Sudanna

Really, if you're going for realism, any hit points-based system should be right out the window. . . if it helps, in my head I don't conceptualize hit points as "how many direct sword wounds can you take", but a sort of abstracted blend of general defense, minor wounds, and fatigue? Like, a character being at 13/40 hit points doesn't mean they've taken several arrows to the chest, but instead have taken a couple minor wounds(small lacerations, bruises, w/e), are tired, their attention is fraying, maybe some equipment damage, etc, and only the final blow is going to be a really serious one. Characters take a minute after fights to catch their breath and otherwise recover. Makes enough sense for me.

Advance: Added Hard to Kill.

Just putting my character sheet out there.

The slith are actually pretty magically formidable, apparently, just not in the infrastructure-building way that humans are.

My computer is currently out of commission on account of catching on fire, so I'll have to get back to you when it's fixed.

The first two Geneforge games really do have spectacular art. G1 has that stark, heavy ink pen stuff with such beautiful detail work, and it so perfectly embodies the tone of the game. I get a really lovely Japanese vibe(like, historical japanese paintings, not anime [censored]) from G2, with all the soft shading and some of the posing. Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. G3's art is cartoonish and just not very good, and G4's isn't bad but not really notable either, except for this one. And then G5 went with the 3D art, and while some of that hits, most of it misses.

That's unfortunate. It's in my pile of books to read right now.

The cultists have actually been associated with the Takers since G1. They have a little monastery-thing adjacent to the main Taker town in both G1 and G2, and it's mentioned that they work together. There are also independent cultists, though.

Lies. I have to take every single thing out of this laptop to get at the fan. Hard drive, CD drive, all of the casing, the keyboard, the RAM, the graphics cards, half of the motherboard, both racks of external connectors, and if I don't take out the monitor too, I have to fiddle a lot to get it out. It's a nightmare and I always end up with unused screws afterwards. Dell hates clean fans.

Because there is literally no other way to behave.

Exactly the opposite approach, over here.

And then the winner would siege the loser's city, storm it, kill everyone they saw and take everything worth taking, and either occupy it or go home. Civilized! Unless, of course, they had a personal grudge to settle, then they would lay waste to every piece of infrastructure around and make the entire area uninhabitable for decades. Cordial, minimally destructive warfare is mostly a myth, and when it's not, it's only because what's being fought over just isn't worth that much. For the absolutely worthless timeframe of less than a century. Sixty-ish years of relative, nominal peace between major powers is not exactly notable, especially after major, world-shaking conflict like the World Wars. If the choice was between, I dunno, the annexation of a region or the deployment of nuclear weapons, I would fully expect nuclear warfare from any state capable of it. It's absolute lunacy to say "Hey! Now that war is potentially more terrible than ever before, we'll never have war again! Every state will respect the sovereignty of every other, behave rationally and with humanitarian interests, and stop wanting things that other states have." This has been disproven many times.

I'm always surprised by people painting this as a choice between an amphibious invasion of Japan and the use of the atomic bombs. Japan's an island. Its navy was in shambles. Its air force was in shambles. Its industrial capacity to replace these assets was in shambles. Extracting a formal surrender from the government seems, frankly, unnecessary.

That's the context of the war where the atomic bombs were dropped. Unspeakable atrocity was the norm - it's how this war was fought, and the atomic bomb was just one more atrocity. "Conventional" warfare, "conventional" bombings, was not doing anyone any favors, least of all the Japanese. Did it constitute a war crime? Of [censored]ing course it did! Hundreds of thousands of people were destroyed! The atomic bombs are not morally unique just for being the worst single physical devices used.

Dan Carlin's show has one of my favorite looks at the morality of the atomic bombs. WW2 was full of completely indiscriminate wide-area attacks and even attacks that clearly deliberately targeted civilians, from both sides. Military attacks on cities were okay by the rules of the game throughout WW2, again according to both sides. And it was a war of carpet-bombing and fire-bombing and wide-area artillery shelling and lines of tanks and massive troop movements. Attacks that were guaranteed to murder literally thousands of civilians were common. The atomic bombs were a difference of scale, not of kind, from the conduct that defined the entire war from beginning to end. You can argue whether that kind of warfare can be morally justified at all - and in fact, that show labels military attacks on cities as a categorical war crime - but the atomic bombs really cannot be differentiated from any other event in the war except maybe in the diplomatic context of trying to demand surrender.

And people who don't provide healthcare can't comment on the morality of it, and only interrogators can decide torture policy, and people who aren't executioners can't say whether the death penalty is okay or not, and people who don't personally have nuclear weapons don't get to choose how those who do use them. . .

