Tag: tv

Sage has this one covered.

Watched (TV animation): Knights of Guinevere pilot: Theme park dystopia, two down-on-their-luck mechanics find a busted princess mascot robot, or maybe the princess mascot robot, and adventure ensues. Seems like it has potential.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.2-3: The one with the plastic waste mogul and the one with the video game tournament. I’m glad they’re keeping Parker weird.

Read (manga): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Written (game design): 135:

Now that I think about it, reducing all characters, or even just all
PCs, to a handful of numbers isn’t very anticapitalist, so a quarter
point for getting rid of stats and also fixed skill lists? Maybe an
eighth. Whatever, I’m good with keeping it. Put what makes your
character different on the sheet, not what makes them the same. (Okay,
and a fallback, characters aren’t that different.)

Which is not helping figure out what magic does and how to write it up
for characters, although it does kind of suggest magic should be unique
rather than D&D-pigeonholed (no classes!). So we need a system to make
all kinds of magic in a way we can actually play, which is either a
story game or reinventing Hero.

This is why people hate theory, isn’t it?

Got it covered!

No office today, I had to get my meatsack inspected. (That sounds way more risque than anything in my life ever has been.) Needs new chemicals, apparently.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.16: The season finale,which both follows on from the previous episode and explains why Harry isn’t there in the next season. And an actual OT3 moment, because measuring somebody for a robot body is true commitment.

Read (manga): The Essence of Being a Muse vol 1 (Aya Fumino): A failed art student finally cannot even with her mother trying to get her to be normal and the horrible people at her office job and feeling like she’s bad at everything, so she runs away, which works out surprisingly well so far.

Read (novel): Big Trouble, Little Earth (JN Chaney, Jason Anspach): The main character is a space trucker, but overall it’s a lot more like a crazed Feng Shui session with the GM’s homebrewed far-future juncture, with all the groundedness and realism that implies.

Read (manga): Succubus & Hitman vol 1-4 (Makoto Fukami, Seigo Tokiya): You know how I sometimes say something is lacking in redeeming social value? I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, I read this, but yikes. Content warning for everything bad that can happen to a human or small animal.

Read (short): Gorilla in the Groove (Murphy Lawless): Fated-mate shifters in Ireland, this time a gorilla DJ and a visiting dancer. There is some conflict, because it’s not Virtue Shifters, but mostly just mushiness.

Written (game design): 233:

If you’re thinking that I have no idea how to make a game
anticolonialist, anticapitalist, or antifascist without being Eat The
Reich, congratulations on being absolutely correct. Should I award
myself half a point for insisting that everyone has the same potential
to become touched, and forbidding special bloodlines? Should I take it
away again for making the creatures that stomp all over the land doing
things that make no sense incomprehensible ultrahumans instead of
people?

Is making the PCs mechnically distinct from NPCs (such as by having only
player-facing rolls, or even NPCs not have stats at all, like in FitD;
or by having some NPCs not have hit points) bad in this respect? Even if
the difference is allegedly only at the level of mechanics and not
reflecting anything in-character, it still lends the PCs a sparkle of
Extra-Specialness, which seems contrary to the spirit of the thing. On
the other hand, Eat the Reich is about literal vampires.

Story points or other metacurrency have a similar problem with forcing
the story in a particular direction, which seems wrong. This ties into
the thing with not rewarding PCs for being good (morally) since then
they’re not making moral choices, they’re just grubbing for points. I
have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m not actually an emergent
story purist, I don’t think, despite liking Play To Find Out What
Happens.

Still playing Shop Titans, I hope that counts!

Did some work, had an initial 1:1 with New Manager T, gave Nightvale some ‘nip so he freaked out. (I offered some to Sage but she didn’t care. Apparently food is her vice.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.14-15: The one with the train heist on the greenwasher, where Breanna gets to be gay, and the one with Harry’s ex-family and the alarming ending.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 5 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The one with the zombies and the duel. Things are getting serious.

Written (game design): 396:

I don’t want generic zombies/skeletons, or even skleltons, because
there’s not much point to any kind of generic monster, let alone one
that’s just a bandit PCs don’t have to feel bad about killing. Maybe
corporeal undead are different depending on where their body was
abandoned? Or just always different, but it’s nice to have some thematic
consistency between monsters and their environment. D&D notwithstanding,
incorporeal undead are just various forms of ghosts. I feel like ghosts
should have more memory of their life, wandering corpses can be more
ravening.

Oh, but what about vampires? Are they even undead? Seems like a clear
case of monster-that-used-to-be-person, even if they were disanimate
for a while. I think it’s fine if they are kind of alive, even. Multiple
kinds of vampires! Multiple ways to become a vampire! All of them are
terrible, none of them are cool! And not all of them drink blood, this
is the category of wandering corpses that are fresh enough to still have
their memories and personality. Instead of draining your blood to turn
you, they can drown you in a bog until you mummify or set you ablaze
with the eternal flame or whatever.

What can ghosts do? I don’t think we have levels, so no level drain, but
whatever spirits can do, which is, um, well…

What even is a spirit? I strongly believe that a witch’s familiar
is a spirit, not a Disney princess cute animal friend. You can have a
cute animal friend, it’s just not a familiar, although maybe the
familiar could be possessing it, or manifesting in its form. So there
are spirits that bring magical knowledge from… somewhere. Maybe the
same place as answers to necromancers’ questions, which is to say the
accumulated memories of everyone dead? Which doesn’t tell us what
spirits are. I don’t think I want to go the Exalted route of everything
having a spirit that can be called up and talked to: that is not the
vibe I have for this setting. I mean, maybe there are spirits, but they
aren’t people, you can’t have a conversation in words. Unless they’re
ghosts and have a personality!

So apparently spirits can manifest in the form of living creatures, and
possess living creatures. What else? I really like the image of a wizard
with a bandolier of cages containing spirits that can be set loose to do
things, but maybe those are more like elementals? Are those different?

We’ve wandered far afield from figuring out how magic works. Maybe
that’s too hard for now and we should think about what kinds of magic
there are instead, or otherwise brainstorm weirdness. (Weirdness tends
to be specific, and show-don’t-tell, so it makes the setting less open,
but that’s fine.)

Different kinds of magic are probably practiced in different areas,
since communication isn’t that great? Maybe there are printing presses,
but is there a scholarly community that likes flaunting knowledge at
each other? Probably not, since magic is immediately useful. Do we have
nation-states that hoard military knowledge? Maybe not, I’m picturing
more like ancient scrolls of martial arts techniques, except not
necessarily ancient.

Does magic actually work differently in different areas? On the one
hand, that would definitely be weird, and entertaining to watch PCs deal
with, but on the other, it would be a lot of work to come up with
multiple ways for magic to work that didn’t just randomly hose different
characters in each zone. Maybe minor differences, though? Does magic
come from living dungeons, and that’s why it’s different in different
places?

Is everything living dungeons? Is everyone a monstergirl from a living
dungeon? No, probably not. If nothing else, things like people becoming
monsters should be global, so there’s some underlying world even if
there are plenty of additions (incursions? I think Trophy Dark took that
one) piled onto it.

It sure seems like all news is bad news, so I guess that would follow.

Went to the office, only Coworker K was there, did some work, ate some chicken nuggets.

