Tag: marith

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.

No idea what that might be. Maybe aliens will bring it to us when they invade.

Went to the office, ate vat sausage and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, did some work.

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.7-8: Season finale! Clever plans were executed, we got revelations about some characters, the day was saved, there are still plot threads unresolved, and of course a cliffhanger to keep the fandom buzzing until next season drops. Charlie shaped up a little, but still not great.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 21 (Kore Yamazaki): “Hey, Chise, can you help us investigate the mysterious dragon that appeared a couple volumes ago? You know about dragons, right?” And that’s how Chise became Red Dragon Queen of Wales.

Read (TTRPG supplement): SLIME beta (Mikey Hamm): Beta version of a Slugblaster supplement. Includes signature “devices” that are actually alien biology (including Monster Out, which reinforces my opinion that Slugblaster is the new TFOS), a few monsters, a few possible runs, and an all-purpose slime table.

Written (game design): 184:

We calculated that Def should cost 7 per point, but how about Res?
It’s like Def but only stops Body (which hasn’t been compressed)
so 1, but each point of Body is a bigger chunk of the whole, so
maybe it’s more like 2. (Should Def’s cost be changed? It’s based
on a ratio of 3.5 for Stun, which is roughly right, so it’s fine.)
That gives a brick who spends 60 points on defenses something like
7 Def (49 points)and 5 Res (10). A 12d6 attack can still do a little
lethal damage if it rolls up, which seems fine even if it wasn’t that
way in the old system.

Those costs are in old points, of course. If we make points bigger, then
it would be 3 for Def and 1 for Res. But I still don’t know if that’s
the right way to go. Which I guess means we should try it and see if we
run into problems later.

I still don’t know about ranks. It is an idea I really like, but
it makes converting some existing Hero powers hard. Maybe this is
a sign that those powers are poorly implemented? The ones that seem
like they would be most difficult to convert/need the most improvement
are Barrier, Change Environment, Clairsentience, Darkness, Enhanced
Senses, Entangle, Flash, Images, Invisibility, Shapeshift, Summoning,
Teleportation. That’s the ones that can be improved in multiple
ways independent ways, and the ones that deal with senses and sense
groups. (Senses and sense groups are another Hero thing that’s good
if you want to be micromanagey but not if you don’t.) I definitely want
to fiddle with Barrier to have better support for both forcewalls and
real objects, which may or may not require splitting it into two powers,
and as already mentioned, I want to make Change Environment more able to
change the environment, like making zero gravity regions. It may combine
with Darkness and/or Images, and we might also have to change how
environments are implemented outside of powers.

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.

Also mild guacamole.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.10: The one where Parker does applied noir philosophy. Also apparently the last one, which we were not expecting. We ended up watching like half an hour of something else Prime randomly switched to because it also had Christian Kane and were very confused.

Read (novel): The Lost City of Ithos (John Bierce): Fourth of the “Mage Errant” series. More power-ups, more romance, lots more doom, at least 100% more tigers.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 194:

Hero already has a multiple attack action but it’s probably too painful
to be a good replacement for Speed as-is: full phase, half DCV, -2(N-1)
OCV for N attacks, lots of limitations on what combat levels you can
apply, what other maneuvers you can use on those attacks, etc, and
marked Caution despite all that. Since it’s full phase, it can’t be
combined with movement except moveby/movethrough. Autofire and spreading
can also be used for multiple attacks, but they require counting the
distance between targets, and are limited by how much autofire you
bought or how many DCs you’re willing to give up to spread, so not
easily generalizable to other multiattacks, never mind other kinds of
multiactions.

Speaking of full-phase actions, I’m not sure whether to move away from
that to a more modern system where you always get to move and do one
action, which might be moving further. I can imagine cases where someone
would need to hold still for a phase, like set and brace or
power-specific anchoring, but that can be handled on a case-by-case
basis.

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).

I don’t have a lawyer, although I probably should.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.8-9: The one where Hurley has to cool the mark, and the one with the Effective Altruism polycule. Parker, or maybe Riesgraf, had way too much fun with that.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 15 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That particular alien invasion might be over, but something is definitely up at school. First, though, the grandma and her metal exorcists have to help a haunted student. It’s still not clear to me whether anyone except the PCs notices any of the rampant destruction. Also, a lead on the missing golden orb.

