RDU Neil

As for Isle of Dogs, it comes down to whether or not Wes Anderson worked with Japanese writers, actors, artists, etc., in order to be positive in his representation and again, the culture in question benefits, not just the white creator... or did he just use the broad brushstrokes of Japanese culture as his pallet, doing his own thing with the trapping of another culture... which is cultural appropriation. I don't know which it was, but it smacks of the latter. (Mainly because there was no requirement in the story for it to take place in Japan or have aspects of Japanese epic story telling in it, except that he seemed to like the aesthetic. It is that aspect... appropriating an aesthetic outside of its cultural norms, for use by a colonial culture (Katy Perry wearing Native America head dress, or white women with bindis just 'cause they are pretty) that really makes for cultural appropriation... and Isle of Dogs kinda felt that way.

Is Color Purple racist? No, but the issue today would be whether or not the writers, actors, researchers, etc. that were engaged to make the film were representative, had input, and would benefit/profit from the movie. Source material of one culture being utilized and profited upon, primarily by the traditional white creators, is now frowned upon. I'd say something more like Dances With Wolves would be something that wouldn't get made today, despite being very much a movie intended to be on the side of the Native Americans, it was still a white savior, white story, using a minority's plight to provide the heroic arc for a white man. Tarzan, a classic trope of colonialism and white saviorism is pretty tough to swallow these days, even if the movie was well made and a great action film (it was neither... ugh).

My wife and I started watching the original Avatar: The Last Airbender over the weekend. Only three seasons, we got through one and a half, seeing what all the fuss is about. Very high quality kids show, clearly created by people who love wuxia and martial arts. I probably wouldn't watch it all if it was just up to me... it is pretty juvenile... but I can recognize high quality animation, characters, and story telling, even if I'm not the target audience. Interestingly, it is only available if you can find a service that streams Nickelodeon. And the format is still 2007 era, SD. Supposedly the entire series (and the sequel Legend of Korra) are being released in June on remastered Blu-Ray... so that should look really nice, and maybe they will start to show up on more easily accessible streaming services like Netflix or Amazon.

Yes... exactly. There are just these huge swaths of time in the 400 million years of complex life on Earth that dwarf our little 15ka agri-civilization... that some other advanced species could arise and disappear certainly seems possible, if not probable. As for the reference to plastics, I've imagined future archeologists looking at ice cores and sediment layers, and finding a thin layer, world wide, of micro-plastics, aligning almost exactly with a major species die out. Ah the theories... some kind of synthetic eruption/explosion/bombwar that covered the world in a layer of plastics that killed off much of life at the time, etc. At this point, we are finding micro-plastics all over the world, arctic, ocean bottoms, everywhere... and it won't decay any time soon, so the likelihood of it being trapped in geological layers is high.

Yeah... we have a Piti, a rescue out of a kill shelter, and he is the sweetest thing you could ever want. He's a mix, and so many pits are, and just wants to snuggle on the couch and lay in the sun. I'm a big fan of the breed, especially as they are so stigmatized and usually great dogs.

Exactly. Why I also said it was "heartening." I'm just ruminating on how we can lose so much in just 100 years of modern, recorded history... how much have we lost in ten thousand years of civilization, and 15-20 thousand of the agricultural era? The fantasy geek in me enjoys the thought of a Hyborean or Middle Earth type of age, long since dust and forgotten. More realistically, the idea of life and development of the past Quartenary that we just know nothing about, and never will, is both mind boggling and humbling... let alone stretching back across the Cenezoic or to the Paleozoic.

And this increase lead to my players, at least, taking skill levels with small groups and individual attacks... focusing on what their character was good at, not being "generally really good" which was the standard in the past. Again, this is Heroic guns and knives and martial arts level. In this type of game it feels more correct to have PCs good at a focused, character defining set of skills and abilities. Whether it is mathematically true or not, the cost changes made these type of skill levels more appealing to the players.

Both saddening and heartening. What these stories really make me consider is the ease of which history is lost. These were enormous, fully recorded events, well within the modern era, and almost no one knows about them. Humanities ability to lose the past always makes me wonder what else has happened that we just don't know about.

