Cancer

Re: Mute Characters I have a L5R bushi (Kuni Bakayaro) whose back-story is the loss of his voice. He can form words and whisper, but his vocal cord appartus is not functional. On the battlefield to attract attention when needed, he has a horn that he blows. It's an interesting limitation, though in this campaign it actually is a borderline advantage. When a hefty part of the background is trying to resist the back-handed taunts of Cranes and Scorpions, having a good in-game and roleplaying reason to maintain silence can be quite handy.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings There's something wrong with you when You write a program with a routine named "getSex". getSex() has a legitimate purpose in your legitimate, work-related program. It does not seem incongruous to you until you reread your code a few days later. Even after noticing it, you leave it in place because it makes more sense than anything else. Even though you recall, in your youth, swearing you would never attempt to get sex with a computer.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Spokane: At least your daughters will be safe!

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Man ... Sorry to have to say this, but for that, you deserve all the acute sleep deprivation that happens to you.

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them Giant cyborg raptors ... there was an old Roger Dean image where he put a bird's skull on the front end of a model of an SR-71. (In fact, there's a number of old Roger Dean images that lend themselves to this sort of speculation.) Let something like this wild, and suddenly regularly scheduled air service comes to a screeching halt. Remember that if it develops that there's a large-scale ecology of cyber/magic/tech organisms, remember to fill all the niches in the ecology, not just the apex predators (which are the coolest and receive the most attention). Scavengers, parasites, and ambush predators make for nasty surprises to the unwary. Imagine cyberjackals that lurk around, just waiting to pull down big things that are hurt or malfunctioning so they can "kill" it and take its components (power cells would be the obvious ones). Mystic maggots (that'll eat anything) that combine magic sense with tech sensors to find stuff hidden or discarded at the metaphysical boundaries, so corpses (and treasures) don't accumulate there and stink up all of metacreation (and to snarf up the cached goodies that mage-types leave to keep non-magicals from finding them). "Tape"-worms, parasitic things that exist as millimeter-size bug-like things when outside a body, that infest cyborgs, hijacking the self-maintanence capacities to build big (and very different) versions of themselves inside the cyborgs. Or, perhaps, which override the cyborg's "brain" and cause it to seek out the nest of the mother parasite, an immobile something the size of a railroad car that lives at the bottom of an ant lion-like crater several city blocks in size and consumes anything that its progeny causes to jump in the pit....

Re: Answers & Questions Q: Tell me again, exactly why you've dug up the septic tank and mounted it on the chassis of a 1977 Trans Am? A: That was the bribe that secured the next Olympics for London.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings At times one is startled by how young people can be and show a ghoulish sense of humor.... My 10-year-old son broke his elbow yesterday. It wasn't obvious, a non-displaced fracture, and he's now in a splint. My wife took him to the doctor this morning. On the way home, Mom asked him what he wanted for dinner this evening. "Something with elbow macaroni."

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: The Last Word When a man and a woman start sharing living quarters, a new game is begun. The woman wins when her clothes occupy all the closet space. The man has no victory conditions.

Re: Your character's theme song would be? (Warning: serious chauvinism for music of the late 1970s here.) I ended up choosing "Hocus Pocus" by Focus. No lyrics (well, there's the yodelling and the maniacal laughter, but no words), cool song, and given that my character is based on a four-aspect Multiform with very different powers, nothing really covers all the bases. I'm waiting for an Energy Blaster character to show up with "Lightning's Hand" by Kansas. Way too apropos. Great villain background songs include "Knife Edge" by Emerson, Lake, & Palmer and "Gates of Babylon" by Rainbow. Actually, the latter would be appropriate for someone with a demonic origin (like Hellboy). ... And I'm waiting for Old Man to chime in on this thread with "Old Man Down the Road" by John Fogerty....

Re: to map combat or not to map combat. That means you're limiting yourself to combats which are mappable. That sounds like a silly statement, but it's not. 3-D mapping is never easy, in particular if it includes both groups on the ground and multiple bunches of high-speed flyers, all of whom can and will take shots at all the other groups. Even a 2-D situation can verge on unmappable, if it involves multiple non-co-moving frames (e.g., the fight around a bridge over a railroad, where stuff is happening on the bridge, on a train, and between two vehicles moving down the road toward the bridge at the same time, again all of which can take shots at each other). Fights which happen at distances no more than handgun range are easy to map out (as long as they're 2-D). You start having real problems when important things can happen involving effects that work at very differing ranges. Finally, there are broad ranges of character types for whom it can be said that "if I'm on the same map as my enemy, then I have already lost". High-end mentalists come to mind first, but there are others as well. As long as you recognize this and make sure everyone else does also, that's OK, but it is an important restriction. In effect, it's a declaration that in your campaign Bricks Rule, because the only combats that will be allowed by the campaign setting are compact mappable ones ... which is THE place for bricks.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings This is by definition a random musing. For the random walk of equal-length steps in 2 dimensions, the probability of reaching any fixed point after N steps approaches unity as N goes to infinity. However, for the random walk of equal-length steps in 3 (or more) dimensions, this limit probability is less than unity.

