Tag: marith

Several of the audience survive every performance!

I slept in incompetently, but eventually went shopping and stuff.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.3: And away Coco goes, to certain death in the trial she’s not at all qualified for.

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.1: The first episode is all backstory and establishing vibes, so following the manga pretty close so far.

Read (manga): The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 5 (Iwatobineko): They’re getting mushier and introducing each other to their parents and even moving in together, but not having sex or anything like that.

Written (new project): 219.

Are bats themselves seasonal, or do they need a separate season reference?

Kind of did some work, I guess. Having energy and being awake is hard.

Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.1: Marith’s right that it has Dr Who energy with the cheesy verve, but it’s really really not Leverage, and I can’t help comparing them since it’s the same director and some actors.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 11 (Kaoru Mori): All Smith and Talas and company this volume.

Read (novel): Sloppy Firsts (Megan McCafferty): High-school drama, but even though the protagonist is straight (ew, boys), she is charmingly misanthropic. Written as her actual diary entries and letters to her long-distance best friend, so there is some unreliability to the narration, or at least a lack of strict chronological ordering.

Written (new project): 264. Sage helped by deleting a paragraph so I had to write it again.

Cue tumblr classic post. “You cannot kill me in any way that matters.”

Planned to WFH today, so got some sleeping in, but not enough to make up for having stayed up until 343569 o’clock reading. Did do some work, failed to meet with the customer again, didn’t learn any Kubernetes, did get piled on by cats.

Watched (movie): Glass Onion: Janelle Monáe definitely stole the show, but all the characters were good characters. Plus, lack of respect for the capitalist class is always refreshing. I liked it quite well.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 10 (Kaoru Mori): Karluk with his inlaws learning archery and falconry and general manliness, Smith traveling and arriving in Ankara.

Written (new project): 294.

On call today, so I slept in next to the phone after taking handover and only eventually went shopping. Because last weekend was weird, I had bonus Maidens of the Fall, which is always nice. Also a support cast, which was less nice, but not a big deal.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1-2: Pretty much the same as the start of the manga, but now in color with swooping!

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 5 (Kaoru Mori): Wedding day for the twins Smith met in the last volume. Their husbands are already long-suffering. Then back to Amir and Karluk for a sad falconry story and a terrifying granny interlude.

Written (game design): 217:

I have dozens of notes for other points that have to be considered, but
possibly none of them matter at all if we can’t establish mechanics for
how characters affect each other, because that’s the core of superheroic
conflict. Or, really, any conflict, and thus most RPGs except Golden Sky
Stories (which is a great game, but not what we’re going for here).
Obviously I’m making some kind of mistake here, but what is it? Should I
not be worrying about making all results come from written rules, even
though some (most? all? few?) players don’t like GM judgment calls?
Should I not be worrying about how to make things seem fair because they
never are? Just let the table decide who should get fewer dice because
they’re too clever with the ones they have? (Self-serving, because I’m
always the least clever.)

(As previously established, the fundamental flaw is almost certainly
thinking that I can do better than real game designers at anything. I’m
not standing on the shoulders of giants, I’m barely even stepping on
their toes. But that’s too bad, because what else am I going to do? Just
play one of the thousands of games I’ve bought? Pfft.)

I shall name her… Pointy-Bob! (Shrieks of anguish in the distance.)

Tried to go to the office, but failed due to being weak and feeble. Slept in a bit more then worked from home. Sage was extremely helpful.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.8: Yeah, fuck that guy anyway.  Anyway, end of Drum Island arc, but also end of the season. I hope it’s still doing well and Netflix doesn’t cancel it just to avoid paying the writers.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 180:

It’s also less dramatic and more hitpointy to have most conditions be
tiny so we’re back to whittling down the enemy. But now it’s harder to
keep track of, so that’s not a win. Fewer more significant conditions
is both more interesting and easier to play. You can have a defense
that burns away the incoming Entangle or whatever, but it has to be a
technique you paid for specially, or else you have to spend an action
or some other resource to try to do it as a maneuver.

