archer

I had never considered this at all. From the way I envisioned the NPC's power working, I'd have to say that he could make an arm or leg completely pass through a physical object which is restraining him. That's a bit more useful than I'd thought the power to be. I don't think his power should pass through a living being under any circumstance. In TV shows and movies, private investigators are getting captured then tied up or handcuffed all the time. But 75 active points to get that effect is really expensive, even if it goes into a multipower with everything else the character could possibly do. Once I give an NPC normal a power/multipower of that size, I have a hard time thinking of him as anything other than a super, which is not the vibe I'm wanting the NPC to have either to myself or to anyone else. Maybe it would be easier to just give a borderline nonsense mystical reason why "the mental intent of the person restraining him doesn't allow him to use his power on restraints". And to answer an earlier question, the way I see the power working is that he can reach through one object, like a wall, even if the wall has several layers (like paint, Sheetrock, empty space, stud, Sheetrock, paint). Once he's passed through that object, his limb sticking out the other side is a physical object just as if it had used no odd power to get there. So if he stuck his arm through the wall and there was a painting on the other side, he'd feel the back side of the painting (or perhaps knock the painting off the wall). If he stuck his arm through a wall into a pile of broken glass on the other side of the wall, he would have just stuck his arm into a pile of broken glass. If he stuck his arm through the top of the desk into a drawer, he could feel the stuff inside the drawer. But he couldn't stick his arm on down through into the next drawer from the top. If he wanted to reach into lower drawers, he'd have to stick his arm in through the side of the desk. When I came up with the idea for this character back in 4e (or maybe 3e), I'd intended on having it as Indirect on 5 STR. But the number of things I could think of which he could do with that Indirect just kept growing and growing. So I came up with the idea of some drawbacks which would keep the players from wanting to spend a couple of points to get free lockpicking, a sort of partial desolid, a slightly ranged touch through a barrier, etc. bundled together at a steep discount (especially for characters who could see through solid objects rather than having to guess what is there). Limiting the power to 5 STR was to keep him from using it effectively as a strike or grab. Being vulnerable to energy (electricity) was to keep the NPC from sticking his arm through everything at random like a player would try to do if he had the power (the NPC would explain to the characters why he wasn't doing that). Not being able to exert his full STR to pull his arm back makes him vulnerable to a grab (not that a player couldn't break down the wall and get his arm back but doing that would defeat the attempt at doing something sneaky in the first place). Thanks for all the responses so far.

One of the Infinity War conspiracy theories is that Loki used illusions to save the lives of most of the Asgardians then switched places with Banner. Banner never turned into the Hulk, instead Loki replaced him and took a light beating in his place while looking like the Hulk. Thanos could have really cut loose on "the Hulk" but saw no reason to since he was trashing the Hulk anyway. Loki remained looking like Banner all through the parts of the movie where Banner was using the Hulk-buster armor.

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.

Thanks, now I can build a wizard/con-man character that I know I'll never be able to use and look wistfully at the character sheet for the next few weeks. Darn that 38 minute trip each way!

I had forgotten how lame that Hulk vs Thanos fight scene was.

