WestRider

Yeah, a lot of the Sector Mechanicus stuff is just ridiculously fiddly. When someone puts in the time and effort to really do it up properly, tho, like you've done here, the result is awesome.

3 hours ago, Ish said:

Vaguely disappointed to learn that Super Bowl LIV has nothing to do with iZombie.

Just reminded me, I finished season 1 last night. Great show. Liv really reminds me of Buffy Summers sometimes. I also have to say, I'm really impressed with some of the male characters. All too often, I find male characters tend to fall into archetypes, and some still kind of do here, like Blaine and Clive, but Ravi and Major are great characters who keep surprising me with how great they are.

@Maxwell ChristianGreat game! I knew I probably should have just played for the draw in the last couple of turns there, but I couldn't resist trying for the win. And, well, you capitalized on that perfectly. Well played!

Emily the Strange, Sorcerer Supreme.

Cast Christina Ricci for the MCU version.

3 hours ago, Ish said:

First of all, it’s Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, show some respect for the cinematic tour de force and use the full title.

Second of all, how in the world can Under Siege not be considered a Steven Seagal movie!? He’s not just the star, he’s also the producer! 

It only qualifies if it's Steven Seagal in Three Word Title. I didn't make up the rule, I just acknowledge it. Oh, and Sniper: Combat Ops is totally another counterexample to the preposition thing.

46 minutes ago, Munkie said:

So close. Since it doesn't have a preposition in the title...

Under Siege

Above the Law

Beyond the Law

On Deadly Ground

Out for Justice

Half Past Dead

Fire Down Below

Out of Reach

Into the Sun

End of a Gun is also spacially aware, but not technically a preposition. 

Under Siege is also not technically a Steven Seagal movie. Under Siege 2 is.

Yeah. It makes the smaller GSC Vehicles take up way more room as well. The Ridgerunner actually has a slightly larger footprint than a Goliath Truck, despite being a substantially smaller Model, because of the base.

Exit Wounds: Since it only has two words in the title, it's technically not a Steven Seagal movie. I do kind of wish I'd seen it back when it first came out, because I had more patience back then with Seagal's overly-choreographed fight scenes, but there were some strong performances from DMX, Jill Hennessy, and Michael Jai White, and they did a great job of establishing the "don't know who to trust" vibe.

A few minutes on Google indicates that PLA is translucent with a slight yellowish tinge before it's dyed.

Tremors 3: The series continues to hold up well. I love that they used the same actors for all the returning characters, and Jodi was a great addition.

Aquaman: My overall impression is sort of like when I watched Revenge of the Sith. For any particular scene, given the actors and imagery and story and lines involved, the results should have been better. Joss Whedon's whining about Alien Resurrection also comes to mind, tho I think it's more valid here. Looking into things a bit more, I notice that James Wan has directed a lot of movies that I got a similar impression from, perhaps most notably the Insidious and Conjuring films. Also, the main theme kind of felt like a crappy knockoff of The Ecstasy of Gold

On 1/24/2020 at 10:04 AM, bouke said:

Interesting.  I read articles for years before I came back to the hobby last year.  Didn't have youtube back then and I feel like in the six months since I started watching these videos, I understand painting a TON better.  I just couldn't get from print what they were trying to convey.

It's not just painting. I am, for whatever reason, terrible at absorbing information from videos. I need to be able to flip back and forth between the various steps more easily than video allows.

16 hours ago, Munkie said:

 

"Mostly doesn't work" seems a very generous way of describing something that works 0.00% of the time when the AP is exceeded. 

That hard shift to never working at all just doesn't make much sense to me. But I don't think either of us will convince the other at this point.

That's taken into account with the times when you roll a 1 to Wound.

3 hours ago, Bosco said:

Doh, I wondered why you didn't Apo the death, sorry about that. Didn't know you were distracted/AFK or we'd have paused/waited.

Hopefully the next game things go better!

At that point I kind of figured there was nothing left that could go wrong to the extent that I'd need to do something. Looks like Nuffle took exception to that. Probably wouldn't have made a difference anyhow. Apothecary re-rolls are one of the places I excel at rolling 6s 😉

Thanks! I hope so too!

That's pretty cool. They should really have some wombats, tho, given that much of the wildlife that has survived did so by sheltering in wombat burrows.

