synthozoic

I think the example to follow would be bird legs.

When digitigrade mammals get on their hind legs, it's not a very stable position for them. They can usually only stay in this stance for short distances and they seem only able to hop a bit. Digitigrade legs don't really seem very efficient or flexible enough for proper bipedal motion.

If I look at mammal digitigrade legs, the motion vectors seem all wrong for bipedalism. Such legs are great for quadrapedal motion allowing for huge body stretching leaps for great running speed. But on humanoid body, the balance seems all wrong unless counterbalanced somehow by bending the spine and hips over and extending a tail like birds, or better still, kangaroos

But this is a science/fantasy game, who says you have to be constrained by real biological anatomy requirements?

Actually just ignore this post. You folks have already covered everything I could possibly say about this in great detail. Never mind.

Okay, I can live with that. That's certainly how I was in ancient days. Adulthood has taught me many coping mechanisms. I can engage in idle chitchat with the best of them--but inside, if it's not a subject I'd ordinarily froth over, I just mark time until the zero interest conversation ends and I can get back to reading my book or the Web.

But I don't think it's mere introversion. There are introverts who are not nerdy and there are nerds who are not introverts--I think Feynman was one of those.

And maybe it's not fair to class Feynman as nerd. Nerd doesn't necessarily mean genius but it does seem to imply higher than average intelligence at weird and mostly useless things.

Maybe the term is just useless in the end. Maybe it's just only pejorative for any kid who's just a little different.

And damn proud of it! I work hard to build this empire of dirt I lord over! Mwhahaha!

As a nerd (Who dislikes the use of word "geek" to describe people like me. Geeks are the folks who shoot cannon balls at themselves or hammer nails up their noses in circus sideshows.), I need no special day to fly my freak flag! For me every day is nerd day!

Ah, but Durraken brought it up and encouraged us to speculate, right? Thus our descent in madness is precipitated!

But as I said before, I'm cool with a handwavium explanation as long as it's consistent. The game background is canon, I dig.

Right, that's the "tuning" method I alluded to before. That's probably the simplest way. As you say this could also explain the naming scheme. The names are a bit like channels on a cable box.

But it's possible that some of the universes or planes of different realities mentioned in the game, and by Durraken earlier, might not be the same as the alternate histories and parallel earths. The physics here might be different and they can't be reachable by "tuning" via a portal machine.

So I think we need to make clear which planes are just parallel Earths and which are something else entirely.

Perhaps, but that makes a lot of assumptions on how the geometry works.

If we were go with speculations in current, real physics then the situation is a lot more complicated.

Forexample, if we go with Ekpyrosis and Brane Theory, then the universe next door is, at some points, barely the width of an atom away from us in along the 5th or whatever dimensional axis. The problem of course is how to point our portal generator at right angles to reality, the four dimensions we know about.

If we go with classical, isotropic but widely separated Hubble Volumes, the distances these portals would have to jump are staggering--many hundreds of thousands of undecillions of lightyears. At those distances the odds of hitting a parallel Earth at random are vanishingly small.

If we go with Linde and Bousso's Eternal Chaotic Inflation, the distances between separate space-time manifolds is just mind melting. But it's even worse than the Hubble Volumes because these bubbles of space-time would only be reachable by traveling huge distances through hyperspace. There may be a 5 dimensional speed limit that we don't know about yet.

But of course this is a game about comic book physics so we can just make something up and then stay consistent to it.

Maybe it's just a tuning situation where the more dissimilar the universe's history is the harder it is to "tune it in" and open a portal into it. And this is why portals so often open so conveniently into parallel Earths instead of empty space.

As long as we are consistent about our hand waving, I'm cool with it.

Well, right, the moment we allow for longer strings of characters then, yes, each universe in an infinity of universes can be labeled--I think this even works for uncountable infinities as well.

But if it's just a numbering system, that's kind of disappointing because, a label, Xi Pi 99-32, doesn't really tell us anything about the parallel world we're linking to. I'd like a classification scheme built into this labeling system as well. So we can say, "All universes that start with 'omicron' are Earths that have been conquered by the Rikti. We'll want to avoid those."

But this gets me to thinking about one of the assumptions behind intercosmic portals. Why do they always seem to open onto a parallel Earth? I'd figure that if the Portal Corporation is just testing the equipment and pointing the machine at random, the portal would most likely open into the space between the galaxies in some other universe. I'd assume this was true because of the huge ratio in favor of empty space to planets in a given universe.

Why does the door so conveniently open onto some largely undisturbed patch of land on a parallel Earth?

Yep, assuming a countably infinite number of parallel universes, they'll run out of names soon.

maybe it's not a coordinate system at all. It may be that the Greek letters refer to specific variations on Earth Prime's history. All Nazi Earths get the rho designation and the universes where John Lennon isn't shot start with the letter xi or something. And so on.

I coined a word for this stuff: Cosmonymics, the system of naming universes.

That's a clever way of doing it but I think I disagree with the use of the word "entropy" for the concept I think you're trying to get across here.

Going with the definition of entropy used in thermodynamics, maximum entropy would be extremely boring indeed. By definition, maximum entropy would allow for no activity of any kind at all. (For a good understanding of what universal, maximum entropy would be like, I suggest reading Paul Davies' The Last Three Minutes.)

