bigdamnhero

Some people are naturally more suited to responsibility than others. There are in fact, people who drive great satisfaction from extremely high stress, critical jobs that can involve personal risk. I've met people who thrive and practically glow in these circumstances.
 
I've met people who absolutely crumble under pressure as well.
 
I'm going to go with a preference Superman is in the former camp.

It's hard not to think that way. But I really have no idea what it would be like to have every victimized, brutalized, or oppressed population on Earth crying out for my help every moment of every day. It reminds me of that Samaritan story from Astro City. It takes a Christ-like degree of compassion, patience, and indomitable will to do what is asked of heroes like Superman or Samaritan.
 
And I think that's why it is difficult to take a "realistic" approach with these characters. They would quickly implode from the sheer implausibility of their circumstances. I just feel that humanizing a character like Superman (too much) undermines his ability to actually do the job assigned to him.

Constantinople, April 7th, 1001. And now for a little Church politics...
 
The Patriarch of Constantinople has passed away, and the various Church factions are vying to have their man elected to replace him. One "dark horse" candidate, a priest named Gregoras, is pushing for Constantinople to break completely with the Roman Church. (50 years earlier than it happened in "our" timeline.) Our heroes have learned Gregoras is being backed by a foreign prince (who may or may not be the Antichrist), who has been greasing the palms of many Byzantine officials to get Gregoras elected. After our heroes reveal this information publicly (High Society by 10, and a natural 3 on Streetwise!), public opinion becomes so outraged that Gregoras is stoned to death by an angry mob. Leading to this exchange between multiple characters:
 
"Congratulations, you just engineered to have a Man Of God stoned to death. But you're pretty sure he was dirty, so..."
"Did we just turn him into a martyr?"
"No, because he was stoned to death by Christians. If he'd been killed by infidels, sure."
"But what if he was right and the people who stoned him were actually heretics?"
"The Bible says "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," right?"
"Riiiiiight..."
"Therefore the people who threw stones must've been sinless. QED."
"LOGIC!"
"I'm so confused."
"Welcome to Catholicism!"

I could've lived with a Superman movie where Superman is eventually placed in a situation where he is forced to kill someone. That alone wouldn't have "ruined" MoS for me if the movie up to that point had been any damn good. But they lost me at Letting Pa Kent Die By Tornado Because I'm An Emo Chickenshit.

It says a lot that the movies have nothing to do with the successful TV series on the CW.  The difference is that the TV shows are being produced by Comic Book fans with some knowledge of the characters.  
 
Case in point is Supergirl.  I was surprised that the Master Jailer showed up in an episode, primarily because he was actually a villain who took her on four times in the pages of Superman Family back in the 1980s.  Now that's almost as cool as having Garrett Morris in Ant-Man.

I disagree with this attitude so much. "Changed" is not a synonym for "ruined," and is almost always preferable to "held completely static for decades."
 
In the specific case of Peter's marriage, I thought letting Peter grow up and change really strengthened the character, and some of the storylines around his marriage with MJ were quite well done. (Say what you will about Straczynski's run on Spidey, but he wrote the Peter-MJ dynamic really well.) And there was something genuinely comforting to know that despite everything Pete went through as a kid and everything he's still going through, he nonetheless managed to find a little bit of happiness for himself. That's not a bad story for people to hear now and then.
 
What ruined Spidey for me was when they retconned away all that progress because "fans don't want to see a married Spider-Man." So we're back to Square 1, and nobody learns from anything? No possibility for character growth? What the hell is interesting about that? Where's the drama in knowing that no matter what a character goes through, nothing is ever going to change?
 
The only alternative is the DC approach of rebooting the universe every 5 years so you have an excuse to keep everyone in the exact same place and keep retelling the same damn stories over and over again. Yawn.
 
By contrast, if Marvel had kept Carol Danvers in the same box she'd been in since the 70s, no one would care about the character today and she certainly wouldn't be getting her own movie. But by letting the character evolve (starting with 2005's House Of M, and really taking off when DeConnick took over), they not only made her a far more interesting character, but they also opened up room for new characters to come in behind her.
 
I hope you don't feel I'm picking on you personally CT - I'm addressing a much wider attitude. (You just happen to be the guy that pushed the button - sorry for that!) But I genuinely feel like this instinctive, visceral resistance to change is the biggest problem with fandom today and is the main reason we can't have nice things.

