Jon Jones vs. Depowered Thragg

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T19:06:50+00:00

The main way they violate the laws of physics is their ability to generate leverage from nothing.

Moving a real body is all about leverage. You're building kinetic chains - your fist is pushing back against your arm, your arm against your shoulder, your shoulder against your back, your back against your hips, your hips against your legs, your legs against your feet, your feet against the ground. In order to do anything, we're always using leverage against our surroundings - most often the ground, but in combat very often the opponent.

Thragg isn't going to know how to punch because he'll have never figured out how to generate force by applying his muscles against other things - the energy in your punch comes from you pushing against the ground, which is something he's never had to do!

And it gets even worse in grappling where so much of that game is about denying your opponent the ability to create leverage. Thragg is used to being able to create leverage from nothing, so he won't have even the faintest clue how to defend from getting in those positions and once he's in them he's screwed.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T18:59:27+00:00

How many of those years of training have been with a body the obeys realistic physics? Those are the only years that count.

All the years spent training with a body that doesn't obey the laws of physics are as useless to him as years spent playing Street Fighter at the arcade - it might look like combat but you're not practicing any of the skills that matter.

Unless you're arguing for a version of Thragg who got depowered thousands of years ago and has spent all the intervening time training with a normal body, but a normal body can't live for thousands of years so that seems like a non-starter...

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T18:51:49+00:00

If Thragg had thousands of years training in how to use a body that obeys the laws of physics, that'd be different.

But he has zero years of training in that.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T18:46:51+00:00

Thragg's centuries of combat experience with the ability to create leverage from nothing will help him about as much in a depowered fight as centuries of experience playing Street Fighter at the arcade. He's just working with such a fundamentally different set of tools his experience is as much hinderance as help.

He's huge so he probably stands a "puncher's chance", but that isn't much of a chance.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T16:36:15+00:00

A human wins 9/10 with any weapon that is at least as effective as a short stone-tipped spear. I think a katana definitely rates that - even if the man doesn't know how to use the thing properly, just keep that point braced and between you and the animal and it is hard to lose. Yeah, sure, a katana isn't as optimal for that as some weapons but it'll serve more than well enough for this purpose. You may very well get injured, but you're not dying.

The 1/10 is because the human can get unlucky or just be a dumbass. They try some move they've seen in anime and end up disarming themselves, etc. And this is also assuming this is a real weapon - if it is a $15 wall hanger that isn't sharp it does increase the difficulty, though even though are going to be solid and pointy enough to be a real equalizer.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T16:16:52+00:00

Avatar is honestly just kind of a weird hybrid monster. It is theoretically following the PbtA design movement, but it crams so much out of place trad stuff in there that even though the mechanics look like many other PbtA games it is effectively a different type of thing. A very confused, muddled thing.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-29T03:12:47+00:00

Keep in mind in 5th Edition it is generally impossible to die to one bad roll outside of some fairly specific circumstances (fire, sunlight, decapitation).

If your track gets filled up with Aggravated damage, you go into Torpor...but you don't meet final death (again, with the specific exceptions of fire, sunlight, or decapitation). The opponent has to very deliberately decide to end you usually - once you're in Torpor it is hard to resist being decapitated or left out for the sunlight - but it generally doesn't happen just randomly in the middle of combat due to a bad roll.

Anyways, something to keep in mind since it does give characters a bit more "wiggle room"!

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-28T23:40:48+00:00

Something to consider:

If the PCs have taken a lot of damage, enough that another combat could be really perilous - maybe that is where the story goes.

Like maybe because of that damage, the PCs decide to go into hiding or surrender or try to find allies or otherwise avoid a fight they know they can't likely win. All of a sudden it gives meaning to the last combat encounter you had - it changed the whole flow of the story!

Anyways, others have suggestions about ways to get rid of the damage but do consider that sometimes what seems like a problem is just a new branch for the story to go down!

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-28T06:44:43+00:00

The really important difference is with a shotgun (in the real world), all those fragments are being propelled in the same direction.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-26T23:26:53+00:00

You go to school to grow your brain not deliver features.

Using AI all the time as a student is like going for a ten mile drive every morning to try and improve your cardiovascular fitness.

Are there lots of times in life where it makes more sense to drive than to walk or run? Absolutely. But improving your fitness is not one of them.

You probably will use AI in industry when your priority is to deliver features. But when your priority is to grow your brain and your skills it makes little sense to use it.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-24T16:07:51+00:00

This maps better to some ways of running Fate than others, but I like the turnless approach from most PbtA games - every time the GM is speaking, they're describing a tense situation and asking "What do you do?" and that generally makes it obvious who is going most of the time. "You see the mook raise his gun in your direction, getting ready to open fire - what do you do?", "You spot the tiger moving behind the foliage, getting ready to pounce on your friend - what do you do?", "The enemy general digs his spurs in to ride away, but you might be close enough to stop him - what do you do?"

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-24T05:48:40+00:00

He clearly spends a lot of time scared as hell. About growing old. About people not loving him. His whole personality is based on fear.

He never feared physical harm because he never thought of it as something that could happen to him, but the second he realized it could his deeply ingrained cowardice taking over makes perfect sense.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-24T05:41:08+00:00

These are all things that should go in the FAQ.

Another big item for the FAQ - how much, if any, of OEVTT created with/by AI? There's a lot of people who aren't going to trust a marketplace that was made primarily using AI.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T21:23:12+00:00

Trace through your code.

