Yeah. Funny story about that. When I first started dating my eventual-wife, and was more heavily into the goth scene, we once went out to a club with her wearing a leash that she had clipped to one of my belt loops.
Her mom saw us.
I said, without missing a beat, that she made a perfect fashion accessory.
Her mom thought it was hilariously adorable.
So, yeah. Not entirely on topic - but, leashes.
That makes sense given that Wisdom's 'opposite' is Hubris. I generally take it that, at high wisdom, your thought follows the line that 'just because you can doesn't mean you should', while at low wisdom you don't even have those thoughts; doing it - whatever it is - is just second nature at that point. It's like this description of a creature in 2e D&D that had natural Detect Magic permanently on - it simply assumed that everything else saw as it did, and couldn't understand their perceptions otherwise. A low Wisdom Mage would feel his/her abilities are 'natural'; almost instinctual at least from a mentality standpoint.
I fully agree; the new Harmony system makes a lot of sense, and plays into the idea that werewolves have a more primal morality than even Vampires might. Vamps struggle to hold on to their humanity and see their Beast as a negative thing; Werewolves don't (ideally) see either side as more morally correct than the other.
There's also this issue that Harmony in 2e is way different a stat than it was in 1e. It's actually far removed from any other Morality system in the game thus far (though the jury's still out on how they're going to handle Clarity).
Basically, in every other Morality higher was 'good', lower was 'bad'. In Werewolf it's between two extremes - how close you are to your human side, and how close you are to your spirit side. Either extreme provides benefits, but also incurs penalties - so optimally you want to keep it in the 4-5-6 range. That means a hell of a lot of consciously breaking to one side or the other just to maintain the balance.
GarouMUSH ran for a good number of years; but their mechanics were strange and everything was glacial in terms of advancement, so...
Pretty much, Coin; and they made one small change (in a sea of many larger changes) to Mage that makes the spellcasting system far more palatable, especially in multisphere games. Specifically, you determine what your spell factors are before casting, allocate numbers and penalize your roll. This is different than 1e, where successes contributed to your primary factor (Which is why you could get people throwing 8-agains/rote/whatever on to that casting roll to get obscene levels of power). In this, all those after-market modifiers just make the effect harder to dispel; to get a more powerful effect you have to increase factors which, in addition to being limited by the system, incurs a -2 to the casting pool per increase, per factor, after a certain point.
My general take on it is, and has always been, it's your XP - once you have it you can do with it what you will.
There are a couple of caveats to this, of course - the primary one being that 'what you will' has to be within the rules or theme of the game you're playing. Mostly this comes down to non-favored, out of clan/tribe/whatever stuff. If you're trying to get something that is allowable to your splat but is not something a character of your particular type or alignment would normally be able to get? Yeah, that requires justification of some form. If you're sticking to mold and buying favored or 'general' type stuff, though? Have at it.
In my mind, this doesn't constitute 'not earning'. You 'earn' what you have by virtue of the xp - even if it's auto-gain. In a realistic sense, people don't 'learn' by amassing a pool of free brain cells then deciding to devote them to a certain task every couple of weeks; there's no such thing as 'experience points' in real life - it's a mechanic within a game designed to represent the normal progression of improvement. You 'earn' the xp - how you spend it, within the above guidelines, is up to you.
They're not - it's an issue they know about and had announced would be fixed in an upcoming patch. Basically, the difficulty curve is less of a curve and more of a ... I dunno. Fractal. I was in a 3.5 skull mission the other day that involved 2 Zeuses and a couple of medium weights, and later on was in a 5 skull that had 1 Thunderbolt and 7 20-45 tonners. There was a freaking Locust. In a 5 skull.
Cockpit mods are just great all the way around - me, I tend to go with the boost to sight range. Put this on a relatively fast Mech ('relative' being the key word since, in my world of overcompensatively huge machinery, I use a Battlemaster to scout), the pour on the LRM fire from other lance mates. Still hunting for a King Crab, though; from the look of it that has one of the most evenly balanced weapon arrangements in the game.
Yeah, I noticed that Pulse lasers were ... less than impressive in that one pre-arranged story mission where you had them. The Gauss Rifle is pretty nice though.
As far as Destiny 2, I'd venture to say it's worse than D1 on some core levels. It has a better (Or at least, cohesive) story, but the game's just not as engaging - and somehow they took their players complaints and distilled it down to interpreting them all as 'we want more grind!'. So that's back.
@packrat Yeah. My cheese weapon in the MW series, from 2 on, were medium pulse lasers. Best damage-to-heat-to-weight ratio, plus fired fast enough that you weren't punished too much for missing.
True that; but they were cheap. The main defensive advantage you had with them was their increased movement <especially with hovers> but, conversely, you also had far greater terrain restrictions too.
@jaded Yeah, I just caught up on that. Good stuff nonetheless.