Does the same go for emotional attacks? They’re kind of like physical
attacks but with different conditions and ways to get rid of the
conditions, but tend to affect decisions rather than combat stats,
so even a minor one can be interesting. There’s also the difference
that if you remind someone of her lost mother to make her distracted
but then punch her, the condition is likely to disappear, or change
to “must clobber this jerk who punched her at a time of great
emotional vulnerability”. Also you can’t just take the action “bring
up the villain’s long-lost mother”, you have to figure out how that
ties into their emotional weakness, which has to be written up some
useful way on their character sheet, just like yours.

Speaking of weaknesses, which we postulated as being necessary to get
around the issue of an attacking 12d6 powerset mostly not doing much
against a defending 12d6 powerset, how do those work? How do you find
them, what do you roll to exploit them, is having your weakness
discovered a condition? Technically it only helps the people who know
about it, but we can presume everyone blabs about everything all the
time.

Or is it a positive condition on the people who know about it,
granting them extra power instead of nerfing the person with the
weakness? For something like knowing where the weak spot in someone’s
defenses is, that seems wrong, even if it worked out the same
mechanically (which it probably wouldn’t, since attacks roll and
defenses are flat). There might be other advantages that should be on
the attacker’s side, though, plus of course any buff would be a
positive condition, with ways to apply and remove and effects while
active.

Positive conditions have the same concerns as adjustment powers in
Hero, namely that we don’t want one buffer to make everyone else
unstoppable, or want to make it mandatory to spend ages buffing
before a fight to be competitive. This isn’t a computer game or D&D
3e, or even Ars Magica. Probably you can only boost someone’s
effective powerset level up to the level of the powerset you’re using
to boost, or a minimum boost of +1d6 if your level is at least half
theirs. Or something along those lines.

Some kind of bringing things back from caves, anyway.

I wanted to sleep in forever again, but somehow I got up and went to do the shopping I failed to do yesterday, and took a shower before going over to Monkeycat Towers for Easter ham sandwiches and deviled eggs and company. Cat and Earl were there, and so was Marith even though she was dead from work. We ate and ate some more and searched for the lost art of conversation and I remembered that I should actually read the “Terra Ignota” books. It was nice.

Read (manga): Someone’s Girlfriend vol 1 (Nikumaru): She should probably dump her boyfriend before throwing herself at his best friend, no matter how horny she is? But then there wouldn’t be enough drama for a whole manga series. Also there’s another girl making another triangle between the two boys, but the two of them should probably run off together, leaving the boys to do whatever boy things in some lesser series.

Written (game design): 128.

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.

So, mermaids in Pride shirts?

Today started off with an excellent technical discussion of a really complicated bug, but then was followed up by a customer actually encountering the bug. Computers, how do they even?

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.6-7: Oh, that’s who that silhouette in the original crew sketch was supposed to be. And his tragic backstory!

Read (anthology): SNAFU (ed Geoff Brown, Amanda J Spedding): Collection of military horror stories, of variable quality, length, interestingness, subgenre, etc. I liked the magical WWII one, but it had plot elements I am weak against.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 111. Ugh.

I really really hate to admit it, because I hate commuting, but I think I do get more work done at the office. I’m not sure this was the case in earlier years, but the second time it is not the same office, and I am not the same productivity unit.

Also did not get Marith a pizza.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.5: Finally they’re done with the assassins on Dinosaur Island, so surely everything will be fine now!

Read (game): Dank & Dark (Philip Reed, Lex Morgan): A complete (though very small) TTRPG published as a board book like little kids read. It’s a hack of Tunnel Goons, which was already quite minimal, so 24 pages with large type and illustrations still contain the whole system, several monsters, and three (small) dungeons. And, it’s okay if your players chew on it!

Written (game design): 122 on the old stupid thing.

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.

Named after the quirkily-titled country song, “Drinkin’ Whiskey at Theatres All Over the Damn World”.

Did some work, learned some kubernetes, got sat on by some cats.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.4: You know it’s an adventure when they get to Dinosaur Island! Which naturally has its own plots going on.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 3 (Kaoru Mori): The random English guy sets out to observe somewhere else and meets a girl. Everything goes terribly, but there are lots of landscapes.

Written (game design): 273:

Is any of this getting us anywhere? Not until we have an actual system
for generating levels and strengths of conditions based on dice in attacking
and defending powersets, and a list of possible conditions and ways to
clear them. And that’s only the start.

