Trencher

On 2/4/2024 at 4:39 PM, Hugh Neilson said:

Not to defend Clown specifically, but the possibility of challenges that cannot be resolved by violence seems quite appropriate for most games, especially Supers games.

I am saying Clown is bait for violent solutions. Not that non violent solutions are bad as you try to imply. Clown have soft targets mixed in with their hard targets spesifically made to make the players feel bad. 

This correlate with Clown being made to p**s on the pc's in general. 

3 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Don't agree with that. I have found that someone who utilized an individual villain or a villain team js for the purpose of pissing off the players is just a bad GM. And as for pretty much all of the villains that are standard and individuals usually are easy to knock out. Whenever I run Champions I have to increase most of the villains I use. They have a tendency of having an average defense of around or even under 20 and many who are considered to be incredibly defended might have 25.

Well if you modify Clown to have better defenses atleast the players dont have to feel like murderers for fighting them. 

Clown exist only for one reason and that is to p**s on the players. Its a GM tool to either make them feel stupid for failing to defeat them or making them feel bad about killing half of them if you do defeat them. That is how they are designed. Glass cannons that can whallop regular PC's but die almost instantly if they are hit with big attacks. There are exceptions but that only makes it more annoying. 

Dr Destroyer is not meant to be particularly interesting personality wise, he is designed as an final boss of this game. He is an powerhouse and generally the most powerful enemy the players will ever defeat. Kicking his ass is meant to be something to be bragged about for years to come. He is an mechanical creation for maximum battle game play. 

Role playing games are a different medium from cooperative fiction writing. And while there is overlap since role playing is a part of the role playing game Dr Destroyer are much more a part of the game than the roleplaying.  The roleplaying would be about the team cooperating and coming up with a way to defeat this incredibly powerful villain. 

And there not being that much underneath that cool armour than an old narcissistic pompous douche is actually perfectly reasonable for his role in the role playing narrative. 

As an aside he can also be a victim. Sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Being a victim is not an status in itself that makes you better or worse than any  other you are simply a victim. 

Clown are by far the most annoying enemies a player can ever face because facing them means your heroic fantasy is going to end right then and there and the evening you set aside to play that heroic fantasy is going to be wasted by the GM making fun of you. 

Because here is the thing. Clown are not killers so there really are no reason to dress up in a costume and go stopping them from whatever nonsense they are doing. 

Think of Clown as the youtube pranksters of the current day. 

You either have to laugh with the GM or be a stick in the mud. And or you have to have your character get smacked around, and or you have to be guilt tripped for going to far against whatever clown your character took out. 

The only defense against clown is to be a bigger douche than they are: "Wow my eybeam cut that skatboarder in half yuck-yuck-yuck"

If you like to play an hero saving the day you know your not going to if Clown arrive. 

And if you like the concept of Clown and are not to busy with playing the latest Suicide Squad game you might think of using them in the game but I think you will have to admit you think about using them against your own players not playing against them yourself. 

All the pro Palestinian friends and family I know are completely quiet on facebook and social media. 

In old media there are still holdouts calling Hamas "warriors" and trying to focus on Palestinian civilian casualties. 

But the long term of this might be that Palestine and its peoples cause loose legitimacy.

I think the reason for this is Hamas use of social media where they display corpses and parade naked civilian women through the city while the crowd is jeering. 

Social media removes the veil and shows the truth, especially to the young. Maybe social media will be what kills Hamas in the long term. 

Harbinger of Justice was made to fight superhero level threats. 

He would be clunky to insert into scenarios but as a solo dude and as a background character he works well. 

As for the vigilantism angle and the problem that can cause I am old school late 80's attitude. 

Vigilantes that kill are villains but just like any good villain you can understand where they are coming from. 

Batman never kills the Joker so he would not kill the Punisher either. He throw him in jail though. 

Good luck and keep us posted!

Underworld enemies are the best Herogames book hands down. 

Look up "Skullbird" from the Spelljammer rpg, thats why the eagels could not take the ring to Mordor.

On 7/19/2023 at 7:35 PM, Lord Liaden said:

You know, every time a new entertainment technology is developed, everyone agonized over how it will replace what came before. Movies would make live theater obsolete. Television would supplant the movie theater. FM radio would displace AM. Digital animation would render hand-drawn extinct. Digital recorded music meant vinyl was obsolete. In every case the earlier medium endured because it evolved to emphasize its distinctive kind of audience experience, one that audiences continue to desire.

 

Writers, actors, practical artists and designers, won't disappear. There's going to be an uncomfortable transition while the new technologies are adapted and integrated, but eventually they'll find their equilibrium.

This time its not the entertainment that will be replaced its the people making it. 

You can say that the ceo of a company wont tell an advanced AI to create a movie and it will be good enough for the masses (who like rap, reality tv and the transformers movies). But I think it will and he wont need any artists to do it. There is no reason at all to belive that companies will keep paying artists and writers if they dont have to. At most they might keep one or two as a sort of show-artists to parade them around as "proof" they still use artists. 

The only solution is that the public refines their taste and start making sure their entertainment is made by humans. 

Sprinfield superhero, white and light blue superhero costume, black hair, blue fire eyes, 90's style, strong, heroic, heroic pose, vibrant colours, city background, photo realistic, action shot, full body

So as you can see this one came out in photo style. I dont like the way the building gives way for the light right under the arm, making it look like its part of the arm but other than that it would have fooled me. 

