bigdamnhero

Yeah, that was my conclusion as well.

Oh, and here's a fun bit of Irish history I came across while researching the game: In 980, Irish High King Máel Sechnaill defeated & killed the Viking King Olaf of Dublin, bringing the Viking towns under Gaelic control. Afterwards, he took Olaf’s widow Gormflaith* as his own wife. But in 997, he divorced Gormflaith and married...her daughter (by Olaf) Máel Muire, who was then 18. Yes, he literally dumped his wife of 17 years to marry his teenage step-daughter who had been living with him since she was an infant. Ick. Gormflaith meanwhile fled back to Dublin, where her son Sigtrygg Silkbeard was now King. In 999 she convinced Sigtrygg to rebel against Irish rule, but that revolt was crushed by Brian Boru the King of Munster and High King Mael's chief rival. This victory solidified Brian's control of the southern half of Ireland. Afterwards Brian married his daughter Sláine off to Sigtrygg, while Brian married...Sigtrygg’s mother Gormflaith. So Gormflaith is simultaneously… The wife of Brian Boru, Over-King of the South. The ex-wife of High King Máel Sechnaill The widow of the late King Olaf of Dublin The mother of Sigtrygg Silkbeard, the current King of Dublin, And the mother of Queen Máel Muire, the High King’s current wife * apparently pronounced "Gorm-lee."

And from this week's Historical-Fantasy Hero game: The PCs have journeyed to Ireland, to the Hill of Tara, seat of High King Mael Sechnaill mac Domnaill, who is currently losing a civil war against Brian Boru, the King of Munster... Player 1: "How would you like to be known to history as the Cheese King? No wonder he wants to take over, he just wants a better title!" The PCs figure out the High King is going blind, so the Holy Warrior and the Alchemist decide to try and cure him: Warrior: "Herbalism by 2, Medic by 4." GM: "OK, great." (to Alchemist) "Give me a SS: Medicine roll." Alchemist: (rolls) "...Well...crap." Priest: "Did we just poison the High King?" Warrior: "We were planning on leaving town anyway..." Alchemist: "Screw that; I'm going to blow a Hero Point to reroll." GM: "But it's funnier this way! ...Okay, fine grumble grumble." Alchemist: (rerolls - gets a natural 3!) "WOOT!" Priest: "As uses of Hero Points go..." GM: "Yeah, wow. OK, go ahead and give me an Alchemical Invention roll just for..." Alchemist: (rolls a second natural 3!) Everyone: Warrior: "So not only is he no longer blind, now he has Super Vision!" GM: (singing) "I can see for miles and miles..." Priest: "Did you make enough for everyone?"

Last week's Star Wars game featured the Battle of Endor and destruction of the second Death Star. Except in this game, instead of the Ewoks being annoying midgets in teddy bear costumes, the GM turned them into terrifying CGI killbeasts who see the world as divided into into "Food" and "Things We Can Use To Kill Food." And the former category very emphatically does NOT include exceptions for sentient species. We manage to convince them not to eat us in exchange for helping them kill "The Food That Comes In White Shells" aka Stormtroopers. GM: "The Ewoks start singing a battle song..." PCs (all singing) "Yub yub, Ewok yub yub..." GM: "Actually their battle songs sound more like recipes." (singing in a low dirge voice) "Add 2 cups butter, parsley and simmer until tender." PCs: Another change in this game is that Luke died blowing up the 1st Death Star, so Leia (as an NPC) became a Jedi instead; while the PCs take out the shield generator planetside, she's the one who goes up to the Death Star to watch Vader and the Emperor kill each other. Afterwards, back on Endor she readies Dad's corpse for the big Viking funeral send-off. PC1: (to Leia) "Do you want to keep Lord Vader's shuttle?" Leia: "No, you guys can have it." PC2: "But you should at least keep his helmet. As a memento" Leia: "That helmet is a reminder of what my father turned into, a monster who killed millions. Why would I want to be reminded of that?" PC1: "Oh, you may not want it now. But someday your kids might want something to connect them to the grandfather they never knew." GM: "..." PC2: "Something to brood and obsess over..." GM: "STOP!"

I played one game of MtG when it first came out, and that's it. Haven't played any other CCGs and have no interest in them.

Ooooo! Hadn't watched that one yet!

