Tag: marith

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

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

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

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 107.

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure how to explain that Cephalopod Awareness Day and World Animal Day are the same day, otherwise.

Got up not horribly late (only very late), did some shopping. It was not as good as usual because not only do I have no Katalepsis to read, the sandwich shop’s microwave was broken so I had to change my order, and the bookstore is pupating for its transformation into a Barnes & Noble.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.10-12: Intrigue! Murder! Medical issues! Mass layoffs! Welp, back to the brothel. Surely Jinshi won’t miss her.

Read (manga): I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School vol 1 (Ui Kashima): The delinquent girl thinks she asked the hapless boy out, the bullied boy thinks the terrifying girl has impressed him into servitude. One of her minions knows what’s going on but is too amused to straighten them out; the other is different but equally confused. Those are pretty much the only characters with lines.

Written (catgirl): 236.

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

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

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

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

Written (catgirl): 153.

Does anyone observe this?

Still no office, WFH all this week, yay.

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

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

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

Written (catgirl): 218.

Gah, she’s 16 now!

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

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

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

Written (catgirl): 142.

Excellent day for outbreaks of phasmophobia.

Successfully shopped for stuff and also other stuff, and um, that’s about it.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.7-9: More deaths in the concubine palace, then our detective gets a home visit where there are, you guessed it, more poisonings! Also we see where she gets it from.

Read (novel): Regent’s Mate (Glynn Stewart): The wayward princess king candidate finally makes it home with everything she has left after the last three books, and resolves the betrayal in time to actually save someone. Of course then she finds out why the betrayal happened, and that’s multiple more cans of worms, plus all the worms she already had.

Read (manga): UQ Holder vol 1 (Ken Akamatsu): Sequel to Negima!, but much less interesting. It’s okay for the main character to be OP, but he should get there through on-screen struggle and suffering, not just by inheriting all the levels the MC of the previous series accumulated over 30+ volumes.

Written (game design): 342.

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 104.

Do I emit gibberish? You be the judge.

Also National Pepperoni Pizza Day, for Non.

Did the usual Saturday stuff, but could not shop for manga very effectively since there was an event happening and the store was all rearranged.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.4-6: Our poor apothecary keeps getting more and more attention, and also revealing more and more abilities. She’s kind of scary. I mean, more than she was by episode 3.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 1 (Shinichi Fukuda): He’s a loner apprentice traditional doll-maker, she’s a popular extrovert who has just found out he can sew and needs someone to help her with cosplay for a deeply sus eroge. This would work better if she were less hot or he had any experience whatsoever with girls having bodies in his vicinity.

Read (novel): Exordia (Seth Dickinson): A severely traumatized Kurdish woman sees an alien in Central Park, finds out about soul-based ultratechnology and the mysterious remnant from before the Big Bang that’s lurking under her hometown. I didn’t know gnostic hard SF was a thing, but it is now. The ending seems to indicate we’ll see more in this universe, which I would like, because it is Weird.

Written (game design): 127.

Sage has this one covered.

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

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

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

Written (game design): 135:

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

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

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

Got it covered!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 233:

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

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

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

Still playing Shop Titans, I hope that counts!

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

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

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

Written (game design): 396:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 284.

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 409:

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Sherilyn!

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 291:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 155:

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

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

There’s one that takes some explaining to the youth!

I took today off to go to Roseville but then that fell through, so now I’m just useless all day.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.7-8: The one with the privacy-destroyer and the one with The Mastermind.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 532:

Other ways to have magic that people know but don’t understand are a
dying earth setting (arguably a subset of post-apocalyptic), which I
like generally but am not leaning toward in this case, and magic being
just plain beyond human comprehension: if you exactly follow the instructions
laid down by the Great Seer in antiquity, you get the miracle, and if
you change them at all, you get somewhere between nothing and disaster.
Incomprehensible magic is arguably what D&D has, since “work with the GM
to make something new that you hope isn’t broken” isn’t a rule. There’s
no question that unalterable menu magic has its advantages, but
admitting that’s how it works in-character is meh for worldbuilding.
(Merely pretending it’s not, as D&D kinda does, is meh in general.) If I
were smart, I would be able to make up multiple magic paradigms and how
each one explains the other, and then everybody could feel not only like
they understood magic but that they were smarter than those other guys.
In the real world, however…

I never explained how people turn into monsters or how monster powers
work, because I have no idea. so at least I’m not as explainy as I could
be?

