sinanju

Granted that she had some baggage to work through as a kid, and the fact that everyone who knew she had powers urged her to hide them would've been a major factor. I'm not saying it makes no sense; I'm saying IMO it contradicts other things they want us to believe about the character.

 

Take Man Of Steel for example: a lot of people (myself included) hated Pa Kent telling young Clark that he should've let that busload of kids die rather than risk revealing his secret. Why is it okay for Supergirl to make basically the same decision, other than we haven't had to see all the buses of kids that dies through her inaction? Why does the same choice make MOS Clark a selfish bastard, but makes TV Kara a nice person who's just trying to fit in?

 

The bit about her whole purpose being to protect Kal-El is actually another minor pet peeve of mine. It makes sense to us narratively because we "know" Superman is more important than Supergirl, but from Krypton's POV why did Kara's parents feel their nephew was more important than their daughter? I'm not saying "look out for your nephew" shouldn't have been on the list, but why was it the only thing on the list? Kal-El gets the (posthumous) "you'll do great things" speech, while all Kara gets is "watch the baby?" Frankly the whole thing is a tad sexist.

 

I could buy that if I thought it was intentional, but I feel like the writers are trying to have it both ways. Again, YMMV.

 

That's fair, tho for purposes of this discussion she didn't know any of that until after she came out.

The most recent episode (the crossover is tomorrow as I write this) did address this point. Young Kara, only recently arrived on earth hears trouble and DOES rush to help. She saves two lives--and is soundly lectured about the dangers of doing so again. So while, yes, she is physically superior to anyone (except Clark) in her life, every authority figure she knows spends the next ten years telling her to keep her head down and avoid making a spectacle of herself. And she's a pre-teen (or teenager) for most of that time. And she does what she's told (by presumably wiser people than she).

Wow. An Ayn Rand disciple? That makes his movies so much more clear, radical devotion to the self and egotism as an inherent good.

Eh. I wouldn't call myself a disciple, but I really like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. On the other hand, I am capable of recognizing that they're not an appropriate model for a SUPERMAN story....

  good guys are GOOD not conflicted and full of angst.  Bad guys are BAD, not misled or technically good guys using the wrong methods, etc.  Heroes were beloved and appreciated, particularly by children.  The press praised them, not attacked.  Nobody protested Hero Guy, they hugged him.  Bad guys knew they were wrong but did it anyway.  Love of country, family, mom, etc was normal and praised

 

I think Bubba nailed it. It's not about powers or power levels or historical periods. It's about the tone of the stories. You could write a golden-age superhero story set today--but it wouldn't feel like our world.

Yes, the reaction from the public was much too sudden to be convincing, but they had to cram the whole story into a single hour (minus commercials). Still, it was entertaining to see Dark Kara for a while. I also liked her supervillain costume (the all black one with the collar, though I do wonder where she got it. (Or maybe she made with sewing skill and superspeed, who knows.)

I'll be disappointed (but not surprised) if the public takes her back very quickly. Something like this, assuming it went as far as it's been shown to have gone, should take a long-term toll. The public has just been forcefully reminded that this cute young blonde girl has the power to level the city if she wanted to, and nobody could stop her. (Well, that's probably not true, but the DEO is unknown to the public at large, and other supers are few and far between.) Sure, she's nice...most of the time, but she's still one of the most dangerous entities on the planet.

I have to say that while I watched it, I thought about what a story like this could be if it was given the time it needed, and the consequences were really explored. Especially if the "dark Kara" personality had stuck around for any length of time. How do you explain that? How do you convince people it's true? And even if it is, how reassuring is it to know that your hero could turn into an anti-hero or villain again at any moment, if exposed to whatever mcguffin did it once already?

Hmm...honestly, I'm having trouble thinking of actual, concrete ways that long-range locomotion gives humans a genuine evolutionary advantage. I'm not saying it doesn't - we have it, so presumably there's a reason why - but I'm scratching my head.

Yes, jogging all day to run down a gazelle and kill it while it stands there too exhausted to move is an inefficient way to hunt--but it beats starving. Not by much (especially, as has been noted, if you fail in your hunt after all), but tiny improvements are all that's required for evolution to go to work.

