Christopher R Taylor

You know what makes Aquaman cool?  Um... nothing.  I like the character Jason Mamoa plays, but he's not Aquaman and he's not a superhero.  He's just a dudebro with powers.  Namor is a lot more interesting because he's such an arrogant jackass.  You can make an interesting water guy but not Aquaman.

I FINALLY watched the Marvels on Disney Plus. It was enjoyable enough I wish I had just seen it on the big screen. The leads were ALL good, with Captain Marvel allowed to show feelings now that she was in this movie deprogrammed so she wasn't stuck in mandatory wooden mode like in her first movie. I'm a fan of Monica in the comics, and her actress did her justice given the set up. Iman Vellani as Kamala had already impressed me in her mini series, but she really shone on the big screen as the fan girl turned superhero. Loved almost every scene she was in. Fury made with some funny, but was not made to be the joke , which is different and I'm grateful. It was definitely comedic in tone for a lot of the movie, but I liked the balance in it.
 
If I had to sum up where it stands compared to other Marvel movies, I think I'd just say I liked it better than THREE of the Thor movies.

I think its best to just ignore the implications and consequences of high tech and superheroes on economics unless its for a specific one-shot scenario.  Why?  Because if you make the world so different and so alien to what we have now, it damages immersion and ease of understanding the world.  The main purpose of superheroes is to engage in power fantasy: here's what I'd do if I had x power/someone ought to do something about this problem.
 
See, Superman's very existence would change society, culture, and science.  He would transform the world.  But the comic books about Superman were about him beating up evil landlords and dictators, stopping mobsters, etc.  Why?  Because nobody put a cape on and jumped from things pretending to fly because they wanted to play out the socioeconomic impact of superbeings.  They wanted to be the guy that beat up the villains, bullies, and criminals.  They wanted to play out what it would be like if someone actually was powerful enough to stop the mafia or corrupt politicians.
 
If you make the world too different from what we now understand and live in, you lose that entire feel.
 
Its fine if you want to do a future-tech, sci fi Champions game, and everyone knows that going in.  But you can't have it both ways.

IMHO one of the best in the video series:
 
 

Multiform is how I would build it, yeah

The defenses are the key, in my view.  If these characters are tossing around, and soaking up, 12 - 18d6 Normal damage routinely, I'd expect that they have defenses in the 30s or higher.  A 15d6 Normal attack averages 52.5 STUN.
 
Normal defenses of 30 will block all BOD from a terminal velocity fall.  BOD from a 20d6 Normal attack is not going to get past those defenses, so there is nothing to double from a head shot.
 
Making the doppelgangers identical and then adding all the advantages of automatons means that they are massively more powerful than the heros, especially defensively.  If they are identical copies (not automatons) and can be knocked out, then the heroes will have to knock them out, then carefully and meticulously bypass their defenses to murder the doppelgangers.
 
Forcing the heroes to demonstrate their heroism by diligently slaughtering their foes seems a little odd.
 
We had a Supers game with an alternate earth scenario some years back, and realized very early on that we would eventually be fighting ourselves.  By the time that happened, it was a bit of a cakewalk as we knew the best tactics as a team to take down an identical team.

Are the doppelgangers going to have their defenses adjusted to equivalent points using the Automaton rules? With only 1/3 of the PC's defenses, you should be able to do the job with Haymakers, Move-Throughs and Pushing.
 
If their defenses are not adjusted, then Drain BODY or some sort of Damage Over Time attack are the only ways I can see.
 
 

I think its best to just ignore the implications and consequences of high tech and superheroes on economics unless its for a specific one-shot scenario.  Why?  Because if you make the world so different and so alien to what we have now, it damages immersion and ease of understanding the world.  The main purpose of superheroes is to engage in power fantasy: here's what I'd do if I had x power/someone ought to do something about this problem.
 
See, Superman's very existence would change society, culture, and science.  He would transform the world.  But the comic books about Superman were about him beating up evil landlords and dictators, stopping mobsters, etc.  Why?  Because nobody put a cape on and jumped from things pretending to fly because they wanted to play out the socioeconomic impact of superbeings.  They wanted to be the guy that beat up the villains, bullies, and criminals.  They wanted to play out what it would be like if someone actually was powerful enough to stop the mafia or corrupt politicians.
 
If you make the world too different from what we now understand and live in, you lose that entire feel.
 
Its fine if you want to do a future-tech, sci fi Champions game, and everyone knows that going in.  But you can't have it both ways.

The key with Multiform is to make sure that the characters are to design, not just "I wanna do a lot of different stuff".  In other words, use multiform to build a character with a theme and a concept, not just to have lots of characters.
 
I did make a guy who could turn into like 20 different superheroes, each a different build, but... they were random. He never knew what was going to activate when he turned on his superpower, and the GM chose them at random for me.  The concept was kind of like Miracleman's body suit thing, where they were all in this stasis and he could tap into them, but had no control over who.  It was kind of fun, but sadly the campaign didn't last long enough to really explore how it would play out.  So it was a tight concept, and controlled.  The GM could at any time just say "you get to be aqua boy this time" at will instead of rolling a random character, even if we were in the desert.

The problem with doing Madam Web movie, unlike with Morbius or any of the others, is that she was always, at best, a support character, not a primary character. 
too bad about Morbius, since would have been interesting for them to do some of the Blade/Morbius/Black Cat(?) trio of stories.

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.