CrosshairCollie

For anybody about to say 'cheetahs can't run 95 mph', I'm reasonably sure that number is actually kph.

On 6/27/2019 at 11:44 AM, L. Marcus said:

I had a root canal last year. I requested a sedative beforehand -- last thing I remembered was sitting down in the sofa outside the op room, the next thing I recall is waking up just at the end of the procedure. Mirtazapin, I think it was I got; worked a treat!

Mirtzapine??!!!

A doctor prescribed me that as a fracking SLEEP AID earlier this year.

To her credit, it worked ... but still, if it's used as a freakin' surgical sedative, no wonder it knocked me out so hard!

Whilst driving today, I came to one of those intersections where your road goes straight, but there's a 90 degree intersection to one side.  Like a sideways T or something.

The branching road went over a bridge.

The branching road was named "Illusion Street."

So ... successful saving throw on my part?

(I am not making this up.)

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

Re-read it in Devo..

You mean Men Without Hats (it's a parody of the Safety Dance).

On 6/25/2019 at 2:25 PM, Lord Liaden said:

Yes, the facilities where those prisoners were gassed had descended even past concentration camps. They were dedicated extermination plants.

 

I really don't want to believe American society will ever sink that low.

I wish I could believe that it won't.

On 6/10/2019 at 6:08 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

I know a GM that puts a basket on the table for phones. Put the phone on  airplane mode, for the duration. Phone rings get taxed, like a pun tax or swear jar to fund snacks. 

I considered something like that, but one of my players regularly gets important calls from work about scheduling at odd times, so that would cause him some serious problems with his job.  Fortunately, he's nice enough that he'll look at it if it rings, and if it's not work, he ignores it until a better time.

And now for something minor, petty, and likely affects no more than five other people who frequent this board.

Unless things change fast ... Pokemon Sword and Shield won't have a National Pokedex.  Not just a matter of 'you can't catch these Pokemon in SwSh', they literally won't be coded into the game and you won't be able to transfer them into the game IN ANY WAY.

Game Freak (GF) has put forth a few excuses ... competitive balance, and not having the resources to create the 3D Switch models for 800+ Pokemon.  I don't buy either of these, myself.  GF has obviously not cared too much about balance, and if that was an issue, they could just put a 'Galar Pokemon only' clause in the Battle Spot/Online Ranking/whatever (possibly as an option).  As to the second, Pokemon is THE highest grossing media franchise EVER, bigger than Mario, bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Hello Kitty, EVERYTHING.  They can afford to hire additional graphical artists or programmers or whoever.  Especially since you only really need four animations for each model (idle/standing, melee attack, ranged attack, reacting to a hit); everything else is just manipulating the model (for example, Tail Whip just involves rotating the model a bit and adding a small graphics effect behind it; EVERY model did the same thing with that move).  And I wouldn't be surprised if they could just tweak most of the 3DS models from Ultra Sun/Moon for the not-new Pokemon in SwSh.

The likely REAL reasons ... 1. They want the game out for a Christmas release and don't believe in Shigeru Miyamoto's 'A delayed game will eventually be good, but a bad game released will always be bad' (paraphrased) and 2 ...

Pokemon GO.  In the 3 years or so GO has been out, it's made 5% of Pokemon's colossal gross income.  GF is allocating more of its resources from the actual main series games into their bastardized mobile offerings because they're more profitable.

To me, this just means SwSh is going to be released in an incomplete state.  Unless they release FREE updates adding the older Pokemon into the game, I will NOT be buying it and I've been a loyal Pokemon player since Gen 2 (Pokemon Crystal, 2000).

I prefer First Person, myself, just 'cause my brain has trouble aiming in third, even with a crosshair in the middle of the screen.

From the looks of things, though, 2077 may be its release date.

On 6/19/2019 at 9:12 AM, Logan.1179 said:

Thanks, all. I'm still dealing with it mentally, and we'll see about what it does to me physically. I've been looking back on my medical history, and I think my first flare-up was in 2009, but we didn't even think of looking for something like this. 

I was diagnosed with it not too long ago myself.  Fortunately, I'm on a medicine that seems to be doing a good job of slowing, if not outright stopping, the progress of the disease.  You have my sympathy and I wish you the best of luck coping with it.

My friend Jeff's cat Halley died a couple of days ago.  Now, to be fair, she had a hell of a run ... she was over twenty, which is roughly the human equivalence of being over a hundred years old.  She was an old farm cat, friendly and affectionate though.  We'd been watching her health deteriorate for a while, but she was holding up very well all things considered.  I don't think she was on death's door so much as Death was at her door, and she was telling him to f*** off.

She died peacefully and, near as anybody could tell, painlessly.  Jeff's buried her in his yard, planted a shrub there, and put a little cat statue on it.  I'm probably gonna take a few minutes to cry at it next time I visit.

8 hours ago, Trencher said:

Everything in WWE exist only to build HHH and Shane. Thats just how it is. If you going to like WWE you need to be able to enjoy the small things that fall through the cracks.

Many people on the internet hopes that Vince will retire soon, I say we will miss him when he is gone. 

While I can respect him for that he created, I'm not going to miss him when he's gone (unless things somehow actually get worse).  Much like many of his wrestlers (Eldertaker, Oldberg ...), he should have stepped away years ago.

2 hours ago, Cassandra said:

 

Multiform is a Standard Power and can be put into a Multipower.  That's the way Hank Pym does it when he goes from Yellowjacket, Ant-Man, and Goliath.

