Tag: office

I don’t make the rules, man. (Narrator: He totally made up those rules.)

Went to the office, listened to an all-hands meeting, ate some yellow curry tofu, did some work, helped some colleagues, learned some kubernetes.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 5 (Chomoran): Road trip episode! Also some backstory for Sachi.

Read (novel): How to Survive This Fairytale (SM Hallow): Hansel escapes his story (with massive PTSD) but is still in a world in which fairytales happen, and a lot of them happen to him, which sucks. But it doesn’t suck forever.

Written (game design): 199.

Mmm, sticky dreams.

Went to the office, listened to a departmental all-hands, did some work, ate some chicken guys and pickled radish, learned some kubernetes.

No gaming, gaming has moved to alternate Fridays, which hopefully will work better for more people.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 4 (Chomoran): The giant school-eating monster is vanquished, but Sachi had to accept a major consequence, so it’s time for a road trip. Also half of Makie’s family has appeared, but they don’t seem that important, maybe because they weren’t actually lost, only misplaced.

Read (short): “Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death” (Charlotte_Stant): Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Probably you have to be at least as online as me to appreciate this.

Read (short): “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” (Isabel J Kim): Smash the corrupt system! Um.

Written (game design): 193:

So how do we decide how many/how much complication a character has?
Negative points aren’t a problem, they reduce the character’s
capabilities just like regular points increase them, but what about
narrative complications? There’s two sides to the this, the number
of complications a player has to manage and the amount of XP generated
per session (adventure? in-game week?). The former needs some minimum
to keep characters from being single-note, but I don’t know what
that minimum would be, and anyway, more can be added over time as
they come up in play, especially reputations, hunteds, etc. For a
maximum, it depends on how we set the maximum per experience cycle.
If it’s per complication, then players are encouraged to take as
many as possible and try to get to them all every cycle, which is
probably not ideal. So, an overall limit to keep play from devolving
into chasing after XP, and also a per-complication limit to keep
players from spamming one annoying psychlim. Numbers to be determined by
playtesting or something.

Also, what counts as “causing trouble” for a complication? Hunteds
are easy: if they show up, you get XP. But how about Watched? Okay,
maybe that’s not even a real complication, but Psychlim, Reputation,
Physlim? Actually, those are two different categories, since Psychlim
trouble comes from the PC’s choices, while social and physical
problems are usually inflicted by the GM. But, how bad of a choice
does it take to be worth XP? Does the GM have to offer a point of
XP for making the wrong choice? But in that case, the PC doesn’t
even need psychlims, the GM just needs to know what they would
usually know better than to do. In that case, psychlims would just be
for taking emotional damage. (You know, like my inconsistent
capitalization is doing to any readers I may have.)

For external complications, it’s even fuzzier. Sure, if Antihero
Lad gets harrassed by the cops, that’s XP, but what if the team
makes a plan that happens to keep him away from the cops because
the place his powers help the most is over there? Does it matter whether
the players think to say out loud that this plan avoids that problem? Is
that even enough trouble to count? The saying is, “experience is what
you get when you don’t get what you want” so maybe avoiding the problem
is its own reward, and the XP only comes when the problem tells you to
assume the position.

Went to the office, possibly freed the team from an onerous burden, didn’t program anything, ate some barbecue, studied some Kubernetes, did some work.

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 2 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): The world is falling apart even more, and also we get to see what utter weirdos these characters are. Also, criminal cultists are apparently an exceptionally cowardly and superstitious lot.

Read (essay): “These Stories Teach Us How to Fight” (Dawn Xiana Moon): Learning resistance from reading SF.

Written (game design): 163.

Samantha who? Dunno, I didn’t invent the day! Maybe we should have left it at Dry Beans Day.

Did not sleep well, probably because I ate only spicy burrito for dinner last night and then stayed up too late. I’m really not very good at this life thing.

Went to the new office. It is spacious and pretty and has nice views on every side and complimentary hair product in the bathrooms, but the usability might be a bit low because windows full of natural light don’t really go with monitors. Also we no longer get a room to hide in, so I have given up on masking. Probably I should come back to it, since wearing a mask even most of the time is still better than not. Ate some German-style Impossible sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, did some work. Our boss³ sits right next to us, which on the one hand is not great, but on the other hand means we can always get a policy decision when we need one.

