(3) Legend of the Elder Souls (Inactive)

Game Master mdt

Sounds good

Hang in there MDT. I appreciate you running this game and thank you for it. If you need anything from me (and I'm sure I speak for all of us) please don't hesitate to ask.

Good luck with everything! And yeah, if we need to slow down, that's fine.

Wednesday Update :

GM Waiting on Johnny/Liisa/Lina to decide if they are going to the caverns with Kong/Luna/Neri or if they are staying behind. Will post Kong/Luna travel once I know who's going and who isn't.

Lina will... actually probably stay behind and craft/train for a day or two. I think y'all can handle squirrels without her at this point, and I just get into trouble anyway.

I'm expecting a comment on the irony of complaining about being in a body of the opposite sex. :p

Nooo! Don't pick that tough looking guy... you'll get the wrong one, lol.

Someone once told me about a sci-fi story where they discovered a cure for cancer, but a side effect is that it changed your sex. It apparently went into details about how people started to take it recreationally and some of the effects it had on society.

As a side note, I always like body swapping sci-fi episodes; it gives a good opportunity to judge the actors. For example, I was not impressed with Pete and Myka from Warehouse 13 since they mostly seemed to be playing up stereotypes, but Victor from Dollhouse was AMAZING as Topher. I literally forgot a few times that he didn't actually have Topher's personality in his head.

@Scifi Standard Episodes - I'm not really a fan of the body swapping ones personally. And not really because of the bodyswap itself (that part is usually hilarious - and as you said a good gauge on acting ability!) but the implications for the metaplot.

Always always always does such an episode end up with the bodyswapping mac-guffin being destroyed/lost/abandoned ect ect. You just know it! Or even worse simply ignored. For me it is basically up there with the 'and everyone woke up cuz it was just a dream' ending.

Sorry for the rant :P

I feel like I remember... Stargate? Explicitly not doing that. It actually became a core part of the show. :)

Hmmm, I don't think it was Stargate. Their body swapping machine was only really in one episode. It had the restriction that you could only swap with the same person once, so they ended up needing a special swapping pattern to finally get the first guy and the original one back into their correct bodies.

Warehouse 13 the machine gets put in a warehouse (as does pretty much every artifact) because it, like everything else, has unfortunate side effects. Dollhouse was technically not body swapping so much as mapping personalities on to brains, which was the main thing of the show. I forget why they had body swapping in Xena, but both Lucy Lawless and whomever played Callisto nailed it.

The other fun sci-fi thing is when they have musical episodes and seeing what explanation they come up with for why everybody is singing. I think Sanctuary had my favorite explanation: someone was being taken over by a parasite and she could only hear certain frequencies, so they had to sing to her to communicate (lolwut).

I looked it up, and Stargate used the stones in something like 14 episodes. And I feel like the newest one (Andromeda? Iunno, I never watched it) was supposed to have used them to allow people to see their families from way away. :)

I like some of the singing episodes. It -really- depends on the characters for me (and the actors portraying them).

BRB, going to see if I liked the Scrubs musical episode. :)

Star Gate Universe did indeed keep up the bodyswapping a bit as a way to communicate back with earth. But 'normal' Stargate went down as Johnny said IIRC : )

Ohhhh, those stones. I was thinking of that machine that got used earlier on (pre-Vala/introduction of Farscape people) by the old man who was dying and wanted to be in a young, healthy body.

I never watched Universe. I heard there was a character more annoying than Rodney. :/

Also, I'm interested in seeing how Jason Momoa/Ronan Dex does as Aquaman.

But Rodney grew into this really nice charater. He was fun :P

I really liked SG:U for most of the part - and the idea especially. Basically some team accidentally activated an Ancient McGuffin and were transported to a runaway/preprogrammed ship racing trough the universe (thus the body-swapping with people back on earth being relevant, even if they couldn't really use it for most body-swapping shenanigans).

Quite cool - sorta like a Stargate Atlantis reboot but without Wraiths and random human civilizations but more focus on survival and not backstabbing eachother. But I must admit it was a bit slow/annoying at the start and really only picked up pace towards the end (before the cancellation).

