Tag: sentenced to be a hero

I hear Magnetohydrodynamic Calculations Day was banned due to SAN loss.

Slept in, did a little shopping, ate an enormous quantity of Chinese food and will probably die.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 12: Asa learns just how much of adults’ life advice is pulled completely out of their asses.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 11: Are things not quite as dark as they looked last episode? Flum seems to be turning things around, anyway.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to be a Hero 11: Jeez, Teoritta, have more faith in your knight’s ability to blow up absolutely everything!

Watched (anime): Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody 1: Generic OP isekai LitRPG, probably to include a harem in later episodes based on the credits.

Read (graphic novel): Incredible Doom vol 1 (Matthew Bogart, Jesse Holden): 90s teen BBS culture, saving kids’ sanity from horrible parents and/or luring them into punk music and crime.

Written (game design): 114.

Also, No Selfies with Pandas Day.

Got the cleaners to invade at a more convenient time, which I felt a little bad about since I usually just say “whatever” but it’s a work day with meetings.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 37 (Tomohito Oda): The end! 100 friends and Komi and Tadano and everyone make it to college and Komi is still the hornier one (but in a wholesome way).

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 10: Yeah, that’s a problem with slave soldiers, especially when they have superpowers.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 10: Now we know some of what Ink’s deal is, and it’s about as bad as expected.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 11: Adults sure like giving advice. But sometimes they also give chocolate.

Written (game design): 389:

Should we not be doing a meter-by-meter, second-by-second, or at
least zone-by-zone, round-by-round simulation? Having the dice tell
us how the story goes, instead of telling us where each energy blast
lands and letting us create our own story from the mechanical
outcomes is the very essence of story game. Not that Hero is
completely immune to this (Luck/Unluck), but it’s a lot more
emergent-story. Can we have emergent story without simplifying combat
down to hit points, though? Conditions involve a lot of GM judgement, as
does anything like tactics (beyond the very basic ganging up on
somebody), so we can’t get everything from dice rolls. That’s even
before we let players go thinking up new things to do that require GM
calls, or choosing the outcome of a successful attack beyond “reduce hit
points”.

Am I pushing too hard for tactical infinity? It’s the reason we play
RPGs with fighting in, rather than just playing Gloomhaven, but maybe
tactical a few hundred, or a few dozen, would be enough? Heck, people
enjoy playing 21st century D&D, and that barely gets out of single
digits in binary. Can we make do with a list of general conditions after
all? And a set of defenses against them? Although much of the point of
tactical cleverness is to work around the otherwise-impenetrable
defenses… Yes, this is the same question I keep going around and
around, looking at from the same set of angles.

RPGs derived from wargames don’t like tactical cleverness because
they don’t like decisive actions. If your entire game is a fight,
something that can cut that short means less gaming, and nobody
wants that. Or at least that’s one of my guesses as to why so many
games have hit points far in excess of what one attack can do. Hero is
actually not quite as bad as some, since a surprise attack out of combat
does double Stun before defenses and that can actually knock someone
out, or at least stun them.

On another axis, it’s harder to “play the world, not your sheet”
in OSR fashion when the PCs aren’t human, maybe not even remotely
(hello, sentient black hole!), and the world offers entirely different
affordances. Maybe we do need more in the way of structure than your
normal bozos creeping with fire through a cave of rock. That probably
means at least a limited set of conditions instead of a complete
free-for-all. It may also mean paying more attention to how things
happen and not just the end state. Which might bring us back to an array
of defenses, or at least a bunch of ways to avoid/resist different kinds
of things people do to you (dodge it, stick out your chest and tank it,
concentrate on memories of your first love who would be so disappointed
if you let yourself get mind-controlled, etc). It might also bring us
back to all powers having limitations by default, so at least some
openings are written down ahead of time, even if they aren’t known. (You
can still buy off the limitations, but then the limitation is that you
don’t have as many points to buy powers.)

