BlackSword

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Wonder Woman Animated Movie - Excellent, really enjoyed the story, good animation and voice work. I have been DVRing and watching Discovery Channel's Planet Earth. Its a nice series with excellent cinematography, and for the most part the narration is good, the only thing that annoys me is that the unprecedented narration provides a majestic use of superlatives to describe everything. Also I think I have seen all of the video clips they have used in their 5 year journey and now they are just resplicing them together in a different order.

Re: Order of the Stick And this is one example that summarizes why we went with that houserule. We have a player in our group that will seek out every exception and there are two ways to deal with it a) heartburn and misery for the GM, steelboot of GM fiat.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Order of the Stick Not in the SRD, but the other invisibility spells are Illusion Conjuration (healing)

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: What books would you recommend?

Re: Help NASA Name Node 3 Any other choice? Go team Venture!

Re: GenCon 2009 Hong Kong Cinematic Superheroes Casshern was released a few years back. Most of the movie was meh, but it had a few good fights mixed in.

Re: "Alien" life

Re: Adamantium discovered

Re: Speeding Up Combat In games where it makes since to have opponents (or allies) group together, I typically use 'fire teams' of about 5 opponents. For each opponent past the first the group has +1 OCV, and +1 DC. This allows me to roll for five people with a single roll. Heroes and special characters operate as normal. When our group abstracts it out further to mass combat, we usually use a version of the L5R mass combat rules that we have modified.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. I think several people have mentioned the cinematic side of torture/interrogation. And while I might consider such a 'Beat it out of you power' for a Brick, said brick would not be a superhero in my games. Ultimately it all comes back to what has been said, it depends on what tone the GM is going for. If beating people up is the best way to get information, then that is what the players are going to tend towards. If the GM doesn't want 'beating it out of people' to work, then he doesn't allow those techniques to work as effectively as the techniques he wishes to encourage.

Re: Musings on Random Musings I picked up the boxed set of Mel Brooks movies a year or two back. Had most of the classics and a few that I had never seen before. The only notable gap was Spaceballs. (it also didn't include either version of The Producers).

Re: Musings on Random Musings Mr. Clean? Oh, McLean....

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Last night at the gym they had Glen Beck on one of the TVs, and right next to him was Woody Paige. I felt my IQ drop through the entire workout.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. An important question for the GM is "what kind of tone is he setting for the game?" There is obviously a spectrum of opinions on the morality of using torture, but for the particular game being run the GM has to set the tone for what is acceptable for the heroes in regards to questioning suspects, and what crosses the line as unacceptable. The second responsibility the GM has is to ensure the information can be gotten in a way that does not require the players to cross the line*. For the original post it sounds like people may need to sit down and discuss that the character is going in a direction they don't want to go and how to proceed forward. *unless the game is specifically, what are the lines, and how are you going to react if your only choice is to cross them. But for such a game the GM should be more upfront about the game.

Re: Order of the Stick I believe anti-magic field only suppresses magic in its area of effect, it doesn't dispell magic.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I have been watching Ranma 1/2 and Batman: The Animated Series.

Re: Mars has gas! I always assumed that McDonald's would be the first fast food chain to open on Mars, but it appears that Taco Bell has beaten them to space.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Over the break I read Phantom by Terry Goodkind, mainly because a friend lied to me and told me it was the last book in the series. The first half of the book was terrible. I actually started skimming paragraphs because it was so poorly written. He had two or three chapters dedicated to how evil the Imperial Order was, and just to drive the point home, after he finished the summary of how bad they were, he had two more chapters retelling the same story from a slightly different perspective. A recap: Chapters 1 - 15: Richard: Ah Zedd and all you other older wizards who have spent your entire lives studying magic, let me explain how I, with no formal training and no ability to actually use magic effectively, understand it much better than you. Zedd: Richard, I think you are exaggerating. Richard: Now let me demonstrate my brilliance. Zedd: Okay, you're right Richard, you are smart, smarter than all of us put together. Women of the novels: Oh Richard, you're so great, please let us have your baby. Chapters 16 - 237 Richard: Tell me, what did they do to the city? Characters from 117 novels ago: They killed every male, then raped all the women, then had the old people go to work in the fields, and brainwashed the kids, then had the brainwashed kids kill more men and rape the women, all in the name of socialism. Zedd: bags Richard, they are evil, which we have established in the past 450 chapters, but wanted to reiterate. Richard: Zedd, of course they are evil, but not one-dimensionally evil, tell us more. Random Character: They raped the village Richard: Yes we know, you told us that. Random Character: No, you don't understand, the Emporer ordered the battering rams to be used on every door or entry into the houses, they actually raped buildings. Zedd: Bags Richards. Richard: Still not evil enough, we know you're holding back. RC: Oh yeah, and when the supplies ran low they started bringing corpses to the kitchen for us to prepare Richard: Finally, they are really, truely evil. Chapter 238 - 239 Goodkind: Crap, I spend so long talking about the evils of a Socialism-like fantasy state I entirely forgot to move the plot forward at all. Umm, summarize, summarize, summarize, and publish.

Re: First extra-solar planet with CO2 They also may have found extraterristrial sugar. No where in the universe is safe for diabetics. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28141876/

Re: Anyone actually playing anything?

Re: Civilians Miniatures? Our group typically uses glass beads. The beads tend to have a flat side so that they can be flipped over to show when an NPC is in a non-normal state. Also you can use multiple colors to denote different groups. And they tend to be dirt cheap.