zslane

Assuming the power has the same list of Advantages and Limitations regardless of the "scale of success", then it is probably easiest to take Doc's approach, but just write it down as a single Limited Power limitation ("Skill Roll Scales Effect -1/2" or whatever is closest to the actual math) on the maximum possible level of effect.

Disney is also famous for stiffing vfx houses for the work they do. WB probably paid up on all their post-production work, lacking the legal and financial muscle to do what Disney gets away with.

I imagine that only Jack Jack is being used to deliver that metaphor. It isn't encoded as a universal (or even family-wide) axiom.

I kind of get the feeling that Jack Jack is meant to be an analog of Franklin Richards, which means he can probably do anything.

Um, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, J.K. Simmons, and Joe Morton don't work for free, and two of them are Oscar winners and one is a multiple Oscar and Golden Globe nominee.

I think a lot of critics are bothered by things that 90% of audience members never notice. Things like plot holes, lack of character development, poor pacing, incoherent fight choreography, lack of convincing character motivation, and so on. Most viewers see the quick cuts (exciting!), the flashy visual effects (amazing!), and hear the silly jokes (hilarious!) and walk out feeling they had a good time. After all, that's really all they were after. But critics are always looking and hoping for evidence of towering artistic achievement and profound social/cultural relevance. Hence the disconnect.

The most expensive part of any tentpole movie today is actor salaries. I suspect that JL's cast cost quite a bit more overall.

For d100, "roll under" makes intuitive sense. If, for example, you have a 64% "skill rating", then you succeed by rolling 64 or less because that's the most direct and intuitive route to "succeed 64% of the time" using percentile dice. Rolling 3d6 under a target number is the same system just with the "percentages to succeed" falling into less granular, step-wise bins. If you want to increase your chances to succeed in a d100 system, you just add a certain % to the target value and try to roll under it as usual. Simple and intuitive, right? Similarly, if you want to increase your chances to succeed in a 3d6 system, you just add a modifier to the target number and try to roll under it as usual. The only reason the natural intuitiveness of this approach isn't quite so obvious with 3d6 is because 3d6 doesn't look like a percentile system to most folks, even though it is equivalent to one. The same could really be said for any "roll under target value" system, regardless of the dice involved.

There seems to be a recurring theme here which insists that these decisions and changes in 6E had to be made at all. Since I don't agree with that basic premise, the debate is pretty much dead before it even starts. What 6E needed to be, in my view, was a massive presentation revamp (ala Champions Complete), not a campaign to eradicate pet peeves and make pet tweaks and house rules official.

Well, the way I see it, it boils down to a general resistance to fixing that which isn't actually broken. Who gets to decide what is or isn't broken? Well in this case it was Steve Long and a bunch of like-minded players whose design instincts I don't feel pointed true north. And lest you think I dislike all change, I will point out that there have been plenty of changes to the game between editions that were quite sound--and even necessary in some cases--but IMO very few of them are to be found in 6E.

That would have been a pretty intriguing product.

I think it's pretty clear that Diana's shattered idealism (i.e., "kill Ares and humans will stop going to war") was the primary element of character development in the movie. I don't think she or any of the Amazons believed humans were puppets whose strings were being pulled by the gods; after all, the gods were all long gone except for Ares. Rather, she merely believed that Ares was like a disease rotting the soul of humanity from the inside. Unfortunately, the penchant for violence and warfare is indelibly woven into our DNA (thanks, testosterone), and killing Ares was never going to change that. It's a little surprising that the Amazons didn't know that, but I guess that's what thousands of years of total isolation does to one's perspective.

When a long-standing core element is useful to some players but not others, the prudent and sensible thing to do is to simply leave it alone. Those who have no use for it can continue to ignore it while those who do use it aren't left refactoring their game to accommodate the change (or undoing the change as a "house rule"). 6E was not made better than 4E/5E by replacing COM with Striking Appearance, it was merely made (needlessly) different.

6E1+6E2 is even worse than FRED. I remember thinking the original BBB was massive when I first saw it. I could never have imagined how bloated and unwieldy it would still become.

