zslane

That's a question only someone who's never read comic books would ask. The MCU doesn't "end" any more than the 616 continuity "ends". It goes on as long it continues to make money for Marvel/Disney. What a dumb question.

I put Daredevil season 1 and Jessica Jones season 1 at the top spot together, and I agree with RDU Neil with his ranking of their villains. I also agree that the less said about Iron Fist the better. It is just too easy to imagine how it could have been infinitely better, and so it is infuriating we got what we did. Similarly, Defenders just felt perfunctory, and the villain motivation was lame. I put it ahead of Iron Fist just for the fun character interactions, but that's not saying much.
 
I differ from most people's views on Luke Cage in that the entire first season left me almost completely disinterested in what was going on, even though I liked the Misty Knight character quite a lot. Luke himself is quite charismatic despite his leave-me-alone vibe, but the show as a whole simply didn't connect with me. I felt the stakes were simply too small and inconsequential to make me care. If you're going to narrow the iris of dramatic scope that much, better I think to make the story a highly personal character study, like Punisher season 1, rather than an oh-noes-there-goes-the-neighborhood riff in which the incidental music is more entertaining than the plot.
 
As for Punisher season 1, I thought it was quite compelling and very well executed. And while I agree that it doesn't really feel like a superhero show, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I wouldn't want more than one show like this for the MCU, but having a show that explores the non-superpowered corners of the Marvel universe is a worthy thing if done well, which I feel Punisher was.
 
Daredevil season 2 wasn't bad, and in fact the Punisher arc was quite riveting. But the Elektra arc was a little disappointing, perhaps because the whole supernatural resurrection thing didn't fit into the overall architecture and tone of these Netflix shows. Jessica Jones season 2 was merely forgettable, which is a shame since I like its characters. What does it say about the series that I'm more excited to see where they go with Trish than Jessica for season 3 (assuming there is one)?

Characters (really) die all the time in the comics. They just don't stay dead, that's all.
 

Netflix's Lost in Space - I really enjoyed this series, except for one thing: Dr. Smith. I hated that character. And not in a fun "love to hate" kind of way. The character was just so awful that she nearly ruined the show for me. It is a testament to how good the rest of the cast is and how good the writing is that I enjoyed the show despite her.
 
I've just started watching Black Lightning--out of curiosity more than anything else--and I can only conclude that genetically inherited superpowers in this universe are more like a disease (which can afflict someone at any point in their lives) rather than an expression of biological maturation (which would manifest powers around puberty).

Infinity War reminds me of those epic 70s disaster movies with every well-known genre actor and "a cast of thousands". It brings together everything that has been built into the MCU over the last ten years. Justice League, on the other hand, was the culmination of one good movie, one mediocre movie, and one bad movie. Performance comparisons between the two were always destined to be a source of profound embarrassment for DC.

DC doesn't have to do that. The source of their revenue, the movie-going audience, is already doing that (minus the slinking home).

DC doesn't have to do that. The source of their revenue, the movie-going audience, is already doing that (minus the slinking home).

The Netflix shows take place in the MCU. By definition that makes all of their characters legitimate contenders for any "best of" (or "worst of") list.

I think it is easier to make the original X-Men "balanced" from a Champions perspective than most other superhero teams of the same size.

I recommend watching your sugar and carbohydrate intake. Make sure you get lots of fat, but don't mix it with carbs. The carbs will get used for fuel and the fat will just get accumulated. Deny the body of all those carbs (which it struggles to process in a healthy way anyway) and give it the high octane fat it really prefers (and is much healthier all around for it) and you'll find it almost trivially easy to stay slender and healthy.
 
In the past year I've roughly doubled my daily caloric intake, including at least doubling the amount of fat I consume, while cutting out nearly all sugar and cutting way back on carbs (for instance, absolutely no pasta). My protein intake has probably gone up a little, but not dramatically. I've lost more excess fat in less time than at any other time in my life. The secret has been 30 mins of morning exercises every day--even when I don't really feel like it--and the aforementioned dietary changes.

oh come on really? Green Lantern doesn't have metapowers because the special effect is a ring.  Are you trolling?  Or bored?  SUPERheros all have meta-abilities even if a few basement dwellers try to be relevant by inventing more categories.
 
Splitting hairs at that ridiculas level does not suit you or the well thought out posts of the past.  Disappointing.
 