@IC - We really haven't seen many magical beasts or monsters and so. Only the ice wolves now recently and also the unicorn on the picture. The ice wolves seemed to be corrupted normal wolves - I wonder about the unicorn - if it is "real" or not? (aka a proper race or just a horse someone magiced a horn ontop of!)

Yeah, after the nosedive they managed with Supes v. Bats, I'm just hopeful they'll be able to manage decent solo films. Jason Mamoa should do well as Aquaman, though. Is it bad that I'm worried they'll make Aquaman too gritty?

I just can't see them getting Shazam right, though.

Yeah, I never did the Universe thing.

Also - Aquaman? (disclaimer: NSFW - cartoon violence and deth metal :P)

I'm willing to bet it's an actual unicorn. Neri has a Salamander, Builder looked to have a dragon, and I'm pretty sure there's a Kraken in the lake for our sharky-friend, even beyond the sharks. :)

I think the Eagles were oversized for the Speaker as well, if I remember right.

Eidolon may be the only outsider, though. ;)

Hmm. But on the whole it seems as if 'fantastical' animals are tied to the 'gods' then? I mean we haven't really seen any signs of giants or griffins on the countryside (not that we have been looking :P). And that lead me to think that maybe the magical critters were custom built for each 'god' hence not real animals/creatures in this world either but merely magical mutations/upgrades of previous ones.

But then we have the raptorians and the pathai (sp?) which sorta are magical races that we don't have back home.

We've fought: Deer, Horse, Squirrels, Priest, Wyvern-bats (I don't know what they were), Some kind of troll, Angry Elsa, and wolves. There may well be more than that, but I don't recall it.

I wanna say 'Phatai', but it hasn't stuck with me. :)

Oh mans, that makes me think I totally should have gone Captain Ahab. KRAKEN. Although admittedly, somewhat less useful in the middle of a forest. :-P

Although I think actually if I had to re-pick, I might go Builder given that Johnny's developed an obsession with making a robot army. Stat-wise, that may not be the best choice though.

You would have liked the Doctor. But we eated it.

phaitai

Personality and goal fit, perhaps. But even worse of a stat mismatch for Johnny. Although there would also have to have been many of a "You can trust me. I'm the Doctor" type references.

I don't think we know what Kiki's title is (heck, we still don't actually know his name). My guess would be the Traveler. Or maybe the Wanderer, but I think he has a horse. Or that was just fan rumor.

@Johnny: The cancer story was probably me. It's one of my favorite short stories by Neil Gaiman.

Warehouse 13 makes me angry nerd rage more than anything else I’ve ever seen (though Fringe comes close, after I accidentally watched the episode where the writers murdered all of biology and then peed on its corpse)

"It had the restriction that you could only swap with the same person once, so they ended up needing a special swapping pattern to finally get the first guy and the original one back into their correct bodies.”

This was also the plot of an episode of Futurama. They had to do some complex math to get everyone back into the right body.

@Neri: Stargate handled it by having the good guys explicitly lock down every piece of body-swapping tech they could find. But they also used it as a last-minute save on several occasions (in general, Stargate had a lot of past tech pop up 5 seasons later, though the Nox never came back). They also had body-snatching alien parasites as the main villains for most of the show, which meant that a lot of villains were played by multiple actors, including occasionally the main characters for brief periods of possession.

@Liisa: I think you mean “Battlestargate Universica"

* * *

EDIT: Oh my, *another* charisma-er. That knowledge, though... gonna be useless for a while, until you can retrain them.

@Johnny: Pretty sure you're "The Sorcerer"

I think they have more than one title. :)

Titles are like pokémon; gotta catch 'em all but mostly the cool ones :P

@Lina - ^^

I watch Warehouse 13 for Claudia and HG Wells. Also for HG/Myka and the fact their actors love that pairing and have apparently said they play it up.

Which episode of Fringe were you talking about? I thought it was meh and then it got good and then they killed it. Season 5 was a "WTF IS THIS?" moment.