And as a belated answer to Theno's question somewhere in there, vehicles (at least in the rules as I remember them) were a different beast from Mechs in terms of armor and durability. With mechs, you had a set amount of internal structure based on the tonnage, and up to double that number in armor points. Vehicles had no internal structure to speak of - you could slap as much armor on to the things as could fit within the tonnage. However, where mechs could lose a limb or torso segment and keep going, a vehicle was destroyed if any segment of it was breached.
That said, I did once put together an annoyance lance consisting of four 50-ton hovertanks with no weapon and maxed out armor and engines. Charge rules were such that you did 1 point per 10 tons of weight, multiplied by the number of hexes moved - and a topped off Hovertank could move at something like 16 or 18 hexes. Basically, 80-90 points of damage to a single leg; which, if it overcame both armor and structure (likely, given that even an Atlas had only 21 Structure and 41 armor in each leg), the remainder would be transferred to the torso. It was also pretty common for most mechs to store ammo in their legs, and we played before the age of CASE - so ...
Battletech.
Just. Battletech. I cannot say enough about Battletech. Maybe it has something to do with it being my first foray into games that didn't involve things like Monopoly or checkers, or that my friends and I growing up got so hardcore into the thing that we set up a 10x10 foot playing field (using Battleforce maps laid over by sheets of plexiglass) to have four on four company battles that lasted the better part of a weekend, or that I've just been totally inundated in everything having to do with the franchise (including all the nonsense about the Unseen and whatnot) from 1st Edition Battledroids up until Fasa decided to stop making games... but I freaking love this iteration of it. There are a number of differences from what I remember (so I'm not sure if they had to do with changes in the actual rules, or just kludges for video game balance - like the limiting of not just critical spaces or weapon types, but total number of weapons per type per location) and there's one or two things I did find annoying (like how punishing Heat can be - not just shutting down or penalizing your mech, but also doing more damage to it than most enemies could ever hope to do in an alpha strike) But ... yeah. Battletech. I kickstarted it. I have the freaking jacket; and thankfully, the game delivers. If you're into turn-based strategy, and looking for something that isn't X-Com (As one review put it, the difference here is that, in X-com, your soldiers die if they get hit too much - while mechs can lose an arm or torso segment and not really notice) I'd definitely recommend it.
I've used a Motorola Z-Force since they came out <1st generation> and absolutely love the thing. I don't take advantage of all the mods available - though the camera and projector ones are kind of cute, and I understand they're adding an Alexa one shortly; but I do use the battery mod that supports Qi charging as a default. Thing's been pretty solid in all respects, though I don't know how the Version 2 stacks up.
Also something else to keep in mind. For several years Androids have had the ability to use SD memory as 'internal'; in normal situations you can only use the SD card as storage, and have to tell the OS to save things to it specifically, or manually transfer. Android has a function to bypass that and have the phone see the SD as an increase of it's own built-in memory, which makes things a hell of a lot easier in terms of both storage and app installation (Though it does require some fiddling both before and, if you want to repurpose the card for whatever reason, after)
https://fossbytes.com/android-sd-card-internal-storage-adoptable-storage/
There are some advantages to using a separate physical drive to cache - primarily, it's because a computer can generally either read, or write, to any given hard drive at any given time - not both at once. Even if you have two partitions and have the cache on the second one, it's still the same physical drive and still faces the same problem. Having a separate drive allows it to be reading on one and writing on the other and vice versa, which can save a bit of time.
If you already have a SSD boot drive, though, the difference will be minimal to imperceptible since the R/W on those is pretty damn fast - and this is especially true if your system has more than 8GB of RAM as well. The above method was great back in the day of 5200RPM mechanical drives, but more modern equipment provides diminishing returns.
“But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."
"Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but its a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily."
"It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."
I could probably just copypasta the whole damn book; so much of it is so very accurate as to how the world is today; and so very misunderstood unless you've sat down and read it. Most telling, though, is something the author himself wrote about it - and keep in mind, the book was written in 1953:
'In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction'
Yeah, that was the kind of dissonance I always noticed about Star Trek, especially since it always focuses on Enterprise.
The Enterprise is the flagship of whatever fleet it's in, which means it's regarded as the best with the best crew. It largely focuses on the bridge crew; which means you're largely focusing on the best of the best.
Within Starfleet itself, it's mentioned a few times as to how stringent the Academy requirements are <especially during the Wesley Crusher arc there in TNG>; and what's more, how easy it is to wash out. So just being in Starfleet means you're among the best.
So, in short terms, you're taking the best candidates from the best applicants possible, then from that taking the most experienced and most exemplary officers and making the show about them.
In that kind of situation, even the Janitor is probably a warp theorist/molecular xenobiologist/pastry chef.
Now that Pact Worlds is out (And it's pretty good), there's at least a bit more meat to the Starfinder setting.