womble

As a starting character, Rand isn't that expensive. Any Power abilities are "Uncontrolled" as well as potentially requiring activation rolls. Once you get into the flow of things though, Rand must be getting XP at a flooding rate, as must all the major characters, especially the other Power users. Aiel. Won't use a sword. Only use spears. How many magic spears are there in most fantasy material? Gimped. Players frustrated. Won't ride. Have astonishing stamina and fight near as well stark naked as they do in any armour (most don't wear armour: they're about the running). Sure you can make them Fighters or Rangers, but both those classes have abilities that they must ignore and require them to take Feats which are non-combat-useful which means they're not the terrifying adversaries they ought to be. What they need is an "Aiel" class... What class is Perrin's wolfspeaking/wolf-dreaming? Or rather: what class was Perrin's wolfspeaking before someone read Wheel of Time and created a class that approximates it?

A Grizzled vet ought to have all the feats. Using those tricks and specialisms is how he compensates for the reflexes and youthful stamina of his opponents and keeps the playing field level. And a BAB 3 higher than your 1st level party comrades will skew combat. Sure, if the ref is playing a game where everyone starts at higher level, you have more options, but taking those options will often mean you're not holding up your end of the party's needs. So take that at first level. The concept is "fighter" with the twist "lightly armoured". Take any of the light fighter classes or rogue, and your AC is in the toilet compared to a fighter once you earn your first decent monetary reward. Unless you make DEX your highest stat rather than STR, and then your damage sucks. Sure, by the time you reach about 8th level, you're only trailing by one or two BAB, and you have lots of mobility options. But how useful are those if you're the only fighter in the party and letting the enemy big guys close on your squishier friends gets them killed? So effectively, as a character that just wants to be a Fighter (but be lightly armoured), rather than one who has ambitions to have other skills available to them (as you will probably have if you go Rogue for a couple of levels) simply gimps themselves for the concept. And how does that work at first level? It takes, what, 13 weeks to go through a modern Basic? Or maybe they did some OCF at school, but now they're a lawyer. "Balance" going up levels really bites (if you care about it) from the get-go. Try the "Fighter with minor magic" in DnD: you might as well just be a Fighter with one fewer levels. WRT "playing your concept", playing "hybrids" or "variants" bites from level 1. Its bite strength actually decreases as you go up levels, because there are options to use to try and shoehorn the rules into letting you play what you want. Effectively, DnD recognises the whole problem by having the proliferation of classes and prestige classes so that once you've "paid your dues" (assuming your ref doesn't let you all start at high enough level to be able to finess the rules so you have the "power suite" you want to play from the start of the game) you can actually have taken enough odd levels and prestige classes to play your concept. The many and various classes are proof that it's an issue that just keeps raising its head, and they're only ever going to be a stopgap solution. And as a solution "lots of choice of classes" only helps if you know about the exact class that fits your character concept, and have the materials to refer to in order to use the class (else the GM is just making things up on the fly, which has its own problems).

Pathfinder/DnD might, by now, have lots and lots of classes which kinda-sorta let you play the class you want, eventually. You can finagle a light-armoured fighter if you cross-class enough between Rogue, Swashbuckler and Fighter, but at level 1 you're specifically one of those, and have a bunch of mandatory skill picks that may be irrelevant to being a beginning example of the type of fighter your character concept demands, while lacking essential components which will gimp the bejazus out of you compared to someone who embraces all the abilities of their class because they're a "standard" Fighter, while you will, at best, only ever achieve parity in combat with someone who's stayed strictly within a single fighting-specific class. Of course, your GM can always try and write a new class with its progression for your specific class, but there's a good chance it's going to exceed one of the "straight, official" classes because most refs like to be accommodating to their players. And it's still going to suffer from "Why can't I do everything badly to begin with and then progress as I want and as the character's personality and needs develop?" Characters from classic old Robert Jordan (that come to mind because I'm re-reading it at the moment) that struggle to fit a class/Level system: Rand Al'Thor; Mat Cauthon; Perrin Aybara; All the Aiel.

WRT Strength: in a Heroic level game, most (and even some in higher powered games) muscle-powered weapons will have a "Strength Minimum". Having STR greater than the STRMin for the weapon you're using in multiples of 5 gets you extra damage, but the STRMins are an arbitrary number, so if you're using a weapon with STRMin 6, having STR 11 is a "breakpoint". Many systems have Characteristic breakpoints like this; the recent incarnations of DnD just had breakpoints every other number, rather than "at the round-up point of 5 more". And for all of these, having a characteristic in between the break points makes the next higher break point closer for character development.

