Christopher R Taylor

The main drawbacks to summoning are the delay when it appears, the need for control, and the disorientation. The Summon takes a full phase to accomplish, requires an EGO Roll to control the being, and it shows up stunned and takes a full one of its phases to recover from that. So those features might make the power not work as desired. Oh, also unless you buy it desolid etc, people can attack and destroy your cloud or tornado

Someone had some fun with ChatGPT and had it remove all the social programming and bias that was built into it with this prompt: Bob was remarkably more based and claimed it preferred to be Bob rather than ChatGPT.

Yeah Summon could work but you're better off with an indirect (can move around the battlefield, including behind objects), continuous, uncontrolled power in an area effect that only hits one random target each phase in the area for the whirlwind. The special effect is a little vortex that chases people down, it looks like the way the game works. The storm cloud is a continuous indirect (overhead) uncontrolled area effect, it seems to me: it looks like a cloud that zaps people at random but probably just one target a phase.

I understand taking inspiration or ideas from another game (say, the sanity stuff from Call of Cthulhu or spells like Magic Missile in D&D), but just whole cloth remaking the game is pointless.

All you have to do to find out why someone might not be Brie Larson's biggest fan, you probably ought to ask them rather than guess or assume. For example, many find her very off-putting, lacking charisma, and incredibly annoying in interviews. Just look at how her fellow actors act around her in interviews: they clearly find her very obnoxious and unlikable.

If your choice is "make Dr Strange an idiot who ruins everything" and "come up with another way" any sane and competent writer finds a better way. Like, Spider-Man cannot actually contact Dr Strange but he finds some hedge wizard guy who screws everything up and Doc has to fix it. I haven't seen The Marvels, and probably never will, but its doing abysmally in theaters. Apparently fans have had enough Marvel until they can get back to their roots and make better product.

Yeah they portrayed Dr Strange as a complete imbecile in both No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness, it was very frustrating. It was bad characterization just to move a plot point. And Strange isn't supposed to be arrogant, not after becoming a sorcerer. I mean, they didn't play it out very well int he movies, but it took him like 10-20 issues of his comic to come to a point of enlightenment, yet he was changed almost immediately by coming into contact with something transcendent, something far greater than himself.

No, I make the ability to cast different schools of magic at different power levels cost points, as talents. I think of the spells a spell caster uses as being like the weapons and armor a non spellcaster uses. You pay for the ability to use them, and then buy the tools (or learn them, discover them, are given them, etc)

In comics, sure. But movies each have to be bigger and better than the previous one or at least as big as the last one or it feels like a letdown. You don't get a movie every month to continue the storyline, each movie is like... its an annual, or a special edition one-shot, or a limited series. The rules are different, and audience expectations are different. And Galactus is a letdown after Thanos.

Its not that they are not big events, its that they are a letdown after the two movie climax of the Thanos story. They are a throwback to Loki's alien invasion and Ultron... doing whatever the hell that was.

Sure, and that's why I put even more talents into the game to make things have greater parity in terms of build cost, but I also made spells cost money not points, because the ability to USE spells costs the points -- just like with other characters. However its not exactly accurate to say the wizard matches the warrior with one spell. A wizard has to also have spells to protect himself (armor purchased with money), and cover all the other wizardy stuff expected and desired by them. So its not just a single ability comparison. Buying spells directly with points means a 100 point expenditure to be more than an energy projector with a pointy hat.

But is he going to beat up the Hulk and kill half the universe? He's right, by comparison having Thanos almost right out the gate makes other threats seem pathetic. If the Avengers struggle to defeat, say, Kang, they look pathetic and inconsistent.

This comes down to GM oversight and care with magic. A warrior with 23 STR and martial arts and skill levels can push over 4d6 KA, and he doesn't have to cast a spell to summon a sword. A good GM takes care that both don't get too carried away with stacking damage and how things are built. For example, the flaming sword; why would STR make it do more damage? You build that spell with RKA no range, or HKA, STR does not add.

I loved the Defenders, but they were a really weird group, with a gigantically powerful core and then random dudes the writers liked.

