Christopher

"Immunity to Martial Arts NND" is dealt with in Hero System Martial Arts 6E (HSMA 6).

Choke hold is just one of the possible forms of NND, that Martial Arts can choose from. Choke Holds is simply one of those.

Predicting the future is solved simply, by just following the "Uncertainty Principle" as part of your world build:
"The more precise the prediction, the less precise the reality. And vice versa."

I actualyl wrote something on the mater:
http://www.herogames.com/forums/index.php?/topic/87678-dealing-with-prediction-or-the-uncertainty-principle/

Unfortunaltey the thread dropped into the archive of hte Forum.

I'm pretty sure he was stating that there is a difference between identical and the same, in this case. That if you make a hundred identical copies of an original, none of them exist as the original, because only the original is the original, only copy 27 is copy 27, etc.

That is what I meant.

If I am original, I can not be any of the copies.

If I am copy 27, I can not be the original or any of the other copies.

I am only one of those 28+ very similar persons.

Let's take a usually permanent change that would be circumvented by the cloning. Say, loosing a leg or arm.

If I loose a arm, the clones would not magically loose thier arm too. They would have thier arms cut off after being cloned, to be similar to the original. They might even have the memory of me loosing my arm. But they sure as hell did not loose the arm the same way as me.

What if we have a different approach to cloning, like time cloning? If I was time cloned right here, right now. Would those two beings be to different but similar persons. Or be twice the same person?

I'm starting to wonder whether the communication problem is on my end or yours at this point.

 

Once again, in this hypothetical scenario, you are you right now, today, the same you that you are in actual reality. The only difference is that "someone else" has been killed and replaced with the current you, and the current you is going to be similarly replaced, but the current hypothetical you is unaware of these facts and believes that he/you has actually had the continuous existence that hypothetical current today you remembers (which is the same set of memories that actual real world today you has as you're reading this).

 

I am NOT, repeat NOT asking how the dead bodies perceive the situation. I am not asking how the replacements growing in the clone tank perceive the situation. I am asking how ALIVE hypothetical today you's perceptions of the situation--indeed, how the ACTUALITY of the situation--would differ from alive real today you's perceptions and actualities.

If I was replaced last night, then by definition I am not the same person as when I was not repalced last night.

I can not be the same person (continous existence) and a different person (repalced every night) at the same time. I can only be one of the two.

I might not know wheter I am one or the other, but I still am one or the other.

If you have two blocks of lead identical down to the quantum level next to one another, they are still two blocks of lead. If you damage one, the other will not magically copy that.

If you only ever showed me one of the blocks and then suddenly started showing me the other one isntead, you would be showing me a different block of lead.

The two blocks are similar. They might even be equivalent down to the quantum level. But they are not the same. If I damage one, the other one would still be unaffected.

I am a programmer, I have to know the difference between Identity and Equality. Those differences mater in programming.

It's pronounced sparti-kleez.

 

You know, because Greek.

And now I am thinking of the "I am Spartacus" scene.

Would explain why it is so hard to find - others keep claiming to be it.

As a Fantasy Hero GM, you might be asked to design a village here and there. And then you have to ask questions like:
Does this town have a smith? A village smith or someone equipped and trained to make weapons?
How far is the next city?

How far the next bigger city?

I just found a video on that mater and 10 miles (16 km) seems to be about the magical number.

Another intersting video is about trains. Here the range "at wich trains are cheaper then flight" is 200-300 miles:

Among other things, the hypothetical supersymmetric particles, or "sparticles," are necessary for explaining the mass of the Higgs particle. (Without them, its mass should be quadrillions of times greater.) Sparticles, predicted to interact only weakly with normal matter, are also one of the leading contenders for dark matter. So, failure to detect them is a problem for physicists and cosmologists.

direction and distance of the event, the masses and spins of the black holes, and other details. The article says that since that first detection, other black hole collisions have been observed, too.

"Gravitons? WE. ARE. SPARTILCES!"

I guess with that name, a "this is sparta" joke was asked for.

Okay, so, how do you know this hasn't been happening every time you sleep, and the current "you" is only as old as the last time you woke up? How do you know it won't happen again the next time you sleep?

 

And more importantly, how would it make any difference in your life if this were the case?

