unclevlad

The Trop's rather old and dated now, so...that's not terribly surprising, they might get rid of it. VERY central location with expansive grounds, going back to its early days. But it's 60+ years old now, and Vegas doesn't treat its elders with respect. I'd also be a bit worried about the complexities underpinning this. The buildings are owned by Bally's, and they're not great, now...Bally's only paid $150M. But the land is owned by a separate group. This kinda feels like an internal squabble just waiting to happen, with the A's stuck in the middle...again. But I suppose there's no such thing as a 'simple' billion-dollar deal. Face masks and college softball...they're optional. I don't watch much softball, but when I do catch it...yeah, pitchers and hitters often have em, and apparently corner infielders at times too. Can't recall about college baseball...hm. The playoff selection show is the 28th, with the regionals the first weekend in June. That puts the conference championships starting in less than 2 weeks, most likely. ESPN's tended to show the ACC and SEC tournaments, at least some of the games, and they're during the day. Probably catch some of em, and may try to watch. Certainly, I don't recall many players wearing any optional protection....

Ehhhh....I really dislike time travel, and multiple timelines isn't a favorite either. Going animated makes sense for this. Probably a good idea connect to the original fans with the original cast, as best one can...and they'd all be obviously MUCH older. If you wanna play with timelines...makeup is less flexible. Claudia Christian returning...hey, that fight was over 20 years ago.

Nope. If they want a 180 point MP, they sank 180 points into it. There is no problem there...so long as an eye is kept on the active points, and more likely simply the damage DCs, in any slot. Recognized something earlier today. It doesn't matter that much, how many active points are on a sheet. What matters much more, is how many active points you can use at any one time. That should be a much stronger predictor of a character's power/balance. The biggest abuses here are: --limitations on a very large number of points...focus (especially, say, OIF), OIAID, Linked, RSR, Always On, and potentially Unified Power. --Multiform, sometimes --ECs,,,because all the powers are available all the time, but you're still getting a significant cost savings. --Duplication and Summon, in many cases....but they're clear STOP SIGN powers, so this should be recognized implicitly.

And now the list of charges is out. Rather extensive, too. From NYT:

Wellllll, drat. I forgot all about it again. Westminster Dog Show concluded tonight. I like to watch 3 primary groups, when I remember...the hounds Monday, and the Sporting and Working groups tonight. Oops. The dog that won best in show was a whiskered petit basset griffon Vendéen but the use name made up for that mouthful....Buddy Holly.

Yeah, I figured that. I'll rephrase: I don't think that many high-level soccer players come from that part of the world, to end up going back there very much. I will admit I could be completely wrong with that. Another aspect is simply the duration of potential exposure. He wasn't in the region for all that long, and ya gotta figure the risk of exposure per day, likely isn't very high.

So base STR is 15 points per???? Because it affects skill rolls...that STR doesn't even have. There are no default STR skills. What about DEX or INT, which are skills-heavy? What about END costs, how do those change? And if STR is 15 points per, then what's HA? What's Blast? What's a martial arts DC? Defenses. Special purpose powers like Invis. None of these have any connection to skills. Worse, what's the cost of, say, Counterstrike, which has +2 OCV, +2 DCV? You have to work through the entire system to see what indirect balance effects you're creating. I guarantee you'll screw it up. No question. I promise I would too; it's too complex a problem NOT to mess it up. And man...in the standard base cost with advantages and limitations...you're making the math that much harder because the numbers are suddenly MUCH bigger. Many people don't LIKE doing that much math; they have a hard enough time with the scales in RAW, much less suddenly blowing things up to 7500 points...a 500 point character. And as LW says...for what? Even you're killing the granularity of the system you propose by just rescaling everything to fit. Scott: I think the abbreviations are mostly standard...just not English standard. Spanish, I presume? Try something different. 2 ideas: 1. skill rolls --> 7 + V / 3 rather than V / 5. 2. skill rolls --> 9 + V / 3, or maybe 10 + V / 3....but on 3d8. Skill costs don't need to change, and you're not changing combat calculations that much either. The key there would be the change in the probability to hit given the delta between the attacker's OCV and defender's DCV. It would change things but it wouldn't be that radical. OR, alternately, roll skills and perceptions on 3d8 but leave the combat rolls alone.