Also, long-term endurance isn't only good for hunting. It also means humans can escape local conditions. Drought? Walk a few hundred miles to a better locale. Or, less dramatically but possibly more importantly, combine our ability to travel long distances with our ability to build fires and wear clothes, and humans can (and did) colonize pretty much every climate on the planet.

Iron Maiden - An apartment with a separate entrance, either a balcony or rooftop access (she's a flier). Minimal decoration; she prefers to live on her own, and will use the quarters only when necessary.

Black Knight - A typical apartment with kitchen, large flatscreen tv, lots of gameboxes, sound system.

Hell's Angel - Ditto Iron Maiden.

Silverstreak - Large apartment, expensively decorated, with YUGE walk-in closets (she's a clotheshorse when not in costume), with separate entrance. Also, a well-stocked kitchen.

Man-Ape - A large apartment with heavy-duty furniture (he weights 800 lbs), home theatre with virtually every film and most tv shows ever made available for viewing. (Former actor and still movie-buff.)

Doctor Syence - Small apartment, minimally furnished save for state-of-the-art computer/internet system; large lab/workshop for tinkering.

Iron Maiden, Black Knight, Hell's Angel, Silverstreak--pretty much all of my PCs--are superheroes who acquired superpowers somehow and became costumed crimefighters because of that. None of them are Batman-esque skilled normals, so they aren't going to take on a protege. On the other hand, all of them would offer the beggar help with getting shelter, social assistance, and so forth.

I, personally, preferred the stand-alone "monster of the week" episodes of X-Files to the myth-arc episodes. Why? Because it became clear to me early on that Chris Carter did not, in fact, have a master chart of The Conspiracy over his desk, and he was making **** up by the seat of his pants...just like the monster of the week episodes. But with MOTW, I didn't have to bother with the nonsensical mythology.

It depends on your "scientific" explanation. I've been working a background for a D&D-style game which answers some of the questions that bother me about D&D if I think too hard about it. For instance, all the various humanoid races. The existence of ancient artifacts of great power. The presence of weird monsters. And so forth.

My answer: (Ancient) Wizards did it. Seriously. The world was once home to a race of men who were almost gods--they'd mastered the 'sciences' of magic and made themselves unaging and beautiful and rich and powerful beyond imagining. They also created all the other humanoid races to be their servants and playthings, giving them the appearances and temperaments they have to this day. Some were bred to work. Some to fight. Some to be unobtrusive servants. Some to be beautiful toys. Then, as always happens in these situations, these men who would be gods, destroyed themselves somehow.

And they left their works behind--ancient cities, deathtraps all as a result of the cataclysm, and their servants. Who fled the cities for centuries or millennia of survival in the wild and, eventually, in cities and nations they built themselves. Those who bred true still resemble their ancestors. Those who didn't, created the mutts (i.e., humans). Any species that doesn't police its bloodlines begins to revert to the mean, i.e., begin to resemble humans more and more closely, since they're the base stock from which all the other races were created. That's why they're all interfertile. That's why half-whatevers are so common.

The various races also tend to stick together, creating nations with common cultures and language. So "Orcish" isn't a racial language in my game, it's the language of the Orcish nation. Ditto for dwarven, elvish, etc. It's like French, German and English. So, yes, you can have members of various races who don't speak their racial language because they grew up elsewhere and never learned it. It makes almost no real difference in play, I admit, but I like it that way.

Most of the monsters in my game also tend to be found in specific areas of the world--because they "evolved" or wandered through open portals to other realms that existed or still exist in the long-abandoned Ancient cities. They fit well enough to be able to survive in the game world, but they have wierd abilities and features because they're from elsewhere. And non-adventurers who don't deliberately go poking them with sticks, who stay in the 'civilized' areas of the world will likely never encounter them.

GURPS is another example. I've played (in more than one campaign) a mage who masquerades as a fighter. He is physically tough, has plenty of combat ability, AND knows lots of spells. Is he as effective as a completely-focused swordsman? No. The points that guy spent on raising his skills and buying special maneuvers, my guy spent on learning magic. Is he as learned as a guy who put all of his points into learning spells? No.

