Christopher R Taylor

You know you're a player when:
- you see a movie or show, and start guessing what the character's Dex, Con, PD & ED, etc. are.
- you see a movie or show, and start figuring out the disadvantages as well.

This one is pretty long, but its a section of GM advice I've stored away from the 90s which people might find useful.  Because its a bit longer, I've posted it as text file attachment, with just the question that prompted the response.  Dave Stallard wrote the response, the question's author is lost to time, but its kind of irrelevant who it was.  When I saved this off, I added another response by David West as well, the Appendix.
 
I really recommend this for everyone, because its an excellent breakdown of GM diplomacy, player  and GM philosophy, and how to deal with problematic situations or characters in a game.  A version of this will end up in my Master Guide for Jolrhos.
 
 
GM Bullying.txt

The one thing that C:NM did which I thought was neat was having combat displayed as a comic and then it described both the action the characters were taking and the mechanics too.

The Wizard is one of the characters that really bug my suspension of disbelief.
 
You've invented functional anti-gravity in devices that can stand up to water sand and fire blasts that are the size of coasters...  Why are you a supervillain? They would build another mint just to print your money. You'd have a bank account significant to G7 nations and if and only if, people give you grief your security army can't handle then you could go villain on them.
 

Just finished it this morning on the my morning commute.
 
My only issue is that I can finish them at a faster rate that you are making them
 
Another great show and keep them coming.

But to be fair.  Those idiot extremes are helped along by a tiny but disproportionately over represented idiot fans.  You know the ones that insist that characters like Venom (I know not DC) are great heroes.  Well they only eat bad guys so yep, hero
 
The problem with relying on social media to get a feel about whether your comic is good, is many of the social media types don't actually contribute anything tangible. 

You forgot the mind-controlling cupcakes and fruit pies.

Fortunately there are two new bundles at Bundle of Holding that for not much money can get you an amazing start with 6e!
 
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Hero6E
 
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Champions6E
 

My problem with reboots is that if you are going to reboot, reboot. Too many writers came in after a reboot and wanted iconic stories to have happened that don't fit if you have a reboot. Like Barb being paralyzed, becoming Oracle. When you reboot to young Barb starting in college at 17 or something and being Batgirl, then it doesn't work if she was Oracle also, but Writers came in and wanted to write stories referring to when she was.

Yeah but they can rewrite that.  Someone made a mistake, it was a fake ring, whatever.  If you do a reboot, then the whole history gets rewritten anyway.  We're on, what, the tenth total restructuring of DC's universe now?  If nothing else you could just blast them all off into Earth-9328 or whatever and have the earth GL be the only one, but now his ring uses a different battery. I think Green Lantern is a fascinating concept character, but has almost never had good execution.  And usually way too much power.

Personally it’s the 1/2 DCV for Multiple Move-Bys which hurt Speedsters more. 

I know a lot of people like it, and many never knew any other way.  But the whole Lantern Corp thing destroyed the entire coolness of the Green Lantern.  Instead of a unique and cool Hero, we got Smuckatelly Joe just one of 246729482629 others. 
 
We went from one unique magical based superhero to one unique superscience based superhero to "just a beat-cop among thousands of other beat-cops".  
 
Sad, but there you have it. 

Yeah, but you've got to be careful with your lines, else you could get tied up in gnats.

Schultz was the owner of the largest toy company in Germany, which had been commandeered for the German war effort.  At several points he mentions not liking the Nazis, both for what they do in general but also for how his family was treated when their company was seized.  I always took his "I Know NOTHING!" announcements to mean he saw a lot more than he reported because he was hoping the Allies would win the war and he was just trying to keep his head down until that day came.  There is a theory that Klink put up with him because he knew that Schultz was going to be a good person to know when the war ended.

IIRC, Multiple Move By also predated Sweep by an edition or two.  I assume the "you could always do that" surprises like Combined Attacks (I don't recall it for Multiple Attacks) are the reason we need over a thousand pages of rules to ensure everything gets spelled out in detail.
 
But I cannot ever recall a character with a 2d6 HKA and a 60 STR using a Combined Attack to inflict 4d6 Killing and 12d6 Normal damage.

It was honestly a surprise when the designers of the rules said "you didn't know you could do this?  You always could" because the rules did not in any way make that clear beyond a Sweep maneuver.  The combined attack thing, completely out of the blue.
 

The last comic series I truly enjoyed was the Busiek/Perez run on Avengers in the late 90s.  I barely stayed with a couple comics here and there after that, although the 2nd JLA incarnation with Brad Meltzer and the brilliant Dwayne McDuffie (RIP) writing alongside Ed Benes art was decent.  After that and Civil War, I've left behind all current comics.  I still buy Graphic Novels for story arcs of comics in the 70's through 90's though.

Super Agents at two levels would do this: a UNTIL/Man from Uncle/SHIELD kind of game, and then a low level/street hero game setting and tips.  One of my long-term dream campaigns I never got to run was super cops: police officers with powers.  Just one low power, just something that sets them apart, and dealing with street crime and low end villains

Yeah I feel like the state of comics now is by far the most open to wild, creative and innovative ideas in comic book history.  Why do I say this?  Because it does not need to make money.  Marvel Comics can totally lose money every month and still stay open because the movies make such ridiculous cash (or, at least, used to).  So why not go nuts, do new wild crazy things, why not try stuff that nobody thinks will work, why not give the creators total freedom?
 
Sadly, a certain rigid political viewpoint seems to be dominating the entire industry, which greatly limits the possibilities, and likely annoys a great deal of their customer base as well.  Stan Lee and Steve Ditko both had very strong political viewpoints (diametrically opposed) but they were able to restrain that in most of their work and make sure it was more broadly acceptable to the overall audience.

Straight up bad writing and poor characterization of characters isn't terribly helpful.  Writing intelligent characters as stupid so they'll fit into the story you want to tell rather then altering the story to fit the characters.  Deus ex machina to give the villain the upper hand doesn't really help matters either.  

Superheroes survived for so long because they were about positive elements of humanity: ideals, principles, responsibility, compassion, hope. They represented the best in us, inspiring us to try to be better people ourselves. What I see of recent comics are full of cynicism, brutality, "edginess" for shock value rather than serving any purpose. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I’ve always thought that Captain America: Winter Soldier would have been a better movie if they’d depicted SHIELD as genuinely going authoritarian and not copped out with “Oh, this is actually all HYDRA’s fault.” 
 
I can see a superhero who is not bothered by non-violent crime, than he is by initiation of force and corruption, whoever it is doing it, and authoritarianism. 

Given the low (financial) stakes involved in comics you'd think that would be where you'd see new characters introduced and used to explore new ideas the most, but I guess that's not the case. You won't see that in movies very often because of the massive financial risks involved. Studios feel they have to play it safe at all times, and so rather than create new characters they mutate existing characters to fit with the social agenda du jour. That's why there's such a big push to race- and gender-bend well-known, existing characters rather than invent new ones.
 
And as for writers who don't want to write superheroes, that extends to directors as well. For all his claims of loving the source material, Zach Snyder sure does love to tear the superhero genre apart and make it nearly unrecognizable.

The thing with Doctor Destroyer is that while his powers do come from a suit of armor, they weren't purchased with any discount for Focus or OIAID. So unless you're retiring the character in the campaign story, there's no way(from a purely RAW standpoint) to get him out of it unless he wants to take it off and any hypothetical loss of function from damage would need to be handled like any other injury to a character with innate powers. Again this is just by RAW and the character write-up, any GM is free to change that to better fit  their campaign.