DShomshak
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Posts posted by DShomshak
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News stories say the Osiris-Rex capsule landed safely and has been transported to the Jpohnson Space Center for study. No word yet of either origins or space plagues. (Though I suppose we could have both, a la Wild Cards.)
Dean Shomshak
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Asteroid material soon to be delivered to Earth... if all goes well. Also (as noted in Champions forum) an excellent "origin event."
Dean Shomshak
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The RL news story: On Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx space probe swings past Earth to drop off a capsure holding material collected from the asteroid Bennu. Pretty good origin material right there, but one of the scientists mentions a few odd dreams about the mission. One sounds straight out of a comic book, lacking only the super-powers one would inevitably gain as a result of the described object and action.
(The text of the linked story gives more information, but the "listen" draws more attention to the dream.)
Enjoy. And if you end up creating a character based on this for your game, you're welcome!
Dean Shomshak
Dean Shomshak
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Today's "The Daily" gives some background on the dispute between Canada and India:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/podcasts/the-daily/canada-india-assassination.html
Dean Shomshak
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well, this is at least mildly hopeful: More Trump Cult Republicans losing to Democrats.
Trumpism costs the GOP in a crucial election, again (msn.com)
Dean Shomshak
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Yesterday on the BBC, the host interviewed an Indian pundit and former member of Modi's government. He blustered: not only rejecting any possibility of Trudeau's accusation being correct, but treating every question from the interviewer as a neo-colonialist insult directed at India. He also suggested that Trudeau was just hustling for popularity with Canada's Sikh community because of his administration's political problems.
(Not a great ingterview overall. The subject was not really in a position to know anything; but stock outrage atroutine questions doesn't make a case either.)
Okay... Without evidence, we can't trust Trudeau's claim that much. After all, Colin Powell solemnly assured the UN that the Bush administration had ironclad evidence of Saddam Hussein's WMD program -- evidence that turned out to be circumstantial at best, filtered by motivated reasoning. On a matter this serious, "Trust us" doesn't fly from *any* government. Not anymore.
But contrary to Mister Bluster, I find it entirely plausible that Modi's government would send a death squad after a leading Sikh separatist. The BJP is explicitly sectarian, and in a Hindu state non-Hindus become second-class citizens by definition. Modi himself first came to political prominence backing Hindu zealots that rioted and murdered Muslims in his home state. There's been heavy (and internationally condemned) repression of the Hindu majority in Jammu and Kashmire. Journalists are threatened; movies are censored to ensure they promote a Hindu nationalist view. "The World's Largest Democracy" looks less democratic every year.
What's the truth in this case? I can't know. But if I'm not ready to trust Trudeau unconditionally, I am even less ready to trust Modi's government unconditionally.
Dean Shomshak
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I just heard a story on this on BBC World Service, so I went looking for more. Here's what I found: A deeply depressing report on xenophobic violence in South Africa. It seems we Americans are not unique in this idiocy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66808346
Dean Shomshak
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Heck, historians of totalitarianism, such as Timothy Snyder, have been shouting warnings from the rooftops for years. See, for instance, Snyder's On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
Dean Shomshak
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I don't know the totality of Tolkien's writings, including his commentary on his own work, so I can't say what he thought the final fate of orcs would be. (Narration in The Hobbit suggests Goblins were responsible for clever machines of torture and destruction unto the present day, but that's a toss-off and I'm reluctant to take it as definitive statement.)
But Tolkien's Catholicism does emphasize free choice, both for sin and redemption, as well as Original Sin. I can only speculate what Tolkien might say, but I suspect that if we could ask him he might say that at any point, Sauron could have repented and turned back from his "ruinous path down to the Void." Though I could be wrong: Perhaps he'd say that by the time LotR starts, Sauron has made too many irrevocable choices and ruined himself too completely -- in effect, choosing to give up his free will to make new choices. Which makes him, I think, even more horrifying.
I think it's also worth remembering that Sauron's armies weren't just orcs. There were also hordes of Men whom he'd duped to his cause.