 

 

No, I'm not; someone under surgical anaesthesia is not conscious. There is no thinking, no response to stimulus going on. The higher brain functions are suspended. I agree that complete brain death does not occur . . . but why does that matter? If my brain WERE completely shut down during surgery, and then started back up with no ill effects, would THAT mean that it was a different person waking up in the recovery room?

It would make a difference for current me, certainly. Because I would know that someone will try to kill me to replace me with a clone when I go to sleep. For next me, it would be irrelevant.

And yes, I do not exclude that this post was started by another person, by definition. Just to the best of my knowlege, it was not.

How do you know you were not repalced while uner Anestesia? The operating crew told you, you were not. Implicitly. Even when you could not observe yourself being alive, you still were alive.

A tree that falls in the forrest still causes a shockwave in air commonly identified as it "making a sound". Wheter a human observes it or only animals and insects, does not change that.*

For sleep it was all the time my parents implicitly told me I was not replaced in my sleep while growing up. Plus all the times I stayed awake through the night and nobody came in, trying to kill me.*

*In both these cases and time travel mechanics I think people are too dependant on "Observing is needed for it to be true".

I do not observe the generator producing the electricity to run my laptop right now (I rarely use the battery). Yet my Laptop runs, hence the power grid has net energy income, hence somewhere a generator is running right now.

Boeing selected to develop High Energy Laser pod for tactical aircraft

C&C Generals - Zero Hour Confirmed!

People make a big deal about continuity of consciousness without stopping to reflect that we already don't have it. Do you ever sleep? Were you conscious then? Hypothetically speaking, if you had died in your sleep and been replaced with a clone with your memories, would you have noticed?

I would not have noticed, because I was dead. And I do not presume to be able to speak for a hypothetical clone of mine

That is at the core of the continuity flaw - I am still dead. What that clone does not realy mater to me, nor will I have the capacity to have it mater to me.

Sleep and Continuity of Consciousness:

We do not currently know why we (as a species) sleep. Much less 8 hours per day. But I do not think it actually cancels the process of "consciousness".

One misconception is that a few important parts of our body never rest. You heart never stops beating (for long) as long as you are alive. Even when it "rests", it is still working. The same is true for our brain - even in sleep, you is still online (even if on a power saving setting).

I once had some surgery that included general anaesthetic, and the stuff they used prevented me from committing anything to long-term memory for a short time after they administered it and before I lost consciousness. My memories simply cut off at a point in the operating room. I woke up later with some "missing time" including a short period of time when I was conscious that I don't remember; a situation very similar to what Clone Tagon is in, in those strips. The only difference is that pre-surgery "me" and current "me" are tied together by an unconscious body, while Tagon's world-line is physically discontinuous.

You are mixing up being aware/having memories of being conscious with continuity of consciousness. Even while under the drugs, your brain never turned off. Braindeath never occurred.

Two things:

 

Continuity of memory

Continuity of consciousness

 

The clone and the original have the first in common, but do not have the second in any way in relation to one another. They are two sets of identical consciousnesses at a specific point, not one.

 

The original, upon death, does not, no matter what, continue on because there is a clone.

 

The memories are all that still exists, not the consciousness of the original. And actually, there is no reason to believe that, given the exact same experiences, the clone would find all the choices he made in his false memories consistent with what he would do. I find it highly likely that he would look on some memories as totally against his own tendencies or preferences.

 

Interesting topic.

Good point with the differnt kinds of Continuity. Memory vs Consciousness.

And we are not even certain that given the same memories, a person would develop the same consciousness.

Actually this ties into how memories actually work on a biochemical level. An area where the scientific knowledge uses the words "X is blieved to be" way too often....

It could be that truly exact replication of memory would result in an excact replication of consciousness. The same way waking a Operating System from a hibernate state is. Because the decision pathways through the brain an memory/experience created is part of that memory.

Or not, we have no idea.

So, a person who shares all but 42 minutes of your life experience is not you.

Of course not. After all, I share 100% of my memories with myself*. So by definition he must be somebody other then me, because he does not have the same access/same memories.

And as I said, those 42 minutes were kind of big for Tagon. As a lot of them was spend in combat, a major factor of Captain Tagons life.

*Within usual limits of biological memory access.

Which means that as I type this, at 0825 hrs local time, I am not the same person I was at 0748 hrs. The Christopher who posted the above at 2305 hrs on 30 DEC is a person who existed at that moment and did not exist at 2347 hrs or at 2228 hrs on that date.

