archer

Maybe Rick Berman is available.

Ah, thanks. That's a little unusual so I thought perhaps it was something like "staff and shield" or "staff and broach".

All the more reasons why people should stop going to Mass.

Be slightly careful with this one because you might have a player in the group who decides the whole "it'll destroy the earth" thing is just a bluff either by the villain or by the GM...then you'll have to deal with a player who seems determined to destroy the world unless the GM finds a way to stop him.

Is the OAF for the Armor and the OAF for the Energy Blast both the ancient oak staff? Or does he have two separate foci? Also, if a group of druids start to worship him, would their favorite hymn be "A Mighty Fortress is Our God"?

I sympathize with that. Drawing is one of those mysterious arts like making a decent pizza.

I own it, bought second hand as part of a bundle when I picked up about 25 HERO products together. Note I specifically said, "a sellable product which wasn't notoriously bad" as opposed to an calling European Enemies "an unsellable product". There are notoriously bad movies which become cult classics and continue producing revenue for decades. I often end up tinkering with characters from published products regardless because I find doing that enjoyable so European Enemies wasn't as much of a downside for me as it would be for many. But I would have liked the option of using the characters as written without there being a problem with their builds, a problem with the blatant national stereotypes, or both. There certainly wasn't anything unsalvageable about the product.

If a mentor gives the character an advantage, the character should pay for any advantages. If the mentor gives a disadvantage, the character gets a disadvantage. As Hermit and Duke pointed out, if it is both, give the character both. I kind of liked how the Legion of Superheroes Academy dealt with mentors (at least in some versions). While the kids were on campus, the mentors were involved in training. When the kids were off campus on official missions, the mentors would try to hang back and let the kids work rather than micromanaging their every action. When the kids were off campus on unofficial missions, they had to hide their activities from their mentors or get into trouble. The LSH mentors in all cases were definitely Contacts who had significant resources and contacts of their own. The kids were definitely Watched. The mentors weren't OCD trying to control the kids at all times.

Best wishes for her recovery. Getting over a fall which results in multiple broken bones is difficult for someone her age.

McConnell says today that he will work for border wall funding during the lame duck session. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/415490-mcconnell-says-he-will-push-for-border-wall-funding Personally, I think the illegal immigration problems would be better off dealt with by using the government's full databases to E-Verify every current and future employee in the US since that's something which could be accomplished relatively quickly and cheaply rather than building a wall. But I know a physical wall appeals to a lot of people.

Thank you for your vote: the (very, very) few, the proud. I do early voting so I can stay glued to the TV all day and into the wee morning hours of tomorrow (go MSNBC!!!). Election day is my equivalent to what the Super Bowl is for football fans.

I had no idea either. BTW, I accidentally clicked on the emoji twice on your post while trying to hover over it. I hope liking then unliking a post multiple times doesn't do anything weird.

"Do you know just how much work it is for the Druids every time they have to reset a henge because of daylight savings time?"

Yeah, translating across the Atlantic is rough. I'm a small government constitutionalist who is also a civil libertarian which places me in the "right wing" according to most people who look at American politics. In Europe, "right wing" could be anything from neo-Nazis to Nazis to "Christian" political parties which back a lot of what Americans would consider to be socialist policies to monarchists. So in the immortal words of Bill Clinton, "I feel your pain!"

Personally, I want a game with very low volatility where strategy and tactics win out over lucky die rolls...as fun as lucky die rolls may be when they turn out in my favor.

Not speaking for everyone, of course, but I like a robust discussion with all sides being heard. I came from original D&D roll-playing to really enjoying roleplaying. But I like roleplaying by interacting with other people rather than roleplaying, for example, by describing how I'm actually picking a lock (which I've seen attempted). Since getting into roleplaying, I've always played my PC's in a bit of an over-the-top manner and have looked for dramatic flourishes everywhere possible. But about 15 years ago, I had my third traumatic brain injury and have had aphasia problems since (mostly verbal but sometimes normal sounds like listening to a TV is painful to my skin). Anyway, sometimes I just randomly lock up and speak very slowly while obviously struggling to get words out, occasionally I can't speak at all, and on the rare occasion, I speak what I think is English but it is actually gibberish then I wonder why everyone is staring at me. And at the best of times, I verbally randomly substitute some words for others...and don't get me started on a story about John, Sally, and Tim because I will be using their names interchangeably throughout the tale. I'm not confused mentally at all, I just can't reliably get words out of my brain out into the world, verbally. It would be a very real challenge if I were to have to roleplay absolutely everything as some people earlier in the thread suggested that they do in their games. I would like to think that they'd be willing to make accommodations other than making me play each of my PC's as "he's a guy who has speech aphasia".....

