Also Film Your Pets Sauntering Day.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.6: Not a new concept at all, but reasonably well-done. I’m glad Cassandra got to keep the [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and hopefully she still has the [SPOILER] as well.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 236.
Logged in to work early to attend the meeting about using AI in our company. I managed to hold on by muting and yelling at the screen for a while, but then someone started going on about “when Claude is an AGI” and I had to drop. Holy shit, why are people so dumb? (People, of course, are going “holy shit, why is Trip so dumb?”)
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.5: For a brief moment, it looked like Ezekial and Jenkins were going to get along, or that Flynn was going to return, or that Cassandra was going to go full supervillain, but no. Still pretty good, and further confirmation about Dulaque.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 283. Do I need the astronomy knowledge now? Maybe I can put it off longer.
Check! Also National Cheese Day, but cheese isn’t really good for cats.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.4: That’s one way to handle the plethora of Yule spirits, I guess. Also to oppress Baird, but blondes deserve more oppression, right? Also, I don’t think I caught before that the master villain is Dulaque.
Read (novel): Catch and Kill (Craig Schaefer): Cyberpunk plus magic, apparently the future of the “Harmony Black” series or a possible future of an alternate timeline of it. A tightly-knit team of a mage who was never understood at university, a hacker who’s turning herself into a catgirl, an ex-soldier, and an ex-military killer robot (sexy lady subclass) get mixed up in horrible skullduggery with corporate psychopaths and rival wizards. Much better than book Shadowrun, made me think of Carl Shadowrun.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 159.
If the dinosaur is not large enough to carry you comfortably, riding a tandem bike with them is also acceptable.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.3: That was actually better, without the chief librarian to solve everything and tell everyone what to do. I also liked the way the thing was written, very much like a Fallen London status that modifies all your cards until you get rid of it somehow.
Read (novel): Splinter Angel vol 1 (AvaritiaBona): Isekai litRPG, a bodyguard is pulled into fantasyland where she gets an OP bodyguarding class and starts leveling up while trying to find out what is going on with having been sucked into another universe. The gimmick of this one is that the MC is, if not a sociopath, personality disorder of some kind. She’s not mean, but she’s extremely unfussed about violence and also not great at peopling.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of Geometry for Mutants): 302.
The Man don’t want us doing the Chicken Dance.
Got Thai food, but I got the very mildest for Marith, and it turned out bland and nobody was happy.
Watched (live-action TV): Good Omens 3.1: Meh. I guess I see why the producers had to wrap it all up in one episode and wash their hands of it, but it could have been a better one episode.
Read (light novel): This Alluring Dark Elf Has the Heart of a Middle-Aged Man vol 1 (Yuhi Shimano, NAJI Yanagida): Pretty much what it says on the tin. A modern-day salaryman is reincarnated as a beautiful young dark elf woman with huge tracts of… magical power, but still thinks of himself as an old guy while making his new adventuring life with impossibly young teammates.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of new project which is now Geometry for Mutants): 461, but the way I wrote the edit counter, I get a lot of credit for moving chunks around. I’m not sure how to fix that without a lot of work.
If you don’t, it’ll mean war.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.2: And the first adventure is concluded, the world is saved, but pretty much any other pair kissing would be better than that.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 18 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Speed Boy finally gets into the cursed board game, bearing important information… one round too late. Now everything is even more doomed.
Read (novel): A Journey in Other Worlds (John Jacob Astor): Written in the 1890s, about life in the year 2000. It is of course horrifyingly racist and sexist by our standards, but has all-electric everything, habitable planets throughout the solar system, a project to straighten out the Earth’s axis so the climate is always perfect, and Christian antigravity. The end goes into interplanetary afterlife theory, which seemed vastly unnecessary to me, but I guess men hadn’t yet discovered writing without exposition. An artifact of its time.
Written (rewrite of new project): 159. But although this new way of doing the thing is definitely better than the original, I think it’s not good enough yet.
Are bats themselves seasonal, or do they need a separate season reference?
Kind of did some work, I guess. Having energy and being awake is hard.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.1: Marith’s right that it has Dr Who energy with the cheesy verve, but it’s really really not Leverage, and I can’t help comparing them since it’s the same director and some actors.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 11 (Kaoru Mori): All Smith and Talas and company this volume.
