massey

There's a lot of argument here over what is basically just 6 points. I don't see it as a problem because particularly for a superheroic character, it's just over 1% of your total character points. It's basically a rounding error. Somebody could slap a "not in intense magnetic fields" on a 30 point power and get the same effect. It's a minor inconvenience. Go ahead and let them sell it off, I don't care. Personally, I think the game could use a few mental combat maneuvers. If somebody shoots them with an Ego attack, and they can somehow detect it coming in, let them abort to try to make an OMCV vs OMCV roll to block it. "Dr Mindhammer is glaring at me, and his face is scrunching up... I can feel him inside my head! Got... to... resist!" Roll as if you're making a hand to hand block. The guy who bought down his OMCV just doesn't quite get it. He's even worse than a normal person. I'm reminded of the scene from the Starship Troopers movie, where Doogie Howser is testing the hero guy for psychic powers. "You know, statistically, you should have gotten at least one of these right by now." The guy with a 1 OMCV is super duper not psychic.

Yeah you're reading it wrong. If you take damage, you don't get any Stun back from taking a Recovery, which is different from "recovering from being Stunned". On phase 3, Bob gets hit with a 12D6 attack. The bad guy rolls really well, doing 57 Stun. Bob has 25 Def and a 25 Con. He takes 32 past defenses and is Stunned. He's also down to 13 Stun. Bob's next action is on segment 5. On 5 he will recover from being Stunned. This means he just doesn't get an action that segment. On 5 he gets blasted again, but this time the villain rolls like crap. He does 30 Stun, so only 5 gets past Bob's defense. Bob is now at 8 Stun, but he is no longer Stunned. Bob next goes on segment 8. He decides to take a Recovery action, since he's almost unconscious. That's his action for 8. At the very end of the phase, an agent shoots Bob with an 8D6 blaster, rolling 26 Stun. One gets past defense, so Bob drops to 7 Stun, and does not get anything back from his Recovery action.

Most Americans are cheering the Raptors on as well.

I am, of course, going to steal this line.

Well yeah. By trying to appeal to one audience, you're gonna lose another. I mean, it doesn't really appeal to me. I don't have any problem with equal representation or anything like that, but I'm very clearly not the target demographic. Unfortunately, I guess controversy gets clicks? One of the downsides of YouTube is that it seems every other person on there wants to be a shock jock or outrage host or whatever. The Angry Nintendo Nerd was funny, but he was just screaming about bad video games. Lots of people have taken that shtick and applied it to politics (or anything they can make political). This show seems like it was kinda made to push their buttons.

I just watched the trailer. It looks like any of the other DC TV shows. I didn't find anything to be offended by, but it's not something I'm going to watch. Of course, I don't watch any of those other shows either. Now, it's clearly trying to send the "I'm a badass bitch" vibe, while also trying to appeal to guys who want to see hot lesbian action but haven't heard of the internet yet. I mean, they're perfectly within their rights to make a show like that, but it's obviously not aimed at me.

Exactly. And I think a well written adventure can make what railroading does exist a lot more palatable. Theoretically the author would have had a lot of time to think things through, and figure out good explanations for why your characters are there. That's one benefit to having secret identities, is that it isn't enough for Captain Strongman to get to England, you've also got to explain how scrawny little Danny Derkins got there as well. If there was a halfway decent explanation for why the characters have to be on the boat, we could have accepted it. So I think you give a set of pregen characters, and in the canon of the game setting, for future publications and such, this is going to be the way it happened. But if you want to use your own characters, that's fine too. But then have something like "it is highly suggested that at least one character have the Deduction skill. At least one character needs to speak German. The adventure needs a character who can be very stealthy or invisible. Without these abilities, the players will find the game much more difficult. If they have teleportation, or mind reading, or desolidification, then the adventure may be too easy." The characters from Star Wars needed R2-D2 to be able to talk to the main computer to shut down the garbage compactor. They don't really have a way out of that trap otherwise.