You don't have to frame anyone for anything; you just get vague on the details. Dent was killed in the confusion and violence after the Joker's attack, the exact circumstances are unclear, evidence is contradictory, not enough to indict anyone, we may never know exactly what happened OH WELL we have plenty of other dead bodies that we can directly tie the Joker, the important thing is that Harvey Dent was a good man who fell victim to the violence and madness instigated by the Joker. And if anyone tries to imply maybe something else was going on, you go full-on outrage I can't believe you're trying to impugn the motives of this good man who gave his life to protect us harumpf harumpf... Simple lie of omission; it's actually a far simpler lie to sell than pinning it all on Batman for no damn reason. I mean this is Gotham FFS; GPD covers up worse shit than that on their slowest days. And while not exactly morally stellar, it's far less morally objectionable than the plan they actually went with.
 
The only reason for it was Nolan needed an excuse to retire Batman so he could come out of retirement ala Dark Knight Returns in the 3rd movie.
 
You mean apart from stating outright that Batman had no impact on crime, and apparently the only thing that was really needed to turn Gotham into a crime-free utopia was tougher sentencing laws? And that despite that, the citizens of Gotham would immediately overturn those laws [legal mechanism unclear] despite 8 years of proven success, just because it turns out the guy the bill was named for wasn't a saint?
 
And apart from how after 8 years of completely giving up on trying to make Gotham a better city as either Bruce or as Bats, how he suddenly decides to come out of retirement just because he hears some guy named Bane is in town - doesn't know anything about him, mind you, just his name - and does so with zero plan and only succeeds in distracting the police so that Bane can get away?
 
Yep, sounds like a Batman movie to me... [/sarcasm]
 
The first 15 minutes of DKR were when I realized just how much Nolan - and apparently everyone at WB - genuinely hates the concept of superheroes.

Having actually watched the show, this is mostly incorrect. Kara arrives on Earth - as a child - to find Clark is grown up and protecting Earth. Clark thinks it's important that Kara have a normal Earth childhood like he did. He also knows that as a child, she's vulnerable and his enemies would use her against him.* So he encourages her to just be a normal child as much as possible. Once she grows up and decides to become Supergirl, Clark makes it clear he's proud of her and had hoped she would choose this, but that it had to be her choice and it had to be an informed adult choice. That's all explained in literally the first episode.
 
Frankly, much of your argument on this thread comes across just like this - you're arguing very passionately about things you haven't read/watched. Which hey, we're all geeks here, nothing wrong with arguing passionately. But at some point you need to entertain the possibility that people who've actually read Superman comics might know the character better than you do?
 
I do agree with your point that early on Marvel's heroes were more relatably human than DC heroes; that's been well discussed. But you're vastly oversimplifying everything that's happened since then.
 
 
* This part is implied but not stated outright in the show.

Having actually watched the show, this is mostly incorrect. Kara arrives on Earth - as a child - to find Clark is grown up and protecting Earth. Clark thinks it's important that Kara have a normal Earth childhood like he did. He also knows that as a child, she's vulnerable and his enemies would use her against him.* So he encourages her to just be a normal child as much as possible. Once she grows up and decides to become Supergirl, Clark makes it clear he's proud of her and had hoped she would choose this, but that it had to be her choice and it had to be an informed adult choice. That's all explained in literally the first episode.
 
Frankly, much of your argument on this thread comes across just like this - you're arguing very passionately about things you haven't read/watched. Which hey, we're all geeks here, nothing wrong with arguing passionately. But at some point you need to entertain the possibility that people who've actually read Superman comics might know the character better than you do?
 
I do agree with your point that early on Marvel's heroes were more relatably human than DC heroes; that's been well discussed. But you're vastly oversimplifying everything that's happened since then.
 
 
* This part is implied but not stated outright in the show.

Just on the theme front for one more moment: One possible knock against the end-credits "Captain America March" from The First Avenger is that it's very "period," and wouldn't work for Captain America in modern times. But Alan Silvestri did another arrangement of the theme for the intro loop on the DVD which would work perfectly today. It's also IMHO the best musical summation of who Cap is and what he stands for I've heard yet:
 

One of my players is like that; he sets out to write this big epic novella, gets a page or two done, and then runs out of time/steam/whatever. Leaving me with more detail than I need in some areas while others are complete blanks. A list of bullet points hitting the highlights would be much more useful to me as a GM (and to the player I think), and can always be fleshed out more as you go.
 
This is great, but I have trouble getting some of my players to fill out my current questionnaire, and it's only 22 questions long!
 
 
Here's a thread from a few months ago where we talked more about getting background info out of the players' heads.

One of the things I heard most often from viewers of Age of Ultron, both in person and online, was how happy they were to hear Alan Silvestri's theme from the first Avengers film played over the credits of AoU.
 
I often hear the "Captain America March" from The First Avenger praised by people for its stirring heroism and, like, American-ness.   And I've lost track of how many young people claim to be rehearsing it for their band class.
 
Those are just two thematic examples that I believe could easily achieve the iconic status of a Bond or Star Wars theme... if Marvel would just repeat them a few times in their movies, as those other themes have been.

