Old Man

Re: The cranky thread

Re: The cranky thread Who's the provider?

Re: The Chain Sword/Sword Whip Might throw the flail maneuver on there too, but otherwise what you have looks like a decent writeup. Brotherhood of the Wolf was my favorite kung fu werewolf mystery horror period costume drama ever.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Re: World Building Elements Sky plankton FTW. Because what feeds on the sky plankton?

Re: How To Run Interesting Starship Battles There are tactical differences between all the weapons, obviously, and plasmas are more versatile than most, but at the end of the day they all just do damage. That's what bored me about SFB, and it's an area that Hero can certainly do better in. And the ISC were pretty easy to deal with using web casters. Pretty much any seeking weapon race was. Even the Romulan player who insisted on starting any game in retrograde Exactly! But sometimes it's nice if the players have certain options spelled out for them already, rather than playing by ear and hoping the GM goes for all their strange ideas. It should actually be possible to make a straight up starship wargame using Hero and having it play as well as, if not better than, SFB (for example).

Re: More space news! I'm inspired to get a dash cam.

Re: Fantasy Swordsman - How much Mental Defense? I never used to put Mental Defense on any of my mundane characters. I could see it justified as martial discipline or even just general heroics, but I never bothered. It seems as though just buying up Ego would be a bit more useful anyway.

Re: The cranky thread Do mail bombs count as 'junk'?

Re: How To Run Interesting Starship Battles I guess the issue here is options; every character needs to have them. The gunner's job is going to be pretty boring unless he a) has lots of targets to prioritize or has different weapons to employ. Option might actually be the way to go. Hero can support a wide range of interesting weapon effects aside from RKAs. There could be shield suppression torpedo warheads, 'entangles' that disrupt the opposing ship's warp drives, energy web projectors that make force walls, and so on. If there are limited quantities of any of these on board, then that adds another layer of decision making, and if the weapons officer is fighting with the helmsman for 'more power!' then that's another. Most starship combat games are pretty boring when it comes to weapon diversity. SFB in particular was guilty of this. Energy costs, accuracy, rate of fire, and damage all varied, but in the end they all just marked boxes off the other ship's SSD. That's why I eventually settled on playing Tholians; I wanted to be able to do something besides just take another shot at the enemy.

Re: The cranky thread No, he worked at my last company. Where I had pretty much decided to quit even though it was going to cost me my house.

Re: "Neat" Pictures ...why?

Re: The cranky thread

Re: "Neat" Pictures Spoilered... for animation.

Re: Dogfighting They wouldn't be very interesting, since most WWII maneuvers aside from the Thach weave involve vertical movement. Split-Ss, Immelmans, loops, yo-yos, Cuban eights, and the tried-and-true tactic of diving passes all involve the vertical plane. Once you squish it down to 2-D all you have is lead and lag pursuit, and maybe barrel rolls. That said a lot of these maneuvers are maneuvers because of gravity and the close proximity of a planetary surface. In space-based 'flight sims' I've played, the third dimension becomes less important--there are no speed differences that you get from facing a particular direction, so all you're doing is turning as hard as possible to point your craft at the target.

Re: Musings on Random Musings It surprised me, but then I hadn't realized how much weight Margaret Cho had lost. She looks pretty good now. Or were you talking about the coherent part?

Re: Musings on Random Musings It's be funnier if those were the only examples, but there are so many others. Like the carnivorous snails they brought in to control the African snail population, which promptly ignored all the African snails and ate all the native ones. We have plenty of less-disastrous introduced species too. We have wild parrots now after some pets got out and bred. And there are currently plenty of brown ankle lizards that are all over the place eating bugs and each other. I'm not sure if the wallabies are still around; I think they became popular with the local pig hunters.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Saw Margaret Cho live this weekend. She led off by mentioning that the LAPD manhunt guy called her one of the most beautiful women in the world on his manifesto. I checked his manifesto and, lo and behold, he actually did. Not the most coherent manifesto I've ever read, though.

Re: Musings on Random Musings We have these running around here wild. People catch them and sell them as pets for twenty bucks. For a while I had three that I'd found and kept as pets, but they turned out not to be compatible with the cat. I wound up letting the survivor go. These are an invasive species here, but then so is almost everything else. That's what happens when you live in the extinction capital of the galaxy.

Re: The cranky thread So say we all.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Huh, I don't remember seeing the live chameleon in those ads.

Re: Most PCs... Yeah, the one time I ran a character that had a giant VPP, I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be able to come up with powers on the fly in game without slowing things way down. I wound up writing up three or four pages of powers that I could fit into the pool. So it was like a multipower with far too many slots, though of course I was still able to invent new powers on the fly if I had to.

Re: The cranky thread Roots? Broken pipe?

Re: Sound of one hand clapping How do we stat that out?

Re: Outside the Box powers Wait--how did we get from multiform to statting out orgies in Hero? What the hell happened?