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L. Marcus

HERO Member
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  1. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Cancer in A Thread For Random Links   
    This popped up this morning when I clicked the "Random Article" link in Wikipedia
  2. Thanks
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Pariah in Funny Pics II: The Revenge   
    Canada: Like the US as if run by Scandinavians.
  3. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Cancer in The Last Word   
    I would never complete this set-up.  DEX 6 and so on.*
     
    Might be amusing to compute the entropy in domino arrays and then examine probabilisticly what the largest array your DEX permits you a reasonable chance of completing rather than having a catastrophic failure during construction.  A rather roundabout way of finding a conversion between DEX and energy, kind of, in HERO terms.
     
    *EDIT: this leaves out the three feline chaos emitters I dwell with.
  4. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Pariah in A Thread for Random Movie Lines   
    "Lord, I'll never pick another pocket again as long as I live. I swear it. But here's the problem: You've got to let me live. How can I prove my good faith to you? If you've heard me, this ledge will remain steady as a rock, and that thing coming at me won't be what I think it is. If it is, there's no hard feelings, of course, but I'd be very disappointed."
  5. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from DentArthurDent in Alphabet Game 2021   
    Steve Jackson and his Games
  6. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Lord Liaden in Funny Pics II: The Revenge   
    Canada: Like the US as if run by Scandinavians.
  7. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Tom Cowan in Funny Pics II: The Revenge   
    Canada: Like the US as if run by Scandinavians.
  8. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Dr.Device in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    I, for one, would be sad to see social justice removed from D&D products. I happen to think social justice is a good thing.
  9. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to tkdguy in Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)   
    I've got bad news for  MAGA folks who want the Niners to win because Taylor Swift is rooting for the Chiefs. It doesn't matter. The 49ers have Gavin Newsom. Remember he was Mayor of San Francisco before he was Governor of California. So regardless of the outcome, Woke wins, and MAGA loses! 😜
  10. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to magnon in Fantasy Hero or Fantasy Hero Complete?   
    Thanks for all the input folks.  I'll get the FHC for now and pick up the FH and HS6e later.  My wife accuses me of being addicted to buying gaming material.  But I only have two book cases full of gaming material so that can't be true.
  11. Sad
    L. Marcus reacted to tkdguy in The cranky thread   
    Unfortunately, my uncle received the Last Rites earlier today. His cancer had spread. It was the chemo that destroyed his heart, which had up to then been healthy.
  12. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Bazza in Jokes   
    Did you hear about the all boys band called The Bracelets? It is a Bangles cover band...
  13. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Lord Liaden in "Neat" Pictures   
  14. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from assault in Favourite Mediaeval Setting?   
    I think the Iron Age in that part of the world started in about 1200 BC, so ... Moses was Bronze, David was Iron. Or something. 
  15. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to tkdguy in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
    Something I may try in my solo games is running a silly campaign. I've tried to run a few humorous games with other folks in the past, and they were never received well. But if I'm playing on my own, I can go to town with the silliness, and no one would be the wiser.
  16. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to DShomshak in Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)   
    Well, no surprise that in 240 years a litigious people should have already considered the constitutionality of secession...
     
    The problems of state-by-state dissolution of the Union are well described, but I think there's something to be said for limited forms of 'soft secession.' My favorite scheme would let individual counties declare themselves quasi-states on the South African "homeland" model -- nominal sovereignty while having no control over their defense or economy. These "Albistans" could be legally Straight White Christian only, since so much of MAGA grievance seems to be loss of acknowledged racial, sectarian and cultural hegemony. They can also do without those nanny-state features that offend their peoples' sense of heroic self-reliance, and the rest of us don't have to feel guilty if this results in starvation or plague. Corporations can also exploit them for non-union labor, if that's how the albistanis roll. (But be careful to draw up the charters of quasi-secession so companies can't use them as tax havens.) Most importantly, Albistanis lose any right to vote in national elections, leaving the rest of the US to chart a more progressive path.
     
