Tag: office

One can invent a bigger word than “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, but is it better?

Went to the office, coughed a lot, did some work, ate some Filipino fried chicken and assorted foods but didn’t enjoy them much (definitely a me problem), tried to learn some Kubernetes but didn’t do a very good job, coughed some more.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 12 (Kaoru Mori): Looks in on every group we’ve met so far, but mostly about Smith and Talas and party and their now photography-enabled journey, with a long stay in the house of the guy with two wives who adore each other.

Written (new project): 165.

Honestly, it’s probably One Piece.

Went to the office, tried to meet with customers but failed, ate a burrito, did some work, learned some kubernetes.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Read (novel): The Faith of Beasts (James SA Corey): The humans are kind of fitting into the imperial alien ecosystem, but that doesn’t stop them from getting into trouble and learning things that are surprising and possibly upsetting to them. More upsetting than everything else in the galaxy, that is. Interesting idea for the “deathless enemy” of the imperial ecosystem.

Written (anything): FAIL. I did catch up quite a few days on my journal, which doesn’t count but is what I was doing all evening.

Went to the office, ate some miscellaneous Asian food, did some work, learned no Kubernetes.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 9 (Kaoru Mori): This volume is mostly about Amir’s friend Pariya and her boy and the fifteen years’ worth of embroidery she has to redo before they can get married. Do you think the manga-ka might like drawing fancy embroidery?

Written (new project): 178.

Probably an Angry Birds tie-in.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some garlic noodles, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (graphic novel): Forgive-Me-Not (Mari Costa): The princess is abducted by a strange butch and told she’s a fae changeling, and things go downhill from there (but in a mostly adorable way, with only some stabbing).

Written (game design): 111.

No, not like that! Well, maybe a little like that. No beaver-shaming.

Went to the office, ate too much falafel hummus shawarma pita, didn’t do too much work.

Read (graphic novel): I Am Not Starfire (Mariko Tamaki, Yoshi Yoshitani): In fact she is Starfire’s round, gay, goth teenaged daughter, who is not dealing that well with having a famous mom who doesn’t entirely understand Earth culture. I’m not sure I really support the way the end went, but okay. At least there were girl-smooches.

Written (game design): 175.

Sadly I’m not very crafty so I mostly just buy hats. Possibly I should buy more different hats, although then I’d need outfits to go with them, and that way lies madness.

Went to the office, had a lot of meetings, resolved a long-running customer issue by doing a different thing (that’s probably more in line with their policies anyway), officially received my 0% raise for not being a rock star, ate some brisket hash with fried egg for lunch, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.3: Yep, that was just about as doomed as it looked.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 2 (Kaoru Mori): Wow, Amir is so much better off away from her old family.

Written (game design): 210.

Went to the office, climbed some stairs, ate some spicy pork dumplings, did not eat any pecan waffles, spent all day working on TLS certificates.

Read (novel): Jett Jamison and the Secret Storm (Kimberly Behre Kenna): A middle-grade book about being a survivor of sexual assault and books about being a survivor of sexual assault and censorship of books about being survivor and also how much American “Christians” suck.

Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 1 (Kaoru Mori): It’s been a long time since I read this, but the fabrics and landscapes are still just as amazing.

Written (game design): 282:

Going off on another tangent, from the idea of conditions having
levels, the ultimate condition is Dead With a Body. (Dead Without a
Body is barely worse than Knocked Unconscious.) But does it have
levels? Does the Wounded condition turn into Dead at level 4? That’s a
lot like hit points, although to be fair, having 4 hit points when
attacks can do up to 4 damage is a lot different than having 200 hit
points when attacks can do up to 20 damage.

Probably a lot of conditions can take out the target, or severely
disable them at level 4, although if lower levels reduce the relevant
defenses, then it’s a death spiral. Possibly lower levels of Wounded
or Battered don’t impose any penalties general, because we are
heroic and full of adrenaline, and also just beating on people is not
what we want to encourage.

Even without a death spiral, if every die of a powerset is also 1
point of defense, then with a 9d6 or greater powerset, it’s possible
(though very unlikely) to inflict a level 4 condition against someone
defending with a 9d6 powerset straight up. Against someone undefended,
5d6 is enough to potentially-but-practically-never do it. This
doesn’t seem right; surely Xd6 offense vs X defense should produce
the same range of results, regardless of the value of X? Perhaps we
need Feng Shui/Nexus die minus die, or FATE dice, or something else
0-centered.

