Chuckg

Re: Back In The Flesh... Starguard, the Baron, and Striker-One/Kaian are either characters who primarily move in the Mystic World, or at minimum have a heckuva lot of crossover into it. Likwise, their aforementioned teammates Horus-Re, Exemplar, and Nox are likewise. (Granted, Nox has the conventional superheroic CvK...) So in situations like this, they tend to (each in their own way) go "if the law of man doesn't cover this, then there are other laws...", and start goin' all Doctor Strange on it. Plus, every modern mystic supervillain this guy's spirit consulted with on mayhem? He's up for conspiracy charges on each one anyway. Edit: Cripes, I'd missed that at first. If this guy's from a prior age of man, then Kaian's met him before... and almost certainly fought against him. And if he's another survivor, somehow, of the original Atlantis... his Dark Secret as the original destroyer of Atlantis is something Kaian really likes to keep secret. He wouldn't murder an innocent to do so, but give him somebody not-innocent who needs silencing and he'd line up the killshot so fast he'd catch fire from the atmospheric friction.

Re: Back In The Flesh... Starguard: Isn't this guy still liable for everything he facilitated/conspired on as a spirit? If she senses too much power coming from him to handle herself, she'll call in Horus-re first, but this guy isn't just going on his way unmolested. Dr. Pain: Get the guy into a drinking contest, carouse with him some, laugh and whoop it up. Somebody's going to have to cope with two problems when he wakes up tomorrow: 1) absolutely killer hangover, and 2) waking up in power-restraining cuffs, in a warded cell, in Stronghold. Baron von Darien: To him, this would be more of a case for 'demon hunter law' than mortal law. IOW, kill the guy while his guard is down. Kaian: "On the one hand, my current teammates are all mostly conventional superhero types who absolutely Would Not Care For. On the other hand, this is clearly a Mystic World 'Hunter' type situation rather than conventional superhero business. On the practical hand, this guy did everything he could to facilitate mystic apocalypse while a spirit and has to go face the judgement of the Afterworld for that, in addition to stopping next week's Apocalypse today. Its just, if they catch me doing it... hah, wait, this idiot is snorting blow and shooting up smack. I'll just disguise myself, go slip a little uncut stuff into his next dose and voila, fatal overdose. And nobody will ever know it wasn't an accident." (later on) "... y'know, it just occurred to me that between Exemplar the cosmic justice avatar and Nox the mystical psychopomp, Vanguard had options available to deal with this guy that didn't involve murder." *sighs* "Backsliding again."

Re: The Twelve most Wanted Starguard: She's very new to this heroing thing, and has been relying on her teammates' guidance to help make the tough decisions. On the other hand, she's hardly stupid, merely inexperienced. Knowing that her only advantage is surprise, she'd restrain her usual impulses to help people and immediately get the heck out to some deserted wilderness where she could think. Having both full life support and various enhanced awarenesses, she wouldn't have to worry about day-to-day survival, and would start gathering information. Her best strategy is to use her magical powers to try and re-open a portal back home, something she might very well be capable of doing. Failing that, she needs to get in touch with whatever powers of Light exist in this dimension... and learn from them the proper methods of using her own nature as a conduit of vast mystic/holy power to empower others as champions of Light. This world has no native heroes? Well, it's about to get some. Edit: Had a very secret ID -- even she didn't know who she was until well in the game. So, own self would be unmolested. Dr. Pain: Is utterly, completely out of his depth here. He goes looking for whatever local Resistance might exist around here, and lends his muscle to it. Edit: Had a Public ID, thus his counterpart is almost certainly dead. Baron von Darien: This scenario is quite possibly the only thing that could achieve the otherwise impossible: actually making the Baron consider "turning" other people into vampires. However, even he'd have to be direly desperate to consider that. On the other hand, its not like a master vampire with centuries of experience as a secret monster hunter of the world's hidden places is inexperienced with shadow wars. Edit: Without superpowers, his counterpart would have been dead of old age in the early Middle Ages. Kaian, aka Striker-One, aka etc, etc, etc.: This world had actually better hope the rest of his super-team gets here, as with Vanguard on his side things can go much less painfully. Kaian tries to be as decent and merciful a person as circumstances allow, but the key words are, "as circumstances allow". When he gets excessively desperate, bad things happen. The villains are really kinda hosed here. Kaian is immortal, has millenia of experience, ninja