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zslane

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Everything posted by zslane

  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.
  15. Y'all gettin' the numbers and units wrong. New Rockstars stated that Tiamut was ~311 miles tall, and that only about 8% of his total height emerged above the surface, which is 40km (not 40mi). Not that this changes the absurdity of it all. The disruption to the Earth's core, its magnetic field, etc. would be catastrophic to say the least.
  16. I recently watched a fun YouTube documentary on the black Lamborghini Countach from the first Canonball Run movie. Lots of fun facts about the real Canonball rallies held by Brock Yates in the 1970s, and of course, the car itself and its history.
  17. Despite any ambitions to appeal to complete newbies, the unspoken assumption by 4e was that 99% of its users would be existing Champions players who already understood the system well. That audience was expected to be able to grasp (or find on their own) a working distinction between skill tiers, and decide on their own how to use them (if at all) in their campaigns.
  18. If you want to see another good example of character specification bloat, compare the write-up for Mechanon from 1e Champions to the write-up for Mechanon from 6e Champions. You can see the incremental growth of the bloat with each edition of the game. And while I would probably agree with the opinion that 1e Mechanon is a bit under-specified, I feel that all sanity left the building by the time of 6e.
  19. Sorry, but I can't agree at all with the above assessment. I had tremendous fun with AD&D 1e and 2e throughout the 1980s, even after my heart had moved on to Champions. Considering that an awful lot (if not most) of new TTRPG players today get "introduced" to the hobby through Critical Role, D&D is going to be the main entry point regardless of how well it stacks up to better systems anyway.
  20. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I have no interest in watching movies about lame, low-end villains, losers, and weirdos who go on covert suicide missions that some off-the-books, morally murky government agency wants carried out in the name of, what? U.S. "national security"? Any mission where you fully expect your operatives to die in the effort is a poorly planned mission. The very idea is bone stupid on the face of it.
  21. Well, it probably doesn't help that I think the whole idea behind the Suicide Squad is retarded to begin with. I can't help but feel that the movies are making fun of themselves, and I just don't get the joke. Bear in mind that I'm not a fan of superhero parody, so the Suicide Squad movies were never destined to be my cup of tea. (And before anyone points out that the SS movies aren't actually parody, I'll reiterate that they come across that way to me just the same, hence my underlying disdain.)
  22. I found great joy in being liberated from the metaphorical prison of D&D's crude and limited game system and being let loose in the vastly more coherent and expansive world of the Champions game system. I would never have experienced that had I started with Champions as my first RPG, and I would not want to rob RPG newbies from that same exhilarating feeling. Plus, I feel that one gains a far greater appreciation for, and perhaps deeper understanding of, the Hero System if one has another game system to compare it to in the course of learning it. Besides, I think that D&D is a far easier sell to RPG newbies who are (probably) already familiar with that brand name; and then once they are hooked on RPGs one can then lure them into the superior game system.
  23. Agreed. That's why I typically recommend that total newcomers to TTRPGs start with something else, like D&D. That's how it went for me; I went from AD&D (1e) to Champions 2e and the transition was very smooth. I would not wish jumping straight into Champions 6e on my worst enemy.
  24. Huh? There is? Was I aware of this and just forgot all about it? Do you have any links to further information?
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