ScottishFox

This might seem bardic, but you can change some of he Limitations:
 
Hard Rock Song:  (Total: 54 Active Cost, 14 Real Cost) Change Environment (-13m of Tunneling, Long-Lasting 1 Day), Costs Endurance Only To Activate (+1/4), Area Of Effect (16m Radius; +3/4) (54 Active Points); OAF (Guitar; -1), No Range (-1/2), Gestures (Requires both hands; -1/2), Incantations (-1/4), Concentration (1/2 DCV; -1/4), Extra Time (Full Phase, Only to Activate, -1/4) (Real Cost: 14)
 
A full phase to sing it, effects last all day. You may need to make it more powerful if the worm has more tunneling, but this will definitely slow it down.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary doesn't think the worm will like that a hole lot.

Aid rPD (only to stone or rock) is the easy, cheap method.  It gives a temporary effect so that you aren't altering the material forever. And yes, you'd need AE or you're only going to affect a small portion of stone (like one tile or an area the size of a hand).
 
Another option is transformation, which turns the stone in question into even tougher stone.  That said, its going to be expensive.  This would be a minor transform (you're not making it anything different, just enhancing it slightly) but rock has a LOT of body, and you need to do a pretty big area.
 
A third option is Entangle: it puts a permanent (or at least enduring) effect of making something that is difficult to break through, and you can call it a molecule-thin layer of super-stone that is tougher than the ground.  This has the drawback of not actually making the rock harder, but adding a layer of super hard stuff on top of it.  This too will be spendy (AE, high PD, although it could be 0 Body)
 
You could use Barrier, but its going to be even more expensive than transform and entangle to get that large of an area, and its even less permanent than the Aid option.
 
A final thought: you could just drain the tunneling ability of the worm.  Reducing its ability to penetrate rock would make it unable to escape as well.

I've been running a game for awhile now and needed a break.  Convinced one of my long-time D&D DM friends to take the reigns for a few weeks.
 
He was sweating bullets, but by the end of the session he was getting the hang of it.
 
Resistance is futile.  They will be (Fantasy HERO) assimilated. 

I have to say, Warren probably lost my primary vote with something that may seem small: her demand for a "no first use of nukes" pledge.
 
First, I don't like litmus-test policy oaths. It's so... Republican.
 
Second, it's either posturing or it's incredibly arrogant. We can't know what the future may bring. It's foolish to imagine there could never be a circumstance in which first use becomes the least bad option. And very often, leaders are forced to choose least-bad options.
 
A fair and honest pledge would be, "My administration's policy would be to not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. [Which, IIRC has been US military policy for long periods -- someone check me on this, please.] But extraordinary events may force policies to change." Not as good a sound bite, though.
 
Dean Shomshak

Yeah. I mean, yup, Russian interference IS a thing, but alas, it is in danger of becoming an excuse when it doesn't apply as well.  Honestly, it went beyond Burn, whatever you think of Tulsi, she stated what fact checkers later found to be dead on FACTS about Harris' performance while in a position of power. That is germane to someone hoping to be Prez.
 
 
Well goodness, this man is a medical genius. He needs to leave the presidency and get t work as Surgeon General!
 
 

Pretty much the reason I read this board I like getting these pieces of contextual information from people.  When I feel it's very relevant I'll dig up more on them.

Yak gives Universal Translator with side effect:  can't shut up.
 

“Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.”
---Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

Every couple of years, the US government tries to bail out Medicare's financial situation by having another round of cuts to the amount it reimburses a doctor for doing anything for a Medicare patient.
 
The government requires more paperwork for Medicare patients than many private insurances require for their patients while at the same time Medicare pays doctors only a small fraction of what the doctor would have received from a private insurer.  And the government is continually reducing the amount of money it gives to doctors for seeing Medicare patients so that the little the doctor gets paid to see a Medicare patient this year will most likely be even less the next year.
 
