moggthegob's page

Lou wrote:

What on earth makes you think I don't understand the difference? And why on earth would you take my levity as a reason to be insulting?

LOL, because comments like:

Lou wrote:

But I guess you're right then. Of the 46 odd million Americans who have no health insurance, none of them is a pregnant women. Things are fine. There's no problem.

are not insulting.

"levity"? Perhaps you need to look back at the definition of sarcasm:

M-W online wrote:

sarcasm

1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a: a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b: the use or language of sarcasm

Sounds kind of insulting, doesn't it?

As for why I think you probably don't understand the difference between correlation and causation, well you keep pointing to something that says that women with insurance are more likely to get prenatal care and keep trying to make that imply that women without insurance can not get prenatal care. There is no evidence that you have present that justifies that claim. All you can say is that the probability someone gets prenatal care is higher if they also have insurance. Maybe people with insurance are more likely to be knowledge about the need of prenatal care. Maybe they are more likely to speak to a medical professional about the need for prenatal care prior to becoming pregnant. We just can't tell with what you have given us, are we can tell is correlations not causations.

WOW, this thread has taken a new life of its own. Does anyone remember this was a thread about McCain's new strategy?

Samuel Weiss wrote:

And yet profit is what drives the economy.

If you think Canada's economy is not driven by a desire for profit, you are sorely mistaken.

Of course and what the Canadian - and western European models have shown is that you can have both universal health care and capitalism.

Lower Infant mortality
Longer Lifespan
Less Years Lost to Preventable Disease
For everyone
AT HALF THE COST

Some one is getting your redistributed wealth - wouldn't you rather give them 50 cents instead of a dollar?

Samuel Weiss wrote:

As for worlds worth living in, I would not want to live in one where people were forcibly assigned professions and specialties because some government office decided more of a particular profession was needed.

And I do not want to live in a world where jack booted stormtroopers named Smith and Friedman allow corporations to kick in my door and take all my money and give it to corporations...

Hey look I can make a strawman too!

What can I say, I agree.

bugleyman wrote:

lastknightleft wrote:

Clinton did just fine without emphasizing christ every speach. Obama is a spiritual person, he attended the same church for 20 years faithfully and was a member not just an attendee, You don't attend church for 20 years because you plan to one day run for president. How can you possibly see that as politically motivated?

I don't see 20 years of church membership as politically motivated. I see the frequency during this campaign with which Obama mentions his faith as politically motivated.

Ah see it was your choice of words then, piety is more than just his speaches it includes his actions and history IMO. therefor when you said his piety was political in nature I was seeing his pious nature, not just his speeches, I see where you are going with it, I just think you're seeing the genuine obama, and thinking that it's political.

Trick is, who IS the real obama. While he was running for the democrati nomination, his faith scarcely came up until ( ironically) it was being called into question whether or not he shared or objected to his preacher's values(which in spite of the issue being dropped there never was an answer to that with which I was satisified. I mean for serious,were you a member of this church but not a regular attendee( in which case you dont go to church very often tsk tsk or worse your membership was part of a ploy to run for office in chicago) or did you go often and hear the speeches( and if so did you object , did you talk to your 'mentor' about them, was he cheering him on and agreeing))

Indeed, it was Hillary Clinton, not him, who defended religion as an impotant aspect of everyday life while obama was mocking it in San Francisco. However, now that it has become clear he needs to winner over some of those voters you hear a lot more "god" dropping in his speeches and rallies.

Maybe its the real him and he was afraid democrats were too secular to understand or maybe he's joining the long list of otherwise sane people who were forced to play the politics of faith. And just to be clear, the old politics aren't going anywhere. It amazes me that people are drinking the Kool-aid on this. Every single election cycle someone shows up saying they want to change the way Washington is run( I believe if you reference speeches made during Bill Clinton and George Bush's first campaigns a good bit of that rhetoric existed.) And well as you may have figured out, it never changes.

