Tag: office

Went to the office, ate a bowl of food, had a meeting, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 13 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Bathhouse episode of appalling nakedness, and ice cream.

Written (game design): 280:

I had been thinking that inflicting a condition the target already has
but at a lower level would increment the level, so they can’t just tank
hits forever, but maybe we should limit that to only happening if the
difference in levels isn’t too great. That way, if the attacker can’t
up their game enough to get within X of a disabling level of the
condition, they can’t take the target down by spamming that attack.
Since we want conditions to be actual effects, not just colorful hit
points, a condition that doesn’t reach the level of disabling could
still open up possibilities for other conditions that could.

Which still leaves us trying to come up with either a set of generic
conditions that cover everything possible, or a set of usable guidelines
for making up new conditions on the spot without them seeming
ridiculous. Is what we need a list of possible ill effects, from the
smallest penalty to a skill roll through being taken out of the fight to
being turned to the enemy side, and how much effect (in the sense of
Body rolled on the dice minus appropriate defenses) it takes to get each
one? Earlier we considered what kind of penalties using a
maneuver might cause as a trade-off, and some of those might apply here
as useful things to force on an enemy, but that’s just a start.

Also applies to other forms of plagiarism.

Went to the office, ate some noodles, did some work, learned a little kubernetes. Boss³ commented on how I looked at my phone a lot, so I should probably work on staring blankly at my monitor instead.

No anime, Marith is full of mucus.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 2 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal and Traditional Doll Boy go to a cosplay event. Photography and heat exhaustion and lack of modesty, oh my.

Written (game design): 256:

This brings us back to the implicit multipower, I guess. 12d6 Cold
Powers is the “pool”, and then you can pay a few points for each
specific application you can reliably use: make ice manacles, shoot icicle
spears, stomp around as a glacier mecha, whatever. If you want to do
something cold-based that you didn’t buy, then the GM has to agree, and
you may have to take extra time, or make one or more skill rolls, or
find something appropriate in the environment (EG, water if you want to
make things out of ice). The base power is explicitly not Energy Blast:
doing damage is an application like any other, or maybe multiple
applications if you want to do damage different ways, like the standard
energy projector multipower with plain energy blast, AoE energy blast,
AP energy blast, etc.

Is there a distinction between effects, that in Hero would be different
powers, and maneuvers, that are more like advantages? Sticking with our
cold powers example, do you buy being able to freeze things solid
differently than being able to spread your powers out over a larger
area? They seem like different categories to me, and they can be
combined in different ways, but can we do that on the fly, or do you
have to buy each combination explicitly like a multipower slot? Or even
worse, do you have to buy each application or maneuver individually to
have access to them without a huge penalty, but still have a smaller
penalty if you haven’t bought the specific combination? That seems both
harsh and complicated, but it lets players spend points on a lot of
things. Can we somehow make it optional and only very very slightly
advantageous? Or is that too much like designing for a different
audience?

I didn’t even make this one up!

Went to the office, ate some yellow chicken curry, did some work, tried to learn some kubernetes but with limited success. Finally managed to get my prescription filled and picked up, go USA.

In case you can stand finding out about the world around you.

Read (manga): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 14 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): More magic ninja causing trouble because there aren’t any demons and now the humanoids have to cause their own trouble.

Read (novel): Neverthorn (Shannon Mayer): It’s like one of those dreams where you have to go back to high school even though you’re an adult, only the highschool is like Hogwarts with a blatantly evil headmaster and all your bullies are now teachers and the dark lord is coming any month now. Also, het romance subplot.

Written (game design): 259:

Of course the advice to game designers is not to design games for people
who will hate them, and I guess that has to apply even when I’m trying
to take over the position of an existing game. I’m sure there are people
who both could and would make a game even more accounting-conscious than
Hero, but I’m not one of them, even if I once would have wanted to be.
I’m more of a filthy story-gamer.

Anyway, even if we don’t need everything to be priced optimally according
to the laws of supply and demand, rating things in small integers makes
them easy to work with, so we’ll stick with powers generating effect,
and every 3 effect over the defense raising the condition by one level.
A full-on superhero has 12d6 in their best powers, which is on average
four steps above the base, so conditions go from 1 to 5, with 4
being incapacitated and 5 also having spillover into long-term effects.
Maybe the levels should have names: Kinda ___, Definitely ___, Severely
___, Totally ___, Overwhelmingly ___. Presence attacks and mental powers
don’t in Hero, though, they just have Characteristic, Char+10, Char+20, etc,
which would be +0/+3/+6/etc now. Although we did mention powers having a
greater or lesser effect, so maybe it’s sometimes +0/+2/+4 or +0/+5/+10
instead, in which case we do want names for levels.

If power usage is limited only by cleverness and special effect, then we
aren’t buying specific powers like Hero any more, it’s just 12d6 Cold
Powers or 8d6 Brick or whatever. We probably want to charge more for
more flexible special effects, though. Or maybe for specific
applications of the power? Like in Champions Now, where if you pay
points for something, you always have it, but if you try to claim you
should get it for free because of your special effect, the GM can say it
doesn’t seem reasonable to them.

Also Random Acts of Crab Racing Day.

Went to the office, listened to the thunder and rain, ate some underheated Chinese buffet for Lunar New Year, got nothing from my scratch-off lottery ticket, did some work, got most of the way home and was betrayed by the bus.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 3 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Maomao visits home, which has more mysterious mysteries.