Leaving this to ferment for a while, back to Actions. I realized that
although I was thinking of the thirteen moves (Act Undetected, Analyze
Something Complex, Befriend Someone, Build, Repair, or Sabotage
Something, Influence Someone, Mingle with the Crowd, Patch Someone Up,
Read Someone or a Situation, Scour a Place for Information, Scramble
Around, Spout Lore, Travel to a Different Place, Work Magic) as
analogous to Dungeon World basic moves, but they don’t have to be.
There’s always Act Under Pressure (maybe needs a better name?) for when
somebody doesn’t have a specific Action. But having the specific Action is
better (in ways to be determined, besides probably getting a higher
rating).

Is this our equivalent to classes? Just like you pick a couple of Traits
based on your ancestry, you pick a couple of Specialized Actions, away
you go with your niche protected? Seems like it could work. Actually,
there might even be Specialized Actions from ancestry, although most of
the ones I can think of are just narrative positioning (if you don’t
have a small body, you don’t have the werewithal to wiggle through the
tight opening, have some +D.)

There could of course be even more specialized Actions with the
regular SAs and appropriate backgrounds as prerequisites, for more
esoteric magical or psychic or martial arts or detective or whatever
abilities. These would include some narrative permission to do the
thing, so characters of vastly different specialties might not even be
able to roll Act Under Pressure for them.

Do we need to split Act Under Pressure into a couple of still very
general Actions? Do The Thing and Find the Clue? But the GM should just
give out the clues, right? Maybe Spout Lore? But I’m not sure Remember
Pertinent Facts Under Pressure needs to be broken out. Maybe Think Under
Pressure in general? How often would that come up? I have no idea!

I wish I remembered my dreams better, some of them are pretty good.

Went to the office, ate some veggies and meat and rice and veggies, had too much meeting and didn’t like it, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.6: The one with the Martin Shkreli stand-in and Breanna’s speech about fandom. (Did she come out as queer there, or just allyship?)

Read (manga): Spy x Family vol 14 (Tatsuya Endo): Ski cabin mystery! Then Anya’s first school dance, and a lot of backstory on secondary characters and the horrible war.

Read (novel): Demon in Disguise (Deborah Wilde): Main character has come out to just about everybody she knows, is at least tentatively back together with her ex, time for everything to go bad and end on a cliffhanger.

Written (game design): 328:

So you have the fancy temple wizards, who draw circles to establish
holy domains and write the true names of gods around them and recite
genealogies back to Creation or cite the exact section, paragraph,
and clause of the Celestial Ordinances that applies, etc, etc. They can
make something happen right away, or bless your weapons, or whatever.
Wizards who aren’t so fancy take longer to make spells, but then they
can stash them in their rings or toads or whatever for later use. Some
don’t bother with storing spells and evoke spirits to follow them around
and do stuff for them. Alchemists don’t cast spells at all, they refine
philosopher’s phosphorus or whatever by actually refining it. Mystics
and martial artists also don’t cast spells, but gain special powers over
body and mind by rigorous training and self-discipline. (This is
completely different than the way people get special powers when they
turn into monsters, how dare you.)

Is this too explainy and mechanical? I don’t want to be as completely
vibes-based as some story games (cough DW Wizard’s primary move cough),
because players need to be able to plan in at least a slightly crunchy
way, but it is magic and shouldn’t be boring like D&D. Do I need to go
full post-apocalyptic “we can turn it on and replace the batteries if we
find new ones but no idea how to repair it”?

(D&D is advertised as medieval, but it’s really a combination of
Renaissance (cities, inns, cash economy) plus post-apocalyptic (perilous
ruins, incomprehensible artifacts) plus Wild West (murder-hobos, clear
the subhuman savages to expand civilization). Various editions have
emphasized different aspects: 1e was relatively heavier on the Wild West
since it was supposed to transition into domain play but the
colonialism aspect has faded over time; 4e was more post-apocalyptic
with the “scattered points of light”, etc. I’m also leaning toward the
post-apoc genre, since ancient magic going haywire is a great excuse for
monsters and other problems.)

Happy happy Ken-day!