But he's more than capable of being a very effective adventurer, and when he's trapped in a room with a vampire, the vampire is going to be VERY surprised when the "swordsman" breathes fire all over him (as happened in one adventure).

Markdoc said it already--and in a wordier fashion --but, yeah, displaying your wealth and privilege by showing that you have the time and money to stay fit is a big factor. Back in the day when most labor was physical and outdoors, the wealthy preferred the pale, soft look to differentiate themselves from the poor saps who had to work hard out in the sun all day.

What if other species view war as diplomacy? "We attack new species to see how they respond. If they unite and resist, even if ineffectually, we cease hostilities and establish diplomatic ties. If they capitulate quickly, we either subjugate them or we don't bother establishing relations."

In FOOTFALL, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell, the aliens arrive in earth orbit--and immediately attack without responding to any of our attempts to communicate.

Why? Because, in their psychology, until you've established which group is dominant (i.e., who must surrender to whom) there's nothing to talk ABOUT. You are either the master or your are the subject. There is no middle ground. We, of course, find this unprovoked, unexplained, surprise attack absolutely unacceptable and start fighting back furiously.

Once both sides have drawn blood and the fight's gone on for a while...the aliens are just as angry and confused as we were because we--who couldn't wait to talk beforehand--now REFUSE to talk to them. We just keep attacking instead of sitting down to negotiate like civilized people now that we know our relative strengths. It's crazy!

I don't know where people keep coming up with the 52 rifts leading anywhere other than to Earth 2. All indications on the show have been that they go between 1 & 2. The fact that Zoom could pop out of any one of them. The fact that Wells told Barry that the rifts were all closed, so there was no way back to Earth 2. Those two things and a lot of other dialog indicate only a bunch of holes punched between Earths 1 & 2. Did I miss something that was said in show? B/C the speculation isn't supported as far as I can tell.

My take on this is that, given an infinite number of parallel earths (and no reason not to assume that once we know the number is greater than one), another Star Labs explosion (or some controlled detonation intended to create a breach) would randomly open a portal to some OTHER parallel earth. Mathematically, the odds of it being Earth-2 again are infinity to one. Plotwise, it's almost a certainty. Plus, assuming the "nearest" parallel worlds are those that most closely mirror Earth-1, the chances of revisiting a previously explored parallel world go way up.

And this doesn't even take into account that many parallel worlds are likely to be so similar to your own that you couldn't tell the difference between them (did I even go anywhere? is this the same Earth-1a I visited last week or Earth-1b and does it really matter either way?). Plus, as Larry Niven has written about, while you're away from YOUR world (assuming the branching-timelines version of multiple earths) it is continuing to split into countless nearly-identical parallels diverging slowly over time. "Broadening of the bands" he called it. You come back to "your" earth, but it's now only one of billions so identical nobody can tell the difference.

And all of that is way too involved for a CBS network show. So let me boil it down. Minor spoilers for the Flash/Supergirl crossover ahead:

I've played in games where the only solution to any problem was to stab it.  There were some monsters around, and the GM would rather be castrated than let you get out of fighting them.  "I got out these monster figures, and by god, you're gonna have to chop through the hit points of every last one of them."  One particular fight, the gamemaster had our 7th or 8th level D&D group encounter a thousand skeletons.  And we sat there and hacked apart every damn one of them.  And he counted the hit points and had them all numbered.  That fight took like three hours.  If I hadn't been 19 and stupid, I'd have probably got up and left.

 

In a game like that, players are going to respond to what works in the campaign.  In that guy's game, priests were the best.  In another guy's game, fighters were the best.  It just depends on what you emphasize.

