zslane

The second episode wasn't bad. The show really needs to find its groove though. Some of the acting is a little stilted (I'm looking at you, Halston Sage), and some of the characters feel more like they stepped off the set of a remake of Quark, but I still see a lot of potential.

Suicide Squad was uninteresting largely due to its utter lack of character development. Every character came out of the experience exactly the same as they went in. And the movie did nothing to make you care about them. The lack of agency didn't help matters either ("Do what we say or your head explodes."). I mean, basically, that screenplay was a textbook example of how not to write one.

As a Supergirl fan, the only date of interest to me is Oct 9. The others, meh.

That's pretty much how I've felt about 99% of the comedy series made in the last 20 years.

I see a similar affection for Star Trek that was evident in Galaxy Quest, a movie I adored. This show doesn't have a feature film budget, and so its vfx will be appropriately modest in quality, but I can look past that if the show is otherwise fun and puts a smile on my face now and then. I just have to try and not allow myself to get too distracted by the glaring asymmetry of Seth's and Adrienne's eyes. Turns out these are two people who look better from a small distance...

How many episodes are the critics basing their reviews on? Just the pilot? Or did they get to see more at some press screening? The pilot wasn't astounding, but it wasn't bad either. I think the people who are tearing it apart are mostly people who don't like it because they don't like Seth MacFarland and don't like his style of humor to begin with, and they can't (or don't want to) imagine the possibility that it will improve over time. I'm willing to give it a few episodes to see what direction it will go. If it stays the same (as the pilot) or gets worse, then it will surely die a pretty quick death. However, if it gets better, then we could end up with a proverbial Galaxy Quest: the Series on our hands.

Warburton had the physical size of The Tick, whereas the new guy doesn't. But Warburton's Tick seemed to trade in the goofiness of the comic for pure camp. The old Tick cartoon was a better adaptation, IMO, than either of the live-action adaptations.

Well, assuming you believe that ganging up on a single villain and ignoring all the other opposition is intelligent combat, then it would appear that sort of intelligence is not displayed by superheroes in the comics (perhaps as a deliberate trope?), and the OP wants to forcibly simulate that in his campaign.

I think the pilot is almost always going to be a bit rocky, as the show has not yet found its footing. A show like this needs time to establish its tone, its character dynamics, and its overall storytelling style. Unfortunately, it might never get the time it needs if it fails to launch the way Powerless failed to. I'm hoping it acquires an audience and sticks around long enough to develop a solid identity and following, because I like the concept and I like Seth MacFarland's comedy style quite a bit (minus his tendency to hang onto a gag for far longer than it deserves, just to make audiences uncomfortable).

Does it take place in the Star Trek universe? Does it actually use any of Paramount's Star Trek trademarks? Does it plagiarize (by the strict legal standard) any Star Trek script? I don't think Paramount would have a legal leg to stand on. If they did, they would have jumped all over Dreamworks for Galaxy Quest back in 1999.

There's more to Champions attacks than just conventional damage-delivering powers. Mental Illusions, Mind Control, Entangle, Teleportation/Desolid Usable On Others, Flash, Drain, and many others. The villains need to be designed so that they can't just be ignored on the battlefield. If there is no meaningful drawback to being attacked in your game, it isn't necessarily a flaw of the game system, but a flaw of villain design and lack of tactical creativity.

It also helps if the heroes have connections to the villains such that each hero has a character-based reason to go after a particular villain. This can't always be arranged, and not usually for every PC in every combat, but it is usually possible to sprinkle them around so at least a few of the PCs have a nemesis they are compelled to go after, regardless whether or not it is tactically optimal to do so. Also, some power sets make it hard to ignore the villain simply because they are so effective. You may want to concentrate your firepower on the leader (or whatever), but if their mentalist is locking down your best attacker with a Mental Illusion, well you can't just ignore that. I guess my experience has been that good GMs find ways to construct their scenarios so that the heroes find it unwise to gang up on just one or two villains at a time. It's not something you build a new mechanic for, it is something that happens naturally as a consequence of properly building the campaign world and the PCs' connections to it (and its villains), along with how cleverly you play the villains (and their tactics). Remember, the villains don't have to just sit around reacting to what the heroes do; they can, and often do, dictate the flow of the battle by taking the initiative (in a chess sense) and doing things the heroes are forced to react to.

And Arthur Brown was the God of Hell Fire.

