Sarachim

42- Brittanian seer- from Ultima (4 for sure, can't remember if he's in any other ones) 2- Servant of Enki- last one left, process of elimination

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan On-topic short story. I'll see you and raise you one.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Also, now I have proved you wrong even according to the strange rules of your argument. Thank you for this useful data. In light of it, I am willing to concede that the number may be as high as 2,000 posts.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Sarachim Originally Posted By: Dantius There is a nonzeo probability that someone, possibly me, will simply spam "first post!" into very old and very long threads to disprove you and win the argument. Hence, you cannot say for certain that it will plateau at all, simply because you cannot predict the behavior of individual humans with any certitude, and it only takes one counterexample to disprove your assertion. Do we actually have any threads 1000 posts long? If not, you would have to extend the thread past that point before you said "first post!" if you wanted to prove me wrong. And if I saw you doing it, I could jump in and say "first post!" myself before you got there, and you would have to start over. No, then you'd have proved yourself wrong and all I'd have to do is lean back and feel vaguely superior that I manipulated you into proving yourself wrong to spite me. The proposition is "if 'first post' is not said in the first 1000 posts, it will not be said at all." As you know, for "if P, then Q" to be false, P must be true. So, if somebody says "first post!" within the first thousand posts, the thread becomes irrelevant to our fascinating, worthwhile argument.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Sarachim Well, you're assuming that the plateau occurs somewhere in the 30s, which I don't think was implied by anything I said. I would argue that, if nobody says "first post" within the first thousand posts, then it will never be said at all. Prove me wrong. There is a nonzeo probability that someone, possibly me, will simply spam "first post!" into very old and very long threads to disprove you and win the argument. Hence, you cannot say for certain that it will plateau at all, simply because you cannot predict the behavior of individual humans with any certitude, and it only takes one counterexample to disprove your assertion. Do we actually have any threads 1000 posts long? If not, you would have to extend the thread past that point before you said "first post!" if you wanted to prove me wrong. And if I saw you doing it, I could jump in and say "first post!" myself before you got there, and you would have to start over.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Your statement quoted here: Originally Posted By: Sarachim if it doesn't get mentioned soon enough, it never gets mentioned at all. "First Post!" may be like this. pretty clearly implied that "First Post!" would only be brought up in or around the first post. Your post itself was very far removed from the first post, thus disproving the assertion you made in the last sentence. I don't see what forward- or backward- lookingness has to do with this, since nobody cares if something is mentioned more than once, only if it is mentioned more than 0 times. Well, you're assuming that the plateau occurs somewhere in the 30s, which I don't think was implied by anything I said. I would argue that, if nobody says "first post" within the first thousand posts, then it will never be said at all. Prove me wrong.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Sarachim's post is like a disembowelment of logic. Gowdin's Law, stated more rigorously, could read "as any thread in which nobody has yet mentioned Nazis grows longer, the odds that somebody will eventually mention Nazis approaches 1." After all, if Nazis have already been mentioned in the thread, then the probability of Nazis being mentioned is equal to 1, not approaching it. Similarly, the probability that somebody will say "first post!" in this thread is not approaching 1, it is 1, because I already did that. Therefore, this thread is not a valid counterexample to my objection to Master1's proposed expansion of Godwin's Law. Honestly, I don't see what's so disembowely about this.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I believe your post disproved the assertion in its last sentence. Not so! Godwin's Law is forward-looking, and so is Master1's proposed Strong Version of Godwin's Law. Both make a prediction about the future development of threads. They do not describe the contents of threads that already exist. (Master1's strong version is especially vulnerable here. If we look only at threads that have clearly ended, it's likely we'll find some topics which occur more often in shorter threads than longer ones.) Since you posted after me, your post was backward-looking, so you can't use either of the laws under discussion to describe my previous post.

Not necessarily. In theory, it is possible for there to be a topic whose odds of being mentioned stop rising after a certain number of posts; in effect, if it doesn't get mentioned soon enough, it never gets mentioned at all. "First Post!" may be like this.

Originally Posted By: Shelagh Oh hey, so it turns out I didn't miss that much this week. That's nice. Also, it seems Kyle took my "knowing about medicine" thing as sarcasm, even though Caitlin totally temped in a hospital. How else did she know we had a bag of saline and a bag of plasma? THANK YOU! I'm glad somebody read that line the way I meant it.