and strategic and combat and espionage skills of every description, and absolutely cannot die. Unless they use extra-dimensional banishment of their own to make him go somewhere else, the overlords of this Earth have now acquired a John Connor of their very own that can't be bargained with. Can't be reasoned with. Doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear... ok, I'm kidding, he can entire feel pity and remorse. But he absolutely will not stop, ever, until the villains are all dead. And no matter how thoroughly they've entrenched themselves... even if its to the point where the villains have warped the very soul of man, the structure of civilization is absolutely corrupted forever, and nothing short of blowing the whole damn thing back to the stone age, wiping out the entire history and letting mankind re-civilize from scratch will work... he can do that. Prince Kaian remembers being the usurper king whose wars ended up destroying the Golden Age of Atlantis. (In his timeline Kaian dates from the first Atlantis, not the undersea civilization commonly recognized as "Atlantis", actually a bunch of Poseidon-worshipping ancient Greeks who had discovered remnants of the original Golden Age and reverse-engineered some of its magitech and tried to rebuild on it. Yes, Kaian may have deliberately futzed with the historical record at the time and afterwards to help take advantage of this confusion and thus further bury his true origins.) He has seen entire cycles of civilization rise and fall. As much as it would kill a piece of his soul permanently to do it again, if all other options fail, he would. When you're cursed to never die, its amazing what you end up living through. Edit: Good Lord, where to start? If superpowered stuff and ancient civilizations never existed in this timeline, then neither did he.

Re: Your hero the villian Starguard is hilariously unsuitable for this: she's a naive, innocent 18-year-old girl who was created based at least partly on the tropes of magical girl anime, and is powered by the essence of an Earth-bound archangel. Also, her teammate and mentor is Horus-Re, god of truth and millenia-old legendary revealer of deception and deceit. It would be utterly unbelievable that she'd secretly harbored hidden darkness, and she'd be utterly inept at trying to act like she had. Dr. Pain is at least moderately suitable: as a former pro-wrestling champion (and one of the ones who could actually act) he has at least some minimal role-playing talent, plus, he could simply act like he was getting disillusioned with the whole 'goody-goody work for free crap' of being a superhero and was selling out and going villain. (After all, he became a superhero in the first place partly because his sudden expression of metapowers meant he couldn't wrestle anymore and, well, he had to do something useful with them.) Of course he's an entirely decent guy underneath the persona (even in his wrestling days, he played the heel) and served 4 years in the Marines when he was young, so its possible a perceptive intelligence agency would have him in their computer and decide that he was a useful enough amateur to use. Baron von Darien, master vampire and mystic antihero, has all of the skills necessary for social infiltration, long-term deception, and betrayal. And, well, he's a vampire. And a particularly ruthless one, with an almost Victor von Doom style honor code. Unfortunately, he's already proved his talents at deception by having his origin story involve a couple of centuries working his way up in the ranks of the secret vampire cabal that was poised to dominate late-medieval Europe and then burning it all down from within (origin story), which is why nobody on the side of Darkness is ever going to remotely consider the possibility of trusting him again. Striker-One, aka Major. Alan Davis, USAF, aka Captain Jack Striker, USMC, aka [insert long long looooooooooong list of names here] is infinitely more suitable for the job than any recruiter could possibly know.(*) As an immortal warrior who has lived the entire length of human history, he's assumed and lived more false IDs and cover roles than he can count, and fought in every kind of conflict from the most open and aboveboard down to the sneakiest type of shadow ops. It would be like hiring a cross between Vandal Savage, Nick Fury, and Batman for your job: hilarious spy overkill. However, these recruiters would have had to come around before his latest re-entry into the superhero world: while he was in 'down time', as it were, he'd be perfect for this: before his latest resumption of overt superheroing, he'd hadn't been in costume for decades, and he hadn't been in intelligence ops for at least 15 years. After he came out and resumed his old WWII costumed persona of 'Captain Jack Striker', aka 'Striker-One', in the aftermath of the Haud Invasion, he's no longer available for things like this: there's too much propaganda built up around his current superhero ID to afford the political hit of having the gameworld's equivalent of Captain