Bright

[Ragitsu]

20 hours ago, DasBroot said:

About the same, I would think - where Jakoby bought up str, con, stun, and tracking or discriminatory (or maybe just a few levels of perception) on his sense of smell Ward took CSL in firearms, contacts, and  had a point sink in an unused framework of some flavour that he wasn't allowed to access for most of the session.

 

19 hours ago, Certified said:

 

Clearly they were built with the same points Ward putting his A into having magic and Jakoby putting his A into being Metahuman.  

 

7 hours ago, Iuz the Evil said:

Agreed.  The real differences are skills, attributes and resources (Ward being higher skills vs attributes and Jakoby having higher attributes vs skills - probably B-C/C-B). Resources are pretty low for both, although Ward spent the crappy 40k nuyen for a lower class (gangster neighbors, faerie infestation) mid size residence so maybe not? 

 

Edit: unless Ward is an Adept, in which case all bets are off...

 

6 hours ago, Sociotard said:

Ward was unable to afford his home and was desperately trying to sell, probably had a poverty social limitation. We don't see Jacoby's home, but he's socially isolated, even from orcs, for a disadvantage of his own.

 

An appropriate determination may very well depend on whether Bright was the beginning of a campaign or a later session in a campaign. If you expect a player to invest a significant chunk of the resources afforded to the construction of their character into a unique ability ("Can use powerful, reality-altering magical artifacts without being obliterated in the process.") that comes into play fairly infrequently, you may find yourself staring at long odds before you know it.

[zslane]

That sort of thing feels like a Plot Device power, not something a PC pays points for to keep permanently. Like Peter Quill’s ability to hold/attenuate an Infinity Stone. That lasted one scene, with his status as latent Celestial having no further practical impact (that we know of), and being taken away by the end of the next adventure in any case. Classic Plot Device power given and taken by the GM to suit the adventure plot.

[Christopher R Taylor]

There has to be another way to test brights other than blowing up 999,999 people.  The wands seem super rare and legendary, things you hear myths about rather than see so that can't be the system.

[Sociotard]

I suspect Elves have a better system, but not humans.  But the reward seems to be worth it to compel people to try.

 

Or, as wands are nukes that grant wishes, there might be an "identify bright" spell.  Now that I think about it, that seems likely.

[Iuz the Evil]

47 minutes ago, Sociotard said:

I suspect Elves have a better system, but not humans.  But the reward seems to be worth it to compel people to try.

 

Or, as wands are nukes that grant wishes, there might be an "identify bright" spell.  Now that I think about it, that seems likely.

And given the low prevalence among humans it seems impractical to test a million of them to identify a single Bright.

[Certified]

16 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

There has to be another way to test brights other than blowing up 999,999 people.  The wands seem super rare and legendary, things you hear myths about rather than see so that can't be the system.

 

Presumably the way would be to learn magic. However, the government seems keen on keeping that knowledge from people, or at least humans and orcs. 

[Ragitsu]

1 hour ago, Certified said:

 

Presumably the way would be to learn magic. However, the government seems keen on keeping that knowledge from people, or at least humans and orcs. 

 

Life as a known Bright would, quite frankly, suck with more force than every black hole in the universe. If you wish to remain inconspicuous and live an otherwise normal life, you hope that no one will discover your abilities...lest they point a gun to your head or the heads of your loved ones in order to make demands.

[Christopher R Taylor]

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However, the government seems keen on keeping that knowledge from people, or at least humans and orcs. 

 

I think its more the extremely powerful and influential elves that are not fond of the idea of anyone else learning magic, but that's just a sense of the world's setting.  They have sort of an exaggerated view of haves and have nots, with gold plated perfect gardens in the streets etc in Elf town.

 

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lest they point a gun to your head or the heads of your loved ones in order to make demands.

 

Nah I don't see that, its like threatening Alfred to get Batman to do something.  That power is just as easily turned at you, and it doesn't have to follow logic or physics.

[bigdamnhero]

On 12/23/2017 at 11:43 AM, Sociotard said:

I had fun. Really best if you don't try to map any real world class/race problems or commentary on it.

Yeah, the ham-fisted racial allegory was as ham-fisted as most Hollywood attempts at racial allegory, but no worse than most. It seems like most of the people I know who hated it did so because they tried to take the racial allegory more seriously than the writers ever intended.

 

On 12/23/2017 at 11:32 PM, Beast said:

total ripoff of shadow run

Like that would be a bad thing? But honestly the only thing it had in common with Shadowrun was "fantasy creatures in the real world."

