Grrl Power #597 – High Int., let’s say average Wis.
The first half of this page is channeling that crime procedural show “Numbers” where, if you haven’t seen it, the FBI guy has his math savant brother use all kinds of crazy math to solve crimes, like applying fluid dynamics to traffic patterns to plot get away driver escape routes and the like. My biggest complaint with that show was they only did a surface level explanation of the math. I really wanted them to spend a good 15 minutes really getting into the math, like an episode of Numberphile. (Similarly, my complaint with The Imitation Game was they barely explained anything about the Enigma machine itself, unlike this Numberphile episode. (And this one talking about how they cracked it.))
The second half of the page is anything involving the sad trombone noise.
To be fair to Dabbler, I didn’t think of that solution until I sat down to write this page. I think if I had played any tabletop RPG’s in the last few years, my brain might have been better geared to outsmart the GM. That’s where the stupidly obvious refrigerator logic solution occurs to you while you’re playing and not 2 nights later, and the GM goes “uh… yeah, I guess you could do that.” and you wind up skipping half the adventure. The evil wizard builds a tower full of traps and monsters, each level more dastardly than the last, and Lina Inverse uses a flight spell to fly up to the top floor on the outside of the tower and chuck a fireball in the window.
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…DaveB, you let Sydney stun Dabbler but you checkov gunned yourself – a bespelled rock would trip any mana void trap set on the portal w/ resultant boom on the other side( Guesticus +I went ’round about Max closing the portal via a blast several pages back for the same reason, and I know I’m setting myself up for the “nose in the book treatment ” from B5)…
Sounds like a fun conversation
… it was, and not in a bad way…
Wasn’t being smart or clever (anyone who has been reading these comments long enough know neither apply to me), honestly don’t remember that
…and in keeping with the thwart the gm theme, this happened in a Champions game. Pc hero group against evil cultists in a castle, gm prepped for a running fight.Pc’s split up- two head for the main tower, rest go for the front door. Gm expected us to storm the place swat style. Instead, player A walks up and knocks on the door then shives the cultist that answers it-w/her longsword. Rest of group enters, fights a single animated suit of plate armor instead of the six mr.unlucky was supposed to activate. Meanwhile, pc’s B+C fly up to the tower. B detected a force ward; C announces he’ll attack to break the ward and remove the window(C is playing a cyborg based off of the Prefectural Earth Defense Force anime -in modern terms his attack was Phara’s from Overwatch!). Gm goes “Roll”. C rolls a 3 to hit w/ a 10 round autofire attack at max damage per round [house rule].Gm then described how C has now removed said top of tower along with the big bad who was up there(can you tell we never played 4 color?)…
Reminds me of that one cultist we wrecked. He was supposed to summon an endless army of skeletons from a magically scorched battlefield until our tank purified it with his spear that had been blessed for this exact purpose. With prophecy and all.
But we managed to find him and sneak up to him (very good rolls on our side and a fail on his). Having him at the tip of our blades we tried to question him for the bigger picture as he was just a minion in this arc. But he decided to summon his pet demon. Which cost him his throat. Not only that, but bleeding out he still sees our elf snipe it through its eye followed by decapitation at the hands of our warrior. Poor demon death kitty.
Well, prophecy void; our tank has an enchanted AND blessed spear now; the area remains charged with dark energies (but who cares) and our DM’s face was priceless.
Reminds me of an assassination my group once did in Shadowrun.
We were hired to take out a high-value target. Since Mr Johnson didn’t specify the need for subtlety or minimizing collatoral damage, we just walked into the basement of the building the target was in with a briefcase full of plastic explosives, then walked out with an empty briefcase.
Can you give specifics on this please? Cause I’m thinking of multiple ways this wouldn’t work in theory and I’ d love to know whether I’m right or wrong. (I usually get stuck with DM/GM duties so I think about these things too much.)
There’s a difference in ‘ways this wouldn’t work’ and ‘reasons why it did’. The former assumes you’re trying to defeat your players’ ingenuity which just devolves into an outdo contest, since they’re trying to defeat what you’ve put down in front of them to begin with as the nature of the game. The latter assumes you’re looking at what went down and how they managed it, because clearly it did happen.
Probably put the charges on support pillars. Take out enough of them and the building collapses in on itself.
Probably wouldn’t work… Now whether I allowed to work or not in my game would probably depend on a lot of things….how integral that mission was to the play session, whether it was part of an arc in a campaign, how well they actually thought and planned it out (i.e this is how you plant demo charges in real life), whether the result would just be plain awesome. Even then if it was for a long play session or a campaign I MIGHT still allow it in spite of questions because of the results…oh my lord the possible results. Depending on the circumstances that could result in a LOT of heat and could be fun to play out……but like I said it depends on a lot of factors….and I just kinda wanted to know about the factors…cause I think about these things alot. Might be usefull someday.
Come to think of it…if I was considering not allowing it I’d probably either point it out or run relevent skill rolls by the group beforehand to explain any problems I think their characters would have training to know themselves.
Likewise any skills which would give them insight in how to modify the plan to get it to work, if it is close to being plausible, but just lacking in elements an experienced character would be trained in.
Well, Mr Johnson gave us info on the building: the target was at the top floor (floor five), which was heavily fortified and had a number of bodyguards with him. My character had a lot of ranks in demolitions, so we got the idea to pick up some plastic explosives, stick them on load-bearing pillars in the basement, which wasn’t guarded after we got in though the service entrance. Plant the explosives, exit the area, trigger the explosives.
The GM had actually been expecting us to figure out a way to sneak in via the roof.
It was a relatively minor mission, quite a bit of the actual play session revolved around framing someone else for the crime (I believe we successfully pegged it on the Halloweeners).
