5too 3 days ago • 100%
GURPS has a specific disadvantage that is essentially this.
5too 1 week ago • 100%
Nah, if I remember right, those arrows use the poison from a tree frog's skin, not something like a snake's venom. So still poison!
5too 1 week ago • 100%
That was my first thought!
5too 1 week ago • 100%
...I think that might be less far-fetched. After all, our black VP is competing for her next job with a guy who's a few oranges short of a basket....
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
Oh yeah: https://instinctmagazine.com/white-nationalist-gavin-mcinnes-plugs-himself-to-own-the-libs/
There's probably better sources, that's just the first Google result.
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
That's not what I've seen. The stories I'm familiar with usually involve defending those things where they already exist, not establishing them. Even in cases where that needs established, as often as not, they're usually protecting someone else who embodies that ideal.
I'm sure there are stories similar to what you've described, but I don't see that in the stories I'm familiar with.
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
It’s always seemed strange to me that earth never made any sort of meaningfull technological progress despite having access to a galaxy full of new tech.
This actually seemed reasonable to me - if alien tech is anything like ours, we lack the parts to make the parts to make the parts to make the tech, so we can't mass produce any of it yet. And we're a bit of a backwater - what resources we do have of galactic interest (vibranium, maybe?) isn't for sale. So we make do with what scraps do find their way to earth.
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
Stories don't need to be told, humans need to tell stories. That's what makes us human, and is how we spread ideas like honor, justice, and even civilization itself.
Hero stories reinforce all of these ideas, and others besides.
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
I don't think it's bullying, because bullying involves tormenting them - finding what they react negatively to, and pushing on that. Here, you're letting them know that there's something you need them to do before you're comfortable playing with them. You might think of it as modelling how to protect your own bodily autonomy!
For me, when my kids were going through that, I'd say something like "Ack! Don't touch me with poo hands! Go wash first, then you can climb on me!" It'd generally get a giggle, then they'd go finish washing up. You'll want to pay attention to their reaction whatever you do, but if you make it clear they're still welcome to play, I don't see how it could be bullying.
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
...how kid friendly? Haven't been able to introduce my kids to his stuff yet!
5too 2 weeks ago • 100%
I want a horror movie where some of the heroes are genre-savvy, Practical Guide to Evil style. I picture it starting as a horror, and shifting into a kind of heist storyline
5too 3 weeks ago • 100%
...I would be very interested in seeing how you describe your hummingbirds!
5too 3 weeks ago • 100%
I certainly hope that happens. But it's not a reliable enough consequence to justify the currently low level of fines, which was how I read your earlier comment.
5too 3 weeks ago • 85%
That seems like a pretty weak consequence, and not an intended one. Worse, it's one likely to be least impactful for the worst offenders - a megacorp isn't going to care much about fines, and the market won't see any danger to their investment in them.
5too 4 weeks ago • 100%
The older one just had a dental appointment today, and was uncomfortable with some of the procedures. My wife talked him through things along with the hygenist, and for a few things she took a different approach he was more comfortable with.
With vaccine reluctance, we generally go straight to bribes. We treat ourselves after doing something like that anyway, so why not them?
So far, we haven't had any issues yet!
5too 4 weeks ago • 100%
We love ours!
5too 4 weeks ago • 100%
We've been doing this with our kids; and when they say "no" and someone doesn't stop, you better believe they say something about it!
Similarly, we've been getting consent before the doctor checks any underwear space. No pushback from any doctors or nurses for that either.
5too 4 weeks ago • 100%
As they burned, it hurt because
5too 1 month ago • 100%
...it didn't occur to them to even start learning Russian before they went?!
5too 1 month ago • 100%
so many fuckin Worfs
...so it's a party van!
5too 1 month ago • 100%
I've been trying to avoid soap labelled antibacterial for this reason, and it's tricky to even find any that's not labelled antibacterial.
Been wondering if they don't just slap the label on any soap, because it could be considered antibacterial by its nature. Apparently not?
5too 1 month ago • 100%
That's a lot better than what I thought he'd be lining up...
5too 1 month ago • 100%
My players ran across some Imperial guardsmen killing off skeletons, only for the orcs accompanying them to protest that they were destroying "registered cultural artifacts!" The orcs didn't have much, and they would leave their bones to their children to help them eke out a meager existence.
5too 1 month ago • 100%
But you don't have to get that across in every discussion of her, either - that moves from discussing his vendetta over to defining her by it.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
About a year ago, I was playing with my younger kids watching. I had a home base above an extensive cave system that featured a ladder up a large stalactite as the main way in and out, as I figured that was plenty safe from mobs.
