The Old Hack

New EGS: NP not up yet. Locking this for now.

The Moderator: By all means. Go ahead.

I believe that Dan put it this way: that 2002 plotholes live in their own little world and that he will likely never get around to fixing all of them. He just sort of ignores them and ascribes them to inexperience.

Consider in comparison the fearsome power of Pharaoh Rutin Tutin and the might this dreadful God-King employs on these forums even today. *shudder*

The Moderator: Please don't.

It was a belief system. It is not a question of whether it worked or not, it is a question of whether those who practice it believe in it or not. Voldemort is a poor comparison. The reason no-one spoke his name was that they were afraid of doing so. A fear deliberately inculcated by Voldemort himself by spreading the rumour that his attention might be drawn by naming him. He may or may not have also actually struck at some of those who did to help spread that fear. You will note that the toughest of the heroes refused to submit to Voldemort's intimidation, including Dumbledore and of course Harry himself.

I believe that if we ask the good Pharaoh here, the chosen MO of ancient Egypt when wanting to utterly destroy an entity -- divine or mortal -- was to destroy all records of it, especially of its name. To speak of it as little as possible and when one did speak of it, to never name it but rather refer to it with some sort of derogative that granted it as little respect (and hence power) as possible. 'The creature', for example. Once the so treated being's name was completely erased and all record of it destroyed and forgotten, the target would be destroyed, too.

I would emphatically second this. Never ever use plot armour (again, with the possible exception of Gods) as it is cheating the players. Not even for the player characters themselves. Death needs to be a looming possibility for everyone and even the most powerful master villains or epic heroes need to be fallible. Mind you, this is not the same as saying that it should be easy to kill anyone. In my Occidentia campaign it would certainly be possible to kill the Byzantine Empress -- once you managed to outwit the Imperial Guards, subvert her massive and paranoid network of spies and counterintelligence, penetrate intricate magical defences erected by the Court Wizards and (last but not least) outmaneuver the Empress' own highly cautious routine of self-preservation. Just remember that all of the above are good at what they do as they get a LOT of practice. Also remember that even arousing suspicion of having intentions against the Empress is as good as a death sentence, of if she is feeling merciful, lifetime imprisonment in a high security jail. Still, on a more everyday basis and with characters the PCs are more likely to meet, it means that if the players play it smart and/or get lucky, they can take any of their personal enemies down. The above was an extreme example as the likelihood of the players making the personal enmity of someone that high up is very low. Unless they really work at it, in which case they only have themselves to thank for it. In short, I consider plot armor an abomination. It's unfair to players, demoralising as all out and it makes the game boring for everyone. What fun is it to run a campaign if your players can't surprise you?

I once did that scenario with a kingdom where powerful nobles were trying to destroy it internally, too. The old king was dead, leaving only a daughter to hold the throne, so wild plotting commenced. But the plotting slowly ground to a halt. First, the most aggressive of the plotters died in a hunting accident. This occurred when he was somehow placed in a trebuchet that was primed to launch and he got fired hundreds of yards away to impact in a noxious swamp. The second plotter, who was also a suitor, suffered from a stroke that was so bad that it not only crushed the back of his skull but also most of his neck and his left shoulder. The third committed suicide by running screaming through his home while beating himself to death with an iron bar. The fourth died when an accidental fire burned his home down and shot everyone trying to escape through the windows with crossbow bolts. After that, the rest of plotters got the hint and decided not to tempt the new queen's wrath any longer. It did not save them, mind. They had the privilege of occupying the front ranks of the army when the Queen ordered the neighbouring kingdom plotting against hers invaded. They all died as war heroes. The players treated the queen of that kingdom very respectfully.

Once again, a cosh or a blackjack is really only a less lethal way of taking someone down, not really a nonlethal one. And you have to know exactly what you are doing -- if you don't, the odds of killing your victim increase dramatically.

That might work very well for something like Thief. To be fair, in a Diablo-like it is probably OK to stay with XP for kills.

It's like they say. Old soldiers are made of old leather and boot soles. They keep going through stuff that left the fainthearts and the tender skinned in the dust many miles ago. And a good thing, too.

Trust me, I hated it, too. I came up with house rules for awarding XP for nonlethal and nonavaricious ways of advancing plot and goals long before it got built into newer roleplaying games.

In an ideal world they would have. And it was certainly what many or even most of the people in the Resistance tried for. But even good men can wear down and when you live under constant threat of capture, torture and death, and you see that happen to your closest friends and family members, and you can not ever be certain that someone you trust won't sell you out... strange things happen to the human mind after a while. And some people are just broken to begin with. That doesn't help, either. In school I was taught a sanitised version that closely resembled the ideal it is so tempting to believe in or hope for. You have to dig to find the atrocities. But if you do, they are there.

