ScottishFox

Do you really expect complete silence from national Republicans? It's a sure bet Mitch McConnell will try to ram through another Conservative justice confirmation before the election, in complete repudiation of the stand he took during President Obama's last year. Because principles aren't even a pretense any more.
 
Brace yourself for unabashed political pit-fighting.
 
Remember the recent SCOTUS decisions, and who voted for what. "Conservative" doesn't necessarily mean "hopelessly partisan."
 
He still has an election to win.

But not among a subsection that has no clue about the environment, and views everything like this through rose-colored blinders.  Wild Areas Must Be WIld!!!!  <sigh>  They go ballistic because...yeah, going on in, thinning trees and undergrowth, maybe even doing a controlled burn (PROPERLY, let me specify...controlled burns have gone out of control) will disturb all the little creatures that are there!  They don't even consider the consequence down the line.
 
I still remember...rather a LONG time ago...pine beetles took out a fairly large chunk of trees that happened to be on public lands, technically.  Nothing was done...so there was...gosh, I don't remember...probably few thousand square foot chunk of dead trees, with dried out needes, with pine sap pushed forward because that's how the trees fought back.  The branches would've been bone dry too;  the trunks would go up like an inverted matchstick from the sap.  So several households got together and cleared them all out...before a major fire did, one that would've practically...probably even literally...have exploded within minutes to cover the entire area.  And then spread.
 
I believe several of Colorado's fires have similar stories;  getting in to clear out what NEEDS to get cleared out, is often made much more difficult than it should be.
 
 

Given that you feel safe enough to make posts like this, yes.
 
Dean Shomshak

If you’re talking about the “McConnell Rule” or the “”Biden Rule” before it, they only apply when the Senate and Presidency are controlled by different parties. That doesn’t apply here.
 
Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens were each confirmed in less than forty days, so there’s also precedent for quick confirmations.

If I had to guess... Two options.

One: It is a Buff. You cast Lightning Fist, and either the next Attack with a HTH attack inflicts the effect, or for the next Minute or so the effect will activate with HTH attacks.
Two: It's a specific Attack. You cast by attacking with Lightning Fist. You make a HTH attack, and the effect goes off.
In both, techincally all three of these cases, you would pay END for the second attack, and see if the Magic hits, but only if you hit them.

The base effect I would have as a Linked Power. You say he wants magic Light to go off? Then I'd say... Presuming it is a Flash attack.
 
Link up a flash attack to a HTH strike. Something like...
Lightning Flashing Fist: xd6 Flash attack. Linked Power: HTH Attack (-1/2), Gestures (-1/4),  No Range (-1/2)
That lets you literally Cast Fist with a flash.

If you are looking for it as a Minute long buff...
Lightning Flashing Fist: xd6 Flash attack, Time Limit: 1 Minuit (+3/4) Linked Power: HTH Attack (-1/2), Gestures (-1/4),  No Range (-1/2)
This cloaks the hand in a lightning or flashy aura, that they can activate for a Zero Phase action when they hit with a HTH attack.
 
If you are looking for a Single Use Buff
Lightning Flashing Fist: xd6 Flash Attack, Trigger: Punching someone (Half Phase to Reset, Zero Phase Activation +1/4), Linked Power: HTH Attack (-1/2), Gestures (-1/4), No Range (-1/2)
That lets them spend a moment prepping themselves before they strike someone, and only lasts through the hit. It requires reupping it.
 
 
Those are the first ways that come to mind.

Just a quick heads-up for folks:  the rules questions forum has been changed a bit, given Steve's schedule and general lack of time to jump in and answer questions these days.
 
The forum is now an open question and answer forum.  Threads should stick to similar themes as previously (rules questions pertaining to 6E).  Anyone can respond now...and folks can vote/rate answers.  The highest rated answer is listed first...and the original poster can select a best-answer (which will be pinned to the top of the list).
 
I'm treating this as something of an experiment for now -- we'll see how it works over time and adjust as needed.

20 STR is stronger than almost everybody who's ever lived. It's extremely close to the absolute upper limit of human strength. I don't think any ancient person lacking hormone therapy and a modern understanding of nutrition can achieve 20 STR without being an extreme anomaly, standing so far outside the bell curve that they could never get armor without it being specially made for them.
 
The drawbacks of armor need to be in END and social implication. In reality, armor is extremely effective. The END cost is significant, especially in hot weather, but it was not easy to penetrate plate armor. It couldn't be done with normal weapons. At all. There's no amount of striking with an edge that's gonna hurt somebody with armor on. You need more weight, you need hammers, picks, or to grapple them and slip a dagger in between the armor. Even then, it would have to be a sharp dagger pressed hard to penetrate the gambeson, and that's only if there's no chainmail. 
 
