Successfully did shopping and also made some spots of light for the cats to chase.

Watched (anime): Gachiakuta 1-3: A poor boy from the non-shiny side of a divided and extremely racist city is accused of murder and flung into the pit that encircles the city where all trash and criminals end up, and discovers that his adoptive father’s old story about cherished objects gaining souls was not entirely nonsense. Very shonen, battles against trash monsters, almost no female characters.

Read (manga): Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 3 (Yoichi Abe): After a lot more surreal dream worlds and things dissolving into other things and alter egos of the ML conflicting with each other and drawing new worlds, everything is somehow resolved! Kind of. But it’s like the real world. The end!

Written (game design): 343:

In Hero, heroes and villains are created the same way, which is
appropriate for a wargame, but for superheroics, maybe villains
(and NPCs in general?) should always have a weakness, or it should
be legit to negate their powers through tactics? Even a recurring
villain shows up a lot less than a PC, so they don’t need to be as
consistent. But there are definitely players who would object to
someone getting extra dice of damage just because they asked the
GM, never mind losing some of their precious defenses just because
the GM feels like it.

Is it worse for the GM to decide what the villain’s weakness is
ahead of time, so whoever best guesses what the GM was thinking the
advantage, or have the players come up with the clever plan on the
fly, so whoever sucks up to the GM most gets the advantage? I’d do both:
the GM should have a weakness and a clue to it prepared, but if the
players come up with something else, that’s fine. I may be a filthy
story gamer, though.

Having mechanics for finding or exploiting a weakness would probably
make that kind of player happier. It might even make me happier. Not
sure what the mechanics would look like, though. The minimum would be a
skill check to spot the weakness and maybe a maneuver to take advantage
of it, but what if the weakness isn’t just a thin spot in the
forcefield, and the PCs have to distract the villain so they can’t use
their big attack, or demoralize them until they’re willing to listen to
reason, or whatever?

There are already mechanics for some of this: the big attack could have
Extra Time and Concentration, Presence attacks that play on someone’s
psychlims get bonus dice, etc. They do need to be set up ahead of
time (or retconned in), though, there’s no provision for other
characters declaring them, which is not surprising since Hero is
not much on giving players GM power. Also the mechanics are all
different, but maybe that’s okay.

Presence attacks don’t quite work for talking someone down, though.
They’re mostly immediate and not cumulative, and have enough language
about “the target may consider doing the thing” that the GM can always
weasel out of having the villain surrender. That’s probably for the best
since otherwise all PCs would have Pre 60 and all NPC opponents would
have to have piles of Presence Defense.