Christopher R Taylor

I can say that without a qualm, but that's not my point. My point isn't that nobody could possibly react like that. Its that they took a very likable, interesting, fun character who is supposed to be noble and heroic and turned him into a psychotic lunatic attacking everything around him like a rabid dog.

Yeah that's just not true in my games. Invisibility is a power that necessarily and by definition makes the origin of your powers invisible to the sense it covers... on your body. If you fire a gyrojet pistol in cold air, its going to create a con trail right to you, but not be visible when fired. Invisibility is a power which makes your powers have invisible power effects (in that sense group), as long as they are part of you and don't have an external extension like a jet of flame. It doesn't make their effects or impact invisible, just your use of them.

No, Darkness would work like this: Person walked up to Darkness vs Invisibility and reaches to touch them, their hand vanishes. Person firing a gun pushes it against Darkness vs invisibility; it stops making noise. Darkness affects everyone in its area, Invisibility only the person in question.

I like Luke Cage quite a bit so far, and enjoyed the first episode more than Daredevil. It had several scenes which felt more like filler to me than story (the sex scene, the 15 minutes flirting with a woman at the bar and ignoring all the other customers, the scene of Cottonmouth playing jazz on the keyboard as women lounged around) which I hope they don't do too much more of in the future, but the last scene made it all work. Part of the reason I don't like Daredevil as much as I could is they make him too human and ordinary for my tastes. Yes, he gets tired fighting, but he seems to get too completely exhausted fighting. Every single battle with guys is a horrendous exertion of time and energy. He hits guys so hard their head makes a dent in the wall, and they get back up and need to be hit again, three, four times. While this has a good "Champions fight" feel to it with all those recoveries, they need to embrace the mook rule and have the non essential bad guys stay down when they go down. Luke Cage does not have this feel. He's like freight train, and when he hits a guy, they just stay down. His drawbacks and limitations are very different: personality conflicts, personal issues, being a fugitive from jail, etc.

Pressure sensing mats are detection based on touch. Doesn't matter how much sound it makes, or the origin of sound, or the scientific structure of how sound is generated or propagated through a medium. The rules are pretty simple on this and easy to figure out. If it targets or detects through touch, the invisibility to sound has no effect on the sense. Let's consider a single example, firing a pistol. -Person with invisibility vs sight: the pistol makes a loud bang and the bullet hits the target visibly. Someone with extreme Rapid sense modifier* can see the bullet once it leaves the gun and travels to the target. Smoke from the gun is visible in the air around where the shooter was. But there is no flash, no movement of the gun, etc. -Person with invisibility vs hearing: the pistol makes a large flare of light and fire, the bullet travels to the target and hits audibly and visibly. The gun makes no sound whatsoever but the bullet may make a crack breaking the sound barrier if its not subsonic, and the empty cartridge of an automatic pistol will make a noise as it flips through the air and bounces off the ground. That's how I see it, at least. *Which is really really too expensive at present. Its just not worth more than a few points to see things fast.

Nah, they planned it as a bomb to set Tony off against both Cap and Bucky in a berserk irrational rage. The writers weren't super clever, they had a goal in mind: a fight between Iron Man and Captain America. But unlike in the comics where there's some big misunderstanding and they settle up and are okay in the end, they had to make Tony go insane and hate Steve. The Black Panther arc was more like the comics, or Hawkeye and Black Widow "we're still friends, right?" There was one aspect of the film that really intrigued me, though. Twice, Black Panthers ring interacts with Bucky's arm. Its likely to me that both have vibranium in them, which suggests the plot or part of the plot for the Black Panther film. You have Ulysses Klaw already set up, and he knew where the stuff came from, so probably there's a leak -- likely a guy that is part of the royal house or in power in Wakanda. How did that vibranium get out of the country to the Soviets so long ago? That seems like its probably a major part of the movie's plot at least.

I understand the logic behind saying SONAR vs targeting sense would require more expensive invisibility vs sound. The principle being Invisibility vs Sound is purchased cheaper because it does not affect targeting senses (ordinarily). However, I'd offer that this price is not to make it only affect non-targeting senses, but because it is only against what is almost always a non-targeting sense; that is, the price is reduced because it is of significantly less utility than invisibility vs sight. So it works against any sort of hearing-based sense, not just non-targeting ones.

Actually it doesn't (see Teenage negasonic whatserface in Deadpool) but they were afraid it looked bad

1) Really? You figure in the 30 seconds they talked he learned who killed Tony's parents? We saw their entire conversation. 2) Telling him "you know how you always wondered how your dad died? It was Hydra" was going to shatter his sanity? Not buying it.

For me, the CW shows are too soap opera-y and targeted at tweens, or at least someone clearly younger than I am. That pair of kids running the computers in the Flash show fill me with the urge to punch faces.

Sure, because its a larger area than the person, and not carried on them. But if you throw a napkin on them, it doesn't work any more than when he puts a hat on. Unless he buys invisibility with a limitation like the Invisible Man in HG Wells' book. Most of this is just common sense judgment and how the power is intended to work, as long as it doesn't violate the rules or give more than the power ought to. Invisible to sound person walking on a pressure-sensitive mat: sets it off. Invisible to sound person walking into a room with audio sensors: nothing. Invisible to sound person walking over a hard floor in boots: no sound. It doesn't matter what the ground's composition is made of, he's bought a power to make himself make no noise. I'll take this a bit further, using the sheet over invisible guy as a basis. Invisible to sound person walking on crunchy leaves, gravel, lego, whatever: no sound. Invisible guy stepping on a long branch with dry leaves on the end: makes no sound stepping on the branch or breaking it... but the leaves, far from him, make rustly rattly noises. Why? because its out side his immediate contact. The leaves are right under his boots, directly contacted. No sound. That's how I'd run it, anyway

That makes even less sense. 1) What possible information did Captain America have access to and time to examine about Iron Man's parents which Iron Man himself would not have gotten access to? 2) Why would keeping the fact that Hydra killed his parents possibly give Iron Man any "peace" as he gives as an excuse? By throwing the guy she already had the explosion under control with at the only skyscraper in Lagos? That was her only option?

If you want to run your game in this manner, feel free, but its pretty obvious the intention and design the character has in mind when they buy invisibility to sound. Nobody pays points merely to make themselves mute. They mean to be unheard, and that means direct interaction with the world like footsteps.

The entire thing was set up based on a move that made no sense at all. Scarlet Witch uses her... whatever powers to throw the guy right up next to the only skyscraper in the entire country? Really? You can't say her control is no good, she shows pinpoint control in the airport fight constantly. She's grabbing people's hands in the middle of a fight from 50 yards away. The entire thing left me disgruntled and annoyed, like playing a video game with their story they're going to tell no matter what you do or intend.

Watched Civil War finally. Not very impressed. It had some great moments, such as Spider-Man, really all the lesser characters, but overall the story was weak and contrived, the tone incredibly dark and miserable, Iron Man's continual descent into insanity is unbearable and unlikable, and overall Cap's motivations are suspect. Bucky really isn't someone he should help out. He really is a bad guy, one of the worst. Like Bucky says, he really did all that. Main quibbles: how in God's name did Captain America know that Winter Soldier killed Stark's parents? Upon what conceivable basis could he have known? Why didn't anyone just ask "gee, if the UN was in charge, how would all those events have gone differently?" Why didn't at least one person step up and say "I was in that crowd and the bomb would have killed hundreds of us in Lagos, she saved lives?" Why is every single person in every single government irredeemably evil in these films? Not just dumb or power hungry, but horrifically tyrannical and sadistic? They had their Civil War story to tell and the hell with the consequences, logic, or even decent writing. The idiots at MCU were so fixated on giving Downey an "interesting" character to play they turned a tremendously entertaining, flawed character into a horrible, unlikable lunatic. What a stupid, missed opportunity. What a pointless destruction of a hero, such as he was. I'm getting the sense that the folks behind all this really despise superheroes, deep down.

In my game, unless someone specifically defined it otherwise, being invisible to sound as a person makes you invisible to all sound that character makes directly. If they knock something over, it makes sound. If they step on leaves, they don't go "crunch" because he's ... invisible to sound. Because SONAR is a hearing-based targeting system, then any power that negates hearing necessarily negates SONAR.

Right, what you do is use the actors for the expressions and movements and enhance them with CGI to give the full effect, I can see a lot of opportunities there.

It wasn't bad, I liked the weapon too, the kinetic device. It wouldn't do remotely the kind of damage indicated but its a cool idea. I liked it pretty well as just a dumb action movie.

We're probably 10 years or so from really being able to do that, and maybe a good start on computer voices, too. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper to do animation and games if you could just type dialog and then tweak it for emphasis.

Yeah I agree, its not Marvel that's the problem here. Batman murdered pretty much all of his villains as well, except Scarecrow. Superman killed Zod. Its a flaw with the films and I do understand it from the perspective of the studios, but... they haven't really tried the alternative much to see how it works, either. Granted, they have tremendous pressure to not be creative or try new things, from the board and investors, but still. There are exceptions. Batroc wasn't killed in Cap 2 (he just didn't have a name or costume). Yellowjacket isn't necessarily dead, but is highly unlikely to return. Scarecrow as I said is alive. Most of the X-Men villains make it through each film. And those movies did not lose money as a result.

Yeah the problem with Superheroes in comics is that you need pro wrestlers to play them and almost none are able to actually act well enough to pull off a movie.

Well, its required for using an AVAD, as the rules are written. Because of some of the price changes, and how normal defenses apply against KA, its probably more valid to just treat the body damage as AVAD, which would negate the need for the "does body" part -- it necessarily does body. That would just add +1/2 to the cost, making each die 7.5 points, which is closer to the cost of killing damage. Still more, making that 1d6 KA sword now 22 points. Another option would be to handwave the AVAD avantage and just treat KAs as if they had it but without the build or cost. You just declare it a killing attack, now it costs the same as a blast, but acts differently. The problem with this approach is that now you have two kinds of damage that cost the same, but one of them has body damage that ignores normal defenses...

OK, well this is probably a good point to drop in the concept discussed here months back of dropping "killing attack" as a power entirely and treating it as an AVAD normal attack. Its kind of like what Duke Bushido did with their group but it works like this: Killing attacks are Blast with AVAD (vs resistant defenses), does body. That ends up a +1 1/2 advantage (so a d6 costs 12.5 points) and a limitation. You treat the damage exactly the same as a normal attack, you count the dice, add 1 for each 6 and take away 1 for each 1; there's your body damage. It acts like a KA in terms of defenses, but doesn't have a special damage multiplier roll. To make it act just like KA, a limitation that makes the stun defended by normal defenses is useful as well. A few tweaks are necessary to make this work best. For example, hit locations would not be multipliers like they are now, but instead probably should be additional dice; the KA to the head gives you +4d6 like a haymaker, for instance. And increased stun multiple would be more dice, that only do stun, not a multiple. This system has a slight drawback of some increased complexity in the build but significantly more simplicity in play. Further, it streamlines combat so there's only one kind of damage, Rather than two different systems. It makes "damage class" effects much easier to figure out; martial arts would just be dice added, for example. If you couple this with a system that Tasha mentioned, where damage is 3 points per d6 with a mandatory "ranged" or "adds to strength" modifier (so its roughly 5 points per d6) then the system becomes even more compact and doesn't require two powers for normal damage. This creates some odd looking builds where the power is built with "ranged" advanage and then "no range" as a limitation (or "strength adds damage" advantage and "strength does not add damage") but it does make for a more streamlined set of rules.

Not so much. Its what audience have been given. Studios expect that because as Bigdamnhero noted, they see these as action flicks, not superhero flicks, and that's how it goes in Die Hard and Commando.

Huh, Karl Urban doesn't really seem big enough to be The Executioner to me.