archer

< Watching a transformation with the monster's skin bubbling as it turns back into an innocent civilian. > "It's like Dr. Pepper and Mister Hyde!"

This exactly. When I had money to buy products, I expected the products I bought for a game system to be playable with the game rules plus that product alone unless it stated in large print on the outside front cover "Not playable unless you have this list of other products as well". You can play D&D perfectly well without a Monster Manual. The game was around for years before the first MM was printed in 1977. I can't say how every group did it but in the boxed set there was a Monsters and Treasures booklet. When I needed something new, I reskinned it and changed its behavior a little bit. Even after the first MM was printed, many of the monsters they printed were re-skins with their stats tweaked a bit. I was so used to reskinning by the time I had access to a MM that I reskinned most of their monsters so that players who had access to the MM wouldn't instantly identify everything. That works for D&D because the monsters for the most part are infinitely replaceable. It doesn't really matter whether you're using goblins, orcs, or kobolds. Or whether it's an ettin, ogre, or troll. Even inexperienced players and DM's have enough experience with pop culture to know what a goblin, ogre, or troll does and can fake making one if he doesn't have access to an official one. But is there a cultural consensus on what a Firewing is and does? Would Oculon be a suitable replacement for Dr. Destroyer in an adventure or should I go with Ankylosaur because he too has an armored suit? You could get away with not including the bad guys in a Western Hero adventure because a human with a gun is pretty much a human with a gun, with the difference being how hard the GM works to bring his character to life. But for Champions? I'd argue that there's far too much variation for a person with his new purchase in hand to be able to guess right in what bad guys to use, if he has no access to the suggested ones.

As my former pastor used to say, there's nothing wrong with a Seventh-Day Adventist that a little Sunday School wouldn't cure.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9653491/USA-Today-fights-FBI-subpoena-asking-hand-readers-information.html The FBI has asked USA Today for the IP addresses and phone numbers of everyone who read one of its articles during a 35-minute period in February as part of an ongoing child porn probe, in what the publisher is calling a violation of the First Amendment. On February 2, FBI agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger were killed and three others were wounded when 55-year-old David Huber started shooting as they approached his apartment in Fort Lauderdale shortly after 6am. He was suspected of possessing child porn, but the FBI has never revealed why. After killing the agents, he took his own life. . . . So I guess according to the FBI, if you click on a story about a child pornographer shooting FBI agents, that means you're either a child pornographer or you want to kill federal agents.

Yeah, being the clean-up crew for the Dyson sphere would be pretty cool. Either the interior or the exterior surface would be hugely greater than all the worlds of the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, and Gorn combined even if you counted in all the worlds that each of those civilizations just visited at least once. The Enterprise didn't make anything like a concerted effort to explore the thing since it was way too busy trying to save itself. There could have been 40-50 existing civilizations still on the thing plus ruins everywhere. Yeah, in theory the interior surface was scorched. But any civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere would surely either have (or leave behind) forcefield tech that could shelter cities or at least clusters of buildings. If nothing else, the inhabitants would have plenty of solar power. And of course the exterior surface could be used just as any space station but with the additional advantage of having access to the interior to replace raw materials such as air. You could put a TNG-era Constitution class starship like the USS Excalibur (Captain Mackenzie Calhoun's first ship) there and have more exploration, diplomatic, and rescue missions than a crew could finish during an entire career.

To be clear, are you paying the cost in BODY or bodies? Because if it's BODY, I guess that's one way of discouraging players from having necromancer PC's....

Facebook Plans to End Hands-Off Approach to Politicians' Posts it will no longer keep posts by politicians up on its site by default if their speech breaks its rules... The change...is a retreat from a policy introduced less than two years ago, when the company said speech from politicians was newsworthy and should not be policed... politicians’ posts will no longer be presumed newsworthy, said the people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Politicians will be subject to Facebook’s content guidelines that prohibit harassment, discrimination or other harmful speech https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/technology/facebook-politicians-posts.html Woot!

I'd imagine most villains would have an online presence. Probably only a few of the most self-destructive of them would broadcast their crimes. But they'd hype how great they were and such plus receive praise from their fans. Superheroes never seem to press charges for assault and battery against themselves from supervillains hitting them or attacking their bases. So if a villain was careful to set up their fight where they didn't create property damage to someone who'd press charges, they could post all kinds of pictures about them clobbering the heroes. Some of them might try to use their social media accounts to create alibis (No, really, look I posted this picture of myself all the way across town as the crime was happening so it couldn't have been me). I'd expect few heroes to have active social media accounts in their hero identities. They might have fan sites tracking them and posting things or hire publicity agents to manage the information flow of what is made public. But most heroes would be properly paranoid about broadcasting information which might help identify them. If superheroes have been around in the world very long, there'll be horror stories in the community about heroes killed when their ID's were discovered and the gruesome trail of friends and loved ones who'd been captured and tortured. And "keep your identity private" would probably be one of the first pieces of advice passed along from experienced heroes to new heroes. You don't necessarily have to have a classic secret ID. But you sure as hell wouldn't want to go around broadcasting it unless you have some pretty particular circumstances (like having no friends and loved ones outside the team and you live in a state of the art superhero HQ with all the latest defensive systems). I think some of the superhero/supervillain print magazines would have survived to the modern era. Maybe as digital magazines only but the interest in superheroes as celebrities would still exist. And I think you could still go to checkout aisles in stores and find out that Pigeon Girl is having the secret love child of Muscle Dude and the 10 most important things to do before the Co-Dominator invasion fleet arrives next month.

