bigdamnhero

Currently listening to...my entire music collection, one album at a time. I recently moved my digital music library, and all my Playlists got lost in transition, so I'm having to recreate them from scratch. Not that listening to a bunch of music I like is all that onerous, but still, annoying.

Thanks everyone for the input!

11 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

BDH if the other characters have access to war horses for no XP then I don’t see a falcon having perhaps an extra csl or two being out of the question.

Yeah, I think I'm inclined to allow changes for free within a range of what would be considered "normal" for a falcon. Maybe +/- 10%? Or even 20%? At some point, there's probably a line where "super bird" needs to be paid for, tho I don't see us getting there in this case.

Follow-up question. For purposes of discussion, let's say anything within +/- 10% of baseline is free; here that would be 18 CP. But then say at some later point, the character trains the bird up to 30 CP above baseline, and has made some really good Animal Handler rolls to justify it. Would you charge the PC for:

• the full price of the bird (now 214/5 = 43 CP),
• just the points that are above baseline (30/5 = 6 CP),
• just the 12 points that are outside the 10% window (12/5 = 2 CP), or
• give it to them for free because they made the Rolls?

13 hours ago, Surrealone said:

37 points worth of follower a bit more than 7CP ...

Yeah, and it's actually worse than you think: the 6ed Bestiary write-up for a normal falcon is 184 points, so that's 37 CP! 

I have observed before that the cost of Followers (and to some extent, vehicles & basis) is the one thing that IMO completely broke in the transition to 6ed. In 5ed you could buy a Standard Heroic sidekick for 15 CP (Follower built on 75 base points, plus 75 points from Disads which do not add to the cost of the Follower Perk). But in 6ed characters cost more to build - Competent Normals are 175 points now - and you don't get to subtract the cost of Complications, so buying one as a Follower costs 35 CP. In my last Superhero game, I house-ruled it to 1 per 10 instead of 1/5, and even that only partly addressed the problem. But I digress...

In my current fantasy game, the PCs do not have to pay points for normal animals such as horses. One of the PCs is a falconer, and has Animal Handler. I didn't make him buy his bird as a Follower either: 37 points hardly seems worth it IMO! Because it's not a Follower, he has to make Animal Handler rolls to make it do things, but at this point it's pretty well trained. (He's actually on his second bird, the first one having gotten shot down some time ago.)

The player has asked about training the falcon to be better in combat: maybe a CSL or two, that sort of thing.

So how would you handle that? Just use some Animal Handler Rolls to train the bird, no XP required? Or would you make him pay the XP for the increased cost of the bird above baseline? Or would you make him buy the bird as a Follower before he can improve on it at all? Or...?

OK, I'll play around with it on my end - thanks.

2 hours ago, Hermit said:

For a time they did. Jake 2.0 was an underrated show

Hey now, let's try and stay on topic. This conversation is about guys named Steve having trouble on planes. 

8 minutes ago, Hermit said:

Maybe someone doesn't think Antifa is all that great an organization, it doesn't mean they're profacist...

[nods] Whether it does or not, this ain't the place for that conversation. Thanks. 

Oh, and as much as I didn't care for the way Cupid's Dagger blithely dismissed multiple instances of date rape, I will give them props for not having Ed go through a Crying Game style post-gay-hookup panic.

11 hours ago, Simon said:

Doesn't matter if you're quoting or not -- you're using the quick reply form at the bottom of the page.  Replies will always go to the end of the thread, but having the page change from your current selection is non-ideal...

I thought with the old software, entering a comment with Quick Reply would change the page to the most-recent page? [shrug] I'm not sure either way is significantly better, just different.

11 hours ago, Simon said:

...so you'll need to just trust the "Saving..." and clearing of the form.

Well that's the thing, IIRC it didn't clear the form or give me a SAVING label or anything to trust in?

6 hours ago, zslane said:

That's why you and a hundred other critics will talk about how shitty a movie is, while the other 99.999% of the viewing public will react with, "What are you talking about? That movie was awesome!"

Well in this case, it seems like the critics and the public pretty-much agree.

I wasn't too enamored with Dr. Finn before, but her Turn To The Creepy this episode was genuinely chilling.