That reminds me of once back in the 90s when the central network of the place I was then working at got empowered by a lightning bolt striking right next to the building and sending a 50.000 volt surge through the network. Happily, our cheap 10-dollar net cards protected themselves by sending the surge on to our 1000-dollar CPUs. The net cards all worked fine afterwards. The CPUs in the servers, not so much.

Ah, shadows of the early days of tabletop roleplaying games. Where you grabbed all the valuables no matter how lawful good you were, because 1 GP = 1 XP.

I am going to answer this as honestly as I can: I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me. Not that any war is ever pretty, but this one was really hideously ugly. Of course we had resistance fighters who tried to minimise civilian casualties. But we also had the type who said, "If they are near Nazi property, they probably had it coming anyway." The Resistance had to deal with informers and deserters and doing so in an environment where getting caught by the Gestapo could readily mean a fate that would be if not worse than death then at least incredibly painful for a while, and then death. And where getting caught could mean that they got the names of your friends out of you. People got murdered just under suspicion of being informers. Gestapo officers got liquidated and countered with more atrocities. My own uncle was a teenager who did stuff like running errands, sugaring gas tanks and spreading illegal papers. He eventually got picked up by the Gestapo and spent the rest of the war in a jail that I somehow don't think appeared in the Michelin guide. During the first part of the war, the Resistance was small and unorganised as well as poorly equipped. It did not accomplish much. More, at the time the government collaborated with the Nazis and so they did not do much in the way of atrocities. In fact, because Danes were so close to what the Nazis fondly imagined to be racial perfection and because Denmark had been one of the nations that had been least harsh with territorial demands after WW1, Denmark was treated more like an ally than a conquered nation. Without support from the population in general and with the police at least nominally assisting the Nazis, the Resistance could and did not accomplish much. But as time wore on, it became harder and harder for the Nazis to ignore the Resistance. They started to do atrocities to suppress it and frighten the population into subservience. As usual, it worked with some but made others more motivated to fight back. And of course atrocities begot more atrocities. The government became less cooperative. The Danish Police was rounded up in 1943, imprisoned in camps and replaced with SS and local collaborators known as Hipo, or the HilfPolizei. As you can imagine, the latter were far more interested in beating people up, having a good time and filling their own pockets than in keeping any sort of order. At that point the Resistance really started to get momentum. I am not an apologist for atrocities but I am honestly not certain if I would have had the moral strength to keep from doing them myself if I had lived at the time. I am sorry.

To be fair, if a bunch of cops formed up in a line between me and my monitor whenever I turned it on, I'd get rid of the damn thing in a freaking hurry, too.

On the countering side, puncturing a pulmonary artery is not likely to fill the lungs with whipped cream.

I was about to comment on forecast services omitting essential information, but thinking more closely about it, I am compelled to agree. (This reminds me of a horrible forecast I once saw in a Danish tech magazine. It featured a bugged forecast page which had placed a nonexistent extra day between Sunday and Monday. According to the forecast, this hypothetical day featured weather such as a constant temperature of 99 degrees Celsius throughout the day (210 degrees Fahrenheit) and an average windspeed of 999 meters/second (1092 yards/second). Near as I could figure out, if that day had actually happened, there would be nothing manmade left standing atop Danish soil afterwards. Possibly buried nuclear bunkers might survive it -- I don't know if we have any of these.)

We had quite a few of those in Denmark three quarters of a century ago. Only we called them 'resistance fighters.' I blame Orwell.

Does the forecast mention the likelihood of Elder Gods appearing to devour the countryside?

Personally, she reminds me equally of the Furies. Spill family blood, pay a terrible price...

Absolutely. If Dan said he didn't do it, of course he didn't do it.

The Moderator: I would like to remind the people posting here that we have at least one Muslim poster here and we may have lurkers of that faith, too. This sort of reductionism is insulting to them. There are many Muslims in the world who live in countries friendly to the United States (millions of them in the US alone, for example) and to make the claim that all their clerics 'feed them anti-US propaganda' is a staggering oversimplification about as reasonable as saying that all Christians are homophobic, anti-science and against LGBT rights. Once again, please do not descend to this particular kind of argument. Faiths are not monolith blocs led by the Borg Queen. And for that matter, terrorism is not limited to the Muslim faith. I am watching this thread closely and I truly do not wish to lock it -- but if I judge it necessary, I will. ~tOH.