Toxxus

I woke up yesterday morning - in a start - to the sound of my wife crying beside the bed. Ran over to see what was going on - She had slipped off the side of the bed and attempted to break her spine on the wood frame. She's been limping around the house for a couple days with a swollen knee and a bruise on her lower back that looks like a Rorschach test.

I felt like the ballista could have easily been dealt with on the naval front by simply going high enough to be unseen and then diving in on the ships from behind. The ballista take a fair bit of time to turn and they have a limited arc of fire - they can't fire anywhere near straight up. A good dive & strafe would have wreaked havoc. The accuracy of the ballista would be high questionable as well. Like, what are they using for target practice to train the soldiers firing them? It's not like they have hot-air-balloon-dragons to test on.

Yeah, it's so rough now with like 1/2 the world's poor being lifted out of poverty in the last several years. Way ahead of UN expectations and stuff. Modern medicine and amenities are a real nightmare. Most people from anywhere in human history would have killed to enjoy the abject misery and horror that we have today.

I lean this way as well. If nothing else, just to trim the ruleset down to something that normal human beings (not nerds like us) are willing to play with.

It might avoid restating that for the simple fact they've already covered that you don't need an attack roll to break out of entangles. Mental Paralysis is a special type of entangle, but absent a specific rule indicating you DO need an attack roll why would you not continue with the previously established rule? The basis for Entangles having a DCV of 3 comes from this section in entangle: "A character may target most types of Entangle specifically, without damaging the character inside it (unless the Entangle has the Entangle And Character Both Take Damage Advantage, below), at -3 OCV. Typically an Entangle targeted in this manner has DCV 0,... " -- Resulting in 3 Then a couple pages later under Mental Paralysis: Another character can target a Mental Paralysis without targeting its victim; the Mental Paralysis has DMCV 3 for this purpose. This doesn't lend itself to requiring a to-hit roll to break out of an Entangle - at all. Also, a subset of a group inherits the properties of the set unless otherwise stated. The most rational interpretation would be that Mental Paralysis (a subset of Entangle) doesn't require a to-hit roll to break out of because the parent set doesn't require a to-hit roll. You're artificially adding something that just isn't there.

Though I generally favor Voter ID laws, this seems unusually harsh. I mean we require a test and an ID to be allowed to operate a motor vehicle and that kills way fewer people than bad government. On the plus side for you with a few more million economic refugees from California - Texas will flip blue and then it's going to be democrat everything for the foreseeable future.

Let me preface by saying I like the HERO system handling of DEF vs. BOD more than any other system, but one thing that has always bothered me is DEF not being adjusted by thickness. Ex: If we're talking pine boards - it's a relatively soft wood and the defense would be low. But in my daughter's TKD class the boards are so thin that the kids with 0 STR (or less) can blast through them with a single blow. I can see at a standard thickness where additional thickness wouldn't add anything to the defense. Such as a medium tree vs. a large tree vs. a chainsaw. The thickness of the tree just makes it take longer to carve through. But on the opposite end of the spectrum - if steel is thin enough - I can bend it with my old man strength (the real kind, not the mythical kind - STR 13 tops). Block of glass vs. light bulb, etc. Are there any rules for reducing DEF when materials are very thin?

Primarily the spellcaster's in my game use OMCV for their alternate CV. I allow for spells to target STAT/3 as a CV as an alternative to help simulate D&D spells in the game for players coming from that background.

I feel this is where a lot of game discussions break down. There's RAW and there's the specific rule set for your own game and then there's what makes the game fun.

I could see that for selling stats off, but I can't imagine that holds true for Drains. If it were then the entire section of what happens when your STR and other stats reach 0 would be pointless (6E1,42).

I haven't even mentioned that it's an option to either one of my tables for fear that it will immediately result in them all selling OMCV to 0 and using the points to raise DMCV to 6 for "free".

I think with the collusion collapse and the sentiment of the public largely shifting that some outlets will put out some mildly positive news on Trump to try to reclaim their status as impartial reporters of the truth instead of DNC marketing team (minus Fox news which is clearly the RNC marketing team).

I felt so strongly this way when they smoked Wolverine and replaced him with the young Hispanic lady. Make interesting new heroes as you go along. Don't hijack the old ones and repaint them. It feels so forced and it alienates the long-time fans (who have paid for the product for decades).