In my world, professional sports eventually died out as we know them, because any player of ability immediately got accused of being metahuman, and there were no reliable tests, and it basically took the whole "juicing" aspect and ramped it up to the level where it was impossible to police or maintain standards. Instead, sports returned to amateur status, and big money went into Super MMA type productions and reality shows. All background stuff, but nice color to the campaign. The big issues were economic. A couple big super battles is one thing, but a city getting hit with several... villains smart enough to target infrastructure, etc., it became a running theme that economies were unstable compared to the real world, and much more heavily militarized. Police were much more militarized, and sooner than we've seen in the real world. Zoning laws and other restrictions on where metahumans could gather (since they disproportionately became combat zones), etc. The banking industry as a whole would look very different, as big, public concentrations of money/gold/etc. quickly became passe, as it only took one good robbery to put an entire local bank chain out of business, etc. Insurance companies would go bankrupt trying to pay off damages from supers, unless they didn't without super-premiums being paid, which meant certain city zones would be classified as high-risk for super activities, making them very expensive to live in, potentially driving people away from cities, contrary to normal economic pressures that drive people to them. How do unions react when a company can hire one big strong guy to do the work of one hundred normal workers, in a tenth of the time? (or whatever). The spread of technology was a big one. Originally the slow spread of super-tech was actually a major plot point, with Dr. Destroyer's primary terrorist actions being against any displays of advancing technology he viewed as a possible threat. This drove super-tech development into isolated and underground type operations, and gave rise to organizations like VIPER, etc. When Dr. D was eventually defeated, the game world changed rapidly over the next decade, with supers and super-tech driving colonies into space, advancing fuels and bio-mechanical research, etc. Religion was also a big one, with certain high level heroes and villains (including PCs) having cults form after them... old world religions respawning as old gods were found out to be real, etc. This served to factionalize religion even more than the real world, spawning lots of conflict. Politics was important as supers ran for office, performed public service, lobbied for and against laws, took over nations, formed nations, became ambassadors to the UN and to alien cultures... The laws that were passed (Metahuman Registration Act) and how PCs responded, their political actions, choosing to operate within the system or outside it, etc. Ultimately, I found that you could take almost any "normal" activity or institution and ask, "HOw might this change if metahumans were a reality?" and usually come up with something. I never got to explore how the fossil fuel industry and big three automakers responded to the glut of the new technologies that were flooding the market, etc. The world was only beginning to really go through the throes of major changes when it was invaded by aliens and a decades long war wiped out 5 billion people and left a solar system full of shattered fleets and struggling colonies... If I ever run a game in that world now, it is one of a new generation of supers trying to rebuild, struggling to figure out what a new world order should look like, and trying to avoid things falling into a global system of metahuman feudalism, as humans live or die based on which metahuman (or team) they choose to follow.

I think Hugh's analysis is excellent from a mathematical angle. I've played mainly Heroic since translating to 6th, and doing a flat translation (same stats from 5th into 6th) saw roughly a 20-25% increase in Stat cost. Not a big deal as points are points and can be adjusted to whatever the play group feels is right... but what we did notice was that with PCs able to get value for skill levels rather than just buying raw DEX, then we saw a proliferation of various skill levels on various maneuvers and actions... which we really liked. Instead of everyone being the same generic character, stat wise, characters started to be more varied in stats, and their skill levels reflected specific skills and actions they were good at, rather than being generally good at everything. At least for us, this decoupling had an added benefit of freeing up characters to spend points on being good at their unique schticks, and that allowed for some cool differentiation in characters. That may be less universal of an outcome for some play groups, but I've enjoyed that change to builds that effected the over all feel of the game.

