Life of a Space Parasite

But I wrote no kitten words, because I am way too stupid. Instead I got up to start my on-call shift and immediately got sucked into an hour-long customer call. That was annoying, but did get resolved and I went back to bed to read for a while and got trapped under cats (I and I tiny brain, we never learn). Eventually I become functional enough to connect my new computer to my old computer and let it suck out the brains, but that took hours and hours during which they were both unavailable, so I was forced to watch anime. Forced, I tell you!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 5: Okay, there’s a “hero” who should not be left to wander the world on his own. Still probably better than the people in charge of things. But that’s all there is so far, so I have to wait to find out how they get out of the stupid plan!

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 3-4: Orphan girl doesn’t even know what she feels, she doesn’t need people knowing about her parents and expecting her to perform emotions! Good thing they don’t know she was able to work on cleaning out her parents’ stuff without breaking down.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1-5: The girl with all stats at 0 and one apparently nonfunctional ability gets pushed out of the hero’s party and secretly sold into slavery, but just as she’s about to be fed to monsters for being unprofitable, she figures out the way in which her ability actually makes her OP and escapes to become an adventurer. Sadly she cannot escape the turmoil of what the hero is questing against. I can’t tell if her declarations to the other escapee are platonic or romantic. Possibly they can’t tell either. Also being simulcast, so I have to wait to find out the shape of her doom.

Read (graphic novel): Bounce Back (Misako Rocks!): Japanese middle-school basketball star suddenly has to move to America and learn English and try to make friends and deal with the basketball team being mean girls and generally suffer as middle-schoolers are supposed to. Feels like it’s aimed at readers for whom middle school is imminent.

Written (anything): NO COMPUTER.

Not sure what to say about it, though.

No anime with Marith, she has to work a hundred days in a row.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 3-4: More weirdos! I dunno, the convict heroes seem to be a lot better than the legitimate authorities. But, they’ve taken out roughly half a demon lord per episode, so it’s not surprising the legitimate authorities are terrified of them.

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 2 (Miyu Morishita): After seeing werewolf culture in the first volume, the second is mostly just school stuff, with some other mythfolk being slightly weird.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 156:

Are we back to figuring out what “damage” means? I still really like
conditions instead of hit points, but they definitely aren’t as simple
and therefore fair-seeming as a simple number or track. We can make it a
track by having conditions ranked (even if it’s just 0 or 1) and having
X ranks of conditions at one time knocks you out, but what is the effect
of the conditions? I guess we need a list of common conditions described
loosely enough they can cover most interactions of powers and special
effects, and then let the GM make judgement calls which one applies when
someone uses Hermetic magic on the alien slime monster.

What set of conditions will do this? How specific do we want to be? We
don’t want Sprained Hand and Sprained Elbow to be completely separate
conditions, but do we need to note which one it is when we mark the more
general condition? What is the more general condition for each?
“Temporarily injured limb”? “Sprain”? “Temporarily injured
manipulator limb” vs “…locomotor limb”? “Temporary physical damage”?
How do we divide up how permanent the damage is? Is two categories
(corresponding to Stun and Body) enough? Sprain is intermediate
between a bruise and a burn, do we make a third category, or tag every
condition with the step on the time chart you get to make a recovery
roll at? That last one probably has the most Hero DNA but is another
number to keep track of for each condition.

Do we have to have ranks on conditions? It’s probably easier to have
Clobbered:5 than five different clobbery conditions. Maybe the rank is
also the step on the time chart? That would be twice as simple. But then
how do we add up multiple instances of similar conditions? The usual
thing where it’s the new value if that’s higher, or increment the old
value by one if not is probably good enough. How similar do conditions
have to be to stack like that? Going around and around, we come back to
the huge variety of terrible things that can happen to a Hero character
being a good reason to abstract, but I don’t want to abstract
all the way to hit points, because bah.

Sounds like a disaster!

Tried some rain and thunder noise instead of fan noise for sleeping. Not sure it worked as well, but it was nice.

Still coughing when I woke up, so I didn’t go to the office to share my potential germs with the office party.

I forgot how to eat food, but Marith saved me with cherry tomato chicken. I put it over microwave rice and ate it and did not die even a little bit.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1-2: The worst and most powerful (and often craziest) criminals are sentenced to the battlefield as expendable special forces units, because their souls can be dragged back mostly intact from hell when they die. Human civilization with Euromedieval aesthetic and some magitech is being driven back by monsters, ancient magical superweapon in the form of a little girl, etc. Lots of gore and explosions and general violence.

Read (comic collection): Harley Quinn and Power Girl (Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Stephane Roux, Paul Mounts): Power Girl has amnesia due to something in another series, so she’s hanging around Gotham with Harley Quinn when some low-level Batman villains use an alien artifact to teleport them to the Planet of Groovy 70s Free-Love Aliens, who are in a war with the forces of repression. The jinx that ensue are definitely high.

