Also Hell is Freezing Over Day, but none of the things that are supposed to happen on that day seem to be happening. Seems sus.
Didn’t go to a protest on short notice, just went shopping.
Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.18-20: Looks like it’s time for Jinshi to sack up! So to speak.
Read (webcomic): Accidentally stayed up until a million o’clock reading Questionable Content archives.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (game design): 194:
But what about morale? Or trauma from taking too much emotional damage?
Again, could be separate items for the various traumas (this time on
individual sheets), but is some kind of overall value worth keeping?
Probably only in specific kinds of campaigns, since this is more or less
SAN (although it comes from the specific issues instead of them being
manifestations of it). If you get taken out by emotional damage, you get
a temporary psychlim, that decrements with a speed appropriate to the
campaign.
Long-term consequences, even if not permanent, make character sheets
more fluid and not always balanced at a specific point level. This is
definitely contrary to the wargame approach of always building your unit
out of N points fresh before every battle, but entirely fair for an RPG.
And there can be a nominal point value that you relax toward between
sessions, possibly keeping recent changes while getting rid of older
items if that seems better to you.
Good/bad karma should not be a consequence (sorry FASERIP), that’s too
much like bribing the PCs to be good. Favor or disfavor of a specific
supernatural power for specific reasons could be, though.
Speaking of emotional damage inflicted in proportion to psychlims,
should there be a default psychlim, Empathy or Humanity or whatever, so
that everyone can be horrified when Godzilla steps on the kindergarten
even if they don’t have “protective of children” written on their sheet
in so many words?
How do we even implement these psychlims? The old way of doing it,
with how often a complication comes up and how much trouble it
causes when it does, rolled into one number, risks having a bogus
value if the player guesses (or “guesses”) wrong on how often it
comes up, and possibly also if the effect isn’t mechanically enforced,
but it does produce a single value that can seem fair to everyone.
The new way is self-adjusting in terms of how often complications
come up, and puts the burden of bringing them up on each player
instead of all on the GM, but is less quantifiable, which makes it
harder to integrate with the rest of the system. If complications
only give XP, then there’s no obvious place to put a level of effect
for calculating emotional damage.
Are we back to needing an entirely new paradigm, on the level of
“everything has a point cost based on its utility”? Hopefully not
as anti-anticapitalist. Also completely new paradigms are hard, I’d
rather cobble together a game out of these parts I found in this
series of tubes. If only I had an adapter…