 

Now I've played in other games where we were allowed to roleplay our way through obstacles.  Skill use and creative thinking was very important.  We went through one dungeon (a cave) where we knew there were a bunch of monsters waiting for us.  There were going to be pit traps and poison dart traps, and other things like that.  So we decided that cheating was better than dying.  Since we had some money, we asked the GM how much a cow costs.  "Umm, like a piece of silver?"  We had lots of silver.  So we bought a huge herd of cattle (like maybe a thousand), got them near the mouth of the cave, and then used a fear spell to make them stampede right through that dungeon.  They piled into those pit traps until they were full, and then they ran over the bodies.  Poison darts dropped a cow or two.  They busted right through wooden doors.  They trampled orcs and goblins, and smashed skeletons to pieces in their panic.  Warded hallways exploded with magical lightning, and the cows ran right through it.  We followed along at a safe distance, ready to take on anything that survived the stampede.  Not much had.  We cleaned up that day, and I don't remember rolling a single die.

 

When we suggested doing it again on another dungeon, the GM said "no".

 

I told that story because it's funny, but primarily to illustrate that if you let something work, players will want to do it.  Let the agile thief sneak into the castle, avoid the guards, steal the gold, and slip back out.  Then everybody will think that's awesome, and they'll want to be a thief.  Right now it sounds like you've got a game where being a fighter is a clear choice.

I've been on both sides of that scenario. I've been the player who came up with a clever strategy to obviate the GM's planned adventure (or most of it), and I've been the GM who saw my carefully planned adventure blown to pieces in the opening move by players doing things I never thought of. The best GMs I've played with have generally a) let the PCs accomplish their goal, even if derailed that adventure, smoothly changed gears and thrown a new adventure at them, and c) talked to the players _out of game_ about how to make sure everyone is having fun*, even if it's somewhat unrealistic/cinematic. The best players will also listen and moderate their behavior.

A group who love pulp-style adventures will have a very different idea of fun (and what constitutes a reasonable character action) than a group of power gamers or rules lawyers who think that a fair fight means you're doing it wrong (i.e., you're not planning adequately to present overwhelming force). As long as everyone is on the same page, both groups can have a lot of fun. I've been in both sorts of groups and had fun, but it requires learning and understanding (and playing by) the "genre" conventions involved.

I have zero interest in another superhero movie. There have been so many I'm bored to death with them. This despite the fact that it has long been one of my favorite genres. I need a rest from it. Its not novel, or a breath of fresh air, or much anticipated anymore. Superhero movies have become the Hollywood equivalent of a bologna sandwich with french's mustard on wonder bread. I do want to see the next Cap and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, but I'm having a hard time mustering more than a half-hearted enthusiasm even for those. Sometimes less is more, and absence makes the heart grow fonder.   

I'm looking forward to a great many superhero movies. The movies I'm not looking forward to--like Ant Man--I just won't see. I'm not in the least burned out on superhero movies, anymore than I ever get burned out on mysteries, action films, comedies, and the like. Sometimes there won't be any films of Genre X currently out that I want to see, but that doesn't mean I'm bored of the genre, it only means not every mystery/action/comedy/superhero film is for me. Hollywood has spent over a century producing endless films in many genres, genres which rose and fell in popularity, but which haven't died out completely. Even westerns still get made occasionally. Yes, we have a glut of superhero movies right now and I'm thrilled--I've wanted to see a lot of this on the big screen for a long, long time. Eventually the glut will end, and superhero movies will become just another genre.

My fear that that model--the model of reliably profitable but not box office record-shattering blockbusters--is a thing of the past. It certainly is in most of the economy. it's not enough anymore for a company to be solid, successful, and reliably profitable year after year, decade after decade; if it isn't growing like kudzu and making bigger profits every quarter, it's a failure. Superhero movies can't do that. NO genre can. I'm afraid that when it becomes obvious that superhero movies aren't going to make ever more money forever, with each release bigger than the last, they'll be stamped FAILURES! and disappear while the idiots wander off in search of the next big thing.

I'd watch that.

If I recall correctly, one of the original series gag reels had a brief clip of someone (possibly Scotty) shoveling coal in the engine room.

I'd like to kick off this thread by raising the topic of colonization of extrasolar planets. Let's assume that Humanity has discovered a relatively cheap and relatively fast FTL (say, at one light-year per day) and has scouted out some life-bearing worlds within reach. Why colonize? With that level of tech, I'd say it's more efficient to go all macro-life -- establish space stations in other star systems, rather than the hassle of trying to survive on a planet with -- in all likelihood -- a biology vastly different from ours.