Watched (animated TV): Helluva Boss 1.1: Not sure about the number, this is the redone pilot that is more like what happens before the first episode, but 73% less gonzo and funny. I’m not at all sure this is a better introduction

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.13: The one with the hurricane and Maria.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 4 (Sai Naekawa): Main character and her two monsters go to basketball camp, where of course there is more horror, and also the mermaid insisting she’s a monster and doesn’t like the MC at all.

Written (game design): 284.

Hi Sherilyn!

Had a dream about the main character of the project I haven’t been working on. It had name-brand superheroes and wasn’t anything like the situation she’s in, but still. Maybe I should work on that. I figured out the emotional arc of the main character, but it’s getting to the point where I should be starting over to include all the stuff I’ve figured out and that would be the 3596th time I’ve started over because I don’t actually know how to write.

Went to the office, ate some pork and veggies and rice but had to leave the rest to call a customer, learned about a new product, gave some advice to my coworkers.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.9-10: The one with the librarian and the one covered in bees. Are Harry and Sophie going anywhere with this?

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 1 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): I remembered liking this a lot when I read it in 2012, enough to hunt down pirated scans of the volumes that didn’t get published over here, but apparently I remember it too well now. Will probably finish rereading what I have, and then we’ll see.

Written (game design): 291:

The creation could be ongoing: surprise, there’s a new god! Or a
new school of magic! Or swinging back the other way, a new curse. Or
every month, in the dark of the moon where no one can see, the gods add
a new hex to the edge of the map.

Being able to explore new regions can come in many forms. Maybe the new
regions are actually newly created, but maybe the gods have provided a
gate to another world, or a bridge over the sea of corrosive mist to the
next island. Maybe someone has invented a new kind of transportation
(boats! riding moose! bigger boats! flying carpets!) or protective gear
to travel across the Vast Deadly Desert surrounding Oz (or maybe just
shoes).

If the PCs have better travel ability, but everyone they meet is better
at murdering, then they aren’t likely to be colonialists, but might have
to worry about being colonized. That would be a different game than
fantasy adventure, I think. More like fantasy Star Trek, which is not
bad, but are we digressing from the original goal? We could be
discarding it as unworthy, but I think we’re just digressing.

Back to bad things happening, what if instead of new gods, we lost the
old gods? Any pantheon can drift off into space, but should these ones
plummet to Earth, leaving mountain-range-sized bodies of divine flesh
and lakes of holy blood, none of which leaves things unaltered? Probably
not; I’m stealing that from a smutty webcomic. Also I already did a game
where the entire landscape was smushed beneath the fallen palaces of
Heaven.

Which brings us back to not knowing what to do or how much to do it, but
at least it was an interesting tangent.

There’s one that takes some explaining to the youth!

I took today off to go to Roseville but then that fell through, so now I’m just useless all day.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.7-8: The one with the privacy-destroyer and the one with The Mastermind.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (game design): 532:

Other ways to have magic that people know but don’t understand are a
dying earth setting (arguably a subset of post-apocalyptic), which I
like generally but am not leaning toward in this case, and magic being
just plain beyond human comprehension: if you exactly follow the instructions
laid down by the Great Seer in antiquity, you get the miracle, and if
you change them at all, you get somewhere between nothing and disaster.
Incomprehensible magic is arguably what D&D has, since “work with the GM
to make something new that you hope isn’t broken” isn’t a rule. There’s
no question that unalterable menu magic has its advantages, but
admitting that’s how it works in-character is meh for worldbuilding.
(Merely pretending it’s not, as D&D kinda does, is meh in general.) If I
were smart, I would be able to make up multiple magic paradigms and how
each one explains the other, and then everybody could feel not only like
they understood magic but that they were smarter than those other guys.
In the real world, however…

I never explained how people turn into monsters or how monster powers
work, because I have no idea. so at least I’m not as explainy as I could
be?

Leaving this to ferment for a while, back to Actions. I realized that
although I was thinking of the thirteen moves (Act Undetected, Analyze
Something Complex, Befriend Someone, Build, Repair, or Sabotage
Something, Influence Someone, Mingle with the Crowd, Patch Someone Up,
Read Someone or a Situation, Scour a Place for Information, Scramble
Around, Spout Lore, Travel to a Different Place, Work Magic) as
analogous to Dungeon World basic moves, but they don’t have to be.
There’s always Act Under Pressure (maybe needs a better name?) for when
somebody doesn’t have a specific Action. But having the specific Action is
better (in ways to be determined, besides probably getting a higher
rating).

Is this our equivalent to classes? Just like you pick a couple of Traits
based on your ancestry, you pick a couple of Specialized Actions, away
you go with your niche protected? Seems like it could work. Actually,
there might even be Specialized Actions from ancestry, although most of
the ones I can think of are just narrative positioning (if you don’t
have a small body, you don’t have the werewithal to wiggle through the
tight opening, have some +D.)

There could of course be even more specialized Actions with the
regular SAs and appropriate backgrounds as prerequisites, for more
esoteric magical or psychic or martial arts or detective or whatever
abilities. These would include some narrative permission to do the
thing, so characters of vastly different specialties might not even be
able to roll Act Under Pressure for them.

Do we need to split Act Under Pressure into a couple of still very
general Actions? Do The Thing and Find the Clue? But the GM should just
give out the clues, right? Maybe Spout Lore? But I’m not sure Remember
Pertinent Facts Under Pressure needs to be broken out. Maybe Think Under
Pressure in general? How often would that come up? I have no idea!

I wish I remembered my dreams better, some of them are pretty good.

Went to the office, ate some veggies and meat and rice and veggies, had too much meeting and didn’t like it, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.6: The one with the Martin Shkreli stand-in and Breanna’s speech about fandom. (Did she come out as queer there, or just allyship?)

Read (manga): Spy x Family vol 14 (Tatsuya Endo): Ski cabin mystery! Then Anya’s first school dance, and a lot of backstory on secondary characters and the horrible war.

Read (novel): Demon in Disguise (Deborah Wilde): Main character has come out to just about everybody she knows, is at least tentatively back together with her ex, time for everything to go bad and end on a cliffhanger.

Written (game design): 328:

So you have the fancy temple wizards, who draw circles to establish
holy domains and write the true names of gods around them and recite
genealogies back to Creation or cite the exact section, paragraph,
and clause of the Celestial Ordinances that applies, etc, etc. They can
make something happen right away, or bless your weapons, or whatever.
Wizards who aren’t so fancy take longer to make spells, but then they
can stash them in their rings or toads or whatever for later use. Some
don’t bother with storing spells and evoke spirits to follow them around
and do stuff for them. Alchemists don’t cast spells at all, they refine
philosopher’s phosphorus or whatever by actually refining it. Mystics
and martial artists also don’t cast spells, but gain special powers over
body and mind by rigorous training and self-discipline. (This is
completely different than the way people get special powers when they
turn into monsters, how dare you.)

Is this too explainy and mechanical? I don’t want to be as completely
vibes-based as some story games (cough DW Wizard’s primary move cough),
because players need to be able to plan in at least a slightly crunchy
way, but it is magic and shouldn’t be boring like D&D. Do I need to go
full post-apocalyptic “we can turn it on and replace the batteries if we
find new ones but no idea how to repair it”?