Boo, I wanted to keep saving my daylight! Did not manage to get out of bed at any reasonable time, but whatever. Did manage to eventually get more gooshyfood for the cats. Sage is super yelly and demanding, which I guess is a good sign. She does not like the mouth squirts, though.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 10: This is so slice-of-life that it’s hard to say what an episode is about, but I was right about the best friend. Also yeah, once somebody’s their kid, they don’t stop being your kid.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 9: Yikes, that is not what I expected to happen!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to be a Hero 9: That is pretty much what everybody should have expected to happen when they let fantasy PCs into their city.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 6 (Shinichi Fukuda): Back to cosplay techniques and fellow cosplayers, but also extremely fraught questions.

Written (game design): 260:

What about getting rid of conditions? Some disappear as soon as they
aren’t being maintained (psychokinetic grasp), some last until action is
taken to break them (frozen in carbonite), some naturally fade over time
and can possibly be removed faster or prolonged by action (poisoned,
wounded).

I’ve been rushing ahead with the FitD model of conditions, because it has
definite advantages. There’s no calculation, just find the lowest open slot to
put the new condition in, and if it’s on level 4, that’s a KO. It also
puts a limit on the number of conditions a character has to manage. It’s
not all good, though: as long as you can inflict any condition, you’re
guaranteed to be able to take someone down eventually. It also doesn’t
distinguish between types of conditions, so the regenerating werewolf
can’t take more physical conditions or whatever. Also also, even if your
buddies get rid of a condition for you, or you regenerate it, there’s
not an obvious way to recover from KO if it wasn’t the level 4
condition.

Hurray for Sage! She is the yelliest!

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Kidnapping, hostage-taking, partial but extremely biased villainous dialog, and horrible bug goo in the conduits!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 8: It’s not a city adventure unless someone goes undercover in disguise.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 8: Another cute girl, but this one is pretty sus. Also the main two are getting more yuri. And there’s some plot and stuff.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 9: Oh no, bad reviews and writer’s block! Queer(?) best friend to the rescue.

Read (comic collection): Getting Dizzy (Shea Fontana, Celia Moscote, Gloria Martinelli): A girl who just wants to be special randomly because a magical skater girl to fight against negativity goblins, but nobody can be that special. The characters are high-schoolers or even older, but I think the writing is for someone much younger.

Written (game design): 158:

What is a skill mechanically, though? Are we keeping the 3d6 roll-under
system? 9 plus the number of dice that have Skills? That’s 10- to 21-
for 1 to 12 ranks, seems reasonable. How many different things you can
roll for depends on how many times you bought Skills on that rank of
power, and we definitely need to establish some way of quantifying that
to avoid the Literally Batman 12d6 powerset being too cheap. I don’t
think we need to be as granular as individual Hero skills; maybe the
skill categories from 6E (Agility, Background, Combat, Intellect,
Interaction)? Is five enough? It’s a place to start, anyway.

Now we’re back to conditions and weaknesses, which are intertwined.
Weaknesses are also intwined with complications and limitations, since
we want one system that supports both PCs having interestingly limited
powers and character-building complications, and NPCs having exploitable
weaknesses.

Following Hero terminology, limitations are things you can’t do with a
powerset, or costs you have to pay, or requirements. Major limitations
only; fiddly little ones are covered by special effect. Once again, we
have to figure out how to have limitations give extra points. Doing the
fractions thing is probably fine, I guess? The limitations are
definitely per-powerset, and with variable-cost ranks, it doesn’t work
to give free ranks. Free points still run into the possibility of
negative cost powersets, so fractions it is until we come up with a new
paradigm.

Fortunately Sage was already spayed when she came to live with me.

No office this week, since I can’t miss morning handover due to transit failure. Stayed at home, did some work, learned a little TLS.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1.7: Flum is doing pretty well at filling her house with cute girls, but there are still criminal lowlives and classism causing problems. Also monsters.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 1.7-8: Teenagers are difficult! Adults are difficult! Grief is extremely difficult!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1.7: Another weirdo, also shopping and ninja attacks.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 7 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The large metal beam!

Written (game design): 231:

Setting that aside for the moment, these either let you get something
without the tradeoff, or get more for what you trade (like putting Area
Effect on a power gets you more than just spreading to fill hexes).
Earlier I mentioned needing one to effectively attack, but is that
covered by whether you pay for your powerset to include attack powers?
Probably something as general as that should be at the powerset level,
but maybe those should be techniques instead? If you don’t have the
ranged attack technique, you have to improvise to attack somebody or
something at range, which gives some kind of penalty, I guess? Or you
can’t use all your dice? It would be a maneuver, trading off something
in order to do the ranged attack at all.