Conditions:
– wounded
– dead
– knocked out
– stunned
– immobilized
– stuck in place
– blind/deaf/etc
– power weakened or negated
– disarmed/focus removed
– compelled to do something
– compelled to not do something
– poisoned
– tripping balls
– completely mind-controlled
– floating in mid-air
– growing infinite extra arms
– on fire
– possessed
– infested
– drained of life force
– insane
– turned into a vampire
– petrified
– teleported away

How many of these overlap? Possessed and mind controlled do, and
there are a bunch more horrible fates that are basically the same.
Some, like poisoned and infected, go in the same bucket but include
a huge variety of potential details. Well, except that disease,
like being on fire, spreads, but that’s an add-on, or maybe a third
column to choose something from although I’m not sure what else
would be there. Making a zone full of the effect, perhaps, which can
be combined with making it sticky. There are probably other similar
enhancements that I will think of later.

Sadly I’m not very crafty so I mostly just buy hats. Possibly I should buy more different hats, although then I’d need outfits to go with them, and that way lies madness.

Went to the office, had a lot of meetings, resolved a long-running customer issue by doing a different thing (that’s probably more in line with their policies anyway), officially received my 0% raise for not being a rock star, ate some brisket hash with fried egg for lunch, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.3: Yep, that was just about as doomed as it looked.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 2 (Kaoru Mori): Wow, Amir is so much better off away from her old family.

Written (game design): 210.

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.

Also Children’s Plays About Frogs and Sparrows Day, Vanessa Was Abducted by Aliens Day, and Propose to a Panther Day. (No word on whether the panther must be pink.)

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.2: That is a big whale. And note that they did not defeat it by running it out of hit points!

Read (graphic novel): Clubbing (Andi Watson, Josh Howard): Apparently I read this before, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. A teen goth from London gets exiled to the countryside all summer for Crimes, where she meets colorful characters and more crimes. Still not sure if the final bit was supposed to be real or just the MC making things up.

Written (game design): 118. Apparently I’m not very smart.

Got 2/3 of the way up the stairs before having to rest, did some work, ate a bento, met with a customer and did not solve their problem but at least they aren’t stuck in Dubai any more, tried to use awk, did not learn any kubernetes. The trains were all late on my way home, but it all lined up anyway and I was able to feed the cats so they could eat before Marith came to scare them away.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.1: Weren’t all these bozos defeated already? But we have a new foil for Roranoa, so that’s good.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 20 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that happen to the Statue of Liberty.

Written (game design): 295:

Hero does have an array of defenses: PD, ED, DCV, MDCV, Mental
Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Desolidification, Damage
Reduction, Presence, Damage Negation, Deflection, Barrier, probably
Strength, Teleportation, any attack count at least for getting out
of conditions. They usually apply to everything unless there’s a
specific limitation or mandatory gap in applicability like Desolid
or Deflection have, because nobody wants their defenses to not work,
and “I’m a brick!” is enough of a special effect for many of them.
There are three different kinds of defenses here, though: make the
attack roll harder (DCV, Deflection), reduce effect (PD, Presence),
or break out of the effect after it’s happened (Strength or
Teleportation vs grabs, any attack vs Entangle).

If we’re putting more of an emphasis on defense, should we be going
back to the idea of the defender rolling instead of the attacker? I
had a better name for this than “saves” but that’s what they were,
divided by ways of getting out of trouble. They can have different
mechanics, though. Like, you can dodge, which is chancy but negates
the attack entirely if you succeed, or tank it, which is easier but
only gives you extra defenses which might be enough. Ignoring the
attack gives you a bonus to whatever else you’re doing, if you’re
still able to do it afterwards. Slipping the punch is essentially
tanking the attack. If we’re using zones where most movement is within
the same zone, then diving for cover is probably a variant of dodge.
Deflecting an attack to another target is also a variant of dodge.
Diving to shield someone is tank+move in the way that dive for dover
is dodge+move. With an appropriate special effect, you could absorb an
attack or otherwise transform it into a different effect. Emotional
and mental attacks probably use the same options, with varying levels
of metaphor. And then there’s removing an effect that’s already been
applied, like breaking an Entangle, or slipping free of it. (Hero’s
Martial Escape that uses the same mechanics as busting free with
Strength but with a bonus to Strength based on skill is pretty
elegant.)