Yes, when hitting post on this post I am not the same person I was when I decided to reply. However the difference is marginally entirely. Nothing remotely similar to "sacrificing yourself to save hundreds of lives".

When you split these hairs, they split all the way down to the root. The continuity flaw invoked by the Chaplain is not unique to the exotic science fiction scenario he describes; it's familiar to anyone who goes through a major life changing experience and comes out the other side, or just looks back in reflection on how they have changed over the years, or even looks forward to imagine what kind of person they may become in the future. And the difference between these obvious cases and the subtler distinction between Chaplain in Frame 3 and Chaplain in Frame 2 is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Now you are mixing up the clone and original viewpoint.

The continuity flaw applies only to the original. It is still dead as a doornail. If there is something like a soul, that soul went on. It's decision maters absolute for itself. This is not like "death in Dragonball".

What Kaff Tagon 2 has to deal with is being the clone of that relationship. Basically a sort of Son. I likened it to Kelvin timeline Kirk and his Father. With Tagon 1 being the Father, Tagon 2 being the Kirk.

Here's my favorite way of doing it.

 

Take one of the neurons in your brain.  Copy its complete functionality into a computer, then physically replace the neuron in your brain with an interface to the copy.  Your brain may take a few minutes to get used to the change, or it may not notice.  (Slight but very low chance of having a seizure.)  

 

After a while, repeat the above process with another neuron.  And another.   Eventually, you're running on external hardware rather than wetware, and you don't notice exactly when the changeover happens.

There are a few problems with that:

1st, what if you die during this process? You could end up a vegetable, and not the Saiyan kind.

2nd, if your brain has to adapt it has a decent chance to affect who you turn out to be after the process. When they re-introduced Fenix as a Mark 2 Purifier in Starcraft 2 LoV, they asked "how true to the original is thins copy"? The answer was 99.8% (or something like this). To wich the only followup question was: "How diffierent could that make him? What if that 0.2% decision was a important one, like to support Tassadar?"

3rd. You actually end up having more issues dealing with "not being human" anymore. Because you are not even running on wetware anymore. The Roid Rage/Nanoman storyline from Henchmen for Hire dealt wit hthat issue:

4rd. You are really just protracting the isue, not solving it.

5th. Latest when you have your copy reinstatiated after a real death, the same issues will apply again.

And that's not even mentioning Kevyn Andreyasan, who was "time cloned" when a version of him travelled into the past to prevent the future that he came from coming to pass.

 

For that matter, although your post mentions "The Gavs" and therefore references it indirectly, the Gatekeepers had been routinely creating and destroying sentient copies of people for....how many hundreds of thousands of years was it?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

There is no palindromedary in Schlock Mercenary

Andreyasan Prime went into retirement. And as a scientist both are destined to develop different stuff anyway.

The only gav that died during the cloning was the original one. Because he simply stood behind the disabeled gate. So it was not even a heroic sacrifice.

Schlock kind of died to own stupidity.

Just remembered that those are the 2nd+3rd Andreyasan - 2nd was the single gateclone he made when firing that gravity gun in target Echo. ("Always make a backup copy of yourself before testfiring a weapon").

All of them have in common that did not die Heriocally enough to warant a shrine/memorial/statue. Tagon 2 relates to Tagon 1 kind of like new timeline Kirk to his dad.

Did you know that your brain is actually two persons, with one maybe just a mute watcher being unable to act?

Another things are musing about mind copy immortality and the continuity flaw. Schlock Mercenary delves into that. Originally only in passing:

While they had these thought exercises, true immortility (of the mind copy&clone flavor) did not become avalible until recently.
While they had awesome medical technology (as long as they put the head into a cryokit quickly), there was still perma-death. Indeed at least one person per storyline/book died. Including one of the persons in above strip.*

But the current book is all about that problem. It is called "a little immortality":
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05

In the previous Story, Captain Kaff Tagon died. He did have a memory backup from 42 minutes before he died. Wich is a lot of difference, as those 42 minutes were packed full of action and he is a Soldier/Captain. And inclued why he choose a heroic sacrifice.

And to make it worse, he was not resurrected quite away. But 4 months afterwards.