My group were playing Call of Cthulhu. A game where you expect your character to die, go insane or get sucked into Hell, by the end of an evening’s playing. Half the fun comes from playing any inanities you pick up, with heart-felt conviction!
So we are investigating an evil cult, getting wind that they are planning some major event, and track them down to a ruin by the side of a lake.
Checking out the ruin, I decide that it looks suspiciously significant. Fortunately my character was sufficiently paranoid to have a trunk full of explosives, in his car. The games master had allowed it, knowing full well that the only monsters in this scenario were so overwhelmingly powerful that high explosives would not even knock a tentacle off.
Turns out to be very effective against cultists though. Hidden strategically all around the site where you anticipate they will stand to conduct their diabolical summoning ritual.
It was kind of weird leaving the session with all of the characters alive, sane and having prevented the summoning of an apocalypse-causing dark elder god!
Heh :) on a small delta green mission, i played as an ex SEAL – we ended up being tricked into unleashing a chtonian on a city… one of the others players passed out in fear while i got some phobia of worms ^^
All the while the guy who sent us was safe on his boat – from chtonians. While my partners went back speaking to him on his boat, telling the guy i was dead, i swam to plant a few charges on his hull ^^ – we didn’t really like that he tricked us :p
a good DM quickly learns to leave things vague enough and the planning loose enough to add in challenges for sneaky players, but one thing you learn quickly. never put the bad guys in a tower. castle is alright. the bowels of a mountain are better. but a tower? that’s just asking for a spell solution.
Id call that one a good game=).Its funny how in every Call of Cthulu game Ive ever played every player has come up with excuses for having various weapons and so on but the DM never seems to realise that while shoggoths and so on arent going to be impressed by them the much needed cultists can die en masse very very easily ^^.That said if you were allowed enough explosives to take out an entire cult in one go the DM super dropped the ball.
Try to set up a mana void spell so close to your portal that it hits anything coming through it, and you’re likely to mana void your portal.
My favorite axiom is “simplicity is the hallmark of genius.”
Allow me to present my card.
“Ley lines”… I smell an Eureka Seven reference.
Why? Ley Lines go back thousands (if not hundreds) of years
Er, about a hundred
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line
The term was coined in 1921.
But yeah, no, this isn’t a Eureka Seven reference. Eureka Seven was referencing Alfred Watkins.
Dark matter is believed to have been around since the Big Bang. Just because the term was only coined recently does not mean that the subject in question is not older than that.
Once again, you open your mouth and dispel all doubts.
The subject at hand is naming rights, not whether something existed before a term was coined for it.
ShadowDweller was crediting the wrong source, and JetstreamGW corrected him. Whether or not lay lines existed before Watkins coined the term is irrelevant.
Ley lines don’t exist, by the way, and in case there was any doubt. It’s just another example of humans finding a pattern and out of their ignorance making something up about it that doesn’t stand up under closer, more scientific, investigation. Just like all religions.
No, Ley Lines are in fact things that have existed way before the term was coined:
Ley lines /leɪ laɪnz/ are apparent alignments of land forms, places of ancient religious significance or culture, often including man-made structures. They are ancient, straight ‘paths’ or routes in the landscape which are believed to have spiritual significance.
^They are just probably not magical or significant in any “mystical” way.
Just so.
And in a world where magic does demonstrably exist their magical significance is more likely. In this case outright confirmed as being genuine, in cannon, by Dabbler, in panel 1.
Your mother dropped you on you head repeatedly as a child, didn’t she?
It’s not any surprise that Yorp would spring to your defense. Regardless of the fact that springing to the defense of an idiot position would make those defending it an idiot. Yorp enjoys the warmth of the idiot springs…
In your desire to insult, you chose your quote omitting the dictionary definition which immediately follows it. Given that it stipulates “… apparent alignments of land forms …” it is perfectly clear that it is the geographical features which have existed from before the term was coined.
But even going so far as to stipulate that:
So your antipathy and rudeness is wholly without any merit.
Please adjust your meds a bit bud. You have been much more constructive of late, so it is a shame to slip back again.
If I have been “more constructive” of late it is only because I am always constructive. I simply have a very low tolerance for idiocy. And when I am affronted by idiocy my constructive feedback often involves calling a thing a thing. If the idiocy levels have been low of late there is no need to thank me.
That’s like arguing that gravity only existed after Newton got beaned by an apple
Your mother dropped you on your head repeatedly as a child, didn’t she?
It’s more like claiming that you coined the term ‘gravity’ before the person who actually coined the term. Or claiming that person X coined the term, when person Y was the actual coiner.
Why am I not surprised to see you pop up in this thread with an indefensible position? Actually, I’d be more surprised if you and Yorp didn’t barge in to prove that you are idiots. It is an intrinsic part of your very nature.
Not only is it defensible you have failed to counter the defences.
1) The comic is set in a world where ley-lines do exist.
The opening comment is quoting Dabbler citing them as a real factor affecting magic. As such this thread is dealing with game world issues.
2) Ley-lines are alignments of geographical features, which have existed far longer than Guesticus claimed.
But we know that they have been in use magically, as part of the world-wide magical web, for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So perfectly correctly stated.
So please stop being a [beep] and spoilt [beep beep] in trying to get a rise from us. You are a useless piece of [beepity beep] in pathetically attempting to prop up your piss-poor argument with insults.
Try showing some character for a change, and bowing out gracefully. I have no hesitation in doing that myself, when I agree that I am in the wrong, and I hope that you might have enough dignity to do that yourself.
Although, from past experience, I am pretty sure you will cling to your flawed position, fail to counter any point in a meaningful way, and just start flinging your poo, or some similarly inane response.