I have no idea how to handle something like Desolidification in this
paradigm.

But all of this is only loosely connected to conditions, or whatever
we do to track things happening to characters, and how they get
applied.

I meant to get up early and go get sampled, but instead slept in forever and then went. I expected the line to be horrendous, but no! Everyone else had gotten up early! So I got sampled expediently and went home and took a nap.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): Finished! That was extremely silly. Also the women were much cooler than the men, even if they were all pretty much tumbrel bait. But earnest tumbrel bait!

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 36 (Tomohito Oda): Wow, multiweek study camp with just the two of them. And yet, so wholesome. Plus, Komi really is good at everything except talking to people, and she’s not bad at that here in the penultimate volume.

Read (anthology): Screams From the Ocean Floor (ed Heather Ann Larson): Assorted horror on, under, around, or vaguely associated with the ocean. Pretty much everybody dies. Variable quality, none of them outstanding.

Written (game design): 132:

Is there even room on the scale for No Big? In wargames, a missed attack
is generally a no-op, because there’s nothing you care about except your
target’s hit points. Maybe you shot up some piece of landscape, but
that’s irrelevant to your victory condition. Sure, the GM could try to
say that you accidentally broke something or someone important, but
that’s practically cheating. PbtA/FitD has only disaster, mixed success,
good success, with no option for nothing to happen, but that’s at a more
zoomed-out scale and player-facing mechanics. Whiffing your attack on
the enemy and getting pasted is entirely within the scope of a PbtA 6-,
even though in D&D it would be a missed attack where nothing happens.

“Realistically”, a lot of failed actions should do nothing much. The
missed energy blast goes somewhere, sure, but there’s a lot that
actually is irrelevant to the fight and can be summarized as general
property damage during the media phase of the encounter. But if we’re
talking about superheroes or supervillains, and we’re not doing a
second-by-second, meter-by-meter simulation of the battle, shouldn’t every
action have a consequence of some kind?

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.

That sounds ominous.

Went to the office, climbed the stairs with only a few breaks, ate some jerk pork and plantains, did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): I had not seen or read this before because I have no culture. It is very silly, although I can’t help thinking that all these people should be in a tumbrel. We only watched up to the intermission because I was sleepy, but will definitely finish sometime when Marith is not dead.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 10 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is going to have to be a lot more assertive than that if she wants to actually get lucky. I guess first she would have to decide whether she wants to.

Written (game design): 216:

I think they probably do. As I learned from reading the Internet, rules
and dice are for the uncertain parts of the game, where you need some
divinatory power. If you can just say what happens and it’s obvious, no
dice needed. So thrilling heroic battles, sure. You can come up with a
plan, but can you execute it correctly while someone is shooting you in
the face with a railgun? Roll for it!

But roll what? Hero has both to-hit and damage rolls, because D&D.
We’ve been talking about powersets in terms of dice that we roll and
count the Body on to determine the magnitude of effect, but should there
be a roll to decide whether you can even make that roll? We’re basing
this on Presence attacks (which don’t have a to-hit roll) and mental
attacks (which do). Since actions are now to inflict conditions, not do
some random amount of Stun and Body, we need some roll to determine
whether an attack goes overboard, or otherwise awry. Maybe it should be
called a disaster roll instead of a to-hit roll, since a bad roll
results in the wrong condition, wrong target, or both. Then the rule can
be that if the table can see a way for the action to go horribly wrong
without the character performing it having to be an incompetent schmuck,
there has to be a disaster roll.

Since the disaster roll determines who gets to decide on the nature of
the condition and where it goes, we still need the effect roll to
determine the level of the condition. Some conditions should be higher
level based on accuracy rather than (or in addition to) sheer power, but
I think we’re okay wrapping that into powerset dice as a measure of
effectiveness, not just raw joules of energy beam. There will also be
maneuvers/techniques that let you have more dice of effect for whatever
tradeoff, and you can probably have a limitation on some dice of your
powerset that you only get them if you can make a skill roll.

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.

Sadly, I have no cheesecakes.

Did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Got test results back for Sage, looks like a UTI so I have to go pick up antibiotics tomorrow. I am sure she will not appreciate the additional mouth squirts, but it is actually for her own good!