Hero needs a great setting, and right now it appears you need pre-packaged adventure books to succeed in the industry. So the topic has sort of drifted around those subjects. Railroading is a real thing, I've played in plenty of games where the GM was only going to let you move from point A to point B. I once played in a Golden Age game where our heroes had to get from New York to London during the war. Despite the fact that most of our characters could fly (and one could long-distance teleport), we were told we had to take a cruise liner. We were supposed to do it for secrecy (the Nazis wouldn't suspect us coming by boat, apparently). Except they did expect us, and we got attacked by a German superteam before we even got to London. There was also a mystery that we were supposed to solve on the boat, but I don't really remember the details very well. It was pretty obvious that the GM had written the adventure without regard for any abilities the players might have, and he was determined that we were going to spend like 4 sessions just getting to England. That's how he'd written it, and that's how it was going to be played. I think part of the problem is that some GMs aren't good at improvising, and they also don't have the time to really devote to crafting an adventure specific to their players. In this instance, I'm sure the GM had seen a movie or something, because he wanted to do some Murder on the Orient Express type adventure, but it didn't make sense for any of the characters we'd made. He didn't really have the time or inclination to modify it for people who really shouldn't be taking a boat to England. And he couldn't think on his feet fast enough to give a compelling reason why our characters needed to be there. The result was that it felt like a video game where you are powerful enough to kill dragons, but you can't get past the town guard who is blocking the treasure room because you don't have the password. A well-written adventure path could solve most of that. GMs who are short on time could have a lengthy adventure series ready to go, they wouldn't have to prepare beyond just reading the adventure ahead of time. It doesn't solve the problem of the guy who can't improvise, but with pregen characters a lot of that could be avoided. If Telepathy would really screw the adventure, then none of the characters have Telepathy. The book could even have warnings that the following powers will probably unbalance the game, so watch out for them if people want to build their own characters. And I think a series of these adventure paths could really help establish a signature setting in a way that sourcebooks don't. Effectively, you could build a continuity for your world in the form of these stories.

If you set it today, a moon shot is pretty small potatoes in the MCU. There's enough alien crap laying around that a smart high school kid should be able to build a moon rocket.

The Wizard could be the first villain they face. He's seems like a standard MCU villain. Generic tech guy invents a thing, builds a suit. It's not super original, but it's not like Marvel hasn't gone that route before. Maybe they want to save him for the disappointing sequel. Devos the Devastator would actually make a lot of sense. He wants to destroy anyone who is a threat to galactic peace, and after the events of Infinity War/Endgame, who fits that description better than the heroes of Earth? Remember, theoretically these guys can go reassemble the Infinity Gauntlet any time they want. Somebody out there might find that threatening.

Well, I don't completely agree. In Superman 2, Zod and his crew get depowered, then fall 10 feet into a cloud. But they aren't up in the sky, they're... on the ground? There shouldn't even be a cloud there. Up until that moment, I just thought there was ice on the ground in the Fortress of Solitude. I don't really know where they went. Onscreen neck snap? We definitely know what happened there. Now maybe Christopher Reeve's Superman killed them. That's possible. But I don't think there's any reason to assume they're dead. It's open to interpretation. When I saw the movie as a toddler, I didn't even think about it. They were defeated, they were gone. When I saw it later, as like a 12 year old or something, I assumed they were dead. "Yeah, kill 'em, Superman!" When I saw it as an adult, I started wondering whether Superman had just murdered Zod. After all, Zod is a normal human at that point. There's basically no reason to do anything other than put him in prison. In the first movie, Lex Luthor tried to nuke California and New Jersey, and Superman just flew him to normal jail. I don't think Zod even killed anybody. So it's not fair to say that we ignored these problems in other films. I've definitely thought about the ending of Superman 2. But it's such a lighthearted movie, and the "death" scene is so vague (combined with the fact that it's nearly 40 years old), I don't think it gets the same level of scrutiny. Then there's the fact that if Zod dies, it's a traditional Disney villain death. He falls into a chasm. Okay, so Superman actually threw him into it, but we've been watching kids movies where the villain dies from a fall since the 1930s. The manner of death may be important as well.

I completely forgot about him letting his dad die. Man that movie sucked.