And I hate these things. Even as a kid, I kept thinking, "Why is Paste Pot Pete trying to rob the FF? He could just patent and sell his formula and be wealthy as hell? The best villains are the ones who use influence and finance to get all the power... kinda like our Cheeto-in-charge. Old, dated comic clichés aside, a villain's motivation shouldn't depend on fan service handwaving, not in any modern context, and especially not in the context of Marvel movies, which have been WAY smarter than this, previously. But in no way did they demonstrate or convince that Thanos was insane. He was generally calm, with a reasonable goal... and not once did anyone confront him with his illogic and force some kind of moment where we see, either "Huh... I never thought of that... you are right, I can reach my goal in a more effective way without killing half of everyone," or a doubling down on his irrationality so we really see his nutso. They failed to show him being insane in anything other than failing logically. That doesn't resonate much. (In fact, barring omnipotence, regular, cyclical wiping out of populations in order to maintain long term viability is simply the natural progression, so there is nothing insane about that. If Thanos had indicated he was just gaining the power in order to enact the role of natural, cyclical population culler, well then I'd have felt a bit better about it.) But that isn't love. Any acceptance of obsessive, brutal manipulation as a display of "love" is inherently flawed, and a cosmic force that is supposed to protect a great power, but easily falls for "well, you THOUGHT you loved her, even though you were just the ultimate example of toxic masculinity and wouldn't know from love... so here's your ultimate power stone!" isn't much of a cosmic protection force. Those McGuffin moments of cosmic insight play a role in story telling where the character is forced to confront a dark truth about themselves... but in this case, Thanos was let off the hook. It was a chance to really make this a Thanos movie, where he is the main character and he gets some real character development (Brolin did his best, and it was almost a worthy role for him)... but they dropped the ball, big time. In a movie that has zero thematic story, zero character development and is all plot... ANY plot holes undermine it. That is the problem with this kind of movie... you better be perfect in your plot, because that is all there is. It was such an obviously, heavy handed "ooooh... you didn't see this coming, did you?" moment... which I totally saw coming and no, it had zero emotional effect on me because there is no way they are going to keep these heroes dead. It was pointless spectacle. So all we are left with is fan service/speculation for next year. The Russo bros better come up with a twist that is so mind-blowingly amazing and that no one sees coming but makes perfect sense in retrospect, that doesn't rely on time travel changing events, or this all falls flat.

I'm always bummed that the scientists get the blame for all the bad stuff. Scientists are just trying to prove or disprove a theory. It is the engineers who actually put the science into practice and make bad stuff.

Ok... I'm surprised none of you are pointing this out... Thanos... take away his "personification of death" obsession, and give him and real and serious problem to which he takes a grand and psychopathic approach... but this makes no sense. Thanos argues that the universe can't withstand unchecked life due to limited resources... and originally believes that wiping out half of all life just needs to happen to balance things out. Honestly, from a mortal and desperate POV, this could make sense. BUT... then he goes on a quest to gain all the power to UTTERLY CHANGE REALITY however he wants... succeeds in gaining that power... and he still can't think of anything better to do that kill half of all life? Oh... and never considers that half of all life will quickly double back to where it was before and keep going? This whole concept suddenly makes no sense and Thanos' motivation is laughably stupid. I'm not saying that I wanted "lady Death" in the movie... that Starlin weirdness was quintessential '70s Marvel and can stay there... but they needed to give Thanos a more well thought out motivation, because once he got the stones, he could have just changed the rules of reality so life doesn't consume, or there are infinite resources, or whatever. He was omnipotent... and all he could think to do is kill half of everyone? That and his killing of Gamora had zero impact. It lacked all verisimilitude that he actually cared for her. There was no development in that area, and in fact, any such scene was actually the opposite... psychologically torturing her at every instance. The good Marvel movies leading up to this were about something... and more than comic book movies. Winter Soldier was about post 9-11 fear and control and was a classic political suspense thriller... Civil War was about the limits of friendship, repercussions of past acts, and was a great revenge flick... Black Panther was a Shakesperean tragedy about colonialism and isolationism, etc. What was Infinity War about? Nothing, really. Just a guy trying to kill people and fights. As folks have pointed out, this was the "most comic booky" of all the Marvel movies... and that is why it fell flat. It wasn't ABOUT anything. It was all plot, zero story. This was disappointing because Marvel has largely succeeded because they took comic book concepts and made actual movies with them... while DC fails because they just try to put comic books on the screen. The fact that Marvel was just building up to a DC movie... and it will require significant fan speculation and theory to explain why this movie was actually really good, instead of it being obvious... bleh.

Condolences. It is always a blow to lose one of the few.

Yah, I knew that... I was looking for others to start posting about it. What did you think, being the mega-fan you seem to be?

Seriously? No one else has seen it? What kind of geeks are you?? Just had a long lunch with my wife, discussing the movie, and both of us are still very much not impressed. They are going to have to do something seriously amazing with Avengers 4 to make this work. Ultimately, I think the biggest flaw is that they just expected you to bring your unabashed emotional engagement with the characters from the other movies, and failed in this one to make any of them particularly resonant (except Vision and Scarlet Witch, which again, I really liked).