Read (novel): Sloppy Firsts (Megan McCafferty): High-school drama, but even though the protagonist is straight (ew, boys), she is charmingly misanthropic. Written as her actual diary entries and letters to her long-distance best friend, so there is some unreliability to the narration, or at least a lack of strict chronological ordering.
Written (new project): 264. Sage helped by deleting a paragraph so I had to write it again.
I shall name her… Pointy-Bob! (Shrieks of anguish in the distance.)
Tried to go to the office, but failed due to being weak and feeble. Slept in a bit more then worked from home. Sage was extremely helpful.
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.8: Yeah, fuck that guy anyway. Anyway, end of Drum Island arc, but also end of the season. I hope it’s still doing well and Netflix doesn’t cancel it just to avoid paying the writers.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (game design): 180:
It’s also less dramatic and more hitpointy to have most conditions be
tiny so we’re back to whittling down the enemy. But now it’s harder to
keep track of, so that’s not a win. Fewer more significant conditions
is both more interesting and easier to play. You can have a defense
that burns away the incoming Entangle or whatever, but it has to be a
technique you paid for specially, or else you have to spend an action
or some other resource to try to do it as a maneuver.
Does the same go for emotional attacks? They’re kind of like physical
attacks but with different conditions and ways to get rid of the
conditions, but tend to affect decisions rather than combat stats,
so even a minor one can be interesting. There’s also the difference
that if you remind someone of her lost mother to make her distracted
but then punch her, the condition is likely to disappear, or change
to “must clobber this jerk who punched her at a time of great
emotional vulnerability”. Also you can’t just take the action “bring
up the villain’s long-lost mother”, you have to figure out how that
ties into their emotional weakness, which has to be written up some
useful way on their character sheet, just like yours.
Speaking of weaknesses, which we postulated as being necessary to get
around the issue of an attacking 12d6 powerset mostly not doing much
against a defending 12d6 powerset, how do those work? How do you find
them, what do you roll to exploit them, is having your weakness
discovered a condition? Technically it only helps the people who know
about it, but we can presume everyone blabs about everything all the
time.
Or is it a positive condition on the people who know about it,
granting them extra power instead of nerfing the person with the
weakness? For something like knowing where the weak spot in someone’s
defenses is, that seems wrong, even if it worked out the same
mechanically (which it probably wouldn’t, since attacks roll and
defenses are flat). There might be other advantages that should be on
the attacker’s side, though, plus of course any buff would be a
positive condition, with ways to apply and remove and effects while
active.
Positive conditions have the same concerns as adjustment powers in
Hero, namely that we don’t want one buffer to make everyone else
unstoppable, or want to make it mandatory to spend ages buffing
before a fight to be competitive. This isn’t a computer game or D&D
3e, or even Ars Magica. Probably you can only boost someone’s
effective powerset level up to the level of the powerset you’re using
to boost, or a minimum boost of +1d6 if your level is at least half
theirs. Or something along those lines.
So, mermaids in Pride shirts?
Today started off with an excellent technical discussion of a really complicated bug, but then was followed up by a customer actually encountering the bug. Computers, how do they even?
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.6-7: Oh, that’s who that silhouette in the original crew sketch was supposed to be. And his tragic backstory!
Read (anthology): SNAFU (ed Geoff Brown, Amanda J Spedding): Collection of military horror stories, of variable quality, length, interestingness, subgenre, etc. I liked the magical WWII one, but it had plot elements I am weak against.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (game design): 111. Ugh.
I really really hate to admit it, because I hate commuting, but I think I do get more work done at the office. I’m not sure this was the case in earlier years, but the second time it is not the same office, and I am not the same productivity unit.
Also did not get Marith a pizza.
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.5: Finally they’re done with the assassins on Dinosaur Island, so surely everything will be fine now!
Read (game): Dank & Dark (Philip Reed, Lex Morgan): A complete (though very small) TTRPG published as a board book like little kids read. It’s a hack of Tunnel Goons, which was already quite minimal, so 24 pages with large type and illustrations still contain the whole system, several monsters, and three (small) dungeons. And, it’s okay if your players chew on it!
Written (game design): 122 on the old stupid thing.
Named after the quirkily-titled country song, “Drinkin’ Whiskey at Theatres All Over the Damn World”.
Did some work, learned some kubernetes, got sat on by some cats.
