unclevlad

Solid but not spectacular == .500 ball club and no playoffs.
 
How often do those big contracts actually play to their cost...and for how long?  Yeah, if they do, that's one thing.  Another aspect with, say, the Yankees of the last several years is IMO roster mis-construction.  Too many all-or-nothing types.  With the Yankees as well, all-or-nothing hitters that were substandard on defense.  The Yankees recognized that last year, and took steps to address the defensive issues, for sure.  
 
Also, note that if Rendon and Trout aren't $20M...they're $35M.  IF they can re-sign Ohtani, even as a hitter only?  We're talking $40-45M...might be more, but that'd just make the case stronger.  So, we're talking 3 players, $110M, and about 50% of the salary cap.  IF they play that way, then they'd have to be brilliant...because the pitching staff will be badly underfunded.
 
Another point:  the Angels put those players on waivers to dump salary, hopefully.  Why?  Not so much to cut expenses this year, but to get under the competitive balance tax...if someone picks them up, then the remaining salary is their problem.  The CBT starts at $233M.  If they lose Ohtani, their compensation pick improves significantly...from post-4th round to post-2nd round.
 
If the Angels accede to Ohtani pitching...and try to get 150 innings a year out of him?  Assuming he doesn't have to have the 2nd TJ to try it...there's only a *slim* chance he'd last 2 years, I think.  Not with the repeat damage.  If he's got to have the TJ now, the first question is whether he *can* pitch again effectively.  History shows, this simply isn't very likely.
 
EDIT:  watching Angels-Phillies, actually, on MLB.  Bottom Line point about the D'backs-Dodgers game, in LA...the D'backs are 7-33 in the last 40 games in Dodger Stadium.   Owwwww.....
 
 

"It's too late to complain about the food now."

But this is the Broncos, so we know they can fail to meet even low expectations.

Another mass murder hate crime in the US...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fatal-store-shooting-florida_n_64ea67e4e4b0a2a9abc4f1ce

His 100th birthday would've been Dec. 12th, so he didn't *quite* get within 100 days of it, to win both showcases.  

His 100th birthday would've been Dec. 12th, so he didn't *quite* get within 100 days of it, to win both showcases.  

Excellent segue there, Cygnia!

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.  
 

This point alone is all that's needed to show the state of the "law and order" party.

This point alone is all that's needed to show the state of the "law and order" party.

This point alone is all that's needed to show the state of the "law and order" party.

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.)  
 
 
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.  

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

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

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. 
 
 

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.
 
 
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.

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. 
 
 

Would you do that to the MAC?  
 
Slap em in Division III.  They might break even there.

Yeah, there's certainly cases where linking SPD to DEX generally meant you'd buy BACK the SPD to 2.  
 
But that isn't the major problem.  It's tying CV to DEX, because CV is critical for the game mechanics, for most, and it's expensive.
 
There's a classic dissonance, IMO, about what "Olympic level gymnast" means.  Because to me, it's NOT!! related to DEX, per se.  It's related to skill roll.  
 
Competent: The character can perform routine tasks easily, and difficult tasks with a little effort. He’s qualified to get a job using the Skill.
 
Skilled: The character is well-versed in the Skill. Routine tasks are easy, and more difficult tasks are well within his abilities. He’s qualified to manage or assist less-skilled workers as they use the Skill.

Very Skilled: The character is a master with the Skill. Easy tasks are a breeze, and he can perform more difficult or unusual tasks without too much trouble.
 
Highly Skilled: The character is one of the very best people in the world with that Skill. Unusual or difficult tasks which give lesser masters pause are matters of routine. He often works on cutting-edge applications of the Skill.
 
So is an Olympic gymnast Very or Highly skilled?  Highly is 16-, so we're talking 18 DEX and 3 levels.  Is Simone Biles highly or extremely skilled?  She's had 2 or 3 moves named for her, which clearly gets into the "new uses for the skill."
 
Remember that an 18 DEX means a 13- in any DEX-related skill into which the person invests some effort...and that's true whether it impacts SPD and CV or not.  I think levels in specific skills is significantly undervalued for NPCs.  We go, oh, well, all those skill levels get too expensive!!  Well, we're not gonna buy that many different skills for them.  
 
This is, for me, even more dramatic when talking about INT...in part because NCM is bogus for INT.  The greatest geniuses BLOW THROUGH a 20...look up "modern polymaths" to see what I mean.  This isn't the greatest of links, but it does start giving a flavor.  Read where von Neumann contributed.  The paradigm polymath in history was Da Vinci.  I've seen lists of some modern polymaths I can't find right now, but with IQ estimates WELL over 200.  By contrast?  I don't believe Einstein was.  He was a genius physicist, but I don't *think* he had the breadth.  So with someone like Reed Richards or Tony Stark...38 INT, or something like a 28 and lots of skill levels?  (Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine.  Levels with INT do not apply, under the rules, to background skills based on INT per RAW.)
 

Isn't this a game where we're playing as Batman or Hank Pym or Tony Stark or John Henry Irons? We play the real world 1% exceptions not the 99% rule. And in the real world there are athletes who are Rhodes scholars. Granted they're not as common as in genre, but they do exist.

Of course, but that's still reasoning backwards to justify the in-game aspects.
 
And they didn't always hold.  AU/AE has the mageblade...who can fight, who can cast spells.  Not AS well as a full-time caster or warrior, but well.  In Ars Magica, the notion of "balanced" was tossed RIGHT OUT of the window.  The magi were MUCH!!!! better than the companions overall.  (With plenty of drawbacks of their own, mind.)  The intent was that you'd have multiple characters, sometimes playing your mage, sometimes not.
 
And let's recognize:  in the D&D source material, there are few seriously important warrior types.  The power brokers are the high priests and archmages.  There was no pretense of balance, at higher levels, in 1E or 2E.  This changed somewhat in 3E;  direct damage became far more problematic once Con bonuses applied to all hit dice.
 
 
Largely false.  I almost never spent any time on math homework, or a non-coding CS assignment.  I didn't need to.  I finished it.  Yeah I was the guy that finished the math exam in 25 minutes with a perfect score.  I had *plenty* of time to be active.  There are plenty of college athletes who are there to try to go pro, and are taking...let's call them less than rigorous classes.  OTOH...there are plenty that are taking serious classes.  AND devoting 2-3 hours every day to their sport.  MIT and Cal Tech play in Division III conferences.  Think their athletes can slack off their course work?

That makes it a new exemplar for "damnation by faint praise."

Perhaps this lawyer's heard how many of Trump's lawyers in the past have also been indicted....

That makes it a new exemplar for "damnation by faint praise."