Official schedule is now 9-18:00, so it’s a good thing we’re moving gaming to a night when I don’t have to commute. On the other hand, although I did not get home at a reasonable hour, I did manage to do several things with my evening. Bah, how am I supposed to resent commuting now?

Read (comic collection): Injection vol 1 (Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey, Jordie Bellaire): Five excessively competent people feel obligated to deal with the weird shit that’s been crawling out of the corners of the world ever since they worked on that project a few years back. Extremely Warren Ellis, but also reminds me of Carl Rigney.

Written (game design): 116:

The smallest skills (familiarity, +1 for a background skill) cost 1
point, so whatever we do with points has to affect skills, probably by
broadening them. As previously established, I’m fine with skills being
more job-like and less individual tasks, but just how broad that is
depends on how chonky points are, so I guess I better decide. One point
per rank is very tempting, although then all limitations have to be one
or more full ranks, no lesser values. That’s if we stick with
limitations that give extra ranks. If we revert to the old fractional
arithmetic system, but with base costs that only go up to 12 or so, is
it not so bad?

Seems a bit late, most people had green bean casserole almost a week ago!

Successfully went into the office, ate some beef and gouda dumplings, did some work, probably didn’t die. Even managed to pick up prescription on the way home.

Read (graphic novel): Flip (Ngozi Ukazu): He’s a rich, athletic white guy at a private boarding school in Texas. She’s an introverted black scholarship girl at the same private school. They mysteriously switch bodies sometimes, much to their consternation.

Written (game design): 223.

Also National Love Your Red Hair Day, which I can no longer celebrate, and for the Brits, National Gunpowder Day.

Traffic was terrible because people already forgot how to drive in the rain. Went to the office, found out it’s Coworker T’s penultimate day, ate some pickled daikon and coleslaw and crispy chicken guys, did some work. Got home and it was already entirely dark, because it’s hibernation season.

Read (manga): After God vol 5 (Sumi Eno): We find out a lot more (comparatively) about gods and their interactions, some of it exploitable by humans but none of it actually good.

Written (game design): 215:

As previously mentioned, I think the idea of getting separate Stun and
Body values from one effect roll and applying them individually against
defenses so that heroes can get knocked out without taking much if any
Body is pretty slick. However, in Hero, Body track is half or less of
Stun, which is a little awkward for combining them into one
characteristic as previously threatened. Not insurmountable, though.

If we track damage by counting up rather than tracking remaining hit
points by counting down, then when the total of getting clobbered plus
getting murdered is more than your Con, you’re out, that’s simple (and
includes the old rule of losing one Stun for every Body you lose). But
then we have to say you’re dying/dead when you’re at half Con or
some other less obvious value. But wait! You don’t actually die until
you’ve taken twice your Body (reached negative Body equal to your max),
so if killing damage is more than half Con, you’re just bleeding. Half
Con is also the most damage (killing + normal) you can take in a single
hit without being stunned, so at least it’s not just a spurious value
used in one place for no good reason. It appears spuriously in two
places, which makes it a real value worth tracking.

What, you think I make these things up?

Went to the office at the right time, did some work, ate some pig meat on a bun and potato salad, stayed late for a meeting with Boss³ M about how things are going to work differently here in our brave new world of helping customers without other departments.

Read (manga): The Lying Bride and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate vol 1 (Kodama Naoko): A lesbian office worker’s lonely apartment is invaded by an acquaintance who needs a place to crash while on the outs with her husband, which makes her off-limits in two different ways despite being excessively cute. Feelings ensue.

Written (game design): 412:

We can then have defense levels against other skills: Resist Temptation,
Resist Fasttalk, etc, all with the same mechanic. We’re so clever.

What skills are there for attacking? 6E has OCV as a single
characteristic, which you can then increase for specific powers or
maneuvers or whatever. +1 OCV is more expensive than +1 to any
skill, but about the same as a medium-sized skill level (5 points).
Maybe Melee Attack and Ranged Attack are the skills? In 6E, +1 to two
skills is 4 points, although only 3 as a skill level.

How do we even buy skills now? What skills are there? Do we need to be
as fine-grained as Hero? Probably not, but that may be different for
different campaigns. There aren’t characteristics to base skills on, so
maybe it’s all levels. Are levels bought in ranks too? If everything is
actually levels, that might make sense, but if we have individual bits
like familiarities, then maybe only characteristics and powers are
bought in ranks. The main point of ranks is to simplify adjustment,
which doesn’t come up much for skills.

