massey

What is this TNG and DS9?
 
I only note 1 star trek series.

What does the Discovery Channel have to do with Star Trek?
 
 

I think there are two different concepts of honor, and we frequently confuse them.
 
Japanese honor is not chivalry.  It's not a matter of following your own internal code and being true to your ideals.  In the Japanese samurai context, honor is reputation.  It's respect.  An honorable warrior is one who people give honors to.  He might be an utter dirtbag in real life, but people perceive him as being great.  He keeps up a good appearance.
 
Personal honor in a modern western context is different.  That's more strength of character kind of thing.  It's the sort of honor you get in a hyper-individualistic society like America, as opposed to the more group-oriented societies of Asia.
 

Don't forget Cap is in the highest-risk age group!

I know I'm way behind, but my wife and I finally watched Spider-Man: Far From Home last night.
 
That was a seriously fun movie.   It really felt like a comic book.  We both had a blast.
 
Tom Holland is perfect as Spider-Man.  And I have to admit (spoilers)... seeing JK Simmons come back as J Jonah Jameson made me so happy I almost squealed like a teenage girl.  There's really nobody who could do that role better than him. Jake Gyllenhaal did a decent job as a villain I never cared about, and the special effects team did a spectacular job.

They're well on track to becoming the biggest cinematic universe of all time.  Wong Fei Hong has 80 films, but at this pace they'll pass him within the next 20 years.  Then I expect a reboot once Tom Holland is around 50+ years old.  
 
It's an amazing cinematic achievement.  As a nerd from the "bad old days", whenever I see or hear someone complaining about the MCU all I hear is that "the caviar isn't fresh and the champagne is going flat, I expected more for my $20".  

I'd argue that the absurdity lies in permitting the device to drain Earth's defenses without explaining why it allows a 1 pip HKA to destroy the Earth in under a hundred Phases.  Of course an absurd assumption will create absurd results. 

I think there are two different concepts of honor, and we frequently confuse them.
 
Japanese honor is not chivalry.  It's not a matter of following your own internal code and being true to your ideals.  In the Japanese samurai context, honor is reputation.  It's respect.  An honorable warrior is one who people give honors to.  He might be an utter dirtbag in real life, but people perceive him as being great.  He keeps up a good appearance.
 
Personal honor in a modern western context is different.  That's more strength of character kind of thing.  It's the sort of honor you get in a hyper-individualistic society like America, as opposed to the more group-oriented societies of Asia.
 

I think there are two different concepts of honor, and we frequently confuse them.
 
Japanese honor is not chivalry.  It's not a matter of following your own internal code and being true to your ideals.  In the Japanese samurai context, honor is reputation.  It's respect.  An honorable warrior is one who people give honors to.  He might be an utter dirtbag in real life, but people perceive him as being great.  He keeps up a good appearance.
 
Personal honor in a modern western context is different.  That's more strength of character kind of thing.  It's the sort of honor you get in a hyper-individualistic society like America, as opposed to the more group-oriented societies of Asia.
 

Duplication is all screwed up.  There aren't very many times you should use Duplication instead of just buying a Follower instead or using Summon.  It's expensive and has some real drawbacks to its use.  It's almost always better to use a different build.
 
Agent Smith probably just had a bunch of Followers (other Agent Smiths), or used Summon: Horde of Agent Smiths to fight Neo.  Trying to do it all with Duplication is a headache.

Duplication is all screwed up.  There aren't very many times you should use Duplication instead of just buying a Follower instead or using Summon.  It's expensive and has some real drawbacks to its use.  It's almost always better to use a different build.
 
Agent Smith probably just had a bunch of Followers (other Agent Smiths), or used Summon: Horde of Agent Smiths to fight Neo.  Trying to do it all with Duplication is a headache.

You're welcome.  The article has a ton of great photos in it and I think the AP did a pretty bang on job of covering it.
 
The "inside the courthouse" side of the article stood out for me as I've seen the DHS propaganda, but I hadn't seen a press perspective on it.  What the reporter detailed were serious injuries that in most cases would justify lethal force.
 
And kudos to the reporter for getting in there and taking the ride.  Sounded very scary.
 
Honestly, I'm so tired of watching say CNN and then Fox and then trying to Frankenstein it together to get an actual story instead of a political opinion.  This AP story was award worthy.

