Inu

Re: Assassin's Creed: Altair

The game is Assassin's Creed' date=' Mike. It's a story of a [/quote']

Is that in the promotional material or revealed in the first five minutes of the game, or am I gonna have to go for my daggers?

 

(Even if it's revealed very early on, I still prefer to find out stuff like that in the game. I specifically avoided promotional material to avoid getting spoilers of any kind, once I'd figured out that I was gonna love the game. But I'm more spoiler-averse than most. The thrill of discovery is one of my primary joys in a game, and that's certainly something I'd have preferred to have discovered after actually starting to play, and not something I'd run into in any of the promotional material more than six months old -- which is when I stopped looking at it.)

Re: Assassin's Creed: Altair

Me too' date=' but it isn't out for the PC - only game consoles.[/quote']

It'll be on PC early 2008, apparently.

Re: Assassin's Creed: Altair

Altaïr -- the ansi code is 139. =) Hold 'alt', and on your keypad (with numlock on), hit 139, then release alt. The character should come up. =)

Sheet looks fine, too!

Re: Order of the Stick

But I could well be wrong. Rich is tricksty with his plot.

Yup, so far most of my predictions (based on the conventional laws of drama) have gone unfulfilled.

Re: Order of the Stick

Wow, big 500 next strip!

Re: Order of the Stick

This is a thread about OotS -- while divergence into system can be fun, can whining about the system be taken to another thread?

Re: Order of the Stick

I'm guessing the "Kill the cleric in one blow" thing was the Improved Critical feat' date=' or some sort of Great Improved Critical.[/quote']

Or the epic feat, 'devastating critical' -- if you crit, target rolls a fort save or dies.

Re: WWYCD: A Damsel Who Doesn't Want To Be Rescued...

Haze: "A bounty's a bounty." *zapt* "If you're really keen to be here, I'm sorry, and I'll see you're returned. But let's see what a few days away from His Imperiousness does."

Jacob al-Duri: "Okay, let's deal with this on a diplomatic level. You say you want to be here, well, as a citizen of the US, we have an interest to make sure that's true. We're going to be staying here for a while to confirm that your needs are being taken care of. By the way, you do know that if you stay, your citizenship will be revoked, because you have an intimate relationship with a known enemy of the State?"

Kid Dynamo: "But... but... wah!" *perplexed, and will go along with what the rest of the team decides*

Haze is basically okay, but amoral. He'd be there for the money, and he'd have accepted the money because it was a 'white knight' kind of job. Jacob is a superpowered government agent. Kid Dynami is a 16-year-old girl, and while the idea of being swept up in romance would appeal to her, I don't think she'd be able to fathom the idea of falling for such a warlord, and she'd find it at least a little creepy.

And no, none would probably react differently if it were a guy in who had bee kidnapped. =)

Re: BBC Airship Article

Hey, they'd already be large. Put a flat deck on top and hoo-boy, aircraft carriers of the air!

 

The fact that I'm sceptical that we'll see any real increase in the use of dirigibles in my lifetime doesn't mean this isn't a cool idea. In fact I like them so much I even have dirgibles in my fantasy game!

Helicarriers are cool enough that a fleet of 'em made it into Sky Captain. =) Dirigibles put a bit more of a steampunkish bent on them (Sky Captain riffing far more off oldskool scifi than modern steampunk).

Speaking of which, anyone tried converting some of the Sky Captain stuff to Hero?

Re: Glorantha Hero

That's one of the things that I found rather unappealing as I was reading up on Glorantha and Runequest last year.

It's good or bad, depending on how it's portrayed. As I said earlier, if you're playing in a country, it doesn't matter how people elsewhere view an event. They're wrong, you're right, so what your culture believes is the only relevant factor.

In addition, there are some objective truths (see the aforementioned Windstop event). Unfortunately, since it seems the primary market for HW/HQ is existing fans of the setting, it's really very difficult to track down all of these myths and behind-the-scenes stuff. For instance, at major Glorantha conventions, the brains behind the setting, Greg Stafford, will answer questions for charity, ones which he must answer truthfully. There doesn't seem to be a repository of these answers.

So Glorantha is a very dense setting to get into. The only reason I've managed to is our GM is very well-versed in Glorantha lore, including most of that behind-the-scenes stuff.

But yeah, if you want the True Answers, Glorantha isn't the setting for you. If you want mythic reality, it really, really is.

Re: Order of the Stick

Wow. New one up already.

 

I love "All Steaks Go To Heaven" as a restaurant name

Three times a week without warning indeed!

Re: Order of the Stick

Oddhat's probably right. ^_- Or something similar to that. Going into heaven chuckling 'serves you right, Dad!' is not quite right for that particular afterlife! Might even be some sort of test.

But yeah, I love that angel. I'm sick of angels who are actually bad guys. It was neat once, but nowadays it's trite. This one? She's great. She really is a representative of law AND good.

Re: U.N. Armament

Well modern ammo makes a little less residue, you should still clean your weapon because some firearms becoming finnicky if they aren't cleaned after so many rounds.

 

The ak-47 gets around this by having such loose tolerances that you could probably chamber a sea cucumber in it and still get it to fire. This tends to make it a very inaccurate weapon over long ranges and this compounded with the 7.62x39's horrendous drop rate means its feasible shooting distance is less.

Which is what makes it so great for third world militias. without training, you can't hit anything at long range anyway, so the long-range accuracy issues with the weapon are moot! Especially so in urban environments.

Re: Glorantha Hero

They're vile.