I was thinking we could have backgrounds instead of skills, like Soldier
11- or Mad Scientist 14-, with a cost depending on how much it covers,
quantified in some fashion that I don’t yet know. The system for
quantifying coverage might be an awful lot like asking which individual
skills it gives you. Rolling them together into a background could still
be worthwhile since it would cover any minor bits between the skills.

Maybe break out the different things people do with skills (persuade
people, analyze evidence, use equipment, etc) and for each of those,
rate the background on whether it lets you do that in
no/few/several/most/all circumstances? Then if you just want to do a
specific thing, you can buy a background that does that in all
circumstances and the rest in no circumstances. I like this in theory,
but it may be running into the same problem with pigeonholing all PC
activities into equal-sized boxes that we originally had in the fantasy
game. But the boxes don’t have to be equal, we can charge more for the
bigger ones! But but, how do we calculate the costs with our big chunky
points? Have I failed already?

Technically it’s International Internet Day and National Cat Day, but the Internet is for cats.

Also it’s Republicans are Bad for the Economy, Actually, Day. 96th anniversary.

Betrayed by transit, eventually made it to the office, nobody was there, ate an Indian food, did some work.

Finally logged into Kit’s Discord, immediately ran into people from the Old Old Days. For whatever reason, they don’t hate me.

I need to learn to manage being on multiple discords. Reading everything is a lot!

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 7 (Aki Irie): We do get a small cutscene to Lilja in Iceland, but mostly it’s still Kei in Japan, looking into Michitaka’s backstory, and it’s just as messed up as you might expect.

Written (game design): 176:

(Yes, I am aware that making the cost of a generic power 4-5 points
would make a +/-1 cost change a lot like a +/-1/4 modifier. But I
invoked the gavel emoji, so we’re stuck doing this way until the
appeal.)

Looking at other signature Hero things, what exactly should be done
about OCV vs DCV? Ideally we’d have one mechanic for resolving attacks,
skills, and any other success roll, but do we want the simple roll-under
version, the complicated target number version, some other version?

A compromise would be to have an attack skill, or skills, that you roll
under, with each point of defense being a -1 penalty to the skill (or
add 1 to the roll, whatever). Attack 11- would be the equivalent of OCV
3, 0 defensive levels would be the equivalent of DCV 3. This frees the
malicious GM to apply penalties to other skill rolls, but there’s an
obvious and easy default of -0, which might cut down on the handwaving.

Also National Fossil Day and Hagfish Day, so Underappreciated Things in general.

Went to the office, ate meat and vegetables and rice, had a half-yearly review with my boss² who is in town this week and my boss³. Apparently I was supposed to come up with more to say on the mandatory self-criticism form, but they didn’t fire me, so whatever. I know I should care more, but it’s 2025.

I think my character for Kaiju Academy is going to have mushroom (well, fungus) magic to go with her dungeon magic. How can you go wrong with mushroom summoning?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 13 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Our new MC almost made a friend, but then there was a devil contract and some more mass murder. Also Denji is completely failing at getting chicks.

Written (catgirl): 188.

Got it covered.

Despite this being Monday the 13th, the most cursed day, the surprise meeting was not that bad. Yes, Boss³ M thinks we suck, but he’s not firing all of us or even putting us in solitary for not understanding Boss T’s explanation of the plan. In fact, the plan sounds a lot like what we were doing before upper management started changing middle management all the time. Fancy that.

Ate Indian food with sufficient naan, did a work, almost drowned trying to cross the street on my way home. Why is drainage such a foreign concept to North California?

Read (manga): Alice & Zoroku vol 1 (Tetsuya Imai): A semi-feral young girl with vast psionic(?) conjuration powers escapes the lab and is adopted by a lawful good old guy and his granddaughter. Other psionics pursue, etc.

Written (catgirl): 243.

Or something like that.

Went to the office, Coworker D is still out so I had the room to myself, spent a million hours helping a customer on a call, ate some freekeh (roasted green wheat?) and falafel and other Mediterranean yummies.

