unclevlad

Makes me kinda wonder who, if any, of the Golden Age stars are still left. Kind of like there's no WW I vets left...or even, almost, the last WW II vets, but there are still a fair number of those. Interesting reading that she was, if you will, Hollywood's Andy Messersmith. Messersmith was the baseball player who fought the MLB reserve clause; de Havilland fought against a very similar clause in studio contracts. What also surprised me was, this was rather early...some time in the 40's.

Sure, but that doesn't work *here*. The two are going to be bought completely differently. The Flight is gonna be, what, 20m, with x4 NC and maybe Reduced END? Something like that. The Teleport is gonna be maybe 5" with Safe Blind Teleport and MegaScale 1m = 10 km for city-wide range, up to 1m = 1,000 km for pretty much country-wide range. If you want to worry about the costing, as was pointed out...slap it into a Multi. You're only paying for the slot. This is fine as long as the Flight isn't going to be particularly limited...cuz if so, then it might be cheaper to buy them separately. Usable As is a nice advantage when you want to combine Flight with either Running or Swimming. The Swimming is the blatantly obvious use case; I think the whole "flying through water" is why it was included. Running means no turn mode, and less knockback...AND, now you can buy back all your base Running as part of the package. So if you're going with, let's say, Flight 24", x8 NC, Usable as Running. 24 + 10 -> 34, +1/4 Advantage is 42...so probably Reduced END. 34 with +1/2 is now 51. NOW knock off 12...39. Combat costs 1 END per, non-combat costs 2. Flight 24", x8 NC is 34, with combat movement costing 2 END per, and non-combat costing 3 END per. If you want to put the Reduced END, you're at 42. There can be other issues, to be sure. If the Flight is gonna be OIAID, then you probably can't buy back the base Running. But it's tricky to put a continuous-move power (flight, swim, run) with an incremental-move power (leap, teleport) via Usable As. They generally just aren't congruent.

How about FC Foggy Bottom? In other NFL news, the league and PA agreed on a restart. Yeahh, well...I still have serious doubts. In the NYT article on the subject, there's a paragraph about the income loss: So there's a fairly firm number. Quite a bit.....

Yeah, the reason to go with a Mind Control, IF you have allies/minions/flunkies, is you can use it to to much more than just the mental binding. That said, it does have the issue that you may need to buy a fair bit of it. I may be way off base here...but...I'm also wondering if the GM didn't craft that Mental Entangle largely because you *did* buy up Ego...because that does an end run, in some ways, on doing that. It's not paranoid when you know at least 2 Champions GMs who *did* that.

The Yahoo story is very seriously slanted. I'm not saying the advice isn't suffering from a heavy dose of Politicization, but that article doesn't give the whole story. It's...complex. By the same token tho...the re-open push is from a totally different part of HHS...and the impetus to water it down is clearly coming from the White House. If the text later in the Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus.html is right then this really is NOT a CDC statement, it's an HHS statement. But we've already learned to be very, very leery of anything issued by basically any agency in this administration. The more it pushes Trump's agenda...the more suspect it is.

The schools issue is IMO the most difficult one of all, with some of the more intractable options. Contact trace a 10 year old? Maybe reorganize into narrow groups that hang together? Manage meals so there's little intermingling? The kids will want to cross the lines, tho. But without that...the contacts explode, if kids have varying, flexible schedules with different groups.

Wiretripping, huh? She wouldn't by chance be trying to do Liz Masters, would she? I'd buy it as 2 separate powers simply because the teleport would be cheap...because it'd be a minimal number of base inches and a LOT of MegaScale. 4" with 1m = 1,000 km is only 7 points. That's before the wiretripping limitation.

As Hugh says, an EGO Entangle is very nasty, but also very expensive at 22 per die. Even if you buy a 15 EGO, you'll break out of a 3d6 EGO Entangle in not *that* many phases...unless the attacker's maintaining it, and that's a BLOODY high cost. And why this, as opposed to other approaches? Higher EGO would help break out of a Mind Control...and if you're that worried about Mental Paralysis, then Mind Control should be right there. I might allow a skill for this. Slippery Mind. Base roll of 9 + EGO/5 for 3 points, +1 for 2 points. Acts like Contortionist, but applies to breakout rolls from mental powers.

I have a copy of FASERIP and I've looked it over, but nothing more than that. Might've deleted it; don't see it offhand now. What I remember from most of the superhero games was the wild randomness, and that by and large, your failure rates were exceptionally high even for simple stuff. Storyteller might make a good basis. Aberrant could work, but would need a fair bit of rework, given that the premise is so negative. Fate System, particularly the implementation used by Marion Harmon in Wearing the Cape, has interesting points...but some very annoying limitations. Champions Now might work well; the first tweak I'd make would be END costs. Even plain ol' Hero is mostly good, with some costing issues...and too much encouragement to take (then work around) limitations to get more points.

Yeah, but some of that is system, and costing. Some of it is, Marvel's got to link to their literary roots, where Points, Shmoints is the rule, and Champions Universe has no such connection. Power tricks are the norm in comics; they're...not barred but handled awkwardly in Hero, because power tricks are a descriptive, narrative device, and Hero is mostly prescriptive and formulaic. Core assumptions are just *different* between the two, for many reasons. I think the notion you mentioned for movement...simply taking each MCH category and defining a Hero equivaent *ignoring points* is your best bet, regardless of how the points come out.

