Toxxus

To be fair, I have a problem wrapping my head around Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Communist Russia, and Pol Pot as well.
 
Pol Pot had everyone who wore eyeglasses executed because he thought people who wore glasses might be decadent intellectuals.

I can understand to some extent stealing from doctors, who are wealthy compared to the general population, and stealing medicines for themselves or for resale.
 
I have a real problem wrapping my head around shooting undefended doctors and burning down medical facilities which might be otherwise be resupplied with valuable medicines. That just doesn't work well within my personal worldview.

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.

There was still a Republican Congress in the early aughts, but then they had a Republican President to work with, and deficits grew.
 
Democrat. Republican. They're all just politicians.

The deficit certainly shrank during the last years of the Clinton administration, due in large part to there being a Republican-controlled House of Representatives for the first time since 1958.
 
But the actual difference between the reality of "the government running a small deficit" and "showing a surplus to the public" came from changes in accounting procedures so that both sides could claim a political victory, rather than coming from an increase in tax revenue or a decrease in spending to actually completely close the gap.

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.

See Equipment Tags in the documentation. You would need to use those (likely TOTAL_CARRIED is the one you'd be after) along with some MATH.

The rule on CSLs (in 6e at least) says that you can only increase DCV against attacks of the same type as the CSL. So a mace against a bow is HTH vs. Ranged, and doesn’t qualify. 
 
As for whether you must actually have the sword equipped to get the CSL, it seems to me that the skill level is related somehow to the sword itself, and a particular skill with the sword. Maybe it’s a flick of the wrist while facing off, or the way one stands with the sword, etc., that makes the character more protected than if he were using a different (i.e., less skilled) weapon. I guess this is ultimately a judgment call on the GM, but I don’t see getting those benefits of using a sword (as opposed to any other weapon) unless you’re actually armed with the sword.

Since Obamacare passed into law, I'm on my 7th general practitioner.
 
The first ended his practice because he was already having trouble making enough money to keep the practice going and the cost of upgrading his computer systems to comply with the online medical documents mandate was more than he could justify spending.
 
The second decided she didn't want patients who had chronic health problems and encouraged me to find someone else because she wasn't willing to put in the work and take the risk it'd be to remain my doctor.
 
The third got disgusted with the Obamacare changes and quit accepting medical insurance at all. He changed his whole practice into a concierge medical service where you paid $4000 per family member per year up front for the privilege of letting him be your doctor. He told me he anticipated being able to drop more than half of his workload, most of his paperwork headaches, and still keep his income the same.
 
The fourth was a good doctor but the practice was having trouble making money so he moved out of the city where I presume his costs were lower.
 
The fifth was in the same practice as the fourth doctor. But the practice still wasn't making money even after moving to cheaper offices. She still couldn't make money and didn't want to put up the the hassle of being a GP, so she quit being a general practitioner and became a specialist.
 
The sixth was a physician's assistant (PA) in the same practice rather than a full doctor. So I'd have an appointment with her and a productive conversation, and we'd decide on a course of action. Then after I left, at some point later she would have to run the plan we came up with by one of the other doctors in the practice, none of whom took Medicare patients like me. Then that doctor without familiarizing herself with my full medical history would make changes to what the PA and I discussed and those changes wouldn't be communicated to me. Such winners as cutting one of my diabetes medicine dosages in half (and the PA and doctor later being forced to admit whoops, that was a flat out mistake in writing out the prescription) and deliberately removing me completely from triglyceride medication despite the fact that my levels were still far above the recommended level and that my history from the last time I was completely off of medication was that my level was six times the recommended maximum (my GP doctor at the time had his nurses come in and look at the rash caused by the blood fats boiling out of the surface of my skin. Nurses generally don't get to see that because people are dead before they get that bad.).
 
Now, for my 7th GP,  I'm making the drive out to the country to go back and again be a patient of the fourth doctor, who was at least competent, interested, and still in business.
 
I'd had 2 GP's in the previous thirty years before Obamacare became law.
 
Since Obamacare became law nine years ago, I've had 7 GP's. Two of those changes the doctor himself said the reason he would no longer be my doctor was Obamacare. I can't tie the other ones directly to Obamacare but when my average time being with a GP changes from 15 years each to 1.28 years each, obviously something has destabilized things in a way that didn't exist before.
 