My take is different. A prototypical use case for an MP is the blaster's MP...blasts, flashes, RKAs. Target different defenses, maybe toss in special-use goodies like AoE or Autofire. Maybe include a Red Pen attack, to use when a full-damage attack may be too lethal. Other than the Red Pen, where you don't care about the point savings, the costs will likely all be the same, or close, based on the DCs of the attack. Limitations need to be common to help reduce costs, like Limited Range does. So the MP cost itself, for this style, isn't saving any points. It's the active cost, less only common limitations. And you still pay the slots. These do add flexibility, but also cost. Saying you're getting freebies is a mischaracterization. This isn't D&D, where every wizard and sorcerer spell has one narrow effect only. Supers often demonstrate more flexibility than this. If you're doing multiple MPs, you're probably doing it wrong...altho, to be fair, it can also result in a cleaner looking character sheet. Yeah, we had a loud, sometimes ugly debate...but you can have a 150 point MP regardless of any active point cap because the MP is a FRAMEWORK. The restriction is that you can only have 60 active in any slot, which is a campaign principle and not worth any sort of limitation, and the MP size is just the pool size here. NOW, you can take limitations specific to individual powers, for the cost reduction, to change how powers fit into your pool. So, perhaps when you're using your Flight, you can only use your Red Pen, Reduced by Range Blast...because that's how things fit together. By design. OK, so you have a VPP with a pool size of 60, and control cost of 60? Are you paying for No Skill Roll? That's another 30. If not, you're buying a Power Skill roll that's gonna probably be at least 20. Changing in combat is required to even try to reach equivalence. That's another 15. You're getting no limited powers limitation, so your 60 points of effectiveness costs anything from 125 to 150 points. Sure, you can do more things, but you've spent 125 to get 60 points at a time. That's Christopher's point. You're getting a lot, but you're PAYING a lot. Your argument doesn't hold up to detailed inspection, IMO. Or, let's put it another way. 500 points. You have your VPP giving you 60 active points for whatever you want to do...but leaving only 375 for the rest. I have all 500. We otherwise agree to similar strategies, power builds and costs, and acceptable limitations...so we're not trying to metagame our limitations any differently. You effectively have a bunch of 435 point "multiforms." I have a single, 500 point type. Which wins? The issue with an EC is, this is NOT the case. A classic EC might be Blast, Force Field, Flight. Let's get definite: --9d6 Blast (45) --15 PD, 15 ED FF, 0 END, still legal in the EC (45) --Flight, 12", x4 NC + Position Shift (handy) or x8 NC, 1/2 END. Base cost 34, active cost 42. That's a 21 point EC, giving you 132 active points all usable together, for 21 (EC) + 24 + 24 + 21 = 90 points. That IS 42 free points. Yes, I can play games with VPPs and give myself much more than this. If I have RSR on all powers in the VPP, I can define my pool size to be 2x my control cost...and with the RSR, I'm getting 3x the control cost in active points usable at once. And there's this *extreme* form, NOT that this'd pass GM muster for game use: Variable Power Pool (Magic Pool), 130 base + 30 control cost, Powers Can Be Changed As A Half-Phase Action (+1/2) (152 Active Points); Hard Skill Roll (-1/2); all slots Requires A Roll (Skill roll, -1 per 5 Active Points modifier; -1) 1) Persistent Powers: Real Cost: 0 - END=0 2) Resistant Protection (6 PD/6 ED), Hardened (+1/4), Impenetrable (+1/4) Nonpersistent (-1/4) Real Cost: 12 3) Damage Negation (-3 DCs Physical, -3 DCs Energy) Nonpersistent (-1/4) Real Cost: 13 4) Energy Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% Nonpersistent (-1/4) Real Cost: 13 5) Physical Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% Nonpersistent (-1/4) Real Cost: 13 6) Boosted Reflexes I: (Total: 29 Active Cost, 13 Real Cost) +2 SPD Nonpersistent (-1/4) plus Lightning Reflexes (+9 DEX to act first with All Actions) 7) Boosted Reflexes II: (Total: 30 Active Cost, 14 Real Cost) +3 OCV, +3 DCV, Nonpersistent (-1/4) 8- Go the distance: (Total: 30 Active Cost, 13 Real Cost) +15 STR plus +10 REC Nonpersistent plus +25 END Nonpersistent 9) Stretching 12m, Does Not Cross Intervening Space (+1/4), IPE (Inobvious to Sight; +1/4), Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4) ; Only To Cause Damage, no Noncombat Stretching Real Cost: 8 10) Attacks...pick 1: 11) TK (12 STR), Fine Manipulation (28 Active Points) Real Cost: 14 - END=3 12) HA +6d6, Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4) (30 Active Points) Real Cost: 15 - END=1 13) HA +3d6, Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4), AVAD (Power Def, LS (Cold) [NND]; +1) (27 Active Points) Real Cost: 13 - END=1 14) HA +2d6, Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4), AVAD (Power Def, LS (Cold) [NND]; +1), Does BODY (+1) (26 Active Points) Real Cost: 13 - END=1 15) Movement, pick 1: Real Cost: 0 - END=0 16) Teleportation 24m, Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4) (30 Active Points) Real Cost: 15 17) Teleportation 9m, Safe Blind Teleport (+1/4), NRM , MegaScale (1m = 100 km) (29 Active Points) Real Cost: 14 18) Miscellaneous: 2 slots, 30 points each (Invis, shape shift, that sort of thing) The issue here *isn't* the VPP. I could do a LOT of the same by simply picking a prime configuration...MAYBE with a 30 point MP for the TK, HAs and Teleports...but keeping the honkin huge -1 limitation on practically everything. Certainly everything that's got Nonpersistent on it. But again...that is not true with an EC. The EC alone gives you savings...and you can play abusive limitations games on top of that, if you like. Say you want OIAID as a common modifier on the EC I built. OK, the base EC cost --> 17. The powers go to 19, 19, and 17. 90 points --> 72. Another 18. It's not as dramatic, but we're also not applying it to nearly as many points...and there's already been a huge honkin' reduction in cost because of the EC. That's the basic difference. The reason why it might be OK, tho, in those earlier editions, as I noted, is that ANY powers-based character is at a significant disadvantage compared to a more characteristics-heavy character.

