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zslane

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zslane last won the day on February 18 2020

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  1. I guess what I was getting at is that I don't view the superhero genre as a particularly fertile one for day-in-the-life serialized "adventure paths" like you see in a typical fantasy RPG like D&D. The easiest play model for busy Champions GMs is the one I am used to, which resembles tournament scenario play to a great degree. The background "world" is almost irrelevant in this model; what matters is the crisis at hand ("the situation") and coming up with a way to resolve it, usually with a battle against the villains in the last third of the game session. GMs don't need to put in a whole lot of work for this. The villains can be pulled from the Enemies volumes and the "plot", such as it is, can be cribbed from any of the gazillions of superhero plots from comic books of the past. This is Champions, where the most compelling, engaging element of the game is the combat system. It's a very detailed superhero "wargame", and constructing scenarios for this is not the same as plotting out fantasy "adventures" with long, complex storylines that border on fan fiction. Bear in mind that I carry this view only for the superhero genre. Which is why I don't think that a "renaissance"--of any edition--should focus on the superhero genre since that is the one genre that, by its nature, needs the least product support beyond what already exists. It doesn't even need a highly developed setting, in my view. I would much rather see a unique setting be constructed, with lots of product support in all the traditional RPG areas for some other genre like sci-fi/space opera, or steam-/cyber-punk fantasy (ala Runeterra rather than, say, Shadowrun). And I feel that the best model for this is the Savage Worlds Plot Point structure because it provides a Big Picture plot, along with example adventure scenarios that plug into it, and lots of information describing how to fit one's own adventure scenarios into it. We should do more, not less, to nudge and encourage players to do more homebrew work.
  2. During all my most active years of playing in various Champions campaigns, we never used any published superhero settings. The settings, such as they were, were always "home brew", at least in the sense that they were not the Champions Universe, they were not DC, and they were not Marvel. They were just "the real world", but with superheroes and supervillains added. Of course many (but not all) villains and organizations were taken from the Champions supplements in order to save time, but the CU timeline was never used, unique CU cities/locations were never used, and the backstories of the villains were pretty much just ignored. The basic structure of play each week was: hear about the new crisis, investigate the crisis, stop the bad guys in a big fight at the end. Wash, rinse, repeat. Each session was like a single issue of a comic book that was not part of some over-arching plotline. Naturally, all of this pre-dated the whole Crisis Comic Book model of massive serialized crossover storytelling that has ruined comics (IMO), and maybe people have forgotten how to play their campaigns any other way. But when it comes to superheroes, a detailed setting with a new large-scale crisis plotline every year is a dubious and unappealing idea in my view. But maybe that's just me and nobody else wants to play silver/bronze age style supers anymore.
  3. For those who are attempting to attract subscribers and monetize their YouTube (and Patreon) content, I'd expect them to care that they don't sound like semi-literate morons.
  4. So I've noticed a new oddity with a lot of people on YouTube lately. They are using the word "implode" to refer to things that are clearing exploding. Do people today not know the difference anymore?
  5. If the whole point of the Celestials creating such a racially diverse group of Eternals was to assist in their being accepted into the societies they were expected to help, then it is curious that there was no Native American or Inuit Eternal. And since Eternals are androids, what is the purpose behind giving them any sort of human sexuality at all? I think we are meant to disregard these deeper questions about the whole concept and just "go with it".
  6. Current in-vogue slang terms that annoy me: glow-up low-key sus fam
  7. Well, even WotC seems to recognize the impact of online D&D streaming shows, and as far as I know CR is the most popular. Nathan Stewart is quoted as saying: “For the first time in our research, it used to be that friends and family were the number reason someone joined D&D,” Stewart said. “Now, the number one reason is ‘I saw someone playing online and I joined.’”
  8. I agree, for the most part. However, I'm tired of Tatooine. We've spent way too much time on that one planet over the course of the movies and, now, streaming shows for my tastes. And if filling in the details of life on Tatooine includes establishing the notion that Jawas and humans can and do date each other, then I'd rather we spent our time elsewhere.
  9. Boba Fett was more interesting to me the less I knew about him. He was infinitely cooler when he was an enigmatic badass played by Jeremy Bulloch and voiced by Jason Wingreen. The more they demystified him and explored his past, the duller his iconic sheen became. Creating an entirely new Mandalorian anti-hero to focus on and explore in depth was the right way to go, while a series like The Book of Boba Fett is, IMO, merely a continuation of the ruination of the character that began in Return of the Jedi.
  10. Ever since I started playing Champions back with 2e, I and everyone I knew looked to the Enemies books to serve as creative examples of how to use the powers, modifiers, and frameworks. In my view this was far better than a reference tome full of examples (or examples crammed in the margins of the main rulebook) because villains--as well as NPC heroes/teams, organizations with super agents, etc.--provided much-needed context for the presented power builds. Too often when players and GMs see Sample Powers presented without context, they tend to treat them like pre-designed D&D spells that they use, unchanged, as though ordering from a menu.
  11. This is pretty much where I land these days. And I (too) lost interest in "the conversation" long ago when it became obvious, to me at least, that all we will ever get is endless talk and debate amongst the old guard because the necessary resources are simply not available to do what needs to be done (which I still believe would primarily consist of an effort to create a setting that lots of people wants to play in, and turning it into an evergreen product line).
  12. That visual gag is effective though. It lets the audience know rather emphatically that the TVA exists outside of the multiverse and is therefore not subject to its physical/cosmological laws.
  13. Sounds like maybe it should be called "the Martial Arts bug" rather than "the STR bug"...
  14. Tiamut was incubated in the center of the Earth, grew to over 300mi tall, and bored his way to the surface. This would not leave the Earth in a structurally viable state. And, in fact, it was never expected to. Planets that incubate new Celestials are always destroyed during their birth.
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