archer

Bring on the tartar sauce!

"Remember that she devours her mates."

I feel strongly that any manufacturer of gear in an interstellar culture would specifically try to make gear which is as adaptable as possible to the greatest number of beings. At least anyone who is in the manufacturing business to make money rather than for some other motive. Sure if you're using ethnic-specific weaponry which is only made for G'Bathtc priest on G'Bathtc worlds and their weapons are brass "knuckles" which are held in place by their stretchy stomach muscles, non-G'Bathtc people might have trouble using the weapons properly. But the rules are already in place to handle odd weapons...do you have the right weapons proficiency?

1) Psi-Kick could always choose not to cooperate or choose some arbitrary limit on her precog power and stick to it regardless of what the villains do to her. That's be a simple EGO roll for her to accomplish and considering that the nature of the experiment increases the time between each event, she could get an "extra time" bonus to her EGO roll. If she thinks it's important to keep that aspect of her power from being revealed, I could see someone who is really hard-core going that route. 2) According to how her telepathy works, it would be very in-flavor of comic books if she used her telepathy to put a psychic block inside her own head to set a limit on her precog power. And perhaps even erase her own memory that she had done it. That'd give the villain a false report on what her true abilities are. Maybe even go so far that she really believes, "Precog ability? You really fell for that? I'm just perceptive as hell, have a few levels in combat, and have reflexes which are off the charts."

That's a very cool idea.

But of course....

So which ones have fillet of sole?

Are you speaking of quality of the writing, the quality of his research on the topic, or both? I was freakishly good at writing when coming out of high school (compared to the typical honors high school student).

My aliens can get very alien on occasion. But if they get too alien, there's not going to be a common frame of reference with PC's who are humanoid. If the characters you introduce to a campaign can't interact effectively with the PC's, you have to consider whether there's a point in introducing them to the campaign. Consider humans. The driving factor of our existence is scarcity of resources. We have a need for food, clothing, shelter, sex, and many other things which we either strictly cannot do without or which we highly desire to have rather than do without. And there's not a free supply of any of those things lying around anywhere with the possible exception of air in some locations. We can understand the needs of aliens who have "scarcity of resources" as the driving force of their existence even if the list of things which they consider to be resources differ from our list. The Outsiders species from Larry Niven's Known Space series look like a cat o' nine tails which live on thermally-generated electricity (at very low temperatures) and exist in vacuum. But they use space ships and trade information for usage of moons around gas giants. They are both very different from us and not very different from us (for the convenience of both the author and the reader). But think if oak trees had sentience. If it is mobile at all, which isn't a given, its location is really its only needed resource. It makes its own food using sunlight. It gets moisture from the soil. It probably isn't hung up on sex or on how badly his kids are behaving. It doesn't need clothing and would have no cultural reference to understand the need for it in other species. It likely never attended school or prom. It doesn't care about landing a good job, the next poor excuse for a Star Wars sequel, or driving a fast car. If we gained the ability to attempt to communicate with a sentient oak tree, would we have anything which it would want to hear or understand? Would we get anything even slightly useful, even as entertainment out of trying to communicate with that tree? That's talking about a species from Earth which might have grown up a couple of miles from thousands of humans...and we don't have enough of a common frame of reference to even have a decent conversation. Think about how much worse it would be trying to communicate with an alien which is really alien to "our frame of reference for interacting with the universe" and has never even seen our world. I think that's why most aliens in fictional worlds tend to be more or less humans but with funny ears and noses.

Exactly. 4th with bits of 5th like megascale. I didn't feel like there was a clean transition from 1st to 2nd to 3rd so it made interpreting some published characters a little awkward. But 4th was a clean break and I felt it did a good balance of cleanness vs complexity. When I'm thinking up characters, I think of them in 4th then have to adapt them to 5th or 6th (much the same way that someone who has English as her native language might think in English then have to translate that thought into French or Italian before communicating in those languages). When I'm a player, I really like utility belts and figured characteristics. 6th lets you have one but not the other, which I see as a problem. I started picking up HERO stuff the year it came out. It took me several years to find Adventurer's Club #1 after they started publishing it. Then I randomly found two copies of it at a used book store out of state, which makes that my favorite random RPG find ever.

Um, what color is the snow?

I would think a robot from the future would be slightly more water-proof....

He'll just offer you links to a dozen studies which show that there's no physical evidence that souls exist. Of course, if he thinks they don't exist, he'll probably sell you his for next to nothing.... Very next level thinking.

Apparently the octopus is from outer space according to a team of 33 researchers published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-scientists-theory-meteors-space-earth-cambrian-explosion-a8358631.html The elder gods really are out there.

I love Cassie. I hope they give her some stature in future movies.

Thanks for the clarification. My impression, which I admit is a year out of date because I've sworn off of politics, has been that those two were among the least pro-Trump Republican senators. That's about the only thing I've ever had to say good about either of them but that's what Trump has done to the party.

You know what they say, "Demons are a Ghoul's best friend."

What metric are you using to measure that?

Alphabetically or in order of importance?

One of the trials of knowing a lot is having to put up with people who don't understand as much as they think they do. I've found that when I want to be effective in putting knowledge into someone else's head, I have to get them to separate the idea of "I have access to a lot of information" from the concept that "I understand a lot of things and can always put the information which I have into the correct context". The distinction between the two is lost on most people.

So we decided to go with "Death Angle" over "Death Angel"?

I apologize for my earlier response. I now get exactly what you are saying.

Aha! https://xkcd.com/1815/

That's dedication. I love science fiction. But the books they choose to win Hugo awards often don't appeal to me. I like hard science fiction when I'm in the mood for science fiction and space opera when I'm in the mood to be mindlessly entertained. But those types of stories weren't what was winning Hugo's the last time I was really paying attention to the Hugo's a couple of decades ago. I mean, I looked in on them during the early Sad Puppy era but was looking at the controversy itself rather than the books.

Best wishes to his family. Losing a loved one his difficult even at the best of times. And I'm sure that brain cancer didn't make his passing easy.