    Failing that, the easiest way to unzip the USA is through sale of territory to other countries. The US grew by buying tracts from other countries; it can shrink the same way. If Trump wins the Presidency again, it might be a good idea for urban governments to petition to be bought by, say, Canada. Trump might love to be the broker of "THE GREATEST REAL ESTATE DEAL IN HISTORY!!!!!" while bidding farewell to most of the people who voted against him. The rural, rump Unites States of Real America can then hold a constitutional convention to make him President for Life, or Emperor, or whatever. The USRA would lose maybe half its population and more than half its economy, but at least the righteous Real Americans would be rid of people like me. We'd be Canadian, and I for one would be glad of it.
     
    As for blather of civil war: It doesn't seem impossible to me, but what's so mind-blowing is the lack of substantive issues on the MAGA side. Slavery gave the Confederate States abundant grounds for secession: It wasn't just a "peculiar institution," like, I don't know, Austtralians and Vegemite. It was integral to their economy and the wealth of its ruling class. Rational, in a deeply unpleasant way. But studies show MAGA isn't suffering economically (though many of them think they should be wealthier). They aren't being robbed to support the elites; rather, the liberal and urbanized states are subsidizing conservative and rural. Nobody is forcing MAGA to worship in particular ways; merely that they can't force their faith on others. The Constitution's setup means they are in no danger of being steamrollered politically. The grievances seem to be all cultural: the rest of us no longer accept their dominance. If it happens, it'll be a Seinfeld civil war, fought about nothing.
     
    Dean Shomshak
  17. Haha
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Duke Bushido in Find Weakness and Lack of Weakness for 6th Edition.   
    ... Subtitle ... ?
  18. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Doc Democracy in Find Weakness and Lack of Weakness for 6th Edition.   
    ... Subtitle ... ?
  19. Like
  20. Thanks
    L. Marcus got a reaction from tkdguy in The "Nice Happy" Thread   
    Hi-five!
  21. Like
    L. Marcus got a reaction from Old Man in Favourite Mediaeval Setting?   
    As for Chivalry & Sorcery, the fifth edition came out a few years ago. Our own Andy Staples was part of the Britannia Game Design crew. 
  22. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Pariah in The Academics Thread   
  23. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to BoloOfEarth in Funny Pics II: The Revenge   
    My go-to response when someone's (justifiably) complaining about something major is, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
  24. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Cancer in Ctrl+V   
    First, I recognize that the (snip) campaign was a labor of love.  There's way more work here in terms of details, structure, and underlying rationale than in nearly all the campaigns we do.  Unfortunately, I think that's both a blessing and a curse.  Now I go on a long personal exposition as why I think that last "curse" part.
     
    I had a parallel experience a bit more than twenty years back, while I was still in Pullman.  You may recall that there was a brief science fiction campaign ... I no longer remember even what system it was, because that wasn't important to me; may have been Hero.  (snip) was the at-table GM.  The social/political context of the campaign world was largely based on C J Cherryh's Chanur books; we didn't use her races but the interstellar political strucutres were similar.  It was more or less current-day Earth, albeit postulating the invention of an interstellar jump drive by humans.  Some of the PCs had been abducted by aliens and transported off-Earth.  Others were in a crew for a Space Shuttle class ship fitted with the jump drive.  There were other bits to it, almost all of I've forgotten now.
     
    That campaign, too, was a labor of love.  With lots of input from (snip), I created a race of sentient, psionic shrubs, with a couple of client races, the most important being something like partly uplifted weasels.  (I don't think the PCs ever "met" one the shrubs, though a couple I think did interact with a couple of the weasels.)  Based on what was at the time very recently released real astronomical data, I chose stars for other inhabited star systems (and got a bit of satisfaction years later when the one I'd chosen for the shrubs' homeworld was found to have a planet orbiting it), computed distances and so on.  I postulated performance characteristics for the jump drive, and did a bunch of thinking about what that implies for the physics of interstellar travel (trajectories and velocities needed for entering jump so as to reach your intended destination, and what the emergent velocity would be at the end of the jump, how you'd get rid of most of that velocity snd get politely and safely into the habited parts of the system, etc.).  Lots of interesting physics and reasoning out the interstellar travel and defense infrastructure a starfaring race would need.  I had lots of fun doing thst.  Similarly, I had lots of fun on side calculations as I explored what all that would mean for a special case, if you postulated our Solar System with an interstellar culture.  Those side calculations informed me a lot about how other cultures would act and the infrastructure they would have to build with that ensemble of interstellar travel characteristics.
     
    Eventually we kicked it into a shape where we thought we were ready to play it, and we got started going with table play.  Things went south in short order.
     