(D&D is advertised as medieval, but it’s really a combination of
Renaissance (cities, inns, cash economy) plus post-apocalyptic (perilous
ruins, incomprehensible artifacts) plus Wild West (murder-hobos, clear
the subhuman savages to expand civilization). Various editions have
emphasized different aspects: 1e was relatively heavier on the Wild West
since it was supposed to transition into domain play but the
colonialism aspect has faded over time; 4e was more post-apocalyptic
with the “scattered points of light”, etc. I’m also leaning toward the
post-apoc genre, since ancient magic going haywire is a great excuse for
monsters and other problems.)

I really should do that soon, once I figure out how to decide which vet to go to.

Spent all day being sleepy, but did a little bit of work anyway. Will I manage to avoid staying up too late tonight? Magic 8-Ball is skeptical.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.4-5: This time Amazon tried to throw us into S3, but we were wise to its trickery. Back in the days when Breanna and Harry were still trying to fit into the team, bringing justice to a crooked real estate developer and also haunting the crap out of some guys. Who needs boys, anyway?

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 4 (Mai Naoi): Hey, look, an example of a functional relationship that’s not a traditional Japanese upper-class marriage! But they have a huge house and everything! Will our poor MC get the hint? Probably it will take more life experience, but she’s moving in the right direction.

Read (novel): Hemlock & Silver (T Kingfisher): Not as horrifying as A Sorceress Comes to Call, but far from horror-free. A scholar who specializes in poison antidotes is drafted by the king to investigate why the young princess is ailing after her mother and baby sister were murdered, because royalty always have to suspect poison, but no, it’s all so much worse than that, and only the main character’s T-Kingfisheresque practicality saves the day.

Written (game design): 251:

Another way of doing resisted rolls for social skills would be to let
people have levels of resistance to various kinds of influence, which each
add +1D (the materials the person doing the influencing has to work with
are not as suitable). This would be extra complexity because we still
want the general opposed-Actions mechanic for general opposed Actions,
but it would let us get rid of Actions that only exist to oppose others.
That is probably a win, since adding Difficulty isn’t complicated.

Speaking of Difficulty, I should make explicit that lacking any of the
(ever-increasing) requirements, background, tools, materials, time, work
environment, physical and mental faculties, etc, etc, can give you +2D
or more if you’re very far from what you need, like trying to do an
hours-long task in moments.

They Frolic.

Went to the office, ate mild masamun meatball curry, did a work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.1: Amazon, what are you doing?! But that explains why some time seemed to have passed. The one with the dictator and his debutante daughter.

Read (novel): Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe (CB Lee): Interdimensional meet-cute, followed by more cuteness but also impending doom which ties into one girl’s family backstory and there are feelings and conspiracies but overall it’s really pretty cozy.

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 3 (Mai Naoi): Yuri-fantasizing girl continues to be extremely traumatized by the existence of this man-thing she has to marry, although other people seem to be able to deal with him just fine and he’s drawn with a face when she’s not there an everything. Also, scenes from the very gay lives of the women she sketches. Best Friend is kind of sus, but I think we saw that before.

Written (game design): 221:

We can definitely come up with lists of potential consequences for
the specific Actions, since they’re more constrained than “Act Under
Pressure”. Another possibility is allowing partial success: “They’re
your friend now, but only as long as you keep the presents coming,”
or whatever. “Act Under Pressure” is by definition for things that
aren’t as interesting to play out in detail, so it can be pass/fail.

Now we’re back to having to construct the list of Actions, because the
one before wasn’t good enough. And we haven’t even gotten into actions
for fighting a guy.

Oh, another possibility for the results of Actions is that you could
give the GM some kind of metacurrency, which they can then spend to give
you a failure later, or some stroke of horrible luck. GM metacurrency is
tricky, since it has to be distinct from what the GM can do normally
according to the rules of the game, but on the other hand, how great is
it to have a stack of Quantifiable Doom to taunt the players with?

Not sure what that’s about, but it sounds spooky!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.3: The one where they ruin the casino emperor’s plans. We’ve had the lawyer guy for three episodes and the new hacker for two, and they both seem good. It’s probably even good from a story standpoint to get Hardison off-screen, since he’s just too powerful. Also, we’re not even pretending Parker was ever neurotypical now, which is an admirable facing of reality.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 3 (Syu Yasaka): I thought for sure I had read vol 2, but I cannot find anywhere I wrote it down, or find the actual book on my shelves. Anyway, there’s a romantic rival, but she cannot stand up to the pure love between our main characters, and also we get to see what the other MC is thinking, which is not really any different than one would expect from the genre. Can they somehow work it out?

Written (game design): 299:

Meh, no need to get into the weeds of specific classes at this point.
What are the components of a DW character in general? Name, Look, Armor,
Hit Points, Damage, Alignment, Abilities, Bonds, Race, Starting Moves,
Coin, Gear/Inventory, Advanced Moves, Advanced Advanced Moves, XP. Also
Basic Moves and Special Basic Moves.

Name and Look being small picklists is sort of like the thing I
mentioned earlier about having some pregens so people can grab a cool
character and get stuck in, which is great, but I have already spent too
much time talking about it. Bonds and Alignment get you XP, also great.
A lot of DW descendants ditch Alignment in favor of Drive or some such,
which I like, because I don’t like Alignment. I don’t want to throw
shade on these important bits, but they’re not really what we’re looking
at now, since they’re already not D&D.

We already stole class-based damage dice for XZQJY and they aren’t D&D
anyway. Hit points have to go. In Apocalypse World, everyone can take an
equal amount of harm, which isn’t all that much (attacks do 1-4, maybe
5, and 4 harm is a fatal wound, IIRC). I’m good with everyone being able
to take the same amount of damage; clinging to life is a function of
heroism, not muscles. There’s a move for beating people up, so keeping
the damage die as actual damage is fine. Hit Protection that refreshes
after every fight, get wounded when you take damage past that, get taken
out if you’re double wounded or if you take X past your HP. Maybe a
basic move to keep going even when you’re technically dead?

Squamate! Squamate! OK!

Went to the office, attended an all-hands where none of the (minor and completely surmountable) problems could be construed as the fault of my team, ate a rice pork burger-shaped thing that made me vaguely queasy, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.2: Still chasing the opiate billionaire, Hardison has to bail to the other side of the world but look! there’s a new hacker that he vouches for. (We knew this was coming, the actor wasn’t able to commit to the whole season.) She has good ideas, though, and an appropriate regard for Parker.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 8 (Hiromu Arakawa): The complicated city-wide murdering scene is over, now all the characters are regrouping. So many characters, who are all these people? But many of them are entertaining people, so it’s okay.

Read (novel): Primer for the Apocalypse vol 1 (Braided Sky): Alien magic and the system will come to Earth, but right now a time mage from after the point has escaped back and is trying to rebuild her power so she can protect her family, without giving away that she will be able to time travel. Bog-standard litRPG.

Read (short): “Trap Line” (Timothy Zahn): An SF story in the old style: a human gets into trouble among the stars and has to figure out the problem and work with some aliens and against other aliens to save the day. In this case, the problem involves astral projection.