Read (manga): Bungo Stray Dogs vol 1 (Kafka Asagiri, Sango Harukawa): Didn’t seem significantly different than the first bit of the anime.

Written (catgirl): 256.

Interrobang?!

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate a huge pile of slightly spicy chicken and some corn, did some work.

Read (manga): Yotsuba&! vol 15 (Kiyohiko Azuma): I’m pretty sure you can identify the end of childhood by the point at which searching for good rocks is no longer fun.

Read (novel): Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Bought Superpowers (Richard Roberts): Another high-school frosh gets extremely sketchy superpowers, so that she can be center of attention as she rightfully deserves. Her variable monster girl transformation power is definitely eye-catching, but also attracts the attention of mad fashion science, ruins her life, forces her to confront monster-defeating monsters in the underground, etc. She does get the attention she wants, though, and of course it works out in the end, somehow. It’s good to see a teen female protagonist who is all, “no, I’m awesome, don’t overlook me!”.

Written (game design): 128:

Wait, are Fancy Temple Wizards the Man? So PCs have to be renegade or at
least politically unsound ones if they’re that kind of wizard? But
mostly they’re other kinds, prophets and pyschics and whatnot. Same with
martial artists who learn the approved styles vs ones who invent their
own forms based on what they learn in living dungeons, or whatever.
Because if you follow the established ways, you definitely won’t turn
into a monster.

Is this too much concrete setting, as opposed to elements people can use
in their settings? Maybe, but let’s keep it for now. Not that tables
can’t ignore it, since the only difference between an unsound FTW and a
sound one isn’t mechanical (much). We can encourage rebellion with the
sample/quickstart characters.

This ties in with another thought I had, which is that at least some
fields of magic aren’t fully explored. In D&D terms, maybe only Fancy
Temple Wizardry goes all the way to 20th level. Blood fire magic
might only go to 10th level, and after that you have to seek out or
develop new techniques. Since we don’t actually have classes or levels,
I’m not sure what this looks like in practice. Maybe it’s just an excuse
to not create higher-end powers to buy off a list.

Even if there are extremely high-level FTW anointments, they probably
are only available to the Politically Sound, which means not these
weirdos. But they’re there, taunting you.

I had been thinking that prophets, as they “level up”, become more like
FTWs, and it occurs to me that it should probably be optional, but slightly
mechanically advantageous, to do that. It’s always more profitable to
gentrify than to keep your town weird. (This is the same reasoning as
not giving out-of-character rewards for good deeds.) But, they can be
weird in solidarity. Each god (where do they come from? spontaneous
excitations in the bureau-magical quantum field triggered by the
expansion of the world’s edge?) has probably three attributes, like
being the god of rainbows, capybaras, and sailing. There’s only one god
of that combination, and only one prophet of that god, but there can be
a god of rainbows, capybaras, and basket weaving, or rainbows/sea
snakes/sailing,and if the prophets of these gods don’t kill each other,
possibly they can combine them into a larger god with more attributes.
This is probably how the “Celestial Bureaucracy” started.

What does it mean for a power to be high level? Just expensive, or
prerequisites, or what? How does any of this work? Pregenerated
lists of powers is easiest for the player, but even a large list
is pretty limited compared to players’ imaginations. Earlier I
mentioned a point-buy system, but a full Hero-level implementation
would be both a lot of work for the designer (me!) and the
(hypothetical) players. We definitely don’t have to pretend that
we can balance things to less than one percent of a character; ten
percent (ie, you get to pick ten powers/feats/whatevers, or fewer
if some of them count double) is maybe plausible. Not that we are
extremely concerned with balancing combat power, but it should be
somewhat fair for players. At least, it should not make them grouchy
about the unfairness.

So, our points system is for calculating what fits into a power slot (or
a double-size or even triple-sized slot for something really great). If
prerequisites are applicable as disads, then yes, of course the prereqs
will always exactly match what the character already has, but it’s not
like they get the points back from those, so I think it’s okay. We need
to figure out how to handle feats that affect other feats, though, which
is the other way of building up. It’s adjustment powers all the way
down!