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.4: You know it’s an adventure when they get to Dinosaur Island! Which naturally has its own plots going on.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 3 (Kaoru Mori): The random English guy sets out to observe somewhere else and meets a girl. Everything goes terribly, but there are lots of landscapes.
Written (game design): 273:
Is any of this getting us anywhere? Not until we have an actual system
for generating levels and strengths of conditions based on dice in attacking
and defending powersets, and a list of possible conditions and ways to
clear them. And that’s only the start.
Conditions:
– wounded
– dead
– knocked out
– stunned
– immobilized
– stuck in place
– blind/deaf/etc
– power weakened or negated
– disarmed/focus removed
– compelled to do something
– compelled to not do something
– poisoned
– tripping balls
– completely mind-controlled
– floating in mid-air
– growing infinite extra arms
– on fire
– possessed
– infested
– drained of life force
– insane
– turned into a vampire
– petrified
– teleported away
How many of these overlap? Possessed and mind controlled do, and
there are a bunch more horrible fates that are basically the same.
Some, like poisoned and infected, go in the same bucket but include
a huge variety of potential details. Well, except that disease,
like being on fire, spreads, but that’s an add-on, or maybe a third
column to choose something from although I’m not sure what else
would be there. Making a zone full of the effect, perhaps, which can
be combined with making it sticky. There are probably other similar
enhancements that I will think of later.
Sadly I’m not very crafty so I mostly just buy hats. Possibly I should buy more different hats, although then I’d need outfits to go with them, and that way lies madness.
Went to the office, had a lot of meetings, resolved a long-running customer issue by doing a different thing (that’s probably more in line with their policies anyway), officially received my 0% raise for not being a rock star, ate some brisket hash with fried egg for lunch, learned some Kubernetes.
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.3: Yep, that was just about as doomed as it looked.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 2 (Kaoru Mori): Wow, Amir is so much better off away from her old family.
Written (game design): 210.
Also Children’s Plays About Frogs and Sparrows Day, Vanessa Was Abducted by Aliens Day, and Propose to a Panther Day. (No word on whether the panther must be pink.)
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.2: That is a big whale. And note that they did not defeat it by running it out of hit points!
Read (graphic novel): Clubbing (Andi Watson, Josh Howard): Apparently I read this before, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. A teen goth from London gets exiled to the countryside all summer for Crimes, where she meets colorful characters and more crimes. Still not sure if the final bit was supposed to be real or just the MC making things up.
Written (game design): 118. Apparently I’m not very smart.
Got 2/3 of the way up the stairs before having to rest, did some work, ate a bento, met with a customer and did not solve their problem but at least they aren’t stuck in Dubai any more, tried to use awk, did not learn any kubernetes. The trains were all late on my way home, but it all lined up anyway and I was able to feed the cats so they could eat before Marith came to scare them away.
Watched (live-action anime): One Piece 2.1: Weren’t all these bozos defeated already? But we have a new foil for Roranoa, so that’s good.
Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 20 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that happen to the Statue of Liberty.
Written (game design): 295:
Hero does have an array of defenses: PD, ED, DCV, MDCV, Mental
Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Desolidification, Damage
Reduction, Presence, Damage Negation, Deflection, Barrier, probably
Strength, Teleportation, any attack count at least for getting out
of conditions. They usually apply to everything unless there’s a
specific limitation or mandatory gap in applicability like Desolid
or Deflection have, because nobody wants their defenses to not work,
and “I’m a brick!” is enough of a special effect for many of them.
There are three different kinds of defenses here, though: make the
attack roll harder (DCV, Deflection), reduce effect (PD, Presence),
or break out of the effect after it’s happened (Strength or
Teleportation vs grabs, any attack vs Entangle).
If we’re putting more of an emphasis on defense, should we be going
back to the idea of the defender rolling instead of the attacker? I
had a better name for this than “saves” but that’s what they were,
divided by ways of getting out of trouble. They can have different
mechanics, though. Like, you can dodge, which is chancy but negates
the attack entirely if you succeed, or tank it, which is easier but
only gives you extra defenses which might be enough. Ignoring the
attack gives you a bonus to whatever else you’re doing, if you’re
still able to do it afterwards. Slipping the punch is essentially
tanking the attack. If we’re using zones where most movement is within
the same zone, then diving for cover is probably a variant of dodge.