Shall we O? On War by Carl von Clausewitz. In the Army we used to say Clausewitz is like the Bible: everyone quotes it, but few have actually read the whole damn thing. [rimshot] Not an easy book to get through - no translation I've seen has managed to get past Clausewitz' ponderous prose style - and many have questioned how relevant Clausewitz is in the era of nuclear weapons and asymmetric warfare. But it's still a must-read for any serious student of military history. Also of note is On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War by Col. Harry Summers. Summers examines America's strategy in Vietnam from a Clausewitzian perspective, as well as in terms of the Principles Of War outlined in US Army doctrine. I actually disagree pretty strongly with several of his conclusions, but it's still an interesting analysis. On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming. My favorite Bond book, and would've been the best Bond movie if they'd had literally anyone else in the lead role... The Once And Future King by T.H. White. The book that really brought the Arthurian legend into the 20th Century. One you might be less aware of: The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman. The first full-length novel featuring his Silver John character (aka John the Balladeer). If you've never read any of the Silver John books or dozens of short stories, think Cthulhu tales set in the backwoods of 1950s-60s Appalachia. Well worth checking out! Plus, he wins the award for Most Badass Name, Fantasy Author Category.

Sidebar: I was just listening to a podcast the other day talking about how reading Braille is becoming a lost art among the younger generation of the blind and visually impaired, because everyone has a smartphone that can just read stuff to you verbally. Numerous advantages, of course, especially in terms of cost - Braille printing ain't cheap as I understand it, and Braille books are bulky as hell. So from that standpoint, it's a huge win. But the article also pointed out that by not learning to read, blind kids are not learning to write at anything approaching an age-appropriate level. Even with high-quality voice-to-text programs, they don't necessarily understand proper grammar, sentence structure, etc and tend to "write the way they talk." Seems to me that could be overcome with different instructional methods, and they didn't offer any evidence that they're learning less from screen readers than they would from Braille. But I still found it interesting.

I can't believe I forgot to plug Traveller Hero!

[Duplicate post deleted - sorry!]

Star Hero treats spaceship design and combat very differently from most sci-if RPGs. Rather than having a separate system, it just uses standard Hero vehicle rules. There are certainly strengths to that approach, particularly in that you can design whatever type of ships you want by reasoning from effect. But some feel it lacks "flavor." Depends on what you want to play. Remember top hat Star Hero is a genre book, not a setting per se. Just like with magic systems in FH, the GM is going to have to set some campaign guidelines for how starship tech works in their specific campaign world. You might want to check out Terran Federation and Alien Wars for examples. I played around with GURPS spaceship rules once awhile back. IIRC I really liked it in theory, but thought it was way too complicated in practice. YMMV and all that. I don't think it would be too hard to meld with SH, but the game design philosophies are very different. I once played around with designing a system that assigned how much space different ship's systems took up based on their AP cost, so you could play the How Much Stuff Can We Fit In This Box game. The idea was to have a Smaller Than Standard Advantage for more advanced systems, or a Larger Than Standard Limitation for older or cheaper systems. Sounded cool in theory, and if I ever get to run my Big Damn Space Opera campaign, I'll have to dust it off again and try to finish it.

OK, now you're just trolling us Cassandra!

Finally saw Valerian, and enjoyed it. Extremely silly, of course, but in a fun way. Shame it did so poorly at the box office.

Most SF movies in the 60s & 70s were intended to be cheesy B movies; it wasn't really until 2001 that Hollywood started taking the genre seriously. I'd definitely agree with the Day The Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World. 2001 I never really got in to personally, tho I can recognize the achievement. Maybe Westworld, Soylent Green & Body Snatchers, if we're grading on a curve. The original Planet of the Apes was cheesy but entertaining. Silent Running suffered from That 70s Syndrome, but had some good bits. Also: Metropolis.

Right. Although it was also specifically stated that his "quirky" personality was a side effect of his reprogramming, which implies that such things are not simply the result of accumulating too much memory. Also, while it appears that K2SO is bound to follow Cassian's orders, IIRC at the end he is able to defy Cassian's direct orders re sealing the door to the data vault and holding off the Imperials in a suicidal last stand. In fact now that I think about it, he also defied Cassian's order earlier to stay on the ship simply because he "got bored." (Tho that could be interpreted as an excuse when the real reason was he knew they'd likely need his help.)

