Came home early on Tuesday. If I come home early at all on Wednesday or Thursday it'll be around four or four thirty p.m.. Hopefully on Friday I'll come home godawful early and be able to waste away in preparation of training the skill of strength.
Now I was going to do dishes but I realized the kitchen sink was clogged so I hoofed it down to the little Safeway, got two bottles of drain cleaner and now the pipes are clean. Plus I plunged and attempted to snake the shower which will probably mean no more standing water.
After training the skill of strength I'll probably cook meatloaf and take out the garbage.
Have I mentioned the anticipation of going to Cassius's place for kettlebells gets me tired before I'm supposed to be tired?
That's me, editor-in-chief of heptapod.org, as a Simpsons character. I look like a fat, hirsute Lenny. If you feel you must waste your time then visit Simpsonize Me.
Basic system requires 2 dodecahedral dice. Twelve siders to you and me. The attacker has to roll under the defender's roll. If you roll doubles, i.e. 12 and 12, that counts as the single number. Using my example one would have rolled a 12 instead of a 24 which would be ridiculously easy for the antagonist to beat. Of course this leads to an instant-win situation where the defender rolls one and one and no one can roll under that since there isn't a zero.
One of the issues I've had with the system deals with criticals. Criticals are when really good things happen and when really bad things happen to the player. A player gets a critical success on their attack then they can add damage dice or get an instakill on the victim. Someone gets an unfortunate critical failure and the bomb they were attempting to disarm will detonate and turns out that one floor above the bomb was a group of little kids and nuns who perish in the inferno.
Right now I have the germ of an idea on criticals. The defender rolls 3 and 8 for an 11. The antagonist rolls 1 and 10 for an 11. Both parties critically fail their rolls. This helps by levelling the playing field should one person get 1 and 1 then the attacker rolls 1 and 1 so they both get something bad.
If the attacker beats the defender's roll by getting, my provisional designation, snake-eyes then it's considered a critical success.
Sadly I'm an idiot. I know nothing about statistics or game theory so I'm working off the seat of my pants rather than actually understanding if I'm creating a balanced game system.
Basically I want to avoid using something like charts! One of the things I brought up to Jaybird was about measuring the difference between the rolls to gauge the level of success. Not conducive to fun at all.
For static rolls, i.e. lockpicking or computer hacking, the game master will choose a target number for the player to beat and it must never be one unless the game master is being a prick or munchkin.
The basic mechanic is taking shape but now I have to figure out how combat works. Conflict is easy enough but resolution, like damage, requires a lot more thought on my part.
I was standing in a street. To my left was a white adobe building with blue trim. Of course the blue trim was to thwart evil spirits. There were a handful of teenagers sitting on the covered porch whiling away a day. In front of me was a mountain and the opening of a well-lit tunnel. On the right were some storefronts which gave me the impression of being boarded up and abandoned.
A few cars sped out of the tunnel and past me standing on the double yellow line. Minutes later a small red sportscar careened from a turn in the tunnel and smashed into the side of the tunnel and one of the abandoned storefronts. Before I could blink a garbage truck thundered into view and crushed what remained of that little red car.
The kids jumped up screaming. Some out of awe shouting about how cool that was and others were horrified at witnessing such a brutal end to someone's life. I ran away from the tunnel to find my father. I knew this scene was going to play itself out again and I wanted him to see because he might have an insight on why it should keep happening ad infinitum or if there was a way to stop the vicious cycle.
Dad could only watch in horror and had no wisdom to dispense. I retired to one of the abandoned storefronts and discovered it was a speakeasy where I drank myself into wakefulness.
