unclevlad

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

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

Key point from the opening paragraph....

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 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.)  

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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.  

Ok...see, with some of those, we can start slotting things in.

Hyperdrive is, at best, going to allow planetary colonization...altho it's HIGHLY debatable whether that would ever happen, IMO...and potentially stuff like asteroid belt mining.  FYI, I was assuming it was FTL...because you basically can't do stellar exploration without it.  I don't even buy colony ships before you've got FTL.  It's simply too slow. 

But realize:  if I don't understand them, I can't use them.  Anything normally in Star Hero?  OK, as long as you're using it as written, then you're covered.  Stuff you're inventing, or renaming, you need to be more explicit.  Also, the notation is a tad confusing.  2.1 - 3...what's where?  

An area you're lacking is the biotech.  This is a very important area, as it has strong influence on how society develops.  

There comes a point where even most sci fi writers hand-wave.  A society with full terraforming, with infinite energy from ZPMs, with FTL?  Why should it bear any resemblance whatsoever to anything we recognize?  THIS far ahead, even thinking of the secondary and tertiarly implications is extremely tough, so you're almost certain to bite yourself in the foot repeatedly.  They're out there?  Sure...but the writers largely stop there.  If cloning and nanotech lead to extended, if not indefinite, lifespans, this likely has a massive impact on wealth distribution/concentration...and thus, power.  ZPMs even start arguing against bothering being on a planet...that nasty gravity, you know.  The elites live on stations.

42 minutes ago, slikmar said:

I have to say, and not against anything else, glad Spain won and the player from England who intentionally stepped on the one from the Nigerian team wasn't, in effect, rewarded. I know would never be done, but I wanted so much to see the coach or someone basically tell her, when you get to the hotel, pack your bags. There is rough play, a lot of uncalled penalties in the WWC, but that was over the top. But as my brother pointed out from the men's side, it took a lot for a guy who was actually biting players to finally be removed.

It's fairly rare that actions like that draw much in the way of suspensions, even when deliberate.  Also, note that the clubs have largely ceded ALL disciplinary power to the overseeing bodies...league, or FIFA in this case.  That way they can avoid the wrath of fans and the player.  "It was taken out of our hands!"  

The cases where really, truly egregious actions drew MAJOR suspensions?  I didn't think it was this long ago, so I might be thinking of another one, but this is really bad.

McSorley got less than 1/3 of a season for it.  The one I can't find right now was more recent, I think...and there was talk of *criminal* charges.

But...yeah, for a stomp, I'd have no problem imposing a 2nd game at least.  World Cup elimination rounds?  Tough noogies.  Control yourself.  Of course, that's not applied any more.

5 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

Does anyone else here find it pathetic that our species has yet to devise an all-encompassing rapid-response fire suppression technology capable of dousing these wildfires in an extremely short timeframe? As residents of this biosphere, we are keenly aware of ecological disasters (natural as well as anthropogenic) and yet we seem to pour more effort into methods of murder than ways of safeguarding ourselves from the attendant hazards of the only habitable region in this universe.

No.  This isn't like a fire in a fireplace.  By the time such a fire is generally even detected, it's burning *acres* of forest.  The scale is simply too large.  If it's a square area?  One acre is 660 feet by 66 feet...exactly.  So 10 acres, which in dry conditions can become involved from the initial trigger in pretty short order, represents 660 feet by 660 feet.  That's a half mile long perimeter, altho it's not gonna move equally quickly in all directions...the wind's a big factor.  

Not only do you have to suppress the fire along the perimeter, too...but how are you going to keep it suppressed, if the fire is still near it?

How are you going to deliver any such solution into rugged terrain?  Helicopters and aircraft have limited capacities.

The natural scales of many things are mind-boggling.  The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million.  A cubic meter of sea level air has a mass of about 1.2 kg per cubic meter.  1.2 kg == 1200 grams == 1.2 million milligrams.  So a cubic meter of air has about 500 milligrams of CO2.

