unclevlad

Now, see, that's where a failing has been, from what I've heard.  They've drafted "MLB ready" for quite a while.  It hasn't worked.  They get middle of the pack ballplayers.  Their farm system might have "MLB ready"...but they're also consistently ranked low.  The Angels' approach has been to try for the quick fix.  It's failed miserably.

Occasional rest won't do enough to alleviate what's causing ligament tears, most likely.  As for Trout...it's not just this injury.  Are they overly deferring to him...out of desperation?  Maybe.  But it's ongoing.  He's missed 40 or more games 5 times in the last 7 years.  

I also don't mean just the free agents.  This team will not win with Trout and Ohtani, because neither can be trusted to play enough moving forward.  I question, admittedly from afar, whether the team's mentality is that one of them will bail them out.  It doesn't work that way.  I look at the Reds...to a point, the D'backs.  The Rays.  The Orioles.  Scrappy.  Hungry.  The Angels?  No.  5th most strikeouts.  4th fewest stolen bases.  3rd in home runs, but 10th in RBI.  Passive and ineffective.

EDIT:  FanGraphs has now given the Angels no chance to make the playoffs.  0.0%.  They need to make a miracle run (26-8 to get to 87 wins), AND have 2 of the 4 teams (Royals, Rangers, Blue Jays, Mariners) play under .500, as they're on pace for 90.

Oh...and the A's are a Seattle win or A's loss away from mathematical elimination.  A's have 91 losses.  4 teams have 72 wins already, and someone will come out of the Central.  That's 5.  Seattle has 71 wins.  

2 hours ago, 1corpus christopher said:

I bet the release of Deadpool 3 and the profits of said 3rd installment will blow the brakes off of the Blue Beetle car.

 

That may go to show us if we have 'superhero fatigue' going, or poor casting and marketing going for the DCU vs MCU.

3rd installments typically have a fanbase developed.  Lots of times, the first installments don't do as well.

I'd also say it's not either-or.  Both can be true.  DCU's problem is less about casting...yeah, OK, Ezra Miller I'll grant...but more about picking terrible material to adapt.  Either characters few know, or taking the UNLIKED versions of the known characters.  But I do think genre fatigue is also prevalent.

And when the BODY roll is even 16-18, which is 25% of the time, a 5 stun die is dropping 29, 33, or 37 STUN.  And consider when you get a 6.  45, 50, or 55 STUN gets through.  Now we're talking stunned AND KO'd...even potentially with just 1 strike.  Take a bit of STUN here and there, THEN get hit?  Yeah, it's lights out.  

6E realized the stun multiplier was very badly broken.  Because it's also more of a risk of doing BODY.  Against 4d6 killing, minimum rDEF is 12, I'd say;  you're still taking BODY on average.  That's bad;  the system doesn't want to be lethal.  

3rd Ed D&D really started to recognize the problem.  Single rolls gave TOO MUCH variation.  Save or die, or the equivalent.  Yeah, it went back earlier, with stuff like poison, but it became glaring in 3E.  Pretty heavily discussed on the boards.  Critical hits could also have the issue.  With 5E killing attacks, mostly, it's the stun mult.  5 or 6 did too much, too often;  1 or 2 meant no STUN got through, regardless.  

Which means it's #2.

This could easily mean the end of the Ohtani Experiment.  No, you *can't* pitch and hit full time, not as a starter.  It also creates serious uncertainty about what his next contract could look like.  

And Trout going RIGHT back...is it just me, or do y'all also start questioning the competence of the Angels' training and medical staffs?

This team needs to be blown up.  The organization's approach has failed.  

It never ends for the Angels.

Ohtani only throws 26 pitches before getting pulled with arm soreness.  Of course, he hits #44 first....  It was pointed out that his workload's been high, due to the WBC.  He wasn't pitching at spring training levels.  Yeah, he's been *great* as a pitcher this year...but the question of whether he can sustain doing both is still up in the air.  OR, whichever club he plays with next year, will have to do some pretty serious load management.

And after playing just 1 game, Trout misses BOTH ends of the double header today;  the Monday game was postponed with all the rain/flooding to today, to give everyone a solid couple of days to do cleanup.

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Mar-a-Lago witness ‘retracted false testimony’ to implicate Trump

Key point from the opening paragraph....

