Old Man

Re: Musings on Random Musings It's funny because ordinarily I can't stand to watch soccer on TV. It's just too slow, and it's too much time to spend waiting for the like three times someone actually scores. But I caught the last half of overtime (in which Japan scored) and the penalty kicks, and it was gripping. Also, the U.S. goalie is hot.

Re: Lost cities countdown

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? The last ten minutes of the U.S. vs. Japan Women's Soccer World Cup final. Then two episodes of Phineas and Ferb.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I'm sad that the American women lost the World Cup final. Heartbreaking. But to be honest, I was rooting for the Japanese to win. I really think they needed it more.

Re: Summoning Question Well, avoiding the moral questions for now... If I were the GM I'd probably say the summoned warriors would come with a reasonable amount of equipment. 83 points is just not a whole lot, so adding in another 30 points of gear wouldn't make a huge difference. Especially if you're crazy enough to drop 16 cp on that spell. The demihuman question is probably campaign dependent. In campaigns that are overrun with a half dozen different humanoid races it probably wouldn't cost extra, but if elves are extremely hard to find then summoning them might cost a premium.

Re: The cranky thread Bad power is one of the most maddening computer issues to try and fix.

Re: The cranky thread

Re: A Game Of Questions Isn't there only one way to find out?

Re: The cranky thread Hmm. We may have to try it twice.

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread For once, news of downsizing makes me happy.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I don't know which is worse--check-in times, or check-out times. I thought the former was bad, getting off the plane with no place to lie down or shower or leave your bags until housekeeping gets around to cleaning a room for you. But now, kicked out of the room with three hours of sleep, and with six hours to kill before I even start the process of heading to the airport, the latter feels pretty damn icky. What do you think?

Re: What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow in flight? You are so a goshawk. I'm impressed too.

Re: The cranky thread I wonder what would happen if we put a person in the car crusher.

Re: What Fiction Book (other than Science Fiction or Fantasy) have you recently finis And I thought people only felt that way about Catcher In The Rye.

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them? Q: "Where the heck does a city this size, with no farmland to speak of, get such great tasting sausage?" A: "Speaking of which, has anyone seen Frank?"

Re: The cranky thread

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) Last night I dreamt that I caught an old Asian couple letting their dog poop on my lawn. I yelled at them, loudly, and I was really mean about it. Then I woke up and felt bad about it. About yelling at people that don't exist! For a perfectly valid reason!

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) You would know.

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them? I think believability is in the eye of the beholder, for one thing, and people are also going to differ in the degree to which they care. Dungeon crawls rarely make economic or any other kind of sense but for many people that's okay. The same goes for fantasy fiction, where even some of the more popular settings don't make a whole lot of economic sense either--Middle-Earth, for starters, IMO, as well as a bunch of others where the setting and map are more of an afterthought. That said, I'm with you in that I would prefer a setting at least address economics at a high level so we don't have players asking difficult questions or attempting to profit from using real economic principles in a setting that has obvious exploitable economic holes.

Re: A clockwork solar system? I did a computer simulation, once upon a time, to demonstrate the importance of resonances in determining orbits. It doesn't take long (in astronomical terms) for low-integer resonance ratios of, say, 2:1 or 5:2 to go away--the orbits of the bodies involved get rather strongly perturbed such that they settle into less resonant orbits (or depart the system entirely). But strong perturbations like this still occur even with ratios of, like, 12:37, if you wait long enough. Anyway... the reason I would argue against the possibility of a clockwork solar system is materials. I don't know what you could make the gears out of, at that scale, and still expect it to run for billions of years. Especially if you expect the mechanism to have negligible gravitational effects on the planets themselves. edit: Having reread the original post, I guess gears are not really under discussion. Still, tidal influences would likely prevent the axial rotation of the planet from remaining at precisely 360/circumnavigation. OTOH, I note that at least one moon in our own system rotates exactly once per orbit, so it may not actually be impossible. And if the "ancient" race is ancient on a scale of thousands of years, as opposed to millions, then perhaps the system would not have had enough time to devolve out of its original orderly motion. Especially if certain alien artifacts are still operating....

Re: Musings on Random Musings I've seen a bunch of those too. At least going barefoot is an option within the buildings.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Arriving on the Strip on Saturday night is an excellent way to encounter drunken hoochies. And I always thought people never actually did the cheap Vegas wedding, but then I saw two such couples here in the space of half an hour. I'm not sure the wedding thing is entirely separate from the drunken hoochie thing.

Re: Fantasy-Less HERO?

Re: Fantasy-Less HERO? The main reason I've never run a completely magic-free campaign is that FH is lethal enough without taking out the healing potions. The closest I ever got was a players-as-PCs pathetically low fantasy game. The first encounter was with a goblin that might as well have been a boss fight, from which we had to flee because one of us took an impairing wound. Good times.