But no, I am happy with my presents!
Forgot today was an official holiday, got up and tried to go to work, then went back to bed and was trapped by cats forever.
Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.7-8: Still cutting between like four different fight scenes, as the rest of the season probably will continue to do.
Read (comic collection): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 4 (Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Jacob Chabot, Rico Renzi): Squirrel Girl vs the world of dating! Boys are just the worst, even the ones that aren’t incels.
Read (short): “Amiable Voyager” (Glynn Stewart): Space piracy! In the setting of, and apparently will be a background event in, the “House Adamant” books.
Read (novel): The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett): Fantasy(?) mystery, in a world of bioenhancement where the empire exists to deal with the enormous monstrosities that crawl out of the ocean every year. Our viewpoint character, a junior detective enhanced with perfect memory, has been assigned to work with the crazy senior detective who has been augmented so much she can’t deal with most people, or city streets, or really anything except hiding in the dark being creepy and deducing. No orchids, though. Anyway, murder and more murder and giant monstrosities and skullduggery and dark history and mysterious biotech, it’s great.
Written (game design): 123:
Time for review! What goes on a character sheet?
Every character has a rating in all of Strength, Presence, Ego, and
Constitution. These are 1d6 per rank, with a base of 2 ranks and a
normal characteristic max of 4d6.
Every character also has Defense (base 0 ranks, NCM 2 ranks),
Resilience (base 2 ranks, NCM 6), and Body (base 6, NCM 12), which all
give 1 point of the characteristic per rank. Recovery gives 2 Rec per
rank, base 1 rank and NCM 3 ranks.
The default for Running is 1 zone as a full move, or somewhere else in
your current zone as a half move. Swimming would be the level below
that: move arond in your zone as a full move, take two full moves to get
to the next hex, and ??? as a half move. This definitely needs more
work.
Not sure what to do with Leaping. Possibly the default is 0 ranks of
Leaping power and you have to fake it by throwing your (awkward,
unaerodynamic) self at the destination with your own Strength? If you
buy any ranks of Leaping, that’s how far you can leap without having to
make a roll. As with Swimming, normal human values are going to be less
than one zone. Do we end up mixing zones and meters? Ew.
DCV and DMCV are sort of like skills, or at least they affect enemy
skill rolls, and are like defensive combat skill levels in 6E. But,
defensive (and other) combat levels in 6E can be specialized to ranged
or melee or some other specific subset of combat, which means a
limitation, and how does that work here? Each limited tranche of DCV
would have to be a separate power, with a separate minimum cost. Then
there’s no point in buying only +1 DCV against thrown knives or
whatever, since the cost after all limitations might as well be the
minimum cost. This has the effect we said we wanted, so now we have to
decide if it’s what we really want.
Converting from 6E to chonky points, each +1 of DCV would cost 2pts.
Even if we are trying to avoid futzing around with the equivalent of
-1/4 limitations, making something work only half the time is probably
worth at least two standard ranks of limitation, so 4 points. The
minimum cost for a power is probably one standard rank, so 2 points,
which means spending 2 points on DCV only against ranged attacks gets +3
DCV. Every additional 2 points is only another +1, since we obviously
don’t allow buying multiple instances of the exact same power with the
exact same limitations. So instead the obnoxious player buys DCV only
against fast-moving ranged attacks and DCV only against thrown objects,
which are each probably 2 points for +4 specialized DCV. That’s a total
of +7 DCV against ranged attacks for 6 points, which is close to half
the cost of all-purpose DCV. Buying +7 DCV without that cheese costs
10pts, so there is a definite cheeseward incentive. Bah.
Note that I’m assuming in all this that DCV that only protects against
half of attacks should cost half as much, which is obviously the Hero
paradigm, but really hard to argue with in such a simple case as this.
I’m not sure what alternative would seem as intuitively correct,
especially to players already familiar with Hero. Are we back to that
first idea where powers are bought in ranks that cost whatever based on
power and/or advantages, but limitations are applied to the total of the
final cost?
(Another asymmetry between limitations and advantages: there are times
when it’s easy to say a limitation is making a power half as useful, but
it’s hard to have an advantage that makes it twice as useful, unless you
count buying twice as many dice of attack as an advantage. Which gets us
back to buying ranks of range or whatever.)