America go insane or go rogue, plus, the newly-formed Vanguard superteam can't afford to be down a member, as they have only four. (Four very powerful members, but still, only four.) (*) While the various intelligence agencies of the world have recently become aware that 'Jack Striker' is a metahuman with advanced lifespan in addition to regeneration powers, and that his career goes back at least to World War II and is implied to have begun a couple centuries before that, nobody not deeply inside the Mystic World is aware that he is actually a cursed immortal who dates back the entire length of recorded human history, and no one knows that he is actually 12,000 years old and the last survivor of ancient Atlantis. And they definitely don't know that back then,he was Prince Kaian the Betrayer, the arch-villain who ended up destroying it, hence his curse.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot If you have the offstage threat having actually been *stopped*, then that removes the primary objection to having it exist in the first place, yes. Which means you can leave it in w/o having it wreck the theme. (aside to the room) See the value of a rigorous debugging process, folks?

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot And you're coming across like somebody who has delusions of moderatorhood. Which is actually worse than anything you've said. What the hell gave you the delusion you could order either of us around? The guy who actually *can* do that is one PM away from you. Ping *him*. Don't try to show how manly you are by doing it yourself, much less ranting and raving about what detestable human animals we are. Way to save the thread, there, Basil. By single-handedly raising it to an entirely new quantum level of invective and bad feelings. You have now nuked the village in order to save it. If you have the slightest idea that what you just did was 'decently', then you're further out there than both me and Supreme Serpent at our worst, added together, squared, cubed, and loaded with jet fuel. PS -- two more points. Supreme Serpent was not the guy I was arguing politics with on the prior thread, that was bigdamnhero, who I haven't had any problems with in this one. (Seein g as how he hasn't imported politics into this one, which was my main beef with him last time.) And SS and I don't have any major grudges from the past, either. We got into it *solely* because a) his idea had a plot hole in it the size of the Death Star and he went off all cranky like on having that pointed out to him in detail. No eternal emnity, no flame war that will not die across threads. So, thanks for jumping to a whole bunch of conclusions, not a single one of which was remotely true. *And* screaming them at the top of your lungs. *With* a full medley of the vilest personal insults (as well as 95+% of *all* the personal insults) used by anyone against anyone in either of these alien threads, since their inception. Again, your tireless efforts to promote civilization, peace, and happy feelings are duly noted.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot It is not a personal disagreement. It is not a contest. It is an effort to find a workable scenario, by peer review -- meaning that non-workable scenarios which are posted get logically examined in detail and noted for flaws. These flaws are then rewritten around and revised scenarios are posted. Then the revised scenarios are themselves rigorously examined and tested for weak points. Repeat step A long enough, and at last, a fully workable idea -- or sevearl -- will be achieved. Think of it like debugging code, if that helps. However, this process cannot work if the meme gets passed around that we're *not* allowed to do our very best to find, and point out, whatever plot holes might exist, but must instead smile and nod and applaud mediocre efforts because to do otherwise would be uncivil or something. OTOH, if people want to keep acting like it's a contest, and personally invest themselves to the point that they cannot separate the logical dissection of their argument from their own hurt feelings or personal pride, then this thread is screwed.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot I notice you've completely abandoned actually talking about the ideas in question. Probably because there really is no way to defend them. Oh, and if the original author wrote that into his scenario, then I strongly suggest he write it back out, unless 'an exploration into complete futility and existential despair' was his objective. Anything that can so overmatch *them* won't even regard *us* as a light snack, and there really isn't much of a way around that.