Read (novel): The Initiate (James L Cambias): A man whose family has just been killed by a demon is recruited to infiltrate the cabal of sorcerers who secretly rule the world with absolute power and absolute corruption. It’s pretty traditional magic, calling up spirits by chanting in ancient tongues on the right day of the week, etc, and also traditional is the problem with going undercover in an evil conspiracy. I saw the twist well before the main character did, because he didn’t pay attention to the error messages.

Written (game design): 289.

What do you mean, “whose heart?”? Nobody important!

Walked to the nearer train station now that I’ve confirmed it’s back in service, went to the office, did some work, ate some Thai eggplant with purplish rice, coughed a bunch.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2: Angela (Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, Francesco Francavilla, Kevin Maguire): Even more disjointed and now Angela the hunting angel from Spawn (isn’t that Image rather than DC?) is with them and reality is falling apart. I think this may be why I stopped reading big publisher comics.

Written (game design): 190:

What do we do about players that just want to hit things and win? The
old-style absolutist approach would be to let them fail to get any XP,
but we’re supposed to be more enlightened now. If nothing else, a
failure by the whole team (EG, by following one person’s stupid idea) can
get XP for the whole team.

So if complications aren’t what give XP, how do they work? Psychlims are
just susceptibility to particular Presence attacks such that they cause
damage as well as spending the round aghast or whatever? Or can any
diabolical action cause emotional damage, but characters have some
defense except where their psychlims are holes? Even though it sounds
cool, do we really want to PCs to take random damage when their enemies
do something terrible? If it’s heinous enough, can they be knocked out
(faint)? That doesn’t seem very heroic, at least by modern standards of
heroism.

Also National Trevor Day, but I’m hardly a national Trevor. I’m barely even a municipal Trevor.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken tikka masala. Most of the people who were fired were remote, so we only have one less person in the office.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1: Cosmic Avengers (Brian Michael Bendis, Steve McNiven, Sara Pichelli): Seems like these are the GoG parts of a larger crossover event? Or something? Anyway Iron Man is with them, Star-Lord’s Star-Dad is up to something that probably needs a star-guillotine, Rocket Raccoon makes fun of Earth’s tech level a lot.

Written (game design): 117. Plus tried to write a Python script but I don’t remember how regular expressions work in Python.

Also Brown Dog Day, so extra treats for Bella.

No treats for coworkers K, N, and C and remote coworker S, only pink slips. “Aligning skills with the company’s future direction”, my ass. That leaves two people in the North America team from before Boss³ M showed up, so “not here to fire everyone” my other ass. Not sure what I can do about it, though, and this is a terrible year to end up out of work by making a doomed stand anyway. This is why all workers should be unionized, I guess.

In better(?) news, the package containing my new computer escaped the Memphis Blizzard and was finally delivered, but I don’t know when I will have enough brain cells to move all my 1s and 0s over to it. I recall it being kind of a pain last time.

Marith brought sundried tomato feta chicken and root vegetables to eat while watching anime, which was very nice of her and definitely better than me trying to feed myself.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.2-3: Well, that’s one way to restart a heart!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Black Mould (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Wait, Peter’s dad is white? I’m sure we knew that, but I never pictured him that way. Also, further evidence that jazz is the most magical of musical genres.

Written (game design): 133. Also doinked around with trying to rewrite my character sheet adder-up.

Seems way more tempting than an apple serpent.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Big fight! The lizard swallows Cedric and his lightsaber and rampages around while its rider and his goons try to capture our heroines with nets and bug cannons and shock tridents and complaints about how much Mal swears. Mal is awesome with her spores, Irinia is awesome with her fists, May is awesome with extraspacial conduits, Amalia is awesome with wedgies. The Prussian and his goons are not awesome but there are several of them and they’re well-equipped, so things go back and forth for a while until the first lizard’s hindquarters explode, reinforcements arrive, the assault on the military school fails, and Cedric will now be known as Darth Lizardass.

Then we had to stop gaming to supervise RV maneuvering and then it was time to go home. We got to take lots of XP back with us, though.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.21, 8.1: Go All Might! But we stopping the season in the middle of a fight means an episode that’s mostly recap to start the new season.

Read (graphic novel): Crossplay (Niki Smith): Various young and horny and unnecessarily hot con-goers engage in cosplay and makeouts and sex and not really that much drama. Printed in black, grey, pink, and red, to emphasize the blushing.

Written (game design): 170:

Even if it’s not new, I really like awarding XP for failure and misery,
but maybe it doesn’t have to be done according to explicit
complications. You get XP for making bad decisions, and what those bad
decisions are is up to you and your sense of the character, or perhaps
to the GM offering you a point to play along/you asking the GM for a
point for a playing along. Still need a cap per session, so that the GM
can’t just pick on one person. You don’t get XP for your hunted showing
up, you get XP for getting ambushed regardless of who it is. XP for
losing a fight in any of the ways mentioned earlier, definitely a bonus
award for getting put in a death trap. Maybe you do get points up front
for having a Hunted, or for any equivalent contribution to the campaign
(if it’s that sort of campaign, but if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be
getting to make up a Hunted any way).