I would agree, but I'd argue we have to look at the MCU separately from the Netflix Marvel, as the style and approach and medium are just too different. Who knows how amazing Malekith or Ivan Venko might have been, given a TV season to bring their character to life?

I don't understand everyone's issue with the Red Skull. I thought he was exactly like the Skull from the comics, and fit the pulp villain mold quite well. Thanos was interesting, but his base motivation is so nonsensical that it undermines the excellent portrayal. I'd personally put Alexander Pierce much higher, and Zemo in the top five.

Yeah... we basically had this very discussion in one form or another over years of playing. We all wanted the BW/BP/Hawkeye types to be feasible... so they would all have been Adepts... or in Black Panther's case, he, like Cap, had the special herb/serum that made him more than human. All of them were playable together, as well as Iron Man types (which brought up a separate conversation... what was technology capable of in the game world?)... but we tended to balk at "Thor" Once you started getting into gods/demi-gods and such... instead of toning them down, or pushing the others too far beyond concept... the play group was comfortable with the idea of "There are power levels... Delta, Gamma, Beta and Alpha class metahumans) and some just Out Power others. (These levels were defined by the combat capacity vs. normal police/military action, damage survivability and pure destructive scale.) Most traditional 4Ed starting PCs were probably Gamma level, and experienced PCs with real power tended to be in the Beta level (most Avengers level). The most powerful PCs, over time, became Alpha class level beings, and characters of lower levels, let alone normal humans, were often outclassed... and that was ok. (We also had Omega Level classification, which was when things got truly cosmic and broke boundaries of human scale definition, etc.) This helped players have an idea/concept of power level for their PC. If a Delta level was like a street level dude, or a New Mutant (original '80s era) with unreliable powers... that could work. If the concept was that the type of powers that New Mutant had could become more and more powerful over time... cool. Maybe after years of playing, that character is now a highely effective Beta Class threat level. Where some other character concepts were like, "I'll never be more than a street fighter... it just isn't in concept." Then ok, as well. But everyone understood what that meant and were willing to retire, sideline, a character when they didn't work... or enjoyed being the fish out of water who struggled beside demi-gods, etc. Again... giving the PCs an internal, campaign consistent guide to match to their expectations is helpful. It gives a way to discuss character concept and playability in a relatively objective way.

This... a hundred times this! Aligning expectations, and realizing that not every build or character concept fits every game is really at the core. We used to joke about someone building a Batman-esque character... "Which one? The pulp crime fighter? The dark knight detective? The master martial artist? Or the one who defeats an army of white martians with a book of matches?" It required the group really talking about expectations and standards for the campaign at hand, and building characters accordingly. One of the worst things that can happen is a player building their character in a vacuum and expecting the game play to just accommodate him. The beauty and bane of Hero is that things can be built in so many different ways, that there is no portability between campaigns. The "right build" is campaign specific.