Ironically, his call for a new kind of politics IS politics as usual, the only reason anyone ever trumpets bi-partisanship or non-partisanship is when they want to get elected or re-elected to something.

Garydee wrote:

You're correct. I won't compromise my beliefs. I'm not going to meet someone in the "middle" for something I can't believe in.

Often you can advance your own beliefs further by being prepared to acknowledge and make concession's to one of your opponent's beliefs... Pretend for a second you are a congressman determined to drill for domestic oil. Your opponent across the aisle, some hippy Democrat, wants to ban all domestic drilling and put money into hydrogen technology. Pretend you absolutely don't believe in hydrogen, because clearly there's plenty of oil, and the infrastructure for it is already in place.

Option 1: You both declare that your beliefs are not subject to change or compromise of any kind. No new drilling gets done. No hydrogen reasearch gets funding, and most of that research moves to Singapore. The US remains dependent on foreign oil, and also loses its competetive edge in emerging energy technologies.

Option 2: You and your opponent throw each other a bone. Maybe you say, "Hey, if we open up some domestic areas for drilling -- under environmental guidelines we'll work out together -- then some subsidies for hydrogen cells are probably in line as well; maybe we can fund them with a drilling tax or something." Then you work out the details. Yes, the price of domestic oil rises a bit because of that tax, but you get your drilling. Your opponent can go back to his constituents and make a bunch of long speeches about how he "pushed through tough environmental regulations" and "opened up hydrogen research for a new era." You both actually got what you were primarily after, by giving the other person something of secondary importance. That's why "package deal," all-or-nothing mind-sets are not conducive to a functioning government.

Option 1 leaves both people feeling like noble, virtuous paragons of justice and purity, but doesn't allow practical solutions, and it ensures that neither party gets what they want -- by standing up for their beliefs in posture, they...

YO uare corect. What I am also referring to,however, is the fact that often agendas can keep votes on issues that can be compromised on off the table, in favor of ones no one will ever compromise on.

For instance, if a bill banning gay marriage comes up, very little room exists for compromise. However, what if a bill offering homosexuals equal protection under the law(similar to the civil rights act of 1964). There would then exist an issue with lots of nuances and such and perhaps some forms of compromise that a more hateful approach to the issue would not allow.

Vattnisse wrote:

houstonderek wrote:

seriously, dude, there isn't...one...thing...in that speech that is dismissive of anyone's "universal human rights". did you even LISTEN to the speech, or did you just assume that since it was made by a republican, she must have advocated eating babies and torturing poodles sixteen times?

or did you just go to the daily kos for their summation?

just curious...

I was referring to the part where she was talking about Obama wanting to read supposed al-Queda supporters their rights. Man, how the crowd loved that.

Nice part, too, about how she has saved Alaska taxpayers money, seeing that Alaska has no income tax and no sales tax...

um, reading someone their rights is an american right (its known as a "miranda warning", although i'm sure most, if not all, european nations probably have something similar. they don't, incidentally, have this in mexico - i know first hand, btw). i'm sure people in 3/4th of the populated world would be shocked to find that it is, apparently, a "universal human right".

ergo, try again...

Well, it may not be a universal human right, but let me ask you, if you were Araibc in complexion, wouldnt it be comforting to know that if you were ever mistaken for a terrorist, you could at least take comfort in the fact that a legal system existed to remedy the problem?

moggthegob wrote:

So you've never made a bad decision ever in your life?

i've made some doozies, and to date haven't taken a government handout.

they have a fallback system. its called a "diverse investment portfolio". if you are foolish enough to put all your eggs in one basket, then yes, i have no sympathy.

you pay into social security, last i checked. its your money...

buy insurance instead of a big screen TV. priorities. americans are instant gratification junkies unwilling to...

And what if the entire market is in decline as in post-2001. My grandfather lost thousands of dollars. He was invested in Enron and got screwed.

