Toxxus

Your rights have been infringed since the 2nd Amendment does not constrain the type of arms you may bear (arms, not guns) by firing mode. You technically have the right to any weapon that you can reasonably bear (carry and use). But you are so used to the constitutionally illegal restrictions that have piled on over the years you don't even notice it. The reality is most of us would be OK with some restrictions. I don't want a neighbor with bazookas, for example, but I'd like them to change the amendment before creating laws that ignore it. Mostly because I don't want my other constitutionally protected rights to be violated whenever the government wants to ignore the Bill of Rights. It's the slippery slope of tyranny my friend.

You just have to get far enough into the us-good them-evil dichotomy and you're good to go. We lost somewhere in the range of 100-200 million people in the previous century because ideologues decided who to blame when things weren't going well. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Communist Russia - it's all the same disease. Things are bad and it's the fault of those guys right there! Kill, rinse, repeat until utopia achieved. Once you're deep into the cycle your own well being is irrelevant. You must destroy the evil them at all costs!

Signs that a society has completely collapsed - roving bands of gunmen shooting the very aid workers trying to save them from Ebola. Game over.

You realize the level of "know what they are doing" involves folding a belt in half and gripping it with the right amount of slack, right? As in anyone interested enough in automatic weapon fire (which they know is illegal) is going to get through this level of difficulty in under 30 minutes. The number of people deterred is going to be right around zero. Also, you may not want to be so comfortable with your constitutional rights being violated because some other items on that list include your freedom of speech, right to due process, protection against being enslaved and so on. I think we're so used to our rights being violated, as a whole, that it barely registers when it happens. How would you feel about a law that prevents you from complaining about political parties or politicians or face felony charges? Because that's not any different than this silly bump stock ban.

This lead to me wanting Obama to win on his first run. Republicans had failed to even TRY to deliver on their promises for so long I wanted them to lose. The only problem was that the alternative was even worse. There hasn't been a winning vote option for President in the last 16-20 years. It's such a stupid regulation. If you know what you're doing you can use a leather belt as a bump stock. I hate these rules for two reasons 1- They don't work - at all. 2- They violate the 2nd amendment. I think most people would be down for some regulation on firearms, but the current law is "shall not be infringed" and I don't like the idea of the government violating our constitutionally protected rights whenever it's convenient. I mean - they do constantly - but I hate it.

If I can badly paraphrase an old software development axiom: Your players won't care whether or not you've memorized the rules. They will care whether or not they've had fun. Get a story going - get them engaged. The rules are there to facilitate fun.

I believe there was a small surplus for 1 or 2 years under Clinton (with a conservative congress) and long before and long since it has all been varying degrees of impending bankruptcy.

I often feel that the issues with the government control of various things is less about political ideology and more about how well they're running the program. I would love everyone to be covered, but I can't trust a government that is 21+ trillion dollars in the hole that has saved exactly NONE of the money I've paid in for the last 3 decades for MY retirement with even more money and authority. If social security was funded for the foreseeable future and the VA wasn't making vets wait until they died of their illnesses to get care I probably wouldn't care much about Obamacare beyond the very dangerous erosion of freedom that came with it. How about adequately fund and manage social security and medicare for the people who have paid in for multiple decades and start paying the debt down before asking for permission to grossly mismanage another 17% of the economy? One thing you notice as you get older: 1- Republican president - debt goes up. 2- Democrat president - debt goes up. 3- Republican congress - debt goes up. 4- Democrat congress - debt goes up. That bill is going to eat our entire annual IRS revenue if the interest rates tick up a little bit and both wings on this bird are flying us right into hell.

If you make the drive at 120 mph you'll get it done in about 20 mins each way and that's not too shabby...

