RDU Neil

The Nice Guys, actually.  Yes, it's excellent.

Would it be like an Ego Attack with the Does Body advantage?

Jeremy Renner, the Legacy actor whose series never come about. He was also supposed to replace Cruise as the lead in the Mission Impossible movies (after his intro in MI:4). I wonder if they considered letting Hawkeye become Cap in marvel.

I have this fantasy of winning the lottery, and taking my millions to Marvel with a proposal, "I'll finance, and have editiory input on a line of Marvel Prime comics that captures true continuity and passage of time for the Marvel Universe, starting in 1962, and diverging from ret-con city in the late '80s."
 
I've thought about this, and while not perfect, I think the cut-off, for Marvel, could logically be the horrible Onslaught storyline, where they first "killed off" all the major characters and restarted the Avengers, Cap, etc. There were a lot of terrible comics leading up to that, but if you take 1962, to about 1996, you could age out the heroes over that time. Then, anything after that would be a new-continuity built on that (using aspects of newer issues that are actually really good, just repositioning them in the new timeline, with new context if wanted). Then have new stories written, real time, that assume the passage of the past 55 years.
 
If there is another major Marvel continuity deal... maybe the original Secret Wars, where the continuity could have 'broken' between then and now... could go with that.
 
Personally, Marvel's original Secret Wars was so bad, that it really signaled the turning point of continuity IMO.

The first Crisis mini-series I really enjoyed. It was unprecedented at the time, and the cluttered and convoluted DC setting could have used some reorganization. IMO the result was a solid basis to build upon. But over time the new continuity grew just as arcane as the old one. And once you've established the precedent of a major resetting event (which was also profitable), it's tempting to keep going back to it.

This is precisely the reason I consider nothing in the comics beyond the mid-1980s to be canon.  It was around then that they started with all the Crises of Infinite Continuity.

The only reason we're not seeing the same in the movies is that they're just starting out.  There wasn't all this reinvention stuff and rebooting and retconning in the first few years of Marvel Comics, either.

 
 
This is one of the things I always wanted to do with a superheroic campaign.  Start at Golden Age, move to silver, with some characters retiring, move to the bronze age with the kids of those former heroes, etc.  Go through generations, each adventure moving along the history.  But that takes a kind of player with a long term attention span and a delight in the genre, which my group didn't seem to have.

I'm pretty sure Eric's actual agenda was "Burn it all"

This is why I've been enjoying the movies more than the comics. The characters are allowed to grow and change and time passes. I absolutely HATE the eternal youth of and reinvention of the characters in the comics. I want Spider-Man to be pushing 70. I want Capt. America to be defined as a man who is out of time, and ages slowly, and watches his friends and allies continue to pass along the way. I want to watch Wanda age, while the Vision doesn't, and read the inevitable funeral issue. Stark and Barton and Romanov should all be old and/or dead by now. Legacy heroes would mean something, with the old ones passing. Thor becomes a tragic figure, as he is the one who will outlive all the rest, etc.

I've always felt that the comic universes had the unique chance to create a massively complex, litereary "other world" and actually have the ability to explores years, decades, more of that universe... but they have routinely chucked that concept for constant rehash posed as reinvention. Stories lose all pathos and impact when they are just going to be rewritten. It is such a waste.

This is why I've been enjoying the movies more than the comics. The characters are allowed to grow and change and time passes. I absolutely HATE the eternal youth of and reinvention of the characters in the comics. I want Spider-Man to be pushing 70. I want Capt. America to be defined as a man who is out of time, and ages slowly, and watches his friends and allies continue to pass along the way. I want to watch Wanda age, while the Vision doesn't, and read the inevitable funeral issue. Stark and Barton and Romanov should all be old and/or dead by now. Legacy heroes would mean something, with the old ones passing. Thor becomes a tragic figure, as he is the one who will outlive all the rest, etc.

I've always felt that the comic universes had the unique chance to create a massively complex, litereary "other world" and actually have the ability to explores years, decades, more of that universe... but they have routinely chucked that concept for constant rehash posed as reinvention. Stories lose all pathos and impact when they are just going to be rewritten. It is such a waste.