I did some regular shopping, but then we went out for an early dinner at a restaurant Ken likes, saw the rare and elusive Non-beast, went back to their place so Marith and Dave and I could watch some anime while digesting, then had cake and very bad singing and very good friendship.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.7-8: Oh, right, they’re being framed and hunted, but all of it may be the result of reality manipulating artifacts. Not that that helps.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 243:

I consolidated most of the actions mentioned earlier into:
– Act Undetected
– Analyze Something Complex
– Befriend Someone
– Build, Repair, or Sabotage Something
– Influence Someone
– Mingle with the Crowd
– Patch Someone Up
– Read Someone or a Situation
– Scour a Place for Information
– Scramble Around
– Spout Lore
– Travel to a Different Place
– Work Magic

Analyze and Read could be consolidated, but technical vs social may
be a distinction worth preserving, so we’ll leave them separate for
now. Scour is also in that space but again, distinct enough we’ll keep
it for now. “Go shopping” doesn’t need to be an Action; looking for stuff
is Scour, haggling is Influence or Befriend, buying things from the
standard equipment list at the listed price is whatever. So that’s
thirteen Actions, plus Act Under Pressure.

“Spot trouble before it strikes” isn’t an Action because it’s reactive,
based on Readiness. “Make a daring escape” is mostly a combat Action, so
maybe it’s time to think about those.

– make a daring escape
– strike at a weak spot
– stand in defense of someone
– block passage
– stop someone in their tracks
– recover and reorient
– push through an obstruction
– strike from ambush
– snipe from a distance
– blaze away
– team up on someone
– terrorize someone into flight or surrender
– stop the fight to parley
– take cover
– duel someone one-on-one
– form a shield wall
– push someone around
– use the environment as a weapon
– take out a bunch of mooks at once
– blow up an area
– curse an enemy
– bless an ally
– move around while avoiding attack

I’m sure there are more I’ll think of later.

I really should do that soon, once I figure out how to decide which vet to go to.

Spent all day being sleepy, but did a little bit of work anyway. Will I manage to avoid staying up too late tonight? Magic 8-Ball is skeptical.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.4-5: This time Amazon tried to throw us into S3, but we were wise to its trickery. Back in the days when Breanna and Harry were still trying to fit into the team, bringing justice to a crooked real estate developer and also haunting the crap out of some guys. Who needs boys, anyway?

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 4 (Mai Naoi): Hey, look, an example of a functional relationship that’s not a traditional Japanese upper-class marriage! But they have a huge house and everything! Will our poor MC get the hint? Probably it will take more life experience, but she’s moving in the right direction.

Read (novel): Hemlock & Silver (T Kingfisher): Not as horrifying as A Sorceress Comes to Call, but far from horror-free. A scholar who specializes in poison antidotes is drafted by the king to investigate why the young princess is ailing after her mother and baby sister were murdered, because royalty always have to suspect poison, but no, it’s all so much worse than that, and only the main character’s T-Kingfisheresque practicality saves the day.

Written (game design): 251:

Another way of doing resisted rolls for social skills would be to let
people have levels of resistance to various kinds of influence, which each
add +1D (the materials the person doing the influencing has to work with
are not as suitable). This would be extra complexity because we still
want the general opposed-Actions mechanic for general opposed Actions,
but it would let us get rid of Actions that only exist to oppose others.
That is probably a win, since adding Difficulty isn’t complicated.

Speaking of Difficulty, I should make explicit that lacking any of the
(ever-increasing) requirements, background, tools, materials, time, work
environment, physical and mental faculties, etc, etc, can give you +2D
or more if you’re very far from what you need, like trying to do an
hours-long task in moments.

They Frolic.

Went to the office, ate mild masamun meatball curry, did a work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.1: Amazon, what are you doing?! But that explains why some time seemed to have passed. The one with the dictator and his debutante daughter.

Read (novel): Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe (CB Lee): Interdimensional meet-cute, followed by more cuteness but also impending doom which ties into one girl’s family backstory and there are feelings and conspiracies but overall it’s really pretty cozy.

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 3 (Mai Naoi): Yuri-fantasizing girl continues to be extremely traumatized by the existence of this man-thing she has to marry, although other people seem to be able to deal with him just fine and he’s drawn with a face when she’s not there an everything. Also, scenes from the very gay lives of the women she sketches. Best Friend is kind of sus, but I think we saw that before.