A doctor only has so many hours in a day to see patients and most doctors are running a business which has a significant and fixed amount of overhead (paying nurses, office staff, rent, electric bill, buying equipment, etc.) which it has to pay out regardless of how much money is coming in.
 
So I find it hard to write the problem off as being an "attitude" problem of the doctors, even speaking as a Medicare patient who has had endless problems finding willing doctors and keeping them.
 
The real problem I have with Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan isn't that the proposed benefits are substantially better (and more expensive) than the benefits available under the current Medicare system but that it would explicitly end private insurance which is all which is allowing many doctor's offices across the country to remain financially viable.
 
The practice my wife's doctor works out of has been wildly unstable over the last five years. Even with their move to smaller and cheaper offices, the doctor's in the practice who accept Medicare patients haven't been able to pay their portion of the bills and contribute anything toward having a profitable practice. So there's been a constant stream of doctor's who accept Medicare coming into the practice, going broke and having to drop out of the practice or having to quit taking Medicare patients. And while I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, rent and salaries for staff here is nothing like what doctors have to pay in Boston or New York City. I honestly have no idea how general practitioners who accept Medicare patients manage to stay in business in the northeastern US cities at all.
 
Whatever changes are made in the US healthcare system in the future, part of the solution isn't to continually cut the reimbursement rates paid to doctors of Medicare patients.
 
< /rant >
 

Reading medical bills is the pathway to Cthulu-esque madness.
 
I had an outpatient surgery about 15 years ago.  The bill was over $35,000.  The insurance only paid about $12,000.  Then there was a stream of numbers and arcane symbols only a mage specialized in billing can read and my share was less than $400.
 
It makes no sense.

1st question:  Neither party is willing to touch its 3rd rail items.  Nobody will cut enough spending to medicare, social security or the military to even slow the train wreck down.  We're upside down to the tune of 150 *trillion* dollars.  If any of us was in debt to the tune of 7.5x our annual pre-tax wages would we be pretending we're in a salvageable situation?
 
2nd question:  The kind of pressure that would be required at this point would be far beyond what voting could accomplish.  I believe our politicians are going to crash this train and then blame each other for the mess while the number of uninsured Americans leaps to catastrophic levels as medicare collapses.  It's going to get real ugly for a few years.
 
3rd question:  No real solutions will draw votes.  Politicians avoid them like the plague.  One thing we're not dealing with at ALL is the supply of physicians and dentists.  The supply of both is going down because the schools that create them are unable to stay in business.  I have to imagine a fairly obscene level of regulatory burden and malpractice insurance rates are contributing to this.  Another problem is that there has been a very nice increase in the number of female dentists (yay!), but they tend to work a LOT fewer hours than their male counterparts which means we need MORE dentists than we did previously - not less.
 
I do not have a good answer for #3 and I'd be skeptical of anyone who said they did.  It is going to take many years of effort on numerous fronts to get healthcare back on track.  I'd also like the people who have paid decades of money into social security to get taken care since they actually put their hard earned money into the program involuntarily.
 
I often wonder why we don't take an approach similar to car insurance (low monthly premiums, coverage is basically nothing until you have a serious problem) for health care.  My car insurance rates have been lovely compared to my health insurance rates over the last couple decades.  One of the contributing cost problems is the nature of 3rd party payers.  My share of an MRI is $27?  Ok, let's get it.  Oh, my share is $2750?  No, thanks, let's try that high-res ultra-sound first. 
Still - I have no good answers here and neither does either party trying to win my vote.
 
4th question:  Nobody should accept that.  We should strive to get everyone covered (*).  We should temper that effort with caution and be wary of making things worse.  Possibly catastrophically so.
 
* - Side Note:  Insurance and coverage aren't even the right paradigm which shows how far misaligned the whole conversation is.  People need affordable healthcare.  Not insurance - healthcare.
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_american_way_of_dentistry/2009/09/the_american_way_of_dentistry_3.html
 
 

There's definitely some of this.  There's also the part where our existing government healthcare systems are worse than private coverage in many instances.
 