Written (game design): 465:

We could do Harmony-based magic like XZQJY. (When you spend a while
in meditation, roll with Mysticism. On a 10+ hold 5 Harmony; on a
7-9 hold 3; on a 6- hold 1 in addition to whatever the GM tells
you.) But we don’t actually have to, there are plenty of other options
for non-battery magic. Like, enchanted or cursed places/objects/monsters
have a Weirdness rating, and you can do any feat of magic (ie, cast any
spell) equal to or less than that Weirdness, but if you roll a 7-9 on
using magic, you can’t use that aura of strangeness against for a while,
and if you roll a 6-, it definitely gets to turn your spell back on you
or possess you or curse you. Or, the gods inscribe spells on the inside
of your skull, but when you roll 7-9 to cast one, it gives you a
concussion and on a 6- maybe you suffer serious brain damage. The
possibilities are endless!

Is it 10+/7-9/6- based on 2d6? It could be 0d6 to 4d6, keep the highest,
6/4-5/1-3, and that’s still officially PbtA. There’s a recent big FitD
fantasy release, Grimwild, though. Let’s stick with 2d6 for now and just
say you can’t roll at more than +/-4.

Back to classes. Cleric and Wizard are the only spellcasters. Druid is
all shapeshifting all the time, which doesn’t need to change. Bards can
spont a few magical effects, but I’m not sure we need bards at all. Any
spellcaster can have singing as their special effect, and any character
can try to seduce all the things.

Actually, can anybody seduce anything? “Hot” isn’t exactly a personality
trait, so there’s not an ability for it. We could make being good at the
D&D stats into moves you can take, though. Brute Force (move and break
things, maybe roll with Aggression), Striking Looks (seduce people,
maybe roll with Focus since paying attention to someone is allegedly
seductive), Educated (you know all about something, like the Bard’s
move), Unkillable, etc.

Back to classes. Do we want thieves? Anybody can sneak up on someone and
murder them without a roll if the fictional positioning is right, but
thieves can have specific moves for it, that’s fine in DW. Not sure
about paladins. Probably not barbarians, they seem OP and/or not really
suited for a party. Having been around since AD&D notwithstanding,
they’re kind of in a different genre.

I keep talking about wizards instead of The Wizard and such, which shows
a lack of commitment to PbtA, but I’m waffling over whether to have
classes like that, or classes at all. Pick one of the major beginning
moves (spellcasting, signature weapon, animal companion, etc), another
from the general pool, and away you go as some unique weirdo?

The best day of all!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.1: Nate’s dead, but they got a new white guy with connections, who seems okay, and a an alternate-timeline Sackler to ruin: so far, so good. Sophie and Eliot look about the same, Parker and Hardison are noticeably older. Parker is still the best.

Read (manga): How Do We Relationship? vol 1 (Tamifull): Two college girls start dating and then have to work out all the problems of the relationship, like being stuck in the closet door, libido mismatch, being in the same band, past romantic trauma, boys who think they’re lovely, etc, etc. Also they have to go to classes and stuff, which really cuts into their having-feelings time.

Written (game design): 331:

(cont from yesterday)

The second scenario has fewer variations, but is (to me and my tiny
brain) more difficult to begin with: A is moving across the battlefield
to shank somebody, and C is stopping them by shooting them (or
throwing a grenade at them or casting a spell on them or whatever
method that doesn’t involve being physically there). Does this work
at all? I can think of three ways to do it: knocking A down/sending
them flying, forcing them to take cover, or wounding them so they
can’t keep running (including by killing them).

Door #2 is simple to apply: A makes a morale check (however that works).
It can even be added to the others, which opens up the possibility of
everybody who got wounded during a round making a morale check. That’s a
different ramble, though.

Earlier, we said getting knocked down wasn’t a big deal because a
round isn’t a second-by-second accounting of every motion. You get
knocked down, you get up again, you keep running if you still want
to. Maybe if you get knocked down enough it can take until next
round to get up and do anything. Now we need to quantify getting
knocked around and Strength and Size and everything, but honestly
we kind of needed to do that anyway, since fantasy is full of people
getting clobbered by ogre clubs and run over by wagons and crushed
beneath falling portcullises and what-not.

That leaves C wounding A enough to stop them, at least temporarily.
I’m good with taking a wound being enough to interrupt whatever you
were doing, but we don’t know whether A is actually wounded until
we apply all Attack dice at the end of the round. Even if we separate
out the dice from getting shot halfway through the turn (not
impossible, although it’s yet another thing to remember until the
resolution phase), do we then have to discard the others (and any
dice A might have attacked someone with at the end of their move)
and move A back to wherever C was able to shoot them? And how likely
do we want to make it for one attack to be enough to wound someone?
Will ranged attacks be OP then?

I mean, the orcas seem to be doing okay, but if they have buddies, that’s fine.

Did not go to the office. Went to the dentist instead to have my thin layer of new gum tissue certified (no actual certificate received). Put off making any kind of decision on bridge (ugh) vs partial denture (ugh) vs nothing (ugh).

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.15: Nate gets to be an unreliable narrator, but gets closure for his original motivation and exits Leverage in a much less self-destructive way than we expected, leaving our OT3 (as much as there could be an OT3 on TV in 2012) to start diverging the timeline. The End!

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 2 (Canno): Reread. Switches to following some other students with they various love geometries, but the pair from vol 1 are there in the background. They’re not as interesting as the original pair, but it sounds like the next volume will switch back to them.

Written (game design): 523:

There’s two scenarios I’m looking at for moving around in combat
and stopping other people from moving around, that the system needs
to support. (I think, or maybe this is something that would never
happen with real players, but it’s what I imagine.)

The first is the very basic round where Character A is running
across the battlefield to shank somebody, and Character B (with
higher Readiness) reacts by moving to stop them. How does this work?
Our rule of thumb is doing things should work unless there’s a good
reason, and the character with higher Readiness should probably be
in control of timing and engagement, so maybe blocking just works.
A is going to have to deal with B in some way (murder, intimidation
(morale check), whatever).

Does it matter whether A is running down a narrow passage/through a
doorway, or across a wide-open space with room to maneuver? For this
basic case, probably not. B’s in the way, A has to deal with that.

What if B had lower Readiness, but declared they’re going to stop
whatever A is trying to do because they hate that guy? Is that even a
valid declaration? Maybe it’s not; if B wanted to be able to react to
A, they should have rolled more Readiness. But what if B declares
they’re going to get in A’s face? Can A use their higher Readiness to
just run away? That doesn’t seem right: B had to decide first, but the
action is happening at roughly the same time. Opposed Get Over There
rolls, I guess?

What if A is coming out of a narrow tunnel into a wider place and
B is already out there? Or vice versa? In that case whoever has the
better Readiness gets to decide whether they meet in the tunnel or
the open space. (If movement wasn’t always 1 zone, we could have
arguments about how A only has to move 2 squares to get out of the
tunnel but B has to move 4 squares to get into the tunnel to block them
up; good on us for avoiding that nonsense.)

What if it’s all in a narrow tunnel, but A is a big strong human and B
is a weak little goblin? Does B get run over if they try to block? This
is where we need to figure out how Strength and Size work, although we
also have to allow for the possibility of B tripping A or anything else
cleverer than body-blocking.

Once the blocking is sorted, though, at the end of the round A and B can
use their melee attack dice on each other unless they avoided contact
completely.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried it. Sounds good, though!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.14: The one with the toys for Christmas.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 2 (Wataru Mitogawa): More girls join the cast, if not Dorothy’s harem. More vampire mooks get murdered, more popes are shady AF. (Okay, really it’s the same number of popes.)