What does he want? The things you said, and to persuade the Russians that he's "Making Russia Great Again", so they continue to ignore the theft of their national assets by Putin and his cronies for their personal enrichment. There really isn't any need to try and put any benevolent motives into Putin's actions. Malice and greed (extreme self-interest) will pretty much provide accurate general classes of reasons for anything that gangster does.

Of course he knows better: his good friend Vladimir assures him it's not true. And it not being so is better for him, which means that, given the world is arranged entirely to suit him and his fancies, it definitely isn't true.

Magic doesn't have to be the most efficient way of doing things, but it can be attractive (even if it's inefficient) if it allows you to do things that can't be done without magic. In your example, maybe the RKA is a waste of points tou buy with magic, but a human can't Glide without some sort of assistance, and +8m Leaping is, IMO, more than even a Hero should be able to buy "straight". Magic can also be more flexible and attract more modifiers to make the same AP cheaper, even if you do have to buy a separate END pool to be able to use it. And you could also make the END pool a "custom stat" that everyone starts with some of, even if they can't use magic. It's free so if they get a story reason to buy some magic later, even the unGifted won't start off sucking wind, and starting magical specialists don't have to buy it up from zero any more than your athletics specialist has to buy "regular" END up from nought.

Someone's got to lay the seeds and set up the mystery. To my mind, around most tables, that's the GM. Certainly, if I'm the GM, I know far more about what's really going on in the wider world, and why, and how, than my players do, and someone rolling a 3 on their 18- Alchemy skill isn't going to get them a Philosopher's Stone just because the player comes up with a poetic-sounding combination of elements. They might get two clues from the experimental series rather than one about how the Stone might actually be made, and maybe I'll've delegated responsibility for providing the colour and flavour of those processes, but a roll, or a high skill alone isn't going to give a solution to a world-changing mystery. I don't know for sure that our GM had anticipated the Science-super's solution. But the conceit behind the super-science "explanamacation" of how the plasma bombs "work" made our conclusion logical for anyone who knows that ceramics are refractory and steel is strong, combined with the high temperatures and pressures of hydrogen plasma. Maybe our team's idea is horribly flawed, in that the Nazi-super's plasma powers don't actually need the exact physical properties of the casings (though if they didn't, why spend all the effort and treasure to make the things exactly so?). Maybe our plan is flawed in that the super is proof against his own plasma (but hopefully not against the shrapnel and flame of conflagrating hydrogen). If he'd just said "you can't sneak into the hangar and change the ceramic into plain steel", that would have been a showstopper. Because it was obvious that we could, having scouted the place using our two super-stealthy characters. Now, we left the session having only conceived the plan, so he's got a while to come up with "eventualities" that make the execution of the plan trickier than we anticipate. Part of the point of having a GM is so that we can come up with solutions like this, once the mystery has been laid out and we've done the "legwork". Sometimes the solution is just to hammer a few Nazi craniums, which is what another character is good at. Which is a reason for the supers to be in a team with a mix of talents: they can act on a wide range of potential solutions. But just saying "My Occult roll means his magic curse bombs are negated by holy water" isn't the way forward. It negates the need for the legwork that others can and have to do, for one.