And you may not have sympathy, but luckily it doesn't matter what you think. It is better for our economy if there are fallbacks and regulations. It is better for all of us if people who fall on hard times can recover and one day contribute to the economy again.

It is for the same reason that,for instance, tuition existence should exist. For if a student fro ma low-income family like mine, can get a college education, I can contribute to society in better ways than if I hadn't gotten that 'government handout' and become a waiter or something.

Especially given spiraling costs,without a correlating rise in income.

ANd yes,for the record, I was once on foodstamps and welfare during a bad stretch and for that reason only was I able to eat for a few months.

Bill Dunn wrote:

moggthegob wrote:

Actually, as a scholar of the era George Washington was the founder of the Federalist Party which was in all senses the conservative party. The trick was that the man himself was above reproach and the vicious media style of the day (seriously, you think Fox news is bad look up some of the stuff said about Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton with NO factual basis.

Above reproach? I wouldn't say that. But being a war hero, which really meant keeping an army together and in the field in retreat after retreat, certainly accounted for a LOT.

moggthegob wrote:

Pass campaign finance reform and we should see a new day dawning.

Amen to that.

You're right. Nobody's above reproach. However, I'll always admire Washington for his strong convictions. He even turned down being our king. If it was offered to me I'd been like "Oh, hell yeah". Thankfully, Washington was a better man than me.

Well maybe he wasn't "above reproach" as I first put it. What I meant was that the newsmen and politicians of the day knew that attacks against Washington wouldn't work. The quickest way to become unpopular was to spread nasty rumors about Washington or to really oppose him when he put his shoulder into something. Not that that really has anything to do with anything.

pres man wrote:

...and being responsible individuals...

this is the crux for me. sorry, socialist types, but my compassion ends where your bad decision making begins...

So you've never made a bad decision ever in your life?

You're going to tell me that when the stock market goes bad and I lose all my money I should be out on my ass because my investment turned out to be "bad"( purely subjective because the same thing could have been said by investing in Microsoft in its early days and yes that would be considered a good investment,if you get my meaning). That there should not be a fallback system to help in case your investments and such fail( and hence why social security is necessary).
Furthermore you would wind up on the streets or being forced to divert someone else in their families income and overall lowering the value of our society. It is ecnomically better for there to be social security than for there not to be.

It's the same thing with healthcare. At one point, it was affordable and insurance wasnt even necessary. But things have changed and for the good of all, it is better if everyone can have healthcare. for, if they do not, all of their medical treatment will be expensive emergency procedures and since its an emergency it will have a very low success rate. Further, since they will be unable to pay, the costs of those procedures have to be passed somewhere and inevitably that would mean higher cost of healthcare for all. Therefore, it is more equitable for everyone to have healthcare and have regular visits with a doctor, rather at a lower cost to the system than for him to need expensive procedures and be unable to pay.

It makes economic sense.

Garydee wrote:

Moderates tend to be wishy washy. I can't think of one good moderate president.

Hitler had strong, passionate ideals. I certainly wouldn't want him as president. George Washington was pretty moderate -- he had no well-established parties to worry about yet, so he was spared being labelled one way or the other (moderate by default?). He seems to have set us off on the right foot.

Strong ideals are invaluable, but if those ideals force you to view anyone who disagrees with you as an enemy, and if those ideals have at their foundation a desire to "win" against other Americans, they're just not very useful ones.

Actually, as a scholar of the era George Washington was the founder of the Federalist Party which was in all senses the conservative party. The trick was that the man himself was above reproach and the vicious media style of the day (seriously, you think Fox news is bad look up some of the stuff said about Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton with NO factual basis.

Just so you know.

I agree though ,the trick with conservatives and liberals is we actually do stand for vastly different things. And to say " why can't you just compromise" shows a vast misunderstanding of he situation. So all that can get done is what we can agree on. Trick is, the agenda setters often ignore the real problems in favor of what can help them raise money, which is a problem with the system, not the candidates or their ideals. Pass campaign finance reform and we should see a new day dawning.

