Nolgroth

Re: Cryostasis

Re: Cryostasis Yes. Yes indeed.

Re: LOTR thoughts North. Even though the kingdom of Gondor eventually spreads its influence northward (as I recall), north is the only place that these exiles might find a place to settle. They might even form some sort of kingdom based on the ruins of some previous Numenorean off-shoot kingdom. Honestly though, the 4th Age is almost completely unexplored. Pick a spot.

Re: The Sinister Secret of the Silver Serpent.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Ain't No Grave" - Johnny Cash

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn I was woken up by the wind this morning. It wasn't the whistling, whining wind that tried to find me through the cracks around the doors and windows. It was a pounding wind, throwing itself against the house and causing it to shake like a nearby freight train was somehow diverted right past my window. The buffeting roar and rattling windows stole my dreams from me. Not sure where the purple prose came from, but it is very true. The wind woke me today and it is fierce. I am loving it. This is sort of a warning. Nothing untoward has happened to the power, but as with any fairly extreme weather, there is always the possibility. I certainly hope not, but if for some reason that you don't see a server, that is probably why. I am especially excited as I now have an ethernet (instead of wireless) connection again. I've also found a holy grail of sorts that enables we to at least entertain a concept that has been in the back of my mind for a while. So mostly I am stoked today. See you all at game time.

Re: Superheat metal As an aside, I've halved the ED of Metal Armor. Cold, fire, and lightning are all going to quickly bypass the defense.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn Take care of your wife. Ta'Rang will just have to be sleeping off a bender or something. Best wishes to your wife's recovery.

Re: What would you do as GM when our intrepid . . . . . . The Dark Feral idea is golden and I wish I could toss some rep that way. It is an extraordinarily creative idea to toss in.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Almost the entire run of How It Should Have Ended. Some of these little clips are just awesome. Some are trite. All of them have thus far been entertaining. EDIT: And thanks much Pizza Man for posting a link in one of the other threads that caused this little distraction.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn There were a whole lot of issues on my end. Issues that I am not entirely sure what happened. I sort of have it narrowed down to one or more of the following; My video drivers were not installed correctly. To fix, I uninstalled completely and reinstalled. I had too many objects on the Facility map. I deleted that map (and a whole day's worth of work and prep). I had too many Vision Blocking elements on the map. Also fixed with the map deletion. The previous two combined. In the end, we did get back together for a total of about an hour and a half. It was mostly roleplaying trying to get in contact with Taffy. Merovign and I have this mad plan to set up a dedicated MapTool server on a hard line connection. We are hoping that will solve at least some of the connection problems.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn Back up again. I hope this is the solution.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn Back up. Think there was too much load. Consolidated and condensed some things.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn Just rebooted computer and server. Try again.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? In My Darkest Hour - Sirenia Just discovered this band tonight. Some of their stuff is very evocative. Some of it is just loud Euro metal. The female lead has a great voice (not to mention is gorgeous). Adding to my Amazon mp3 wishlist.

Re: The Cape - What do you think of it so far? Well nuthin' says we have to agree on that. Personally I think that the tone was important, only in the fact that they could not settle on one. The thing that damned the show was an apparent lack of superhero/pulp timing knowledge. Or any dramatic timing for that matter. Second the "shame" part though.

Re: The Cape - What do you think of it so far? Okay, this last episode, Goggles and Hicks pretty much cinched it for me. No matter what my hopes for the show were, there were just too many misses. First of all, the "Who's the hunted" storyline works best when you take a member of a group and split him from the group and/or rob them of their signature power. Since both of those have already been done in just the last couple of episodes, the timing of this one is just not good. Then there was the whole clumsy "firing" scene. The guy is about to hand you some sort of data, you take it. Part of the problem is that Chess is less like a master planner/organizer than he is a rampant psychopath. They've hinted that he has some extraordinary planning skills, but I have just not seen it portrayed convincingly yet. And as much as I like cheesy one liners, the whole "who wears the Cape in the relationship" line almost physically hurt. This all really sucks, because there was at least some good points. The whole storyline developing with Mrs. Faraday and the new friendship Chip develops were both welcome scenes. I even liked that Vince's mortality is highlighted with the whole broken rib thing. It gave all the other scenes with him fighting a heroic "overcoming his limitation" touch. This would have been a good season finale type episode where several competing plotlines are all left dangling for the season 2 premiere. Just bad timing and execution all around. I'll continue watching, and enjoying, the show. I just don't expect that it will survive. Not because of some jinx. Because it basically falls far short of being a well written show. Makes me a little sad. The actors are actually doing as well as can be expected considering the crappy writing.