I thought the glacial pace was a feature, not a bug. It seemed to really reinforce the... not sterile, exactly, but cold and isolated vibe of the setting.

I agree that this was a divisive point. Why did T'Chaka kill him and not just take him in? We don't really know. I'm just saying that the implication is more than just "don't get found out" which as I stated, would have been better resolved by taking Eric with them.
 
I also felt it was clear that there were those who would have summarily dismissed Eric's claim, royal or not... and it was only because T'Challa felt guilty and was goaded into allowing it (past the due date as it were) that it went as far as it did. Sure there would have been much of an action movie to say, "Nope... not gonna. Put this guy in jail and we'll hash this out in the court." Probably more of a R.R. Martin version of Black Panther at that point, with way more court intrigue, assassinations, overthrows, etc.
 
I still feel that Killmonger never intended any kind of long term rule... just getting in there and sending out the weapons and starting a war, before any kind of resistance or revolt could form. The inevitable revolt would have been horrible an bloody, but too late, once world governments were being toppled. "Sun never sets on Wakanda" was just a line... not something he realistically expected to happen. He just wanted his vengeance.

Added to my queue, thanks.
 
 
Season 2 is up. Must've gone up recently, wasn't there when I watched the first episode of 1.

Just reading this argument over, as I inadvertently started it, I like it because it is exposing some of the hidden assumptions about the game.
1) That there is some universal, perfect way to build a character from a set of common mechanical denominators... which there isn't, no matter how reductive you make the mechanics, even though it is heavily implied by the design.
2) That builds can be divorced from SFX and still be meaningful/coherent in actual play... which is never the case if you are actually role playing, and not just doing abstract calculations.
3) That building a character is separate from the game you are playing in, and that there is some kind of generic way the characters are portable to every other Hero game.  Simply not the case.
4) That Limitations are rules for helping to "define" a specific power, rather than what they are, desired methods/situations in which a numerated power is reduced or made ineffective IN GAME PLAY, and the player WANTS IT THAT WAY! (A whole different thread)
5) That game play can somehow be purely mechanical and not exist on a rule and judgment level, where "what makes sense and feels right" is decided in a shared imaginary moment between players, not on paper, in numbers or programmed code.
 
Hero has always been a war between two games... the game of building a character, vs. the game of actually role playing the character in a group, with a story, a shared world, etc. There are many things that can be mechanically pure and consistent in the former (adjustment powers mechanically affecting other powers) that can completely break the latter ("What? That makes no sense?!")? Hero has spent so many years and words and pages on the former, but very little on the latter... so it makes sense that people think of it this way.
 
I know there are people who love just messing around with the rules and seeing what kind of builds they can come up with that are "legal" and cram the most in for the least. I also know that just because it can be done by the rules, doesn't mean it makes it anywhere near a table or actual play. The mechanics will surely affect the play experience, but people seem to balk at it going the other way around, that actual play should affect how mechanics are interpreted and used. Hero is still stuck in these horrible arguments because it was built before game designers understood that rule and mechanics are judged by the resulting game play they help manifest. Game play is the goal of the game creation. Hero is still in the old school model of mechanics first, with the expected game play nebulously defined at best. It tried, pretty well for its time, to have aspects of mechanics built to reflect a certain outcome... the idea of nine panel pages and actions that reflected it... and the idea that the mechanics at the time were specifically written to reflect a Bronze Age style of comic book fighting... but it was limited, and still had too many war game aspects, and the more genericized the system became, the more it lost touch with its resulting game play.
 
If you are going to build a house, do you...
1) Look at the tools and materials you have, and build whatever kind of house they allow for?
2) Design a house, then get the tools and materials that will best help you make that house a reality?
 
Too many Hero arguments exist with the former mindset, instead of the latter... which is where it really gets dicey. Hence why I used the word "interpret" in the title of this thread. The only way you get the house you want (the role playing experience) is to allow for interpretation, not just "This is what the rules say."

All the best, man. 

I can see both sides of the W'Kabi issue. On one hand, he was politically and personally at odds with the established rule from the beginning. OTOH, he never SEEMED angry enough to openly fight and kill his own people. I found W'Kabi completely believable in so much as he argued very logically and reasonably for Wakandan aggression both before and after Killmonger showed up. What we didn't see was his reason for being willing to sacrifice Wakanda for his revenge.
 
