sinanju

I find it doublfull that this "Planet Hawai" people would ever had any option to develop to industrial age to begin with.

I mean our planet is only 30% landmass, of wich a large part is unuseable for Human habitation. But at least it allows relatively easy access to resources. We would not even have the option to mine underwater or in space without those landlocked resouces fuelling our growth to begin with.

Yes. I think it's likely that, assuming alien intelligence exists, that we may find most such civilizations stalled out at pre-industrial levels of technology for various economic, cultural, resource-access and other reasons. The development of a high-tech industrial civilization is not, in my opinion, inevitable. The right social/economic/whatever confluence of events needed to kick off an industrial revolution may well be a real bottleneck.

The Romans had steam engines. They used them for toys. The Chinese invented gunpowder millennia ago. They created fireworks and maybe a few bombs. And so on. But for various cultural or economic reasons, it wasn't until fairly recently that things really took off. We can argue over whether this or that particular thing was crucial--but I think it's clear that simply having an intelligent species around is no guarantee that they'll develop high technology soon, or possibly at all.

The STUN mechanic is fairly baked into HERO.  This goes back to its Champions/supers roots but it serves other genres as well.

 

I can't think of a better way to handle the fight between Bond and Drax the Destroyer from the recent film Spectre:

 

 

Bond does not appear to take much if any lasting (BODY) from the otherwise brutal fight. The latter part of the fight gives a good example of Bond getting Stunned momentarily.

 

I'll echo Tasha and ask what 'problem' are you trying to solve that the current setup can't handle?  Also, have you looked at the Automaton rules?

 

HM

A friend of mine often used James Bond movies to illustrate the difference between Normal and Killing damage. Specifically, GOLDFINGER. He points out that when 007 confronts Odd Job in the vault in Fort Knox, he's careful but not especially worried. They fight. They punch one another, Bond gets flung around, but seems to take no lasting damage. Because that's all just fisticuffs and brawling--normal damage. When Odd Job takes off his razor-edged hat (capable of decapitating a marble statue!) and readies himself to throw it, you see Bond get a LOT more cautious. Suddenly, he's facing KILLING damage, and he has no resistant defenses.

When you're dealing with normal humans, I think the Stun/Body mechanics work quite well as is.

An old-style jukebox with various records from the 1940s through the 1960s. (I once read a neat story where a jukebox was actually a time machine that could transport you back in time for the duration of the song being played.  Could be a neat game hook.)

 

There are a bunch of those stories, actually. Dean Wesley Smith writes them, and has several collections of them (among countless other short stories and longer works).

We don't have to be special to be the first technically-advanced sentient species, anymore than being a lottery winner makes you special. *Someone* had to be first, and as we have no evidence that anyone else is, it *could* be us.

On the other hand, even if the universe is filled with hundreds of thousands of advanced civilizations, there are literally millions if not billions of galaxies. If the next nearest civilization is in another galaxy, even with any reasonably plausible FTL drive, we might well never know they were there, much less interact with them.

It's a great day for America. Not because Trump was elected. Because Hillary WASN'T.

That is all.

IRON MAIDEN, who is (unbeknownst to her) the daughter of a famous flying brick who had a fling with her mother. Her powers just developed one day.

BLACK KNIGHT, who grew up, fought in WWII, came home, married, raised a family, grew old and died--and then was reborn as the indestructible Black Knight.

DOCTOR SCIENCE, child prodigy of filthy rich elite couple. Super genius. No tragedy.

And others. Most of the characters I create don't have tragic backgrounds. I just don't find that inherently interesting, though there are a few. But mostly not.

This thread is starting to read like the Warehouse 23 random object generator.

What do you find in the basement of a museum? 1) Items that didn't make the cut to be displayed above, 2) items worthy of display but currently out of rotation, and 3) items still being repaired/studied.

1) would be lots of minion uniforms, weapons and gear captured over the years, out-of-date gear both ordinary and extraordinary, and the like. Mostly just stacked or racked anywhere convenient.

2) would be anything you might find in the museum, but carefully packaged for safekeeping, carefully labeled, and kept in the appropriate environment.

3) would be workbenches and lab machinery covered/filled with bits and pieces of weapons, armor, gear, biological samples, and so forth.

Make the little man out of antimatter and enclose him in a magnetic bottle and you have the ultimate in terror weapons.

Not hardly. What are the odds of the anti-matter Lego figure coming into contact with a regular Lego figure? Quite remote. And as Star Trek has taught us, only if two identical items (Character A and Character made of matter and anti-matter come into contact is there any danger. Otherwise Anti-matter Guy can run around the regular matter universe all he wants with nary a problem.