 

This all assumes a campaign on the high side of the Mohs Scale Of Sci-Fi Hardness, of course. And who knows -- with advances in science, terraforming a barren rock (Mars, probably) or a hothouse hell (Venus, definitely) might be more favorable.

 

Another thing: I'd imagine that humans who have grown up and lived their whole life in a O'Neill cylinder could be predisposed towards agoraphobia. Imagine such a spacer being plonked down in the middle of the Great Plains. I'd give fifty-fifty odds that he or she would lay face down on the ground, grab at the grass and be very reticent to let go.

I tend to agree. I think we're far more likely to colonize SPACE than other planets. The dangers of space--vacuum, extremes of cold and heat, radiation, etc--are pretty well known. We haven't figured out answers for all of them, especially in the long term, but once we do...the answers will work everywhere. Lack of gravity is another killer problem in the long run (it might prove impossible to adapt to long-term weightlessness, we really don't know yet) but serious colonization will include habitats large enough to use spin for gravity so it needn't be a dealbreaker.

Planets, I suspect, will be much harder nut to crack. Every planet (and different parts of the same planet) will throw an endless variety of problems at would-be colonists. Different atmospheric compositions, temperatures, humidity levels, and weather effects. Different gravity. If there's any life at all, it's probably going to be a real problem whether it's microscopic or big enough to eat you. And the alien biology is probably going to interact with terran biology in unexpected ways whenever you least expect it. Unless there's some pressing reason to climb down into a big gravity well, why bother? You can have shirtsleeve environments and nice plants and flowers and animals and lakes, and forests and streams and waterfalls on artificial habitats when they're big enough (and the more practice we get, the bigger we'll be able to make them). Robots can mine the planets for raw materials, and ship it back up out of the gravity well to our safe, comfortable habitats.

Cocaine Blues, Flying Too High, Murder on the Ballarat Train, Death at Victoria Dock--the first few books in a mystery series about The Honorable Miss Fryne Fisher, amateur detective (and libertine) in 1920s Australia by Kerry Greenwood. Miss Fisher grew up very poor, but the Great War killed off a lot of young Englishmen, and her father inherited a title and fortune as a result. Now she's independently wealthy, and lives in Australia, where she solves crimes (and though the local chief detective is annoyed by her sometimes, he does generally welcome her help--a nice change from the usual relationship in such books). She also takes at least one new lover in each book*, which her personal maid Dot and her servants (Mr. & Mrs. Butler) take in stride. They've all worked for people with far more troublesome habits....

They're not classics, but they're enjoyable enough that I started with one from the library, and I've been getting more as I finish them.

*And why not? It's pretty common for detectives (especially of the class hardboiled sort) to cimb into bed with at least one attractive woman per novel, so why shouldn't she do the same?

Yeah, I just watched it. I fast-fowarded through a lot of the scenes with Wally and/or streetracing. I just don't care. The real story is about Wells, and the conflict between saving his daughter and helping Flash and company. That's the one that interests me.

Brainwashing/Mind Control Powers: Unless you have some means of transmitting your power globally, you're limited to Mind Controlling whoever you can interact with personally. You might succeed in becoming the equivalent of a cult leader, but world domination is likely to remain out of your grasp. Sure, you could try going the route of targeting people in positions of power and authority (always assuming you can get anywhere near them to begin with), but the jig may very well be up the instant you have them do anything that is out of character for them and/or so blatantly unconstitutional that even the most oblivious members of society will notice something's fishy.

I think you're sadly underestimating the effectiveness of one-on-one mind control. There's no world leader you couldn't see, given a little time. You just work your way through the "flappers" one by one. Talk to gate guard, he lets you in. Talk to door guard. He lets you in. Talk to secretary/assistant to get "five minutes with the big guy". Once you're there, convince him to give you all the time you need. Then he can arrange for you to meet his allies, associates, contacts. Lather, rinse, repeat. As for having world leaders do things "out of character" enough to cause trouble--why? You could eventually meet everyone important in the administration, and all of Congress. Convince *enough* of them to do what you want, and even (for extra verisimilitude) convince a minority to oppose your plans. So your proposed bills are controversial. So what?

