AmadanNaBriona

Re: Paratwa haven't tried, but I've always sorta fancied the epithet Liegekiller. has a nice ring to it.

Re: Epic Poetry, Sagas, and the like: any fans? yeppers. Dig me some epic poetry, and my Epic Celt game long ago drew heavily from the Tain Bo Culange. I'll also pimp Grettir's Saga for Norse Undead killin' goodness, The Kalevala for general magical weirdness, and the Mabinogion for REAL Arthurian adventuring (See the 12 page list of heroes who assemble to go hunt a pig. See the piglets PWN said heroes...) I'm sure more will come to me after I've slept

Re: Plots for the Holidays Well, the obvious one for me would be " The Snakes come back" as the reference about St Pat & the snakes is usually considered to be actually talking about him breaking the hold of the druidic faith, St Paddy's would be the perfect day for some uber powerful Dark Druid type (Samhain, anyone?) to show up at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin and challenge the Archbishop to a test of Divine powers, just like Patrick did way back when when challenging the chief Druid at Tara.

Re: Your favorite Hero Codes of Honor "To defend . . . this is the Pact. But when life loses its value, and is taken for naught, then the Pact is . . . to avenge."

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Disadvantages of a Humvee Yeah, the early Hummers were considered more likely to "high center" in some off-road conditions due to the length of the wheelbase, but that's mostly when taken in comparison to off-road vehicles with a shorter wheelbase rather than against road vehicles. And in any case, I think they more or less eliminated the problem with a few tweaks to the suspension design.

Re: High-End Autofire I've had a number of thoughts on the same subject, and have come up with both House rule options and rules legal ones. by the RAW, I totally agree with you, high ROF autofire weapons aren't a very good simulation of how they work in RL. With no other modifications, your best option for getting the most effect from a high AF weapon is to use the Supression Fire maneuver. You can lay down a very effective zone of "don't go there, or get hosed" with that many shots. If you're reengineering them, your option of an AOE works, but can be a bit odd in play. Most of the time however, it works fine. I've done it as a Non Selective AOE line Autofire before and it does a pretty good job of approximating the "1 bullet in every square inch" effect M134 gunners sometimes brag about. Another approach I've considered is to build a rotary gun "by the barrel", and use a big MPA to make the attack. Hideously effective, and probably pretty realistic. Any other options get into house rule territory. Ever since 4th came out and they dropped the +4 OCV from autofire, whist dropping "standard" AF down to 5 shots, we've used a "Trade one potential hit for a +1 OCV" option that works fairly well, tho it does mean that really high ROF weapons seldom miss if concentrated on a single target. Not terribly Heroic, but probably fairly accurate. The simple fact that the really high ROF weapons like miniguns were expressly designed to hit very fast moving targets by virtue of filling the air with a cloud of bullets makes the current function of AF very much a construct of game balance rather than Realism, IMHO.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: "Neat" Pictures I abso-frickin-lutely LOST it when I saw this one... Best peepshow, evah!

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "The Torch"- Dropkick Murphys Totally understand the Banjo thing, m'man... just got mine out of storage, tho I busted my high G string trying to get her in tune. And I got to meet the lead singer/songwriter/founder of Black 47 this weekend. Woot!

Re: Order of the Stick it's probably be fair to give EGG "Promoter" credits as well as co creator. Arneson is better at mechanics, IMO, but Gary really made himself the face of D&D, such as it was.

Re: Holy Water that was how I did it, yeah. is there a better example of a "Spiritual" transform?

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? MC Frontalot, who does "Nerdcore hip hop" "Goth Girls" was bloody genius, "Speed Queen" had me chuckling, and his collaboration "Rhyme of the Nibelung" had me rolling. "Yellow Lasers", about a hot girl looking for love at a Star Wars convention, had a twist I predicted but was still fun, too.

Re: Damaging Block I generally like this approach. It also lets you tweak to flavor by changing the triggering circumstance like "Triggers when a block roll is half or less of the target number" to make a "Critical Block" talent, f'rinstance.

Re: A Blasphemous Idea for HERO 6th hmmmmmm... The Hermetic Order of the Emerald Hexagon I like it....

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns It's entirely possible that the source I was remembering reading got that distinction confused, because I'm totally failing to find anything supporting what I said earlier. I'm not suprised, frankly... If I remember correctly, the info was from a 19th century book on the history of arms and armor, and victorian sources were often a bit sketchy with their accuracy. Heres a cool site about Regency period combat grade airguns, however... Girandoni air rifle

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns to support the pnuematisist thing.... when the science of gun smithing was really beginning to take off in the late 16th century, there were some extremely nasty examples of combat air guns produced, that were every bit as potent as the gunpowder weapons of the time. They were dropped for religious reasons... the Pope declared them an abomination, IIRC (probably as a favor to a relative who made gunpowder) had things gone differently, or if there was no gunpowder to begin with, I imagine pneumatic and spring loaded weapons would make advances by leaps and bounds

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Fairy Dance -Ashley MacIsaac Man, does he rip it up with a fiddle. before that.... An Innocent Man -Billy Joel Because I'm a pinhead, as the bartender from Cowboy Feng's might say.

Re: Why are so many people upset that Cryptic is only using the Champions IP? For my part, I really don't care how the game is written "under the hood' as it were, but at the user interface/character creation level I'd like it to be recognizably related to the pen and paper HERO system, enough so that porting characters from the MMO to a pen & paper game is a fairly simple conversion without retooling everything, and somewhat vice versa. If I can write up a character I really like for champions, then hop into the CO character builder and come up with a close duplicate of my character, I'll be fairly happy. If I can also avoid dealing with a huge influx of new players who are outraged that the PnP system doesn't translate their 50th level Tank/Scrapper I'll be even happier. In a nutshell...if the game's gonna have the Champions name on it, and the production of the MMO is spurring on a whole new edition of the system... I want to see the two games being at least cosmetically similar at the player level. Point buy characters, familiar stats, no level based advancement, no classes, a speed characteristic that determines how fast your actions are executed, low level experience gains that can be allocated freely or saved towards larger purchases, and goal/story based experience awards rather than combat related awards.

Re: Play on words magic items/spells You should really check out Kingdom of Loathing sometime. it's almost entirely populated by bad puns and obscure references.

Re: Champions AND Dark Champions you know, I'd have probably made sure that was part of the contract if I was Steve.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Yeah, for an all purpose DA I'd probably go with the GP100, but for a carry piece I'd prefer not to have a hammer that could get snagged or intercepted with a quick grab. And I like the option of the little red dot. I absolutely love the way the old army is put together, and it's got a bunch of nice features. It's about as accurate as you can make a cap & ball, can get performance near magnum levels using black power, and has a drop in conversion cylinder for .45 Long Colt available for it. At around $400 they're not on the bottom end of the cap & ball price range, but it's a Ruger. I have a great fondness for the sturdy construction of Ruger revolvers.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games oh, if I ever decide to start carrying, I've probably found my huckleberry... the Ruger SP101 in this configuration

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Been doing some sixgun window shopping lately, in anticipation of my upcoming birthday and in general because I'm getting the "wanna new gun" itch. I have decided that I am GOING to own a Ruger Old Army .44 in stainless, with the 7 1/2" barrel and adjustable front sights. One of the other guns I've been drooling over is a bit out of my price range, but boy howdy is it pretty...the Beretta Laramie SA top break .45 LC

Re: What would you do? what would you do? "Go n-ithe an cat thu, is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat." translation: