ok, off topic here... but I am reading the Spaceship Zero core book atm and I gotta say I think I found the best name of a character ever. Ensign Benson. I freaking love that character name! hahahaha
@waxeagle Where's the bit in the Gospels where Christ says he knows more stuff but it'd blow the brains out of anyone who hears it, so he'll wait until he comes back to share it? I'm paraphrasing.
> Someone has asked for verification of the existence of felt in frozen burials in Siberia, and I happen to know that this refers to the Frozen Tombs of Pazyryk, which are well-documented online. There are several large pieces of felt from there exhibited in the Hermitage Museum in Moscow. [...]
> [...] I find it interesting that this material is so poorly treated here, given its antiquity and importance as a material among nomadic peoples, and though I would fill in the blanks, so to speak, I am, perhaps, at one with the anonymous contributor who just wants to get hold of a big piece of felt, so as to use it to avoid the attentions of remote surveillance devices! It must be someone else's job to fill in the blanks and provide the appropriate references...
Once upon a time, for a couple of weeks, the Wikipedia article on the parrotfish spent a couple of paragraphs in detailed description of the fish. And then at the end, someone had innocuously amended: "It's like a parrot but a fish."
that sentence stayed there for a couple of weeks and remains my favourite
@BESW I agree. Im not blatantly saying unachievable goals should be dropped (there are a lot where getting 90% there is way better than not there at all) but in the case of objectivity its a binary off/on state
I don't really find anything weird about an Internet encyclopedia website saying "Let's follow the general 'objectivity' standards of the encyclopedia projects of bygone days, but with a bit more multiculturalism."
@JoshuaAslanSmith i would hesitate to fully accept that claim. To make a ridiculously over simplified and exaggerated example. Some people think that racial cleansing is an acceptable goal. That is a social problem, so that would be a topic for subjectivity to be king... not the objective truth that murdering people is wrong.
@MC_Hambone It's the societal consensus that racial cleansing is wrong. You can be "subjective" while adhering to widespread consensus positions. The (alleged) "subjectivity" comes in excluding other positions because you think they are for crazy people.
@JoshuaAslanSmith That is not a reply to me. That is a reply to Hambone.
I dont want to persue that line of discussion, i am just saying objectivity is not only for science.... and with that I need to step away from the computer for a bit
@mc_hambone Ive had other people in chat evoke a similar response for me. I thank you for being open to rational discourse and yes we should focus back in on RPGs.
I just mention movies because Xmen DOFP trailer 2, the first trailer for Hercules Thracian wars, and the 2nd Edge of Tomorrow trailer all came out yesterday and the day before
The dramatic bits drag a little, and its special effects rip off movies from Godzilla to The Matrix to Troy, but it's also insanely creative. I kept saying "I've never seen that in a film!"
and I was in military uniform since I had done ROTC then classes than Cru meeting and then ended up going with some cute girls who just happened to be in town for a missionary outreach project and were at the cru meeting (campus crusade for christ)
@JoshuaAslanSmith Shortly thereafter: "We can't aim the toxic fish!"
There's also a Swamp Thing called Mr. Yuan.
Fair warning, it drags sometimes, especially at the start, and some of the fight scenes are kind of by-the-book but with a lot of CGI "coming at the camera" shots. And often the CGI is pretty bad.
And if you have trouble with subtitles, this is not a film for you.
It'd almost be better to watch it with them off if you have trouble reading subtitles really quickly. Lots of blink-and-you'll-miss-it stuff in the dialogue and the scenes.
I remember watching an anime many years ago - Lodoss War, maybe? - on a DVD that had both English subtitles and English dubbing. Unfortunately, it seemed that they were each translated by different people, possibly not with the same grasp of Japanese, and likely without actually having the film to watch as they were translating.
The two were wildly different, to the point that watching it with both subtitles and dubbing was hilarious.