Also, I think the name would be better if it were just "Battlegate Univerica". Although that description makes me want to watch it even less since I strongly disliked BSG. I really wanted to like Starbuck and just couldn't stand her. :/

I definitely enjoyed both of those (Wells and Claudia). She's been on tabletop at least once and I enjoyed her there as well. As an actress/person. Hard to know which ;)

Most shows I just ignore the science of. There can be some neat anecdotes (even if they probably aren't true, like the idea of enhancing a photo to make it look like someone, and then that 'photoshopped picture' being usable in court...)

It's how I'm able to watch The Flash and enjoy it. It took a bit, though. :P

"The giant slug strangling everybody is actually a single-celled life-form created from the common cold."[/b]

There are four separate contradictions in that single sentence. And no reason for it; the writers could've had a murderer who put giant mutant slug eggs in people's food and the plot would've been identical, but instead they decided to butcher science for NO REASON.

* * *

I can ignore the science of some shows, but it's hard when it's what I do on a daily basis. Me trying to watch Fringe, or Helix, or the X-Files, (or, god forbid, Numb3rs) is like a lawyer trying to watch Perry Mason, or a doctor trying to watch House.

The Flash I have trouble watching because the characters are such monumental idiots. Like, these are supposed to be a city's brightest scientists and detectives, but they have the common sense, forethought and deduction skills of sleep-deprived pre-teens.

Also, because literally 90% of the villains in that show are less threatening than "Man with Gun." Captain Cold? He has a cold gun that kills people when it hits them directly. Unlike a machine gun, which also kills people when it hits them directly, his cold gun is slow and flashy enough for just about anyone to easily dodge. (Johnny has heard this rant before)

Comic Book physics is Comic Book Physics. I can watch Flash or Arrow butcher hacking/electronic intrusions every day of the week because it's Comic Book Reality, not real reality.

NCIS on the other hand, when they have Abby and McGee both type on the same keyboard to 'respond to the hacker faster' makes me want to throw my remote through the TV. This is supposed to be a real world show (IE: Set in the real world).

csi: cyber is even worse.. they jump the shark every single week with some misuse of the internet or the dark web ... I had to stop watching because it was so bad.

ncis has it's problems, but the characters are (or at least were) somewhat interesting... too bad they lost ziva to replace her with a ditz, and now they are losing tony... I may not watch anymore...

I actually like the new girl. But yeah, I never even bothered with CSI: Cyber. The older CSI's were so bad about science I used to throw up a bit in my mouth watching them sometimes. I never even bothered with it (same with Scorpion).

Now, if you give me a nice Knight Rider reboot, I won't care about the tech, because it's Comic Book Reality. Not Real Reality. Same reason I don't get too hung up on Independence Day (let's give the alien computer that works on quantum trinary a virus using my old work laptop that's 10 years old...) or Transformers, both are Comic Book Reality, not real reality.

There's a wider margin of error for me, sure. I'm much more bothered by the science (and I don't mean the wormhole stuff) in Interstellar than, say, Star Wars. But if there's one thing that ruins my suspension of disbelief in any medium or genre, it's science that's gratuitously bad—where there's an easier way to explain thing, where random science "buzzwords" were put in just to sound technical that instead change the meaning of something.

And this is what I hate about Fringe. X-Files did science badly to advance the plot (Lampreyman, anyone?), while Fringe did science badly *for no reason* (other than potentially the fact that nobody bothered to read a single wikipedia page while writing it). There's science fiction, and then there's science horror.

(A similar sentence to the "single-celled virus" one that may be more understandable to the programmer crowd here is this infamous line)

well now you're crossing over from science fiction to science fantasy...

Star Wars wasn't science fiction, it was science fantasy... and really just a western in outer space... but it worked because there was no real reality to push the boundaries of...

When you get to stuff like The Martian, where it's more hard science fiction, they need to get it right... which they rarely do...

I treat most tv shows as more fantasy than hard core science or I wouldn't be able to watch any of them... but even so, some are SO bad, they are truly unwatchable... Scorpion was an example... though the show's premise had promise, I watched a few episodes and had to give up on it. I'd rather watch real fantasy like, for example Lucifer, than anything with bad science that tries to pass itself off as real science... These writers just don't know their stuff, and they either aren't using or listening to their technical advisors, or the ones they are hiring aren't worth s*~t.