I would agree it was better than the first two prequels, but that's a pretty low bar IMO. Tho I do have a friend who still gives me grief because he saw Sith based on my "recommendation" and hated it, said recommendation consisting of "It's mostly watchable, at least compared to the previous two." He hadn't seen the previous two, so he didn't understand how faint that praise was meant to be.

There was only one Matrix movie, and it was awesome.

Personally I agree with you. (Tho I thought Homecoming at least did a good job with that element of the character.) But I doubt that had much to do with its box office performance, particularly among non-comics fan. I think it's more that people have already seen 5 Spidey movies in the last 15 years, only two of which were any good, and they're just tired of the character and the constant reboots.

I'm not sure where you got that number, but according to Wikipedia the only MCU movie to break $500M domestically was Avengers 1. Homecoming has already beaten out Dr. Strange ($233M) and is on track to beat Winter Soldier ($260M), both of which had similar budgets. It's overseas performance has been relatively low (which makes some sense - too much talking, not enough explosions) putting its worldwide gross so far in the bottom half of the MCU, but I don't know how many markets its opened in overseas and how all that works. Comparing it to other Spidey films, it's already passed Amazing 2 ($202M) and in another week should pass up Amazing 1 ($262M). They've still got a ways to go before they catch up with the Tobey Maguire films, but even the first of those only cleared $400M domestically. Tho here again, its overseas performance is relatively weak so far. And yes, while they're regarding it as the first in a trilogy, everybody else sees it as the fifth Spider Man movie in 15 years. Basically what I'm saying is, if they were expecting to make $500M domestically, the problem was their expectations, not the film's performance.

It still beat out Planet of the Apes, which was only in its 2nd week. At it's already the 3rd highest-grossing movie so far this year (behind WW & GotG2) I don't think anyone at Sony or Marvel is crying too hard.

I don't see why it wouldn't - an astromech that holds the entire crew's life in it's non-hands can probably do more damage than a lying protocol droid or cargo loader. I couldn't find videos without spending more time than I have right now. But the first one that comes to mind is Ep 4, on the Death Star, when the Droids are discovered in the control room by Stormtroopers after Luke & Han have run off to rescue Leia. 3PO first tells the Stormtroopers something like "They're madmen; they're headed for the detention level" which is technically true, so okay there. But then a second later he tells the remaining guard "All of this excitement has overrun the circuits in my counterpart here. If you don't mind, I'd like to take him down to maintenance" which is two lies for the price of one. Then of course he lies to the Ewoks later in Jedi when he tells them he's a god and will use his magic powers if they displease him. Now in this case you could argue he's just doing what Han/Luke told him to do, and IIRC he does raise some protest that "impersonating a deity" is against his programming. But note he never says that lying is against his programming. Those are the ones I'm sure of off the top of my head - I have vague memories of a couple others, but I'd have to rewatch them to verify. Sure. But do we have any evidence that "do no harm" is programmed into any Droids? I can't think of any examples of Artoo or Threepio directly harming anyone, other than Artoo shocking a couple Ewoks and whatever that creature was on Jabba's sail barge. But neither can I think of an example where a Droid refuses to harm anyone based on their programming? I'm just not sure there's evidence to suggest the 3 Laws (or something similar) are a thing in SW. AI vs Engineered Lifeform: OK, I get the distinction you're making; thanks for clarifying. Oh absolutely! I'm waiting for the day the GM uses that against me! Hmm. Actually I'd say it speaks to how unreliable droids are, regardless of memory wipe status. If non-aware droids always followed orders, there would be no needs for restraining bolts. And if you discover your droid is self-aware (or might be), all you should have to do is wipe their memory and problem solved. The more I think of it, the fact that bolts are needed at all speaks to a lack of consistently-programmed droid "laws." Yeah well, ethical questions often take second place to practical considerations in most universes, including ours. Tho that doesn't invalidate the questions themselves IMO. Applied to people: say a few centuries after the trilogy, the mon calamari or some other race becomes dominant in the galaxy, concludes that humans are to blame for the whole Evil Empire mess, and decides to lobotomize all humans because they might stir up similar trouble later on? Obviously most of us would say that's horrifically unethical, even if it were applied to a species like the Huts. So why is it okay to do it to droids? I realize that's not a 100% apples-to-apples comparison; I'm just saying there are some uncomfortable parallels. Killer Droid Armies notwithstanding: my original point was that as reluctant as people have historically been to free slaves that provide mainly manual labor, I can only imagine they'd be orders of magnitude more resistant to the idea of freeing droid "slaves" if they do all the technical work that keeps galactic society functioning.