Watched (videoed stage musical): Act II of Firebringer: Now that fire has been brought, everything can go to hell with social commentary and plot twists and surprising plot twists and everything. Sadly, all the wisdom they gained was lost in the intervening millennia, which is why the social commentary is relevant.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 6 (Kiyoko Iwami): Okay, even the manga-ka thinks Cheater Girl is being a dumbass. I think they should all break up and try again in about five years, but on the other hands, nothing’s being broken except hearts and that’s what adolescence is for, right?

Read (novel): Wayward: Running (TA Star): Isekai litRPG, a terminally ill, bedridden, trans girl gets to be a real girl with totally OP powers and only a moderate amount of getting murdered in the fantasy realm. She is extremely special in several ways, in fact, but she doesn’t seem to be actually saving the world on a daily basis, that’s more of a long-term plan the gods have.

Written (game design): 273:

List time!
– Reduce a powerset’s dice for some time
– Make some action require a skill roll, or worsen an existing one
– Make it harder to resist something
– Reduce defenses, overall or against specific attacks
– Apply a limitation to some powers or powersets
– Prevent certain actions, or all actions (IE, incapacitation)
– Apply another condition if certain actions are taken or not taken
– Compel certain actions
– Make them produce some effect (EG, everything they touch ignites)

That might be vague enough to cover most things, although it’s also too
vague to assign even relative costs yet.

What about levels of conditions? It seems natural for some of these
that just reduce dice in a powerset or skill rolls, or whatever,
but less so for others. The ones that are just numbers to subtract
from other numbers want as many levels as the numbers that are being
reduced (so up to 12 for the ones that reduce dice in powersets),
but the more qualitative ones only naturally have like two or three,
minor/major/overwhelming effect. We could reduce the others to fewer
levels by having each level give more than -1, but then they probably
have to be scaled to campaign power. Or maybe not, since the points
of effect do scale with campaign power and one level per point of
effect is natural for those conditions. It’s not natural for the
others, though, so then they would have to be scaled. I don’t see
a way to have both of them work naturally at all levels.

Of course we can have “penalties” and “conditions” as different kinds of
things with different rules, but it would be better to have the same
rules. It also makes it more difficult to add them together for a total
hosedness level beyond which you’re incapacitated. Maybe instead we
should give each level of a condition a stress rating, and when the
stress rating of all your conditions adds up to more than X, down you
go. Probably at least two stress tracks, physical and mental, and a
condition can count 0 or more toward each. That works with any number of
levels in a condition, but it’s another guideline we have to provide
for ad-hoc conditions.

Instead, we could have something like FitD harm, where there’s a fixed
number of slots for a character to have conditions of each level, and
if an attack inflicts a condition at a level that’s already full, it
rolls up to the next open slot. When the X+1th slot is full, the
character is taken out. This would need a fixed number of levels for
each condition, which is probably fine since we already had the
thresholds of def+0/3/6/9 for levels of effect for things like Presence
attacks and mental powers and that generalizes nicely. So we have four
levels of conditions.

Some conditions might not be able to take someone out even at level
4, but I think that’s probably rare enough to be a special tag on
the specific conditions.

Poutine wants to be free!

Sage was still hanging out in the litterbox, so I skipped going to work, called the vet that’s only a couple of blocks away, hauled Sage in, got her tested and praised, etc. Most things except a UTI have been ruled out, which is good, because we know how to treat that. She is still eating and drinking and patrolling her apartment.

Watched (videoed stage musical): Act I of Firebringer: A very ridiculous musical about early humans discovering important things about their world, like what’s edible and how much the previous generation lied to them. Not even slightly chronistic.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 8 (Nujima): Writer Lady seems to have done something to Red String Girl, but it’s not clear what. Also we know more about the siblings now. Nothing good, though.

Written (game design): 215.

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.

Also, For Pete’s Sake, Girls Already Know About Engineering Day.

This morning was full of all-hands meeting. I hope we aren’t betting the whole company on AI.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.10-11: The End! There is nothing to disprove my theory that Froppy and Uravity are married now.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 9 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Getting to the Foreign Dignitaries storyline, plus assorted random mysterious mysteries.