Is it really okay for experience to be free-form? I guess it really is
in Hero, it’s just based on how much the GM thinks you won, by vibes,
with maybe an extra point for somebody if the GM (really, the table)
thinks they were extra cool. We could be actually be more organized than
that, and give the GM a small pile of XP tokens for each character,
showing both the cap per session and who has/hasn’t been earning their
XP by engaging with adversity. They could even be different colors if we
cap awards for different kinds of woe.

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…

There’s an xkcd about this.

No gaming, Ken has surprise inspections at work. No anime, because I am dumb.

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Night Witch (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Same art style, alas. Varvara and her Russianness and other Russian expats who might come to the attention of the police.

Read (manga): Blade Girl vol 1 (Narumi Shigematsu): A teenager despondent over the loss of her foot encounters Paralympians and the running blade prostheses and takes up running.

Written (game design): 398:

PCs need to be vulnerable too, though, and unfortunately the GM already
knows all their weaknesses. I’m not sure what to do about that, since I
feel like PCs and NPCs being written up the same way is important.

PCs and NPCs being written the same way suggests that they should have
the same potential outcomes from a fight, which is technically true and
practically false. The heroes almost never lose a fight, and when they
do, it’s by getting beaten unconscious. NPCs usually get knocked out,
but sometimes surrender or run away.Very rarely, everyone stops fighting
to have a standoff or negotiation, or the entire battlefield gets
upended by a larger villain or erupting volcano or whatever. Ideally,
whatever new system we come up with should have these other
possibilities happen more often, especially the PCs surrendering or
fleeing. Losing and then coming back with a better plan is a classic,
right?

Possibly by definition, having weaknesses makes you stronger than
your point value against opponents who aren’t taking advantage of
them (EG, heroes who haven’t figured them out yet), but weaker
against ones who are. This is pretty much what we want for NPCs
that appear once, cause trouble, have their weakness uncovered and
exploited, and slink away again until they come back with a new
plan. PCs who star in every session can then have relatively fewer
weaknesses (making up for it with other complications, probably)
so their performance is more consistent.

It would also be good to have possible long-term consequences,
non-wargame though that is. Wounds, loss of confidence, curses, unstable
powers, broken foci, broken alliances, bad press, etc. Of course
this should apply to both PCs and NPCs, although it probably will affect
PCs more since they appear in every session, while an NPC can go
off-screen for as long as it takes to recover. Unless the PCs hunt them
down while they’re weakened, and player-driven plots are good. But of
course turn about’s fair play.

How do we mechanize these longterm consequences? Is Reputation a
characteristic that adds with Presence? Probably not, since it can vary
so much depending on who you’re talking to, so it should be multiple
items for all the people who have opinions. Possibly on a team sheet,
rather than individual character sheets.

It me, although I’m probably not as freethinking as I think (freely).

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken and rice, learned some kubernetes.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.19-20: Two very dramatic episodes, Dabi vs multiple Todorokis and Uravity vs Himiko!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Body Work (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): A short story about a Falcon incident. I had not pictured Peter as wearing a suit and tie to work every day, but Aaronovitch signed off on it, so it must be so. I did not like the art at all, though. It is murky and rough and bleah and I am a Philistine.

Written (game design): 257:

Are we coming back around to my earlier idea of conditions, but
making them actual conditions instead of hit points with post-its?
As previously realized, that needs a lot of judgement calls for
what conditions a character (PC or NPC) can take or not take based
on their powers and special effects, but it’s 2026, we aren’t
actually expecting the GM to use their infinite power for TPKs.

A lot of this can be done in stock Hero, by giving characters
appropriate complications and limitations, but then we’re back to the
players guessing what weaknesses the GM prepared. Maybe NPCs can just
have “Weaknesses appropriate to being a magical goo monster (30)”? Or
“Weaknesses to be established in play by the heroes (30)”? It’s still a
little vaporous as to what they are ahead of time, but once they’re
established, they should be written down. Possibly there needs to be a
rule (more like a guideline) about when in the fight the GM has to have
spent all those points.

The GM can predefine some weaknesses, but leaving some for the players
to “discover”, although possibly lacking in verisimilitude, might help
with the problem of coming up with a whole new suite of complications
every session. Not sure it helps with limitations, though, so we may
still want a more freeform approach. Or perhaps this is a reason to
revisit the idea of having limitations be accounted for separately from
the base power cost? But probably just writing “susceptible to PC
cleverness as established in play (-1/2)” is enough.

Hopefully it’s inclusive and either a duck minifig or a larger duck made out of bricks would qualify.

Went to the office, ate some steamed pork buns and some pork shrimp dumplings, did some work, cleaned up some stuff instead of learning a kubernetes.

Read (TTRPG): Sig: City of Blades (Jason Pitre): Blades in the Dark crossed with lightly detrademarked Planescape. Of course there is no way they could have afforded DiTerlizzi, but I think more Planescapey art would have helped. It made me want to play it anyway.

Written (game design): 234. Should I be stealing more from Blades in the Dark? Probably not.

Another one that’s illegal, and also I guess we’re not supposed to think it’s at all applicable or else we’re hating fascism in the wrong way.

Went to the office, ate some vat sausages and sauerkraut and green spud, did some work, learned a little kubernetes.

