unclevlad

Or the Utterly Contemptuous Sneer, defined as Reflect Presence Attack.

Oh my gosh..... Read this, people. The sample size for the German test is small, but the percentages are SO high that they're terrifying.

Embiid might work as a low post center with 3 shooters and a driver around him...but that's largely one of the ideal lineups, if you can't pull off a completely positionless lineup. Good luck with that; it's hard to do, and harder to keep together. But yeah, if Simmons can't shoot outside the paint, things don't work with a low-post center. Harris and Horford have been major busts. Harris was the 18th highest paid player this year; Horford was 24th. (Simmons 'only' made $8M; his extension kicks in NEXT year.) The combined salaries of the 4 of them for next year is about $127M...which is over the cap and darn near the luxury tax. Spotrac has their cap total at $147M for 20-21...that's $8M over the luxury tax threshold. And that much cash tied up into 4 players means they have no flexibility. The massive contracts for Embiid and Simmons also say VERY few teams can even consider trades. (Oh, and cutting Horford and/or Harris don't help. Harris' contract is fully guaranteed; Horford's is 90%.) Options...? Probably some I can't see but it feels like...none. Even if they have championship pieces, as y'all are suggesting, they don't work together. And they're completely painted into a corner by those contracts.

Scott Adams is trying to position himself next to Orson Scott Card, it seems.

Even the most conservative herd-immunity numbers...reached at 70%, 1% mortality rate...mean over 2 million deaths in the US. Also, if we want to be brutal? Blacks and Latinos are about 5x more likely to be hospitalized than whites/ https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html#hospitalizations So Trump may just see this as cleaning up the voting lists.

Took over ESPN for quite a while too, but that's not surprising. They've ridden the Jimmy V, Stuart Scott, etc. stories as image shapers, and to a point, self-promotion ever since the Jimmy V speech. (Which is awesome, sure, but I've seen it way too many times.)

It might be a learnable skill but has Simmons improved his shooting? How can you expect him to do squat with his shooting, when his FT % is 60? For a ball handler, that's HORRIBLE. Basketball Reference's stats for the 2020 season has 117 players listed by FT%. Simmons is # 113. For as much as he handles the ball, I'd also like to see him at the line more. That was better this year tho, I believe. But the cornerstone to a player's improvement in the NBA is the player. I don't trust either of those two to have the self-awareness and commitment to improve. I think the point that Embiid and Simmons clash in terms of floor spacing is big, particularly when Simmons is no threat from the outside. 15-17' contested jumpers should also be the LAST choice of any offense...but it's what Embiid and Simmons do best. There's a lot to be said that unproven, short-term upside potential is seriously overvalued. If Simmons and Embiid don't have their acts together after THIS long, they were horrendously overpaid for those years. Philly's gotten very little in practice. Yet they've got close to $60M/year tied out between them. OK, part of the problem is the front office; they paid about $50M or so to Horford and Harris, and they gave nothing like that much in return.

"Only their third year" is placating them. Both have had more than enough time on-court; they're not spot or role players. The minutes they've logged, they need to be better. Simmons' lack of shot is now inexcusable. Embiid's attitude has seemed problematic several times during the restart. If these are the future, the Sixers have no future. I'm not saying they're bad players; they're not franchise cornerstones because IMO neither one has the right kind of game, or the right personality, to be The Guy.

It never is. It's another confirmation of Stuart Scott's truth: Boseman made one of the more profound confirmations of this without saying a word. EDIT: Found the name I was looking for. Lauren Hill. Just wanted to score once in a college game. NCAA gave her school a waiver to play a game in early November, 2 weeks early...because it wasn't certain she'd be physically capable of playing as it was. Brain cancer.

The way humanity is going, a nuclear war might be less a suicide, and more like a mercy killing.

Yep, that's what you want. That one was incorporated into Hero Designer. The other Costs END that I like from APG is Damage-Based END Cost.

Could happen, but there probably would be considerable pushback in making her the leader. What's horrible...y'lknow who MIGHT pull off taking over the role of T'challa? Michael B. Jordan. But that is beyond impossible. Finding an actor with the right qualities to replace him is only simply impossible. Because it won't be just professionally.

Argh. Annoying but it looks like they're using the regular broadcast scheduling...so, 8 Eastern, 7 Central, 7 Mountain, probably 8 Pacific. I'm hoping 7 anyway...

Even the 3% might be an underestimate. Granted that the early European outbreaks were, I believe, racing through older people mostly, still...their death rates were 10-15%. Population shifts, treatments may be better now...ok, I doubt they'd go that high, but 5 or 6%? Yeah, I could see it. Plus, consider the *extreme* burden on ICU resources. What does that do to recovery times and death rates for coronary care, for stroke, for acute onset conditions or flare-ups of chronic conditions, for transplant patients? What about services to the elderly or disabled? It's a scary thought but you have to consider that resources might have to be diverted. And we haven't even touched on...who the heck is gonna pay for all the medical care, when 20x the number of people in the US are hit by this?

I think they can do isolated movies without a leader, but one is crucial for the longer term. You can argue one of the issues with the DC movies is the lack of a leader. They're predominately standalone stories, not developing much on each other. The leader makes the whole storyline work better. I don't think the MCU would've been NEARLY as successful without Robert Downey's Tony Stark. Doc Strange might fill in for a bit but his major concern is different. Does Marvel have FF and X-Men as theirs now? Two possibles there...Beast and Reed Richards.

