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Re: Worst comic book superfight ever I've seen the first season of the JLU only... he doesn't seem too bad there. The Mongul fight, for instance: he tries to get involved, but it's so far over his head it isn't funny. So he tries something else. A true Bat-God would have whipped out a flash-bomb or blinded him, or used a grenade to make a stalactite fall and smash into him, or something like that. JLU Batman left the fight to Wonder Woman and went about trying to free Superman. I really dug that.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/law/archives.shtml Sounds great to me, too.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever I can see how that would get heated. Regardless of any particular evidence in place.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Of course, the game mechanics can mess things up on occasion. For example, damage classes are, in my opinion, kinda mushed together in Hero. So that, for instance, the brick, martial artist, energy blaster and speedster end up doing about the same damage... whereas I'd personally expect the brick to be doing a lot more damage than the others (possibly same damage as the blaster), while the speedster and martial artist would be doing different kinds of things. So Hero, while a common language to us gamers, might not be the best thing to present such comic book fights in. I'm not sure it illuminates anything, except how the stats work out in Hero.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Brilliant! And Chris Bachalo art, if I'm not mistaken? His girls are the cutest.

Re: Clever Future Weapons That too, good points.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Clever Future Weapons Manpads! Any word gets funnier with 'man' as a prefix. Try it, it works. Manpads is one of the funniest words I've encountered this year. It's a late entrant, but it might just take the sweeps.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Ah, the Gray Hulk was MUCH weaker than the Green Hulk... even when he got angry, he didn't get close to a calm Green. All the old Hulk foes, such as the Absorbing Man, or Thing (who was powered-up at the time, admittedly), were seriously out-classing him in his grey form. He beat them by out-smarting them, or not at all.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Yah, just about any fight involving the 'Riddler factor': where a less-powerful villain survives and puts in a good showing due solely to the writer wanting them to do so. So the hero acts stupid, falls into traps, forgets about powers/equipment they posses, and is slow and ineffective. PARTICULARLY if this means the villain WINS.

Re: Clever Future Weapons Yep, I was misled by the anti-satellite lasers you linked to. I was reading various reports about the tests, which were confusingly written (I personally wonder whether the authors knew what they were writing about) and gave the impression that the ground-based laser shot down a satellite. Insetad, it appears that the ground-based 30-watt laser managed to track a satellite, or something like that. If that was true, it was still impressive! But not exactly sci-fi yet.

Re: I remember EVERYTHING Depends on how much you remember. If you remember everything you perceived, then Eidetic Memory may suffice. If you remember absolutely everything your sensory organs take in, then it's a whole lot more effective. Keep in mind that what we 'see' is a tiny fraction of what our eyes perceive. I had a character in one game... a Shadowrun game, actually. He had an enormous perception score (it wasn't created according to the rules. The character was an amnesiac, I gave him his stats, which were kept secret). He had the concept that his brain processed the vast majority of what his sensory organs perceived, and genuinely took it in as knowledge. The first time he appeared, he met one of the other characters. I went on a five minute digression describing (with the other player's input) the character's walk, mannerisms, speech patterns, scent, eyes, hair colour, style, and other aspects. In the opening glance, the new PC had basically sized up the other character's personality and had gleaned several facts about him that no-one else ever had. Basically, he was an information-processing machine in organic form. If you're interested in pushing that concept to the maximum, feel free to steal from me or ignore me as you deem fit.

Re: Clever Future Weapons From what I'm aware, there are lasers available today that are effective against targets... and I seem to recall ground-based lasers that are capable of shooting down satellites. I may have been misled by badly-written news articles, however. It just seems to me that electromagnetic energy, even visible light-based, can penetrate the atmosphere much more easily than people. But one problem I keep hearing about is smoke and fog and other particulate matter. Sure, even if a laser might be able to go out of the atmosphere, a light fog might stop it utterly, making it all but useless to actual infantry. Which I've used in sci-fi settings to create an odd effect, where civilain-available weapons (lasers) are more powerful than military weapons (bullets) due to the fact that the military has to issue rifles that will work in all-weather conditions, whereas civilians don't always worry about that.

Re: Clever Future Weapons Myself, I'm a fan of the Effectors, courtesy Iain M. Banks. A multi-function tool, Effectors were available to virtually any artificial intelligence in The Culture (where Minds - advanced enough AIs - had full right as citizens). Basically, technology that could create effects at a distance. Anything from sensory (including detecting chemical/electrical states in minds to read thoughts) to benign (warming food) to dangerous (heating people to boiling point, disorienting organics, inducing harmonic overload, or generically frying targets). A truly multi-purpose tool. they had dedicated weapons as well, but the Effector was an incredible tool for peace and war.

Re: Clever Future Weapons From what I'm aware, they were designed to injure, not kill, producing the result you describe (and Markdoc alludes to). An injured soldier requires requires people to drag him back to hospital and take care of him once he's there. A dead soldier requires either a) nothing, or a burial detail. Much less of a drain on resources. Scary reasoning.

Re: Living Steel?

Re: Good Concepts, Bad Characters Heh! If only it had come after Buffy, he'd have been a mini-Giles. Neat.

Re: Human Torch vs. Pyro, who wins?

Re: Good Concepts, Bad Characters

Re: Good Concepts, Bad Characters Have you read Christopher Priest's run?