Cancer

Re: Astrogator's Handbook distance = SQUARE ROOT[ (x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2 + (z1 - z2)^2 ] What's the date on the book, out of idle curiosity?

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Hey, I recall the horrible night at the observatory, without any tunes accessible at all, when the song stuck in my head was ... I kid you not ... Good Ship Lollipop. Man, that was hell.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Pajama Boy and the Boa of Bliss

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Disk one of the "Blue collection" of the Beatles.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I hereby start the vicious rumor that the Secret Decoder Ring works via a Vigenere Cipher using "ANALHEADGEAR" as its key.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings The dude from facilities came and fixed my office chair. No more hard-back, non-adjustable seat. I can do again.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Suspension bridges are cool. Damn near tail-ending someone on a suspension bridge while you are gawking at it is NOT cool.

Re: Good News For Time Travelers! I think there's inherent quantum mechanics problems. Take the teaching thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat: lock a cat in a box with a bomb, where the probability of the bomb having gone off increases linearly with time. At time 0.0, the cat is certainly alive. At time 1.00, the cat is certainly dead. But inbetween, it is improper to think of the cat as alive or dead; those aren't the correct quantum states. It is a mixture of both, a mixture where the relative proportions change with time. If you have time travel, then you can, in principle, look in the box at times between 0.00 and 1.00 and determine exactly when the cat died. But that's something that quantum doesn't let you do. You would be forcing the wavefunctions into one state at the instant you inspected the cat, and that interferes with wavefunctions of the system. In effect, you're extracting information from a system in ways that quantum mechanics explicitly forbids ... in effect, you are forcing the outcome after the fact.

Re: Thoughts on using 1d20 instead of 3d6? I've played a lot of systems, in my decades with the dice, And in all those years I've never had polyhedra without lice. But the jinxes when they come, it's never all at once, Unless you're only rolling one of 'em, and then it's you being the dunce. I really hate flat probability density distributions; no matter how skilled the character, he'll always have abject rookie pratfall failures whenever there's a roll to be made. And no matter how absurdly impossible the task cooked up by the munchkin with the trained die, he can succeed. Quite possibly this distaste is the result stumbling into poor GMing with some of those flat-distribution systems, but it's there and no arguing with it. I'm not wedded to 3d6 per se, but there should be some mechanism for producing reasonable expectations of success -- or more properly, assurance against the same failure a completely unskilled individual should suffer -- for routine tasks by skilled individuals. A peaked p.d.f. is a natural way to do this, especially when combined with Hero-style skill adds naturally giving you successively larger probabilistic payoff as you buy more of them.

Re: The cranky thread I gotta pee. Gimme your orange juice glass.

Re: The cranky thread Hmm. It's been a while. Maybe I should do some preemptive back-ups this weekend. It's been not quite a year since I was unemployed, and I was in that state when the backups last happened.

Re: The Last Word Rice, sushi-grade rice.

Re: Curious of Other Opins You are certainly correct with that last quoted clause. I have serious doubts about the first one, though. Looking at the ability, thinking about what it means for most of the scenarios I've played before ... it does feel like something where unless the GM specifically plans around it, this power would distort every encounter. If it's that way, then the GM has two options: squash the player like a bug (which I take as equivalent to tailoring everything the GM does to circumvent the abusive power), or let the player pin down his campaign like a bug on a corkboard, and let it twist around painfully and futilely. I'm in a campaign where I strongly suspect the GMs feel obliged to plan around the signature power of one of the PCs. (It's worth pointing out here that the player described what she wanted in words, and let one of the GMs design the character and her powers, so it's impossible to give sole .. or perhaps even primary ... blame to the player in this case.) IIRC, that signature power has been used in exactly one scene in the campaign. Subsequent to that, when it comes to fight time, as soon as that PC is on the scene, she gets squashed. They say it's not on purpose, that there's die-rolls for the NPC actions, and so on. Sure doesn't feel like it; I suspect those rolls are made with a one-sided die. We haven't left that campaign yet, but I've thought about it more than once.

Re: Atmosphere

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I read the name of the thread Fire Balls Spells and Hit Locations. and thought, "Yeah, that would count as a location," and shift uncomfortably in my chair.

Re: Orc fall down, go BOOM! Hm. I've done this sort of thing with an RKA, Explosive, limited to "All or Nothing" (No damage unless target destroyed). But, I was trying to make something where the explosion was in proprotion to the size of the thing being destroyed, while this clearly is looking for a boost in the damage in the explosion compared to whatever kills the original target.