Re: News Headlines as Plot Seeds Thread My favorite real-life headline of all time: "FIVE KILLED BY DRUNKEN ELEPHANTS" Gist: In India, a herd of wild elephants were attracted to the smell of a moonshine liquor operation. They ate the corn, slurped down several vats of hooch, and it turned out they were angry drunks. More or less destroyed the compound. It's unclear whether they were just angry, or angry that there wasn't more booze....

Re: Stardrive Engines, how would you do it? I think you should design your star drive around what sort of game you want to run. If some particular aspects of interstellar travel are important to your campaign, then choose those aspects and make up spfx around them, and then trowel in whatever mechanics you need to make that happen. There's nothing wrong with "push the button and it goes" if that doesn't detract from the campaign you're trying to run. I know from painful experience that you can get lost in working out all the logical consequences of a set of assumptions about how your star-drive works. It can be a hugely attractive puzzle working all that out, and if you get lost in it, then the campaign you run turns into a few sessions where you demand your players to be in awe of your magnificent creation and see how cool this-that-and-the-other details work out. It makes for a truly sucky abortive campaign. I know. I've done that. Instead, decide on the kind of flavor you want in the story you want to tell, realize you need to be consistent with that flavor to avoid the "One sci-fi campaign, stinky with extra cheese" feeling, and then go from there. If you and your players are happy tinkering with details of ship operation and design, and you plan on making ship-to-ship combat in deep space an important operational piece of the campaign, then go for as much nitty-gritty as you want (I'd call this the Car Wars In Space end of sci-fi gaming). But if starships are just the equivalent of commuter trains to the next world, then don't worry about it. In short, let the star drive mechanics and details follow from your intended campaign flavor, and then put in as much work as that requires, and no more.

Re: The Last Word And we'll leave it to Mightybec to speculate about what he does with Miss Piggy.

Re: Campaign Idea - Suggestions Gratefully Welcome If you really want to bring home a dark, corrupt world, have the PCs get befriended by a small group of NPC heroes who are comparable in origin/motives/etc. to the PCs. Maybe these NPCs save their butts once. (Heck, maybe one of them is a PC's parent, sibling, SO, or something.) Then let those friend NPCs step on some corporate toes, and then get framed for something nasty (and the PCs know beyond a doubt it was a frame), and then hunted down and wiped out by the corrupt governmental agencies in the pocket of the corps. And let Fox World News carry it live on TV, include infinite replays of a particularly nasty lethal head-shot of one of their pals (since that's what boosts the ratings most).

Re: The Last Word If MightyBec were to use Zornwil's avatar, there would be no end to cracks about the word "greenhorn".

Re: The Last Word There's an old Far Side strip where the frog in the honkytonk sings, "... I got the greens real bad..."

Re: There's No "REAL HORROR" in a Horror RPG setting...is there? I've played in a couple of horror-type quickie games (test runs for convention events). Although I don't enjoy horror as a genre (either reading or cinema), the games were OK. You just have to play characters you despise, let them do stupid things, and revel in their hideous deaths. The jerk jock from school? That weasel slimeball manager at work? Your ex's lawyer? Aren't all of those people you'd want to roleplay having their viscera torn out and devoured before their eyes? Last time, when I played the Weasel Slimeball Manager, the plotline involved characters being "converted" by Evil and doing homicidal things. The GM was shaken by how readily I joined in the carnage. I had no problem envisioning that character come in late, calling a late-working office goober into his office, and then beating him to death so he could suck the marrow from his bones...

Re: Drugs, man... Drugs... My Champions character (I know, that's not FH) has a Multiform which is based on "Power Pills". His name is Mr. Terrific, and if you're not old enough to remember that very-short-term TV series, well, that's just another advantage of youth. He hasn't yet bumped up against an anti-drug campaigner, though that could be an interesting plot twist.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings A minor fringe benefit of teaching physics -- specifically, the optics lab courses -- is that you can get your 8- and 10-year-old kids excited by offering to take them to the school and show them the lasers. They are at first disappointed that they aren't the giant death rays of infinite destruction that are all the lasers on the kidivd shows, but playing around with them is still cool, even to the kids.

Re: The cranky thread

Re: The Last Word All against the wall, suckahs!

Re: WWYCD: The Binder My character isn't this creative, but I would be tempted to find the supervillains' character sheets, erase the most significant digit in their stats and powers, and then rent a safe deposit box and lock the binder in it. If the character's major psychlim was triggered, he'd be tempted to take his own sheet out of the binder and drop the binder (and all the rest of its contents) into an incinerator. If his minor pyschlim was activated, he'd be tempted to take out all the sheets except his own, make up a new character sheet (to his own specifications, which includes a certain Psychlim: Slavish Infatuation) for Montana Wildhack and insert that into the binder. If neither psychlim activates, probably he just does the safe deposit box thing until something pushes him over the edge.

Re: The Last Word Is there a logically viable way to distinguish those?