Duke Bushido

The drunken sailor district in the waterfront area of an old campaign was colloquially referrred to as "The Stumbles," primariy for the effect that the roads (paved with two hundred years worth of ballast stones) tended to have on drunken sailors.

Eh. Every time the "but the Players think the characters should be able to Google the answers" (only happens with players new since the great Bomb Debate was resolved), I look at them and recite "How is baby made? How is baby form?" Gets the point across, usually.

Mine hurt like Hell! And I felt pretty stupid when I found out that your nose has a septum, too....

That's a reasonable assumption, given that the OP asked for a mechanic to drive things away. Perhaps I was looking too deeply at his example.

Odd man out here: I don't think it needs to be built, at least not the example given. Living things tend to avoid those items and places that they have learned to associate with agonizing death. It's a pretty normal behavior. If you want to require an EGO roll to fight the urge to leave, that's fine, but "the ground is killing me" or "this chemical stench is causing me to weaken" should require no more build to cause an insect to leave a chemically-treated area than "this building is on fire" requires a special build to cause humans to leave it.

You're asking the wrong guy, V I was offering a suggestion for the proposed build; I'm not the guy that wants the build. Frankly, I would have done the Scorpion spear with some sort of ranged grab: TK or Stretching or some such thing, but that wasn't what was asked for.

Agreed, assuming a significantly short time limit.l, say. No more than a very few segments.

Those two replies, together, sum up pretty much how I do it: if you have the skill, you have the tools (within reason; you may just have access to the tools: a character with "Warp Drive Technician" probably isn't walking around with his Irrilium Calibration Spingle, as they weigh eighty pounds and are four meters long, but odds are he can scrounge one up easily anywhere that he might need to use the skill. Characters with bonuses to the skill are welcome to define them as either 'being much better at the skill' or "having better equipment." In general, though I _know_ it's not _exactly_ book legal (so don't bother pointing that out, please ), I allow an OAF bonus on a skill level (one, _sometimes_ 2 in sci-fi or supers) to represent actually owning and amazingly full and high-quality tool set.

Thanks to the Venture Brothers, I can no longer read that word without hearing Colonel Gentleman saying it. 😕 ("Colonel Gentleman's List of Toys He Wishes He Had When He Was a Lad, But They Weren't Invented Yet.... Micronauts!" )

It might be because I'm a huge fan of reducing bookkeeping when available, but I'd put a time limit on it and call it good: in two Segments (or whatever), the entangle stops, period.

Everyone who knows my wife has known this for about a decade now.

Okay, by itself, it's not so funny (well, it is to me), but once you hear, in "that voice," someone growling at the top of their lungs "It's a fap!" you will just lose it.... And, to redeem myself: The question I have: Is this a guinea hog? Or a guinea Big?

Great. That means I can't ask how it's controversial and not universally understood as a horrible thing, doesn't it?

They keep them at one of our local sports supply stores. I've tried to buy a pair several times, but my wife usually catches me.....

Snuffeluphagus

It's only a lie if the maidens aren't on hand, either.

I solved this one in the late 0s, because I had a new player that was driving me nutty with "I use my phone to google that!" I built a toy bomb. It worked, mind you, but rather than explosives I used a piezo electric buzzer a 24v red indicator light (I don't know if I mentioned this, but I used to be partnered up in a DC electrical shop). So I puttered around for a few hours, and built as fine a "terrorist device" as you might see in a movie or on television, complete with digital countdown and fancy wires, nicely coiled and running here and there. The wires I friction fit so they could be pulled loose instead of cut; I wanted everyone to have a turn. I offered my computer, and I had a couple of players that had "computer phones" instead of flip phones. The timer was set for twenty minutes. Three players tried to internet the solution "how to defuse a bomb." We "died" three times that night. And "I google the solution" never came up again. Oh-- if you were wondering about the solution: There was a pair of buttons on the bottom of the bomb disguised as little rubber feet. Turn it over, lift it up-- take pressure of one or the other-- but not both-- and you could pull all the wires without setting it off.

I dated my first wife for two-and-a-half years before we "married." (We got engaged, and wanted to get married, but we both wanted everything to be perfect, and perfect never happens, and....) We were "engaged" (see previous parenthetical) for almost nine years when lost the girls, then her. It was nearly ten years later before I realized that in that twelve-year period, we were pulled over twice as many times as the entirety of my driving life without her. That was when I started to really pay attention to things. And while it is not the topic at hand, I would like to see prominent public officials point out that running away from the police is - _nowhere in this country_- on the books as a capital crime. You absolutely cannot go before a judge for evasion or resisting and be sentenced to death. Only a police officer is allowed to do that.