Deflecting an attack to another target is also a variant of dodge.
Diving to shield someone is tank+move in the way that dive for dover
is dodge+move. With an appropriate special effect, you could absorb an
attack or otherwise transform it into a different effect. Emotional
and mental attacks probably use the same options, with varying levels
of metaphor. And then there’s removing an effect that’s already been
applied, like breaking an Entangle, or slipping free of it. (Hero’s
Martial Escape that uses the same mechanics as busting free with
Strength but with a bonus to Strength based on skill is pretty
elegant.)
I have no idea how to handle something like Desolidification in this
paradigm.
But all of this is only loosely connected to conditions, or whatever
we do to track things happening to characters, and how they get
applied.
I meant to get up early and go get sampled, but instead slept in forever and then went. I expected the line to be horrendous, but no! Everyone else had gotten up early! So I got sampled expediently and went home and took a nap.
Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): Finished! That was extremely silly. Also the women were much cooler than the men, even if they were all pretty much tumbrel bait. But earnest tumbrel bait!
Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 36 (Tomohito Oda): Wow, multiweek study camp with just the two of them. And yet, so wholesome. Plus, Komi really is good at everything except talking to people, and she’s not bad at that here in the penultimate volume.
Read (anthology): Screams From the Ocean Floor (ed Heather Ann Larson): Assorted horror on, under, around, or vaguely associated with the ocean. Pretty much everybody dies. Variable quality, none of them outstanding.
Written (game design): 132:
Is there even room on the scale for No Big? In wargames, a missed attack
is generally a no-op, because there’s nothing you care about except your
target’s hit points. Maybe you shot up some piece of landscape, but
that’s irrelevant to your victory condition. Sure, the GM could try to
say that you accidentally broke something or someone important, but
that’s practically cheating. PbtA/FitD has only disaster, mixed success,
good success, with no option for nothing to happen, but that’s at a more
zoomed-out scale and player-facing mechanics. Whiffing your attack on
the enemy and getting pasted is entirely within the scope of a PbtA 6-,
even though in D&D it would be a missed attack where nothing happens.
“Realistically”, a lot of failed actions should do nothing much. The
missed energy blast goes somewhere, sure, but there’s a lot that
actually is irrelevant to the fight and can be summarized as general
property damage during the media phase of the encounter. But if we’re
talking about superheroes or supervillains, and we’re not doing a
second-by-second, meter-by-meter simulation of the battle, shouldn’t every
action have a consequence of some kind?
That sounds ominous.
Went to the office, climbed the stairs with only a few breaks, ate some jerk pork and plantains, did some work, learned some Kubernetes.
Watched (culture): The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre 2026): I had not seen or read this before because I have no culture. It is very silly, although I can’t help thinking that all these people should be in a tumbrel. We only watched up to the intermission because I was sleepy, but will definitely finish sometime when Marith is not dead.
Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 10 (Shinichi Fukuda): Cosplay Gal is going to have to be a lot more assertive than that if she wants to actually get lucky. I guess first she would have to decide whether she wants to.
Written (game design): 216:
I think they probably do. As I learned from reading the Internet, rules
and dice are for the uncertain parts of the game, where you need some
divinatory power. If you can just say what happens and it’s obvious, no
dice needed. So thrilling heroic battles, sure. You can come up with a
plan, but can you execute it correctly while someone is shooting you in
the face with a railgun? Roll for it!
But roll what? Hero has both to-hit and damage rolls, because D&D.
We’ve been talking about powersets in terms of dice that we roll and
count the Body on to determine the magnitude of effect, but should there
be a roll to decide whether you can even make that roll? We’re basing
this on Presence attacks (which don’t have a to-hit roll) and mental
attacks (which do). Since actions are now to inflict conditions, not do
some random amount of Stun and Body, we need some roll to determine
whether an attack goes overboard, or otherwise awry. Maybe it should be
called a disaster roll instead of a to-hit roll, since a bad roll
results in the wrong condition, wrong target, or both. Then the rule can
be that if the table can see a way for the action to go horribly wrong
without the character performing it having to be an incompetent schmuck,
there has to be a disaster roll.