How many higher-level international players end up in matches in sub-Saharan Africa? Not to say malaria isn't a massive problem...QUITE!!!!! the opposite. https://www.who.int/teams/global-malaria-programme/reports/world-malaria-report-2021 It's simply that we tend to be First Worlders, and malaria's much more of Third World Problem. We're pretty good at forgetting about those, unless they're particularly dramatic, like ebola.

1. The gentleman in question never earned the right to that honorific. He did get an LL.D late in his life, but that's styled differently. 2. Unfortunately, the act of looking directly at the sun does not preclude the act of...contributing...to the gene pool. Unfortunate, but not that surprising. Fish farmed from rivers in Vietnam have frequently received red ratings from Seafood Watch, due to high levels of pollutants in the waters in which they're raised. That doesn't bode well for any wild species that share the habitat.

Ohmygosh.......ohh this one is UGLY. There's video that kicks off immediately...and the key moment is right up front. https://www.mlb.com/news/ryan-yarbrough-leaves-start-after-being-hit-by-line-drive The video shows he takes it squarely right in the face. It rebounds SO HARD that the ball returns almost all the way to the catcher so fast that he throws the batter out by 10-15 feet. That was Sunday; today, the KC manager had this: VERY fortunate. 3 non-displaced fractures around the eye; I suspect there's some vision problems as well, and that he'll be monitored for concussion symptoms. But it could've been so, so much worse.

Checking Pro Football Reference...cuz I don't remember him at all as a pro... Rookie year, 1 game. MOST inauspicious. Bad snap near the goal line in OT, in punt formation. Obviously nothing good is gonna happen from that. Turned into a pick-6, but hey, after the snap there were no good outcomes. Then a pulled hamstring in game 2 and gone for the year. Oops. After paying the kid for a high draft pick, too. Second year, his kicking was, as you say, miserable. 1-4 from 30-39 is Just Plain Bad. They gave up quickly, he had only 5 attempts. The Saints drafted someone else...who turned out to be Morten Andersen. Yeah, he was now an emergency kicker. The NCAA eliminated the kicking tee on FGs in '89, so there weren't that many opportunities to repeat the mistake. Plus, you figure: lots of kickers made the transition. Erxleben, Wikipedia points out, was a straight-on kicker; the tee, I think, helps them more. The soccer-style kick allows a leg swing path to loft the ball better. But you're also probably right: I suspect after Erxleben, there was an increase in checking out kickers without the tee for those several years until the NCAA abandoned it.

And the appeals process will commence shortly. Interesting update on the story... Also notes, fine if you want to identify yourself, but you are barred from identifying anyone else on the jury. Yeah, I would be extremely concerned about retaliation if my name got out.

Zebra cake Next: non-human or alien races from fantasy, sci fi, or gaming sources.