On 11/19/2017 at 10:14 AM, zslane said:

I think a lot of critics are bothered by things that 90% of audience members never notice. Things like plot holes, lack of character development, poor pacing, incoherent fight choreography, lack of convincing character motivation, and so on.

...I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not? You just described the top five things that ruin a movie for me. Those aren't exactly minor technical points; they're the minimum qualifications for Not Shitty.

As for reviews, I only listen to the handful of reviewers whose opinions I trust. It's harder now that Roger Ebert has left us - whether or not *he* liked a movie, I could almost always tell if *I* was going to like it from his reviews.

Has anyone else experienced this: when you post a comment quoting a post that's not on the most-recent page of the thread, the old software would take you to the most-recent page so you could see your new post. The new software doesn't do that, it seems to leave you on the page you were quoting from and doesn't give you a notification that your post went through. As a result, I wound up creating 3 or 4 duplicate posts before I realized what was going on. Could just be user error, of course, but seemed odd.

OK, I think they have officially Hit Their Stride. I wouldn't call Firestorm a perfect episode, but it was the first one that I felt really stood on its own with no apologies needed.

And yeah, Alara's definitely my favorite character too.

Triple post? Damn.

Double post, sorry.

On 11/15/2017 at 10:54 AM, zslane said:

One Star Trek trope I could never really buy into was the "all biped species in the universe are sexually compatible" trope. It's worse than the tacit assumption that invisible, perfect universal translators are operating at all times, no matter the situation, no matter the location of the action.

Well the latter is pretty-much a story-telling necessity; having to wait to have everything translated really destroys the narrative flow. So necessary evil IMO.

And the former they sorta-quasi justified by revealing that most intelligent life in the galaxy was all "seeded" from common genetic stock by the Progenitors or whatever they called them.

23 hours ago, Pattern Ghost said:

My wife saw a headline that the JL villain was Steppenwolf. Her response? "They're fighting a band? One that only has two good songs?"

The question is whether DC is self-aware enough to have a character make that joke in-character or not, and who gets to make it. My money’s on Flash. 

I normally don't care much for flashback episodes. And if I could live the rest of my life without being forced to sit through more High School Melodrama, I'd die a happy man. And yet somehow, I really enjoyed this episode. I felt like it really did a good job of fleshing out Kara & Alex's relationship, and also put the whole "I'm driven to help people yet I chose to hide my powers for years" thing into better context.

Having never watched Smallville, I had to look up the Chloe reference. And I was puzzled by the whole "Mom" thing, since I didn't think the actress looked anything like Kar's mom - I didn't realize they'd recast the part. But the Noell Neill bit was a nice shout out.

Y'all let me know how bad this train wreck turns out to be. I think Ima go see Thor again this weekend. If it turns out JL manages to defy the odds and doesn't totally suck, maybe I'll catch it next weekend.

I'm getting the roof replaced: hail damage, insurance covered it, no biggie. But the dogs are freaked out by all these people on the roof and walking around and all the hammering and stuff. So we're listening to Karen Olson aka The Most Calming Music On Earth. Seriously,  they were completely spastic 10 minutes ago and by Track 3 they're both sound asleep. Works every time. (Now if *I* can manage to stay awake and get some work done...)

I thought Baby Driver was OK all the way through - not great, but entertaining. I did think it was kindof impressive from a filmmaking standpoint how well they edited the action to match with the musical beats, rather than the other way around. But yeah, not great.

"Beowulf is the epic rant of Baron von Cheese-Weasel!"

I could try to explain the context, but...

17 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

Supposedly the Jane Goodall Institute got all pissed off about this cartoon & tried to sue Larson. Inappropriate and disrespectful and all that. Until someone showed the cartoon to Jane herself, and she thought it was funny and told them to drop it. 

(That wasn’t in the film; I just read about it.)

Jane, the "profile documentary" about Jane Goodall, made using mostly archive footage from the 60s & 70s. Magnificent: visually beautiful, personal, touching, funny, occasionally heartwrenching, and even managed to be educational. Definitely catch this one on the big screen, unless you don't care about beautiful nature photography.

As an aside: I've always know Jane Goodall as this healthy but somewhat dowdy grey-haired woman. Who knew she was a Gwenyth Paltrow lookalike back in the day?

Bonzer, I don’t mind holding on to them for a few days until you’re back in town if you want? Or I can just drop them in the mail if that’s easier. Thanks!