womble

Only it doesn't, really. That's likely to be at least 3 or 4d6 with a lot of tables of players, with potential for more if the "no more than double base weapon damage" optional rule is not invoked. Not that I think this is terribly wrong or anything, but don't let the sudden appearance of extra DCs blindside you.

From the article: My riverine travel speed averages out at (2+10)/2 = 6 kmh which is 48km in an 8 hour day... Have I made an arithmetic boo-boo? My tired head isn't seeing it... 500km up the Daugova at 2kmh = 250hr ~32 days 2000 down the Dneipr at 10kmh = 200hr ~ 25 days 2000 up the Dneipr at 2kmh = 1000hr ~ 125 days Average speed on the Dneipr = 4000/150 = 27km/d. Ah. That's the difference. Average speed for the trip is not the same as for two separate hours. Silly womble. So yes, those guys were shifting a lot faster than my guesstimate. Those boats are good analogues of the Drakken So "3-6 months" for the Riga-Kherson round trip might be a good range for "busting a gut on a known route" at one extreme and "moseying along while finding the way" at the other... And then add in the inevitable distractions

Some good points raised. But all the characters mentioned are Mary Sues who can pretty much do what the "story writers" at Blizzard want them to do at any point. They're all vastly more powerful than any PC at whatever level-appropriate point you meet them, because they have to be powerful enough to survive assaults by platoons of PCs, mostly on their own (though they often have Summon powers). It's almost not worth statting them up.

2 is also a frelling awful predictor of risk. The number of Muslims travelling to the USA is huge compared to the number who have actually committed terrorist attacks on your country. It's simple xenophobic nonsense spouted by a demagogue for his crazed constituency. It's simply mind-boggling that there are citizens of the USA who even passingly entertain the option. Your borders are not impermeable; if fanatics of any stripe want to get in and do you harm, they will, and picking on their religion will only fuel the desire of that vanishingly small minority of the Umma which wishes physical harm to be inflicted on your people to find those cracks in your borders, as well as fuelling the propaganda machines of Daesh and the Taleban whose purposes are only aided by demonstrating such mindless hatred. Are the US border agencies going to investigate every single person coming to the country who claims not to be a Muslim? Just to check that anyone isn't lying? No. So it won't even work. Trump is just feeding his trolls. Or at least dangling morsels in their cages so they get all riled up.

According to Google Maps, the Daugova from Riga (Latvia) to Belarus is about 500km. The Dneipr from Orsha, Belarus to the Euxine is about 2000km. The portage between the two is about 80km as the crow flies, but the terrain is pretty wet-looking which might mean floating some of the way... Mouths of the Dneipr to Constantinople is 650km. 2kmh upstream, 10kmh downstream, 8 hours a day makes the 5000km riverine round trip take 2500/16 + 2500/80 ~ 160 + 32 days. 8 days each way for the portage, say, and 10 for the return crossing of the western Euxine. Plus however long it takes the particular Norseman to get to the Gulf of Riga from wherever he calls home. Call it 6 months without much in the way of distractions. Quicker to get there than back because of the larger downstream portion of that direction. You might go faster than 10kmh downstream, but it would be risky in parts. You might go faster upstream with a favourable wind, but longships, being square rigged and shallow draught are not known for being able to sail even crosswind in the confines of a river, so the winds would have to be just right to give the rowers a rest. The the Rhine-Danube route would be the longest way round though. And you could be stuck rowing, even on the open sea, if the wind was against you. You could travel longer each day, light permitting, but there has to be time set aside for foraging and mooring/camping. That any use as a basis to work from?

Which, for me, disqualifies it as a palatable choice. Putin playing Stalin to Trump's Hitler isn't a thing the world would benefit from seeing.

The last place you want to be in a street fight is on the ground. Even if you're the one on top, you don't know what the other mook's friends are going to be doing, and "kicking the crap out of you while you ineffectively grope the other mook" is an option you do not wish to present to them.

Somewhere around the death of Charlie I or the accession of Charlie II. The Monarch has largely been a figurehead since then. Still 350 years. The Mother of Parliaments is so called for a reason.

I'm entirely unconvinced that it is a bad idea. The cap is only an optional rule after all. I'm even more convinced that there's no real rationale to it except to tone down lethality. I think I'm pretty comfortable with allowing Heroic level characters to ramp up their damage. 12 points for Weapon Master is a goodly chunk of a Heroic character's points, and a further 10 points for Martial Strike, +1DC and Weapon Element isn't trivial for a Heroic character either. Should there be a cap on the damage? Probably; cutting someone clean in half with a knife isn't very plausible. Adding Weapon Master to the base damage before doubling it to find the max seems to work well, in my head.

By either measure, the UK is 150 years past the first, and 100 years past the second. And it's still not an anarchy, nor, (quite, no matter how centralised Westminster would like it to become) a dictatorship. I think those two measures are pretty far short of "maximum durations", and if they're meant to be some sort of average, the number of very-short-lived democracies over the years and the globe probably means the US has to keep cruising on as a representative democracy for a while to keep the average where those quotees supposed it to be.

So, to stick with the Rapier, you're really only paying "extra" for the first 3 DCs (the D6 that a money-rather-than-points-bought weapon gets you for zero points spent). I wonder whether having to spend those extra points, just to be able to make full use of your Martial Strike, CSLs-for-damage and Weaponmaster/Deadly blow combos (which can both both be bought multiple times for 3DC a time, and which stack...) which you've already paid points for, is really warranted.

