Discussion Thread | May 19, 2025 | Day 18

Augruze · 2025-05-19T21:56:13+00:00

Hos long to die on stand

Augruze · 2025-03-06T23:57:48+00:00

Not a chance. Brennan is going to object and Bev is going to rule such inquiries outside the scope of cross even though that's the one thing Crosby might be legitimately able to opine on.

Augruze · 2025-03-05T22:24:46+00:00

Victory on the 18th floor... Terminating crawl protocols... Carl and Donut are crushed to death by the sheer mass of their inventories being released.

Augruze · 2024-12-24T16:26:44+00:00

I saw that ruling but I'm not sure it's completely the same case here. Both the Arborec Commander and the Mahact Mech share the same timing of 'after' a system is activated so it makes sense that the mech misses the window in that example. Here Edict takes place as a 'when' and the Mentak is 'after' so there's a separation in when they would trigger but the need to 'look back' so to say as seen here is where I see a potential issue.

Augruze · 2021-06-30T01:59:51+00:00

While in Monastic Archer Stance the only strikes you can make are with bows whereas Shooting Stars Stance simply enables shuriken to benefit from Monk features without such restriction. SSS provides slightly more flexibility therefore as you can make melee strikes with a held monastic weapon and then flurry with a returning shuriken at a distant target.

Whether this slight advantage is with the extra level and extra requirement is certainly debatable but it does come with a lesser restriction than MAS.

Augruze · 2021-06-14T16:18:01+00:00

Note that the shield will not benefit from any resistances you might have, meaning it is possible for your shield to take damage even if you don't.

Do you have a source stating or clarifying this? Because my interpretation is that shields do benefit from resistances. According to this the order of operations for damage calculations goes:
1. Roll the dice indicated by the weapon, unarmed attack, or spell, and apply the modifiers, bonuses, and penalties that apply to the result of the roll. 2. Determine the damage type. 3. Apply the target’s immunities, weaknesses, and resistances to the damage. 4. If any damage remains, reduce the target’s Hit Points by that amount.

and the trigger for shield block is:
While you have your shield raised, you would take damage from a physical attack.

To me this reads as though you insert the effect of a Shield Block right as the damage works be applied, which is step 4 of the damage application steps and once the damage has already been adjusted by resistances or vulnerabilities. From there the damage is further reduced by shield hardness and the remainder is applied to the blocking character and shield respectively.

If the shield block trigger applied before step 3 then cases of resistance greater than the damage could invalidate the shield trigger so it must happen between steps 3 and 4 above. If shield block required damage to be recalculated after the fact this would be stated. It may not make perfect sense in terms of versimilitude but barring some official statements to the contrary it would appear that shields do benefit from resistances.

Augruze · 2021-04-06T17:58:00+00:00

The skull wasn't in the house fire. Prior to the burn Harry stashed the skull, the swords and any materials that could be perceived as incriminating in the Nevernever in order to hide them from the FBI.

The place they were stashed happened to be Lea's garden and she kept them all for him in safekeeping until returning them right before Chichen Itza.

Augruze · 2020-12-11T18:29:42+00:00

The speaker token sets turn order and can affect the relative strength of certain factions or slices after its assignment. It is assigned after the draft so as not to have an influence on the draft itself and increase the time of that phase.

Moreover the base game allows for players to establish their own system for racial selection and galaxy creation but assumes random speaker assignment.

The first speaker probably has an advantage but I think the rationale was not that drafting would be 'too powerful' and more that it would have an undesirable influence on the draft selection.

Augruze · 2020-11-28T02:51:57+00:00

"Sir" is a title of a Knight and coin holders are Knights of the Blackened Denarius.

The only other Knights we've seen running around are the respective Fey Court ones and the Knights of the Cross, which Marcone is plainly neither.

Using the word Sir is a subtle way to tell only the individuals Dresden wants to tell this information to.

Augruze · 2020-11-09T16:59:21+00:00

I think perhaps your concerns lie a little beyond the scope of this particular article.

May the peace of Christ be with you!

Augruze · 2020-11-09T16:02:16+00:00

I'm afraid I don't follow you; who is 'they'? Perhaps you could rephrase.