Since the disaster roll determines who gets to decide on the nature of
the condition and where it goes, we still need the effect roll to
determine the level of the condition. Some conditions should be higher
level based on accuracy rather than (or in addition to) sheer power, but
I think we’re okay wrapping that into powerset dice as a measure of
effectiveness, not just raw joules of energy beam. There will also be
maneuvers/techniques that let you have more dice of effect for whatever
tradeoff, and you can probably have a limitation on some dice of your
powerset that you only get them if you can make a skill roll.
They can’t all be funny.
Ayse and Ken and Jus and Non went back home this morning, because they have to do work and school and all kinds of things on Monday. Dave and I stayed to entertain our hosts, or at least help Halloween Toddler throw more things down the stairs.
Played (card game): Buffer Time. After realizing we had been cheating before, we started playing correctly (it wasn’t a lot of difference) and eventually won a game. Losing the other games was approximately as fun, because it is a ridiculous and random game.
Watched (animated TV): Star Trek: Lower Decks 1.4-5: Still pretty great. Also, brain-sucking alien parasite!
Played (board game): Nippon Rails. A long and narrow crayon rails game. I am still very bad at these, because I cannot keep enough thoughts in my head to plan out a run more than one contract long. Also I forget to keep enough money in reserve to make all the rails I need and get stuck redrawing for four turns in a row to get a contract I can fulfill. Also also I suck.
Played (board game): Daybreak. We won on turn four, go us.
Played (board game): Codenames. It was very late, and we were not very clever.
Read (manga): VACATION.
Written (anything): VACATION.
Also Buy Nothing on the Blue Planet, which we violated only slightly by patronizing a FLGS and not buying very much. I would have bought some Fluxxes for Sherilyn, but I didn’t know which of the more than 37 varieties she doesn’t already have.
Played (card game): Buffer Time. Al got a copy of the Star Trek: Lower Decks card game for his birthday last spring or something but finally broke it out. It was surprisingly fun for a cooperative game where everyone usually loses.
Watched (animated TV): Star Trek: Lower Decks 1.1-3: Dave and I wanted to know what all the jokes were referencing, so Al showed us the first three episodes. It was pretty good! I’m not fannish, so I probably missed 90% of the references to the 900 other episodes of Star Trek-related material, but it was funny in its own right. I suspect all my characters are actually Boimler.
Played (board game): Lords of Waterdeep with Skullport and Undermountain expansions. I did okay, but came in– wait, I came in first?! I think I successfully dipped into the blue corruption skulls to get a bit ahead and then shed them, so I got all those extra points. Dave went heavy into blue skulls, and zoomed ahead during the game but then lost 84 points in the final accounting. Ouch.
Read (manga): VACATION.
Written (anything): VACATION.
No idea what that might be. Maybe aliens will bring it to us when they invade.
Went to the office, ate vat sausage and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, did some work.
Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.7-8: Season finale! Clever plans were executed, we got revelations about some characters, the day was saved, there are still plot threads unresolved, and of course a cliffhanger to keep the fandom buzzing until next season drops. Charlie shaped up a little, but still not great.
Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 21 (Kore Yamazaki): “Hey, Chise, can you help us investigate the mysterious dragon that appeared a couple volumes ago? You know about dragons, right?” And that’s how Chise became Red Dragon Queen of Wales.
Read (TTRPG supplement): SLIME beta (Mikey Hamm): Beta version of a Slugblaster supplement. Includes signature “devices” that are actually alien biology (including Monster Out, which reinforces my opinion that Slugblaster is the new TFOS), a few monsters, a few possible runs, and an all-purpose slime table.
Written (game design): 184:
We calculated that Def should cost 7 per point, but how about Res?
It’s like Def but only stops Body (which hasn’t been compressed)
so 1, but each point of Body is a bigger chunk of the whole, so
maybe it’s more like 2. (Should Def’s cost be changed? It’s based
on a ratio of 3.5 for Stun, which is roughly right, so it’s fine.)
That gives a brick who spends 60 points on defenses something like
7 Def (49 points)and 5 Res (10). A 12d6 attack can still do a little
lethal damage if it rolls up, which seems fine even if it wasn’t that
way in the old system.
Those costs are in old points, of course. If we make points bigger, then
it would be 3 for Def and 1 for Res. But I still don’t know if that’s
the right way to go. Which I guess means we should try it and see if we
run into problems later.
