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The original 5th edition is perfectly serviceable. You shouldn't have any issues using it.

Years before HBO picked up Game of Thrones, I had hopes that they would work out a deal with the Tolkien estate to do a series, maybe called something along the lines of "Tales from the Silmarillion", which would cover the epic stories from the First Age of Middle-Earth. That was merely a pipe dream back then. Now, if that's what Amazon wants to do then they have my full support. However, if they just want to continue to tread the tired old ground of the Third Age, then I'm not going to jump on that bandwagon.

The revised edition is better than the original 5E edition in pretty much every way. There's no compelling reason to get the original version, IMO.

Just like maybe it's a sign that Game of Thrones convinced Amazon that there are more stories in Middle-Earth worth telling?

I think we, the audience, are no different than the general public of the MCU in that superheroes were unknown to us prior to Tony Stark revealing himself in the first film. That doesn't mean others (like Captain Marvel) didn't exist (and have adventures) prior to 2008, it's just that they weren't known to the public. It would be awkward to retcon Captain Marvel into the MCU's past as a well-known public figure (not as Carol Danvers, but as Captain Marvel the superhero), and I don't think they'll do that. I'm sure they will write her origin story and first adventure such that it takes place behind-the-scenes (in a "top secret military project" kind of way, at least in terms of public knowledge and perception) when she's on Earth, and won't even have to worry about it when she's fighting off-planet.

5th edition is a good choice, especially if you are already comfortable with the 4th edition. In my view, 5E is like "Advanced 4E". Same game, but presented in a way more suited to advanced, experienced users of the system. My biggest problem with 5E is that it sets players on a character design path I don't care for; it legitimizes--through its many, many examples--the "overspecify everything" approach to building powers for your characters. This has a tendency to make the game look, feel, and play far more complicated than it really is (or needs to be). You'll discover what I mean when you see power builds offered up by forum members in response to your power design questions.

Depends on the laws in effect in this campaign world. If they are no different than our Real World® laws, then I'd turn him over to the police. The guy deserves his day in court like everyone else.

At first I wasn't entirely convinced the show was name-dropping Smallville's Chloe, but then Kara mentioned Chloe's "Wall of Weird" and that made it conclusive. BTW, the actresses who played young Alex and Kara did a smash up job. Kudos to the casting director(s).

One Star Trek trope I could never really buy into was the "all biped species in the universe are sexually compatible" trope. It's worse than the tacit assumption that invisible, perfect universal translators are operating at all times, no matter the situation, no matter the location of the action. And the end solution was predictable as hell. But still a fairly entertaining episode, all in all. And I do appreciate that they found a way to exonerate Kelly.

Does that matter? The movie will presumably do the necessary job of introducing Steppenwolf to the audience. As mentioned earlier, nobody knew who Hans Gruber was either, and he made a fine movie villain.

Fixed that for you.

Independent of Justice League they have the following movies in development/production: Aquaman, Wonder Woman 2, Flash, Shazam, and Suicide Squad 2. None of these are particularly dependent on the success of JL, and they will give WB/DC plenty to put out against Disney/Marvel for the next few years even if JL2 never gets off the ground. I doubt they want to look out any further than that anyway, especially given how horrible they are at this. Also, they have yet to figure out who will be Batman going forward, a slightly sticky situation that puts anything resembling a "DCEU Phase 2" into question right now.

I thought I heard that they were originally going to use Darkseid, but when they decided that Justice League would be an Avengers-like sub-franchise within the DCEU, they decided to build up to Darkseid over the course of multiple movies, which necessitated shifting to a lower-grade villain for the initial film in the series. Hence Steppenwolf. It remains to be seen if this strategy will pay off. I mean, nobody particularly liked Suicide Squad but it did well enough financially to justify another movie, and so even if Justice League fails to get glowing reviews, it will undoubtedly do well enough at the box office to greenlight the sequel where we will most likely see Darkseid.

Yeah, I was surprised by that too (the Chloe thing, not the Durance thing). Seemed a little cheesy to me, but I guess it's CW canon now. All in all I feel that Supergirl is doing a great job with its storytelling this season. The last two episodes in particular were very good. But from the snippets shown in the teaser for next week, I fear that the return of Mon-El could really muck things up.

