Tag: marith

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.

Sage has many questions, but I don’t know what they are!

Had a meeting with our new colleagues in Australia, but we did the lame American thing of just talking about sharks and giant spiders and drop bears. Also I embarrassed myself by forgetting which way the planet rotates.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.17-18: More characters from past arcs make an appearance! Some of them even survive!

Read (novel): Shadow of Mars: Book eighteen, back with the current action heroine on the conquered planet. Action and heroics ensue, mostly unsanctioned.

Written (game design): 202.

I guess that’s using AI instead of paying for a support contract.

Monday is a holiday, so I’ll do my shopping for next week then. Unfortunately, this means I had no reason not to let the cats keep me trapped in bed until noon. I spent the afternoon reading journalism about Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) and his Scientology-spawned abuses, which is probably not any better a use of time than slowly dissolving into mulch.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.12-14: The romance plot isn’t going anywhere, but it’s more of a big deal that it’s not. Also, the hot springs bath episode. We passed the halfway point of the season, so there are new credits, and Shisui (bug girl) is a lot more prominent…

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 3 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): S still has no thoughts of romance, but that doesn’t mean this childhood friend isn’t competition!

Read (journalism?): The Cuddled Little Vice (Elizabeth Sandifer): A side piece to the author’s main current work, which is a metaphorical(?) description of Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s comics careers as a magical war a la Crowley. Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) came out of that same British comics scene and was a big deal, so he also gets a long piece on his works (mostly Sandman) and also how shitty he was. I read it all, because my ability to not read things is very weak, but I don’t feel like it has improved my life to read such extensive commentary on Sandman even though I liked it thirty years ago. I also do not feel compelled to read the rest of the larger work, although I bet there are people who find it right up their alley.

Written (game design): 158:

Back to emotional damage! Letting an opponent be defeated by filling
either of two damage tracks is a strong incentive to focus on one,
although which one depends on what the players think that particular
opponent is weakest against. Depending on how much variation there is in
that, PCs might specialize in one track, and let’s face it, that’s
always going to be punching.

Even when a villain gets talked down, there’s often punching first, so
maybe both tracks have to be filled? Although there are plenty of
villains that need only punching, or only talking, so maybe one track is
sometimes zero, or very small. But now we’re back to the players guessing
what the GM set as the way to defeat the villain.

So is there just one track, emotional damage counting the same as
clobbering damage? But then there needs to be emotional Def and
emotional Res, and this is getting further and further away from Hero.

Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.

Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!

Written (game design): 160:

The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)

(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)

One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.

We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).

How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.

Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.

It me.

I did two whole shoppings today, wheee.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.9-11: Is the romance subplot finally getting somewhere?!

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 1 (Sumiko Arai): High school girl with taste in music gets a crush on the ccool assumed-boy at the music store, not knowing that it’s actually the girl who sits next to her in class. The secret is revealed by the end of vol 1, but neither of them is thinking about romance yet. Printed with acid-green backgrounds, for extra cool artisticness.

Written (game design): 280:

Using the (1+A)/(1+L) system inevitably leads to fractional values,
which means rounding (unless you keep all fractions, which I have no
intention of doing), and rounding 7.5 to 7 is a lot more of a bonus than
rounding 15.5 to 15, never mind 32.5 to 32. Obviously this is just math,
but psychologically it seems like even more somehow. Do we like that?
Maybe not.

Leaving that aside for now, since we will definitely return to it sooner
rather than later, I was reading theory blogs on being mindful of what
kinds of activity a game supports, because players are going to do the
thing that has firm mechanics. Superheroics (or action
movie heroics) is never not going to have punching, but we should have
other ways of solving problems as well. At least Hero has Presence
attacks, which is a lot more than most systems. It might be nice to have
even more support for moral suasion, though. You can’t talk Doom out of
exerting his rightful authority over the whole Earth, at least not
without a lot of leverage, but apparently you can dissuade Galactus from
eating the planet. (And of course criminals are a cowardly and superstitious
lot, but that’s mostly covered by Presence attacks.)