Quote

 after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington,

Yeah, this is what happens when the attorney gives advice in his client's interest...rather than the interest of who's paying the tab....

Secondary:  will the prior attorney be up on ethics charges, and even possible criminal charges for suborning perjury?   It's definitely grounds for disbarment.

High attack, low defense is called a glass cannon.  One hit, dropped!  But how often can/should the GM target him to be dropped?  Actually, quite a bit!  If he's much more effective, then NOT targeting him is stupid.  

Auto rifles doing AP killing?  Recognize these are murderous.  Nothing less.  Unless you're talking SERIOUSLY high powered.  If I have to worry about it?  It'll sharply re-shape my defenses.  3d6 killing?  I'd better have 11-12 resistant, if I don't wanna get TOO mauled.  AP?  I'd better have MOST of that *hardened*.  Make it autofire, and ok, 2 hits might not be too likely...but it'll happen often enough.  Now I gotta face a bad damage roll *twice*.

Killing attacks are a classic example why your concept breaks down.  Killing attacks are MASSIVELY variable.  Sure, much of the time...they're useless.  They do nothing, assuming appropriate rDEF.  But that's not the risk, from the PCs' perspective.  They have to be concerned with the HIGH damage rolls.  8d6 K isn't a 24 DC attack, from a risk mitigation perspective.  Ask yourself, what would you rather face?
 

--8d6 killing in 5E (with the ugly d6-1 stun mult)

--24d6 normal

--30d6 normal

It's LESS bad in 6E.  The stun mult *had* to be reduced, IMO.  But still...8d6 killing requires at least mid-20s rDEF;  you need 28 to bounce the average BODY.  34+ will happen about 13%.

But there's also a recognition...even in VERY HIGH powered supers, 24 DC attacks are huge.  24 DCs is 120 active...if it's full END, more if it's got Reduced END...which is the upper limit for Very High Powered supers (6E1 35).  24 DCs normal does 84 STUN...so what kinda defenses are needed?

1 hour ago, Pattern Ghost said:

 

Hey, I moved from Florida to the West Coast going on 30 years ago. I'm pretty sure none of those things followed me out here. Had to be someone else.

Nah, just took that long to trace you.

We're getting the effect of Harold now.  Nothing nearly as bad, altho flash flood warnings are out.  

17 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Of course in 2nd Edition D&D each character type had different experience requirements. I believe that a thief needed about one fifth of what a wizard required.

It varied.  Levels 1-5, thief was about 1/2.  6-9?  Wizard for some bizarre reason made these *fast*.  The jump was at 10, and at that point you needed a ton of XP.

http://www.sisterworlds.com/olde/2e/xp.htm

But, also remember that the thief class in 1st and 2nd Ed was pretty bad.  Poor hit points, poor attacks, thieving skills took a LONG time, IIRC, to be good enough.  And traps were frequently Save or Die.  (And often far, far, far too common.  It says a lot, IMO, that there was a Dragon (?) article titled Do YOU Trap Your Bedroom Door?  Because traps tended to be grossly overused.)  

Quote

I think the different races had experience penalties as well, probably to offset their special abilities that humans lacked.

No.  The limitation was level caps, which were often VERY!!! low.  Like, an elven fighter could never be higher than 7th level.  The highest levels also required HIGH!!! stats...like, for fighters, not just 18 STR but 18/75...for half elf fighters...?  Been forever, so this might not be right.

If you're curious, then look online for the manuals from the SSI AD&D games, like Pools of Darkness.  That was #3 in the series, so highest level characters and that should show the limitations.  They were pretty bad.

In 3E, there was the notion of a racial level adjustment for some of the powerful races.  You might have 1 class level, but if you're a drow?  You were treated as 3rd or 4th level in terms of power.  It was a terrible notion;  it almost never balanced out.  

22 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Here's where I bring up Gary Gygax' sample dungeon where the level one characters run into a pack of ghouls and one is eaten alive in reward for figuring out a puzzle.

Back then, tho, low level character deaths didn't mean anything.  Roll up a new one!  Takes 5 minutes.  Characters had about as much depth as the paper they were written on.  Early D&D had almost no sense of balance.

