Bloodstone

Re: Pixar's the Incredibles

Re: transformer question Summon is probably the easiest way to go, though one could make a strong case for Altered Duplicates as well. Unfortunately, it will be very expensive as a Summon. They are (mostly) Slavishly Loyal, are all Specific Beings and he can deploy multiples cassettes at once for extended periods of time ( I don't think we ever saw him summon more then 5 at once in the cartoon, thought he had 8-10) Several different ways to do Combining (Multiform, Duplication, etc). Do you have the Ultimate Metamorph? Several options are laid out in there.

Re: Ben 10: Ultimate Alien In The Widening Gyre Way Big becomes even more Ultraman-like, having now exhibited bursts of Super Speed. I'm not even sure I want to try and calculate how much AoE TK it takes to throw a mountain sized trashmonster into the sun... That's probably going to bump up the cost of the watch just a bit...

Re: No magic? I don't find that to necessarily be true. Many people don't bother to explain the mechanics of super technology, innate powers or magic. Lets be honest, no one can tell me exactly how Iron Man's force fields or Professor X's telepathy really work. People can come up with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, but that's all it is. By the same token, the magic guy can come up with rules that govern spellcasting or whatnot just as easily. Or we can hand wave it all away with "It's a comic book world. It just works!" type logic and many people are fine with that.

Re: "Neat" Pictures This is supposed to be the Stockholm Library. They apparently have about 2 million books. Let's assume that the average e-book is 500kb. Some will be more, many will be less. This is about 120 GB. That means it would take approximately 40 Kindle 3s, as they cap out at 3GB of useable storage and have no external storage. You could do it with 20 Kindle Fire's, since they have 6GB each. I believe the first Kindle actually had a full sized SD card slot... assuming it was supported, you could do it with a lone Kindle 1 using a nice big 128 GB SD card. Of course, if we open the floor up to other readers and tablets, we can find many devices that could pull this off And with cloud storage you could certainly grow that list to include virtually any internet connected device...

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: The Living Bridge of Meghalaya related: http://www.designshell.com/articles/living-trees-living-art-pooktre.html (looks like the actual Pooktre website is messed up though)

Re: No magic? Like I said, it potentially kills a lot of character concepts, but so long as you are up front about the setting parameters, I don't see it being a huge issue. As a player, I could personally live with it. Of course, if I REALLY, REALLY had my heart set on some sort of magic, I'd probably just play an alien, extra-dimensional being or mutant with a VPP that was ultimately the result of my psionic ability to warp reality or tap into the power cosmic. Nanites and hard light construct are also a great short hand for magic that isn't really magic. Magic weapons become alien artifacts, creatures of myth are mutant bloodlines, extra dimensional beings or aliens. Are you planning to use the CU as a base or will this be completely homebrew?

Re: No magic? Depends on how you do it. This could potentially kill a lot of character concepts, but the players might be just fine with that. Do you want everyone to be tech based? Or will there be mutants, aliens and other folks with superhuman abilities that completely bend physics but which folks simply choose not to call "magic"? Oh, and Clarke's Law in 3...2...1...

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I really love this concept and design! If only it had fold up wings...

Re: How big should a Golden Age superteam be? I like stories that feature a fairly robust cast. One of my main mega teams has roster of 18 members. But in actual play I find my groups tend to operate best with 6 or less main characters, so that mega team is split into three cells of six members each.

Re: Do you run Sandbox style? and how? Several of my players hate it. They don't want to be totally railroaded, but they want a pretty clear path in front of them. They really seem to prefer when there aren't too many branches along that path. If there are too many plot hooks, they just get racked with indecision. They get frustrated when they feel like there is too much going on for them to keep track of. I think it all kinda depends on the players motivation, attention spans and memory for details (or in many cases, note taking skills). Many players just want to chill out and finish a fun adventure. So sandbox style games can be incredibly frustrating for them, since it requires a much greater investment from all parties involved. And, with too many irons in the fire, they sometimes complain that they no longer feel like they are accomplishing anything, because succeeding in part A just means they have to get to work on part's B-Z. This seems especially bad for players that have something of a Completest mentality. So, know your players is probably the first and most important step.