I've got an idea for a NPC private investigator character who I'm not sure how to model in 6e without it being hugely expensive. He does mostly the spooky fringe cases of the supernatural: things where the cops or a normal private eye would be completely out of their depth but where you would feel silly calling on a heavy-hitter like Dr. Strange. And besides, this guy is in the Yellow Pages while Dr. Strange isn't. The main gimmick, that he's known for, is that his extremities are sometimes a bit out of phase with the real world. Like if he's gesturing broadly, his fingertips might pass through a desk or a wall but so quickly that the people he's talking to aren't quite sure if they actually saw what they saw. In game terms, he can reach most of an arm (or another limb) through something and manipulate things on the other side with 5 STR. He can do stuff like open a locked door or window, flip on the lights, adjust the display inside a jewelry case, feel what's in someone's pockets, feel what's inside a lock-box, drop candy from a vending machine without paying for it, pick up a piece of paper on a desk and bring it close to the window to read, etc. Anything you could do with your arm or leg, he can do with whatever length of limb he has stuck through to the other side. He can't see through the barrier unless the barrier is normally transparent. If someone grabs his arm while it's pushed through something, he can only exert 5 STR when trying to pull his arm back through. 5 STR is literally all which can be exerted even if Grond is trying to help pull the arm back through. Also, the arm physically exists in the intervening space so if, for example, he accidentally pushes his arm into the power cable going to a light switch, he could electrocute himself. And he can feel the difference between various substances so he can feel the difference between empty space, studs, nails, Sheetrock, etc. when sticking his hands through a wall. As a SFX, it'd be nice if, for example, when arguing to Iron Man that he could poke him in the chest with one finger (for emphasis) and the finger go through the armor and poke Tony himself. That'd be a great hero (or villain) freak out moment but isn't overwhelmingly important and could be a GM handwave SFX rather than strictly by the rules if necessary. The idea sounds a bit like a Sense power, a bit like STR with an Indirect advantage, a bit like Desolid with a huge pile of disadvantages, and a bit like Telekinesis with disadvantages. Maybe it's a multipower with all of those options? Maybe it's only one of those? Maybe it's something totally different? I also haven't fleshed out the rest of the abilities an experienced but barely supernatural private eye might have so if you have some low cost ideas....

I'm slightly too far to make it unaccompanied to a game. But for my sanity, I need to know if the genre is Champions (or Fantasy Hero, etc.) and which edition.

Rumor around the industry is that both Legends and Arrow are cancelled after wrapping up their next season. But I don't know if that's set in stone or not.

Writing is now a chore for me rather than the effortless joy it was for decades. So I consider the time I'm able to write to be precious since I have so little of it compared to the past.

If you misrepresent what you are wanting to accomplish by posting and thereby waste other people's time in writing a response, I would argue that you are being rude. If you are intentionally misrepresenting, then I'd argue that you are being intentionally rude.

My grandmother married at age 13 (my grandfather was 18 years old at the time). And she had my father at age 14. She remained married a little over 65 years. There's a hell of a lot of difference between supervised dating with permission then getting married with permission and what Michael Jackson was doing.

Barbara Streisand speaking of Michael Jackson and about two men accusing Michael Jackson of sexually assaulting them as children. “His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has," Streisand told The Times. “You can say ‘molested,' but those children, as you heard say [grown-up Robson and Safechuck], they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.” Another of her statements in the interview was “I feel bad for the children,” she said. “I feel bad for him. I blame, I guess, the parents, who would allow their children to sleep with him." https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/ny-barbra-streisand-michael-jackson-accusers-thrilled-sexual-needs-20190323-7z3b2dqgbzh7jfs4yyhqhdfjyi-story.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6841461/Barbra-Streisand-says-Michael-Jacksons-accusers-thrilled-there.html Umm, yeah...I don't think she understands, at all, why she is getting criticism for what she said in the interview.

You determine the maximum number of absurd penalties which the most anal-retentive GM at a convention could possibly throw at your character then buy that many skill levels in your everyman ranged blocking ability?

You're statement was "I don't get why so many folks (it's not just here) are bagging on the flerken" which seemed to imply that you wanted an explanation of why people are bagging on the Flerken. If you had been honest up front and told me, "I don't care why people are bagging on the Flerken" I wouldn't have wasted my time writing up an explanation for you to read. In case I wasn't clear up to this point, I find it irksome when people deliberately waste my time.

Her Flerken's name was Chewie. The other known Flerken's name was Goose. The MCU people more likely to run into Star Wars infringement problems than run into Top Gun infringement problems. Just because Disney owns both Star Wars and the MCU doesn't necessarily mean that the two sections of the company play nice with each other.

I was thinking of it as being more of a "hold the patient's hand until he gets better" power. The patient should start looking and feeling better quickly enough to let the healer know whether the effect is working or not (i.e. before the healer invests a huge amount of time). When the patient's body becomes a completely hostile environment for a disease, I wouldn't GM rule that a healer would have to keep the power going for days or weeks in order to kill off that bacteria or virus. YMMV. Of course with long-term continuing charges, you could get around the hand-holding part, but at some point in extending the time the power works, it'd just be cheaper to buy a transform.