Read (from the shelf): I have been reading, but haven’t finished the book full of words yet.

Written (game design): 213.

I wonder if that would be any good? Pistachio chocolate seems to sell at twenty bucks a bar for no obvious reason.

I hate self-assessment forms. Also I have to write an upward assessment for my manager, which will be read by her manager and cohort, so it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in putting anything in it.

Read (manga): The Fed-Up Office Lady Wants to Serve the Villainess vol 1 (Nekotarou): Right after getting fired from her first job, a dedicated but hapless office lady gets summoned to be the minion of the villainess of her favorite fantasy game. She really likes her new job, that’s why her heart is always going dokidoki, right?

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 1 (Miyu Morishita): A high-school boy falls in with a werewolf girl who is oddly going to school instead of staying in werewolfville. Cultural exchange and hijinks ensue.

Read (novel): The Regicide Report (Charles Stross): Back to Bob and Mo for what seems very much like the last book of the Laundry series. Many plot threads are resolved, much humanity is cast away, some old enemies show up. The world is still completely fucked up, so there could be more books later, but it doesn’t seem likely, even though it would be interesting to see what things are like after a generation or two of the Black Pharaoh’s rule.

Written (game design): 157:

With all of this, I probably don’t even need to say that I don’t plan on
completely removing the combat system in favor of having the players
talk through plans to overcome each aspect of the opposition that the GM
tells them about. (I think that’s what FKR is.) We want dice to make
things go wrong in a nominally fair way, and we need to quantify
all the crazy stuff from comic books that’s not in the players’ everyday
experience. Quantifying it in SI units is almost certainly the wrong
approach for telling comicbook stories, but we need some way to make
judgements that everyone accepts aren’t pulled out of the GM’s hat and
don’t take people too far out of the game.

As discussed, Hero powers are very inflexible: your 10d6 energy blast or
37 resistent PD does exactly what it says on the character sheet, never
more, and only less if you’re trying to save End or if someone bought
just the right adjustment power (or similar, like Find Weakness). Okay,
this is not quite true, since there are things like Haymaker, but for
the most part, what you have on your character sheet is exactly your
options during combat.

Out of combat, there are skills, which are still pretty tightly
defined, but still more flexible than powers, and players mostly trust
the GM to make reasonable calls about the scope and effect. Is that just
because they know the GM is obligated to get them to the fight one way
or another? Anyway, that’s probably more along the lines of what
I’m looking for.

(I’m being a little unfair to Hero. Unlike D&D, at least you can push
someone off a cliff without needing a class feature, there’s some chance
of being able to intimidate people in cmobat, etc. But I would like more
flexibility, even if I’m unsure what direction to bend in.)

The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what kinds of flexibility we
need. What clever plans will PCs come up, and how can we accomodate the
maximum number of them with the minimum number of mechanics? The plans
are obvious (kinda) in the moment, but absent concrete situations, what
are they like? Using the environment, of course, but that needs to be
either stronger than just punching, or get around defenses somehow. (Do
we have to accept that falls doing up to 30d6 is actually a good thing?
I hope not! Anyway it should be at most three hits of 10d6 or
whathaveyou as the ground gives way.) Psychological warfare I mean moral
suasion. Sneak attacks? Precision attacks? Nonstandard use of powers,
like spreading or haymakering, but modifying them in other ways, like
concentrating an energy blast to get armor-piercing, or something like
AP in the same way spreading is like AoE. Deception, distraction,
bamboozlement? Demoralization? Being demoralized should make you less
effective, but how do we express that mechanically?

More important now than ever, somehow.

The cats kept me in bed forever, which on the one hand is fine because I have only a little shopping to do today, but on the other hand just makes my sleep schedule worse.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 1-2: A suddenly-orphaned 15-year-old is taken in by her estranged weird aunt (novelist, probably neurospicy, doing her best). No hijinks ensue.

Read (graphic novel): Whistle: A good-hearted schoolgirl gets drawn into a life of crime because her family needs money and crime is how you get money in Gotham City. No Batman or Joker, but she meets several lower-tier canonical villains.

Written (game design): 190.

Hey, maybe that’s what Sage was yelling about! I sure don’t know what else it might be.

I just missed the bus to go shopping, so instead of waiting half an hour, I walked to the store. I really need to do that more when the weather is suitable (ie, not summer).

Lady on the street corner by my apartment was with a sign about increased ICE in San Jose, handing out fliers for the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network. The number is 408 290 1144 if you see any anonymous masked kidnappers.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.15-17: And now all the plot threads are coming back to life at once! Conspiracy! Betrayal! Eunuchs! Genetics! That one guy!

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 1 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Trying to make the move to reading manga on my pad. It works well when I remember to do it, although I have to hold the pad in landscape mode, so maybe I should get used to doing all my other timewasters that way too. Anyway, the anime follows the manga very closely. There is a translator note when Gaoshun starts calling Maomao “Xiaomao” which tells us that the “xiao” means “little”, so he’s basically calling her Mao-chan, which is pretty adorable.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL. But if I can stop adding more paper to the shelf, that’s good, right? Except then I feel like I’m betraying my buddy Doug at the bookstore by not buying anything in paper.

