Planet Hulk trailer

This could be interesting. I liked the original story of Planet Hulk, and I'm curious to see how much this follows the original.

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Commander Oz

Your result for The What Starfleet Rank Would You Be? Test...

Commander

The Understanding First Officer

You are the commander! This probably means that you are authoritative, and yet are able to take orders. You are creative when thinking, and tend to come up with most interesting solutions to problems. You are understanding and pay attentio to other peoples' needs as well as your own. You can adapt to amost any situation, which makes you a big help to your Captain. There are two sides to you: Riksy and Logcal. Your logical side makes you a good judger, and very good at predicting what is to come and advising the Captain. You can be a little risky, but that's just the fun part, right?

Take The What Starfleet Rank Would You Be? Test at HelloQuizzy

I've always said I make a better First Officer than Captain.

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Project 39 - Defenses

Project 39 is the nickname I've used for my various attempts to make an Ozzified d20 that falls between 3.5 and 4e. Rather than make a new tag for my a la carte home-brew, I've been using the Project 39 tag, so I might as well call the class-less version by that name.

To the matter on hand, I've been chewing on defenses. I've decided to do away with Armor Class or Defense Bonus (the mechanic used in Modern d20). Star Wars Saga does a similar thing, though their system with armor can get kind of messy. I also have to consider my use of Combat Skills.


Just using Reflex as a defense has some problems. Say Phil Farmer, who has a total of +3 with swords, is fighting Bill Badass, who has +10 with swords. Let's assume their Reflex Defense is the same. Their target numbers are the same. Bill's superior skill doesn't help keep him from getting hit.

What I'm considering is a set of feats that allow the character to use an appropriate skill as defense. This means with that feat and wielding a sword, Bill would have a Defense of 20 (10 base + 10 for swords) against a melee attacker instead of his Reflex Defense. But this doesn't help is Oscar the Ogre decides to lob a cinder block at Bill.

As for calculating the base Reflex, Fortitude and Will Defenses in the absence of class bonuses I came up with a simple idea. Instead of a given Defense being 10 + stat bonus + class bonus + level bonus + feat bonuses it would be Stat plus feat bonus. If you have a Dex of 13 (and no applicable feats) your Reflex Defense would be 13.

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More class-less musings

Why do I get my best ideas at work or when I'm driving?

Anyways, I've been chewing on character creation for my latest a la carte iteration of d20. The one advantage of classes was they made character construction easy and relatively balanced. Giving the players free reign opens things up to balance issues, both intentional and unintentional.


Novice players I figured out an easy fix in designing beginning packages themed around different kinds of characters like Woad Warrior, Hedge Druid, Faith Healer and Ley Raveller. I'm thinking there won't be any mechanical benefits, players building characters from scratch can get the exact same results, but it will make it easier for someone who wants to play a "healer" type and not spend two hours crunching mechanics to pick the Faith Healer template, plug in a couple of things and go.

Think on this led to a chain of ideas. I was considering how to handle Weapon Proficiencies, trying to decide how detailed I wanted to get and how to balance how many feats a starting character should have when I had the heretical thought "get rid of them."

Huh?

In most systems not having a proficiency inflicted a penalty. But since I was replacing Attack Bonus with Combat Skills, did I really need a penalty. If Phil Farmer picked up a sword, what would the difference be between him and Bill Badass? Well Bill would have skill ranks and Phil wouldn't. If Phil later got a little training or practice with the sword, he wouldn't leap from -4 to 0 by buying proficiency, he'd go from 0 to +1 by buying a skill rank.

Eliminating weapon proficiencies meant not having to worry about giving starting characters enough feats to be adequately diverse in weapon choices without finding an artificial means to prevent a min-maxer from loading up on a narrow focus.

I'll also be handling skills the same way. Instead of a penalty for not having a skill, it will just be a lack of bonus. This get rids of the rank zero skills I've used in other iterations of a la carte.

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Marvel to throttle back on cross-overs

It seems like the cross-over bender that Marvel has been on for the past three years, with Civil War, Secret Invasion, and now Dark Reign, will finally come to end... at least for a while, a noted in this article.

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Serenity - The Big Damn Replica

No price is listed for this Serenity model, which includes an option to come rigged with a remote control lighting effects system, but looking at it, I can some things up in one word...

Want.

And you thought I was going to say "shiny".