Albanian patriotic superhero, red and black costume, black eagle on chest, 90's style, strong, heroic, heroic pose, vibrant colours, city background, photo realistic, action shot, full body

for the first guy and the two others are

Albanian patriotic superhero, 90's style, strong, heroic, heroic pose, vibrant colours, city background, photo realistic, action shot, full body

Those two are the first I tried to make.

Yes I can see batman and superman influence there even though I tried to use different colours and concepts.

15 hours ago, Pattern Ghost said:

 

 

What AI did you use to generate the above?

Also Midjourney. Its good for some fun even though its not art. 

It did. Ok let me show you some other A.I art of villians and monster I made.

There is a couple there I would think were real art.

And I repeat my players loved the AI art I made of their characters. Even though I showed them as a joke. 

Like one of them I described as carrying a shiny silver shield and standing in front of a barn.

And then the AI showed the character standing infront of a gigantic shining shield leaned on top of a barn. 

The player thought it was awesome and did not care about the odd fact there was a giant shiny shield back there for some reason.  

Most people dont analyze things. 

De

Does this work?

Lets do the math. 

2100 galleries lets say hundred pictures each. Thats twenty one thousand pictures.

Making some pics now I easily made 84 picture in under three minutes. 

Take into consideration I did it now when the servers are slowest. And I was not working fast. Lets round it down to 80 per three minutes. 

21000/80 is 262.5 or lets say 300 for ease.

So that means 900 minutes was the absolute maximum time it took to make these galleries. Thats 15 working hours. 

An real artist can easily use 15 days on one masterpiece or atleast can easily work for 15 hours on one picture, as 15 hours is 3 working days. A bare minimum for a commission I would say. 

This is one important part of my point. The sheer quantity of A.I work will out-compete new up and coming real artists. 

7 minutes ago, Pattern Ghost said:

Hey, they have to eat, too.

So does other artists as well. 

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

To give Trencher some support here......

 

It's important to recognize that our criticism of the artistic merits of these products...may not be mirrored by the great unwashed masses.  Critical observers can likely be ignored, as we're a tiny, tiny minority.  The AI drek may well be like the Wal Mart python, squeezing out quality in a push to the bottom.

You said it better than I did.

1 hour ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

And of course many commissions exist because you want something drawn by a specific artist. Not just a style, but the artifact from the artist's own hands. That kind of thing won't go away.

 

Doing commisisions is a way for up and coming artists that are learning their craft to gain some extra cash. The old masters wont dissapear right away but the problem is that when they do there wont be anyone but AI to replace them. As aspiring artists had to get other jobs to feed themselves. 

26 minutes ago, Grailknight said:

 

AI definitely lets you generate sexy pictures. Go to e-hentai.org and use AI-generated as a search criterion. Definitely NSFW!

Thats probably a programmer that have made his own AI. A customer cant write in his own A.I porn pictures so porn is safe. Meaning the only commission type that are not under threat from AI is porn.

Okay how about these I made in old dnd like style?

That is interesting. 

When I made the characters my players play in my game they actually loved it. Although I showed them the pictures expecting them to laugh

36 minutes ago, Ragitsu said:

Damn those factories.

Damn that synthetic medicine.

Damn those automobiles.

Damn those computers.

Damn that internet.

 

They took our jobs!

Well atleast those things gave jobs back. This does not.

7 minutes ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

Not only do these pictures have no financial value, they have almost no aesthetic value. An experienced artist, or even a consumer of art with no real training, would throw them aside (or throw them away) because they are really, really terrible. Someone may have thought that their idea was clever, but they produce no feeling -- certainly not the speculation and even terror induced by the original.

 

They have nothing like an idea, nothing to say, only a pale imitation of whatever feeling original art with the same topics would attempt to convey. The farmer's hundred-yard stare and the unease in the eyes of the woman next him are gone.

 

You dismiss it to easily.  Check out these I actually put ten minutes effort into. 

Well ten minutes for one of them the two others were about two and one minutes. 

So these pictures are worth nothing and was only created by things stolen from other artists. 

But in a world where people rather fly with junk heaps planes barley hanging together instead of more expensive and comfortable planes just to save money this souless art has two  advantages. Its cheap and quick. 

And I fear that this will make people not buy commissions as often as they do now. 

Another bad note is that the AI dont let you create sexy pictures (I heard.. Ahem..) this means the only commision artist that will not be run broke by access to endless amount of cheap crap AI pictures are the ones that draw porn! 

World has gotten worse. AI can off course be used to something good but people have only used it to cut into peoples occupations livelihood so far. 

okay

Or if Flash Gordon and Ellen Ripley maybe?

How about Larry Elmore style?

This will be bad for real artist. 

Let me give you an example. Ask me for a picture of anything. 

Pinkerton did a lot of union busting for Amazon and a lot of Hasbro suits are former Amazon guys. 

Hasbro is just a syndicate at this point. None of the leaders there have ever created anything. Just a bunch of goons buying up everything and then jacking up prices, cutting corners and trying to strong arm monopolies into place. 

I will never give Hasbro money ever again and dont come to me with "but the people who works at wizards are good guys". 

If you work for hasbro in any capacity now your just a scab. Get yourself a new job. 

I dont get it.