Written (game design): 112:

Now we have three ways to deal with opponents: find their
weakness/overcome their strengths, talk them down, or just punch them.
But, by the nature of dominant mechanics, alternate approaches can’t
coexist: if grinding down their hit points is an option, that’s the one
most players will take unless the other options are so much better than
the complexity is worth dealing with, and then one of them will be the
preferred one. Even if they’re mathematically equal (unlikely,
especially since different opponents will probably have different
susceptibility to each), there’s probably going to be one that looks the
best to players.

Not to buy in to the “dominant mechanics” theory uncritically, but that
does sound a lot like how players work. Having them carefully work out
which approach is best in each scene is also not ideal, since there’s a
bunch of pondering and calculating, and then only one approach getting
used. Although I guess as long as it’s not the same one approach every
time it’s not that bad? But a combination would be better.

It’s an important part of Hero that NPCs and PCs are made using the
same rules, but that means the NPCs should be working on overcoming
all the aspects of the PCs, who also have only 1HP (each? between
them all? hardly matters). This doesn’t work as well because the
GM has only one brain against all the PCs, instead of many brains
against one villainous plot (even if it has many individual villains).
On the other hand, it’s also unfairly easy for the GM because while
every villainous plot can have at least somewhat different obstacles
to overcome, while a team of PCs generally stays very similar from
one adventure to the next (if they’re like typical Hero characters that
have most of their points spent on their own capabilities that can’t be
changed quickly).

Another difficulty is that whatever the GM prepares needs to provide
something for every character to do, or else the players have to be able
to define enough of the situation that they can make opportunities to
stick the opposition with quills.

Put on my One More Chapter Club shirt, did more work than I expected although maybe still not a lot.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 10-13: She punches her way through a war and a dungeon and a flirtation, all the way to the end!

Read (artbook): Magic Knights (Dames Productions): Pictures of magical girls, now with swords! Also spears, dashing uniforms, guardian spirits, fancy dresses, mounts, comrades in arms, etc. Every page is by a different artist, but the styles are in the same genre.

Read (novel): Murder Medic vol 1 (EC Krueger). Someone who manages to die of rabies is isekai’d, steals the demon heart a cultist was hoping to use himself, makes some friends that then find out she’s a demon, gets harrassed by the cultist and various other people, does a lot of murders and LitRPG leveling up while her demon nature heckles her.

Written (game design): 264.

Sage has many questions, but I don’t know what they are!

Had a meeting with our new colleagues in Australia, but we did the lame American thing of just talking about sharks and giant spiders and drop bears. Also I embarrassed myself by forgetting which way the planet rotates.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.17-18: More characters from past arcs make an appearance! Some of them even survive!

Read (novel): Shadow of Mars: Book eighteen, back with the current action heroine on the conquered planet. Action and heroics ensue, mostly unsanctioned.

Written (game design): 202.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 7-9: Religious intrigue! Divine intrigue! Treason, betrayal, crushes! Also punching. Lots of punching.

Read (graphic novel): Stutterhug vol 1 (Sam Davies): Brightly colored animals, some anthropomorphic, many stylishly-dressed, dance and flirt and meet and part and sing, usually lovingly, sometimes sadly.

Written (game design): 430:

I’ve been complaining about hit points since at least the previous
game design document, and off and on since then. It would definitely
be better to defeat enemies (and overcome adversity in general)
through in-game action. The one approach I know of is the 1HP Dragon:
the dragon is so large that a sword is but a mosquito bite and its
scales are as impenetrable as an inch of iron plate, but instead
of abstracting those into a large number that you have to grind
down with endless dice rolls of the one optimum power on your
character sheet, they’re factors you have to deal with by planning
and in-game action, just like the dragon’s power of flight, and the
way its lair is hidden deep in the mountains, and the surprise army
of kobold ninjas. (This is phrased in D&D I mean “generic fantasy”
terms, but what is a supervillain but a dragon in spandex?)

The problem with this is that it requires a lot of prep by the GM to
establish all the components of the opposition. Is it too much for
anything except a boss fight/master villain? The amount of detail for a
master villain is probably too much for anything else, but the minor
villain robbing the local bank probably doesn’t need that much. They do
need some detail, though, and every aspect needs to be at least somewhat
interesting, so that’s still work. Also, if one of the aspects is that
the villain has a gang of henchmen, does each of them need to have their
set of aspects to overcome?

(We’re only talking about the end stage of the adventure here, or
at least the combat encounters. The first part of a superheroic
adventure is usually investigation, which works the same way as
before, peeling away secrecy and resources from the villain. Sometimes
those resources are minions, who would have hit points, so do we
fractalize them? What if they’re normals?)

As always with games where the characters aren’t baseline humans
in a mundane world, we need some way to ajudicate what they can do
to or about each other where intuition fails. How does a biotech
suit of powered armor interact with the opponent’s runic array? For
that matter, can this particular rail gun shoot through that
particular adamantium-plated robot? With time to plan and flexible
powers (gadgeteering, magic, any kind of VPP) many things are
possible, but sometimes supervillains are attacking right now.