10 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Of course a lot of this depends on the GM. I have ran with a number of GMs where everything is just completely random by the die roll and in those cases pretty much everyone dies. But of course this has been with D&D or Pathfinder. But with Champions (superheroic games) I have never seen a character actually die when the player didn't want them to. Not sure if this is due to the rules in Hero or if Champion gamemasters just don't like killing people. Are GMs who run Full Superheroic games different than ones who run other games?

It depends.  Does the GM recognize scaling issues/problems?  2 examples, both from Living City...which got to be murderous almost out of necessity.  I'd played the scenario;  there was a seriously nasty fight that our pretty balanced party had a hard time with.  (LC fights were scaled by total party levels...and woe betide the party that *just* cleared a threshold.)  Then I happened to watch a session...same scenario.  TERRIBLE party construction.  4 total newbie characters...a couple, IIRC, were multiclass demihumans, which was a bad idea in LC due to the impact on tiering (and VERY slow advancement).  1 player had a pretty high level character...but it was a thief.  The GM added up total levels, never even thinking about it.  When they hit the fight my group had a hard time with?  2 or 3 of em dropped in the first or second round...THEN the GM was worried it'd be a TPK.  Little late.  It was a very bad session.

Different con, different GM.  I ran my 6th level fighter;  most of the rest of the party was, again, super low level.  GM took me aside and flat out said, my guy was gonna catch the brunt of the fighting.  I said, of course.  AFAIK, no one else caught on.

Oh, yeah...and slavish attention to rolls.  <sigh>  Literally the start of the 3E era...so everyone was converting their characters, when no one really got the details.  One guy, IIRC, a triple-class elf...which he converted to something like a fighter 2, wizard 2, thief 2.  Translation?  USELESS compared to a 6th level *anything*.  So we start the scenario, and we're chatting player to player...new system and whatnot...the scenario dictates an ambush if the PCs weren't paying much attention.  We weren't, for various reasons (some of it organizational, too)...and the ambush included crossbowmen.  DM rolled 3 crits before anyone could react.  Yeah, you can guess, TPK.

LOTS of things done wrong.  Organizational problems led to VERY late start.  Changing systems and no one understood them.  Poor choices by the GM.  Everyone agreed to write off the whole thing...we didn't even fill out sheets.  

Reported just now.

The head of the Wagner military group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is being listed as a passenger on a plane that crashed.

Uh.  Huh.

You don't tug on Superman's cape................

Yeah, it meant higher primary stats gave you higher secondary ones.

PD was STR/5;  ED was CON/5

SPD was 1 + DEX/10

REC was STR/5 + CON/5

END was CON*2

STUN was BODY + STR/2 + CON/2

OCV and DCV were DEX/3 ...  this is the big one, obviously.  ECV was EGO/3, so you might see a little buy-up there to be...well a little less of a sitting duck.

The rounding rules were in effect, too, which mostly applied to CON and DEX.  STR, you'd typically buy full dice of damage.  23 DEX hits both the CV and DEX roll rounding points, which made it extremely efficient.  Given the central role of CV, you'd still see 26 sometimes.  Or the "+1" numbers, 18 and 29.  17 is CV, 18 is DEX roll.  28 is DEX roll, 29 is CV.

To make things worse in several ways...in 5E, REC, END, and STUN were *expensive* to buy up from the figured values.  In 6E, REC is 1, END is 1 point for 5 END, and STUN is 1 point for 2 STUN.  In 5E, REC is 2, END is 1 point for 2 END, and STUN is 1.  Flip side, note that DEX was 3 points per, and CON, EGO, and BODY were 2 points.  So, SOME of the increase from figured characteristics was factored into the price.  The cost of REC, in particular, gets to be painful for a higher SPD character.  

57 minutes ago, Pariah said:

White Sox to Nashville? Preposterous ... but possible. Maybe.

 

White Sox owner considering moving team out of Chicago: report

 

My first reaction to any story like this is...let's put the squeeze on the city/location we're in, to get more concessions from them.

And in that story, I see where, AFAIK, the first axes fell today.  White Sox fire their GM and exec VP.  Happens when your team had Expectations...and sits below .400 right now.  Neck and neck with the Rockies for the 3rd worst record...or, another way to look at it, worst record among clubs trying.  (We know the story with the A's, and I've seen a few HIGHLY critical stories about how the Royals have run things recently.)