Another important distinction, I think, is how one approaches the battle against a presumed irredeemable evil. If it's reluctant resolve -- they're intelligent, they didn't ask to be what they are, it's them or us so the fight must be fought - that's heroic. If it's "Wahoo, let's go kill them sumbitches and take their stuff!" -- then the difference between Good and Evil seems that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
(I recently read a book about the Just War doctrine developed by Medieval Catholics. It isn't called out as such, but nothing done by the heroes in LotR violates it.)
Dean Shomshak
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1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:
I must be stupid, because it never occurred to me until you wrote this that the reason the Xenovores were designed to "get high from eating other sapients" was to incentivize them to eliminate any competitive survivors. Making sure that "their side" is the only one that endures. That's... next-level evil.
Of course it's also next-level stupid, as the Xenovores could be expected to also put their creators on the menu.
And did! But RL evil *is* often deeply stupid.
I like a line Lois McMaster Bujold put in the mouth of her series hero Miles Vorkosigan: Monsters often are ordinary people, just a bit more confused in their thinking.
Dean Shomshak
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It may be worth remembering that Christian theology holds that humans are an "inherently evil" race. Everyone is born tainted by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. We can struggle against that evil taint, as individuals and as societies, but can never succeed completely. Fortunately, forgiveness is an option.
Dean Shomshak
- assault and Lord Liaden
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The Xenovores are a well-designed "evil" race because there is a reason and method to the horrible things they do. As LL said, they were genetically engineered. As Alien Wars describes, a nation created them to be the survivors of a nuclear war. That is the founding evil: Leaders who decided they could accept the mass death of a nuclear war as long as something of themselves survived afterward as a gotcha-last, right down to the Xenovores getting high from eating other sapients. They are the product of someone else's freely chosen evil.
Not all Xenovores carry the genetic programming to get high from eating sapients. By the time of the Terran Empire, these recessives have become dominant genotype since most Xenovores got exterminated. They have a chance to break free of their creators' will. Though some still eat other people as a point of cultural tradition; but that is their choice.
Dean Shomshak
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It's unfortunate, Chris, that LotR has been "spoilered" so much, and so often imitated... badly. There's a lot going on below the surface that Tolkien's imitators don't get, to the extent that I'd argue LotR deconstructs the genre it so much inspired. But that is another discussion, for another place.
For here, I'll simply note that I don't recall any point where Tolkien's heroes jingoistically cheer that yay, they're going to kill a bunch o' bad guys! There is courage and tragic resolve, but pity turns out to be just as important. Maybe more so.
Dean Shomshak
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11 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:
Have they grappled in 5th edition with what the plane of elemental evil actually means? Is it simply a huge source of energy to tap? I kind of bet they dont philosophise about what evil is and is not...
Not so far as I know. In fact, this is the first I've heard of any Plane of Elemental Evil -- but I haven't followed every iteration of D&D. 5e keeps the wheel of Outer Planes that goes all the way back to AD&D (though a few have been renamed -- like the Happy Hunting Grounds are now the Beastlands, which I'm sure has *nothing* to do with recognition of offensive racial stereotyping...)
But the structure of the Outer Planes makes Evil still a cosmological fact rather than a purely ethical quality. It's something entites can be, not just something they do.
Honestly, I don't blame them for glossing over the philosophical Nature of Evil. It is, after all, a game rather than a philosophical treatise; and as I said, I do overthink.
Dean Shomshak
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Was StarLink scheduled to launch another cluster of satellites tonight? Or maybe Bezos' satellite constellation? Because I think I just saw them. At about 9:05 while I took a short walk, I looked up and saw a line of small lights moving across the sky from the WNW, crossing the handle of the Big Dipper, then winking out as they reached the zenith, no longer reflecting the sunlight. I'd guess they were, hm, two degrees apart? The last winked out about 5 minutes after I noti ced the procession.
It was quite pretty.