Even if the players come up with a plan, are there any mechanics
around executing the plan in a rush under field (ie, horrible)
conditions? What if the plan is “get them”? Even Squirrel Girl
punches villains pretty often, so we still need a combat system of
some kind, better than the 1HP Goblin. Have we just put the hit
points inside a puzzle box? Do players want to always open a puzzle
box? I’m sure the GM doesn’t want to make a new puzzle box every
week. It’s 2026, nobody has time for that.

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)?

Also known as MLK Day.

No work today, mostly (I was backup to the backup), but I had to get up early to let the cleaners in, and then I was up so I went shopping and did laundry and died in a pit. My computer spontaneously rebooted, so I finally gave Apple a huge pile of money for a new computer and some peripherals.

Watched (anime): May I Ask for One Final Thing? 1-3: The rotten prince publicly breaks off his engagement with our heroine in favor of some chickie who accuses her of awful things, but instead of fleeing the country or dying and reincarnating, she puts on her punching gloves and beats the everliving crap out of the side piece, the prince, and all the members of his faction who are at the party. She then goes on to help her brother the investigator and his boss the crown prince with their work by beating the everliving crap out of a bunch more extremely deserving people.

Read (novel): Demon Queen Wants to Paint vol 1 (Amber Atlas): A young artist from Earth is reincarnated as a baby in the demon realm, which is pretty frustrating because she has tiny baby limbs and all while having her teenage mind, and also the demon realm is creepy and everyone is scary, but she does her best. Things are actually explained

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 5 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, A is really not dealing well with her feelings being different than S’s, or maybe just her feelings at all. Too bad therapy isn’t a thing in Japan, because she could really use some.

Written (game design): 163. Not very much for a holiday, but it’s more than 100.

Also Coffee Is Divine Day.

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Finally, after being completely overmatched and having to be rescued by adults or at least older students every time for four sessions in a row, the group finally defeats someone! It’s only combat exercises at the military school they’re visiting, and as guests and juniors they get all their gear and none of the opposition know what to expect, but still! They successfully escape captivity and take out three military academy students along the way, because finally they are awesome! Then the school is attacked and there are giant lizards everywhere and Cedric is going full Darth Vader, so they’ll probably need to be rescued again next session.

Read (blog post): The Chameleon.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 4 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Yep, that childhood friend is definitely competition, although she doesn’t know A even exists. Also, A and S have completely different ideas about that sleepover.

Written (game design): 206:

Story-wise, a master villain’s minions are often an extension of
them for this purpose: punch the minions, then once you’ve shown
you’re worthy of respect, talk down the mastermind. That sure sounds
like doing emotional damage to them, even if it’s expressed
differently. Maybe it just makes negotiations easier, though? Rather
than having a story-game single track for overcoming obstacles,
emotional damage could be an expanded Presence attack, which can
do more than make people lose a phase? It’s okay if it’s a little
simpler (no Def or Res), since it’s orthogonal. But how do skills
work into this? Are there no more of the skills that would have
been Interaction skills, and it’s all Pre attacks, maybe with ranks
limited to only help with your specialty? Or are the skills effectively
attack rolls, and you only get to roll Pre dice if you make the
skill roll? I don’t think we want to undermine the skill system, and
it seems like interaction should always get some kind of reaction, but
does this then make us want to remove attack rolls from physical
attacks? Of course it does, but then we have to come up with some other
way to distinguish between martial artists and bricks.

I guess that’s using AI instead of paying for a support contract.

Monday is a holiday, so I’ll do my shopping for next week then. Unfortunately, this means I had no reason not to let the cats keep me trapped in bed until noon. I spent the afternoon reading journalism about Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) and his Scientology-spawned abuses, which is probably not any better a use of time than slowly dissolving into mulch.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.12-14: The romance plot isn’t going anywhere, but it’s more of a big deal that it’s not. Also, the hot springs bath episode. We passed the halfway point of the season, so there are new credits, and Shisui (bug girl) is a lot more prominent…

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 3 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): S still has no thoughts of romance, but that doesn’t mean this childhood friend isn’t competition!

Read (journalism?): The Cuddled Little Vice (Elizabeth Sandifer): A side piece to the author’s main current work, which is a metaphorical(?) description of Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s comics careers as a magical war a la Crowley. Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) came out of that same British comics scene and was a big deal, so he also gets a long piece on his works (mostly Sandman) and also how shitty he was. I read it all, because my ability to not read things is very weak, but I don’t feel like it has improved my life to read such extensive commentary on Sandman even though I liked it thirty years ago. I also do not feel compelled to read the rest of the larger work, although I bet there are people who find it right up their alley.

Written (game design): 158:

Back to emotional damage! Letting an opponent be defeated by filling
either of two damage tracks is a strong incentive to focus on one,
although which one depends on what the players think that particular
opponent is weakest against. Depending on how much variation there is in
that, PCs might specialize in one track, and let’s face it, that’s
always going to be punching.