@Lord_Gareth my webmaster is thinking to implement some new races in our game. One is gonna be a LA +0 version of the genasi, one is gonna be a LA +1 mix between extaminaar and yuan-ti corrupt and one... well, he said casting two spells per round is too strong so no Dvati. Looks like I just need to get a new character to the level where he can cast Shapechange and be a chronotyryn if I want it. (and no, I want him to nerf Dvati to make it playable and not "high risk high reward" as it is now)
I think I'm gonna look for Dvati homebrew solutions
Never would have thought that people playing rpg on cons know so little about rpg though. :p
Was my first convention, I was a bit worried before my first round that I wasn't really all that fresh on the rules, because the sessions were just 6 hours... ;)
I actually read up a bit on the rules that would be relevant to my characters
turned out that I was the most experienced player by far.
I mean, Shadowrun tends to bring out that "what-if"-planning sessions, but that was really stupid
there were quite a few efforts to intervene, but it went right back into the "what-if" spiral
we ended up doing what was first proposed after about five minutes into the discussion
heh
it worked.
Except that one guy that had argued a lot (playing the mage) ran in before the meat shield and caught a headshot. Now that I think about it, it might have been intentional by the gamemaster that this particular roll was pretty good.
Keeping busy, working on posters for the local theatre productions and a multilingual/cultural lit mag. Reviving/revising an old aborted D&D 3.5 campaign to use in Fate with a couple of players, now that I sometimes have more than one player.
I do know of a 3.5 group with several people from a group I ran a few years ago, but it sounds more like "RPG as social activity," meaning it's more about the individuals and their out-of-game interactions.
Not something I would want to join or usurp.
For one thing, it seems to break up and then re-join every couple months.
And without him, well, @Trogdor and I have done "twosies" (one GM, one player) before. It takes some getting used to --no long campaigns, keep them down to three sessions maximum, for example-- but it works.
Ah, no. I've got one very regular player, and one who comes when he's free, and a couple who want to come but never can.
Even when I had up to a half-dozen "regular" players, Trogdor was the guy I knew I could count on to be there every single game, so I'm used to wrapping my plots around him.
I had this one game a while back, where I had just build up the perhaps greatest plot-tension I had created so far, and then the player moved to another city.
So I Skyped with him about ideas, and our next session had his PC get possessed by the ghost of the recurring villain he'd recently defeated for the second or third time.
It was 4e, and his PC had been a "lazy warlord" build that used his moves to grant everyone else extra moves; the villain had been a "necromancy and mind control are how I make friends" character. Combined together, he was a powerhouse of ordering the PCs to attack each other, manipulating them into fighting amongst themselves instead of fighting him.
When it became clear that despite this, the villain wasn't going to win, he killed the PC he was possessing and tried to escape.
Which led to another character performing an ad-hoc blank-check ritual in mid-combat: "Any power who is listening, if you imprison Davith the Wicked in eternal waking stasis until he forgets how to hate, I will dedicate myself to you!"
It was perfect for the PC's character arc; Kamola Hava was a puffed-up, racist, nationalist bigot who was convinced that his half-orc empire was the best thing since pointy sticks.
maybe because I'm bad at building a world around the characters, maybe because my usual players like to smash opposition and fight battles more than thinking about how their characters could behave, I never get such situations.
@Zachiel Kamola is all about that player. He designed the guy with major flaws and told me flat-out he was going to take the character on a wild ride of character development and see where it went.
When I saw an opportunity I'd put a tough choice or temptation in front of him, but more often he just took advantage of whatever was going on.
The player was very gung-ho, so I didn't have to go out of my way to put the spotlight on Kamola. Kamola took the spotlight whenever he could.
(Which was nice, actually, because it meant there was never any point where everyone was just staring at each other blankly. You could always count on Kamola to push forward.)
But I wrapped the campaign's overarching plot around Trogdor's character because I was never sure if Kamola would even survive from session to session.
