk to forest animals?
They cast speak with animals once per day (keep track of that
separate). Tieflings need spooky powers? They can cast, uh…
hellish rebuke, it has “hell” in the name! And darkness, that’s
spooky. (Track them both separately.) Dragons should be magically
powerful? They can cast these pile of spells three times a day each
(track them each separately), these other spells once a day (yep),
and these spells whenever (hope you like flipping through the PHB). It’s
not hard to see why they do it that way: the spell list is the closest a
game like D&D has to a catalog of powers. It’s still a list of spells
for Magic-Users, though, gibbering and gesticulating and waving around
eye of newt. Clerics and druids and everybody are shoehorned into the
same paradigm, because that’s the most generic and least interesting
option.

Actual Vancian casting for wizards isn’t completely flavorless,
although D&D hasn’t had that since 3rd ed at latest, but the current
system with spells known and X slots of Y level and then possible
additional powers that refresh on a different cycle or use a pool
of points with a refresh cycle and yadda yadda is a lot of bookkeeping
for no flavor at all. I’d rather go with a single pool of points that
spells, ancestral powers, random class powers, etc, all draw from, like
Runequest MP. This does strongly imply that all abilities that draw from
the pool are magic, but I’m okay with a fighter slicing through stone
pillars or a martial artist leaping ninety feet in the air
not being completely mundane. I don’t think we need to draw a strict
line between magic and not-magic in any case.

I also don’t want magic to work like electricity with batteries that
discharge and recharge, which is pretty much the only other paradigm
besides spell levels (and even those often get translated into charges)
that we find outside of squishy storygames. My best thought so far is to
say that magic damages human souls, and magic points are how much you
can use before it starts really hurting you. Recovering magic points
(which now need a new name) isn’t recharging, it’s healing. Also this
opens the possibility of taking actual damage to do more magic than you
really can, which is always nice.

Not things that normally go together, unless maybe they mean the shoes?

Not as much work today as yesterday. Got the really smart guy to look at the mysterious problem, but he doesn’t understand it either, which is both good and bad.

Feeling gastrointestinal again. Is this related to the change in dosage of my meds? But I was taking the higher dose for a month without any of this!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings explore the grotto of the Queen of Winter some more, using various poorly-understood magical powers, which confirms that someone is still supporting the grotto, and gives them a lead on a lockbox full of documents buried… somewhere (possibly involving cypress trees). Thessaly attunes herself to the grotto, so it’s partially hers, and Theophania tries to use her magical-security-suborning power to take over the rest of the lease, which results in alarming icy manifestations that feel like the faeries who kidnapped her to begin with. Nobody comes to eat them, but it’s still ominous.

Written (catgirl): 154.

Success!

Cleaners somehow jammed my balcony door. It looks like it’s on the rails, but doesn’t move. On the other hand, when I can get to the balcony, there’s a hummingbird nest near it now.

We have two people out this week, so I have to actually the do the work. Tragic.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.2: Draco Malfoy, MI5 agent (the one who framed our hero, naturally).

Read (novel): Seekers in the Void (Glynn Stewart): New series, jackbooted corporate goons who control all FTL travel and the xenoarchaeologists who need them to get to the dig. Doom ensues, along with a subplot that shows (IMHO a little too strongly) that the author has read Murderbot.

Read (fanfic): The Stairs Beneath the Heart (hermitknut): Fanfic of The Goblin Emperor, various bits behind the scenes of the events in the book, about secondary characters and their adapting to all the changes and the new emperor’s eccentricities &c.

Written (catgirl): 267. No game design today.

Electricity is good. We should stop wasting it on bloated autocomplete, though.

I usually don’t like going shopping on Sunday, but it wasn’t too crowded today.

Written (game design): 271:

No XP for defeating enemies! There’s a plausible school of thought
that D&D jumped the shark when monsters became the primary source
of XP. Now the PCs always have to go through monsters, every fight
has to be carefully calibrated to be guaranteed survivable (whatever
that means in a game with readily available resurrection magic) and
easy to win, but not so easy that it’s boring. This means we need
a huge pile of standardized monsters to build the level-appropriate
encounters from, with a strong need the harder it is to make a monster
of a specific CR. (Obviously you can get some distance with reskinning
existing monsters, but that usually takes about one round for a player
to spot and start calling the reskinned monster by the original name.)

PCs also have to be standardized: if an encounter (especially in a
module or a Living Greyhawk session or some other standardized
adventure) is calibrated for five 5th-level character, it has to work
with any (non-pathological) party, regardless of their particular
histories. I’m pretty sure this is why magic items were nerfed in 4E,
level drain was abolished, all buffs and debuffs are short-term, etc:
combat strength is supposed to be based on character level and nothing
else.

Modern D&D has probably embedded the idea that all enemies must
be fought toe-to-toe in a set-piece battle too deeply to be overcome,
but we can try.

For that matter, do we need XP at all? Even if we do, it should be
Dungeon World style, where experience is what you get when you don’t get
what you want. More on that later.

Because, seriously, fuck that guy and his sycophants.

I did not get a lot else done today, but I did not melt from being in the sun or die of datastarve from leaving my phone behind, so I guess it was somewhat successful? Also apparently there is someone known as “Batman of San Jose”, who is an advocate for the unhoused, which comes as news to me.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.1: MI5 agents who fuck up get sent to Slough House to do meaningless busywork until they give up and quit. Our hero is of course not quitting or even keeping his nose out of trouble. Plus he was totally framed.