That's a very common complaint. We went through that to some extent ourselves (my wife kept complaining and pushing until our case worker admitted that there was only one person in their HUGE office who knew how to properly code the paperwork so that it would be processed rather than being merely shuffled around from worker to worker until some part of it got lost).

1) For people who are not watching Marvel's Agents of SHIELD television show, their only exposure to Kree (stated explicitly as such) was Ronan who was described as an extremist and therefore presumably not a representative sample of his race. So the Captain Marvel movie was an introduction to the Kree for most of the audience. The Captain Marvel movie was also served an introduction to the Skrull race (and did an extremely poor job of that, in my opinion). The Flerken were a third race tossed into the movie, at random and with no explanation of why it should have a spot in the movie. There was nothing in the movie that "being a Flerken" accomplished that Goose "not being revealed as a flerken" couldn't have accomplished just as well with only very tiny alterations. The Carol Danvers character existed in the comic books for 38 years before a Flerken came into her life and it was eight years after that when she first found out that her "cat" was really an alien lifeform. I think the MCU could have slow-rolled that reveal by saving it for some other movie and have helped the pacing of this movie. 2) As I said earlier, having the Flerken pick up four alien humanoids while Nick was holding the Flerken made zero sense from a physics point of view or from the powers which a Flerken has. If they want to display a Flerken as a Flerken, fine. If they want to imply that Fury is given superstrength by holding a Flerken, that isn't fine at all because the MCU isn't planning on "holding a Flerken" being something which gives someone superstrength. That was just an example of bad writing. 3) Flerken are intelligent enough to understand idiomatic English (comic book canon) but aren't intelligent enough to refrain from scratching out someone's eye for absolutely no reason (which real cats who are house pets can easily do)? No, that's just more bad writing. If the movie hadn't suffered from not adequately developing the two alien races it was already introducing to the audience plus had done a good job of writing the Flerken (instead of screwing up majorly twice), I wouldn't have had a problem with the Flerken being part of the movie. If Fury had put the cat down and been fighting an alien and Goose had swallowed four aliens while Fury's back was turned, that could have been a great comedic moment. Fury would have had a "what the hell happened" look on his face when he turned around then glanced down at Goose who was casually licking his paw and pretending that nothing odd had happened. If the cat had been defending itself and Fury got his eye accidentally scratched while trying to save it, that could be understandable. But apparently I'm supposed to, as a moviegoer, like the Goose character even though it attacks allies at random and does them permanent serious harm? If the movie had introduced any other Marvel alien race by having it randomly claw out the eye of one of the most popular characters in the MCU, I wouldn't be expected to like that alien race based on that experience. Why should a Flerken be any different? Why should the people who wrote this movie expect me to treat a Flerken any differently? Why should I emotionally treat it as a cat when the writers went out of their way to shove my face in the fact that it wasn't a cat? The writers portrayed our only example of the Flerken race as being a HUGE jerk. That doesn't endear me to this Flerken or to the Flerken race in general. The writers should have easily got that much information out of test screenings of the movie, long before it was released, even if everyone in-house was too stupid to figure it out.

You could very easily talk me into not allowing the blocking of melee attacks be an everyman skill. I have some experience in not being able to block ranged "attacks". I have no experience at all with being in a brawl and trying to block a melee attack. I suspect that if I had tried at some point that I would have been spectacularly unsuccessful repeatedly.

"high tech should never be a complete replacement for basic safety." I feel like I should elaborate on that. I once had the idea of making the most flexible mission Federation vessel ever: the power plant, some gravity plating, and holo-emitters were the only real objects inside the entire ship. The rest of the interior of the ship would be a re-creation and could be reconfigured for any use instantly. You need extra sickbay beds: create a new sickbay. You need extra cargo room: create more storage areas. You need to seal off whole decks of the ship from intruders: delete doors, corridors, and empty space. You need extra hull: create extra layers of it on the interior. You need a new central computer: create one. You need more holo-emitters: create more holo-emitters. Then about five minutes later I thought about what would happen during a momentary power disruption as your command crew would be falling seventy decks to splat upon the bottom level of the ship.