Read (essay): Why All Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Are Historians (Ada Palmer): It’s because they have opinions about how the world changes. Literary people on the slack (so, pretty much the whole slack) had many opinions on this when Marith posted it.

Read (novel): Saints and Monsters (Ellen McGinty): A disabled princess has to save her sister and her Japan-flavored country with the unwilling assistance of a dragon. It was not bad, but could have used 80% less heterosexuality, and probably 30% fewer words.

Written (game design): 192:

It may seem like we’re making techniques into Hero powers, but my hope
is that we aren’t, because techniques don’t let you do anything your
powerset doesn’t already let you do. They just let you do it with fewer
tradeoffs or outright penalties than maneuvers do. Also, they don’t
(usually) grind away at hit points, they inflict conditions, which we
still don’t have a good handle on.

Other vital things we have no handle on: weakness for NPCs/complications
for PCs, skills, normal human abilities, gaining experience. Well, human
abilities are easy: everybody starts with the powerset Human, with
whatever capabilities and dice are needed to get 2d6 strength, normal
vision and other senses, etc.

What do you mean you don’t have a pangolin to read to? (Although my pangolin a) is plush, and 2) has an advanced degree in Animal Feelings, so probably can do their own reading.)

I had horrible heartburn all night after staying up too late, so have not been very useful today. I’m not sure whether the burritos were less easy on my insides than wheat tortillas and chicken should be, the chicken that seemed fine despite being in the fridge for ??? days was not fine, or finally getting organ juice again after being off it for a while (thanks, American health care system) was a bit steep.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.23-24: End of the second season! Does Maomao not know what she wants, or does she know and it’s to frustrate Jinshi to death? It’s a pretty definite end to a lot of plot threads, so I’m curious to see where the third season will go when it comes out.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 4 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Back at the departure of the concubine after the garden party of poisoning and intrigue. Apparently this is the end of the first light novel volume, which I could read but haven’t and may not. But may yet!

Read (novel): Azarinth Healer vol 5 (Rhaegar): OP MC is so OP she’s making the system invent new classes. Also saving entire alien species, gaining a third class of her own, etc.

Read (collection): Consequences (Moe Lane): Four short stories about Edwardian monsters, cryptids, aliens, obnoxious gods.

Written (game design): 231:

We need some kind of tables of environmental stuff, like Hero has Def
and Body of various materials, to provide guidelines for how much
Entangle you do get from six inches of water or waist deep mud, how many
dice of zapping a power substation has, etc. The tricky part is that the
environment has to be enough to matter, not a world of tissue paper, but
shouldn’t overshadow powers at whatever level they’re in play.

Do we also need a system for which penalty and how much of it to apply
when someone’s using an application they haven’t bought, to seem fair
and objective? Or is it enough to have a list the GM can choose from, so
they don’t have to make up something new every time? And possibly some
guidelines for how much of each penalty corresponds to a minor, medium,
or severe penalty. Extra penalties for using multiple
maneuvers/applications?

Speaking of dice and powers, do we need to charge more or less for
broader or narrower powers? Every power is effectively a variable power
pool, so the breadth of the special effect does matter, unlike Hero
where it’s only the powers you actually buy that matter regardless of
what your special effect could possibly justify with unlimited points.
Is this where the idea of cost per rank comes in? Powers are now the
only thing we’re buying in ranks, it looks like.

Check! Also Clean Out Your Bookcase Day, which is not going quite as well.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.7-9: The End! Then some epilogue. More people survived than expected.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 3-4 (Shinichi Fukuda): More cosplay buddies for Doll Boy to dress up. They are cute girls, but Cosplay Gal is clearly the main, and so far only, romantic connection.

Written (game design): 132:

Leaving that alone for a minute, what kind of penalties can there even
be? The first few that come to mind are:
– Reduce dice of effect
– Reduce OCV/skill roll
– Require a skill roll, or flat activation roll
– Lose some Stun/gain some Exhausted or other condition
– Reduce DCV
– Can’t use other powers at the same time
– Takes extra time
– Side effect on you, or backblast on people around you
– Drain the power you’re using

There could also be requirements that you have to provide, like water if
you want to make ice manacles but didn’t buy doing that as an
application. If there’s not enough of it, the amount of effect you can
generate might be capped, like if there’s only six inches of water, you
can only get so many dice of Entangle on somebody’s feet.