For whatever reason, it seems like getting areas of capability in a
powerset should cost per die, so a flat-cost technique shouldn’t be able
to completely make up for that, or maybe not make up for it at all. Of
course you can always save up and add a new capability to a powerset if
you really want to be able to do the thing.

How do we divide up capabilities? And what do you get for each one
as a base without maneuvers or techniques? I still think
offense/defense/movement/chrome is too coarse, but we can split those
up. I don’t think ranged/melee is the right divide for attacks;
normal/special (NNDs, drains) seems better. Defense I’m less sure about
splitting, maybe it stays as one capability. Are mental powers part of
special attacks, or a separate thing? Based on how many special rules
Hero has for them, they probably are their own thing. Movement also
tricky, since the obvious division is speed vs movement modes that give
you extra stuff like Flight. And chrome is not only a grab-bag, but has
things that don’t really correlate with how many dice you have in your
powerset, like Extra Limbs or Enhanced Senses.

No work today, but I did have to get up to let the cleaners in (they were late), and ride the bus (it was also late) to go shopping, and then do laundry.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 6: Six episodes, three demon lords down! Also, for those who were worried whether this might be a pervy anime, Teoritta briefly takes off her coat.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 6: There is some kind of actual problem with corruption and human experimentation (in the FMA sense), but Flum is busy dealing with petty criminals. At least she has a house now.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 5-6: Makio is not free of problems herself.

Read (short): “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” (Rati Mehrotra): Inexplicable events cause lots of trouble for someone.

Read (short): “Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” (Caroline M. Yoachim): Alien temporal architecture from beyond the gates.

Read (short): “The Millay Illusion” (Sarah Pinsker): Men who said a woman couldn’t be a good stage magician get what’s coming to them, probably.

Read (short): “With Her Serpent Locks” (Mary Robinette Kowal): Don’t fuck with the gorgon, no matter how hot shit you think you are.

Read (short): “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” (Samantha Mills): So many dooms.

Read (short): “Six People to Revise You” (J.R. Dawson): Yeah, capitalism would absolutely charge people a fortune for the privilege of being brain-edited into social conformity.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 2 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): It’s hard being Maomao. But it’s also hard putting up with Maomao.

Written (game design): 152:

Speaking of balance, the effect of using a power cleverly on someone
should probably be proportional to the active points/ranks, just as
(presumably) the amount of Grind Down or KO is. But greater cleverness
should also increase the effect, and different effects are going to get
quantified differently if we aren’t just chipping active points/ranks
off. And then there’s defenses against conditions, or maybe against
maneuvers, which also need to have an effect according to cost, however
that works. Maybe there are weak, normal, and strong conditions that are
different divisors on the level of effect, just like moveby and
movethrough need different amounts of movement to get +1d6? That at
least gives something to come to an agreement on, instead of the GM
making it up out of whole cloth. Or possibly it’s split along some other
axis, but we should definitely have a short list to pick from instead of
having to guess at the magnitude of effect from first principles.

But I wrote no kitten words, because I am way too stupid. Instead I got up to start my on-call shift and immediately got sucked into an hour-long customer call. That was annoying, but did get resolved and I went back to bed to read for a while and got trapped under cats (I and I tiny brain, we never learn). Eventually I become functional enough to connect my new computer to my old computer and let it suck out the brains, but that took hours and hours during which they were both unavailable, so I was forced to watch anime. Forced, I tell you!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 5: Okay, there’s a “hero” who should not be left to wander the world on his own. Still probably better than the people in charge of things. But that’s all there is so far, so I have to wait to find out how they get out of the stupid plan!

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 3-4: Orphan girl doesn’t even know what she feels, she doesn’t need people knowing about her parents and expecting her to perform emotions! Good thing they don’t know she was able to work on cleaning out her parents’ stuff without breaking down.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1-5: The girl with all stats at 0 and one apparently nonfunctional ability gets pushed out of the hero’s party and secretly sold into slavery, but just as she’s about to be fed to monsters for being unprofitable, she figures out the way in which her ability actually makes her OP and escapes to become an adventurer. Sadly she cannot escape the turmoil of what the hero is questing against. I can’t tell if her declarations to the other escapee are platonic or romantic. Possibly they can’t tell either. Also being simulcast, so I have to wait to find out the shape of her doom.