Healthcare, yes. Education, yes. Internet, yes. Reproduction, yes. Torture, prohibited always. Suicide, yes always. Death penalty, other. The death penalty should be applied not for any particular crime, but when its application would have positive effects on the future. I have no interest in purely punitive justice. Abortion, on request. Rights acquisition, other. People gain rights when they can be trusted with those rights. That's different times for everyone. Nukes, yes. If you've decided to kill a lot of people anyways, the method doesn't really make it any more or less ethical.

That has no bearing on free will, either way. The origin of my will is either randomness built into basic physical laws, or deterministic cause and effect stretching back to the beginning of the universe. Neither of those things are me making anything, let alone an impossible choice. Never mind that we don't have to fully perceive everything, or anything, about the universe for it to function. The limits of statistics and measurements are not necessarily the limits of the universe. Could be, but could not be.

Free will in that sense communicates nothing meaningful whatsoever. If you can only possibly make one choice, then you aren't making any choices at all. It is, by definition, impossible to make a choice - you have no original input on that process. Everything that feels like "making choices" to the conscious mind are just the effects of causes that lie outside of the self. You're a part of the universe and the product of the same physical forces as anything else - does Earth -choose- to orbit the sun, just because the physical laws that determine the chain of cause and effect have resulted in an outcome where it can do nothing but orbit the sun? Does my computer -choose- to operate in the specific way it is operating right now? No. It doesn't have choice. I am not fundamentally different, and the perception that I am is cognitive illusion. Why would you differentiate the mind - whatever that is - from this system? Where does free will - and the act of choosing that it requires - come from? Does only my brain have agency? Does all of it, or just specific structures? Do individual neurons have agency? Do the atoms making them up? Anything that doesn't create itself with zero input from anything else - anything that is in any way bound by causality - cannot possibly have a choice. And I can't imagine what something unbound from causality would look like, so the discussion of such a thing is ultimately worthless. Free will is a completely meaningless idea. It is ill-defined in the first place and sets up inherent and irresolvable contradictions in the nature of the universe as we know it. It should be discarded as simply as the four elements are discarded.

Since Kepling died, I guess I'll finally release his -super secret- character sheet that never really amounted to much.

1. Hard determinism. Free will is a meaningless phrase stemming from the cognitive illusions of our conscious minds. It signifies absolutely nothing. It is an empty altar. 2. Skepticism. Nothing can be trusted, everything is superstition. Speaking of altars. 3. What Alo said. 4. Nihilism. Right and wrong are human inventions, not features of the universe. 5. Evaluating the worth of actions and the worth of the person performing those actions are different questions. That said, strict consequentialism is the only way to determine whether an action is right or not. 6. Physicalism. I'm not a barbarian. 7. I take my nihilism black. No hedonist sugar or existentialist cream. Nihilism. Nothing else. Nothing at all, in fact. I dunno why some people have trouble taking simple philosophical positions to their logical extremes.

Not exactly a myth, he was a real guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_dictators Everyone on that list up to Julius Caesar either gave up their power or died in the middle of serving in the office and almost certainly -would- have given it up. Even Sulla, who was a bloodthirsty tyrant that emptied Rome of every conceivably threatening populari by posting lists of people he would pay you to kill in public squares and dismantled all legal development from the last 200 years of the republic, gave up the dictatorship. Him trying to do so much in so little time is probably why it all immediately fell apart, too. It's not exactly a mark against Caesar that he appointed himself dictator for life - the republic had just gone through two generations of full civil war and was effectively broken, and the attempted reforms of the last guy (who had a directly opposed ideology as well, but still) failed because Sulla didn't take his time. Caesar was actually a merciful and fair reformist autocrat.

Yeah, that was not the elimination of a government, that was reform. Radical reform, sure, but nothing was destroyed. Also, I would remind you that there totally was an armed rebellion against the US under the Articles. People died and everything.

1. 20 2. America. America. America. I've been to a lot of other places though. 3. English. I had German classes from kindergarten to eighth grade, which I remember nothing from. 4. Descended from immigrant Hungarian gypsies. 5. Hatred and surrender. Apathy and despair. In that order. 6. I believe there is no divinity. 7. Date me. 8. My mom's a retired teacher, my dad is a civil engineer. Is that still middle class? Anyways, I scorn family and will be a comfortable step down in class. 9. Nope. 10. I'm a machinist. I flunked out of college after a year.

As time goes on, I'm more and more convinced that the broad ideological structure of a government is at best tangentially related to its quality.