I dunno, I'd interpret that just as a Multipower with Growth and Shrinking, along with a Gadget Pool.  I do freely admit that, the last time I paid much attention to the main Marvel comics, Pym actually couldn't change size without endangering his health, but could enlarge and shrink other objects and people by touch (and carried around a small arsenal of shrunken weapons and gadgets in his jumpsuit), and didn't use a superheroic identity.

1. Active Points and point costs don't tell the whole story.  They're a good starting point for balance for direct, straightforward things like attacks vs defenses, but when you get into the less direct aspects of character building, you can't just go by the numbers.  It's entirely possible to have a cheap game-breaking power, or an expensive power than doesn't accomplish all that much.

2. Remember that you can always say 'that was a mistake, it's unbalancing the game, we need to do something about that'.  GMs make mistakes, and aren't omniscient ... it's impossible to foresee every possible situation a PC might end up in or how they might (ab)use a power.

On a more 'which power to use' front, assuming all the forms are bipedal/raptor-bodied dinosaurs, this doesn't sound like Multiform to me, just maybe a Multipower with a Growth slot and a Shrinking slot, since the skills and overall powers remain the same.

Attention wHHHore.

"God, will today be a good day?"

If you're gonna hack a roadsign, do it with style.

The very first Champions game I was in, which was simultaneously a great thing (it introduced me to the game) and a bad thing (the GM had several ... quirks that I took as gospel and took me years to shake free of), regularly had 10 players in it, up to 12 on occasion.  The only reason this didn't make things take forever was one of those quirks ... a campaign cap of 18d6 on attacks with defenses in the 25-30 range, meaning 'if you got hit, you were probably dunked for the duration'.

It didn't take me too long to realize that was absurd and didn't really give much time for actual characterization, so when I started running, I decided to cap at six.  I got wheedled into 8 once,  but never again.  Nowadays, my game group consists of 4 people including myself, so not really an issue anymore.

On 6/8/2019 at 9:07 AM, death tribble said:

No big changes from the Super Showdown in Saudi Arabia. The big gimmick was the 50 man battle royale. This is different to the Rumble as everyone starts in the ring.

Lesner tried to cash in the Money in the Bank contract but was stopped. This is a good thing.

Super Letdown didn't change anything because it's just a high-profile house show.

Roman Reigns is the Big Dog, the guy we wanna push, the future of the company, the new face than runs the place?  Let's have him humiliated by the owner's kid, with the once fearsome and monstrous Drew MacIntyre reduced to the role of a lackey.

Triple H vs Randy Orton version 8,586.

The colossal main event, featuring two legends who can't wrestle for more than three minutes without wheezing for air, Oldberg vs the Eldertaker.  This match might have been good twenty years ago, but both of these guys are over, done, finished, and between Crown Jewel and this, Taker's legacy is getting a thick layer of tarnish on it.

A fifty-man battle royal ... with fifty-one participants and no spots.

As you say, at least Blockhead Loser didn't get to cash in.  If WWE is smart, the 'Friday' he spoke of will be the first Friday show on Fox Sports (and ideally, he'll fail there ... no, ideally he'll quit before that and we'll never have to see him again).

Okay, gonna try to get back into this stuff.  Here's my thought for an opening adventure, 'get the gang together' sort of setup.  I've mentioned the idea before, but it's been a while, so this might seem familiar to some.

The idea is that Loki wants/needs to get his hands on Mjolnir, but knows damn well he can't get it off Thor himself, as Thor would kick the living crap out of him.  So, he does his behind-the-scenes manipulation schtick and gets Thor and Bulldozer to get in a drinking contest.  He arranges it so Dozer can't get drunk off the magicked booze, and with a bit of mental prodding, gets Dozer to grab the hammer.

Now, of course, Loki, mischievous jackhole he is, does see some potential chaos that could be generated by Dozer having Mjolnir, so makes the mistake of not taking it away immediately; he knows of Dozer's arachnophobia and knows he can use that to get him to relinquish the hammer.  Thor wakes up, hung over and extremely ticked off, and basically goes around tearing a path through (Campaign City) looking for Dozer.   This is the PCs' first problem, because they have an angry brick on a rampage and the odds of a shared language are slim at best.  I don't have any pre-planned thoughts of how they're going to deal with him, I'm just gonna have to wing it.

Sometime after Thor is dealt with (or Thor deals with them), that's when Dozer will start discovering how much fun he can have with the hammer.  I don't think Dozer is smart enough to think about doing more than hitting people with the hammer, either in-hand or by throwing, and I don't think he's seen any of the Thor/Avengers movies ("Comic books are for NERDS!"), so things like throwing lightning just aren't going to occur to him without prompting (also, see below).  Believe me, I'm waiting for a PC to say something about it, though.  "At least he's not throwing lightning at us." "I can throw lightning?" "FFFFFFFFFFFFF--"

I'll be doing a lot of ad-libbing at that point, just kind of seeing what happens and reacting ... ideally, the PCs (maybe with Thor's help? depends) will weaken Dozer enough that Loki can make his move to swipe the hammer (at which point I'll have to figure out just what he wants to do with it), then they have to go after Loki.

N.B. I'm not using Marvel Thor.  I'm using mythological Thor.  He's red-haired and bearded, and there is no 'worthiness' bit on Mjolnir (and Mjolnir cannot be used to fly).  He speaks Norse (or whatever language is appropriate, I'll have to look it up), not Ye Olde English.  He's short-tempered, completely without guile (and thus easily tricked), hits first and asks questions never.

Anyway, thoughts?  Intriguing premise?  Lame?