Kenneth Kooi's page

Fundraiser Link

PGI, the producers of MechWarrior Online has just opened a charity fundraiser to pay respects to a young player who recently lost her battle with cancer.

They're selling a custom Jenner Light BattleMech themed after the girl's favorite 'Mech with all proceeds going to charity - I personally think it's a nice gesture worthy of support.

100% of the proceeds will be donated to the Canadian Cancer Society, net of applicable Sales Taxes and third-party transaction fees such as credit card and payment processing fees. These fees typically represent less than 4%. For clarity, IGP and PGI are not making any money off of the donated funds.

I don't know how he's responsible but...
I blame Cosmo for the smog blowing over from Indonesia.

Dies Irae wrote:

Barry Allen should have stayed dead. We already had a Flash. Same for Jason Todd and Hal Jordan (Yes... I went there...).

I don't care enough about Green Lanterns to care about Hal (Though DCAU John Stewart is awesome. Shame we won't seem to see him again). Barry was better dead, and Jason Todd's death always served as Batman being mortal, and capable of failure.

Honestly, I enjoyed the Green Lantern Corps v2 (and v3) books which had Guy Gardner, John Stewart and Kyle Rayner and the rest of the alien GLs knocking about playing Space Cop, but I dropped the Green Lantern main book, which despite Geoff Johns trying his hardest, still had the problem of writing stories around Hal Jordan rather than writing for him.

I only recently picked up the new Green Lantern relaunch because Hal has pretty much been reduced to a sidekick cameo role by Sinestro.

Frankly this recent wave of EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN in the last 5 years of comics hasn't particularly inspired confidence in me.

Barry Allen should have stayed dead. We already had a Flash. Same for Jason Todd and Hal Jordan (Yes... I went there...).

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

Have you ever killed a fellow iconic?

Eew! No! That would be not only not nice, but tarnishing to my pristine and faultless reputation as EVERYONE'S FAVORITE!

I'm fairly certain that if you killed Alain, it would actually increase your popularity.

"I think I've seen this before... First, they ask you to save the Earth..." He deadpanned with the slightest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Next thing you know, BAM! You're the host of a symbiotic alien policeman."

He noticed Chelsea tense slightly as the walls peeled away to revealing the cavernous hanger complex before them. Airfix always got a bit irascible around Mecha bays. Perhaps it was a wistful memory of lost glory or the sting of bad memories - possibly both. He couldn't fault her - that whole thing had been a heck of a nasty mess. Reaching over, he gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

Always got your back, Chel.

He stepped out of the van onto the metal floor, giving the saluting Cadwallader a wide berth. If he wasn't saluting the Major, he sure as hell wasn't giving one to the gearheads.

Instead, he let his feet keep their momentum, keeping the casual pace as he angled himself to intercept one of the ground staff.

"Winston. Winston Chang." The greeting was a casual one and he offered his hand in a firm handshake. "I need a rundown on the basic-four."

It was a simple un-ostentatious introduction common to the lower ranks who usually lived, fought and died together, a statement of name inviting reciprocity and the request of assistance an admission of one's new status. The basic-four were the cornerstones of a soldiers existence - the bunks, the mess hall, the person nominally in charge and the person who actually knew what was going on. The details of everything else could be sorted out afterwards.

He lowered his voice to a conspiratory whisper. "Pardon the tin-man."

--------------------------------

@ Everyone: When I did my basic training, every day without fail, there'd be at least one recruit doing laps around the parade square while screaming "A Sir is a Sir! A Sergeant is a Sergeant! A Sergeant is not a Sir! A Sir is not a Sergeant! I will salute a Sir! I will not salute a Sergeant!" That beat the urge to salute everything in sight out of us real quick. :-)

Cartigan wrote:

And so is your overcomplication of claiming people are drilling oil to make a single 1"x1"x1" figure. Oil is a very lucrative market. That's why people drill for it. Plastics are cheaper to make then metal casts or wood sculpts. That's why people make them. So save your crap.

Let's just go ahead and save this one for later. On another day, come on back and re-read what you've been writing today and enjoy the knowledge that "yup, that's who I am, how I like to express myself."

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

Has anyone noticed the inherent irony of having an internet argument in a thread announcing the release of "Pathfinder Battles"?