Monday is a holiday, so I didn’t go shopping today, I just pulsated grotesquely.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.21-22: All the conspiracies and rebellions and other national-level politics are coming to a head around Maomao. I wonder if anyone will make it out alive?

Read (novel): Take Back Demons (Casey Blair): Sequel to Take Back Magic, main character is actually doing pretty great at restoring Earth, making friends, defeating enemies, getting a hot husband, etc.

Read (comic collection): Gotham Academy Second Semester vol 1 (Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, MSASSYK): I thought I read the first arc of this, but I don’t remember any of these characters except Batman. Everything is creepy and haunted and half the adults have questionable fashion sense and obsessions they’re willing to kill for, so it checks out as being in Gotham.

Written (game design): 133:

Hero, like other games from that distant era, treats hits to locations
as things that just happen while hit points are being lost, or if
you somehow have a reason to aim for one location over another, it
boosts the Roll To Confirm You Wasted Your Phase probability. If
there are effects beyond loss of hit points, then they’re similarly
incidental and based generically on the body part. But we don’t want
“oh, I guess you hit her in the leg” because we’re deemphasizing
grinding away at hit points. We want, “you successfully slowed her down,
now maybe your teammates can do something”, so conditions should be
created from that point of view.

If we’re demphasizing the hit point grind, then it shouldn’t be the
standard result of a combat round, maybe not even the default. “Wear
them down” can be a specific maneuver. Maybe it’s the same as “KO them”
(when they have few enough hit points or whatever), maybe those are
separate maneuvers and you can skip straight to KO if you outclass them
by enough, otherwise you have to wear them down with clever maneuvers
and/or emotional damage I mean moral suasion.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some carbs and some chicken guys, skipped out slightly early to get home in time to watch anime.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.4-6: Wow, they did it! Well, half of it, leaving five episodes for the other half.

Read (comic collection): Sweet Paprika vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo): Everyone is devils or angels and named after seasonings, although that seems to be purely cosmetic since everything else is the real world with NYC and cell phones and publishing companies and all. Our MC, Paprika, is extremely horny and repressed and rules her department with an iron fist but neither chill nor work-life balance. She falls for guy, continues to make poor life decisions and terrify her underlings, there are R-rated makeouts but not the right ones, etc. Paprika is kind of a terrible person, but a good character.

Read (novel): The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage (Hiyodori): F/F romance in a secondary world with an actually slightly non-generic magic system. One of the last survivors of a marginalized group from a terrifying magic forest wants to go home to properly bury her aunt and friend before the dominant culture nukes the entire island, somehow gets a crazy hot mage to go with her as bodyguard if she’ll marry her, there’s military intrigue and zombies and gradual revelation of shared traumatic backstory and also girlsmooches.Apparently a spinoff of a series set in the same universe but a different culture that’s differently D/s with their mages and mage massagers.

Written (game design): 221.

Also Brown Dog Day, so extra treats for Bella.

No treats for coworkers K, N, and C and remote coworker S, only pink slips. “Aligning skills with the company’s future direction”, my ass. That leaves two people in the North America team from before Boss³ M showed up, so “not here to fire everyone” my other ass. Not sure what I can do about it, though, and this is a terrible year to end up out of work by making a doomed stand anyway. This is why all workers should be unionized, I guess.

In better(?) news, the package containing my new computer escaped the Memphis Blizzard and was finally delivered, but I don’t know when I will have enough brain cells to move all my 1s and 0s over to it. I recall it being kind of a pain last time.

Marith brought sundried tomato feta chicken and root vegetables to eat while watching anime, which was very nice of her and definitely better than me trying to feed myself.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.2-3: Well, that’s one way to restart a heart!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Black Mould (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Wait, Peter’s dad is white? I’m sure we knew that, but I never pictured him that way. Also, further evidence that jazz is the most magical of musical genres.

Written (game design): 133. Also doinked around with trying to rewrite my character sheet adder-up.

It me, although I’m probably not as freethinking as I think (freely).