Tonight (30 Aug) at 8 Eastern, ABC is showing Black Panther with no commercials.

I don't worry about the pressure on the players; that's nothing new. The unethical aspect is monetizing them.

A normal Entangle does not repair itself. A Constant Entangle does; long as the attacker is paying the END, he gets an opportunity to re-roll the dice to determine the Body. So even if the target's breakout attempt *almost* got him out...too bad, so sad. If the attacker acts before the target, Entangle's back to full Body.

And what has been the cost of (and to) medical care? Without the containment measures, what would we multiply that by?

This isn't a "season." Heinlein was right. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

page 242 (HS6E v1): 1/2d6 is d3. We're not talking about including Stun Mult advantages or limitations, so, excluding those, what other options are out there?

AARGH. Why my brain fixates on the d6-1 for a stun mult, I don't know...because I know d3 is the rule, but my brain just reverts... It still does mean that you need to consider rDef a fair bit, but also suggests the sweet spot is something like 10 Def total with 7-8 resistant, and 4 DCs negation. A 4d killing attack drops to 2 1/2 d or 3d-1 depending on the GM...so you are taking some BODY on average, and versus 12d normal, you're taking high teens still. An odd aspect of, say, 6 DC negation and 4 rDef is, you're exposing yourself to MORE variance...because 2 dice killing rolls 9+ BODY almost 30% of the time. Plus, Ninja, it REALLY means you want to look at amplifying your killing attack. Doing that, you are seriously lethal. You won't knock out; you'll leave them bleeding out. Unless the campaign is particularly dark, that is not a good thing. So you don't necessarily want to be buffing it like that...or using a KA as a main attack, period.

I agree those are Multipower slots or a VPP, not Multiform. In fact, you shouldn't need 3 multis, and you don't want variable slots because the combo effects are not necessarily pure multiples. You can't link between different multis, or different slots in a multi...but you don't need to. What you described is a 9 slot Multi: 1 Red, 2 Reds, 3 Reds; 1 Green, 2 Greens, 3 Greens; 1 Blue, 2 Blue, 3 Blue. The points define the combo, and that you can't use the 2 Blue and 2 Green combo. Each slot is a combo power, but that's perfectly legal. The rest is SFX. BUT, if you have *12* sets???? So you need to define 36 separate line items. THAT becomes a VPP...but it's also gonna cost you a TON. 60 point pool size; the control size depends on how many of these trinkets you can swap at a time. (And I would not allow a 20 point control cost with Zero Time to Switch, as that feels like an end run around being able to swap all 3 out.) But good lord, what a bookkeeping hell, if you have 36 separate combined powers to define. And what a mess to try to assess. And again...how many combinations are really that different? +2 DCs with your HKA is actually less versatile than +10 STR which does the same thing (and more besides) for the same END cost. I probably would not allow CSLs bought like this...or I'd probably require they're the more expensive ones, like All HTH. Skills normally should not be purchased in a framework, as they're a Special power. Also, your math is off. The +2 DCs on the HKA is 10; the DI is 4, and the REC is 1. That only leaves 5 points for +1 OCV. Or are you saying that the 2nd green ONLY gives OCV? Those "amplifying" combinations generally don't work on the math. You're trying to translate the utterly untranslatable...completely foo, descriptive SFX by the writer...into mechanics. If there's really all these many tweaks, I'm hearing a 60 point VPP with a 60 point control cost, no skill roll, and probably a half phase to change slots. Granted, that's, what, 135 points....but that's the cost of extreme versatility. How you set that pool isn't relevant t the GM; YOU define it as swapping around those trinkets.

The math of defense powers is fun to play with, but I was a math major in college, and a programmer for 30 or so years.

Because all of that is under the total control of the writers. Trying to do this in-game is very likely impossible. It's insanely hard to build, and it tends to really bog things down as you work through "gee, what do I want now?" and of course the tracking might be insane. Plus, it's highly likely the combinations will largely fall into a much smaller set of groups, where differences within the group are minor. Some archetypes support a very large, universal-power VPP; the character sheet might literally have the VPP as the ONLY power, if the GM's willing. Alternately, it might well have some of the special powers (enhanced senses, life support, regen) that are discouraged in a framework as standalone powers, but otherwise it's the VPP. This can lead to a very large pool size with an appropriate control size. In a case like this, standard advice is to get the player to develop the power sets and combos (as I did above) so he doesn't bog the game down by figuring out how he's manipulating his pool. That's the scenario 1700+ configurations lead to. Authors never care about points, never care about complexity, and rarely care about consistency. Their characters will have what they need to have, when they need it, and things will go off without a hitch. Because it's all plot device. Yeah, well, that doesn't work in a game that has to make everything concrete. I might be hard-pressed to define what you're talking about sanely even in a descriptive system like Fate; in a GURPS or Hero...gahhh. It's not worth the effort, before the game AND in the game. If I'm a GM, and you're presenting me with a dozen character sheets because you've got that many Multiforms...I'll tell you right now, I hand them back and say No. I can't spend THAT much time doing my due diligence that these are all feasible and balanced, just for one player. Nor am I gonna be happy, because with that many...odds are, you're gonna find the Perfect Form To Defeat My Plan. No matter what the plan is, or close. This kind of character looks VERY STRONGLY to be a total spotlight hog...and a solo. So I really have to worry about the group dynamic.