Written (game design): 221:

We can definitely come up with lists of potential consequences for
the specific Actions, since they’re more constrained than “Act Under
Pressure”. Another possibility is allowing partial success: “They’re
your friend now, but only as long as you keep the presents coming,”
or whatever. “Act Under Pressure” is by definition for things that
aren’t as interesting to play out in detail, so it can be pass/fail.

Now we’re back to having to construct the list of Actions, because the
one before wasn’t good enough. And we haven’t even gotten into actions
for fighting a guy.

Oh, another possibility for the results of Actions is that you could
give the GM some kind of metacurrency, which they can then spend to give
you a failure later, or some stroke of horrible luck. GM metacurrency is
tricky, since it has to be distinct from what the GM can do normally
according to the rules of the game, but on the other hand, how great is
it to have a stack of Quantifiable Doom to taunt the players with?

Loving homes for all rescue animals!

Did the usual lazing-in and shopping and reading Katalepsis and watching anime at Dave’s place.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.5-6: Rampo wraps up the mysterious murder of the murder mystery, and gets a clue for the next plot against the Armed Detective Agency, which turns out to not help very much against them being completely framed.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 128:

Oh, right, Last Breath. That definitely establishes something about the
setting, but I’m not sure it’s inconsistent with everything else we
want, so we can leave it for now.

The other basic moves are arguably the core of Dungeon World, and I
already ripped them off. The whole melee fighting/running to block
somebody/shooting somebody that I spent so much anguish on come directly
from Hack and Slash, Stand in Defense, Volley. We kind of reject Discern
Realities in favor of the GM just telling the players stuff. Not sure
about Spout Lore; maybe it should be automatic like Discern Realities,
but in accordance with “draw maps, leave blanks” maybe it’s fine as is?

None of this feels like it’s getting anywhere with XZQJY. Bah.

Not sure what that’s about, but it sounds spooky!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.3: The one where they ruin the casino emperor’s plans. We’ve had the lawyer guy for three episodes and the new hacker for two, and they both seem good. It’s probably even good from a story standpoint to get Hardison off-screen, since he’s just too powerful. Also, we’re not even pretending Parker was ever neurotypical now, which is an admirable facing of reality.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 3 (Syu Yasaka): I thought for sure I had read vol 2, but I cannot find anywhere I wrote it down, or find the actual book on my shelves. Anyway, there’s a romantic rival, but she cannot stand up to the pure love between our main characters, and also we get to see what the other MC is thinking, which is not really any different than one would expect from the genre. Can they somehow work it out?

Written (game design): 299:

Meh, no need to get into the weeds of specific classes at this point.
What are the components of a DW character in general? Name, Look, Armor,
Hit Points, Damage, Alignment, Abilities, Bonds, Race, Starting Moves,
Coin, Gear/Inventory, Advanced Moves, Advanced Advanced Moves, XP. Also
Basic Moves and Special Basic Moves.

Name and Look being small picklists is sort of like the thing I
mentioned earlier about having some pregens so people can grab a cool
character and get stuck in, which is great, but I have already spent too
much time talking about it. Bonds and Alignment get you XP, also great.
A lot of DW descendants ditch Alignment in favor of Drive or some such,
which I like, because I don’t like Alignment. I don’t want to throw
shade on these important bits, but they’re not really what we’re looking
at now, since they’re already not D&D.

We already stole class-based damage dice for XZQJY and they aren’t D&D
anyway. Hit points have to go. In Apocalypse World, everyone can take an
equal amount of harm, which isn’t all that much (attacks do 1-4, maybe
5, and 4 harm is a fatal wound, IIRC). I’m good with everyone being able
to take the same amount of damage; clinging to life is a function of
heroism, not muscles. There’s a move for beating people up, so keeping
the damage die as actual damage is fine. Hit Protection that refreshes
after every fight, get wounded when you take damage past that, get taken
out if you’re double wounded or if you take X past your HP. Maybe a
basic move to keep going even when you’re technically dead?

Squamate! Squamate! OK!

