ghost-angel

The Human Immune System: Switching between Almost Useless to Attempting To Kill You on a regular basis.

Enhance Disease: Drain Body - as a life mage add life force to any of the various diseases a human body my harbor it drains the life from the host, eventually killing them. (this could easily be a Killing Attack as well) Fever Curse: Drain End - causing the bodies natural response to disease to go into overdrive, a fever drains their stanima until they fall unconscious and can do nothing but wait for the body to return to normal. Cancerous Growth: Major Transform - causes cancer to grow uncontrollably in the body until they literally become deformed and unable to function; (the exact nature could vary from loss of DEX due to tumors, loss of senses, or adding a Physical Complication: Chronic Pain, must make an EGO Roll for any physical exertion)

No, but if you're a young trader and you encounter another trade coming from the other direction with a bunch of goods you know you can turn around and sell at home for profit it also makes sense to trade out good right there, and go home saving yourself a bunch of time and money in the process. On the other hand, if there are no major trade cities on the route then yes, you'd have to go all the way out to trade your goods. I'm less familiar with the Viking Road, but I do know that the Silk Road had a whole bunch of points along it that traders met at, exchanged goods (instead of money) and then turned around, shortening their trips considerably.

There's probably a lot of truth to the idea that a single merchant didn't take his goods all the way from point of origin to point of resolution. I mean, the biggest achievement of the modern diesel age is fast, cheap, good, transportation. We hit all three points on the Choose Two spectrum... I'd imagine goods flowed in both directions as direct trades for each other, any given merchant going over a small section of any given route. I know, at least according to a museum visit, on the Silk Road it was rare for a single trader to traverse the entire Silk Road himself. Major trade cities were so because they were positioned so that traders from both directions reached those points in close succession as much as anything else and could just transfer good across right there and then turn back with their new stuff and sell it for profit once home again.

They're 5 to 6 year old Latitudes, we tried every trick in the book. Win10 is either unusable, or refuses to recognize even the simplest drivers. We weren't/aren't going to put any more resources into older laptops, so it's a moot point; but the older Latitudes just simply do not run Win10 in our experience. I do have a newer latitude that seems to operate OK on it, bit slow, but nothing overly unbearable (at least, from my POV. Some of the users get down right pissed if a web page takes longer than 10 seconds to load).

Yeah but.... man, she'd be awesome.

Yes, it has rules for playing organizations from street level gangs up to galactic empires. It's the Kingdoms chapter. It works pretty well, it is not some shoehorning of standard Hero Rules to work with that scale, it is a new set of rules using the basic building blocks of the system. It feels like Hero in every sense. The Characteristics for Kingdoms are: STR (divided into Air, Land, and Water STR for military unit types) CON (population) Size EGO (happiness & loyalty) Defense Speed (divided into three types: Economic, Military, Political) Recovery (income, sources need to be defined, and each Point of REC can be a different source) Endurance (treasury/reserves) They also have some specialized skills as well as some standard skills scaled up (one such Kingdom Skill is Commerce) And Combat has a series of special maneuvers that affect a kingdom in one of the three basic arenas of Politics, Economics, and Militart (so you could conduct exclusively Economic Wars with each other...) They work pretty well, though I had some trouble scaling them down to street gang level, that had as more to do with my test group as it did with the rules. There are also rules for how to treat a small, specialized group, of people within a Kingdom (i.e. The PCs) so you can go back and forth between large and personal scales.

Yeah, this isn't really an Attack, and isn't going to do what you're implying. It will make them appear unconscious, but not actually knock them out.

We've had OK luck with 7/XP environments, though without NetBIOS, tricking the Firewall on the 7 Side, and a Win7 registry fix one of our guys cooked up has gotten them to play nice most of the time. We look forward to the day XP disappears completely. At least nothing runs 8.1

The Point Of Sale software we support is supposed to get Win10 approval in October, we're not especially looking forward to that as it will inevitably mean mixed Win10/Win7 environments between server and register.

Most of my Win10 woes revolve around video cards and related issues. Some of the laptops I've had to back the Intel Management Engine back down to 9.5 to get the machine to come out of sleep properly. I feel like the guy I told "don't have six monitors" got what he deserved though (we said we aren't supporting that, you can figure it out on your own). An older model video card flat out didn't work at all with Win10, so we replaced it and trashed the old one. Lenovo model machines seem to hate Win10, a lot. At least, the older models we have in the building do. No one of them has taken the upgrade well. Which is better than a few Dell Latitude laptop models have taken it: which is to say they don't. They don't even pretend. They just die.

The real state of the system & rules will come when the print run of both Complete Books runs its course and those become unavailable in hardcopy....