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken and rice, learned some kubernetes.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.19-20: Two very dramatic episodes, Dabi vs multiple Todorokis and Uravity vs Himiko!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Body Work (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): A short story about a Falcon incident. I had not pictured Peter as wearing a suit and tie to work every day, but Aaronovitch signed off on it, so it must be so. I did not like the art at all, though. It is murky and rough and bleah and I am a Philistine.

Written (game design): 257:

Are we coming back around to my earlier idea of conditions, but
making them actual conditions instead of hit points with post-its?
As previously realized, that needs a lot of judgement calls for
what conditions a character (PC or NPC) can take or not take based
on their powers and special effects, but it’s 2026, we aren’t
actually expecting the GM to use their infinite power for TPKs.

A lot of this can be done in stock Hero, by giving characters
appropriate complications and limitations, but then we’re back to the
players guessing what weaknesses the GM prepared. Maybe NPCs can just
have “Weaknesses appropriate to being a magical goo monster (30)”? Or
“Weaknesses to be established in play by the heroes (30)”? It’s still a
little vaporous as to what they are ahead of time, but once they’re
established, they should be written down. Possibly there needs to be a
rule (more like a guideline) about when in the fight the GM has to have
spent all those points.

The GM can predefine some weaknesses, but leaving some for the players
to “discover”, although possibly lacking in verisimilitude, might help
with the problem of coming up with a whole new suite of complications
every session. Not sure it helps with limitations, though, so we may
still want a more freeform approach. Or perhaps this is a reason to
revisit the idea of having limitations be accounted for separately from
the base power cost? But probably just writing “susceptible to PC
cleverness as established in play (-1/2)” is enough.

Hey, maybe that’s what Sage was yelling about! I sure don’t know what else it might be.

I just missed the bus to go shopping, so instead of waiting half an hour, I walked to the store. I really need to do that more when the weather is suitable (ie, not summer).

Lady on the street corner by my apartment was with a sign about increased ICE in San Jose, handing out fliers for the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network. The number is 408 290 1144 if you see any anonymous masked kidnappers.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.15-17: And now all the plot threads are coming back to life at once! Conspiracy! Betrayal! Eunuchs! Genetics! That one guy!

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 1 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Trying to make the move to reading manga on my pad. It works well when I remember to do it, although I have to hold the pad in landscape mode, so maybe I should get used to doing all my other timewasters that way too. Anyway, the anime follows the manga very closely. There is a translator note when Gaoshun starts calling Maomao “Xiaomao” which tells us that the “xiao” means “little”, so he’s basically calling her Mao-chan, which is pretty adorable.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL. But if I can stop adding more paper to the shelf, that’s good, right? Except then I feel like I’m betraying my buddy Doug at the bookstore by not buying anything in paper.

Written (game design): 112:

Now we have three ways to deal with opponents: find their
weakness/overcome their strengths, talk them down, or just punch them.
But, by the nature of dominant mechanics, alternate approaches can’t
coexist: if grinding down their hit points is an option, that’s the one
most players will take unless the other options are so much better than
the complexity is worth dealing with, and then one of them will be the
preferred one. Even if they’re mathematically equal (unlikely,
especially since different opponents will probably have different
susceptibility to each), there’s probably going to be one that looks the
best to players.

Not to buy in to the “dominant mechanics” theory uncritically, but that
does sound a lot like how players work. Having them carefully work out
which approach is best in each scene is also not ideal, since there’s a
bunch of pondering and calculating, and then only one approach getting
used. Although I guess as long as it’s not the same one approach every
time it’s not that bad? But a combination would be better.

It’s an important part of Hero that NPCs and PCs are made using the
same rules, but that means the NPCs should be working on overcoming
all the aspects of the PCs, who also have only 1HP (each? between
them all? hardly matters). This doesn’t work as well because the
GM has only one brain against all the PCs, instead of many brains
against one villainous plot (even if it has many individual villains).
On the other hand, it’s also unfairly easy for the GM because while
every villainous plot can have at least somewhat different obstacles
to overcome, while a team of PCs generally stays very similar from
one adventure to the next (if they’re like typical Hero characters that
have most of their points spent on their own capabilities that can’t be
changed quickly).

Another difficulty is that whatever the GM prepares needs to provide
something for every character to do, or else the players have to be able
to define enough of the situation that they can make opportunities to
stick the opposition with quills.