First: he was drafted by the Saints. The same team that traded an entire draft for Ricky Williams...one of the 2 worst trades in history. OK, hold that against Ditka primarily if you like, as he certainly shares much of the blame, but the GM still had the last word. Fine, it was 20 years later....details! That was a badly managed organization for quite some time. Then...well, OK, the notion wasn't bad...if it worked. It's still a pretty crazy reach, I'll grant. Erxleben DID have an excellent college career, tho...even if it was at that obnoxious university in Austin. And if he could free up a roster spot? Well it'd be worth making something of a reach. Not all the way to #11, of course. Another factor...that was the OLD DAYS. Football in 1980 was still run *massively* dominated by the running game and defenses. There, a punter has far more value. People scoffed at the Ray Guy draft pick, but his punts changed games. Granted, I think he was the exception proving the rule. But now? The punter is an afterthought for many teams, where offense and passing rule. The position that's lost the most value in the current game is running back...but punter might be close. If not it's because they weren't valued overly highly even in 1980. Plus, there are many good punters out there. 16 punters averaged between 41 and 44 net yards per punt, punting full time. (One other only played in 7 games, punting 28 times.) 27 full time punters averaged 40 or more, and the overall spread among them was less than 5 yards. When defense dominates...that's a big deal. You win the field position game that way. When everyone's shooting for 400 yards a game, that kind of difference isn't that meaningful. And, quite often, decent punters have long careers. Put these together...and there's little pressure to spend draft capital now, at least until the last couple rounds where many draftees won't make rosters anyway. If you need a punter, invite them to camp.

VPPs offer flexibility, so you don't have to pay for it with advantages like Variable Special Effects or Allocatable, available on some defense powers, lets you shift points between the different defense types. And this can easily be viewed as dubious, but...for a combat VPP, you generally don't buy No Skill Roll. It's too expensive in most cases. Well, OK...you're gonna buy your Power skill up to something fairly good anyway, right? If we're talking 18 INT, and a 60 point control cost, to get to a 14- requires 7 levels. That's 17 points. Well, taking it to a 17- is only 6 more. And here's the dubious part: slap the common modifier Requires a Skill Roll on. Your Power skill's already the natural choice, and you've already paid for it. Yeah, you have to make the roll, but that's why you buy the roll up. What this means is, everything in your VPP is now getting a -1/2 limitation. In a 6E VPP, pool size and control cost are completely separate. Pool size is character points. So you can have pool size 41, control 62...say, for a VPP where you have 10 dice at 1/2 END, or 12 dice at full, for a swath of basic attack powers, and you can tweak for AoEs or whatnot. You can also define the pool size as much larger, so you throw your Flight in there, with both combat and non-combat modes. With the -1/2 limitation applying. An extreme form of this is a control cost of 30, with a pool size of around 100...yeah, 5 separate 30 point powers, if you keep the skill roll. What you MAY do is buy 0 Phase to switch powers. What can you buy? Defense in layers. 10/10 Resistant and 50% DR...physical and energy are separate. That's 3 slots. HTH attacks. Movement. Characteristics...30 points means as much as +3 SPD, or +3 OCV and DCV, or +20 STR, 0 END...combined with 4d6 AP HA at 1/2 END for a Harvey Wallbanger configuration. For No Skill Roll? A smaller pool size, enough for probably 1 power, where that power can take other limitations. Or when the entire pool is gonna be bought with OIAID. ESPECIALLY when you can take a fairly large Limited Powers in the VPP. Quite often this works out better in an MP, tho...basically, the double cost savings of keeping the skill roll on the VPP, and slapping RSR as a common modifier, is huge. Basically, the Hero rules are open-ended, and there's almost no inherent balance checking. That's left up to the GM and players. Character creation is an exercise in massaging the rules to get the most we can get, while keeping the drawbacks to what we can accept. That assessment is highly personal. The rules allow point shaving in MANY ways...OIAID, focus, the double-use skill roll VPP, ECs, multiform abuse. For combat powers, Limited Range is your friend because the range mods kill your attack effectiveness anyway, long before you hit the limit for Limited Range. I agree that the notion of "you get what you pay for, and no more" is a goal, but it tends to be a lot easier to enforce at the micro level, not the macro level.

I defined High Scale as x3 for +1/4, x10 for +1/2, x30 for +3/4, and x100 for +1. You do get to use your NCMs, even the base one, so for example, 18m base flight, +5 points for an NCM --> 40. With x10 High Scale, it's 400m per phase. It's also 18+5 x1.5, 34 points. But your OCV and DCV are as per Megascale, and you can't use it for move throughs or move-bys. I do still use Megascale...but almost entirely for Teleport. Single-jump range is the key there, not velocity. Obviously if yo want to build pure speed, you keep the base move down, but I've never liked that. I think some minimums should remain in place, particularly for movement. I'll grant that I don't necessarily stick to that with Teleport, tho.