Read (graphic novel): Bounce Back (Misako Rocks!): Japanese middle-school basketball star suddenly has to move to America and learn English and try to make friends and deal with the basketball team being mean girls and generally suffer as middle-schoolers are supposed to. Feels like it’s aimed at readers for whom middle school is imminent.

Written (anything): NO COMPUTER.

Not sure what to say about it, though.

No anime with Marith, she has to work a hundred days in a row.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 3-4: More weirdos! I dunno, the convict heroes seem to be a lot better than the legitimate authorities. But, they’ve taken out roughly half a demon lord per episode, so it’s not surprising the legitimate authorities are terrified of them.

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 2 (Miyu Morishita): After seeing werewolf culture in the first volume, the second is mostly just school stuff, with some other mythfolk being slightly weird.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 156:

Are we back to figuring out what “damage” means? I still really like
conditions instead of hit points, but they definitely aren’t as simple
and therefore fair-seeming as a simple number or track. We can make it a
track by having conditions ranked (even if it’s just 0 or 1) and having
X ranks of conditions at one time knocks you out, but what is the effect
of the conditions? I guess we need a list of common conditions described
loosely enough they can cover most interactions of powers and special
effects, and then let the GM make judgement calls which one applies when
someone uses Hermetic magic on the alien slime monster.

What set of conditions will do this? How specific do we want to be? We
don’t want Sprained Hand and Sprained Elbow to be completely separate
conditions, but do we need to note which one it is when we mark the more
general condition? What is the more general condition for each?
“Temporarily injured limb”? “Sprain”? “Temporarily injured
manipulator limb” vs “…locomotor limb”? “Temporary physical damage”?
How do we divide up how permanent the damage is? Is two categories
(corresponding to Stun and Body) enough? Sprain is intermediate
between a bruise and a burn, do we make a third category, or tag every
condition with the step on the time chart you get to make a recovery
roll at? That last one probably has the most Hero DNA but is another
number to keep track of for each condition.

Do we have to have ranks on conditions? It’s probably easier to have
Clobbered:5 than five different clobbery conditions. Maybe the rank is
also the step on the time chart? That would be twice as simple. But then
how do we add up multiple instances of similar conditions? The usual
thing where it’s the new value if that’s higher, or increment the old
value by one if not is probably good enough. How similar do conditions
have to be to stack like that? Going around and around, we come back to
the huge variety of terrible things that can happen to a Hero character
being a good reason to abstract, but I don’t want to abstract
all the way to hit points, because bah.

Sounds like a disaster!

Tried some rain and thunder noise instead of fan noise for sleeping. Not sure it worked as well, but it was nice.

Still coughing when I woke up, so I didn’t go to the office to share my potential germs with the office party.

I forgot how to eat food, but Marith saved me with cherry tomato chicken. I put it over microwave rice and ate it and did not die even a little bit.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1-2: The worst and most powerful (and often craziest) criminals are sentenced to the battlefield as expendable special forces units, because their souls can be dragged back mostly intact from hell when they die. Human civilization with Euromedieval aesthetic and some magitech is being driven back by monsters, ancient magical superweapon in the form of a little girl, etc. Lots of gore and explosions and general violence.

Read (comic collection): Harley Quinn and Power Girl (Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Stephane Roux, Paul Mounts): Power Girl has amnesia due to something in another series, so she’s hanging around Gotham with Harley Quinn when some low-level Batman villains use an alien artifact to teleport them to the Planet of Groovy 70s Free-Love Aliens, who are in a war with the forces of repression. The jinx that ensue are definitely high.

Read (novel): The Initiate (James L Cambias): A man whose family has just been killed by a demon is recruited to infiltrate the cabal of sorcerers who secretly rule the world with absolute power and absolute corruption. It’s pretty traditional magic, calling up spirits by chanting in ancient tongues on the right day of the week, etc, and also traditional is the problem with going undercover in an evil conspiracy. I saw the twist well before the main character did, because he didn’t pay attention to the error messages.

Written (game design): 289.