Desolid, not if attacker makes an Ego roll

Supes and Thor are just different characters. MCU Thor isn't comic book Thor, but I still like the character. Up to that point, we've had 3 Thor movies and 3 previous Avengers movies to get to know him. We've also had those clips with Thor and his roommate Darryl, and honestly by Endgame we just really really like Thor. Then when he's got his chance to undo everything bad, it turns out the villain has beaten them to the punch. It's the Ozymandius "I did it thirty five minutes ago" moment. And so Thor chops his effing head off. Here's a guy who we've spend 6 movies growing to love, and we completely understand his frustration and despair, and he has a completely human moment and he does what many of us might do in that moment. He becomes more like Eric Draven in The Crow, or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. It's a completely righteous execution of a completely terrible man. It's cathartic, and yet it doesn't put anything right. It's not a great heroic moment, but it is a great heroic failure. It's an awesome moment in the film. It's final but in a sense it's also anti-climactic. We're expecting there to be this great battle where the heroes fix everything, and instead Thor kills him and now there's nothing for the heroes to do except live the rest of their lives in a half-dead world. Thanos is dead, but the heroes still lost. Superman's neck snap isn't unjustified. I'm not saying he's a villain for killing Zod, or even that he was wrong. He had to do it, but the filmmaker didn't give it nearly the same dramatic weight as Thor's decapitation. They haven't even established that Superman has a code versus killing at that point. Obviously he doesn't want to kill Zod, but there's no indication that he has anything more than the normal "reluctance to kill" that all of us have (and that we get no points for). Now again, Thor doesn't have it at all, but they aren't the same character.

To be fair, I was two years old when I saw that movie.

His failure wasn't in killing Thanos. That never entered into it. It never bothered Thor at all. Do you think Odin, father of Hela, would be bothered by the idea of his son executing Thanos? Thor's failure was in not killing Thanos in time. It wasn't heroic for Thor to kill Thanos as he did. Not at all. That was the point of that scene -- they had failed as heroes. All that was left was to render judgment. Thanos absolutely deserved it. Even 2014 Thanos recognized that.

I think they kept Thanos alive initially because they wanted to know what he did with the second use of the gems. They needed to interrogate him so they knew what to undo. When they found out he'd destroyed them, Thor saw no reason to let him keep breathing.

Yuck. I don't like the tactile TK explanation. I just like him being strong. But it's not him grabbing the guy that I have a problem with. Christopher Reeve caught Margot Kidder while she was falling off a building and she was fine. It's the "flying through ten concrete walls with the dude in front of him" that he shouldn't have survived.

I think I remember reading that one too. I think you could probably make a case that lots of heroes represent different aspects of US identity. In a lot of ways we're like the Hulk. "America SMASH!" is a real thing. But I don't think he necessarily represents that in the MCU films. Spidey and Ant-Man, I think, as later additions to the MCU, are less representative of that than some of the other characters. Ant-Man is "woke" (though I hate that term) and Spidey is still a kid wrestling with how he interacts with one of his idols. He's in the middle of that "becoming a man" story. I loved how at the end of his movie, he's basically become more mature than Tony Stark. "This is a test, right?" "Yeah, it's a test. Obviously." And then Ton'ys got to figure out what to tell all those reporters because he was completely willing to add a 15 year old kid to the Avengers.

