[Namikaze]

I can understand that.  For what it's worth, I really like /dev/grrl.  I've watched her develop, and I'll admit that a part of me is rather proud to see her striking out somewhat on her own.  The Safehouses book was especially delightful for that reason.  Without her, the book would have been rather like a catalog of things to put into the Advanced Lifestyles rules.  I also understand the purpose of the FNG in something like this - in addition to being generally great fodder for newb questions, it also gives the feeling that the world is rather dynamic, and that things are constantly changing.  I'm a fan. 

[martinchaen]

Would you say you're a Ma'fan?

[Mirikon]

Puns like that deserve phonebooking.

[Namikaze]

Would you say you're a Ma'fan?

Ouch!  I want to find a way to quote that, but my existing signature is too long.  Maybe I'll put it in my personal text. 

[Ishmell]

Would you say you're a Ma'fan?

Ouch!  I want to find a way to quote that, but my existing signature is too long.  Maybe I'll put it in my personal text. 

Punsters are the worst sort of people, almost as bad as.........

[horngeek]

Wouldn't most of the 'complete dumb idiot' questions have been asked already, though?  By this point, I reckon you're at the stage where a lot of info may be... specialist, shall we say?  So, you've got the situation where however experienced people are in general, there's something about the specific situation that their experiences may not cover.  The best Mage might know stuff all about... to be on-topic, disease prevention?

On the note of Stolen Souls, for whoever made the conversation about Mary Mallon and passing on the disease deliberately- this is actually an interesting case to make here, because Typhoid Mary completely refused to even consider the possibility that she was a Typhoid carrier.  She reacted angrily to suggestions that she might have done so, she continued going on exactly as she had been to the point where she had to be taken into quarantine by force (and refused to have her gall bladder removed, which would have solved the issue).  When released from quarantine after three years, on the explicit condition that she agree to stop working as a cook and take reasonable precautions to not pass on the disease... she changed her name to Mary Brown, went right back to cooking, and still didn't wash her hands.  She proceeded to do so for five more years, changing jobs regularly (which kept the authorities from finding her), and only stopped when she was put back into quarantine, this time for the rest of her life. 

In this case, it was blind ignorance and stubborness, but I imagine a deliberate spread by Patient Zero would look very similar. 

[Bull]

Wouldn't most of the 'complete dumb idiot' questions have been asked already, though?  By this point, I reckon you're at the stage where a lot of info may be... specialist, shall we say?  So, you've got the situation where however experienced people are in general, there's something about the specific situation that their experiences may not cover.  The best Mage might know stuff all about... to be on-topic, disease prevention?

The problem is, every edition as writers and publishers we have to think about new players.  While we use and pull from older source material, we can't really expect every player to be familiar with them.  So when you're referencing something from an older edition like, say, Bug City, or Dunklezahn's assassination, or the Nightwraith Incident, the Nanosecond Buyout, Deus, Year of the Comet, the Artifact Rush, Super Tuesday, Sam Verner, the Mana Storms in Australia, Yomi Island in Japan, Kid Stealth's custom cyberlegs, Argent, Jack Skater, Hatchetman, Cyberzombies, the Night of Rage, UGE, Goblinization, decking naked with program carriers, Boosted Reflexes, FAB... 

You get the idea.  There's a crapton of data out there.  We have a couple HUNDRED sourcebooks at this point.  Even if every book and every novel was available in PDF (WHich they aren't for one reason or another), that's a couple thousand dollars to purchase them all, and god only knows how long reading them.  We can't expect every player and GM to know all of this information.

So when you're talking about something that's ancient history, but is relevant to the current discussion, you can assume that all of the runners on Jackpoint would know this stuff.  That's where a newbie comes in.  Because they can ask a stupid "Who's Deus" type of question, and not lose credibility the way Kane or Bull would.  And then that gives us, as writers, an excuse to summarize Deus and the Renraku Arc shutdown while maintaining some kind of fictional structural integrity.

[horngeek]

True enough, and as one of the new players myself, I thank you for making the effort! 

[Bruce]

Butch's dilemma was considered a VERY long time ago.  "If the Kingdom of God could only be brought into existence by torturing to death an innocent child, would it be worth the cost?"

Although that's an evil to achieve a positive result.  Butch's dilemma deals with avoiding a negative result; the potential extermination of every biological sapient being on Earth. Given the magnitude of the threat, what measures should be considered 'off-limits' and not to be used, even in the face of annihilation?

Even if you don't believe that's a possible result, Butch clearly does, and has clinical evidence to support that belief, given that the ONLY beings that proved to be immune were previously infected with HMHVV, or 'already dead' in some senses of the word.

So, no, I don't think that comparisons between Butch and Mengele are very fair.