AmadanNaBriona

Re: Strange Asteroid Stalks the Earth Sure, I got him for ya. I don't need much encouragement to rep the man *Unabashed Nyrath fanboy*

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. Helped a friend move her furniture, went to sword class, rebuilt my resume from scratch, and drew four pages worth of set design work for "The Crying Princess and the Golden Goose", and took care of a bunch of shopping. I'm beat.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings German Longsword is different enough from Scottish/Irish Greatsword techniques that I'm going to have to reprogram my kinesthetic memory. The sore muscles feel good tho, and it was nice to see my old Captain again (I've known the instructor for 22 years and was one of the Best men at his wedding)

Re: Double Ended Weapons

Re: Double Ended Weapons I do understand the idea of the sweep levels, and I even agree in the case of low mass/low relative inertia weapons like quarterstaves and double bladed lightsabers, but the bigger the blade you slap on each end the more mass you have to shift in it's parabola and the harder it will be to do so, coupled with a relatively predictable strike path. I just got back from German longsword class, and I suspect many game designers don't really realize exactly how damn fast you can make an ordinary bastard sword do tricks. Furthermore, ANY hafted weapon has some of the same advantages, except in some cases more pronounced (such as in the case of Block maneuvers). For example... I spent years sparring with a bardiche with a 5 foot haft, a Great Axe in game terms, and by exploiting the balance difference between the blade end and the butt end I can move the butt around in a parry using the weight of the blade to provide so much inertia to the butt that I've both disarmed unaware opponents and actually bent swords with the force of the impact from the wooden haft. It's actually a lot like spinning a color-guard ensign, in fact. There really aren't any 'magic bullet' weapon designs that are vastly superior to all others, tho swords come close, which is why they gradually won the "most common tool of battle" position.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Lose Yourself -Eminem From my Apocalypse playlist

Re: Musings on Random Musings or as Erik the Phantom might say... "Down once more to the dungeon of my black despair! Down we plunge to the prison of my mind! Down that path into darkness deep as hell!" (Eric the Amadan has, on occasion been known to sing this whilst descending the stairs into the massively cluttered, dusty and dark Prop basement)

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. sounds like the topic hits one of your own Psych Lims, there CC

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? That's been getting a lot of airtime lately, too

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? To Live Forever - Planet P Project, Pink World (The Definitive Edition)

Re: teen champons geeks vs jocks kung fu version This was the first thing that popped into my head as well.

Re: It pay to listen to the stories of your Grandfathers MBuhahaha! Have a smack with my repstick

Re: The Monster As Hero thread Not to mention Soft White Underbelly fans....

Re: Expanded Unoffical Bibliography for the Ultimate Mentalist. Don't have TUM, so I don't know if it was skipped because it's already listed in the book, but May's Galactic Milieu Series is, if possible, even more psi-oriented than her Pliocene Exile series

Re: The Monster As Hero thread "Three times I've sent you back from me Three times my bones gone dry And three times I've seen the shooting shark Lighting up the sky" -BOC (How the heck do you type an umlaut anyway?)

Re: Double Ended Weapons I basically agree with every thing Vulcan says here, from my years of experience as a fight choreographer. A doublebladed lightsaber should include something like a major side effects that if the attack roll misses by a certain amount the weilder takes full damage. Darth Maul bought off the Limitation as a naked differing modifier with the SFX of "The Force". The advantages given to double ended weapons in D&D3 are totally out of scope with their actual utility, IMHO. Oh, and one of the main reasons for putting a buttspike on a polearm is to provide a firmer anchor when setting vs. charge (Extra levels, probably). Having the extra 1/2d6 HKA or so as a backup is just kinda a bonus in the event of a catastrophic weapon failure.

Re: Dhalsim's Transcendent Awareness: Zen No Mind I recall building a character for my very Steven Perry influenced SH game with similar abilities (different name... Zanshin, because I tend to come from a more Japanese MA background), which IIRC I modeled as a lot of Lightning Reflexes, Combat Sense, Danger Sense, and 8 point All Combat skill levels with RSR. A resetting triggered Speed boost of some sort might also be good.

Re: Yet another Fantasy Hero Weapons Thread... I've toyed with "overdrawing" rules but thus far haven't really bothered implementing any in a game. Probably something on the order of allowing an extra +5 STR to be used for an extra +1 DC, with the drawback that any overdrawn shot that rolls a 16 or better breaks something for Major Side Effects, roughly modeled as the same DC attack on the user.