Re: Welcoming Women Who Game it`s a very broad topic. people may be completly comfortable with discussing one aspect of it, but not want to slog through several posts discussing something they find inappropriate (or possibly even distasteful). Might go over better as a series of seperate posts that could then be organized as a collection in a single post full of links...

Re: Welcoming Women Who Game Yeah, but you play on the other team, so it's probably extra grating I'm a pretty big flirt, but I tend to curb it in certain situations, like gaming. I still flirt a lot when it's actually in character, just not quite so much out of character. Well, unless I perceive some actual chemistry between me and one of the other players. And I've known a few gals that really love the attention they get from your average group of gamer dudes...

Re: Welcoming Women Who Game

Re: Creepy Pics.

Re: Ben 10: Ultimate Alien Yep, me too Frankly, Ben's go to forms are pretty well established and Goop really isn't one of them. So that whole aspect kind of fell flat even if the idea of one of Ben's villains figuring him out is pretty solid... It was Ssserpent, not Vilgax. Ben has manhandled him in their past two encounters in SECONDS flat. It's not even a contest. Would you send the Thor and Dr Stranger after Paste Pot Pete or would you trust that either one of them could handle it? Gwen wanted to give her cousin and her friend a chance to have a nice moment together. Ben's been seeing other girls, he and Julie have been on again off again for a while now and they end up fighting almost every time we see them lately. This is a rather critical time in their relationship, with Julie actually being the one that was going away for a while. It was obvious that she was going to miss him and Ben seemed to feel the same way. He was FINALLY doing something for her that was just a nice, sweet gesture. Then out of nowhere, danger strikes! Gwen thought she could handle it and she thought it was important that he stay with Julie. Ben obviously didn't agree. When Gwen tried to convince him not to go with the whole "then you're going alone!" it backfired and he took off in a huff. At that point Gwen, while annoyed with her cousins decision, wasn't worried at all. As she has quite recently explained, Ben makes everything look easy. The idea that he could be defeated by the likes of Ssserpent was inconceivable. Sure, it's hubris... but it was pretty well justified... Now, if they treat Ssserpent like a joke again in an upcoming episode, that will probably tick me off... Actually, it was at least an hour or so before liftoff based on the dialogue. So yes, he probably could have gone Jetray, XLR8 or Fasttrack, zipped over there, kicked the villains butt and been back before she had to board. That's assuming that nothing else came up... but arguably, Gwen knows better. It's like Mr Incredible almost missing his own wedding, all the while telling himself "I've still got time"... something is ALWAYS going to happen, be it another small time hood, a full on alien invasion or Ben getting mobbed by fans. Now, that said, I'm not sure why Ben wanted to drag Julie along to the fight/hostage situation. What exactly was she going to do? That was just a terrible way to make them argue IMO. So I don't agree with exact method the writer used to make Ben and Julie fight. And I didn't care for how Ssserpent almost managed to defeat Ben. But... I liked the overall direction of it all. Yes she has. If she had told Ben to blow off Julie and catch up with her later it would have been quite out of character It's not so much about Ben being self centered. It's about the fact that Gwen wants her cousin to have a shot at a somewhat normal life outside of work. She knows what Ben will turn into if he doesn't have any time outside of Hero Time... she's seen that future and doesn't care for it. Remember, way back in the beginning of Alien Force she really didn't want him to even put the Omnitrix back on because she was afraid he would never be able to take it back off... I can agree with feeling this trend more lately than before. She's the smart and super capable chick on a show primarily aimed at preteen boys. Stereotypical stuff like her being the responsible one or the voice of reason will creep in from time to time. I know Dwayne made a conscious effort to minimize that sort of thing. Not sure if we're feeling his absence in that regard or if it's just a coincidence... Don't worry about it. I don't mind and enjoy discussing this sort of stuff

Re: Ben 10: Ultimate Alien While I can see where you're coming from there, I don't quite agree. .. Ben's beaten Ssserpent easly before. Gwen said she would handle it, so it's not like they were ignoting the problem. She's arguably the most powerful member of the team, so I'm sure she was confident she actually could handle it. Gwen knows Ben has a hard time striking the right balance now that he no longer has a secret iD. Plus, she's close with Julie. And she's still a teenage girl at heart, so relationship stuff probably ranks pretty high on her personal scale of importance Ultimatly, I'm sure Gwen thought she (and Kevin) could take care of it so that Ben could take care of his personal life. What are friends / teammates for? I am interested in the new and improved Ssserpent, both in regards to him acting smarter and the fact that he shed his skin... so he might get a physical upgrade as well...