Went to the office, attended an all-hands where none of the (minor and completely surmountable) problems could be construed as the fault of my team, ate a rice pork burger-shaped thing that made me vaguely queasy, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.2: Still chasing the opiate billionaire, Hardison has to bail to the other side of the world but look! there’s a new hacker that he vouches for. (We knew this was coming, the actor wasn’t able to commit to the whole season.) She has good ideas, though, and an appropriate regard for Parker.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 8 (Hiromu Arakawa): The complicated city-wide murdering scene is over, now all the characters are regrouping. So many characters, who are all these people? But many of them are entertaining people, so it’s okay.

Read (novel): Primer for the Apocalypse vol 1 (Braided Sky): Alien magic and the system will come to Earth, but right now a time mage from after the point has escaped back and is trying to rebuild her power so she can protect her family, without giving away that she will be able to time travel. Bog-standard litRPG.

Read (short): “Trap Line” (Timothy Zahn): An SF story in the old style: a human gets into trouble among the stars and has to figure out the problem and work with some aliens and against other aliens to save the day. In this case, the problem involves astral projection.

Written (game design): 465:

We could do Harmony-based magic like XZQJY. (When you spend a while
in meditation, roll with Mysticism. On a 10+ hold 5 Harmony; on a
7-9 hold 3; on a 6- hold 1 in addition to whatever the GM tells
you.) But we don’t actually have to, there are plenty of other options
for non-battery magic. Like, enchanted or cursed places/objects/monsters
have a Weirdness rating, and you can do any feat of magic (ie, cast any
spell) equal to or less than that Weirdness, but if you roll a 7-9 on
using magic, you can’t use that aura of strangeness against for a while,
and if you roll a 6-, it definitely gets to turn your spell back on you
or possess you or curse you. Or, the gods inscribe spells on the inside
of your skull, but when you roll 7-9 to cast one, it gives you a
concussion and on a 6- maybe you suffer serious brain damage. The
possibilities are endless!

Is it 10+/7-9/6- based on 2d6? It could be 0d6 to 4d6, keep the highest,
6/4-5/1-3, and that’s still officially PbtA. There’s a recent big FitD
fantasy release, Grimwild, though. Let’s stick with 2d6 for now and just
say you can’t roll at more than +/-4.

Back to classes. Cleric and Wizard are the only spellcasters. Druid is
all shapeshifting all the time, which doesn’t need to change. Bards can
spont a few magical effects, but I’m not sure we need bards at all. Any
spellcaster can have singing as their special effect, and any character
can try to seduce all the things.

Actually, can anybody seduce anything? “Hot” isn’t exactly a personality
trait, so there’s not an ability for it. We could make being good at the
D&D stats into moves you can take, though. Brute Force (move and break
things, maybe roll with Aggression), Striking Looks (seduce people,
maybe roll with Focus since paying attention to someone is allegedly
seductive), Educated (you know all about something, like the Bard’s
move), Unkillable, etc.

Back to classes. Do we want thieves? Anybody can sneak up on someone and
murder them without a roll if the fictional positioning is right, but
thieves can have specific moves for it, that’s fine in DW. Not sure
about paladins. Probably not barbarians, they seem OP and/or not really
suited for a party. Having been around since AD&D notwithstanding,
they’re kind of in a different genre.

I keep talking about wizards instead of The Wizard and such, which shows
a lack of commitment to PbtA, but I’m waffling over whether to have
classes like that, or classes at all. Pick one of the major beginning
moves (spellcasting, signature weapon, animal companion, etc), another
from the general pool, and away you go as some unique weirdo?

Humans, huh? Seem sus to me.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.2-4: End of the flashback, Rampo has triumphed and the detective agency can be formed. Back in the present day, Kunikida’s in jail because of the girl who exploded, and the enemy has a paranormal specifically tuned against Rampo. I suspect this will not avail them.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 2 (Tamifull): Well, they figured out having sex, but there are still a lot of people who may not be cool with lesbians, because Japan, and also there’s jealousy and a new friend with a loud voice and no filter whatsoever.

Written (game design): 390.

The best day of all!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.1: Nate’s dead, but they got a new white guy with connections, who seems okay, and a an alternate-timeline Sackler to ruin: so far, so good. Sophie and Eliot look about the same, Parker and Hardison are noticeably older. Parker is still the best.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 1 (Tamifull): Two college girls start dating and then have to work out all the problems of the relationship, like being stuck in the closet door, libido mismatch, being in the same band, past romantic trauma, boys who think they’re lovely, etc, etc. Also they have to go to classes and stuff, which really cuts into their having-feelings time.

