Tag: kowloon generic romance

Did nothing today because I was on call, but after waking up to take handover, I was able to go back to bed and be useless for much of the day while Nightvale trained his Weight of a Thousand Dead Suns napping technique.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 12-13: We did learn at least some who and why and when, but how was only hinted at. Still, that was a completely unexpected level of doom in the end.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): Everything broke on Y2k and also horrible mutant plagues started, now it’s generations later and the survivors are engaging in conspiracy and rebellion about the mysteries behind it. It has very impractical sci-fi aesthetics.

Written (game design): 162. Still haven’t managed to switch to another project.

I keep wanting to slide into a very abstract system, which on the one
hand is flexible for accomodating all the weird shit players come up
with, but on the other is less grounded. At the very least, we have to
have people establish the special effect ahead of time, and being able
to put everything into a bucket with specific mechanics (physical
object, break by doing Body), even a large bucket, would be better.

If I sucked even more than I actually do, I’d say we should use an LLM
to invent rules for a special effect when the player invents it, but
a) I don’t think that would actually work well, and b) ew no. Someone
else can explore this frontier of game design. (Or, given the pride with
which people put NOAI banners on their games, no one can explore it,
and that’s fine by me. Fuck LLMs and their capitalist wielders.)

Back to splitting up the removal condition, that doesn’t work since
how much Body you have to do is both what it takes and how long it
takes. Or maybe what it takes is more like how much Def? Having to
make a skill roll is similar to 1 Body 0 Def, unless it takes a
long time. (Should we have skill rolls generate effect against some
kind of defense, unifying them with attacks? Probably not.) So maybe
the two factors are how long it takes to wait the condition out
(possibly forever, although that would be kind of expensive), and
what it takes to clear it before then (possibly nothing except an
equally strong power, which would also be expensive).

Leaving this to stew for a while, earlier I was on my usual bullshit
of wanting experience to come from suffering, so maybe taking a
condition lets you mark XP? Or it’s a limitation you can apply to
your maneuver/technique to offset getting more or not getting less?
Should the GM be tracking XP for NPCs? It’s more work, but maybe adds
flavor.

If conditions still have levels, then maybe any condition at the top
level should give XP, but I’m not sure they do, just the points of
effect left over after the defense is subtracted from the roll.
Although not everything needs to be that granular, and sometimes
there’s not an obvious use for it that’s distinct from the removal
condition. Once you’re blind, you generally can’t get any blinder; at
most the blindness could last longer, or take more healing to remove.
At the lower end you could just have poor vision for a while, so
blindess isn’t entirely binary, but for playability I don’t think it
can have very many gradations.

Also Respect Your Cat’s Drug Stash Day, but that’s every day, right?

Ended up going to a small local rally on a street corner instead of the big one downtown because the timing was better for going shopping. It was somewhere in the couple of hundred to few hundred range, we waved signs and people honked, I scritched a nice dog. Most of the people there were my age or older, with only a few parents and kids, so I’m surprised it wasn’t more bloodthirsty.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 10-11: Now we know who, and can speculate on why, but how is still up in the air, as are certain aspects of when. Is this really going to all get wrapped up in one more episode?

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 4 (Kaoru Mori): Further stories about the people Smith meets in passing on his way to Ankara. This time the marriage-crazed girls aren’t trying to marry him, though. They have their own lives to mess up.

Written (game design): Finally updated my character sheet for Kaiju Academy, which either counts as writing or doesn’t.

Another day that’s not for me: I’m terrible at poetry and also have no brain! Or maybe those are causally linked. I’m pretty sure poetry is a sign of sapience, or at least whatever it is humans have.

Slept in too much because it’s a weekend, managed to shop a little. I hear Jus is slaying at robot competition, though, because she’s not like me.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 7-9: Do people know things? Or are they just speculating? Either way, it seems like things are closing in. Also, smooching.

Read (graphic novel): Just Between Us (Adeline Kon): Rival figure skaters, one of whom is kind of terrible as a person, taking their rivalry and all kinds of strong feelings all the way to the Olympics.

Written (game design): 169:

It initially seems like we should be able to make a catalog of general
conditions, but players’ weird special effects are going to make
everything unique. Can we just have a condition “Blind”? Sure, that
has some mechanical effect, but are you blind from a bright light?
Pocket sand? Face covered in Negagloop? Crow spirit pecked out the
eyes of your soul? All of those have different defenses, different
durations, and different ways to remove them early, and that’s just
one possible effect out of… a dozen? scores? incalculably many
because players are most creative when it’s least convenient?

Can we do it with a combination of one catalog of effect and one
of how the effect is accomplished? Biological, do some healing or
wait; spiritual, do some magic cleansing or wait; physical, break
it? I guess there are at least three components here: how the effect
is targeted and implemented, which isn’t part of the condition since
it’s all handled at the “attack” time and then we can stop worrying
about it; what effect the condition actually has while it’s there;
and what it takes to get rid of it, both how long it takes to expire
naturally and what kind of powers will end it early and how well they
have to roll.

One from column A and one from column B seems doable once we populate
the columns. It has to be explictly not just allowed but encouraged to
make new entries if none of the existing ones match someone’s novel special
effect. We also need to determine what each entry costs: do more
useful ones use up some dice off your powerset if you don’t have a
technique? Or impose some other penalty? It seems likely. Not sure how
Column Zero (attack method) works, exactly, but it also needs to do
something based on whether it’s more or less useful than the baseline.

But I write fantasy because I can’t do math!