Written (game design): 246:

Looking at option #2, you could roll 3d6 for any effect roll. If
you make a 8-, great, you do well above average (5 Stun per die).
If not, if you make an 11-, good, a little above average (4 per
die). If not, but you still make a 14-, then a little below average
(3 per die). If you can’t even make that, then it’s well below
average (2 per die). Body is always Stun/3. (For an even distribution
it should be more like 8-/10-/12-, but 8-/11-/14- numbers most Hero
players already have in their brains.)

Or if we wanted to combine with the success roll, say every odd number
showing on one of the dice gives you a bump, and a 1 gives you another
bump. (Or reverse if you think only rolls that were easy to make deserve
to do better.) That’s 4/6 bumps per die, so 3d6 gets an average 2 bumps,
min 0, max 6. That range is too large for 1 per die, so it’s 2.5 Stun
per die plus 0.5 per bump. Body could be Stun/3, or dice-2 +1 per bump
with hard bounds of 0 and dice*2.

These both use a lot fewer dice, and the calculation can mostly be done
ahead of time (except when something like a haymaker or moveby adds
dice), but it’s more table lookups and the curves don’t match that well.

Isn’t that missing the entire point of nachos, though? You need the cheese and sour cream!

Bus was late even though it wasn’t raining. Went to the office, heard through the grapevine that Former Coworker T was fired for poor performance, which is a) bullshit and b) possibly grounds for a lawsuit, ate some green curry chicken, did what seemed like a lot of work. Train was late on the way home.

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.3-4: Wow, Charlie is just relentlessly imbecilic. I think Marith’s right that this is the season where she’s going to drive everyone away. Also, Alastor backstory, much less sympathetic than I expected, and also full of mystery. No songs as good as “Gravity” but the Pentious/Cherri remote duet was nice. Jus will be glad that her waifu Velvette gets more screen time.

Read (novel): Into the Labyrinth (John Bierce): This is the series that Jeremy is stealing heavily from for our current campaign,but he also stole lightly from it for the previous campaign (the book Great Library is cooler, alas), so it keeps giving me flashbacks. It’s very heavily about the magic system. The main character is a boy with low self-esteem, which, yeah, relatable to likely readers, but did we have to? I think this is the same guy who wrote The City That Would Eat The World.

Read (manga): After God vol 6 (Sumi Eno): Still in the non-Euclidian palace, more Obikawa tragedy, some Tokinaga revelations, even some Waka backstory.

Written (game design): 349:

This finally brings us back around to the question of rolling a huge
pile of dice for effect rolls.

On the pro side, we know it’s playable, it produces the 3.5:1 ratio
of Stun:Body we’re used to, and it’s not complicated. It also produces
quantitative (or “quantitative”) numeric damage which is easy to apply
to anything, animate or inanimate.

On the other hand, it’s a lot of rolling and adding (movethrough!) for
results that aren’t particularly distinct, as is usually the case with
hit point systems.

There are a few ways we can approach this. Obviously the downsides aren’t
a complete dealbreaker, so we can just accept them in exchange for the
upsides. Roll between 2 and 30 dice, add up Stun and Body, away you go.

Second, we can try to come up with an easier or at least faster way to get
results in the same range, even if we don’t get every possible result.
(Does it actually matter significantly to gameplay that a 10d6 attack
could do either 37 or 38 Stun? Probably not.) EG, we could roll at most
3d6 and use a table lookup or some other operation to expand that range
of results to a reasonable range for more virtual dice. For bonus
points, we could combine this with the success roll, so 3d6 tells you
everything you know. EG, have a base Stun and Body per virtual die, and
then add a certain amount per die for every 1 you roll on the dice for
the success roll. (Or for every 6; maybe you should only get the extra
effect if the success was easy enough you could roll badly and still
make it.)