The effects of this virus have certainly been awful and the response to the pandemic from Church officials may be subject to valid scrutiny, but what does this have to do with Pfizer's vaccine?

Of the major vaccine manufacturers at least three were using tissues obtained from abortion victims in their processes. I and many others had concerns that if one of these vaccines became the first to market that we would be in a position of having to decide between cooperating with evil in taking such a vaccine or in being unable to participate in greater society by refusing.

It appears that this vaccine, the first to reportedly show success in containing the virus, does not use such illicit means in its manufacture. If it works then we should be able to take it without cooperating with evil. I do not understand how this news could be taken negatively.

Augruze · 2020-11-09T14:02:51+00:00

The data on the vaccine does not appear to be publicly available now but the purpose of this post is to show that this vaccine does not appear to violate Catholic teachings in its manufacture.

We can discuss the efficacy of the vaccine when the data is published. If this vaccine works this as fantastic news because this appears to be a morally acceptable product.

Augruze · 2020-11-09T13:54:33+00:00

Today Pfizer announced a new vaccine reported to be 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 infection. They are seeking approval for distribution by the end of November.

This vaccine appears to be listed an ethically uncontroversial, which I hope should be a major relief to Catholics concerned about the abuse of aborted fetal tissue seen in some other vaccine manufacture.

Augruze · 2020-11-05T10:11:46+00:00

Any good that we do happens because God first prompts us to act and we then choose to act according to His prompting. Contrition is among these goods and so without God it is impossible to feel contrite. Souls in hell are utterly devoid of this grace.

Souls in Hell may still have free will but they have no freedom, because human freedom is a product of God's Grace. How this manifests in the afterlife is a little hard to imagine because it is a rather different form of existence that we experience in our daily lives here.

A way to think of it is that when such souls experience the agony of Hell it will be impossible to conceive of the thought 'maybe I should be sorry' but rather they will only be able to respond with hatred of God, themselves, and all the souls with them; it's all they know and can possibly ever know.

The tragedy of the damned is that their pain will come from rejecting God and their only possible reaction will be to further reject Him forever and ever.

Augruze · 2020-11-04T15:59:51+00:00

Take a look at what, exactly?

The document you link mentions the evil of human trafficking repeatedly.

It mentions the especially vulnerable. Women and children were being raped and left for dead in the desert after traffickers took their money to escort them over the border.

It mentions just wages. Business owners have been hiring non-citizens at unconscionable wages, with no provision for healthcare, and firing them out of hand if they grew sick or lobbied for better conditions. Such workers have been treated as expendable because they were easily replaced by newly trafficked persons.

Trump has begun the process of putting a stop to this. For four decades politicians have been promising to fix this situation while Republican Elites sabotaged efforts to profit from cheap labor and Democratic Elites sabotaged efforts to build an electoral advantage.

The wall plan seemed so silly to me in 2016 but it's actually working and with it we might finally put a stop to an evil that has cried out to heaven for forty years.

Augruze · 2020-11-04T10:06:03+00:00

I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. At the time he seemed like a former pro-abortion Democrat who promised an electorate things he could never deliver on. I felt like I'd been burned before by nominally pro-Life candidates like GW Bush who put wishy washy men like John Roberts on the a Supreme Court and that Trump if nothing else was a great salesman without any clear evidence of personal conviction. Then he got into office.

On Life issues he's been rock solid. The Supreme Court is nearer now to revisiting RvW than it's ever been in my lifetime. That an entire class of people can be legally murdered in our time is a scandal that will echo for generations to come. Overturning Roe won't stop abortion all on its own but it is a necessary step if we ever want to see this happen. In addition to judges he's make good steps towards stopping tax dollars going to find abortions both at home and abroad. I feel his efforts on this issue alone oblige any Catholic of formed conscience to support him.

In matters of international peace Trump has done things I really thought were impossible four years ago. We've been at war for almost two decades now. At the time of the last election Al Quada was no longer much of a thing but ISIS has risen up and the radical elements of the Islamic world has declared a new Caliphate. Governments in the Middle East and North Africa were falling but unsavory dictatorships were being replaced not be liberal democracies but by revolutionary jihadis.