The Hero System is sort of like a piece of software. With each new version there are going to be changes, but ideally you don't make changes that require your user base to refactor all previous content. Backwards compatibility is important, and most of the 6E changes forced players to refactor all their characters and villains, which is a major PITA and totally unjustified for the dubious benefits most of those changes delivered. To my mind, the removal of COM is a good example of a change that didn't need to be made, wasn't replaced by a clearly superior mechanic, and which made every single character sheet in existence incompatible with the official RAW. It is because of changes like that (of which there are many, in my view) that I have a very difficult time endorsing 6E to players familiar with previous editions, even with the much improved presentation of the Complete books.

The wildly different reviews of JL make me wonder if people are seeing entirely different movies. This is why reviews are useless to me. There's no way someone else's movie experience can or will meaningfully inform/predict my own. In fact, in my experience, my off-the-cuff judgments based strictly on trailers has historically been a far more accurate predictor of what I will think of a movie as a whole (assuming I ever get around to seeing it at all), than anyone else's opinion/review.

The lower "usefulness" of COM was already encapsulated by its lower cost. Taking COM away and replacing it with a Talent was not a solution to any problem of meaningful magnitude. It was change for change's sake, in my view. Steve absolutely had another choice, which was to just leave COM alone; I kind of feel it is disingenuous to frame this as though Steve just had to make a change, when he really didn't.

Apparently they've retconned that (her post-WWI seclusion from "Man's World") out of her backstory.

Women are decrying the treatment of Wonder Woman in this film. Apparently she does get some nice moments of badassery, but she reportedly spends most of the movie just being sexually objectified by most of the male characters. CIVILIZATION HAS BEEN SET BACK CENTURIES BY THIS MOVIE!

Suggestion that Seduction should be based on (PRE + COM) / 2 for male characters, and COM for female characters.

Moreover, between Demogorgon's 95% magic resistance and his natural demonic resistance to all fire attacks (no damage on a very easy saving throw, half damage on failure, I believe?), lobbing fireballs at him--even 20d6 ones--would be a pointless exercise. Besides, by the time a party even reaches him, they should have no useful spells left, not after getting past all his minions. I just assumed that these kids didn't play with all the RAW. Few D&D groups I knew back then did.

I just think Hollywood is lazy and goes with invisible, perfect universal translators because it is easy and they don't really like a meaningful (writing/production) challenge. More fertile creative minds could come up with a way to deal with alien languages without slowing down the storytelling or blowing the fx budget. The Vorlons and Shadows of Babylon 5 are a reasonably good example. Let's face it, Trek's "seeding the universe" trope is pure handwavium, designed explicitly to make you stop engaging your higher reasoning centers and just "go with it," no matter how absurd the storytelling becomes as a result of it. Not all of Trek's tropes are like that, and many are easier to accept than others. I'm merely pointing out that it is one of those that I conceptually choke on every time it is made central to a major plotline.

We're probably stuck with Corrupt, Evil Government as superhero villain for the foreseeable future. It seems to be the only villain the general public can relate to right now, and Hollywood is always desperately falling over itself in its attempt to appear "relevant". And it looks like Joss Whedon is taking the heat for adding all the sophomoric humor to the movie. Somehow I have a feeling they'll find a way to blame him for the new Amazon outfits too.

I suppose COM is a bit of a game design anachronism, born out of the desire to break D&D's monolithic CHA characteristic into two more compartmentalized concepts: PRE (personality) and COM (physical appearance). I feel that if you agree in principle that PRE is worth codifying with a number, then there's no logical reason to reject COM.

My favorite edition is, and always has been, 4th edition. I feel the 5th edition adds a few welcome elements, but its dense presentation makes the system difficult to digest and get into. 6th edition continues in this misguided direction, with its needless deconstruction of numerous core elements, and I was extremely disappointed when I read it. For me, the ideal "edition" is 4E with bits from 5E cherry-picked (things like megascale and standard effect). However, books like Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete do an admirable job of making the system digestible again. Moreover, 6E's disposal of some of the game's most long-standing, traditional game elements won't hinder newcomers who have nothing to unlearn. Beware though that if you and your group do become highly accustomed to 5E and later decide to try 6E, you'll find many of the changes in 6E rather jarring.