Tag: monkeycat towers

Also National Creativity Day. I am doing better at one of those than the other.

Didn’t sleep in quite as much as most Saturdays, so I guess that’s good. Did some shopping.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.9: Just because you’re 11 doesn’t mean you can stay up forever, Coco! Also, Tartah, don’t ask those questions, it won’t make anybody happy if you get answers.

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.7-8: And now we find out what demons really are and why they are that way, and how some humans still fall for it.

Read (manga): Love Bullet vol 1 (inee): Cute girls saved by the goddess of love from actual death become cupids but it’s the 21st century so they have guns with heart-shaped muzzles, and also they’re kind of fighty, probably because they can’t fall in love even with each other.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 210. Rewrote what I wrote yesterday to make it more consistent, which arguably is not something I should be doing now, but it was All Wrong.

None of these modern factory-pond turtles that have been bred for nothing but size and transportability!

I was backup on call, so all my usual sleeping in and shopping and whatnot involved a computer sitting nearby, but as it turned out, no one needed me. Story of my life.

When we went over for anime, Ayse offered me some spare hot pot, but I butter-fingered it all over the floor and had to apologize for disrespecting the hot pot, which is like mother and father. This was hilarious to anyone who has seen one specific Chow Yun-Fat movie from the previous century, and incomprehensible to everyone else, as the best in-jokes are. I’m sorry I didn’t get to eat the hot pot, though, because it looked really good.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.8: And now we know why nobody likes the Knights Moralis, not that Qifrey can complain!

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.6: Why yes, despite his personality defects, Stark was trained by one of the legendary heroes. The dragon, apparently, was not.

Read (novel): Spirit Blade (Glynn Steward): An ex-Vatican monster hunter washes up as a bartender in a small city in Canada, where he finds out that monsters are still everywhere around him and also trying to eat his new girlfriend and her magic cat.

Read (novel): That Which Devours: Survive (Jer Patch): Instead of dying, or getting sucked through a portal, the main character arrives in the purview of the System by crashlanding on a new colony planet. It is full of Unexpected Dinosaurs, and also a lot of the colonists don’t seem to have been selected for mental stability, but our MC gets the special S-tier class Eat Their Heart And Gain Their Power. Om nom nom.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 183.

Have you even seen a pickle salute?

I not only slept in before shopping, I took a nap after shopping. Then we went to see anime and I made Marith stay in the cat-infested house until she expired of sneezings.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.7: The carriage disaster.

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.4-5: And now they have Stark, although he doesn’t realize it yet.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (second rewrite of Geometry for Mutants): 381. I need to keep a list of everything my MC makes a mental note of, though, because

I was on call today, so I didn’t do anything. Some of the doing nothing was sleeping, but some was just doing nothing. Despite that, I was late to hand over to the next person, because I am dumb. I did manage a little shopping after handover.

Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.6:We finally meet Olruggio and Coco gives him the rant about her love of magic. Then Agott gets to head out to help with the carriage disaster.

Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.2-3: Fern joins the party (over the course of like eight years). Frieren really does not understand any people, which is a problem because she is herself a person. She does love magic, though.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (second rewrite of new project): 301.

 

Several of the audience survive every performance!

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

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

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

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

Written (new project): 219.

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

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

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

Written (game design): 217:

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

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

Some kind of bringing things back from caves, anyway.

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

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

Written (game design): 128.

Did nothing today because I was on call, but after waking up to take handover, I was able to go back to bed and be useless for much of the day while Nightvale trained his Weight of a Thousand Dead Suns napping technique.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 12-13: We did learn at least some who and why and when, but how was only hinted at. Still, that was a completely unexpected level of doom in the end.

Read (comic collection): Deep Beyond vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo, David Goy, Andrea Broccardo, Barbara Nosenzo): Everything broke on Y2k and also horrible mutant plagues started, now it’s generations later and the survivors are engaging in conspiracy and rebellion about the mysteries behind it. It has very impractical sci-fi aesthetics.

