David Johnston

Re: Alignment Issues

Games and fiction asserting that real people can be "Lawful good" or "chaotic evil" or whatever? I've seen games that do this' date=' but not fiction. [/quote']

 

For a start, you can consider comic books. Both Marvel and DC have Law and Chaos as distinct sides although in DC they are usually at war and in Marvel they are usually cooperative with each other. At the same time however, you be a good guy or bad and still be affiliated with either side, and both sides also have warring heavens and hells.

 

Most novels that have such an axis go the simple route though, with a single axis of light and darkness, law and chaos or whatever. And of course most D&D groups do the same thing, treating one axis as important and the other as just a detail.

Re: Location of Gotham City

Without getting into the official answers, when the question mattered to me, I put Gotham in Massachusetts and Metropolis on the Great Lakes.

Re: Crude Combined Marvel/DC timeline to use as backstory to a Supers campaign

Don't forget the Super Sons - he could adventure with Batman II

Him, I'd rather forget. Bruce Wayne never struck me as having the makings of a family man. Particularly since the only women he's attracted to are supervillains.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

Who says? The Mutant Registration Act arose out of just such things' date=' and so did this one. Don't forget that Stamford did not cause the Registration Act to be introduced. All it did was counterbalance Iron Man's publicity stunt and shift a few votes, enough to narrowly pass a bill that otherwise would have narrowly failed to pass.[/b']

 

Actually, a non-mutant registration act has not been in the storylines for years and its revival from obscurity was directly related to the Stamford incident. Btw, what publicity stunt by IM are you talking about?

The one where he paid Titanium Man to have a staged fight with him in order to convince Congress that they needed to stay out of the way and let the heroes do their thing. But then at the last moment after he'd testified on that topic and used TM's scripted announcement that soon all the heroes would be out of his way because the government would be going after them to sway congress, the Stamford Incident happened at the last moment, complete with a camera crew to show all the dead kids in glorious technicolour. Needless to say, a few dead kids on-screen does a heck of a lot more to sway public opinion then a thousands of dead adults with no film crew to record them. Also needless to say, the timing is suspicious.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

 

That said, the whole storyline is VERY forced. Much worse events (like Onslaught and the Magneto attack on Manhatten) inflicted far worse losses but failed to produce such measures.

Who says? The Mutant Registration Act arose out of just such things, and so did this one. Don't forget that Stamford did not cause the Registration Act to be introduced. All it did was counterbalance Iron Man's publicity stunt and shift a few votes, enough to narrowly pass a bill that otherwise would have narrowly failed to pass.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

Um, even granting the right to privacy argument not floating, there's a couple other problems with it:

 

1. It amounts to mandatory conscription of *everyone* of a single group. Legally, it would need to pass a 'necessity' muster equivalent to a *universal* draft, or else it violates nondiscrimination clauses and the various ones a draft would, absent necessity

 

2. Bills of attainder and ex post facto laws. The act manages to be both.

 

3. Due process. Nobody violating the law is getting it.

 

4. Cruel and unusual punishment. Everyone violating the law whose caught *is* getting this

1. No. People with powers are required to register, but they are not required to work for the government. You can hang up the cape.

2. No. The act is not an ex post facto law. People who have been superheroes but aren't now, or had powers but don't now aren't required to register. The act is also not a bill of attainder. It doesn't say "Captain America is a criminal".

3. Yes...or to be more accurate they haven't _shown_ the criminals getting due process. A forgiving reading might assume that in most cases these people are either getting trials or will at some indefinite point in the future get trials. Bear in mind though that in real life there is often a time frame of many months of imprisonment between a person being arrested and them actually getting a trial. That's why people convicted of less serious felonies often get sentenced to "time served". However it is extremely unlikely that the act itself says "nobody who violates this act gets a trial". The cases, however few or common, where due process is being violated are going to be statutorily enshrined any more than there's a law that says you can shuffle a prisoner from containment facility to containment facility to keep his lawyer from finding him.

4. Not a consideration. Considering the difficulties involved in restraining even many non-powered supervillains, 616's Supreme Court would have long since ruled that some very extreme methods of restraint aren't unusual at all. Dude, in real life they ruled concerning capital punishment "Sure, it's cruel, but we already do it, so it ain't unusual".

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

When I wrote this I wasn't aware of the extent of the act (I don't read Marvel anymore); after reading the other posts I will revise my answers.