Read (novel): Afterlove (Tanya Byrne): It’s hard being a high-school lesbian, and even harder finding true love and then dying. Fortunately(?) the story doesn’t end there.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 5 (Yoshimurakana): Serial killer of the week, no match for Kuroko. It probably was actually smart of the police to suspend her sentence as long as they can keep her on a leash, horrible though she is.

Written (game design): 234:

Race in/near D&D is complicated along a lot of axes. At least without
stats, we don’t have “orcs are dumb” or “elves are naturally criminal”,
but without stats, do we even need predefined ancestries? Why not go
full anti-canon and let players make up their own ancestries? You want
to play an elf, great! Tell the table what elves are like! Pick a couple
of feats from this list, and explain them as being from your
ancestry, or not, as you find appropriate. (Do you have the Strong feat
because you’re a dwarf and all dwarves are strong, or are you just
swole?)

Tangentially, no darkvision! Seeing by starlight, okay. Navigating caves
by feeling the airflow around walls and obstacles okay. But no casually
ignoring darkness. (This goes back to the bad ideas about combat.)

The downside to this is that making a character takes more effort when
you can’t just pick from three lists and slam them together, but of
course there can be a list of examples, with multiple types of elves
(Tolkien, D&D, Elfquest, …) and GMs that have a world already designed
can make the list for their players to choose from.

(This is far beyond any planning horizon, but an idea I’ve seen is
to have a selection of pregens with good character art for first-time
players instead of making them engage with character creation, so
they can go “that one looks cool” and dive in.)

It’s certainly not my fault it’s Friday the 13th! It’s my fault I’m on vacation today, though, since I volunteered to work on Juneteenth.

Took some books to the used book store, Got some tasty Thai lunch, did some shopping, bought a blood pressure machine.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 4 (Yoshimurakana): Absolutely no one was surprised by how Kuroko succumbed to the lesbian cult’s brainwashing, but it was surprising that Yakuza Princess went to some lengths to get her back. Maybe she actually likes her!

Written (game design): 255:

That’s simple actions sorted, but what about opposed rolls, social
skills, NPCs rolling, etc? NPCs do get to roll, this isn’t a completely
player-facing system. We’re not going that story-game. But *mostly*
player-facing is fine. Since there aren’t target numbers,
directly-opposed rolls or using the opposing skill as the target number
or whatever isn’t viable; the GM sets the Difficult as usual. Most
social actions will often get the +1D for having someone working against you
because a lot of people are ornery and self-interested, maybe more if
you’re being extremely unreasonable.

What about when the NPCs try to bamboozle the PCs? Save vs Influence!
Rolls are mostly player-facing, so you make saves instead of opposed
rolls. We could do Fortitude/Reflex/Will, but that’s
not as interesting as the old-school named saves. The names could be a
little less opaque, though, so we have something like
Save vs Influence, Save vs Ambush or Trap, Save vs Poison or
Sickness, Save vs Curses, Save vs Restraint, Save vs Falls, Save vs
Possession and Compulsion. Or maybe some other way of dividing up the
vicissitudes of the adventuring life, but those seem to cover most
things and it should be obvious which one to use for novel problems.

None of these saves are “miraculously take half damage from the fireball
while standing still at ground zero” because I don’t think that should
be a thing. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the area of effect!

I have a whole lot of bad ideas about combat.

We could really use some more heroes to humiliate the KKK. They’re getting uppity again.

Intestines better this morning, but not overnight, so I slept in and didn’t go to the office.

The cupboard above the fridge isn’t deep enough for the pans I have stored there, so I put a twist-tie on the handles to keep it shut. Today the cats figured out how to undo it and get into all the cabinets on that side of the kitchen. This is definitely a cat crime, but I don’t actually care that much about what’s in the cupboard because I am incapable of remembering that cupboards contain things (even drawers are iffy), so after trying extra-twisty securement and being defeated, I gave up. It’s their apartment, I just live in it.

Written (game design): 318:

1990 me would probably find this the most upsetting thing about this
timeline, but I’m going with a roll-under-skill-rating system. In
theory, something like modern D&D’s skill+die vs target is great: it
allows for variation on sides, it’s not too complicated, etc. It even
does work for attacks and saves, because the target number is right
there. It might even work for prepared adventures, where the designer
can put the target numbers in everywhere. When the PCs inevitably go off
whatever rails there are, though, the GM ends up ignoring target numbers
and deciding the outcome of the roll based on Vibes. (It’s not just our
table, it seems to be pretty common across the Internet.) At that point,
why do you even have a system?

Something like Lancer’s skill+d20 vs 10 for success and critical success
on a total 20+ would also work, but at the moment I’m not feeling a need
for critical successes. Getting what you want and moving on to the next
problem seems like plenty to get from a roll. (Although this reminds me
of a different D&D variant I thought of, where you don’t add anything to
your d20 rolls: on a natural 1, it’s a horrible fumble; on a natural 20 it’s an
amazing crit; and on a 2-19 whatever the normal expected thing is,
happens, because after the game people only want to hear about the crits
and fumbles.)

Rather than adding and subtracting (much), your rating for each action
stays the same, but Difficulty is how many d20s you roll. Every one
that’s over your Action rating knocks off one of Success or No
Consequences. Not sure what the level of Difficulty that makes a task
impossible should be; if there are two good results to knock off then
maybe it should be 3, but that seems low. 4? 5? With extra failed dice
optionally making the consequences worse.