This is why I spend months away from the boards. It is slowly sliding away from awesome reasonable debate to micro-hairsplitting and titanium tap-shoes....
 
Blackhawks in the comic and the pulps were well within normal, no The Shadow mysticism or "supergadgets" at all.  Except the short flirtation where they tried to make them supers and failed. 
 
But in the end they did not act in the supers world, instead the were firmly in the "normal human max" threshold.
 
Time for another hiatus..

There's substantial difference between a GM who seeks to make death (or ignominious defeat) a possible consequence of poor decision making on the part of the PCs, and a GM who seeks to ruthlessly kill the party every chance he gets. I'd say the former is simply normative roleplaying, whereas the latter is borderline sociopathic. At the other end of the spectrum, a care bear GM seeks to soften the blow of every poor PC decision so that there are virtually no negative consequences (character death in particular). That may be a reasonable approach for a one-off demonstration game intended to attract newcomers, but it is not the kind of long-term campaign I'd recommend for most players, especially those involving children. Such campaigns denude the game's tremendous potential for teaching valuable lessons about actions and consequences, all folded into the fabric of fun adventure and engagement through creative problem solving.

1. Out of my 14 meals each week, 2 are fast food, 1 is often but not always at a restaurant, and the rest are home-cooked.
 
2. I do all my own cooking, except on the rare occasion my gf makes something for us.
 
3. I'm an omnivore with a deep love for meats of all kinds, though when it comes to fish I really only care for crustaceans.
 

I think that comes into the GM style.  It almost has to be shown early on that if the players screw up (not usually the dice unless they are only being rolled due to bad decisions) then someone is likely to die.
 
When my players decide that they are going to embark on a headlong assault on a hard point that I have demonstrated by wasting countless NPC lives to be deadly, then they accept they are now in life or death dice rolling.  If one of them dies in this, I am pretty unsympathetic.
 
If they had sought another way round the hard-point, trying to think but it all goes wrong due to issues they had no way of knowing about, I am more likely to seek to transform death into capture or severe disadvantage (loss of equipment, disabling wounds etc).
 
It is almost impossible for the game to be both deadly and forgiving.  Gamers will game.  If the system has built in mechanisms to escape death, gamers will not keep them for special situations, they will consider them as part of the tactical landscape.  (I am not using gamers pejoratively here, just saying we are playing a game and players will often look to play optimally, even when making bad strategic decisions).
 
Doc

Well put.
 
It's not about when our characters die, but how. I think most of us want to feel like our characters' actions matter and that our characters have had an impact (ideally a legendary one) on the game world, so that if/when they do die, whenever that may be, they will not have died in vain.
 
I don't like Care Bear campaigns because I'm firmly in the "what's the point of a game with no risk of character loss" camp. I once played a paladin-like character in a GURPS Fantasy campaign and I got so sick of the GM fudging outcomes to keep my character from nasty consequences that in frustration I deliberately tried to sacrifice the character in the most glorious and epicly heroic way possible, and even then the GM would not let my character die. He assumed that just because the other players were Care Bears that I was too. Ugh! I stopped playing shortly after that.

Yeah, I've seen cases like that. Usually it is only one or two players who are afflicted with that condition though, and so the problem is really just with them and not the rules or the campaign style. I think that is better handled by trained professionals, not an accommodating GM. ?‍⚕️
 
 
Characters who don't survive a single scenario in Call of Cthulhu are the result of players who doesn't understand the game/genre, possibly including the GM. If you approach CoC like D&D, you're going to fail/die fairly quickly. The goal isn't to kill the big bad monster, but to figure out the plot of the scenario and try to foil it by using your wits and your character's knowledge/skills. The price of success is a slowly eroding sanity, but your character should last several sessions at least. Players who understand this going in will have a lot more fun with it than those who don't. The latter will be understandably frustrated by their inability to solve every dilemma and crisis head-on. Hell, I've seen characters last longer in CoC than D&D simply because CoC forces you to be more careful and to use finesse in solving problems, whereas D&D players typically assume that every challenge is defeatable through sheer force, and will stupidly die trying to prove it.

Paranoia...

Sequel is released in 10-12 days.  