In wrestling with the "what is normal?" issue, and how does that translate to "essentially human characters who have superhuman levels of success and survivability" in my campaign, I came up with the concept of the Adept. Within the world, there were classifications for the kinds of metahumans that were known and studied/cataloged (the Kirby-Ellis Scale I called it... heh) and it took notice of people who, in any scientific examination, would be nothing more than an incredibly fit and healthy human being, but seemed capable of doing incredible things. I took the concept from the idea that even in the real world humans can demonstrate some really amazing feats, or train to be really really incredible at one or two tightly controlled and defined activities... but most of these feats are one-offs or only in a very controlled environment. What if there were humans who could perform at that level consistently and in chaotic, ad hoc environments (like combat)? These were called Adepts. They were hard to identify except in what they demonstrated over time. Nothing that was "impossible" just usually improbable, except these Adepts do it all the time. (It was usually some kind of special origina... ninja training or traumatic event, whatever... that enabled someone to break through normal human levels and become an adept.) From a stat point of view, Adepts had no limitations except what we as a play group made sense... so 27-30 Dex and 6-7 SPDs were possible. 25 STR, etc. The idea that the amazing aspects of humanity that show up in rare and single instances across the population, well these Adepts had many of those aspects in one person. It was a nice conceit, and was a recognized form of "otherness" within the game world, even though they couldn't technically be called metahuman, they were a recognized class of such. So, in a game where there were plenty of characters that had stats that fell within NCM, there were the truly elite who could be more than that. The point was, even these Adepts were outclassed by true metahumans. Once the games started to move into the Avengers/Authority level of power, as some of our sub-campaigns did, the Batman/Daredevil types often couldn't keep up. This was felt as appropriate for the way our games played out... addressing Massey's issue of not trying to force certain character concepts into every campaign. If an Adept ALSO had access to high-tech, or magic or whatever, then maybe they'd gain the raw power and defenses to stand with the Vanguard... but no, none of us ever felt that a pure Batman type belonged at that level. To me, this was always an important aspect of defining the world you are gaming in. So many comic book tropes simply don't translate well if you try to put ALL of them in the same campaign and hope for consistency and verisimilitude. Comics aren't consistent, and contradict themselves all the time. So a Champions campaign needs to create internally consistent standards for itself, and then that helps define which of the tropes will be acceptable, and which will not. A good test of that, IMO, is a Batman type character... how they are statted and defined, and what precedent does that set for the campaign. If Doc Shadow's version above is acceptable (and for the most part, he'd have fit right into my campaign as a very experienced Adept character) then that sets a precedent for what is acceptable in the game. If you also have well trained spec-ops agent types, whose stats are all in the NCM range, but are still considered really good/well trained humans, then, IMO, you have to explain why they are so much less than the "also human" Batman-esque guy. For me, this explanation was the Adept class. The one in ten thousand highly trained spec-ops dudes, who transcends and becomes legendary. To me, it is about having an internally consistent universe, more than obeying certain source material tropes (that often make little sense in the first place).

My opinion... meh. It was... too much. They did some things well, but as a movie it was too much like Age of Ultron, in that it was too much a comic book, not enough a good movie. Great moments, with a gutsy way to go at the end, but it ultimately failed at what the best Marvel movies do so well, make it personal and relatable. This cosmic stuff became pure sturm und drang and lacked real emotional impact. They tried... certain things were well done (I love that they allowed Scarlet Witch to really kick ass, they did Corvus Glaive, Ebony Maw and Proxima Midnight really well. There were some good set-piece battles, and I really liked the chemistry between SW and Vision) But Cap's roll was barely there... same with Black Panther , Bucky, Black Widow. The Hulk deal was more head scratching than anything, and Ruffalo seemed to be phoning in his part. The GotG parts were too much, and too tonally off to really work. Red Skull appearance was well done, but ultimately all the "set piece to acquire a stone" was just not very suspenseful, nor was the big "sacrifice" emotionally resonant. This was, IMO, one of the biggest "misses" in the Marvel line-up, because, like in the comics, when they build up to the "big thing" it never really pays off, and is more just "big happenings" rather than engaging and impacting developments. Nothing was a surprise, you could see it all coming, the inevitability of where the movie was going made all the set-pieces leading up to it kind of boring... like "just get on with it already." They are going to have to really pull off a major job with Avengers 4 that is more than just "complex time travel undo" that generates some truly unexpected plot developments to make this work out. I liked the expected call out to Captain Marvel at the end, so we'll see... but overall, I left head shaking and... well... "meh."

The fact that Push was defined as "only for heroic actions" was unknown to me. Has it always been that way? Pushing is exactly how humans exert ourselves at max. That defensive lineman is pushing as he explodes into the offensive tackle, that Olympic level weight lifter is pushing to get to that level of weight... the boxer who is jab, jab, jabbing, will only put his full energy into a punch (and no, not a haymaker) when he gets that opening... the bad fighter is the one who swings hard again and again and quickly tires... etc. I'm looking at human behavior and seeing "Does the system have a way of simulating that?" and pushing really works... from an END spend and getting max levels. So, if I'm saying that I feel certain statements in RAW are misguided, as I did above, I'll append that to include that statement on Pushing. And I'm not saying I have a 10 STR, I'm saying it as theoretical example, since we were discussing what did and did not make sense in terms of Hero examples of building certain characters and reflecting certain real life realities.

I'd almost be up for that, just to watch the Queen give our current Cheeto-In-Charge the old heave-ho!

I moved this discussion to a new thread under Champs. Here....