It's possible Adam Wainwright's starting career MIGHT be over now.

"Encouraging" in a start last week vs. the Mets after two awful outings before that.  Had that gone poorly, the Cards were considering making the change.

Unfortunately tonight?  4 2/3, 6 runs.  Started superbly;  retired the first 9.  Gave up a run on a walk, runner advance, 2 out single.  5th, tho, the roof caved in.  Fly out, single, infield single, bunt single, ground out to first (1 run scored), double scoring 2, 2 run homer to knock him out.

Cards aren't technically eliminated yet, but if they can't come back tonight, and it's 6-2 Pirates after 6, it's their 72nd loss.  Maybe you get in with 85 wins, in the NL?  But that means they'd have to go 30-5 the rest of the way...to MAYBE get into the mix.  Time to move on.  They've tried hard to help him reach 200 wins;  he's at 198.  But he's had 9 starts since June 17th.  He's lost 7, and probably this'll be #8.  This is the 6th game he couldn't complete 5 innings.

He even got off to a decent start...for a #4 starter.  Nothiing better than that.  But it's gone now.  

Some of the MLB Network guys have said the Cards really, seriously miss Yadier Molina.  I was kinda thinking Wainwright would also retire last year, given how tied at the hip those two were.  Now I wish he had.  It's sad to see THIS much of a drop-off.  Hall of Fame?  Maybe, maybe not, but certainly at least worthy of consideration.  4 times, top 3 in the Cy Young.  Forgetting this year, 195-117 career record.  Win totals mean less now, but that kinda winning percentage is very much meaningful in my book.

Ah...thank you.  I sit corrected.  Which is very uncomfortable, so I try to avoid it.

You mean *races* that often have shapeshifters?  Dude, those are pretty darn rare!  Would D&D or folklore monsters that have 2 or 3 specific forms count, like vampires?

Of course if it was all white, it'd be Bleach.

3 hours ago, slikmar said:

From what I read, it involves a 17 year old girl, problem being, unlike US, minor is under 18. Have to be careful with headlines, as those make it sound like multiple girls who are much younger. Curious to see what happens. Not like Wander is that much older at 22.

But DR law is rigid here.  There are no exceptions, so as you say, therein lies the rub...and why I'm basically only commenting on the procedural elements.  

Plus...Kobe Bryant.  The Duke lacrosse team.  Both cases eventually dropped because, IIRC, the accuser was deemed unreliable.  

This isn't a Hero failing, tho.  It's pretty much system-agnostic.  You're also not unique there;  for some reason, it feels pretty common that "don't make the roll" gets treated as a complete, utter FAILURE.  Like in D&D?  Roll a 1 on your attack roll?  Oh, you hit your buddy!  It can be appropriate at times, but it's really easy to overdo or misuse it.  We tend to like over-dramatizing.  

I wonder if a lot of this is related to how Hero promotes a bean-counter mindset...nothing for nothing, the push to cram as much as you can into the limited points you have.

And if you had to roll for everything?  A 14- means you still mess up 10% of the time.  So a 14- Chef messes up 1 dish in 10?  He gets fired.  So I'd go further...the GM should assume success, not "for ease of game play" but because it's respecting the point of the skills system.

23 minutes ago, MrAgdesh said:

You can just use Skill Modifiers for that? An Average Joe who doesn’t particularly think about his job outside of work (11-) should still be able to perform mundane tasks within that job at probably 12- to 14-. 

Specific tasks, yes, perhaps, but you can also assign a task modifier...this is an easy, frequently used task for the skill, so +2 to the roll.  The skills system isn't granular enough to support adjustments, but situational modifiers can be anything.

4 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

What we are trying to simulate is useless for evaluating how well the game succeeds in simulating it? Sorry, no.  The Human Torch doesn't pick up a car because "all Supers have a 30+ STR".  We don't see many Supers trying to execute superhuman feats of agility because not many of them are superhumanly agile, and can treat 14- DEX rolls as a routine matter, no real risk of failure.  We don't see bystanders gasp as Green Lantern manages feats of agility far beyond those of ordinary mortals. Because he's not markedly more agile than ordinary mortals.  His power suite doesn't include legendary to superhuman agility, any more than he hefts a Buick with raw strength, rather than his amazing ring.