The beautiful thing about Hero is that you get to choose how armor works in your campaign. If you want it to be a matter of aesthetics with some mechanical consequences, do that.

While still an interesting bit I originally read that as "Transsexual Satanist Arcanist" which would have been even better.

Transsexual Satanist Anarchist Wins Republican Nomination
 
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1463548/transsexual-satanist-anarchist-wins-nomination-new-hampshire-sheriff/
 
DiMezzo is the High Priestess of the Reformed Satanic Church. Her campaign slogan was "F*** the Police".
 
She attributes her win to voter stupidity in not researching the candidates and what they stand for.

Yeah, one of the things that worries me personally is that I have hypertension. It's extremely well-managed by medication so my readings are always good and I don't have more concerns about a stroke than the average person on the street. But I have no idea if the COVID-19 comorbidity kicks in only if the circulatory system is stressed by actually having high blood pressure, or if having the underlying condition with no symptoms is enough to put one at greater risk.

Btw I have this issue with Martial Art weapons. When is it free and when do you have to pay for them? They’re usually not magic but sometimes they have unusual abilities.

Really comes down to balancing, imo.
 
If you make players pay points to possess or attune (in 5e parlance) to a magic item you help prevent magic gear from creating an imbalance. 
If you don't have characters pay cp for their gear then you have to pay a lot more attention to overall character balance as the GM.  You'll have to insert or remove items throughout the course of the game to keep things reasonably close between characters.
 
Both approaches work just fine.  It's really just a matter of how you want to run things.
 
Probably due to the influence of D&D what I've historically seen done the most often is:
* Fantasy settings the gear is not paid for in CP.
* Super Hero settings the gear IS paid for in CP.
 
 

I mean... in terms of laws, class privilege is key.  In terms of societal treatment, you can hide your class and background and accent and more... but not your skin.  So it depends on topic

I’m an American, and this is news to me too.  
 
I think the massive weight of historical legalized and codified white supremacy will continue to have an impact on our culture and individual outcomes for a long time.  There is a lot of litter, we have to work together to clean it up. No blame, no guilt, just a mess that needs cleaning. We need to keep the conversation focused and refocused on that. 
 
I would also humbly submit that one reason we continue to talk on and on about white privilege is so we don’t talk about class privilege, which is to my (admittedly white) mind a greater problem, and one that White Privilege is used to obfuscate. 

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/515396-colorado-school-suspends-12-year-old-called-police-for-welfare
 
A twelve year old seventh-grader with ADHD is learning at home in a virtual classroom. He owns a very obviously plastic toy gun with a green barrel and orange tip with the words "Zombie Killer" printed on it in large white lettering. 
 
At one point during the school day, he picks up his toy, fiddles around with it, and the toy is visible onscreen momentarily. 
 
The teacher sees the toy gun and notifies the principle. The school had been secretly recording classrooms and caught the incident on video. Rather than looking at the video and dealing with the matter internally or contacting the parents, the principle notifies the police.  (In the police report, the teacher is quoted as saying that she assumed it was a toy gun but was not certain. In the video which the parents eventually got to see, the green barreled and orange tipped gun with the words on the side is visible. The school refuses to give a copy of the tape to the parents or the media.)
 
Anyway, back to the story. The principle requests that the police go to the student's home and check out the student's home environment.
 
The police go to the kid's home and the parents find out about the "incident" from the police rather than the school. The police threaten the student with arrest as if he had shown up to the school with a gun (real or fake) and threatened to shoot people.
 
The school suspended the student for five days.
 
Okay, everyone still with me? So far, so good?
 
The kid and his family are black.
 
The school admits no wrong-doing and insist that the handling of the incident had nothing to do with the student's race or the fact that the kid is more of a pain in the butt than most because he has ADHD (which doesn't make him an easy student to teach in a distance-learning environment).
 
The school has also announced that it would no longer be secretly or openly recording classes, also without admitting that the secretly taping classrooms was in any way inappropriate.
 
I am highly skeptical that discrimination had absolutely no role in what happened. At the very least, the parents are moving the kid to a different school district. That's something the school would know would happen if they harassed the family. That particular school and the district in general won't have that student dragging down standardized test scores and won't have to put up with a kid who has ADHD.
 