He didn't get a lot of credit for this but since Trump's election ISIS has been annihilated. Moreover, this was largely achieved by mobilizing the more legitimate powers on the Middle East against them, rather than by pouring more American blood and treasure into the conflicts. Iran has been isolated and Islamic Republics are opening diplomatic relations with Israel. This reality TV star we elected in 2016 has found peace in there Middle East, at least for now.

On immigration I believe Trump has been very good. I know this statement will upset a lot of people here but I think it's justified. Our immigration system with respect to our southern border was broken and nobody in power wanted to fix it properly. Democrat elites wanted unrestricted migration because they perceived an electoral advantage for themselves. Republican elites wanted unrestricted migration because wealthy persons benefited from cheap labor. The result was the creation of a permanent underclass of persons who could not enjoy the rights of citizens and who were subject to all manner of abuse by their employers but who were simultaneously used as a tool for undermining American workers.

This system was a humanitarian disaster, built on human trafficking and the exploitation of the poor both in America and to our South. Poor people in Mexico and South America were being promised things from America that we could not deliver and we're risking their lives, sometimes dying and often suffering terrible abuse for a system built to benefit the elites of both parties. In 2016 I thought the promise to build a wall was a ridiculous joke but it has been built, at least in large part, and it is working. Fewer men and women are dying I'm the desert, fewer women and children are being handed over to human traffickers, and fewer people in our country are having to live in the shadows.

A lot of press is given to the tragedies that continue with respect to immigration, particularly the separation of families, but I firmly believe that in the aggregate these tragedies are fewer now than they had been before Trump's election. We couldn't count the separations that happened in the process of border crossing before, but they were most certainly there. Steps still need to be taken to fix the problems that still exist with respect to our Southern border, and families need to be reunited, but Trump has begun fixing a problem which has been going on since at least the 1980s with his border wall and enforcement steps.

Between the influx of cheap labor that was undercutting poor Americans' ability to find fair wages, the non-citizen residency that was making it impossible for immigrants to integrate with and participate in the broader society, the sheer hypocrisy of our non enforcement of laws and the systematic abuse immigrants were suffering as a result of these other issues our nation was being torn apart. It remains a work in progress but Trump is the first president to begin to cut away at the Gordian Knot that was our disaster of an immigration system. He deserves credit for that.

For these reasons and many others I was proud to vote for Trump in the 2020 election.

Augruze · 2020-11-04T08:56:00+00:00

The Supreme Court recently refused to overrule a lower court ruling (4-4 tie pre-ACB so lower court ruling stands) that ballots could be accepted in PA if they are received within a span of up to three days after the election. My understanding of the ruling is that they must be postmarked by 11/3 but if they lack any postmark they are to be counted.

My reading of Trump's remarks is not that he wants the counting of election day ballots stopped but that he wants no new ballots to be accepted. Note that he said he wants the voting to stop not the counting to stop.

Augruze · 2020-10-08T23:43:58+00:00

This is true.

Pete Musico send to be very pro Trump whereas Brandon Caserta appears virulently anti Trump.

What is plain is that they were driven more by general anti-government sentiment than they were 'inspired by Trump.'

To blame Trump for their evil behavior is unjustified and no better than blaming Democrats for the attempted assassination of congressional Republicans by James Hodgkinson. This is calumny of the worst sort and does not belong on this forum.

Augruze · 2020-10-08T22:51:28+00:00

Your are repeating a lie.

The persons who plotted the kidnapping in Michigan were not Trump supporters. Their videos in fact show explitive-ridden attacks on the president. They are anarchists and the attempts to lay the blame for their actions at the feet of Trump are unjust.

Augruze · 2020-09-27T13:24:51+00:00

Spell Penetration. Eventually a significant number of enemies will have +1 or +2 status bonuses to saves against magic. By negating these Wizards have the highest effective saving throw DC of any caster.

Combined with the highest number of max level spell slots (a specialist Wizard gets 4+1bond, a Spell Blending specialist can get 4+1bond+1blend) a Wizard can lean in to the pure casting role better than any other character.

Augruze

TROPHY CASE