I might be basing this too much on the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it
seems like the main ways for a superhero to defeat a villain are
straight-up punching (especially for agents or minor villains), talking
them down, or finding their weakness/coming up with a clever plan to get
an advantage. Hero combat is usually only the first, and very rarely the
last since unless the GM specifically prepared a gimmick fight, it’s
very difficult to have any tactic be more effective than hitting them
with your main attack. (If you only paid for a 10d6 attack, why should
you get to do more than that? And if they paid for 40 Def, why shouldn’t
they always get it?)

I play like ten word games every day, so hard to deny it me.

Did not go into the office, did get sat on by cats.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.13-14: More fighting in the Sky Coffin, heteromorph riot on the ground.

Read (novel): Cold Eyes (Peter Cawdron): This book annoyed me so much! The entire story hinges on the aliens not being able to get into space because their planet has too high an orbital velocity for chemical rockets and limited uranium, and obviously  what humans knew about in the 1960s is all that’s physically possible. Gaaah! Read a book! Or a journal!

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 5 (Yodokawa): Landlord resolves her troublesome backstory, HEA, the end!

Written (game design): 191.

I typed in a chair instead, which is definitely not as classy.

Went to the office, did some work, learned some kubernetes, ate some beef stroganoff.

Read (graphic novel): Family Force V vol 1 (Matt Braly, Ainsworth Lin): The somewhat (but not very) delinquent daughter of a family sentai team struggles with life, the alien spaceship that gives the sentai teams their powers, new aliens, etc. There is of course a cliffhanger ending.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.11-12: Meh, surely that guy wasn’t an important character or anything. Certainly not compared to Tintin-Face Lad, who has returned to the fray.

Written (game design): 286.

Also, Earth is at perihelion, which probably doesn’t matter much given the poor quality of spaceships available locally.

I meant to get up early and do all the things, but instead slept way in and did a few of the things. Dave is back in town, so we were able to watch more anime, after getting the AV equipment back in working order (bad cable).

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.8: Time to investigate a curse!

Read (artbook): Bleeding Edges (Danni Shinya Luo): Pretty girls and watercolor. Reminds me of Olivia.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 3: Siren’s Reach (C Peinhopf): Oh god, now there are three of them. Or maybe four. Also ocean-based monster attacks, politics and warfare, excessive pranks, restoration of the proper order of the universe, etc. Not the end, though.

Written (anything): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Hey, I wrote a cats of science fiction that one time! And that other time!

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.9-10: Fights! More fights! Maiming! No murders yet, but it’s coming.

Read (graphic novel): Watersnakes (Tony Sandoval): A girl meets a mysterious girl, they become friends, but when they try to kiss, everything is weird and more mysterious and they have a dream-like adventure. Distinctive art style, extremely peculiar, not actually about kissing.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 2: West Peak (C Peinhopf): The kitsune sisters continue the fight the demons started, with an ever-growing band of allies (including a giant beetle) and the odd volcanic eruption here and there. They remain overpowered and mischevious.

Written (game design): 184.

But no, I am happy with my presents!

Forgot today was an official holiday, got up and tried to go to work, then went back to bed and was trapped by cats forever.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.7-8: Still cutting between like four different fight scenes, as the rest of the season probably will continue to do.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 4 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Jacob Chabot, Rico Renzi): Squirrel Girl vs the world of dating! Boys are just the worst, even the ones that aren’t incels.

Read (short): “Amiable Voyager” (Glynn Stewart): Space piracy! In the setting of, and apparently will be a background event in, the “House Adamant” books.

Read (novel): The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett): Fantasy(?) mystery, in a world of bioenhancement where the empire exists to deal with the enormous monstrosities that crawl out of the ocean every year. Our viewpoint character, a junior detective enhanced with perfect memory, has been assigned to work with the crazy senior detective who has been augmented so much she can’t deal with most people, or city streets, or really anything except hiding in the dark being creepy and deducing. No orchids, though. Anyway, murder and more murder and giant monstrosities and skullduggery and dark history and mysterious biotech, it’s great.

