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The problem with using superhero stories to make these critiques is that their existence creates a heightened threat- a heightened reality that often justifies the CIA, security state, etc much moreso than the situation IRL. Part of the argument against the War on Terror was that Terror was a fairly minimal threat compared to the resources used to combat it, even on the terms that the War on Terror implies. If there are in fact supervillains who can kill millions, it undercuts that argument. Intense government surveillance and intelligence activity make a lot more sense when you construct a situation where any rando might end up having the power to blow up Chicago.
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Jan 20, 2022 14:52
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Gatto Grigio posted:"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for mutant children." That's why they sent Doug to have a conversation with Krakoa.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:30
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PurpleXVI posted:I think part of what matters to a superhero setting is also where powers are from. In like a grab-bag setting like Marvel or DC's it's hard to focus things, but if superpowers are genetic, and more importantly inheritable traits, that makes it one thing. If they're markers of divine favour(or disfavour), that's another thing. If they're mostly super science that can be replicated, bought and sold, that's a third thing(for instance you can be quite sure anyone with superpowers has government/corporate funding, or is already rich, and is thus likely to be a real shithead), and so on. I always felt like having too many different power "sources" was often a bad thing for superhero settings, since it would ruin any kind of thematic focus.  Marvel has sort-of created a single origin of powers in their universe, by having the Celestials come to Earth a million years ago and fiddle with proto-humanity so we could start getting superhuman abilities after we developed nuclear power. Which seems pretty irresponsible really. But it makes the bitten-by-radioactive-bug, touched-an-ancient-artifact, and born-into-a-world-that-hates-and-fears-them types essentially the same thing.Aliens or interdimensional beings are just riffs on the same theme, and a lot of them are the result of Celestials or other cosmic beings messing around with their progenitors too. An interesting low-combat superhero campaign idea would be a group of heroes (or not even heroes; maybe just a ragtag group of scientists, researchers, and philosophers) trying to figure out why their Celestial-analogues are so invested in seeding powered races throughout the multiverse.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:39
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Mirage posted:
Though a big part of the setting is that people don't know that, while stuff like the X-gene in comparison is known and fairly understood in how it works. Besides, meta-origin stuff is stupid, we have too many superhero movies that get stuck on only one kind of super being allowed to exist at a time no matter how much it limits what they can hope to actually do.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:46
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Mirage posted:
I mean I guess that's interesting but the problem is that a lack of theme to how people get the powers means that it's impossible to construct themes around it. Having a power source giving access to all of those origins does nothing to solve that problem. Like if all mutant powers are genetic, and perhaps heritable factors, then suddenly it raises questions of how superhuman "families" affect the future of a society attempting to be egalitarian. It affects that power-hungry governments and corporations would probably attempt to breed ubermenschen or control their genetic lines. If superpowers are all superscience, either expensive gadgets or rare lab experiments, we get a realm where most super"heroes" are in fact corporate agents, rich dilettantes or perhaps dictators with their own personal mecha, which raises an entirely new set of questions and challenges. If it's all divine/cosmics blessings, curses and magic items found in ancient tombs, a whole third selection of issues pops up. Magic items can be fought over, divine favour can even be fought over, not to mention the question of the motives of the divine agents granting the powers. Plus it often adds some sort of theming to the powers, and theming gives limits, limits are often what drive interesting writing and situations.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:59
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Covok posted:https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1482079452121243648 https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1484189028824006659?s=20 I hope no one minds if I take a moment to announce that the PDF has dropped for Friendship, Effort, Victory!
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Jan 20, 2022 16:41
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Mirage posted:
Which in my mind defeats the entire purpose of an RPG setting (though obviously Marvel isn't an RPG setting) - I don't love superhero RPGs, but I do like kitchen sinks, and superhero kitchen sinks are the easiest way to explain why you have aliens and magic in our world. You don't have to explain anything to players - "It's superheroes" justifies everything. The moment there's some kind of meta-narrative, I have to care, and I play superheroes so I don't have to care.