I'm finding that paying for anything on such an income is a challenge.

Most game stores make a lot of their money through comics and cards/tournaments for games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. But both comics and Magic cards/tournaments are going digital which is making it very difficult to keep a LGS in business. Most owners don't have extra money anymore to spend on having an inventory of non-D&D roleplaying games which they might or might not be able to sell. If we could come up something similar to Adventurers League to play HERO in LGS's, we could probably get those LGS's to stock HERO products on their shelves. But HERO doesn't have any money to support such a venture and there's no way to convince HERO players across the country to converge upon LGS's across the country once a week to play, and incidentally spend money in the store, even if you could find the LGS's who would be willing to provide the space.

Groceries were taxed where I grew up but overall sales taxes were much less than the surrounding states. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't taxed on groceries on my first trip to the store. Then going to a different store, I was shocked out of my socks when I discovered that the state sales tax was more than twice what I had been paying (going from something like 3.5% to somewhere over 8%).

Well, it's a question of what you consider to be a "problem". There's a couple of stories a year locally about bags of discarded bags of mail being discovered. I would suspect that it happens a lot more than that since not everyone working in the Post Office would be stupid enough to discard bags of mail where it would be easily found (you could for example put it into any business's dumpster and it'd go directly to the dump without anyone seeing it. I know that we haven't been able to send or receive birthday cards through the mail for at least 15 years because it's always a crap shoot as to whether it will get through. If post office employees are willing to steal cards looking for money, I would suspect there'd be employees there who would be willing to steal ballots, either Republicans stealing from minority communities or Democrats stealing from suburbs and rural areas. Or more likely both.

Actually I wanted to ask someone about this. We have a problem here with the Post Office employing people who toss out mail on the side of the road and who steal every birthday card out of the mail hoping to find money inside. After your ballot is delivered and you put it back into the mail, does some system exist which would tell you if your ballot was actually delivered to where it was supposed to go?

I'd prefer a two day election, either Friday-Saturday or Saturday-Sunday and for the national election days to be official national holidays. I would also really like poll workers to be trained and paid as if the job were serious and as if the people who are poll workers are professionals. Under our current system, we depend heavily on seniors in most places to fill poll worker positions because those are the people who aren't busy working on election day. Having spent time working in local party positions and spending a heck of a lot of time with people my own age, eyesight starts to go at a certain point, being able to soak in training and retain information lessens over time, and staying sharp for a 10+ hour workday is a chancy proposition. As much as I appreciate the efforts of all the seniors who are out there election after election, I think we would be better served by paying an hourly wage which would attract professional people in the prime of their lives and which would attract enough prospective workers that we could pick and choose among them. Automatic registration and then de-registration when you change addresses. ID required to vote and effort-free ID's available to everyone (as I once put it, "even if I have to send a gold-plated limousine to your house at three in the morning to make it happen".) As for alternative voting, I really like "no excuse" absentee ballots (as I'm getting progressively less mobile, I'm figuring out exactly how brilliant my support of this position has been over the years). I'm not a fan of online voting at this point because I have major security concerns.

A month or two ago I made a post coming up with a 26 member UN superteam with each member named after letter in the alphabet. I came up with the character concepts for 26 heroes in 15 minutes. European Enemies struck me as being of the same length of thought: someone had a list of European countries and came up with 26 heavily stereotyped character concepts in 15 minutes. The main difference is that I think my characters had some thought and depth to them, at least enough to be written up as a sellable product which wasn't notoriously bad.

You have no idea how much I appreciated the "within proper distance" part of your post. One of the things which I found most irksome about our system is election day hijinks. During the primary election, I had to report the Democrat state senate candidate who was electioneering right outside the door to the polling place to the election judge. (The candidate at least made it easy to identify the culprit by putting his picture on the campaign literature which he handed me. The candidate was still there arguing with the election judge after I'd voted and was leaving. I don't really know what there was to argue about since "6 inches from the entrance" was clearly closer than the "100 feet away from the entrance" which is the closest that state law allows for electioneering.

Oh, they are well within their rights to run their website as they wish. But if they want political discussion on their site, that kind of ban isn't helpful for having political discussion.