If you consider that the aliens on Earth are, for the most part, those who were imprisoned on the Kryptonian prison ship (which was likely for the "harder case" criminals) it's not all that unreasonable that they'd be the more powerful ones.  I expect they would have had on-planet or in-orbit prisons for the more normal, unpowered brand of criminals.

Okay, yeah, I'd forgotten about that. So I suppose it's not unreasonable for there to be a significant number of aliens--still weird that they're all or mostly hanging out in  National City, though.

I really, really want to like this show but this episode was...not good.

Lynda Carter really disappointed me. She was far more animated and entertaining as the Principal in Sky High than she was here. Plus, I'm sorry but willing suspension of disbelief is out the window. Not one, but two attempts on the President's life, and the Secret Service doesn't carry her bodily out of National City if necessary? They don't have her surrounded by a wall of agents?

Could the "aliens = foreign immigrants" (well, mutants and inhumans are taken, I guess) storyline have been any more ham-handedly blatant? My family has a call-out for this sort of thing when we're watching TV. "Bonk bonk, bad grup!"* As in, they're hitting us over the head with their Very Special Message .

Snapper Carr is a d**k. That is all. (That said, it doesn't mean he's *wrong* about things. I was very surprised and pleased when he tore Kara a new one for her blatantly slanted story on Lena Luthor and made her rewrite it. I guess he really is old school; most modern day journalism is just about that obvious.

I liked the new cop lady (Maggie Sawyer, that's it). But--okay, she's gay. Got it. I hope they have more to say about her than that. We'll see.

Apparently, there are no aliens who don't have superpowers. Who knew?

I'm okay with rubber science, but please, people. Can you at least TRY to pretend it's not just Plot Convenience Theatre whenever Winn is at the keyboard? Make him work at least a *little* before his next giant reveal?

I'm hoping for better as the season progresses. Really hoping.

So did Flashpoint erase Maxwell Lord from Supergirl?

Martian Manhunter is masquerading as Maxwell Lord after the real Lord's untimely...accident. Since we see him a lot as Hank or Martian Manhunter, he hasn't had a lot of screentime as Max yet.

In other news, Lord Industries has become much more cooperative with the authorities of late.

(Hey, MM already has a well-known secret identity (well known to our heroes, anyhow). Nobody would ever suspect he has another.

I literally laughed out loud several times, including Cat calling for her new assistant (not gonna spoil it for you!). And damn, I wish I'd had a mentor like Kat to give me that speech when I was Kara's age! Overall, one of their better episodes, and hopefully a sign of good things to come on the new network.

 

 

Glad you didn't spoil me. That was very entertaining. And completely unexpected.

Yeah, I'll miss the Cat/Kara dynamic on this show. (And no one will ever convince me that Cat doesn't know Kara's secret. She only pretends not to because it is obviously so important to Kara that she not know.)

It's usually Medium to low "at table" I like to run that stuff as "Blue booking".

Yeah, my relatively new Champions game (I'm playing with a new set of players and a GM) is fairly combat-heavy during the sessions, but we still get some role-playing in. I also do a lot of, well, not blue-booking because I'm doing it solo--I write a lot of fic about my character and post it to the Google group we use to communicate. I'd like a little more role-playing in session, personally, but the game is enjoyable as is.

I was pretty disappointed with The Flash season opener. After all the build-up about Flashpoint!!!!! I expected it to last a while, maybe all season, and to see Barry living with--or learning to live with--the ramifications (for good or ill) of his decision to change the timeline so drastically. There was a LOT of potential there.

I expected (or perhaps only WANTED) to see Barry dealing with a whole lifetime "he" had lived that he had no memory of, because he still remembers only what happened in the timeline he changed. Yes, his parents are alive. But what if he had a sibling (or siblings) he didn't recognize and knew nothing about? A whole different set of friends and co-workers he didn't remember? What if he'd gone into a whole different line of work because he didn't grow up with the unsolved (in his mind) murder of his mother to drive him toward criminology? Everyone would wonder about him and why he's developed such complete amnesia for his past (and worry even more if they realize he remembers a whole different life that none of them recognize). Someone could have tried to investigate? What if they'd found that poor man crazy old Barry was holding captive--and released him without Barry knowing (for a while)?

Instead we get the merest hint of all this, and it's over by the end of the episode. Disappointing. Very disappointing.

The Murderous Man-Bear. A rich, obnoxious businessman and hunter, he was attacked and bitten by a radioactive Kodiak Bear (Soviet spy satellite full of radioactive material for its power source crashed nearby). He acquired--surprise!--the size, strength, keen senses, claws and overall ferocity of a Kodiak Bear. Except he lost a leg (Kodiak Bear bites being considerably more damaging than spider bites), so he has a peg leg with a booster for Super-Leaps! Naturally, he became a supervillain.

