Lee

I have nothing to say here, but I cannot forego an opportunity to post on page 666 in a politics thread.

I wonder what the political reaction would be if a patient going to an abortion clinic surrounded by protests felt "threatened".

Don't Look Back (1978 Boston album & single)

Carry On Wayward Son

"Police Suspect Fowl Play"

Maybe the real Roddenberry fans don't watch Discovery.

With that I can agree. I love the Green Lantern Corps. The idea of a small army of super beings chosen to bear one of the most powerful and versatile artifacts in existence, and charged with protecting the entire universe, is compelling to me. It opened the DC world into a whole cosmos of potential adventure. The diversity of sapient beings in the Corps, all united by dedication to an ideal, is IMO inspiring.
 
I do have to disagree with some other objections raised here about the Corps. A Green Lantern is not "just a beat cop among beat cops," any more than a Knight of the Round Table was just one of a bunch of armored fighters. A Green Lantern is an exceptional being carefully chosen for a tremendous responsibility. And I remember multiple eras since the Silver Age when Green Lantern and the Corps were very popular.
 
As you say, it comes down to execution. Overpowering is a chronic issue with DC. Every time there was a reboot to try to bring their characters down to a reasonable level, writers came along who wanted to move planets or rewrite time or cross the entire universe. In the case of Green Lantern, IMO it was a mistake to introduce continuing multiple GLs based on Earth, and to keep dragging the whole Corps into so many events focused there. It diluted what was special about the Lantern from Earth, and diminished the epic impact of the Corps. Again IMO, the GLC works best when individual Lanterns are looking after their own sectors, and the larger Corps only becomes involved in the most epic of star-spanning events.

And...yet again....other countries seem to manage giving their employees a working wage just fine. So most of the First World can do something the world's most powerful economy can't? It's not a question of can't. It's a question of won't. I'll go further....countries giving better living wages to their populace did not suffer price increases out of proportion to the increase in wages. If I'm making a living wage which enables me to pay my bills and occasionally buy something nice for myself, I am not going to give a **** about someone doing the SAME work making the same amount of money. We're doing the same work! And if you have a large investment in a secondary education....you're most likely making way more than minimum wage so the point is completely irrelevant. We're talking about MINIMUM wage. What person who "spent years and thousands of dollars on post-secondary education and professional development" is making minimum wage? Nobody I know....that's for damn sure. And...for the umpteenth time, other countries don't have this massive complaint of perceived "unfairness and discontent" among their workers that is being presented in arguments as inevitable. It's not. The populace in all of those countries have a much higher happiness index than people in the States do.

The increase was made abruptly. Employers made the changes that were easiest to make quickly to compensate for the changes to their operating costs. The Biden administration is rolling this out over five years.
 
 
I honestly don't see why I would consider those to be tied together. That's still well above minimum wage. Median wage is a much more significant factor in how an economy will respond.
 
 
Which is why I suggested that things like tax breaks could help ease the cost to small businesses.
 
I've heard the same arguments from business all my life, about adding employee benefits to the payroll, about the cost of environmental protections. In every case there was an initial impact, until the economy adapted and the situation became normalized.

My mustache twirling is for entertainment purposes only.

The special effect of any powers from the pool would be, "magic." This might not seem like much of a restriction, but, "Dispel Magic" would work against any of them.

No, leave it. I’d love to see somebody do something to keep this ship afloat. I just didn’t want you to feel rejected if you didn’t see much or any response to a perfectly fine idea.
  Let me take some heat if anybody’s out there.
   The “company” consists of a few people who are buried with their own real world concerns, with so many of the rights to the work scattered by past concerns and no real cash coming in that new output is limited to a few guys working on their own personal projects and they have no interest in working on anything that doesn’t either interest or profit them personally. So a lot of work going towards general building up for the future isn’t a priority.
    
    All that being said, everyone here is a decent, kind person, with good intentions.  They rally around each other in bad times and are a lot of fun in the good ones.  Also they’re the best source of information and council for playing in and running your own game.
   Please stick around and find out for yourself.    Feel free to send me an E-mail on the system if you want.   Tjack.
 

No, C stands for Cookie. That's good enough for me. 

The Joy of Painting

Quoted on the Book of Face by our very own Darren Watts:
 
"I get it now. Ted and Heidi Cruz wanted their children to be safe, to have basic sanitary services like heat and running water, to leave behind a third-world apocalyptic nightmare for a safer place. Like so many parents before them, they decided to cross the Mexican border.
@julieroginsky"

Nudge nudge

Paradox

Neil Peart 

Do you know why Magneto no longer wears light purple?
 
