Balabanto

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones!

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! It's also harder. For one thing, you have a lot of outraged and angry people who don't like being cloned and happen to be superheroes with a considerable amount of influence. For another, again, all of this is very leftist. It assumes the existence of prima facie rights for all beings, regardless of whether or not they're considered sentients. The assumption of true sentience for clones is flawed. At any time, a preprogrammed message could turn a clone into a veritable engine of destruction. Is the clone responsible for it's own actions then? Or is the cloner responsible once again? This is an insane principle, to hold the cloner responsible for everything. If Atomic Man is a clone, and then he turns into Nuclear Destruction boy, and blows up Sacremento, who's responsible? The government is now responsible under this paradigm, because all clones start with rights in the logic of most of these folks. You can't predict this stuff, and that's why clones have no rights. Because there are too many grey areas that can result in death and destruction, the undermining of the entire government, or the subtle replacement of vast swaths of the natural human population. To decide this on a case by case basis WOULD be madness. Look at the original Spider-Man clone saga with the Jackal (I think it was #145-149) This got so confusing and stupid they created a second clone saga, which was one of the worst Spidey stories of all time, even worse than One More Day. (And while what Quesada did was jerky, nothing beats never knowing if you're EVER going to read about the same character again. Really. It doesn't) Look at the Project Cadmus stuff with the Newsboy Legion, where all the clones were controlled by Dubbilex Look at any comic book where a superhero is copied. These purposes are always nefarious and always screw people. Clonus's hypotheticals are useless. Superman would NEVER allow himself to be cloned, precisely because he already knows the consequences of being cloned. (See Project Cadmus, above.)

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones!

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! There are other logistical problems, too, like clone communities, government interference, etc. Really, no good can come of cloning human beings.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Really? And how do you propose to keep that clone from suing the original for everything he has? Your argument is tinged with the idea that the clone IS a person, and that you've already made that moral judgement. Since you've already accepted that a clone is a person, your argument is essentially a fait accompli that has no value, because you've shoehorned the clone into the position of having rights by making a moral judgement when the law may or may not make that distinction.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! All right, Mr. Nielson. I’m glad to see that your usual tendencies are in force, so I’m going to respond and turn all of your points one at a time in the manner to which you are accustomed. Yes, temporary insanity does not exist in many legal systems, but for the most part, most superhero games I run take place in the United States of America, where it is a legal defense in all fifty states. Outside the United States, the rules may be different. (See previous posts.) The thing is, you can use temporary insanity as a defense instead of Mind Control until the telepath/psychic/mage is brought in. Extracting a confession still works. Clearly if Bob confesses on the stand that he took control of Doctor Hero’s mind in order to bend it to his will, and that’s why he did those things that are clearly not things he will usually do, that will more than likely stick. Hugh, that logic is ridiculous. There is no legal system in the first world where you are guilty until proven innocent except Italy, and the Italian courts are a joke to begin with. Mind explaining what your actual problem is here? As far as your majority is concerned, the problem has nothing to do with the GM and everything to do with the way lawyers would seize upon this as a means of getting their clients off. Between this and double jeopardy, you might ask, how do any supervillains wind up in jail at all? Well, there’s this process called inevitable discovery in the law, and in my game, judges are a little more liberal with it assuming the rights of the defendant haven’t been violated. If Doctor Lava is planning to build a giant volcano out of Yellowstone National Park, and the heroes capture Doctor Lava before he can succeed, the prosecution will usually argue that inevitably, Doctor Lava’s crime would have been discovered because there would have been a giant volcano where Yellowstone National Park used to be. That’s how you get a telepath arrested and thrown in prison, by stopping his plan, not by attacking his powers. The problem is that if you allow for the specificity of a mind control defense instead of simply using temporary insanity, you run into a number of problems specific to the existence of telepathy. Normally, the way this is handled (If a character without a criminal record does a bunch of things against his will) is to try and find documentation of everything that was done, why it was done and who it benefited, the same way other investigations work. Usually, this trail doesn’t travel back to the hero. If it does, well…that’s a plot for PC’s to work to solve. As for super-scientific advancement, cloning occupies a special place in the world’s logic. Extraterrestrials and dimensional aliens do face extensive screening. For many years, governments of the world gave them cover identities. They were unwilling to admit the existence of aliens to the general public. But the screening system is already in place, most of the time. As for scrutiny of super powers in general, super powers have become a part of global culture, due to their appearance around World War II. Superhero comics aren’t popular. There are other forms of comics that are, but for the most part, if you’re a fan of superheroes, you read the newspaper, link up to C-News on the internet or whatever, and find out what superheroes have been doing and what their adventures are like. Superhero novels do exist. For the most part, people don’t see a difference between a mutant and a non-mutant. They do see people who do the same things without any powers of their own, such as pure martial artists with no mutations and powered armor characters as slightly braver, but no more or less heroic/or villainous. But…caveat, this makes cloning all the more heinous a crime. In a world where humanity aspires to greatness, making better humans to replace human aspirations and dreams can (And does) seem particularly threatening. As far as research into mentalists is concerned, there is a psychic field that surrounds the world…but to understand that, you’ll have to buy Imaginary Friends and Mind over Matter when I publish those…. Your argument about word substitution is leftist nonsense, and that’s coming from someone who pretty much sits on the left on most social issues. This is nothing but a straw man argument that assumes that there’s no difference between a normal human or superbeing and his or her clone. Any number of modifications can be made to the clone that the original did not possess. The original person’s rights have clearly been violated. What recourse does he have if he doesn’t want his genetic material running around? According to you, the answer is none. You’ve been cloned. Suck it up. This being is now a person with their own rights, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it or put a stop to it, and you have to live with all the consequences of being cloned forever. Make no mistake. This is no different from rape. And that’s why the laws regarding it are so strict, because THAT’s the crime cloning most closely mirrors in the real world. Not identity theft. Rape. Does a rape victim have the right to abort her fetus? Of course she does. It’s the same. It’s the laws governing identity theft that seize the day for all of you. But it doesn’t do it for me.

