The Gaming Den

some stuff Ok, I didn't ask the right question. What is the benefit of having millions and millions of poor and unskilled illegal immigrants in the country while at the same time increasing our spending on entitlement programs? How does allowing additional millions to enter improve American fiscal ...

Can someone tell me the rational argument against strengthening our borders and stopping the flow of illegal immigrants? What are the benefits of keeping the status quo to our society?

I agree with Frank; the GOO's lose their mystery if they can be defeated by a bunch of plucky upstarts that have previously failed at resolving simpler issues. If they manifest, I want it to All End Horribly, not in some sort of metaphysical gunfight at the OK Corral. Our games have never resulted i...

Regarding the anti-ship missiles, these things, even if produced, would not really be a threat to the US navy. They would be a serious threat to cruise/passenger ships though but it seems an awful lot of work for ships that could be destroyed by coming along side them with more conventional delivery...

TI: I like the game, I like the scale and scope. It reminds me of the Master of Orion PC Game. The races are definitely unbalanced. We like to use the random/hidden landing variant rules to add uncertainty and give the weaker race(s) a bit of an edge. We also have used a few different board buildin...

kineticist, chronomancer, elocator

Damn it all Count, that link made me laugh so hard I blew coke out of my nose and into my keyboard.

Thanks for the ideas. We had pretty much decided that we would go the Private Investigator route. In fact, that was his idea and he built the character to almost be legal in most areas (nothing forbidden, fake licenses tied to his SINs for all of his restricted gear). The Batman idea is a good one a...

If someone follows all the instructions making their character they'll have a definite reason to adventure, preexisting relationships and reasons to work with the others, and a backstory everyone contributed some things to that doesn't take up pages and pages. Would you guess that this process coul...

There is no way I am going to post over at Dumpshock given...everything, so I figured I would ask here: I am introducing a new player to Shadowrun via SR4 as modified by the Ends. I was going to have a second player join us with some experience, but things fell through. However, the new guy is very ...

No-bids are not always fishy. But in Cheney's case they are because there were actual competing bids from other companies (I believe one that was mentioned was Dynacorp) Well this does not make it fishy. Just because more than one company bids a job and the contract is awarded sole-source, does not...

I have absolutely no doubt that Cheney is a crook. With that said, I do know quite a bit about government no-bid contracting. Such contracting can and does regularly occur if something needs to be done now and no viable stable of candidate companies are on hand to do the job *or* if the bidding proc...

To be fair, 3.5 had long combats at mid-high levels. :confused: IRL time-wise, not turn-wise. I...still don't get your point. At issue is that if combat takes a long time then one would fervently hope that something memorable occurs to make the time investment worthwhile. It is a huge black mark ag...

Yeah my being an EE probably doesn't help matters much. I should stop thinking and start playing the damn gamed.

Gotchya So to continue in the vein of a hobbit hammering away on questions to Gandalf figuring as long as he answering I might as well keep asking... Why do systems (read as commlinks, maglocks, credsticks whatever) bother with passcodes or keys at all? Wouldn't it make more sense just to grab biome...

Yeah this is what confuses me. Brain waves are very slow things, like 1Hz to 50 Hz or something. This sort of frequency is just not conducive for transmission let alone communications. And to get signals in that range, you need a (dipole) antenna that is half a wavelength, or 5 x10^6 meters in lengt...

Frank - First of all, thanks for putting this up. This makes much more sense than the confusing jumble that appears in the SR4 books. Now that I am starting a new SR4 game, I wanted to put these rules into use and recently re-read them . While I still like the overall approach, I do have a few quest...

One mistake I see a lot of people make IRL, not necessarily here, is they think that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are only about accomplishing one thing: getting oil. In reality there are a bunch of different things, power projection in the region, putting pressure on Iran and maybe radical ele...

Actually, I've learned to believe that war is almost always unjustifiable and unstoppably stupid. Interesting. What position as a statesman have you held and what was your record on guiding your country away from war and toward prosperity? Your response appears to be a similar, "war is hell&qu...

Here's your million-dollar-question: if might makes right and these poor fools need America to save them, then why has might not made right? Here is a better idea - why don't you ask the poor bastards in that video about 'might' and 'right' and then tell me it is all just platitudes. Scoreboard mot...

Lich-loved, you're starting to foam at the mouth a little there. Are you seriously espousing a "might-makes-right" philosophy? Are you making these statements as assessments of the way the world is , or as it should be? Are you meaning to imply that periods of peace are abhorrent, aberran...

All of this bitching is simply so laughable. Here's an idea - go carry some signs or have a sit in or shave your head in protest like Eddie Vedder or whatever the fuck you feel the need to do. But here is one thing that isn't going to stop: the US carrying out its mission to provide an epic beatdown...

In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven...

You realize all this is BS, with only the barest connection to the truth? I see a pattern. The pattern is that people like you needed to get their hard-on destroying countries and killing a hundred thousand people across the world to make up for how scared you felt when some tragedy struck the US. ...

I see. So then as soon as America declares you an enemy, invades your country, destroys your government and bombs your entire society into a mad max like stone age... Everyone who fights back should put on big red uniforms and march in line directly into the gun sights of the marines. I think you f...