I think maybe what you want here is something more vague like "purity" and "corruption" or maybe something like the Chinese idea of yin and yang.

It does sound very intriguing, and I really liked the 2-6 thread too but I think I'll pass at the moment. Perhaps maybe later I'll join. If I do, I think I'll do it with a different set of character(s) than the telepolice squad. Only because I have alt-itis and am always dreaming up characters. I hope we'll see more of Doc Onnoroc though!

Good luck everyone! Join in!

Well there are PnP systems that attempt to address characters of similar levels of power. Amber Diceless for example. As spare as the rule set is there, people could agree to be constrained by it in roleplaying in this game I suppose. But it's true that characters of this level of power are really hard to constrain by any set of rules. The options their powers open up to them are just too enormous to really quantify rigorously and in a balanced way.

They become marysues or plot devices. Were I GM, I'd retire them.

I apologize for iterating the obvious. I'll read the thread through to see if I have anything to contribute hasn't been said already.

Good point. Often the players are a group of heroes of all roughly equal strength, or even better, with overlapping strengths to compensate for their various weaknesses. That way everyone has a crucial part to play. If one player has all the powers, or is so immensely powerful that even their weaknesses aren't all that weak, what do they need with the other players? That makes it boring for everyone.

Another good point. Maybe Galactus is a bad example. He definitely should be an NPC, not a player. Unless of course he was playing in a group that had beings of similar power.

But then you run into another problem, at least as a GM, where if you have player characters of that strength, you may run out of believable challenges for them.

Well when we get back into the CoX game itself, then it's the software that's king. You really can't do the equivalent of appealing to the GM in a table top game, except maybe by petitioning the Devs to nerf a powerset. The Devs try to write the software so the game is balanced. Players don't have system administrative access to actually change how the software runs on the servers.

This pretty much excludes certain character conceptions or actions.

Well, I think there is another way to win in collaborative roleplaying. It's to have the plot (or a subplot) evolve in a way that is satisfying to you. If you build a character and you think that some point they should die heroically or wind up in prison or just retire to make way for the younger heroes, then that doesn't necessarily mean that your character has to demonstrate they are the biggest can of whupass on planet. I think a lot of people in this hobby don't really mind losing fights or being, at least initially, frustrated from their goals--sane or insane--as long as those events happen in a way makes for a great read!

Some people make characters they are know are doomed to failure and they don't mind, just so long as the character doesn't look like a chump when doing so.

When Galactus shows up and threatens to eat the Earth, we know Reed Richards is gonna figure out a way to stop him. But it's okay because Galactus gets to posture a bunch and demonstrate he's a nearly invincible space alien that can shrug off nuclear weapons and what have you. If I were a player running Galactus, I wouldn't feel bad when Mr. Fantastic pulls out the Ultimate Nullifier because I had a hand in creating a story that lasted a few issues and made me one of the more interesting villains in superhero comics.

Does this make sense? It's why roleplaying games, while being zero sum in parts, are considered cooperative, positive sum games. The GM isn't the opponent, the players might occasionally be opponents but, if they are mature about it, they realize they are creating a story that's bigger than any of them.

I more or less agree with everything Fea said after this. (And am sorry I missed the beginning of this thread!)

Actually, what I find in my threads so far is that the frustrated hard science fiction writer in me starts imposing a lot of limits on my characters even before I start typing a move. I start thinking how a super-power might actually work and immediately rigor starts imposing lots of limitations in my mind. I start thinking, "Electricity doesn't work like that!" or "Fire has to work like this!" and so on. Have you actually ever been thrown through a plate glass window? It's a lot more bloody and damaging than most movies make it out to be. Batman or Captain America can't run much faster than 24 kph, no matter how much training he does or how many steroids he takes. Sports cars can't flip buses.

And so on.

God modding never really becomes a problem for me.

But having said that I have one or two characters that could one day evolve towards the kind of power Kang, Thor or Galactus has. At that point I just treat them like plot devices more than actual characters. And they stop being that fun for me because they really can't be played in interactive, collaborative fiction like we're all writing here.

I want to know where planet threatening evil stands on this scale. Where do we rank Galactus, Cthulhu or whatever? At this scale the evil becomes a lot less personal, in fact it becomes so abstract that one has has to wonder if it's terribly parochial of us to apply our narrow human definitions to a creature like Galactus.

Maybe I'm weird but, there are some area music intros in the game that I really like and then there some that I dislike. So much so that I'll stay in certain areas of the map and avoid others. Steel Canyon for example, how many of you out there find the Blyde Square intro teeth grittingly jarring? How many linger in the Copper District or Bronze Way to hear the whole intro because it sounds nice?

But never mind.

When I play my own music during the game, often it's just whatever I have randomized in rhythmbox, on another machine. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Man or Astroman? and Laika and the Cosmonauts.

Actually, if I have a choice in the matter, I'd rather be like Citadel, only less human looking and far, far older!

Well, I can't speak for all of us old cats but, I'd say, "Aw! You kids ain't gonna listen to a me anyway so go ahead! Make your own damn mistakes!"

There was Stochastic Fats in Top 10 but he's dead. I suppose some might call Strata in DCU fat but I think she's really blocky and hypermuscled. There's the Penguin, right?