Captain Obvious

Re: Velocity Based DCV Fixed wing aircraft with forward mounted weaponry were strafing ground targets as far back as WWI. I think this "sideways movement" concept is an offshoot of FPS gaming.

Re: Velocity Based DCV The whole idea of strafing is to use the vehicle's movement as a targeting aid. Autofire weapons, at least, should receive no penalty. EDIT: But yeah, Greywind has a point there...forward facing autofire weapons should receive no penalty.

Re: Language Relations Chinese Pidgin English provides a pretty decent real-world example. From Wikipedia: Typical sentences in Chinese Pidgin are Hab gat rening kum daun (Have got raining come down) “There is rain coming down”; Tumoro mai no kan kum (Tomorrow my no can come) “Tomorrow I can't come”; and Mai no hab kachi basket (My no have catch basket) “I didn't bring a basket.” Definitely not a 4 pt similarity. The words are very similar to standard English, but usage is way off. Grammar seems to mostly follow the Chinese, although it's hard to tell from such a small sample. It appears the pidgin is more closely related to English than Chinese, likely because English speakers in the past have been notorious about not lowering themselves to learning other languages. So, for your language table, I'd suggest looking at the two cultures and the circumstances involved, decide which side is more likely to resist learning a new language. Give three points of similarity to that parent language, and only one or two to the other.

Re: Sawed Off Shotguns 4E and earlier had a different system for shotguns, simulating pellet hits. Each pellet did 1d6K, IIRC, and you could hit with 1-4 pellets, but I don't remember the exact procedure to determine how many hit...

Re: Order of the Stick "Thog's name is Thog"

Re: "Neat" Pictures My son just called this "Spur Wars"...

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! The ludicrously munchkinish are worth a whole 'nuther thread. Interesting sidenote: In the War Machine rules from the D&D Companion set, a million goblin mercenaries hired up and sent into battle without training together are no match for a few tens of thousands of well-trained humans.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Dunwich Horror is good. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is good. The Thing on the Doorstep is good. I liked Cool Air a lot too. Once you've read through your book, assuming that you've enjoyed it overall, I recommend going back to look at the ones that didn't tickle your fancy the first time. Some of the stories just seem better once you've got a better idea of what kind of stuff it is that you're reading.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Well, I can definitely see how a few major super-clone-based attacks could cause a massive backlash against anything smacking of clones and/or genetic research. I'm not sure how that paranoia doesn't spread into McCarthy-esque levels of witch-hunting, leading into paranoia directed against all supers. In the real world, the majority of terrorists directing attacks against the West have been of fairly obvious west Asia or south Asia extraction. The ones who haven't have been big followers of the Islamic fundamentalist tradition of growing a big, nasty beard. And in the real world, we're constantly bombarded with reminders that you can't always tell by appearances who the bad guys are, or even potential bad guys. Now take away even that slim straw most people cling to of knowing what a terrorist looks like, and throw in the idea that even people you know (or people who you may think are people you know) might harbor a terrorist agenda, and you crank the hysteria to 11. After all, anyone who was obviously above average in anything might be a super-powered clone. I'd be surprised if mobs didn't string up doctors for performing an amniocentesis (OMG! DNA testing!!!!), or even an ultrasound after a while. We'd be lucky if it didn't end in a Luddite apocalypse.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Replace every "clone" with "superhero" in this paragraph and it's just as valid. If people are so paranoid that all clones are potential terror attacks, why are they not paranoid about supers in general? I mean, you can't tell who might be a clone until you examine them at a cellular level, if I recall your world parameters correctly. So any time any superhero shows up somewhere, unless you have trusted medical personnel on scene to verify their non-clone status, it's a potential terror attack. And even if, in the middle of an emergency, some geneticist is able to verify that every Justice Team member who has responded is not a clone, who's to say that none of them have been brainwashed or ensorcelled into a Manchurian Candidate? At any rate, not all clones are super-powered. Suppose Viper decides its recruits have not been up to snuff lately, and decides an army of clones would work out better. They're probably not going to throw in all the bells and whistles needed to turn them into all-out supers. Smart enough to follow orders and strong enough to pull a trigger is good enough. Now granted, none of these guys is likely to be a model citizen, and will probably end up in Gitmo based on their own actions, but is it moral to treat what is genetically human like a rabid animal if he hasn't done anything wrong? Going further, say the first batch of clones didn't work out as well as hoped. Smart enough to follow orders only takes you so far...they want some minions with a little initiative. So the next batch of clones is made significantly smarter, say 12 as opposed to 7. Now say one of the clones, in the course of their brutal training regimen, finds some philosophy/political book in a broom closet, left behind by a recruit from years gone by, and decides that this terrorist stuff is BS. He escapes the training camp and, after digging up enough phony documents to fake a past, joins a police force, where his insider knowledge of how Viper works allows an otherwise unremarkable small-town police department to put a major hurting on an international terrorist operation. In one of his heroic exploits, he's fairly seriously wounded, and it comes out that he's a clone. Is it moral to put him down, on the grounds that he might turn on society, after having proven himself over and over? Granted, since you're clearly talking above about super-powered clones, they are obviously a lot more volatile than a regular human level clone. But as I brought up earlier, in that case, it's the super-powers causing at least 90% of the problem, not the "clone" part.