*turns back on Oberon, in contempt, and gets back to enjoying other threads*
*tail wagging contentedly*
I pointed out that the topic at hand wasn’t the existence of lay lines but the naming rights, and you rebut with a few meaningless paragraphs about the existence of ley lines.
You never fail to fail to see your own hypocrisy, do you?
Actually I mostly just ignore anything you say after you start being insulting. You may recall me mentioning that in the past. Several times.
But now that you have reiterated it in a civil manner, I concede that your point was a fair one. I do though dispute that it is an overriding one, which renders everything else irrelevant, as you claim.
When you are referencing something the words involved are just the medium by which you are describing the original subject. Yet here you are elevating those above the actual subject in question.
By example if you are trying to trace the providence of anything, be it a piece of antique art or a juicy steak, first you follow the paper chain and the names involved. Checking that the brokers and other people in the chain have properly sourced the object and the paperwork corroborates it all the way down the chain.
But, ultimately, the thing that is important is the thing that the paperwork and labels are referring to. Even if the paperwork refers to ‘cow’, if genetic testing comes back as ‘horse’ then that reference is false. You even bring in this side of it by expressing your belief that ley-lines do not exist.
So you would be right if the subject matter was a work of pure fiction. So let us say Superman. In which case we can precisely date when the name was coined and the subject was created, as the case may be. In that example probably at about the same time.
Whereas in this case Ley Lines were an observation of pre-existing landscape features and a proposal of their significance. The TV show was referencing this and he was referencing the features that he had mapped.
So you are right to point out the date the term was coined, but that is not the end of the chain of reference. It points further back into prehistory.
This is specifically pertinent as the TV show was not about the guy who coined the term, rather it was about the ley lines themselves. That is what they were referencing (via his work).
Besides, Dabs should be more about lay lines.
Indeed. She probably has queues at her bedroom door.
LOL wow took me a second but when i got it i couldn’t stop laughing.
I don’t remember anything about ley lines in Eureka Seven. Coral, yes. Surfing mecha, yes. Ley lines, no.
Are you perhaps thinking of Outlaw Star?
Oooh nice Slayers reference with Lina Inverse.
Slayers always did afford Lina a lovely since of directness. The combination of genius, youthful impatience, and a massive inferiority complex (towards her sister).
That look when you’re the smartest person on the planet and a comic book nerd with some floating balls came up with something you’d never have thought of.
:-)
Smooth, Dabs, EVERY adventurer knows about the pebble trick.
Need to cast Light on something? Pebble.
Explosive Runes? Pebble.
Just be careful of the Bam-Bam :P
Or a bag of apples, if you’re concerned the traps are only activated by living tissue
Apples aren’t alive when removed from the tree…
Yes, my less than “good” character kept a portable hole full of captive halfings. I went into the 10x10x10 space inside the hole, paid people to brick and mortar it into a safe prison cell type room, cast a continual light spell on a rock with a hand drawn shutter around it for a lantern, and created a oxygen source from a bit of Pure Air taken from the Plane of Elemental Air. Halflings make great trap activators.
I have a suspicion about your definition of ‘good’.
Well, they did say ‘less than “good”” :P
Yes, they are. Apples are very much alive when removed from a tree. The cells continues to respirate and produce energy until they start to rot.
(Unless you you use some misch-masch hokus-pokus religious definition of life, but then I assume nothing but humans (and preferably white middleage male humans) are alive.
Virus, there we can have a discussion, but apples … They are alive, if you listen next time you bite into one you can hear it screaming…
The rot that consumes the apple is also alive. which is why they don’t rot when stored in cool dry place. Realistically, any magic set to trip on “is it alive” will trip on almost any object on the surface of planet earth. Rock? lichens, mold spores, bacteria. Steel shank? Tetanus (ok, that’s debatable) . Ham sandwich? Trichinosis. Mineral ore from 2 miles down? A nematode. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110601-deepest-worm-earth-devil-science-animals-life/
The magic should require a certain level of complexity of life, but even that’s a tough call:
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-02/water-flea-genome-most-complex-yet-and-may-help-scientists-study-organisms-response-stress
Considering we’re talking about adventuring and most tabletop adventures involve magic, then yes. We are talking about hocus-pocus and no we’re not talking about middleage white folk, why even bring that up?
Traps that detect for ‘living’, often search for a creature that is [not dead]. Regardless of composition. Plant creatures, animal creatures, mineral creatures. Produce and the like, completely unmagical and whatnot, typically doesn’t even trigger this sort of thing for the very purpose of preventing people triggering traps with fruit or rocks or something.
*cries*
Poor harmless fruit and veg. Why don’t those barbaric vegetarians caninely kill their food‽
At the point when a plant can 100% be declared “dead” is usually a disgusting mush, dried out husk *but not all plants are dead in this state*, or all the cells have been denatured through cooking.
However fruits are a bit different from vegetables, the fruit is intended to be eaten, that way the seeds which are protected from the digestive process of most animals can pass through to be spread out the area in a nice heap of fertilizer that also discourages seed eaters from getting to them.
vegetables are usually eating the flesh-body of the plant which it would rather you not eat.
Oh, the seeds definitely are. They couldn’t germinate if they weren’t.
Old MacDonald’s Bag of Holding. Chickens, sheep, an assortment of animals to use as needed to check for traps.
Well you can always throw the troublesome hobbit in first.
Yeah, the situation did remind me a bit of Harry Potter and the Natural 20. A Harry Potter and D&D crossover fan fiction which is actually well written, despite the description making it sound like the worst thing ever possible. Any fans of both franchises should give it a read.