If all conditions were invented for the specific situation, we could
dismiss the notion of a condition coming in multiple levels, but if we
have to have a finite set of conditions, that’s a natural way to
categorize them. The effects don’t have to scale linearly with level,
though, so level 1-3 can be penalties but 4 can still be “completely
____”.

Which I celebrated by eating way too much pie. Also Flatmates Day, which I celebrated by having thrown my flatmate into the cold cruel streets to live alone.

For some reason I said it was okay for work to celebrate my birthday, but at least I got chocolate cream pie out of it. Also several people said “happy birthday” and I said “thanks” like a functional member of society. Also there was barbecue, although I didn’t get as much as I wanted because Coworker T talks forever on video calls. Not in person, though.

Read (graphic novel): Wallflower (Jasmin Omar Ata): An introverted and probably neurospicy middle-school girl in Florida can see people’s auras? souls? as flowers growing on them. This turns out to be related to why her family is kind of horrible to her and why the new kid at school is so weird. Not that it’s actually explained.

Written (game design): 182.

Got 2/3 of the way up the stairs before having to rest, did some work, ate a bento, met with a customer and did not solve their problem but at least they aren’t stuck in Dubai any more, tried to use awk, did not learn any kubernetes. The trains were all late on my way home, but it all lined up anyway and I was able to feed the cats so they could eat before Marith came to scare them away.

Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.1: Weren’t all these bozos defeated already? But we have a new foil for Roranoa, so that’s good.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 20 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that happen to the Statue of Liberty.

Written (game design): 295:

Hero does have an array of defenses: PD, ED, DCV, MDCV, Mental
Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Desolidification, Damage
Reduction, Presence, Damage Negation, Deflection, Barrier, probably
Strength, Teleportation, any attack count at least for getting out
of conditions. They usually apply to everything unless there’s a
specific limitation or mandatory gap in applicability like Desolid
or Deflection have, because nobody wants their defenses to not work,
and “I’m a brick!” is enough of a special effect for many of them.
There are three different kinds of defenses here, though: make the
attack roll harder (DCV, Deflection), reduce effect (PD, Presence),
or break out of the effect after it’s happened (Strength or
Teleportation vs grabs, any attack vs Entangle).

If we’re putting more of an emphasis on defense, should we be going
back to the idea of the defender rolling instead of the attacker? I
had a better name for this than “saves” but that’s what they were,
divided by ways of getting out of trouble. They can have different
mechanics, though. Like, you can dodge, which is chancy but negates
the attack entirely if you succeed, or tank it, which is easier but
only gives you extra defenses which might be enough. Ignoring the
attack gives you a bonus to whatever else you’re doing, if you’re
still able to do it afterwards. Slipping the punch is essentially
tanking the attack. If we’re using zones where most movement is within
the same zone, then diving for cover is probably a variant of dodge.
Deflecting an attack to another target is also a variant of dodge.
Diving to shield someone is tank+move in the way that dive for dover
is dodge+move. With an appropriate special effect, you could absorb an
attack or otherwise transform it into a different effect. Emotional
and mental attacks probably use the same options, with varying levels
of metaphor. And then there’s removing an effect that’s already been
applied, like breaking an Entangle, or slipping free of it. (Hero’s
Martial Escape that uses the same mechanics as busting free with
Strength but with a bonus to Strength based on skill is pretty
elegant.)

I have no idea how to handle something like Desolidification in this
paradigm.

But all of this is only loosely connected to conditions, or whatever
we do to track things happening to characters, and how they get
applied.

Walked up some stairs, did some work, ate some falafel and hummus and eggplant even though they tried to hide it from me, learned kubernetes until I died.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 10 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): They’re well into the plot part of the game, so MC’s knowledge is helping her a lot, if not as much as it could have.

Written (game design): 106, because I am stupid and also I had to go to bed.

Climbed some stairs, had a meeting with my colleagues, had a meeting with my endocrinologist, pretended to ignore my phone, ate some soy-garlic chicken guys with crunchy white veggies, did some work, complained about the heat.

Read (comic collection): Mercy (Mirka Andolfo): Pod people in late C19 Pacific Northwest, humans having feelings about monsters, monsters having feelings about Earth, gory murder everywhere.

Written (game design): 135.

That sounds ominous.

Went to the office, climbed the stairs with only a few breaks, ate some jerk pork and plantains, did some work, learned some Kubernetes.

Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): I had not seen or read this before because I have no culture. It is very silly, although I can’t help thinking that all these people should be in a tumbrel. We only watched up to the intermission because I was sleepy, but will definitely finish sometime when Marith is not dead.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 10 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is going to have to be a lot more assertive than that if she wants to actually get lucky. I guess first she would have to decide whether she wants to.

