Zeropoint

Neat. It looks like an opal or like a piece of artisan colored glass.

I simply assumed that he still had all his muscle under that fat. As much emphasis as the current media puts on looking good, it's still entirely possible to be in great cardiovascular condition and have large amounts of well-developed muscle and still have fat on top of all that.

4 hours ago, Bazza said:

It was in Endgame when Thor gave up the Kingship that was mostly out of character. One can also make the credible argument that his lethargy is also out of character. 

Of course it was. Thor acting out of his usual character was intended to convey how hard it hit him that half of all living beings in the entire universe had been destroyed and he was helpless against that fact. O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

Honestly, I liked the way it looked like Vader was letting his anger get in the way of proper technique. It might not be the Vader we built up in our heads in the decades before the prequels, but there's no denying that Anakin had anger issues.

6 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

This is the difference in design that I see with modern RPGs vs. old school models like HERO is the new ones focus mostly on what HERO calls "handwaving" which can seem dismissive.

I'm actually on board with this trend. In my earlier gaming days, I loved simulationism. Today, I realize that there is no bottom to the simulationist rabbit hole, and also that 1) most people are going to be using their intuition and judgement to determine whether a simulationist approach is "realistic" or not, so 2) the simulationist approaches tend to spit your seat-of-the-pants judgements back to you but with more work, so 3) why not just go straight to the seat of the pants and save some work and play time?

11 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

That BODY is abstracted to represent both the structural integrity, mass and systemic functioning of a person or object... it lends itself to a lot of head scratching moments. SFX generally applies in a "whatever" moment... but if my SFX is "Disintigrator Ray!" and yours is "Shotgun!" but both of us have 3d6RKA... then things start to get dicey at times. One wipes out the entire body of the target, the other leaves a bleeding corpse, which all have game implications. One makes sense to create a hole in a concrete wall to walk through, the other doesn't at all.

9 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

Oh, don't get me started on those rules... where shooting a wall with a .45 somehow causes a man sized gap in an interior drywall type wall.

It's my understanding that a "proper" modeling of firearms would include the Real Weapon and Beam (can't find that in 6E, though) limitations, which would account for those differences.  

I don't know how to rule on corpses being destroyed, though. HERO has some blind spots, and that's one of them. There's also nothing in the rules (that I'm aware of) about "blowthrough"--by RAW, if a human gets hit by a main battle tank APDS round, they'll die but they'll also stop the dart. That . . . doesn't seem right to me.

12 hours ago, Cygnia said:

You can lead a horse to water . . .

In downtown Portland, Oregon, there are a decent number of pump & tool stations for bicyclists. Not "every doorstep" but they're around.

You'd also expect that someone with 60 STR to be able to tear an adult male human in half like wet tissue paper. The logarithmic damage is explicitly designed to allow high lifting strength without damage getting out of hand. Of course, such gamist decisions kind of conflict with the simulationist flavor of HERO, but . . . the whole point of this business is a game that you can actually play at the table, right?

13 hours ago, dsatow said:

As one reduces thickness, the defense of the item should go down.

Makes sense to me. I can tear through aluminum foil by accident, with force that wouldn't deal a single pip of damage as measured against a human target. The foil is effectively 0 BODY and 0 DEF. Faced with a half-inch slab of aluminum (the same material), I couldn't damage it at all--it's DEF exceeds the maximum damage that I can deal with my bare hands.

But some dogs can do lab work.

If you squint really hard, you can make out a teeny tiny Ankh-Morpork.

This is easy for me to say, because I don't like sports in the first place, but I would like to see a future where people--even professional athletes--refuse to harm themselves for other people's profits and entertainment.

1 hour ago, Old Man said:

IIRC Strange saw possibilities, not actual timelines, though the distinction may be a fine one.

It's an important one. When Strange was first experimenting with the Eye of Agomato by running time forward and backward on the apple, chunks disappeared out of the apple as though it were being eaten. But (I didn't notice this myself; someone else pointed it out and I can't confirm it right now) no one ever eats that apple in its future. The Eye seems to be showing a possible future, as opposed to THE future.

Also, regarding the philosophy of time travel: there's a third possibility. There could be only one timeline, which IS mutable. Such a case would allow for weird, acausal effects (such as information appearing out of nowhere, or people who exist in the timeline as adults despite their childhood never happening at any point in the timeline). Of course, such a situation breaks causality, but I haven't found anything that demonstrates that causality must hold; everything I've seen on the subject seems to just assume that it must.

Of course, if anyone has a source demonstrating that causality must hold, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

20 hours ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

Lay off Dad Body Thor, everybody. PTSD. Look it up.

This. So much this. "Dad Body Thor" isn't there to be funny, it's there to be tragic (okay, with a layer of funny on top). It's there to show you that Thor is broken emotionally. I thought it worked pretty well.

20 hours ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

I love* the development of Nebula's role in a way that I haven't always loved the big movie heel turns.

I wholeheartedly agree. To me, it felt believable and organic, and also like she was "growing" rather than "changing". She's still the product of all the mental, emotional, and physical trauma that she went through, but with the example of her new family, she's learned how to channel it in a positive direction.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll in . . .

Do you want zombies? Because this is how you get zombies.

Woot! Salemanders represent! I would love to get a game going down here!

As I understand it, tentacle porn got a huge boost after the war when the US forced them to add clauses to their new constitution restricting the depictions of genitals in porn, and hey, a tentacle isn't a genital, is it?

Of course, that doesn't explain things like The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.

Armored tentacles? That's really cool!

If I had to play a Southern role in an American Civil War game, I'd have to work hard at not falling into a "Christian insisting that slavery is the will of God" type of role.

1 hour ago, archer said:

If you want to get picky, most of the German soldiers on the battlefield weren't Nazis.

 

In 1939, for example, the population of Germany was 86.7 million people while the membership of the Nazi party was a little over 6 million.

 

Russian soldiers during the course of the war were fighting to keep Stalin in power just as German soldiers during the course of the war were fighting to keep Hitler in power. You can't realistically take the stance that "German soldiers were Nazis" without also taking the stance that "Russian soldiers were Stalinists".

 

I'm pretty sure that no one would take the stance that "American soldiers were Democrats" just because FDR was president at the time.

You keep your dirty logic away from my pure Mosin-wielding quasi-historical anime waifus.

The only thing cooler than a Zeppelin is a CAVORITE ZEPPELIN!!!

I'm not trying to say that Stalin was a good guy, by any means! When I think of the WW2 Soviets in this context, I'm usually thinking of the common men and women out at the sharp end, like Lyudmilla Pavlichenko or the Night Witches, or all the men from the battle for Stalingrad. They were defending their homeland from Nazis, and I doubt that politics played a big role in their minds.

It also helps that the Soviet Union has fallen, and is no longer a threat (not saying that Russia isn't a problem). That makes it easier for me to focus on the parts I like, like cool pilots bombing the crap out of fascist invaders.

18 hours ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

It mainly brought to mind the boardgame club I was in in Portland in the 1990's. The de-factor clubleader consistently and loudly refused to take the Russian side in games of Squad Leader (a classic WWII tactical game where the units are infantry squads and individual tanks and guns) because he hated what the Soviets represented. But he had no similar qualms about playing the Germans

How bizarre. I go out of my way to play the Soviets in Great Patriotic War settings, and use red pieces otherwise, because I whole-heartedly approve of history's greatest Nazi-smashers.