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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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The Old Hack
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Content count
5,594 -
Joined
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Last visited
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Days Won
356
Posts posted by The Old Hack
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2 hours ago, mlooney said:Not really it's a French 20mm single barreled antiaircraft gun.
So how much AC do the various aircraft they are shooting at have?
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2 hours ago, mlooney said:While a 20 is an auto hit and a 1 is an auto miss in 5e, the same can't be said about saving throws and ability checks. They are just high or low numbers. The 1st One D&D release's rule mods made a 20 an auto success and a 1 an auto fail for all d20 rolls. This was removed in all other drops after much screaming about it by playtesters.
A friend of mine told me that in one of the editions you could only hit the Tarrasque if you rolled a '1'. To him that sounded like, "Even your hits automatically miss." I admit that makes the darn thing even scarier.
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38 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:At least more arbitrary. I've observed this over many years IRL. State politics is more manipulative and dirtier than federal, and below that level can get really nasty.
I am not sure I dare to ask about how it works when you elect village dogcatcher.
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2 hours ago, mlooney said:It's been a decade or so since I've played 3.5 Does a 20 auto save or was that a house rule?
20 was auto save. 1 was auto fail. We had a huge discussion about whether we should do away with auto fail one time. Ironically enough I was the deciding factor. It happened in a massive boss fight where the Big Bad was a massive slaad. My sorceress cast a death spell on it with a fort save of 29 (mostly because I couldn't think of anything else to do, I did not expect it to work). The boss slaad had a +200 fort modifier. It rolled a '1' and died.
After that we changed the rules so automatic fail could no longer happen.
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21 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:My dad was in the Army Air Corps in WW II, and he performed a valuable service, but he was not near combat. He was essentially a remote air traffic controller.
What he did was nonetheless still necessary and important for winning the war. He was part of the effort that freed my homeland from Nazi control and so allowed me to live free. I thank him for his service.
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Just now, ijuin said:True, but the writers wanted the vocabulary to identifiably resemble known Latin words, so that’s where it ended up.
Lazy and scientifically _extremely_ implausible. Then again they had enough self-awareness to parody themselves. After all, this was the show that featured the line "The singularity is about to explode."
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5 hours ago, mlooney said:That's a fairly high DC. Well, a 20 isn't all that high, at least for mid to high level characters, but needing to roll a 20 is probably too damn high as that's going to adjust to a 29 or 30. At least in 5e of course.
This was 3.5, as I recall it. I played a 6th level fighter with a will save of +5. Turned out the save DC was 26 total which means my pluses were pointless as only a 20 would have worked anyway. I was so mad.
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30 minutes ago, mlooney said:Also for those that don't follow the Ukrainian war daily, Russia has claimed it's destroyed multiple Leopards and has released a video of one being destroyed by a helicopter fired anti tank guided missile. The thermal image is of the tractor in the lower right.
To be fair to the Russians, these tractors are brutal. They have towed any number of abandoned and captured vehicles to Ukrainian repair shops for repair and conversion to Ukrainian use.
5 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:And isn't that weird "Å" a Viking relic?
Actually it is comparatively recent, at least in Denmark. We used to write it using two As in a row, but people got tired of it and introduced the Å in 1948.
2 hours ago, ijuin said:The character is actually the Alteran glyph for Tau’ri, or Terra. (The Alterans, or Ancients, were the ones who invented the Stargates, and their language was apparently the ancestor of early Latin.)
I wish science fiction writers of that kind of series would study at least a little linguistics. The history of Latin evolution is eminently traceable through the Indo-European language tree all the way back to Sanskrit. If they had been arsed to at least make their language the ancestor of Sanskrit it would have been 1) much more believable and 2) way cooler, insinuating that ALL Indo-European languages could trace their ancestry back to the Alterans.
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27 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:Why should he? He had Stargates built into them.
Not Stargates. Stargåtes. These are off brand imitations with a silly modified A to get around the trademark.
They are an endless hassle to maintain and every week or so you get invaded by creatures from the beyond or crap like that. All in all they are more trouble than they are worth.
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16 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:"a dear bought victory; another such would have ruined us" - General Clinton, British Army, after the Battle of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution.
Almost word for word what King Pyrrhus said. But this kind of too-expensive victory is sadly a constant throughout the history of warfare.
18 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:Battle of Bunker Hill
For some reason this name gives me a terrible mental image of a defending American force led by Archie Bunker.
19 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:In the end the British won, but in the process they lost nearly half of their forces in the Boston area - more than twice as many casualties as the Americans took - and 1/4 of all officers lost over the course of the entire war.
I suspect these were the worst possible officers to lose as they were courageous ones leading their men into the teeth of terrible opposition.
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4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:Their treatment of Hong Kong qualifies as a show stopper as well.
On a mildly related note, Europe seems to be dealing fairly well with the Russian gas embargo. Prices have now dropped to prewar levels. It seems that the principal accomplishment of the Russian gas embargo has been to gradually wean Europe of dependence on Russian gas.
As Darth Putin says, "I remain a master strategist."