Written (game design): 216:

I think they probably do. As I learned from reading the Internet, rules
and dice are for the uncertain parts of the game, where you need some
divinatory power. If you can just say what happens and it’s obvious, no
dice needed. So thrilling heroic battles, sure. You can come up with a
plan, but can you execute it correctly while someone is shooting you in
the face with a railgun? Roll for it!

But roll what? Hero has both to-hit and damage rolls, because D&D.
We’ve been talking about powersets in terms of dice that we roll and
count the Body on to determine the magnitude of effect, but should there
be a roll to decide whether you can even make that roll? We’re basing
this on Presence attacks (which don’t have a to-hit roll) and mental
attacks (which do). Since actions are now to inflict conditions, not do
some random amount of Stun and Body, we need some roll to determine
whether an attack goes overboard, or otherwise awry. Maybe it should be
called a disaster roll instead of a to-hit roll, since a bad roll
results in the wrong condition, wrong target, or both. Then the rule can
be that if the table can see a way for the action to go horribly wrong
without the character performing it having to be an incompetent schmuck,
there has to be a disaster roll.

Since the disaster roll determines who gets to decide on the nature of
the condition and where it goes, we still need the effect roll to
determine the level of the condition. Some conditions should be higher
level based on accuracy rather than (or in addition to) sheer power, but
I think we’re okay wrapping that into powerset dice as a measure of
effectiveness, not just raw joules of energy beam. There will also be
maneuvers/techniques that let you have more dice of effect for whatever
tradeoff, and you can probably have a limitation on some dice of your
powerset that you only get them if you can make a skill roll.

No, not like that! I mean, unless that’s your thing, no kinkshaming.

It turns out the building keycard lets me into the stairwell from the bottom, so I took the stairs instead of the elevator. That’s a lot of stairs, but I did eventually make it. Did some customer meetings, ate some freekeh with falafel, learned some Kubernetes.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 9 (Shinichi Fukuda): What? How dare bodies change?

Written (game design): 196:

It’s not like we won’t have a bunch of different ways to remove a
condition, or different circumstances under which a condition can be
removed. Automatically at the end(?) of the next turn, with a free
action as soon as you get a turn again, with a free action if you make a
roll or an action if you don’t, with an action, with an action if you
can make a roll, with an action from somebody else, after some noncombat
length of time unless somebody has an appropriate power, after ending
enough turns, … I’m not sure we’re actually simplifying anything here,
although since we are placing more emphasis on conditions, we do need
more structure.

Does getting rid of a condition depend on what level it is? It seems
like it should, but is, EG, the “Strength” of a grab or the “Body” of an
entangle based on the level of the condition, or the dice of power (or
environment) inflicting the condition? Or a combination of both, but how
so? I think we’re back to wondering whether to-hit rolls have any place
in this game.

Lame bagpipes can be left behind, or thrown willy-nilly into the cargo pit.

Went to the office in the slightly-less-illuminated morning, had some meetings, did some work, ate some tiny pies for Pi Day (Observed), ate an emergency brisket sandwich, learned some Kubernetes. The pies were from a place I walked past on my way to the train, which seems silly, but Car Culture is like that.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 8 (Shinichi Fukuda): Conclusion of the Cultural Festival arc, Cosplay Gal successfully crossplays as a girl passing as a host despite being notably not boy-shaped, she has it bad for Doll Boy.

Written (game design): 201:

We can mitigate the first problem by saying that a duplicate condition
(same type and level) doesn’t do anything. If you’re already Lightly
Electrocuted, getting lightly electrocuted again doesn’t do anything;
Zapstress has to somehow get to 3 above your defense to make you
Moderately Electrocuted. That way at least it has to be a variety
of conditions to nickle and dime someone. For the second problem,
maybe you can buy extra condition slots as techniques, that only
take appropriate conditions? They would have to be pretty expensive,
and maybe it’s not worth implementing. If you should be tough against
something, buy the technique that lets you use your full defense
against it or whatever.

Not sure how to handle removing conditions from the bottom or middle of
the stack. We can’t have conditions just fall down to the lowest open
slot, or rolling up and getting a level 3 condition on someone right off
is meaningless. Maybe it only triggers when a condition is removed? Or
we keep track of the level a condition was originally at before it
rolled it, and it can only fall down that far? That’s more notekeeping,
but maybe not unworkable?