Written (game design): 331:

(cont from yesterday)

The second scenario has fewer variations, but is (to me and my tiny
brain) more difficult to begin with: A is moving across the battlefield
to shank somebody, and C is stopping them by shooting them (or
throwing a grenade at them or casting a spell on them or whatever
method that doesn’t involve being physically there). Does this work
at all? I can think of three ways to do it: knocking A down/sending
them flying, forcing them to take cover, or wounding them so they
can’t keep running (including by killing them).

Door #2 is simple to apply: A makes a morale check (however that works).
It can even be added to the others, which opens up the possibility of
everybody who got wounded during a round making a morale check. That’s a
different ramble, though.

Earlier, we said getting knocked down wasn’t a big deal because a
round isn’t a second-by-second accounting of every motion. You get
knocked down, you get up again, you keep running if you still want
to. Maybe if you get knocked down enough it can take until next
round to get up and do anything. Now we need to quantify getting
knocked around and Strength and Size and everything, but honestly
we kind of needed to do that anyway, since fantasy is full of people
getting clobbered by ogre clubs and run over by wagons and crushed
beneath falling portcullises and what-not.

That leaves C wounding A enough to stop them, at least temporarily.
I’m good with taking a wound being enough to interrupt whatever you
were doing, but we don’t know whether A is actually wounded until
we apply all Attack dice at the end of the round. Even if we separate
out the dice from getting shot halfway through the turn (not
impossible, although it’s yet another thing to remember until the
resolution phase), do we then have to discard the others (and any
dice A might have attacked someone with at the end of their move)
and move A back to wherever C was able to shoot them? And how likely
do we want to make it for one attack to be enough to wound someone?
Will ranged attacks be OP then?

I mean, the orcas seem to be doing okay, but if they have buddies, that’s fine.

Did not go to the office. Went to the dentist instead to have my thin layer of new gum tissue certified (no actual certificate received). Put off making any kind of decision on bridge (ugh) vs partial denture (ugh) vs nothing (ugh).

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.15: Nate gets to be an unreliable narrator, but gets closure for his original motivation and exits Leverage in a much less self-destructive way than we expected, leaving our OT3 (as much as there could be an OT3 on TV in 2012) to start diverging the timeline. The End!

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 2 (Canno): Reread. Switches to following some other students with they various love geometries, but the pair from vol 1 are there in the background. They’re not as interesting as the original pair, but it sounds like the next volume will switch back to them.

Written (game design): 523:

There’s two scenarios I’m looking at for moving around in combat
and stopping other people from moving around, that the system needs
to support. (I think, or maybe this is something that would never
happen with real players, but it’s what I imagine.)

The first is the very basic round where Character A is running
across the battlefield to shank somebody, and Character B (with
higher Readiness) reacts by moving to stop them. How does this work?
Our rule of thumb is doing things should work unless there’s a good
reason, and the character with higher Readiness should probably be
in control of timing and engagement, so maybe blocking just works.
A is going to have to deal with B in some way (murder, intimidation
(morale check), whatever).

Does it matter whether A is running down a narrow passage/through a
doorway, or across a wide-open space with room to maneuver? For this
basic case, probably not. B’s in the way, A has to deal with that.

What if B had lower Readiness, but declared they’re going to stop
whatever A is trying to do because they hate that guy? Is that even a
valid declaration? Maybe it’s not; if B wanted to be able to react to
A, they should have rolled more Readiness. But what if B declares
they’re going to get in A’s face? Can A use their higher Readiness to
just run away? That doesn’t seem right: B had to decide first, but the
action is happening at roughly the same time. Opposed Get Over There
rolls, I guess?

What if A is coming out of a narrow tunnel into a wider place and
B is already out there? Or vice versa? In that case whoever has the
better Readiness gets to decide whether they meet in the tunnel or
the open space. (If movement wasn’t always 1 zone, we could have
arguments about how A only has to move 2 squares to get out of the
tunnel but B has to move 4 squares to get into the tunnel to block them
up; good on us for avoiding that nonsense.)