Plumb hammers.

And for the love of God, do _NOT_ say "micro fiche." It will confuse young people no end...

And let's remember that even today, we are getting sharper, clearer photographs from the surface of Mars than we are are from the four-pixel cameras down at the local bank. 😕

Can't help you on whether or not I'm playing "retro," as I know diddly / squat about comic books. I do want to point out that secret identities work fine. Is it really so difficult to postulate that people who can fly, bounce bullets, project energy from their fingers, turn invisible and walk through walls are every day things and yet secret identities just don't work?

Okay, since Mightybec has beaten me to the punch with the video review of Western HERO (don't fret: I still intend to do one; this just means it's a bit less pressing so I don't have to devote all of my precious spare minutes to the study of it-- a "pressure's off" kind of thing ), I'm going to forego five minutes worth of reading and note-taking and instead give a more useful answer to the question (thought thanks for the love on the first answer, folks. Completely unexpected, and very welcome). I can't do anything with leftover pizza because there isn't any pizza. There hasn't been in a couple of decades. The older I get, the less I like it. I don't know if pizza is changing or if I'm changing, but pizza cheese tastes more and more like vinyl and I swear pizza sauce gets _sweeter_ every time a new competitor arrives on the scene. It's just wrong. So what do I do after the adventure? While I am making mental notes, I listen to my players decompress or discuss things from the game-- throwing out their favorite moment or moment, their own pet theories about what is or isn't going on and what is or isn't going to happen next. Mostly, I try to key on what they are _really_ excited about, particularly if it is something that hadn't occurred to me already, or it is something I had considered and shot down before the game even started. I particularly like to take note of those "Dude! Wouldn't it be _great_ if X ?!" and the reaction to those. Because sometimes they're right: sometimes, it _would_ be awesome if X, and by God, I'm going to find a way to, if not work that in, either work toward or-- more evil, but just as fun if done well-- work in something that certainly makes it seem as if X is where we're headed, but then we're not. Yes; if you have an over-arcing story, that's harder to do, so I tend to keep my plots as little more than some randomly-generated bits of information, clues, a list of NPCs, the bad guy and rough timeline of what he is doing start to finish. It seems to be maddening to most of the other GMs I've met, but I find it makes it easier to work in a new thing the players are beginning to clamor for, and to eliminate things that just aren't working out without actually making it feel like something was just dropped. I collect the notes from the note-takers (I like to have one "assigned" note taker-- not so that I don't have to take my own notes, mind you; I take my own notes-- but so that I can kind of see how the game is going from the other point of view. Generally, more than one player will take notes-- each about different things: one wants to be a record-keeper; one wants to make sure he remembers a particular thing or person; another still has questions about something from two sessions ago--- I like to see that. The biggest immediate benefit is that I can see what was important to the players that I didn't think would be (you know: those things you just tossed out to flesh out a scene; you didn't take notes about it because you didn't think it was more than filler, but now you find out that you've got at least one player who wants to know just why that vase was up there, and where it came from. Even if it's just a garage sale find, you've got to remember that vase. Better write it into your notes, too. I don't solicit player feedback, at least not in a traditional sense. I _used to_, back in the early days of my GM'ing: "How'd I do? Do you like where we're going? Is the story okay? Are you excited? Is the coffee okay?" but one day I noticed that this direct Q-and-A was a bit off-putting to some players-- particularly newer ones... _and_ I noticed that I would get a lot more useful, actionable information from listening to the players re-hash bits of the game: I've never had a player rehash something he hated two and three and four times in a post-game "let's finish the snacks and get the hell out of my house" session. They were more free complaining to each other (and they do) and more excited re-living their preferred story or action points, and their speculations run on faster and faster and it's all so stinking _useful_ to me..... So what I do mostly during clean up is to encourage player interaction and write down new notes while pretending to copy theirs. And when the room is salvaged, I point to the door and encourage them to use it. No; seriously: it's faux jerkism. I've learned that they have a better memory of the session if they are still discussing it when they leave than if I let it play completely out and they find themselves thinking "well, that's over. Why am I still here?" And having read some of the excellent responses in this thread so far, not only do I look like the odd man out, but I suspect I may be doing something wrong. 😕