Old Man

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Arrived at the hotel for the hacking contest. It was being held in the hotel next door, but it was booked, so we wound up in this one. Elevator buttons were very strange--white, like very tall and narrow rocker switches. Checked in, headed up to the room to drop off the bags, and then went to the hotel next door for the kickoff dinner. It was a pretty standard event, the usual hotel food, some meaningless speeches and polite applause. There was one sour point where one of the women working the buffet line opined that "these are the only kinds of customers that ever give us trouble." I shot her a dark look. Dropped off the wife in our hotel room and headed back to link up with Steve, my teammate. Going back and forth between the hotels was quickly getting old. It was late, but this was a hacking contest; it had to happen late at night. Found Steve and without further preamble we jacked into the network in the lobby. The hack was pretty straightforward, just time consuming since we had to do a bit of custom coding. Getting the key back from the target also required some odd rerouting, to evade the intrusion detection mechanism. The hack completed, we hung out in the lobby waiting for the competition to finish. Before long one of the event staff came by to let us know we'd placed 11th out of 24 teams. Pretty unremarkable, way back in the pack. I briefly wondered what the other teams had done to get the information faster. She handed us our prize, which was plane tickets to Canada; Steve and I laughed, because in order to get the information back from the hacked system we'd had to route it through a travel agency's system and had bought plane tickets to Canada in the process. At this point some oddly dressed Japanese people started to wander in. Here was young man with bleached hair and a pinstriped suit with no shirt; he'd left the bottom jacket buttons unbuttoned so as to show off his well-defined abdomen. Another girl walked in with far too much eyeliner and mascara; it clashed with her intentionally-torn wedding dress. A tall man followed in a suit with broad black-and-white stripes that made him look something like a circus clown. Even his bowler hat had matching stripes. As more of these gaudily dressed people streamed in, I reasoned that they must be here for some sort of style or fashion expo. Sure enough, some of them were beginning to set up booths to sell jewelry and accessories. One strangely-dressed girl, staring at me, asked her friend, "What is he doing here?" Her friend, a petite girl with a bob cut held up to the side with a large black velvet ribbon, said, "It's okay, he knows me from the Pearl Salon." Which was a lie, of course; I'd never seen the girl before in my life, nor heard of the "Pearl Salon". This is about when my kid started to cry, waking me up.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Yeah, there's two levels of catfight: silly, and extremely-dirty-to-the-death.

Re: What is Your Favorite Item? Going further back, there was also the Deck of Many Things that got turned into a weapon. After a few lucky draws we realized that we'd pulled most of the good results, leaving a deck with an 80% chance of something really bad happening to whoever pulled the next card. So there were a few instances of the cleric trying to convince certain people to "pick a card, any card." GM let us get away with it a couple of times.

Re: What is Your Favorite Item? Had a character once that got hold of "the Strongsword". It was essentially unbreakable but otherwise unremarkable as a weapon. However, its wielder gained like +10 STR, CON, and BODY, and several defenses as well. The character in question was a total loser rogue/mage, who upon learning just what he'd picked up, had the thing tethered to his wrist (and often bound his hand to the hilt with leather straps as well). Many amusing situations ensued, like only ever having one hand free, trying to use its abilities in places where swords were frowned upon, and not being able to drop the sword lest he die instantly.

Re: Musings on Random Musings The second rule of Fight Like A Girl Club is... "Not the hair!!"

Re: Rail gun damage? How hard would it be to employ disposable one-shot rails? Not very sexy, but might be more feasible than using magic superconducting unobtainium that doesn't exist.

Re: Do any of you still play 4th edition and FH Circa 1990? The magic system discussion on that second link is extremely interesting.

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads

Re: Musings on Random Musings No, he meant tribblers.

Re: Musings on Random Musings But do they double dip? No salsa for them!

Re: A Thread for Random Musings We should have company over more often. It forces the wife to clean up, and the house actually looks nice when it's clean.

Re: Buy Fantasy Hero Now Is it the same cover art or is it leather bound with gilded edges?

Re: Bandages and such I've always thought RPGs fostered an amusing attitude toward wounds. Your character gets nicked for 1 body and you blow it off--but in real life, if you got cut so bad it brought you 1/10 of the way to death, you might not be so blasé.

Re: Greater difficulty for intricate spells I've thought about that, but I actually prefer players to design spells with at least a couple of advantages. Nothing bores me more than an artillery piece mage who slings a vanilla RKA.

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so - The difficulty of a spell has only to do with its overall power, not its intricacy. - The requirements for casting a given spell are set--you can't take extra time or use additional materials to make it any easier, for example. - Fire hurts exactly the same as cold. - Flight is the easiest spell to learn.

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so Yeah, but is it better than a lightsaber? Because a lightsaber's blade glows in the presence of orcs too!

Re: The cranky thread Lady, I like you a lot--otherwise I wouldn't have married you--but do you think you could shut up for like five minutes? Especially since you know I have a lot of work to do tonight.

Re: The cranky thread Christmas "music" by George Harrison, may he rest in peace.

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so IIRC, more often than not it only warned you if orcs were here, i.e. too late.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Lateral isn't gonna happen in this company. I'd have to "lateral" to a different org. I dunno, maybe I can make some positive changes here and improve the situation; I've gotten like three hours of sleep every night this week so I'm just down. If I can just get through the end of the month--but then I find myself saying that every month.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I've seen some guys still riding their Harleys in the recent 40+ MPH gusts and driving rain. I'm like, dude, give up and admit that it's not fun any more.

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so Anyway... - A normal can quadruple his strength, becoming a Schwarzeneggerian freak of nature, after a few months of adventuring. - A slight speed advantage translates into a huge advantage in combat. - Higher agility generally means you can run faster. - You are most likely to hit your opponent in the chest, even in melee, regardless of what weapon you're using. - Shields are totally awesome. Wait, that is so. Never mind. - Hammers and axes suck when compared to spears (in 5th) or swords (in 4th).

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Wouldn't be so bad except for the power outages. Why they can't bury the damn power lines in a state that routinely gets windstorms and hurricanes, and never freezes, is beyond me. But then again we can't keep the roads paved either. Anyway, the wind did cost me a couple of bushed in the front yard, and if the rain ever stops I have to climb up and check the shingles on the play fort.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER We've had a strange cold front come in and sit on the island for about five days now. Rain, wind, temps clear down in the high 60s at night. Biggest problem is the gusts of wind coming out of the south, opposite form the way the wind blows 95% of the year, so everything that grew expecting winds out of the northwest is getting knocked over.