 

I eventually figured out the part about the implantation of larva, kinda like certain species of wasp, but geez did I have to dig around and read between a lot of lines. Given all the other stuff that's online and can be stumbled into very accidentally, it's strange that all of a sudden no one was willing to give a straightforward and clear account of this one thing, almost as if it were too vile to even speak about.

Yup. And I'll note that their position in the game is one of vileness, not anything else. They are not treated lightly.

Re: Multi-tiered Missile Deflection/Reflection

Deflect thrown/arrows is 10 points.

Deflect all is 20 points, but you've already payed 10. So you end up paying 10AP, with OIF, so 7RP.

You also buy a naked advantage (deflect adjecent, +1/2) on the entire 20AP power, limited by OIF. Another 7RP.

Missile reflection would start to get painful, but you can't use missile reflection at range, and don't have to buy the +1/2 advantage for it, as per p210. It costs 30 points (reflect at anyone), -1 OAF, for 15 RP.

Total power: 60AP, 29RP.

I think that's how it works, anyway. Can someone run my maths?

Re: Order of the Stick

I like verbage in comics. I cut my teeth on early Claremont.

I also didn't feel that today was a rant about alignment... it seemed pretty much just like an application of alignment, as the author sees it.

Re: HERO: Combat Evolved [Equipment Posts & Comments]

There are some arguments I never got into... that was one of them. And you CAN MC a construct' date=' it's simply a [i']machine class of minds[/i]. I can give them mental defense, but then, no one in the Haloverse appears to have Psionics either, do they?

I can think of one being: the Gravemind.

But then, it shouldn't have any problem mind-controlling Flood.

Re: Coming To A Western Front Near You

Who gets the credit for shooting down "The Red Baron"; Brown or the Australian infantry ?

With luck, they'll leave it unanswered. =)

I'm of the understanding that the evidence really points to the ground fire taking him out, but I must admit a bit of bias in that area, so I'd be happy just seeing it as an unanswered question. =)

Edit: in fact, in that trailer, there are shots of artillery firing -- probably the Australian battery. Of course, I also saw someone take out a blimp with a flare gun, and the Baron seemed to be in a biplane. 'Course, he flew a lotta different planes, but some of those shots did look like the final climactic dogfight... not enough to really tell if they flubbed that one or not!

Re: HERO: Combat Evolved [Equipment Posts & Comments]

makes me happy! how will that do against a spartan's shields...

 

or have you built that yet?

 

on average across the games (on normal difficulty), i'd say a popping infection form and a plasma pistol (uncharged) are about the same. but thats completely from memory.

Well, in 2 and 3 that's more or less true, but 2 radically increased the damage from infection forms. In 1, they did a tiny sliver of damage. In 2, even on easy, four or five was enough to take shields down.

Re: HERO: Combat Evolved [Equipment Posts & Comments]

If I make it a 2d6 EB AOE' date=' that should take out the surrounding units -- however, they don't DETONATE... which is weird. I've never seen a whole group just explode. You can't take out a whole platoon, to my recollection (and I'll be playing later tonight, so I'll pay special attention to this).[/quote']

It's harder in Halo 2 and 3, because you don't get the same swarms that you did in 1. I do definitely remember killin 20+ infectio forms with a few bullets, in the first game. 2, there just aren't enough at a time (but they do more damage). 3, they dodge aroudn too much, and it seems that the blast radius has been reduced.

Re: HERO: Combat Evolved [Equipment Posts & Comments]

Well' date=' it's really more like a 'suicide leap' wherein said leap does enough damage to pop it; because they're "hive minded" they have no sense of individual survival, so flinging themselves to pop on a shield (for a whole 1 normal damage) will eventually wear it down, which I think is their objective, although I can make it a 2d6 EB, No Range, Side Effect: You freaking die, Side Effect occurs whenever power is used, side effect occurs automatically, side effect only affects user of power.[/quote']

Except they don't normally die when they attack people. In Halo 1, I remember seeing them attack un-shielded targets (such as the Marines) repeatedly, without dying. In Halo 3, they seem to burrow in or something like that -- they certainly don't just 'pop'.

 

And the shielded target takes some fairly serious damage, too. ^_-

Re: Need a "clean" world map

http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/woutline.htm

A similar map, but not quite so distorted towards the northern hemisphere.

Re: HERO: Combat Evolved [Equipment Posts & Comments]

II'd put AP on the Penetrating Spike' date=' since it punches through Elite and Marine armor, and even the gets into the Master Chief (I believe Cortana overloaded his shields to kill the sucker before it managed to really get a hold on him).[/quote']Huh, is that how it works? I just figured they couldn't handle shields... do they blow up when they hit Elite shields? I don't seem to remember. They certainly blow up on the Arbiter's shields.

 

How are you going to deal with Mind Control or PRE attacks? They really are... well, not quite mindless. More like living machines, jacked into the Gravemind (or instinct until a Gravemind forms).

They seem to keep coming no matter what... depending on what you're wielding. In Halo 3, in the final run out of the Flood ship near the end, I noticed that when I had the energy sword out, they ran away from me. I could actually herd them around.

 

Life Support: do they need to sleep?

Flood forms probably do need to rest. As for infection forms... my personal theory is that they simply wouldn't survive long outside of their carrier form. As you say, they're more or less made of air. I can't see them having a long life cycle, possibly not long enough to get around to sleeping!

Re: U.N. Armament

He's in the drug trade.

And I'm not sure if he does this or not, but some of the people he works with cut people for a living.

Re: Order of the Stick

Nice to know that Lawful Good has a barely constrained bureaucracy.

I bet you the Neutral Good Heaven asks you to pet a kitten (or Puppy depending on allergies) and if it liked the pet yer in.

I like that despite it being a bureaucracy, it IS actually a well-intentioned and functioning one. =)