Re: "Neat" Pictures That kid looks more like a Skywalker than Jake Lloyd. Too bad he wasn't around for the first prequel. Seems to have more personality. EDIT: And just after I post, I learn the kid has a congenital heart defect that requires a pace maker. He's halfway to Darth Vader already.

Re: Cybernetics My own answers; My own interpretation is that replacement limbs would get the Focus or Physical Manifestation limitation as well as Restrainable. They would be subject to damage separate from the main body, so the net Limitation value might well be -0. Other forms of cyberware would probably have some limitation reflecting that they can be damaged due to physical trauma (Impairing/Disabling Wounds). An exact replacement would not cost anything. Even with the limitation value though, the character would gain no points directly. A Distinctive Features: Concealable (w Effort), Requires Special Senses (Cyberware detection machines) would be part of the package. If the character loses the natural limb and gains a cyberlimb during play, he gets the Distinctive Features at 0 value (subject to GM judgment of course). I agree with ghost-angel that a "Humanity" characteristic is sort of pointless. On the other hand, something like Shadowrun Essence could be dealt with by establishing an Active Point cap for both Cyberware and Magic. If the person spends points in Cyberware, it lowers the amount of Active Points in which that character can use to buy spells. For instance; there is a campaign maxima of 60 Active Points for either spells or cyberware. Bob's character is injured during an explosion and loses his eyesight. Cyber replacement eyes (I believe the AP for eyesight is 20) are installed. Now Bob's character could only spend 40 Active Points on spells. In the above, you could be an Active Point Loss (to Magic) cap on any given replacement. In Bob's character's case, you might put a 20 Active Point Loss on replacement eyes, no matter how many mods are put into the eye (Nightvision, Thermographic, Telescopic, etc). Indeed, the Active Point Loss cap could be standardized for each replacement type. Gets pretty complicated, but it is doable. You can also change the Active Point Loss to Real Point Loss, so that Focus and/or other limitations make cyberware not as magically devastating. Neat thread. Been sort of letting cybernetic enhancements percolate in the back of my brain.

Re: The Cape - What do you think of it so far?

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Started watching X-Files on Hulu. It's surprising just how many episodes I've missed over the years. So far, 2 in season 1 and 1 in season 2. I just started season 2, so there may be more.

Re: The Cape - What do you think of it so far?

Re: The Cape - What do you think of it so far? I liked the beginnings, but it sort of went to Mopeyville the last couple of episodes. I did not have as much fun with it. To the above comment about Burn Notice doing the apparent lack of progress better, that is because there was progress. Burn Notice breaks down each episode into overarching plot and episodic plot. While the overarching plot shows small gains at first, momentum builds as the season goes along. No matter what though, there is a specific attempt to highlight the season plot in each episode. At the same time, there is always some sort of resolution, usually cleverly achieved, to the smaller episodic plots. Then there is the ensemble cast. While Michael may be doing his overarching plot stuff, Fi and Sam go off to do the other stuff. Then later Michael drifts into the episodic story while one of the others takes over some aspect of the arch. The Cape could have learned from that. Small successes each episode towards getting the season plot of family reunification. Even if the resolution to the season plot turns out to be something other than the goal, the creative staff should have made it possible for little strides in that direction. And quite frankly, Jeffrey Donovan and Bruce Campbell are simply better actors. Not a huge fan of the actress portraying Fi, but she does solid work. There are some good actors on the Cape (Keith David being my favorite), but the chemistry is just not there. The motions are mostly right, but I am just not buying into it. That means the actors are not selling it. It reminds me of the late 80's to early 90's Flash TV series. I really want to like it but I don't.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn I'm sure that is exactly what will happen.

Re: Gemini Ascendant: Reborn Sorry folks. Wasn't exactly my connection dropping so much as my wireless access point getting flaky with me. Has done so in the past when my daughter and I kept "resetting" the wireless router every time one of us logged in. I think something similar is happening here, as I added a wireless printer to the mix. I think, not entirely sure, that every time it polled the network, I was getting booted. Anyway, I should be returning to a hard wire connection before next week, so hopefully this will not happen again.