Mutant for Hire

Re: The Chronicles of Counter Harn Not my style of fantasy gaming, to be honest. I prefer my fantasty worlds a little more fantastic. I'm not really the medieval gaming type. The closest I get is Ars Magica. But it looks solid otherwise.

Re: The Chronicles of Counter Harn Yes, I read the logs. This is called "humor" which occasionally surfaces on the boards.

Re: The Chronicles of Counter Harn *manfully trying to avoid making any Gor jokes here*

Re: Complicate the Person Above Death Tribble does line dancing.

Scientists invent smar armor, flexible yet able to resist impact. link here This looks like something out of a comic book.

Re: Your PC's might be underpowered if... ...if they have a negative point total.

Re: Sick of Wolverine All things considered, Illyana is one of the lucky ones. Female characters in the Marvel Universe tend not to do too well.

Re: Your PC's might be underpowered if... ...you look on the Mystery Men as superheroes you can only dream of becoming.

Re: Your PCs might be overpowered if... ...if the GM's Mary Sue NPC thinks you're ridiculously overpowered.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" - Joe Walsh

Re: Complicate the Person Above Amused is the last survivor of the planet Koozbain. [rep to anyone who can identify that reference]

Re: Ethics for mentalists Is this the same Xavier who used to make people forget about the school all the time?

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? An interesting point raised is that the superhero world is built on a number of unrealistic genre conventions as distinct from the real world. We live in a world where those genre conventions are ridiculous and unrealistic. The question is if we lived in those worlds and bought into the conventions, then what? In the end, if people started developing powers in the real world, things go completely different. Someone invents supertech, it starts spreading all over the place. Look at the atomic bomb. In some ways it was the real world equivalent of supertech and despite U.S. efforts to keep it secret, it leaked and was independently reinvented in other places. Secret IDs are next to impossible to keep with modern technology and forensics, not to mention real world lifestyle demands.

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? Okay, here's where I like the *concept* of the X-Men. Because under the right circumstances it is the one place where I could see myself joining such a group. If I woke up, found myself with powers in a world that hated my kind and there were nutcases rocking the boat pushing towards a war between my kind and the rest of humanity, I might get involved for simple self-preservation. Note that I said the concept. I am aware there are a huge number of problems with the implementation.

Re: Complicate the Person Above L. Marcus. No one who has enquired into the fate of K. Marcus has ever returned alive to tell the tale.

Re: Ethics for mentalists Charles Xavier has used his power in a very immoral fashion at times, casually rewriting memories when it suits him. I understand in the Ultimates they have gone more into this angle, making him a more sinister figure than others. In some ways though, I don't find the Ultimates character that much worse, it's more like they are a bit more honest of the morality of the Professor's powers. Frankly, if I could go back and alter Charles Xavier's powers from the start, I would have made him more of a precognative and clairvoyant, a seer who could see into other times and places, possible futures, into the present as well, with an instinctive sense of where the trouble spots were. That would have given him a handy plot device to know where to send the X-Men, and it would have been a less morally corrupting power as well. Well, there is investing in the stock market, but someone has to pay the bills. I wouldn't have removed the character of an uber-powerful telepath from the X-Men, but I would have made him an enemy of the X-Men, one who believed in the natural superiority of telepaths over everyone else. They would not have necessarily been strictly in favor of mutant telepaths, any paranormal telepath would have been acceptable to them, but they had to be telepaths and heirarchy was determined by strenght. Good telepaths do exist but struggle with the temptations of their powers. Honestly, when I invent a superhero universe I have a hard time not making psi detectors and psionic shielding available, even to civilians. It's just too essential to keep telepaths from sleazing their way to the top easily. Vegas would heavily invest in psi detectors and biometric scanners, to the point that a psionic can't even walk into one of those places without being asked to leave. At once. Even approaching the building would get a polite intercept near the door. Which leads to the scenario of psionic gambling joints where 'anything goes' is the rule, but I digress. Still, not all forms of mind control are inherently unethical. Something else to put in perspective: when a police officer holds a gun at you and threatens to shoot unless you do a certain thing, that is coercive behavior. Obviously, police officers are authorized to use coercive behavior in certain ways. There are limits on what they can make a person do that way, obviously, but there are cases where they can. I would view it this way: Alterations of personality and memory - always bad, period. Unless of course the person in question is certifiably insane and the alterations of personality are something to restore them to sanity. Of course this leads to dangerous definitions of what constitutes sane, but there are extreme cases where the issues are relatively clear. In those cases, consent by the guardian or someone with power of attorney is needed. Temporary alterations of thought - the ethics of said behavior transfer to the person controlling, and in all cases this is a lesser of two evils scenario. If the other person is clearly engaging in life threatening or potentially life threatening behavior, actions taken to prevent the threatening of said life is acceptable. In short, if it is ethically permissable to aim a gun at a person and order them to do something, then it is probably the same to use mind control to effect a temporary alteration to achieve the same result. A key point here as always is to focus on the effect, not the power. Look at alternate ways to achieve the same general type of effect, and you start to see that the issue isn't always as simple as mind control = evil.

Re: Ethics for mentalists I think people are getting a little too hyped up about mental powers. Most of the powers surrounding mentalists can be duplicated, if somewhat crudely, by alternate means: 1. Telepathy Force-feeding someone drugs and getting them to spill their guts about things they would never say otherwise 2. Mind Control Force-feeding someone drugs and talking them into doing things they wouldn't do normally And so on and so forth. So the question becomes when are said non-psionic methods ethical and when are they not.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Shine" by Meredith Brooks.

Re: Marvel's Best "Bricks" Does Beast count as a brick? I actually like bricks with high IQs that go against the 'big, strong, not too bright' stereotype.