I still don’t know about ranks. It is an idea I really like, but
it makes converting some existing Hero powers hard. Maybe this is
a sign that those powers are poorly implemented? The ones that seem
like they would be most difficult to convert/need the most improvement
are Barrier, Change Environment, Clairsentience, Darkness, Enhanced
Senses, Entangle, Flash, Images, Invisibility, Shapeshift, Summoning,
Teleportation. That’s the ones that can be improved in multiple
ways independent ways, and the ones that deal with senses and sense
groups. (Senses and sense groups are another Hero thing that’s good
if you want to be micromanagey but not if you don’t.) I definitely want
to fiddle with Barrier to have better support for both forcewalls and
real objects, which may or may not require splitting it into two powers,
and as already mentioned, I want to make Change Environment more able to
change the environment, like making zero gravity regions. It may combine
with Darkness and/or Images, and we might also have to change how
environments are implemented outside of powers.
Also mild guacamole.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.10: The one where Parker does applied noir philosophy. Also apparently the last one, which we were not expecting. We ended up watching like half an hour of something else Prime randomly switched to because it also had Christian Kane and were very confused.
Read (novel): The Lost City of Ithos (John Bierce): Fourth of the “Mage Errant” series. More power-ups, more romance, lots more doom, at least 100% more tigers.
Read (manga): FAIL.
Written (game design): 194:
Hero already has a multiple attack action but it’s probably too painful
to be a good replacement for Speed as-is: full phase, half DCV, -2(N-1)
OCV for N attacks, lots of limitations on what combat levels you can
apply, what other maneuvers you can use on those attacks, etc, and
marked Caution despite all that. Since it’s full phase, it can’t be
combined with movement except moveby/movethrough. Autofire and spreading
can also be used for multiple attacks, but they require counting the
distance between targets, and are limited by how much autofire you
bought or how many DCs you’re willing to give up to spread, so not
easily generalizable to other multiattacks, never mind other kinds of
multiactions.
Speaking of full-phase actions, I’m not sure whether to move away from
that to a more modern system where you always get to move and do one
action, which might be moving further. I can imagine cases where someone
would need to hold still for a phase, like set and brace or
power-specific anchoring, but that can be handled on a case-by-case
basis.
I don’t have a lawyer, although I probably should.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.8-9: The one where Hurley has to cool the mark, and the one with the Effective Altruism polycule. Parker, or maybe Riesgraf, had way too much fun with that.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 15 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That particular alien invasion might be over, but something is definitely up at school. First, though, the grandma and her metal exorcists have to help a haunted student. It’s still not clear to me whether anyone except the PCs notices any of the rampant destruction. Also, a lead on the missing golden orb.
Written (game design): 246:
Looking at option #2, you could roll 3d6 for any effect roll. If
you make a 8-, great, you do well above average (5 Stun per die).
If not, if you make an 11-, good, a little above average (4 per
die). If not, but you still make a 14-, then a little below average
(3 per die). If you can’t even make that, then it’s well below
average (2 per die). Body is always Stun/3. (For an even distribution
it should be more like 8-/10-/12-, but 8-/11-/14- numbers most Hero
players already have in their brains.)
Or if we wanted to combine with the success roll, say every odd number
showing on one of the dice gives you a bump, and a 1 gives you another
bump. (Or reverse if you think only rolls that were easy to make deserve
to do better.) That’s 4/6 bumps per die, so 3d6 gets an average 2 bumps,
min 0, max 6. That range is too large for 1 per die, so it’s 2.5 Stun
per die plus 0.5 per bump. Body could be Stun/3, or dice-2 +1 per bump
with hard bounds of 0 and dice*2.
These both use a lot fewer dice, and the calculation can mostly be done
ahead of time (except when something like a haymaker or moveby adds
dice), but it’s more table lookups and the curves don’t match that well.
Isn’t that missing the entire point of nachos, though? You need the cheese and sour cream!
Bus was late even though it wasn’t raining. Went to the office, heard through the grapevine that Former Coworker T was fired for poor performance, which is a) bullshit and b) possibly grounds for a lawsuit, ate some green curry chicken, did what seemed like a lot of work. Train was late on the way home.
Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.3-4: Wow, Charlie is just relentlessly imbecilic. I think Marith’s right that this is the season where she’s going to drive everyone away. Also, Alastor backstory, much less sympathetic than I expected, and also full of mystery. No songs as good as “Gravity” but the Pentious/Cherri remote duet was nice. Jus will be glad that her waifu Velvette gets more screen time.