I would be more concerned about death traps within the portal than those on the other side.
Why would Sciona not just have the portal keyed to specific people and have it disintegrate any other would-be traveler.
Prevents people from finding your house by throwing GPS rocks into your portal.
That is why you go hybrid solution – there are lots of possibilities – summoned critters, constructs, droids, grenades – when you mix tech with magic you have so many options besides boom but boom is still nice.
Sydney found the portal by falling into it, so we can already pretty much rule out that scenario.
Just noticed that half of the ‘math’ in Panel 5 is actually sexual innuendos.
Actually, I now believe that about 50% of EVERYTHING Dabbler writes down contains sexual innuendos – some of them so subtle and intricate, only other succubi can notice them?
LMAO, I missed that because I was to into Dabbler’s expression!
Oh sweet summer child, you think only half of that is innuendo… I’ll have you know my power tower is really big. And instead of rooting around, if you’ll just do me the favor of taking my all natural log down to the base, we can test it to the limit for convergence. ;)
All of it, actually. The thing in the lower right hand corner is a penis ejaculating the square root of 2. Often shortened by mathematicians to sound like “screwtof2.” And anything which sounds like “screwt” is an innuendo.
Also, I like how “Oh sweet summer child” has been made into a way to call someone a naive imbecile. Game of Thrones!
Really?
Whenever I saw the expression shortened by having the vowels removed, I’d always pronounced it as “Squirt of 2”.
:)
Oh sweet summer child. :-P
Thinketh thou mayhap that I be naïve?
Then we 2 are picturing EXTREMELY different fluids to be squirting!
“…squirt-2-squirt-2-squirt-2-squirt-2-squirt-2-squirt…”
not a far fetch that a spell preventor would be in place in the portal.
so people dont lob fire balls or lightning storms through it. or summon monsters in it to fire off traps.
even a tracking spell would be countered.
Speaking from experience, about half of engineering conversations go like this.
The intelligence team should whip up a Dnd based game where they play the GM and whip up a character sheet for each member of the team, based on known powers and power levels.
Then have a game night once every week or two,
Isn’t that a page out of the “successful” evil overloard’s handbook?
The intelligence team should whip up a Dnd based game where they play the GM and whip up a character sheet for each member of the team, based on known powers and power levels.
Then have a game night once every week or two, having them learn how to apply their powers more outside conventional thinking and whatnot, since superpowers makes them a lot like adventurers in games. They could even use illusions to turn a spacious room into a fairly accurate simulator.
‘Birth’ of the HoloSuite? o_O
Also, have them play D&D as *each other* sometimes. Not only do they get a greater understanding and appreciation of each other’s powers, they also have a different mind looking at the same powers and trying to come up with stuff.
Yeah, can remember a time when Emma Frost was ‘possessing’ Bobby Drake’s body, and taught him a few new ways to use his abilities
Yea, only problem would be Sydney, her way of thinking would be impossible to factor into the game, you’d need to do some random check every five minutes to factor in her meds wearing off and all that.
Maybe get her a deck of many things that just have random phrases or items in them for her to brainstorm off of.
One major snag to that otherwise good idea is Varia. Her power would not be easy to stat up without being either unrealisticly useless or eclipticly powerful.
It would not prevent her being detailed, nor would it make her unplayable. The nature of how she gains her power puts it mostly within the games master’s control. So a wise GM will ensure that whatever powers she gets from super team mates are the routine useful ones that would be convenient for her to have easy access to, game balance wise.
Any that might get a bit inconvenient, like powerful healing or knowledge powers (being able to activate a power and say “he is the murderer!” or “aha, I know where the artefact is hidden” would ruin many an investigative story arc – including the one featured on the current page), would only be gained by forming a gestalt with people who may not be available at the right time.
In other words if the games master has an enjoyable murder mystery weekend planned he ensures that either Varia and co are on a remote island or foreign train journey and that no one she will have ready access to has plot spoiling powers.
Of course, with seven billion different super powers at her disposal, some of those are going to be profound. The ability to raise the dead, travel to other planes of existence, speak directly with god(s), time travel and more. But all of these are with non-player characters (thanks to the wise GM ensuring that fellow player gestalts do not have such), so if inconvenient to a particular arc, they can be unavailable.
If it is just a specific power that is a problem, that person can be on holiday or sick, or just feeling crotchety and refusing to cooperate. If it is more then there are other options. Such as having a bit of bad PR hit Varia and she finds that her usually cooperative partners are boycotting her, in protest. Or have the story take place in a remote enough location that it is too inconvenient to travel back to find a partner.
I confess as a GM Id have a fieldday with Varias powers.Id either be passing out random ones just to see what the players come up with(Ive done more than a few games with theoratically useless magical items that wound up being used in epic ways) or if i feel the players being a huge munchkin start interfering with a sideorder of realism ” Whelp yes you touching bob from accounting has made you invulnerable but unfortunately bob ate the blast as well and is now cinders so you have head to toe burns from the heatspike around you after the invilnerablity switched off” Or “Yes you have the ability to communicate with the gods-unfortunately in a lot of mythologys this is not a good thing-Roll fortitude to avoid being roofied by Zeus.”.
In short Varias powers are all a matter of perspective.Sure she can be insanely useful but she can also be a huge liability-especially since suddenly having a power doesnt make you a master of it either =).
Yea, she would be tremendous fun for everyone. Both the DM, as you point out, the player themselves (although it would require one receptive to the limitations and adaptability required) and to fellow players, as they will often be involved, when a gestalt is needed. If those gestalts are well thought out, they will be ones that inspire special moves that compliment Varia’s power and that of her partner. Or other team members, as the case may be.
