@tnp said in FCs on Comic MUs:

A female Cap would be problematic since women combatants were not a thing in WWII and would certainly not be the subject of super soldier experiments. If possible at all, there would need to be a lot of consultation with staff on how that would work.

This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like a female Cap would be totally in line with the story of Captain America. After all, Steve Rogers doesn't become Captain America because he's totally suited to be a heroic American super-soldier; he gets to be the guinea pig because he's completely unsuited to it. Pre-Super Soldier Serum, he's 4F. It's not just that if he didn't get picked by Dr. Erskine, he'd be one more grunt with a helmet and a rifle; absent the experiments he doesn't get to be in the Army at all.

And I don't think it would even be a challenge to draw a straight line from that idea, to having a female Captain America, and making it a compelling idea in the process. Stephanie Rogers wants to fight the Nazis, too, and she's at least as brave as any of the men lining up to enlist, but she'll never be allowed to -- partly because she's a weak and sickly young woman, but mostly because she's a woman. So when Dr. Erskine needs a test subject for his dangerous, and possibly fatal, experiments, she's quick to volunteer, and he's quick to accept. Because if his experiments kill someone who wasn't going to fight anyway, it doesn't hurt the fight against the Nazis -- and if his experiment works, then they'll be cranking out battalions of super soldiers in no time, and the marginal cost of having tested it on a non-combatant is pretty close to zero.

And she knows it, too. She doesn't expect to be anything other than a guinea pig, but she's willing to risk her life, because if this is the only way her country will allow her to help beat fascism, then by God that's what she's going to do. When it works, and she turns out to be the only one there'll ever be, she's going to have a very similar experience to Movie Cap, where the Army just wants to send her on morale tours and raise money selling war bonds and she has to defy her own government to punch out the SS.

I think it would totally work. And kick ass.

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

This is a result of what I view as the major falling down of Arx. Don't get me wrong, this is the best thought out game I've played on since RfK and it generally provides what I look for in a game. However, the help files read like they've been written by someone with a technical background and they don't actually tell the players how to use the systems or commands or what these systems and commands are for.

I just want to echo this for emphasis. The game has a lot of really neat ideas but the need for more and better documentation is pretty dire.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to equipment.

On the one hand, the core book is pretty sparse. I think you could make a reasonable argument that it's too sparse for some concepts that people actually want to play.

On the other hand, there's also such a thing as Too Much. Mostly, what the extensive equipment lists in Armory seem to do is make more work for staff and provide advantages for people who want to dumpster-dive through page after page of handgun minutiae (or whatever). A handful of items in any given category are quickly quantified as the best, and everything else in that category might as well be wasted space.

As long as staff is reasonably flexible I don't think a short equipment list is necessarily a problem. So there's no Lucerne Hammer on the equipment list; so what? Figure out what's closest to it that is on the list, run it by staff to make sure they think it's reasonable, and just call it a Lucerne Hammer when you get into a fight. I think most people will be fine with that as long as you don't try to start arguing that your Lucerne Hammer gives you 8-again even though the Great Ax stats say no such thing.

@thenomain I'd be fine if they just made another Wonder Woman movie with some cameos from Jason Momoa and called it "Justice League."

@prototart said in X-Men Game:

as somebody who's done them, imo with comedy chars (and tho it hasn't been brought up I think it's also valid for horror chars just for different reasons) there's a p thin line between, like, actually contributing to stuff/adding comedic elements to scenes where they're appropriate and just, idk, laughing at your own jokes/jacking yourself off in a room where literally nobody wants any part of it

Comedy characters work best when their player is focused on entertaining the rest of the game -- unfortunately most comedy characters seem to end up played by people focused on entertaining themselves.

***=NSFW content***

@Arkandel said:

For instance playing a survivor of vast supernatural phenomena, a veteran mystic who's seen too much, can easily make it bland to actually hit the grid and find not much is happening. Those aspects of his personality won't be easy to come out while mixing it up with the random ghoul from next door whose interests include pop music and Call of Duty.