Written (game design): 123:

Time for review! What goes on a character sheet?

Every character has a rating in all of Strength, Presence, Ego, and
Constitution. These are 1d6 per rank, with a base of 2 ranks and a
normal characteristic max of 4d6.

Every character also has Defense (base 0 ranks, NCM 2 ranks),
Resilience (base 2 ranks, NCM 6), and Body (base 6, NCM 12), which all
give 1 point of the characteristic per rank. Recovery gives 2 Rec per
rank, base 1 rank and NCM 3 ranks.

The default for Running is 1 zone as a full move, or somewhere else in
your current zone as a half move. Swimming would be the level below
that: move arond in your zone as a full move, take two full moves to get
to the next hex, and ??? as a half move. This definitely needs more
work.

Not sure what to do with Leaping. Possibly the default is 0 ranks of
Leaping power and you have to fake it by throwing your (awkward,
unaerodynamic) self at the destination with your own Strength? If you
buy any ranks of Leaping, that’s how far you can leap without having to
make a roll. As with Swimming, normal human values are going to be less
than one zone. Do we end up mixing zones and meters? Ew.

DCV and DMCV are sort of like skills, or at least they affect enemy
skill rolls, and are like defensive combat skill levels in 6E. But,
defensive (and other) combat levels in 6E can be specialized to ranged
or melee or some other specific subset of combat, which means a
limitation, and how does that work here? Each limited tranche of DCV
would have to be a separate power, with a separate minimum cost. Then
there’s no point in buying only +1 DCV against thrown knives or
whatever, since the cost after all limitations might as well be the
minimum cost. This has the effect we said we wanted, so now we have to
decide if it’s what we really want.

Converting from 6E to chonky points, each +1 of DCV would cost 2pts.
Even if we are trying to avoid futzing around with the equivalent of
-1/4 limitations, making something work only half the time is probably
worth at least two standard ranks of limitation, so 4 points. The
minimum cost for a power is probably one standard rank, so 2 points,
which means spending 2 points on DCV only against ranged attacks gets +3
DCV. Every additional 2 points is only another +1, since we obviously
don’t allow buying multiple instances of the exact same power with the
exact same limitations. So instead the obnoxious player buys DCV only
against fast-moving ranged attacks and DCV only against thrown objects,
which are each probably 2 points for +4 specialized DCV. That’s a total
of +7 DCV against ranged attacks for 6 points, which is close to half
the cost of all-purpose DCV. Buying +7 DCV without that cheese costs
10pts, so there is a definite cheeseward incentive. Bah.

Note that I’m assuming in all this that DCV that only protects against
half of attacks should cost half as much, which is obviously the Hero
paradigm, but really hard to argue with in such a simple case as this.
I’m not sure what alternative would seem as intuitively correct,
especially to players already familiar with Hero. Are we back to that
first idea where powers are bought in ranks that cost whatever based on
power and/or advantages, but limitations are applied to the total of the
final cost?

(Another asymmetry between limitations and advantages: there are times
when it’s easy to say a limitation is making a power half as useful, but
it’s hard to have an advantage that makes it twice as useful, unless you
count buying twice as many dice of attack as an advantage. Which gets us
back to buying ranks of range or whatever.)

But not actually Newtonmas because he was a weird heretic of some kind.

Went to Monkeycat Towers for Christmas dinner. Gave few presents, got slightly more presents. I think this chocolate may be too good for me. It was all very festive and nice, though, so I am happy. Everyone is alive and plans to reconvene for New Year’s Fondue.

Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 3 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles): The time travel run. 60s fashion and violent grannies!

Read (short): “Castle, Anima” (CE Murphy): A short story several years after the Urban Shaman series. Joanne defeats completely unexpected evil magic while severely handicapped.

Written (game design): 197.

I presume they mean people who never manage to accomplish things.