“We really need X, but have no way to make it.”
“Oh wait, A can make Y. If Varia teams up with B, she can use their gestalt power to convert Y into X!”
As for the random powers gained from strangers I knew a couple of players who went wobbly kneed if they got their hands on a Wand of Wonder or any similar device. Many other players would only use those in desperation, if they had no other options. Whereas these guys would go out of their way to use them.
One because he was hoping that he would get a specific result (whilst illogically ignoring that other more likely results would be detrimental in that circumstance) whilst the other just loved letting the dice decide what would happen, be that good or bad.
When I made a wand of wonder that slowly recharged itself available, he opted not to stake a claim on significantly powerful permanent items, to ensure that he got his dream toy! That is the kind of player who would be in heaven playing Varia. Not being skilled at the power keeps the chaos that is lost by Varia being able to ‘get a feel’ for what a power does. And, of course, the apparently random nature of what gestalt is initially obtained, is what would be like catnip for a feline.
Right. Players are evil sometimes.
I had a door to a vault with powerful artefacts secured like fort knox.
Sorcerer: “I cast disintegrate on the wall next to the door.”
Me: …
That trick has worked in Real Life [tm] a few times in the past – usually the vault floor.
This is why the wall is way thicker than the door
Riches were on the line. Why would they risk not being able to get at them at all when they could just shoot a shortcut through to ’em? Why would anyone, realistically?
I worked for a while in a FBI field office which was in a normal office building shared by many other businesses. We had to go through a freaking almost-air-lock to get in: A heavy steel door you opened using your electronic key badge and a combination, stepping into a small (~4’x10′) room with another heavy steel door at the other end you had to use a numeric keypad with a rotating combination to open. The classic combination of “something you have and something you know,” so no one could just kill you and get access using your badge.
I asked one day if the standard drywall walls had been similarly reinforced. *crickets* *tumbleweeds* So yeah, anyone with almost any kind of metal tool such as a crowbar or a hand sledge, or even just heavy gloves and a will to get inside could have just gone through the drywall-and-2×4* wall right next to the heavy steel door with the second heavy steel door…
* Sometimes buildings use a very light metal instead of the 2x4s to support the drywall. The point is just as valid regardless of which light and easy to break through construction methods are used.
I see this all the time in Office buildings. Locked door to the IT room or offices? False ceilings are a common easy work around. Motion sensors on doors? I’ve cheated many with a coat hanger and a rag.
The other thing to bear in mind is that adding armour to regular offices can exceed the building’s structural integrity. In one office the top management got concerned that our most vital records be stored in a fire-proof safe. A very big, heavy one. Which they put far enough away from the structural pillar that I expressed my concerns. Being a pretty big fellow at the time.
This obliged them to check out the building’s stress tolerances. Which turned out to be one fully loaded safe and three people. So two plus size guys could bring the floor down!
Their solution? Move the safe next to the pillar? Naa, of course not. They just issued an instruction that me and the department manager (also a big guy) must never stand next to the safe at the same time.
No such order to the rest of the department mind. And it was a convenient height to pop mugs on and have a chat around. So you would regularly see four or more folks working or nattering around it.
I stood well away.
Yeah… Armor…
Here’s another anecdote:
I worked for a while in a building which had been previously a CIA building just on the cusp of the information era. It had many rooms which were basically bank vaults, as a layer of steel was what was thought to provide safety against spying attempts. The doors of witch were also basically bank vaults, they were feet thick.
And yeah, it is actually worthwhile. My colleagues who were housed in the vaults which had their doors standing open were not reachable via cell phone. You had to email them or call them.
One thing which I always got a huge laugh out of was the multiple signs stating “NO CAMERAS” in the reception room.
But everyone who passed through the secured door into the main facility was carrying a cell phone.
I caught my former manager, of a security team mind, taking pictures of a beautiful rainbow using his cell phone in the parking lot of our building. Caught is the wrong term, as I was also taking pictures of the rainbow. It was a sweet double rainbow. I said something like “Wow, what a beautiful rainbow! It’s a shame that we can’t take pictures of it because cameras are banned on this facility.” He just took more pictures and then got in his car and drove away.
I remember reading about that kind of “shortcuts”, I think it was in a very old issue of Dragon Magazine, and IIRC they mentionned real-life cases where thieves went through the wall instead of bothering with a tough door. It was too long ago to be sure anymore, but I think one example involved using a car jack to break the wall. And then there were the magical options, of course, such as using Stone to Mud or Stone to Flesh on the wall.
Considering how long dungeon crawls can sometimes take, a flight-and-fireball solution can be just the thing. . .
For future threat assessment, Arc needs to give Sydney a rundown of the basics of everyone’s abilities and then throw scenarios at her. I sure they have people doing that already but her thinking would be a education boon. Though, I rather like some of the suggestions to set it up as a DnD campaign. It would be good practice. XD
There’s a better idea. Time to try out the spoiler tag – mild, non-plot-related spoiler for R.J. Ross’s Cape High series.
In the Cape High series, all students get a video game with a lot of the current supers and their approximate powers programmed in. And they get credit for taking down the video supers, with team-ups and out-of-the-box thinking encouraged.
The problem with this is that unless shes hooked upto actual meth 24/7 her concentration span is appoximately 2.6 seconds….well that and the difficulties of finding someone willing to spend the next 10 years trying to get Sydneys attention long enough to give a brief as possible power description without giving into the urge to strangle the life out of herXD.
I would be at the front of a, doubtless long, queue.
Youd be a good candidate,Its hard to strangle someone with paws XD.
:-D
That long exhale, thats the wind being taken out of Dabblers sails.
Or alternatively, the sound of deflating ego.
