Also World Tofu Day. I’m an uncle and have the consistency of tofu, so I guess that’s why it’s the same day.
I was too feeble to take books to the used bookstore today, but I did the other usual shopping. No anime because Dave is in Roseville.
Watched (animated movie): K-Pop Demon Hunters: Surprisingly awesome! Points off for heterosexuality, but the demon hunters are otherwise great and possibly neurodivergent. It looks like TWICE did at least some of the music, so it’s real K-Pop.
Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 4 (Nakatani Nio): A loves B, B loves C, nobody thinks their love can go anywhere but that doesn’t make all living in the same room at theater camp and bathing together any less nerve-wracking. Really the focus is on B’s idea of what kind of person she should be and literally nobody else agreeing.
Written (game design): 850:
Speaking of wandering monsters, it’s extremely hypocritical of me to put
in something that requires preparation, given how terrible I am at all
forms of prep and using prep, but the argument that letting the dice
determine events instead of the GM railroading (or quantum-ogring) them
leads to more versimilitude and fun seems valid to me. Also, obviously
I’m going for more randomness in general, since we spurn the notion of
carefully calibrated video-game encounters.
This applies to NPC behavior as well, in the form of reaction rolls and
morale checks. NPCs don’t have to always fight, and fight to the death,
to make sure PC resources get used up at the correct rate, so we can let
them be less predictable, or at least have a wider range of options.
The old-fashioned reaction roll on a scale from “BFFs” to “murder time”
is probably a bit simple. Ideally we’d want to know what they want, and
how far they’re willing to go to get it. Maybe something like Troika’s
Mien mechanic (6 options for what the monster is doing/interested
in/feeling, roll a d6) is little enough prep for the first? Of course a
prefab monster can have a prefab table, but we’re aiming for more
bespoke monsters, since they don’t have to be carefully weighed and
measured for encounter-building. For how far they’re willing to go to
get it, roll another d6. 1-3: they would trade a little bit for what
they want; 4-5: they’d trade a lot or take some risks; 6: it’s a matter of
life and death.
Morale can be a simple pass/fail, check when the first person gets taken
down and when half of them are down, or equivalent setbacks. This should
somehow be integrated with Difficulty of using social skills on them
(since they don’t get bribed with experience).
Is morale the same as HP/initiative? That would be convenient, but I
don’t think it is. NPCs have human weaknesses, including lack of
selfawareness, so combat ability and courage aren’t necessarily
correlated.
And, speaking of advancements, I was thinking about purely diegetic
improvement (if you want to learn a new martial arts technique, you have
to put in the work in-game to find a teacher and mark off the time to
learn it), but then I thought about bribing people with experience
points (pretty sure XP doesn’t mean “experience protection”; need to get
MP a better name so that’s not an issue). I also really like the Dungeon
World thing of getting XP for failing. “Experience is what you get when
you don’t get what you want” and all that. So, there are XP. Not sure if
you get some from every failed roll, or if it’s like the end-of-session
moves where you get XP if you had a significant failure, and more if you
had a major failure. If you completely failed the adventure, you get a
lot of XP, but also emotional wounds.
I was considering also awarding XP for proper behavior, like giving your
slain enemies proper burials, but that might lead to XP for being
heroic, which is wrong. It’s not a moral choice if you’re bribed into
it. XP for a type of action is okay, like Dungeon World’s end-of-session
questions about whether you’ve overcome a worthy foe, etc, but that
would require pinning down what the game should be about instead of
leaving it open, and I don’t know if that’s what I want. Or maybe a list
of possible goals, pick three for your campaign?
For now, I’m good with XP only resulting failure, either rolled or
chosen.
Once you get XP, you can spend it to buy new advancements that you
get in-game. You have to spend time learning them or have them
grafted onto your soul and take time to recover, or whatever: no
levelling up instantaneously in the middle of a battle WoW-style.
You may also need to pay for them in cash or favors.
There may be starting packages for classes, or “classes”, but after that
I think all advancements are available to all characters. If you’re a
spellcaster but want to buy up your melee attack die, go for it. We’re
not here to tell you what your character should be.
Like Hero System, advancements are simple and mechanical; if you want
something fancy, you need to assemble it yourself and provide the flavor
text. That said, we should have plenty of examples. Hopefully this will
not spiral out of control into a huge list of advantages and limitations
and power frameworks and modifiers and argh.