Dean Shomshak
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5 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:
I have indeed thught about it a lot because of my Greyhawk HERO project. I wanted to replicate the universe in HERO terms which, like many things in HERO, meant I had to delve deep to understand what question I was actually asking. All I wanted was to build detect evil and protection from evil. Suddenly I was wondering what it was I was detecting and protecting from.... 😄
Side note: In 5th edition D&D, the spell is now "Detect Evil and Good," which in fact detects neither. The name is a holdover, but it actually detects supernatural creatures: aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey [sic], fiends, and undead. Standard game defines celestials as good, fiends and undead as evil, but elementals tend to be neutral. Aberrations usually "evil," but the flumph is good.
Same thing for "Protection from Evil and Good." It grants protection from all classes of supernatural creatures.
Even D&D now moves beyond D&D. 😀
Dean Shomshak
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"The races tend to act evil because evil gods made them to be that way" has been good enough for D&D for decades. It's good enough for an action/adventure game about characters becoming more powerful by killing monsters and taking their stuff. But:
1) Just because D&D does something, doesn't mean everyone else, or indeed anyone else, should do Fantasy that way. Or even Fantasy gaming.
2) I am no longer one of the young adult males who were D&D's original target audience. I am a late-middle-aged, effete pseudo-intellectual. I overthink. So even when I play D&D, I toss the metaphysics and do it my own way. But that would be very long to explain and likely of limited interest to anyone else.
Suffice to say that if Tolkien can build a Fantasy world on the theological and moral frameworks of Catholicism, I can do it on Enlightenment humanism. I have no trouble finding a sufficient supply of villains the PCs feel happy to battle and kill. I am quite happy with the result, and my players seem to be, too.
Dean Shomshak
- assault, Lord Liaden and Chris Goodwin
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A further point of Moral Foundations Theory is that people place different weights on each foundation. This gets into politics, which I will avoid, but it's worth noting.
But it's also worth noting that just about everyone acknowledges the need for *compromise* between virtues. One way to create peoples whose motives are comprehensible but reprehensible is to pick one virtue and make it absolute, leaving no room for compromise. For one easy example, every member of a species might be totally loyal to each other, but regard all other sapient beings as enemies who must be eradicated to make more living space for themselves. Conversely, members of another species might be such libertarians that they refuse to give an inch to anyone else's will, even to respecting contracts or other free associations. (OK, we just re-invented Lawful and Chaotic Evil.) Or folk who are Purity/Defilement absolutists might fanatically seek to conquer everyone else to impose their dietary, religious, or other code. Even Care/Harm becomes supremely creepy in the classic SF short story "With Folded Hands," in which unstoppable robots invade Earth to keep humans safe and comfortable... whether we want it or not.
They are all, by their own standards, righteous. But their absolutism also makes them implacably hostile to everyone else. They must be fought.
Dean Shomshak
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16 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:
I may have missed this completely, but it would help if we had a definition of evil, and what all-pervasive traits would define a race as evil.
And by extension, a definition of good. I favor the anthropological/psychological approach of moral foundations theory, which seeks to study the moral reasoning of actual people to find the basis for their judgements. Here's the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory
In brief, though, the researchers have identified six moral foundations that seem widespread across cultures. (More may be possible. Research continues.)
* Care/Harm may be the most straightforward, as it is individually observable and relatively non-contextual. The deliberate infliction of suffering on another is evil; the alleviation of suffering and active promotion of quality of life is usually considered good, all other things being equal.
* Liberty/Oppression is also pretty straightforward. Most people want to do what they want to do, and object to someone else forcing them to act or not act as they choose.
* Fairness/Unfairness: Humans are clearly born with an innate sense that it's wrong for some people to get more than others, or more than they've earned. (Though the definition of "earned" is of course subject to self-interest.) Any parent who has had one child complain that another child's slice of cake was a millimeter larger than their own knows what I'm talking about. Active cheating is, well, it's often dependent on who's cheating whom. But cheating your own group is almost always condemned.
* Loyalty/Treachery is more group-dependent than the previous. Very few people actually admire betrayal of the group. But what group owns your loyalty?
*Authority/Insubordination: Most people, in most societies, admire obedience to authority. But this gets even more conditional, as the authority must be accepted as legitimate, which gets into circular definitions. Also, this foundation is reciptocal: Whoever is in authority must do its duty in order to maintain legitimacy. Failure to do so makes rebellion righteous. It's not always good to be king!