Written (game design): 162. Still haven’t managed to switch to another project.

I keep wanting to slide into a very abstract system, which on the one
hand is flexible for accomodating all the weird shit players come up
with, but on the other is less grounded. At the very least, we have to
have people establish the special effect ahead of time, and being able
to put everything into a bucket with specific mechanics (physical
object, break by doing Body), even a large bucket, would be better.

If I sucked even more than I actually do, I’d say we should use an LLM
to invent rules for a special effect when the player invents it, but
a) I don’t think that would actually work well, and b) ew no. Someone
else can explore this frontier of game design. (Or, given the pride with
which people put NOAI banners on their games, no one can explore it,
and that’s fine by me. Fuck LLMs and their capitalist wielders.)

Back to splitting up the removal condition, that doesn’t work since
how much Body you have to do is both what it takes and how long it
takes. Or maybe what it takes is more like how much Def? Having to
make a skill roll is similar to 1 Body 0 Def, unless it takes a
long time. (Should we have skill rolls generate effect against some
kind of defense, unifying them with attacks? Probably not.) So maybe
the two factors are how long it takes to wait the condition out
(possibly forever, although that would be kind of expensive), and
what it takes to clear it before then (possibly nothing except an
equally strong power, which would also be expensive).

Leaving this to stew for a while, earlier I was on my usual bullshit
of wanting experience to come from suffering, so maybe taking a
condition lets you mark XP? Or it’s a limitation you can apply to
your maneuver/technique to offset getting more or not getting less?
Should the GM be tracking XP for NPCs? It’s more work, but maybe adds
flavor.

If conditions still have levels, then maybe any condition at the top
level should give XP, but I’m not sure they do, just the points of
effect left over after the defense is subtracted from the roll.
Although not everything needs to be that granular, and sometimes
there’s not an obvious use for it that’s distinct from the removal
condition. Once you’re blind, you generally can’t get any blinder; at
most the blindness could last longer, or take more healing to remove.
At the lower end you could just have poor vision for a while, so
blindess isn’t entirely binary, but for playability I don’t think it
can have very many gradations.

Also Respect Your Cat’s Drug Stash Day, but that’s every day, right?

Ended up going to a small local rally on a street corner instead of the big one downtown because the timing was better for going shopping. It was somewhere in the couple of hundred to few hundred range, we waved signs and people honked, I scritched a nice dog. Most of the people there were my age or older, with only a few parents and kids, so I’m surprised it wasn’t more bloodthirsty.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 10-11: Now we know who, and can speculate on why, but how is still up in the air, as are certain aspects of when. Is this really going to all get wrapped up in one more episode?

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 4 (Kaoru Mori): Further stories about the people Smith meets in passing on his way to Ankara. This time the marriage-crazed girls aren’t trying to marry him, though. They have their own lives to mess up.

Written (game design): Finally updated my character sheet for Kaiju Academy, which either counts as writing or doesn’t.

Another day that’s not for me: I’m terrible at poetry and also have no brain! Or maybe those are causally linked. I’m pretty sure poetry is a sign of sapience, or at least whatever it is humans have.

Slept in too much because it’s a weekend, managed to shop a little. I hear Jus is slaying at robot competition, though, because she’s not like me.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 7-9: Do people know things? Or are they just speculating? Either way, it seems like things are closing in. Also, smooching.

Read (graphic novel): Just Between Us (Adeline Kon): Rival figure skaters, one of whom is kind of terrible as a person, taking their rivalry and all kinds of strong feelings all the way to the Olympics.

Written (game design): 169:

It initially seems like we should be able to make a catalog of general
conditions, but players’ weird special effects are going to make
everything unique. Can we just have a condition “Blind”? Sure, that
has some mechanical effect, but are you blind from a bright light?
Pocket sand? Face covered in Negagloop? Crow spirit pecked out the
eyes of your soul? All of those have different defenses, different
durations, and different ways to remove them early, and that’s just
one possible effect out of… a dozen? scores? incalculably many
because players are most creative when it’s least convenient?