Or, we could change what an effect roll does (and probably how it’s
rolled). This probably comes down to conditions instead of hit points,
or maybe a short track of statuses. We need to keep some aspect that’s
strongly but not perfectly correlated with the number of dice (or ranks,
or however we rate an effect) for things like escaping from grabs and
maybe knockback, as well as the usual lethal and non-lethal damage.

Not sure what nation that’s from. Atlantis? Shangri-La?

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.1-2: It’s finally here! 2.1 is the equivalent of the episode 14 recap in anime, which is fine, it’s been a while since season 1. 2.2 is where it gets going, with Sir Pentius in Heaven, which has some definite flaws. Also there’s obviously no continuing moral education requirement, although “Gravity” is a banger of a song and video. And WTF is up with Lilith?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 19 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Death! Dismemberment! Trauma! Disappointment! Hand jobs! More trauma! More death! Conceptual warfare! It is all extremely fucked up, both in how the world is and what people are doing to cope.

Written (game design): 259:

The skill levels from old Hero would, in our new system, be 1 point
(either one skill or a couple of skills), 2 points (all skills based on
a single characteristic), or 4 points (all skills). An overall level
that can be used for combat as well would be 5 points, and attacking is
just skills. So we could say a background that’s boring, I mean not so
useful for adventuring, costs 2 per +1, one that’s pretty useful costs
3, and omnicompetence (my background is that I’m Literally Batman) is 4,
leaving the decision of what’s less useful and more useful in a given
campaign to the table. Likewise, conflicting views of what’s included in
the same single-word descriptor can be settled by reasonable players.

But, is it Hero? Maybe it’s not. We consolidated characteristics, but
they’re just as concrete as before. Maybe making skills looser is the
wrong approach here and we should leave the skill list as is.

The base 11- for a skill costs 1 point regardless of what kind of skill
it is (except attack), but another point would get +1 for a full skill
and +2 or arguably even +3 for a knowledge or professional skill, which
is a little awkward if a skill level covers some of each. Do skill
levels not include knowledge skills? Just pay 1/2/3 points for a
11/14/17- with a specific skill? Is it bad to not have the intermediate
values? 6E only has even values for Stun and multiples of five for End,
so maybe it’s fine.

Pretty sure a pastrami cheese melt counts.

Tried to take books to the used book store, but the Internet said it was likely to rain and I can’t make my wire granny cart full of paper bags of books at all rain-proof, so that will have to wait. Did the usual shopping, got many new volumes of manga to read because I still haven’t converted to digital for that.

Ayse is sick again, so no cake this week. Maybe next week, if she can recover her health.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.16-18: Maomao solves a puzzle with Deduction instead of PS: Apothecary, then some more of her mysterious past gets dug up (although she doesn’t know it yet). That one character really needs a lingering, painful, and incurable accident.

Read (manga): Monster-Colored Island vol 1 (Mitsuru Hattori): She’s never been off the island and has no friends. She’s just run away to this remote island and is a total tsundere. Together, they awaken a mysterious supernatural force by making out in front of its shrine.

Written (game design): 347. Making a Hero 6E character reminded me of all the things I want to fix in Hero.

Holy crap, stop giving them ideas!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.6-7: The one where Harry has to charm a dude, and the one where a speed trap catches more than the corrupt mayor bargained for. Bonus points for the villain in ep 6 being bisexual without any particular comment, and Harry going out with him without any comment, but points off for, well, villainous promiscuous bisexual. More points with no deductions for OT3.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 35 (Tomohito Oda): 97/100! Everyone would befriend again!

Written (Fantasy Hero): Finished up a 100-point character, sent it off to be picked apart.

Happy Happy Ayse Day!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.5: The one where Tara helps them steal a Sophie Devereaux.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 5 (Aki Irie): The three legs of this series are Icleand, Lilja/Kei, and Michitaka’s crime drama, and in this volume we get all three. Also some shorts from the PoV of non-Kei characters.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Fiddled around some more. I’ll say it counts, but it wasn’t much.

Exactly what kind of person is scared of anti-fascism?

Slept in excessively, but still went to the protest. The newspaper was saying 10k people in San Jose, 7M nationwide. That’s like 2% of the entire country!

Also managed to run a couple of errands including haircut.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.13-15: Recap episode! New credits! (I liked the old OP better.) Back to the skulduggery, this time including fuel-air explosions to go with the poisonings.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 2 (Rem, Bikkuri): Still rereading what I originally read as webcomic. There is an ongoing plot now, but it’s still extremely ridiculous. Not as fluffy as TFOS, but still that energy. More characters are getting spotlight, but Pandora is still great. Ricket is also great.

Written (catgirl): I finally deleted the stuff I commented out, and also added a little more, so technically today was 1445, but that number feels extremely bogus.

Learning is good!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.3-4: The cryonics one and the pool one. I like that they’re showing everyone has been cross-training all these years. Also, Parker is apparently all-in on the transhumanism, so I have my next Eclipse Phase character. (Yeah, like I could play that.)

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 14-16 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Denji is becoming more of a major character, but the other main character for this arc is just as hopeless at humaning as he is, so of course they have to go on a date and also get attacked by devils a lot. Really creepy horrible devils that show why 35% of all deaths in Japan are due to devil activity.

Written (catgirl): 117, and even that took staying up until forever o’clock. I’m not good at this writing thing, am I?

Specifically, it’s Marith’s party!

We celebrated with the traditional bowling, although there were only four of us because everyone else was sick or busy or introverted. I was not the absolute worst at bowling, at least! Then we went back to Monkeycat Towers to see Ayse and Jus and Non, and eat DoorDashed Cheesecake Factory and choco mousse cake. Jus was on her way to HoCo (that’s how they say Homecoming this year) and looked very nice. All that took so long that Marith had to go home because tomorrow is work, so although it was happy, there was no anime.

Read (manga): Evil-ish (Kennedy Tarrell): Villains who are not necessarily evil in a modern/fantasy world, kind of like Nimona. Our nonbinary protagonist tries to join the organization of villains, because it’s way cooler than being a potion barista, and succeeds through an improbable series of events, along with the annoying person who has actual magical power. It’s not as great as they hoped, and they have to face the consequences of their actions and their friend’s past and ancient curses and everything.

Written (catgirl): 144.

 

Also National Family Bowling Day, which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Squid & Cuttlefish Day. (That’s like Frog & Toad, only with more tentacles.)

New Manager T tried to explain the brilliant plan she received from above, but we didn’t understand, so suddenly we have a mandatory in-office meeting on Monday with Newish Boss³ M. This is not filling me with optimism. How do resumes work again? (It’s 2025, they don’t work.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.1-2: The weekend in Paris, and the one with the crooked judge. I know they try to not do murders, but that house in France would have been an excellent site for an orbital bombardment, if only Hardison hadn’t wasted all of S2 failing to set up an orbital domination array.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 107.

We’re still at the level of lightly tweaking stuff we pick up off the ground, but I think that counts.

Went to the office, some people were there, ate rolled-up beef and onion and rice noodles and bean sprouts, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.12-13: Two-part season finale! You come at the Sophie, you best not miss!

Read (graphic novel): Teen Titans: Raven (Kami Garcia, Gabriel Picolo): Hey, if being half-demon was good enough for Merlin…!He probably didn’t have to deal with high-school crushes, though.

Written (catgirl): 298. I am rewriting a bunch, but if I actually delete the old words, instead of commenting them out, then my word count will be inflated in a way that feels bogus, even though I determined when I wrote the counting script that deleting is just as important as adding.

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.

I saw one butterfly the other day. That’s not really the right number to see. I think I’ve seen more hummingbirds, which is kind of alarming given their relative sizes.

Did some work, sat on a call with a customer forever but did fix their problem as much as it probably could be, forgot to eat lunch. Should probably die in a pit.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.10-11: The one about the grad student and the evil professor, and the one where the main characters are only in the background. Also, Parker is literally Batman.

Read (manga): Beauty and the Beast of Paradise Lost vol 1 (Kaori Yuki): Beauty is weird-looking and bullied, has a horrible home life, eventually winds up in the time and space castle of the Beast, hunted by the local authorities, everything is terrible and kind of cracktastic.

Written (catgirl): 153.

Does anyone observe this?

Still no office, WFH all this week, yay.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.8-9: Harry’s turn in the mastermind chair, and the MLM one.

