SteveZilla

Re: Did the palindromedary eat the title?

Re: Did the palindromedary eat the title?

Re: Did the palindromedary eat the title?

Re: New Player Hates All The Dice I think we can leave DC calculations out of this discussion. Nobody is (AFAIK) taking the stance of 2d6+(8 * 3.5) ≠ 10d6 in terms of Damage Classes (all other things being equal). Damage Classes don't equally translate to numbers of dice in all instances. A 12 DC attack could be 20, 12, 6, or 4 dice, just to use Base Costs for certain powers. Now, if 2d6 and 2d6+28 are equally predictable, that means that in terms of predictability, the +28 is meaningless. And if 2d6+28 is more predictable than 10d6, that means that 2d6 is also more predictable than 10d6. My conclusions, drawn from only the information above: If we predetermine some of the dice being used, we are not rolling them any more -- they have become a static (fixed) element. Adding a static (fixed) number to a group of dice doesn’t change the predictability of that group of dice. Fewer dice used, regardless of a fixed number added to them, is more predictable than a greater number of dice. Thus, saying that “it’s more predictable because some dice are predetermined†seems to be just a roundabout way of saying "it’s more predictable because fewer dice are being used in the roll".

Re: Good-by Speedster

Re: Good-by Speedster I think that anything more than "he winds up in *that* hex over there" is both getting more than what was paid for, and is unfairly effective. Otherwise, why not say you 'port the speedster in front of a wall -- one nanometer from it. Y'know, I don't think there are many tunneling speedsters. Do that whole "buried alive" trick with Tunneling + UAA on them. Do a mulitple-power attack with a Drain Desolidification + Zero END, Persistent, Uncontrolled to it for good measure.

Re: RKane_!'s heretical and Audacious Block variant

Re: RKane_!'s heretical and Audacious Block variant I also realized that had Seeker just stood there and *not* blocked... Ogre's OCV: 6 Seeker's DCV: 11(?) 11+6-11=6 or less to hit, and rolled 10. ...would have resulted in Seeker taking *no* damage, as Ogre would have missed.

Re: RKane_!'s heretical and Audacious Block variant Based upon the actual mechanics of this maneuver, "prevents" is not the best choice of words. Which Block maneuver is Seeker using in this example? Doesn't he get bonus PD from the 'successful block' he did? More like the force of a Mack Truck. But I digress again. So he just uses his legs and neatly sidesteps this penalty. So Joe 'Martial Artist' Normal has a kevlar suit (resistant defenses), but is also blocking with an object with non-resistant defense, the pd the maneuver grants is suddenly not the same as his own PD? Thank goodness that object's DEF is always Resistant! Okay, now how would this maneuver combine with the following situations: 1. The Attacker has Stretching. Does Stretching velocity make an attack harder to block? 2. The Attacker has Shrinking. Does The Growth Momentum "maneuver" from turning off the Shrinking make an attack harder to block? 3. The Defender has Damage Reduction & uses one of the Block maneuvers. How does the halving of damage from a successful block combine with the Damage Reduction? 4. Does the PD that the maneuver grants gain any and all Advantages & Limitations that the defender's own PD has (like Hardened)? 5. The Attacker is using an attack that goes against ED. Does the Block maneuver provide an identical amount of ED? 6. The Attacker has Find Weakness, and has achieved at least one level of success against the defending martial artist. Is the PD from the block maneuver reduced by Find Weakness at the same raito? 7. Can a Martial Artist purchase sectional Armor/FF/PD/ED for just his arms/legs to protect against the beating they will now get? 8. Does the Martial Artist who 'successfully' blocks still take the usual knockback from the 'blocked' attack?

Re: Good-by Speedster There is no such thing as Drain Turn Mode.

Re: Modeling, er, "sexual prowess"

Steve, I think there is something contradictory to 5re in the FAQ. In the FAQ for powers (Desolification), it states: But in 5re, p 148, under "The Drawbacks of Intangibility", it gives two options for a Desolid character who is falling. Either pass into the ground, or exercise 'force of will' and stop and take falling damage. Since this is talking about "standard Desolidification", it seems the two contradict each other. Will a "Cannot Pass Through Solid Objects" Desolidified character take falling damage or not? !!

