Pariah

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Subtle signs that your city's new sports area was designed by non-Euclidean aliens.

Players have to run past third base and the opposing team's dugout on the way to first base. And don't even get me started on the lines to the restrooms....

New Topic: Rock bands that should tour together, with humorous results.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Who really is on first?

No, Who is on stage, followed by Yes, Guess Who, and The Band.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

How Foxbat would improve baseball's World Series.

Kidnap the Commissioner (Bud Selig) and replace him with Centipede Boy. Or Foxbat Lass. Or pretty much anyone else, really.

Re: WWYCD? Women City Savers Only

A menstrual cycle?

 

"Gosh Wild Card, if you hadn't bent over with those cramps right then, that death ray would have killed you!"

Yeah, that's pretty much how it'd work.

Rep for the laugh, by the way.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Decapitating an opponent is now a two-minute minor.

Do you really want Teh Bunneh playing hockey...?

NT: Changes that should be made to make hockey more appealing to American audiences.

Make all the players huddle up after every change of possession, so that a game with three 20-minute periods will take four hours to play.

New Topic: Why did the ostrich cross the road?

Re: Answers & Questions

A: You English are a ragger folk' date=' your mothers are all lagger folk, your army is a bloody joke, you couldn't beat an artichoke![/quote']

 

Q: Man, British Sterling is really ticked off tonight. What'd Shamrock say to him, anyway?

 

A: "Brickbat lingerie".

Re: The amazing Superblog!

Nice work. The cockfighting cyborg chickens were a particularly nice touch. Repped.

Re: WWYCD? Women City Savers Only

Jack Diamond wouldn't have that big a problem with it. He had cosmetic and pyschic surgery once to infiltrate a villain group. This is just another disguise, right?

Pariah (with an INT roll) remembers that his old Order had a spell for this kind of transformation. Once he figures it out, he's in.

Thunderstrike is a little weirded out by the idea of becoming a woman, even for a short period of time. Given that his role models are Black Cat and Gibraltar, there's a part of him that thinks being a superheroine means being aggressive, domineering, and/or cranky all the time. Can you blame him for being hesitant?

Wild Card dives right in. He's got 3d6 of Luck, what's the worst that could happen?

Onyx looks at it as a research opportunity. Not only does he get to beat up a new group of villains, he gets to see the entire experience from an entirely different point of view. He'll probably take notes along the way and spend two full days afterward writing it up.

Fang has no problems with it. He's been living as a reluctant werewolf for the past several years, so he's already got the whole moon cycle thing down.

Magnetite, Amethyst, Morningstar, and ColdFire, already being female, proceed to move in and start kicking butt. ColdFire really hopes that fetus she's carrying won't be a problem....

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Professional Sports Leagues of the future!

WWF in zero gravity!

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Unusual plays on the football field on 1st and 10 or as the opening pitch in baseball

Going 5-hole on the catcher.

Re: Answers & Questions

A: I never should have pulled that thorn out.

Q: What's the deal with that lion that's always following you around...?

A: I know we all have our 'thorns in the flesh', but this is ridiculous!

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

TNT: What the Church of Death Tribble serves for communion.

Bread and wine, of course.

And if the bread just happens to be part of a tasty sandwich, so much the better!

Re: 3d6 Dice Roll Probabilities

From our gaming group's wiki: Roll the Bones

Roll The Bones

A Study in Probability

by Pariah

One thing that makes Hero System different that most other RPGs is the dice. Champions players don't habitually carry around a bunch of dice that make you think of Kepler trying to align the planets within Platonian solids. We use six-sided dice (abbreviated 'd6'), the kind you used as a kid to play Monopoly, Risk, or Yahtzee. We use d6 and only d6. We're pretty exclusive that way. We only use the fancy dice to indicate on the map where the bad guys are—if we use them at all.

So, where D&D might call on a player to roll a d20 (read as 'a twenty-sided die', a geometric shape called an icosahedron), Hero System calls for the player to roll 3d6 (read as 'three six-sided dice'). Why would anyone prefer rolling three dice when you could only roll one? The answer is simple. It's called "The Bell Curve."

Let's say that in order for your character to perform a certain skill, you have to roll ten or less (abbreviated '10-') on the dice. With either a single d20 or with 3d6, the probability of doing so is 50%. So far, so good. Now, let's say that with experience, you character's roll changes so that now you have to roll eleven or less (11-). The probability of doing so on a d20 is 55%, which is not bad. But on 3d6, the probability jumps to 62.5%. The net effect that the mid-range is opened up substantially with 3d6, while the extremes remain highly improbable. (One effect of this is that a person rolling a d20 is ten times as likely to roll a critical failure and get his/her character killed at an inopportune moment.)

The table below, which I constructed based on my own study and knowledge of probabilities back in the mid-90's, shows how likely each outcome is when 3d6 are rolled. There are 216 possibilities that can arise when rolling 3d6: each of the three dice can achieve six different results, which leads to 6^3 (6x6x6=216) different total outcomes. Only one of these outcomes produces a result of 3: a '1' on all three dice (abbreviated, for our purposes, as '111'). There are three different ways a 4 can result: each of the three dice could produce a 2, while the others show 1, i.e., 112, 121, and 211. There are six different ways that a 5 can be produced: 113, 131, 311, 122, 212, and 221. And so on.