Re: Ben 10: Ultimate Alien As of Perfect Girlfriend, look like I need to add police scanner functions to the Omnitrix (and Plumber's Badges?)

Re: "Neat" Pictures No... POOHBACCA!!!

Re: Samurai Jack!

Re: A Thread for Random Videos I found this impressive and inspiring. Need to make sure Spidey88 sees it... and need to go do a lot more pullups...

Re: Why do tails cost points? Actual cats?Yeah, not really. But you will note that they do not pay for an extra limb in their writups in the Bestiary. Cat-men and cat-girls? I see this sort of thing depicted all the time in fiction/anime/video games...

Re: Night vision goggles

Re: Night vision goggles I'll try to explain the differences to the best of my ability, which is pretty basic in the grand scheme of things... NVG's work on two levels. The first is that they magnify existing light. The second is that they lets you perceive objects that are reflecting IR radiation, just like how our normal color vision lets us perceive objects when visible light radiation bounces off them. As such, NVG's will not work in total darkness without an illumintor With NVG's, everything shows up green because that's the way the screen is designed to work. We could make it all show up as red or blue instead, but most humans have a better ability to perceive different shades of green than they do other colors. So the green screen provides us with better image contrast. Because it's working with reflected light (albeit some of it light we can't normally perceive), I can read a book, watch a movie or see my reflection in a mirror while using my NVG's. NVG's perceive the shadows objects cast, which can be a benefit or a disadvantage depending on what you want to do (you can't hide in a shadow if you can't tell it's there, for example) Overall, it's fairly simple technology and not all that different from our normal vision. Thermal imaging works totally differently. This is where my first hand experience goes down considerably, as I've only played around with the stuff a little bit here and there. I don;t own any equipment that does this and have used a pair of imaging goggles. Everything I've used with thermal imaging was on either a hand held scanner or a stationary computer display. But here goes anyhow.. In simple terms, a devices thermal sensors read the heat signature of an object. This is the radiation that an object actually emits, as opposed to what it reflects, making light sources largely irrelevant. This is a passive sense in HERO terms. Using that info, the computer in the device then assembles a visible light image that is displayed on a monitor of some sort. This is usually done in false color (ala the Predator) or in gray scale (as in the vid above). This provides us with a accurate 3D model of whatever we are looking at, with the contrast determined by the heat an object emits. This is why thermal imaging can cut right through smoke and fog, whereas NVG's are still impeded by it like normal vision. With thermal imaging you can perceive differences in shape, depth and sometimes a sense of texture. Depending on how accurate the sensors are and how close the target is, you can generally tell people apart. At longer distances, a persons hair style will stand out more than facial features. Skin color may as well not exist in thermal, because you can't see light dependent details. This includes the print in a book/map or the picture on a tv/monitor. They all have essentially the same temperature, so the sensors don't perceive the differences. Sure, now you can see that guy hiding in the bushes. He stands out like a neon sign because he's so much warmer than his surroundings. But you can't really perceive the individual leaves of the bushes as it's just a big black mass until you get closer. This can also make it hard to tell friend from foe if they are wearing similar clothing... Normal glass is particularly interesting, since it isn't transparent to heat quite the same way it is to light. A pair of reading glasses may as well be sunglasses and the window on a building just looks like a differently colored section of wall. Car windshields can conceal the identity of the occupants. With thermal imaging, lights do little to nothing to illuminate the object they are shining on, as they are not significantly changing the objects temperature. So the actual flashlight will show up in someone's hand because of the heat difference between hand and metal tube/bulb, but you won't actually see the beam itself. Of course, you can also do neat things like see the heat people leave behind when they touch something. But that probably requires more sensitive devices (and things like the Tracking adder in HERO terms). The ENVG I showed off above seek to take all the benefits of both technologies and combine them into one unit. And that was much longer winded than I intended... and hopefully largely accurate...