Unified Power is a Limitation that any related Powers with this Modifier are affected simultaneously by Negative Adjustment Powers, regardless which singular one of them was initially targeted. It replaced Elemental Control within the system. Alternate Combat Value is an Advantage that allows you to change with Combat Values are used to Attack or Attack Against, it's part of how 6E split apart AVAD Attacks.

I found the Chaos Rift to be massively helpful.... Just lick and stick badguys with a healthy Knockback roll... ha! Powers that Monkeywrenched the Campaign and everyone agreed to stop using them almost immediately: Rewind: EDM: 1 Turn Back, UAA (any 8 friendly people); The Time Controller used it twice, it's combat level & we decided it took the fun out of it. (instead she decided that Speed 12 DEX 48 DCV 26 was a fine compromise) And then: An Unkindness Of Ravens, Razor Sharp Beak: 1 Pip HKA, Penetrating x2 - on a Duplicator with x32 Duplicates. One red mist later the GM and I decided it was campaign inappropriate. Funny, but inappropriate.

That second one was part of what prompted me to finally fix the database issue; it's woefully incomplete.

All of the websites where I knew it was stored are gone to the obliterating tides of time.... and not a small number of people have emailed me in the past year or so asking where the copy I was hosting was, as it returned a SQL Database error. As bigdamnhero has requested one for his new campaign, and as I'm a player I thought it best to help the GM out, I found my original files (3 archive hard drives deep and counting... I need a better system) and found all the backend logins I needed, fixed it all up, and we're back. It was originally built in the days of "Disadvantages" and "Limitations" instead of just "Complications" and so that stands - because this was a quick and dirty fix, not an update; but for new players the terms are functionally interchangeable, don't let that stop you from using them, enjoy. http://www.cellularsmoke.net/rpgs/masterlistdisads.php (you know what I also found... the abandoned Master Index Cross Reference Project... If I get bored this summer the Online 5th Edition Master Index may find the light of day yet.)

Consider if you have Conversation at 12-, Oratory at 15-, and Charm at 13- in a campaign with a Skill Maxima of 15-; You buy a Skill Level for three "Closely related skills" or a "PRE Based Skill Level"; for the Conversation and Charm skills, it doesn't get you to the max, so it's normal cost. For Oratory though, you immediately exceed the Maxima. So you either have "Costs two SKill Levels to get a +1 above the Maxima" which is quite expensive at the "All PRE Based Skills" Level (8pts IIRC, which is double what an actual +1 would cost for that skill to exceed the maximum); Or just disallow it. I'd probably be inclined to say the first rule is more appropriate, but the second one is much cleaner/definitive an explanation.... or decision. I can see why the Rules went that way...

I think that's going to be a factor in some of the test group. But the study was over 1400 kids of both genders. That's not going to be a factor amongst most of them, I don't believe. On the other hand, our society systematically tells girls to be constantly on the look out for dangerous boys, basically teaching all women that men are psychotic predators waiting to rape and murder them at every turn. So, you know, it could be the parents.... I doubt it's just that though.

Must have missed that, thanks for finding the passage.

I actually got into a discussion of "in print" with some friends, as the definition they stood by was "hardcopy available" and I stood by "available by any format" as I've basically switched entirely to PDF gaming books just due to space and desire to have them on hand while out gaming... I looked it up, the Publishing Industry does not care about availability, "In Print" is "Contract with the author is still active" - it doesn't matter if there are 1 million or 1 copies available for sale. If the contract is good, the book is in print. I still stand that in the modern industry, available will also include PDF/ebook formats. I know a few small, mostly romance, companies that are digital only. Which by "hardcopy available" definition means nothing they have is In Print.... a concept I find silly.

Ultron is my least favorite movie in the franchise (well, I haven't seen Ant Man yet... technically); Whedon did a good job, but the editing felt discombobulated and truncated, and caused more than a few issues I have with how some characters were portrayed.

Which is why almost all Will Smith characters sound exactly the same, variations on a theme, regardless of story and other character considerations. He rarely steps out of that "I am Will Smith" role. Sometimes the Actor really does need to lose themselves in the writers vision. Good ones can.

The excuses are so ... misogynistic and they can't even stop back peddling long enough to see it.

I seriously doubt it's a parental factor. In fact, given the number that don't even want other people in the room with them I doubt some parents even know their daughters play either. Every single female video gamer I know has been harassed when they make it known they're female online in games. Without fail. From "I can tell by your voice your a fat B----" to actual threats, and sexual harassment. Every. One. Anecdote is not Data. But that's alarming to me. That a dozen friends can't use mics in games with strangers because of constant threat of harassment.

Most actors have input on specific lines, character mannerisms (like Iron Man having dried blue berries on the helicarrier because they couldn't stop RDJ from stashing snacks and just ran with it), and minor aspects of a scene. But the plot, movie, and many scenes are dictated by Writers and Producers, not Actors or Directors.