RDU Neil

I figured I'd start this thread to redirect the great conversation that had derailed the "Coming Epic Failure..." discussion in Non-gaming.. When last we left the discussion, Ninja-bear had asked... "RDU Neil are you suggesting then that the max weight listed for STR should be considered Pish STR? Cause I like it." My thoughts on this are... 1) I believe this statement in the rules is misguided. "A character’s lifting capacity is indicated on the Strength Table. It represents the maximum amount of weight he can just manage to lift off the ground, stagger with for a step or two, then drop. He can easily carry or lift the weight which he can pick up with his Casual STR." While I agree with the concept, I think it forgets the pushing rule. "stagger with and then drop" sounds like Pushing, not simply spending normal END. For example: a 10 STR can lift 100kg... extremely high, but then the STR is way higher in lift than it should be on every level compared to damage (IMO), but let's go with it. If I was to personally lift a washing machine by myself, I would do exactly that, carry it a little bit, and then drop, assuming I don't have tools and leverage to make it easier. I'd have to rest, shake my arms out, try again, and only have a few of those lifts before I was spent. That, to me, doesn't sound like spending 2 END x10 actions (20 END), and quickly recovering. That to me sounds like I'm spending 7 END (2 plus push for 5) for x3 actions (21 END, actually hurt myself a little), and I'm wasted very quickly. Essentially, to be able to lift 100kg, I'm pushing... not just using my STR as statted. "Max STR" to me says just that, maximum possible... which for a 10 STR NCM, would be 200 kg, or 15 STR... because you can "push" to get to your maximum. Lift needs to involve both "how much can be lifted" (STR) and how long it can be maintained (which is END). The problem is that the STR chart as is, doesn't really address that. To get to this, you just need to adjust the STR table. 10 STR should be 50 kgs, 15 STR should be 100kgs, etc. (Honestly, I hate the lift doubles but damage is linear thing immensely, but that is a different issue, we'll go with it for now.) Therefore, if a 10 STR wants to lift a washing machine equivalent, they are pushing to do so, which is much more appropriate. IMO

On this and the "max deadlift" issue, I think everyone always forgot "pushing" as a thing. I guarantee that whatever the max deadlift is in real life, it isn't base STR... but a very strong person "pushing" to lift way beyond the normal for a very brief period of time, exhausting themselves in the process. Back when I did the gym rat thing, and would bench press... I could essentially do 150 lbs. multiple times very regularly... but at my best, hit 225 for only a rep or two, with a spotter, fully exhausting myself... so I was "pushing" to hit that level and couldn't maintain it much at all. Those guys throwing up 400 lbs, etc., even as huge as they are... are still pushing to get there.

Wasn't there a Futurama episode about this? If not, there should be.

RE: Venom... bleh

Highly recommended. Best straight up superhero show that manages to tread the gritty street crime feel and the truly superheroic wonderfully well. On top of that it actually has great writing and acting.

Agreed... Peaky Blinders is one of the best things on TV in the past five years.

I'd never watched House of Cards before. I began the first season yesterday. It seems so... tame.

Binge watched the final season of Bosch on HBO. If you enjoy top quality acting, drama, excellent plotting, and great character development, I recommend it. A very excellent police procedural. I'm also more than half way through Swiss Family Robinson, as something going on in the background while I clean the house and do laundry, etc. It is basically the kind of show that would have been must see family TV in some earlier era, so while more diverse and better special effects, the writing feels like something from the late '70s. Isle of Dogs was both genius, and tone deaf in some ways. Really enjoyed it, absolutely beautiful craftsmanship, but in this day and age, you got to wonder about the cultural representation bit. And Quantum of Solace is my second favorite Bond, after Casino Royale, in that it is basically the second half of that movie. It has the most brutal killing by Bond ever portrayed on film, and manages the exotic, remote set-piece final battle in a way that felt almost believable. What it lacked was any real interpersonal connections whatsoever, being a highly internal revenge flick that only makes sense, emotionally, if you have just watched Casino Royale. The villain basically being a faceless organization of the super-rich, also kept them from being emotionally engaging... with the cathartic moment at the end being again tied to events in Casino. Watch them back to back, and it is an excellent, bleak, violent revenge chapter.

Wait... seriously... "The scene was so volatile that authorities barred the rest of the apartment building’s residents from re-entering their homes, and burned the entire building to the ground in a 1,600-degree controlled blaze overseen by 100 firefighters. Residents left their valuables inside." ???? ?