My take isn't stupid, it's suffering from mental health issues.

Ahhh...yes, if there's a professional caretaker, then he/she will know whether this is a real problem or just......

It's easy to forget that Trump's been doing the same things for a very, very long time...

If it was unintentional, wouldn't you also call for EMTs? Prima facie, I think such a call is warranted, even if it proves to be really nothing. And yeah...this is hazardous biomaterial. So the cleaning to be done is much more extensive.

Oh, to be sure. Most of us can do that. How many people out there have math aversion and *won't* understand this? Whereas if we say "a million cases in 14 days"...that they might get more easily, even if they might not connect that much with it.

I think the election will happen. It's just going to be more hotly contested after the fact than before.

I wonder...hope?...if this is going to backfire. Trump pushes it as a "law and order" move; that'll placate his base but hey, there's that solid bloc that will NEVER move away. And there's the bloc that's already had it WAY past here with His Imperial Donaldness. IF there's any middle ground/undecided left...putting federal troops into one city might be one thing, but into multiple...the look to me is a tyrant. ESPECIALLY given that he's blasted the liberal Democrats, making it an implicitly partisan, arguably flat-out punitive action. On that read, it's totally the move of a tyrant.

I wonder what has more impact. Saying we're adding another million cases faster...or saying the doubling rate is not slowing down? Probably not so much here, but I suspect a lot of folks wouldn't recognize the implications that the *doubling* rate is remaining fixed. Little thought experiment for those folks. I will pay you $1M. In return, you pay me back 1 cent today, 2 cents tomorrow, 4 cents on day 3, 8 on day 4, etc. For one month...call it 30 days. Deal or no deal? (The classic analogy is MUCH nastier. It's 1 grain of wheat on one square of a chessboard....2 on the next, 4 on the next, etc. For all 64 squares. Short answer? That's about 3x the *entire worldwide production* of wheat in 2017...it's about 2.5 TRILLION tons.)

A very depressing little piece of information... In the US: total cases: a bit over 4M total recovered: 1.9M active cases: 2M So think of it this way...there have 2M new cases since June 7th. So you either say that every case since June 7th...6 weeks ago...IS STILL GOING...or even worse...for each recovery for a new case since June 7th, there's a case from BEFORE that date that has NOT recovered. That doesn't mean every case has been severe, but if nothing else, that if you do get it...you have a LONG period before you get rid of it. EDIT: also note. 4M cases means that, for every 80 people in the US...one has it.

The potentially permanent changes are beginning to shape up. Brooks Brothers declared bankruptcy earlier this month; IIRC, the comment was they'd never branched out enough. CNN is reporting today that the parent company of Men's Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, 2 of the larger business-dress chains in the country, is planning to close about 1/3 of its 1500 stores and lay off 20% of its corporate positions. The story says the rumor was they were pretty close to bankruptcy themselves...as a cut of this magnitude suggests...and may yet do so. The permanent change MAY be to the dress code itself. Suits won't completely disappear, but may well go from "expected" to "if you wish to." Certainly, the expectation is that some of the workplace shifts happening right now will carry over to a degree...and if people aren't going into the office, they're not going to wear suits. I can see nice sportswear...decent button-down shirt, quarter-zip light wool or cotton sweater, flat-front pants...taking over MUCH of the workplace.

Or my favorite..."let's watch the tsunami from the pier, we'll have a great view!" Brave isn't fearless, it's proceeding to do what you need to do despite the fear. Brave also isn't foolish, a la, let us say, playing Russian roulette on a dare/taunt. Because that's something that, barring some *extreme* circumstances, you simply do not need to do.

So...1 mill to 2 mill took 44 days, if I count right. 2 to 3, 29. 3 to 4...we passed 4M today...15. And OMG THIS IS IN THE NYT. FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

This SO nails it to me, the absolutely BRAIN DEAD attitude of that last group of people. The other argument seems to be rooted in toxic masculinity...one poster on a local social app said "I'm not gonna wear a mask, I'll go where I want, I don't live in fear." Gawd, straight from the cave man days....

Counting the BODY from a normal attack takes basically no time...and sometimes, hey, who knows. How many dice was that...how many 6's, how many 1's. With a little practice, even with 12 dice, you get the BODY at a glance. It's always the STUN that takes much longer. (Well, OK, almost always. I remember one player who couldn't aggregate worth a darn, and his counts were *painfully* slow.) Also, some character types DO take some BODY at times...not everyone has great defenses, some might pricipally rely on staying out of the way. I'd rather have the same rules for PCs and NPCs...the NUMBERS can be different of course, but not the rules. Blast 8d6 that misses the target and hits a normal...? Ewwww....gonna be a NASTY injury. A fair bit of this is, I used to play with rules munchkins who WOULD twist things like this around, and this would be a path to do that. (Like, STUN-only damage negation or damage reduction.)

It's not just that. How much of the broad police abuse can be traced back to an "I don't care what you do, I want to be secure" mentality? The cops' bad actors are doing that somewhere else...so "not my problem." Some of this is also likely responsible for the US incarceration rate.