 

None of my character will comply with the act.

I would have to roll for Professora No Va as to whether she joins the resistance or just leaves the country.

Mr. Blue would sue the government. He would also make citizen's arrests of prominent politicians who had voted for the act, charging them with criminal conspiracy to violate citizens' constitutional rights.

The act doesn't violate citizen's constitutional rights. Constitutional rights have been violated in the course of the enforcement of the act on a couple of occasions, but the act itself doesn't do it, unless the Supreme Court chooses to rule that the interpolated "right to privacy" covers the right to conceal your superpowers, something which would be impossible to know in advance of the ruling. And I don't believe a court similar to the current one would in fact make such a ruling.

Re: Alignment Issues

Which really doesn't change my point at all.

If that is true, then I did not understand your point. Are you saying that people's reasons for doing what they do should not matter?

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

I keep seeing mention of leaving the country. This is one of my other problems with this Civil War series. Now I accept that comics are going to be U.S.-centered' date=' it is the primary market for the product. But this current series, from what I've heard, seems to have taken this to an entirely new level, practically ignoring that U.S. law is not international law.[/quote']

 

By no means. Not only did Ben Grimm move to France but the (temporary) replacements for the recently somewhat slaughtered Alpha Flight are going to be expatriate American heroes. The reason why more resisting heroes didn't just relocate is because they just aren't being sensible. Apparently, relocating to a place where the law doesn't apply or obeying the law just isn't heroic enough.

 

Or the idea that the US would be the only country on the planet dealing with superhero related issues, or that the US would automatically choose the most ridiculous police state choice where every where else would choose to be a bastion of freedom and tolerance.

 

You might want to bear in mind that most of the other countries in the Marvel Universe do not in fact let superheroes range free. Pretty much every Canadian with powers was a member of the Alpha Flight program, or a villain. There were no independants. (And yes, Canada had it's own registration program storyline) Russian superhumans have traditionally fallen into the categories of government operatives or concentration camp resident, and the only vigilante I've seen them using was indeed a hunted fugitive. African superhumans all seem to be bandits and extortionists outside of Wakanda which is a super-led monarchy. All the Japanese heroes we've seen in the Marvel Universe belong to the same government sponsored team. I

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero

That the guy from GURPS Supers Mixed Doubles?

Yup. I recognised the reference.

Re: WWYCD: Red Garden

Anyway, I started out trying to figure out how to design the girls of the Red Garden, and I realised it can't really be done. Here's the setup:

The girls are revenants, brought most of the way back from the dead to kill the beast-men. However the only thing that keeps them alive is their own will to live. If they do not risk their lives on a regular basis, they lose will-to-live, and eventually they'll just passively let themselves be killed or if nobody does the service for them, they'll commit suicide. As they continue to fight they get more and more powerful, but if they lose morale and start thinking about how futile their situation is, they'll also lose will-to-live. For some reason drinking lemon juice helps prevent this, which frankly I find the weirdest part. But there's another danger as well. If they start feeling that they are on their own and can't rely on each other they'll start to go into berserker rages and eventually will become what they are fighting if they retain their will-to-live. Therefore the girls have to stick together to stay sane and alive. (It's a Japanese thing. The team is indispensable. And since the girls are American, they have a little trouble mastering this concept.)

Re: Crude Combined Marvel/DC timeline to use as backstory to a Supers campaign

Ehn. If DC can kill Superman, so can you. I was actually thinking that, given all the Silver Age Superboy and Superman Junior stories, it might be a nice touch for the Golden Age Superman to die as Lois Lane is pregnant with their child. Naturally the boy is also named "Clark" after his father, is mostly raised by his grandparents in Smallville since Lois is a globe-trotting workaholic and eventually he makes his debut as Superman II in 1986 saving a space shuttle from disaster. (Giving a nod to the Byrne reboot).

You might even go so far as to let history repeat itself by involving him with a reporter named Chloe Sullivan.

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero

I'm overcoming my crippling fear of everything.

Which was of course Fearless's motivation.

Re: (best ever...) reasons for becoming a superhero

Look, when people in costumes just keep showing up to commit mayhem all around or on me, do I really have an option?