Was messing with something in the cave system, picked up a creeper on the way back, and dashed back to the ladder and started climbing out. Looked back down and the creeper was climbing the ladder after me! I'd never seen any mobs use ladders before! So I'm making these panicked shrieks in between laughing at my potential demise, the kids are cracking up, and I eventually get to the top and close a door behind me - but that panicked, giddy rush still sticks with me!
(I never looked into it - how long have creepers been able to climb ladders? And can most mobs do that now, or just them?)
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Dead? Really? Cuz Portal and Minecraft are my kids' top two games!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Dragon's not completely gone; she's just attending to other stuff while the characters are handling their slice of things. She does show up more towards the end, IIRC. I think she also had some plot resolution; though my memory is fuzzy here.
And some of my other favorites feature in Ward!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
More of a callback, I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/grilledcheese/comments/2or1p3/you_people_make_me_sick/
5too 2 months ago • 75%
I think that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
People who live in an area should be empowered to push back against outside interests coming in and changing things to the detriment of the residents, like the HOA posted earlier that protected their forest and watershed.
The problem is that this power is often turned back onto the residents. This sounds to me like hyper-local politics - and so the answer is to get involved and vote out the assholes in power, not ban the existence of the political body!
(Edit) I didn't realize this, but some HOAs are controlled by outside developers, rather than local residents? That I can get behind banning!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Mine has been docked for months at a time. I recently started shifting it to be near the kids when they're home; but not undocking it wouldn't strike me as strange at all.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
That's a really tough thing to deal with, but that doesn't mean what you did was wrong.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
I can't see Trump being the sort to try to build something beyond himself. I don't think he could see the point of trying to cultivate a successor; and even if he did, I think he would see them as potential competition - he'd likely try to sabotage them, if anything.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Some of those solo games can be played with multiple players and no GM, too!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Ugh, okay - I suspected something hinky was going on with Adam just from the summaries I'd seen, but I'm just as happy to give that game a miss now! Think I like him better as a brain in a box, but it still colors their relationship...
5too 2 months ago • 100%
But not the stem!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
What went on in that game? The plot synopses I've found have lacked detail; he just comes off as vaguely controlling and uncommunicative.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
That's the one I haven't played. Then I had to look up who this weird "Adam" character was in some of the following games...
I remember the plot was odd, but reading a random wiki didn't make the story really stick for me.
5too 2 months ago • 100%
We need more chicks who are “Basically the female equivalent of Duke Nukem”, and only Lara and Bombshell (from Ion Fury) come close to that bill
I've long been a fan of Samus Aran!
5too 2 months ago • 100%
Does that show Ben Shapiro’s people made to be a Pro-Right Cartoon, but failed when the super woke antagonist was… a far more likable character than the protagonist, and said protagonist was so accidentally queer-coded as a closested gay bear with a crush on the woke antagonist guy that it attracted a Leftist fanbase that ships the Protagonist and Antagonist together? To such an extent that it might as well be a canon pairing?
Oh my god, this blew right past me! What show was this?
5too 2 months ago • 100%
For flavor, you might include some NPCs mourning relatives who joined other failed adventuring parties. And if the module includes hireable NPCs, some of those might be survivors from other hastily assembled parties as well - the players' party might be more attractive as a more capable party than their former squad. Or some NPCs might be shell-shocked survivors of other parties instead!
Mostly, this would let The Edge look like the best of the opposition, rather than the only other game in town!
Hello! I'm looking for a way to copy a set of rollable tables from one system to another. Specifically, I'd like to grab a bunch of the oracles from the "Ironsworn & Starforged" system over to a GURPS game I'm running; to help with generating content on the fly. The rollable tables I'm looking at are pretty basic, but extensive - the ones I'm after are mostly roll a d100 for a textual result. I'm able to go through and individually import the table (from a compendium), export it to my file system, switch game systems, and import it there without issue; but I'm looking at a few dozen or more tables that I want to do this with! I'm hoping there's an easier way. They're all nicely bundled in a compendium; but I suspect that's part of the issue - is there a way to move a compendium from one system to another? Or another way to move rollable tables en masse?