Read (novel): Into the Labyrinth (John Bierce): This is the series that Jeremy is stealing heavily from for our current campaign,but he also stole lightly from it for the previous campaign (the book Great Library is cooler, alas), so it keeps giving me flashbacks. It’s very heavily about the magic system. The main character is a boy with low self-esteem, which, yeah, relatable to likely readers, but did we have to? I think this is the same guy who wrote The City That Would Eat The World.
Read (manga): After God vol 6 (Sumi Eno): Still in the non-Euclidian palace, more Obikawa tragedy, some Tokinaga revelations, even some Waka backstory.
Written (game design): 349:
This finally brings us back around to the question of rolling a huge
pile of dice for effect rolls.
On the pro side, we know it’s playable, it produces the 3.5:1 ratio
of Stun:Body we’re used to, and it’s not complicated. It also produces
quantitative (or “quantitative”) numeric damage which is easy to apply
to anything, animate or inanimate.
On the other hand, it’s a lot of rolling and adding (movethrough!) for
results that aren’t particularly distinct, as is usually the case with
hit point systems.
There are a few ways we can approach this. Obviously the downsides aren’t
a complete dealbreaker, so we can just accept them in exchange for the
upsides. Roll between 2 and 30 dice, add up Stun and Body, away you go.
Second, we can try to come up with an easier or at least faster way to get
results in the same range, even if we don’t get every possible result.
(Does it actually matter significantly to gameplay that a 10d6 attack
could do either 37 or 38 Stun? Probably not.) EG, we could roll at most
3d6 and use a table lookup or some other operation to expand that range
of results to a reasonable range for more virtual dice. For bonus
points, we could combine this with the success roll, so 3d6 tells you
everything you know. EG, have a base Stun and Body per virtual die, and
then add a certain amount per die for every 1 you roll on the dice for
the success roll. (Or for every 6; maybe you should only get the extra
effect if the success was easy enough you could roll badly and still
make it.)
Or, we could change what an effect roll does (and probably how it’s
rolled). This probably comes down to conditions instead of hit points,
or maybe a short track of statuses. We need to keep some aspect that’s
strongly but not perfectly correlated with the number of dice (or ranks,
or however we rate an effect) for things like escaping from grabs and
maybe knockback, as well as the usual lethal and non-lethal damage.
Not sure what nation that’s from. Atlantis? Shangri-La?
Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.1-2: It’s finally here! 2.1 is the equivalent of the episode 14 recap in anime, which is fine, it’s been a while since season 1. 2.2 is where it gets going, with Sir Pentius in Heaven, which has some definite flaws. Also there’s obviously no continuing moral education requirement, although “Gravity” is a banger of a song and video. And WTF is up with Lilith?
Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 19 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Death! Dismemberment! Trauma! Disappointment! Hand jobs! More trauma! More death! Conceptual warfare! It is all extremely fucked up, both in how the world is and what people are doing to cope.
Written (game design): 259:
The skill levels from old Hero would, in our new system, be 1 point
(either one skill or a couple of skills), 2 points (all skills based on
a single characteristic), or 4 points (all skills). An overall level
that can be used for combat as well would be 5 points, and attacking is
just skills. So we could say a background that’s boring, I mean not so
useful for adventuring, costs 2 per +1, one that’s pretty useful costs
3, and omnicompetence (my background is that I’m Literally Batman) is 4,
leaving the decision of what’s less useful and more useful in a given
campaign to the table. Likewise, conflicting views of what’s included in
the same single-word descriptor can be settled by reasonable players.
But, is it Hero? Maybe it’s not. We consolidated characteristics, but
they’re just as concrete as before. Maybe making skills looser is the
wrong approach here and we should leave the skill list as is.
The base 11- for a skill costs 1 point regardless of what kind of skill
it is (except attack), but another point would get +1 for a full skill
and +2 or arguably even +3 for a knowledge or professional skill, which
is a little awkward if a skill level covers some of each. Do skill
levels not include knowledge skills? Just pay 1/2/3 points for a
11/14/17- with a specific skill? Is it bad to not have the intermediate
values? 6E only has even values for Stun and multiples of five for End,
so maybe it’s fine.
Holy crap, stop giving them ideas!
