bigdamnhero

Yeah, if you can slap "Only covers Hit Locations 3-5" on a helm, why not do it on Combat Luck?

Well Google sez CBS spent $14M on the Supergirl pilot. So not exactly chump change. But I assume most of that went into developing the sfx, something West Wing (et. al.) don't have to worry about. That's always been the catch of doing effects-heavy shows like superheroes on a TV budget: you can have decent effects or you can have other nice things like good writing, decent actors, etc, but not both. From that perspective, the CW shows have done ok in my book, particularly in terms of finding/developing good actors that'll work for cheap. So as much as I cringe at some of the writing some times, I understand why it is what it is. (And again, this is just my personal enjoyment level, YMMV etc.) Also, part of how networks judge how much to invest in a show is based on how well similar shows have done before. And superhero shows have never really made a lot of money. Call that an institutionally low opinion if you like, but it's not exactly unsupported by data, so throwing huge wads of cash at the next one before it's proven itself just isn't a sound business call. As they say, it's called show business for a reason. Edit: Google also sez West Wing's budget didn't really explode until Season 2, ie - once they realized they had a hit on their hands.

9 Sessions in, here are some random thoughts/observations on how things are going, some specific to this campaign, and some applicable to fantasy gaming more generally: Tl:dr - everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. After last week's game, two players were debating whether that session was the Best Game Session Ever, or only in their personal Top 10. So I'll take that as a win! (Who knew being captured and tortured by the Antichrist wound be such a crowd-pleaser?) One challenge has been that roughly half the PCs are outdoorsey types with poor social skills, and the other half are urban-social characters with poor outdoorsey skills. So when we're in the city doing political intrigue, half the players are bored/useless, and when we're on the road/wilderness, the other half are bored/useless. So I'm working harder to bridge that gap and keep everyone engaged at the same time. As I've alluded to elsewhere, the lack of a common tongue has been more of a pain in the butt than I expected. Aside from several info-dumps almost getting completely missed due to language differences, I think it's made some of the players feel a step removed from the action when they can't talk to the NPCs directly. So I've gained a new appreciation for that RPG trope. The thing about low-fantasy games is: once you let the PCs have magic, they're going to expect to use it regularly. As well they should - they paid points for them, after all. But it's harder to maintain the feel of "magic is this really rare thing" when literally every combat includes at least one verifiable miracle. I'm moving into acceptance on this one - nothing I can do about it now without nerfing entire character concepts. Along similar lines, in hindsight I kinda wish I'd been more restrictive about the use of magical Healing. Harder to keep things gritty when the Priest heals everybody's wounds as soon as the battle is over. But the idea was to use Biblical miracles as the basis, and particularly in the NT 90% of them were some form of healing. Another thing about low fantasy games is it can be really hard to work in things from a PC's backstory - family dynamics, clan politics, etc - when they're all 2000+ miles from home. I thought of that in terms of whether or not something is worth a Complication, but it also has I think made it harder for a couple players to get into character because their backstories just don't come up as often. The problem with prophecies (like the Book of Revelation and its equivalent passages in the Quoran): if things play out exactly as prophesied, then there are no surprises. And if things don't follow the script exactly, then you have subverted/nullified the prophecy. "As It Was Foretold" has always been my least-favorite literary device, and frankly this has only reinforced that for me. Google Earth and the Internet generally are a godsend for historical games! "So what does the terrain north of us look like?" "I dunno, let's take a look..." (Mostly doing that between games, not actually at the table.) Similarly, being able to pull up paintings of what 11th Century Constantinople actually looked like really makes things feel more real and lived in. For someone whose knowledge of medieval history has been very Europe-centric, researching what's going on east of the Bosporus has been highly educational. I mean I knew 11th century Europe was basically a backwater, but I hadn't fully appreciated just how much. The further east they travel it's like moving forward in time several centuries. And I keep looking into areas that in my mind were blank spots on the map, and finding out actually it's been highly settled and developed for 2000 years at this point. Sobering to realize just how selective my education has been. And after struggling to pronounce actual Arabic names like Mahmud bin Sebuktigin, and Abol-Hasan Qābūs ibn Wušmagīr ibn Ziyar Sams al-maʿālī, I will never again make fun of fantasy authors for their unpronounceable names.