First, Killmonger gives him his revenge, and gets him to present him to the court. All on the up & up. They make their argument to the court. T'Challa accepted the challenge from Killmonger and died... unfortunate, but them's the rules. Now, Killmonger was never intending to lead Wakanda in any kind of reasonable way... he was out for the power to enact his revenge, no matter what he destroyed along the way... but W'Kabi was willing to get him into power for his own agenda. BUT.. once KM started burning the sacred herb and when T'Challa showed back up alive, and said "The challenge is not over..." then W'Kabi had a choice to make.
 
This is where I think the movie wasn't wrong, but could have given us a much more emotional scene. When W'Kabi chose to fight with Killmonger in the final battle... let us, the audiene, see some kind of conflict. He knows that now, the rules ARE being broken. Killmonger is no longer the accepted King by law. W'Kabi has to decide to fight with him and sacrifice his country, love and friend/King... or he can decide to say, "Ok... hold on. As much as I want you to kick the world's ass, the law of Wakanda is paramount, so we have to resolve that first."  

This is W'Kabi's true thematic moment... and we don't get to see more than a minor hesitation.
 
It is completely logical that, having gone as far as he has, W'Kabi couldn't back down at that moment... but we never got to see or really feel (as the audience) any personal struggle. If this was a Shakespearean play (which it resembled in some ways in structure) that moment would have had a long monologue from W'Kabi of anguish and introspection, so we could have known his internal thoughts on betrayal and vengeance, etc.

I'm wondering how much of that was just left on the cutting room floor, since there is supposedly a four hour version of this movie out there that I hope we get to see, one day.
 

It would seem that the personal struggle we got to see was Okoye's. I guess they didn't feel they had time to do that for W'Kabi too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just reading this argument over, as I inadvertently started it, I like it because it is exposing some of the hidden assumptions about the game.
1) That there is some universal, perfect way to build a character from a set of common mechanical denominators... which there isn't, no matter how reductive you make the mechanics, even though it is heavily implied by the design.
2) That builds can be divorced from SFX and still be meaningful/coherent in actual play... which is never the case if you are actually role playing, and not just doing abstract calculations.
3) That building a character is separate from the game you are playing in, and that there is some kind of generic way the characters are portable to every other Hero game.  Simply not the case.
4) That Limitations are rules for helping to "define" a specific power, rather than what they are, desired methods/situations in which a numerated power is reduced or made ineffective IN GAME PLAY, and the player WANTS IT THAT WAY! (A whole different thread)
5) That game play can somehow be purely mechanical and not exist on a rule and judgment level, where "what makes sense and feels right" is decided in a shared imaginary moment between players, not on paper, in numbers or programmed code.
 
Hero has always been a war between two games... the game of building a character, vs. the game of actually role playing the character in a group, with a story, a shared world, etc. There are many things that can be mechanically pure and consistent in the former (adjustment powers mechanically affecting other powers) that can completely break the latter ("What? That makes no sense?!")? Hero has spent so many years and words and pages on the former, but very little on the latter... so it makes sense that people think of it this way.
 
I know there are people who love just messing around with the rules and seeing what kind of builds they can come up with that are "legal" and cram the most in for the least. I also know that just because it can be done by the rules, doesn't mean it makes it anywhere near a table or actual play. The mechanics will surely affect the play experience, but people seem to balk at it going the other way around, that actual play should affect how mechanics are interpreted and used. Hero is still stuck in these horrible arguments because it was built before game designers understood that rule and mechanics are judged by the resulting game play they help manifest. Game play is the goal of the game creation. Hero is still in the old school model of mechanics first, with the expected game play nebulously defined at best. It tried, pretty well for its time, to have aspects of mechanics built to reflect a certain outcome... the idea of nine panel pages and actions that reflected it... and the idea that the mechanics at the time were specifically written to reflect a Bronze Age style of comic book fighting... but it was limited, and still had too many war game aspects, and the more genericized the system became, the more it lost touch with its resulting game play.
 