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.6-7: The one where Harry has to charm a dude, and the one where a speed trap catches more than the corrupt mayor bargained for. Bonus points for the villain in ep 6 being bisexual without any particular comment, and Harry going out with him without any comment, but points off for, well, villainous promiscuous bisexual. More points with no deductions for OT3.
Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 35 (Tomohito Oda): 97/100! Everyone would befriend again!
Written (Fantasy Hero): Finished up a 100-point character, sent it off to be picked apart.
Happy Happy Ayse Day!
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.5: The one where Tara helps them steal a Sophie Devereaux.
Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 5 (Aki Irie): The three legs of this series are Icleand, Lilja/Kei, and Michitaka’s crime drama, and in this volume we get all three. Also some shorts from the PoV of non-Kei characters.
Written (Fantasy Hero): Fiddled around some more. I’ll say it counts, but it wasn’t much.
Learning is good!
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.3-4: The cryonics one and the pool one. I like that they’re showing everyone has been cross-training all these years. Also, Parker is apparently all-in on the transhumanism, so I have my next Eclipse Phase character. (Yeah, like I could play that.)
Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 14-16 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Denji is becoming more of a major character, but the other main character for this arc is just as hopeless at humaning as he is, so of course they have to go on a date and also get attacked by devils a lot. Really creepy horrible devils that show why 35% of all deaths in Japan are due to devil activity.
Written (catgirl): 117, and even that took staying up until forever o’clock. I’m not good at this writing thing, am I?
Also National Family Bowling Day, which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Squid & Cuttlefish Day. (That’s like Frog & Toad, only with more tentacles.)
New Manager T tried to explain the brilliant plan she received from above, but we didn’t understand, so suddenly we have a mandatory in-office meeting on Monday with Newish Boss³ M. This is not filling me with optimism. How do resumes work again? (It’s 2025, they don’t work.)
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.1-2: The weekend in Paris, and the one with the crooked judge. I know they try to not do murders, but that house in France would have been an excellent site for an orbital bombardment, if only Hardison hadn’t wasted all of S2 failing to set up an orbital domination array.
Read (manga): FAIL.
Written (catgirl): 107.
We’re still at the level of lightly tweaking stuff we pick up off the ground, but I think that counts.
Went to the office, some people were there, ate rolled-up beef and onion and rice noodles and bean sprouts, did some work.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.12-13: Two-part season finale! You come at the Sophie, you best not miss!
Read (graphic novel): Teen Titans: Raven (Kami Garcia, Gabriel Picolo): Hey, if being half-demon was good enough for Merlin…!He probably didn’t have to deal with high-school crushes, though.
Written (catgirl): 298. I am rewriting a bunch, but if I actually delete the old words, instead of commenting them out, then my word count will be inflated in a way that feels bogus, even though I determined when I wrote the counting script that deleting is just as important as adding.
I saw one butterfly the other day. That’s not really the right number to see. I think I’ve seen more hummingbirds, which is kind of alarming given their relative sizes.
Did some work, sat on a call with a customer forever but did fix their problem as much as it probably could be, forgot to eat lunch. Should probably die in a pit.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.10-11: The one about the grad student and the evil professor, and the one where the main characters are only in the background. Also, Parker is literally Batman.
Read (manga): Beauty and the Beast of Paradise Lost vol 1 (Kaori Yuki): Beauty is weird-looking and bullied, has a horrible home life, eventually winds up in the time and space castle of the Beast, hunted by the local authorities, everything is terrible and kind of cracktastic.
Written (catgirl): 153.
Does anyone observe this?
Still no office, WFH all this week, yay.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.8-9: Harry’s turn in the mastermind chair, and the MLM one.
Read (novel): Broker vol 1 (Derelict Presence): The main character gets popups, but mostly it’s not LitRPG, although it does have sudden powers, world eaten by monsters, etc. MC manages to come back in time from supervillains ownzoring everything, with the meta-power of being able to shuffle powers around, as well as being able to make binding contracts and unable to lie. Now she has only a few short years to keep the world from imploding, and no time for moral qualms.
Read (manga): Kase-san and… vol 2-3 (Hiromi Takashima): This is Kase-san and Bento and Kase-san and Shortcake. More high-school romance. Yamada is too pure for this world, or at least for knowing what to do with a girl and a bed, or being able to take a bath with her crush on the school trip.
Written (catgirl): 218.