The table below is organized as follows. The first column shows each possible value from rolling 3d6, 3-18. The second column shows how many different ways (out of 216) that value can be obtained. The third column shows the probability or that value coming up [P(x)]. And the final column—the really useful one—shows the cumulative probability of all values equal to or less than the current value turning up [P(x-)]. So, as can be seen from the table, the chance of rolling 8- is about one in four, while the probability of rolling 14- is about nine in ten.

Value Occurrences P(x)% P(x-)%

=============================

3..............1...............0.46.......0.46

4..............3...............1.38.......1.85

5..............6...............2.78.......4.63

6............10...............4.63.......9.26

7............15...............6.94.......16.2

8............21...............9.72.......25.9

9............25.............11.57.......37.5

10...........27.............12.50......50.0

11...........27.............12.50.......62.5

12...........25.............11.57.......74.1

13...........21...............9.72.......83.8

14...........15...............6.94.......90.7

15...........10...............4.63.......95.4

16.............6...............2.78.......98.1

17.............3...............1.38.......99.5

18.............1...............0.46........100

All hail the Hero System!

--

Verbose, but I hope informative as well. And yes, if anyone was wondering, I AM a math & science geek.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Subtle signs that it might have been a bad idea to hire Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton to babysit your little girls (ages 6 and 8) while you went out to dinner with your spouse.

All the Barbie dolls have hangovers the next morning.

New Topic: The opening sentence(s) to Death Tribble's autobiography.

Re: Your Heroscope, er Horoscope

Excellent work, and Repworthy, except for that whole "You must spread" thing....

Taurus- A Tauran superhero such as yourself should not neglect his deep need for artistry even in the battle for justice.

 

Sadly, the mayor,while probably asking for it, will not appreciate it when you turn his limo to modern sculpture.

Only one problem, though -- We Tauruses don't believe in all that astrological cr@p.

Re: Answers & Questions

A: It's a mix of genre favourites and concept art that will make the studio executives drool with anticipation' date=' while the actual fans will be groaning over it's utter banality.[/quote']

 

Q: Okay, so what's different about this season of Survivor?

 

A: Samurai delicatessen.

Re: Soundtracks?

You can always create your own compiliation of songs for your players; sort of your own soundtrack. Some of us on on these boards have already done that in a thread, myself included:

WIYCT: What is your character's Theme?

I remember putting up that thread.

I was just thinking of doing something like that. Gotta find that thread....

And for the curious, I personally enjoy a CD titled "Classical Music for Home Improvements" for gaming. It's got a lot of loud, boisterous classical pieces. Great music for when Phase 12 rolls around.

Re: Answers & Questions

A: A butt aneurism.

Q: I'm gonna get what if I continue to use the chainsaw to cut up the tofu?

A: A big, smelly, inedible mess.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Unpleasant consequences after the undead are given the right to vote.

Everyone who voted for Strom Thurmond between 1954 and 2003 get to vote for him again!

Re: Answers & Questions

A: They are quiet at 250 decibels.

Q: So, Arthur, what did you think of the Disaster Area concert?

A: Decorah, Iowa, on a Wednesday night.

Re: Answers & Questions

A: But it's such an UGLY color!

Q: Hey, check out our team's new chartreuse hockey jerseys! Nobody else in the league has anything like 'em! Pretty great, huh?

A: That's not penicillin, it's just ordinary bread mold.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

NT: Signs that Jesus' date=' when he said he would return "like a thief in the night", meant it more literally than anyone expected.[/quote']

 

The opening words of the family Bible change from "In the beginning..." to "Im in ur house, takin away ur sinz".

 

New Topic: Signs that local politicians have been hitting the bottle again.

Re: Answers & Questions

A: You gone about as fer as you can go.

Q: 'Scuze me, y'all, but I was fixin' ta head to Fer, Fer Away ta meet that Ogre fella. Did I git fer enough?

A: Actually, chartreuse is a sort of yellow-green, not a condiment.

Re: Your Superhero Identity for Today

Your Superhero Identity For Today Is:

Name: Green Guy

Secret Identity: (Classified)

Special Power: Kinetic Fart

Transportation: Turbo Submarine

Weapon: Psychotronic Cutlass

Costume: Hardened Shorts

Sidekick: Samwise

Nemesis: Jasmine the Younger

Tragic Flaw: Big nose

Favorite Food: Lasagna

'Hardened Shorts'? I guess that's appropriate, given Green Guy's 'Special' Power.

Re: FFN: Super Bloopers

We had a great super blooper in our campaign many years ago.

Oracles, the team speedster, was rushing in to stop a bank robbery. He zipped into the back of the bank, intending to do a Move Through on one of the villains. Unfortunately, the villain dodged, and Oracles missed. So he continued on his original path...

Into the heavily armored bank vault.

He tried to push to get enough damage to break through the vault wall so that he'd only take half the damage. He came up 1 BODY short.

End result: Oracles knocked himself cold and left a human-shaped indentation in the back of the bank vault.

Why do these sorts of things always happen to speedsters...?