The number of veterans that have died while waiting for their already promised VA benefits is staggering and disgusting.  The last family member I have who got on Medicare needed a lawyer and 15 months to get on and gets to deal with several doctors not accepting their business at all.
 
Philosophically, I don't care if the insurance is private or publicly administered as long as it is run effectively.  I don't trust the American government to handle this well.
I've been paying into social security for well over 30 years and they saved literally none of the money they've collected from me.  When I'm finally old enough to retire, unless they make massive changes, the money I was promised and paid for will simply not be there.

Handing over one of the largest economic sectors in the country to the same government that has run us 22.5 trillion dollars in the hole and continues to have a trillion dollar a year deficit while the spending continues to climb seems like a very bad idea.  I would love government run healthcare for everyone.  The promises they already made to people are worth 125 trillion and change.  I just can't trust the government to deliver.
 
I think our collective batch of irresponsible politicians will run this thing into the ground before they even consider something resembling fiscal sanity.
 

1st question:  Neither party is willing to touch its 3rd rail items.  Nobody will cut enough spending to medicare, social security or the military to even slow the train wreck down.  We're upside down to the tune of 150 *trillion* dollars.  If any of us was in debt to the tune of 7.5x our annual pre-tax wages would we be pretending we're in a salvageable situation?
 
2nd question:  The kind of pressure that would be required at this point would be far beyond what voting could accomplish.  I believe our politicians are going to crash this train and then blame each other for the mess while the number of uninsured Americans leaps to catastrophic levels as medicare collapses.  It's going to get real ugly for a few years.
 
3rd question:  No real solutions will draw votes.  Politicians avoid them like the plague.  One thing we're not dealing with at ALL is the supply of physicians and dentists.  The supply of both is going down because the schools that create them are unable to stay in business.  I have to imagine a fairly obscene level of regulatory burden and malpractice insurance rates are contributing to this.  Another problem is that there has been a very nice increase in the number of female dentists (yay!), but they tend to work a LOT fewer hours than their male counterparts which means we need MORE dentists than we did previously - not less.
 
I do not have a good answer for #3 and I'd be skeptical of anyone who said they did.  It is going to take many years of effort on numerous fronts to get healthcare back on track.  I'd also like the people who have paid decades of money into social security to get taken care since they actually put their hard earned money into the program involuntarily.
 
I often wonder why we don't take an approach similar to car insurance (low monthly premiums, coverage is basically nothing until you have a serious problem) for health care.  My car insurance rates have been lovely compared to my health insurance rates over the last couple decades.  One of the contributing cost problems is the nature of 3rd party payers.  My share of an MRI is $27?  Ok, let's get it.  Oh, my share is $2750?  No, thanks, let's try that high-res ultra-sound first. 
Still - I have no good answers here and neither does either party trying to win my vote.
 
4th question:  Nobody should accept that.  We should strive to get everyone covered (*).  We should temper that effort with caution and be wary of making things worse.  Possibly catastrophically so.
 
* - Side Note:  Insurance and coverage aren't even the right paradigm which shows how far misaligned the whole conversation is.  People need affordable healthcare.  Not insurance - healthcare.
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_american_way_of_dentistry/2009/09/the_american_way_of_dentistry_3.html
 
 

1st question:  Neither party is willing to touch its 3rd rail items.  Nobody will cut enough spending to medicare, social security or the military to even slow the train wreck down.  We're upside down to the tune of 150 *trillion* dollars.  If any of us was in debt to the tune of 7.5x our annual pre-tax wages would we be pretending we're in a salvageable situation?
 
2nd question:  The kind of pressure that would be required at this point would be far beyond what voting could accomplish.  I believe our politicians are going to crash this train and then blame each other for the mess while the number of uninsured Americans leaps to catastrophic levels as medicare collapses.  It's going to get real ugly for a few years.
 