Can we do it with a combination of one catalog of effect and one
of how the effect is accomplished? Biological, do some healing or
wait; spiritual, do some magic cleansing or wait; physical, break
it? I guess there are at least three components here: how the effect
is targeted and implemented, which isn’t part of the condition since
it’s all handled at the “attack” time and then we can stop worrying
about it; what effect the condition actually has while it’s there;
and what it takes to get rid of it, both how long it takes to expire
naturally and what kind of powers will end it early and how well they
have to roll.

One from column A and one from column B seems doable once we populate
the columns. It has to be explictly not just allowed but encouraged to
make new entries if none of the existing ones match someone’s novel special
effect. We also need to determine what each entry costs: do more
useful ones use up some dice off your powerset if you don’t have a
technique? Or impose some other penalty? It seems likely. Not sure how
Column Zero (attack method) works, exactly, but it also needs to do
something based on whether it’s more or less useful than the baseline.

But I write fantasy because I can’t do math!

Went shopping, tried to get quarters, got a hard time for having an expired ID card. I should probably do something about that, but it matters so rarely.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 4-6: Well, now we have Dr Snake’s minion’s theory about what’s going on, but even the characters we thought were in a position of knowledge or power seem pretty confused, and I’m not sure any of this explains what was going on with Blonde Friend. Female Lead seems to be doing better emotionally, so probably it’s all going to come crashing down.

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 14 (Kamome Shirahama): And that is why every field needs both young whippersnappers and experienced elders, but no field needs dogmatic zealots.

Written (game design): 209:

Earlier I said there would be three outcomes from a disaster roll:
everything works as intended; partial or conflicted success; disaster.
The middle one is the most effort for the GM, who has to invent a
setback that doesn’t negate the success, so that should come up the
least often for playability, even if outright disaster should be the
least common for plausability. Which do we value most highly? If it’s
playability, then partial success comes up when you make the roll
exactly; if it’s plausibility then a disaster happens on a natural 18 or
something. That’s if we want to keep the Hero 3d6-roll-low. Something
like PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ or FitD’s 1-3/4-5/6 more naturally gives a
three-way outcome, but the range doesn’t feel as large as would match
the 1-12d6 of powersets. They’re completely different rolls, they don’t
have to match directly, but having, for example, skills that only go
from -1 to +4 feels too constrained.

Although, a disaster roll isn’t exactly a skill roll, and definitely
isn’t a to-hit roll. It definitely is more like a PbtA/FitD “how’s that
going for you?” roll, which once again is veering into filthy story game
territory. In the interests of our already-stated goal of not being as
hard on the GM as a full-fledged story game, can we make a list of the
possible results of a disaster roll? Obviously if you make the roll,
then you apply the condition you intended to the target(s) you were
aiming for, or as close as possible, and determine the level of the
condition with an effect roll using powerset dice.

The other obvious two-bit values are right condition wrong target (you
didn’t melt the Despairmech(tm), you melted the bridge truss), wrong
condition right target (you didn’t gently incapacitate the criminal
goon, you crushed them like a bug), and wrong condition wrong target
(you didn’t freeze the villain’s feet in ice, you made the road slippery
under the mayor’s car). There are always infinitely more ways for
something to go wrong than to go right, though, so I’m not sure this is
helping. Even having to pick a point on the scale from No Big to
Complete Disaster is a pain.

Failed to get up early, but did eventually get up and get Sage’s medicine and do some shopping.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 2-3: Okay, so maybe she’s [SPOILER]? But what about the guy? Is this all the fault of Dr Snake? (He’s not a real snake, but he is a real doctor.)

