Christopher R Taylor

The Sony non-Spider-Man films of late  remind me of the similar films in the 2000s eg: Ghost Rider, Electra, and I’ll and to look up the others. 

Yes, with Aaron Taylor Johnson as Kraven. Not close to the first person I would have thought of to play the part, but we'll see.
 
But that's another beef I have with Sony: Taking characters who are outright villains, or at best anti-heroes, and making them the protagonists of superhero movies, mainly because they have the rights to the character. They don't understand what the genre is about and why it was popular for so long. To be fair, most creators of comics today seem to suffer the same deficiency.

Sony execs want more blockbuster Spider-Man related box-office bucks. But they keep demonstrating they have no clue why the successful Spidey movies were successful. They think all it takes is checking off enough boxes.
 
I don't understand why they don't hire the people making their Spider-Man video games to write their movies. Those folks obviously know and respect the characters, and they know how to tell a compelling story.

Almost nothing whatsoever has changed in basics of combat in Hero from the first typewritten pages.

Looking at likely damage taken and likely damage inflicted still makes sense to me.

We could not do "Gain of Function experiments in the U.S., so a few scientists talked to Chinese colleagues, and We spent two years in lock down anyway.

Yeah its like nukes or guns or porn or whatever.  The cat is out of the bag, you cannot put it back.  Superman could grab all the nuclear weapons in a net and throw them into the sun, and nations would just build more and keep them in lead silos or disguise them as something Superman ignored.  You can't unlearn tech, unless there is a horrendous catastrophe that resets civilization.  You just have to learn how to use things responsibly and how to respond when people do not.
 
Approximately 1.2 million people die each year as a result of auto collisions.  That's a price we have come to accept as being worth having cars; how many are saved as a result of automobiles?  Ten times that, if not more.  New tech requires new responses, moral judgement, and law.  It takes time, and study, and analysis and cultural change.

We're in the process now of getting used to the idea of instant communication on the internet.  We're trying to learn socially how to handle that, legally how to approach it, and it takes time, philosophical thought, theology, legal study etc.  Every new wave of tech makes that necessary, and people adapt.  The problem we're facing right now is that tech is happening so fast and is so potent in terms of cultural impact that its rough trying to get it all straight.  Making matters worse is that our culture has removed nearly all consequence to certain kinds of behavior, so a lot of corrosive things are consequence-free, or consequence-light, at least.
 
It will all get worked out to at least a functional level, but not perfectly, in time.  Until then its a rough ride, like when the Model T drove through town and scared all the horses and womenfolk.

Its not enormously grandiose but one of my favorite scenarios Hero published was in the 4th edition Viper book, and it goes like this.
 
A celebrity who has a chain of restaurants* opens one in The City.  Viper comes over with a powerful flying ship and uses gravity control to rip the entire building, including all the dignitaries and celebrities inside, and hang it in the air.  Then VIPER demands all of them pay a ransom or they will drop the building.  Obviously destroying or damaging the ship will cause the same result.
 
*They clearly meant Planet Hollywood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but had to file the serial numbers off, but I used them in my campaign.
 
It was a good time for all, including a Hero who was inside the restaurant with his family.
 
This is the kind of Champions adventure I love.  Does it make sense?  Kinda?  Is there any real chance that VIPER could get away with it?  Nah.  But its fun and exciting and requires more careful thought than "punch the bad guy" with real dramatic challenge but not too depressing or deep.  This is the kind of VIPER I like, not terrorists, not super serious spy masterminds, but comic book bad guys who do comic book crimes.

This really isn't grandiose, but I had Foxbat kidnap someone in order to get Mickey Mouse's autograph.
 
I also had the idea of him using a helicopter in an attempt to steal a cell phone tower.  It would end up with the helicopter getting impaled by the tower, screwing up cell phone signals, and requiring the local medevac helicopter to transport people to the nearest trauma hospital.

I ran two campaigns set in a world where, in 2000, a quarter mile radius sphere of nothingness, dubbed "The Void" appeared just South of downtown Austin. Many people were caught in it when it appeared. Those who made their own way out (including the PCs) ended up with powers (which the PCs used to rescue most of the folks who couldn't make it out on their own). As the campaign progressed, I did open up origins a little bit, because the Void sort of broke the world. Eventually there was magic. The second campaign was focused on a team that was assembled to deal with otherworldly incursions, and ended up with a couple of members that were there because of those incursions.
 

Yeah there's a reason that the X-Men comics generally felt like they were not a part of the Marvel universe at large.  Although the mutant menace thing was not really a major factor in most of the stories, it only really works if mutants are the standout changes rather than all the other origin stories and people with powers.  So if you want to do that kind of paranoid, enemy of the people kind of campaign, it works best to isolate things, I think.