3rd question:  No real solutions will draw votes.  Politicians avoid them like the plague.  One thing we're not dealing with at ALL is the supply of physicians and dentists.  The supply of both is going down because the schools that create them are unable to stay in business.  I have to imagine a fairly obscene level of regulatory burden and malpractice insurance rates are contributing to this.  Another problem is that there has been a very nice increase in the number of female dentists (yay!), but they tend to work a LOT fewer hours than their male counterparts which means we need MORE dentists than we did previously - not less.
 
I do not have a good answer for #3 and I'd be skeptical of anyone who said they did.  It is going to take many years of effort on numerous fronts to get healthcare back on track.  I'd also like the people who have paid decades of money into social security to get taken care since they actually put their hard earned money into the program involuntarily.
 
I often wonder why we don't take an approach similar to car insurance (low monthly premiums, coverage is basically nothing until you have a serious problem) for health care.  My car insurance rates have been lovely compared to my health insurance rates over the last couple decades.  One of the contributing cost problems is the nature of 3rd party payers.  My share of an MRI is $27?  Ok, let's get it.  Oh, my share is $2750?  No, thanks, let's try that high-res ultra-sound first. 
Still - I have no good answers here and neither does either party trying to win my vote.
 
4th question:  Nobody should accept that.  We should strive to get everyone covered (*).  We should temper that effort with caution and be wary of making things worse.  Possibly catastrophically so.
 
* - Side Note:  Insurance and coverage aren't even the right paradigm which shows how far misaligned the whole conversation is.  People need affordable healthcare.  Not insurance - healthcare.
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_american_way_of_dentistry/2009/09/the_american_way_of_dentistry_3.html
 
 

1st question:  Neither party is willing to touch its 3rd rail items.  Nobody will cut enough spending to medicare, social security or the military to even slow the train wreck down.  We're upside down to the tune of 150 *trillion* dollars.  If any of us was in debt to the tune of 7.5x our annual pre-tax wages would we be pretending we're in a salvageable situation?
 
2nd question:  The kind of pressure that would be required at this point would be far beyond what voting could accomplish.  I believe our politicians are going to crash this train and then blame each other for the mess while the number of uninsured Americans leaps to catastrophic levels as medicare collapses.  It's going to get real ugly for a few years.
 
3rd question:  No real solutions will draw votes.  Politicians avoid them like the plague.  One thing we're not dealing with at ALL is the supply of physicians and dentists.  The supply of both is going down because the schools that create them are unable to stay in business.  I have to imagine a fairly obscene level of regulatory burden and malpractice insurance rates are contributing to this.  Another problem is that there has been a very nice increase in the number of female dentists (yay!), but they tend to work a LOT fewer hours than their male counterparts which means we need MORE dentists than we did previously - not less.
 
I do not have a good answer for #3 and I'd be skeptical of anyone who said they did.  It is going to take many years of effort on numerous fronts to get healthcare back on track.  I'd also like the people who have paid decades of money into social security to get taken care since they actually put their hard earned money into the program involuntarily.
 
I often wonder why we don't take an approach similar to car insurance (low monthly premiums, coverage is basically nothing until you have a serious problem) for health care.  My car insurance rates have been lovely compared to my health insurance rates over the last couple decades.  One of the contributing cost problems is the nature of 3rd party payers.  My share of an MRI is $27?  Ok, let's get it.  Oh, my share is $2750?  No, thanks, let's try that high-res ultra-sound first. 
Still - I have no good answers here and neither does either party trying to win my vote.
 
4th question:  Nobody should accept that.  We should strive to get everyone covered (*).  We should temper that effort with caution and be wary of making things worse.  Possibly catastrophically so.
 