Now scale this up....1 km x 1m x 1m.  500 grams.  1 km x 1 km x 1 m.  500 kilograms.  10 km x 10 km x 10 meters...500 metric tonnes.  That's a VERY thin slice of the atmosphere, over a small area.  Nebraska's a middling large state.  Its area?  200,000 square kilometers, 2000x as much.  Now thicken the atmospheric layer to 500 meters...that won't change the atmospheric density that much.  So, over the state of Nebraska...not the whole US, just Nebraska...there's about 5,000,000 TONNES of CO2.

That starts giving you the scope of the problem of removing the existing carbon from the atmosphere.  Your fire suppression issue is similar.  If nothing else, the sheer amount of HEAT!!! being released is very hard to fathom.  It's huge. 

I don't mind if a high-powered villain escapes...OCCASIONALLY.  And it'd better be someone not too lethal.  From Dark Knight...Joker blew up, IIRC, a police station and a hospital.  How many died there?  How many did he threaten to kill on those boats?  My only real complaint about the film is that the damage and chaos that Joker represented, drew FAR TOO LITTLE of a response.

When someone is a threat of that magnitude, then NOT having the death penalty for them is promising they'll never get out...so a promise they'll never escape is entirely reasonable.  On the fiip side, the prison can only go so far.  Defenses are static.  Someone may occasionally work out how to get around them.

I take the position that it's much like felony murder...if someone dies during an attempted robbery, it doesn't matter that it was your partner in crime that shot...or that he tripped and the gun went off accidentally.  If someone died, it's the same as deliberate, premeditated murder.  In other ways, almost ANY power constitutes at least a deadly weapon, and in many cases, might even border into a weapon of mass destruction.  The judicial system, IMO, can't afford to be forgiving.  

Ars Magica was set in the early part of the millenium...15th century maybe?  Possibly earlier, it's been forever.  So with things like travel times, and projects that took months...generally, no.  Not all the magi would be in play at one time.  

12 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

Why should we have to build NPCs inefficiently rather than just giving NPCs fewer points.  Do you find that an 11- skill feels all that "competent" in-game?  Does a "very skilled" 14- or so roll feel like a "master"?  What's the penalty for a "difficult or unusual" task?  Is a 16- enough to make a -5 penalty "matters of routine" in-game?

 

And a standard Super is "very skilled" with any DEX skill he spends 3 points on. Is that true of every character in the source material?  I don't believe that it is.  Nor do I believe that every comic book superhero is more agile than 99.9% of the population.

Why should we care about a few points on an NPC?  What difference does it make?  When it's NOT spent on combat, anyway.  

The scale and those descriptions are straight RAW.  The descriptors mean a LOT more to me than the rolls...because what they're also talking about is when you *don't* need to roll, by giving a general, convenient translation of a scale that otherwise has none.  What's a 14- Chemistry roll...AP high school, undergrad degree, masters, doctorate?  

The source material is, as always, useless for these arguments.  Writers write what they want to write...and don't write what they don't want to write.  We don't have the character sheets.  Hey, maybe those guys ARE 13 DEX and Lightning Reflexes 10.  We don't know.  We don't see many of em trying to execute DEX skills, either...unless it's Beast, or Spidey sometimes, where it's something to be highlighted.  And the standard of comparison is generally...other supers.  If the average STR is 50, then someone with a 40 is gonna look puny.  To borrow a useful aphorism:  absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  We all can, all too easily, impute what our innate prejudices believe because what's presented is totally subjective, and we'll shape it to fit our preconceived notions.

I personally have no problem with the vast majority of comics supers having a 23+ DEX.  I DO buy starting from a position that, generally...Supers Are Better.  To be sure, I'm not talking street-level or Golden Age here.  That's always a massive disconnect.  You say Supers, I say Supers, but what we're talking about may be 200 points different.