Re: New Player Hates All The Dice I don't understand why there would be a difference in predictability between Xd6 and Xd6+Y. While the end result numbers are different (rolling a 5, 3, 6 vs rolling 5, 3, 6, and adding 14), the shape of the bell curve remains the same. Doesn't that mean that the two are equally predictable because the distribution of probabilities (the shape of the curve) is the same?

Re: RKane_!'s heretical and Audacious Block variant What happened to the roll that Seeker makes to attempt the block? He's not just standing there.

Re: Good-by Speedster You can't induce a Limitation (Turn Mode) on another character's power without using Tranformation Attack. What you seem to be describing is a movement power bought with Useable As Attack.

Re: Good-by Speedster

You recently answered a question by directing the asker to the sidebar on p110 of 5re. After reading that sidebar, I had two questions: 1. While the points given to the "to" power (PD in the sidebar example) are halved, does the transfer still remove the full value from the "from" power (STR in same example), and still have the full max limit on that power? 2. If transferring both from and to a defensive power, is the effect halved once, or twice?

Re: Jokes An Engineer's evaluation of Santa Clause ---------------------------------------- There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a Poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them, Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs. Merry Christmas.

Re: Jokes A punny thing happend on the way home today... 1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, "I'm sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger," 2. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils. 3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it, too. 4. A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. He slides up to the bar and announces: "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw." 5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication. 6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer." 7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal." 8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that Hugh, only Hugh, can prevent florist friars. 9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Re: Defense against Entangle I'm presuming that the focused paralysis beam is a Mental Entangle? I really can't see it being done any other way. But for breakouts, it is possible to both push and haymaker -- giving 30 extra active points to whatever is being used to escape. Yeah, it costs the power's END + 10, and takes an extra segment. But where's he going in such a hurry, anyway? ;-) IIRC, you can do the pushed haymaker on phase 12 (which is when you pay the END), then get your PP12 Recovery, and the haymaker goes off at the bottom of phase 1. The character should be out and ready to go at the start of Phase 2. If I'm mis-remembering the (new) haymaker rules, somebody please correct me -- I don't have my book handy right now.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Hey! That reminds me. I still have that old DOS game lying around somewhere.

Re: Good-by Speedster Who's the Speedster Now?: Transfer Speed Damage Shield

Re: How do I build: Caltrops Actually, the writeup for Caltrops in TUMa has charges and uncontrolled as well. It also has Continuous, which AFAIK isn't needed because of the Uncontrolled Advantage, I didn't concern myself with Leaping for two reasons: 1. It reduced the cost of the whole build. 2. 2D6 Drain will average 7 pts = 3.5" of running, and 7" of leaping! A dichotomy I can't explain.

Re: What fundamental thing would you change about the Hero system? In Karate, the most common Block is effectively a hard strike against the approaching fist/foot (and attendant limb) to deflect it. That it uses the entire forearm in this process doesn't change that fact. It (IMO) just makes it easier for a beginner to execute -- they're using a much bigger "weapon". From what I can tell, the "more realistic block" you seek comes from the thought that Strength (Power) *should* win out over Skill. Or to put it another way, that in a (pure) contest of Strength vs Skill, Skill looses. I'm not saying that I know what you're thinking -- this is just my interpretation based upon the discussion that has happend so far. From http://www.whk.fi/arts/wingchun.html: In Wing Chun Kung Fu, some of the blocks (like the Pak Sao) start out with the whole open hand, and can progress to eventually using just the index and middle finger in very skilled Artists. This, I have seen and experienced. The person who trained me could deflect my fists with just his index finger. An index finger vs a whole arm & body -- there's a really big STR difference, yet he had no problem blocking me. And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Sao: My point with all this is that there are *real world* examples of martial arts that do what you seem to believe isn't possible ('realistic' is the word you used, IIRC). That a Block can succeede despite a large difference in Strengths between the attacker and blocker. Wing Chun Kung Fu is an art *designed* for just that purpose -- a weaker artist vs a stronger opponent. Also, I took a quick glance in my TUM eariler today but couldn't find a Block where the blocker still takes damage. If I am missing it, please provide a specific page/book reference for me.

Re: What fundamental thing would you change about the Hero system?