Tag: journal with witch

Hurray for Sage! She is the yelliest!

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Kidnapping, hostage-taking, partial but extremely biased villainous dialog, and horrible bug goo in the conduits!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 8: It’s not a city adventure unless someone goes undercover in disguise.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 8: Another cute girl, but this one is pretty sus. Also the main two are getting more yuri. And there’s some plot and stuff.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 9: Oh no, bad reviews and writer’s block! Queer(?) best friend to the rescue.

Read (comic collection): Getting Dizzy (Shea Fontana, Celia Moscote, Gloria Martinelli): A girl who just wants to be special randomly because a magical skater girl to fight against negativity goblins, but nobody can be that special. The characters are high-schoolers or even older, but I think the writing is for someone much younger.

Written (game design): 158:

What is a skill mechanically, though? Are we keeping the 3d6 roll-under
system? 9 plus the number of dice that have Skills? That’s 10- to 21-
for 1 to 12 ranks, seems reasonable. How many different things you can
roll for depends on how many times you bought Skills on that rank of
power, and we definitely need to establish some way of quantifying that
to avoid the Literally Batman 12d6 powerset being too cheap. I don’t
think we need to be as granular as individual Hero skills; maybe the
skill categories from 6E (Agility, Background, Combat, Intellect,
Interaction)? Is five enough? It’s a place to start, anyway.

Now we’re back to conditions and weaknesses, which are intertwined.
Weaknesses are also intwined with complications and limitations, since
we want one system that supports both PCs having interestingly limited
powers and character-building complications, and NPCs having exploitable
weaknesses.

Following Hero terminology, limitations are things you can’t do with a
powerset, or costs you have to pay, or requirements. Major limitations
only; fiddly little ones are covered by special effect. Once again, we
have to figure out how to have limitations give extra points. Doing the
fractions thing is probably fine, I guess? The limitations are
definitely per-powerset, and with variable-cost ranks, it doesn’t work
to give free ranks. Free points still run into the possibility of
negative cost powersets, so fractions it is until we come up with a new
paradigm.

Fortunately Sage was already spayed when she came to live with me.

No office this week, since I can’t miss morning handover due to transit failure. Stayed at home, did some work, learned a little TLS.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1.7: Flum is doing pretty well at filling her house with cute girls, but there are still criminal lowlives and classism causing problems. Also monsters.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 1.7-8: Teenagers are difficult! Adults are difficult! Grief is extremely difficult!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1.7: Another weirdo, also shopping and ninja attacks.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 7 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The large metal beam!

Written (game design): 231:

Setting that aside for the moment, these either let you get something
without the tradeoff, or get more for what you trade (like putting Area
Effect on a power gets you more than just spreading to fill hexes).
Earlier I mentioned needing one to effectively attack, but is that
covered by whether you pay for your powerset to include attack powers?
Probably something as general as that should be at the powerset level,
but maybe those should be techniques instead? If you don’t have the
ranged attack technique, you have to improvise to attack somebody or
something at range, which gives some kind of penalty, I guess? Or you
can’t use all your dice? It would be a maneuver, trading off something
in order to do the ranged attack at all.

For whatever reason, it seems like getting areas of capability in a
powerset should cost per die, so a flat-cost technique shouldn’t be able
to completely make up for that, or maybe not make up for it at all. Of
course you can always save up and add a new capability to a powerset if
you really want to be able to do the thing.

How do we divide up capabilities? And what do you get for each one
as a base without maneuvers or techniques? I still think
offense/defense/movement/chrome is too coarse, but we can split those
up. I don’t think ranged/melee is the right divide for attacks;
normal/special (NNDs, drains) seems better. Defense I’m less sure about
splitting, maybe it stays as one capability. Are mental powers part of
special attacks, or a separate thing? Based on how many special rules
Hero has for them, they probably are their own thing. Movement also
tricky, since the obvious division is speed vs movement modes that give
you extra stuff like Flight. And chrome is not only a grab-bag, but has
things that don’t really correlate with how many dice you have in your
powerset, like Extra Limbs or Enhanced Senses.

No work today, but I did have to get up to let the cleaners in (they were late), and ride the bus (it was also late) to go shopping, and then do laundry.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 6: Six episodes, three demon lords down! Also, for those who were worried whether this might be a pervy anime, Teoritta briefly takes off her coat.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 6: There is some kind of actual problem with corruption and human experimentation (in the FMA sense), but Flum is busy dealing with petty criminals. At least she has a house now.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 5-6: Makio is not free of problems herself.

Read (short): “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” (Rati Mehrotra): Inexplicable events cause lots of trouble for someone.

Read (short): “Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” (Caroline M. Yoachim): Alien temporal architecture from beyond the gates.

Read (short): “The Millay Illusion” (Sarah Pinsker): Men who said a woman couldn’t be a good stage magician get what’s coming to them, probably.

Read (short): “With Her Serpent Locks” (Mary Robinette Kowal): Don’t fuck with the gorgon, no matter how hot shit you think you are.

Read (short): “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” (Samantha Mills): So many dooms.

Read (short): “Six People to Revise You” (J.R. Dawson): Yeah, capitalism would absolutely charge people a fortune for the privilege of being brain-edited into social conformity.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 2 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): It’s hard being Maomao. But it’s also hard putting up with Maomao.

Written (game design): 152:

Speaking of balance, the effect of using a power cleverly on someone
should probably be proportional to the active points/ranks, just as
(presumably) the amount of Grind Down or KO is. But greater cleverness
should also increase the effect, and different effects are going to get
quantified differently if we aren’t just chipping active points/ranks
off. And then there’s defenses against conditions, or maybe against
maneuvers, which also need to have an effect according to cost, however
that works. Maybe there are weak, normal, and strong conditions that are
different divisors on the level of effect, just like moveby and
movethrough need different amounts of movement to get +1d6? That at
least gives something to come to an agreement on, instead of the GM
making it up out of whole cloth. Or possibly it’s split along some other
axis, but we should definitely have a short list to pick from instead of
having to guess at the magnitude of effect from first principles.

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.

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.