You're not wrong.
 
Still, I'm far more concerned about the prosecution manufacturing evidence so they can push charges.  That has ramifications for the entire community.  Mr.  and Mrs. BadWithGuns are only a threat to people breaking into their property.  That's a much smaller group of people.
 
Corrupt prosecution teams are the same kind of super-evil that dirty cops are.  They are charged with enforcing justice and are instead working to destroy it.  A jumpy old couple that got scared and went for their firearms before earning national fame as the worst gun handlers in recent history are not a threat to society.

The actress Olivia de Havilland has died at the age of 104.
She was the last survivor of Gone With the Wind and was responsible for the end of the contract system. She was the oldest Oscar winner still alive.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53546021
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12717233
 

Kansas?

Limitation: Looks like a dork while using it (-1/4 to -1/2, depending on how mean your fellow PCs are).

Thanks Ninja-Bear and bluesguy!  This helps alot as they are fighting Darkun Assassins who are using poison and really screwing these guys up.  This forum is great and very helpful, really appreciate all the help.

Burn down the too-big threats.  No unusable "can wipe 4-6 PCs with half his AP tied behind his back" Mary Sues like Destroyer.  No globe-spanning too-large-to-defeat organizations like VIPER.  Set the world up so the PCs have the opportunity to pick a thing they don't like and let the campaign be how they get rid of it.  Anything outside that scope has no business being in a superhero TTRPG setting. 
Do the same to the good guys.  Nobody wants to play a game where the GMPCs are just around the corner being better than the PCs.  Gut PRIMUS, UNTIL, all the other hero groups so the PCs can be important. 

As long as the one way is using Change Environment and not Images... 

Digression but I find it always interesting that we can have several ways to model Fear effects but ONLY one way to create light.

Immune to XYZ is always tricky in Hero, because you can define any power as being XYZ-based.
 
Being Really Really Scary -- 10D6 RKA (so frightening that it causes you to have a heart attack)
 
And you want to be immune to that for 5 or 10 points?  Of course, you aren't likely to run into anybody who actually defined their RKA as fear-based.  But what if you did?  Part of the job of the GM is to determine how the world works.  How are fear-based attacks going to work in your game?  Because that's really all that matters.  Being immune to fear is a common trope in fantasy gaming.  So what you do is figure out the limits of what you'll allow a fear attack to do in the game.  Then devise an appropriate defense against it.  Then you're done.
 
In a fantasy game, where fear is relatively common but not an overwhelming attack, I'd probably make Immune to Fear cost 10 points or something.  And now you're immune to fear, period.  But I might also require a Psych Lim -- Fearless.  The character is going to be more susceptible to certain Mind Controls ("Attack that dragon?  No problem!") because he doesn't have the fear that would normally give him a bonus to resist.  While exploring a creepy dungeon, everybody else gets a cold chill when you start to open the crypt that contains the wight.  But not our fearless character, he doesn't get that warning at all.

I just bought a copy of OA from Drive Thru (super cheap -- they're having a Christmas in July sale!), and here's from the "Special thanks to" section:
 
"To the Japanese players—Masataka Ohta, Akira Saito, Hiroyasu Kurose, Takafumi Sakurai, and Yuka
Tate-ishi—for critiquing and improving the manuscript on short notice"
 
As for the treatment of Asian culture, from Cook's introduction:
 
"In preparing Oriental Adventures, there were many goals to meet. Foremost of these was the interesting but conflicting demands of historical accuracy and fantastic imagination. There is very little point in doing a book about Oriental culture if the material is not accurate. But accuracy can often be unplayable or just unacceptable. Accuracy here would mean stricter class structures, less chance for player advancement and less adventure. It would mean more fiddlely rules for little details that would get in the way of play. And rules that might apply to a Japanese culture would certainly be incorrect in a strict Chinese culture! Furthermore, the world presented had to be what people think the Orient is, not necessarily what it actually is. Thus, reference works and sources of ideas went beyond books and included popular Japanese movies about samurai and ninja, the whole family of Hong Kong kung-fu movies, comics, and even those endearing monster epics of giant reptiles and funny dinosaurs."
 