Or of course we could just not have conditions roll up. If you want to
take somebody out, you need to take advantage of the effects of
conditions to inflict a level 4 condition straight up. Or maybe you can
boost a level 3 condition to level 4 with a maneuver or a technique
that’s good enough to inflict another level 3? But either way, it
doesn’t roll up automatically.

As always when I have an idea, it’s time to stop and look at whether
we actually need this time. Hero characters can get grabbed,
terrified, set on fire, blinded, etc, but without a unified system
for conditions. The mechanics are scattered all over the book with
the powers that are likely to inflict them, which is possibly more
organic, but means there are a lot of different rules for these
conditions and how to get out of them, like a grab having anywhere
from 1 to 24 Body that you need to overcome with your own Str, Flash
absolutely removing a sense and sticking around until a certain
number of segments have elapsed, being prone reducing your DCV by
exactly half until you spend a half phase, etc, etc. Again, charmingly
old-school, but is that better than having a unified system? I mean,
maybe it is! That’s why people like OSR, right? [citation needed]

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, did some work, ate some carbs and some chicken guys, skipped out slightly early to get home in time to watch anime.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.4-6: Wow, they did it! Well, half of it, leaving five episodes for the other half.

Read (comic collection): Sweet Paprika vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo): Everyone is devils or angels and named after seasonings, although that seems to be purely cosmetic since everything else is the real world with NYC and cell phones and publishing companies and all. Our MC, Paprika, is extremely horny and repressed and rules her department with an iron fist but neither chill nor work-life balance. She falls for guy, continues to make poor life decisions and terrify her underlings, there are R-rated makeouts but not the right ones, etc. Paprika is kind of a terrible person, but a good character.

Read (novel): The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage (Hiyodori): F/F romance in a secondary world with an actually slightly non-generic magic system. One of the last survivors of a marginalized group from a terrifying magic forest wants to go home to properly bury her aunt and friend before the dominant culture nukes the entire island, somehow gets a crazy hot mage to go with her as bodyguard if she’ll marry her, there’s military intrigue and zombies and gradual revelation of shared traumatic backstory and also girlsmooches.Apparently a spinoff of a series set in the same universe but a different culture that’s differently D/s with their mages and mage massagers.

Written (game design): 221.

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.

It me, although I’m probably not as freethinking as I think (freely).

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken and rice, learned some kubernetes.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.19-20: Two very dramatic episodes, Dabi vs multiple Todorokis and Uravity vs Himiko!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Body Work (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): A short story about a Falcon incident. I had not pictured Peter as wearing a suit and tie to work every day, but Aaronovitch signed off on it, so it must be so. I did not like the art at all, though. It is murky and rough and bleah and I am a Philistine.

Written (game design): 257:

Are we coming back around to my earlier idea of conditions, but
making them actual conditions instead of hit points with post-its?
As previously realized, that needs a lot of judgement calls for
what conditions a character (PC or NPC) can take or not take based
on their powers and special effects, but it’s 2026, we aren’t
actually expecting the GM to use their infinite power for TPKs.

A lot of this can be done in stock Hero, by giving characters
appropriate complications and limitations, but then we’re back to the
players guessing what weaknesses the GM prepared. Maybe NPCs can just
have “Weaknesses appropriate to being a magical goo monster (30)”? Or
“Weaknesses to be established in play by the heroes (30)”? It’s still a
little vaporous as to what they are ahead of time, but once they’re
established, they should be written down. Possibly there needs to be a
rule (more like a guideline) about when in the fight the GM has to have
spent all those points.

The GM can predefine some weaknesses, but leaving some for the players
to “discover”, although possibly lacking in verisimilitude, might help
with the problem of coming up with a whole new suite of complications
every session. Not sure it helps with limitations, though, so we may
still want a more freeform approach. Or perhaps this is a reason to
revisit the idea of having limitations be accounted for separately from
the base power cost? But probably just writing “susceptible to PC
cleverness as established in play (-1/2)” is enough.

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.

Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.

Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!

Written (game design): 160:

The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)

(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)

One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.

We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).

How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.

Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.

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.

I typed in a chair instead, which is definitely not as classy.

Went to the office, did some work, learned some kubernetes, ate some beef stroganoff.

Read (graphic novel): Family Force V vol 1 (Matt Braly, Ainsworth Lin): The somewhat (but not very) delinquent daughter of a family sentai team struggles with life, the alien spaceship that gives the sentai teams their powers, new aliens, etc. There is of course a cliffhanger ending.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.11-12: Meh, surely that guy wasn’t an important character or anything. Certainly not compared to Tintin-Face Lad, who has returned to the fray.

Written (game design): 286.