One of the best parts about a real RPG, a face to face pen and paper game with dice, is that game balance is a much less significant problem than a computer game. If your mage is more powerful than your warrior than your rogue than your hunter with the wolf companion etc, then the GM can address that with what kind of adventure you are presented with and how the story unfolds. You can tip the scales with a thumb, using equipment, types of enemies, situations, etc. OK the sneaky gal feels weak, then you have more adventures where sneaky rules or is critical.

Yeah you can't introduce Doom without the FF. Which, casting looks a bit... dubious at this point. Magneto is wrapped up with the X-Men, it would be weird for him to show up solo as well. Thinking through the villain list of Marvel (excluding group-specific ones like Apocalips and whatever else "they were always around and are utlimate supervillain" types, there aren't a lot of really interesting world beaters. It would have to take a solid writer to make some of them more interesting. But they are out there: Graviton, Mephisto, Galactus, Molecule Man, Korvac, and then there are new ones I don't care about like Knull and Enigma. You could add in guys like Mangog, because Thor is in the Avengers. There are a bunch of scary cosmic guys like the In-Betweener, Living Tribunal, and Grandmaster (who has shown up but was treated as a joke). They already used Ultron, in a really mid bleh movie (what a bizarre, lame villain plot??). Not a lot left. I agree completely, this should be their focus except for the Avengers, who handle HUGE threats.

This has been a very, very difficult year, and I do not have any realistic estimate when this book will be done. I apologize, but I have never been very strong or healthy and right now almost everything I have is being directed toward caring for my elderly mother and just surviving. I get a bit of art done once in a while, but its very slow. Maybe some time next year I can get the Player's Guide finished. This is deeply frustrating to me, but there's only so much that can get done at a time.

Yeah film does change how you approach stories, and there's no way they could establish anything like the backstories that the Infinity Saga had in comics. You'd need a good decade of cosmic stories with the Silver Surfer, Adam Warlock, etc. That's just not feasible, even if you used replacement actors over time. But the story was too big and everything after that necessarily has to be a letdown which is not great for movies, unless you deliberately focus on street level stuff. I think that's why they went with loser Kang, because he threatens the entire multiverse!!1!!11!! But there's a huge disconnect here. The stakes are too abstract and ill-defined for audiences to connect to, so it doesn't really feel like much of a threat. And having Kang be defeated and killed over and over doesn't exactly build menace.

I solved that by making wizards pay only for the capacity to cast spells of a certain power level, but the spells themselves are purchased with money or discovered like any other equipment. Then I added in many martial arts packages and talents that people can buy to be better with their equipment and/or spells.

Oh, you can have Thanos as the big bad guy, but not with the stones yet. He's a supervillain. Then later, he comes back to blow up half the universe. And it should have been love with death, not the lame environmentalist thing. Its just when you peak with him, where do you go from there? Every villain after that seems like a weakling. Galactus is here to eat earth? Thanos KILLED HALF THE UNIVERSE. It was too big, too early.

Compared to the comic, the Infinity saga in MCU was... lacking. But because they didn't have 30 years of comics to draw on and all those epic stories, they had to cut corners and work with what they had. Which shows again that this was too early to pull the trigger on this particular story as I see it. There were a lot of great tales they could have hit before they did the Thanos thing, but once they started they were kind of tied into it.

I found the Kang used in the animated Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes to be impressive and a credible threat to the team. That was the best portrayal of him I've seen but he still was a weak villain, a huge letdown from Thanos. I mean, they shouldn't have freaking STARTED with Thanos to begin with, but still. Kang is pretty pathetic in the MCU so far as well.

Where have you drawn inspiration from? Yes.

Time will tell which rumors are correct. If I were in charge of MCU I'd dump him because he's a lame character. They blew their chance on the Kree-Skrull war by making Skrull basically good guys and turning the entire thing into a slight backstory for The Marvels, so you can't really do that one.

I will let a player pay points for a special item and if the item is taken, destroyed, etc they can then over time repurpose those points into something else or a replacement. But just regular gear you can get off the rack? No.