Pattern Ghost

Tsogh Nrettap, the Sleepy, Hoarder of Pizza and TV Remote!

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

but I dont think anyone ever bought large amounts of BODY to up their bonuses on those figureds. 

I always liked round numbers, so that means a STUN ending in 5 or 0. So, I tend to buy up BODY to make the figured come up as something aesthetically pleasing, if I have the points. I could just round up by buying STUN directly, but usually don't. I also don't tend to split hairs on optimizing builds to the point I need to scrounge up the "wasted" points on the extra BODY.

7 hours ago, rravenwood said:

This is pretty much what "Skill Rolls Based On Alternate Characteristics" (6E1 55-56) suggests. 

Nice.  I'm not as familiar with 6th, thanks.

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

And what so you mean here?  I am likely missing something, but skills hve to be rolled if they are char-based or not; how does removing the characteristic base increase the amount of rolling?

The complimentary roll being added in.

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I have never really felt they were too strong- not even STR, which is everyone's favorite to complain about because of the "free damage" element.  

Me either. 😃 This whole thing is just a thought experiment.

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

That's about the biggest push I can give.  If it doesnt get discussed now, I dont know what to tell you.

LOL, thanks for your support. I don't really care if it gets discussed, just figured I'd toss it out there and see what folks think. It's more about just posting on the actual gaming side of the board more for me. I haven't played in a long time, and tend to hang out more in the NGD these days. I'm more of an RPG Reader than RPG Player these days.

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I'm not fond of making characteristics matter less and less

Fair point. 

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

I don't think it's worth the trouble.

 

Yeah, I was thinking one of the drawbacks of this would be the extra rolling. It's probably not worth the extra effort.

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

Let's start with a motivational question.  WHY decouple the characteristics?

The motivation was just to get the stupid idea out of my head, discuss it, have a conversation starter. As to the decoupling, it's something that's been brought up from time to time, with the thought that Characteristics are too strong. I'm honestly fine with the current interaction of skills and Characteristics. But . . . I like to play Devil's Advocate, to ask if there's a way to do it that doesn't totally remove the interaction of the Characteristics and also adds something to the mix. Flexibility seemed like it might be a good trade off. Seeing the math, maybe not? I did the math in my head, from a different angle, and wasn't quite convinced it'd leave enough benefit to Char, and you confirmed that. This looks like it might devalue stats too much.

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

OTOH, I'm generally fine with the notion of allowing a more flexible interpretation of what characteristic to use.  For 3 points, you get 9-, plus the characteristic bonus that fits what you're trying to do the best.  

 

If I actually did implement any of this, that's what I'd probably do, and just leave the rest alone. 

30 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

But it doesnt feel like Champions to a 2e player.   

 

Oh, I get that. I started basically with 4th Edition, though I'd read 2e some time before that. (Or it may have been 3e, it had Marksman swinging across the cover.) 

I was primarily thinking about letting multiple Characteristics govern a Skill, depending on circumstance, as a way of adding granularity to character builds, especially for Heroic level games. This would let two characters with the same skill excel at different aspects of the skill, depending on their stats. Or maybe just be slightly stronger at those aspectss.

I wonder what took this so, so very long:

Of course, it's "breaking news," so that means "take with a grain of salt."

Edit: Also, is that NY Representative wearing a freaking tracksuit top under his suit jacket? They need to get on that dress code ASAP.

So, I was thinking about de-coupling Skills from Characteristics. Skills would all be costed similarly to General Skills from 4th/5th, 3 points for 11-, +2 points for +1 to the Skill, and Familiarity at 8- for 1 point.

Then, what good are Characteristics? Complimentary Rolls. So, a higher Characteristic would result in better odds of boosting the skill with a Complimentary Skill Roll. Moreover, many Skills can logically be governed by more than one Characteristic. If we think of real world Acrobats, we tend to think of: Gymnasts, Circus Acrobats or Parkour. All of these, especially the two former, tend to be very physically strong as well as coordinated. So, Agility may apply most of the time, but there may be instances where Strength might be the better choice, such as maneuvers requiring high grip strength (grabbing a light pole or flagpole to slow a fall, for instance).

This type of arrangement would add a new level of granularity for Skills as well as de-emphasize the impact of Characteristics without eliminating it. (Or at least I think it would.)

Thoughts? Feelings? Tear it apart, put it back together, theorize!

Note: This is just for fun, so have at it. I've not played in a literal dog's age, so I have no current plans to implement any of this.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker had some pulpy elements.

The Serpent and the Rainbow, while not pulp, I could see being used for inspiration.

We've been watching Gilmore Girls. We stopped watching it on broadcast sometime in Season 4, but can't remember why. The poor subtitlers can't keep up with the sheer wordage that the titular characters spew, which is hilarious. I can only imagine deaf people thinking the show is extremely dry and boring.

He'll start doing community theater and really lean into it and start using Shakespearean speech all the time.

A few thoughts:

Players will build around such a change (plenty of examples in this thread), and conversely so you will as GM. This might  not be a big deal if you write up all of your own NPCs, but you might have to re-write published characters you want to use.

You'll probably see characters burning more END, so you'll want to track that carefully.

If you implement it, I'd do some dry run combats with your group's characters first, and let them go back and adjust their characters based on what works/doesn't under the house rule.

On 10/23/2023 at 4:46 AM, Hugh Neilson said:

We're going to focus on athletic competition, so perhaps physical combat is resolved by opposed "Brawling" skill rolls.  Maybe weapon proficiencies get expanded to add 3 point full skills and that replaces the more granular combat system - a fight is resolved quickly with skill rolls so we can get back to the focus of the campaign, whatever it may be.