Even when a villain gets talked down, there’s often punching first, so
maybe both tracks have to be filled? Although there are plenty of
villains that need only punching, or only talking, so maybe one track is
sometimes zero, or very small. But now we’re back to the players guessing
what the GM set as the way to defeat the villain.

So is there just one track, emotional damage counting the same as
clobbering damage? But then there needs to be emotional Def and
emotional Res, and this is getting further and further away from Hero.

Went to the doctor for a yearly checkup, and apparently all my numbers are great. This doctor is very big on the protective effects of Mounjaro on various organs, so okay. Also got a vaccination, big globs of wax taken out of my ears, and (eventually) pictures taken of my retinas to see if they’re exploding.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. The changelings try to come up with a plan to rescue Faizal from his bridge, but can’t figure out where to get enough explosives. Then they go to a party, where Melanie recruits Theophania to quest for the Holy Grail and tells her about a dream. Thessaly makes out with a living candle and judges people harshly, Everett hangs out with his fetch and his girlfriend, Gretchen melts into the floorboards, and Siddy wasn’t there at all.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 2 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): A is so smitten everybody except S can tell.

Written (game design): 138:

Another thing I got from my blog reading was not giving rewards for
virtuous behavior, because then it’s not virtuous, it’s just mercenary
on the part of the players. So no XP for saving the day, but XP for
getting beaten up while trying to save the day is fine. Not saving the
day is probably worth even more XP (as long as it doesn’t end the
campaign). No XP for beating up others, though. Definitely XP for
getting captured and put in a death trap, following the rule of only
rewarding suffering in the service of genre tropes, not the tropes
themselves.

Honestly, although I’m trying to make a procedure for deciding how
much XP each character gets based on the shape of their doom, the
time-honored method of the GM saying, “You had a pretty hard time
this session, 4 XP for everyone” has always worked acceptably. Maybe
+1 XP for whoever the table votes as having failed the most
spectacularly. An individual character’s complications just provide
the components for a more holistic view of failure, and who are we
to say the table doesn’t know how to award XP?

In this approach, narrative complications are just notes on how to play
your character, or how to GM for them (that is, what kind of adversity
they need to face), and don’t need point values or other quantification.
Unless, that is, we do want to have variable amounts of emotional
damage.

Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.

Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!

Written (game design): 160:

The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)

(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)

One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.

We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).

How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.

Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.

I don’t make the rules, man. (Narrator: He totally made up those rules.)

Went to the office, listened to an all-hands meeting, ate some yellow curry tofu, did some work, helped some colleagues, learned some kubernetes.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 5 (Chomoran): Road trip episode! Also some backstory for Sachi.

Read (novel): How to Survive This Fairytale (SM Hallow): Hansel escapes his story (with massive PTSD) but is still in a world in which fairytales happen, and a lot of them happen to him, which sucks. But it doesn’t suck forever.

Written (game design): 199.

Mmm, sticky dreams.

Went to the office, listened to a departmental all-hands, did some work, ate some chicken guys and pickled radish, learned some kubernetes.

No gaming, gaming has moved to alternate Fridays, which hopefully will work better for more people.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 4 (Chomoran): The giant school-eating monster is vanquished, but Sachi had to accept a major consequence, so it’s time for a road trip. Also half of Makie’s family has appeared, but they don’t seem that important, maybe because they weren’t actually lost, only misplaced.

Read (short): “Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death” (Charlotte_Stant): Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Probably you have to be at least as online as me to appreciate this.

Read (short): “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” (Isabel J Kim): Smash the corrupt system! Um.

Written (game design): 193:

So how do we decide how many/how much complication a character has?
Negative points aren’t a problem, they reduce the character’s
capabilities just like regular points increase them, but what about
narrative complications? There’s two sides to the this, the number
of complications a player has to manage and the amount of XP generated
per session (adventure? in-game week?). The former needs some minimum
to keep characters from being single-note, but I don’t know what
that minimum would be, and anyway, more can be added over time as
they come up in play, especially reputations, hunteds, etc. For a
maximum, it depends on how we set the maximum per experience cycle.
If it’s per complication, then players are encouraged to take as
many as possible and try to get to them all every cycle, which is
probably not ideal. So, an overall limit to keep play from devolving
into chasing after XP, and also a per-complication limit to keep
players from spamming one annoying psychlim. Numbers to be determined by
playtesting or something.

Also, what counts as “causing trouble” for a complication? Hunteds
are easy: if they show up, you get XP. But how about Watched? Okay,
maybe that’s not even a real complication, but Psychlim, Reputation,
Physlim? Actually, those are two different categories, since Psychlim
trouble comes from the PC’s choices, while social and physical
problems are usually inflicted by the GM. But, how bad of a choice
does it take to be worth XP? Does the GM have to offer a point of
XP for making the wrong choice? But in that case, the PC doesn’t
even need psychlims, the GM just needs to know what they would
usually know better than to do. In that case, psychlims would just be
for taking emotional damage. (You know, like my inconsistent
capitalization is doing to any readers I may have.)