This post is going to creep a little bit towards politics, but I'll try to keep it non-controversial. In the first Iron Man movie, Tony Stark is basically Mr Super-Republican. Remember it's 2008, we're at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and things aren't going great. Now here comes this billionaire arms-dealer, a walking poster board for the second amendment, who goes overseas and fixes things. Can't find Osama bin Laden? Tony Stark can. He's just going to fly over to Iraqistan and blow away the bad guys. Yeah he has his awakening where he decides that selling weapons is a bad thing, and dedicates his life to world peace, but he's gonna start that process by killing people we don't like. That movie really fit the mood of the country, where we just wanted to go over there and smash somebody and make it okay again. John Wayne killed people in his movies. Most of those were post-WWII and up through early Vietnam. Yeah, they were cowboy movies, but they were also war movies. Even if he's playing a cowboy, he's also basically a symbol of mid-20th century America. Even if he's literally fighting the Comanche, he's also symbolically fighting the Cold War. After John Wayne died, Schwarzenegger filled that role. It didn't matter if he was fighting aliens in the jungle or teaching kindergarten, those were basically war movies. In the MCU, that role is shared by Iron Man and Captain America. Tony Stark represents America's might, and Cap represents America's ideals. And just like John Wayne's movies or Schwarzenegger's movies, most of the MCU films are symbolically still about war and America's place in the world. They're about responsible use of power and what happens when we screw up. There's a whole big layer of meaning to the MCU, and I'm not sure it was 100% intentional. Maybe partially intentional and mostly it's just a factor of how good movies reflect the times in which they were made. Captain America is a superhero, but he's also the Navy sniper who shot those pirates who had seized that boat (exactly what I thought of in that Winter Soldier scene). Iron Man is a superhero, but he's also the pilot who drops a smart bomb, or the SEAL team who fly in a stealth helicopter and kill bin Laden. Superman isn't any of those things. Superman is, as zslane said, a Jesus metaphor. He's ultra powerful, he's really really nice, and he watches over us. And we don't really like the idea of Jesus snapping people's necks.

I don't blame Superman for killing Zod. He didn't have a choice. I do blame Zack Snyder for making a Superman movie where protecting civilians is not a priority. I said earlier, Marvel's heroes all have a body count. I mean, dear God, Iron Man gave a teenage kid a suit with an "instant kill" option. He's definitely got the irresponsible uncle role down. Tony kills I don't know how many terrorists in the first movie. Now these are all bad guys who are getting killed, and the heroes all make a dedicated effort to save innocent people. And the only person who is portrayed as any sort of moral paragon is Cap. Thor is awesome, but he's not exactly a role model in our modern society. Captain America is a soldier, and we all accept that killing Nazis in WW2 is okay. Then in Winter Soldier, he's kind of a James Bond superspy, going on missions for what he thinks is a good cause serving his country. But Cap goes out of his way in Civil War to avoid killing any of the cops who are going after Bucky. Superman is a different character altogether. As far as moral symbols, he and Cap are similar. But Cap has always been willing to kill, if he had to. His powers are more limited, and often he doesn't have the choice. Superman's powers mean that he almost always has the option to not kill. If he had spent the entire movie saving civilians, and then he had to snap Zod's neck at the end, we'd have more sympathy. As it was, he had just had a brawl where tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of people would have died, and then he's sad because he had to kill the villain? It didn't feel right.

Let's say that Hero decided to start in that direction. They could start by publishing a combined rulebook and genre book, like 4th edition Champions. It gives people Viper agents, a villain team, about a dozen individual villains, and a master villain like Mechanon. It also gives a starting hero team and some basic ideas on superhero adventures, as well as info on Delta City or something, wherever you've got your campaigns set. You also publish a Classic Enemies/CKC villain book with like 50 different bad guys to use. This is your standard Players Handbook/Monster Manual that most people will buy. It's kind of expected at this point. But then, then let's say you start 3 different adventure modules, based around 3 different teams. So you've got maybe X-Men, Teen Titans, and Fantastic Four. The first module gives character sheets for our heroes, and campaign guidelines if players want to use their own. And each module has like a dozen adventures (one game a week for 3 months) for these characters. And once every quarter, you release a new module. You could go for a year, or a year and a half (or however long you want), taking these characters through the equivalent of one writer's time on a comic book. So it would be sort of like John Byrne's run on Superman, or Walt Simonson's run on Thor. You've got a certain set of plots and supporting characters that the author likes, and villains who will show up, but it's a defined period of the characters' history. Each new module shows how the characters have spent their XP and gives updated character sheets. It also obviously includes new villains and NPCs that will be appearing in the next three months worth of adventures. So you've got like 3 different teams of characters for a new group of players to select from. And you'll have 3 different storylines that you'll develop over the next year or two. Then, once you complete one of those stories, you can publish a sourcebook that brings everybody up to date. So let's say your X-Men analog have been operating in the Pacific Northwest city of Seacouver. You could make an X-Men sourcebook that details what it's like, who the villains are, and just sort of a general update for people who didn't play through the modules. It gives character sheets for the heroes that would more or less match up with their final versions from the modules (it doesn't have to be exactly the same -- there's a new writer on that comic now, after all). And maybe some characters or organizations who were mentioned in the module get fleshed out a little better here. Then, you start with a new series of modules. New characters in a different part of the world. Maybe now you have Hudson City Vigilantes (Batman Family plus Spidey plus Cloak and Dagger), Avengers West Coast (standard adult supers), and a comedy one (🎵Rorschach and Deadpool...🎶). Sort of different genres within the broader superhero category. If something became really popular, like say maybe your X-Men adventures sold really well, you could always revisit them a little later with a new adventure module. Characters don't have to stay static. Just because Wolverine ended the last module at 537 points, that doesn't mean that he's at least that level in your new module. Maybe he's been hanging out in bars instead of training, or his powers are fluctuating, or whatever. In one adventure maybe he traveled into outer space and hung out with aliens, and that character sheet included Language: Klingon and +2 OCV with disintegrators. That doesn't mean it needs to be on his character sheet now that he's on a mission to rescue mutant POWs from some southeast asian country. I think something like this would let you flesh out your superhero world in an organic and interesting way. People might actually care when you publish the stats for some superhero team. The Tiger Squad would be somebody who was introduced in a planned way, and not just like "oh yeah, here are some dudes from China that you might use if you can come up with anything". Anyway, this post was kind of stream of consciousness, but nobody is really doing any kind of real continuity with superhero rpgs.

