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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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The Old Hack

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Posts posted by The Old Hack

  1. Posted

    [To the tune of 'One Night in Bangkok']
     
    Waterdeep, fantasy settingAnd the city don't know that the city is gettingThe creme de la creme of the D&D world In a show with everything but Vin Diesel
     
    One D&D will make a hard man humbleNot much between despair and ecstasyOne D&D will make the tough guys tumbleCan't be too careful picking your partyI can feel Baatezu walking next to me...
    Darth Fluffy reacted to this

  2. Posted

    14 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    This makes a great deal of difference.

    To be fair, modern capabilities of precisely targeting single individuals at long distances has removed a great deal of attraction from the act of leading from the front lines. In combination with the doctrine of decapitating enemy armies specifically by targeting their leadership it has rendered heroic charges while holding battle flags aloft positively unhealthy. I do not anticipate Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen leading cavalry formations with drawn saber any time soon.

    Darth Fluffy reacted to this

  4. Posted

    11 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Not alien as such.  And yeah, reverse engineering stuff with limited to no documentation is a skill that applies to many things.

    A line actually spoken in a game I participated in: "No, for the last time. Your technomage can't reverse engineer the One Ring."

  5. Posted

    https://www.egscomics.com/egsnp/wie-147

    In classic old AD&D a housecat could be pretty badass. It could bite for 1 point of damage and do 1-2 damage with its front paws, and if it hit with both of these attacks it would also rake with its rear paws for another 1-2 points of damage.

    One time during a massively chaotic battle my wizard managed to paralyze a hill giant. Against paralyzed opponents all attacks hit for maximum damage. His housecat familiar promptly attacked it for 5 points of damage. It kept this going and the giant died ten painful rounds later. Given that in this version of the game each round counted as a full minute, this meant that the poor stupid thing spent ten minutes being flayed to death by an angry cat. Not fun. :danshiftyeyes:

  9. Posted

    3 hours ago, mlooney said:

    Doesn't take a dire chicken.  A fully grown chicken can be hard to deal with.  And if it's a fighting cock can be dangerous even to a human.

    True. For some reason I suspect that that priest is not nearly as skilled at handling chickens as, say, a regular farmwife.

  11. Posted

    9 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

    Lots of wars where one side is the comparatively good guys...

    That 'comparatively' is important. War is an incredibly filthy business and collateral damage does not care which side you are on. And often even the 'good guys' will have leaders that make to put it mildly rather doubtful decisions. This is not helped by the fact that sometimes these leaders get no good options at all and it becomes a question of which group of people you end up betraying.

    Of course there is the relatively common example of an aggressive neighbour invading on the legal basis of What's Mine Is Mine And What's Yours Is Also Mine If I Can Grab It. It's fairly easy to sympathize with the defender in that case. But even these need not be clear cut. Example: the Spanish conquistadores are generally not considered nice people. But they got into a fight with the Aztec Empire and it is really hard for me to see the Aztecs as purely innocent victims. Sometimes two groups of different bastards get into a fight over the same spoils and you end up not caring much who wins. In that case the 'good guys' is the side that is the least likely to make trouble for you and your in-group when the fighting is over.

    But even the 'good guys' too often end up with innocent blood on their hands. Winston Churchill for example was to put it mildly a creature of many parts. There are people who curse his name to this day and consider him not much of an improvement on the side he fought. Quite a few of those live in India.

    10 hours ago, ijuin said:

    The closest we have come to one of those in modern times was WWII, and that’s only because Germany and Japan decided to play the genocide card.

    I am going to go out on a limb here and say that aggressively persecuting and scapegoating minorities in order to consolidate and expand your own power is bad and that anyone who does it is also bad and should feel bad.

  13. Posted

    On 6/21/2023 at 1:46 AM, Don Edwards said:

    Granted, they were effectively applying that question and their answer in defense of slavery, which is despicable and makes them clearly not the good guys... but I can't say the Union were the good guys either.

    When did the war happen where one side was the good guys? I think I missed that one.

  19. Posted

    On 6/9/2023 at 2:04 PM, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    Why did I not hear of this in my High School French class or in Sunday School?

    Well I hear that there is an almost criminal lack of D&D games in Sunday School's curriculum.