Zeropoint

6 hours ago, Cassandra said:

So if you're character is put in a coffin they just die?   You don't want to give them a chance to escape?

I'm not clear on why the coffin has to be written up as a power to offer a buried character a chance to escape. If the killer is making these coffins himself, you just give the coffin lid whatever DEF and BOD scores you think is appropriate for the challenge level. He doesn't need a power to build a wooden box. If he's using off-the-shelf coffins, you do a little research and set the DEF and BOD to simulate the coffins he's buying. He doesn't need a power to buy a wooden box.

If you're this hung up on using powers to represent things, a buried character won't have any chance of escape from the grave anyway . . . unless they had the foresight to buy some Tunneling to let them dig up through the dirt.

I agree. You don't need to buy a power with character points to be able to use a shovel. A HERO character already has the INT to figure out how to dig a hole, the DEX to make the shovel go where they want, and the STR to lift the dirt. You wouldn't (I hope) buy the Summon power to represent the fact that your character can call a taxi/Uber/Lyft. This way lies madness and spoons with half-page writeups.

There are no mistakes in bronze casting, only happy accidents!

On 9/10/2019 at 1:20 AM, Doc Democracy said:

In such a world is a drought purely meteorological or does it mean that there are magical forces at work that might take against those who counter their drought?  Are there competing divine forces at play?  Obviously the odd little creation of water to ameliorate the edge of the drought for people is overlooked but a concerted effort to counter the effects of the drought might find that certain divine magics are blocked

It never came up in the homebrew fantasy world/game I have, but areas could be "aspected" or "flavored" magically such that certain categories of spells would be easier or harder to cast. A magic user trying to Create Water in a desert, or in the middle of a drought-stricken area, would have a harder time of it. Also I had an area which was once a breadbasket agricultural region but is now a wasteland thanks to past use of strategic level magic; no one is just going to walk in there and fix the problem by spamming noob spells.

Ah, that fits the motion, and the relationship (or lack thereof) between the shape of the "orb" and the background, much better.

16 hours ago, archer said:

Ghostly orb at a comic book store caught on video and repeatedly sets off store alarm.

 

https://www.spaldingtoday.co.uk/news/strange-floating-orb-is-captured-on-shop-cctv-footage-9082223/

The fact that it was only visible via the camera, and not to the naked eye, suggests that it was an infrared light. It almost looks like someone was shining an IR laser around the store, but the motion doesn't look like what I'd expect from human hands. Motion detectors usually work with IR light, so it would explain that as well.

That reminds me, I should try to run/play a game of Cyberpunk 2020 next year.

That is indeed a cool gun. Thanks!

If I could get broadband internet and pizza delivery, I'd like to live in a place like that.

1 hour ago, megaplayboy said:

One of the recipients of the MOH threw himself on two hand grenades(the first one was a dud).

"Maybe this one will do the trick."

Do keep in mind that we have ships, swords, axes and guns in the real world, and the people responsible for fighting aboard their own ships always choose guns.

But we had a black president, so that means racism is over, right?

When you run the numbers, that doesn't sound so far-fetched. We can calculate the minimum energy needed for the Death Star to blow up an Earth-sized planet, and when we do, we discover that:

1) That shot contained more energy than you'd get by converting the entire mass of the Death Star directly to energy, and

2) Even at 99.99% efficiency, firing that shot would have generated enough waste heat to melt the Death Star (I want to say "vaporize" but I don't remember exactly). No wonder the engineers couldn't eliminate the thermal exhaust ports!

Star Wars tech, at least in some areas, is PFM. We can't even start to describe how it might work in theory.

Today is special because it's MCU Nick Fury's birthday.

Happy Fury Day, everyone!

So those earthlings threaten to put people into a bubbling vat of universal solvent, and then they wonder why no one responds?

Dang, someone hates trees.

To quote myself from a different context, "There is no god but John Moses Browning, and Barret is his prophet."

2 hours ago, Pattern Ghost said:

I agree that someone piping up with "See? Gun control in Australia doesn't work!" is in extremely poor taste after a mass shooting. However, I don't see any evidence that it's had a large impact. Australia already had a downward trend in homicides. Australians still have access to firearms. The sheer number of arsons and stabbings on that list demonstrates that people who aren't armed with guns aren't necessarily deterred. At the end of the day, they have a LOT less mass murder than we do in the U.S., but then again, they always have.

That's about where I am. Despite being a firearm owner, I do acknowledge that we have way too much firearm-enabled violent crime here in the US, and that Something Must Be Done. However, I also have serious qualms about whether the kind of laws popular among my fellow liberals would actually help. Many such laws focus on cosmetic features, and are thus useless. We also see that in many cases, shooters were already prohibited by law from having the guns they used, making it obvious that laws aren't an effective barrier. And finally, as Pattern Ghost pointed out, there are many ways for people to commit mass violence, if that's their goal, which don't require access to firearms.

I'm in favor of actual solutions, and I'd be willing to accept some restrictions on my firearms ownership if I felt confident that those restrictions would actually save lives. However, I don't think the root of the problem is access to guns--I think it's cultural. There's some pervasive aspect of US culture that makes people think that enacting violence is a go-to solution, and I feel that until we address that, passing laws against specific tools of violence won't accomplish anything good.

With enough brains on board, it sure would be. You could fire it blind into an area where you're pretty sure the enemy is, and let it find its own target. I don't see any obvious reason why you couldn't have it disarm the payload and fly back to you if it didn't find anyone to blow up. (Well, okay, having a grenade fly back to you would make people really nervous.) Twenty minutes of flight time would let it cover a lot of ground, too.

3 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Thing is, the whole tent is under attack from ideologies that do not share the liberal assumptions that individuals and reason matter -- from nationalists that elevate tribal identity, to Jihadists that deny humanity in the name of God, to looney-tunes postmodern academics who reject the very idea of objective truth as a tool of oppression.

I'm inclined to agree. At this point in US politics, anyone who believes in science and evidence, and in trying to make things better for the common people, is some flavor of "liberal". 

On 5/24/2019 at 7:28 AM, Hugh Neilson said:

On the topic of "events have impact", what happens when all those people who disappeared all across the universe reappear again 5 years later?  What happens when the broader cosmic MCU learns it was backwater earth people who did that?

People do seem to be more or less ignoring the fact that Tony Stark built a mother-hecking Infinity Gauntlet. The capability may not be wide-spread yet, but Earth has the ability to run with the galactic big boys, in terms of tech at least, if not economically.

I don't quite understand why it's such a problem. It's just a rock. Sure, it's too big to move at the moment, but the techniques for breaking up stone are well-understood. They should be able to get it out of there in a weekend.

Leonardo Dar'lyeh, surely?

That's a great picture. It makes the plane look like it's fast while it's standing still. I'm no photographer or visual artist, but let's see if I can analyze this:

I think it's the way the viewing angle and relatively short lens emphasize the nose, giving the plane a weight-forward appearance. Also, the chosen viewing angle gives the plane a fairly smooth silhouette, with strong diagonal lines running along the plane's belly and along the fuselage top and wing leading edge. The composition follows the "rule of thirds", with the bottom third of the image taken up by the ground, and the top third by the sky. The slanted edge of the ground echos the strong diagonals of the plane, adding to the sense of motion. The large clump of plants hides the rear landing gear, lessening the sense that the plane is connected to the ground. The human figure lies entirely within the silhouette of the airplane, leaving its lines intact.

Props to the photographer, even if it is a jet.