This is sort of the approach the first edition of Ars Magica used. The physical combat system was very simplified and brutal. It made combat something to avoid, and pushed the focus onto the magic system and RPing mage life. The troupe system (interesting, but I haven't met anyone who really buys into it) has one player run a whole group of Grog NPCs, who are basically presented as cannon fodder, mechanically. This kind of approach has its pros and cons (cool, detailed magic system vs nobody wanting to run multiple cannon fodder instead of their mage or companion character). 

I think most RPGs focus more on combat than skills systems is because the stakes for combat are higher, and therefore more universally exciting. In an espionage game, though, hacking a computer or picking a lock can easily become a life or death situation. Top Secret SI put about the same weight on combat and skills, with both resolution systems having more significant overlap than in Hero, and now I'm wondering it this is the reason. (Of course, it could be the designers just wanted a streamlined resolution system as its own end. I remember it as fast to pick up and play, and pretty fun. The system tended to get out of the way of the game.)

On 10/20/2023 at 4:54 PM, Gauntlet said:

So, when we were kids, what type of candy did you all want to get?

Anything but apples. There was always one old lady that dropped an apple in the bag . . . THUMP! . . . smashing the good stuff.

Midjourney has some new tricks since the last time I tried it. /describe gives fun and unexpected results. (Mainly because the descriptions are way off base, but still find some cool prompts playing with it), and Vary (Region) is a godsend for fixing small blips in otherwise good outputs. I generated a new avatar and a background pic for my profile tonight, both Halloween-themed. Actually, this is the first time my profile page has had a background image (the "Cover Photo" thing at the top that's geometric shapes and a color by default).

I didn't see much journalistic rigor in that NPR article, TBH. All that's presented as evidence against the Israeli story is a Doppler shift analysis? We have video of the rocket, for example, that's publicly available and seems to support Israel's narrative, that a rocket burned out, and fell. The crater, burn patterns and exterior building damage also seem to support this. I'd like to see an expert analysis of the same evidence presented by Israel, to see if it holds up to independent analysis. So, we're left with weighing all of the visual evidence against a Doppler analysis by an unnamed source whose bias we can't research.

Israel also presented audio evidence from alleged audio transmissions between two Islamic Jihad (IIRC) who are discussing the failed rocket strike. That's something that could (and should) be analyzed for authenticity, though it's not from a "publicly available" source.

According to this CNN article analyzing the blast, the rocket was fired from the South. It's worth a read. 

Edit: Relevant quote from the linked article:

"A leading US acoustic expert, who did not have permission to speak publicly from their university, analyzed the sound waveform from the video and concluded that, while there were changes in the sound frequency, indicating that the object was in motion, there was no directional information that could be gleaned from it."

Sorry for the negative reply, but I think it's important to try to look at all of the information received on the key events in this conflict as objectively as possible, especially since objectivity in the matter has been historically difficult to come by.

Condolences. 

Two American hostages released by HAMAS. Got from BBC video with a lot of editorializing in it, so no link. Qatar apparently helped broker the deal.

EDIT: Here's a CNN article with a decent level of details: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/middleeast/hamas-us-hostages-released-intl/index.html

Yeah, that's a problem with Midjourney, too. It seems most of the better ones have the same safeguards.  

Given that Trump has doxed both the NY AG and Fani Willis recently, I think she may not be getting off that light when the pack turns on her.

Seems like they're pushing the tech out too hard too early, TBH. Saw that a little while back, or heard a snippet about it anyway, and it seems to me that it's more of a publicity stunt to retain users more than anything else. My guess is that their lawyers believe the artist's claims about AI copying their styles are spurious (they are), so they won't have to pay out any claims. So, it's a safe bet for them for some cheap publicity. I noticed it doesn't mention trademark claims, and I'm willing to bet it has something regarding intentional copyright violations, versus some artist offended because an AI picture had their names in the prompt.

I also wonder how the digital watermarking is going to be implemented. The image generators generally make pretty low resolution output, so those are often run through another AI tool to upsize them or convert them to vector (vectorizer.ai is one I just found that works well for this), or an AI re-drawing tool to remove extra fingers, etc. I'm curious about how all of this impacts those digital watermarks. If it's just meta-data (which it sounds like), it seems like it could be stripped out by those tools. 

It does some neat stuff with "pen and ink" style. It's just hard to control the output and DALL-E seems to really love trademarked characters. 

So, I was going through the Inktober prompts with Bing/DALL-E, to see what it'd do with them. I get to "dodge" and it just spits out cars. So, I modified it to "dodging" (full prompt "black and white pen and ink art "dodging" highly stylized") to try to get the action of dodging. Instead, I got an illustration for Dante's Inferno, maybe:

I think DALL-E isn't quite ready for prime time.

Not sure why that one's a story. People do offensive stuff all day on the internet, every day. The AI didn't make them do it. And that one in particular has a massive level of restrictions. I was playing with it the other day and got an amazing number of seemingly innocuous prompts blocked. So many, that I feared being banned just from trying to figure out what was allowed and not allowed.

Eel

I saw at least one Israeli official answer this question along the lines of right now they intend to deal with HAMAS, but they'll be asking a lot of questions about how the attack was planned and executed without advanced warning afterward.

The training is the least question in my mind; armies train in plain sight of their enemies all the time for intimidation. The fact that they could amass the resources required with all of the associated activities not being detected, and the fact that the entire country wasn't on a high state of alert -- especially near the Gaza border -- during a milestone anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, and the movement of troops out of that area at that time . . . those are all bigger questions to me. Given that the Israeli intelligence apparatus is supposed to be among the best in the world, it's nearly inconceivable that all of this could happen under their noses.