Needs one for Nick Fury with the last one labelled "Ominous threat".

First, don't tell us to feel free to post comments when you don't want us to feel free to post comments. Second, politely requesting us to not make off-topic posts in this thread is fine. Third, that was not a polite request. Fourth, you have absolutely no control over what people post on this thread and don't post on this thread. This is a discussion forum on a website which deliberately has a free-flowing discussion forum. If we were to for some bizarre reason want to discuss haircare tips here, that is perfectly fine. Fifth, if you insist on having control over the discussion, you need to go to the "clubs" section and post there instead of here.

I've seen Ghost Rider transform an existing motorcycle into his hellcycle. But I've also seen him summon the hellcycle out of thin air. So I guess it depends on whether or not he wants to carry his existing motorcycle with him from Point A to Point B while in hero ID. In the Ultimates Universe (Earth-1610), Ghost Rider reverted to Johnny Blaze while on holy ground and lost all his powers, including the hellfire motorcycle. I'm not sure whether the mainstream (Earth-616) Ghost Rider has that limitation or not. That limitation would probably be worth the same as giving some versions of Superman a total power loss when in the presence of green kryptonite, IMO. As for the original question about the power, I'd say that if the character defines it as a stock motorcycle that he ought to give it a turn radius ("My character rides a Kawasaki ZX-15") because other people he comes in contact with who have that exact bike should have their bike behave the same way (and differences in performance should come from Combat Driving). If the character defines it as my suped up super-motorcycle, he's not going to be in a chase facing the same motorcycle. And he should have it perform in whatever manner he desires it to perform. In short, the character can't change the game world with his choice of powers (such as declaring "the Kawasaki ZX-15 doesn't have a turn radius" because, ahem, yes it does). The player can build his character's powers but the player cannot determine how the game world's environment works.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/01/trump-lost-generation-491474 A fascinating look at the "Trump effect" on the Republican Party, including: “of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate or House on Jan. 20, 2017 — the day of Trump’s inauguration — a full 132 (45 percent) are no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation.”

My condolences, Pariah.

That could easily happen if you run out of gas inside an Indian reservation in Wyoming. You're spending that next 18 hours pushing your bike to the nearest gas station. (Seriously, huge Indian reservations with state highways through them and no gas stations at all inside the reservations.)

Well, the businesses didn't make the gain that they'd anticipated making based on what they expected someone else to do. That's different legally than taking a loss (unless there was a contract directly between that business and the other entity which didn't take the expected action). The only way to prove that there was a loss would be if they'd spent money already to prepare for the event then had to eat the loss of the money that they'd spent (and that's way tougher to do than it sounds). The cancellation was far enough in advance that taking a loss wouldn't be the case for the vast majority of businesses in the area in any case.

Sorcerer on the left, paladin on the right. I can't get the image to save and post for some reason. https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-weekly-roll/ch-2-finding-a-fourth-party-member/viewer?title_no=358889&episode_no=2

My daughter who works at Sonic had her busiest day ever with 120 separate tickets. As I've mentioned before, she works for tips but the state doesn't allow her or her place of business to inform their customers that waitresses at that establishment work for tips. She made $80 in tips off of 120 separate tickets. So that's an average of 66.6 cents per group that she waited on.

Yeah, but that's not exactly a test of courage unless she assumes Thor is totally inept and will accidentally hit her with the hammer. Or she assumes Thor is a homicidal maniac who will deliberately hit her with the hammer for no good reason.

There's nostalgia value in updating old stuff, there's people who don't have access to the old stuff, and there's people who have access to the old stuff but don't have the time or skill to update it for a play session themselves. I'd prefer that new stuff be written since I like pretending my favorite game system is still alive and well. And it's more fun to read about new things. But I assume that "people who have no disposable income and thus can't buy a product no matter how awesome it is" will never be an author's target audience. So what I like doesn't matter except as a matter of curiosity.

I don't have a problem with how you wrote it up. I'd give it a +0 Limitation of "hey, it's a motorcycle". That's effectively the social complication of a motorcycle not being acceptable everywhere plus the physical limitation of it's size. I wouldn't give the Limitation any value because it's effectively offsetting the advantage of not having to use the official vehicle rules.

Yeah, Side Effect plus, ahem, Burnout.

Yeah, probably membership drive (since I don't recall hearing of the group before) plus general fundraising. It's pretty trivial to get a sympathetic lawyer to volunteer his time to file a lawsuit. I'd be shocked if the case even went forward far enough that it went to court and a judge had to summarily dismiss it. edit: Their recent claim to fame seems to be that they were agitating to put hydroxychloroquine out to doctors for use against COVID without having to go through all of that pesky FDA approval stuff.

That's a publicity stunt, IMO. That group doesn't have standing for a lawsuit since it wasn't that group which experienced the damage.

Reynolds Wrap FTW!

Well, I'm kind of old and in poor health. I used to do a lot of political blogging. What else do you want to know?