What if it’s all in a narrow tunnel, but A is a big strong human and B
is a weak little goblin? Does B get run over if they try to block? This
is where we need to figure out how Strength and Size work, although we
also have to allow for the possibility of B tripping A or anything else
cleverer than body-blocking.

Once the blocking is sorted, though, at the end of the round A and B can
use their melee attack dice on each other unless they avoided contact
completely.

Happy happy Rachelday!!

Went to Rachel’s party, it was full of people I know to varying small degrees (or not at all) and also food. Told some people about my brilliant plan to combine hit points and initiative (although not the person I imagined explaining it to, because he would have mocked it), did not find any new gamers for after the Bertanis abandon us. Mostly talked to Dave.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 24: Dumplings! Also a plan for dealing with Falin’s problem, but it’s the end of the anime, so you’ll have to go to the manga to find out if it works!

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.1: Flashback to when the president and Rampo were starting the agency, with almost-monochrome art so you know it’s The Past.

Read (short): “Sharp Undoing” (Natasha King): What if headware, but with as much security as electronics have today?

Read (manga): Cheerful Amnesia vol 3 (Tamamushi Oku): Further life of the horny amnesiac airhead and her girlfriend who she doesn’t remember sleeping with but is overwhelmed by. Also incidental characters, who often try to help, but she is so beyond help.

Written (game design): 295:

The main mechanics at this time are:
DOING THE THING
– Difficulty starts at 0 if you have all of
– Appropriate background
– Proper tools and materials
– Ample time
– Trouble-free work environment
– Difficulty increases by 1 or more for each that you’re lacking
– If Difficulty is 4+, you can’t do the thing until you address some of
these problems
– Otherwise, roll d20s equal to Difficulty and compare to Action rating
– 1 die above Action rating: fail OR succeed with consequences
– 2 or more dice above Action rating: fail with consequences

TBD: opposed rolls

FIGHTING THE GUYS
– Start of round: everyone rolls Readiness dice (d8s)
– From lowest to highest roll (later reductions don’t matter):
– Declare action – attack that guy, defend this guy, steal the
maguffin, etc. Can move one zone to do it, or two zones if running
(halve Readiness)
– Anyone who hasn’t declared yet can declare to help or interfere
– Once everyone has declared, resolve it all
– Assign each of your attack dice to somebody you were engaged with this
turn and roll it
– If somebody attacks you, you can (and probably should) spend your
Readiness 1-for-1 to counter the attack
– If you counter it all, great!
– If there’s any attack left, roll the Wound die (d10). Add the remaining
attack, subtract your armor
– If 1+, take a wound
– If 11+ take 2 wounds
– Wounds go into your inventory, possibly displacing gear
– Every Wound is +1 Difficulty to all Actions
– At 2+ Wounds, spend Harmony every round to not pass out

TBD: ranged attacks, stopping someone with ranged attacks, pushing and
shoving, spells, area effect attacks, Wound die on non-animals, special
effects of weapons

I dunno, manne. Maybe instead of taking D&D out of D&D, I should have
taken D&D out of Dungeon World.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried it. Sounds good, though!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.14: The one with the toys for Christmas.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 2 (Wataru Mitogawa): More girls join the cast, if not Dorothy’s harem. More vampire mooks get murdered, more popes are shady AF. (Okay, really it’s the same number of popes.)

Read (novel): Bunny Girl Evolution vol 1 (Sir Bedivere the Mad): Isekai LitRPG, MC is incarnated as a cute bunny, violence and conspiracy and predation and evolution ensue. Meh.

Written (catgirl): 235.

I’m sure they mean musical instruments, but what if they don’t? Is Uncommon Instruments the title of my new YA fantasy trilogy?

Went to the dentist to have my tooth looked at because it seemed dodgy on x-ray, they said it would have to come out soon so I had them take it out right there. Now my mouth is weird.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.12-13: The one with the mindfuckery and the one with the winery.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 1 (Wataru Mitogawa): She’s a sadistic, horny monster-hunting nun. She’s a free-lance monster hunter looking for her missing sister. Together they play out dom/sub scenes kill vampires. I’d say it’s completely lacking in redeeming social value, but even though it’s secondary world, it makes the Catholic church look bad, so that’s something.

Written (catgirl): 155.