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archer

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Everything posted by archer

  1. And I'd point out that "popular" issues are really often regional issues. If the country was small and homogeneous so that what was popular opinion in one portion of the country was always popular opinion everywhere else on every issue, ruling the country strictly by popular opinion would be fine. But since we have a wildly diverse country with a huge number of often conflicting regional issues, electing a president in a manner which ignores the concerns of many regions of the country isn't any more fair than the current system.
  2. My wife is Choctaw, the last generation which would allow a family member to qualify for membership in the tribe. I encouraged her to file the appropriate paperwork since she's interested but she's afraid they'd think she was money-grubbing for a cut of casino cash. I get peeved at people like Warren. There's just no excuse, in my opinion.
  3. At the rate the Democrat race is moving leftward, Biden and Sanders might turn out to be the moderate candidates this time around. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a voluntary one term president. It might seem kind of odd to us given that most politicians cling to power until we pry it out of their cold, dead hands.
  4. I really don't get why low-population states would want to sign on to an idea which would guarantee that presidential candidates would never visit them or spend advertising money in their state to try to get their votes. I've seen some maps which show that if we go to a straight popular vote that candidates can camp out in California, Chicago, and a few places on the East Coast and win without attempting to appeal to the rest of the country. I think it's a good thing that presidential candidates have to campaign in great plains farm states and have to address questions on agricultural issues then western states which have a large amount of public lands and their own lists of concerns then rural poverty stricken hellholes...I mean states...in the South which have their own unique problems. A president is supposed to be president of the whole country so, in my opinion, a system which will allow a presidential candidate to ignore campaigning and answering questions in large swaths of the country isn't going to be an improvement over the current system.
  5. Back when I had a religion and believed in a deity, I'd have had a huge problem being assigned a chaplain who was from a different denomination than myself. The Christian group I was in doesn't consider other Christian religions to be valid on any level. Assigning me a random Christian chaplain would have been emotionally the equivalent of them trying to infect me with syphilis. So I can sympathize a hell of a lot with a Muslim being assigned someone who was not of his faith. I have a real problem with the state having a chaplain of any religion on the payroll in the first place. They can't find volunteers?
  6. At least Trump was up front in admitting that he doesn't have time to devote to owning a dog. Most people in that situation would just get one for photo ops and palm off the actual caring of the animal to whoever was around that day. That's not good for a dog. Dogs need a lot of contact with their owners and are needy compared to a cat, a turtle, or a mirror. Trump strikes me as the "mirror" type of pet owner.
  7. https://newsthump.com/2019/02/19/dont-you-fcking-dare-hillary-clinton-told/ "Hillary Clinton has been told not to announce a new Presidential run in 2020 by absolutely everybody...A spokesperson for the Clintons said, “Hillary is obviously disappointed to have been tied to a chair with a sock stuffed in her mouth to prevent her from announcing her candidacy. "
  8. Between invading armies from across the sea, invading zombie hordes from the north, and crazy Lannisters around King's Landing, killing off only 90% of the people seems almost a little bit optimistic.
  9. You know how Brinn accidentally drove Hodor mad through using his mental powers? I have two words which will change your outlook on The Game of Thrones forever: Mad King.
  10. While this is a step in the right direction, the ruling made it clear that it was the galling magnitude of the seizure compared to the size of the legally allowed fine which was the problem. If the police had seized his $10,000 car rather than his $42,000 SUV, it doesn't appear that there would have been any problem at all with that action. Law enforcement can still use money from seizures. This ruling just says the seizures have to be in line with the limits on fines rather than in addition to fines (or completely unrelated to the issue of fines). In theory, law enforcement could continue to bring in the exact same amount of money from seizures if they start aggressively looking for properties which fall under the legal limits for fines and if prosecutors aggressively lay on all the additional charges they can think of in order to boost the cap. I mean, it'd be nice if state and local governments looked at the ruling and gave up their evil ways. But I think it's more likely that they'll just work to maximize their revenue under the new ruling. On the bright side, it was nice to see justices on both sides of the aisle come together on this ruling.
  11. So many of my childhood heroes are taking that final journey. RIP
  12. Back when I used to do political activism and blogging, I advocated, at the very least, that the agency which confiscated the money should NEVER get any of the money. Law enforcement agencies shouldn't have a profit motive for going after real crime, much less have a profit motive for going after innocent people.
  13. I build a movement multipower like that for my PC's more often than not. You just don't see many examples of supers being slower than an agent whose bought a couple of points of running so I figure most heroes have a low level of movement power even when they don't have a high amount of movement. Though I haven't add Swinging to the multipower. That's probably a mistake since I'd never thought of Swinging as being SFX super-parkour. And I always buy the maximum amount of movement I can get in the slot whether that turns out to be a rounding breakpoint or not. I can always slow down but it's difficult to increase my movement speed if I don't put it on the character sheet.