 

The fact that we do not see most Supers perform great feats of agility is not a "lack of evidence" - their abilities are highlighted, not shielded from view.

 

Supers can be "better" by having stats of 13 - 15.  You are willing to abide by the description of the skill rolls, but not characteristics?  15 is "twice as good as a normal person", and 23 is into "Legendary" territory.  I don't believe every Super has Legendary agility - the ones whose Agility is truly remarkable are moving into Legendary territory, and some few are Superhumanly agile (which, again, the game defines as over 30).

You can only look at the OVERALL result.  The details are not comparable because the contexts are totally different.  Hero characters are built in a game world where initiative is hugely important;  it's arguably far more important than the DEX skill rolls.  They're built within rigid, completely artificial constraints and rules.  Comics characters don't have initiative.  They don't have SPD.  They don't have turns.  They don't have points or construction rules.  They have writer's fiat.

What exactly is a superhuman feat of agility?  Lifting things is directly quantifiable.  Agility is not.  Does Green Lantern ever NEED to execute such a move?  Not that I can recall.  Also, in order to execute such a feat, Acrobatics is required...or do you simply let someone make a DEX roll with no penalty, even lacking the skill?  Perhaps GL simply doesn't have the skill.  As you say, it's not something he'd need.  You have no evidence of what his DEX is.

Terms like "twice as good as a normal person" are useless when there is no associated number.

What do you think "legendary" means?  For me, it's legendary among normals...but for me that's not a very high bar.  

Some of this may actually just be that what you consider a "super" and what I consider a "super" might well be different.  If you drop down to Golden Age?  Then perhaps there's more 18 DEX.  They aren't superheroes, tho, in my book.  (Nor were they generally considered "super" heroes at the time.)  t's also possible that what you define as "talented normal" is radically different from mine.  Multiple 18's?  Entirely possible.  NFL linebacker..18 STR, DEX, and CON?  No problem.  I get the sense that you want to redefine "average human" MUCH lower than the rules.  That's all well and good, and they may well be too high...but that would be redefining the context in a very basic way, and has too many ripple effects.

29 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

Damn, Rays. What did you get yourselves into? 

 

 

Yeah, but this story's been building for a week now.  Not sure why MLB did it now, but I'd assume it's basically just the process moving forward.  The question's gonna be how the investigation in the Dominican pans out.  As long as there's a credible investigation?  MLB pretty much has to use administrative leave.  Procedurally, I think this is basically like the Bauer case.  MLB doesn't want to let him play while the investigation happens, but they also can't issue an extended suspension until the case is resolved.

Heh, I did something like that too, altho it wasn't a one-shot.  It was an alien invasion scenario, and I built a Radioactive Man kinda character...STR Drain damage shield, always on.  Unpleasant person...and HATED what he'd become.  At one point, the GM let us board a ship.  

I headed straight to the engine room or reactor room, I forget.  Had something to use to stab with...

Double pushed STR, Haymaker, to trap the containment.

BOOM.  

Yep, the character was vaporized, no argument.  Took out the entire ship tho.

I never count suicides as "character deaths" tho, in the sense OP meant.  And, well, with both of ours, it's potentially debatable whether they were really heroes in the usual sense.   And to a degree, it's true in any one-shot or tournament scenario, as at that point, there's probably no real consequence for the character death, unless it's REALLY early in the event.  That kinda bites, the player's gonna feel cheated.

Well, that was fun!

Rangers at D'backs.  Pitching duel despite the fact that it was a bullpen game for the D'backs.  Rangers score first on a solo homer in the 7th.  D'backs tie it with a solo homer in the bottom of the 9th.  Top 11, Rangers get 2.  Bottom 11, D'backs string together 3, winning on a walkoff, clean single to right center...runners on 2nd and 3rd, no doubt about the hit, and enough in the gap that there was never a shot at stopping the winning run.  D'backs have quietly won 8 of 10 again, somehow...

Me included!!!

I hope all of you in SoCal and other areas that are getting *crushed* by rains and flooding are safe.  From what I'm reading right now, it's mostly property damage, fortunately, but still, that's no fun.