* - Side Note:  Insurance and coverage aren't even the right paradigm which shows how far misaligned the whole conversation is.  People need affordable healthcare.  Not insurance - healthcare.
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_american_way_of_dentistry/2009/09/the_american_way_of_dentistry_3.html
 
 

Part of it is that it's those that are most in need that are not being taken care of (often).  As you say, if you're insured and in generally good health, there's little issue (though out of pocket can still be pretty high...and insurance costs, even when half is footed by the employer, are VERY high compared to other countries).  It's when you're in need that things change (for the worse).  A friend of mine had been fighting cancer for years...very expensive treatments.  His insurer decided to cut him off/decline coverage.  The insurer's gamble was sound -- it would cost a large chunk of money for my friend to go after them in court and make them pay...and the insurer's legal fees were already covered by the lawyers they kept on retainer.  So they could cut him off and worst-case (for them) be forced to pay out after a lengthy court battle.

The flip side to this (and part of the reason for doctors' reluctance to take Medicare patients) is that we're a VERY litigious society. This drives up rates across the board, doctors paying higher malpractice insurance, insurers having higher rates due to payouts and legal, etc.  This is why it's not an easy solution -- any change in coverage (single payer, etc.) needs to be matched with protections for doctors (and, in turn, the insurers) from litigation. Not immunity, but protection.

Funny. 
 
I left my hometown of Circle, Alaska and went straight to Georgia.  Unfortunately, I arrived in the middle of winter and thought "sweet!  I can ride all year round down here!" 
 
When the job finished up, I stayed. 
 
That first summer, I was hospitalized twice for heat prostration.  I'd give a leg to get back to the frozen whatever it was you called it. 

I felt this way when I lived up north.  If going outside means you will die then God clearly doesn't want you to live here.
 
I left the frozen, murderous wastelands 30+ years ago.

I felt this way when I lived up north.  If going outside means you will die then God clearly doesn't want you to live here.
 
I left the frozen, murderous wastelands 30+ years ago.

I have a few characters I've made off of completely random comments by my players.  Entire plot twists spun up by a stray comment or two.
 
One such character spawned from, "Oh, Ned the Baker, I'm going to write that down because I'm SURE he's a key player in the story....".
He is now you snarky !@#$. 
 
Little do my players know, but Ned the Baker will be the one that will resurrect them with his mystical pastries should they fall in battle.
 
His powers are a variety of buffs, self-only, usable by others, delayed effect, OAF - baked good, that essentially can be used by anyone who eats one of the enchanted pastries.  He needs a few hours near a stove or open flame to recover his charges.
 
I can't wait to spring this guy on the players.

I've been running a game for awhile now and needed a break.  Convinced one of my long-time D&D DM friends to take the reigns for a few weeks.
 
He was sweating bullets, but by the end of the session he was getting the hang of it.
 
Resistance is futile.  They will be (Fantasy HERO) assimilated. 

I'm the same way, but it's not necessarily a comfort-level thing.  I'm just a cheap-a**-b*****d. 

There's a lot, as a stereotype, Europeans don't get about American homes.
 
Some do not understand just how bleeping HOT some parts of  our country gets (And I'm not talking the last 20 years either). This confusion could be considered our fault as we don't use Celsius  Also, our TV shows either show the North East or a breezy sunny cali as a rule. They do not show you "Devil's Armpit, Louisiana" "or Frying Pan, Arizona"
I hear a lot of trash talk about how we all have 'way too much house'... which I might agree with but it always comes across as sour grapes. For a long time, we could build bigger because there was land and resources to do it in and past generations could afford it.
Then there's the 'our houses are made of stone'...
Well, yes.. we have more wood than most countries in Europe... you build with what you got. Heck, we actually have more forest now than we did 170 years ago so I hear.
But I do tend to prefer the AC set  at warmer temps than my housemates. they like 72... so it's always blowing in the summer .. me? I'm good with 75
 
 
 
 
 

I saw a video recently about things in America that the rest of the world finds confusing. I had no idea that our fondness for air conditioning was so rare. But then, I'm in Florida. It's not a luxury, it's a necessity here. 

Hmm, seems like I needed to give myself the old RTFM advice.
 
It's actually under the Usable by Others advantage writeup in 6E1.
 
"Characteristics: Characters cannot buy Characteristics
as Usable By Others without GM’s
permission; they should use Aid to achieve that
effect."
 
/facepalm