Mr. Fantastic - Owl (from Winnie the Pooh. Owl can help Mr. Fantastic with his math) Spider-Man - Winnie the Pooh (bear from Winnie the Pooh)

There's supposedly been a skyrocketing number of people going onto disability in the US for more than the last 15 years so it is somewhat understandable that people may suspect there's a reason for it. The increase has been faster than what could be explained by an aging population (or at least it was when last I looked at it over a decade ago). I put myself through a lot more hell than I should have in order to keep working literally as long as I possibly could. And my employer worked with me admirably for the last few years in order to keep me despite my health problems (until the last two months when I got a new boss but that's a very messy story). Not everyone is willing to put themselves through hell in order to keep a job and not everyone has an employer who is willing to work with employees who are obviously ill and suffering. But when I was finally forced to attempt to get on to disability, I had a four to five inch thick sheathe of medical records with years of testing data from various specialists to explain why I needed to go on disability. I got cleared for disability payments faster than anyone else my case worker had ever seen, according to her, despite the local office twice screwing up by putting the wrong codes on my paperwork.

Back when Dateline, 20/20, and the rest of the similar evening news shows covered things other than lurid crime stories, each used to do an undercover segment or two a year showing hidden camera footage of supposedly disabled people who were doing hours of unrestricted hard manual labor. Then they'd move in and bust the "disabled" person on camera, asking him how he's able to do all of this work. Later they'd show the footage to officials at the Social Security Administration to get their reaction and wrap up by telling what the resolution to the story was. Usually the person who was defrauding the system at the very least had their benefits cut off, though some were having to pay back money or were facing trial for fraud. Looking at their Facebook isn't the worst idea if they have a reason to suspect someone of fraud. If you're posting pictures of yourself skiing in Aspen when you supposedly can barely walk....

I much prefer playing and GM-ing with 4e Missile Deflection rules. I know what I'm getting and not getting in every situation, simply and easily. As far as IRL goes when I was much younger, my friend and I saw someone on That's Incredible! snatch an arrow out of the air with his bare hands. The guy was a trained martial artist of some sort, had years of experience, and was standing to the side as the arrow was going by. We thought, "We could do that too" but (not being totally stupid) we decided to start out by catching darts out of the air. (Darts at the time were the only ranged weapon magic-users could use in D&D so we thought, why not?) My friend learned to catch darts out of the air, which I was throwing deliberately slowly and predictably, in about five minutes. After a few hours, I could catch about a third of the ones he threw, deflect or got poked a third of the time and miss entirely the rest of the time. I found out later than I had some rather severe uncorrected depth perception problems compared to everyone else in the world so looking back on it, I don;t feel as bad about my lack of success as I did at the time. But that was with each of us throwing deliberately slowly and the other knowing in advance when the dart was coming. When the speeds went up even moderately, neither of us were successful (and neither of us were stupid enough to try standing directly in front of the dart and let the other attempt to throw it hard). As a game mechanic, I just can't believe Missile Deflection as an everyman skill.