Is it really ego when it’s true? She can do mental math that easily calculates for non-physical space in relation to physical space based on pixie fart drift. She’s only ever made this statement that she’s got the biggest brain on the planet once that we know of, so it’s less bragging and more “This is a thing, yes.”
I think that’s Maxima.
I agree with RobK. That is Maxima, using her superpower of restraint to avoid making some cutting comment to the member of her team who seconds ago declared themselves the most intelligent person on the planet, and then got accidentally slapped back in her place by an off-hand comment of the least senior member of the team.
Proof that wisdom and intelligence are way 2 different scored
Yes Dabbler, we know you are the most intelligent being on this planet – but are you smarter than a 5th grader?
By the way, the expression toward the bottom right of the beat panel appears to asymptotically approach 4 as you make the nesting deeper.
And while determining that, I apparently hit the limit of https://wolframalpha.com on parentheses nesting – the site couldn’t compute the expression when it ended with ))))))))))))))))))))))))
Looks like 2 to me. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=a(0)+%3D+1,+a(n%2B1)+%3D+sqrt(2^a_(n))
Then again, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x+%3D+sqrt(2^x)
Huh.
Proper links:
a(0) = 1, a(n) = √2ª⁽ⁿ⁻¹⁾
x = √2ˣ
Clearly Wolfram Alpha is broken, it returns “0+0 = 80085” as “False”!
Clearly. Even a grade school child knows that much math!
@DaveB: If Lina Inverse really felt like performing a dungeon bypass, she’d just cast Dragon Slave on the tower and turn the whole place into a glass crater.
You’re a man after my own heart.
Amber Diceless RPG characters can solve standard dungeon crawl by summoning the target object directly to the inn they are starting the adventure in, then turn the dungeon into vulcano. Just after finishing character creation. Of course, that hardly counts as adventure for them.
… on the other hand, they are unlikely to be 16 like Lina Inverse.
The GM has to allow it, as in the players have to be able to tell the tale of how they accomplish it. And at any moment the GM can add to or subtract from their story with a different one. So, perhaps the volcano erupts just a little bit earlier than predicted and all the players die in the fire and fury. Because in Amber the characters don’t actually cause volcanoes to erupt, they just travel to a shadow where a volcano is about to erupt. So getting the eruption timing right can be a tricky thing.
But yeah, they can story tell their way around any number of plot devices. I had a character who was the best at wrestling, and who also had a sword with a lot of power invested in it. The GM put me up against an NPC who was a tough match for me, but one I could beat. With the sword as the prize. But it was in a friendly setting, where humiliating the NPC in front of all his people would have been a bad thing. So I let him win, and lost the sword. And then while traveling away to our next destination I just told the story of how I had once rested by a lake with a fallen tree and had stored my sword in the tree as I took a swim. And as we traveled, lo and behold there was the lake. And there was the tree. And I pulled my sword out of the fallen tree and went along my business.
So your sword was with your rival and simultaneously hidden in a tree stump. Hang on… I am starting to spot something weird going on here…
You showed empathy to someone?
*falls off chair*
My sword was with the NPC who had won it from me. And if I was back in that shadow then the GM might have had my sword disappear from my posession or be duplicated. But I wasn’t in that shadow when I was at the lake where I had previously hidden my sword. And once I had my sword it was my sword.
And really, you’re going to claim that my showing empathy is weird? I show you empathy all the time. Don’t be confused by my failures to point out your many idiocies. Those expressions of empathy are easily overlooked because they are an absence rather than a presence. I only bother to point out your more egregious idiocies, but you manage to demonstrate your idiocy with regularity and that doesn’t need anyone to point to it in order for it to be widely known.
So the ‘absence’ of empathy is ‘showing empathy’? Oookay.
But, don’t mind me, I am sure you can be a nice person, in real life, and do not eat babies.
Err, you don’t right? I mean I hope you don’t – but it is kinda hard to feel confident about that, with you.
Nah, Gourry would call Lina flat indirectly and she’d nuke the tower. End of episode.
Is Dabbler a genius? Or, dare I say it, a “stable genius”?
I get suspicious of anyone who boasts about how smart they are, and aside from making up a lot of formulae, I don’t really see a *demonstration* of her supposed intelligence.
Too be far she’s lived a lot longer than anyone else in the room, and we’ve seen some of the things she’s invented/built, so it’s obvious she’s not an idiot.
So, if the smartest person who could ever exist stated that this was the case, you would call it boasting? Even though it’s a fact? This sort of reaction tends to come less from a place of social understanding and more often from people who don’t like being made to feel less intelligent than someone else, especially when it’s true. Often they’ll either doubt the person is intelligent at all, or lash out as if someone was trying to personally offend them.
One of the smartest characters in the comic we know of was apparently floored by what Dabbler can do just as mental math, accounting for variables we – the readers – can’t appropriately comprehend because there are factors which are not real and portrayed as too advanced even if they could be real.
She also built a hand-held railgun, has seen far more of the universe and other dimensions than any known human, and her demonic/alien biology likely has expanded mental capability when compared to humans. What more demonstration do you need? Her brain can do things a human’s can’t, and she’s far more advanced in tech, and far more experienced and well-traveled. Do you think that somehow makes her a dunce all because she stated she has the most powerful brain on the planet?
Its just a matter of common sense, Sydney as an outsider isn’t used to thinking in the same manner of as a genius, so simple unorthodox thinking would come to her faster. I’ve had plenty of times at work where the management are trying to think of a way to solve an issue but being stumped, only for me or some teenager working there to suggest something so simple that it never occurred to them.