I’ve been reading something where people get magical powers from
the attention and emotions of others, and now I’m thinking, what
if at least some magic doesn’t work when you’re by yourself? No
more brooding loners! Or at least not as many. Is this how Fancy Temple
Wizardry works? That would explain why it’s popular in civilization,
where they can get large congegrations, even if the congregations aren’t
that invested individually. Wandering wizards have much smaller groups,
but have bonded under fire, so they count more. Does this work with the
Celestial Bureaucracy metaphor? Maybe you have to have a metaphorical
petition from the people? Or maybe you don’t count as human without
connections? So people who turn into monsters and lurk alone in the
desolate places of the world can’t do that kind of magic? I don’t know
if it’s right for XZQJY, but I do like that.

New tangent, “bonding under fire”. Am I really keeping black powder
ray guns? I like them, and they’re not historic which makes them more
fantastical and also maybe reduces the pedantry level? On the other
tentacle, guns and bullets have been around long enough to be part of
the mythology in a way energy weapons obviously haven’t, and people have
a better intuitive feel for them. Also, exorcising the ghost with a
golden bullet cast from the locket of its lover is a better story beat
than tuning your laser to the peak color of sunlight or whatever. On the
other other tentacle, D&D players have been okay with smiting their
enemies with beams of radiance since at least 4E. So, maybe?

Back to character creation/advancement. It’s not just spells and
martial arts techniques and ancestry feats that go in these slots,
it’s moves other than Act Under Fire, it’s extra Readiness dice,
Attack dice, Harmony if we have that, armor, inventory and Psyche
slots, it’s bonuses to action ratings, and probably other things I’m not
remembering or haven’t considered yet, so we have to figure out how much
of each of those goes into one slot. That sounds uncomfortably like
work.

I like the idea of purely diagetic advancement, but punishing players
for NOT harassing the GM seems counterproductive, and would definitely
not seem fair. Also I like the idea of getting XP for failing, as
previously mentioned, so that also has to be sorted.

Still going in circles.

More honored in the breach, etc etc.

Went to the office, got blamed by customers for not knowing things they hadn’t told us, New Boss T sent LLM output to the customer but nobody except me noticed, ate a stroganoff of beef.

Read (manga): HoriMiya vol 1 (Hero, Daisuke Hagiwara): Apparently this has been sitting on my TBR shelf since the days I thought boys had any place in romance stories. Anyway, she is glamorous at school but practical to take care of her little brother the rest of the time, he is emo and boring at school but secretly pierced and tattooed, together they shop for groceries and entertain the little brother.

Read (novel): The Shattering Peace (John Scalzi): Seventh(?) in the “Old Man’s War” series. Not quite what it says on the tin, although side effects of Consu meddling come close. The main character is pretty awesome. Possibly excessively so, but I like her.

Written (game design): 252:

The name came later, but Harmony was one of the first mechanics I put in
to get rid of spell slots and ten thousand abilities each with their own
set of charges and recharge condition. Now I’m throwing it out? And even
before adding MP, I got rid of health-based HP and now I’m bringing them
back? What is wrong with me? Am I just not smart enough to break free of
the D&D paradigm, even when I have all these other games to steal from?
Am I failing by trying to keep some crunch and not going full
story-game? Have I really reached the point where living dungeons and
black powder masers aren’t enough of a distraction and I have to go back
to the beginning on the system?

And, how do I make any of this anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and
antifascist? Starting with the PCs being outcasts from society instead
of members of a community probably isn’t great. Arguably living dungeons
and meteor monsters are colonizing the world? And wicked people turning
into monsters is spot on as long as we define wickedness appropriately.
And the visitors from the higher realms are definitely colonialist,
showing up and paving over things without regard to the mortals living
there. Whoever recycles souls (I’m pretty sure it’s not the higher
realms nor the celestial bureaucracy that FTWs work with, but some third
group) is also not great in this respect.

But, does the mere existence of colonialist entities presented
unfavorably make the game anticolonialist?

Watch, by next year this will be National Charlie Kirk Martyrdom Day. Maybe we can stuff some Nazis into the LHC.

Went to the office, ate a sandwich, did some work, read some news. Poor Coworker D was stuck on a customer call until well past his quitting time. I only had a couple hours of customer call.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 4 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): More monsters, so many more monsters. Some can be defeated with Hime’s encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural, but a chainsaw is still always handy.

Read (manga): Throw Away the Suit Together vol 3 (Keyyang): I guess I see the appeal of billionaire romances, since any story that involves job-hunting in the 21st century is guaranteed to be a downer, but at least they still have each other, so it probably counts as HEA?

