Armory

47 minutes ago, slikmar said:

I like limiting number of "visits" to the mound. Watching a catcher walk out to the mound every other pitch is boring as hell and brings the game to a crawl.Especially as they are including the "every player in the infield" has to visit the pitcher once an inning it seems. I am waiting for one of the outfielder to have to come in to talk to him every third inning or so too.

The problem with this is that mound visits rarely take up much time, so the effect it will have on pace of play is negligible. 

I've read that a lot of catchers will be wearing 'cheat sheets' on wrist pads, a la football quarterbacks.  They probably should've been doing this already; the number of pitchers used last year broke a record.  That's a lot of pitchers for the catcher to keep track of:  their repertoire of pitches and which are better than others, their tendencies, etc.  With a limited ability to have a quick word if signals get crossed up it could be the difference between a win and a loss.  Sometimes a game comes down to one mistake.

I'm not so sure Montreal did support that team.  Anecdotal evidence, sure, but I attended a game there back in '96 I think it was.  The place was mostly empty.   On a side note, I got a batting practice ball signed by Henry Rodriguez.  I tried to get Pedro Martinez to sign it also but he was a diva.

Non-anecdotal:  I looked it up.  In 2001, average attendance didn't reach 8000 per game.  It was only slightly better in 2002, barely topping 10k.  My Triple-A Indianapolis Indians draw that many (just over 9k per game in 2017). 

Portland just lost a Triple-A team, the Beavers, who'd been there since 1903.  The franchise moved to El Paso and became the Chihuahuas.  I don't think Portland would or could support an MLB franchise at all. 

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

 

This is why I've been enjoying the movies more than the comics. The characters are allowed to grow and change and time passes. I absolutely HATE the eternal youth of and reinvention of the characters in the comics. I want Spider-Man to be pushing 70. I want Capt. America to be defined as a man who is out of time, and ages slowly, and watches his friends and allies continue to pass along the way. I want to watch Wanda age, while the Vision doesn't, and read the inevitable funeral issue. Stark and Barton and Romanov should all be old and/or dead by now. Legacy heroes would mean something, with the old ones passing. Thor becomes a tragic figure, as he is the one who will outlive all the rest, etc. 

I've always felt that the comic universes had the unique chance to create a massively complex, litereary "other world" and actually have the ability to explores years, decades, more of that universe... but they have routinely chucked that concept for constant rehash posed as reinvention. Stories lose all pathos and impact when they are just going to be rewritten. It is such a waste.

This is precisely the reason I consider nothing in the comics beyond the mid-1980s to be canon.  It was around then that they started with all the Crises of Infinite Continuity.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery. 

One of the players in my current group and I both started playing Champions in 1982.  It's the same universe, although we've had breaks of as long as ten years, so it's not exactly continuous, but we're both still playing our original PCs.  So I challenge this record!

7 hours ago, zslane said:

I also didn't care for W'kabi's attitude towards T'Challa when he failed to bring in Klaue. You'd think he would understand that complex covert operations, conducted within the borders of distant sovereign nations do not always go as planned. Rather than see T'Challa's failure as nothing more than a failure of mission execution, he chose to see it as some sort of ideological betrayal ("I thought you would be different. But it is just the same thing.") That's just lazy Hollywood writing IMO, shoe-horning a wedge between close friends just to lay the (unearned) dramatic groundwork for the Wakandan civil uprising that needed to happen in the third act.

That kinda bothered me too the first time I saw it.  But they did establish that Klaue had been dodging Wakandan justice for 20 years or so.  I can see W'kabi just being fed up with empty royal promises, and this was the last straw for him.

I've had a gravity character for years and it seems like I've changed my mind on how to simulate the effect several times.  Back in 3rd and 4th I think I did Density Increase, Usable On Others, then applied a custom Limitation "No STR bonus", so they gained the weight but not the ability to move that weight.  When I reworked him for 5th Ed. I used Suppress up to four movement powers at the same time.  I think the former more closely simulates an actual increase in the effects of gravity (although its legality is questionable at best), but the latter best simulates their being pinned to the ground, which is the primary effect I wanted.

6 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 I love the Avengers theme, its the one movie they really got it right.  Its up there with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but they never push it enough.  The second film hardly even used it.  You gotta celebrate your theme music, its like James Bond's theme.