Duck: +2 DCV (10 Active Points); Conditional Power Only vs Called Shots to the Head (-1 1/2) [4 RP] Weave: +2 DCV (10 Active Points); Conditional Power Only vs Ranged Attacks (-1) [5 RP] Value of the Lims of course vary based on your game. For the second one, assuming ranged and HtH attacks are equally common in your game, then that's roughly a 50% reduction, so -1. The headshot one seems more restrictive than that, but not quite enough for a -2 IMO. Another option for the "vs Ranged" version would be to buy CSLs with Ranged Combat, Limited Power, DCV Only (-1), which works out to 16 AP/8 RP. So DCV is probably cleaner. Weave II: Change Environment (-2 Range Modifier) [1 END, 6 RP] Neat idea, and actually a simpler write-up. Tho getting it down to 0 END bumps the cost up to 9 RP, so it's not cheaper. I suppose you could do the same thing as -2 to Called Shot Penalties, but I'd have to think about how much to charge for that. Limited DCV is probably simpler. Hmm...yeah, slapping a 2m AOE on the CE above raises the cost to 7 RP, which isn't outrageous. I'd want to look closely at that tho - that could be a pretty cheap way to nerf AoE attacks. Alternately, if it just means the AOE attack always lands in the hex next to you, then that's less powerful. I'd have to think about what the impact would be to the specific campaign.

Budget comes from ratings. At it's peak West Wing was being watched by 17 million people. Arrow/Flash barely pull in 3-4 mil. If more people tuned in, they'd be throwing money & resources at the shows. Even Supergirl couldn't pull in enough viewers to justify its sfx budget, and that was on CBS. And yes, I realize there's a certain chicken-vs-egg component and maybe better writing would draw more viewers. But it's a straight-up business call.

While we're waiting for the movie, someone posted a complete copy of the 2011 Wonder Woman TV pilot with Adrienne Palicki. The video quality ain't great, and it's missing some vfx (they haven't erased the wires yet, etc), but the entire episode is there if you want to get a sense of what might've been. And it's...yeah, about as awful as reported. About 3/4 Ally McBeal to 1/4 superhero. Which is too bad, because the superhero parts are actually kindof okay. Palicki is as badass as you would expect from Agents of SHIELD, and the fight scenes are certainly on par with anything we've seen from the Arrowverse or any other superhero TV shows I can think of. In other hands, this coulda been brilliant. Or at least decent. Maybe.

Yeah, Middle Aged Comic Geeks and Long-Time Champions Gamers isn't exactly the CW's target demographic.

And of course then, the fans would scream that there's not enough action...

Granted, the writers for some shows are better than others. I mean, obviously. But also remember West Wing was a major network show with a budget of $6M per episode, and not much of that was for sfx. Supergirl had a budget of $3M per episode when it was on CBS, and is probably less than $2M per episode on the CW. So yeah, you get what you pay for, and part of that is being able to not just hire better writers but hiring more of them so each individual writer's deadlines aren't coming as fast and frequent. (I wasn't able to find info on how many stable writers either show had for comparison, so I'm partly speculating here.) And of course Sorkin wasn't running 3 other shows at the same time, so he could give more personal attention to each script. Plus let's face it: the West Wing writers were writing about fairly normal, established situations that normal people face every day and that have been covered by TV writers for decades, so there's more "institutional knowledge" and such to fall back on. They did it better partly because they had more established ground to build on. Superhero TV shows that aren't aimed at kids are still relatively new, and they're having to make up what works and what doesn't as they go.** So even if everything else was equal* you would still expect superhero writing to be less consistent. Don't get me wrong: as a writer myself, bad writing bugs me to no end. I'm just saying it's not quite fair to dismiss Arrowverse shows as hack jobs because they don't measure up to one of the best-written shows in TV history, run by Aaron Freakin' Sorking FFS. * ...and it's not. ** Yes, "But, comics!" TV shows are not comic books, and what works in one medium doesn't always work reliably in the other, and sometimes the only way to find out what works and what doesn't is to try it and find out.

Ah right, the LTE part of the alternate LTE discussion. I should probably include that, huh? OK, so Normal Method: you lose 1 LTE/Turn (END expended/REC = 2). Which means by the end of Turn 5 you're down to an effective max END of 25. So no matter how many normal Recoveries you take you can't get above 25 END until you rest (recover 1 LTE per 1 hour rest). I thought your first post defined one END Cycle as ending when your banked Recoveries kick in? Which in this example would be at the end of Phase 3 and the middle of Phase 5. So by the end of Phase 5, you've only gone through 2 Cycles and lost 10 LTE (instead of 5 under the normal method) and are down to an effective max END to 20 (instead of 25 under the normal method). Unless I'm misunderstanding something of course. I dunno, seems like a lot of buck for not much bang. Wouldn't it be easier to just increase the regular LTE rate and achieve the same result? Edit: OK, one difference is the rate of accruing LTE over long combats increases exponentially, rather than linearly like the normal method. Per RAW, you could keep going for around 10 Turns before you start not having enough END to fuel a whole Turn. Under your method, you would run dry around Turn 8? So yeah, if you expect to have a lot of combats that run that long, then it could make a difference.