Written (game design): 317:

Actually, lots of terms, if we’re going to have multiple kinds of
magic (whether distinguished by what it’s like to cast them, what
kind of effects they get, or both), and each needs at least what
its own practitioners call it and what everybody else calls it.
Which brings us back to the unresolved question from weeks ago,
“how does magic even?”.

There’s at least invoking the powers that be, and channeling your chi.
Turning your blood into flaming spears to fling at your enemies? Begging
the god of snails and sunsets and palindromes to give you a protective
shell? Letting the conjured phoenix out of the little cage you keep it
in? Breathing fire like the dragon you’re descended from? Growing spikes
like the mutant porcupine you ate the heart of? Monstering out by
drinking a mysterious potion? Calling up the spirits of the dead to drag
their shameful descendants to the grave?

How does necromancy (either D&D-style armies of undead, or OG divination
by spirits of the dead) work if souls get reprocessed? Are the parts
that know stuff or animate bodies reprocessed, or discarded back into
the environment, or what? What even is a soul? Egyptians had multi-part
souls, it’s not that much of a stretch.

For that matter, what is a spirit of the dead? Is that the same as
an individual ghost, or a more generalized vat of soul (which, not
being a physical substance, can be accessible everywhere)? There’s more
exciting friction (ie, the PCs are more boned) if you have to go where
somebody died to ask their spirit questions, but the Greeks did okay
with random locations and vats of blood, right?

And what’s an undead? I prefer the dead rising from their graves
to cause trouble as an omen of worse things to come over necromancers
calling up stupid shambling comic-relief zombies, but neither has
to be very common before cremation or sky burial or woodchipper has
always been everyone’s mandatory funeral custom. I guess if it’s rare
and there’s a very strong preference for burying intact bodies, maybe it
could still happen? Nothing horrible a PC can do is going to stay rare,
though. Some number of bodies get lost, though, so those could still
come back. Of course the bodies of wandering weirdos are most likely to
not get recovered, so maybe that’s another reason normal people don’t
like the touched. That gets us both headless horsemen and ghost ships,
which are vitally (hah) necessary part of undead stories.

I suppose bodies don’t need to get woodchipped to be safe from returning
from the dead if they have proper funeral rites. They could still be
animated as objects, though.

Like takeout boxes full of brains!

Went to the office, tried to eat a braised pork bowl but it was too fatty, did some work.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 4 (Syu Yasaka): Despite each still not realizing the other is gay, they spend Christmas and New Year’s and into the school ski trip getting closer and closer to either making out or dying of heart attacks.

Written (game design): 338:

We’re not making a time-travel game (I hope), so the present of whatever
our vague setting is does depend on its past. What are our options for
the general trajectory?

Post-apocalyptic and ancient world were already mentioned. They are
similar in that most good (valuable or interesting) stuff comes from the
past, but the aesthetics are different: in one, everything is “normal”
just busted up (nuked, dehydrated, zombie-infested), while in the other
the beaches sparkle dazzlingly because they’re a billion years of wear
from structural diamond girders, the landscape is covered with huge
circular lakes from the Age of Relativistic Bombardment, that mountain
range is a buried arcology, etc. Post-apoc is usually SF because the
previous world is supposed to be relatable, meaning usually our world,
but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. A sufficiently
well-understood fictional setting (generic D&D) would probably work just
as well, and a novel setting that’s fallen apart is just part of the
current setting, which people are fine with being novel. Probably.

Ancient world/deep time settings tend more to be science-fantasy,
with the fantasy usually being psionics and other dubious
science/technology with Clarke’s Law (Numenera), but sometimes real
magic (Ultraviolet Grasslands). The science part is almost always there,
because pure fantasy deep time can be anything, and isn’t more engaging
that pure fantasy that was poofed into existence. Black powder masers
notwithstanding, I don’t think I want to go the science-fantasy route,
but maybe that’s wrong of me. Apparently it’s how D&D started.

If it’s post-apocalyptic but the good stuff is new, and the old bad
stuff has been rejected, I think that’s solarpunk. I feel like that
needs more a link to our world than regular post-apoc, so that we
understand how bad it was. We can tay the ancients’ magic was innately
cursed and that’s why they fell, but do the players care? I guess maybe
if there’s a point in the campaign where they discover what’s in the
basement of the ruins of *m*l*s.