I definitely enjoyed both of those (Wells and Claudia). She's been on tabletop at least once and I enjoyed her there as well. As an actress/person. Hard to know which ;)

Oh, are you talking about the game of Resistance where all the red heads were spies? Btw, they did a pretty horrible job of playing that game; they kept voting up teams super easily and no one was using logic. But then, maybe I'm just used to playing with people who do lots of metagaming and logic. But I will say, Claudia's outfit was pretty awesome. I dug her hat.

Also, have you seen the tabletop episode with Felicia Day playing Last Night on Earth? I loved it, but I think Wil wanted to strangle her.

Most shows I just ignore the science of. There can be some neat anecdotes (even if they probably aren't true, like the idea of enhancing a photo to make it look like someone, and then that 'photoshopped picture' being usable in court...)

This reminds me of Rizzoli and Isles, especially early on when they were breaking down doors incorrectly and Isles was just flat out wrong about blood types and inheritance. But then, the point of watching the show is the Rizzoli/Isles relationship, not the cop stuff. I'm still convinced that if Isles were a real person, she'd never be a PD medical examiner; her lifestyle just seems too extravagant.

It's how I'm able to watch The Flash and enjoy it. It took a bit, though. :P

Still haven't quite gotten there yet. Although mostly I get annoyed by the fact that they seem to insist that the solution to all problems is metahuman powers. And the fact that their characters are fake smart like Lina says. AKA, they're smart because the other characters say they are and because LOOK HOW GOOD THEY SCIENCE. And then they just make dumb choices (mainly I'm thinking of the episode with the shapeshifter). Although I'm also not up to date on the series. The Flash also suffers from the fact that it doesn't have Felicity Smoak often enough.

"The giant slug strangling everybody is actually a single-celled life-form created from the common cold."

Oh, I remember that! It reminds me of 9th grade when I wondered if giants were made of giant cells or just lots of regular sized cells. X-Files also has some fun moments when they say things that seem to suggest they think "organic" material = "alive" and "inorganic" = "dead".

NCIS on the other hand, when they have Abby and McGee both type on the same keyboard to 'respond to the hacker faster' makes me want to throw my remote through the TV. This is supposed to be a real world show (IE: Set in the real world).

I got the impression that part of that was purposefully mocking that idea. ...or maybe I'm just hopeful that people don't actually think that having two people use a keyboard at the same time will somehow make you type faster and therefore prevent hacking better. But I may also be biased because I love Abby. Although I also haven't seen any of the newer stuff. I think the latest stuff I saw I was sad that Ziva was losing her badass Mossad edge.

(A similar sentence to the "single-celled virus" one that may be more understandable to the programmer crowd here is this infamous line)

I love that video! Visual Basic! GUI! Nowadays it'd be something about using machine learning to crowd source big data to the cloud.

You forgot 'using social media'. :P

I was actually literally just contemplating adding that. Also what language they would want to use. I feel like they could use Go, but I also think that maybe that doesn't sound program-y enough.

Err, in the video, they say "GUI Interface," not just "GUI."

Also, EVERY show suffers from the fact that it doesn't have Felicity Smoak often enough. (Except Arrow, she's basically the main character of Arrow now)

And now you've made a mistake that I can't forgive in shows, in real life. I shall endeavor not to hold it too much against you all.

You've equated High IQ with High Wisdom.

IQ is knowing tomatoes are a fruit...

Wisdom is knowing not to put them in fruit salad...

I have known plenty of people who were very very smart (like scary smart) who made the most god awful stupid decisions. Not to blow my own horn, but my IQ, while not quite Mensa level, is certainly pushing that envelope (not that I pay much attention to those IQ tests), and I've made some ungodly stupid decisions in my life.

People who are Smart (High IQ) are not always Smart (Common Sense).

I think the part I agree with with the 'fake smart' isn't 'not doing stupid things', because people are not robots, and even computers screw up sometimes...

But rather that they use fake explanations of how things work, when the actual explanation is much more simple. In which case it's just them saying things because the writer made them, and it undermines their authority on their own subject... which is the ridiculous thing for me.

