Rich McGee

So you're all good with the idea of charging points to prevent a character's sexual identity from being tampered with against their will. Yeah. Done with this community.

I truly don't understand the reasoning here. Either you trust your GM to honor your red lines and your central character concept and not use that sort of influence on your PC (in which case you don't need this as a defense at all), or you don't trust them and you're taking a defense against betrayal (in which case you need another GM, not a protective game mechanic - and since any defense can be overcome by NPCs who aren't actually restrained by point budgets, a treacherous GM can and probably will still just blow past it). Aside from the ethics of social contracts in gaming, as GM I also tend to look at unusual defenses on a PC as something that the player wants to see use from. If you specifically take less damage/effect than usual from, say, magic from a particular school of magic, that tells me I should occasionally throw that type of magic at you to make your investment meaningful. It's sort of a mirror of the way taking an unusual weakness means you will see that weakness exploited sometimes so that you've earned the points you got from it. You want the exact opposite here - you explicitly do not want that defense tested because having it overcome would be repellant, and as a GM if I'm not a awful human being I won't ever do so anyway - so you're not getting any benefit from whatever points you spend on it. No one should have to pay points to ensure the sexuality of their character remains inviolate without explicit consent to make a change (presumably for dramatic narrative purposes). That's what X Cards are for.

Heh. I mistook the character name for Jade Naga from Silver Age Sentinels, who's an 8' tall alien lizard-snake-reptile person. Now that would been quite a reimagining.

Not me. You ever see one of those old public education films warning about not using gasoline/kerosene to wash your clothes? Rifftrax did one of them, and they're pretty much all horror shows filled with people setting themselves, their houses and their families on fire, with the lucky ones dying. Loads of fun, like a homemaker's version of Blood On The Pavement. When I was a kid, the great aunt who raised us used to do some of the laundry in kerosene. And I'm not even sixty, she was barely Greatest Gen and still acted like detergent was going to eat her hands off or something. Certainly never owned or used a washing machine.

Re: Seth's video, the term "rules lawyer" goes all the way back to pre-D&D wargamer communities, and it's almost certainly derived from military expressions like "barrack-room lawyer" or "wardroom lawyer" or "guardhouse lawyer" among others. There's reliable evidence of variations on the term going back to the 1800s in print, and I suspect the oral history extends much farther than that. The Roman army almost certainly understood the concept just fine even if the phrasing was different in Latin.

Flip the concept with a team of aquatic/amphibious/Atlantean supers called the Coast Guard. They keep an eye on the land/sea interface from the ocean side of things, and they've had it up to here with land-dwellers ruining their territory. Noteworthy for having dumped a trash barge in NYC Central Park and heaving a leaking supertanker into a Texan oil field well clear of the coastline. When they say "You aren't dumping that here any more" they mean it. On less terrifying note, they've also done more to deal with invasive aquatic species than the rest of the planet combined, and have a track record for rescues at sea that tops even their US namesake. Seen as villains by some, heroes by others.

Pretty much any improved or "impossible" drive tech can be so big a game-changer that it redefines a whole setting, making it a prize beyond measure. Even grossly inefficient FTL with no immediate practical use in a non-FTL setting would force a re-evaluation of entire fields of science just by existing. There's reasons everyone got excited when Zaphod stole the Heart of Gold. Niven's Known Worlds setting had perfectly good FTL (bought by humanity from aliens) for ages, but the impractical ENORMOUS SPOILER WARNINGS Quantum II hyperdrive the Puppeteers paid off Beowulf Shaeffer with still made a huge difference in terms of where you could go without unreasonable travel times even if few people ever used it.

As you noted, definitely not. The Ballad of Eskimo Nell is one of the filthiest bits of doggerel in the English language, and I'm always vaguely surprised when someone hasn't at least heard of it even in today's environment. Do they no longer mention it as such in college lit courses? That's where I first encountered it back in 1984. One of my profs allowed it as an alternate read if you didn't want to slog through Moby Dick.