Read (novel): Broker vol 1 (Derelict Presence): The main character gets popups, but mostly it’s not LitRPG, although it does have sudden powers, world eaten by monsters, etc. MC manages to come back in time from supervillains ownzoring everything, with the meta-power of being able to shuffle powers around, as well as being able to make binding contracts and unable to lie. Now she has only a few short years to keep the world from imploding, and no time for moral qualms.

Read (manga): Kase-san and… vol 2-3 (Hiromi Takashima): This is Kase-san and Bento and Kase-san and Shortcake. More high-school romance. Yamada is too pure for this world, or at least for knowing what to do with a girl and a bed, or being able to take a bath with her crush on the school trip.

Written (catgirl): 218.

Gah, she’s 16 now!

Did not go to the office because I’m doing evening handover this week, did go to sushi dinner and cake and presents with Jus. How did it come to this?

Read (manga): Kase-san and… vol 1 (Hiromi Takashima): Another reread of high-school yuri that I found while sorting. She’s a meek girl who loves gardening, she’s a dashing athlete, somehow they start going out. Every volume of the series has a different completion of the title; this one is Kase-san and Morning Glories.

Read (novel): What Stalks the Deep (T Kingfisher): This time the horrible thing is in an abandoned coal mine in America, which the doctor friend from the first book has lost a relative to. Battlefields are one thing, but deep dark tunnels with millions and millions of tons of stone just waiting to trap an enby forever are quite another, and that’s not even counting the horrible thing.

Written (catgirl): 142.

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.

But only the ones that don’t refuse to fulfill prescriptions for religious reasons.

Was too sleepy from never going to bed on time to go to the office. Did some work anyway.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.4-5: The one with Parker and Hardison’s date night, and the one with off-brand Bohemian Grove and Eliot’s old army buddy.

Read (manga): Dirty Pair vol 1-2 omnibus (Haruka Takachiho, Hisao Tamaki): Too much and too sleazy fan service, and they only have one (admittedly psychic) brain cell between them. They would be doomed without Mugi. (This may be more true to the original than the Warren Ellis version I read first.) But, there is a horrible disaster at the end of every story.

Written (game design): 104.

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.

Sage has this one covered.

Watched (TV animation): Knights of Guinevere pilot: Theme park dystopia, two down-on-their-luck mechanics find a busted princess mascot robot, or maybe the princess mascot robot, and adventure ensues. Seems like it has potential.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.2-3: The one with the plastic waste mogul and the one with the video game tournament. I’m glad they’re keeping Parker weird.

Read (manga): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Written (game design): 135:

Now that I think about it, reducing all characters, or even just all
PCs, to a handful of numbers isn’t very anticapitalist, so a quarter
point for getting rid of stats and also fixed skill lists? Maybe an
eighth. Whatever, I’m good with keeping it. Put what makes your
character different on the sheet, not what makes them the same. (Okay,
and a fallback, characters aren’t that different.)

Which is not helping figure out what magic does and how to write it up
for characters, although it does kind of suggest magic should be unique
rather than D&D-pigeonholed (no classes!). So we need a system to make
all kinds of magic in a way we can actually play, which is either a
story game or reinventing Hero.

This is why people hate theory, isn’t it?

Got it covered!

No office today, I had to get my meatsack inspected. (That sounds way more risque than anything in my life ever has been.) Needs new chemicals, apparently.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.16: The season finale,which both follows on from the previous episode and explains why Harry isn’t there in the next season. And an actual OT3 moment, because measuring somebody for a robot body is true commitment.

Read (manga): The Essence of Being a Muse vol 1 (Aya Fumino): A failed art student finally cannot even with her mother trying to get her to be normal and the horrible people at her office job and feeling like she’s bad at everything, so she runs away, which works out surprisingly well so far.

Read (novel): Big Trouble, Little Earth (JN Chaney, Jason Anspach): The main character is a space trucker, but overall it’s a lot more like a crazed Feng Shui session with the GM’s homebrewed far-future juncture, with all the groundedness and realism that implies.