[shrug] The actual method of counting votes isn't as important for me as the fact it's compulsory to turn up to the polling station (or make some other legitimate arrangement), and that you can officially vote for "none of these Schmucks represents me", rather than just spoiling your ballot paper, as in this country (UK), or writing in a candidate, when most of the people who would write in that candidate are just not going to come vote. Might be interesting to allow/encourage wrtite-ins as well as "none-of-the-above".

Does Weaponmaster add to the base damage of a weapon in a Heroic level game? Or is it "added damage" in the same way that STR in excess of STR Min, CSLs, Maneuvers and Movement are?

I just read Weaponmaster, Deadly Blow, and the Adding Damage section again, and it doesn't mention damage caps in the first two, nor Talents in the latter. It covers CSLs, Str, Advantages and movement, and they all seem to be covered by the double-DC suggestion, so the assumption on my part was that the Talents are also part of the cap. I can certainly see that the argument regarding the knifemaster could point the other way. Edit: I actually like the concept that Weaponmaster adds to the base damage; it means that a master of that weapon isn't often going to have to worry about exceeding the "double base" cap in a Heroic level game unless they're pulling some crazy stunt involving potentially suicidal movement speeds. Maybe combine it with "damage in excess of the putative cap's max damage" goes towards breakage... So, for example, a Knife Master (5DC base) would have to do in excess of 19 damage with their knife for it to suffer breakage under normal use... I think one of the reasons I don't like the breakage rules is that weapons seem particularly fragile. 4PD/6BOD for a sword seems very low considering you can make armour from the same material that's got more PD.

I like Australia's compulsory voting. You have to attend the polling station (on pain of a fine, I believe), and all the ballot papers have to have a "none of the above" box. I don't know what the consequences of there being a majority "none of the above" vote are, if any...

I wasn't talking about multiple hits, I was describing one damage roll in a picturesque fashion. A classic knife move strikes edge up on one side below the ribs, slices up the line of the lowest rib, driving the point into the heart. Turn the hand over, and cut back out down the other side. One attack up, down and out in less than a second. Hole in the heart, flap of abdominal muscle and blood everywhere. Dead target. At least 9DCs damage to get 16BOD for an instakill on a normal 8 BOD human, and no stress to speak of on the knife blade that would be capped at 4DC, which isn't enough to reduce a normal 8BOD human to bleeding-to-death in one go, for its absolute maximum damage if you restrict it to double base DCs. Yes, good steel blades sometimes break: when they hit armour, or another good steel blade, or if they've been mistreated previously (by being bashed against armour or a good steel blade). 3D6 doesn't cut anyone clean in two. It'll kill a normal bloke some of the time and leave them bleeding to death most of the time. Clean in two is a lot more than just "instakill". Damage to weapons should, IMO, be based on the damage they were going to do that was stopped by [whatever]. No cleaver in good condition ever broke just chopping off a few dozen cutlets. Talents like Weaponmaster, or DC-increasing CSLs should mitigate the damage done to a weapon when it's used because the extra control means it's avoiding the hard parts, or being turned so that shield rims don't nick the weapon edge etc. To my mind, the double-DC limit is actually most suited to Superheroic campaigns, per the example in "Toolkitting: Adding Damage", where an illustration of the potential "abuse" of the ability to add damage to a cheap HKA is presented. Most Heroic campaigns aren't going to be adding more than 5 or 6 DCs (Martial Strike, some extra STR and maybe a couple of spare CSLs put into damage or some Talent; maybe they get up to +8DC with a Haymaker) anyway, without magic, and magic is something of a rule unto itself. 6DC moves a knife up to 2 1/2 dice, which'll still never one-shot-kill a Hero who hasn't sold back some BOD, but means a razorgirl can reliably shiv mooks. And not having the weapon do damage to itself means she doesn't have to carry a lot of spares to account for breakage. And generally, using a bigger weapon will still increase the damage done, because of the way the STR Minima are set. Anyway, thanks for getting me to reread the adding damage and weapon damage rules.

Observing from this side of The Pond, I'm sanguine that Trump is entirely unelectable as President. Clinton II won't "doom" the country any more than it is already; the trajectory of dominance has its own inertia anyway, and I'm not sure that a Sanders Presidency (attractive as it might seem) could alter that either. But HRC will preside over "business as usual", and nothing will change, if only because Congress will be deadlocked. Maybe Sanders' legacy will be that he galvanises enough Democrats to vote to change how Congress behaves.

I don't find that justification very convincing. The nature of the target is more important. A decent steel blade will not break just because it's cut a man completely in two rather than just dinging his skull. Edit cos the timer went off and I hit "post" too soon... It's not just physics, either. Many damage adders are about skill and placement: extracting someone's liver in little slices doesn't put insuperable stresses on a fine rapier, but is just as lethal as a giant chopper crushing a ribcage.

"Elsa wasn't expecting the hessian bag to hit quite so hard..."

Railsea by China Mieville. Typically idiosyncratic homage to Herman Melville and other ocean stories.

Why bother? Just keep using DnD/Pathfinder/whatever; it's already set up that way. Converting out of one system into another that has to be jimmied so it's exactly the same as the one you're coming from seems like a serious waste of time.

And are habitually referred to as "Fair folk" because if they happen to hear you being at all derogatory, they'll claw your face off and curse your children to be baboons.

4 disrupt C35 counter enemy snipers

Um, no. Random events have tuned life. Mutations are random events. Meteor/comet impacts are random events. Random events combined with their interaction with life and the environment drive evolution. But that's as far as I'm going to go if this is going to get turned into a conversation like two best mates I used to know (one rationalist, the other deist): "Made," said the deist. "Just happened," said the rationalist. Repeat, potentially, ad infinitum. They'd between them settled somehow on three repetitions before letting the matter rest.

You might want to try again with that second sentence.