Even though I’m an extremely basic sucker for the OSR Aesthetic, not all
settings have to have apocalypses. That doesn’t mean peace; I’m thinking
of like early China where it was a heap of little kingdoms constantly
conquering each other. It wasn’t much fun for people in the way, but not
everything everywhere was destroyed all at once, so civilization as a
whole carried on. Lower-intensity would be Celts/Sartarites and constant
cattle-raiding skirmishes. Or, everything could be a peaceful utopia,
which is why PCs have to go Anywhere Else. (But that may lead to
colonialism.)

The world could even be improving (see Frieren, where they actually
develop new spells), which again just means less atrocity, not none,
although the improved state does have to be enough better for the
players to appreciate it. Also, if things are already getting better,
what do PCs do? Obviously they help improve things, but this implies
(does not require?) them to be more a part of society than murderhobos
usually are. That might not be a bad thing, but it’s probably more
limiting than D&D.

And of course, on the other side, maybe there’s not an apocalypse yet, but
everything is deteriorating. Probably not what people want to play in
this year 2025, but on the other hand, if the PCs play their cards
right, they could be the apocalypse! Requires a height to fall from,
probably.

Going up one level and then going to the other side, what if something
good happened (euapocalypse? I think that means something different, and
has calamitous koalas)? That can be just as disruptive and exciting as
an apocalypse, although not always as murdery. The biggest one would of
course be the creation of people, by the gods or space bats or whatever.
Maybe the world was created at the same time, or maybe it existed
earlier and didn’t matter because no one was around to see it. This
lends itself to an exploration campaign, which could be light or dark
depending on what they find out there in the world or what people at
home do with it.

Less drastic, but still a pretty big deal would be a sketchy titan
offering mortals a light around the back of the temple, the goddess
Etain bringing the secrets of writing, the wheel, and the double-blind
experiment, or the Okay Sage discovering Zero so you don’t have to herd
pigs any more. People having existed before this and probably gotten used
to how things were, there seems likely to be some social strife, even if
it’s good overall. Also exploration-oriented, but maybe more
competitive, and again, dependent on what possibilities in the world
have opened up.

Speaking of opening up, maybe the new thing is a region or world to
explore. If it’s not inhabited, though, it might not be very
interesting, and if it is, that can lead to colonialism. Maybe that’s
interesting to navigate?

A popular arguably-good change is magic appearing or returning.
That’s almost always in a modern or future setting, but what if a
psuedo-historic setting suddenly becomes a fantasy setting? Nobody
knows what kinds of magic there are, or what the limits could be. I
think this would need a stronger magic system than a settign that had
always had magic, even if only the GM knows it to begin with. Either
that, or some meta-system for discovering the magic system in play, like
the emergent mystery systems from Brindlewood, Ex Tenebris, etc. This
wouldn’t be a general fantasy-adventure system, but it could be
interesting.

A twist on that would be, surprise, there’s gods now! Could be very
similar, could be more social upheaval depending on what people think of
these gods and whether they had preconceptions.

What do you mean, “why”?

Went to the office, ate a pad thai, did some work.Train was late on the way back, probably because someone was an idiot on the tracks, but not so late that I couldn’t feed the cats on time.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 14 (Yukinobu Tatsu): More huge fight against aliens, some plotlines even got resolved. I’m sure there will be new ones any minute, though, since there’s not danger of running out of weirdos

Written (game design): 256:

Since we’re repudiating any distinction between arcane and divine magic,
drawing circles and burning incense and chanting is obviously prayer
stuff, invoking greater powers to do the thing. What the greater powers
think of this or how they implement it is obviously ineffable. Are these
the same entities from the higher realms that can appear as monsters? I
don’t think so, those are from the cosmic horror side. What humans pray
to are embedded in the same flow of the universe that Harmony harmonizes
with, ex-humans providing an interface that isn’t people any more, but
similar enough to translate between religious ceremony and fundamental
forces of the universe.

(The higher realms aren’t places, they’re states of being in a completely
different way. In theory you could translate someone from the world to
be something in the higher realms, but it wouldn’t be the same person,
probably not even a person at all. Why does it work the other way? You’d
understand after the translation process.)