Read (novel): Bunny Girl Evolution vol 1 (Sir Bedivere the Mad): Isekai LitRPG, MC is incarnated as a cute bunny, violence and conspiracy and predation and evolution ensue. Meh.

Written (catgirl): 235.

I’m sure they mean musical instruments, but what if they don’t? Is Uncommon Instruments the title of my new YA fantasy trilogy?

Went to the dentist to have my tooth looked at because it seemed dodgy on x-ray, they said it would have to come out soon so I had them take it out right there. Now my mouth is weird.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.12-13: The one with the mindfuckery and the one with the winery.

Read (manga): Gunbured x Sisters vol 1 (Wataru Mitogawa): She’s a sadistic, horny monster-hunting nun. She’s a free-lance monster hunter looking for her missing sister. Together they play out dom/sub scenes kill vampires. I’d say it’s completely lacking in redeeming social value, but even though it’s secondary world, it makes the Catholic church look bad, so that’s something.

Written (catgirl): 155.

Are there even sysadmins any more? It’s all Site Ops or Dev Ops or whatever now, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely makes me feel old.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.10-11: The one with Sophie and the painting and Nate and Sterling while everyone else is in the previous episode, and the one with the big-box store and Elliott’s backstory.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 2-3 (Nakatani Nio): The one who’s in love is getting more in love, the one who thinks she’s aro (not in those terms) has various feelings, there’s kissing anyway, school life happens, there’s a tragic backstory, etc.

Read (novel): All Roads Lead to the Phoenix Princess: Rebirth as a Wind Cultivator (Erios909): Reincarnation cultivation isekai, in the world of a MMORPG but without any game mechanics. Our protagonist does a lot of murders (arguably justified), uses OP game knowledge, attracts the attention of powerful people due to her unusual nature, starts accumulating a harem despite not showing interest in anyone, levels up repeatedly, all the usual isekai protagonist  stuff. There are obviously intended to be many more books, since there’s five years to save the world from the disaster that sets up the game world, but it’s self-published on Kindle Unlimited, so knows?

Written (game design): 438:

Now that we’ve reduced saves down to a single Save (shades of Perils
& Princesses!), back to HP. Losing HP is some amorphous combination
of fatigue, luck running out, and minor injuries (or other effects)
that don’t add up to a wound. It recovers quickly compared to wounds,
but how quickly? After a good night’s sleep? After a lunch break? After
a few minutes of rest?

It may be ridiculous, but I like the idea of rolling HP each time. The
meanest way of doing that would be to roll when the fight (or whatever
excitement goes against HP, like a trap) starts, but that might be too
much. Maybe roll at a reduced die size if you haven’t had a full night’s
sleep or lunch break? If you roll really badly, you can always take
another rest and reroll. Either take the higher of the roll and current
HP, or keep rerolling until you get a higher number. The latter
encourages people to keep resting until they get a really good result,
but wandering monster rolls and resource limits would keep that in
check.

Rolling HP each round is awfully appealing, though. Obviously with
this option the dice would be smaller than with the result of one
roll having to last a whole combat. It would be another roll each round
along with initiative though, unless we combined them somehow. When
we’re going from low to high initiative, are we actually just going from
low to high HP, giving it an element of battlefield awareness? I like
that, let’s try that.

The range of dice for HP depends on the range of dice for attacks, which
I imagine as being d4 to d10 to start with, like Dungeon World.
Increasing the die size, and getting more dice so you can beat up more
people at once, would be power-ups or advancements or whatever we’re
calling them. Getting more dice of HP would also be an advancement; not
sure about increasing the size of them. Or maybe they don’t all have to
be the same size; if you have 3d6 and to buy a d10, sure, go for it.

I’m okay with armor being a penalty on (appropriate) wound dice, but
what about shields? Extra HP is obvious, but then you also get extra
initiative. Is that too weird? Probably. Maybe a shield is a fixed
amount and only rolled HP count as initiative. And need a new name.

Double miss.

Stayed home, did some work, listened to some twitch streamers playing Minecraft, ate a salad.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.9: The one where the OT3 foil a terrorist attack. I guess we weren’t as cynical about blowing off the law in the interest of alleged national security in 2012.

Read (manga): She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 5 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): They are still cooking and eating, but also moving in together (despite renting an apartment in Japan apparently being super-obnoxious) and even hugging! Also their friend with the eating disorder finally talked to a professional about it. Go them!

Written (game design): 423:

The problem with reading OSR blogs is then I start wondering if
dungeon-crawling might be fun, actually, and whether resource
constraints and inventory limits might make it more interesting.

D&D doesn’t seem to have dungeon crawling any more, just travel
montages between the set-piece level-appropriate encounters, and
for the most part, the only resources are character abilities (since
of course if you were able to buy resources that meant anything in
combat, you’d be OP for your level). There isn’t even a need to
worry about light, since almost everyone has darkvision and almost
anybody can get infinite light cantrips. Encumbrance is so fiddly that
it usually just gets ignored, too. This is why I want darkvision to not
be on the list of options for PCs, and also slot-based inventory (and
not just because inventory slots can get filled with wounds and fatigue
and maybe curses).

What do we expect PCs to do? (Obviously players can do anything
they want.) I like the idea that being able to spend MP also causes
trouble, the more trouble the more adepts you have and the longer
they stay in one place, so PCs either wander or are based out of a
temple/dojo/fortress that’s warded or remote or both. But what do
they do as they wander around? Or more specifically, since this is
heroic adventure fantasy, what kind of threats do they fight? People
who turned into monsters? 13th Age-style living dungeons and the
things that come out of them? Heretics with wrong magic? Celestials
shirking their afterlife duties in the mortal world? Inexplicable
walking dead? Pre-apocalyptic magic that has curdled over the ages
and now does something only vaguely like supporting a highly-advanced
civilization? Alien invaders? Your mom?

Actually all of those sound fun, alone or in combination. (Renegade
angels from outer space! Heretics worshiping an ancient city spirit so
it builds an ever-growing temple! A PC’s relative who has been consumed
by evil deeds and become a manticore!) Not all of them can be fought
directly, but that’s fine. At least some of them involving going into
sketchy confined areas where the inhabitants hate you, so that’s also
fine.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!

Apparently I’m not British enough.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.7: The one with the car guy and the Mafia guy.

Read (manga): FAILED. Because I suck.

Read (novel): The Lies Arcana (Glynn Stewart): Seventeenth or so in the missiles-in-space-with-magic series, following the diplomat we picked up in the last couple of books and the spy ship captain from a while back. Despite the massive undertaking from last book, there is a whole lot that needs to be done, and also some secrets revealed both in and out of character.

Written (game design): 274:

If HP is Hit Protection, is MP Magic Protection? Conjuring up a
lightning bolt to throw at someone probably goes against their HP,
since you’re trying to hit them with something, but trying to put
a curse on them, or otherwise targeting them as a person, could go
against MP. Is using the same stat for defense and fuel bad? On the
one hand, it would cut down on the numbers on a character sheet (or
the associated postit note for numbers that change a lot), but on
the other hand, it would be a weird dynamic in combat. I’m not sure
spending HP for martial abilities is correct when it’s defense and
not health, or ever, so there could be an annoying inconsistency,
but I’m not sure it’s not, so ugh.