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy - Oscar Wilde

I had to twice stand in line for 1.5-2 hours waiting for the SSA office to open...waiting along with 50-60 other people. I can't say I can figure out who is disabled by looking at them, not at all, but everyone but me didn't seem to have a problem standing that length of time and have to sit on the sidewalk. And all the rest of them could hold casual conversations with the people around them without any apparent difficulties. (Considering back problems severe enough to disable someone was one of the top reasons people applied for disability benefits at the time, I thought it was odd that I didn't see any other people in apparent distress. I was on three prescription pain medicines plus naproxen sodium and was still in enough pain that there was no way I could mask the fact that I was in significant pain from others.)
 
By the time I got inside the building, waited there for a long time, and got to see a case worker, I was still non-verbal from the stress and uncontrollably, visibly shaking like a leaf.
 
An outside observer might not have been able to pick out everyone who was "really" disabled, but everyone would have picked me as the person in the line who they thought was really disabled.

I’ve never heard of a system like this before. I think it’s neat.

How about redesigning Mental Entangle so it's a Mind Control power. Only one Command - "to be still."
 
This allows Mental Defense to be effective;
and gives Breakout rolls to the character.
 
This latter has the bonus of being active rather than passive, which is good for the player. They get to feel like they are doing something.
 
Downside is of course that the gap between breakout rolls gets longer and longer... This could be bad for the dragon in the OP.
 
Another downside just occurred to me: what state is the target in in-between being hit by the mental entangle and their first breakout roll? Specifically , what DCV does the target have?
 
Look at me, posting a solution and the reasons why it's a bad solution, all in the one post.
 
<Zoidberg voice> Hooray, I'm helping!

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.

Discovering this thread was like time travel back through the 2016 election cycle. 
 
So much drama and despair and ridiculous statements from both sides of the aisle.
 
I think one of the pinnacle moments was some guy wearing a "Punch a Nazi" t-shirt to my home D&D game.  My wife, who is Mexican, voted for Trump (I didn't) and suddenly white-hipster-man came face to face with reality.
 
You can't call everyone who disagrees with you (either direction) some variation of evil without considering their personal motivations for making their decisions.
 
Hers was that her family immigrated legally and it was BS that millions of people were coming in illegally and ruining it for everyone who played by the rules.  She also supports the wall - big time.  Reminder - she's Mexican.
 
I, like many, felt that I couldn't in good conscience vote for Hillary or Trump and gave my vote to the Libertarians.  Both of them had major problems as candidates for me and I just couldn't do it.  I might as well have voted for Giant Meteor.
 
This was just the mental reset I needed before I start this next bit of code. 

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
 

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.

One of the most important requirements for a decent society is a central authority that is willing and able to assert its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Some very nice people don't like to hear that, but it's true. Because when you lack such a monopoly, you don't get peace and harmony. You get entrepreneurs of violence: gangs, bandits, warlords, clan vendettas, etc. For evidence, there are plenty of Third World hellholes and a lot of history.
 
And so, emotionally satisfying though it might be to see Richard Spence get punched in the face, I must regretfully condemn it as wrong. But I hope the FBI watches him like a hawk, ready to swoop down and nab him the moment he can be linked to a specific violent act.
 
Dean Shomshak

My problem with the whole “punch a nazi” meme is that most people are not equipped to punch a Nazi and the idea that you physically assault someone just because you judge their motivations to be suspect, is in itself, suspect.
 
Doc

As long as we're quoting Snopes:
"In an email sent to Snopes.com, Brandon Kendhammer, associate professor of political science at Ohio University and an expert in Nigerian politics, said the religious dynamics of the conflict were further complicated by the fact that Fulani herders had also been attacking farmers in Zamfara State, “where nearly all the farmers and victims are also Muslim.” He added, “Here, the conflict very clearly appears to be rooted in the impunity of criminal gangs.” "
 
I think the real reason the Nigerian atrocities are getting less play than the New Zealand massacre has to do with the fact that one is in Africa, and the other is in a first-world Western nation we don't expect to be plagued with such violence. In Nigeria, violence is expected, thus, not "news."
 
Lucius Alexander
 
In a Lucius Alexander post, a palindromedary tagline is to be expected.
 

Eh, at this point MCU Marvel has a much longer association with a woman than it does a man anyway.
 
I thought Fury losing his eye was intentionally played for stupid, i.e., look at the way this badass character actually loses an eye.  HAHA, aren't we funny?  No?  Ok.
 
I actually thought his reaction to it was far worse.  He completely no-sold a serious injury for the rest of the movie.  It's one thing in an action movie to take a serious blow and keep fighting, but then to be calmly sitting around the dinner table like nothing happened. I found that a bit jarring.

From my experience running  FH< I am always a little leery of Damage Reduction, and instead use Focus based 0 END Forcewall,  for most applications like that.Only if the shield breaks does damage get through (though minus is's regular PD/ ED subtraction.

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.

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
 

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