If your STR is high enough - A fallen enemy.

Tactically and thematically - great move. But, I was thinking more in terms of game balance. If you allow the grab & tunnel combo you're effectively giving that character a massive barrier/entangle/darkness ability that is on par with Extra-Dimensional Movement Usable as an Attack. The lever I normally use at my tables for such abilities is: Are you OK with the villains doing this to your characters? That normally dissuades the over-the-top powers.

Captain Contact and the Cataract Kid (much like a villainous Batman & Robin) would be opposed by... 1- Lasik and his deadly array of cost-effective eyeball lasers. 2- Lady Crystal Lens and her perfect, but costly vision! Ok, this pun HAS been beaten to death.

One idea i had after the episode is that the Night King is from House Targaryen since he is immune to dragon fire. The way he died was profoundly anti-climactic. Arya just smokes him from out of nowhere... No back and forth, no villain monologue, no understanding of why he's trying to do any of this? Nothing? Ok....

Presumably a large chunk of formerly dusted teachers and administration staff will have returned with the new students. Should be a wash.

Things like this are probably not helping stabilize the mood of the increasingly unrepresented voting public. Princeton University study: Public opinion has “near-zero” impact on U.S. law. Gilens & Page found that the number of Americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that Congress will make it law. “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

I feel like the 52% of the population who didn't vote for him assumes he is both stupid AND evil. And maybe one of those things is true, but he's not stupid. He's turned a big chunk of daddy's money into a titanic amount of money and run a successful TV show for many years and then, based largely on being insulted, took the presidency. Stupid won't get you that far.

That was a good read. Thanks for the link. Just seeing how disgustingly racist the country was even 50 years ago makes me feel MUCH better about America today. The things they tried back then would have them instantly ostracized in modern times.

Mentally, Captain Contacts takes me in a completely different direction. Imagine a HERO with a transparent Captain America style shield (contact) on one arm and a nano-tech lens launcher on his other arm. Fun powers like: 1- AoE severe transform - glasses / goggles / eye wear into contact lenses - which then fall to the ground and are near invisible unmitigated visual difficulty on the previous eye wear wearers. 2- Dusty Lens - Nano-tech contact drones fly at an opponent and attach sandy, gritty lenses to their eyes inflicting NND stun + flash. 3- Opague Lens - Nano-tech contact drones fly at an opponent and attach inflicting a single-target darkness field on their eyeballs. 4- Frisbee sized hard lenses shoot forcefully from the launcher inflicting armor piercing normal damage that can bounce to additional targets. 5- He can fly standing on his anti-grav lenses. etc. Frustrated by years of overpriced, ill-fitting glasses and a host of bullies a high-tech villain was born. Captain Contacts! His goal - to destroy all diabolical purveyors of eye wear!

You could build the genie stat block and then use Summon with charges to do this. Add the "must obey lamp wielder" as a psychological complication.

In 5th edition D&D they specifically forbade that tactic with Earth Elementals and Blue Dragons and the like because of how powerful an effect it is. If you're being semi-realistic about the weight even at 6 meters down with dirt (not stone) you're looking at having 36 tons of earth on top of you. That's dead in a hurry for anyone without substantial super strength. Plus you can't breathe, can't see, can't move, etc.

Defeating Trump will require two things: 1- The Democrats will have to stop underestimating his ability to win. They laughed him off in the primaries and practically celebrated their victory in advance before the general election. He's a non-politician who took the presidency. And he did this, imo, based on being told he couldn't do it at a random celebrity event a few years earlier. Stop pretending he's somehow insane, mentally deficient, stupid, etc., and take the opponent seriously. 2- Stop claiming to be the party of diversity while forwarding a roster of 80 year old white candidates. The drop in black voters in 2016 and the number of white voters that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump instead of Hillary are the two primary factors that landed Trump in the White House. Also, it might be helpful to stop alienating white voters - 12 percent of whom voted for Obama and then picked Trump over Hillary. from the Washington Post: Those percentages aren’t distributed evenly by race. According to the analysis, 12 percent of white voters who had backed Obama in 2012 voted for Trump four years later. Eleven percent of black Obama 2012 voters stayed home.