 

On 12/26/2017 at 3:41 AM, Starlord said:

What about disliking it because Will Smith plays Will Smith, instead of Will Smith playing a new character in a movie? 

Actually I liked that Smith wasn't playing his usual quip-driven persona. Granted, it wasn't exactly a huge departure...

 

On 12/26/2017 at 11:52 AM, Christopher R Taylor said:

The only magic in the entire film was by the maguffin.  That's it.  There was no magic at all except that one item and mentions of other, duplicates of it.

Yeah, it wasn't entirely clear to me if the elves (or some elves) have any magic of their own apart from the wands? It it something that's being actively suppressed by the government/elves/corps/whoever? Or just something that's largely been lost? But I'm okay with them leaving that vague, rather than trying to cram in more exposition.

 

On 12/26/2017 at 12:31 PM, Spence said:

It was a made for television TV pilot more than a made for TV movie.  And yet 90% of the negative commentary is of a type aimed at a 200 million dollar plus block buster.

You're not wrong, but it's a testament to Netflix's success that their films are no longer graded on the Made For TV scale.

 

 

My $0.02: It was entertaining. Not great art, but an entertaining way to spend an hour or two. "District 9" meets "Training Day," which isn't a bad concept, as such things go. Yeah, the plot was a tad simplistic. But I actually liked that they didn't have an 11th hour plot twist that Changed Everything You Thought You Knew! That trope has been overused to the point where it's become a parody of itself.

 

And you know what I absolutely loved? That it didn't feel the need to open with a 5 minute voice-over monologue explaining the history of this world and why there are orcs and the Dark Lord's backstory and blah blah blah. Instead the opening credits sequence takes us on a tour of LA where we *see* how this world is different, mostly through really clever use of graffiti, and assumed we were smart enough to fill in the blanks. Goddamn brilliant, that was. I hope the rest of Hollywood was paying attention.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I agree that the racial stuff could have been really obnoxious -- indeed it was right on the cusp of being so -- but was not taken too far.  Mostly it was setting up how orcs were treated (and the orcs admitted it was at least partly their fault for siding with the wrong guys).  Basically it would be like if all the Nazis were literally a different species, and that species was still with us.  It would be very tough not to presume too much about their inclinations, especially since they are are not particularly bright and are brutish.

 

So it turned into not an allegory about racism, but a depiction of human nature and the difficulties of one's past being expressed in treatment by people.  Which I thought was pretty well handled, in the end.  There never was a "can't we all just get along/racial harmony" moment, just redemption for the one guy and a glimpse at Orc culture of honor and family.

[Ragitsu]

Minorities being treated like garbage isn't exactly an uncommon theme throughout our history any more than romance or eating dinner.

[Starlord]

Perhaps in the specific case of Jakoby in the police, but I never got the general sense there were 'minorities', more a feeling of racial apartheid.  The elves were the power elite.

[bigdamnhero]

We’re used to equating “oppressed peoples” with “minorities” because that’s been our history. But there are plenty of historical counter-examples; South Africa, et al. So whether the orcs are numerically in the minority, they were being treated the way we treat minorities. Semantics

[zslane]

I found it to be pretty dull, to be honest. Not much originality was displayed. But being dull and predictable wasn't the worst part.

 

I kind of felt that they wanted the world to feel like it had this deep, rich history with these races, but it just didn't work for me. Too much would be different, in my view, if there had been these fantasy races around for thousands of years, including some great battle with an unimaginably powerful evil entity. They wanted to eat their cake and have it too, with a modern world just like ours but with a history completely different from ours. That just doesn't compute for me.

 

The lack of imagination applied to the names of things was astonishing to me as well. I would have given the creators major points for coming up with unique names for their fantasy elements rather than rehashing clichéd terms like orcs, elves, dwarves, and faeries. And do you mean to tell me they couldn't come up with a better name than "Dark Lord"? Seriously? Or a better term than "magic wand"? This is the laziest kind of world-building there is. It seems like they exhausted their entire creative brain budget coming up with the names Inferni and Shield of Light.

 

And, of course, the movie clumsily telegraphed the fact that Will Smith would be a bright almost right from the beginning. There was nothing I was impressed by in this movie except maybe for how badass Noomi Rapace was.

[Ternaugh]

I was actually holding out for the orc to be the Bright, but that never happened. 

[Sundog]

That would have been breaking the internal rules of the setting - something I usually consider a failing.