Also since Dabbler had the tracking spell on him, probably from the instant shortly after knocking him unconscious, or at least once he was in the room, she probably didn’t even consider a second option.
“Boasting” about intelligence. 1: Zephan is probably unaccustomed to not being the smartest person in the room and might even need a reminder that it’s possible; 2: Sometimes ya gotta get past the other expert’s filters in order to be able to work with them. I’ve had to do something similar, but very gently, to hardware engineers I’ve worked with. I’m a software person, but my original training & experience is avionics.
Only an unstable idiot feels the need to constantly declare themselves to be a “stable genius.”
Only a racist feels the need to constantly declare that they are the “least racist person” who has ever existed.
Only someone who is guilty of colluding with a foreign government feels the need to constantly declare that there was no collusion, no crime, and fire an FBI director who was investigating this non-crime.
All fair points. But we should not poke the political anthill too much. We would not want to provoke an argument over politics.
Psst. you forgot to mention defence of abnormal hand size.
The funny thing here is that when Trump says “Believe me” it is a clear tell for his lies. So when he said that there was no issue with the size of his cock and followed it up with “Believe me,” it is clear that Trump has a micro-penis.
And anyone who voted for this racist, misogynist, micro-dicked imbecile deserves what they got.
Best “outsmart the GM” moment for me remains my players literally climbing the walls to avoid a Mine-Sweeper style floor trap.
While two of them were busy with me getting “1-2-3 mines around you” , the other two were checking their inventories. Where they found over 150 feet of rope between all party members and an absurd number of climbing pitons (stuff that comes in the “standard adventures equipment bundle”). So they climbed the walls of the room.
The fairy dragon overseeing the whole thing was most upset.
To be fair, if you were to write Lina inverse up in D&D, she would probably be a level 40 sorceress.
Used to play D&D years ago… Started out with the Temple of elemental evil scenario. Beat that… so the DM takes two weeks writing up an adventure that should have been weeks to finish. Our party was given a task to take a ship to another continent to look for a cure for Lycanthropy. Needless to say, our half orc cleric drug us into a tavern where we were drugged and found ourselves in chains on a ship when we awoke. Pirate captain and officers, slave crew. So, the three main characters, Aspen, a half elf Fighter-mage, Ulfgar, the Half Orc Cleric and Dilynrae, the Dark elf assassin and three knolls are chained to the main deck. Aspen comes up with the idea to test the chains. Fails. Ulfgar… fails. Dilynrae, being dark elf isn’t too powerful but is a master with blades but is shyte at breaking stuff. I almost had her not even try but in the end picked up my dice. 4% chance to bend bars and break chains. She rolls triple zeroes. Her first target is the guard with the keys. Once she has a blade in her hands and the party is free, she starts mowing down pirates. Ten minutes later, the ship is in our hands and the DM is sitting there stunned. There should have been no way we did what we did, but we hit every single roll… I still have that set of clear brown dice…
I love how Sydney consistently challenges the team’s intelligence. Except for Max… Maxi seems to be a kindred nerd spirit under all that hardass exterior. I’d love to see Syd lure her into a game of D&D with her gaming gang… or maybe get some of the team into an adventure. I’d imagine Leon would be a kick ass DM…
That story right there is why I use other game engines now. . .
No, that story is where you ask the GM “What was the plan for the adventure if no one could break or pick their way out of the chains?” Because presumably there was a plan, right? What transpired sounded to me like there wasn’t a plan, or much of a plan.
This is what makes D&D magical. Sometimes, everything aligns just right, and you do something amazing instead of just following someone’s rails and basically just being an audience.
The REEEEEAAALLL fun part was many years later, I was made the unit urinalysis NCO… I got to set up and conduct the unit “piss tests”… Part of that was making the lists of who had to contribute. The day I finished the course and had my certification, the commander decides he wants to schedule one for that afternoon… (Thursday afternoon before a four day weekend no less). Part of my method of randomly choosing numbers (we went by the last number of the Social Security Number) was… you guessed it… 10 sided die. I handed one to the commander and one to the First Sergeant to have them roll. The first Sergeant rolled first and rolled the commanders last number. He busted out laughing until the commander rolled his… LOL All this time and I still have my box of dice…
I’m not sure why this is funny. Were they both pot smokers and had hoped to avoid the test? Where is the punch line? Because “I had to take a random piss test and passed” just seems kind of random to me, and not worthy of busting out laughing. Was it supposed to be funny because “people in power had to drink a lot of water so they could piss before they got a 4 day leave,” perhaps? I’m really missing the funny here.
Well at least the unit can put up a sign saying:
“All water in this establishment has been passed by the management”
The funny was that they both rolled the other persons number
“Excellent idea, Sydney! Here’s a pebble.”
“Nooooooo….”
Poor Dabbler, gets all braggy about herself and then suffers a dose of humility right afterwards. Thats right babe, even smart folks dont think of everything.
As to your comments Dave, man I remember those days as a GM. My players had already been put through the ringer in a hectic all out battle only to discover that the real boss fight was about to happen. I will admit I was rather gleefully looking forward to seeing how they were going to rise to the situation and triumph in the end. When suddenly my wife comes up with a rather simple but undeniably effective loophole strategy which totally undid my master villain in one dice roll. To this day she still enjoys telling other about the look of absolute shock and horror on my face as my well crafted finale ended with a whimper instead of a bang.
I’m reminded of the story of the engineer who was applying wax to the kitchen floor, he was determined to not “Paint himself into a corner” so he laid out exactly how and where he would apply the wax so he’d end at the door. It all works fine. until he gets to the door and realized the door was locked and the key was in the living room.
Then he realised he was only wearing socks, as a pair of timber wolves burst in, and started chasing him round the room!