I've got a niece and nephew live in Colorado within 20 miles of this school district. He's a teacher who has taught in several school districts in that area over the last 16 years. My niece is Hispanic. They have three kids of their own and two Hispanic foster kids.  One of their kids is a high IQ ADHD problem student. One of the foster kids has severe behavioral issues but my family hasn't won the fights necessary to get the school district to test and diagnose exactly what that girl's problem is and the foster system apparently won't pay for that kind of testing.
 
Colorado doesn't seem to have many state laws, at least which are enforced, which make school districts attempt to give problem students a decent education. Their family has had to fight like hell and switch schools and school districts several times in order to find a school which will attempt to deal with educating their problem kid (and that with my nephew often being a teacher in that school district) and has had to repeat those fights to get their foster girl educated.
 
Their kids have also faced discrimination and bigotry for being Hispanic (sometimes from other students and sometimes more subtly from teachers and administration).
 
I guess I'm just frustrated. The school calling the police to go harass a black family in THIS environment? And harassing that black family's kid who has a neurological disorder?
 
Like HELL the school district isn't treating this kid differently because he's black and has ADHD. Where's my "really ticked off" emoji?

I had a response here, but I've deleted it.  I don't feel comfortable ranting at someone, even if they don't fully understand where I am coming from.

We had our chance to.  But the alternative to not trying to contain it at all is literally million plus dead, so... finding the middle road is actually the best option.
 
Good luck.

Guys, we're in Coronavirus, not Political.  

No, on balance I think this is good. This is why we have studies of new medications before releasing them to the general public. Many risks don't show up until more subjects are exposed to the med.
 
Personally, I'm comforted and reassured that AstraZeneca caught this and initiated an investigation. They should take the time and effort to get it right the first time.

PaladinAG, you might take a look at Hero's The Valdorian Age, which was designed to evoke the kind of fantasy written by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, and Fritz Leiber. Several elements from it, particularly its unique magic system, seem applicable to the kind of setting you sound like you want.
 
Our long-absent forum colleague James Gillen wrote a pretty cogent review of the book: https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11199.phtml

I'd suggest getting the fiction right, before you start looking at mechanics.
 
That is, how magic fits into the setting and its societies. That's particularly important since magic will shape those societies.
 
Once you've got all that sorted, then you can look at all the crunchy blah blah blah.

I'm not sure if I've got any ideas which are particularly original but...
 
You could limit the active points of magical attacks so that they aren't any more effective than an arrow and allow hit locations for both regular attacks and magic. That'd push the players away from magic offense except for those who might want to try for extremely high accuracy magical attacks or who just want particular special effects.
 
Require extra time and immobile focus (such as a written pentagram) for most non-combat magics. Make it plain that magic isn't casually used by making it difficult or impossible to use magic casually. You could also require expensive spell components which, while not unique, are rare enough that players will have to quest to obtain them and will dread the day when they might lose them.
 
Many low fantasy settings in fiction seem to have followed a previous historical period when the world was a high fantasy setting and magic was much more powerful and prevalent. You could build story arcs in the campaign around trying to find out how to build more powerful magical items than the cantrip-type which are all the most powerful magicians today can manage. Or at least figure out why people today cannot manage the feats of magic which seemed to be more common in centuries past.
 
 
As for low-powered, subtle magic for NPC's, divine magic might focus on empowering groups of devout followers (a Blessing spell whether for combat or to increase the skill of farmers and craftsmen). Speaking to the deity. Healing wounds and diseases of believers. Increasing the PRE and Oratory of priests. Increasing the lifespan of the most powerful priests.
 
Most of the powers of the priests would be manifest from the influence they have over their followers rather than through the raw divine magic which they channel. Rulers would listen to the counsel of priests as much because of the power they have over the mob as because the ruler respects the mob.
 
And priests might literally be the power behind some thrones as the current high priest was the high priest in the days of the ruler's great-grandfather and taught the grandfather, the father, the ruler himself, and all of his siblings and children.

Your responses to me came across as aggressively rude even as I continued with polite conversation.
 
If you want polite conversation, try to be an ass deliberately.

Admittedly, the result would have been the same if the boats had flown Biden or Black Lives Matter flags. As King Canute reminded us, the natural world doesn't give a rat's ass about mortal desires. The tide will come in;  plagues will not magically disappear; and stormy lakes will sink open-sided boats. But Trumpists do seem unusually determined to ignore reality.
 
Dean Shomshak

You're correct.  I was basing my napkin math on the virus taking out 3-5% of the population of the world, but the death rate in America was MUCH lower (675k-750k).
 
Good catch!  Thanks.