If you are going to build a house, do you...
1) Look at the tools and materials you have, and build whatever kind of house they allow for?
2) Design a house, then get the tools and materials that will best help you make that house a reality?
 
Too many Hero arguments exist with the former mindset, instead of the latter... which is where it really gets dicey. Hence why I used the word "interpret" in the title of this thread. The only way you get the house you want (the role playing experience) is to allow for interpretation, not just "This is what the rules say."

Love, Simon. I wish there had been movies like this when I was a teenager. I'm thrilled beyond the telling of it that LGBT kids can now have a teen romance about characters like themselves playing in mainstream theaters across the country. Was also a fun watch apart from the groundbreaking aspect—it reminded me a lot of Easy A.

I can see both sides of the W'Kabi issue. On one hand, he was politically and personally at odds with the established rule from the beginning. OTOH, he never SEEMED angry enough to openly fight and kill his own people. I found W'Kabi completely believable in so much as he argued very logically and reasonably for Wakandan aggression both before and after Killmonger showed up. What we didn't see was his reason for being willing to sacrifice Wakanda for his revenge.
 
First, Killmonger gives him his revenge, and gets him to present him to the court. All on the up & up. They make their argument to the court. T'Challa accepted the challenge from Killmonger and died... unfortunate, but them's the rules. Now, Killmonger was never intending to lead Wakanda in any kind of reasonable way... he was out for the power to enact his revenge, no matter what he destroyed along the way... but W'Kabi was willing to get him into power for his own agenda. BUT.. once KM started burning the sacred herb and when T'Challa showed back up alive, and said "The challenge is not over..." then W'Kabi had a choice to make.
 
This is where I think the movie wasn't wrong, but could have given us a much more emotional scene. When W'Kabi chose to fight with Killmonger in the final battle... let us, the audiene, see some kind of conflict. He knows that now, the rules ARE being broken. Killmonger is no longer the accepted King by law. W'Kabi has to decide to fight with him and sacrifice his country, love and friend/King... or he can decide to say, "Ok... hold on. As much as I want you to kick the world's ass, the law of Wakanda is paramount, so we have to resolve that first."  

This is W'Kabi's true thematic moment... and we don't get to see more than a minor hesitation.
 
It is completely logical that, having gone as far as he has, W'Kabi couldn't back down at that moment... but we never got to see or really feel (as the audience) any personal struggle. If this was a Shakespearean play (which it resembled in some ways in structure) that moment would have had a long monologue from W'Kabi of anguish and introspection, so we could have known his internal thoughts on betrayal and vengeance, etc.

I'm wondering how much of that was just left on the cutting room floor, since there is supposedly a four hour version of this movie out there that I hope we get to see, one day.
 

Just reading this argument over, as I inadvertently started it, I like it because it is exposing some of the hidden assumptions about the game.
1) That there is some universal, perfect way to build a character from a set of common mechanical denominators... which there isn't, no matter how reductive you make the mechanics, even though it is heavily implied by the design.
2) That builds can be divorced from SFX and still be meaningful/coherent in actual play... which is never the case if you are actually role playing, and not just doing abstract calculations.
3) That building a character is separate from the game you are playing in, and that there is some kind of generic way the characters are portable to every other Hero game.  Simply not the case.
4) That Limitations are rules for helping to "define" a specific power, rather than what they are, desired methods/situations in which a numerated power is reduced or made ineffective IN GAME PLAY, and the player WANTS IT THAT WAY! (A whole different thread)
5) That game play can somehow be purely mechanical and not exist on a rule and judgment level, where "what makes sense and feels right" is decided in a shared imaginary moment between players, not on paper, in numbers or programmed code.
 
Hero has always been a war between two games... the game of building a character, vs. the game of actually role playing the character in a group, with a story, a shared world, etc. There are many things that can be mechanically pure and consistent in the former (adjustment powers mechanically affecting other powers) that can completely break the latter ("What? That makes no sense?!")? Hero has spent so many years and words and pages on the former, but very little on the latter... so it makes sense that people think of it this way.
 