Originally Posted By: It's a trap Edit Reason: also, does anyone know what the food situation is? I haven't touched the stuff in my inventory, I assume it's been eaten? I forget the details, but the party acquired a bunch of food at that rest stop before you arrived. There was enough to last two or three days, I think.

Originally Posted By: Nephils vs. Sliths NO RUSH No. All member numbers went down as unused accounts were deleted during the migration to the new UBB. —Alorael, who who was terribly saddened. He was rather attached to his old member number. When I read this, I was outraged that someone else had my number, 95. Turns out I didn't have to worry, because I still have it. I'm a little surprised that none of the first 94 accounts were unused.

Thursday is good for me, too.

Hey, Nikki, it's been two weeks. Are we on a break that I forgot about, or do I need to prod you?

Originally Posted By: Triumph I wonder if anyone produced similar reports back when writing was invented. "We'll lose our capacity to memorize things! Oral transmission of information will decline because of this new-fangled writing! People will think they can write stuff and then they won't have to remember it! Writing rots your brain!!!! Oral traditions for the win." In fairness, they were right. When was the last time you heard someone recite the Iliad from memory?

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Originally Posted By: Dantius Price of admission into a game board where some members have an advanced college degree in physics, I guess... FYT Maybe we historians will make our own thread, and not invite the physicists.

Originally Posted By: Nioca Yeah. But I find the lack of weapon skills more worrisome; right now, we have two characters with actual weapons and the skill to use them (Devin with a service pistol, William with a hunting rifle and pocket knife). All the others have is their wits, harsh language (to which zombies are immune), and two cans of tuna. 'Course, it makes sense, since this is a group of random people caught up in a zombie plague, but still. Very squishy. Given the relative lack of emphasis on weapons in the rules, it seems like Laz expected this kind of party. If he wanted/expected everyone to be useful in combat, he wouldn't have made it necessary to spend your one and only feat on a weapon proficiency in order to achieve that.

Originally Posted By: Nioca ...Man, I want to join, but I'm currently in two other campaigns at the moment. So I should probably sit this one out. I shall watch with interest, however. Same here. I'm in two campaigns, I've promised to be in two more in the future, and I've also promised to one run (The Abyss, still happening, sometime while I'm still young!) But yeah, I'll show up and watch when I can.