Re: Exotic Names and Exotic Locations This hardly qualifies as "exotic", but at one time you could copy files containing the most common US surnames, male given names, and female given names, from the US Census Bureau site, based on definitive real data (the 1990 Census). The page is hard to find, but it's here. The files are unfortunately MONOCASE and suppress non-letters (e.g., "de la Rosa" would be present as "DELAROSA"). The names are ranked, and the files include frequencies, although quoted only to 0.001 percent. And, of course, they are incomplete. Also, there's no cross-reference, because there are of course correlations between surname and given name (an obvious example: you almost never see "Jesus" as a given name for anyone who doesn't have a Spanish surname). But a little coding and use of an RNG and you can make a statistically solid collection of all-American random character names. I've done it myself.

Re: The Last Word Is that anything like lutefisk (which figures prominently in the mythos of one neighborhood here)?

Re: The Last Word What's that?

Re: The cranky thread Heh. Send them this link, and disappear for a week.

Re: Modern Gods Wow. Apotheosis at last. Worship Me, mortals! More on-thread ... Credit (though that may be just one Aspect of Money), and Bimbo.

Re: Supers and the law Actually, in a real-life college course I have asked exactly this question in hopes of getting a high-quality term paper out of a student about it. Law is strongly backward-looking, not forward-looking. If a situation hasn't happened, there probably isn't a law covering it, and existing law will be carried forward as much as possible if the situation arises. The best response I have to date came from one student who interviewed an uncle of hers who, she said, was a senior judge here in WA. The response was torturuous enough that I believe her. In the absence of other precedents, and of direct statutes, something that could be assumed to be an extraterrestrial alien would almost certainly have the same protections and obligations under the law as a human foreign national. In other words, kill them and it's murder, injure them and it's assault, and the other way around. (That opens questions about illegal entry into the country, but those questions were not addressed. The question of how a non-humanoid would be recognized as sentient rather than animal, vegetable, or mechanical was also not addressed. The question as read said "little green man from a flying saucer" that landed in your back yard.) I assume that if supers exist and are publicly acknowledged, then there would be laws passed for handling their peculiar circumstances. At that point the GM makes up what he wants and runs with it.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Long ago, back before the Great Renaming, back when you sent emails to people at other sites using "bang path" addresses, before nethack or angband or even rogue, back when Ultimate Gaming Nerd status hinged on becoming Commodore Emeritus in trek and getting all 350 points in advent, I taught myself ANSI C. As I have done with several languages I've picked up by myself, one of the first things I wrote in it was a game. It was a very simple text game, "Aliens from Outer Space". The player was nominally in charge of the forces defending Earth, he had a finite number of troops, as did the aliens. You gave orders, read the results, and continued until one side went down to zero. The game was deeply tongue in cheek. Options which sounded stupid (e.g., rocks) were, probabilistically speaking, the best. Options which sounded cool (e.g., laser cannon) were, again probabilistically speaking, poorest. You could try using Dick Nixon imitations (though the only result of such a tactic was "Of what conceiveable use is that form of attack?"). You could use tire irons, jet fighter planes, obscene gestures, handguns, and nuclear missiles. There were possible outcomes which could bring in alien reinforcements, wound humans, cause casualties on both sides. There was a secret weapon (which never worked, and Professor Scheisskopf screamed "Donnerwetter!" and gave a different excuse each time); there was a trap ("You truck your wounded out to White Sands Missile Range and leave them there amidst many large 'FREE LUNCH' signs. The aliens show up and start chowing down on your delicious wounded. You then set off the 20-megaton warhead buried just under the sand..."). You could appeal for Divine Intervention (but if you did that, the aliens did it at the same time). You could negotiate a treaty (among the terms of which was that the aliens got the right to set up Colonel Zurgznart's Kentucky Fried Humans franchises world-wide). After getting it ("aliens.c", I called it) to a point where I had problems getting it to crash, I posted the source out on the Usenet. A couple of years later I got the highest compliment a game programmer can receive. In an unsolicited email, someone explained that one of their favored late Saturday night pastimes was to get stoned out of their minds, play the game, and giggle for hours at the silly responses they got. They asked if I'd updated it. I had, I sent them the new code code, and that was that. That was over 20 years ago now. I've moved many times, changed storage media at least three times, and things got lost. Among them, sometime, was aliens.c. It doesn't show up on the web (certain phrases like "Zurgznart", "Fzurgtaprotz", etc., draw no hits). I'd kinda like to recover it someday, but maybe I'll just re-do it from scratch (probably in python this time) and hang it off a web page. We'll see.

Re: WWYCD: Holes in the story Mr Terrific is passive-aggressive enough that he'd take the hint, get back in his car, drive to the next supermarket with a bakery, and buy what he wants from there. And he'd never patronize the first establishment again.

Re: Friendly faces in the Post-Apocalypse The distillery is likely to be a key installation. Produces clean water, drinkable alcohol (always an important item), and undrinkable alcohol (a/k/a vehicle fuel). I would expect most "towns" would have such a thing, and it would be defended with people's lives. A town's stillmaster is a valuable person.