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Jan 20, 2022 17:07
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CitizenKeen posted:Which in my mind defeats the entire purpose of an RPG setting (though obviously Marvel isn't an RPG setting) - I don't love superhero RPGs, but I do like kitchen sinks, and superhero kitchen sinks are the easiest way to explain why you have aliens and magic in our world. You don't have to explain anything to players - "It's superheroes" justifies everything. The moment there's some kind of meta-narrative, I have to care, and I play superheroes so I don't have to care. This is in part why I enjoy Chronicles of Dorkness over WoD. It has my favorite monster mash without any form of metaplot/mysteries explained in gms section
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Jan 20, 2022 17:48
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Arivia posted:fixed that for you stay away from my ao3
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Jan 20, 2022 17:52
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Panzeh posted:The problem with using superhero stories to make these critiques is that their existence creates a heightened threat- a heightened reality that often justifies the CIA, security state, etc much moreso than the situation IRL. Part of the argument against the War on Terror was that Terror was a fairly minimal threat compared to the resources used to combat it, even on the terms that the War on Terror implies. If there are in fact supervillains who can kill millions, it undercuts that argument. Intense government surveillance and intelligence activity make a lot more sense when you construct a situation where any rando might end up having the power to blow up Chicago. Reminds me of the huge amount of comments regarding Spider-Man helping the cops in the PS4 game. People were so mad at Spidey busting up drug deals but only because it made good rhetorical fuel. Spider-Man wouldn't normally bust a corner weed dealer, but every drug bust in the game was 10 guys with machine guns on a roof.
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Jan 20, 2022 17:59
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CitizenKeen posted:Which in my mind defeats the entire purpose of an RPG setting (though obviously Marvel isn't an RPG setting) - I don't love superhero RPGs, but I do like kitchen sinks, and superhero kitchen sinks are the easiest way to explain why you have aliens and magic in our world. You don't have to explain anything to players - "It's superheroes" justifies everything. The moment there's some kind of meta-narrative, I have to care, and I play superheroes so I don't have to care. Has there ever been a setting or comic book or whatever where super powers all have an explicitly lower class source? Like generational exposure to pollution that hasn't occurred in the rich due to their higher QOL?
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Jan 20, 2022 18:08
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Well, in The Boys, almost all superpowers come from Compound V. You either get it from the corporation that makes it, or you get it from accidental exposure, which mostly only happens to poor people. I really can't recommend reading the book over watching the show, though. Godlike has people getting powers from moments of absolute belief. This can happen to anyone, but it often happens to people in life-or-death situations, which of course happens mostly to civilian populations being terrorized. ninjoatse.cx posted:Anyone purchased Ascendant? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jan 20, 2022 |
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Jan 20, 2022 18:19
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Splicer posted:Has there ever been a setting or comic book or whatever where super powers all have an explicitly lower class source? Like generational exposure to pollution that hasn't occurred in the rich due to their higher QOL? There at at least several where poor communities are exposed to pollution or contamination that induces mutations which are usually dangerous but sometimes beneficial. I believe Over the Edge had it explicitly (or at least On the Edge did) but, yea, that doesn't look great in context now. (And they usually have the problem that the beneficial mutations are massively over-represented in narrative since the negative ones aren't interesting to explore, which gives a unicorn problem that inverts sympathy with the situation..)
