Cancer

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I heard one of these that ran "The best thing in life is a bottle of Jack Daniels and a girl who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch."

Re: The Last Word Wife hauls cat #3 to the vet this morning, to deal with a big abcess.

Re: The Art Of The NPC I find it very helpful to base important NPCs on a real person from my past that the players don't know. That way, I know intuitively how that person will react to most situations, while the PCs have to deal with a stranger. Once you have that, flesh out stats (if you need them) as appropriate for the campaign and run from there. Now, I've known (AFAIK ) no Criminal Overlords, Psychotic Mass Murderers, Amoral Megacorp Executives, Conquering Alien Invaders, Monsters From The Bottom Of The Sea, etc., so I'm a bit handicapped in creating those, but those are more or less always caricatures anyway.

Re: Gravity manipulation costs? For the most basic form of the power, #2 as I listed it, MitchellS's idea of the Flight UAA probably comes closest to what I want. Define a volume of effect (so there's an Area Effect in there too), and then everything in that volume that isn't tied down to the ground adequately "falls up". When it reaches the top the volume, it accelerates due to normal gravity downward, and so on. You get oscillatory motion, if you sustain the power. (The other versions I listed are almost certainly out of range in terms of costs.) Things with Flight would be at most momentarily inconvenienced by this, but walkers/rollers have motility problems Hmm. That suggests you could do this with a strange area-effect Entangle, if the movement arrestment is all you wanted. I'll think about that, too. Time to talk to the GMs and see what to make of this in terms of cost. And hammer out the results of Area Effect. If I know by a non-targeting sense that MunchkiNinja is in a particular 40-square-meter area, I don't want to have to beat his 15+ DCV with an attack roll. If I have to do that, then time to ditch the character concept and deal with that abomination in a different way.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Went to the zoo yesterday with the kids. There wasn't anything as funny as the time we went in march, and the Cape Barren goose was feeling broody and chasing the emus around the enclosure they share. But we did there for snack time for the orangs and siamangs, though.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Rats. My banana is too green.

Re: Taking Names A lot of the answer to this depends on the framework magic system. I can think of some situations where loss of your name can be world-threateningly catastrophic: this is the case in, e.g., Legend of the Five Rings, where you have to give the oni (demon) your name when you summon it; and in The Farthest Shore (I think; the 3rd novel in Leguin's Earthsea series) the mage that threatened the whole world was one who'd forgotten his name. In other systems it could even be an advantage: someone without a name might not be able to be uniquely identified, and if Something Bad is after you that might help.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: Why did Jim Henson die? A: Ummm ... which Commandment was that again?

Re: What do you think...

Re: What do you think... Time-chain confusion and/or disintegration is a cool idea and can be a handy mechanism, but use it sparingly. Either that, or work toward making it unclear which time stream the PCs really belong to. Small but persistent anomalies can crop up, and those can be very funny. In one temporal disintegration adventure I co-ran, one of those anomalies was that all the money said "In Baal We Trust" on it, and another was that one of the PCs found (from the posters plastered outside the group's HQ) that he was porn star. By that time, the world was well on its way to complete chronoentropic dissolution.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: What do you think... Get your map of Manhattan and choose ground zero, and figure out how many people were toasted using a 2-kilometer radius. And how many digits of property damage were done. I don't know if redemption is possible in our world for an error that large. Even by averting literal destruction of Earth's biosphere, multiple times. The negative is too large for people to wrap their minds around; any possible counterbalancing positive suffers from the same situation. How do you prove you saved the world? By withholding your protection once, that'll show 'em it's for real? Errmm.... There's also the cyncism thing. Even if they were to, say, divert the 200-km asteroid into hitting the Moon instead of Earth (which has the advantage that people could see the impact), you can bet Fox News would assert they'd set it all up to fix their rep in the first place. Political and journalistic careers would have "Revenge for Manhattan!" as their core defining basis, and the support of millions of grieving relatives. It has happened before, obviously. I think generations will have to pass; living memory of the event will have to expire before any hope of "redemption" is possible.

Re: What do you think... Another idea into the bucket ... in the replay, give one or more of the PCs the ability to "play the Martyr card", to borrow a situation from TORG: save the day at the price of his own life. Like, perhaps, let that PC with the indirect strength buy more STR at the cost of BODY damage ... at a rate guaranteed to irretrieveably destroy the character, 1 STR per 1 BODY or something. Then the character chucks the tanker out into the North Atlantic, his head explodes, and suddenly that PC is a sainted martyr instead of a mass murderer. From such stuff are great comics made.