An alternate flavor for MP could be synchronization with the flow of the
cosmos, which gets disrupted when you push on the cosmos to do magic.
The hit from overspending might be more wild magic-flavored than soul
damage-flavored, but otherwise the implementation would be about the same,
just less metal.

Another difference between HP and MP would be that HP can be recovered
in combat, or at least pretty immediately outside of combat, since
it’s “just” energy and alertness. I’m not sure how fast MP should
recover, though. Maybe it’s okay to also recover quickly? It depends
on how much you can do with a spell, I guess, that determines how
powerful being able to cast spells all day is. What does “powerful” even
mean when there’s more to life than level-appropriate encounters?

Every day is kitten day, for every nation! [gavel emoji]

Went to the office, had a chat with New Boss² A (he did most of the chatting), had a chat with Newish Boss³ M, ate a Beyond Meat wrap, finally made progress on the thing I’ve been putting off. The explanation for Former Boss² B’s dismissal was kind of sus, but I don’t know enough to refute it.

Beyond Meat sounds like it should be delivered by TARDIS from the far reaches of the continuum.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.10: Despite all the changes made for TV, it did end in the same place as the first book, so that was good. There may have been Feelings. Also, set design! I hear a second season has been approved, although no idea when it will come out or what it will cover.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 3 (Sai Naekawa): Rival girl monster makes a strong showing with the dramatic gesture!

Read (short): “Hart-Struck” (Murphy Lawless): It’s an entire Virtue Shifter novella compressed into one scene!

Read (manga): Lonely Castle in the Mirror vol 5 (Mizuki Tsujimura, Tomo Taketomi): The dramatic conclusion, in which we find out what everybody’s personal deal was, and also what the deal with the castle was, and what happens when there’s a wish and everything. The End!

Read (short): “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” (Martha Wells): A non-Murderbot (but ART) story, somewhere between Artificial Condition and Network Effect, where we see what kind of stuff ART’s crew gets up to and also maybe ART has a feeling.

Written (game design): 372:

Other magic I don’t like, even though it does something instead of
plusses, is remove curse/dispel magic. A proper curse should take more
than a single generic spell to get rid of. Likewise, unenchanting
something enchanted should take more than a single abracadabra. We spurn
the level-appropriate adventure, negative (or positive!) consequences
don’t have to be gone by the next morning to keep everything calibrated.

I also dislike detect magic, although that might be a matter of
presentation. We need more enemy mages appearing as hundred-handed
god-monsters in the astral realm and fewer color-coded arrows, but that
may be a lot of work for the GM.

Related to remove curse, I want to unify curses, diseases, and poisons
conceptually and mechanically, but I’m not sure how. It’s either a minor
issue that can be put off, or a key to the entire system.

For that matter, I don’t even know exactly what to do with the kind of
wounds PCs are expected to accumulate. When the enemy’s attack roll
exceeds your remaining Hit Protection, you take a hit, but what does
that mean? Are you out? Do you go through some degrees of woundedness
before being taken out? Should there be something like a roll modified
by how much attack exceeds HP, so that a better attack hurts more? I
like that because it offers the possibility of varying the results based
on whether you’re a huge dragon, or a slime zombie with no vital organs,
or whatever.

A lot of OSR systems have Dismemberment & Disfigurement tables, or
something named very similarly, to roll on when you take a serious
wound, but I may be too attached to my characters being cute to go for
that. We are assuming some kind of healing magic, though, so temporary
disabilities are fine.

I don’t think I want healing in combat, but that opens up the whole can
of worms about what magic is available and how fast it can be cast. It’s
not fantasy adventure without fireballs, but ritual magic is overall
more interesting.

Every day is Chocolate Day!

I slept way in (and had more dreams than when I was sleeping in Roseville, which suggests I need to fix something here) but did manage to go chocolate grocery shopping and read Katalepsis. Should probably have done more shoppings, but whatever. There’s always tomorrow.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.9: We thought there were ten episodes, but nope, looks like the end! Also, Dr Mensah has reached the levels of badassery she started with in the books.

Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 20 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, finally a new volume! It’s mostly recovery over Christmas vacation for all the characters after the last plot arc, plus small talk with the gods of Britain, foreshadowing of doom, mistletoe smooches and talk of romance, etc.

Written (game design): 366:

One thing I noticed about Pathfinder that’s probably not as annoying as
the others is that you have to recalculate every number on your sheet
every time you level, because level is the most important aspect of your
character. It would be unseemly for a 1st-level character to get more
than +1 in any bonus type, but by mid-levels, you have to be able to
stack bonuses to roll skills at +30 or +40 (or so I hear). Over here in
the land without level-appropriate encounters, we don’t need
ever-increasing target numbers–hey, we don’t even have target
numbers!–so do we even need levels? There are two things that come with
levelling up: bigger numbers, and more/better abilities. And I guess more
uses of abilities, which is a combination. Since we have a single value
for magic points instead of different trackers for every ability, the
equivalent would be reducing the cost.

Since spending MP is doing damage (to your own soul) I was thinking
it should always be random; costs are d2, d3, d4, d6, etc. It’s
magic, you can never be certain how much you can use without hurting
yourself, or whatever taking a hit from overspending MP is. (It has
to be painful, so casting a spell for 1d4 MP when you only have 2
left is a hard decision.)

It’s hard to quantify some aspects of how much D&D characters improve
from level 1 to level 20. Since NPC numbers improve as the
appropriate level for the encounters improves, the chance of success on
a skill or attack doesn’t change much (until you get to things like
expertise in 5E), but they get about 13-15x in HP and something like
5-10x in weapon damage (spell damage is just a mess with area effect vs
various groups, damage types and resistances, etc), which seems like a
lot. HP (Defense? Guard?) and attack dice are more a measure of skill,
though, so I guess it depends how many regular soldiers a hero is
supposed to be able to hold off for how long.

Watch me agonize about how much characters should improve and then end
up recreating the D&D curve.

Sadly, all piloted by the Loch Ness monster. In further depressing news, it’s Second Half of the Year Day, which means we are now and forever more closer to 2050 than 2000.

Went to the office, ate some scallion pancakes rolled around meat and veggies and some sesame balls, did some work, got notes in everything that might become active before next Wednesday, set my email and Salesforce to OoO.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.5: There seem to be a lot of guns around for the UK, but I guess most of them are coming from the government thugs. I have definite hopes for who gets shot next.

Read (short): “Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow” (Shveta Thakrar): The power of stories, and also snakes.

Read (novel): The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks): Another in the recent subgenre where part of the world goes weird, in this case Siberia, although it has a Great Train running through it to have steampunk capitalism vs mystic landscape.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 4-5 (Ajiichi): Love confessions all over! Apparently there’s only one more volume in which to get everything sorted.

Written (game design): 329:

D&D combat is very much putting all the pieces, whose rules are
public knowledge, onto the chessboard in plain view of everyone,
each in their own square, and then taking turns moving exactly one
piece at a time from square to square and applying one of its rules.
There are definite advantages to doing it this way: when the sorcerer
takes her turn, the barbarian is absolutely in this square and the
evil pharaoh is absolutely in that square, so there’s no question
about who’s in the nine squares of the thunderwave. Easy for newbs,
consistent results, no need for judgment calls. But there are board
games for that, some not even explicitly based on D&D.

