Ranxerox

Re: Foxbat Went a Courtin'.... But ... but... what about Lenore !??

Re: What kind of aliens? There is a saying that goes, 'To a hammer, everything is a nail.' We are tool users and any alien species that we encounter that could threaten us is likely to be tool users; and to a tool user, everything is a tool. Therefore, I would expect any intelligent life we run into to try to exploit us for there own benefit and exterminate us alright only if it became apparent we were too grave of a threat to leave alive or too big of an obstacle for them tolerate in their path. We are also social beings and as such like to form relationships. I think any alien life forms that we would view as being intelligent would also more likely than not be social beings, though there are admitly other possibilities. So unless we are simply too alien to one another to permit the forming of relationships, I would expect them to occur. Those these are not necessarily going to be relationships of equals. So as the songs says, we'll make great pets.

Re: Help with Alien Wars Hi. I run a play by post Alien Wars campaign over at Hero Central. This certainly doesn't make me an expert on the subject of running one but I have at least given the subject some thought. My advice get the players out of their starships as often as possible. Battlecruiser versus battlecruiser combat is only interesting to the person playing the captain, and it is hard to mimic a 3-dimensional dogfight on a flat table top. Therefore your best bet is get your players fighting the xenovores face to ugly face whenever possible. In the early part of the war this means a lot of sabotage and rescue missions as the characters try to save lives while slowing the xenovore advance. Think spacestations, colonized asteroid belts, ice moons and planetside for your adventure locations. The characters should be adhoc groups of the 'best of the best' which have been thrown together and told to get along so that they can fight this new enemy. Campaigns later in the war should be largely planetside as the characters fight to take back planets from the xenoes and eventually push to take the fight to the xenovore homeworld. Most missions will revolve around taking out hard targets and and securing locations. Unlike early war campaigns the characters will all probably belong to a single branch of the service which limits character concepts a bit. To make up for this, they should have access to better hardware and have more opportunities to kick butt. My $0.02

Re: Comics you loved...but apparently no one else did I would like to mention a couple recent additions to the died too young category - Wildcats v2.0 and The Intimates. Also, curious, does anyone else remember The Jam?

Re: Cities of the Future I've read Snow Crash and liked it a good deal, but I would like to propose a city that takes idea of virtual real estate one step farther. Perhaps being plugged into the net will become such the normal, that cities will assume that their residents are always plugged in and the distinction between the physical and virtual world will blur to the point of near meaninglessness. In cities of the future, buildings may project virtual representations of themselves and host virtual visitors. So as you walk around your city you could choose to view the actual buildings or virtual conterparts (of which you may have a selection to choose from depending on what channel you are monitoring). Alternately, you could visit other cities as a 'ghost' and observe and interact with people and other 'ghost' in these cities in real time. So city could have an actual population of 5 million and a virtual population that is 10 times that. How much of this virtual population you would interact with at any given time would depend on your channel settings.

Re: Cities of the Future

Re: Cities of the Future This notion is definitely cool to visualize, but what sort of light do people in the bottom cities get?

Re: Cities of the Future

Re: Cities of the Future Well, of course what the form the cities take will depend on social and economic variables. Part of what I'm asking for is that you take your best guesses concerning those variables. Also, I'm asking you guys to play philospher. What would constitute an ideal human city (if cities can be ideal and not just a functionality of the moment), and how much closer or further away from this ideal do you suspect humanity to be in 300 years.

I recently saw the movie Aeon Flux and while I found the movie to just okay, I really liked the fictional city in which it is set, Bregna. Bregna is pretty much the exact opposite of the city from Blade Runner. It is clean, elegant and its technology, rather than being in your face, has made itself all but invisible. Even though I thought Bregna was cool, it doesn't seem like a very realistic city of the future to me. It was too elegant. Elegance is something that people like to visit, not somewhere that they really want to live. Somehow, I don't see the the mere passage of 3 or 4 centuries changing that about us as a specie. So, I'm posing the question, 'What will cities look like in three hundred years?' Will the rise of virtual spaces diminish the need for people to congregate in actaul physical space so that large cities become less common, or will improvements in building technology and transportation herald in an age of megalopolii? Will humanity strive for elegance or continue to wallow in the tacky? And most importantly, what cool new gadgets and features will the cities of the future have?

Re: Okay, Dream Park from scratch. Help please (longish) The other choice would be to make all the ingame abilities into a VPP. As a house rule for this one game, both he base and the control cost of the VPP could have the limitation "Only in DreamPark, Only During the Game, Only to Effect Items and People/Creatures of the Game" (-4). This would bring down the VPP cost to the point where competent normals could afford a good size pool and let their "RL" stats carry into the game - i.e. a triathlete can go on longer without being winded than a couch potato regardless of what the holograms say. YMMV

Re: Comics are getting too steamy... Emty Vee from The Intimates has a serious weight problem, and Punchy from the same title looks kinda dorky too.

I'm posting to plug The Winter Men, an 8 issue mini-series by Wildstorm that's first issue just shipped this week. The premise of the series is that all the former Soviet Super Soldiers are working as cops, gangsters and bodyguards in modern Russia. In addition to an interesting high-concept idea, the first issue had strong writing and a setting that just dripped of atmosphere and little bits of information about modern day Russia. I don't know how accurate the depictions is but I can say that the Russia it depicts would be a fascinating place to take a group of DC characters or to hold a complete DC campaign. Check it out!