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

I did not see this posted already, but sorry if I missed it:

 

Taking the example from marvel's Civil War series, a group of younger heros are involved in an incident that leads to a death of hundreds of innocents. The outcry and backlash leads to the registration act and its the Champions leading the crusade. Heroes must sign up to be trained by and work for the government or be jailed/hunted until such time as they agree to sign up. Secret id's will be exposed to the government. Do you join or do you fight the Champions?

Neither. Riptide just swims across the Pacific and hangs out in Japan instead. They love him in Japan. (Hellfire actually did work for the government, but she was Canadian).

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines)

Poor boy. He looks sick. Really, all these institutions handling radioactive materials ought to be more careful. Sometimes I think it's my fault. If I didn't go around covering for their mistakes, if I let more people die from their carelessness, maybe their government would watch them more carefully. Oh, look, now he's "tossing his accounts", as they used to say. It's his body trying to cleanse itself of the contamination, trying to live. It won't be enough.

I walk up beside him and put my hand on his shoulder and say "Hey, mister? You look pretty sick. Maybe you should go to the hospital."

I'm just making conversation. Actually there's nothing a hospital can do for him. I'm the only thing that can save him. But should I? I offer him tissue to wipe his mouth and he thanks me. What a nice guy, polite even when he's feeling so sick. Will he stay nice? Give some nice people a little power and they can't handle it. They just turn out awful. Is it better to live in corruption or to die innocent?

"I'll be fine," he lies without knowing it, muttering under his breath "I have to be. My aunt and..."

Well...I guess I'm just not the kind of person who can cross her arms and let someone die when he's right in front of her. I concentrate and the power flows out of my palm and into his body. I'm no healer. I can't take away his poisoning. But I can change him into someone who doesn't have to worry about little radiation. He'll probably look back on this day and figure out this was the day his life was changed forever. Maybe ruined, depending on how he handles the powers I'm giving him.

I don't wear a costume. I don't fight crime. I look like I'm only 13. I've looked that way for almost a century now. Who am I? I'm the unnoticed reason why this city has ten or a hundred times as many "heroes" and "villains" than anywhere else. I hope I always stay unnoticed, because I'm Power Girl, and if they ever spot me, I'll be in a lot of trouble.

Re: WWYCD: Red Garden

The girls do not attack the superhero/vigilante unless he has a Looks or Reputation disadvantage that might lead people to fear him. However, their first reaction on seeing the hero (assuming he's flesh and blood) is to say, "Oh god, what if it bites HIM?". Three of them fiercely attack their opponent while the fourth (the one in the "good girl dress") frantically tries to stay in between the crazy guy and you, begging you to go away. The crazy guy seems to be moderately super strong and fast, has at tendency to lope on all fours at times, and his eyes really reflect any ambient light. His vocabulary seems to be limited to "grr". The girls...well the girls seem like they can really take a pounding for otherwise normal people and seem to want to finish their opponent off.

If intimidated, (which isn't difficult for the typical person with superheroic presence), the girls tell you that the things they fight look like they're people, but they aren't.

Oh, incidentally, if you have an ability to detect magic, all participants reek of it. If you are a mentalist (or consult one concerning a captive crazy guy), there seems to be nobody home in his brain. Just a bundle of murderous reflexes.

Assume that your character is in a very large city and he or she sees a group of teenage girls walking down the street around midnight. They seem a bit stressed, and one of them has a baseball bat. If you take a close look, they seem a bit mismatched. One of them looks pretty much like a streetwalker, one of them is the jeans and sweatshirt type, another is in fashionably expensive capris and the last is wearing a polka-dotted dress that screams "I'm a good girl, I am." There's none of the standardisation of style you'd expect from a high school clique. Also, they seem to be looking up in the air at something you can't see.

As they walk along, they encounter an unarmed nutjob who as he sees them, growls like a werewolf and charges very fast. The girls do not seem to be surprised by this, and the sweatshirt girl pulls a knife. Both the crazy guy and the stressed-out girls seem fully intent on killing each other.

What do you do?

(Red Garden is a Japanese cartoon series)

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out?

 

As for your personal character, it's not a fair comparison because 1. Every character has a breaking point. Only you can determine the break point for your character.

But isn't that really my point? The villain doesn't know the hero's breakpoint. So why try so hard to reach it?

Re: Alignment Issues

However, I think more than one of us is of the opinion that the Alignment system does a very poor job of simulating that aspect of those settings.