  14. Gwaihir, Lord of the Eagles as the Lord of the Ring...I think they could have done worse. Anyway...multipowers Multipower The One Ring (OIF, not very breakable) 1) Invisibility sight group (gestures to activate, 0 END, only if your character writeup has under 400 points not counting the One Ring...sorry Tom Bombadil) plus Mind Link to Sauron 2) Mind Link to Sauron (empathic impressions so a lesser level than when the Invisibility slot is in use, this slot is always on if no other slot is in use) 3) Mind Control (only upon bearers of other Rings of Power, only if your character writeup has over 400 points not counting the One Ring) 4) Desolidification (0 END permanent), Invisibility sight and sound groups (0 END temporarily permanent aka 5 centuries) and Regeneration from death (all powers trigger upon death, only if your name is Sauron and you made the One Ring. 1 recoverable charge). Carrying the One Ring gives you a vulnerability to Morgul-blades if your character has complications which are generally considered to be positive character traits such as "cheerful", "innocent", "trusting", "code of the hero", etc. If I wrote that up, it'd be a low-level cumulative transform.
  15. Jefferson Davis as Secretary of War for the United States evaluated repeating rifles for purchase for the US Army. He turned it down because he didn't see the use in putting a hell of a lot of bullets in the air in a short period of time. All that he saw was that being able to shoot quickly might encourage soldiers to "waste bullets". I think that was highly ironic given that at the Battle of Gettysburd that Custer's well-equipped regiment stopped the entire Confederate cavalry dead in its tracks for a couple of hours and kept the Confederates from hitting the Union forces from behind during Pickett's Charge. I'd love to see an alternate history written where President Jefferson Davis has the random thought that if it were to come to war that the South would be outnumbered...then sends a delegation and buys the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company and the couple of other manufacturers and moves them lock, stock, and barrel to Atlanta before hostilities break out. Harry Turtledove! Paging Harry Turtledove! Please report to your typewriter ASAP!
  16. Mount Doom wasn't where Sauron lived in that era, it was just his former workshop. Barad-dûr was 10-30 miles away, according to which map resource you choose to believe. As far as the eagles being free will creatures, couldn't have hurt to ask. They voluntarily rescued the group in the Hobbit without even being asked to intervene. The eagles weren't like the Ents who were totally divorced from the events of the world and who had to have their faces shoved in the fact that they wouldn't be left alone just because of their neutrality.
  17. They also don't know what Germany and Italy have in the way of super-assets to stop them. Sending Superman in might have been a great idea. But the original version of Superman didn't fly and no one knew for sure whether Germany might have had twelve of their own Ubermen to stop him. Though I think in the DC comics universe (in at least one of the reboots) that the war in Europe ended in 1943 because of superhero intervention. And much of the time the Allies didn't have a good idea where Hitler was. He was recording his radio broadcasts which were airing at a later time and were announced as being given in some random city while Hitler was really someplace else (or later just hiding in a bunker someplace else). Recording stuff for the radio then rebroadcasting it was such as new technology that it didn't occur to many people that it existed, much less that Hitler was using it frequently. The History Channel had an interesting show talking about that but I can't for the life of me remember the name of it.
  18. Who needs Gondor at all? In theory as soon as Gandalf tells Frodo, in Frodo's own living room, that the ring has to be taken to Mordor, Frodo could have remembered the story of Bilbo flying on the eagles. Frodo reminds Gandalf who then summons the eagles. They get to Mount Doom before the Nazgul are hot on Frodo's trail and before Saruman deploys his army. Everything is over before it begins.
  19. I'd also note that Lord of the Rings doesn't work as an adventure if you've got access to giant eagles which can fly you to your volcano destination without trouble.
  20. They're a desert-dwelling race so I'd suggest that they have skill in ranged weapons or weapons which can be used from the saddle of a mount. If you're on foot in the desert, you're going to have trouble getting from one oasis to the next and you're also going to be picked apart by any opponent which has ranged weapons to use before you can close to melee range because there's no cover. The Mamluks, for example, were known as cavalry lancers but also fought on horseback with a scimitar and on foot with scimitar and shield. If the culture is at all organized, I wouldn't place a lot of stock on weapons being formed from just whatever materials are easily available in the area. Any king or warrior who wants effective equipment will do what it takes to get wood for spear shafts and arrows or metal for spear and arrow points regardless of whether it is easily available nearby. (Now peasant weapons might be a different matter. I wouldn't expect desert peasants to have scythes and pitchforks like farmer peasants would have.) Having said that, I like the idea of ceremonial glass daggers used for ornamentation. And for use in assassinations where you are intentionally showing disrespect for the target, shove in the dagger then twist to snap the blade off inside the target. It'd take a little bit of skill to use effectively to keep the blade from snapping off before it's driven in to the haft. I'd expect peasants to use a non-snappable obsidian knife version of the weapon and one way you could tell the difference between someone who is a peasant and someone who isn't would be the amount of ornamentation on the haft and whether the blade is made from an artisan's glass or a peasant's obsidian.