1. It's going to be cheaper to have one large explosion or area of effect, and then put a custom limitation on it. So something like 10D6 Energy Blast, Area of Effect Radius with increased area, Limited Power: only does 6D6 in largest blast, does full 10D6 in smaller blasts (then define how big those are) 2. Indirect works fine. If you can't see them, you'll take an OCV penalty anyway. 3. Area of Effect: Any Area, with a limitation that you have to roll to hit each one. Or Indirect and Autofire can work as well. 4. Similar to #1, except with a really really big Area of Effect. 10D6 Energy Blast, Area of Effect Radius with very large increased area, Limited Power: works how you described it. This power would normally do 10D6 to everybody in a very large area. Now it only "chains" out if there are people nearby to carry it further. Note: this will only explode once. Two dudes next to each other won't just go trading explosions back and forth. To do that, you need Continuous and Uncontrolled. 5. Just buy the thrown shield as an Energy Blast. You aren't actually throwing anything, just using a blast power. It's just a visual effect that something gets thrown, and therefore it always returns. Put a limitation on it if you want enemies to have a chance to intercept it. 6. There's nothing wrong with wanting to build Cap.

Well, it's quite possible that adventure modules are sort of a "loss leader" for RPGs. They may not sell great, but you really only need one guy to buy the adventure, and then the four or five people in his gaming group end up purchasing the rulebook. And it's possible that they are sort of a prerequisite to having a successful game. If you don't make them, people don't pick up your system. A series of adventure modules, kind of like Paizo's adventure paths, that told a story like a comic book would be interesting. The first module could introduce a hero team, and then you run them through the equivalent of like a 50 issue story arc. Think the New Teen Titans from the early 80s. Each module could cover like the equivalent of 7 or 8 issues, complete with DNPC story hooks, intro of new villains, power complication subplots, newly revealed backstory, new villain character sheets, etc. You could have four or five different storylines, with different hero groups, going at the same time. Perhaps fleshing out the universe that way instead of just focusing on sourcebooks would be a better idea.

Yeah, that's my feeling on it too. I accept that people survive things that should be fatal in the Marvel films. They've got a more comic-booky type physics going on. Even though bad guys die, often frequently, a lot of people survive falls or hits that should kill them. So if Iron Man slaps some dude while wearing his suit, I don't think "oh he's gotta be dead". I can basically accept that some villain goon will wake up in the hospital in a few days with his jaw wired shut. It's strange that the Marvel heroes are generally far more lethal than their DC counterparts (Cap, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye... all of them have huge body counts), and yet I don't see any of them in the same "Casual Killer" light that I do Zack Snyder's heroes. Maybe it's because Superman has like 80 different ways that he could stop that terrorist, and he chooses the one that looks fatal.