 

I'd also say that alignment fails to ring true because it's philosophically backwards -- "good" and "evil" are about what one does, not about what one is.

What one is is expressed in what one does.

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out?

Well' date=' the villain can be pretty sure. This is especially the case with well known heroes who have established personalities/psych profiles. No crook believes Capt. America will kill him because Cap has made it clear through his actions that it just won't happen. [/quote']

 

Well, no he hasn't. Cap doesn't kill as many people as he did in the Golden Age. He no longer considers himself a soldier. He clearly considers killing to be a last resort for what he is now, a kind of law enforcement officer. But how many villains have tested that by killing his girlfriends? Note that Cap in fact has no secret identity. Anyone who cares to has known who Steve Rogers is for, oh must be decades now. He made an abortive attempt to set up a new secret identity for himself but apparently he (or his writer) concluded it was too much trouble. It's a comic book cliche now for the grief-stricken hero to come within a hairs-breadth of killing the villain but at the last moment to prove he's "better" by not taking that finishing blow, but of course he couldn't do that if the villain was just a hairs-breadth less tough so the previous blow ended up being not quite enough to kill him.

 

So no, a villain can't count on Captain Public Awareness not killing him if he pushes CPA farther than CPA has ever been pushed before. Take my public ID character, Riptide. He once had an encounter with the villain who killed his mother (and no, that had nothing to do with his public ID. He inherited powers from his superheroine mother and became a superhero after she was murdered). Now at no other point during his career did he come off as anything other than a boastful fun loving thrill-seeker who treated fighting crime as a game at least as far as his opponents and the media were concerned. In fact he was on record as not minding if supervillains escaped custody because that just meant he got to have the fun of catching them again before they could do anything.

 

But you know, I played him a bit differently on that particular occasion. The opponent survived because I let Riptide's teammates stop him, but if they hadn't been there, I would have been in a bind since I would have had to have Bob kill him. And if the character had been a crunchy, that first killing attack _would_ have killed him.

Re: Around the World With A New Character Each Week

The Creature: was actually Arvin Hasselbladt, a b-movie writer/producer/director who manage to get his hands on a strength assisting exoskeleton being sold at the auction of a deceased inventor's estate and created a reptilian monster costume to wear over it with the intention of using it to make cheezy horror movies. His publicity stunts wearing the costume quickly escalated into a whole career of fighting crime (and certain heros who were inclined to judge a book by it's cover.). The Creature was hunted down and killed by Bounty for an extremely wealthy music producer with a taste for illegal thrills who believed (correctly) that The Creature was out to get him.

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero

I'm making a mint off endorsements!

I want to eliminate all my competitors before taking over the world. Ahahahaha!

The dental plan totally rules.

I'm afraid of death, but superheroes keep coming back from it.

Re: Genocide

While things like the one drop rule happen' date=' it was because of some form of identification (in this case a genealogical records). [/quote']

 

This is true. Which why I pointed out that the reason why people know Storm is a mutant, is because she's an X-Man. Had she made her debut as a solo hero and never self-identified as a mutant, they wouldn't have assumed she was one unless and until she pinged on a mutant detector. The thing is, most people have no clear idea what a "mutant" is. They just know that it's a word that sounds scary, hinting at freakish deformity, and is associated with an organisation dedicated to conquering them and turning them into second class citizens in the short term, and entirely replacing them in the long term.

 

In the marvel public's minds, the idea is widespread that a "mutant" is someone genetically hardwired to displace homo sapiens sapiens all thanks to the great and wonderful saviors of mutantkind, Magneto and Xavier. There are of course people who go beyond that to hate anyone with biologically derived powers, just as there are people who go beyond hating one ethnic group to hate many. But for many, like Gyrich, while they hate them all, the mutants still seemed like the biggest threat simply because they had a sense of group identity, and a presence in sheer numbers that was not shared by any other origin.

Re: Genocide

I don't think the arguement is that such groups are not realistic in human attutide' date=' but that in genre they are not realistic, meaning that they pick on certain people with power and not others. Marvel X books have people hissing booing and killing X-Men, but praising the freaky Mr. Fantastic and the Thing. The Genre is ... [b']uneven[/b]... in its paranoia.

Is it realistic that people could have a "one-drop" rule which said that if someone had one identifiably African ancestor, then they were not white, regardless of their actual pallor, but as long as people didn't look very Asian, they were still white?