With supers games, because you often have the whole dual identity thing, there's also variation between what I think of as the DC-vs-Marvel approach. I.e. some players are better than others at envisioning their characters as people who have powers, whereas other players see their characters as a set of powers first and any SID or personal life tends to get tacked on as an afterthought.

The question is whether or not any of the MCU film themes will ever reach the iconic status of themes like Star Wars, Super Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Jurassic Park. I seriously doubt it. But I think the reasons have less to do with the quality of the music and more to do with our relationship to pop culture today. In particular, I think the way we consume cinema is very different today than in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Our relationship to the music of cinema has changed along the way as well, I suspect.

Banning mutant as an origin story, to prevent players from skimping on background, seems like begging the question to me.
 
Are you intending on forcing players to write a backstory, in spite of their inability or unwillingness to do so? A player who wants a backstory will create one, even if his power origin is "mutant", and a player who doesn't want to write one, will find a different low-effort origin to fill in the blanks with.
 
I personally find backstory to be a great part of most RPG characters, I'm just saying that this is kind of creating an in-character rule for an out-of-character problem. Engaging players directly to say they need a richer backstory seems like the better thing to do.

I dunno. Filling out an extensive questionaire feels like overkill to me. I mean, if a player really wants to go to all that trouble that's fine, but most GMs I know wouldn't bother with pouring over and integrating that much character information. I don't think that the answer to the problem of "no information" is "too much information". There's got to be a happy middle ground somewhere.
 
Some folks seem to be getting hung up on the act of writing a character background, as if they are expected to write scintillating prose worthy of publication by Random House. As a GM, all I would ask is that a player imagine in their heads the scene (or series of linked scenes as with Dr. Strange or Iron Man) that caused their character to acquire their powers. If you can imagine the scene(s) in your head, then you are certainly capable of jotting down the bare basics of what is going on in those scenes:
 
"Talented surgeon is trained (for years) by ancient master in the mystic arts after losing the use of his hands in a car accident."
 
"Genius inventor/engineer builds first armored suit out of scraps and misappropriated weapons parts while held captive by terrorists."
 
These are just one sentence summaries of what I imagine was going on with two characters during their origin stories. This is not a writing contest, and nobody is going to grade your work. If you can write forum posts, you can write one-sentence summaries of scenes you are capable of imagining in your head. And I know you are capable of imagining scenes in your head because you are playing an RPG.
 
Most GMs aren't looking for anything more than the bones of an origin story, not a full story written in novel form. I don't know very many players who are good at writing fanfic, and no GM I've ever played with expected anyone to be. So let's not get hung up on an expectation nobody has of you. Just do something we all know you are capable of: imagining a scene (or set of connected scenes) and jotting down one-line summaries of what you see in your head.
 
Given how simple and straightforward that is, there is just no excuse for writing (or saying), "mutant; born with fire powers," and leaving it at that.

One of my players is like that; he sets out to write this big epic novella, gets a page or two done, and then runs out of time/steam/whatever. Leaving me with more detail than I need in some areas while others are complete blanks. A list of bullet points hitting the highlights would be much more useful to me as a GM (and to the player I think), and can always be fleshed out more as you go.
 
This is great, but I have trouble getting some of my players to fill out my current questionnaire, and it's only 22 questions long!
 
 
Here's a thread from a few months ago where we talked more about getting background info out of the players' heads.

Re turning the arrow around, what I meant is: I am not saying everyone (or even most) who pick mutant origin are lazy/uninterested. I am saying most players who are lazy/uninterested seem to latch onto mutant origin because it allows them to do the absolute minimum. And yes, my beef is with the NFI part, and I feel the mutant origin can too often enable that cop out in some players.
 
I do 100% agree with your point that whether or not someone is interested in developing an elaborate backstory for their character doesn't necessarily correlate with them being interested in the game.

I could cite more examples of Cap in the comics not being "unfailingly" supportive of the government beyond the Nomad one I already mentioned, but I get the feeling they wouldn't carry enough weight for you. I also sense we have a fundamentally different perception of what "wanting" entails, for Superman or anyone else. The debate between us has probably reached an impasse, so if we can agree to disagree, I shall withdraw.

I remember when vampires and werewolves were something I looked forward to. Now they have way over-saturated the market. We need something new. I'm guessing cryptids will replace them.

I hope Scott Bennie won't mind me reprinting this, but for this topic I just couldn't resist.   Scott often plays Champions Online, usually as his longtime superhero PC alter-ego, Thundrax. From time to time he also posts bits of CU-based fiction featuring that character to the CO website discussion forums. Not long ago Scott put up this bit of Thundrax fiction relating to Batman vs Superman, which I hope you'll find as satisfying as I did. Following are Scott's words:
 
 
(Warning: Spoilers for Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Note, this is an IC fiction piece only and not a review of the movie, which many have enjoyed, and which many have also criticized.)