I worked on the software integration between the state & federal Affordable (ha!) Care Act act groups and one of the nations largest insurance carriers. It was a hot mess. The states struggled so greatly with the complexity of the work that almost all of them defaulted their people to the federal exchange. The subsidization rate was astronomical. Also, my favorite part of Obamacare (seriously) the protection for people with pre-existing conditions was exploited at unbelievable levels. Essentially, people would wait until they were sick to sign up for the coverage and rely on sign up grace periods that were endlessly extended. The penalties for not getting insurance were cheaper than the insurance for a lot of people (the ones not so heavily subsidized) so they simply didn't sign up. Costs were massively over predictions so fast that many carriers began to drop out and a large number of areas had only a single provider left (one provider and a government mandate forcing you to sign up.). And the healthcare provider issue exists for Medicare as well. They keep cutting payments and the number of doctors willing to tolerate Medicare patients continues to dwindle.

An almost exact match to my favorite marvel movies list. And you're right. The bar is set so high that when a movie like Captain Marvel hits (which was good, just not Marvel good) hits it gets dumped on. It just wasn't up to the level of awesome we've been spoiled with over the last few years.

At least that worked out. I had a family member get denied, get their appeal insta-rejected and then had to lawyer up. About 15 months before they saw check #1 and 25% of the accumulated disability payments had to go to the lawyer. If you have any doubt that the rate of fraud is picking up just spend a morning at the SSA office and look who's applying for benefits.

I've been largely doing this on the fly for my D&D group and it would be great to have something more formalized. One of the things I've had to address is the action economy around reactions. They don't really have that in HERO so I've built out most of those abilities with a Trigger advantage that can't be reset until the start of your next phase. A pleasant surprise is that the blatantly overpowered spells of 5th edition D&D are all prohibitively expensive in HERO. AKA - Active Points balance the powers out better than Crawfordian fiat.

My wife's character has an AoE usable by nearby life support ability vs. poison and disease. I've allowed her to "heal" sick people by spending a couple days with them with their immune systems being able to eventually prevail while the deleterious effects of the disease were held at bay by the life support. Made for an interesting RP encounter where the normally nuke happy fire witch was willing to sit with a family of infected villagers for a couple days.

I'm trying to get Encumbrance penalties to show up on the character sheet. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that out of the box. I'll give the customer adders or modifiers a try.

We're running Fantasy Hero 6th edition with a couple of house rule carry overs from 4th edition (encumbrance and armor penalties and weapons with STR min based on active points).

Medicare fraud is clocking in at around 25% compared to 3% for private insurance so maybe a little extra scrutiny applied to verifying people who claim the need have the need isn't unwarranted. Alternately, I really need all your money and only embracing fascist evil would make you hesitate to hand it over. If we're being serious though - I had a family member who was legitimately in need of disability payments. They applied twice, got shot down twice and had to sue. 15 months before the need started and the money started. Not a fun ride at all. I balance that with also knowing someone on welfare who claimed to not know who the father of her children was so that he could get paid to babysit them at home. There are no easy answers to this stuff.

Massive Area of Effect Tunnelling, limitation only lasts for 2 phases, side effect - Mountain falls on you if you're still in the tunnel when it ends.

I've gone with a hybrid of 4th edition Encumbrance rules where if the players strength is high enough they can remove 1 level of penalties. Anything after that I attribute to weight & bulk and they have to deal with it. My Wednesday night team has a strange mix of a true tank (full plate, big shield, martial strikes every round to get +2 DCV) and is usually sitting at 8rPD, 8PD, 12 DCV, 6 OCV. The "backup" tank is wearing heavy plate 9rPD, 8PD and dual wielding. He's generally at 2 DCV (yes, two) and 10 OCV due to armor penalties. The small shots fall away like rain drops, but the big bads drop him constantly. It's not a *real* encounter until Scrappy is KO'd. Anyway, interesting take on the shield-as-barrier idea. So against a big bad like a dragon pulsing out 4d6k or 3d6k armor piercing the shield would most likely be destroyed on the first use as a barrier. Do you remove the DCV bonus when the shield as used as a barrier so that if the character is attacked from the sides or back they don't benefit from the shield?

Also, it's quite historically accurate to be able to block arrows with shields. It is the historical go-to tool for dealing with ranged attacks.

