Grailknight

It's not a bad movie but it's not great. i could have done with a lot less flerkin content and more of the main characters. 

For reasons I can't understand, a large portion of the usual MCU audience has antipathy towards Brie Larson and have attacked both Captain Marvel movies sight unseen. The Marvels, IMO, is better than Thor 2 and 4 and Incredible Hulk and as good as Iron Man 3 and GotG 2. It has flaws but MCU fatigue may be more to blame than the quality of the film.

Cleveland's defense is awesome. 

However, their offense is missing their starting QB and RB. Their receivers are pretty meh outside of Cooper and they're rolling with a 5th round rookie at QB.

He didn't have the endpoints. Doing it properly would have entailed a long conversation with Peter before they started to finalize the details and instructions to not speak up and change things. If a typical group of players can discuss how to use a wish for 10-15 minutes before giving the GM the final version, a supposed Sorcerer Supreme candidate should be able to plan one out also.

I like the Strange appearances as a whole but you'd think that he could apply "First do no harm." to magic. He's supposed to be arrogant, extremely so, but not idiotic to the point of being the problem instead of the solution.

Got 2 turkeys and all the turnip greens in the freezer or else there'd be room.

A local seasonal deal has started up here in Mobile, AL. They are offering 5 lobster tails for $25 and 20 ribeye steaks for $35. Hopefully they'll last until after Thanksgiving so we can clear space in the freezer.

Don't care about the lobster, but I've done the steaks before, and they were fresh and restaurant quality. A great thing when you're going to be the only person staying home from the casinos or a family cookout.

Sorry LL, I've got to agree that the setup to No Way Home was pure bad writing. If you're going to rewrite the universe, you should get your start and end points finalized before you begin the spell. If Strange isn't an arrogant idiot the movie doesn't happen.

Another issue here would be name recognition. Sure, the MCU has pulled in a large number of fans who weren't comic readers, but the core audience is still long-term fans. Thanos was the known cosmic menace they had available, especially since they did not have access to any Fantastic Four or X-men villains at the time. Perhaps it would have been better to start small with him, but you roll with what you have, and they had already started with the Infinity Stones in AoU.  One of the bigger problems of Phase 4 is that the villains aren't well known. Kang is the biggest foe the Avengers have left with the possible exception of a decent team of the Masters of Evil.

That's five game checks which in Draymond's case amount to a little over $1.3 million. Not going to cripple him but he'll notice.

58 minutes ago, Pariah said:

So I've read a fair amount of scuttlebutt recently about the Patriots parting ways with Bill Belichick. It's stupid.

 

To be clear, I'm no fan of Bill Belichick. If his Patriots were playing the North Korean national team, I'd be there with a Fathead of Kim Jong-un and a sign that says "Bill Belichick licks goats" in Korean. I am fully convinced that his long-term success is the result of some sort of Faustian bargain with the Powers of Darkness. (Same with Tom Brady, though that's a different conversation.)

 

But you can't really argue with the success. He is the most successful coach of this generation. Before he came along, the closest the Patriots came to sniffing relevance was a blowout loss to the Bears in the Super Bowl Shuffle game. He put that franchise on the map and kept them there for the better part of two decades. He has earned the right to leave the team on his own terms. If he, for whatever reason, wanted to coach this team to five consecutive last place finishes, that should be his decision and his privilege.

 

The Patriots forcing out Bill Belichick would be like Alabama firing Nick Saban. Absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable. (And yes, that word means exactly what I think it means.)

 

But this is the NFL, and there's nothing like a little "What have you done for me lately?" to shake things up. And hey, look at it this way: If the Patriots do decide to get rid of Belichick, they have one of his proteges freshly available to take over.

 

J*** McD****** as coach of the Patriots? I could get behind that. 

As a coach Belichick is definitely in the GOAT conversation but as Starlord points out, the rest of the package is suspect. The personnel level has cratered since Pioli left and evidence is mounting that it was Brady that was the more important of the pair.