In that last sentence, the "books" he was going on included (from earlier in the intro):
 
"The second pleasure in writing this comes from the reading I had to do to prepare. The Oriental Adventures project spurred me to read materials I would otherwise never have seen. Some of it was thrilling and some not. The variety of topics was huge—legends, folktales, literary epics, genealogical histories, philosophy, religion, poetry, architecture, land management, government, history, martial arts, sociology, anthropology, military affairs, economics, and fiction. The bulk of this material deals with Japan, with China a close second. This is not due to any oversight. Most of the material available deals with Japan, through the choice of various writers. From the standpoint of gaming, Japan's history and culture provides greater opportunities for adventure and advancement. Although often seen as a rigid society, Japan has had several periods of tumultuous upheavel where a person of any rank could make his name—the Sengoku period or the collapse of the Heian government being only two. Of course, anyone who looks carefully at China will find the same occurred there.
However, fewer people cared to write about it."
 
Given the author's (and Cook was the sole author of the text of the book, the other two credited didn't contribute other than some Gygaxian spotlight hogging going on) own stated intent and methodology, I don't think we should take the thing as anything other than it was intended: A big old mashup of Asian stuff, with a heavy Japanese base flavor, the same way that the prior material was a mashup of European and Middle Eastern (or Near East, according to Gygax) stuff with a heavy Northern European base.
 
Now, I don't know if there is any tone deaf stereotyping going on, but I don't think you can call out a white guy for using stereotypes he found in Asian fiction and cinema. Of course, those would be "tropes" and not "stereotypes" if we were talking about a Euro-centric setting . . . .
 
I'm sorry, but the guy who spent 26 hours in a "deep read" on social media overlooking something as basic as the author's introduction to the material to try to call someone out seems more like attention whoring than any sort of legitimate complaint. Then again, maybe that guy calls out old Kurosawa movies too, but I doubt it.
 
EDIT: The guy who started this claims to be an anthropologist, so it'd be interesting to see if he points out any of the inherent racism in Cook's more scholarly sources. To be fair, there's probably plenty more to be found on that side, than the pop culture references that form the framework for OA. The press and comments on it have only mentioned him calling out "three white guys" for being bunglingly racist, though. I'm not sure if I have the stomach to sit through 26 hours of podcasts, but I might check out a bit of it to be fair to the complainer.

Every fantasy fiction publisher pushes for non-Eurocentric settings in their submissions guidelines, and have been for at least the last 20+ years, but now WOTC has to put "sensitivity" disclaimers on OA, which was probably its most popular non-Eurocentric setting supplement?
 
So, how do writers win these days? If you're a person of European descent and write about faux-medieval European settings, you're not inclusive. If you write about other cultures, you're a racist, or culturally appropriating, or whatever the newspeak of the day is.
 
I don't remember anything particularly offensive about OA, though I haven't looked at it since '86. All I remember is the same pulling of a bunch of folklore from Asian cultures into a DnD mishmash, the same way the original DnD did with mostly European and Middle Eastern cultures the first time out.
 
So, Faux-Europe is out and Faux-Asia is out. I guess they'll have to release a setting that's based on nobody and nothing from nowhere in the nowhen time period next.

As I have no desire to fight a land war in Asia, I will say my piece and then depart.
 
I don't believe that playing in or DMing/GMing old school tabletop campaigns makes one a bigot. Likewise, featuring a race/species that is a monolith of evil does not make one a bigot. Some DMs/GMs are prejudiced and choose - with varying degrees of subtlety - to express this prejudice through their games, but that is their failing and not a failing of any particular tabletop RPG system. If a DM/GM appears to be subconsciously manifesting real-life stereotypes through their NPCs, but is otherwise the salt of the earth, then calmly bringing up these purported manifestations in the interest of having them recognized is fair...hectoring them is not. Also, it is perfectly possible for one to run a squeaky clean adventure and be a jackass in their day-to-day interactions. Finally, if one cannot tell the difference between a game that embraces escapism (with black-and-white/clear-cut morality for all groups) and reality (too many shades of grey to count with bands of black and white on opposite ends), then they should take a step back in order to reassess their beliefs.
 
P.S. "race" is such an antiquated and imprecise/unscientific term that was created (or at least promoted) by imperialists seeking power as a means to foster division that would lead to war. Can't we - citizens of the future - devise something better?

"Does the Earth have the same Damage Reduction as a giant space amoeba?" is the quality discussion I come here for.