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot > Or, after millenia of ruling a multi-galaxy empire and being extremely > out of practice in dealing with low-tech, single-species non-spacefaring > races, they make a mistake or misinterpret something. Only if you're running a totally campy game. Now that you've established them as having run a multi-galaxy empire, you just established that they are an extremely cosmopolitan, long-lived race. I.e. -- the odds of them being unable to grasp the concept of non-telepathic sentients is nil, because unless humanity is the only non-telepathic species in multiple galaxies, they'll have *met* prior "mind-blind" civilizations by now. Edit -- actually, didn't dblsousa say, in his setting material, that his telepathic aliens were allies with several non-telepathic species? There, they've already run into the phenomenon. > And certainly after just having come from a disastrous rout that > resulted in them having to destroy one-ninth of their empire JUST TO > SLOW THE INVADERS DOWN, they might be a tad jumpy. Yes, jumpy of this planet of primitives that don't even have warp drive or FTL radio. Mmm hmmm. BTW, now that you've written that Invaders are on the way that required the destruction of one-ninth of a *multiple galaxy star empire* just to slow down, you know what? The entire game is pointless. Literally, what's the point of saving Earth? The Invaders are coming. A force of destruction that a multi-galaxy star empire can't even begin to slow down. When they get here, what do *we* do? You just put a threat on the game board (even if waaaaaaaaay off to the side) that makes *Galactus* look puny. At this point, everything else is totally screwed, unless you literally leave an Infinity Gauntlet lying around for humanity to pick up. The players are fighting to beat the alien threat so that in the few years' span of time we have left between Liberation Day and the arrival of The Horror From Beyond, we'll be celebrating those few years without aliens occupying are real estate. Hrm... you know, if the entire galaxy's going to be destroyed anyway, I think I'll just concentrate my last few years of life on making my peace with myself and God, not in fighting another war that has no real point. Even a valiant gesture of defiance only works if you've got something to be valiant *for*. > If the US had to nuke say, New England or the Pacific Northwest in > order to have a chance at slowing an invader down, I imagine we'd be > a tad touchy in the immediate aftermath too. > But no, of course, that would stretch disbelief majorly. Absolutely. > Certainly, we never have any trouble here on Earth within our own > species with any cultural snafus or misunderstandings, like something > as silly as getting mobs together to attack another nation's embassy > because of a cartoon. Certainly, the analogy between a few thousand rioters in a street and attempted planetary genocide is exact and carries over very well. Furthermore, a military expeditionary force from a civilization so old and so advanced that it actually had a functioning multi-GALACTIC star empire compares both in experience, temperament, and intellectual ability to Islamic fundamentalist rioters. /sarcasm off Some things don't scale up too good when analogizing. This is one of them. We are talking about here about attempted planetary sterilization. Try to, when making analogies to something like this, have the analogy involve the actual use of a nuclear weapon. You cannot substantiate your point merely by reminding us that idiots exist in the universe. Idiots exist anywhere and everywhere. You also have to make it plausible that these idiots could be in charge of so much, and have come so far, and achieve such great things... and still be complete idiots. [snip] > And certainly, a two-line throwout to help spark an idea must be taken > as a fully detailed campaign background, and therefore must be > vigorously attacked Oh, for cryin' out loud. Why the hell must everybody immediately scream about how they're being so 'attacked' simply because somebody points out that their idea had a gaping plot hole in it? Here's a hint -- you want people to not point out that your idea has gaping plot holes, don't write any ideas that have gaping plot holes. Your reasoning is not magically exempt from being examined logically, and you can't try to claim personal offense to fool me into believing that it is. [snip] > Here's another thought - have fun with it. "The reason the aliens > attack is: they hate cheese and any cheese-producing or consuming > societies are an abomination on the face of the universe." How many times have I said this or some variation of this? "My logical objections apply only to serious games. If you want campy silver age whacky, then go for it." Answer: Counting both threads, approaching half a dozen.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot I mean, wouldn't it be more reasonable if they went: "In our culture, it is considered a sign of good faith to open one's mind to another. We have attempted to do so to you, only to have our contact efforts rebuffed and you concentrate upon shielding your own thoughts and not even acknowledging our efforts to share our own. We *strongly request* that you explain why you have chosen to open these negotiations with such a gross insult!" "... ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, you're NON-TELEPATHIC. Boy, are our faces red! Sorry!"

