Recent content by Umbran

You know what? I have a holiday, and a cat full of cancer to deal with. I have no patience for your picayune wordplay. I'm done.

The cat got her first dose of chemotherapy back on Monday. She seems to have tolerated it pretty well. Her food intake dropped a bit, which was expected, but it may be heading back up already, which is nice. But, we have to do it once a week for three or four weeks, which is a lot, and she...

No, it is still a relative one - it would only be absolute if physics changed in that rest frame, which it does not. As far as has been measured so far, the CMB rest frame is not special. Choosing the CMB as a rest frame is the same as choosing a frame in which the center of the Milky Way, or...

Overpowering the PCs is easy for the GM. It takes no skill, nuance, understanding, or imagination for a GM to dial an adversary up to 11. In that sense, your dragon is unimpressive. For a traditional RPG, it is very useful for a game to provide for the GM, not so much balance, as a clear...

With the right GM and players, I'll try anything once. But it still sounds like having to make decisions NOW, on the spot. Choose a card, NOW. Make up what it means NOW. Next round, next card, NOW. If I'm not particularly creative in that moment, I'm stuck with it for the months or years...

Not that I'm aware of, no. Remember - sales data is proprietary business information. Other people having that data can impact the business. For drivethru to release it would be a breach of trust that would likely make sellers abandon the platform in droves. I think that there's one...

So, that's not necessarily a GM's job - it is a style choice. Many GMs like to take that on, but it is not a requirement to run a game. The FR GM in question did not claim they'd work backstories into play. They were not violating an agreement by not doing so.

I guess I wasn't clear. I, personally, here and now, cannot pass through one without the other. I, personally, here and now, am restricted to motion governed by Einsteinian Relativity. But I, personally, here and now, don't have a time machine. Time machines, in general concept, can violate...

One of these was in the FR, and yeah, I kind of recognized that as a likelihood for that reason. I positioned it as, "This is why I am in the area the adventure would take place in, and it is available for the GM to use, if they want." The other cases weren't in FR, but followed the general...

Mostly not. Companies are by no means required to release sales data, and there are some good reasons for them to not make such information public.

Mod note: I see a number of folks here getting a little testy, rude, insulting, and so on. Being a jerk isn't going to have much payoff here, folks. Dial it back, please and thanks.

The last several times I have tried to use the setting, as presented, as a solid basis for my characters, I found that the bits I'd chosen to connect to were bits that the GM decided they weren't going to refer to, pretty much at all. My connections to the setting were relevant only to my...

So, as a player, putting me on the spot and saying, "You must come as a blank slate, and do all your character creation right now," is a great way for me to end up with a character I'm not really interested in playing, and that probably won't be all that interesting for others to play alongside...

Well... Since we are talking about weird things like time travel.... If we are, in fact, a hologram or a simulation (two kinda weird, but technically possible cosmologies), then "height" may, in fact, be an illusion.

Not quite. Einstein's Special Relativity tells us, in effect, that there is no inertial frame of reference in which physical laws of the universe differ. If you are looking at two different frames of reference, and you account for the (constant) velocity difference between them, the laws of...