Ah... I get you. Thanks for the explanation. As for drama dice, remember I was literally making up the idea as I typed, so I'm sure there are plenty of tweaks needed to keep it balanced and playable. I can always post my "Luck Chit" rules that I use for my game as well, since it is very much the Nar mechanic I layered on top of Hero. It works well and has been play tested for years, so I know where the balance is and where it tends to break. (Like any rule, it can be misused or break in certain circumstances, etc.) One thing I personally have noticed is that Nar mechanics can heavily shift the play style of a group. It may not seem like much, but simply having a chance to re-roll once or twice a game can heavily influence how sessions play out, and the more players you have the more people can use their narrative power, etc. Missed activation or skill rolls, or even a missed attack when it really matters... now you have that "nope... reroll" chance, and things tend to reduce those outlier bad moments. My experience is that it gives players more confidence in their characters, because it lowers the "feels bad man" moments that pure dice rolls can generate. This is a plus for our gaming group, but is certainly up to each, depending on play styles.

No... just no... I use these Narrative mechanics with people I've been playing with for 35 years in places. These mechanics are not training wheels, they are as integral to making the game work as having mechanics for resolving whether a punch lands or misses. "If you are mature role players you don't need rules for that. You should just be able to role play the fight without mechanics." They guide the group and provide structure for group interaction. Not at all. The mechanics make the game. Mechanics matter to what kind of imaginative additions can be brought in, under what circumstances, etc.

Yes... Advantage Gained vs. Dramatic Challenge. As a kind of hamfisted example... say, the player, when they get the advantage (adding extra dice to an attack, or guaranteeing a skill roll, whatever) the GM (or even better ,the play group as a whole) get a chit or something symbolizing "Drama!" which will force a challenging, dramatic shift when played. So... now, the PC, having just gotten the bonus to make a really difficult stealth role, sneaks into the base... GM asks, "Ok... any ideas on the drama challenge?" and one of the other players says, "I have an idea... how about this... we see PC Lad sneaking into the base, but cut scene, not far behind him, dressed in black with a look of determination on her face, is LL Smith, Roving Reporter and PC Lad's DNPC, who'd followed him up to Storm Mountain in the hopes of a big story! She follows PC Lad's path, and thinks she's made it when out of nowhere, a net falls on her followed by six ninjas! She's captured!" So now the PC's DNPC has been invoked, providing dramatic challenge, and it was a group decision and interaction that brought it into play, not just the GM "screwing with" the player. Suddenly the game becomes really fun and engaging storytelling. You'll get players debating whether it is good or necessary to risk further challenge for a benefit now. You can limit the number of times you can invoke the benefit, making it a special, powerful moment in the story, etc. Sure, if you have min-max munchkins in the group where they only want to demonstrate rule mastery and that they are 'better' at the game than others... well, they aren't going to buy into this. But if people want story and drama and character development and such, this kind of thing can give a structure to pulling them out of the group imagination, rather than just hoping people are all on the same page and engaged.

This is old school RPG thinking, where the players are poised against the GM, and anything other than min-maxing task resolution/combat actions are considered a "mistake" by the players to be punished. Original CoC was taking a stab at narrative mechanics with this insanity enforcement, but it was long before that kind of game development hit its stride. It felt punitive to that old school mindset. For a CoC game, or any such, you really need to be thinking narratively, as a player, and not "protagonizing" your PC... because it isn't about the PC gaining points and getting more mechanically powerful over time, it is about the PC as a vehicle to role play madness and obsession and isolation to evoke that feeling in the playgroup. The player doesn't lose agency, it is about granting them the agency to role play that descent into dissolution in a way that is an enjoyable experience. To say mechanics don't matter to role playing is wrong. Just expecting players to "get it" and all have the same experiential reference will never really work, not even with long standing, similar style players. Providing a structure is important. Hero "rewards" players who want to be good at punching things by giving them a clear system and interactive mechanics for them to demonstrate effective punching. The same is for many different task resolutions, combat or no. To get to Brian Stanfield's question... there are many different Narrative Mechanics that layer very nicely over Hero's Task Resolution mechanics, so you can get the best of both worlds. Try a "bennies" system or an "advantage/threat" system like in the current Star Wars RPG. Usually some mechanic that allows a level of director stance to players, works with intent not just action resolution ("You hit him, but what did you want to happen as a result of you hitting him?") Hero has traditionally not addressed (back to this thread's origins) Narrative mechanics, coming out of the old school, vanilla role playing concepts (mechanics help you fight, everything else is based on whether the player is just "good at it") though it has some attempts at this... the original Presence Attack was a step toward this, as it helped encourage intent "After I punch the guy's lights out, I want the others realizing they are outclassed and maybe giving up!" which was a great thing. It was limited in its applications, and was still about losing agency if the effect was turned on the PCs. If you want to encourage role playing, maybe something like "Drama Dice" (which I'm making up as I type)... say PCs have a pool of dice, separated (by color?) from their other dice. They can choose to add these dice to a damage roll, or have the subtracted from a skill roll, but the number of dice, or amount rolled on them would result in some kind of challenge or dramatic shift appropriate to the story... and the PLAYERS get to help come up with this outcome, not just the GM... so "We are getting smacked down by the Doominator! I go all in on this blast, 'cause we have to take him out! (Rolls big dice pool with Drama Dice added... gets big numbers!) YES! Got him! But oh boy, look at all those drama dice... something... let me think... oh, I got it, you mentioned that school bus earlier! Well my blast was so powerful, it cracked the bridge struts, and suddenly it is starting to collapse out from under that bus! We have to save 'em!" When the PLAYERS are encouraged to create these kind of drama bits... even if just by adding the dice to the pool and letting the GM come up with the drama issue afterwards... they are much more invested in the scene, theme story, than just reacting to every decision being implemented by the GM. This kind of mechanic encourages player involvement in the drama, provides an ingame reward, as well as encourages metagame dynamics... and some very small aspects of this (again, easily layered on to basic Hero task resolution mechanics) can go a long way toward encouraging the kind of experiential role playing that otherwise is just left up to undefined "good role playing" and whatever the heck that might mean for that particular group.