 

Never will like Marvel acting like code names are something to be embarrased by and avoid as much as possible.

Quite right about the theme song, it's instantly recognizable, and majestic.  I love it as well.

As far as code-names go...I like the fact that they are familiar with each other.  When you know somebody personally you drop whatever title they carry and call them by their actual name.  It humanizes them.

5 hours ago, Starlord said:

A fan theory about fan theorizing.  How ironic.

They always say that you know a news story has run its course when the reporters start doing stories on how they're reporting it.  This reminds me of that.

I posted a FB comment on a CBR thread, something about, "Save the spoilers, I'd actually like to see something new when I see it in the theater."   I was excoriated for it.  Guess I'm old but I don't understand wanting to be spoon-fed tidbits like a slavering dog.  Official trailers are enough, I can keep myself occupied with something else until the movie comes out.

So I read the story about how the added runner in extra innings will be in place for MiLB this year.  Ugh.  Score-wise, placed there via an error that nobody made.  Nonsensical.

A pretty good breakdown of it here:

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/22466504/three-box-answers-baseball-extra-innings-issue

Quote

"The players and fans hated it," said Theo Fightmaster, GM of the Sonoma Stompers, who went 8-1 in extra innings. "Even with all our success, it was easily the most hated thing we've ever introduced into the league."

Limiting pitching changes alters in-game strategy, so:  bad idea.  I hope they never adopt the "runner on 2nd in extras".  How does one even score that?  If that runner crosses the plate, which pitcher is charged with the run?  Nobody actually allowed the guy on base.  It's a stupid idea from jump.

I'm a huge minor league fan; they've had a 20-second pitch clock for several years now, to no ill effect.  I believe high-level independent leagues like the Atlantic League use it as well.  I doubt anybody would even notice except those few pitchers who take too long between pitches anyway.

But of course, there are two different problems here that people seem to conflate:  length of game and pace of play.  Further, there are two different customer bases involved:  those who attend live games, and the television audience.  I don't know anybody who goes to the ballpark and complains that the game's too long.  That's a TV thing which, ironically, is probably due to TV-mandated commercial breaks more than anything else.

Pace of play I believe is the real problem.  Increasingly, the results of an at-bat are three things that don't involve defenders at all:  strikeouts, walks, and home runs.  The "three true outcomes".  So the question becomes how to get more balls actually in play on the diamond, to get fielders involved, to get runners actually running.  I don't have an answer for that.

They can nibble around the edges, like requiring batters to stay in the box between pitches; eliminate walk-up music (I'd like to see that one); and for the attention span-deprived TV audience, run some commercials in little boxes during play to shorten breaks between innings.  I think they did some of that during the WS last year.  Somewhat annoying, but I think it would work.

I'm an old white guy, so this will sound fuddy-duddy, but baseball is a game that invites reflection and discussion during the game.  It's almost as much about the anticipation and examination of all the various potential outcomes of the next play, as it is about what does happen.  Today's audiences want their brains turned off and their eyes glued to spectacle at all times and those things are fundamentally at odds.   

On 3/5/2018 at 7:30 AM, Bazza said:

Killmonger anyone? 

 

I'm also reminded of a quote from James Baldwin (I'm paraphrasing):  What a man believes he's doing and what he's doing in fact are two different things.

Caught the first two episodes of Season 3 of Hap and Leonard on the Sundance Channel.  FIne actors, great chemistry between the leads Michael Kenneth Williams and James Purefoy; this series is quite enjoyable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hap_and_Leonard_(TV_series)

EDIT: I just discovered that the author of the novels upon which this series is based, Joe R. Lansdale, also wrote Bubba Ho-tep, and he's written comics as well as episodes of B:TAS.  This dude is awesome.

I would really like to "like" your post, Matt, but there is an asinine limit on how many reactions I can post in a day.  Makes no bloody sense.

18 hours ago, Cancer said:

Actually, back at the Pink Floyd concert we went to at B.C. Place in the early 1990s, there was an obvious father-son pair seated near us.  

 

The most jarring thing about that, actually, was watching them pass a joint back and forth during the intermission.

I'd need a whole lotta joints to hang out at a Pink Floyd show.  Maybe it's a case of Classic Rock Radio overkill, but blech.

I wonder how old the kid was?  I get high with my daughter, but she's in her 30s now.  Didn't even think about doing that with her until she was out of college.