I know there are people who love just messing around with the rules and seeing what kind of builds they can come up with that are "legal" and cram the most in for the least. I also know that just because it can be done by the rules, doesn't mean it makes it anywhere near a table or actual play. The mechanics will surely affect the play experience, but people seem to balk at it going the other way around, that actual play should affect how mechanics are interpreted and used. Hero is still stuck in these horrible arguments because it was built before game designers understood that rule and mechanics are judged by the resulting game play they help manifest. Game play is the goal of the game creation. Hero is still in the old school model of mechanics first, with the expected game play nebulously defined at best. It tried, pretty well for its time, to have aspects of mechanics built to reflect a certain outcome... the idea of nine panel pages and actions that reflected it... and the idea that the mechanics at the time were specifically written to reflect a Bronze Age style of comic book fighting... but it was limited, and still had too many war game aspects, and the more genericized the system became, the more it lost touch with its resulting game play.
 
If you are going to build a house, do you...
1) Look at the tools and materials you have, and build whatever kind of house they allow for?
2) Design a house, then get the tools and materials that will best help you make that house a reality?
 
Too many Hero arguments exist with the former mindset, instead of the latter... which is where it really gets dicey. Hence why I used the word "interpret" in the title of this thread. The only way you get the house you want (the role playing experience) is to allow for interpretation, not just "This is what the rules say."

RDU Neil I agree with what you say and at least for me, I’ve been factoring in game play to judge game mechanics. Also I try to judge players experiences too. With that, I try to choose mechanics which are easier for players to grasp and me to explain/remeber! ?

Just reading this argument over, as I inadvertently started it, I like it because it is exposing some of the hidden assumptions about the game.
1) That there is some universal, perfect way to build a character from a set of common mechanical denominators... which there isn't, no matter how reductive you make the mechanics, even though it is heavily implied by the design.
2) That builds can be divorced from SFX and still be meaningful/coherent in actual play... which is never the case if you are actually role playing, and not just doing abstract calculations.
3) That building a character is separate from the game you are playing in, and that there is some kind of generic way the characters are portable to every other Hero game.  Simply not the case.
4) That Limitations are rules for helping to "define" a specific power, rather than what they are, desired methods/situations in which a numerated power is reduced or made ineffective IN GAME PLAY, and the player WANTS IT THAT WAY! (A whole different thread)
5) That game play can somehow be purely mechanical and not exist on a rule and judgment level, where "what makes sense and feels right" is decided in a shared imaginary moment between players, not on paper, in numbers or programmed code.
 
Hero has always been a war between two games... the game of building a character, vs. the game of actually role playing the character in a group, with a story, a shared world, etc. There are many things that can be mechanically pure and consistent in the former (adjustment powers mechanically affecting other powers) that can completely break the latter ("What? That makes no sense?!")? Hero has spent so many years and words and pages on the former, but very little on the latter... so it makes sense that people think of it this way.
 
I know there are people who love just messing around with the rules and seeing what kind of builds they can come up with that are "legal" and cram the most in for the least. I also know that just because it can be done by the rules, doesn't mean it makes it anywhere near a table or actual play. The mechanics will surely affect the play experience, but people seem to balk at it going the other way around, that actual play should affect how mechanics are interpreted and used. Hero is still stuck in these horrible arguments because it was built before game designers understood that rule and mechanics are judged by the resulting game play they help manifest. Game play is the goal of the game creation. Hero is still in the old school model of mechanics first, with the expected game play nebulously defined at best. It tried, pretty well for its time, to have aspects of mechanics built to reflect a certain outcome... the idea of nine panel pages and actions that reflected it... and the idea that the mechanics at the time were specifically written to reflect a Bronze Age style of comic book fighting... but it was limited, and still had too many war game aspects, and the more genericized the system became, the more it lost touch with its resulting game play.
 
If you are going to build a house, do you...
1) Look at the tools and materials you have, and build whatever kind of house they allow for?
2) Design a house, then get the tools and materials that will best help you make that house a reality?
 
Too many Hero arguments exist with the former mindset, instead of the latter... which is where it really gets dicey. Hence why I used the word "interpret" in the title of this thread. The only way you get the house you want (the role playing experience) is to allow for interpretation, not just "This is what the rules say."

Only us comic nerds can appreciate the pleasures of debating the practical realistic consequences of things that physically can't possibly exist.