To be fair, folks have already determined the chance of what Sydney said working was practically nil. Who would set up a portal that doesn’t want to be tracked down, and not have a way to prevent exactly what Sydney was talking about? I certainly would.
Too be fair, they had to way of knowing how they got in, the only reason they found the portal was because Sydney fell into it. It may have been a timed portal that would close automatically after a while based on the strength of the spell used. Placing any other spells combined with the portal spell may not work due to magical coding. Another option was that since they now have god tier artifacts now, they may have either been hoping they would be followed to kill some off right away, or that they simply didn’t care since they would be running off right after anyways and not even sticking around.
Sydney is a set of walking, talking, karmic dice….
Heh heh, yeah she is, isnt she.
And she just came up ’00’.
I feel like this gutshot was worse than the one Dabbler got in the showers.
Harry Potter has been arrested, for dangerous driving!
THIS is what I would use to answer that silly question, “It’s the future, where is my flying car?”
You left it in the attic of a dentist office?
Really should have opted for air brakes.
What the fuck?!?
“The driver has been arrested” implies that the launch occurred on purpose.
And again: What the fuck? Drugs? Alcohol? Idiocy?
And it is California, so you just know that there will be millions spent on removing all possible vehicular launch ramps from public spaces in order to protect the public from this kind of idiocy… There will be a new job created “Vehicular launch ramp surveyor.” And these persons will be paid 6 figure salaries to find and eliminate all possible vehicular launch ramps.
I’m also slightly concerned about the fact that there were at least two video cameras recording the event from two different angles. What the fuck, California?
Possibly suspicious. But car dashcams are pretty common nowadays, and I have seen many incidents (such as meteors falling and other car accidents) on the news from such sources. Given that the car filming that was a hair’s breadth from being hit itself, it would have taken a suicidally stupid person to have been in collusion with Harry Potter.
Whilst the other angle appeared to be a fixed surveillance camera, typical of a shop, household security or community CCTV. The zooming in that we saw was being done by the TV cameras (or similar post-production technique) as opposed to being a live zoom (we can see the time-stamp going gradually off-screen, which would not happen with that kind of zoom).
We do live in a society with a high degree of surveillance, especially on roads and access points off them. So I do not consider that the footage alone is indicative of cooperating in a filmed stunt.
The driver’s actions, on the other paw, are clearly criminal. They are driving at right angles to a busy public highway, at great speed. Whether they were attempting to commit suicide, play an insanely reckless stunt, were high on drink or drugs, we can only guess. But that speed was far too high for, say, a car that had rolled downhill, with no breaks, or any plausible excuse for it being accidental.
Had they not been arrested, on one charge or another, I would have been astonished.
Sidney is a born strategist – she finds simple solutions from a variety of angles. Get that girl the right kind of information, and encourage her. Maybe even train her in conventional methods alongside encouraging her natural gifts.
+1
within seconds of claiming you have the highest Intelligence stat, someone points our your horrible wisdom stat…
:-D
*dexterously wags tail*
[critical fumble]
*tail falls off*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!
*Tries to glue on* umm …your now a unicorn.
*tries to stand proud*
[fails]
Oh Dabbler you silly succunus havent you ever heard of Occam’s razor?
Funnily enough she was just about to look up its definition, when the call to scramble for the underwater mission came up!
In the right person’s hands, Occam’s Razor becomes Occam’s Chainsaw.
Heh.
I meant Succubus
Just as well.
*blushing*
*eyes bleeding, from googling it*
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAH…OH! GOD. Every time I look a panel 5 I laugh so hard my glasses fog up.
Seriously? I mean, really? She wouldn’t, not ever, not in a million years.
Why make the effort of flying up and casting fireball?
Lina Inverse would just Dragon Slave the wizard tower.
As a GM these kinds of solutions are not something to fight against. per se but do keep in mind that the old as time litch dragon priest is in fact probably smarter than you so feel free to come up with counters on the fly nothing set in stone and all that
Well some things are good set in stone, like scything blades, explosive runes and cunning variants of stone golems.
Oh and, after those, a small needle trap in an ornate stone treasure chest. Set on top of a wooden trap door, that cannot be detected by any pesky dwarf using the ability to detect stonework traps!
Psst the mimic lives inside that chest. It prefers to look like a big pile of gold coins, rather than the cliche treasure chest.
Hey, Dabbler; define “most intelligent”. :-)
She may very well be the most intelligent, no one said anything about how wise she was :P
Intelligence and smarts are two totally different and separate things (just look at Smelly Shelly Cooper, he may be super-intelligent, butt he’s also a complete dumbas who bullies and threatens everyone around him)
Dabblers definition of most intelligent is basically “Im a novice at a lot of things that are hard to learn in this universe”.In other dimensions shes Homer Simpson but she doesnt want to admit this bit n.n.
I would
likeabsolutely not want to see Homer Simpson scratch building a gun capable of shooting satellites out of orbit or firing holes through a mountain!Not if it involved standing on the same
continentplanet as him. I have seen some of the documentaries featuring his behaviour! It is a wonder you don’t lock him up forever!Given the amount of things Homers done and has occassionally actually shown an aptitude for comparing him to Dabbler is more spot on than youd think.
…………
Huh…….I think I accidently gave a reason Dabbles doesnt live in her home dimension anymorelol.
Spiderclimb is an awesome way to annoy gamemasters. One simply walks along the wall or ceiling to avoid the traps. Flight is also handy that way.
…AAAAAnd of course, there is the Zintiel method of dealing with a dungeon…
It does help if your landlord is one of the key monsters guarding it.
Especially when you have no fear of dragons. Or … well … anything.
Weddings maybe?