    As is the flip side of any real-physics discussion of interplanetary travel (not interstellar, which is all inconsistent impossible crap), physically realizable techniques force you into regimes where ... there's nothing for people on board such ships to do until literally the last few minutes of docking micromanuvers.  The orbital mechanics of manuvers and trajectories are dictated by the original incoming velocity and pop-in point, the calculations require heavy computation no human can do, and so on.  For hours or more likely days at a stretch, there's nothing for passengers of such a spaceship to do but think about information about the system as it comes through the instrument array.  They can't do anything with that information, but they can think about it.  Maybe.  It's hard to think about a situation when there's serious question about how relevant you are.
     
    The players rebelled before it got too far.  There was nothing for them to do, and their attempts to do anything had to be talked down as being either impossible or counter productive.  All Tell, no Show, as we have heard this situation described in some discussions on the web of this sort of GM failure.
     
    Yes, there was, I think, another session, where I spammed individual-player infodumps out to people between sessions.  Ultimately, though, I recognized that I had put together something that was a personally fascinating construction, and could perhaps be made into the overall setting for an interesting ***story***, but it made for a more or less unplayable ***game****.  Of everyone at the table, I was the only one who could understand and work with the physical problems my chosen axiom set posed.  Far more important, I was also the only one at the table WHO WOULD CARE.  It was an astrophysics problem.  By real-world personal preferences and interests, I was the only astrophysicist at the table (I believe (snip) had not yet joined us at that point).  By the logical requirements of the underlying circumstances, there wasn't much chance of anyone else being interested in those sorts of problems, even though I found them fascinating.  Yet, for the quality of the game, by far I was the one who mattered least.
     
    At that point I realized I'd made a fundamental mistake: I'd let my interest in the physics override what ought to be a GM's principal concern, and that is to keep the players engaged and entertained.
     
    It was a bit more than a decade before I tried running anything again as I internalized those lessons and thought about how I might run something again.  (It's not like we had a shortage of GMs and stuff to play, so I felt OK about spending that time and doing long thought about it; also, embroiled in a temporary career change as I was at the time, I did have other things on my mind.)  I was resolved not to repeat those mistakes, while at the same time recognizing another personal issue of mine, without which I wouldn't want to run anything at all.
     
    That personal issue is that I am a die-hard top-down simulationist in terms of running an RPG.  When constructing a game which I alone am running, I have to have a fundamental idea of a grand plot arc, and I make sure everything that happens in the game fits into that arc (modulo intentional red herrings that I might put in for their own plot reasons).  At the same time, the players *can* do things to affect the arc's path and it's my job to accommodate those player alterations of the world while maintaining a meaningful and enjoyable campaign.  (Shared games like Rocket Age and Feng Shui don't count; for those there doesn't need to be a unifying plot, in my opinion.)  Also, I greatly prefer playing in games where there is such an arc so that I can puzzle out what it is and how it can be solved.  You've seen me enough at the table to recognize this shortcoming of mine.  It's a big reason why I have never, ever liked Star Wars as a game-world.  The attempt after the very first movie to retrofit story and rationale into the Star Wars universe is so hopelessly inconsistent that I lost interest in it immediately.  As action movies, the first three are great movies.  But taking that setting and putting players in it ... it doesn't scratch an itch I personally need to have scratched.  What happens is what's going to happen, and what anyone outside the nucleus of the Skywalker clan, Sidious, and Yoda does is more or less irrelevant to the course of future events.  Lots of people can have the opportunity to kick serious butt, but even the most spectactular of this peripheral butt-kicking doesn't have any effect on what happens in that universe.  Further, because that means the entire purpose of the game itself is that butt-kicking, one of my personal favorite situations -- finessing the party around direct physical confrontation with large bad guy forces and accomplishing a major strategic goal while sidestepping the big team of Big Bads -- is rendered impossible.  The butt-kicking itself is the whole point of the game, so to try sidestepping it is counter to the only reason to play.  That combination of PC irrelevance to the fate of the world, and the inherent necessity of exclusion of the kind of lateral strategy I like to create, makes it hard for me to have any real interest in that setting.
  25. Like
    L. Marcus reacted to Lord Liaden in More space news!   
    Massive subsurface frozen sea discovered on Mars
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