Compelling villains seem to be the weak spot for most superhero movies and tv shows. Here's hoping Thanos can change all that...

Not if your destination is many light years away. If it takes four years to receive a distress call from the nearest non-local star in your empire, and then five years for the help you send to arrive there, the crisis will be long over before your characters can participate meaningfully. Your science fiction story ceases to feel like science fiction and more like ancient pre-history.

Most performance athletes, including boxers and MMA fighters, don't juice up on steroids the way body builders do. Surely I'm not the only person here who recognizes the impact of routine steroid use on the human body and can see that Snyder's Amazons look more like body builders than boxers. Look at Ronda Rousey versus the women on American Gladiators. No comparison.

They left out time travel, but I'm pretty sure that's because the impossibility of it precludes it from appearing in any article with the word "Plausibility" in its title.

Well, sure, but that's because most of us don't have much of a physique at all, never mind a hypermasculinized one. Given the biological norms for our species, Amazons would look like olympic heptathletes, not modern female body builders who dose themselves with steroids to give themselves an unnaturally masculine physique.

I'm not a fan of Snyder's Amazon outfits either. And while everyone lauds the costumes in the Jenkins film, let's face it, they weren't exactly historically accurate either. To be fair, superhero movies aren't trying to be historically authentic in any of their style choices, so that shouldn't surprise anyone. But Snyder's take on ancient "armor" is an insult to the concept of "warrior", be it male or female. I'm also not a fan of the muscle-bound female body-builder look, to be honest. Amazons were warriors, yes, and they would have been in peak physical condition. However, they would not look like these women who have clearly been juicing on steroids. They look entirely too masculine. Wonder Woman herself looks completely out of place among them, which is a real conceptual as well as aesthetic problem in my view.

All of Hollywood has some problems. Once the lid was blown off the Harvey Weinstein case, all the women who have ever been sexually harassed in Hollywood (i.e., practically all of them) now feel emboldened to step forward, which means almost any guy who has ever been in a position of power or authority in Hollywood will be in the hot seat for the next few weeks.

6E2 page 88.

Indeed. And I think the looseness required to make this Jenga-like super-franchise work yields enough flexibility to set Captain Marvel's earliest adventure(s) in the 1990s without upsetting or seriously compromising established continuity.

Well, by movie franchise standards I suppose the MCU is intricate, though we could debate for ages how careful they are being about its construction. But by comic book standards the MCU is pretty shallow and simplistic. And I think that is due to the time and cost it takes to add a single new entry (movie, tv series, etc.) into the continuity. By necessity they have to be somewhat loose in their world building, and if it sometimes feels like they are making this stuff up as they go (from a planning perspective), that's because they largely are. For example, as soon as Marvel could ink a deal to get Spider-Man into the MCU, they shoved him in as quickly as they could. There was nothing "careful" about it. Fast-tracking ol' Webhead into the MCU was a business decision, not a creative one, just like sidelining the Fantastic Four and mutants in the comics was a business (and political) decision rather than a creative one. Being "careful and intricate" may be the general perception Marvel wants to put forth, but it doesn't reflect the reality, IMO. Given the number of moving parts involved, I just don't think it ever can (or will). Constructing such a complicated (logistically speaking), loosely-connected multimedia franchise involves pleasing too many masters to ever achieve a clean, perfectly-architected result.

I wonder if the example object (a grenade) is throwing off our assessment? I mean, what if he had asked about dropping a set of car keys mid-move? In the case of a grenade, if the grenade is intended to explode on the same Phase that it is dropped (no different than a grenade intended to explode on the same Phase it is thrown), then I'd probably tell the player that it will go off while he is still in that hex, taking damage and ending his move (aside from any knockback that might result). But if the grenade isn't armed (or is on a Time Delay) then it is just being dropped like any mundane small object, and I'd call it a zero-phase action that occurs during the move. Precision here is just "somewhere in the hex I was in," and if you want to really get prickly about it you could roll for bounce and scatter. On the other hand, if the player is trying to drop a golf ball into the hole on a green as he moves past it, then I'd call it a 0-hex range Strafe attack.