But do you NEED to do that? You already have greater personal power than anyone on the planet. Anyone you meet will do whatever you want. Once you've convinced Bill Gates, George Soros, the Koch brothers and a few other billionaires to "loan" you a few billion dollars, or make you the CEO of a new charitable trust with a vague-enough mission to let you spend the money however you like (approved by any auditors or government overseers you've met), you'll have all the money you ever want. You're already the world's greatest pick-up artist. You can convince anyone who owns anything (a particular work of art, or home, or business) to sell it to you.

You may not change the world radically, but unless you're an altruist (but one willing to manipulate and use people) or crave power for its own sake, why bother?

• I dropped the Speed Chart: One less Characteristic, and no need to describe the turn sequence beyond “Sarita is fastest, so she goes first.” (Behind the scenes, I just gave everyone SPD 3, and after every three Phases I’d say “Take a Recovery.”)  

I did the same thing in my recently-concluded Champions campaign. Except it was SPD 4. It worked well. I had people act in order of DEX, with ties being decided by going alphabetically by character name. (Yes, it was completely arbitrary, but it worked well and meant I could work out combat order well before the combats began--make a list of everyone involved in the session, sorted by DEX (and then name), then just skip anyone not involved in a given battle.

The first list reminds me of an episode of the X-Files.

"You're a fortune teller. You really should have seen this coming."

"There are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more embarrassing way than autoerotic asphyxiation."

"Why are you telling _me_ this?"

"How do I die?"

"You don't."

The Final Repose of Clyde Bruckman was one of the best X-Files episodes ever.

But if vampires don't die (which is a feature of the undead) then no matter how slowly the population grows, it never shrinks. And if you have a good run of fecundity you can accelerate that growth, but nothing reverses it.

But vampires do die. In pretty much any story. They're unaging and powerful, but not truly immortal.

What makes  them potentially fearful foes is not their vampiric powers - but the fact that they can live for centuries or even millennia: the Vampire Queen of Vulea isn't feared because she's a vampire (or at least not just for that) but because she's an 800 year-old sorceress, with all the power and knowledge accumulated in that time.  Most newly-created vampires are more powerful than ordinary people, but are no match for an experienced adventurer.

I think the show Supernatural is a good model for this sort of thing (at least the early seasons). Yes, vampires (and werewolves and lots of other things that go bump in the night) are deadly threats, and one-on-one probably superior to humans in many ways. BUT...a motivated human, who knows the score, is nonetheless a mortal to them. Humans don't have fangs or claws or the strength, speed, toughness and so forth of the monsters--but they can use weapons and tactics, and exploit the monster's known weaknesses, and will. Hunters aren't a threat (just) because they're experienced adventurers--they talk to one another, and leave records for their colleagues (and later generations) to find, which helps negate the monsters' key advantage: secrecy and non-belief in them.

My problem with vampires in general is the ecology of them. As a population element they should run away and within a generation the entire population is vampire. There's no negative feedback in any version I've ever heard of. And if vampires die without ordinary humans to feed on, then in a couple of generations everyone is dead, after the last humans are consumed and then the vamps starve.

 

Humans have always hunted their favored prey to extinction, and then moved on to less favored things, until they learned agriculture.

 

The classic vampire story has vamps as hunters, and looking at the population dynamics, extinction is absolutely unpreventable. Ordinary humans go the way of the giant ground sloth and the moa and the California sardine fishery.

P. N. Elrod's vampire novels (two series, connected but in different time periods--one Revolutionary-era US, the other 1930s Chicago) address the issue. Vampires can drink from humans without killing them, and with no risk of ever turning them. The only way to potentially turn a human into a vampire is to exchange blood. And even then, it's like sex--it might work after one try, or it might take many tries, or it might not work at all. And you won't know until the human dies (by whatever means, including old age) and comes back as a vampire...or doesn't.