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot They have never, in the entire history of their species, ever met or even conceived of the hypothetical possibility of a sentient non-telepathic race? That stretches disbelief majorly. A general point is that any species intelligent enough to figure out that the secret is to bang the rocks together is either: 1) relatively civilized enough that war is something they don't happily leap into the instant some little thing first goes wrong, but instead wait for something remotely resembling an actual /casus belli/ or: 2) barbaric idjits Now, you can have your aliens be 2) if you want, but I thought we were trying to get *away* from the camp SF 'Genghis Khan with spaceships' alien invaders. I mean, seriously, even if they *haven't* ever found the idea of the mind-blind before, you have your aliens jumping straight from 'they might possibly be betraying us!' to 'KILL THEM ALL!' without even taking a nanosecond to stop at 'OK, people, stay on your toes!' Nope, at the first suspicion of anything wrong, they just up and cut loose with the nuking. No presumption of innocence, no nothing -- straight from 'something is wrong' to 'genocide!' with no hesitation. They *supposed* to be psycho? If so, then go for it. If not, then see argument above.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? > One brief note: I did not call you intellectually arrogant. Didn't say you had. Was commenting on the irony of my having been accused of such in the past. Edit -- on going back and rechecking, turns out I did indeed say 'and *he* calls me intellectually arrogant', not 'and *they* call me intellectually arrogant'. I'm sorry for my carelessness, and I'll go back and edit it now. [snip] > One final note: I am sorry that you choose to interpret my arguments and > my words in the way you do. Here's a nice article explaining the anatomy of a proper apology: http://wizbangblog.com/archives/008498.php Ask yourself which criteria you just fell down on. As for the remainder of your post, yes, we do indeed have irreconcilable views. Very much so. That having been acknowledged, let's go to the other thread and start talking about aliens.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords: Reboot In a realistic hard-SF campaign, yes. However, in-atmosphere plasma guns are a long-established genre trope, and a *moderate* amount of rubber science doesn't harm most SF campaigns. The real trick for a DM is in knowing when to stop.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? Yes, and I just ripped a strip off the other guy for pretending to read *my* mind. But, of course, I wouldn't have done that and said this if I hadn't felt the two situations were different. Why did I feel they were different? Simple. It is really unlikely that anyone who's been on NGD, much less seen *me* post on NGD, bring up *that* issue of real-world politics in a conversation with me and then claim that he didn't expect a real-world political discussion to break out. It is flat-out impossible that anybody could do so *twice* and not expect a political discussion to break out. (Add -- good God, man, you didn't get on the Internet just last week. You /know/ what political hot buttons exist on the Internet, and you knew you were saying one. I mean, it's like if I suddenly went off in a speech about gun control or abortion, and then tried to claim I didn't expect anybody to react politically to my post. You'd *know* I couldn't possibly be serious.) I mean, seriously, dude. The real killer was not your first post, but your second -- the one where you 'apologized' and said that you didn't want a political discussion to break out but then went on to keep trying to score political points. Like I said then and say again now, if you'd really wanted to avoid an NGD-style heated discussion on politics, you'd have stopped talking about politics right after the word 'apology', instead of devoting the last paragraph of that post to trying to get the last -- political -- word in again. You didn't. Stop, that is. So I didn't *have* to read your mind. I *wasn't* reading your mind. Your intent and your actions were literally written all over your posts in black and white, I merely had to read *them*. Edit -- and no, you're not like me at all. For one thing, I'm not much for pretending that I wasn't doing something while I did it.