Read (manga): Succubus & Hitman vol 1-4 (Makoto Fukami, Seigo Tokiya): You know how I sometimes say something is lacking in redeeming social value? I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, I read this, but yikes. Content warning for everything bad that can happen to a human or small animal.

Read (short): Gorilla in the Groove (Murphy Lawless): Fated-mate shifters in Ireland, this time a gorilla DJ and a visiting dancer. There is some conflict, because it’s not Virtue Shifters, but mostly just mushiness.

Written (game design): 233:

If you’re thinking that I have no idea how to make a game
anticolonialist, anticapitalist, or antifascist without being Eat The
Reich, congratulations on being absolutely correct. Should I award
myself half a point for insisting that everyone has the same potential
to become touched, and forbidding special bloodlines? Should I take it
away again for making the creatures that stomp all over the land doing
things that make no sense incomprehensible ultrahumans instead of
people?

Is making the PCs mechnically distinct from NPCs (such as by having only
player-facing rolls, or even NPCs not have stats at all, like in FitD;
or by having some NPCs not have hit points) bad in this respect? Even if
the difference is allegedly only at the level of mechanics and not
reflecting anything in-character, it still lends the PCs a sparkle of
Extra-Specialness, which seems contrary to the spirit of the thing. On
the other hand, Eat the Reich is about literal vampires.

Story points or other metacurrency have a similar problem with forcing
the story in a particular direction, which seems wrong. This ties into
the thing with not rewarding PCs for being good (morally) since then
they’re not making moral choices, they’re just grubbing for points. I
have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m not actually an emergent
story purist, I don’t think, despite liking Play To Find Out What
Happens.

Still playing Shop Titans, I hope that counts!

Did some work, had an initial 1:1 with New Manager T, gave Nightvale some ‘nip so he freaked out. (I offered some to Sage but she didn’t care. Apparently food is her vice.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.14-15: The one with the train heist on the greenwasher, where Breanna gets to be gay, and the one with Harry’s ex-family and the alarming ending.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 5 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The one with the zombies and the duel. Things are getting serious.

Written (game design): 396:

I don’t want generic zombies/skeletons, or even skleltons, because
there’s not much point to any kind of generic monster, let alone one
that’s just a bandit PCs don’t have to feel bad about killing. Maybe
corporeal undead are different depending on where their body was
abandoned? Or just always different, but it’s nice to have some thematic
consistency between monsters and their environment. D&D notwithstanding,
incorporeal undead are just various forms of ghosts. I feel like ghosts
should have more memory of their life, wandering corpses can be more
ravening.

Oh, but what about vampires? Are they even undead? Seems like a clear
case of monster-that-used-to-be-person, even if they were disanimate
for a while. I think it’s fine if they are kind of alive, even. Multiple
kinds of vampires! Multiple ways to become a vampire! All of them are
terrible, none of them are cool! And not all of them drink blood, this
is the category of wandering corpses that are fresh enough to still have
their memories and personality. Instead of draining your blood to turn
you, they can drown you in a bog until you mummify or set you ablaze
with the eternal flame or whatever.

What can ghosts do? I don’t think we have levels, so no level drain, but
whatever spirits can do, which is, um, well…

What even is a spirit? I strongly believe that a witch’s familiar
is a spirit, not a Disney princess cute animal friend. You can have a
cute animal friend, it’s just not a familiar, although maybe the
familiar could be possessing it, or manifesting in its form. So there
are spirits that bring magical knowledge from… somewhere. Maybe the
same place as answers to necromancers’ questions, which is to say the
accumulated memories of everyone dead? Which doesn’t tell us what
spirits are. I don’t think I want to go the Exalted route of everything
having a spirit that can be called up and talked to: that is not the
vibe I have for this setting. I mean, maybe there are spirits, but they
aren’t people, you can’t have a conversation in words. Unless they’re
ghosts and have a personality!

So apparently spirits can manifest in the form of living creatures, and
possess living creatures. What else? I really like the image of a wizard
with a bandolier of cages containing spirits that can be set loose to do
things, but maybe those are more like elementals? Are those different?