I went out of my way to avoid watching trailers and reading spoilers so that I'd look at the movie with the freshest eyes possible. I just saw it this week and, going back to read this thread, I must say that I agree with almost every negative comment made about the movie so far. 1) Wooden acting- not just Danvers but Fury, the Rambeau's, the Skrulls, the Kree 2) Bad choice of accents was distracting - minor quibble but part of blending in as a shapeshifter is doing the appropriate accent. Doing the right accent to match your target should be automatic. 3) Unmemorable or non-existent plot 4) Loss of Fury's eye - one of the low points of the MCU so far 5) Lame Skrull shapeshifting 6) Lame Skrull motivations, the movie would have been much better with both Kree and Skrull as villains 7) Captain Marvel way overpowered at the end compared to anyone else in the MCU (and inconsistent power levels earlier in the movie) 8 ) Unbelievable that a Skrull scientist wouldn't recognize space coordinates or at least suspect they were coordinates which were in space 9) Calling the invention a "lightspeed" engine was confusing when calling it any other sci-fi sounding name would have at least not have sounded retro compared to the tech the Kree already had. 10) Also unbelievably stupid that a Kree scientist would give a breakthrough lightspeed engine to a race of shapeshifters who had a grudge against her race. Superior speed is a military weapon. Any scientist who is a member of a spacefaring race which had been at war for decades would know that superior speed is a weapon rather than a tool which would bring peace. 11) I kept expecting Korvac to do something special but he never did. If they wanted Korvac to be seen but do nothing, they should have had him standing at Ronan's side, not be part of the Kree's SEAL team. 12) Abysmally stupid cat alien I understand that people liked the Men in Black movies with their stupid aliens with stupid powers. But Nick Fury was holding the damned cat when the damned cat picked four aliens up off the floor, which means that Nick Fury was holding the weight of a cat plus four aliens in his outstretched arms. I can accept a super-strong alien cat. I can't accept a super-strong alien cat which temporarily gives Nick Fury super-strength just long enough for the cat to swallow the aliens. No, that was just bad writing. The movie would have been so much better if the Skrull had been uneasy and scared of the cat the whole movie, while the cat was nothing else other than a cat for the whole movie. That would have just made the alien seem quirky and alien rather than introducing the cat as being a part of a whole other race of aliens which had no justification at all for why it was on Earth, much less in that place at that point in time. ==== I don't follow actors and actresses, had no idea who Larsen was, and go out of my way to avoid hearing spoilers but it penetrated even my intense disinterest that Larson was playing up the feminist angle of the movie as she was making the talk show circuit promoting the movie. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie didn't come across as some political manifesto. I noted the same feminist/anti-male/whatever scenes in the movie which others mentioned, but honestly, I see those all the times in movies, TV shows, and commercials anyway and this movie wasn't any more blatant than anything else in pop culture. The Carol Danvers character started off her superhero career as Ms. Marvel so I wouldn't have been exactly shocked to have seen a heck of a lot more than her burning the face off of Arnold Schwarzeneger and stealing a rude guy's bike. Anyway, given this movie, if the Captain Marvel character were to literally disappear from the MCU, I would not be sad at all. And I say that as a big fan of Carol Danvers, Ms. Marvel and Binary from the comics. I didn't like the movie overall. When it inevitably shows up on TV with another MCU movie on another station, I'll tune in to any other MCU movie rather than watch Captain Marvel. I needed to see it to set up the next Avengers movie. But I don't feel a need to see it over and over like I do some MCU movies which I watch whenever I need to feel better. I thought Wonder Woman was much, much better than Captain Marvel. But I think that's true because of Chris Pine vs Jackson, rather than because of the leading ladies. I thought Gadot was better than Larson but not by a huge margin. But Gadot worked off of Pine wonderfully while Larson and Jackson had no chemistry on any level (whether lovers, friends, people who happened to be on the same planet at the same time, etc.). And I say that as a Marvel fan, not a DC fan, and as someone who has never cared much for the Wonder Woman character. My wife fell asleep during Captain Marvel, I woke her up so I wouldn't have to endure it alone. And she was the one who was pushing for us to go see it sooner rather than later. On the good side, a) Ronan the Accuser looked better in this movie without the ridiculous face paint. b) Nice cameo by Phil Coulson. I kept wanting him to have more dialogue because his actor knows how to deliver a line. c) I didn't mind that the "Avenger" name was Carol's call-sign. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. In the context of the movie, it made sense. d) The de-aged Fury looked good. If I didn't know he was old, I wouldn't have guessed it from the SFX. e) I liked having both blue Kree and pink Kree and the fact that Captain Marvel didn't comment on it. Logically it should have been just a background fact of life to her and she shouldn't have taken special note of it. f) The Rambeau's didn't add anything special to the movie for me but I can see why they were there as part of the fan service. g) I didn't mind Fury trying to be funny: everything is all fun and games until someone loses an eye.