Hindenbeggar. A bum who discovered he could generate and control flames when he was set on fire by a bunch of thuggish frat-boys. He was surprised. And so were they--briefly.

Flash-Mob. A guy whose only superpower is the ability to instantly generate about three dozen "duplicates", each with a different appearance (sex, race, etc). No special powers, but he has acquired a *lot* of skills.

Kid Kaiju. He can transform into any giant Japanese monster-style form he can imagine, but never larger than about 6'6" and 300 #. Nonetheless, he is horrifically tough and strong and destructive.

First, LMDs were probably not invented in 1965 if I read an earth 616 comic written in 2016, as the "start point" of the MU (generally accepted as the FF space flight) is a moving target, I think about 10 years back from "today". So despite comics where Ben Grimm meets the Beatles and Jimmy Carter, he did not, in present continuity, Ben and Reed no longer served in WW II and Tony Stark was not injured in Viet Nam. LMDs probably moved up several decades as well.

 

Second, why do the movies have to explain the difference? Why isn't the writer/editor group of Marvel 616 charged with explaining how LMDs were developed in their continuity. You are seeing how they developed in MCU one week at a time - they are providing their backstory for LMDs.

This is a job for my (soon-to-be-ex) wife's mantra, "It's ALL fanfic!"

The MCU is not 616 is not the Ultimates Universe and so forth. Take what you like and leave the rest. And that includes your own headcanon. It's much more relaxing to watch (or read) the stories when you don't expect any particular iteration to match up with any other. To the extent that they do, and you like that, enjoy it. To the extent that they don't, and you don't like that, ignore it. Accept each one for what it is.

Smallville did suffer a bit from a first season that was "freak of the week" in nature. But the show stepped it up and got much, much better after that, at least IMO. When it came to Smallville, my personal attitude was "Come for the Lana, stay for the Lex," which held up pretty well until Lex made his exit. After that, even my crush on Kristen Kreuk couldn't keep me watching much longer.

 

For me, the show was doomed anyway because of the "No Flight, No Tights" law they lived by. Putting Clark in a black overcoat and having everyone call him The Blur was just not the Elseworlds variant of Superman I was looking for.

For me, it was Chloe. But otherwise...yeah.

That's even worse. If they keep the powers without the threat of exploding you've got an assemby line that the military will be all over. Even if they lose them after the regeneration, people will risk death rather than live mutilated.

Not really. The technique already exists, and at worst, Tony can reverse it. There are still plenty of people who'd try to use it, even given the risks.

But in any case, this is only my headcanon. Pepper still has the Extremis powers, but no longer has to fear exploding if she overdoes it.

[shrug] It's also quite possible they made twice as much money as they could have if they'd more closely followed comic book tropes instead of action movie tropes. I mean I get your point, but given the orders-of-magnitude difference in audience sizes we're talking about, I can't really get too mad at the studio for not throwing away all the lessons they've learned from decades of making movies that are backed up by an ocean of (flawed but extensive) research and focus-grouping, in favor of tropes favored by a relative handful of nerds just because I happen to be one of the latter. And as for taking half measures, don't forget they already took a huge number of risks that many people at the time didn't expect to pay off. They only look safe now in hindsight because we know they paid off.

 

As for the CW shows, I love Supergirl, really like Flash, enjoy Arrow in spite of its flaws, and thought Legends was a complete train wreck. (Haven't seen any of this season's premieres yet.)

 

Agents of SHIELD I gave up on after I realized that each week I couldn't remember the previous week's episode until the "Previously on..." recaps; at least the CW shows are seldom boring.

I'd like to point that the X-Men movies, in many ways, were the alpha test for this approach. I remember hearing that an X-Men movie was in the works way back when. I was both excited by the prospect, and alarmed that it would end up being another embarrassing, half-assed and campy effort aimed at children by adults who were clearly embarrassed to be associated with it. I went into the premiere hoping not to cringe in embarrassment.

It wasn't like that at all. Yes, they did away with some of the comic book mainstays (swapping black leather for yellow spandex, for instance) because things that look good in the comics look silly in real life. But the movie took itself seriously. There was no mugging, no winking at the camera (even metaphorically). Within the context of the story, it was real. And we got an opening scene with two heavyweight actors to set the tone. And it worked. It was a financial success, and proved that a "comic book" movie that was presented like it expected you to take it just as seriously as any other action-oriented film could pull in audiences. (the 70s Superman, for all its virtues, still succumbed to the belief that audiences needed some camp and to be able to laugh; hence the silliness of Luthor's oafish minion Otis, among other things).

