Tag: apothecary diaries

Pretty sure leaving your aura behind when you go for a ride is a second level D&D spell.

I was on call for the middle of the day, so I had to drag my work laptop with me, but I did succeed in buying shoes and going grocery shopping and reading a new chapter of Maidens of the Fall. I also worked on the project that was due Friday, and made some progress despite with Sage’s help.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.1-3: Picks up right where the first season left off, with Jinshi and mushrooms and murders and conspiracies. Also the great literacy project.

Read (novel): Snake-Eater (T Kingfisher): It is very Kingfisher, despite being about roadrunners. Also about the desert and awesome old ladies and getting away from shitty men. There are some scary bits, but it’s not actually horror, I would say.

Read (graphic novel): Leap (Simina Popescu): Roommates at dance school in (not very queer-friendly) Bucharest try to deal with gay romance and unwise gay crushes and burnout and familial expectations and being 16 and everything. They do not end up dating, they do end up being great friends.

Written (game design):

One of the arguments for ranks is that it makes adjustment powers
easier, but they aren’t that common. Maybe they would be if they were
easier in play, though. Also, the problem of adjusting a power that has
multiple dimensions is still there with active points. If I spent 12
points making my Barrier wide and 19 points making it tall and 9 points
giving it more Def, what happens when someone Drains 13 active points
from it? 6E just says to apply the increase or decrease as
proportionally and reasonably as possible, which seems like a lot of
work to do in the middle of a combat round.

I’ve been picking on Barrier, which has five different aspects you have
to spend points on (length, height, thickness, Def, Body) in addition to
possible adders. Even if we collapse the three dimensions into a single
size rating, and Def and Body into a single toughness rating, it’s still
two dimensions that have no particular reason to be correlated. Change
Environment is just as bad, with size and strength of effect, without
even getting into the possibility of multiple effects. Does the number
of ranks give the area, and the cost per rank the power? Or vice versa?
How does that square with area being an advantage on most powers? 6E has
some powers where you buy size directly and some where it’s an
advantage, but should it? Or should we throw out advantages and make
them ranks, so your 12-rank power has 8 ranks of effect and 4 ranks of
area?

That sounds more promising than doing advantages as cost per rank, at
least in general, but it’s not very adjustable. It would be back to
removing ranks proportionally and reasonably, but that’s easier with 12
ranks than 67.5 active points. Although limitations were more of a
problem than advantages, and this doesn’t help that at all.

Yet also Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

Not being imprisoned, I went grocery shopping. I didn’t even have an ankle monitor.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.22-24: Lakan is still not great, but now we have a version of the story where he’s not so bad, and he did pay for his screwup, although it didn’t fix much. End of season! Still no word on whether Maomao and Jinshi are ever going to kiss!

Read (manga): The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor vol 5 (Anko Yuzu, Sarasa Nagase, Mitsuya Fuji): Preincarnated MC is trying to keep her emperor from losing SAN due to isolation and becoming a monster, and maybe it’s working? Also they’re kind of cute, although not too romantic since she’s still in her 10-year-old body.

Writing (game design): 293:

Making the -2 penalty per action beyond the first the only limit doesn’t
work, because then even Jane Normal can do an unlimited number of things
that don’t require rolls. In a human-scale game, the GM can set reasonable
limits and everyone can agree on what a person can do in 6 seconds or
whatever, but what about superspeed? And we don’t even have just one
kind of superspeed; every speedster has their own special effect.

We could say things that “don’t require a roll” are actually 17- (18 is
always a failure), so trying to do two things makes them both 15- and if
you fail the first you also fail the second, but that’s still pretty
likely to succeed. We could increase the penalty to -4 so it’s 13- even
for things that don’t normally require a roll, which is still fairly
good odds but more of a risk. Also it would make multiattacks much less
viable out of the box.

Alternately, we could make a new Superspeed power, or Speed
characteristic, that’s how much non-attack stuff you can do in a phase.
Or rather, how many steps more on the time chart a phase counts for, for
purposes of doing noncombat stuff/making skill rolls that take time.
It’s still going to be a GM call in a lot of cases where you’re limited
by equipment (keyboard only accepts so many WPM) or whatever, but it’s
reasonably quantitative without having the kind of number that suggests
you should be getting 4 or 32 or 250 attacks in a phase.

It me.

