RDU Neil

It is not the act but the context... and you were supposed to be shocked by the act. It was not played for smirking good times. It was a moment of defeat for Thor, which played out in the rest of the movie, not a feel good "show the dude bro being KEWL!" moment.

Thematic context matters a lot.
 

Are Endgame spoilers okay in this thread?
 
I'll wrap this in spoiler tags, just in case.
Here's what I'd like to see for a Fantastic Four movie

This I totally agree with. It was something of a moment of cowardice and moment of courage... could he stand to ACTUALLY find out if he was worthy or not? Easy to wallow and "feel" unworthy... a whole 'nother level to find out you actually ARE! After talking to his mother, he had the psychological strength to find out. Very powerful scene, and again, probably my favorite bit (Thor and his mom) in the whole movie.

This I totally agree with. It was something of a moment of cowardice and moment of courage... could he stand to ACTUALLY find out if he was worthy or not? Easy to wallow and "feel" unworthy... a whole 'nother level to find out you actually ARE! After talking to his mother, he had the psychological strength to find out. Very powerful scene, and again, probably my favorite bit (Thor and his mom) in the whole movie.

The sole aspect I would challenge is a focus on pregen characters.  I would instead take the route of a "campaign guide" (most likely an online one) for players which spells out the character guidelines in detail,  and possibly provides some pregen's who would be suitable, but also serve as good examples.  As an example, that X-Men themed campaign might require all PCs be mutants, set a mandatory complication or two, set out a few acceptable Hunteds (and/or mandate these be "mystery hunteds" which are detailed in the AP for assignment by the GM), maybe even some DNPCs.  It might ban some powers outright and require others (e.g. a Cosmic Campaign might require enough Life Support and transportation abilities to be able to operate in space on a galactic scale). 
 
An FF theme might push that the characters must, in some way, be interconnected by friendships or family relationships, and here is how they obtain(ed) their powers.
 
Those three APs could/should also be of differing power levels.  That could mean our X-Men/Teen Titans start out as very novice heroes, maybe with less than Standard Supers points, our FF is standard supers, and perhaps we replace the third with an Avengers/Justice League "world's greatest Supers" vibe.  Or maybe that third one is full-on cosmic as we already have two fairly traditional earth-based Supers setups.
 
But I'd be more than happy to see a single, solid campaign AP!
 
Fantasy tends to be a really good fit for "novice to demigod, then retire and start again".  A different approach could be better for other genres, as well as for Hero System where character growth is less "zero to hero", with defined beginning and ending power levels, than the d20 system.
 
The problem, as we have said before on these Boards, is not that Hero is not a great game system.  It is that it is a game system, not a game.  In today's time-pressed market, it really needs Games Powered by Hero System to sell it.  There is no d20 system rulebook, only games that are powered by the d20 system.

Yep, and they did not necessarily fit into existing campaigns.  But today we have Plot Points/Adventure Paths/Adventure Books that are complete self-contained start to finish campaigns that included adjusted/tweaked rules if necessary.  These are $50 books, colorful and shiny and they sell, a lot.   One or two a year. 
 
D&D centers their Adventure League night around it.  Come in a learn to play, not books or dice required.  Don't have a character?  Here is a pregen.  They have pregen characters with versions from 1st level to 10th that are free for download.    Every league night sees 4 or 5 new to D&D players buying a Players Handbook. 
 
The key is PLAYING.    (yes I shouted that last word )
 
When you pick up a Hero rulebook (4th, 5th or 6th) you cannot play the game.  Instead you have to spend several weeks deciding on  how the world works, what a suitable PC is, teach people how to build those suitable PC's and then create a world and adventure from scratch.  Even if you use a setting, they are so hyper detailed that you spend weeks learning then teaching that hyper detail and you still have to build adventures. 
 
We had PC's built and were actually playing Conan (Modiphious), Fear Itself, Fall of Delta Green & Trail of Cthulhu (Pelgrane) and Star Wars (FFG) within two days of buying the rulebook.  I am familiar with Hero and I could not build PC's and a campaign in two days and I already know the rules.
 
 

Who is being punished, the audience or the cast & crew? 

Don't know about DC or Marvel, just know that Superman doesn't kill and Bats doesn't use guns.  These are core beliefs of the characters.  Don't care if Thor is forced to kill...or Cap or Iron Man or Aquaman or Wonder Woman or blah, blah, blah.  I DO care about certain aspects of certain characters being maintained, otherwise THEY AREN'T said characters.  A Superman who kills or a Batman who uses guns is akin to a Tony Stark who can't fix a toaster or a Steve Rogers as a lemming-like sidekick.

