Nolgroth

Re: Tesunden Isles I'm in pretty constant contact with Merovign so I am sure it will be pro-gaming for him. Cool. That will be enough to plan a game around. Would like to see the rest of y'all (ghost-angel and Solron) there too, but I would be willing to work with what I have if previous arrangements have been made. Thanks for the replies.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update 10/15/10: In an unusual stroke of luck, I got today off instead of yesterday. Never one to question Providence, I took today to go visit my mother and some of my other relations (siblings, nieces, nephews, etc). All in all it was a very beautiful trip and very bolstering. I got to catch up on old times and was subjected to the unabated envy of my family's extraordinary view from their backyard. Stupidly, I forgot my camera so I don't have any pictures of the mountains to the east of Dayton, NV. Absolutely gorgeous weather though. Cool and dry. What this means is that I do not need to take next week off like I planned. So unless you all have made other arrangements for next week, the game is on and we only lost one week instead of two. Let me know how to plan this one. I'm going to work on the assumption that you planned stuff so please let me know if you want to game next week. Thanks. -James

Re: Tesunden Isles EDIT: Got called into work to cover somebody. Game is canceled for today.

Re: Firing around corners, over barriers, blind, in the dark, etc Enhanced Senses such as Radar or Spatial awareness would compensate for some/all of those accuracy penalties. Clairsentience might too. If it were going around solid objects, I would require Penetrative added onto the sense.

Re: Tesunden Isles

Re: Tesunden Isles Server is up. Before we start, I have a rules discussion question.

Re: Tesunden Isles Gotcha.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I think we are agreeing more than not. I would never believe that the Lord of the Rings would be easily translated to film. My complaints lie with the portrayal of the essentials. I brought up Aragorn and Gandalf, Nevelon brought up Faramir, you brought up Legolas, Gimli, and the Ents. I really don't understand why the base motivations would change. The extended cut, where Aragorn told Boromir that he would not take the ring within a 100 leagues of Gondor could have just as easily been more of the "I'd like to go with you, but this is the more important quest." speech. Faramir could have been less of the "Daddy Issue" and more heroic. The movie could have played out almost the same, but it would have made the characters more noble and more true to the story. Instead, they had to burden all of the characters with unnecessary pathos. How right you are!

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Lord of the Rings is a great fantasy movie trilogy. It is not Lord of the Rings so much as fanfic brought to life. If I try to compare the movies to the books, I get really ticked off. The whole Aragorn being an anti-Gondor freak, the fact that Gandalf did not want to go through Moria. Those two motivations were directly contrary to the books and they didn't need to be. In Aragorn's case, he wanted, longed to go back to Gondor and take up the good fight. It was only his perceived need with the Fellowship that kept him from doing so. Gandalf wanted to go through Moria, not knowing that the Balrog had taken up residence. I'm not sure it would have mattered if he did know. The need for haste was just too strong in his motivation, especially after the failed attempt to go over the mountains. Instead we get this whole reluctant hero crap from Aragorn and fear of the Balrog from Gandalf. Where was the need to change that part of the story because I saw absolutely no reason that the original motivations could not have stayed. And those are just two of the many reasons that the movies can never truly be the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings that do the books justice. They are wonderful films to watch, but in the end, they are simply too different at the fundamental things to truly represent the books. And no, I don't need Tom Bombadil in the movie either.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos don't think I can embed this directly, but follow the link. Woman survives vehicle versus pedestrian collision. http://news.mydaily.com/2010/10/05/upended/?ncid=webmail

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? The Event & Not Your Ordinary Family. Liking both shows, though I have to turn off crotchety mode a lot. For instance, in the pilot of NYOF, the woman running along the freeway and breaking that side mirror made me sigh. No, not from any scientific physics vantage. From the fact that if I placed myself in the driver's place, that would be a major expense. One that might set me back a month or two of disposable income. Even with insurance, there is a deductible to be paid. It really annoyed me that it was a throwaway moment in the show to demonstrate how fast/cool the mom is now. And that thought process, reminds me of just how not fun I am becoming. The Event is turning out to be more fun. I find the likelihood of a human like, but superior to human, alien species just so tiresome. Yet the story and pacing is quite engaging. Starting to show influence from Lost, X-Files, and probably a few other shows. There is a bit of crime drama feel going on which is good too. The big shocker in the recent episode wasn't. I knew the creative staff would be too gutless for that. Still an enjoyable show. What I would like, is a show like The Event told from the perspective of humanity being the dominant species and having to make decisions about how to interact with a less technologically advanced species. SICK of the aliens are superior meme in entertainment media these days. Done to death and the only thing different is the faces involved. Or perhaps the locker combination. Not sure which. I suppose I am being critical today.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update 10/09/10: Updated that maximum allowable Defense / Resistant Defense ratings. Looking at how much damage is being done, a bit more defense will probably be required. This also brings it to the point where Resistant Defense max = mac DC. See how that rolls for a while.