One thing I like about Complications is that they serve to remind players of a genre's most iconic conventions, and for those not very familiar with a genre they can serve a tutorial function. But I also think Complications go a bit beyond merely teaching how to roleplay, especially in a Champions (superhero) context where everything is cranked up to 11.
 
Complications are attributes of a character so potentially debilitating that you deserve some sort of compensation for agreeing to take them. Rather than viewing them as enforcing genre conventions and role-aligned actions (after all, they are entirely optional in the sense that every character is free to not take any), I find it more worthwhile to view them as reward vehicles for voluntarily taking traits that will cause real, and sometimes dire, difficulties for PCs. I see Complications as a vital part of the point economy built into the very foundation of the Hero System, and not merely as a means to incentivise roleplaying (that's just a side effect, in my view).
 
Another benefit of Complications is that they help GMs build plots that are PC-centric, which engage players far more deeply than generic plots with little or no direct connection to their characters. If Complications incentivise anything they incentivise PC-centric plot construction, which is full of win in my book because that helps intertwine characters with the game setting in a way that even writing an elaborate piece of fanfic as a backstory usually won't.

One thing I like about Complications is that they serve to remind players of a genre's most iconic conventions, and for those not very familiar with a genre they can serve a tutorial function. But I also think Complications go a bit beyond merely teaching how to roleplay, especially in a Champions (superhero) context where everything is cranked up to 11.
 
Complications are attributes of a character so potentially debilitating that you deserve some sort of compensation for agreeing to take them. Rather than viewing them as enforcing genre conventions and role-aligned actions (after all, they are entirely optional in the sense that every character is free to not take any), I find it more worthwhile to view them as reward vehicles for voluntarily taking traits that will cause real, and sometimes dire, difficulties for PCs. I see Complications as a vital part of the point economy built into the very foundation of the Hero System, and not merely as a means to incentivise roleplaying (that's just a side effect, in my view).
 
Another benefit of Complications is that they help GMs build plots that are PC-centric, which engage players far more deeply than generic plots with little or no direct connection to their characters. If Complications incentivise anything they incentivise PC-centric plot construction, which is full of win in my book because that helps intertwine characters with the game setting in a way that even writing an elaborate piece of fanfic as a backstory usually won't.

A good GM will make use of those Complications for sure. Unfortunately, they require a certain degree of cooperation from the players. They have to "play along", so to speak, for that to really work, and some players just don't. There's only so much the mechanics can do in the face of an unwilling player. You can usually spot the non-roleplayers because they are the ones who get irritated when their Complications come up in play, and they are the first to ask how they can buy them off as quickly as possible.

Many RPGs, not just horror RPGs, put incentive mechanics into their systems to try and motivate players to actually roleplay their characters. It is a clever way to get players to do what their characters would do, rather than what would be best for them to do. But this problem has plagued the hobby since its inception, and I think we've always recognized a distinction between those who really get into character and those who don't. I vividly recall how this perceived separation between "typical gamers" and "real roleplayers" is what divided the hobby in the 90s when Vampire: the Masquerade came out and the rulebook went out of its way to embrace (no pun intended) and celebrate those who were into it for the psychodrama, rather than the "winning" of any given scenario.
 
If you're into RPGs primarily for tactical problem solving, great, don't play CoC or any horror game designed to capture the high death toll and low survivability inherent in the genre. On the other hand, if you're into RPGs to experience everything the chosen genre has to offer, and you really like Lovecraftian horror, then you're going to be okay with not always being in control of your character, and you're going to be okay with the eventual deterioration of his or her sanity and the ultimate futility of fighting against the darkness.

He won't be a cloud, but knowing Feige, Galactus will emerge from Taa II and spend most of the movie without his iconic helmet or armor (and whatever is left will definitely not be purple and blue), and he'll probably look a lot like Ben Mendelsohn.

Shuri is T'Challa's "Q". And just like the more recent Bond films, they are casting this role very young in order to connect with today's teens who are growing up with high tech as their cultural norm. Marvel doesn't really care whether this is "realistic", only that they get to have at least one character that stands in proxy for the teen audience, regardless of how implausible it might be.

Agreed. Thanos doesn't have to need his armor to want to wear it. It could be, and probably should be, a statement of identity and status as a cosmic badass. This notion of "taking off the armor and rolling up the sleeves" as some sort of I-mean-business-and-I-aint-afraid-of-anyone attitude comes across to me as very WWE.