My view is that everyone involved should try and give the answer as much verisimilitude as possible. If it's a question anyone round the table has any expertise in, I'd expect the GM to allow them to chuck in their twopenn'orth once the Savant had made a successful and appropriate roll, and then the player of the knowledgeable character provides some sort of solution. The GM isn't "required" to fill in all the gaps, but if no one else can, it's down to them to flesh out their world. Maybe that's by providing the Savant with more information, either about the problem, the resources available to solve it, or the metaphysics of the world, or maybe it's by giving actual names to solution components. If a GM was to insist on always "doing the designing" of the solution, once the Savant has proved they know what to do, via the abstract mechanic of the skill roll, it would, indeed, be constraining player agency unacceptably. For a player to be able to make their character's esoteric knowledge credible in the game setting, the player has to have a good grasp of the game setting, or the GM constantly has to rein them in (or push them to the bleeding edge, where their character's brain would take them) to the paramaters of the metaphysic. Providing that grasp is, mostly, down to the GM. I find it rare to be in a group where players will do very much "prep" in this direction, and in a homebrew setting, the GM would have to provide the material for "study", which might mean committing thought to paper to a greater degree than desired or possible, so it all has to come across the table. I think that the idea that players can take creative control of their environment to the same degree as the GM to be contrary to the crunchy ethos of the Hero system. Numbers provide boundaries. Hexes provide boundaries. For starters, the player almost always has to roll. Regardless of how good they are at problem solving. Sometimes that roll might be an auto-success, because they're extremely able and the task is trivial, so the dice don't need to be picked up, but the GM has the final say over what will, and won't, work, because they are the only ones who (should) have a complete picture of what is actually going on. A genius character might be able to figure out nearly everything, but if some key data isn't available, or the opposition is just as clever, there has to be a way of evaluating the imponderables, and that's exactly what dice mediate in tabletop RPGs. An example from a game recently: the Bad Guys are making county-flattening plasma bombs. We've figured out how, and where, and the GM has set up a "Where Eagles Dare" situation for us to go all action movie and kill the super who's fuelling the bombs. One of the characters is a scientist, and part of her superpower is the ability to change the properties of materials she touches, but the player knows pretty much nothing about materials science, though the character does. The table, though, has some knowledgeable heads. We will gloss over the super-science, but the GM let us contribute to a plan which now means we don't need to assault into a mountain-top fortress full of SS mooks and possibly lots of Nazi supers, and which involves some stealth into a poorly-guarded hangar and have the scientist work her mojo on the bomb casings so that when they are used, they'll go off in the Germans' faces, killing the enemy super. In this case, it was just a matter of connecting the dots the GM had provided, using real world knowledge that the table as a whole had, and which was so basic that really the player of the clever-bonce character should have known.

Carbon fibre comes in flexible sheets, then gets held in shape by resins and such. Most of the strength is still in the fibre, and while it might not yield, it will be floppy once the matrix has spalled off in an initial impact, but that's generally okay for that sort of protective function.

Hmm. There's an element of "Not our problem" and "Not even recognising that they need do anything to help fix it" in that pic that isn't necessarily reflected in the general "How do you like being fooled, chumps?" derision that's generally heaped by the anti-Trump upon the Trumpettes.

It is sad that all that is left is Schadenfreude. Though that's not quite right. Is there a German word for laughing at people for bringing troubles upon themselves while you share their fate?

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely. And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

I'd content that they're not chucking the 'R-word' around because people didn't vote for Clinton. They're aiming it at people who voted for Trump in spite of him being a knee-jerk racist and inveterate misogynist. They made the choice that his nebulous promises to achieve the unattainable were more important than respect and concern for their fellow Americans and the wider global community. They told Trump, "It's okay to be an ignorant, bigoted narcissist, if you improve our economic position," at the very least. They gave their civic sanction to racist policy-making. I think that's true, but with the media operating as they do, what option is there? Rational, calm dissection of the opposition's position won't gain any column inches. Or at least not enough to counter the histrionics of Trumpism and its ilk. Doesn't look good for the future, whatever your political colour, if elections solely become decided by who can spread the most fear. Based on some of the comments up-thread, perhaps all the DNC need to do is focus the FUD on their own supporters, to get them worried enough about the Dem victory to actually bother to get off their arses and go vote. Should be easier next time for them, though: "Look at the clown that got in last time; that proves there's no such thing as a foregone conclusion. Get out and vote." I think any democratic system would be greatly improved by making voting mandatory, as they do in Australia. Provided that there is an explicit requirement also for a "None of the above" box, that no one is disenfranchised by the arrangements needed and that the penalty for not voting doesn't criminalise anyone.

Trump's "PR problem" around the racism thing is, as Soar points out, likely not going away. What he did can't just be apologised for, or, as us gamers might call it "retconned" in the minds of those who witnessed him courting those barbarians. It can, however, as Orwell pointed out, be retconned in History, if he makes the big speech. In 100 years, how much of the detail of the filthy campaign will be remembered if he makes a big speech that professors can quote. He will actually have to do something concrete to change the minds of those who he so thoroughly alienated during his campaign. Maybe he'll do that, along with all his other about-faces, and the theories about him standing as a Republican with Democratic intent will be proven correct. Or maybe he's just flapping in the wind, out of his depth and is about to destroy any power for good the US might ever have had whether within or without its borders.