Re: Ctrl+V Awesome. Love to see that sort of thing.

Re: Tesunden Isles Blog Updated with 10/07/10 session recap.

Re: Tesunden Isles Blog (finally!) updated.

Re: Vampire: the masquerade style blood pool Not charges on the END Reserve. Just charges on something like Multipower containing all the powers.

Re: Vampire: the masquerade style blood pool End Reserve is the first thing that pops into my head. I would likely buy it with a 0 REC, but tack on a Healing (Blood Pool), only from feeding. You can season extra rules in there to represent that 1 Body = a certain amount of END healed. A more strict HERO interpretation would be a Linked Drain Body/Aid Blood Pool. Tends to be more expensive that way, but maybe it is apropos to your concept. Charges may also work, especially if the Vampire Powerz are all in some sort of Framework and the charges all apply to the Framework. I would make the charges Recoverable, but only Recovers Under Certain Circumstances (feeding). Maybe at 1 Body per Charge or something. That is kind of a wonky workaround though and I don't know how many GMs would approve of it.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update: We will be switching to MapTool version 1.3b74. It seems a bit more stable and fast according to Starwolf. I did not notice much of a performance difference from my end. In good news, we found a major error and corrected it. I'm not going to get real technical (partly because I am not sure I understand it enough to describe it correctly). I will say that it almost changes the way we do things. In this case, defenses are applied when you input damage into the Apply Damage v2 macro. It takes the raw, unmodified damage, subtracts defenses and sets the appropriate values. For the most part, it is hardly different than what we do now. The only difference is an Armor Piercing check box and a Surprise (ignore Combat Luck) check box that will need to (rarely) be checked. I'll post the Blog entry sometime later this weekend. I really, really need to sleep now. Until next time.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? I am so going to buy this soundtrack.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update: Fixed an error in Armor Piercing calculation. It was not rounding, so defenses after AP calculation were not whole numbers. Penetrating is, for the moment, sort of a hack so that Filch gets his bonus. Right now it rounds down the Final DC of the Attack divided by 3 and then adds 1. For even number of Dice (dc 3, 6, 9, etc) this makes the average Body rolled just slightly higher. For odd numbers, it falls into line, except for the no additional Body for xd6+1 attacks. Penetrating attacks are pretty uncommon, so we'll run with it for a while. Not sure what the canon rules are, but I had Penetrating attacks adjust damage based on Hit Location. It's pretty simple to remove that if my "off the cuff" interpretation violates some sacred cow. I used Haakon, Filch and an NPC for testing purposes. Check to make sure that I did not accidentally "Heal" Body or outstanding Stun while I was dorking around.

Re: Tesunden Isles

Re: Tesunden Isles ghost-angel I keep getting errors on the latest Filch .hdc file. Any chance you can tell me what attacks are Penetrating? Or send me a new copy with the extension renamed. Or both.

Re: Tesunden Isles First of all, let me look at the Shield write-up. I may have forgotten to toggle the "Str Adds to Damage" flag. If that is set, then yeah, a +xd6 Blast, No Range would be appropriate. EDIT: Just waking up here, but giving the semi-Epic nature of the campaign, I would also see just adding damage to the base HtH attack value. Currently it is rounddown( (STR-8) + 2d6 ) which gives Haakon a 4d6 regular attack. This is 4 DC, which is roughly 1/3 the Campaign Limits for DC. You don't have to max out the damage in order to make it effective either. Option 3 is to add a Shield Element to your Martial Art and then buy additional DC with the Martial Art. If you are near peak damage with your sword, then that may be less effective. Then again, I have it hard coded with a Max Damage of 2x Base Damage. That will cover any additional damage from Martial Arts to CSLs. Option 4 is to buy some CSLs with the Shield and devote them to extra damage.

Re: Ctrl+V Penetrating [if (dmgType==Normal"), CODE: { [r: "Stun:] [r: round( penStun * tbl ("nstunx", hitLocation))] }; { [r: "Body:"] [h: herostun (floor (finalDC /3),6)] [r: round (herobody (floor (finalDC/3),6) * tbl ("bodyx", hitLocation)))] }]

Re: Tesunden Isles Update: I sort of have Penetrating worked in. It does not read any weapon data nor does it compare Penetrating versus Impenetrable, but I have it worked out so that it outputs a Penetrating Damage. We have to know which attacks are Penetrating and the Penetrating damage only applies if the base damage is 0. As I said, none of that is figured out for us. We will have to do that ourselves. At least now we have some method by which we can do Penetrating. This one has been a long time in coming. Next I will pursue the same sort of output only for Martial Maneuvers. Now that I have shelved the idea of having the macro automate STR vs STR (Disarm rolls for example), creating an output for a specific maneuver should be child's play. Might even get that done tomorrow, though I doubt it. Now it is sleepy time for Nolgroth. I am expecting the roofers to get another early start so they can maximize the amount of time in which to raise a purely evil cacophony. See you all tomorrow,....er later today.