Because the days of fuchsia passed.

And finally:
 
It would be more appropriately named "Vampire: the Marketing."
 
Remember when it came out?  Pop culture was nuts for all things Vampire. Anne Rice was Still a hot seller, the hipsters were still pretending Buffy was a niche, and there was a brief revisit to goth style in the youth.  As Spence noted, it wasn't marketed to typical RPG players; it was marketed to fang bangers and daydreamers who were spending those vampire bucks.
 
And when the winds shifted, WW sailed beautifully, socializing and generally de-monsterizng werewolves in the same way when Shark boy started taking off his shirt regularly.  I don't remember just which way (I had lost interest in Vampire for the exact dame reasons Spence pointed out: the people playing were... Well, the polite southernism is "touched a bit."), but WW made a pretty deft shift to ride the tide of Blair Witch, and that was every bit as in-and-out as it should have been.
 
For those who stuck with it, they kept grinding out supplemental material, all of which amounted to more versions of the same thing that sold, and the fans kept buying.
 
It makes all the WOD stuff less an exercise in how to make a game that appeals to RPG fans and more of a treatise on "how to cash in on a trend at just the right time."
 
I know there have been hundreds of discussions here on how HERO should have capitalized on the Marvel movies, but there is just no way that would have worked: you want instant recognizability and a rules set that can be picked up, learned, and played by any group of never-played-an-RPG-before types in a weekend, a week at most.  White Wolf did that very thing.
 
The "HERO System" just won't work that way, and each new revision moves it further from having any hope of ever working that way.
 
A superhero game powered by HERO?  That might have worked, but only had HERO had a chance in Hell of licensing known characters.  Nobody saw Golden Heroes or Prowlers and Paragons making any new splash via the popularity of the Marvel Movies, right?  Supers is a super-crowded market; fantasy is a super-crowded market; steampunk has played out; the last good pulp was Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (don't question it!  Just watch it again, with more seasoned eyes!) or possibly Sid and Marty Croft's Land of the Lost, though Brendan Fraser's Mummy movies were awesome; sci-fi that says Star Trek squeaks by; sci-fi that says Star Wars does extremely well, but only Disney makes money on anything Disney owns.
 
Ultimately, its like any other 'going viral' event: we can sit here and armchair just what needs to happen when and why, but its a matter of a perfect storm of random factors-
 
Remember the one true 5e powered-by-HERO game?  MHI?  Well-loved franchise; an author who is almost his own caricature; books still selling great guns?
 
After the deal is made, the author pulls a stunt that tanks his popularity, and the game went nowhere.
 
There is no magic balloon to carry HERO onward and upward; there is just a lot of hot air about what the ideal solution is.

No, C stands for Cookie. That's good enough for me. 

Yes, it is. That program also used those investigations as a basis from which to explore theoretical and practical ideas for aerospace engineering and security. But the documents still don't confirm any of that stuff came from recovered materials from UFO sites.

Thank you for the links. I'm seeing much information about the composition, properties, and potential uses of experimental materials. So far I haven't found anything that confirms any of these materials are or are based on recoveries from UFO sites. If you can cite a specific passage from this document to that effect, or refer me to such documentation, I'd love to see it.

I spent many years fighting in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I practiced and was qualified in all weapons (including weapon and shield), but I mostly fought with polearm and two hand sword (what I used was the equivalent of a hand and a half bastard sword, wielded two handed). People wearing shields were by FAR the hardest to hit. There is absolutely no question they got a DCV bonus out of it and it wasn't because they used it to 'actively' block. That's not how shields are actually used.
 
Hollywood gets shields, or more specifically how shields are used, wrong, all the time. They depict people swinging their shields to intercept attacks. You would do this with a buckler, maybe a small heater, but for serious shields there is no way you could swing that thing around with any real effect without utterly exhausting your strength. Rather what you do is to brace it close to your body and lean the weight so it is centered in your shoulder. You then maneuver yourself around the shield, you do not move the shield! There is of course a bit of movement, such as when you hunch your shoulder in a flinch response to defend against a head strike, but for the most part it stays where it is. This is not incidentally why shields can work in a shield wall.
 
Oh, and using a shield that way is not at all tiring. That's WHY it is used that way.