So now questions arose. Like the one about agency:

One realistaition I had that the relationship between this kind of clone and it's original might be similar to "having to life up to my parent". Just much, much worse - having to life up to your previous self:

I can already tell that this storyline is going to be deep and confusing.

*

Chewbacca Busted For Robbing Vending Machines In Florida

I can not tell if that costume counts as another of these cases:

"The Star Wars fan has had prior arrests for disorderly conduct and indecent exposure."

Preach love and peace, but don't be afraid of bruising your knuckles while doing so.

Love, good, truth, justice, equality. Sometimes those things need a preacher to further the cause.

A lot of the time, they need a fighter to defend them.

They performed every test they could devise, literally took him apart and put him back together and could find no evidence to substantiate the "legend" of the dangerous human. To extend the amount of time they could observe the subject, made him functionally immortal (no aging, immune to disease, able to recover from nearly any injury).

Mad science means: Never asking "what is the worst that could happen?"

My main issues with the story as described is that the aliens are so mind-bogglingly stupid. They literally gave him the ability to overcome thier "escape proof" prision.

I mean it is one thing to have the saw smuggeled in via a cake. Another for the Prisionkeepers to give metal saws to thier inmates. And even replacing them when they get dull.

What you are describing is one of those all-encompassing meta-special effects that usually demands the use of the Variable Power Pool (VPP) Framework.  The big question to ask first though is whether this is intended to be a PC or NPC?  A PC would be better to start out with a smaller/tighter sfx that can be expanded later with XP.

 

HM

Effectively you have a adapting Hero in a Solo Incarnation. Kind of like Ironman, Batman, Spiderman.

Those never translate well to a Hero Group Character. You have to first realise that they have way to much power to be effectively modelled ingame:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/index.php?/topic/87378-translating-characters-from-fiction-and-the-secret-of-having-fun-in-roleplaying/

Superman (solo version) is a flying Brick, Speedsters, Energy Blaster, Martial Artist, Detective, Mentalist and many more.

In Hero you pay for what you get.

If you want to have many options (defenses or the like) to choose from, it costs more.

One way to limit "adaptability" is actually to just not include a common weakness. For example, there is this Martial Arts ability called "Iron Shirt"*, wich effectively makes the skin superthough. But not against bullets, fire and the like (proper Limitations).

When I build a shape shifter with such Martial Arts training, I removed those limitations. Limited skin shapeshift can propably cover those weaknesses of the original ability. Superior Iron Shirt* was born.

*I am not sure if that was the name.

And of course, adaption could also be the special effect of string abilities. Or even limitations.

If the character can "adapt to enemy attacks", that could just be High Defenses. Maybe with the limitation "only after being hit by it once this combat/only agaisnt the last damage type taken".

Yeah, WW's original powerset is kindof a weird grab-bag of whatever Marston thought might be cool, sans any particular unifying concept. A Classical Greek-esque culture that still relies on swords & bows? Sure. And yet they also have super-tech far more advanced than anything in Man's World? Okay. Mind controlling lasso? Um, I guess so. Riding kangaroo fights? Whatever, dude...

To get back on topic:

"Sometimes being super also means, being super confused how your powers even fit together."

Oh, I have no problem with her being able to deflect bullets, or at least being able to learn how to do so. It's the notion that the Amazons specifically train to do so, when there's no reason they should even have guns, and they certainly don't use them for anything else. Just...odd.

They did show that training in Justice League, with Aersia (just can not find it online). The original training was against Arrows and similar projectiles. Something they did had back in the days of Greece.

Personally I find the Invisible Jet with Mental Interface a lot less understandable as far as Wonder Womans powers go.

...even if they've all been isolated from the world since long before guns were invented.

Meh, Bullets are just really small, really fast arrows in the end.

Except for Railguns. Those are realy, REALY fast Arrows.

Plus, they do it in much less logical cases as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOVsYeFOckw

Elan is awesome when you least expect it

As he once said: "With Mediocre Power comes Medicocre Responsibility".

In this case the "Power" in questions is a Cantrip.

With great power comes great marketability.  

That is the Hero Business:

http://www.theherobiz.com/

What made Elves so terrifying to other races that they feel the need to belittle them so?

That life for a minor eternity, are more agile and even thier men are so pretty you have issues distinguishing them from the women.

What is not to fear with them?