13 hours ago, Twilight said:

I think he's a two dimensional hypocrite and the idea that he could convince T'Challa of anything is patently ridiculous given that Killmonger didn't give a damn about anybody but himself.  Killmonger's father now he could convince T'Challa he was right because he legitimately believed, I never once believed that Killmonger was doing anything but paying lip service to his father's beliefs in order to get what he wanted.  The fact that he openly admitted to killing black people with no remorse makes it clear that he doesn't care about his father's goals of protecting black people.  

Well yeah, he was a villain, not the hero.  Of course his methods will be villainous.  Of course his worldview has been twisted from what is a noble goal into a really really bad idea.  Sympathetic villain means you understand why he does what he does, not that you agree with it.  You can keep the evil-for-evil's-sake villains, I prefer mine with some kind of coherent personal motivation.

21 hours ago, Twilight said:

I saw Black Panther today.  It was really good up until the point they started to try and make the villain sympathetic, which was a step to far for me.  You want to make your villain a remorseless murderer and terrorist who kills the people he claims he's trying to protect? Fine.  Just don't try and make me feel sorry for him because that ship has already sailed.  I walked out of the movie at that point.

Yet the biggest gripe about Marvel Studios is that their villains are one-dimensional.  Killmonger was anything but.  And in the end, he convinces T'Challa that he's right.  Not about his methods, but about his grievances.  The most memorable, impactful villains are those who are sympathetic.  I think he's one of the best villains in the MCU.

On 3/6/2018 at 11:46 AM, Netzilla said:

Classic Rock: Whatever kind of rock your parents listened to when you were young.

Interesting you should say that...my 15-year-old nephew listens to a lot of the stuff his father and I were into growing up: Scorpions, AC/DC, Ratt, Dokken, Motley Crew.  My brother and I took him to a Van Halen show a few years ago, and I made the comment to my brother, "Can you imagine us, at 15, listening to the stuff our parents grew up on?"  The answer, of course, was "no".

Classic rock is more than just old.  It's virtually timeless.

16 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

People like to throw around the term "fascist" as a generic bad guy term without a shred of comprehension what it was really about or stood for.  And its easy to take random parts of a movement and match them up with something wholly unrelated to smear it.  Slave owners were often farmers and owned land, guess who ELSE owns land and are farmers???  Its a pretty tired, ragged technique to smear ideological opponents or create boogie men, and I got sick of it decades ago.

 

Superheroes are about people who do good, at their own cost, to bring justice to a world that needs it.  Full stop.

Yet the fascist undertones of the superhero genre are exactly what were examined in, and really the entire point of, Watchmen.  This is not a new concept.

Something one of my players has discovered, and is perhaps too specific to qualify as an aphorism, but...When you're a gas-controlling hero, the second time you encounter any villain they will have nose plugs.

I agree in general, Charges don't cost END, but it really depends on the SFX of the Power, doesn't it?  As someone previously mentioned, if my Charges are bullets in a magazine, I still have to pull the trigger, ("...firing a weapon..." from the 5ER p425 quote above) which requires 1 END.  If my charges are hand grenades, I still have to spend 1 END to toss them.

5ER, p39:  "A character who uses a Power, moves, or uses STR expends END."  That sounds to me like it covers any action.  It still takes STR to pull a trigger, for instance, even a hair-trigger.

5ER, p425:  "Some Maneuvers and other Actions don't have a listed STR value.  In such cases, a character spends 1 END (unless the GM rules otherwise).  This includes Combat Maneuvers such as Block, Dodge, or firing a weapon.  Martial Maneuvers do not cost END."  That specifically makes an exception for Martial Maneuvers (which I really don't understand).  That seems to imply that everything else does require at least 1 END.  That's the way we've always run our games.

Speaking of classic rock, I found a band back in the late '80s that I absolutely loved.  They had one minor hit in 1990 ("I'll See You In My Dreams").  I'm telling you, this is one of the best melodic rock albums I've ever heard. 

On 2/18/2018 at 12:17 AM, Nothere said:

O.k. I haven't seen it yet ...  

Probably should've stopped there.

I saw it Saturday with my wife, who typically avoids MCU films like the plague, but she really wanted to see this one.  Both of us loved it.  It is a visual feast, it touches on relevant social themes, and the villain is relatable.  It's a fun movie.