Point of Fact: Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were the children of Jewish immigrants.
 
The Jesus metaphor may not be entirely accurate.

It is not the act but the context... and you were supposed to be shocked by the act. It was not played for smirking good times. It was a moment of defeat for Thor, which played out in the rest of the movie, not a feel good "show the dude bro being KEWL!" moment.

Thematic context matters a lot.
 

Credit where credit is due, that was Gnome, not me.  🙂  I went for the much more radical approach of getting rid of the old primary characteristics (STR, DEX, CON, PRE, INT and EGO) completely.

Not wrong
 
But I personally don't think 6th took it as far as it can go. 
 
I believe it was a step too far. 
 
An RPG has two parts. 
1) The rules and their internal balance. 
2) Intuitive fun factor. 
#1 is self explanatory, while #2 is not something that can be objectively defined, but truly exists. 
 
In the obsessive quest for some kind of mathematical purity, they literally dumped the "feel" and "fun" that made Champions, Espionage, Justice Inc. and the other games so great for so many years.  For me 1st through 4th was a roller coaster of fun packed fun.  5th was where Hero began to get that antiseptic feel.  But it also had some of the best books they ever put out, just no actual playable adventures.  It was like they were trying to bleach the game out, but the game was resisting the attempts to kill it. 
 
6th completely changed the "feel" of the game.  Even on these boards, threads like this one endlessly argue about opinions of the purity of the math and completely ignore the primary attribute of a game.  Fun.   Instead of the endless point cost discussions or whether Comeliness is a stat, maybe a discussion of why the greater gaming world doesn't even realize Hero exists anymore. 
 
While I know that my points will be labeled "straw men" or whatever other terms currently use for burying unpopular opinions.  But there are three very real things being done by literally all of the current successful games.
1) Playable settings.
2) actual adventures and campaigns that only require the GM to read them to run.  In other words playable "out of the box".   One or two 6-10 episode campaigns a year are more than enough, especially when you have #3.
3) Some form of open license that allows people to create adventures without needing a specific license.  That allows anywhere from dozens to hundreds, depending on the game, of low cost or free adventures to be available for people who do not have time to spend building games but want to play.  They may not be top shelf master works, but they are more than sufficient to play.
 
I normally don't really post much anymore, especially in threads like this.  But sometimes I just can't help myself.  It's like seeing a house on fire and the firemen are arguing over the color of its paint while it burns.  It is just frustrating as well as disappointing.
 

personally I think characteristics are what skew the system. There are two big elements to HERO. Skills and Powers. Everything a character does tends to come down to these two elements. Characteristics have been an ill-fitting bridge between these two elements since first edition.
 
I know why that is. I know why people like them, they are a direct link to how we perceive the world.
 
personally I think the system would be cleaner without them and all the arguments of the proper cost and the assumption that one characteristic is pretty much like another.
 
Doc
 
 

It is not the act but the context... and you were supposed to be shocked by the act. It was not played for smirking good times. It was a moment of defeat for Thor, which played out in the rest of the movie, not a feel good "show the dude bro being KEWL!" moment.

Thematic context matters a lot.
 

It is not the act but the context... and you were supposed to be shocked by the act. It was not played for smirking good times. It was a moment of defeat for Thor, which played out in the rest of the movie, not a feel good "show the dude bro being KEWL!" moment.

Thematic context matters a lot.
 

I don't blame Superman for killing Zod.  He didn't have a choice.  I do blame Zack Snyder for making a Superman movie where protecting civilians is not a priority.
 
I said earlier, Marvel's heroes all have a body count.  I mean, dear God, Iron Man gave a teenage kid a suit with an "instant kill" option.  He's definitely got the irresponsible uncle role down.  Tony kills I don't know how many terrorists in the first movie.  Now these are all bad guys who are getting killed, and the heroes all make a dedicated effort to save innocent people.  And the only person who is portrayed as any sort of moral paragon is Cap.  Thor is awesome, but he's not exactly a role model in our modern society.  Captain America is a soldier, and we all accept that killing Nazis in WW2 is okay.  Then in Winter Soldier, he's kind of a James Bond superspy, going on missions for what he thinks is a good cause serving his country.  But Cap goes out of his way in Civil War to avoid killing any of the cops who are going after Bucky.
 
Superman is a different character altogether.  As far as moral symbols, he and Cap are similar.  But Cap has always been willing to kill, if he had to.  His powers are more limited, and often he doesn't have the choice.  Superman's powers mean that he almost always has the option to not kill.  If he had spent the entire movie saving civilians, and then he had to snap Zod's neck at the end, we'd have more sympathy.  As it was, he had just had a brawl where tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of people would have died, and then he's sad because he had to kill the villain?  It didn't feel right.