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 5 (Shinichi Fukuda): This volume is less about cosplay and more about the two of them doing stuff together, although taking cosplay pictures leads Doll Boy into a new world of embarrassment.

Written (game design): 206:

Duplicate conditions probably discard all except the highest one,
otherwise it’s too easy to get spammed with a bunch of copies of the
same condition and that’s boring even if they stack (which they probably
shouldn’t).

We’re trying to move away from the computer-game paradigm of “select
Attack from the menu, let the RNG tell you what happens”, which now
that I think about it solves the problem of how to determine whether
getting punched is doing Stun or Body. If you make your “attack”
roll, then you inflict the condition you want on your intended
target, or as close as possible given the circumstances; if not,
the GM decides what target gets which condition. Miss with your
fireblast, and the villain won’t be on fire, but something will! Or miss
creasing the criminal’s skull with your .45 and, well… I think we
need three levels of success: you get what you want; you have to choose
between getting what you want with a side of what you didn’t want OR
nothing much happens; or you get a full serving of what you didn’t want.
Which is more like a filthy story game than a wargame, so we need the
guidelines for the GM to make choices that seem fair.

Only one of those was invented by me.

Apparently I can drop directly into REM sleep in the nine minutes of an alarm snooze. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Socialized too much and only had time for one episode of Anime With Dave.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 1: Ew, smoking. But also, ??!??

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 11 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Genetic coup!

Read (novel): The Sundered Realms (Casey Blair): The start of a different series about a terrifying wizard lady with a traumatic upbringing and her impossibly hot, equally terrifying new boyfriend, in a fractured world where demons are trying to crawl in and eat everything and humans are entirely willing to sell each other out. Magic works by linguistics nerdery, which is always good.

Read (novel): Take Back Worlds (Casey Blair): Conclusion to the trilogy about terrifying lady wizard etc that I started before. Lady wizard manages to get enough people onside, including some of the asshole descendants of the people who caused the problem to begin with, to save three out of four worlds and not actually destroy the fourth (who would have totally deserved it). Marriage, wild magic sex, HEA.

Written (game design): 140:

Or is that only Human Body, and there’s also Human Mind, which
includes skills? It does make sense for powersets to include skills,
since Ninja Training is a canonical source of superpowers. How does
this work? We considered buying ranks in Skills earlier, but never
settled on anything. In most games, a character’s skills have both
breadth (how many things they cover) and height (chance of success)
and it’s usually not a rectangle. Sometimes it’s a triangle (some
FATE implementations), sometimes it’s just a scribble with every
bit of the breadth having its own height. A powerset only has one
dimension– wait, no it doesn’t, some capabilities can be bought
more than once for broader effect. So there are two dimensions
available. But what does it mean to buy Skills as a capability for your
Heat Subtraction 12d6 powerset?

“Mu.” Or, I don’t know, it’s your powerset, you tell me. Start with
the fiction, then buy mechanics to match. I don’t think Human Mind
is actually a powerset, though. Buy a background or training regimen
or whatever as a powerset that has Skills and maybe something else
or maybe not. Talents and Perks are now techniques that have
prerequisites of some number of Skills dice.

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

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

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

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

Written (game design): 133:

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

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

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.

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.

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?)

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.

I had to work today, but skipped out early to take the bus over to Monkeycat Towers for the traditional fondue of our people. Dave is still out of town, and Marith was too overcome with the horror of having to be at work at 5:00 tomorrow, but we had Earl and Cat and also Jus’s current girlfriend and one of their friends. They seemed like nice kids. They helped us eat cheese fondue, but then they had to leave so we old people (and Jus) got all the chocolate. There was conversation and friendship and rainy fireworks and it was a very nice evening and everyone was happy.

Read (manga): A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow vol 1 (Makoto Hagino): A girl moves to a remote town and meets another girl. There’s an aquarium and possibly chemistry, but not really a lot happening.

Written (anything): PARTY.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

 

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.