When I say the gods or ancestors or saints or whatever aren’t people, I
mean you can’t have a conversation with them and get them to just answer
questions or give you that little bit more power for your really good
cause. You do the thing, the flow of the universe is altered (lose
Harmony) in accordance with the opaque rules. In a lot of cases the
thing may be saying what you want to have happen, but you can’t just say
whatever and hope to get anything.

I think that’s one of those jobs that seems way more exciting on the screen than in real life. (Like most jobs.)

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate some jerk pork, did some work, nicked some extra jerk pork to eat for dinner.

Read (manga): There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 7 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Rena and Ajisai finish their runaway episode with Mai’s “help”, Ajisai admits that she loves Rena (to herself, readers already knew), nobody is actually murdered by their family.

Written (game design): 278:

One of the problems with stealing PbtA moves is that they’re completely
player-facing, so we finally have to decide on how to resist social
skills, which may be the impetus need to make a rule for opposed
actions.

The quality of your action, which may only matter for opposed actions,
is the lowest value on any of your successful dice. If you didn’t roll
because you were at Difficulty 0, your quality is the same as your skill
rating. If you rolled and have no successful dice, your quality is 0.
Higher, or highest, quality wins.

Actual harm still goes through Readiness to get to your tender flesh or
soul, but mere blandishments can be resisted with an opposed roll using
“Be a Stubborn Ass” against whatever the other person is using. This is
like a save, but subtly different for reasons to be explained later.

Another question is, why would players choose these more specific
Actions that have to have their own ratings instead of always Acting
Under Pressure and spending all their XP on improving that one rating?
Of course the rule is that if there’s a specific move for what you’re
doing, you have to use it, but never underestimate a player’s
willingness to argue that they’re doing something slightly different and
therefore that rule doesn’t apply. We can make Act Under Pressure more
expensive to buy up, although probably not as expensive as everything
else put together. (But maybe.)

Using the carrot instead of the stick, we can make the outcomes for
using a specific move better (for the player) or more concrete (for the
GM). Or we could if we had any ideas how to do that.

My own handwriting is terrible, but I admire calligraphy!

Betrayed by one bus, went to the office, ate a weirdly small burrito, did some weirdly small work, raised a concern to my interim manager, attended a training about new mandatory self-criticism reports.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 7 (Hiromu Arakawa): More reunions and murders and escapes and backstories. Basically every character is still more interesting than the MC, though.

Written (game design): 223:

Leaving that to ferment, earlier I mentioned taking D&D out of
Dungeon World, so let’s look at a different part of game space and see
if there’s anything to bring back.

D&D abilities still suck, but Dungeon World is not the kind of game that
should have a bunch of skills. Maybe replace the abilities with
personality traits, more like Apocalypse World? Aggression instead of
Strength (not my idea; Into the Odd, maybe?), Focus, Mysticism,
Jitters, Determination? Five is probably enough. Also there should be a
move to fall prey to the downside of each one, although that risks
creating a “roll minus” mechanic. Also no ability scores, just -1 to +3
like the Bakers intended.

Level is just the number of advances you’ve taken, we can swap one term
for the other without losing anything except a few characters. Check XP
on failure and when answering end-of-session questions, that’s all good.

PbtA games are big on playbooks, but allow pretty arbitrary
“multiclassing” for at least a few moves, so going classless wouldn’t be
impossible. Making new classes isn’t hard, though, so it might be better
to just have a whole bunch of classes, replacing the old ones that are
too D&Dish. Wizard and Cleric would go, since we no longer believe in
secular magic.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in the world agreed this was not a celebration?

Went to the office, ate some samosas and chicken biriyani, did some work.

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 1 (Canno): Reread. The girl who is good at everything using raw stats x the girl who put time into developing skills and still comes in second at everything, grrr! With many interludes about other students at Yuri High.

Written (catgirl): 266.

Also other things that are relevant is this dystopia, such as National Support Public Education Day, National Whistleblowers Appreciation Day, and World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. And, as a treat, National Cheesecake Day.

Went to the office, ate some falafal and dolmas and stuff, did a little work, almost fell asleep.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 12 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): The search for the missing person has reached a major plot twist! Also, a cult compound full of creepy interdimensional weirdness is definitely the ideal place for PCs to set up a secret base.

Written (catgirl): 236.