I meant to get up early and go get sampled, but instead slept in forever and then went. I expected the line to be horrendous, but no! Everyone else had gotten up early! So I got sampled expediently and went home and took a nap.
Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): Finished! That was extremely silly. Also the women were much cooler than the men, even if they were all pretty much tumbrel bait. But earnest tumbrel bait!
Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 36 (Tomohito Oda): Wow, multiweek study camp with just the two of them. And yet, so wholesome. Plus, Komi really is good at everything except talking to people, and she’s not bad at that here in the penultimate volume.
Read (anthology): Screams From the Ocean Floor (ed Heather Ann Larson): Assorted horror on, under, around, or vaguely associated with the ocean. Pretty much everybody dies. Variable quality, none of them outstanding.
Written (game design): 132:
Is there even room on the scale for No Big? In wargames, a missed attack
is generally a no-op, because there’s nothing you care about except your
target’s hit points. Maybe you shot up some piece of landscape, but
that’s irrelevant to your victory condition. Sure, the GM could try to
say that you accidentally broke something or someone important, but
that’s practically cheating. PbtA/FitD has only disaster, mixed success,
good success, with no option for nothing to happen, but that’s at a more
zoomed-out scale and player-facing mechanics. Whiffing your attack on
the enemy and getting pasted is entirely within the scope of a PbtA 6-,
even though in D&D it would be a missed attack where nothing happens.
“Realistically”, a lot of failed actions should do nothing much. The
missed energy blast goes somewhere, sure, but there’s a lot that
actually is irrelevant to the fight and can be summarized as general
property damage during the media phase of the encounter. But if we’re
talking about superheroes or supervillains, and we’re not doing a
second-by-second, meter-by-meter simulation of the battle, shouldn’t every
action have a consequence of some kind?