I recently asked this question about usage of a . although it's pretty must answered, I had a non-fighting situation in mind and ended up with several fighting situations answers.  So here I reiterate my question for a non-fighting situation : Can we get some kind of leverage from already touching or being in proximity of an eventual target?  Take this situation: You are a caster and you are in a parlay with a foe. Discussion goes pretty well and you keep talking and moving around while arguing as peacefully as possible. You get to a point where both you and your foe are now close to each other. You put your hand on his shoulder (or shake his hand) and your foe confesses an abominable betrayal. At that moment, you decide this parlay was useless and prefer to see your foe suffer rather than become your ally.  Since you are already touching you target, can you get any kind of advantage from the fact that you are already making a contact that would allow you to inflict the spell's effect on the target?
I came to think about some situations where it would be almost impossible to miss a melee spell attack (target is grappling you or vice versa, target is holding you or is close to you, your character already has it's hand on the target, etc.). How do you manage those situations?    Do you give an advantage to the caster? Does the spell automatically succeed? Or you just don't ask yourself the question and just play along with the base rules?
Tag scores are not updated and the issue is getting worse Prove that $(ma, mb) = |m|(a, b)\ $ [GCD & LCM Distributive Law] I'm trying to prove that $(ma, mb) = $|$m$|$(a, b)$ , where $(ma, mb)$ is the greatest common divisor between $ma$ and $mb$. My thoughts: If $(ma, mb) = d$ , then $d$|$ma$ and $d$|$mb$ → $d$|$max + mby$ → $d$|$m(ax+by)$. This implies that $d$|$m$ or $d$|$(ax+by)$. This is the same as  $d$|$m$ or $d$|$a$ and $d$|$b$, so $d$|$m$ or $d$|$(a,b)$. This is the same as $d$|$m|$ or $d|(a,b)$, so $d$|$|m|(a,b)$. I don't know what to do. Why are so many forces explainable using inverse squares when space is three dimensional? How to prevent SIGPIPEs (or handle them properly) How to secure database passwords in PHP? Identification of fuzzy insect in Pennsylvania I live in south eastern Pennsylvania, USA. About a month ago I came across this very peculiar insect. Its body was about an inch long, it was fuzzy, and it had a long proboscis(?) and long orange legs.  I've been wondering about it ever since. Can anyone identify it? When lecturing about conservation of energy in the 1960s, Richard Feynman remarked:     It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives “28” —always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.    50 some years later, have we made any progress in terms of understanding the fundamental nature of what energy is? Get polynomial interpolation formula NOR Gate is Working Correctly with Vcc Pin Disconnected Firefox doesn't launch in Ubuntu 13.04 Firefox starts when I use sudo in the terminal, but not from the launcher. All the other apps work like a charm, just not Firefox. How can I fix this? Consider the group $\mathbb{Q}$ under addition of rational numbers. If $H$ is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Q}$ with finite index, then $H = \mathbb{Q}$.  I just saw this on our exam earlier and was stumped on how to show this. Any ideas? If background applications can't launch automatically how does Cardcase launch on a location change? Facebook: Ways to preserve image quality of uploaded images? Allow rejected editors to be @replied to Quoting in ssh $host $FOO and ssh $host "sudo su user -c $FOO" type constructs I often end up issuing complex commands over ssh; these commands involve piping to awk or perl one-lines, and as a result contain single quotes and $'s.  I have neither been able to figure out a hard and fast rule to do the quoting properly, nor found a good reference for it.  For instance, consider the following:  # what I'd run locally: CMD='pgrep -fl java | grep -i datanode | awk '{print $1}' # this works with ssh $host "$CMD": CMD='pgrep -fl java | grep -i datanode | awk '"'"'{print $1}'"'"   (Note the extra quotes in the awk statement.)  But how do I get this to work with, e.g. ssh $host "sudo su user -c '$CMD'"?  Is there a general recipe for managing quotes in such scenarios?.. Applications of complex numbers to solve non-complex problems Recently I asked a question regarding the diophantine equation $x^2+y^2=z^n$ for $x, y, z, n \in \mathbb{N}$, which to my surprise was answered with the help complex numbers. I find it fascinating that for a question which only concerns integers, and whose answers can only be integers, such an elegant solution comes from the seemingly unrelated complex numbers - looking only at the question and solution one would never suspect that complex numbers were lurking behind the curtain!  Can anyone give some more examples where a problem which seems to deal entirely with real numbers can be solved using complex numbers behind the scenes? One other example which springs to mind for me is solving a homogeneous second order differential equation whose coefficients form a quadratic with complex roots, which in some cases gives real solutions for real coefficients but requires complex arithmetic to calculate.  (If anyone is interested, the original question I asked can be found here: )  EDIT:  I just wanted to thank everyone for all the great answers! I'm working my way through all of them, although some are beyond me for now! How do I draw a badge on my Dock icon using Cocoa? "shyer" or "shier" My Longman dictionary states that the comparative of 'shy' is 'shyer'. However, at least two online dictionaries also give the form 'shier' as being acceptable:  and . On an English language  I came across a reference to British (shyer) vs. American (shier) spelling. But an Ngram chart shows that even in American English 'shyer' is much more used.  My problem is that I've been told that it is definitely wrong, but if it's in dictionaries then... has there been a change to what is wrong?   P.S.: Orbiting a specific point - Orbiting Camera How would I create a camera that with the mouse, it allows you to orbit around a specifc position, with the camera always facing that point? I would also like it to be able to always be at a constant distance from the point, and be able to orbit around it in every direction.   Any ideas? Often I see code blocks pasted into questions with no formatting, or terrible formatting.  It's sometimes quite a chore to fix these: you have to either manually space out each line, or paste the code into an IDE, format it there, and paste it back.  Could we have a button/function where you could highlight a code block, and it would turn this:  foreach (var i in stuff) { if (i==1) { Whatever(); } }   into this:  foreach (var i in stuff) {   if (i==1) {     Whatever();   } }   I realise the function would have to work differently based on the language in the code block. Perhaps  it could use the same rules as the prettify code.  Also, it wouldn't be a big deal if it gets the language wrong and breaks the code, since you can always just ctrl+z.