Nioca's thoughts are pretty similar to mine. I'll add to his first, then work on my own. Originally Posted By: Nioca THE PC DEATH Okay, the sudden and abrupt PC death was a rather nifty bit of drama. It's a swerve no one saw coming, and cranked up the tension in an already-tense situation. Never. Do it. Again. While it ultimately turned out excellent, there are so many ways this could have backfired and gone horribly wrong it's not even funny. And even though it didn't, outright killing a very healthy PC with no warning, no save, not even an indication that the PC made a bad move, was still a very bad call. Not that I'm against the resultant drama, but in the future, if you're going to do something like that, the player should have either advance notice or some way to save against it or back out. Otherwise, it just seems like a vindictive "screw you" to the player in question. I'd give Rowen the benefit of the doubt here, since his judgment turned out to be right in this case. One of the strengths of this campaign was the exceptional level of trust between all involved, but that's wasted if you don't use it to do something big. However, Nioca is right. Don't try anything like that again without either making sure the player is cool with it or giving him a chance to back out. Originally Posted By: Nioca LOOT/ABILITY BALANCE One thing I had noticed is that the stuff we were finding was pretty powerful, and we wound up with a lot of it. To some extent, this made sense; we were in the heart of magic-country, and it seemed Ona didn't understand the meaning of the word "small". In addition, Arell and Porifio also got some pretty powerful abilities. Porifio can summon the magical equivalent of Thermite, and Arell's now capable of raising an army of undead... at level 5. Fact is, despite three levels and two party members between them, this party could probably give the RomD party a run for its money. In short, I'm saying you may want to scale the power level back a bit. I disagree. Power is fun. More to the point, given the level our adversaries were operating at, the stuff we found was pretty tame by comparison. Levels are an abstraction that don't have to be consistent from one GM to the next unless someone is bringing a character into a campaign with a different GM than they started with. If Rowen Level 5 is stronger than Ephesos Level 5 (which makes sense, since Rowen hands out levels about half as often), let's not make it into a problem unless we have to. Originally Posted By: Nioca HE-WHO-MUST-BE-NAMED-REALLY-AWKWARDLY Seriously, some work needs to be done on names. On one end of the spectrum, we have names like Emperor Harlifigrzix Jafplivew, Lady Isralger Kivmqat, Pranidhana Palace... Seriously, some of these sound like you dropped a bunch of marbles on the keyboard and called it good. While there's obviously no hard and fast rules for what makes a good name, having a name that's reasonably memorized and isn't impossible to spell properly is a good idea (unless you WANT your important NPCs and locales referred to as Emperor Harlyfig and Phanda Palace ). On the other end of the spectrum, we have names such as the "Battle of Death" and "Cobber". The first one is boring and non-indicative; most battles have death, after all. The second brings to mind either a typo of copper or an Austrailian greeting. Neither are impressions you want to make when you're talking about an apocalyptic final battle or magical thermite; To quote Schlock Mercenary here, "Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth." Making good names is hard. If you insist that every name sound exotic without being hard to pronounce, you get those awful generic fantasy names that are only bearable in small doses. I think it's appropriate that the Emperor of Freakin' Mote have a name that's both huge (because he's an emperor) and unfamiliar (because he's from a totally different time). "Cobber" sounds like something you'd make in a lab, which fits. "Death's Battle," while asinine when applied to an ordinary battle, isn't so bad when the battle in question totally destroyed civilization. In general, I'd say I prefer Rowen's eccentric naming style to the more conventional ones that most of us use. Originally Posted By: Nioca PLOT COMPLEXITY There's some issue with how complex the plot got. Its one thing to have twists, turns, and complexity in a plot, but it got to the point in this one that it became nearly impossible to keep everything straight, and it still took some considerable OoC explaining to actually sort out what was going on. There were also some plot points that showed up, then later seemed to be ignored entirely. For example, the Plant Thing antagonized Arell for a few days, only to step out of the spotlight once he revealed that he only wanted our help to stop Slumwood cutting. Considering he was apparently a Gatekeeper, you'd have thought he would have been more important, but no, he vanishes and is only mentioned a few times by the PCs after. There was also the mysterious lights over the Ko Mountains that wound up disappearing without a trace, then there was the murdered Lacewing who died under mysterious circumstances and was never mentioned again. Then we have the issue of time travel: Arell, Porifio, Sarsus, an entire squad of those assassin things (?), Leaf, and Porifio all were able to travel back (and forth) in time. How? Future Whsck demonstrated that even with his immense power, it still took a month of prep time and studying to pull it off, yet everyone else seems to be bouncing around like it was no problem. In short, while I can't remember if there were a whole lot of actual plot holes, there definitely seemed to be a lot of threads left hanging. I didn't mind the complexity, but Nioca is right on about all the hanging threads. Remember Chekov's gun; if you introduce a seemingly important character or detail, your players will expect you to be going somewhere with it, and they'll be let down if it turns out you aren't. Even if your original plan doesn't work out, you can always make a new one. If the players forget something, you're allowed to forget it too, but if they don't, you aren't. Originally Posted By: Nioca PARTY IMBALANCE Sarachim touched on this briefly at the end of the finale, and it probably needs to be brought up again. In terms of power, the party isn't internally balanced; as it stands, we have: -Arell at the front of the pack with the strongest melee weapon (to my knowledge), the ability to breathe a necromantic coldfire, the ability to raise an undead army, her ability to heal most undead creatures to full for 1STM, and finally, Click to reveal.. (HUGE SPOILERS for those that haven't read the finale) Her transformation into a lich and everything that entails. -Then there's Porifio, with a magic Epee that can be upgraded, the ability to summon Cobber (magical thermite), the ability to dispel the wards of the main villain, mithril armor, and gauntlets that massively enhance strength. -And finally Sarsus, with magical armor that grants one extra turn per combat, a slight bonus to dream world manipulation, a healing cloth that burns stamina, and an antimagic token. Yeah. There's a problem here. Arell's getting favored when it comes to powers, while Sarsus is getting left behind, and it's not fair to the players. Especially considering this isn't a situation where the party sorted the loot in a kind of lopsided way; these items and abilities were given to specific players, and that was where they stayed. In a way, it's an unconscious show of favoritism (or just complacency), and it's a tendency you need to nip in the bud. You already know that I agree about the outcome, but I think favoritism is the wrong word. It seemed to me that it was more an honest failure to balance things properly. We can fix this between campaigns, though, which leads me to. . . Quote: However, I'm thinking that if there's a sequel, I might not rejoin as Arell Iseil. Primarily because of what was outlined under Party Imbalance; in comparison to the party, she's getting too powerful, and probably needs to be consigned to NPC-dom. I hope you don't do that. First, the imbalance between Arell and the rest of the party can easily be fixed in the inter-campaign period, during which the party will presumably gain a level or two, get some new equipment, and generally gain or lose whatever is necessary to get things started on the right foot. As for Arell's big spoilery transformation, I think that's likely to be more of a handicap than an asset. Second, Arell is too awesome to hand over to the DM. I have a couple of thoughts of my own, which I'll bring up in a separate post.

