Christopher R Taylor

Batagaika Crater deep in Siberia is a bizarre, awesome and somewhat frightening place.  The crater is over 300 feet deep and half a mile long and grows 60 feet a year.  What was it caused by?  For a long time people didn't know, they suspected things like climate change, but the reality is that the Soviet government scoured the ground down to the permafrost and were digging up the dirt and rock for road material, and exposed to the sun the permafrost started to melt.  For decades it did, melting and eroding deeper and now its enormous.
 

Stan Lee’s Daughter Co-Signs Spider-Man Deal, Says Disney and Marvel Gave Dad’s Legacy No ‘Respect or Decency’
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2019/08/stan-lee-daughter-co-signs-spider-man-deal-disney-marvel-no-respect
 

Its turning into an episode of the Four Yorkshiremen here
 
You had walls?  LUXURY!

There's generally a longer lead time for animation (6 months for an episode in the case of The Simpsons, for example), so I'm guessing that the project was most likely approved well before the current falling-out between Disney and Sony.

Finally saw Endgame.
While well made and I have always liked the cast, I have liked each of the Avengers movies less and less overall.
It isn't that anything in them was not well done.  The solo movies have been fantastic and the initial Avengers was a home run, It is just that for me they get less interesting with each sequel. 
 
I won't discus any specifics, but for Endgame instead of avidly waiting to see "what will happen next?", it was "can it please get to the end faster?"
 
As for the paywall shows.  The initial info had me seriously thinking of reversing myself and trying D+. 
And then they started expounding and adding info.
 
This line made me cringe.
 
I'm not really looking forward to any of it now.  Maybe after it hits rental or blu-ray I'll sample some of them.  But not too likely. 
 

There's also the idea in one of the advanced books wherein ego attacks damage ego, lowering it each attack.  The concept of damaging ego to the point where you take control of someone intrigues me as well

Water is incompressible; that is, it can be displaced, but not smooshed.  If you are moving too fast, you cannot push it aside quickly enough and simply crash into the water, suffering horrible damage before pushing into it.  A fall from 150 feet into water will kill you in real life just as dead as if you hit pavement.
 
However, its routine in movies and role playing games that water is "safe" to fall into, so its up to you as a GM.

Its a pretty minor effect, honestly.  I think Mind Control (and other mental powers) are broken in Hero and always have been.  They cost vast points for minor effects and simulate the genre material very, very poorly.  I would rather see a structure more like transform where the desire effect determines the cost rather than a flat build structure across all desired attempts.  

Transform has different costs for specific attempts to accomplish a goal: Making someone's eyebrows pink costs 3 points per d6, its not a flat cost for every type of effect.  Mental powers should follow the same kind of structure, and target the Ego of a character to overwhelm it rather than presence attack-like levels of effect.

Its possible, yeah. Its a bit of a kludge like the Taunt thing, but it would give the desired effect for couple phases at least.

I wouldn't mind a reboot at all since they made so many unnecessary changes to the character and setting.  But Holland does a great job with the character, so I would want to keep him.  Give Sam Raimi back the keys, too he's the only director and writer yet who seems to have actually read any of the comics.

That's because a sword isn't a tool with broad demand creating high production levels, its a specialty collector's item and people will pay a premium price.  It does not cost all that much to put out a sword, just a lot of skill and some equipment (and nice steel).  In a culture where people buy and sell a lot of swords, the price drops much closer to production cost because the supply increases greatly to match the demand.
 
Even if the blade has super zowie tech going into it, that's going to be less zowie than the guns and still cheaper to produce.

Mental Powers in Hero show the game's roots in the Supers genre.
 
The average normal is pretty helpless against 60 AP Mental Powers, needing a 6 or less vs +10 effects or an 8 or less vs +20 to break out. PC Characters of course are better than this, as they should be, but Mental Attacks are still competitive at doing STUN to them.
 
Where they break down is at the Heroic level, where the same normal is now 9 or less vs +10 and 11 or less vs+20 effects and the PC's have 50% or better chances on most builds. I fix this with a campaign slider that gives normals 2x Effect and significant but lesser NPC's 1.5x Effect vs Mental Powers. It works for my games but YMMV.
 
In high power Supers, the Mental Powers usually grow faster than the defenses of the non-Mentalist PC's and the normals  are SOL. Notice how there is no Mentalist equivalent to DrD or Tak because that villain would be even more OP than they are. Killgrave in Jessica Jones is a good example here.

Its a pretty minor effect, honestly.  I think Mind Control (and other mental powers) are broken in Hero and always have been.  They cost vast points for minor effects and simulate the genre material very, very poorly.  I would rather see a structure more like transform where the desire effect determines the cost rather than a flat build structure across all desired attempts.  

Transform has different costs for specific attempts to accomplish a goal: Making someone's eyebrows pink costs 3 points per d6, its not a flat cost for every type of effect.  Mental powers should follow the same kind of structure, and target the Ego of a character to overwhelm it rather than presence attack-like levels of effect.

Obviously you've never hit someone hard enough with a rusty blaster....

The saddest thing about Temple of Doom is that it starts really well.

I've found several D&D spells can be best simulated with Change Environment using a rough guideline of being roughly as effective as falling down (1/2 DCV) at base value or 1/2 DCV & lose your turn using the APG +20 point version.
 
Like you said, using other constructs makes the AP cost prohibitive for non-supers campaigns.

I built it with a Change Environment; make an Ego roll or target and attack the taunter.  I know its a bit of a stretch but anything else is inordinately expensive for the effect, like 62 active cost above...

Flash Gordon vs. the Nazi Moon Men!!       Hell to the ya!!!!      The handout characters are all pulp characters from the JI cover.

I would point out, does this mean Sony in the next 2 movies don't get to mention Tony Stark, Shield, Fury, Happy (Spidey's go to guy and May's new boy toy), etc.? Think how much they will have to retcon if you can't use that stuff, not to mention that the Battle of New York and the tech from that played a central part of the first movie and Stark played a big part o the second one. Also, do they still get to mention the Snap? I assume this goes both ways, or they are paying Disney a bunch of royalties anyway.

Sony is being run by imbeciles if they don't rent out Spider-Man to Disney on a permanent basis.  You can use him... if you pay us.  Make your billion and give us our cut.  Its basically zero risk, zero investment, and constant income.

I shouldn't laugh. 

They're going to get that anyway. Sony has tried to boost up their IP and most of them have only made their costs back or failed. If someone else was taking one of my properties (which I have to keep making movies to keep anyway), and making a billion dollars and giving me half, I would be like okay, let's do this
CES 

I miss 4th edition.  Perfect balance of crunch and playability. If Hero Designer had a 4th edition option I'd be using that rule set now.
 
Separating Transfer into a linked Aid and Drain just took a power that was intuitively understood and turned it into several lines of crunch.
 
The fact that Grab has SIX pages and change and the equivalent maneuver in D&D's 5th edition player handbook is less than a single page is very telling.
 
The champions 4th edition hardcover was both visually great and a good balance between too many and too few rules.
 
I feel old and nostalgic.  😐