Also, No Selfies with Pandas Day.
Got the cleaners to invade at a more convenient time, which I felt a little bad about since I usually just say “whatever” but it’s a work day with meetings.
Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 37 (Tomohito Oda): The end! 100 friends and Komi and Tadano and everyone make it to college and Komi is still the hornier one (but in a wholesome way).
Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 10: Yeah, that’s a problem with slave soldiers, especially when they have superpowers.
Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 10: Now we know some of what Ink’s deal is, and it’s about as bad as expected.
Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 11: Adults sure like giving advice. But sometimes they also give chocolate.
Written (game design): 389:
Should we not be doing a meter-by-meter, second-by-second, or at
least zone-by-zone, round-by-round simulation? Having the dice tell
us how the story goes, instead of telling us where each energy blast
lands and letting us create our own story from the mechanical
outcomes is the very essence of story game. Not that Hero is
completely immune to this (Luck/Unluck), but it’s a lot more
emergent-story. Can we have emergent story without simplifying combat
down to hit points, though? Conditions involve a lot of GM judgement, as
does anything like tactics (beyond the very basic ganging up on
somebody), so we can’t get everything from dice rolls. That’s even
before we let players go thinking up new things to do that require GM
calls, or choosing the outcome of a successful attack beyond “reduce hit
points”.
Am I pushing too hard for tactical infinity? It’s the reason we play
RPGs with fighting in, rather than just playing Gloomhaven, but maybe
tactical a few hundred, or a few dozen, would be enough? Heck, people
enjoy playing 21st century D&D, and that barely gets out of single
digits in binary. Can we make do with a list of general conditions after
all? And a set of defenses against them? Although much of the point of
tactical cleverness is to work around the otherwise-impenetrable
defenses… Yes, this is the same question I keep going around and
around, looking at from the same set of angles.
RPGs derived from wargames don’t like tactical cleverness because
they don’t like decisive actions. If your entire game is a fight,
something that can cut that short means less gaming, and nobody
wants that. Or at least that’s one of my guesses as to why so many
games have hit points far in excess of what one attack can do. Hero is
actually not quite as bad as some, since a surprise attack out of combat
does double Stun before defenses and that can actually knock someone
out, or at least stun them.
On another axis, it’s harder to “play the world, not your sheet”
in OSR fashion when the PCs aren’t human, maybe not even remotely
(hello, sentient black hole!), and the world offers entirely different
affordances. Maybe we do need more in the way of structure than your
normal bozos creeping with fire through a cave of rock. That probably
means at least a limited set of conditions instead of a complete
free-for-all. It may also mean paying more attention to how things
happen and not just the end state. Which might bring us back to an array
of defenses, or at least a bunch of ways to avoid/resist different kinds
of things people do to you (dodge it, stick out your chest and tank it,
concentrate on memories of your first love who would be so disappointed
if you let yourself get mind-controlled, etc). It might also bring us
back to all powers having limitations by default, so at least some
openings are written down ahead of time, even if they aren’t known. (You
can still buy off the limitations, but then the limitation is that you
don’t have as many points to buy powers.)