@ Scott Betts: I think your doing a great job here buddy. I can't post all the time to defend 4E (something that's more prevailantly needed on these boards than others) so keep on fightin' the good fight.

Shouldn't we not be fighting in the first place?

The 8th Dwarf wrote:

You always send your conscripts first and save your professionals to train and as a reserve.

On a side note, I'm 100% against conscription too , just sayin' :p

It's easy enough to avoid when you have a large enough population base, but I live on an island with a population of something like 5-6 million, and at more than one point in my country 40 plus odd years of history, we've had pissed off neighbors.

My country's just doesn't have the critical population mass to keep a standing professional army, so it supplants to regular army with a mass of conscripts.

I can't say I LIKE it, but I can at least see the logic behind it.

The pig was my best friend back in the day. I got to the point where I was a bet shot with it than with a M-16.

Meh. At least you still use the 16s. Over here, we 'upgraded' to the 'Toy Gun'.

The transition to a bullpup did a number on my accuracy.

Pardon my opinion then, but f*ck that patriarchal b*llsh*t. If I have the same rights as men, then I should have the same responsibilities. If I can prove I can do the job, then f*ck whether I'm a woman or not.

I'm probably gonna regret getting into this, but I'm actually curious about opinions on the following:

I come from a country with conscription. I spent two and a half years rolling around in the mud and digging foxholes. My female colleagues did not.

There is as a result, an very Heinlein-esque unspoken agreement amongst most employers (corporate and otherwise) that male employees who have completed their terms of service draw a higher starting pay.

The phenomenon has been studied across WAY too many academic papers and it annoys the local feminists to no end. Nevertheless, the process continues even though the wage gap between genders narrows dramatically several years later.

Are my 'lost' years of financial productivity enough to justify an initial wage differential?

One Gurkha, 40 Bandits. No Contest

Talk about taking a knife to a gunfight...

(Retired) Gurkha charges into a mob of 40 armed bandits with a Kukri to rescue a rape victim...

Kinda leaves you speechless doesn't it?

I am whole heartedly opposed to any retrocons that make the old materials obsolete. Apparently it should have been allowed to die with FASA.

This may come across as offensive. I hope it doesn't, but I tend to offend people on the internet. Please accept an apology in advance:

As a Commando seeing a lot of new players, I wholeheartedly support of retcons which make it easier for a new player to get into the game.

I don't mind that my old and long out of print FASA era House and Clan Sourcebooks are rendered obsolete just so long as I can keep a steady stream of new players marching to the firing line.

If I can tell a player "You like the era? Here's a book which contains everything you need to know...", it means one more book sold for Catalyst and another player buying stuff from the store. If it means stepping on the toes of canon to get another player, so be it.

I can't sell a player on "This isn't the truth. You should listen to me because I have a 20 year old yellowing book which is rapidly succumbing to age that is better than what you are reading." It felt good for a bit, but then I realized that if I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with the new guys, I had to move on if I wanted to keep playing the game I love.

I've had to run a couple of cranky "old-school" players out of my community, not because they were bad players or anything but because their constant snobbery at anything they considered as a "Bad Era" was toxic to community growth. Some of them later came back realizing that "Bad" BattleTech was better than no Battletech.

If the new guy/gal wants to run around with Clan Heavy Lasers, Stealth Armor, Heavy Gauss Rifles and Snub-Nose PPCs, then so be it. My community knows I don't like the new toys and some of them even oblige the "RetroTech" guy to a game on his terms now and again, but as long as I don't demean a player for his choice of era, I remain an accepted member. Telling a player that their era of choice(some of my players are Clicky converts who bought Record Sheets: Dark Age so they could learn to play BattleTech in an era with designs they were familiar with) is inferior and should be written out of history is just damaging to the community as a whole.

I wish it would stop.

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote:

I'd personally be shipping a Valeros/Imrijka/Seoni as a threesome.

I'm certain Valeros wouldn't have any objections to this.

The other two? Hmm....

Wait, which set-up are we talking about here?

Never mind Rule34s. You REALLY ought to identify the links to TVTropes.

I've always been fond of the steampunk Iron Kingdoms setting by Privateer Press. It's downright lethal due to it's limited magical healing and lack of a revolving door of death. In one of the most memorable games I've had the opportunity to play in, almost the entire party managed to konk off one after the other in epic fashion after a two and a half year campaign.