I try to stick to the principle that RIGHT NOW should be the most interesting period of my character's life, and make their backgrounds and thematic ties work toward that end. That doesn't mean they can't have been an international superspy or a world-famous fashion model-slash-actress or a member of the SEAL team that shot bin Laden, just that I have to come up with some reason why their life today is not just a series of wistful glances back toward when cool stuff was happening to them.

I've never understood why people get so peeved about being carded for alcohol, and, now that I'm closer to retirement age than underage, I understand it even less. So, you're saying I'm not obviously well over the age of 21? How nice of you to say so!

@lordbelh said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Furthermore, clearly while the character worships the Emperor, she blames the higher ups in the military for the actions of Imperial Japan at present. We can argue how much blame Hirohito deserves (seems a decent amount), but that's really besides the point.

I wanted to go back to this post for a minute, just to think through the more general question of how informed we should expect characters (not just this specific character) to be in the context of their time. The abovementioned hypothetical Russian Communist character in 1938 might very well be ignorant of a lot of horrifying things that have been done at Stalin's behest; probably the great majority of actual Russians at the time were. As far as this brawny Russian lad who wants to go and shoot some fascists in Spain is concerned, Stalin is the warm, benevolent, fatherly figure who protects the Soviet Union from fascists and counterrevolutionaries, not the guy who had the kulaks rounded up and shipped off to Siberia.

Is that problematic? Is it less problematic if the character finds out about the horrible stuff that's happened in the Soviet Union since the revolution, and, revulsed, abandons their loyalty to Stalin? Conversely, is it more problematic if the character finds out about them and refuses to believe it, remaining convinced that Stalin couldn't possibly do those things and it must all be the fault of counterrevolutionaries? Or if he finds out and believes it, but supports Stalin anyway, because sometimes hard measures are necessary to stamp out the cancer of fascism? Does whether or not that character continues to profess adherence to Communist principles make a difference?

I'm not suggesting a particular answer to any of the above questions. But it struck me as interesting grist for discussion in light of the rest of this thread.

So I made this post a while back and now that the move is finished (as chronicled here) I'm sort of blown away.

We pulled off the move without any major hitches. We love the house we rented on the basis of a few blurry iPhone pictures and some short video clips. We love being up on a mountain with ravens hopping around the backyard. The property backs right up to a national forest. We narrowly escaped the polar vortex in the northeast and the climate in our new home is being super kind to both of us, after years of waking up in the morning aching and stiff. My partner started getting freelance work literally the Monday after the Friday we arrived. And in under a month I had a job that should (cross fingers) be extremely secure, for more money than I was getting before despite the cost of living being around 75% of what it was. I struggle to think of literally anything that went seriously wrong with the whole process.

I say all this not to brag about how awesome I am and how great my life is. I say it because I am acutely aware of how ridiculously, absurdly fortunate I've been, and I don't want the universe getting to thinking that I expect this. So this is my version of Polycrates throwing a ring into the sea.

Bookmarked! We'll see where my time goes over the next week or so.

I've always been really charmed (pun halfway intended) by the Dragon-Blooded and I think a game centered on them has great potential to be a fun mix of action-adventure and lords & ladies hijinks ... sort of like a less uptight anime-flavored Amber game!

So I would recommend being super cautious about copying one of the long-time pain points of Amber games: having a higher up tier of PC that's, well, better than the sort the average person gets to play. The other flavors of Exalted might be better kept as NPCs and/or villains; otherwise you have to walk a very narrow line between allowing too many in play (which risks the game becoming entirely different and no longer meaningfully about the Terrestrials at all) and allowing too few (which runs the risk of DB players getting cranky about being reduced to second fiddles in a game ostensibly about them).

I'm sure it's possible to handle this well. And honestly, the first option is probably a feature rather than a bug for a lot of Exalted fans. Just makes me twitch, is all.