I’m backup on-call today, as I often am, but today I used it as an excuse to lounge around home and be completely useless. I supported local business by getting takeout Chinese lunch, I guess.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 1.19-21: I think we have now had enough revealed that we should understand Jinshi’s ancestry and position and general endealment, but I don’t get it. I also don’t get what’s going on with that guy who sucks. Did he think Maomao was not going to figure it out? Was he surprised she took so long and got hurt?

Read (manga): 7th Time Loop vol 3 (Touko Amekawa, Hinoki Kino, Wan∗Hachipisu): The princess combines a few of her many past-life classes to impress people, engineer a better society, and reform someone’s warped personality. Little if any progress on the central mystery of the whole affair, though.

Written (game design): 222:

One other way I just remembered to reduce dice rolling is to only roll
the first up to N dice and the rest add a flat 3.5 Stun and 1 Body each.
I’d make N something like 4, so the normal human range stays variable
but the superheroic range is faster to play. Something like this could
also help with adding extra dice for movethroughs and such for the
previous two ideas, but I don’t think it’s enough to save them.

Can we make a system for beating people up that isn’t hit points?
We only kind of succeeded for the fantasy game, and as said earlier,
superheroes probably need even more abstraction. On the other hand,
nickel-and-diming the brick over multiple turns, while possibly
“realistic”, isn’t that much fun.

As far as getting beaten up goes, the statuses are unhurt, stunned, knocked
out, dying, dead. Plus the intermediate values between unhurt and
knocked out, and unhurt and dying, where you aren’t worse off but it’s
easier to move you to the bad status. This isn’t considering
transformation attacks, mental attacks, entangle, mental paralysis, etc,
etc, although perhaps we should be trying to unify physical, mental, and
presence attacks (which is, yes, getting back to conditions, because I
am a filthy story-gamer).

Not sure how to explain that Cephalopod Awareness Day and World Animal Day are the same day, otherwise.

Got up not horribly late (only very late), did some shopping. It was not as good as usual because not only do I have no Katalepsis to read, the sandwich shop’s microwave was broken so I had to change my order, and the bookstore is pupating for its transformation into a Barnes & Noble.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.10-12: Intrigue! Murder! Medical issues! Mass layoffs! Welp, back to the brothel. Surely Jinshi won’t miss her.

Read (manga): I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School vol 1 (Ui Kashima): The delinquent girl thinks she asked the hapless boy out, the bullied boy thinks the terrifying girl has impressed him into servitude. One of her minions knows what’s going on but is too amused to straighten them out; the other is different but equally confused. Those are pretty much the only characters with lines.

Written (catgirl): 236.

Excellent day for outbreaks of phasmophobia.

Successfully shopped for stuff and also other stuff, and um, that’s about it.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.7-9: More deaths in the concubine palace, then our detective gets a home visit where there are, you guessed it, more poisonings! Also we see where she gets it from.

Read (novel): Regent’s Mate (Glynn Stewart): The wayward princess king candidate finally makes it home with everything she has left after the last three books, and resolves the betrayal in time to actually save someone. Of course then she finds out why the betrayal happened, and that’s multiple more cans of worms, plus all the worms she already had.

Read (manga): UQ Holder vol 1 (Ken Akamatsu): Sequel to Negima!, but much less interesting. It’s okay for the main character to be OP, but he should get there through on-screen struggle and suffering, not just by inheriting all the levels the MC of the previous series accumulated over 30+ volumes.

Written (game design): 342.

Do I emit gibberish? You be the judge.

Also National Pepperoni Pizza Day, for Non.

Did the usual Saturday stuff, but could not shop for manga very effectively since there was an event happening and the store was all rearranged.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.4-6: Our poor apothecary keeps getting more and more attention, and also revealing more and more abilities. She’s kind of scary. I mean, more than she was by episode 3.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 1 (Shinichi Fukuda): He’s a loner apprentice traditional doll-maker, she’s a popular extrovert who has just found out he can sew and needs someone to help her with cosplay for a deeply sus eroge. This would work better if she were less hot or he had any experience whatsoever with girls having bodies in his vicinity.

Read (novel): Exordia (Seth Dickinson): A severely traumatized Kurdish woman sees an alien in Central Park, finds out about soul-based ultratechnology and the mysterious remnant from before the Big Bang that’s lurking under her hometown. I didn’t know gnostic hard SF was a thing, but it is now. The ending seems to indicate we’ll see more in this universe, which I would like, because it is Weird.

Written (game design): 127.