Also, World Duran Duran Appreciation Day. Something for everyone!

I don’t know why, but Nightvale was super-affectionate today.Possibly it’s because he’s a great cat.

I did several shopping expeditions and returned with boons for all catkind. Also some stuff for me.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 3 (Tamifull): Oh, no, they found a new way to be insecure about sex! (Okay, not really that new, but full of baggage.) Relationships, how do they even?

Read (novel): Underland 2 (Maxime J Durand): Our well-meaning abomination learns more and more about how horrible his universe is, but continues to reject nihilism. Mostly he prevails through being a horrifying monster, but also some through not being a complete dick so he has allies. The End!

Written (game design): 414:

Possibly we need a different mechanic for ranged attacks. For melee, the
Attack die represents spending the round, or a chunk of it, fighting
with this guy, with whatever hacking, slashing, punching, stabbing,
tripping, shield-bashing, biting, eye-gouging, etc, etc, so summing it
up at the end of the round is reasonable. Shooting somebody, or having a
grenade blow up next to them, is a singular event that happens at a
specific point in the round. It’s not the worst thing to put the damage
off until the end of the round, since people don’t usually drop dead
immediately (sometimes not even when shot in the head), but if there’s
supposed to be some other effect, what do? I guess that’s not even
restricted to ranged attacks, since a melee attacker could do something
with other effects, like disarm their foe, erase the glyph on the
golem’s forehead, stake the vampire through the heart, or whatever.

I guess we need a new combat maneuver, Cunning Blow. It’s not
Decisive Blow, because it doesn’t do more damage to a normal
opponent; that’s still Attack + wound die – Armor. It’s for taking
advantage of a weakness, like “sword isn’t built-in” or “needs feet to
run”. Special effect happens immediately, Attack dice happen at the end
of the round as usual.

Does Cunning Blow always succeed? We generally lean in favor of things
succeeding (no to-hit rolls!) but it seems like Cunning Blow should be a
risk.

It may be time to revisit what Readiness is used for. When this
started, it was Hit Protection and all it did was keep you from
taking wounds. At some point it became more of an all-purpose
resource for dodging and avoiding trouble, and we got rid of saves.
This is where it made sense (…) to combine HP with initiative as
some kind of general battlefield awareness. But was that really
such a good idea?

Reliably putting off getting wounded until later in the fight lets
combat not be such a terrible idea, and that’s the kind of fantasy
we’re in. But, preventing non-wound effects even for the first part
of the fight makes it less interesting, and removes the incentive
to do anything except pound away.

The question of whether to make these effects (which need a name,
there’s more than debuffs except in video games everything’s a debuff)
automatic is still open, since it includes spells that I already said I
hate seeing fizzle. Not sure players would be good with enemy special
attacks always succeeding, though.

Alternatively, we could undelete saves, possibly in a simpler/more
Action-like way (Evade Your Doom, Withstand Your Doom, Refuse Your
Doom, Ward Against Your Doom?). This is easy to play, everyone knows
what you mean when you ask them to roll to avoid being spleefed or
whatever. It does add more things to keep track of on the character
sheet, and special attacks can still fizzle, which is not ideal.

(By that logic, we probably have too many Actions already and should
consolidate them, or at least group them for ease of finding. It’s not
like there’s not an ease-of-use justification for having a handful of
abilities.)

Earlier I mentioned sacrificing Readiness to counter Attack dice as
being voluntary, but that was just choice-positivity. If we do it on
purpose, though, then it’s the target’s choice whether to avoid getting
knocked down/possessed/turned into a frog, or save the Readiness against a
potentially lethal blow later in the round. An attack might still not
accomplish anything, but at least it’s using up resources the same as
any other attack. We’d use an Effect die (the generalization of the
Wound die), but the major difference would be the Readiness loss and any
effect would happen before the general resolution phase at the end of
the round.

Armor subtracts from the Effect die when it’s doing physical harm (a
Wound die), but all kinds of things could subtract from the Effect die
in the general case. This is where we put in Strength and Size (the Size
10 dragon laughs at your puny Strength 0 throwing knives trying to stop
it) but also we may kind of be bringing saves back in, in the form of
resistances to various mischiefs. The default is 0, though, which makes
things cleaner, and others will use Size or Strength which we already
established.