You mean the helpless prisoner who murdered Thor's people, friend, and brother right in front of him? Who had just recently used that hand to kill half the universe, after first mocking Thor for not killing him right away when Thor had the chance? And then mocking the Avengers again for being too late to do anything about it? Pretty much the definition of "extraordinary provocation," which I believe most fans understand and accept. But I also noticed that the other Avengers seemed shocked that Thor did it.

Let's be fair here, Man of Steel has a heart-warming scene where Supes saves millions of acres of cornfields and dirt by deliberately dragging the battle into the center of Smallville.

Exactly this.  Even though the Marvel universe has always been grayer than DC, the MCU films stressed the importance of protecting innocents to the point where it was literally the central catalyst for at least two of the films (AoU and Civil War).  Whereas the Snyderverse took one character who is consistently written as protecting innocents and made him seem indifferent at best to the collateral damage he caused, and took another who specifically refuses to use guns and won't even blow up ducks and turned him into a machinegun-wielding hardcore vigilante. 
 
In fact off the top of my head:  
 
Avengers I: During the Battle of New York, Cap's entire focus is protecting bystanders from collateral damage.  Iron Man risks his life to save the city from a nuke fired by Hydra. Avengers AoU: Stark creates a suit whose entire purpose is to stop Hulk from rampaging in a city.  Hawkeye directs the evacuation onto the helicarrier and sacrifices himself to save Sokovian citizens from machine gun fire.  Stark and Thor risk their lives to blow up Sokovia preventing it from killing uncounted civilians. Avengers IW: Quill lets his own anger get in the way of saving the universe, and audiences hate him for it. Thor: Thor finally gets motivation when he sees Destroyer defeat the Warriors Three and come for the diner and its mortal occupants. Thor Ragnarok: The last half of this film is Thor & Co. saving Asgardian civilians from Hela. Captain America: Cap deliberately crashes the Hydra plane to prevent its weapons from being used against American cities. Iron Man 2: Stark refuses to sell suits to the DoD. Spider Man: Homecoming: Washington Monument, Staten Island ferry. Doctor Strange: Protecting Earth is literally his entire job. Black Panther: By the end of the film T'Challa has saved the world from the Wakandan military and has taken a more active role in protecting civilians worldwide.  
Tl;dr: The protection of civilians is a constant thread throughout the MCU.  In the DCEU prior to WW, it's... not a priority.

A large part of that was my fault, for which I apologize. So let me see if I can get it back on track, with an observation raised by massey:
 
 
That could be. It's certainly what was on my mind when I saw that now-infamous scene. But it might also have to do with the way most people have come to learn about these characters. Superman and Batman in particular have had the highest profile among non-comics readers due to previous movies; and their principles against killing are probably well established in the cultural zeitgeist. OTOH the majority of people were introduced to Marvel's heroes as presented in the MCU. Tony Stark was an arms manufacturer, and was shown killing recognizably bad people in his first movie. Steve Rogers was a soldier during war time. Thor was a warrior from a warrior culture. Hulk was a raging but innocent monster. Black Widow and Hawkeye were literal professional assassins. The standards established for them in those appearances didn't include unwillingness to kill.
 
OTOH the MCU heroes have repeatedly been depicted going out of their way to protect innocent civilians, something the DCEU heroes had generally neglected, at least in their first few movies. That has reinforced the impression that the Marvel crew don't treat life lightly.

Isn't there a DC Movies thread where we can discuss the myriad logical, moral, and artistic shortcomings of the Snyderverse? Do we have to darken this tread, too?

Also Tony is used to "super-physics". 
- arc reactor
- invented his own element
- previous study with Tesseract. 

By Endgame, Stark had exposure to Loki's staff, the Space stone, the Mind stone, Mjolnir, the remnants of the original Gauntlet, and Nebula who might have been present when it was made.  The Avengers engineering team included Stark, Banner, Rocket, and Scott Lang.  It's still odd that they were able to build one without uru metal, and this should probably have been addressed, but I can live with how it was portrayed.

Not really a gun, but ammo for one
 
New Drone-40 grenade/drone. Launches out of a 40mm grenade launcher, but has a drone function that they claim can loiter up to 20 minutes, has different payloads and is programmable. Includes camera, anti-armor, fuel-air, HE/frag, smoke, and other options. They claim its "cheap" but I'm guessing that's compared to a missile, so it costs thousands rather than millions.
 

 

The series would have been a lot shorter if he had just seen a mental health professional and stayed on his meds.