There is a new Ai bot called Sora. The prompts can now generate up to one minute of full motion video. Take a look:
 
 
This is under a company lock down, so it's not yet available to the public, but it would be a useful tool for generating B-Roll for YouTube, It as of now cannot generate Porn, celebrity look alikes or graphic violence. How long does one think those restrictions wil stay in place?.

Oh definitely. We did a brief "All Powered Armored Suits, All the time, and though the campaign was short it had a unified feel, like a Television show. It was a lot of fun. Cold War, so it was the U.S. Versus the Commies, and the occasional villain group or malign corporation.

Yeah my Golden Age game all powers came from a single source (magic and Asgardian fruit).  Its very restrictive, in some ways, but in others it makes storytelling work better and the overall campaign has more cohesion and focus.

Yes, this idea can work and work well. Giving everyone a common origin, makes it simpler to weave plots together. And it makes less work for the GM on organizations.  Plus, single can still be pretty broad in scope.
 
It can also give some justification to fear by the population because these supers are different from the norm. All mages? They're after our souls! All cyborgs? They're going to turn us into spare parts! All mutants? We'll be replaced! Aliens? They'll enslave us and then eat us! It's much easier to fuel one strong conspiracy than lots of small ones.

Yeah my Golden Age game all powers came from a single source (magic and Asgardian fruit).  Its very restrictive, in some ways, but in others it makes storytelling work better and the overall campaign has more cohesion and focus.

The "most grandiose crime" scenario I ever personally ran was back in my 4E Champions GM days. My group's penultimate encounter with Dr. Destroyer was over his attempt to blackmail the world with a universe-breaching weapon which could cast entire cities into alternate universes. Initially sneaking into, then fighting their way into DD's base, the PCs managed to reverse the weapon and bring back Cleveland, Ohio, before Destroyer arrived. DD had regained control of it and was kicking their butts, when one of the heroes shoved her whole belt of grenades through a rent that had been torn in one of the weapon's control panels. The resultant blast caused the weapon to dimensionally implode, and Destroyer appeared to be obliterated with it; but none of the players believed that.
 
About a year later (game-time), the PCs were contacted by the Bogeyman, the nightmare-creating monster from the Dreamzone, whom they'd previously fought. (See Champions in 3-D.) This time the Bogeyman had come to beg their help. It turned out Destroyer had been cast into the Dreamzone, enslaved its native Dreamshadows, and built them into an army per his twisted imagination. He was now on the verge of opening a portal for his army to enter the waking world.
 
The heroes had to trek across the Dreamzone, which DD had reshaped into a literal totalitarian nightmare, to confront him and his assembled army. Since awake beings physically in the Dreamzone have power to shape it to their will, the PCs focused their combined wills on taking control of the Doctor's portal device, using it to trap him in a pocket-Dreamzone in which he believed he'd succeeded in conquering the world.

I've seen and read various studies of the outcomes of these "catastrophic" events from man's leftovers. Virtually all of them will be healed in a few centuries at most, an eyeblink in the lifetime of this world.
 
We tend to overestimate our impact on the planet. Global warming, for example, will be devastating for us, and will cause mass extinctions... which have happened dozens of times to life on Earth. The planet will eventually stabilize, surviving life will diversify, and equilibrium will be restored. Probably too late to do us any good, but the world doesn't really care.

Perhaps start by NOT making Dr. Doom the villain and use one of the, I don't know, 100s of other villains in their pantheon? Its probably one of the most annoying thing about the last one with Kate and Mara is it would have been a perfect opportunity to use Blastaar as the villain from the Negative Zone, thereby setting a future Annihilus.

Indeed, I like Captain Carter. I do not understand why the Watcher cares about her more than the billions of humans (trillions?) who die in the course of the incidents he’s observing. 

A few of us are already covered: we've got faces only an AI could love...or render.

Here are the old articles of mine I could find -- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Q-1oKphlwDWQe3LWZX2dt1DHB5S-iUq0?usp=sharing
I think the timeframe (for me, at least) was 95-ish to 2000-ish.
I'm pretty sure I lost my physical copies to some basement flooding many years ago.
 
The APA was part articles and part superhero fiction. The fiction eventually split off into a sister APA, The OmniVerse.
There were annual awards, called The Grimmies.
 
From memory, some of the contributors were: Ben Bellott, Will Geiger, Bill Jackson, Martin Maenza, John Moorman, Michael O'Connell (RIP), K.C. Ryan, Tim Watts
 

Clairsentience would work.  It would let you put your sense point outside the Darkness.  Note that if the Darkness affects any of the Clair- senses, then you won't be able to perceive into the Darkness area, but you'll still be able to perceive outside of it.
 
 
If they've bought Darkness vs. taste/smell, it would cover that sense group even if the group was bought with Targeting.  The cost of the Darkness assumes the 'normal human suite' regardless of what extras (i.e. Targeting) the target might have bought. 
 
 

Heh wow I had never considered that.  Its too cheap to allow but its a neat twist.