I would like to point out that, as a man who spent every day for a few months actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton, it has taken me a very very long time to get to the point where seeing Obama doesn't anger me.

We fought them tooth and nail. I put in 16 hour days to see that this man didn't get the nomination because we felt that he was unfit to be president. We felt that we were screwed over because of how the process was set up. For instance, we felt that caucuses unfairly favor Obama's voters due to the nature of caucuses and that fact that clintons supporters were far more likely to have to work nights and therefore be unable to attend.

If the states were winner take all, we still would have won. Even then, we felt that at the end, we had the momentum and the fact that the contest was a virtual dead heat, we felt that it was a situation that needed adjudication, rather than giving the victory to obama outright. I mean, if you have two candidates one who just found her voice and has been on a roll and one who had the lead going in but now seems to be running low and with a message that seems to be weakening, who would you go with.

So yeah that was bitterness and frustration. I even had to choke back tears watching her speech at the convention because, I just felt like "she's the president" and then watched Obamas and still felt nothing, like this guy could be in class with me and that he just didn't feel like something special to me. So I am torn. I like Obama's positions, but very much dislike his personality and I feel as though he would be a bad president, IN SPITE, of his positions.

He comes off ,to me, as just a liberal bush. And that would be bad for my party,because ou positionsare jsut coming in vogue

I personally liked Nixon. He did all sorts of great things and essentially just got caught doing all the same things that every administrations had been doing since Eisenhower.

And what's wrong with wage and price controls? The economy was in trouble and rather than just throw money at the problem he actually tried to do something. That's respectable. If Bush had done that, he may not have become QUITE so hated.(Though hed have still been George Bush....)

houstonderek wrote:

i wasn't aware you were a politician, sorry...

You didn't say anything about politicians, you said:

note to partisans on both sides: y'all are ALL complete [fill in the plural for beasts of burden]. get over yourselves. reality isn't black and white. you're ALL wrong, neither of your parties get jack done most of the time, and they're all out to screw the average american.

So...is there some presumption that you are right? Or should we all just tune you out and leave you alone with your self-importance.

Talking religion and politics might be fun and edifying if people weren't afraid comments like yours above were going to show up.

Apparently one of the advantages of being beholden to no ideology (whatever that phrase means), is that you can lump people you've never met into a group that doesn't exist and browbeat them with your own lack of accomplishment.

Actually, sounds a LOT like the Clintons.

Hey, I was a huge supporter of the Clintons. Hell, and Mitt Romney(despite not liking his politics, I actually had to give him some props). You know what the biggest reason why is? I know where their money is coming from. They are rich. I am okay with this, most presidents have lots of money.

What worries me is presidential candidates without money. Because then you think to yourself, where is the cash coming from? The answer: special interests. I don't want my president to be beholden to anyone who isn't the American people. This is why I think that until the entire country adopts the measure already in place in New Jersey and Maine, where the government provides funding to run for office.

McCain-Feingold almost works, but its just not enough. There is a bill the Durbin-Specter Fair Elections Now Act. Until then, Every candidate who doesnt essentially fund themselves, owes someone something. So as yourself this, who does Obama owe? And further, who does McCain owe?

Don't trust either of these guys as far as you can throw them.

That said, I feel that that the government can provide quality solutions to problems. Bureaucracy is not a bad thing. it's what makes the government run. The bureaucracy just needs a tune-up and I say let's give it one.
Think of it,one of the reasons many are suffering right now is many state and local programs were recently discontinued and so the safety net there to catch them is weaker than it once was. I know that i personally got screwed out of 8000 dollars because a state program for tuition assistance was cancelled. The reason why is because the federal government cut the spending.

And to those of you libertarians out there, any thoughts that government deregulation is a good thing, the housing crisis is the proof that there is a need for it. The reason there are regulations on business is to protect us the consumer, not to screw over the producer.
As consumers, why wouldn't we favor regulation?
Let's just clean up the government, not cut out its legs from under it.