For external complications, it’s even fuzzier. Sure, if Antihero
Lad gets harrassed by the cops, that’s XP, but what if the team
makes a plan that happens to keep him away from the cops because
the place his powers help the most is over there? Does it matter whether
the players think to say out loud that this plan avoids that problem? Is
that even enough trouble to count? The saying is, “experience is what
you get when you don’t get what you want” so maybe avoiding the problem
is its own reward, and the XP only comes when the problem tells you to
assume the position.

Presumably somebody likes fabulous wild men.

Read (novel): Never Send Roses (Craig Schaefer): Seventh Harmony Black book, Harmony and her werewolf BFF (backed up by the rest of their horrifyingly unrestrained black ops agency) join a heist being pulled by one of their greatest enemies, which of course goes horribly wrong, but was horrible from the beginning.

Read (novel): Snake Oil Bullet (Craig Schaefer): Eighth book, with return of some enemies thought dead as well as new enemies, conspiracies, immortality, demons in cages, new magical powers, etc. Also alarming revelations about Harmony.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 248:

We can’t just make a Morale track that parallels the regular damage
track. Splitting effect between two tracks makes it take twice as long
to take someone down, so all the incentive is for the entire team to
focus on one or the other. Either they should share the same track, or
they should have completely different mechanics.

Long ago on Usenet (but I repeat myself) I saw a reference to a
superhero game where villains performing heinous acts like
machine-gunning the crowd would inflict Emotional Damage on the heroes,
with the implication that this was just another damage type like Fire
Damage or Ballistic Damage. Do we want something like that? Since heroes
and villains use the same rules, we’d want to base who takes how much
damage on each character’s Psychlims. That converts Psychlims into
something like Susceptibilities, which is fine. They can still award XP
when the character makes decisions based on them, unless we want to
split those functions.

Which maybe we do, since Psychlims as self-funding Complications don’t
have a level: XP is awarded according to how many times a Complication
causes trouble, not according to how important it theoretically is.
Antipowers like Susceptibilities and Vulnerabilities do have levels
according to how much they hurt, so if these are independent, everyone
is going to buy Psychlims at the lowest level unless there’s some
incentive not to.

(Psychlims, social limitations, hunted and watched, are all
Complications, but are physlims Antipowers? Fewer Limbs is the natural
inverse of Extra Limbs, but it’s probably okay to take baseline human
capabilities for granted. Buying down movement or whatever is still
negative cost. Not sure about buying off senses, though. That could be
both: negative points to use for buying whatever compensatory sense,
plus a complication for not fitting into human technology.)

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.

 

It me.

I did two whole shoppings today, wheee.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.9-11: Is the romance subplot finally getting somewhere?!

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 1 (Sumiko Arai): High school girl with taste in music gets a crush on the ccool assumed-boy at the music store, not knowing that it’s actually the girl who sits next to her in class. The secret is revealed by the end of vol 1, but neither of them is thinking about romance yet. Printed with acid-green backgrounds, for extra cool artisticness.

Written (game design): 280:

Using the (1+A)/(1+L) system inevitably leads to fractional values,
which means rounding (unless you keep all fractions, which I have no
intention of doing), and rounding 7.5 to 7 is a lot more of a bonus than
rounding 15.5 to 15, never mind 32.5 to 32. Obviously this is just math,
but psychologically it seems like even more somehow. Do we like that?
Maybe not.

Leaving that aside for now, since we will definitely return to it sooner
rather than later, I was reading theory blogs on being mindful of what
kinds of activity a game supports, because players are going to do the
thing that has firm mechanics. Superheroics (or action
movie heroics) is never not going to have punching, but we should have
other ways of solving problems as well. At least Hero has Presence
attacks, which is a lot more than most systems. It might be nice to have
even more support for moral suasion, though. You can’t talk Doom out of
exerting his rightful authority over the whole Earth, at least not
without a lot of leverage, but apparently you can dissuade Galactus from
eating the planet. (And of course criminals are a cowardly and superstitious
lot, but that’s mostly covered by Presence attacks.)

I might be basing this too much on the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it
seems like the main ways for a superhero to defeat a villain are
straight-up punching (especially for agents or minor villains), talking
them down, or finding their weakness/coming up with a clever plan to get
an advantage. Hero combat is usually only the first, and very rarely the
last since unless the GM specifically prepared a gimmick fight, it’s
very difficult to have any tactic be more effective than hitting them
with your main attack. (If you only paid for a 10d6 attack, why should
you get to do more than that? And if they paid for 40 Def, why shouldn’t
they always get it?)

I play like ten word games every day, so hard to deny it me.

Did not go into the office, did get sat on by cats.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.13-14: More fighting in the Sky Coffin, heteromorph riot on the ground.

Read (novel): Cold Eyes (Peter Cawdron): This book annoyed me so much! The entire story hinges on the aliens not being able to get into space because their planet has too high an orbital velocity for chemical rockets and limited uranium, and obviously  what humans knew about in the 1960s is all that’s physically possible. Gaaah! Read a book! Or a journal!

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 5 (Yodokawa): Landlord resolves her troublesome backstory, HEA, the end!

Written (game design): 191.