Cancer

Re: Musings on Random Musings Naah. Even at the Jesuit school, you can't get away with that any more.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I've got baseball tickets for tonight (late birthday present; my birthday, when it falls in the middle of the week as it did this year, is always during the All-Star break). But, it's rainy today. However, Safeco Field has the roll-on/roll-off roof so it will happen.

Re: Musings on Random Musings I may look at it someday, but obviously not from the office. Your description of the setting makes it sound interesting; of course, being an academic myself, it is "close to home" for me, sort of.

Re: The Last Word The other speaking-races tend to have attitudes about sex with other non-humanoid species that are approximately "What?!? Ugh. Take him out and hang him." It's common enough (though not really accepted) among Orcs that they view it more like a disgusting admission that you can't get your sexual gratification any other way.

Re: How do you keep your dark knights from going "squish"?

Re: The Last Word Mildly different from the standard interpretation.

Re: from little plot seeds, mighty games do grow: Share you ideas! Violence & irrationality slowly escalates in the city, missing some odd pockets in certain old & poor neighborhoods and some hyper-trendy affluent ones. Cause: slow proto-poison being put in the city water supply. By itself, it's not dangerous. But on extended contact with copper it's catalyzed into an accumulating psychotropic drug with the observed effect. The unaffected pockets are where folks haven't had old lead plumbing removed, or where they've gone to nothing bottled water out of fashion sense.

Re: The Last Word Of course, there's the bit where the young orc teaches the curse words to those of other races ... who are subsequently shocked when they are told what they mean ....

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat At the end, after it's all faded to black, there's a discontinuity and we see a brief clip in a room on Enterprise where Data is powering down the holodeck. NT: Obnoxious McGuffin devices that will get left behind and unresolved in HP&tDH.

Re: The Last Word Sure, it happens. But it only happens in pretty restricted circumstances ("Yeah?!? F*** YOU! Or has your mommy let you out long enough figure out what that means yet?"). Especially where orcs are concerned.

Re: The Last Word They can parse out that they're curses, certainly. What they mean ... that's what the lexicon is for. I mean, how often in RL does anyone explain what the f-bomb means?

Re: How many points does a person have? I suspect most players have the RL Required Psychlim Disad "Thinks he's better than he is", which, as it works out, provides most of the points in what ought to be the standard 0 + 25 point build for such games.

Re: How do you keep your dark knights from going "squish"? Actually, another way of framing the opening question (a tendency to kill your high-skill, low DEF guys) is to turn it into a comment on your campaign. If the dark knight types are getting killed, then you're running an excessively brick-friendly campaign. IOW, your campaigns are leading to the same sort of combat every time, and those combats are all about doing and taking physical damage, rather than hitting. Or figuring out that where the target is. Or who the target is. When your combats always happen on a standard battle mat, no more than 40 hexes long and 30 wide, then ... Bricks Rule. That's close range. And it's also the only circumstances where bricks are effective. It's the equivalent of a cage match. Dark knights get squished. Mentalists go squish. Energy projectors go squish. Speedsters are fast enough they can stay out of harm's way, if they play it right. Martial artists have the maneuvers to keep their CVs high enough to remain viable in that battle. Power-armer guys may be able to play there, too, but the gadgeteer can't, unless he has a hell of a Force Field gadget. If your dark knights are ineffective, then you have to reconsider your campaign. Part of the dark knight shtick is the "protocol" trope: they only fight on their terms, with proper preparation, when the enemy is at a crucial disadvantage (and, preferably, that enemy doesn't know it). A dark knight without those things is just a squishy target. A cage match on a 20-by-30-hex board is NOT something those dark knights ought to be fighting in, except in interdiction/interception skirmishes (the robbery/burglary/kidnapping scene). And in those they shouldn't get killed, because the bad guys are doing a snatch and get-away thing, rather than a fight-to-the-death thing. Are you letting your dark knight characters be prepared, call their own shots, and R&D the protocol they need? Or are you taking away the dark knight's glory, by letting the brick overcome every enemy by raw dumb STR at close quarters? If the players misplaying their character concept and skipping the prep stuff, then it's partly their fault when they get splattered. But consider the possibility that your campaign structure excludes the opportunity for a DK type to be anything other than a soft-target ancillary in the cage matches.

Re: The Last Word In conversation or at-the-table FTF RPG play, that works. In written fiction, you need something else. (Curses will be monosyllables, for the most part, no matter what, though.) In standard dialog, italicized got occurs frequently enough that using got as a curse in your fiction dialog will cause unnecessary confusion. So I resort to invented words (with a lexicon at the start or end). For example, plog is the term I adopted for "one who fornicates with beasts"; the suffix -zo means "son of", so plogzo means what you think it should.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT OK, when two guys who are usually knowledgeable say the same thing, then I must be confused. So help the poor b*****d with the physics education: the column labeled MV throws me. Velocity ought to be in ft/sec or m/sec or some such. The units given are foot-pounds, and foot-pounds is not a unit of velocity, it's a unit of energy. You can't turn energy in joules to a muzzle velocity (in m/sec or ft/sec) without specifying a projectile mass. Further, the values in column MV are approximately proportional to the values in the "Energy" column, and the numbers in the "energy" column are proportional to the numbers in each of the last three columns, which makes sense if the energy release is just (heat of explosion of TNT) * (mass of TNT). But it doesn't work with any assumption I can think of for projectile mass. If you take Edsel's assumption that the projectile mass is in one of the last three columns, then the velocity ought to be constant (if projectile mass = explosive mass). So I'm pretty sure the "MV" column is just the energy yield expressed in English units. I'm not a gunbunny, but foot-pounds is what I've seen used in those discussions of cartridge energy release (given in foot-pounds for a given load, or foot-pounds per grain of powder in a load), bullet mass (specified in grains), and muzzle velocity (in fps).

Re: The Last Word I've made up bits of foul language for fantasy stories. I mean, stories where the protag is an Orc must have foul language. And lots of words for "murder".

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Variety, and lots of it.

Re: The Last Word I hadn't realized until just now that there's 1600+ items on that list. I'd last looked at it when it was at 800.

Re: The Last Word Not that I'm aware. I tend to pick such things up from multilingual friends/acquaintances. I got "Oakting" from L. Marcus, for example.

Re: The Last Word I try to spot words which are impolite in other societies (like the local Seniors Housing Advisory Group, whose TV ads included the acronym "SHAG" in fullscreen block letters). Of course, I'm guilty many times over of violating item #196 in the "can no longer in RPG" list.

Re: The Grand List Of Overuse Science Fiction Cliches General fiction trope (at least in US culture), not specific to sci-fi. Similarly, Also a general (perhaps US culture) trope, provided you generalize from "scientist" to "career of those nearest to the genre core". E.g., detectives and cop shows. EDIT: Nerts, Ghost-angel beat me to this point on a more general basis.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT Just guessing, but ... MV is actually the energy of the blast, but in English rather than metric units. 1 foot-pounds = 1.35581795 joules

Re: The Last Word I was acquainted with a Norwegian astronomer, and while visiting him in the dome one night his equipment stopped working. In a reflexive burst he swore in at least three languages ... English, German, and at least one I couldn't identify, and I strongly suspect there were two or three in the section I couldn't parse.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: The Last Word Felix came in through the bedroom window (his preferred nighttime entry port) Saturday night. Thing is, momcat & the kids were loose in our bedroom at the time. Both Felix & momcat were very surprised, the latter profanely so. We were able to grab both of them and hustle Felix out of the room without further incident.