Hmm. Well Threepio & Artoo both lie throughout the trilogy: Artoo lying about Leia's message, Threepio repeatedly lying to Stormtroopers, etc. I can't think of any examples of them harming anyone, but we know that battle droids exist, so clearly "do no harm" isn't a universal law. Either way, it does seem like at least some droids are capable of breaking/exceeding their programming to some degree. I'm not quite sure I understand the distinction you're drawing here. Care to elaborate? Exactly. The very fact that restraining bolts are a thing implies that Droids disobeying orders or otherwise "thinking for themselves" is not uncommon. In our current SW game, my PC is a protocol droid who has figured out how to make fake restraining bolts. "Why, I could never have done such a thing, as you can see by my perfectly functioning restraining bolt!" Heh. In our game, the handshake protocol for self-aware droids is "Wanna kill all fleshies?" in binary. But I'm pretty sure that's not canon. Yeah, in that context "Mind wipe your droids regularly so they don't become sentient" makes a certain practical sense, tho it raises a host of ethical questions.

Oh, here's one I missed for M: Making The Most Of Your Money by Jane Bryant Quinn. Or as it's known in our house, the Holy Book Of Jane. A book on money management written for normal people, not one-percenters. Mrs BDH credits it for getting her out of debt in her 20s, it helped us figure out how to start saving in our 30s, manage it in our 40s, and are using it for retirement planning now that we're in our 50s. It covers everything from the basics of banking, to how much insurance do you really need, to creating a budget/spending plan that actually works, to how much house can you afford, to picking a mutual fund to retiring in style. Seriously, if there's one book I'd recommend everyone should read, this is it, whether you're living paycheck to paycheck or trying to decide what to do with that extra $50 a month or whatever.

Nine Princes In Amber: check. Night At The Lonesome October: check Neuromancer: check. Name Of The Rose: check Well that's about all I had. The only one I'd add, just for its curiosity factor, is Number, Predictions & War by Trevor N. Dupuy. Dupuy was a WWII veteran who later taught military science at Harvard, and wrote something like 50 books on military history. He's probably best known for The Encyclopedia of Military History, which was an absolutely invaluable reference in the pre-Internet age. In Numbers, Predictions & War, he presents what he calls the Quantified Judgment Method, a mathematical model to analyze and predict the outcome of battles, based on a huge slate of variables, ranging from Force Strength to leadership & morale, to terrain & weather factors to air superiority, etc. etc. etc. Like a lot of computer models with relatively subjective inputs, the outputs shouldn't be taken as gospel; but it's fun to play around with, especially if you like to play around with ideas like how would a modern rifle platoon fare against a Roman Legion and that sort of thing, and you'd rather not paint a ton of minis.

A couple other ideas, now that you got me thinking. (See what you did?) In my current SW game, one of the ancillary themes has been the idea of Droid rights, given that Droids whose memories aren't wiped every few years seem to develop personalities and reasoning capabilities that seem largely indistinguishable from sentience. At what point do you cross the line from "Toaster's don't need rights" to "Droids are essentially a slave race?" This isn't exactly a new question, in SW or in SciFi generally. But how does it change the equation where, instead of providing cheap manual labor (as with most human slaves throughout our history) the Droids are essentially the technicians, the only ones capable of maintaining your machines & gadgets? (Especially since many SW fringe planets seem only habitable with mechanical assistance.) Losing control of your supply of cheap labor and having to now actually pay workers is one thing. Losing control of the technician class is a whole `nother matter, and you can see why most "fleshies" in SW wouldn't want to examine the idea too closely. Again, especially if there are limited ways to spread the notion that Droids are people. (i.e. - no Uncle Tom's Cabin.) Similarly, some sociologists/psychologists have shown that reading (and particularly reading fiction) is critical to developing a sense of empathy or sympathy for other people, ie the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes. Some historians have pointed to the "reading revolution" of the 17th and 18th Century as the end of medieval views and the start of our "modern" view of individualism and human rights. Now in a medieval world - where most people only rarely encounter people from other cultures, regarding other cultures as mysterious, unknowable, and therefore frightening - is obviously bad, but has arguably limited consequences, compared to a modern or futuristic society where those sorts of interaction are far more commonplace. So what how would that impact a functionally-illiterate futuristic society? (Again, more interested in the implications for RPG world-building than in debating SW canon...)