I'm also at least 'above average', but 'I am not a clever man'. :)

Sort of Off-topic (a lot off-topic!):

If I'm playing a Hunter, and take Bonded Mind as my level 3 bonus feat, my companion and I can both 'communicate' as long as we can 'see' each other. Would you consider the blind-sense of a dire bat to be 'seeing' for abilities that require sight? It seems wonky, because I don't think it would count for gaze attacks...

Does it matter; you must "see eachother" so if only one has vision (even with blindsight) it doesn't work.

But as long as you can 'see' eachother (in some way!) it should work, going by how it was written. (Since I don't think 'see' is defined in any way other then Line of Sight - and Blindsight definitely works for that!)

Blindsight never allows a creature to distinguish color or visual contrast. A creature cannot read with blindsight.

Blindsight does not subject a creature to gaze attacks (even though darkvision does).
Blinding attacks do not penalize creatures that use blindsight.
Deafening attacks thwart blindsight if it relies on hearing.
Blindsight works underwater but not in a vacuum.
Blindsight negates displacement and blur effects.

And now you've made a mistake that I can't forgive in shows, in real life. I shall endeavor not to hold it too much against you all.

You've equated High IQ with High Wisdom.

Except it doesn't work that way in real life (there's more than three mental scores to a cognitive psychologist). In the case of the Flash, we've got a team consisting of the three most brilliant scientists in the city, a highly talented police detective, an investigative reporter, and the best forensic technician the city has to offer.

None of those are jobs you can get just by being good at memorizing things. Actually succeeding in science isn't just about having a high IQ at all; that will get you, maybe, through undergrad, but the rest requires an ability to solve hard problems with incredible amounts of consideration, foresight, and generally a good sense of the consequences and problems of every plan. I've seen every one of my friends with a 2400 on the SATs (and there have been several) drop out of academia because it was "too hard." Real scientists are far usually better than the average person at seeing the problems with a simple plan (for an exception, see Linus Pauling and Vitamin C, but the young ones are generally less crazy).

And Barry, Joe, and Iris are all in careers that rely less on intelligence and more on highly-trained skills of deduction, especially when it comes to crime. But they're even worse at this part of their jobs than, say, the characters of something like CSI: Miami. Sure, I can understand most of the characters not having the same sense of self-preservation of someone who's been in combat, but they should be learning by now, and so many of their other slip-ups seem pretty blatantly along the line of "let's make this character dumber so the audience knows their stupid plan will fail, because dramatic irony is the only way we know of to keep up plot tension."

A better argument for what I'm trying to say would be this article, possibly followed by the beginning of this followup

EDIT: Technically, a tomato is a vegetable. Because all fruits are technically vegetables. Use this fun biologist fact to annoy your friends!

I think the dumb things they do are really just sloppy writing. The writers want X to happen, so the characters do dumb thing Y because they didn't think up some other way to have it happen.

For example, IIRC with the shapeshifter, Iris and Caitlin capture the guy, handcuff him with his hands in front of him, and put him in an unmarked civilian car. I could maybe forgive Caitlin for this, but Iris' dad is a freaking cop. And sure, I don't expect her to know all the ins and outs of cop training, but I kind of would have thought she'd pick up a few things. I was seriously expecting the shapeshifter to wake up and start using his handcuffs to strangle the driver (on the bright side, what he actually did was much smarter). But because they wanted him to escape, they had the characters transport the shapeshift this way instead of having Iris call her dad to arrest him while they kept him unconscious, which probably would have made escaping harder.

I dunno; I consider myself to have a reasonably high Int but low Wis, and I definitely do dumb stuff and let a lot of dumb stuff go by without noticing (that then often Lina points out during a rant, so I become aware that I missed it). So I feel like if I'm noticing these things, it's a bad sign.

(that then often Lina points out during a rant)

Whee. I'm angry!

Johnny Slade wrote:

(that then often Lina points out during a rant)

Whee. I'm angry!

I'm not really sure how to interpret this, but I feel like there may have been a misunderstanding involved. Basically, what I was saying is that when you rant to me, you often point out dumb stuff that characters do that I didn't particularly notice/that went past me.

Oh yeah, no, I got that. Just commenting on the fact that I rant a lot.