The Gaming Den

If you ask me to choose between getting a million dollars and being punched in the face, you can predict with 100% certainty what the outcome will be, because I am not sufficiently rich that a million dollars would not be a life-changing amount of money, nor so much of a masochist that I would prefe...

I was in my FLGS today, and as I browsed halfheartedly through the RPG shelf (as I always do), I noticed two titles I was not familiar with - OVERLIGHT and CAVALIERS OF MARS. Initial Googling says these are each Kickstartered projects that came out in the last two years or so. OVERLIGHT claims to be...

So with all the marketing around Glass, I want to remind folks that Unbreakable had a character who didn't know what his weightlifting limits were, despite that character having previously played football competetively at the college level in the US of A. Now, I've never been accused of being athle...

Likewise, the assertions that Hawkeye is a weakling who can't be on an Avengers team with the Vision without throwing verisimilitude out the window is a matter of opinion and writing style. Ehm no, this is actually true and you don't have to dig that far. The thing is, while Hawkeye has some superh...

Fuck off. If I'm playing a character who is the power level of The Fucking Hulk, I don't want the MC to tell me that I have a roughly equal chance of losing to some guy who routine struggles with muggers while wearing pajamas with lines drawn on them for a costume. See, this is what keeps confusing...

From the original quote above that Frank responded to and you seem to be responding to, I took it differently than you appear to be. I took it to mean that the rules should support at minimum a range with Hawkeye on the bottom and Vision on the top. Obviously it would be bad to make one player suck...

Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition is a pretty great game up until about level 9 or so, but it's basically unplayable at level 16. OK, this is a pretty noncontroversial statement, but that does still give you 9 full levels to play with. In your mind, what are the top and bottom of the scale at which ...

Why? Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters? ... It is certainly possible to make a game that has both Mr. Freeze and Mag...

Just as players need to subjugate their desired tone to what the table consensus will accept, the "power band" of the characters needs to be pretty tight. You aren't going to have Phoenix and Jubilee in the same team of mutants. I accept that in a tabletop game, you're not going to want P...

Realizm has nothing to do with it. It's about whether or not you can assume a character has one power when they have been demonstrated to have a different power. And you just can't do that, because none of it works with real physics and therefore you just can't extrapolate freely or deduce anything ...

I don't think that's a fair or charitable reading of Dogbert's post, but I'll leave it to Dogbert to clarify or defend those statements, rather than try to argue what another poster meant or was trying to say.

That's an amazingly good example, because I also wouldn't tell harry potter fans who watch the movies religiously that they aren't allowed to have an opinion until the read the books. Which is kind of my point. "Go read comics" is not the only source for someone to have SUPER HERO stories...

But my impression of the Hulk from the movies is that his toughness is, within superhero movie physics, a pretty generic form of toughness, and that a system built with superheroes in mind should key as many environmental hazards as possible off of stats the Hulk already has a lot of. Yes, that's t...

Yeah sorry, it's 2018, "Read and Study Comic Books before you start having opinions about how to play Superhero RPGs" is pretty fucking dumb. Obviously, anyone can have an opinion at any time, regardless of their level of sophistication or familiarity with any particular topic. But if you...

Maybe I'm just not understanding what your actual complaint is. It sounded like you wanted a game where The Hulk just needs one or two powers, and I'm not aware of a game where having those powers is going to let you actually play The Hulk. However, some of your other comments make it seem like you ...

I think you're going to be out of luck, because you're basically not counting a lot of powers that even the simple examples you've chosen have AND NEED to play like their comic book counterparts. The Hulk - Being "big, tough, and strong" is never just one power in any game I've seen - it's...

See, comicbook identities are not that nailed down as people always say. We all have this vague idea how superman and batman behave, but that is not nearly as nailed down as you pretend. In "Batman TAS", Superman tries to persuade the Bat into joining the Justice League because friendship...

Green Lantern’s got a long history, and a lot of chaacters have used the name. The original, Alan Scott, started out popular enough to get his own series with his own name on it (back in the 40s, you started in something like RADIO COMCS or WHIZ COMICS as one of several features, and only got a book...

Oh boy. Look, I support the creation of new minority heroes. I support attempts to give existing minority heroes a media and marketing "push." And I don't believe that it's as simple as telling creators to "just make good new characters," because I recognize that it's actually re...

Why has Steve Rogers decided to quit anyway? He can be the new Falcon. That would actually be kind of fun, but also touches on another element of this whole thing that is strange. So when the Falcon first took over as Captain America, Steve was literally a decrepit old man. Like, rail-thin, haggard...

I was prepared to put you in a separate camp, but with that little line you don't get to be in some better rational, not crazy racist/sexist camp, you get to be in the same camp as FatR, Darkmaster and Sacrificial Lamb. I don't intend to make a habit of responding to this kind of thing, but I am go...

I don't think owning a fortune 500 company with offices on three continents counts as being "kicked out" of New York. Particularly since Parker Industries does have a couple of facilities in New York City and Peter is there most of the time. He just also has globe-trotting adventures in C...

So I'm going to talk now about Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel. http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/962/123/6af.jpg Way back in 1967, Marvel Comics created Ms. Marvel as a spin-off distaff counterpart of the Kree superhero Captain Marvel. She was a long-time supporting character in Marv...

I've never been able to understand why or how anyone could possibly think that continuity wasn't important, or could be done away with. Continuity is what allows for long-form storytelling. If you're going to write a story in which the previous installments may not have happened, or may not have hap...

The important thing, though, is that having successful runs with minority characters proves that minority superheroes can sell comic books. Which means that entirely fresh characters won't be rejected out of hand for being economically nonviable. Large companies are notoriously gun-shy. It would be...