Yeah, ouch. I think the Panthers figured they'd signed up for a 7s league or something*. The fact that I got distracted during the one chunk of time when a re-roll would have really made a difference and got my AG4 Linewoman killed as a result was just icing on the cake. Well played. I just wish I could say the same for myself.

*I'm not really joking here. I think I only had a single turn in the first half with more than 7 Players on the field (I still had 8 for my first Turn), and the second was only marginally better. If it weren't so frowned upon in BB, that's exactly the sort of game where I would have conceded. It was just depressing.

8 hours ago, Munkie said:

Rated sure. But that's not the same thing. It just means that it's likely to function as intended at or below what it's rated for. And it doesn't mean it's guaranteed to fail above that threshold, just that the manufacturer can't vouch for its performance outside the specified range. "Bulletproof vest" is not a guarantee, but "bullet resistant vest" doesn't instill the same level of confidence in the product.

A waterproof watch will be rated for a certain depth, say 10 meters. That does not mean there's no chance of water ingress below 10 meters and guaranteed ingress above 10 meters. It's just that at deeper than 10 meters, there's a statistically significant dropoff in performance.

Product standards are never a guaranteed to work/guaranteed to fail system even if that's how it's presented. Just a more likely than not to work/ more likely than not to fail. That's the difference in the AP system too.

And 40K armour isn't guaranteed to, either. That's why rolling a 1 always fails. But what that means is that a given rating can reliably protect against a certain class of weapons if the shot hits the armour. Not 100%, but a large enough percent of the time that they're willing to certify it against that class of weapons. The differences in probability of a shot breaking through that's somewhere below the rated category are negligible, as are the differences of the odds of it stopping a shot of any given weapon more powerful than that. There isn't a sharply defined break point between "always works" and "never works", but there is a pretty solid division between "mostly works" and "mostly doesn't work", not a smooth curve of gradually and evenly shifting probabilities. And the pass/fail AP system does a better job of modeling that than the modifier system does.

3 hours ago, Munkie said:

But that isn't the way armor works in the real world. There aren't materials that are impervious to damage up to and including 1500 fps, but as soon as you hit them with 1501 fps it's utterly useless. 

Or imagine crashing your car. No discernible damage at 34 mph or under, car is unrecognizable at 35 mph.

That's the logic of the old system, and absolutely nothing about that feels right to me.

 

And yet, that actually is more or less how body armour is rated in the real world.

11 minutes ago, Bosco said:

Cool, I'll be online and gtg!

I got like 12 hours of sleep last night and am feeling substantially better. Should hold up through this evening at the very least.

2 hours ago, Munkie said:

Absolutely. It just makes more sense. Under the old system: battlecannon=lasgun as far as a terminator is concerned. Power sword=foam noodle. It was either a threat, or it was not.

Under the new system, there are degrees of threat. -1 AP scares a terminator a little. -2 is worrisome, -3 is a legit hazard, -4 is terrifying, and -5 is hell on earth! 

I actually feel like the old system makes more sense. The way I see it, there isn't a whole lot of gradual variation in armour protection. Any given shot is either going to hit a weak point or a strong point. The weak points in a given suit of power armour or whatever are all going to be about the same durability, and the strong points are all going to be about the same durability. Most weapons are going to be either capable of punching through the strong sections or they aren't. If they can, it doesn't matter where they hit, they're going through. If they can't, it doesn't really matter how close it is to being able to, it goes through if it hits a weak point, and gets stopped if it hits a strong section.

For the modifier system to make sense, all the heavier types of armour have to have a more or less even distribution of different thickness/strength sections. 66% of a suit of Power Armour can stop a Lasgun blast, but only 50% is strong enough to resist a Heavy Bolter round, 33% is durable enough to take a Krak Missile, and only 16% can handle a Lascannon shot. Where I can really see an argument for some form of modifier is with things like Blasts and Flamers, that are hitting most or all of any given target if they land at all. Even that feels more like it should be maybe a "re-roll successful saves" thing rather than a linear modifier, tho.

I can see pros and cons to both from a rules/game balance point of view, but the all or nothing system definitely feels more "right" to me.

5 hours ago, andy said:

Goonhammer has been knocking it out of the park lately, for example they just recently posted a really good article on painting flesh.

There are definitely other good sources. I particularly like Miniature Hobby Tutorials, , which compiles curated lists of links to good tutorials in one place. I just kinda with GW hadn't decided to go all video for their online painting guides.

22 hours ago, Bosco said:

Weds night @ 7?

Let's give it a try. Thanks!