* Purity/Defilement: This one is the most abstract and culturally dependent, but people tend to have strong feelings in favor of what they conceive as pure, and against what they regard as soiled, corrupted, or adulterated -- anything from a white bigot feeling horror at "race mixing," to an environmentalist's exaltation at experiencing "unspoiled wilderness."
People being complicated, moral judgements are rarely based on just one foundation. For instance, soldiers can fall into a competition of showing who's most loyal to the group and the leader by trying to outdo each other in harming the enemy. See: the Rape of Nanking and other mass atrocities.
One game application of Moral Foundations Theory is that it offers a way to make different groups "evil" in diofferent ways. But I've gone on long enough; examples are left to the reader.
Dean Shomshak
- Lord Liaden and Duke Bushido
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Investigating an exoplanet's atmosphere:
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/2023/webb-discovers-methane-carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-of-k2-18b
Dean Shomshak
- tkdguy and Scott Ruggels
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I have never seen any such rule. It's always been twice the BODY to Transform anything.
I haven't seen Scourges of the Galaxy, so I can't comment much on the specific example. But from my experience writing game supplements, I can say that writers do experience brain farts now and then, or one part of a text gets changed in revising a draft and other parts don't, creating contradictions or errors.
Dean Shomshak
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I checked through a few editions, and the qualifier that Universal Translator only enables one to speak or write a language "crudely" seems to appear in 5th edition. 4th edition version just says that, yeah, you can speak, read and write any language you encounter. (With a few qualifiers such as physical ability to "speak" in the mode presented). So one solution is just to use 4th edition. (I'm not checking previous editions.)
OK, so you're stuck with a particular edition and you don't want to say the Rules As Written for that edition are pointlessly limiting. Steve Long gave another way out in 5e by deriving Talents from standard Powers and Skills. Officially, Universal Translator consists of two Detects: Detect Meaning of Speech [10 points] + Detect Meaning of Text [10 points]. Except thi9s is wrong. BY RAW, a basic Detect only registers the presence and intensity of some object or quality. Detect Meaning of Speech will only tell you that yup, that's speech and it has more or less meaning. You need Discriminatory, at the very least. And you would also need Transmit in order to speak back.
So let's "correct" the derivation, while conserving the final cost, by treating it this way: Detect Meaning of Speech (3 points -- pretty specialized), Discriminatory (+5 points), Transmit (+2 points); + Detect Meaning of Text (3 points), Descriminatory (+5 points), Transmit (+2 points). Though by RAW you could reduce the cost to 15, because you can add a second class of entity to a Detect for a flat +5 points without needing to re-purchase all the added modifiers.
To Detect and Transmit the finer shades of meaning implied by true mastery of a language, add Analyze. For the verion of UT that conserves existing point values that pushes the final cost to 30 points. Using the two-categories hack, the final cost drops back to 20 points.
You'll still have to make a PER Roll to comprehend or communicate in the language, but getting a better roll for this single Enhanced Sense costs only 1 point per +1. Buy +3 and I think it's fair to say you'now effectively have 4 points of fluency in any language you enounter.
If you're *really* persnickety, add +2 points for "Sense", so you can use it without needing a half-Phase action. But I think you can bring the whole thing in at 25 points.
Dean Shomshak
Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)
in Non-Gaming Discussion
Posted
NPR, quite rightly, no longer reports every deranged thing Trump says, but this got mentioned in passing: Trump recently claimed he could design a better fighter jet than the Pentagon.
Okay, given that the Pentagon is an extremely large office building and, as such, would not function well as a fighter jet, for once Trump is probably correct.
But I'm also amused by the thought of a Trum-designed fighter jet. Literally gold-plated, for sure. Instrument panel of Carrera marble. Real leather or crushed velvet bucket seat for the pilot! Wet bar stocked with the most expensive single malt whiskeys! And most important of all, a big "TRUMP" sign on it! A great fighter jet! The best fighter jet ever! Ability to fly optional.
Sorry, but the cheap shots are just so easy I couldn't resist.
Dean Shomshak