Re: Yet another Fantasy Hero Weapons Thread... Let me guess... ARMA? longsword is a bit closer to the mark, having multiple cultural origins and not always referring to hand-and-a-half swords, besides being a convenient label. I blame D&D for starting the whole mess, as a means to distinguish different classes of blade without having to list off specs. I suppose it's easier to grok than "Oakeshott XIIIa" EDIT: I suppose I should have said Oakshotte XIV, as the XIII and XIIIa are 1 1/2 handers and great swords, respectively. Shows you what I normally play with

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I am a pirate, as far as the children of the world are concerned. I'm good with this, and in recent years have encouraged the trend. at work I am known as The Pirate. My nephew, who is a month from his 3rd Birthday, idolizes me. He wandered up into my workshop for the first time last week, on a very purposeful mission of exploration. My pride all slinked out of wherever they'd been sleeping to see who the new person was. He was a bit overwhelmed by the feline flood that descended on him (all four cats happened to be in the shop at the time), but let loose with a delighted "Oh?! Kitties!" when he'd gotten his fill of petting them, he looked up and sort of did a pan and scan of the room. The wall full of old chart style maps, the bo'suns whistle on a chain, the antlers full of Mardi Gras beads, the faeries and swords on the walls, and finally the billowing Jolly Roger over my computer. He got very excited. "Oh, a pirate flag!" *he has apparently got in into his wee head that "Oh" is the perfect expression of surprise* Fast forward to the end of the week. I went to go visit so I could use my sisters tempering machine to cast some dark chocolate desert cups. And of course to hang out with Ruari. Just as I was leaving, he peeled on of my gloves off and put in on himself, very carefully getting his wee fingers in all the right hols and closing the strap across the back of his hand. Even so, he had to hold his hand up to keep it on. In his red thermal shirt with my comparatively ginormous black leather fingerless glove on, he sort looked like a Hellboy cosplayer, but he immediately started stomping around going "Arrrrrr! Arrrrr! I'm a Pirate! You, go there! You, go there! Arrr!". I was rolling. The next day, while Sis and Mom were talking, this fragment was overheard and passed on by Mom.... "I know you're a pirate, but that doesn't mean you can hit the dogs. You have to be a good pirate like your Uncle. Does Uncle Eric hit the dogs?" The very next day, Ru was watching a pirate cartoon with his Dad and it "connected" with him just what a cutlass was. He proceeded to swing around a variety of straight or slightly curved objects in mock swordplay. Until Dad brought him into his office. Ruari stopped dead in his tracks, apparently so excited he was shaking. On the wall of my Brother in Laws office/studio is a highly polished and engraved machete given to him by the village blacksmith from the African village he taught basic computer use classes for 6 months a few years ago. My Nephew was staring at , trembling. "Papa, you have a REAL cutlass!" Then,turning to stare at his father in awe "Papa, are you a Pirate, TOO?!"

Re: Lightning powers...with a BOOM! Another way would be to drop a Resetting Trigger on the Flash so it goes off whenever another power is activated. That said, I tend to agree with Thia, in that it's a limitation. Visible to the Sound Group (Noisy, basically), because you can home in on it from miles away. Heck, every schoolkid knows hyow to figure out how far away you are by counting the lag. I'd also encourage Side Effects that always effect the environment, just like the backblast of a bazooka, Jet Exhaust or Propeller blades. Because it's going to be a nuisance at least as often as it's gonna be helpful

Re: Bestiar(ies) questions By Critical Hits, I mean the straight from the RAW Optional Rule, "roll 1/2 or under what you need to hit and do max damage" style criticals. People balk at them for the danger level they impart to a campaign, but once you've used them for a while, you begin to see the paradigm shift. Attacks become far more predictable, in that you know exactly how much damage a particular attack will do on a solid hit, and how much armor it will penetrate. Makes modeling larger attacks or converting from RL stats much simpler, and reflects a certain level of accuracy without radically whacked new rules. They also bring Normal Attacks up to par with Killing Attacks (By allowing normal attacks to hit their maximum damage, something the bell curve otherwise essentially eliminates), and give a good game-play mechanism for the Real Weapon/Real Armor approach (rather than eliminating the ability of the Real attack to do damage, you simply don't allow them to critical against inappropriate targets.)

Re: Bestiar(ies) questions Spalling is best represented with Penetrating, and the reason it's not exploited more in modern warfare is because spallguards have become fairly standard equipment on armored vehicles. As an amusing aside, spalling and hull fragmentation is the reason why all the bedding on wooden ships was bundled and webbed to the inside of the hulls while at General Quarters back in the Age of Sail

Re: Bestiar(ies) questions I have to be at work in a half hour or I'd leap to the KA mechanic's defense, but I haven't the time. But I will say this, again.... Use Critical hits and consistent armor penetration benchmarks suddenly become nicely real world. With the addition of Piercing, you wind up being able to model heavy armored combat fairly well, speaking as the guy who used to play and run a SH campaign that at times included a lot of Hammer's Slammers style action. Random damage rolls represent variations in angle of impact, deflection, and all that other fun stuff. One thing we did use in our games was the advantage AP Capped, from the original GAC, which was a nice shorthand build for the "if it penetrates the armor bad things happen" effect, but that can be build in other ways under the current edition. Fox1 did it rather well, back in the day, before he bailed. I'd rather ask why supernatural creatures seem to be the only things that get Damage Reduction in their writeup?