Re: What do you think... I am a firm believer in the principle that "Luck is the residue of design." Creating a situation where that kind of (unintended, even unimagined) result is possible is a sign of greatness. You have made a world where no one knows all the consequences of their actions, even though they may be truly horrific: the ultimate in role-playing realism.

Re: What do you think...

Re: What do you think... Woof, you've done it already. Ooooh. Man, the authorities are gonna be after the PCs now. The cure was much worse than the disease. I like it. "Neutral evil gamemasters have the most fun."

Re: What do you think... If you're going to do this, you might do some thinking about what superhero PCs might be able to do about it before impact. If you just materialize the tanker 2 km up, then the answer is "not much". There'll be 20 seconds of free-fall time before impact. Trying to lift the thing back up, or deflect it, isn't going to work, if you do the Superman-style fly up to it and catch it in your hands. The tanker doesn't have the strength to support its own weight. The STR you compute for moving that 400,000 tons has to be applied approximately uniformly over the whole tanker surface, or you'll just break the tanker apart; the pieces other than the one in Superman's hands will keep falling, and now they fall slightly away from each other, widening the zone of destruction. If that happens high enough up, then the oil will disperse over a much larger area. If you have a way of igniting it after that (it won't ignite on impact by itself), that could give your the widely dispersed fires you need to start a firestorm.

Re: What do you think... It's not supersonic at impact; the velocity is only about 200 m/s. Drawing numbers from here, posit 200,000 tons of oil on a ship with an empty mass of 200,000 tons. The ship is 350m long by 55 m wide by 35 m deep. That's the "footprint" of the falling object. Very crudely, that makes for 20 tons per square meter fallling, with that 200 m/s velocity, in the impact footprint. You can probably turn that into Hero-style KA damage. You'll also have tsunami-like damage done by all that liquid (with its density of about 0.9 tons per cubic meter) being bounced away from the impact as the tanker structure is crushed. The impression I have (from reading discussions of the firestorms resulting from WW2 strategic bombing) is that firestorms don't really come from a single big fire. To get one going, you need lots of lesser fires over a large fuel-rich area. I don't think this will make a firestorm. It'll be a very large nasty fire, but not a firestorm. If you were to spread the oil out in a layer 1 m deep, then that makes a circle about 250 m in radius. If you make that 10 cm deep, then it's about an 800 m radius. So that's probably about the size of the area directly covered with the burning oil. The big tankers carry crude, which isn't going to explode, and isn't as flammable as its refined products (gasoline). It also doesn't burn as cleanly, so you'll have yucky black smoke from the oil fire. I would look to descriptions of being downwind of the oilfield fires in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion in 1990 (or '91, I forget) for that. The wind matters, both for smoke, and for the progress of the "collateral damage" fires that break out after impact. Offhand, I'd say total destruction for a 1-kilometer radius around the center of the impact, and severe damage for another kilometer.

Re: The Last Word Uranium oxide is a high-quality, robust, beautiful orange pigment.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What sort of idiot would counterfeit an 18-Euro bill? A: The building burned to the ground, but they never found her again.

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps Sounds like you've already committed yourself to a skeleton of a map already, though all you have is one crude sketch. Try scanning it, and then print out expanded/reduced copies. Most copy shops will be happy to let you do that, especially on big-format paper. You can work on and from those. Heck, if you make something that you really like, re-scan that, and get the first one laminated. Then you're set for life.

Re: A Thread For Random Links Approximately real-time earthquake information for Oregon & Washington One of those data-geek kinda things.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: Whatever happened to that student you caught dry-labbing the exercise in your Human Sexuality course? I never understood why you got so annoyed about it. It's not like anyone else knew how to deal with that llama either. A: That's number 17 on the list of things that guaranteed to squash your hopes of the Senate confirming your appointment to the Supreme Court.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings This is a nice image of ice in a Martian crater, with full attribution. It's the attribution that makes me scratch my head a bit. I know what "FU Berlin" is (I've been there, long long ago), though Freie Universitat isn't what pops into the head of most folks when they see that phrase. And with the name like "G. Neukum" (which I expect most USer's would pronounce as "Nuke 'em", and find the similary to Duke Nukem suggestive....), the name + affiliation borders on surrealistic pseudonymity.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Doh, I forgot. 10000000019 10000000033 10000000061 10000000069 10000000097 10000000103 10000000121 10000000141 10000000147 10000000207 10000000259