How much do you allow mages to pump up their missile spells when using the default GURPS magic-as-skills system? Particularly with casting level 15+ (enough to get a discount) and a few levels of Magery? The GURPS FAQ 4.3.3 [here](http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/faq/FAQ4-4.html) mentions that the total cost of the full charging time is discounted once - so at casting level 15 you can charge a 1 die fireball for 1 second for free, but you cannot cast a free 3 dice fireball by spending 3 seconds charging it - that would instead cost 2 energy points. But what about the upper end? GURPS Basic Set page 240 says you can “invest one or more points of energy in the spell, to a maximum number of energy points equal to your Magery level”. Suppose a PC with Fireball-15 and Magery 2 spends 1 second creating a 2 dice fireball. This has cost them 1 energy point. Does this mean they could instead spent 1 second investing 2 energy points (their maximum Magery) into a 3 dice (discounted price) fireball? I saw this idea posted on the GURPS wiki [here](https://gurps.fandom.com/wiki/Fireball), but I haven’t found anything discussing this idea elsewhere. Peter V. Dell'Orto has [mentioned](https://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-inexpensive-missile-spells-of.html) that even allowing the discount to apply to each charging turn hasn't wrecked his game, so I'm not worried about the balance component of 1-2 extra dice of damage; I'm just curious what other GMs would permit at their table.
Ironsworn (and it's sci-fi successor, Starforged) are products of the recent surge in solo gaming. I really like how they tie several simple moves and mechanics together to create unexpected storylines and exciting campaigns. However, it's not a particularly *crunchy* system. GURPS, of course, can be; but has no real system of its own for less GM-centric play (the closest I've seen is [The Collaborative Gamer's work](https://thecollaborativegamer.wordpress.com/), which doesn't really stretch beyond individual adventures). So, I thought I'd try wrapping the crunchy GURPS ruleset inside a nice Starforged move system! My approach has been to keep most of the Ironsworn/Starforged moves intact; but resolve the move rolls using GURPS rules based on a full-fledged GURPS character. I've detailed the changes I've made to the Starforged system [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17q78sXhhkKYOmbeBnFmB9sRxfyYwkf5IziY7LKcFCxY/edit?usp=sharing). I documented a brief playthrough using this system, a bit of which will be posted in the comments as an example of this system in use. The world I'm using is based on GURPS: After the End, with elements from GURPS: Lands Out of Time and GURPS: Reign of Steel. Think Mad Max with dinosaurs and robots! I'm using mostly the Starforged versions of the moves, with Ironsworn and other oracles to better fit the setting.
So, the whole big trick to using GURPS successfully is to ruthlessly cut down the rules you're using to just the ones that are useful to your campaign, right? So how are the rest of you sharing with your players which rules apply in a given game? Or do you share them at all? I'm running a game right now which has taken a "generic" Dungeon Fantasy world with all the races and magic options and everything, run it forward a few hundred years with generally low mana, low sanctity, etc; and advanced technology up to a steampunk style setting. I'm running it as a high adventure campaign, so some Action components are in, and we've got automatons and artificers and such, so weird science and metatronic generators are included. And since the players are managing an airship that's perpetually about to go broke, I'm looking to the After the End scrounging and invention rules. I've also supplemented all this with various other Pyramid articles. So I've got around a dozen or so rules sources, on top of the Basic Set. Now, I knew when I was setting this up that there'd be a lot of splicing sources together (that's part of the fun!); but I didn't think through how tricky this would be for my *players* to work out. Right now I've got versions of the PDFs edited down to just the salient details, but I'd love a better way to present a cleaner, unified ruleset for them. Has anyone else run into this? Or have you found it best to just hide the sausage making from them?
(I wrote this both to have more #GURPS content on Lemmy, and to help drive community engagement. So, there's a wall of text for content, and there's a TL;DR at the end for engagement! :D) I've become enamoured with running Eberron in GURPS lately, and I recently came across this scene from Arcane, where the Firelights board a drug smuggling airship (first minute or so; mild spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew4SLG_XR-Q. I love how they portray the Firelights gang fighting in close quarters, and I'd like to come up with a similar martial arts style (or more than one, depending on what I find) that centers around using the Flying Carpet spell or enchantment. But before I can do that, I'd like to nail down some more details about how flying carpets might work. The Flying Carpet spell is defined in GURPS Magic p146 (and is reviewed at https://gurps4e.fandom.com/wiki/Flying_Carpet). It transforms any object a person could reasonably stand or sit on or in (carpet, broom, cauldron, towel, chair...) into a flying vehicle with Move equal to the caster's effective level (so at least Move 15 for an enchanted version). It uses the Pilot (Contragravity) spell to pilot it, but can handle up to 1G turns without skill rolls. A combination of magic and automatic maneuvering keeps the occupants on board normally, though fighting or other strenuous activity requires a DX roll to stay aboard (modified at GM's discretion). Aside