Read (short): “Barbershops of the Floating City” (Angela Liu): Classism, unexplained magic hairdressing, generational trauma.

Read (short): “When He Calls Your Name” (Catherynne M. Valente): I figured out what the name was pretty quickly, but still good.

Written (game design): 394:

I see two kinds of maneuvers. One is like Hero maneuvers, where you
modify what you’re doing: charge up your power to get a strong
effect, spread it out to affect more, etc. The other is based on
what you’re trying to accomplish: grind them down, take them out,
disable their abilities, set them up for a teammate, trick them
into doing something they didn’t mean to, temporarily incapacitate
them, etc. These are intentionally broad and like a PbtA move, you
have to say what you’re actually doing. Are you grinding someone
down by getting them to use their biggest attack until they’re
exhausted? Taking them out by machine-gunning a crowd so they faint
from trauma? Et cetera. But the first is mechanical means, the
second is narrative ends, so I’m not sure these even belong in the
same game.

Is it even possible to allow for cleverness instead of grinding hit points
without becoming a story game? It definitely could be if the need for
cleverness was preplanned and rigorously documented as a puzzle to
solve, but when it’s ad-hoc or even based on player input, how are
wargame players going to believe that it’s fair and accurately priced?
Reducing the granularity of points helps by not setting expectations of
careful accounting, but is it enough? There’s precedent for judgment
calls in Presence attacks and mental powers, but those aren’t the
primary way of taking someone out, so it’s not as much of a problem to
have the GM make up stuff on the fly.

Went to the office, ate more carbs and a barbecue sandwich, got my picture taken, did some work.

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 3 (Sumiko Arai): Oh no, CD Store Girl has gained enough confidence to assert her own style even at school, and now everybody knows she’s hot! Also, music festival! They are edging closer to recognizing romantic feelings now that jealousy is a thing.

Written (game design): 153.

Also Teddy Day, which probably doesn’t mean Kit’s Trail of Cthulhu character but really should.

Went to the office, ate too many free breakfast carbs, did some work, ate some Mayan pork and rice and veggies and plantain, stood around the train station for an hour or two while the train recovered from at-grade crossings.

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 2 (Sumiko Arai): Competition? No, not really. Also school trip. I thought the bonus color would change for each volume, but nope, green. Maybe it’s supposed to be a spring green for blossoming feelings? Not that they are thinking more than very vaguely about romantic feelings, when there is so much good music to listen to.

Written (game design): 166.

What do you mean, “whose heart?”? Nobody important!

Walked to the nearer train station now that I’ve confirmed it’s back in service, went to the office, did some work, ate some Thai eggplant with purplish rice, coughed a bunch.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2: Angela (Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, Francesco Francavilla, Kevin Maguire): Even more disjointed and now Angela the hunting angel from Spawn (isn’t that Image rather than DC?) is with them and reality is falling apart. I think this may be why I stopped reading big publisher comics.

Written (game design): 190:

What do we do about players that just want to hit things and win? The
old-style absolutist approach would be to let them fail to get any XP,
but we’re supposed to be more enlightened now. If nothing else, a
failure by the whole team (EG, by following one person’s stupid idea) can
get XP for the whole team.

So if complications aren’t what give XP, how do they work? Psychlims are
just susceptibility to particular Presence attacks such that they cause
damage as well as spending the round aghast or whatever? Or can any
diabolical action cause emotional damage, but characters have some
defense except where their psychlims are holes? Even though it sounds
cool, do we really want to PCs to take random damage when their enemies
do something terrible? If it’s heinous enough, can they be knocked out
(faint)? That doesn’t seem very heroic, at least by modern standards of
heroism.

Also National Trevor Day, but I’m hardly a national Trevor. I’m barely even a municipal Trevor.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken tikka masala. Most of the people who were fired were remote, so we only have one less person in the office.

Read (comic collection): Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1: Cosmic Avengers (Brian Michael Bendis, Steve McNiven, Sara Pichelli): Seems like these are the GoG parts of a larger crossover event? Or something? Anyway Iron Man is with them, Star-Lord’s Star-Dad is up to something that probably needs a star-guillotine, Rocket Raccoon makes fun of Earth’s tech level a lot.

Written (game design): 117. Plus tried to write a Python script but I don’t remember how regular expressions work in Python.

Hopefully it’s inclusive and either a duck minifig or a larger duck made out of bricks would qualify.

Went to the office, ate some steamed pork buns and some pork shrimp dumplings, did some work, cleaned up some stuff instead of learning a kubernetes.

Read (TTRPG): Sig: City of Blades (Jason Pitre): Blades in the Dark crossed with lightly detrademarked Planescape. Of course there is no way they could have afforded DiTerlizzi, but I think more Planescapey art would have helped. It made me want to play it anyway.

Written (game design): 234. Should I be stealing more from Blades in the Dark? Probably not.

Another one that’s illegal, and also I guess we’re not supposed to think it’s at all applicable or else we’re hating fascism in the wrong way.

Went to the office, ate some vat sausages and sauerkraut and green spud, did some work, learned a little kubernetes.

Read (from the shelf): I have been reading, but haven’t finished the book full of words yet.

Written (game design): 213.

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?