Re: Limits to Superhuman Intelligence? I would like to say yes and no to your assertion that it is skill level and not INT score that matters. Using your own table 15- is cutting edge science which is by definition where current science stops. Consequently, at this point you are as far as any normal teacher can bring and from here on out have to blaze your own trail scientifically to bring your skill higher. Personally as a GM, I would normally limit what a person can acheive through purely self instruction to 2 or possibly 3 points of skill improvement. Someone with normal or lower INT, I might limit to 1 or 0 points of skill if they were already at the 15- level. So, even at the most generous level of 3 points improvement by self study we are capping out at 18-. InfiniteMind, with her INT score of 50 on the otherhand, starts all sciences she chooses to seriously study at 19-. In other words, just by turning her vast intellect to a subject she automatically makes deduction and leaps gaps in ways the would revolutionize the field. By devoting serious time and energy to a field she could potentially improve her level to 22-. Borrowing some rules from Star Hero, InfiniteMind could work develop technology 2 tech levels above the current involving completely new concepts with an even chance of sucess (she would be at a -3 for each tech level beyond her own and a -5 for the new concept, so after deduction she would have an 11-). Alternately, she could project up to 3 tech levels above the current with a good chance of sucess as long as only extensions of known concepts were involved (she would be at a -3 for each tech level above the current, so after deductions have a 13-). Still, the fact that I had to invent a character with a 50 INT to illustrate my point shows that the vast majority of the time it IS skill level and not INT that matters.

Re: Altered time perception Actually, Cratermaker pretty much nailed the character (or a more idealized version thereof) that I was going for. However, the power that you just described is a cool one, and if I'm ever making a Timelord style character, I will certainly use it. Thank you.

Re: Altered time perception Boy, there are a ton of great idea here! Unfortunately, I turned in my character to my GM earlier today. Since, I only had 250 pts to work with I don't think I could have made a character near as cool as the one you described even if I had seen you post in time. Still, you have just claimed my next hundred or so experience points with you ideas.

Re: Altered time perception That is VERY funny. My GM would have to be on drugs to let me get away with it, but it is still very funny.

Re: Altered time perception Thanks for the reply Kirby. Unfortunately I don't own USPD, though maybe I should get it. The powers that you suggested sound like time altering power, however. The character that I'm working on has no control over time. He can just control his own personsal perception of it. He can speed up the firing and recovery of his mental neurons as to make make time seem slower relatively speaking, or he can slow down the rate of neuron fire to make time quicker by comparison.

Re: Altered time perception Actually, I was planning on giving him extra levels of speed with the limitations cost endurance and can't be used for movement. I figure the slow motion quality will give him time to pick out extra targets and he can probably coax a few extra squeezes of the trigger out of his body. However, I had forgotton speed reading and eidetic memory, and Pinecones reduction in stun by fast forwarding past the initial pain is clever too. So, posting the question has already paid dividends for me. Thank you. Additional thoughts and ideas are warmly welcomed.

I want to make a character that can alter his own perception of time. He can speed it up to fastforward through lifes boring parts, and slow it down to allow himself to catch every detail and give himself plenty of time to consider his own next move. Note: When he slows down time in his perception he doesn't move any faster than he normally can, he just has more subjective time to choose his actions and get maximun gain out of what he does. I'm looking for suggestion on how to translate this ability into game terms. Thanks in advance for all ideas given.

Re: War of the Worlds Hmmm, the question of why we hadn't detected any of the warmachines through mining, drilling or geological surveys bothered me too. I don't recall the figure of 200 feet mentioned for their depth. Perhaps they were buried much deeper, like over a thousand feet. Still, you would think that we would have discovered atleast 1 of them. However the surface of the planet is very large and we have explored deep beneath it only in a scattering of places so maybe not. Personally, I don't think the aliens were waiting on intelligent life to make taking over easier. The aliens seem more than capable of clearing their own space and making their own things. I'm more inclined to think that the aliens were making a preemptive strike against an emerging rival and the buried warmachines were just an act of considerable forsight. Alternatively, maybe the aleins realized a long time ago the the galaxy had a limited number of habitable planets, so they 'dibbed' them all early.

Re: War of the Worlds The whole movie happens in about 2 and a half days of character time. What reason is there to think that the red weed would necessarily come into play during such a short time?

I just got back from seeing The War of the Worlds, and I think that it is destined to be a classic right up there with the 1953 version. Speilberg's experience making Saving Private Ryan get put to good use here in some scences of chaos and devastation that few other director could have composed. In addition to being visually strong, the movie has enough intellectual meat on it's bones to spark countless conversations about politics, morality and human destiny. A few caveats though, while the movie does well with the big issues it often falls down when you apply logic to the small details (it is afterall a big budget, summer action film). Also I would recommend taking the PG-13 rating seriously - don't take small children. Personally I feel bad for star Dakota Fanning. My daughter is about her age and I would not take her to see this film much less let her play a lead role.

Re: Favorite Pulp Character Fu Manchu, hands down favorite.

Re: Culture HERO The Culture books make for some fascinating reading. You won't regret the time you spend with them Uhlan.