from this roll, combatants are otherwise treated as being on the ground - Flying Carpet specifically provides a stable platform, without sharp banking, folding, etc. Flying Carpet costs 1 point per square foot, which supports "about" 25 pounds; and half that cost to maintain. It takes 5 seconds to cast and lasts 10 minutes - you can cast the spell easily before combat, but that becomes a long casting time in combat! The spell may also be made permanent for 200 times the casting cost. In a broad-magic world like Eberron, it seems completely reasonable that items with these enchantments would be accessible enough to accomodate fighting styles built around them - and in fact, Aundaire in particular is known to have used Skystaff squadrons throughout most of the Last War. Just from the list of example items the spell might be applied to, I can think of three form factors that might have very different styles: * The broom, which in Eberron has had its bristles removed and is renamed into a Skystaff. It also presumably gains a seat and handles, and the user rides it like a bicycle. This lets the user keep a lower profile, granting a defensive posture bonus but also penalizing normal attacks (without training). The most interesting thing here though is that it's a *staff* - which seems like it would pair nicely with an Eberron wandslinger's staff enchantment! Combining these would make the Skystaff into an airborne fighter - a flying vehicle whose pilot can cast offensive spells out of the front as if from a mounted weapon. * The cauldron. By itself, this would let an occupant sit inside a well protected space and zip about the battlefield. But if you add in a Hideaway enchantment to allow a little more internal space, an Earth Vision or Wizard Eye enchantment for visibility, and poke a wand with a Staff enchantment out through the lid; you've now got a flying mage-tank! For bonus points, carve a face into the front of the cauldron for a mini-MODOK! Or, y'know, use an illusion shell to look like a beholder or something. * A towel, rug, or other open platform. This trades off the more protected profile for a full range of combat movement for the user, as in the video above. The carpet flyer will be using speed for protection; and therefore wants a high spell level along with the ability to use acrobatic feats, elevated dodge, etc. This option best fits more of a Swashbuckler style of character. However, before I start building Flying Carpet fighting styles, I think the following needs explored and clarified: Say you're zipping through a busy battlefield, spot a troll, and decide to smack them in the face with your cauldron. Say they're sturdier than you thought - what happens? Ramming uses the Slam calculation to determine damage to the target and the vehicle. If the target rolls less damage, it needs to make a DX roll to stay up; if it rolls less than half the damage the vehicle did, it falls down automatically. But what happens if the vehicle rolls *less* damage than the target? It can't easily fall as long as the pilot stays aboard. Should the check to stay aboard be penalized as the vehicle tumbles for a moment, or even failed automatically if the target rolls a lot of damage? It seems reasonable that certain techniques could help with these rolls, but I'm not clear what the consequences of failure to slam are yet. I'd also *really* like a way to streamline this whole process - there's easily six rolls that need to be made if you try to knock someone over (to-hit, dodge, damage vs damage, loser's DX roll to not fall, occupant roll to stay aboard). I'm tempted to at least declare a flat damage value (3.5 times the dice count). I'm also still trying to resolve a few seemingly contradictory statements in the spell description: The Flying Carpet "does not bank sharply, fold, or bend", but "specifically provides a stable, level platform". This seems at odds with the earlier statement that "the carpet keeps its riders safe through a combination of magic and deft maneuvering". It ALSO "can handle 1G turns without skill rolls being necessary". 1G of acceleration from a standstill moves you about 5 yards in 1 second - this would look rather odd without any banking, to say nothing of broomstick riders not leaning into turns! I'm thinking these statements together suggest that the vehicle does gently sway and shift to keep occupants comfortably in place, but cannot be made to change its profile for gameplay impacting reasons - it can't tilt on its side to maneuver through a narrow gap, it can't kick up an edge to smack a too-close foe, and it can't roll to put itself between you and wandfire (though you can hang off the side). How do you envision the Flying Carpet enchantment maneuvering? This leads into my third question - why are there DX rolls to stay mounted in combat? I don't recall any other 4th edition mechanic that works like this; usually there's a penalty or cap to other rolls instead (maybe it's a leftover from 3rd edition? Magic has a lot of these). At the moment I'm debating between treating it more like ordinary mounted combat (penalties to skills, with techniques to buy them off); or just providing a technique to boost the DX roll, and allowing it to be ignored altogether with a perk if it's over SL 16 (Supers defines such a perk). I could also treat it as a variable "bad footing", which might also be reduced with a technique. TL;DR: * What other objects would be interesting to have Flying Carpet cast on them? * What happens when a hoverboard, flying cauldron, etc. rams something heavy enough to take the hit? How might this be handled? * How do you resolve the tension between it shifting to keep you aboard, and not being able to sharply bank? * Do we *really* need the DX roll each combat turn, or is there a better way?