Went shopping, tried to get quarters, got a hard time for having an expired ID card. I should probably do something about that, but it matters so rarely.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 4-6: Well, now we have Dr Snake’s minion’s theory about what’s going on, but even the characters we thought were in a position of knowledge or power seem pretty confused, and I’m not sure any of this explains what was going on with Blonde Friend. Female Lead seems to be doing better emotionally, so probably it’s all going to come crashing down.

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 14 (Kamome Shirahama): And that is why every field needs both young whippersnappers and experienced elders, but no field needs dogmatic zealots.

Written (game design): 209:

Earlier I said there would be three outcomes from a disaster roll:
everything works as intended; partial or conflicted success; disaster.
The middle one is the most effort for the GM, who has to invent a
setback that doesn’t negate the success, so that should come up the
least often for playability, even if outright disaster should be the
least common for plausability. Which do we value most highly? If it’s
playability, then partial success comes up when you make the roll
exactly; if it’s plausibility then a disaster happens on a natural 18 or
something. That’s if we want to keep the Hero 3d6-roll-low. Something
like PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ or FitD’s 1-3/4-5/6 more naturally gives a
three-way outcome, but the range doesn’t feel as large as would match
the 1-12d6 of powersets. They’re completely different rolls, they don’t
have to match directly, but having, for example, skills that only go
from -1 to +4 feels too constrained.

Although, a disaster roll isn’t exactly a skill roll, and definitely
isn’t a to-hit roll. It definitely is more like a PbtA/FitD “how’s that
going for you?” roll, which once again is veering into filthy story game
territory. In the interests of our already-stated goal of not being as
hard on the GM as a full-fledged story game, can we make a list of the
possible results of a disaster roll? Obviously if you make the roll,
then you apply the condition you intended to the target(s) you were
aiming for, or as close as possible, and determine the level of the
condition with an effect roll using powerset dice.

The other obvious two-bit values are right condition wrong target (you
didn’t melt the Despairmech(tm), you melted the bridge truss), wrong
condition right target (you didn’t gently incapacitate the criminal
goon, you crushed them like a bug), and wrong condition wrong target
(you didn’t freeze the villain’s feet in ice, you made the road slippery
under the mayor’s car). There are always infinitely more ways for
something to go wrong than to go right, though, so I’m not sure this is
helping. Even having to pick a point on the scale from No Big to
Complete Disaster is a pain.

Failed to get up early, but did eventually get up and get Sage’s medicine and do some shopping.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 2-3: Okay, so maybe she’s [SPOILER]? But what about the guy? Is this all the fault of Dr Snake? (He’s not a real snake, but he is a real doctor.)

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 5 (Shinichi Fukuda): This volume is less about cosplay and more about the two of them doing stuff together, although taking cosplay pictures leads Doll Boy into a new world of embarrassment.

Written (game design): 206:

Duplicate conditions probably discard all except the highest one,
otherwise it’s too easy to get spammed with a bunch of copies of the
same condition and that’s boring even if they stack (which they probably
shouldn’t).

We’re trying to move away from the computer-game paradigm of “select
Attack from the menu, let the RNG tell you what happens”, which now
that I think about it solves the problem of how to determine whether
getting punched is doing Stun or Body. If you make your “attack”
roll, then you inflict the condition you want on your intended
target, or as close as possible given the circumstances; if not,
the GM decides what target gets which condition. Miss with your
fireblast, and the villain won’t be on fire, but something will! Or miss
creasing the criminal’s skull with your .45 and, well… I think we
need three levels of success: you get what you want; you have to choose
between getting what you want with a side of what you didn’t want OR
nothing much happens; or you get a full serving of what you didn’t want.
Which is more like a filthy story game than a wargame, so we need the
guidelines for the GM to make choices that seem fair.

Only one of those was invented by me.

Apparently I can drop directly into REM sleep in the nine minutes of an alarm snooze. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Socialized too much and only had time for one episode of Anime With Dave.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 1: Ew, smoking. But also, ??!??

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 11 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Genetic coup!

Read (novel): The Sundered Realms (Casey Blair): The start of a different series about a terrifying wizard lady with a traumatic upbringing and her impossibly hot, equally terrifying new boyfriend, in a fractured world where demons are trying to crawl in and eat everything and humans are entirely willing to sell each other out. Magic works by linguistics nerdery, which is always good.

Read (novel): Take Back Worlds (Casey Blair): Conclusion to the trilogy about terrifying lady wizard etc that I started before. Lady wizard manages to get enough people onside, including some of the asshole descendants of the people who caused the problem to begin with, to save three out of four worlds and not actually destroy the fourth (who would have totally deserved it). Marriage, wild magic sex, HEA.

Written (game design): 140:

Or is that only Human Body, and there’s also Human Mind, which
includes skills? It does make sense for powersets to include skills,
since Ninja Training is a canonical source of superpowers. How does
this work? We considered buying ranks in Skills earlier, but never
settled on anything. In most games, a character’s skills have both
breadth (how many things they cover) and height (chance of success)
and it’s usually not a rectangle. Sometimes it’s a triangle (some
FATE implementations), sometimes it’s just a scribble with every
bit of the breadth having its own height. A powerset only has one
dimension– wait, no it doesn’t, some capabilities can be bought
more than once for broader effect. So there are two dimensions
available. But what does it mean to buy Skills as a capability for your
Heat Subtraction 12d6 powerset?

“Mu.” Or, I don’t know, it’s your powerset, you tell me. Start with
the fiction, then buy mechanics to match. I don’t think Human Mind
is actually a powerset, though. Buy a background or training regimen
or whatever as a powerset that has Skills and maybe something else
or maybe not. Talents and Perks are now techniques that have
prerequisites of some number of Skills dice.