Anybody else noticed the Trump volte-face on the Alt-Right? It was reported on the Beeb (as far as I can remember; the article appears to have vanished in favour of one about his business ties, which refers to him doing the disowning, but doesn't quote him on it) as him disowning and repudiating their views. In that article, though, he defends Brietbart as "just a publication". Seems like a good move, politically, along with his u-turn on prosecuting Hilary. Too little, too late, though? Guilty of stoking hatred to get what he wanted, whatever the consequences? Edit: The Beeb were mostly rehashing this interview with the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-visit.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&hp&_r=1

I just finished The Crippled God, 10th of 10 in the epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. I started this series for the first time several years ago, and got to about book 7, which was the most recently available one, then swore off finishing the series until the last book was out, in case Erikson "did a Jordan" and popped his clogs before finishing his oeuvre. I finally got round to starting again a while back, some time after we actually acquired book 10 because I hadn't realised that it was done. Really glad I did. Some of the best sword-and-sorcery fiction I've read. Sufficiently engaging that there was the occasional time that I had to take a break because it was all so intense. Laughter and tears; joy and despair. I have no idea how many characters get dealt with in such fascinating detail. Heroes and villains, and villains who are heroes... I'm a sucker for military fiction, and there's that in spadefuls, along with mystery and intrigue and world-shattering plots. The background was, I'm given to understand, created as the setting for Ericson's GURPS game...

Ain't that a bit close to the knuckle with all the currrent worries about the fate of expat Brits in Europe post-Brexit?

Please don't. Red rags to a bull is as nothing compared to a dare or challenge to Stupid.

Would a VPP Gadget Pool be a valid approach? Everything created has to be a Focus, real and "Usable by Others", amongst other restrictions. The TL of the "forge" will determine some of the other restrictions: if energy-to-matter conversion is possible, you won't need raw materials, but if it's not, consider the very wide range of feedstocks needed by even a society of our TL for complicated things like electronics.

The only glimmer of hope for anything I'd consider good to come out of the Trump Presidency might be finally doing something about China's invidious trading position and expansionism. Trump has said he's going to do something about the balance of trade with China. Maybe he'll succeed in building a global consensus to put pressure on them to stop their state subsidy of all their industry (achieved via the artificial maintenance of the Yuan at below-market-rate values). Maybe he'll succeed in getting the world to stand up against the systematic and government sanctioned flouting of international IP rules. Maybe he'll stand up to them in the South China Sea. While he's at it, perhaps he'll put pressure on them to give their citizens the freedoms most of the rest of the world have come to view as desirable societal goods. But he probably won't. Making it work would hurt. Even if the long term gains of having China be an actual equal partner in global free trade (rather than a beneficiary of unequal trading)

The ones who actually believe the election system is rigged must, surely, for the love of all that is good, be a vanishingly small minority. Surely? Please? Just because a few stadiums-full of brainwashed eejits Yee and Haw everything the incompetent carpetbagger spouts doesn't mean that many of the millions of people who are voting for him for understandable, though IMO misguided, reasons actually fall for every line of bull he spouts? Does it? Please, O Leftpondians, tell me it ain't so! Please? Signed Worried of Rightpondia.

My question would be "why Traveller"? I'm assuming you're using Hero for the game system, since you're asking here. For me, though, setting aside the system, the implications of Traveller's J-Drive, both in how they affect the day to day lives of the characters and the consequences of wider stellapolitics are central to the setting, so if it's the setting you're keen on, you just "have" to choose J-drive over wormholes, unless the same constraints apply to wormholes as do to J-Drive, at which point it's just terminology... So, if your answer to "Why Traveller? Other elements of transhumanism fit more readily into the milieu than a different way of getting about the "terrain".

Sanction use is complicated. "We" don't want to put the economic strong-arm on the poor downtrodden Russkies who are only reacting badly to the changing world because the pretty much 100% Putin-controlled Russian media is feeding them propaganda and fantasy. The Kleptocrats who Putin might need to consider (fewer in number and more loyal nowadays than they once were, thanks to the good old successors of the KGB) can keep soaking the public purse for a good while yet. Your average Russian is no naif with tricolours in their eyes, but they're barely one generation out of 100% totalitarianism, (which didn't arise out of any long tradition of parliamentary democracy) and stereotypical fatalism will make any backlash against the gangsters who stole the benefits of Russia's vast natural resources slow to arise. Without that backlash, though, I'd say you barely have to consider the actual opinions of the Russian People, since they are, effectively, the opinions of the propaganda organs which serve the incumbent kleptocracy.

There's a lot of difference between the largest and smallest penguins... which kind are you looking for?