Grenadier sold an "invisible stalker figure" that was a lead base with clawed footprints sculpted in, although IIRC it was part of a set of comedy figures like a dead wererat in giant mousetrap and a "half elf" that had been bisected vertically, leaving just one side of the poor guy standing there on his one remaining leg. Many years later GW cribbed the same trick for Frodo with the Ring on, although they also did him as a clear resin fig.

It's too late, my headcanon is committed to Zarkoff having run an Evil Dating Service to get chicks. I mean, to make the world suffer more. Of course, he might have arranged to plant that energy bomb that empowered Discharge, so it's not ruled out. Guy needs psych complications around being mocked or made to feel insecure, which is going to a common problem with a supranym like Discharge. The "premature" jokes almost write themselves. Increased END costs on his attacks would also be appropriate, forcing him to spend STUN regularly if he wants to keep up the pace. Also ought to have a nemesis named Eskimo Nell who can take his best shot and just laugh it off.

If you're using Doom Patrol villains for inspiration, you might as well just use the Codpiece almost as-is, with his origin changed so that his "engineered tragedy" occurred during a brief attempt at running a dating service (an EVIL dating service) that Zarkoff doesn't like to talk about any more. He totally wasn't trying to get chicks himself, no sir. And still somehow less ridiculous than the Butts from the show.

It definitely is, although it's been decades since I've compared prices between it and epoxy craft resins or putties like Milliput or Magic-Sculpt. I suspect all of them are extremely cost-inefficient compared to 3D printing STL files these days, but that's a very different skill set. Really depends on whether you want the figure to be translucent/transparent or not. Molding with clear resin is a fairly easy way to make transparent stuff, although getting a good translucent effect by mixing in small amounts of pigment is a skill I never mastered (or even attempted much of). Avoiding bubbles is the tricky part (and may not be an issue for water elementals anyway). You can also play around with embedding things - bones, leaves, magical scrolls, fish, seaweed, etc. - is another possibility, but obviously they need to be prepainted and my couple of attempts at it weren't worth the effort - even clear resin distorts the image too much to see detail clearly. Painting solid fire effects is actually quite easy with a little practice - something Reapers cheap Bones stuff is ideal for, as you can see in this old blog post. If I were doing them again today I'd probably sculpt on some thick smoke plumes on some of them - I've seen people use painted cotton for the same purpose but it doesn't seem very convincing to me. Opaque water isn't to hard either as long as you remember that water generally isn't really blue. Seawater is going have a lot greens in there, something conjured up out of a marsh or other standing water may have browns and greens from sediment and algae, and any moving water (like an elemental that's trying to kill you) will have white foam mixed in, which make for good highlights. Opaque air is something of an oxymoron, but if your elemental has a lot of smoke or fog in its makeup you can get away with whites and grays and you can play around with source lighting effects. Just look at various types of clouds for ideas. Invisible stalkers are just an empty base, maybe with a previous victim being dragged around as a trophy - style points if it's hanging in mid-air until teh critter drops it to fight.

You're not wrong, but (to the annoyance of Hasbro) there's a lot more to D&D than what WotC makes. Maybe they'll manage to alienate existing players and turn off potential new bloods to the point where their profits implode, but if so it'll be ten-twenty years before the sudden loss of growth in the overall RPG community affects people beyond the walled garden WotC is crafting. And honestly, their business model is already so familiar in the PC/console gaming industry it probably won't cost them all that many people despite the outrage in that video.

The Masquerade: Typical "five-man band" super team with a mix of power sets and distinctly different looks, but they have an ace in the hole. All of them have secondary powers (illusions, limited shapeshifting, etc.) that let them easily imitate each other and/or their current enemies at the drop of a hat, plus a telepathic link that keeps their impersonations coordinated to avoid friendly fire. If you figure out who's who they'll be at a bit of a disadvantage in terms of raw power, but they've practiced their tricks enough that it isn't easy keep track for long.

"Play it where it lies" also has some added complications there.