I think nuance was thrown out the window when DC decided that in the ancient past of the DCEU, Ares sought to wipe out all of humanity. As eternal personal missions go, genocide pretty much puts him in the all evil, all the time camp. As for war getting a bad rap in the DCEU, well when you think about it, prior to WWII, it is difficult to find many large-scale wars that were initiated and/or fought for what Diana would consider a just cause (I am, of course, assuming that conquest and empire-building would not qualify as just causes, despite the demi-god status of figures like Alexander the Great in the eyes of the ancient Greeks). I just don't think Trevor would have gotten very far with that rhetorical approach.

By genre convention, James Bond is usually put into a kill-or-be-killed position. The villain's ignominious end is practically inevitable. But with superheroes, comic book writers always managed to contrive ways/reasons the hero would win without ever having to kill the villain. Well, at least until later publishing ages when "dark and gritty" became a popular marketing ploy. The notion of the recurring villain, largely borrowed from the pulps, was a handy way of introducing serialized drama to an ongoing narrative. But until recently, superhero movies weren't serialized in any sense. Each movie was a one-off story in which everyone except the title character was essentially disposable. The MCU is the first attempt to turn a film franchise into an ongoing mythology similar to the comics it draws from. And it has been pretty successful at this, though I find it odd that they have killed off so many of their villains. I guess this is one way in which MCU movies are less like (superhero) comic book movies and more like action films (ala James Bond) that happen to have superheroes/supervillains in them.

Snyder is an accomplished visualist, there's no denying that. But his storytelling acumen is questionable. Even when he's adapting very good material.

It also appears to be an open question as to whether or not the next Batman movie will be part of the DCEU. The parade of stupid just keeps marching on...

When you hear there's going to be a series about The Immortal Iron Fist, you don't expect to get The Ward Meachum Story. Marvel simply told the wrong story. Period. The fact that it had a very good actor playing (what should have been) a relatively minor secondary role does not change that one bit.

It's not necessarily a stereotype. Depending on where they live, they have a lot to be angry about (for real). Marvel is trying to play the political correctness game and losing.

Yeah, reversing those personality traits was boneheaded.

Agreed. Danny's story of how he earned the title of "Immortal Iron Fist" should have been what the first 2/3rds of the first season was all about. It should have taken place entirely in Kun Lun, where we got to see the culture and customs there. It would have been an opportunity for Iron Fist to establish its own unique feel as a series, steeped in Eastern mysticism and high-flying martial arts action. It should have been a cross between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Into the Badlands (i.e., lots of fantasy elements, but with modern fighting choreography instead of traditional wushu wirework). It could have been revealed that Madam Gao had been captured and imprisoned there, and that her escape puts Danny in pursuit of her, and that's how he ends up in NYC. Then the third act of the season would be Danny discovering how The Hand has infiltrated NYC and the threat they represent. But most importantly, while Danny may new to the superhero game, and be a fish out of water in terms of fitting into NYC, especially after 15 years of isolation and indoctrination into a way of life utterly foreign to modern Americans, there's no excuse for him not demonstrating the degree of fighting prowess necessary to defeat Shou Lao the Undying. And I just don't buy that he would still be so utterly torn up emotionally and psychologically after having 15 years to get his s**t together under the tutelage and training of Kun Lun's masters.

I kind of agree with you there. However, by analogy, if what I'm hungering and hoping for is a fantastic steak, I'm not going to be happy if I'm served a lukewarm pasta dish in which its only virtue is that it's "not quite as bad" as an entire Internet of haters say it is.

In this case, disappointment is probably also relative to one's ability to imagine a far more interesting alternative to what we got.

Are we really going to rehash all the reasons Iron Fist was a monumental disappointment?

I guess that depends on the sort of science fiction your setting is going for: Space Opera or Hard Sci-Fi. Traveller can't claim adherence to hard science fiction due to its use of FTL. But even if it did, the idea of instantaneous information exchange is more supported by real physics than FTL. Research into quantum entanglement is yielding interesting and promising results, making "the speed of communication thing" not "solid physics" for long. But that is mostly besides the point. The more salient point is that players today are used to communications that move faster than physical travel, and have been since the earliest days of the telegraph. You can't hand them a far-future scifi setting and expect the Pony Express nature of communications to suddenly make sense to them. They are already buying into FTL; they expect the ansible too.