Why do I have weird chest tightness? It doesn’t seem like a heart attack or anything, just weird and annoying, especially when I bend over. I do not approve.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.3-4: Finally, that plot thread from a million seasons ago is explained! Also, more about Navel Laser Boy’s backstory, which is surprisingly relevant to the current disaster.

Read (collection): The Gorgon Incident and Other Stories (John Bierce): Short stories in the world of the “Mage Errant” series, decades or centuries before the main series. We get to see a lot more mages and their weird affinities and how they use them cleverly to gain vast power, so good source material for Kaiju Academy.

Read (manga): MADK vol 1 (Ryo Suzuri): A teenager with extremely depraved fetishes summons an Archduke of Hell to satisfy him, because it would not be okay to do those things to a human. One thing leads to another and he ends up in Hell as a pet/apprentice of the archduke. Despite the violence and depravity of demons, it’s actually kind of wholesome, because the main character’s personal journey is learning is to stand up for himself and his honest (if horrible) desires.

Written (game design): 154.

Didn’t manage to celebrate this one.

Got up at commuting-to-work time to try to get to phlebotomization ahead of the rush, did not succeed. Fortunately, I have a smartphone, so queues of reasonable length are not distressing. Made it back in time to go shopping and eat pastrami and read Maidens of the Fall at my usual lazy time.

Read (graphic novel): Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (Mariko Tamaki, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell): Another lesbian high-school drama. MC is dating the hottest, most popular lesbian in school. Drama ensues. So much drama. But also opportunities for personal growth.

Read (novel): Hell Hath No Fury (Rachel Aaron): At the end of book 3/5, everything was terrible, the lovers were separate, the villain looked like he was winning, etc. Now in book 4/5, the plan is starting to come together, they’re invading Heaven though the basement, making friends, influencing demons, reuniting, discovering the power that was inside them all along, etc. But Gilgamesh’s plan to crush them once and for is clearly about to come to fruition, because the next volume is the final battle.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.5-7: Finally, the Moon Fairy! Also, genetic infiltration.

Written (game design): 508:

This implies that all ranks have the same cost, so we have to adjust
powers by how much one rank gives instead of cost per rank. As always,
the benchmark will be 1d6 damage per rank. This also means that
characteristics and skills/skill levels have to be bought in ranks,
which might be a little harder. Maybe a rank of Skill gives N skill
points, which are not the same as character points, or something
similar. Depends on how broad or narrow we want to make skills.

What kinds of ranks do we need? One for each power, although we can
consolidate some: Blast, Hand Attack, Killing Attack (already
combined in 6E), and maybe Mental Blast can be combined into Attack;
Mind Control and Mental Illusions can possibly be combined; FTL
Travel and Extra-Dimensional Travel, etc.

I mentioned ranks of damage/effect before, but I think those actually
come from ranks in the power itself. If nothing else, we may need
to have some that only give 1/2d6 (average 0.5 point of effect) per
rank. (1/3d6 and 2/3d6 are also possible, but we’ll try to avoid
those.) I think this may also apply to defense, although I’m less
certain about that. Maybe there is no Armor or Forcewall power, you just
throw a bunch of defense ranks and optionally some area and range ranks
in a bucket and call it a day?

Enhancement ranks? Is that a good name for them? Good enough for
now. We have, obviously, range (0 ranks is melee, then same zone,
nearby zones, distant zones/LoS, usable through mind scan), area
(0: single target or an area of a meter if appropriate, then enough
to block a doorway, cover a room, fill a zone, zone and adjacent zones,
etc), penetration (1 rank knocks off 2 of whatever defense), AVLD/NND,
constant/persistent, affects desolid, affects solid, alternate CV,
cumulative effect, damage over time, autofire, invisible, hardened, hole
in the middle, faster acceleration, more noncombat speed, knockback,
indirect, invisible, megascale, teleport more mass, safe teleport,
resistant, killing, sticky, transdimensional, trigger, usable by/on
others, variable special effect, probably more I missed or will need to
be invented new. A lot of these are only going be available as a
single rank, some will need multiple ranks to be effective at all,
some start at 1 and go as far as you can afford. Some only apply to
certain powers, or even a single power (depending on how we combine
powers).