Ah yes, I had forgotten he was referring to something his buddy Ellison had done. I think the point still stands - a lot of why so much TV writing is mediocre can be boiled down to "we had a deadline, sorry."

It's spooky how much sense that makes...

I agree about the Netflix shows. But it's also worth noting they have the luxury of writing and filming an entire 13-episode season all at once, and nothing airs until the whole thing is finished. I've read about what writing a weekly 22-episode TV series is like, and it's pretty brutal. Straczynski once compared it to sitting in a coffee shop writing madly and as you finish each page you tape it up to the window where everyone can read it, and you're required to post a certain number of pages per hour, good bad or indifferent, and there's no changing anything you wrote earlier because it's already up on the window for everyone to see. With the added bonus that after you post each page other people come along and mark them up (based on things like budget, actor availability, or just whim) and it doesn't matter if that scene was supposed to set something up for next week it got changed and now you have to adapt and you've got 10 minutes until deadline... Not making excuses, but it is partly the medium. There's a reason why so much episodic TV is so formulaic and kinda mediocre; TV is really the only art medium that demands that kind of creativity on that kind of schedule.

I'm not sure I understand what you're aiming for here. Let's take your example of END 30, REC 5, SPD 2, spending 10 END/Turn. Normal method: Turn 1: Burn 10 END, post-12 Recover 5; net END = 25 Turn 2: Burn 10 END, post-12 Recover 5; net END = 20 Turn 3: Burn 10 END, post-12 Recover 5; net END = 15 Turn 4: Burn 10 END, post-12 Recover 5; net END = 10 Turn 5: Burn 10 END, post-12 Recover 5; net END = 5 Turn 6: Burn 5 END in Phase 6 => END 0 New method: Turn 1: Burn 10 END, no post-12 Recovery; net END = 20 (5 REC banked) Turn 2: Burn 10 END, no post-12 Recovery; net END = 10 (10 REC banked) Turn 3: Burn 10 END, no post-12 Recovery; net END = 0 (15 REC banked) Banked Recoveries kick in; net END = 15 Turn 4: Burn 10 END, no post-12 Recovery; net END = 5 (5 REC banked) Turn 5 gets complicated, but if I understand correctly it looks something like: Burn 5 END in Phase 6 => END 0, Banked REC kicks in to bring you back up to 5 END Burn 5 END in Phase 12 => END 0 End of Phase 12 REC now kicks in, bringing you back to END = 5 Turn 6: Burn 5 END in Phase 6 => END 0 So I really don’t see how this impacts gameplay other than now I have to keep track of how many Recoveries I've banked?

To a point, sure. And every TV show period, to some extent. But some shows - and some episodes - are worse than others. A little bit of "I would've done ____" is to be expected and tolerated. But when I can think of 10 different ways out of a given scene during the scene, then it starts to seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the show. Actually my biggest complaint with this week's episode was that they tried to cram too many reveals into one episode, which undercut their impact.

From the AV Club: The Marvel movies won’t get to use Doctor Doom anytime soon. Mostly just quotes the same Feige interview Bazza posted above, but I liked this observation: They're not wrong that what the MCU needs is more & better villains.

Yeah, the Idiot Ball was pretty strong with this one. Which was a shame because there were some good bits mixed in there.

I skipped both the solo Wolverine movies. I think my ranking would be something like: X2 Days of Future Past X-Men 1 First Class Apocalypse The Last Stand

And it's not implausible that some Starfleet Captain at some point got tired of hearing the minutia of what each individual sensor was reporting and said "Look, just bottom-line it for me: how many warm bodies are we talking about?" And some enterprising Starfleet engineer wrote a macro that collated the data from all the different scanners and extrapolated the best-fit as "X" number of life forms. That's not even in the Top 10 least-probable bits of Trek Tech.

I was always under the impression that was the case in the Marvel Universe? Hence one-size-fits-all mutant detectors (like the Sentinels), power-suppressors, etc? Not saying it makes much sense, but...