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28 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:Note that Kursk is considered to be a Russian victory, yet Russia lost three times as many tanks as Germany.
An expensive victory can still be a victory. The Kursk offensive failed and cost Germany so much they could no longer muster a serious counteroffensive on the East Front for the rest of the war. Russia could replace its losses; Germany couldn't.
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Ah yeah, the 'reasonable' DM. I've met that kind. After a long and frustrating game my Strong-Willed character got hit by a Hold Person spell. A 19 die roll was not good enough, I needed a natural 20 to save, taking me out for the rest of the fight. Fantastic climax to the game.
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7 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:Liam was, however, Dwight's superior, no? He had a clear deference to 'royalty' on the EGS side (once he got past the induced killing spree compulsion; he did not expect to find royalty on this side.)
Superior to, perhaps, but not necessarily his direct superior. Consider: Dwight is the equivalent of a beat cop. Law enforcement. Liam strikes me as more like a noble or politician of great rank, let's say a Senator. A regular beat cop would probably give a lot of deference to a Senator, especially in what was obviously becoming a complicated political situation.
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14 hours ago, ijuin said:On the other hand, a minigun is harder to conceal and transport than a sniper rifle, and the element of surprise remains important.
Absolutely agreed. But it is all situational. The point isn't which is better, a sniper rifle or a minigun. The point is what kind of action they are preparing for.
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On 6/2/2023 at 10:08 AM, ijuin said:Yes, Rincewind always knew when it would be best to put some distance between himself and trouble.
Which was generally a very, very short time after trouble became apparent. At times this interval could be measured in microseconds.
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14 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:That's the tank's role, you're the budding glass cannon, George. Seems like they should both already know that.
New game rules. But though George is aware of what a tank is, he is not aware whether the group's current tank can be trusted to do his job. Speaking from personal experience, just assuming that can at times be... overly optimistic.
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4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:We found an Earth-like planet, & we destroyed it.
Big talk from the Pharaoh who couldn't even put warp engines in his pyramids.
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5 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:How does that apply to Liam? In your analogy, he's in the role of a cop. I could see Virginia aiding them. Perhaps his positive relation with Virginia makes him a sympathizer?
Nope. Not a cop. I said less likely to face oppression from royalty. He is clearly aware of the inherent unfairness of the system. On the other hand, the gate guard griffin was clearly in the position of law enforcement and look how he reacted to Virginia when she showed. It's a bit like cops from our world facing a Black man with a cell phone and shooting him twenty times. I do not know how that would have ended if Liam had not intervened but I am, shall we say, not eager to bet a thousand dollars on the outcome being harmless and without injury.
Liam, I suspect, is in the position of being immensely privileged but not having the leverage to intervene directly. He may be helping the rebels because he believes he can shape the situation to reach a less destructive outcome than open warfare. It would be unsurprising if saddening if the rebels were much less optimistic about that and were preparing for violence anyway.
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4 hours ago, ijuin said:Tech makes sense for what they want to take back because most of the things that we know that the EGS side has that the other side does not are either tech or the products of tech. Non-magical (and thus harder-to-trace) telecommunications, computers, high-tech materials such as ballistic or ceramic armor, or weapons would all seem valuable to a rebel faction.
If a gun presents a danger to even a powerful mage, a minigun would probably be even more so of one.
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2 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:The griffins all seemed to respect royalty, the four we've met, including Liam. Why is Liam aiding a group that is anti-royalty?
The griffins have a lot more societal privilege and are less likely to face oppression from royalty. In effect the situation is like the different way police is viewed by rich white people as opposed to poor Black people living in ghettos. It is a little hard to view a group positively if a nonzero percentage of it considers you subhuman and useful only as target practice.
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15 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:It is reliable, especially if you are ignorant about the target markets. "I'm moving to another universe, what can I take that is negotiable and has value." Well, assuming the physics is similar, gold will still be rare, valued for various qualities, and is likely to be known; it appears a nuggets in nature, and is relatively easy to purify. Other factors, such as, it was illegal to own and trade in the US for several decades might come as a surprise. What else would you take with you that you'd have a reasonable certainty of the item having value? Gems, maybe, and they'd be lighter. They are more difficult to trade. Silver, but it is bulkier per value. Platinum or palladium, but they were discovered later, and are not as available as gold is here, presumably a similar situation might exist, and they are not as recognizable as gold.
It depends a lot on the society as well. There was a time where diamonds were not as highly valued as other rare gems. A few centuries ago spices fetched REALLY high prices due to rarity. The word 'salary' stems from a time where you would issue pay in the form of salt. Also baseball trading cards can reach really impressive values, though I am less sure that the fame of players in other dimensions would carry over as readily. As to Magic: the Gathering, I wonder what that would be called on the other world. Technology: the Menacing?
The one thing I am fairly sure they would not bother to bring is NFTs. With magic and illusions available they have simpler ways of scamming people.
Deep Thoughts
in Off Topic Discussion
Posted
You get a Lamp of Diogenes and use it for lighting in Plato's Cave. Once inside you cross the Einstein-Rosen bridge to where you will find the box with Schrödinger's Cat. The replacement blades lie right next to the box.