Crow81 wrote:

Taldor Empire in decline

Taldor Empire on the upswing

Say it like you mean it!!

In my very subjective view, the cleric changes were a good thing, actually. The 3.5 Cleric is often viewed as the strongest base class (alongside with the druid), so toning them down a little is ok.

The revamped domains work well IMHO simply they lead to a stronger differentiation between different clerics. 3.5 kind of had a few "winners" and a lot of "losers" in that regard, and all the winners looked alike ;)

I agree. I do not know how many o you played living greyhawk,but if I saw one more cleric who had either Sun or Glory and Healing Domains or another travel/Luck cleric, I was going to pull out my hair. I like that the way they did it made it so that there was an equally likely chance that I will see A Good Domain Cleric who also had the Fire Domain.

For backwards compatability, I agree certain characters no longer work,but to my mind that's ok. The druid and cleric needed a bit of a downgrade and this seems to be a sufficient way to implement it.

Alleynbard wrote:

I don't see how using a power is any different than colorful descriptions in combat.

Logos wrote:

then your not looking hard enough, colourful description = only fluff power = fluff and crunch. Would a colourful description ever allow you to do something extra unless the dm house rules/fiats it No. Do you powers allow you to do something extra, yes.

I wasn't very clear. Of course there are mechanical results. I don't think the repeated use of twin strike is any more exciting than "I swing my sword and warhammer". Both can be dressed up. Only now the action is restricted to a certain number of powers.

But I think you hit upon what is my problem here. The powers feel much more static to me. They were advertised as a way for all players to do something "cool" in combat. Instead they just feel repetitive to me.

And I am one of those DMs that add extra effects for the sake of flair. I like combat to be dynamic and dramatic. The formula doesn't work for me. I find it more stifling than exciting.

But I recognize this is a "me" thing. I am having trouble getting past the powers in that regard.

I totally agree with what you are saying. When I first got the books my group demanded we add a 3rd game to our rotation.

However, now that we've been playing for the better part of the summer, we almost always end up playing either my 3.5 campaign converted to alpha PFRPG or Star Wars Saga edition. The luster of the new system wore off and our other games were both more interesting and more fun.

I say this as a person who sat in front of the 4e book for hours before picking his class and race because it looked so tough as a choice, and now "meh' I don't even want to try out those other things i was thinking about.

BigDaddyG wrote:

And somehow the mentality that a company like Paizo or Necromancer or Mongoose or Palladium being able to compete toe to toe with WotC, and WIN, is unrealistic? It's not unheard of.

When a company is as dominant as WotC they need to fail so horribly for the competition to have any chance at all of taking their place. Apple and Microsoft have been going at it for decades and Apple is just now taking away a serious chunk of Microsoft's market share and they are still only down in the single digit percentages.

Paizo replacing WotC as the market leader is unrealistic.

And what's wrong with that? No one laughs at you when you have an apple. In the eyes of many, apple happens to produce the better product. Even iff Microsoft has a larger market share,no one is thinking that apple is making a mistake by producing their own OS.

Why should it be any different for Paizo? They can be a strong 2nd party, without ever having to take down WotC. Instead, if the continue to do well, which the reliable high-quality of their products virtually garuntees, they can create something here that other companies have only dreamed of.

White Wolf and Green Ronin do this and I do not see how Paizo doing it could possibly be harmful to the industry or to us as consumers.

Hell the very existence of Pathfinder can be very good for the quality of product produced by Wizards or even Green Ronin or White Wolf. But mostly wizards.

Each company's game represents a different style of gameplay.

The interesting thing is pathfinder is no occupying a spot that wizards just left and wizards is occupying a completely new spot.

Overall, this is an exciting time to be playing games and I am proud to be one of Pathfinder's 25,000( my first paycheck at my new job is buying PFCS and the beta release.)