I want something that’s slightly more like being in a haunted cave
while a giant worm monster and its pet sewer cannibals try to eat
your face. It’s still a tabletop game, it’s not going to be that
much more, but some would be nice.

Instead of having each unit activate, take its turn, and then freeze
again, we can separate declaration and resolution. From worst initiative
upward, each character declares what they’re doing, but they can declare
they’re getting involved (either for or against) in something that’s
already been declared. Then everything gets resolved more or less at
once, which may involve some judgment calls on the part of the GM as to
how far the human charging toward the wizard gets before they get
intercepted by the war bear, or what have you. This does want a new
initiative roll every round, so we might not want to have everyone
do double-digit addition ever time. My hope is to make a round a larger
chunk of the combat, though, so a heavier end/beginning of round
procedure might not be as bad.

Positioning should be looser, not down to the minimum space a
medium-size combatant occupies. I don’t know whether we want to be
as loose as 13th Age, which has zones of one standard move, and
then combatants can be engaged (adjacent) if they’re in the same
zone, or at a specific point like blocking a doorway, or just
somewhere in the zone. Maybe like 10′ zones, so anyone in a zone can
interact with anyone else if they want without having to take a move
action? That might still be too finicky, though.

Definitely one of the world’s great inventions.

My errands did not go as smoothly as they would have if I were competent, but I did eventually get them all done. Sweatily.

Ugh, nighttime jackhammering on the next block. I put on clothes so I could go find out what their deal was, and they say the jackhammer is only through tomorrow night. After that, they bring in the heavy equipment.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.4: Wow, these people are terrible. I guess it really must be impossible to fire civil servants in the UK.

Read (graphic novel): Rainbow vol 2 (Sunny, Gloomy): I hadn’t read this far in the Webtoon, so it was all new but still cute except for horrible mothers. Also, the end! I was not expecting it so quickly, but two big fat volumes is not that short, and the lesbians and their dog got some happily ever eventually.

Written (game design): 352:

What is a hit point, anyway? In war games, it was how much abuse a unit
could take before it lost cohesion or sank or otherwise became
irrelevant to the battle, which is fine, especially when you have
several or many units to deal with. Not as great when the unit is a
single person you’re allegedly identifying with, which is why early D&D
had the arguments about whether losing hit points meant running out of
luck or getting wounded, and how to square either view with what happens
when a 15th level fighter falls off a 100′ cliff. More recent editions
seem to treat hit points as a video-game health bar, where running out
means you’re defeated but otherwise there’s no meaning to any value or
change in value. Even getting the “bloodied” tag at half hit points has
been dropped.

Several OSR games like Cairn and Into the Odd have redefined HP to be
“hit protection”, which is what keeps you from actually taking a wound,
which is at least implicitly option A. Other games relabel it as
“guard” or “defense” or something along those lines, same thing. I like
this approach in general, although requiring the victim to make a saving
throw vs stabbing to avoid a wound instead is very tempting. It would
make combat way less predictable, though, which is more realistic but
less gameable.

Some games have variable HP: if your class and level give you 4d8 HP,
then you roll 4d8 every morning, or even at the start of every battle,
and that’s what you have. I find this idea entertaining, although
players who always roll below average might not. For extra fun, don’t
roll until the first time you get hit.

I am definitely not going with the suggestion I found on one OSR blog
that you start with a lot of hit points but can never regain them, so
your fate is always approaching. There are games where that would fit,
but I’m pretty sure this is not one of them.

Fuck yeah, Wobblies!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.6: The one with the 70s flashbacks and the twist.

Read (manga):I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 4-5 (Yutaka):The overnight study session episode, which veers more into standard rom-com with accidental contact, unintentionally hot borrowed clothes, jealous fiancees, etc, but then back to doing bad things and fraternal conflict for a bit before the summer festival yukata episode.

Read (novel): A Broken Darkness (Premee Mohamed): Our viewpoint character has not really moved on from his feelings at the end of Beneath the Rising, but that’s too bad for him because the world is in danger again, or maybe still, and the person he hates still has some claim to being the only person who can fix it.

Written (game design): 245:

Something the OSR talks about is “tactical infinity”, the idea that you
can use actual tactics (ie, cheating) and have it be effective. D&D
gives lip service to this, but clever tactics can’t actually be more
effective than the abilities granted by your class levels, or you’re off
the power curve and the level-appropriate encounters aren’t appropriate
any more. This isn’t so much of a problem in a home game, but D&D as a
branding entity wants to have a consistent experience across the
published adventures, Living Whatsit sessions, etc, so no incentive to
encourage going off-label.

By the same token, opponents are limited, not just individually to the
actions on their character sheet, but globally to some set of mechanics.
If the GM sets up a battle against ghosts that are immune to physical
damage, that’s not cricket because then everybody’s attacks they got
from their level don’t help and the calibration is off. However, if we
yeet the idea of level-appropriate encounters and having to fight
everything in set-piece battles with only what’s on your character
sheet, it’s fine. If you can’t beat up the ghosts, you can go around them
or come back later with exorcism incense or buy them off with cow blood
or just not go that way, there’s probably nothing interesting over there
anyway.

Hopefully includes air conditioning for our friends on the East Coast!

Went to the office, the train worked out okay going but I need to change it up on the way back, ate some meat and veggies and rice and tea egg, did some work, told other people how to do work.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.8: Uh oh, Murderbot has a plan. And yeah, I thought we hadn’t had the name reveal until now!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.5: The one with the cheerleaders and the federal government. It seems pretty obvious what Nate’s plan is, but we don’t know his motivation yet and there’s probably a twist.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 7 (Yoshimurakana): The unwholesomeness from last volume is still going on in the background, but now Kuroko has an entire terrorist organization to murder, so that should keep her occupied for a bit.

Read (manga): I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 3 (Yutaka): Oh no, someone else has noticed that our heroine is smoking hot and apparently also bi!

Written (game design): 320:

Leaving the primary spell-casting classes aside for the moment, what
other combined classes do we need, if we need classes? Fighter,
barbarian, and ranger are basically the same, they just have different
combat feats/fighting styles. (D&D rangers have spells, but I think
that’s just shoehorned in because as previously mentioned, everything is
spells. Two-weapon fighting and animal companion are more central to the
class.) Paladin and monk are more magical, but again, it doesn’t have to be
spells. Innate powers seem just as fitting, and possibly there’s not a
difference between those and advanced combat feats. Again, I’m okay with
nobody being able to claim punching through a brick wall isn’t magic.

There’s a school of thought that holds that D&D jumped the shark
when thieves were introduced. Suddenly, there’s a class that has
Climb Walls, Read Scrolls, and Backstab on its sheet, which means
all the other classes don’t. 3rd ed somewhat reversed that by
making most of those things skills that any character can have, but
the idea that you can do what’s on your character sheet and can’t
do things that aren’t was pretty firmly embedded.

The major thief ability that didn’t get turned into a skill is Backstab,
which has also gotten progressively genericized until now it has nothing
to do with stealth or surprise or distraction, and just gives a damage
bonus if the thief has a buddy nearby. This is as lame as calling them
“rogues”. It’s not that great to make only one class able to get an
advantage from ambushing people, though. Stabbing your enemies in the
back is a basic tactic, not a superpower. So, thieves are part of the
fighter superclass, differentiated only by the feats they take.