Re: Egg McGuffin Well...At least until Buh-Bawwk the Giant Space Chicken hatches to walk the earth once more.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! The problem is every jury doesn't have to. Only a reasonable amount of them do, because that's how courts work. If you develop a "Mind Control" defense, then everyone can use it. There's nothing to prevent this defense from being used against the PC's as certainly as it's being used for them. People can't build devices in my game that generate psychic interference, and can't get mental powers through a device of any kind unless they already have mental powers to begin with. From this, come many of the problems. Mentalists are rare in the game world. They are the single least common hero and villain type. This prevents Mental Defense from being so common that everyone in the world has a psi-screen that provides cheap and plentiful mental defense, rendering every mentalist PC in the game useless. The average EGO for PC's is between 10 and 15. It takes a rare hero to have an EGO above 20 unless they're a mentalist themselves, or a mage who uses their EGO to control their magic. The consequences of this are vast. Mentalists are hard to catch, and harder to convict. But it's better, overall, than having a world where mentalism is reasonably plentiful and you can buy a psi-screen from any one of a number of corporations, rendering the character type useless. To get back to cloning. A lot of the in-game reasons for the way the world is are also based on comic book logic. Far too many characters in the comics have been ruined by clone stories. Even more of a problem is what is to be done with all these clones once the adventure is over. Repeated attempts, in this world, to take it over with clones, genetically engineered beings, and the like have produced backlash from the powers that be in governments. Again, Power Defense isn't that common. Everything on people's sheets has to be justified. Skill lists are longer, characters don't throw a ton of dice around. The most powerful heroes in the world throw 14. Defenses run between 15 and 30. By the way, one of the most powerful heroes in the world was kidnapped this week in the game and a villain injected him with a fake marker that identifies his DNA as that of a clone. He's really mad. Yes, there are problems with this that villains can exploit. Now if they can just find the right villain who made it...

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares A Game of Thrones, Starring Mario Mario and Luigi Mario (They are plumbers, after all.)

Re: CHAMPIONS BEYOND Sneak Peek: The Cover! I'd like to point out that it's merely a movie reference gone expanded. Google Amazon Women on the Moon. I haven't seen the draft, but I'm pretty sure that was the intended nod.

Re: Its not really a base, but... As long as it doesn't have any special abilities, I would say, sure.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Then every villain gets away forever. Mind Control is not provable. What lawyer worth his salt wouldn't say "Your honor, my client was mind controlled. He's not responsible for any of it." Jails would be EMPTY. How do you prove a target was mind controlled to commit crimes? This is why people are innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around. You can still have reasonable doubt and fail to convict, but the Mind Control Defense means all crimes were performed against the victim's will. This turns the court system into a mockery and justice into a fraud. Who would want to roleplay in a world like that?

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones!

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares That's not a nightmare. I would read that.

Re: New Review... Thanks. I knew I could count on you. Seriously, I'm really happy about it, and I'm closing in on King of the Mountain in the next couple of weeks. Then it's off to Imaginary Friends, which I think will probably be ready around October or November. It has as many villains, but not as many maps, and has some classic tributes to "Old Favorites," who you may or may not recognize. Trust me. The semi-reboots will be awesome.

Re: New Review... The nice thing about this review is that most people wait all their lives for a review like this one. I only had to wait half.