  21. I take the level of player abuse to be based primarily on whether the GM came up with that race and list of racial powers or whether the player came up with that race and list of racial powers. For example, if the GM comes up with Kryptonians and throw them at the team then a player later wants to play a Kryptonian character, to me, that's not at all like a player coming up with a ridiculous list of powers and saying his character has all of those linked powers because they're part of his "alien heritage" from an unknown group of aliens who have never before been part of the GM's campaign. The GM is certainly well within his rights to deny letting a player use a Kryptonian or to insist that the player tone the Kryptonian powers down. But if the GM didn't want "Kryptonian powers" to be a thing in his campaign, he shouldn't introduce Kryptonian powers himself or let a player introduce them. The Martian Manhunter and his "Martian powers" works as a character because he isn't a PC in a RPG. The author conveniently has the character forget to use whatever powers the character needs to forget in order to get the story to turn out in a certain way and to unfold at a certain pace. But you can't ever depend on players to forget their characters have multiple powers which would let them skip through to the end of an adventure without going through all the difficult and confusing parts.
  22. I don't recall anyone deliberately starting out characters at less than the maximum allowed starting point of a campaign. I've seen people showing up for the first session having spent points on random things because they have no idea how to build a character and no one knew to offer to help. But not deliberately starting off less than the maximum allowed. For Champions, I've most often played 4e. When putting together my idea for a 250 point character, my first pass at building a new one would generally end up somewhere around 325 points. Then the rest of character building is making a seemingly unending series of agonizing cuts and compromises in an attempt to get the character to 250 points...or whatever additional points from disadvantages I could talk the GM into allowing me at the beginning. I don't think I've ever had any extra points lying around to throw into a "point sink". Ever. But I've had characters who were colorblind, young, overconfident, or a large variety of other disadvantages which have provided some wonderful moments of gaming. I don't recall anything other than a momentary regret over a character having any disadvantage (though I admit I don't build characters who could die from simple exposure to Krytonite). I have had GM's who were more generous in allowing things in the initial build than they were about spending earned experience later. So I'd always prefer to spend some points in the initial build to establish that a character has some ability in a certain area (whether power or skill) rather than counting on the GM allowing me to purchase what he might judge to be "an unrelated power or skill" later on. As for spending earned experience, I try to not get in too much of a hurry to do that. My characters generally are competitive in damage output and defense either through the build or through use of combat maneuvers so I usually don't feel pressure to spend points to catch up there. And there's always the chance we'll end up doing something odd like spending months of real time on an outer space adventure and spending a large wad of points while the starship is in hyperspace on things like WF: Lightsaber, Starship Operations, KS: Alien Technology, and Combat Piloting along with getting an OIF Life Support belt would seem like a good time to quit being a cheapskate. Having said all of that, I don't philosophically have anything against another player deliberately spending less than the maximum allowed points for a starting character as long as the character isn't going to be a burden to everyone else. If we have to carry him to the battle then shield him in the battle because he can't do anything at all in a fight, his character is probably in the wrong genre. But if he's a contributing character to the team, great, regardless of point totals. I do think a new player might be robbing himself of some roleplaying opportunities by skimping on the disadvantages. They're there to give the GM a hook so he can interact with the character, immerse the player into the game, and give the player a unique moment in the spotlight from time to time. If a player isn't familiar with all the comic book tropes and doesn't have disadvantages, it could be difficult for him, from my perspective at least.
  23. In one of the early editions of Champions, there was a company which sold Turtle Armor (Registered Trademark). It was roughly on par with Guardsman power armor from the Marvel Comics universe. The company sold the armor to prisons for the guards, for use by bodyguards, as toys for the rich and famous, etc. It was pretty basic and not point efficient compared to the normal PC's point-bought power armor. But if you were to buy a set of Turtle Armor for cash then put it on your Captain America clone, in game terms it would have vastly increased your character's power level.
  24. Come to think of it, a lot of things tend to be active when covered by the sheets....
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