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? No, I'm saying you weren't paying attention and that your lack of attention annoyed me. If you're going to pretend that that is a vicious personal attack upon you, maybe I should make a *real* one so that you could tell the difference. Then again, the moderators tend to frown when I do that, and I've collected enough warnings. No, what you have done is completely make up something inside your own head and then claim that it was what I was really saying. The last time I checked, I was not, in fact, the Oracle at Delphi. I did not need somebody to translate my cryptic mutterings for the world to hear, nor did I need an interpreter to divine the *real* 'truth' of what I was saying and do all my talking for me. I do the talking for me. You do the talking for you. You do not in any way, shape, manner or form pretend that you have either the ability or the right to read my mind and find 'the real argument behind my words', or whatever the hell nonsense you were saying. You most especially do not do so as a dodge to avoid having to address what I'm actually saying. If this isn't plain enough for you, I can't think of anything that would be that would not involve language sufficient to get me tempbanned. No, the reason I am reacting in such a manner is because you have been combining an egregiously fallacious argument along with a devastating lack of attention to the points I've actually been trying to make, *plus* your making up arguments 'behind my questions' that I've never actually said and spending all your time talking about those, as opposed to simply addressing what I'm saying, you're instead pretending to read my mind. So on both a logical, a presentation, and a communications level, you've managed to figure out exactly what most annoys the heck out of me and stomp right on that particular nerve ending with hob-nailed boots. You have scored a perfect trifecta of Chuckg's frustration triggers. At this point, I don't need to be personally offended to show signs of irritation, my general lack of admiration for both the types of arguments you're making and the debate tactics you make them with is enough to serve. PS -- or if you need it boiled down into one sentence -- your original argument was so damn wrong it made my head hurt just to look at it. I get very cranky when my head hurts.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? What major point? His major point is because some people are mistaken about the hijackers being involved with Iraq, therefore President Bush hates all Muslims (with mutterings aside from him about how he's possibly manipulating other people into believing this as well). That isn't a 'point', it's a patent absurdity. It's right down there with Merovingian conspiracy theory. I treat reasoning this fallacious with all the intellectual respect it deserves, which is none. As for the 'bluff', you yourself admit that none of them are world leaders, and that's all I need. Your 'but they're world *players*!' fudge is precisely that, fudge. Not to mention that the Islamic fundamentalist radicals to which you refer have hardly gotten up and stated that they think all *Muslims* are evil, which is the question I originally asked.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? > Honestly, I was NOT trying to invoke a political rant; *snorts* You knew perfectly well what your last post was going to provoke, don't try to pretend that you didn't. More to the point, you knew what *this* post was going to provoke. If y'all truly didn't want to argue about it, this last post of yours would have ended with "... my apologies to everyone on the thread.", and *NOT* gone any further. You honestly think you're going to drag Iraq into a thread and then claim you didn't think it would trigger an NGD debate? Oh, one thing. 'Vitriol'? Don't overdramatize. I didn't show you *any* vitriol yet. What I *have* done is object strongly to your accusations -- which, given the strength and seriousness of the charges, is an entirely appropriate reaction. You accuse people of serious ****, don't act shocked when you provoke serious feelings. You made an extraordinary claim, you had to provide extraordinary proof. You have totally failed to do so. None of them said it -- and contrary to your claims, none of them have acted like it either. If we'd reprised the Japanese internment camps, only with American Muslims, *THAT* would be 'acting like it'. You know what? We haven't. It takes more than handing me rep and agreeing with some things I say to make me ignore when the rest of what you're saying is totally not true.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords? Or to try to sum it up even shorter: Remember that even the most selfish, short-sighted, amoral, mass murdering tyrant alive still shares a basic common desire with every other sane human being -- the desire to not die young. And write accordingly.

Re: How to Overthrow the Alien Overlords?

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From our group's 'change of pace' venture into the fantasy genre yesterday... Things you do really do not want to hear from the young scion of nobility whom you fished out of the harbor, where some evil sorts had obviously left him to drown: "My true name is... Emperor Niall VI of the Rystani Empire."

Re: [Campaign] UNITY Prime No, we missed the last couple of sessions due to people not being able to attend. We hope that next week everybody can make it.

Re: WWYCD? The Trap Starguard -- be horrified, insincerely smile and nod, fly away, the guys with the white coats -- and the other guys with the blue suits and guns -- will be showing up soon. Dr. Pain -- *conks* Obsessed Avenger on the head, likewise. Baron von Darien -- "... you know, that's actually a very clever idea. Do you have a spare key to the property that I might use? Oh, and I might suggest that you improve your fencing..."