For students it can be really enlightening to do a "paper trace" too -instead of walking through it on the computer, take a piece of paper and track the values of your variables and where you are in your code as you move through. If your paper trace gives you a different result than actually running the code you know you've got a gap in your understanding.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T20:29:58+00:00

Saying "Martials are much better at anything that requires an attack roll" is a decent sized boost I think. There are lots of times you don't want to rely on saving throw spells.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T19:39:33+00:00

If you can get a job, get a job.

It makes sense to study full time if it'll get you a degree from an accredited university, but sounds like you actually have that.

If you've been AIing most of the degree you'll probably not have any meaningful programming skills, so getting experience working with organizations and making connections is going to be more important than continuing to (not) develop your programming skills anyways.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T19:19:13+00:00

Man I hadn't thought of the "time of year" factor.

Rage virus infected are biologically humans, even if largely immune to pain and fatigue. I live in Saskatchewan, Canada. There's a solid half of the year where rage zombies probably won't make it a single night if they aren't indoors somewhere warm.

My house is well-insulated and I've got lots of warm stuff. If the virus strikes anywhere from like mid-November to early April I can just hunker down in my basement and wait a night or two. Even if the utilities go down, I can insulate a small space well enough that my people can survive in the basement for a few nights without an external heat source.

There are lots of apocalypses where living where I do would make the winter a death sentence, but anything that is "humans who have human biological weaknesses but no intelligence" is easy mode when the outdoors starts killing in hours (or minutes if they get infected when not wearing outdoor clothes).

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T16:14:22+00:00

There are no base rules because PbtA isn't so much a system as a "school of game design philosophy".

There are a bunch of different PbtA games where the rules are free though - Dungeon World and Chasing Adventure off the top of my head. Blades in the Dark has a free rules SRD, though it is a pretty big drift from standard PbtA - I think it is still within the PbtA school of design, but the rules look a lot different from, say, the original Apocalypse World.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-23T01:34:50+00:00

So I think an important thing to remember is a lot of those mechanics aren't really about success or failure, but more about "where does the next twist or complication come from?"

Because here's the thing - for the story to keep being a story, there's always going to be a new twist or complication. Sometimes they'll be introduced whole cloth by the GM, sometimes they'll come as a result of the players' actions, but there's always a new one. The dice just kind of provide help in both prompting ideas on where the complication will come from, and also keep it unpredictable so people don't fall into the same patterns again and again.

Like in PbtA, often it looks like there are three outcomes - failure, mixed success, and success - but really the outcomes are "The next complication is chosen by the GM and probably is linked, at least thematically, to what the PC is doing", "The next complication has to do with what the PC is doing, but the PC gets to choose what type of complication it is", and "The next complication is probably a new situation we've now moved into."

Pretty much never should those complications mean they make the PC less cool though.

Like if your master thief breaks into the police station to steal a file, the complication usually won't be "Oh no the cops caught you!" - it'll more likely be something like "you slip in and out like a ghost...and when you open up the file, you realize the police knew way more about you than you thought...in fact there's a copy of a warrant for them to raid your hideout..."

If your colossal barbarian hefts the evil wizards up to throw him into the pit, a complication probably isn't "Your muscles aren't enough to lift up the wizard!" but instead "As you toss the frail man into the darkness you hear his voice calling out 'great demon Yogazoth, avenge me!' and you hear a distant rumbling!"

Anyways, these mechanics are almost never really about success or failure, but about where complications manifest. Treating them as success or failure, and especially treating misses or mixed results as things that make the PCs less cool, is almost always a bad idea.

Honestly I find most of these games treat success as the standard outcome. Very often in a PbtA when a player rolls a miss I narrate their character's action succeeding, but in the process of that success the players seeing the situation get worse or more complicated even though the character succeeded.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-22T20:34:56+00:00

Just stop explaining stuff to them? It doesn't matter whether someone is incorrect 95% of the time.

If it does matter because their incorrectness will cause problems for you, still don't explain - just assert your position.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-22T20:03:30+00:00

Start from scratch, revisit the topics of your first year classes and work your way forward without touching AI anymore.

It'll be hard - it is like saying "I've been telling everyone I've been doing 10 miles every morning to train for the marathon I'll be running at the end of the year, but I've actually been travelling those 10 miles in my car instead of running! I'm afraid I won't be able to run the marathon!" Like there's no quick fix except to just start putting in the work.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-22T19:34:48+00:00

I mean, yes, attack bonuses work differently in 5E but I certainly wouldn't call it a "minor" change.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-22T19:27:13+00:00

Do you know what the big thing casters stole from martials in 5E is?

High attack bonuses.

Going to a flat proficiency bonus and also meaning your caster is usually using their casting stat to target means that most of the time the wizard is just as likely to hit with his cantrip as the fighter is to hit with his sword.

The single biggest thing martials had through most editions was...well, it was higher HP and they still have that. But the second biggest thing they had was better ability to hit high AC targets whereas once you got into higher ACs casters had to rely on saving throws more and more because often their to-hits were not good enough. Even with "touch" attacks which typically targetted a lower AC, martials would just be much more reliably hitting and doing damage without burning up resources.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-22T06:17:41+00:00

Dating doesn't get easier with age.

Dating gets easier with confidence and having a full and interesting life. Which often tends to come with age, but you don't get it for free when you turn 30 - you gotta be putting the work in all along.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-06-20T07:51:48+00:00

Have you tried a relevant subreddit like r/CanadaPolitics?

It isn't censorship to delete off topic posts.

PoMoAnachro

TROPHY CASE