Recent content by MJ12 Commando

A Succession Wars era Atlas variant: Atlas AS7-D2 Mass: 100 tons Chassis: Foundation Type 10X Power Plant: Vlar 300 Cruising Speed: 32.4 kph Maximum Speed: 54 kph Jump Jets: None Jump Capacity: 0 meters Armor: Durallex Special Heavy Armament: 2 PPC 4 Medium Laser 4 SRM 6...

I don't think the problem with "powerscaling" is because people like numbers, the problem is an aggressive lack of interest in any of the literature - technical or literary - that they are trying to ape. One of these manifestations is a complete disinterest in second order effects because those...

Gateway: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/ I don't think there's any indication either way if there's a random chance component to Gateway resolution though.

The favorite pasttime of the Scarlet Dynasty is a Grog Wargame, terrifying. I bet Gateway also requires large dice buckets.

If you could train most mages to a level comparable to WW1 - or even 18th century artillery - there would be zero armies in TES, because you could get 100% of the combat power you needed by simply deploying your hypothetical invisible, enchanted armored mages, who would, by virtue of having no...

You can allow it to happen but do the Earthdawn/1879/Shadowrun thing where your fantasy races can interbreed but there aren't half-orks or half-elves or whatever because the changes to a specific metatype (the SR term) are so closely associated with each other that they're all or nothing. You...

The Solarian League versus Manticore sort of has an analogy but it's probably not an intended one by Weber. Seth Dickinson played it up in his fic.

Us in 2015: *nodding heads, agreeing that this is an impossible combination* Us in 2025: Fuck.

Godlike Talents have very specific, harsh restrictions on their abilities - in particular Gadgeteering - which are deliberately engineered to make it difficult to make big world-shaking changes so your WW2 looks more like Wolfenstein 3D than Wolfenstein The New Order. There is a sequel timeline...

Yep, that was Shaitan.

Adam Smasher being super special is a thing CDPR and Trigger basically created out of whole cloth, and he actually wasn't that special in the original game. In 2020 Militech and SOCOM were fielding entire squads of guys with equivalent specs and skills. His "archrival," Morgan Blackhand, was a...

The funny-depressing thing is that CPRED (and the Edgerunners handbook) are actually ironically harsher about cyberpsychosis and empathy loss than Cyberpunk 2020, which hid an obscure note that you could regain humanity via therapy with no cap in the early books and gave things like European...

The problem in RPGs is that the loss of humanity or essence is often as much a game balance issue as it is a social commentary statement. This leads to things like how the recent Shadowrun books talk about how your essence is essentially how well your soul vibes with your body which is why you...

Sure, romance isn't just kissing but I also don't think it's appropriate for "redeeming" Amanda because her problem isn't really personal. It's that she wants to be superwoman in a world which is more complicated than that. She probably wouldn't even mind being Spider-Man, in the sense that...

I used scarequotes for Kaiya's description to make it clear that I did not believe this was an accurate depiction of modernity at all. Most people understand what scarequotes mean. You, looking for a cheap shot, decided to "pwn" me by going "ha ha you claim China is a fascist dystopia!" This is...