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TNG on Family Guy

For those of you who remember Star Trek: The Next Generation

Family Guy's Stewie meets Star Trek The Next Generation from Work Avoidance on Vimeo.

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SW:TOR video - voiceovers

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XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery

I think I need to get my paws on a copy of this book about DMing.

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Darth MC Hammer

The only thing funnier would have been if they had been doing Riverdance.

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Cats are manipulative

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Scientists are just figuring out what cat "owners" have known for ages, that our feline friends manipulate us to get what they want. This article talks about their discovery. I'm pretty sure Ryoga uses the sound they are talking about, but sometimes it gets him booted out of the bedroom for the rest of the night because it is too effective at getting my attention (read waking me up).

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Epitath One clip

More Dollhouse goodness, Whedonian foreshadowing *and* Felicia Day? Yes, I'll be getting the DVDs.

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d20 with no class?

Yes, my headline does lend itself to many obvious slams, but this isn't another e-skirmish in the Edition Wars.

I've been thinking about my campaign idea I call "The Sundered Veil" or Sundered for short. In a nutshell a science experiment run amok punches a hole between this world and the one that the beings of myth and lore retreated to after the Milesian Accords. This breaks the accords, allowing these beings and magic to enter the world. For some reason when they enter a large chunk of mankind vanishes. Oh, and did I mention there was a global EMP when the rupture occurred? Bye bye digital age.


A quick comparison would be a cross between the various urban fantasy novels of Charles de Lint and Ariel - A Book of the Change. My mental vision for this is a nomadic druid on an antiquated Harley with a sword and a shotgun riding through a foggy countryside.

With my recent experimentation (and so far success) with my a la carte adaptations of 4e and Star Wars Saga, I've been mulling a Modern d20 adaptation, taking good math from 4e and the basics of Md20 and combining them. As I contemplated this, it occurred to me the system might be ideal for Sundered.

When I tackle a game system, I tend to think about character generation first. Even though I liked the Md20 classes, each based on a Characteristic, I realized I could entirely eliminate classes and just keep the Characteristic associated talent trees. By maintaining prerequisites in the talent trees I could mitigate cherry-picking. The hardest part of an a la carte system versus the level framework is balance. I saw that when my players converted their Star Wars characters and heavily invested where they could get the most bang for the buck. A good GM rule is that if players really want something you've ruled against, odds are you did the right thing.

In my other a la carte conversions I still kept classes for character creation purposes. Players built a first level character, using the changes I had put in like having separate skill ranks instead of universal skill progression and having weapon skills instead of attack bonuses. Then they advanced the characters in the new a la carte advancement until they ran out of xp to spend.

In Sundered, I can just give the players the numbers for starting stats, skills, feats and talents and go from there. Seeing as the characters are the "new heroes" of the new age, or at least will be eventually, I can be as generous as 4e in attributes and make sure they have enough hit points that the first goblin with a pointy stick doesn't end their heroic careers. The trickiest part will be magic, which I'm thinking I will do as a self-contained module so that the new core system is easily ported to different settings.

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Too bad this isn't playing in Indy-no-place

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Noooooo... Lucas "involved" in SW:TOR

According to this Massively article, George Lucas is "keeping an eye on" Star Wars - The Old Republic. For those of you who remember Star Wars Galaxies, it was pressure from the Lucas camp that led to the radical changes that effectively killed the game.

Lucas, keep your stilted dialogue and CGI misfits out of my future MMO!

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New MechWarrior trailer

MechWarrior at IGN.com

Looks like the old MechWarrior/Battletech line is getting rebooted, and from the trailer, it looks good. I'm surprised there isn't a MechWarrior MMO out there, the setting seems perfect. You have merc companies (guilds), warring houses (factions/RvR), and abundant PvP options including arena fighting (Solaris).

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Mandalorian 101

Yes, every tidbit is making me more stoked to play SW:TOR. Fitting it's state of living death, Star wars Galaxies will be adding zombies. Yes, really.

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Good EFCA article

I just read a good article regarding the Employee Free Choice Act. The author, a small business owner, does more than just criticize unions and the impending legislation, he points out the things small businesses do that could lead them to getting stuck with a union. You can check out the Newsweek article here.

Businesses had better get ready, because the EFCA is a matter of when, not if. And if you want a good example of union effects on businesses, look at some of the troubles the car companies have. Businesses that don't want the additional costs imposed by unions had better get on the ball with employee relations.

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Carnivore FTW

see more Fail Blog

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