I must admit, I have never been an FR fan, Greyahwk was always my fantasy setting of choice and now that its lost support I will be buying the Pathfinder and making it my new standby.

I only like ot have one setting of each flavor,which is why,for different occasions and playstyles, I like Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Eberron, in addition Greyahwk/Pathfinder.

Characters do NOT retire after the first year.

Characters retire at 12th level. The highest you could possibly be in the first year is level 9.

We won't give much thought to the exact nature of the character modifications that'll need to happen August 2009--we'll start on that about the time Jason finalizes the Beta rules into the final PRPG rules.

So I take that to mean a conversion will definitely be taking place for the characters we progress? So this whole year 0 will not be for nothing for our characters?

While we are answering questions, I have a couple.

1.)How often are you allowed to perform to make money? Once per adventure? Once per day within the adventure? Only "in between" adventures?

2.) If in an adventure I find a +1 frost Longsword and I decide use it until the end of the adventure and I get disarmed or sundered, what does that do for my ability to buy it after the adventure? Do we as a group lose it as treasure or do I need to pay for a Make whole or mending? or some other spell? Is it simply gone forever( along with the gold it was worth to the party)?

I claim 1788 for Tandor

No Thankyou Paizo.

This looks awesome. I was eagerly anticipating this all night, it was hard to concentrate on the PRPG Red Hand of Doom I was running.

And it didnt disappoint. I am now excited to play my first Taldan Gnomish Bard and get back to OP after a years hiatus after my LG group broke up after Gen con 2007.

What if we do not run our game out of a gaming store,but rather we have a group who gathers in a coffeehouse to the play the game with advertising for local players,etc. done online, would we qualify to run it for free or would I need to pay the 'small fee'?

Additionally, is there any word on what the fee is going to be now that we are closer to the release date?

Couple things I noticed:

You seem to have forgotten knowledges. Thats kind of important.

Also, the sheet seems kind of crowded and it seems like it may be just a bit much.

Otherwise, very good sheet.

I just got done running a pathfinder converted Red Hand of Doom run through parts 1 and 2 of the adventure and so far they are loving it. The even love what it does with the enemies.

One of the bads used grappled on them and in the end, thanks to the new mechanic everyone was laughing and smiling in the end instead of bored.

One major source of complaints was the rampant use of the melee touch attack for sorceror powers and wizard powers(enchantment school) and for some of the cleric powers. The player's would really love to not have their squishy attempting to get up close and personal just to use what look like really cool abilities otherwise.

Also new fighter rocks. He is undisputably the best at using weapons ever, even at the cost of his other features. The overall feeling at the table was that the slight power creep was needed as it allowed everyone to be better at what the y do without breaking the game wide open.

Channel energy has been working like a charm( so much so that the paladin has actually used it in addition to the cleric, a feat I can claim to have never seen with the old turning), but then again we havent run into many undead. That'll be next time.

One complaint I got was from a guy who was attempting to convert a beloved 3.5 character into a pathfinder and was upset to see his air and fire domains no longer let him turn/rebuke elementals as though they were undead, but I suppose that was just a casualty of the changes in the system.

As for barbarian rage point, everyone was super excited by them. They worked very well and after the night was over I had players who usually only play casters clamoring to play the barbarian and( due to an awesome demonstration) the monk, classes which havent seen play at my table for more than a level or so dip since the early days of 3.5.

The only other problem I ran into was a rather confusing rapid shot/ many shot overlap problem, where the player wanted to use both at once and I was unable to divine a clear answer out of the rules.

Otherwise, the game ran much more smoothly than it had when we had played the same adventure in 3.5 and the game really seemed to be everything we had hoped 4th ed. would bring.

Another interesting thing is that since the two do not seem to be incompatable with each other ( as both are phrased "as part of a full attack action") Is it possible to fire 3 arrows in two shots using both feats at once, or is this expressly forbidden somewhere.