We’ve wandered far afield from figuring out how magic works. Maybe
that’s too hard for now and we should think about what kinds of magic
there are instead, or otherwise brainstorm weirdness. (Weirdness tends
to be specific, and show-don’t-tell, so it makes the setting less open,
but that’s fine.)

Different kinds of magic are probably practiced in different areas,
since communication isn’t that great? Maybe there are printing presses,
but is there a scholarly community that likes flaunting knowledge at
each other? Probably not, since magic is immediately useful. Do we have
nation-states that hoard military knowledge? Maybe not, I’m picturing
more like ancient scrolls of martial arts techniques, except not
necessarily ancient.

Does magic actually work differently in different areas? On the one
hand, that would definitely be weird, and entertaining to watch PCs deal
with, but on the other, it would be a lot of work to come up with
multiple ways for magic to work that didn’t just randomly hose different
characters in each zone. Maybe minor differences, though? Does magic
come from living dungeons, and that’s why it’s different in different
places?

Is everything living dungeons? Is everyone a monstergirl from a living
dungeon? No, probably not. If nothing else, things like people becoming
monsters should be global, so there’s some underlying world even if
there are plenty of additions (incursions? I think Trophy Dark took that
one) piled onto it.

It sure seems like all news is bad news, so I guess that would follow.

Went to the office, only Coworker K was there, did some work, ate some chicken nuggets.

Watched (animated TV): Helluva Boss 1.1: Not sure about the number, this is the redone pilot that is more like what happens before the first episode, but 73% less gonzo and funny. I’m not at all sure this is a better introduction

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.13: The one with the hurricane and Maria.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 4 (Sai Naekawa): Main character and her two monsters go to basketball camp, where of course there is more horror, and also the mermaid insisting she’s a monster and doesn’t like the MC at all.

Written (game design): 284.

I guess this was the wrong day to wear my pro-procrastination shirt.

Slept way in but then was able to save some time on shopping because there probably haven’t been any new books delivered since Tuesday.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.11-13: more villains who have always existed yet were written into existence days ago, finally someone willing to monologue about the villains’ plan, but then the end of the season! Although this is 13 episodes and where we should be at the midpoint, so it’s probably annoying marketing splitting season 4 into two.

Read (manga): Spy Classroom vol 2 (SeuKaname, Takemachi, Tomari): The girls still have not gotten one over on their teacher, but it’s time for the suicide mission anyway! After hearing about the great spies who failed at it before.

Read (novel): Any Minor World (Craig Schaefer): Same setting as most of Schaefer’s books, a hardboiled private eye gets mixed up with the criminal cartel that tries to control the multiverse and a dame who is already entangled with some of the less pleasant parts of it (think Gotham but with more supernatural horror). Colorful villains, desperate chases, redemption, betrayal, subway trains to hell.

Written (game design): 409:

My bullshit definitely includes people becoming able to use magic
after getting exposed to the supernatural or otherwise traumatized,
and this coming with some kind of curse that makes normal people
not want them around so they’re pushed to the edges of society. At
least part of the curse is susceptibility to turning into a monster,
either through one’s own wickedness or through being cursed or
whatever. (Note that meeting a vampire’s cursed eyes is definitely
exposure to the supernatural, so one is immediately vulnerable.)
Every person is equally susceptible to this; there’s no lineage
that has more or less magic than any other, although in-world that
may not be apparent. In fact, I’m pretty against any plot tokens
being passed down by blood, even if characters want to be weird
about it.

PCs can have whatever role in society they’re permitted, but
fundamentally they ain’t right and are going to end up, sooner or later,
as the ones dealing with problems that ain’t right. So what are those
problems and where do they come from? Monsters that used to be people,
obviously, and monsters that are still technically people (the wealthy
and powerful, insert Leverage intro here), and sometimes the two working
together. I mentioned interdimensional incursions as a source of
monsters before, and still like strange creatures from the higher realms
(although I’m less sure about PCs being able to do much about them,
because, higher realms). Living dungeons are also good, although they
need some kind of different spin than in 13th Age. A good source of
problems, though, possibly as good as pre-apocalyptic ruins? Also
there’s probably something about dimensions trying to invade and
corrupt each other with vacuoles (completely independent of anything their
inhabitants might want).