Re: Driving Under The Radar I'd probably go with a limited form of Invisibility. It is an interesting concept..."Oh yeah, you know that Mustang we're looking out for? I saw one just like that earlier today...sweet ride..."

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Looks like the anarchy symbol tattooed/scarred/branded onto her face.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones!

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! A rape victim can't abort the fetus after it's been born and is on its way to becoming a functioning member of society. An identical twin doesn't have the option to have his clone (yes, identical twins are clones) terminated either. Once the clone is out of its spawning tank, despite the fact that it has an identical genetic structure as someone else, it should be afforded the rights of any other human, although certain privileges might be curtailed, based on actual age as opposed to apparent age in the case of accelerated maturation. If the clone has committed any crimes, then that should be a separate issue. I'm sure some explanation of the background of a given campaign might shed enough light on the specifics of that world to show how another system might be reasonable, or at least politically expedient. The explanation of mind control/temporary insanity makes sense, as an example. Many people (myself included) got hung up on the phrase "Mind Control is not a valid defense" which makes it sound like a person is 100% liable for anything, no matter how out of character, that is done under Mind Control. Pointing out that the temporary insanity defense can be applied makes a world of difference, though.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Must spread rep...

Re: "Neat" Pictures Half the calories of two-sided pasta.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Is there no in-between? Lawyers bring in expert witnesses all the time to explain esoteric details to juries. Surely in a superhero world, someone somewhere can do some psychic poking-around and find a disconnect between parts of the brain involving judgment and motor functions.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Bwahahaha! That palindromedary will be a pretty patsy...I spent my points on Mind Control...

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones!

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Time traveling characters should always have Multiform, IMO. At least three different forms: a base form, an inexperienced form, and an experienced form. And every time they show up, it should be random which form appears...it's unlikely his least experienced form would always appear in our time before his more experienced forms.

Re: Western Hero - US Marshal Bass Reeves Nice writeup, Mike. And I agree, Ranxerox. I'd see a movie about Bass Reeves.

Re: Conan: The Current Movie in Progress..... Do my eyes deceive me, or at 1:34, is that some kind of siege engine being carried by eight elephants? Wow...yeah. At 0:31 you can see it a little more clearly, at least in part. That's fairly epic, and not in the overused modern sense either.

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits No problem. I had to look up a decent source, because after I posted that, I wondered if I was remembering correctly or talking out of my ass.

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits Elves didn't have an afterlife, per se, in Tolkien's world. They had another life. If their physical body was destroyed, their spirit traveled to the Undying Lands. I think there are a few instances of elves coming back to Middle Earth after being killed. http://tolkien.cro.net/elves/phylosop.html

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Illuminator