So I don't think the Marvel MCU was quite as unprecedented as it might seem. What they did that DC could have benefited from emulating, was patiently build the universe over a series of movies before launching the big team franchise.

And as long as Justin Hammer is alive there could still be villains in the Iron Monger/Whiplash vein.  The Destroyer can be reforged. The Abomination Formula is still out there. And then we have Extremis which really should be researched actively but clandestinely because regenerating lost body parts is kinda a multiple Nobel Prize medical breakthrough and it can be safely removed from the patient afterward, 

I admit this i my personal (head)canon, but...no, it can't. Tony figured out how to *stabilize* Pepper so she's in no danger of explosive spontaneous combustion...but he didn't remove the DNA alteration. Why? Because, in my opinion, unwriting the change is at least as dangerous as initiating it in the first place, and that had a pretty high (and spectacular) failure rate. (And also why the technique isn't being used all the time--it's still extremely dangerous to implement.)

Why would Tony risk killing Pepper that way when he can cure the flaw and leave her alive and pretty much unkillable? For extra bonus points, Pepper might not see it that way, and that might have contributed to why they're "taking a break" in the latest Avengers movie. Tony's unhappy that she's not with him...but happy to know she's alive and well and pretty much unkillable by most threats.

I'm rereading some of my Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker (rip). Most recently, Small Vices, where Spenser is almost killed by a hitman and spends the middle of the book recuperating and rehabbing for ten months before he resumes the investigation that nearly got him killed.

Iron Maiden wears a wool cloak, tank top, tights, leather skirt and boots and cloth mask. It's protected by the tk shield that protects her, so there's some damage--mostly to the cloak--but not much else.

Black Knight just wears whatever he can scrounge up, since his whole schtick is that he can take immense amounts of damage and instantly heal up. His clothes get shredded all the time.

Most characters in my games/stories have no particular special costume defenses. Either their powers protect the costumes, or the costumes can and do get damaged. There's no miracle fabric to be had.

Flash Mob! (My version can also make every duplicate look different--male, female, old. young, different ethnicities so he looks like a mob of random people).

As far as MoS goes, I didn't have too much of a problem with Supes killing Zod. He killed the 3 Kryptonian super-criminals post-Crisis. He had no choice.

 

The problem he faced in MoS is simple. What do you do with Zod? There's no super-prison to send him to. The phantom zone projector is gone. As soon as you let him out of the headlock, he's going to murder as many people as he can. He's just as strong as you, there's no guarantee you can get the advantage on him again.

 

The fight in the city, he's got very little choice there. The city-smasher thing is there, if you run off elsewhere the bad guys will just keep wrecking Metropolis. He got a little carried away during the fight, but that's more bad direction by Snyder than a decision on Superman's part.

 

The biggest problem I had with the movie was Pa Kent being a horrible role model.

 

I liked the film okay, but it's definitely an Elseworlds story.

I didn't like Man of Steel or BvS, but one defense of the fight in Man of Steel that I think I have concede has some merit, is that Superman's fight against the Kryptonians (and Zod in particular) was that it was his FIRST FIGHT EVER. And even if not his very first, certainly the first one ever against superpowered opponents. Given how he was raised by Pa Kent, I think it's safe to say he's never brawled with anyone, and never used anything close to his true power in a fight before. He's learning this in the middle of a life-and-death battle to save the planet. Mistakes are inevitable. A lack of tactical or strategic thought too, as he's completely inexperienced.

I don't entirely buy this argument, but I think reasonable people can disagree on the point.

I watched the first episode of DARK MATTER via Netflix on the recommendation of an acquaintance. Six people (and an android) awaken on a spaceship with no memory of their identities or how they got there. I only discovered after starting it (via the credits) that Tailgunner Joe (Joseph Mallozzi) and a fellow alumnus of Stargate were the executive producers and writers. I hate Tailgunner Joe. Given the chance, he stripped the Stargate universe of everything enjoyable about it and created the arrogantly, aggressively, abysmally stupid and awful Stargate Universe. Anyone who disagrees about the utter lack of redeeming qualities of SGU is just wrong.

Still, I watched the first episode. And I was surprised to find that I liked it.

But I'm not sure I'll watch any more. Why? Because it was so ****ing dark! (Among his other numerous sins when he ran SGU, he favored a show so darkly lit that you could hardly see what the hell was happening most of the time. And that has carried over to Dark Matter. I guess he thinks it's "artistic" to fill the screen with shadows and darkness. Or maybe he takes "dark" literally when it comes to dark stories or dark matters. I dunno. But it's annoying as hell, and doubly so when I know very well that it's a deliberate choice not to light the damn set.