Tag: may i ask for one final thing

Put on my One More Chapter Club shirt, did more work than I expected although maybe still not a lot.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 10-13: She punches her way through a war and a dungeon and a flirtation, all the way to the end!

Read (artbook): Magic Knights (Dames Productions): Pictures of magical girls, now with swords! Also spears, dashing uniforms, guardian spirits, fancy dresses, mounts, comrades in arms, etc. Every page is by a different artist, but the styles are in the same genre.

Read (novel): Murder Medic vol 1 (EC Krueger). Someone who manages to die of rabies is isekai’d, steals the demon heart a cultist was hoping to use himself, makes some friends that then find out she’s a demon, gets harrassed by the cultist and various other people, does a lot of murders and LitRPG leveling up while her demon nature heckles her.

Written (game design): 264.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 7-9: Religious intrigue! Divine intrigue! Treason, betrayal, crushes! Also punching. Lots of punching.

Read (graphic novel): Stutterhug vol 1 (Sam Davies): Brightly colored animals, some anthropomorphic, many stylishly-dressed, dance and flirt and meet and part and sing, usually lovingly, sometimes sadly.

Written (game design): 430:

I’ve been complaining about hit points since at least the previous
game design document, and off and on since then. It would definitely
be better to defeat enemies (and overcome adversity in general)
through in-game action. The one approach I know of is the 1HP Dragon:
the dragon is so large that a sword is but a mosquito bite and its
scales are as impenetrable as an inch of iron plate, but instead
of abstracting those into a large number that you have to grind
down with endless dice rolls of the one optimum power on your
character sheet, they’re factors you have to deal with by planning
and in-game action, just like the dragon’s power of flight, and the
way its lair is hidden deep in the mountains, and the surprise army
of kobold ninjas. (This is phrased in D&D I mean “generic fantasy”
terms, but what is a supervillain but a dragon in spandex?)

The problem with this is that it requires a lot of prep by the GM to
establish all the components of the opposition. Is it too much for
anything except a boss fight/master villain? The amount of detail for a
master villain is probably too much for anything else, but the minor
villain robbing the local bank probably doesn’t need that much. They do
need some detail, though, and every aspect needs to be at least somewhat
interesting, so that’s still work. Also, if one of the aspects is that
the villain has a gang of henchmen, does each of them need to have their
set of aspects to overcome?

(We’re only talking about the end stage of the adventure here, or
at least the combat encounters. The first part of a superheroic
adventure is usually investigation, which works the same way as
before, peeling away secrecy and resources from the villain. Sometimes
those resources are minions, who would have hit points, so do we
fractalize them? What if they’re normals?)

As always with games where the characters aren’t baseline humans
in a mundane world, we need some way to ajudicate what they can do
to or about each other where intuition fails. How does a biotech
suit of powered armor interact with the opponent’s runic array? For
that matter, can this particular rail gun shoot through that
particular adamantium-plated robot? With time to plan and flexible
powers (gadgeteering, magic, any kind of VPP) many things are
possible, but sometimes supervillains are attacking right now.

Even if the players come up with a plan, are there any mechanics
around executing the plan in a rush under field (ie, horrible)
conditions? What if the plan is “get them”? Even Squirrel Girl
punches villains pretty often, so we still need a combat system of
some kind, better than the 1HP Goblin. Have we just put the hit
points inside a puzzle box? Do players want to always open a puzzle
box? I’m sure the GM doesn’t want to make a new puzzle box every
week. It’s 2026, nobody has time for that.

It’s like Monday, only different. I’m doing handover and on-call this week, so I don’t have to get up early to go into the office, I guess that’s something.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 4-6: More punching! Also various people falling in love with Scarlet, which is legit because she’s awesome, but also boys are gross.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 6 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, S finally got it! But I bet they have a lot more mismatched feelings coming in the future, especially once T finds out.

Written (game design): 198:

Leaving attack rolls and damage rolls alone for the moment, the effect
of emotional damage has to be somewhat cumulative, but preferably not
just filling up a track like physical damage. Maybe a Presence attack
has whatever effect it has, and also gives a -1 to defend against
similar moods but +1 against opposing moods. If it reaches an effective
Presence 0, then the target should adjust their psychlims accordingly,
although possibly not until after the fight.

Of course NPCs should be able to do this to PCs, but Hero characters
don’t change unless the player changes them, so any adjustment of
psychlims would need to be optional and compensated with XP.

(Since we’re using points of effect, fka Body on the dice, it’s now Pre,
Pre+3, Pre+6, etc for the steps of effect, rather than +10, +20.)

What effects could be worth doing Pre attacks instead of just grinding
down hitpoints. This is not a novel observation, but players tend to go
for options that are simple, immediate, and reliable, which is why so
many games have combat that boils down to taking away as many of the
enemy’s hit points as possible, even if there are other options. Clayton
Notestine called these “dominant mechanics”. Skill rolls are another
one: when you can get rid of the trap with a roll, instead of describing
how you carefully use your ten-foot pole to pack the gas vent with mud,
what are players going to do more often? A skill roll isn’t reliable in
the sense of always working, but you have X% change of succeeding even
if you don’t baffle the GM with bullshit.

This works fine in a low-tech, low-magic dungeon crawl, but a
superheroic, SF, high-magic, or even just modern game is going to have
characters that are experts in things the players aren’t, or things nobody
in the world is actually an expert in because they don’t exist. At that
point, what can we do except abstraction, or nonsense (technobabble)?