Robyn

Re: WWYCD: A Christmas Carol, Champions Style!

Re: WWYCD - little girls and diplomatic troubles Heroes don't enforce justice by targeting every single independent crime - that's called a police state. Laws need to be backed by respect, not fear, and diplomats are in the process of negotiating with a government that will gain respect - and therefore power - by bringing in dollars to the local economy. This law, along with many others, can and will be changed to bring the country fully into the 21st century - but not by sacrificing the instrument of wider change in the name of a single immediate effect! In context, this would amount to nothing more than condemning all the other young children to this fate, in the name of saving one who just happens to be in front of their eyes at this moment. Strike you as suspicious at all? If the practice is common enough for them to observe it in their short time there, the local government has been covering this up, and making a public fuss over it will bring to light the history of that law. Locals in support of it will oppose the trading because they see the foreigners as the instigators of this trouble, and The Home Nation will break off negotiations in response to its local outcry. If the practice is as unusual as the original post indicated, it can't be coincidence that something like this occurred right in front of the heroes' eyes; someone's trying to set them up. Kaja warns the rest of the group, then announces that he's going to the embassy to warn any other heroes there that someone might be trying to sabotage the diplomatic process. He urges the others to exercise caution, and suggests that they track down anyone else with "free time" to give the same warning. Any requests (as he's leaving) that he assist with some action is met with the statement that he won't play into "their" hands like that, and a reminder that the heroes "must not" endanger the long-term hopes for this nation by allowing their impatience to insist on some changes now. They are, after all, so close to giving local officials the power to make a real difference . . . Whether the other heroes take this at face value, or assume that he's trying to leave them alone to do their thing without having to (officially) know about it, is irrelevant to him. As is whether or not they actually decide to (eventually) do anything; if they do, it will cause a diplomatic incident that leads to the collapse of all trading, and if they don't, the information will be "leaked" later on, anyway (at the worst possible time), and the leak blamed on the same mysterious "they" who set up the heroes' encounter with that child in the first place. In the end, diplomatic efforts will be set back for years, and the McGuffin mineral used for making cars or microchips or whatever, will be unavailable to The Home Nation for another few years, holding back the spread of technology . . . What, you thought any of this was Kaja's morality? He's there to sabotage technology, as his true masters desire

Re: The Munchkin Build Contest Not to worry, it's not like the rest of us have been following them (#3 comes to mind)

Re: The Munchkin Build Contest Isn't this 1d6-1, with a minimum of 1? So, the spread would be 1d6+1 [2,3,4,5,6,7].

Re: WWYCD - little girls and diplomatic troubles (And if your character would normally see this as the very height of morality, something has happened during negotiations that reached down into your character's very soul and reversed this.) __________________

Re: The Munchkin Build Contest

Re: Resolving a Combat in One Roll? I thought we were talking about almost "guaranteed PC death", not nearly "dead"

Re: Transform the final fronteer!b

Re: Resolving a Combat in One Roll? Where the death of all the PC's is nearly guaranteed, I would (as a player) prefer to make a noble sacrifice in a single die roll instead of play it out and watch everyone die.

Re: Transform the final fronteer!b This is, by the way, one of the "building blocks of the system" I've got laid out so far; experience is a single-point Transform.

Re: WWYCD: A Christmas Carol, Champions Style! Please don't talk about players as if they hold the same metaphysical beliefs as their characters. Wait until we identify our beliefs directly (in the 1st person) before attributing those beliefs to the player.

Re: Resolving a Combat in One Roll?

Re: The Intangibles... (sounds like a group name, eh?)

Re: Need help with 5ER and targeting a hex. Yes. "I respectfully submit that you might be envisioning..." is actually the polite way of saying I assume. Err . . . except that, in a polite debate, you don't simply declare various points and expect them to be challenged qua established truths; you submit propositions for review by the group before they can be deemed acceptable by anyone, much less (as Kirby noted) taken for granted.

Re: I may be overthinking this, but The overlooked question, as usual, is scope: is the optimal level of thinking the same for every person, or only for an individual, or only for a group?

Re: A variant of standard effect damage Involves an extra step of math, where you subtract the roll from the "number needed to hit"; also, it means telling the players what DCV their opponent had, which may be undesirable

Re: Age and Sanction?

Re: The Munchkin Build Contest

Re: He's right over... Where'd He Go!

Re: Need help with 5ER and targeting a hex. Isn't "respectfully submit" a form of submission to the other party (or parties) in a debate? (Keeping in mind that I recognize debates as being useful and, indeed, necessary for more than just disagreements of current beliefs; establishing new beliefs can be arbitrary but also may take place within the framework of a debate, where participants adopt the role of "Devil's Advocate" to test new theories and point out alternatives, and ideas must be proposed against a default of "not existing" with sufficient arguments to prove that they do exist, before they can be formally accepted.)

Re: Need help with 5ER and targeting a hex. Hrm . . . sigged

Re: A variant of standard effect damage

Re: A variant of standard effect damage Then you're cheating, or the GM is applying "hidden modifiers"; if the former, expect your GM to notice Too much like a very powerful attack that has Limitations piled on it to reduce the cost. Past discussions on this board have covered the difference in efficiency; for comparison, imagine a 10d6 EB for 50 points, and another Energy Blast at 30 dice with "Activation Roll: 8-" for a -2 Limitation, also costing 50 points. If defenses are sufficient that only a little damage gets through each time with the average 10d6 roll, it may not add up enough to balance out the 30d6 roll - which most of the time does no damage, but occasionally pays off and does a lot of damage. Your multiplier idea makes it all too easy for characters to roll too high or too low; too low is essentially a "no damage" attack (Activation Roll failed), whereas too high is the critical that does not obey a bell curve.

Re: Santa Claus is coming (and man, is he ever pissed!) I think I've heard of it. Is that the one referred to as "the great HTML nerfing"?

Re: A variant of standard effect damage