We'd managed to gain egress to an ancient temple containing the campaign McGuffin when one of the campaign's recurring villains turned up with a horrific force of blighted draconic monstrosities.

The party fighter (an eternally optimistic Midlunder Trencher) glanced back, looked at the rest of us, shrugged and said "There's no way we can stop them."

The entire group paused. There was silence. Here was the heart and soul of the group - the one who repeatedly laughed in the face of danger and lived to tell the tale admitting defeat.

He tightened his helmet strap, checked his rifle, fixed his bayonet, then turned around and started walking calmly backwards into the face of death. His final words were - "You've got half a minute."

He was wrong. On the 6th round of combat, his final blow was a crit impaling the head BBEG.

He lasted one more round before being torn apart.

Hacking our way into the temple's shrine, the artifact was at the bottom of a massive shaft. There was no time to climb down to plant demolition charges and we were all fairly near death so nobody could make the jump. The party Monk looked around, thought for the moment, glanced at the Rogue and quietly declared "I've got your back."

He used his body to shield the fall of the party rogue who was our demolitions expert. The falling damage killed him. The rogue survived the drop with 2 hp left.

The Rogue joined him shortly afterwards as well, manually detonating his demolition charges. His last words were "It's beautiful. Never seen anything quite like it. Alright. Three, Two, One."

As the party's Arcane Mechanik/Paladin/Warcaster, my character was subsequently killed overloading his mechanical prosthetics and steam armor to hold up the temple's collapsing roof. Warcaster power-fields really aren't meant to hold up multiple tons of collapsing obsidian. He managed to hold up the roof just long enough to buy enough time for his companions to escape though. Then his power-field collapsed and his back gave out.

The Party Bard and Sorcerer managed to hobble back to the safety of civilization, the sorcerer dying of his wounds hours later in her arms afterwards (Yay... Poison Con Damage).

The Bard who had been in unrequited love with the Sorcerer, penned the tale of our last Hurrah then was last seen walked out into the desert.

We still talk about this.

Privateer Press:
Iron Kingdoms Character Guide:
- Firearms
- Pain of Healing
- Gun Mage Base Class

Monstronomicon:
- Adventuring Scholar Prestige Class

In the RotRL I'm currently running, Del Wesh, a PC Cleric of Cayden Cailean ended up getting into a relationship with Shalelu and she's been with the party ever since.

As a GM, I'm baffled. It's really really strange.

Every single time he gets hit by an attack, she'll crit and roll obscene damage against whatever she's shooting at. Nobody at the table can explain it. It just... happens.

Stranger, every single time he's cast a spell with a range of touch on her, she'll flub the skill check/attack roll with a natural one.

Under any other circumstances, the dice roll normally.

Needless to say, this was the basis of many a joke at the table.

This has continued for at least a dozen sessions already. The party at this point now considers pushing the cleric in front of enemies during fights as a perfectly valid tactic.

I circumvented the Justice problem with a deal with the devil options. If confronted with a kill first, ask questions later option, players will tend to take the path of least resistance.

I refused to give them that option. I instead ran Ironbriar as a psychotic nutjob vigilante who masterminded a cult who went after criminals which the law couldn't touch either because the case was too small or the criminal was too big. On the other hand he was also a competent justice and cared deeply about Magnimar but was being arm-twisted into the Sihedron plot by blackmail from Xanesha.

He had quite a presence during the Magnimar arc, asking questions, handing out 'helpful leads', providing the PCs with lodging and generally being an all around nice guy.

When the PCs finally realised what they were up against and confronted him, there was an awkward moment where he dared them to kill him after they slapped him around. After all, he was too big to just disappear. If they killed him, he had no doubt that the law would find them. If the PCs revealed him as the Skinsaw Man, he was under no illusion he would be found mad and locked up... but his cases would be overturned and worse men would walk free.

A damned if you do damned if you don't moment.

In the end, he used them against Xanesha.

The PCs know he's a rat, but he came out of the Skinsaw murders smelling of roses.

--------------------

Of course, to make matters worse, they walked in on him in the middle of an 'operation' on Nualia (who they had talked some sense into before she was packed off to Magnimar for trial). Walking into a room with a bloody and screaming Aasimar and Ironbriar casually tossing her arm to them when they entered caused more than a few pale faces.