It’s like Monday, only different. I’m doing handover and on-call this week, so I don’t have to get up early to go into the office, I guess that’s something.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 4-6: More punching! Also various people falling in love with Scarlet, which is legit because she’s awesome, but also boys are gross.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 6 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, S finally got it! But I bet they have a lot more mismatched feelings coming in the future, especially once T finds out.

Written (game design): 198:

Leaving attack rolls and damage rolls alone for the moment, the effect
of emotional damage has to be somewhat cumulative, but preferably not
just filling up a track like physical damage. Maybe a Presence attack
has whatever effect it has, and also gives a -1 to defend against
similar moods but +1 against opposing moods. If it reaches an effective
Presence 0, then the target should adjust their psychlims accordingly,
although possibly not until after the fight.

Of course NPCs should be able to do this to PCs, but Hero characters
don’t change unless the player changes them, so any adjustment of
psychlims would need to be optional and compensated with XP.

(Since we’re using points of effect, fka Body on the dice, it’s now Pre,
Pre+3, Pre+6, etc for the steps of effect, rather than +10, +20.)

What effects could be worth doing Pre attacks instead of just grinding
down hitpoints. This is not a novel observation, but players tend to go
for options that are simple, immediate, and reliable, which is why so
many games have combat that boils down to taking away as many of the
enemy’s hit points as possible, even if there are other options. Clayton
Notestine called these “dominant mechanics”. Skill rolls are another
one: when you can get rid of the trap with a roll, instead of describing
how you carefully use your ten-foot pole to pack the gas vent with mud,
what are players going to do more often? A skill roll isn’t reliable in
the sense of always working, but you have X% change of succeeding even
if you don’t baffle the GM with bullshit.

This works fine in a low-tech, low-magic dungeon crawl, but a
superheroic, SF, high-magic, or even just modern game is going to have
characters that are experts in things the players aren’t, or things nobody
in the world is actually an expert in because they don’t exist. At that
point, what can we do except abstraction, or nonsense (technobabble)?