Then we need to take all the power limitations (which may also only apply to
certain powers) and figure out how many ranks each one is worth. We also
need to list all the requirement limitations, although they don’t need
to be rated in any way: if they come up, you get XP, and if not, you
don’t.

What it means for a requirement to come up is easy for something like
Gestures or Extra Time, but less so for something like Only At Night. If
the adventure happens entirely during the day, does that automatically
count as a single incident for the whole adventure? As many incidents?
Does it depend on how many times you say “I wish I could use that
power”? (I was thinking if a Complication comes up once, you get 1 XP;
if it comes up several times (5?) then 2 XP; maybe if it’s constant for
the whole adventure, you get 3? Is it per adventure? Per session? Is
there some other time period like D&D’s long rest that we use to divide
up play?)

If we give 1 or more XP per Complication per session, then an XP
probably can’t be a full character point the way it is in Hero,
especially if we use chonky points. I don’t think we’re going to be like
Storyteller where points are linear at character creation and geometric
afterwards, just a straight ratio.

Also Ambrosia Day, which fits since it’s forbidden to mortals.

Almost kind of did some work, mostly kind of bleah.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.1-2: Starting off with a bang, but it’s looking pretty bad for the good guys. I feel like Star and Stripe should have done better with that quirk, but she did pretty well.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 144.

That sounds even more repulsive than plain vodka.

Did not manage to get up early to go get blood drawn, or even get up at a reasonable time. Eventually I did get out from under the cats and go shopping, though.

After cancelling my Spotify account and spending a few weeks listening to music on Youtube which is not ideal, I signed up for Qobuz on the recommendation of a pocket frond. So far, so good. I was able to magically port over my Spotify playlists (I still have an account, I just don’t use it or give them money) with Soundiiz, although they did not magically become better organized.

My blog is up to three whole comments! All by one commenter, though.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.4: So who are these mysterious envoys and why are they setting puzzles for Jinshi/his mysterious advisor? Also, I feel like the mirror should allow us to date when the show is set, but Wikipedia is only giving me “later than the 1500s” since although metal-backed glass mirrors were available in Italy at that time, they were less than a meter square.

Read (novel): Broker vol 2 (Derelict Presence): The continuing adventures of trying to save the world despite superpowers and dungeons and monsters having spontaneously appeared to disrupt everything. It looks like most of the people who were monsters in MC’s future are pretty monstrous even early on.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 118:

This would bring back minimum costs, since to buy the equivalent of even
1d6 Blast from 6E, you’d also have to buy up range from melee to hex to
few hexes to many hexes, buy up sustainability from “does lethal damage
when used” to “does nonlethal damage when used” to “will tire out user
eventually”, buy up targets from “one target ever” to “can spread”,
penetration from “stopped by any amount of defenses” to “reduced
penetration” to “normal”. Okay, this isn’t going to work. Most powers
are far from the greatest limitations on multiple axes, so merely being
at the default level takes up a lot of points and a lot of space
on a character sheet. Bah.

Went to the office, ate some jerk pork and bean rice and friend plantains, did some work. Only Coworker K was there, but I was able to foist off the macadamia nuts on her.

I don’t have to go to the office next week, and after that the office is closed for the rest of the month, so this is my last visit to the office for 2025. It’s also my last visit to that office, since after the first of the year we will be in a larger space on the 7th floor, the better to RTO us all.

Watched (anime movie): Fruits Basket ~Prelude~: Despite the title, it’s the end of the manga with Kyo’s feelings and Tohru’s mom’s backstory, and then a little bit of epilogue.

Read (manga): Unearthly vol 1 (Ted Naifeh, Elmer Damaso): I’ve read this before, but it was on the shelf, so reading it and moving it to a different shelf counts. Two girls discover the boy they like has been kidnapped by aliens and set off to find him with the help of an alien jerk. It is very 90s, and apparently never made it into the future, as it was cancelled after one volume.

Written (game design): 218.

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.