Bill Barwell goes more in-depth here:

Fire Bill Belichick? Bench Mac Jones? What's next for Patriots - ESPN

Good. Now we just need a permanent link on the Hero home page.

11 hours ago, unclevlad said:

The Harden Effect is in full swing.

The Phillies are 8-1.

The Clippers have gone 0-4 in the games he's played.  +/- is a tricky stat, but...in those 4 games, he's been -18, -15, -6, and -28 tonight...against the bottom-dwelling Grizzlies, who get only their 2nd win of the season.

Following up, my cousin the Clippers fan is quite sick about this. Beyond Harden being Harden, they lost too much of their bench to match salaries.

In a topic that drifted to how new players learn the game. I realized that we don't have crosslinks between the Discord and this site. Would it be possible to establish these links?

8 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

 

True.  But...

 

6e2 has a number of pregen characters in the HERO System Genre By Genre section.  6e1 has multiple sets of Characteristics guidelines by power levels on pages 35 and 48.  And then there's us, here at the boards and on the Discord server. 

 

And there's a ton more information available in the other supporting books. Champions, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero for 6th edition alone.  Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete.

 

A person new to 5th edition is going to be in exactly the same place as a person new to 6th edition with respect to expectations of where stats should be.  In this regard, reducing the amount of math by eliminating Figured Characteristics is reducing the mental load.  I can't comprehend how the opposite could be true.

Hero's best resource is its community, both the Discord and these boards, but that's not how new players are introduced to the game. Without a wider circulation of the printed source material, newbies don't have easy access to those examples to learn from. The source material itself isn't inadequate, it's just not commonly available. There's nothing but word of mouth out there to attract newbies. This topic made me realize that we don't even have a Discord invite link on these boards or vice versa.

2 hours ago, Chris Goodwin said:

There's even more simplicity in just buying the DEX, CON, and SPD you want, and then just buying the OCV, DCV, ED, REC, and END (edit: and STUN) you want. 

 

For the life of me I can't figure out how this could possibly be an increased mental load. 

Because with Figured Characteristics, you got a baseline to work with. Without that being the intention of the writer's, the rules still hinted that a Brick with STR 65 CON 33 BODY 15 should have REC 20 END 66 STUN 65 at a minimum. Character creation had some built-in paradigms, flawed though they were.

6th Edition took those away and gave minimal guidance on what values were common to certain character types. No Characteristic could be assumed adequate at its staring value. I agree that you should have been doing so in the earlier editions also, but it was possible to leave characters like my example with the minimums derived. You can't do that now and have a viable character. It's a small extra step but it is extra.

Many of us older players who've been doing this since First Edition do this as second nature. I've got 40+ years of Hero to draw on and I think you have similar experience. I can do Hero without a book. But it doesn't come naturally to newer players, it has to be learned.

The movie takes place over a short time period and in that time, she gets teleported at random across the universe, meets aliens for the first time and has to save the world. She goes from not doing anything more serious than the events of Ms. Marvel to having to make hard choices with the lives of thousands of people and face off against a villain with the power to break reality. In the aftermath, she begins to form her own super team. So, no, her basic personality doesn't change, but she goes through plenty of growth. The movie isn't flawless but the characters are on point.

Just got in from seeing The Marvels. It's a solid entry, not their greatest work, but nothing to be ashamed of.

The action is good although Carol's power level isn't as consistent as I'd like.

Kamala and Monica are excellent, Carol and Fury are good, Kamala's family feels very real and the villain actually has a valid motivation if somewhat extreme methods.

I'll score it a 7.5 out of 10.

On 11/9/2023 at 12:27 PM, Pariah said:

My right ankle is almost completely immobile today due to swelling and tenderness. I must have twisted it in the sheets last night. (Not the first time that has happened, incidentally.) The acetaminophen only does so much....

Advil is what you should take for that type of pain.

10 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

Agreed, Doc - taken to its ultimate extreme, that rule should eliminate Mental Attack in favour of a Blast with IPE, LoS range, AVAD and ACV.