As of today, I seem to be able to see the reactions on my own posts, again. They were not there yesterday, but I can see them (well, at least in this thread, since that is all I've checked) as of today. Fixed? Thanks! Watchman... i liked your post above, so see if you can see it.

Yeah, as they've indicated, start with -8 for headshot, and add more minuses as you see fit (including minuses for range unless fully offset by the attacker's scope). The bigger question I'd ask is "If you miss the scope, do you still hit the guy?" Hero rules generally assumes a miss means no effect... so you'd have to have house rules for that kind of thing, if you are tracking every missed shot for possible collateral effect. (I tend to dramatically describe misses as well as hits, and sometimes the miss will be in such circumstances as it can add drama to a scene as well... but that is far beyond your question here.)

Ok... I tried to follow the link you provided... https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka Following through, I'm assuming you are using the numbers of Officers Feloniously Killed information (taking out accidental deaths)? https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-feloniously-killed/felonious_topic_page_-2016

Question... where is the thread discussing this new DC TV thing... and does anyone know anything about it? This looks fun... and DC has always done TV better than movies. https://www.cbr.com/titans-tv-costumes-beast-boy-raven/

The write assumes the original (ugh) Secret Wars, and not the most recent version (quite good) by Hickman. If this is more than speculation, then going cosmic (with GotG3 and Captain Marvel, etc.) would fit perfectly with the influx of Fox properties and a Hickman style Secret Wars. That would be fun.

Am I reading this correctly, that minimal gun control and higher # of guns per household correlate strongly with increased number of both police deaths and deaths by police shooting? Nice work on this all the way around, but just checking to see if I'm interpreting it correctly.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/mark-zuckerbergs-facebook-hearing-sham An excellent summarization... but of course, Trump will just shoot some missiles and distract everybody.

All the best, and hopefully we'll see your hyper-self back here soon.

and in follow up, he goes full fascist... equating himself with the country... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/09/michael-cohen-raid-trump-lawyer-fbi-mueller-documents?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=270836&subid=24646434&CMP=GT_US_collection

So you just "reacted" to one of my posts... and the system informed me. But looking at the post, I see nothing. I don't even see the blank gray heart on my posts, only on others (but I think that is typical). So if you "Liked" my post, I can't tell... but the system did record it. I was notified, and the little green number under my name went up by 1... but I can see nothing on the post indicating this at all. Not world ending, of course, but thought I'd bring this up since it just started with the last updates.

I would say, even at the height of my gaming, it was really a once a week occurrence for the RPG thing. Yes, sometimes more, and we had our long weekends of multiple games when we pulled people in from far away... but I didn't play multiple regular sessions every week. Our group had one weekly game night. That said, even then, when I basically ran a large meta-campaign that lasted for 25 solid years, and five more sporadically, I could only do that by changing things up. Make a big world, with players having multiple PCs, so moving between small arcs of certain characters kept things fresh. "Ok, on we are playing the Vanguard, ,high-powered global heroes" vs. "Ok... let's play Mavericks for a while... NYC based, mid-level heroes on the edge of the law" vs. "Now it's Malta Professionals, metahuman and cybernetic mercs working for whoever pays in Euro-African theater" etc. The games had different feels and scopes and PC interactions... but at the same time, inhabited the same world, and got to see larger plots from different angles... maybe one group would set something in motion that another group might have to deal with... so the players really got to become part of the larger world. That really helped me both, stay focused enough to continue moving a large campaign forward, but varied enough to not get stale or bogged down. It also allowed players to GM their own storylines at times. I found that really empowering, as I could then riff off some small thing they introduced, some technological MacGuffin stolen from a lab, whatever, and wind it into my larger plot, and it helped everyone feel like they were contributing to building the world. That level of interaction made it easier to GM, as it wasn't just people waiting to be entertained and I had to do all the prep.

"The Accountant" was surprisingly not bad from an action stand-point, though the "magical abilities of the autistic" was so heavy handed.