Living dungeons don’t have to be interdimensional. Maybe the ancient
layer of fallen heavenly palaces is rebuilding itself upward. Maybe it’s
just the regular D&D Underdark expanding upward in search of water or
plants. This might be the kind of thing that needs a list of 1d12
anticanon possibilities.

There’s a particular kind of player (I heard, from a friend) that will
want to play a monstergirl from a living dungeon. I should probably
figure out what to do about that.

This answers the question of whether to apocalypse, at least. We have
weird stuff from other places, not other times, at least mostly.

Hi Sherilyn!

Had a dream about the main character of the project I haven’t been working on. It had name-brand superheroes and wasn’t anything like the situation she’s in, but still. Maybe I should work on that. I figured out the emotional arc of the main character, but it’s getting to the point where I should be starting over to include all the stuff I’ve figured out and that would be the 3596th time I’ve started over because I don’t actually know how to write.

Went to the office, ate some pork and veggies and rice but had to leave the rest to call a customer, learned about a new product, gave some advice to my coworkers.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.9-10: The one with the librarian and the one covered in bees. Are Harry and Sophie going anywhere with this?

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 1 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): I remembered liking this a lot when I read it in 2012, enough to hunt down pirated scans of the volumes that didn’t get published over here, but apparently I remember it too well now. Will probably finish rereading what I have, and then we’ll see.

Written (game design): 291:

The creation could be ongoing: surprise, there’s a new god! Or a
new school of magic! Or swinging back the other way, a new curse. Or
every month, in the dark of the moon where no one can see, the gods add
a new hex to the edge of the map.

Being able to explore new regions can come in many forms. Maybe the new
regions are actually newly created, but maybe the gods have provided a
gate to another world, or a bridge over the sea of corrosive mist to the
next island. Maybe someone has invented a new kind of transportation
(boats! riding moose! bigger boats! flying carpets!) or protective gear
to travel across the Vast Deadly Desert surrounding Oz (or maybe just
shoes).

If the PCs have better travel ability, but everyone they meet is better
at murdering, then they aren’t likely to be colonialists, but might have
to worry about being colonized. That would be a different game than
fantasy adventure, I think. More like fantasy Star Trek, which is not
bad, but are we digressing from the original goal? We could be
discarding it as unworthy, but I think we’re just digressing.

Back to bad things happening, what if instead of new gods, we lost the
old gods? Any pantheon can drift off into space, but should these ones
plummet to Earth, leaving mountain-range-sized bodies of divine flesh
and lakes of holy blood, none of which leaves things unaltered? Probably
not; I’m stealing that from a smutty webcomic. Also I already did a game
where the entire landscape was smushed beneath the fallen palaces of
Heaven.

Which brings us back to not knowing what to do or how much to do it, but
at least it was an interesting tangent.

They aren’t real whales, but they are real sharks!

It’s Saturday, but I don’t have work for ages, so I didn’t do any weekly shopping. I did get a sandwich from the very crowded deli; it was pretty good. I did not accomplish anything today

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.9-10: Yosano’s backstory, and a lot more doom that we know was conjured out of nothing.

Read (graphic novel): Doughnuts and Doom (Balazs Lorinczi): A witch who’s bad at magic and a hopeful rock star get off to a rocky start over cursed doughnuts, but band together (SWIDT) to defeat bureaucrats and obscurity and lack of smooches.

Written (game design): 155:

(Every time I see a module that says “easily compatible with OSR
systems”, I wish I could come up with a system I liked that used those
same numbers but in a different way. This certainly isn’t it, though (AC
-> Readiness? Meh, and OSR is all about the stats anyway). Maybe
someday, but probably not.)

Every time I see a game with a post-apocalyptic/ancient world fantasy
(Worlds Without Number, Godbound, Numenera, Ex Tenebris, so many) I
think “I want to do that” but it’s just because I like the aesthetic,
not because I have anything particularly brilliant to do with it,
certainly not compared to those games. On the other hand, apparently
there’s a reasonable demand… On yet another hand, it does have
potential problems with the setting making sense, but that’s nothing new
for fantasy. Argh! I have no idea where to go from here.