That metarule only applies to combinations of Powers, Advantages and Limitations to achieve results not covered by an existing Power. If Mental Attack did not exist, then your method would be the correct one.

Bion would just watch the parade, and he'd tell the rest of the team and any other heroes to just watch also. CLOWN wants attention more than anything, so unless they blow their MO and start something with the citizenry, just don't give it to them.

If you have access to 4th or 5th, the rules for Negative Characteristics are very complete.

On 11/4/2023 at 8:01 AM, unclevlad said:

LOL  that would require me to pay attention to it.

 

And might mean I have to watch some of the games...on those *hideous* courts..........

20 hours ago, Pariah said:

Looking at some of those court designs makes me wish for the glory days of black and white television.

Some of the courts are ... distinctive but others are pretty nice. The red ones should all go into the woodchipper as soon as their team is eliminated though.

NBA debuts In-Season Tournament courts for all 30 teams | NBA.com

5 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Then perhaps PRE with a limitation of some kind may be the best way to go.

Which is exactly what Striking Appearance is.

Hero is not overly complicated. It is overly frontloaded. 

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Maybe; I am not sure of where you are at with it, so let me try a rephrase:

 

Striking Appearance is COM.  It is the same thing, reserved for what would have previously been more elevated or lowered values of COM.  Instead of buying COM, one buys the mechanic of COM.

 

Similarly, if we do away with DEX and declare that any rolls for physical coordination and deftness default to 11 or less, but can be raised by 1 by paying a cost of (the cost of ever-how-many points of DEX it takes in 6e to raise a DEX roll, well...  We're still buying DEX.  Even at half the price, we are still buying DEX.

 

Same with Striking Appearance: we are still buying COM. 

 

We are just calling it something else, and we are requiring a bigger buy in, unless "wow; that guy is strikingly striking" or "stunningly stunning" is an acceptable thing (don't see why it wouldn't be, but the name suggests otherwise).

 

And there, Sir, is my problem with Comeliness as a stat or any appearance-based mechanic:

 

Who _is_ the author with the say so here?  "The player determines his character is shockingly, jaw-dropping my, car-crash-inducingly beautiful."

 

So the GM has no say in his NPCs:  all NPCs will now react according to the points spent in Stellar Appearance (or COM:30 or whatever). 

 

And I say it's not really your decision as to how the rest of the world treats you or reacts to you. If you want to control how people treat you, well, as I have mentioned, we have a mechanic for that: it's called Mind Control.  Buy that.  

 

There isn't a guide.  There's a mechanic.  GM agency is lost here.

 

While I agree with on one level, I do see an inconsistency in your stance.

Yes, COM and Striking Appearance are both attempts to place a mechanical value on a subjective value, but that doesn't mean either should be free.

By the nature of HERO, spending points on either means that you should get some value from them and that does affect GM agency. I think that NPC who varies from the general consensus is better represented as one with a Psychological Limitation- Likes/Dislikes COM/Striking Appearance of SFX X though.  This can vary from a 0-point quirk to a 25-point murderous hatred and fits perfectly in the rules. It's an extra step but it perfectly restores GM agency for that NPC while allowing the PC the general benefit of his spent points.

And there are several mechanics that affect the way that NPCs react to a character.

Mind Control is the most absolute and the scale descends to Mental Illusions then Images/Shape Shift and finally to PRE and PRE-based skills which is where COM/Striking Appearance enters the discussion. But note that there is always GM agency involved here, it just comes at character generation for both PCs and NPCs. If it best fits your GM preferences for your game, you are perfectly justified in not allowing it. And if you do allow it, then you are perfectly within your rights to create NPCs that have qualities that negate the effects of a particular powerset. That can be Mental Defense/EGO, increased PER, high PRE or conflicting Psychological Limitations. This way your PC has their general desire, but you retain your GM freedom.

2 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

 

Are his new meds helping?

I'll ask him at lunch tomorrow.