Vulcan

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster I gave up religion for Lent. I also made a New Year's Resolution to stop making New Year's Resolutions (and it's the only one I've ever managed to actually accomplish ).

Re: Evil PCs In the context of a party, 'evil' is how they treat people who aren't their friends. The evil party will level a town, murder the inhabitants, and salt the land if it's the easiest way to get what they want. That doesn't mean they don't have old friends, even people they trust, it just means they have a hard time making new friends...

Re: Evil PCs There are a lot of players who think that 'evil' means 'I'll stab my buddies in the back at the first opportunity.' These people generally cannot handle playing in an evil party... unless rampant PvP is what you are looking for. If you are looking to run a game centered around a party of evil characters that does NOT focus on PvP, your players need to come up with the reason they won't turn on each other at the first opportunity. Even evil characters can have friends they won't screw over on a whim... with a good reason, sure, but not on a whim...

Re: Orbital Mechanics and stuff: Check my understanding of spatial relations Yeah, at a light-year distant I don't even know if it really qualifies as a binary system. The orbital period of the system would be on the order of billions of years, I'd bet, assuming there was enough gravitational influence between the two at that distance. Remember, Alpha Cenutari is four light-years away from the Sun, and we're not classified as a binary system with them (Isn't Centauri a trinary system? I forget, my last astronomy class was a loooooonng time ago).

Re: "Neat" Pictures That depends if they are being filmed at the time. They were precision shooting against the Jawas offscreen, but a room full of them couldn't hit Han in a hallway once their picture was taken. I guess they're just TERRIBLY camera-shy.

Re: Cool Guns for your Games In other words, minimum BODY, minimum STUN - a distressingly common occurance in our games when killing attacks are used. I am curious as to what percentatge of the people shot multiple times by large-calibur rounds and shrugging the hits off are on drugs at the time...

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Or 4d6 RKA, Reduced Penetration - if you hit, you're going to hit twice...

Re: Killiing a lot of zombies from a safe position. Are we looking at magic zombies (animated dead bodies) or virus zombies (pain and shock resistant living bodies)? That makes a pretty big difference in what it takes to kill one.

Re: "Neat" Pictures What armor? There's a couple random metal pieces scattered around, but no sign of any sort of breastplate, arm, or leg protection! She is cute, though...

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster Wouldn't that put the conception around March 21st... which we are some days away from yet? Or am I just missing the joke (aside from the obvious one about Snooki's kid heralding the end of the world)?

Re: "Neat" Pictures The amount of energy being split away from the beams as visible light for the observer to see. That's all lost energy, from a weapon point of view. One thing visual Sci-fi NEVER gets right. Energy weapon shots are invisible. Only HITS would be visible. You don't see bullets traveling at 1,000 mph, right? Why would you see a particle burst travelling at 100,000 mph? And lasers do not show up unless there is something in the beam to scatter the beam... dust, gas, errant birds, whatever. In the vaccum of space, there's precious little of that to get in the way. EDIT: Had to go back and finish my statement...

Re: Sci-Fi Webcomic: Escape From Terra! By the Ceres legal system (such as it is), she was within her rights as the wronged party. Shooting the goon was her choice. The trick is that Ceres and the belt miners really don't have anything in the way of organized government beyond a basic civil court system. If someone does harm to you, you file a case and the court rules on how much they owe you. In this case, the loss of her family in a wanton act of agression not just against the people (who had no possible way of harming the warship that destroyed their home) but against the whole belter society, the courts ruled that his life was forfeit to her. And she decided to take it. Not terribly civilized by American standards... but I think quite a few people believe that goon earned it.

Re: WWYCD: The Spark! I wonder if my wife's electrical character Lady Thunderstrike could absorb Spark and contain him that way (she has Absorbtion: Energy to END, Electrical only)...

Re: "Neat" Pictures Ah! Someone who has spent time in Saint Louis! That was pretty common on the south side in the '80s.

Re: "Neat" Pictures No, no, no, y'all is singular. The pural is all y'all.

Re: PMCs--Private(and Public) Metahuman Contractors I toyed with a vaguely related idea - a superhuman who, instead of becoming a hero, a villian, or just ignoring his powers to try and live a normal life, used them to try and earn an honest living. He was a winged brick and he worked as a 'heavy lift' deliveryman in Chicago. He'd be the guy you called to deliver an AC unit from the warehouse to the top of a skyscraper, or help take cranes down, or similar such things. He couldn't do construction; OSHA rules say that anyone working the high steel MUST wear a safety harness and... whassitcalled, the rope that keeps you from falling. Doesn't make much sense for a winged guy, but those are the rules. The downfall of this whole thing was that the GM was running a grimdark world that really WAS out to get the supers...

Re: Star Fleet Battles Starships I thought the reason they were Phasers instead of Lasers was that they were capable of being fired at warp speed. At any rate, from sometime before TMP, Phasers were warp-capable. After all, they were Kirk's reflexive choice when they were stuck in the wormhole (from a failed warp field) with the asteriod...

Re: Sci-Fi Melee Weapons: Bat'leth, Lirpas, Lightsabres, Rykk Blades, Koltari, Denn'B Grevious probably also had programmed lockouts, preventing him from bringing the lightsabers into contact with his own body.

Re: Super Transportation Well, aerodynmaic principles are the same all over the world, and if you have the same mission in mind, it's not impossible that two separate designers would come up with very similar designs. Of course, it's not like most of the designs copied were ever really that secret either...

Re: From Superfriends to Watchmen: The Extremes of Superheroes Try playing with a GM who thinks the heros should live up to silver age ideals... while living in a rusty iron world. Gets old quick.

Re: Sci-Fi Melee Weapons: Bat'leth, Lirpas, Lightsabres, Rykk Blades, Koltari, Denn'B Given the source material, I always thought Lightsabers should be NND (forcefield), does Body.

Re: Sci-Fi Melee Weapons: Bat'leth, Lirpas, Lightsabres, Rykk Blades, Koltari, Denn'B The Koltari is actually much more like a Gladius than a fencing sword. It is short and wide, not long and slender... at least, according to the weapon's one screen appearance on B5. The Bat'leth is not an especially good weapon. Unless you are highly trained in its use, it is clumsy and just as likely to disembowel the user as his foe. Where it really shines is in use against a more conventional weapon (sword, spear, etc.) where you can block, lock, and either bind or disarm your opponent, and close in to unarmed/grappling range with impunity for the takedown. Only then is the Bat'leth used as a lethal instrument, against a foe already beaten. It's really much more a shield than a weapon. Ah, the lightsaber. A full meter of plasma (heated by the power core, focused through the lens) contained in a magnetic field. It is one of the perfect weapons, the beauty that destroys everything it touches... Including the wielder. This is why it is relegated to force-users; no one else is dumb enough to use one without the TK ability to keep the blade from chopping yourself in half. It's also awkward as heck - grab a Maglight and try to swing it around like a lightsaber in a dark room, odds are you'll get the beam in your face before too long. A Maglight has roughly the same weight distributuion as a lightsaber - NO weight at all in the blade, the large mass of the battery below the hand. Of course, it makes the ultimate lockpick...

Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!! Destroy my Geek Cred. Hunh. I though being married to a goddess like Aphrodite would have forever denied me any Geek Cred in the first place.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: Background help please Might be as simple as 'you used to be filthy rich, then blew it all on nanotech.'