True, but that last one really hurts. Being 1/2 DCV for an extended period is a real liability. Barriers are an interesting item for Fantasy Hero. I've forced the players to make a DEX roll to successfully abort to Barrier as a defense. Otherwise it's just TOO effective. I've also applied an armor-stacking mechanic to barriers to prevent them from reducing damage to virtually nothing. Example: Plate Armor Man (8 rPD/ 8 PD) is behind the Barrier( 7 PD, 3 bod) that Earth Mage has thrown up. The Tectonic Dragon breathes a shower of deadly rock shards (4d6k) at Plate Armor Man. The roll is (14 BOD / 28 STUN). Do you... 1- Remove 10 BOD / 10 STUN as the attack annihilates the barrier and apply 4 BOD / 18 STUN against Plate Armor Man's defenses resulting in 0 BOD / 2 STUN taken? OR 2- Remove 10 BOD / 10 STUN as the attack annihilates the barrier and apply 4 BOD / 18 STUN against the stackable portion of Plate Armor Man's defenses (2 rPD) and apply 2 BOD / 16 STUN?

This is true, but I'm trying to balance the effectiveness of the move against Dive for Cover which in action economy terms and combat vulnerability is VERY expensive. 1- You abort your turn. 2- It may not work. 3- You end up prone (1/2 DCV) until your next phase. If you just aborted that's closer to two phases. They've made it intentionally difficult to avoid AoE damage and that's probably there to prevent Captain DCV from avoiding too many forms of damage. The tank on my Wednesday crew is in full plate armor with a large shield and with hits martial arts and combat skill levels he's usually at 12 DCV. Standard attacks rarely hit and when they do the damage is heavily mitigated. He's like the Tick. Nigh invulnerable. If I let him further mitigate AoE damage by hiding behind shields... That steps on the toes of the vulnerable low-armor high-dex types who make up for their fragility with mobility. I'll agree with you that it is a pretty iconic fantasy trope - hiding behind the shield to avoid dragon breath damage - but if its too easy to pull off or too effective you'll put game balance at risk. How would you handle it?

I would probably allow a variation of my limited-armor-stacking scheme and do: +1 rPD/ +1 rED for Medium Shield - requires abort or held action +2 rPD / +2 rED for Large Shield - requires abort or held action If you wanted the move to be more effective you might replace it with a variation like this: 25% resistant damage reduction (PD/ED) for Medium Shield with a successful block roll 50% resistant damage reduction (PD/ED) for Large Shield with a successful block roll

One of the challenging parts with stories that lean away from combat is that you need to develop two things: 1- Motivation - Why do the characters care? What's their stake in what's happening? If they seem to not care about NPCs (not knowing names is a big clue) then they haven't been hooked. a. The NPCs have to feel like real people in the story. Real people that they care about. b. This works for villains as well. They'll stop most any villain because it's the right thing to do, but a villain they have personal reasons to loathe will add an intensity to the combat that is otherwise absent. 2- The characters have to be actual characters. This means the players have to feel they have a character in a story and not a pile of combat stats. a. Some (most) of this is on the players. If they are just moving the Knight on their chessboard they're not as deeply invested. b. Some of this is on the GM to hook the players and their characters into the story. It's hard to do well. Keep practicing. If you're using pre-canned adventures then be picky. I grabbed War for the Crown from Pathfinder a few months ago and started my group down that path even though I had concerns it would be too social schmoozing and intrigue related and too light on combat. The players love it! It is such a nice break from the other campaign we were doing - Dungeon of the Mad Mage - which is a 1000 room dungeon slog.

I mostly run Fantasy Hero so here's what I'm currently running with: If you have a shield you can make a block against a ranged attack with a standard roll. If you have magical powers of synergistic or antagonistic special effects you can block a ranged attack with your ranged attack (fire to block fire or ice to block fire, etc.). I don't allow for blocking ranged attacks with a weapon unless you buy the Deflection power. If you were going to make it more sophisticated with modifiers I would recommend these: Range: The defender gets a bonus to the block roll equal to 1/2 the range modifier between themselves and the attacker. More range = more time to block. Shield Size: -1 for bucklers, standard roll for medium shields, +1 for large shields AoE: If the defender is using magic to block another magic attack maybe allow for a bonus if their attack is a cone or other AoE