Originally Posted By: Karoka As for continents, I would just define it as one of the seven accepted continents of earth. Then again, someone here will have to argue semantics there. Explain why Asia and Europe should be different continents.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer "It's not dead yet." --- obligatory parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Usually a topic has to be "dead" for a few months to be considered dead. Could we say that this topic just has a flesh wound?

Click to reveal.. Samos, level 5 Elf Occupation: Detective Alignment: Pragmatic 3 Str/5 Dex/6 Int 13/22 HP, 3/10 stamina Magic (Divination): 7 Martial (Blowdarts): 6 Stealth: 4 Streetwise: 2+1 Thievery: 2 Nature: 2 Perception: 1 Artifice: 1 Martial (Spears): 1 Composure: 0+1 1 point banked Spells: Location: Gives information on the location of an object or person. The more familiar the caster is with the target, the more accurate the intel.. Vision: Gives a vision of a location, allowing the caster to see and hear things as if they were present. The closer the area is and the more familiar to the caster, the longer and clearer the vision will be. Portent: Offer advice regarding a person's immediate future. Stamina is recommended for accuracy. Lehun's Messenger: Allows the caster to send a brief verbal message to someone they are personally acquainted with, even across great distances. The recipient may make a brief reply. Costs 1 stamina. Panopticon: For an instant, the caster becomes aware of all people and objects within a given radius of himself. An ordinary success can grant awareness up to fifty feet; it is possible to extend the spell further, but this will cost extra stamina and/or result in less complete information. Costs 1 stamina. Detect History: By touching an object or person, or being present at a location, the caster can gain glimpses of insight into the object, person or location's past.

Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES I'm confused, Solberg. Which song are you arguing for? In that post I wasn't arguing for any song, I was just stating some facts. If I had to choose, I would choose The Star-Spangled Banner. Originally Posted By: Sarachim Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg There are several things that America the Beautiful has going for it that The Star-Spangled Banner does not. 1. Easier to sing. 2. More melodic. 3. Invokes God. Post #568 The motto "In God we trust" comes from one of the rarely-sung later verses of The Star-Spangled Banner. The Star-Spangled Banner only mentions God in passing. America the Beautiful gives Him praise for His creative work. Post #570 If America is more beautiful than other countries, I'm not sure if that actually reflects well on God, seeing as He created the ugly ones, too.

Click to reveal.. Name: Selffar Race: Elf Occupation: Gentleman Alignment: Classy Level 2 4 STR 5 DEX 2 INT ?/17 HP Composure 3+1 Thievery 3 Martial (Improvised) 3 Crafting (Alchemy) 3 Streetwise 2+1 Stealth 1 First Aid 1 Perception 1

Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg There are several things that America the Beautiful has going for it that The Star-Spangled Banner does not. 1. Easier to sing. 2. More melodic. 3. Invokes God. Post #568 The motto "In God we trust" comes from one of the rarely-sung later verses of The Star-Spangled Banner. Speaking of those unfortunate later verses: Originally Posted By: Wikipedia According to the historian Robin Blackburn, the words "the hireling and slave" allude to the fact that the British attackers had many ex-slaves in their ranks, who had been promised liberty and demanded to be placed in the battle line "where they might expect to meet their former masters." So yeah, the national anthem includes some gloating about winning a battle against our former slaves.