That’s another thing we need a list of, or several lists, or a tree or
something.

Yay! It’s a day for me! I’m a stupid guy thing!

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: The sending to Renwick’s grad student doesn’t produce any results after an entire fifteen minutes, so the Reshelving Squad sets off into Bibliospace. Somewhat later, as they cross the vast empty savanna of young adult romance, they see giant scavenging books circling in the sky way over there. It seems like a long walk, but Lilli conjures a divine meerkat that indicates that’s the way, so they go, and find a grad student, half-dead from the lack of serious literature, crawling across the landscape. This is Hannibal, Sophia Sharpe’s research subject assistant, who has been sent to find them and lead them to Renwick’s. This works great until, while fording the famous Stream of Consciousness, they are all swept away by a surge of best-seller nonsense and washed into a deep cavern on another plane. Which plane? The Library of Sobek-in-Chains, where Bob the Mummy sits on his throne, lording it over his army navy of crocodiles, and dominated in turn by the dark overlord Walter, of course! The fight is not much fun, because Bob has very annoying magic and everything is difficult terrain, and poor Lilli gets death-rolled, but Grimm can subvert the other crocodile, and Walter is only there in the form of seventeen books in a trenchcoat, which Lilli’s shoggoth is optimized against, so eventually Pergamum prevails. Finally, the Squad arrives at Renwick’s. Of course he can work out a variant on the spell that will trap Walter forever, but of course he needs someone to go fetch the fourth book of a famous three-volume set first.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.6-7: Well, this is going quite far afield from the books! Also, the armor is giving SecUnit black-bordered word balloons.

Written (game design): 235 of rambling nonsense:

D&D defines a broad genre, but only a few elements of setting: wizards,
elves, swords, drow, dragons, dwarves, taverns, gods, ancient ruins,
orcs. (Maybe this is why it’s become the default Generic Fantasy setting,
although being amplified like a virus in video games and being adjacent
to LotR probably helped too.) It leaves open who the PCs are, at least
in theory, although somehow being an adventurer usually overshadows any
background and everybody starts with the same 3d6x10gp or standard class kit
or whatever. Is having the PCs set apart by their ability to use magic
consistent with this or not? They usually set themselves apart by their
behavior anyway, even if the GM has some idea of Renaissance social
roles (D&D hasn’t been medieval in decades).

The overarching question is, what do we need in order to replace D&D?
(Not worldwide, I don’t have that much hubris; just at one table.)
Anti-canon ancestry covers most of elves, dwarves, orcs, drow, etc,
unless someone is deeply attached to a specific feature from a specific
D&D edition that I don’t like (ie, darkvision). Any game can have kings
and castles and swords of one shape or another. I guess we’re back to
figuring out what wizards, gods, clerics, etc are like. Oh, and dragons,
because I also have opinions on how everything in D&D is a species
and/or one of an unlimited number of the same.

I shouldn’t underrate it, but Juneteenth would be a more compelling holiday if the 13th Amendment didn’t legalize slavery to this day.

Working so everybody else can take the day off, which is why I didn’t have to work last Friday. Looks like a lot of customers also have today off, though, since there is not a lot of work coming in.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.3: Unsurprisingly, the person in charge of spies is Too Clever By Half (the extra half is thinking that nobody else is clever at all).

Read (fanfic): Take These Tower Stones (hermitknut): Non-canon sequel to The Goblin Emperor, covering the next year or so of Edrehasivar’s reign, from various points of view. It did not entirely please me for reasons that are hard to articulate. I think it’s that the author clearly wanted to get the AO3 tag and the other AO3 tag in there, and did, but they were just events without much of a narrative arc? Which obviously is an example of noticing most readily in others the faults we ourselves have.

Read (short): “The Name Ziya” (Wen-yi Lee): An antimetaphor (reification?) of the colonized giving up their identities for success in the colonizers’ world, and seeing their culture appropriated as fashion.

Written (game design): 223:

There’s no such thing as an hereditary ability to use magic. Anybody
can learn to do magic if exposed to the supernatural: cursed by a
sorcerer, near-death experience, lost in the cursed wood for three days
and three nights, haunted by ghosts, kidnapped by faeries, even
deliberately inducted into a wizard school or priesthood. Most people
don’t have an experience like this (and don’t want to), which is why
they aren’t PCs.

Everybody who can spend magic points (soul points? attunement? mojo?)
has something they can spend them on to push their natural abilities,
chosen at character creation. Extra movement or talk to animals or see
ghosts or something, not fireballs. Again, could be due to your ancestry
if you want to spin it that way, or a leftover from your origin story,
or whatever. That’s another list to create, along with actions, starting
feats, and saves. We haven’t even gotten to classes yet.

Earlier I was complaining about all classes casting spells the same way,
so how do we fix that? What spellcasting classes do we even want? Since
spellcasting is no longer how all powers are implemented, we can ditch
ranger and paladin, leaving wizard, warlock, sorcerer, bard, cleric,
druid. Four groups: magic from a higher power, a weird power, being
part monster, or actually learning spells with your actual brain.

Success!

Cleaners somehow jammed my balcony door. It looks like it’s on the rails, but doesn’t move. On the other hand, when I can get to the balcony, there’s a hummingbird nest near it now.

We have two people out this week, so I have to actually the do the work. Tragic.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.2: Draco Malfoy, MI5 agent (the one who framed our hero, naturally).

Read (novel): Seekers in the Void (Glynn Stewart): New series, jackbooted corporate goons who control all FTL travel and the xenoarchaeologists who need them to get to the dig. Doom ensues, along with a subplot that shows (IMHO a little too strongly) that the author has read Murderbot.

Read (fanfic): The Stairs Beneath the Heart (hermitknut): Fanfic of The Goblin Emperor, various bits behind the scenes of the events in the book, about secondary characters and their adapting to all the changes and the new emperor’s eccentricities &c.

Written (catgirl): 267. No game design today.

That’s every day, for humans!

Went to the office, did some work, ate a torta or at least picked out the insides.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 2 (Yoshimurakana): More horndoggery, more crazed killers, a murder mansion, still no redeeming social value.

Read (short): Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells): Murderbot solves a murder mystery and is still the best.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.5: What’s up with this new character?! Marith and I suspect different things about them, which could both be true.

Written (catgirl): 270.

Insert mockery of the current regime here.

Missed my train stop but still made it in to the office, Coworker D is on vacation, ate some popcorn chicken, had my first 1:1 with Boss T.

Watched (live action TV): Leverage 5.3-4: The one where Nate doesn’t listen, and the one where Eliot helps Parker have an emotion.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 1 (Yoshimurakana): A mass-murdering lesbian horndog kills criminals the police can’t handle in a city named R’lyeh. It’s over-the-top action-horror, not cosmic horror despite the Lovecraftian words scattered around, and all the monsters are nominally human, but it’s not surprising SAN is in generally short supply. Very unwholesome, zero redeeming social value.

Read (novel): Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky): It’s not a Hal Clement novel, but probably as close as we get in 2025. Two unfortunate explorers from a von Neumann corporate dystopia are stranded on a world that’s a cross between Venus and Titan and have to trek across the alien terrain full of alien creatures to get off. It’s more xenobiology and xenopsychology than chemistry and physics, though.

Written (catgirl): 198. Oh, that’s what was behind that door.