@Auspice said in Image Attribution & Creative Commons:

I almost feel like there should/could be two descriptions. The overly fancy (more for your own sense of ego) and the one that gets down to brass tacks so that someone can look at you mid-scene and go 'okay, that's right, she has green eyes.'

Isn't that what shortdescs are for? Or is that too little information?

@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

@Autumn said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
You can be a Communist and not a Stalinist, you know.

Of course! I was just trying to draw a comparison back to the issue of monarchist characters. I'm just genuinely curious how people feel about some of these hypotheticals, irrespective of whether they would be permitted by the game rules or not.

@lordbelh said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Furthermore, clearly while the character worships the Emperor, she blames the higher ups in the military for the actions of Imperial Japan at present. We can argue how much blame Hirohito deserves (seems a decent amount), but that's really besides the point.

I wanted to go back to this post for a minute, just to think through the more general question of how informed we should expect characters (not just this specific character) to be in the context of their time. The abovementioned hypothetical Russian Communist character in 1938 might very well be ignorant of a lot of horrifying things that have been done at Stalin's behest; probably the great majority of actual Russians at the time were. As far as this brawny Russian lad who wants to go and shoot some fascists in Spain is concerned, Stalin is the warm, benevolent, fatherly figure who protects the Soviet Union from fascists and counterrevolutionaries, not the guy who had the kulaks rounded up and shipped off to Siberia.

Is that problematic? Is it less problematic if the character finds out about the horrible stuff that's happened in the Soviet Union since the revolution, and, revulsed, abandons their loyalty to Stalin? Conversely, is it more problematic if the character finds out about them and refuses to believe it, remaining convinced that Stalin couldn't possibly do those things and it must all be the fault of counterrevolutionaries? Or if he finds out and believes it, but supports Stalin anyway, because sometimes hard measures are necessary to stamp out the cancer of fascism? Does whether or not that character continues to profess adherence to Communist principles make a difference?

I'm not suggesting a particular answer to any of the above questions. But it struck me as interesting grist for discussion in light of the rest of this thread.

@marsmrsmars said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Ex-Nazis are explicitly disallowed in character generation which I assume extends to fascism, which Nazi Germany is the poster boys for.

That's an interesting question. I wonder whether, say, an Italian army veteran who fought in the Ethiopian campaign would be permitted. I would guess it would depend more on the details of the character concept than the bare facts per se (e.g., a character disgusted by what their country did and determined to stop the spread of fascism would get a very different response from an enthusiastic Mussolini-ite) -- but that's just a guess on my part, since I have no more insight on staff's decisionmaking than anyone else.

@faraday said in The Savage Skies:

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't get how an ex-navy pilot with a specific RP hook of being benevolent toward non-Japanese people is racist? Should the game ban all Japanese characters?

I think the argument to be made there is that Imperial Japan is every bit as offensive to Asian people as Nazi Germany is to westerners, and that therefore permitting one but not the other indicates a cultural bias. To be clear, I'm not making this argument, but that's how I read the objection.

I'm less clear on the objection to monarchist characters; the game's background is explicit that populations are divided between communists, democrats, monarchists, and fascists, and none are specifically called out as forbidden (even fascists, although that might be a tough pitch in a game that's explicitly about punching fascists). Perhaps it's more about a character who supports this specific monarch, and an openly pro-Communist character who supports Stalin would garner a similar response?

I loved Crimson Skies. So, two thumbs up!

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

@TheOnceler said in Good or New Movies Review:

People should go see Knives Out. It's Rian Johnson finally recovering from the stumble of making a critically acclaimed billion dollar movie.

Looper?

Brick?

Oh, wait, no, that only made a billion dollars in my imagination.

(Still wildly underappreciated, though.)

48 hours into the flu and I don't feel significantly better than I did the first night. This is misery.

Worse, my poorly-timed illness has killed a trip that sweetie had been totally looking forward to and now I feel extra awful as a result.

Please send non-hostile thoughts and try not to pick up any of my germs.