Re: Is it time for people to stop making new RPG systems? I have to make a confession. For fantasy gaming, I honestly tend to prefer systems custom built around a given magic system. Ars Magica is one of my favorite fantasy gaming systems for that reason. Likewise I tend to favor systems where the genre is at least partially built into the mechanics for flavor. Champions is my favorite superhero RPG, but for other genres I tend to favor other systems. It's one of the reasons that GURPS has never caught my eye. It's too generic and flavorless for everything.

Re: Comics that I miss. Claremont's run on the New Mutants. Claremont/Byrne on the X-Men Peter David on the Hulk Hawk & Dove (up until Hank Hall was made a criminal by DC editorial stupdiity)

Re: Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved *sigh* I repeatedly covered points that had nothing to do with agriculture. That I ended up shooting down some of your points that had nothing to do with agriculture doesn't mean I'm fixated on the subject. What I did spend a lot of time looking at was economic realities. Magic as a labor saving device only makes sense when magical labor is cheaper than manual labor, and that includes the cost and expense of the magician. Again, the Black Death reduced the population and drove up labor costs even as the increase in money per capita drove up the demand for goods, and thus produced a situation where labor saving devices became economical. The steam engine was invented centuries ago in Greece, but it languished because slave labor was so cheap. Likewise, sure a wizard can extract ore out of the earth. But as magic tends to tire the caster out, the question is whether that wizard with all of their expensive training is actually cheaper in the long run than a bunch of peasants. For that matter, is it the most economical use of the wizard's skill to haul ore out of the earth? Maybe you can teach miners some spells to help them pull ore out of the earth, but then you're just treating magic as an alternative to the hydraulic drill. If you really want to think about more realistic magic, then the simplest thing to do is to remember that magic is merely the technology of a world where the laws of nature work differently. Technology is invented to solve problems that people face, and is used when it is economical to do so. (yes, I keep harping on the economic angle, history is littered with inventions that gathered dust because no one had a need for them) And to some extent your categories are approaching things backwards. Most commerce needs communication, transportation and preservation magic to solve most of the demands. Communication to arrange buyers and find prices in distant markets, transportation to move goods around and magic to preserve perishable goods. Another way to approach the problem is by profession. You list professions that are reasonably affected by magic and where it is economical to use magic instead of brute labor, or cases where magic can do things brute labor cannot. What sort of spells are carpenters and woodworkers likely to learn and to use? Most magic ends up being incredibly boring and dull. Yes, there is a cantrip that allows a woodworker to sense hidden rot or cracks or other flaws in the wood, but is it particularly relevent to anyone who isn't a woodworker? And there are economic realities of supply and demand. A spell to weave cloth quickly is useless unless there is magical increase along every link of the supply chain. The industrial revolution required vast production of raw materials as well as the mass conversion of raw materials to finished products, as well as the evolution of a market to demand cheap goods. And by that point you're no longer in your classical fantasy world which is based on an agrarian society. And again, obsession with agriarian society != obsession with agricultural magic. It's an overall technology level and economics. Magical spells are produced and used in response to demands of the population and only when it is economical to do so.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Alphaville - Forever Young

Re: Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved *snigger* Oh you have absolutely *no* idea of how much that would impact society. Hint: look at what the contraceptive pill has done to sexual mores. Now think about what happens when you dump that sort of contraceptive technology on a primitive society. Hunter/gatherer societies already have pretty loose sexual mores. Actually, it's the combination of contraceptive magic and paternity magic that would deal a double-whammy. A spell to reliably determine paternity (and the two fundies of magic, sympathy and contigation would do that) would bascially undermine a huge number of sexual customs and mores, like the prizing of virginity and locking women up (two crude methods to control paternity of the offspring of the women). With reliable contraception and paternity magic, all of a sudden a need for those customs goes out the window. Well, you're talking about magic that's useful to citizens. I said there was overlap. Now you run into a snag. In most medieval economies, labor was dirt cheap. In fact it wasn't until the Black Death made labor more expensive that labor saving devices came into vogue. Why spend money on an expensive magician and magic when peasant labor is so cheap. In the end, you use magic to accomplish the things that can't be done by brute labor. Unless you're pushing yourself into an industrial-age magitech society, which veers away from most medieval fantasy worlds. Why bother wasting magical energy enchanting coins to make change? Frankly most magicians would be spending their energy detecting (or creating) counterfeit coins. Well, excuse me but given the fact that 90+% of people in agrarian society are farmers and the other percentage are heavily dependent on agriculture, frankly agricultural magic would almost certainly be the dominant form of magic studied and practiced. Agricultural societies tended to live one good harvest away from starvation. For that matter, the revenues of the upper class depend on squeezing as much wealth out of the land as possible. In general, in most societies, replacing unskilled labor by magic would be extremely unlikely, unless the magic of a skilled and educated (and hence expensive) magician became cheaper than that of an unskilled laborer. Frankly, most of the "boring" spells are the ones that are most useful. There are spells/items that allow communication over long distances. That looks dull to you but believe me, most rulers would love to have those spells. Except that for every spell there is a counterspell. Remember that a truth spell can only determine what someone believes to be the truth. Murder someone, alter a peasant's memories to make them believe they were the murderer and turn them in. Likewise if necromancy exists, bind the spirits to lie under interrogation magic, and use more magic to conceal the lie.

Re: Real-Life Hyperspace Theory? Then they're tossing causality out the window, allowing spacelike vectors with a positive delta in time can easily be shifted to having a negative delta in time. I said "pick two". And of course there are fun issues with tossing causality out the window, which is why most physicists view it as a last resort.