As was stated, a 2 slot MP simply for combat and NC is almost de rigeur. Non combat movement is fun...it's NOT often that important in the game because The Fight Doesn't Start Until the PCs Arrive. 600 miles an hour is 10 miles a minute...so it still takes 3 minutes, or 15 full turns, for the PCs to travel 30 miles. But the battle site's not halfway to being a wasteland, or the thieves are barely into their job, or.... Y'all know what I mean. We handwave this. OTOH, for *me*...on a personal scale...being able to travel quickly is very, very high on my personal wish list, so I look at that kind of thing a LOT. But systemically, it isn't that important. But combat half move is useful...in part because I tend to be a tactical thinker. The 2 have to be built relatively differently, tho, for costing. In standard 6E, for running and flight, you're largely stuck with NCMs. MegaScale is TOO much. 5 SPD, 12m means 60m per turn, 300m per minute. +1 MegaScale makes that 300 km per minute...that's about 11,000 mph, or about Mach 14. NCMs add up fast, tho, in terms of cost...and you still need to keep an eye on END use because you have to burn this END for an extended period. 5 SPD, 10m base, x64 NCM is 576 mph for 35 points in the movement power. That's around commercial jet speed...the 777 is a bit higher, others are somewhat lower. The sweet spot for Flight or Running is 10m...then start doubling. (I built my High Scale Movement advantage to fill the void between the two.) With Teleport it's even worse, because now MegaScale IS on the table, and it's a fairly expensive advantage. Plus, for a good, general teleporter you need Usable Simultaneously, and probably Safe Blind Teleport. So you need to keep the base cost down. Note again: same build pattern difference between combat and non-combat powers. I think the only character concept where movement is a central theme is the speedster. There aren't many flyers, say, who integrate their flight into their combat strategy, that I can recall. Maybe some who embrace The Art of the Strafe.

I can't speak to the frequency Unified Power should be applied. I don't use it much; I think the last one was with an MP with TK (OMCV vs. DCV), Energy Blast (also OMCV vs. DCV), a Mental Entangle (re-interpreted as a mental power...OMCV vs. DMCV, acts against Ego), and mental-based Flash (also OMCV vs. DMCV even with the increased cost, and defense is Ego Def)...so they're kind of odd mental powers. I didn't give it to anything else. As far as abusive...some of this relates to Drains having fairly finicky definitions...they're fairly specific, in most cases, or they get really expensive. That's even assuming the player/GM recognizes the potentially big downside: drain one, drain all. It's also potentially like OIAID, as Khymeria mentioned...just slap it onto everything. This can pretty clearly be asking for trouble...but GMs may not make you pay for taking either limitation. Another would be Focus. VPP...well, yes, if one cares to, there are all kinds of scary-dirty tricks to be played..... Movement MPs and VPPs are fun. A VPP that's for nothing but Teleport makes more sense than you might think at first glance, particularly if you try to move significant mass, that adder is a KILLER.

The structures of 4E and 6E don't really mesh. There are implicit, built-in assumptions that clash violently if you try to mix them. I'd pick one or the other and basically stick with it. Pathfinder's even worse in this regard. I'm not saying it's an inferior system, but its premises are totally different.

I can't agree with that. Many comic book supers can use their powers in quite a few different ways. What's GL's power ring...even just considering the TK-like effects? How many different things can it do? How many different effects can Spidey create using his web shooters? The Hero rules are highly specific; getting them to do the numerous specific stunts we see regularly, is going to be exceptionally difficult or expensive. Mind, I will agree that ECs do tend to be this way, especially if you allow the 0 END powers in. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the motivation for ECs was linked to the fact that bricks are so cheap to build with figured characteristics. +10 STR gives 21 points of benefits; +10 CON costs 20 points, but gives 21 points worth of derived characteristics. +6 DEX costs 18...but gives +2 OCV and DCV (16, using the "with any 2 categories" combat levels), 6 points of SPD, 9 points for initiative determination, and call it 10 points for +2 to a group of similar skills. This is a huge advantage for building anything or anyone with a Characteristics focus, relative to anyone with a Powers focus. So it's plausible the EC exists in part to try to balance this.

The police are being pretty reticent about coming out with information on this guy. I'm wondering if they're trying to trace connections to others, at this point, as they'll usually have made SOME statements by now.

Orange sherbet, and/or oatmeal raisin cookies (with walnuts, possibly my all time favorite)

Creme Brulee

Zweihander New category: desserts.