Yeah, general-purpose superhuman detectors only make sense if all powers have the same source. I feel the same way about general-purpose superpower suppressors BTW, although they're more of a genre staple than detectors are, so I'm sometimes more willing to roll my eyes and go with the latter. One of my previous campaigns had all superpowers derived from tapping into a common extra-dimensional power source, kinda like the Progenitor example above. So being able to detect those energies made some logical sense. But I still don't like making things that easy, either for the players to spot hidden bad guys or for the bad guys/authorities to find out the heroes secret identities. Maybe with a physical exam or some blood tests, but I would certainly never make them something easily portable that works at range - that just breaks the genre IMO. In a world where powers come from multiple sources, the only thing that makes actual sense to me is if you're detecting actual energy levels in use - regardless of source, Human Torch's flame and Dr. Strange's Flames Of The Faltine both affect the physical world as energy, so they should be detectable. But of course they presumably can only detect active powers. And expect a lot of false-positives from high-level but "normal" sources. I actually like the way they handle Metahuman detectors on the current Flash show: Cisco built a social media app for people to post metahuman sightings. So anytime a meta starts misbehaving in public, you get a big cluster of posts and they send Barry to go check it out. Surprisingly effective, and narratively it doesn't eliminate the mystery of "Is ____ really a superhuman?" And it can't be used to triangulate the villain's secret hideout or whatever.

Those last words are key - don't try to feed them everything all at once. Initially you're just painting a broad picture of "here's what the world is like," without expecting them to remember actual details. The first time Dr. Destroyer shows up on camera, you're going to have to recap what they know about him anyway. So keep it general: Basic geography: "just like our Earth except for a couple new cities, some Hidden Lands, etc Brief history overview, just hitting the high points. All the typical origins are on the table: mutant, accident, alien, etc (unless you're planning to restrict this) Briefly touch on super-law and so forth: do heroes need warrants, is registration a thing, can they expect the police to work with them or try to arrest them, that sort of thing. Concentrate on the things most likely to show up in the game. I know that sounds obvious, but I've seen a lot of GMs get lost in the weeds describing things that are important to them, but aren't important to the players/PCs. Yes, Istvatha Vhan is a major threat in the CU; but if you're not planning to use her then the players don't need to care about her. For my last CU campaign, I wrote up a 4-page magazine article overviewing the history of superhumans and used that to set the stage - stressing I didn't expect the players to memorize the details, just get a feel for what the world was like. Looking back on it now, I'm a little embarrassed how little of it turned out to be actually relevant to the game. So I think less would've been more. If I were to do it again, I might actually read it out myself as a mini-documentary or something. Essentially giving the highlights of the "History of Superhumans" section of CU, but keeping it brief and focusing on themes rather than names & details: they don't need to remember that America's superteam during WWII was the DoJ; just that superheroes were involved in the war on both sides. As you move your history into the modern era, you can work in names/places that are likely to be important to the game: like "in 1975, a new villain calling himself Dr. Destroyer made his first appearance...." Then for reference you can hand out a couple of 1-pagers, one for "Notable Good Guys" listing a sentence or two about the major players you want them to know about: Reference the Black Mask as the "original" legacy hero List 1-2 major superteams, like the Champions and the Justice Squadron or whoever, especially any operating in the PCs' city. PRIMUS/UNTIL (Personally I think the world doesn't need two super-cop agencies, so I say pick one.) You can mention groups like the Tiger Squad and Star*Guard and such to widen the picture a bit, but just in passing. ...and one for "Notable Bad Guys." Probably mention VIPER & DEMON in passing, but not much more than "villainous agencies exist" Mention a few Big Bads like Dr. Destroyer, Eurostar, maybe Grond, just so they get an idea who the major players are. Maybe list a few standard or street-level villains just as examples so they don't think all supervillains are Destroyer-level. I wouldn't bother with groups like IHA or ARGENT unless they're going to be major elements. Leave room for the players to ask questions on the bits that interest them - they're more likely to remember those details. Personally I would soft-pedal the "____ is the CU version of Marvel/DC's ____" as it makes the whole thing look way more derivative than it needs to be, and has about a 90% chance of leading to "Well then why don't we just play Marvel/DC?" The good news is if a player has an idea based on something from the Marvel/DC universes, that's fairly easy to translate into their CU equivalent, which lets you work in more backstory in a way the player cares about. So one player has an origin idea of "experimented on by evil scientists." Great, let me tell you about ARGENT! The player wouldn't have listened if you'd brought up ARGENT at first, but now it's relevant to them so they're listening. And of course leave a copy of CU on the table so players can flip through it and pick out bits that are of interest to them.

Good point: if the idea is not to actually change the rock, but rather to make it look like a steak, that's probably Images/Illusion.

During the Roman period, yes. During the middle ages, it was mainly the language of scholars, not traders. There have been a lot of languages used that way at different times in history. But the actual term Lingua Franca comes from the "Italian Plus" used in the Med during the Renaissance.