This is the latest review of Pretty Hate Machines by Blackwyrm Games. http://gamecryer.com/

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! Clearly, your world didn't have any superheroes during the 1950's. Examples of 1950's superhero plots include... With my modified kryptonite ray, I shoot Superman, creating his evil duplicate, Bizarro. No, really. That was it. No biotechnology, no nothing, I create Bizarro by shooting Superman with a ray gun. It's still a clone. Pod People. That's right. Plants come, copy your memories and grow new versions of you. Still a clone. An evil alien clone, to be sure, but still a clone.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! There is controversy. There is a superhero who is a GEB of several bad guys (The Red Baron, Hitler, etc.) And SHE has to keep that a secret. Because if it ever gets out, there will be a superhero war. There are already sides forming up. She's told two people. One of them is completely down with it. The other is secretly furious that she's now in this position, and she's Red Baroness's team leader. This is likely to turn nasty. So, there is a story about rights for clones. And there are groups who oppose it on a civil liberties basis. Unfortunately, one of them is C.A.S.H. (Citizens Against Super Heroes.) And a LOT of villains donate to this organization so that they will have freedom to create their own armies of superbeings. The problem is, that if you're a parent, you're likely to be furious with any change in the law. Clones carry a genetic marker that identifies them, however, the difficulty of detecting this marker is variable. There's actually a subset of the forgery skill in my game that specifically deals with clones and is opposed by soft science skills and superhuman biology. The problem isn't so much "What about the clone?" as "What about my kids?" And one of the most influential superheroes in the world supports the law, because he has two kids. And he has absolutely no super powers whatsoever other than super-intelligence. There's too much of a slippery slope for a brilliant scientist/powered armor guy to go against this, especially when he is the child of a human and an alien himself. Any other stance won't go well.

Re: The Morality of Sending In The Clones! My government destroys the clones. Absolutely and without question. Scott Bennie wrote an old article somewhere that explains why. The Constitution entitles one man to one vote, but it doesn't entitle one man to create as many votes as he can. Cloning attempts have resulted in not one, not two, but three separate attempts to take over the entire world through the use of cloned beings. So in my game world... 1) Clones have no rights in the western nations. In areas where the world has a more morally slippery view (China, Russia, the third world) cloning experimentation is carried out in dark corridors and secret labs. Superheroes have their work cut out for them stopping all these weirdo cloning experiments, even though less than one in a hundred are successful. For one thing, breaking into another country is an act of war. For another, many of these governments are willing to offer these clones, especially super-clones, citizenship on the basis of the Golden Rule. (He who has the gold makes the rules.) 2) Being a GEB (Genetically Engineered Being) requires a clone test. If you were a single being and engineered from artificial materials, etc, usually, you'll be okay. Being a test tube baby is okay. Being assembled from multiple forms of DNA and/or being an exact copy of another living being through non-natural causes is illegal, even a dead one. It, or anyone else around it, is profiting from a criminal act through the very act of it's survival, namely, the stealing of the aforementioned DNA. 3) A lot of people argue for punishing the problem, not the solution. Unfortunately, this leads to radical overpopulation in a short period of time, the creation of "Clone Communities" who can elect their own representatives, and so on. See Star Wars for why stuff like this can be a problem. Cloning beings is illegal for a reason. 4) Genetically Engineered Beings have to undergo the same tests aliens do, only the requirements are much stricter. For one thing, aliens don't necessarily get their medical records kept by the government after a period of time. For another, aliens come from space. They aren't physical evidence in the commission of a crime. A lot of people have accused me of being a total fascist every time I mention this. Now imagine that the people who are ending this plot are superheroes who've been doing their job for 20 years or so. If you're a superhero and you haven't been copied by a bad guy at some point, chances are, unless you're very lucky, your spurs haven't been earned. But, it's still identity theft, and pretty much, the consequences of cloning, or creating a clone army, are exceptionally dire.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares The Incredible Easter Hulk Solaris, Filmed by Joel Schumacher All Things of the Al-Azif Great and Small All Presidents Go to Heaven

Re: WHo is Thor and the Gold Goast Guardians? (The Champions character) The Gold Coast Guardians GM, as near as I can remember, was Graeme Smith. He ran a game in the Miami, Florida area back in the day. He married a woman named Melissa, who I went to college with. She was a good kid. I was never in that game, but he ran a game in the same world as the one he ran for them that I did play in. He mentioned the players only in passing, but as far as I know, the members of the team that he did mention were Thor, Doctor Erzatz, and a martial artist with a 35 dex that I don't remember the name of.

Re: Superhuman women less attractive in 6th Edition? Yes, and they changed that rule for some insane reason that I can't even begin to fathom. None of the numbers change. As for that "Make your skill roll?" thing? Common sense dictates that you don't need to roll dice every time you do something unless the situation REQUIRES it. Now you're rules lawyering role playing instead of role playing and using the rules. THE GM determines when a roll is required, not the rules, at least the last time I checked the rules. This never WAS a discussion based on the rules. It's all based on how people look at comliness, which people look at differently, which was the entire point of my argument. And you just proved it! Without me needing to say another word.

Re: Superhuman women less attractive in 6th Edition?