“Isn’t this great?” Sean exclaimed, munching on his popcorn. “This fight is gonna be awesome!”

Craig squirmed in his seat, sighing. It was bad enough when Sean dragged him to this movie the first time, but he wanted to watch it again? Teenagers. He muttered something about Christopher Reeve under his breath.

“Come on Batman,” Sean grinned. “Kick his ass again!”

Craig snorted in disgust, and finally rose to his feet. People immediately snarled at him to sit down. Sean winced. “Uncle Craig, you’re wrecking the movie!”

“Incubus,” Thundrax said with a growl, referring to an omnipotent, malevolent cosmic imp with whom he'd clashed repeatedly over the years. “You remember that favor you once promised me, as long as it’s totally selfish? I’m calling it in.”

With that, Craig walked into the screen.

“Who are you?” Batman and Superman exclaimed together. Craig shook his head.

“The “S” stands for hope?” Craig said. “How about for “stupid”. You’ve got an hour to find your mom, and you waste it on a fight scene? Duh. Superspeed, moron. Use it. Not to mention access to a crack investigative team who might move the damn planet to find a popular co-worker’s kidnapped mom.” He turned on Batman. “And you! Lex Luthor’s bitch!” He placed a Lexcorp logo over the bat symbol on his chest.

“I can take you down too.” the Bat growled.

“Shut up, Luthor's bitch. Oh, by the way, when you said that a 1% chance of him being hostile made you perform an action that has a much higher chance of turning a potentially deadly alien into an enemy... so damn stupid. I so wanted to hit you in the face."

"Try it."

"Give me a break. Even if I wasn't playing Rod Sterling for a day..."

"That's Serling," Superman corrected.

"Fine. Even if I wasn't playing Rod Serling for a day, you don't know my abilities and you haven't made preparations to handle me, so you're hosed." Craig answered. “But for now you’re going to stop being an emotionally stunted three year old and listen to me as I explain everything Luthor’s done to set up this fight. Also, to cut to he chase and quote the Brady Bunch, Martha, Martha, Martha.”

“Wasn’t that Marcia?” Superman wondered.

“Details, Details,” Thundrax chided dismissively. “And as long as I’m here…” Craig concentrated and the sky cleared. Batman shielded his eyes. “Man, no wonder you’re all angry and depressed. This palette makes Caprice look cheery and wholesome.”

“What’s Caprice?” Superman again wondered.

“Shut up. I’m talking.” Craig snapped, and he explained to Batman everything Luthor had done to set up the climactic showdown. He could see Batman's face drop by the end of the very long explanation. “Some detective you are. You still want to fight, Luthor’s bitch?”

Batman said nothing.

“Good. Now, bad CGI Doomsday is on his way, so don’t throw out the Kryptonite spear, give it to Wonder Woman instead, she’s tough enough to handle it, not to mention Amazon training. Okay, I think I’ve done enough for you two morons. This thing is almost as dumb as Thundrax the movie, and that’s saying a lot. But remember you two. Adult yourself. Testosterone can be controlled.”

With that, Craig stepped back out of the picture and returned to his seat, smiling in deep satisfaction. Sean Doerksen dumped his popcorn on the Canadian hero and, hands on his hips, shouted angrily at the Canadian.

“That was the best fight scene ever and you ruined it!” He paused to hyperventilate. “Never take a superhero to see a superhero movie! You’re worse than dad!”

Craig settled back in his seat and chuckled, drinking in the dirty looks of the rest of the audience.

Technically no. That was Superman 2,which made $190M on a $54M budget (also sold tickets).

I too prefer Marvel, but you really have to watch the entire MoS to understand how relentless it is. (I am not recommending that you actually do this, because your lifespan is finite and hours of it are valuable.)
 

The other, lesser, problem with MoS is that it commits the all-too-comomon offense of assuming that spectacular fights are interesting. They can be, up to a point. But if it just drags on with no change in circumstances or personal stakes for the combatants, it gets boring. Oh look, they knocked over another building. Yawn.
 

I always thought a Three Stooges eyepoke would have been more effective, but there's enough wrong with the movie already that we don't have to spend time picking on continuity and editing mistakes.

I could've lived with a Superman movie where Superman is eventually placed in a situation where he is forced to kill someone. That alone wouldn't have "ruined" MoS for me if the movie up to that point had been any damn good. But they lost me at Letting Pa Kent Die By Tornado Because I'm An Emo Chickenshit.

I could've lived with a Superman movie where Superman is eventually placed in a situation where he is forced to kill someone. That alone wouldn't have "ruined" MoS for me if the movie up to that point had been any damn good. But they lost me at Letting Pa Kent Die By Tornado Because I'm An Emo Chickenshit.