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Jan 20, 2022 18:56
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grassy gnoll posted:stay away from my ao3 oh no i forgot about your username lol
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Jan 20, 2022 19:08
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Splicer posted:Has there ever been a setting or comic book or whatever where super powers all have an explicitly lower class source? Like generational exposure to pollution that hasn't occurred in the rich due to their higher QOL? It's not exactly the same, but there was a setting for Wild Talents (Progenitor, I think it might have been called) where the first superhuman was a housewife from Kansas in the early 1960s who pulled a Dr. Manhattan and went off to Vietnam to win the war with her godlike powers--except that nobody figured out until later that super powers are contagious and you catch them by exposure to someone using them, near you, so a ton of the most powerful first-generation supes end up being poor American GIs and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:11
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Granted, the supers in Progenitor also include LBJ and J Edgar Hoover.PurpleXVI posted:As heroes exist in most comics I've encountered, dealing entirely with symptoms and only rarely paying attention to systemic issues that drive people to crime, like poverty, lack of education, poor social safety nets, etc. and often cooperating to a lesser or greater extent with the police, it would feel like they'd generally be darlings of the right as opposed to friends of the left. I mean, these stories were originally written for little boys aged 5-10, and their moral impulse is inherently childish. "If I was strong enough I'd just end the war by beating up Hitler." Golden Age comics dealt with social issues more than they get credit for, from Superman down to one-off characters nobody remembers. But they're solving these problems with punches and lasers. Leperflesh posted:The whole Civil War arc in Marvel was about confronting the inherent conflict between vigilante "freedom" justice warriors and fascist "control" government, but also shouldn't civilian voters and their freely-elected officials have the right to regulate superheroism, and also tony stark's megalomania really does need to be controlled, and aren't quite a lot of superpowered people seriously dangerous and often kinda deranged, etc. etc. Regarding the story: in the comic it's just straightforward that a sane society wouldn't tolerate ungoverned super-vigilantism, so now Tony and Reed are building a dystopian super-prison and creating an army of super-slaves. In the movie, the actual political conflict is that Tony and Steve are different kinds of libertarian, so it devolves into a meaningless fight over the Winter Soldier. In the big picture, Civil War was also the beginning of everything in Big Two comics being built around bloated crossover Event Books, so we have it to thank for that. With the films, I feel like Civil War finally cemented this attitude that it doesn't matter if the movies are convoluted gibberish, because they're "about the characters." Just an unbelievable pile of poo poo. The Watchmen, on the other hand, depicts superheroes as a fad from the 1930s that most people wish would just go away, and the people with actual superpowers just make the world worse. It's not subtle. Covok posted:I recenty had to think about this issue when a bout of nostalgia for Ultimate Marvel hit me. Re-reading the comics, you can clearly see that Mark Millar viewed superheroes as part of the military-industrial complex. He clearly had issues with that concept but also did things that were intentional or unintentionally facist. For example, while congress is presented as incompetent (as are the heroes), the actual military is shown in a positive light.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:28
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My Lovely Horse posted:Warren Ellis wrote a bunch of those real world superhero things where the heroes operate on a grand scale, including a loose thematic trilogy of Black Summer (a superhero goes after the US president for war crimes [from 2007]), No Hero (superheroes spring up during the late 60s and ingrain themselves in world politics) and Supergod (explores the idea of literal superhumans who no longer follow the same constraints, ethics or basic thought patterns as people). Also worth mentioning is The Authority, where the heroes are firmly interventionist and put themselves in a position above any government bodies. And of course there's Watchmen. Generally it feels like the most valuable material to get into superhero politics ideas can be found in series off the DC/Marvel mainstream that aren't beholden to editorial guidelines and the status quo. Ellis has returned to this well a bunch, from various directions. Planetary flips it around from "what would the world look like with interventionist superheroes" to "given the existence of superheroes, why is the world such a crapsack" and gradually builds up to "because the Fantastic Four got their powers as part of a pact with an alternate-timeline Earth where they agreed to keep our Earth weak and incapable, so in addition to not sharing their goodies they've been spending their entire careers assassinating, mindwiping, or otherwise neutralizing anyone who looked like they might upset the status quo".
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Jan 20, 2022 19:30
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Halloween Jack posted:I would argue that this sort of thing isn't "banked into" the idea of the superhero, it is the idea of the superhero. We can solve intractable social problems with transcendent individual power. I mean, yeah, I recognize this, I just can't turn my brain off enough to accept it if it's a game I'm personally participating in, or a setting that runs for more than a couple of storylines. Also punches and lasers can solve an awful lot of social problems, frankly, depending on who they're aimed at...
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Jan 20, 2022 19:44
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Halloween Jack posted:In the big picture, Civil War was also the beginning of everything in Big Two comics being built around bloated crossover Event Books, so we have it to thank for that. I never really read much DC, but I feel like this trend in Marvel goes much further back. Secret Wars and Secret Wars II kind of dominated Marvel books for a whole year, back when I was regularly buying some of them, and you had to buy the limited series if you wanted any kind of resolution to all the poo poo that was happening across a dozen of their major titles. Broadly agree with the most of what you're saying, though I think I'd add that this isn't confined to superheroes. Male Power Fantasies, the theme in western history books from the 19th and 20th (and maybe earlier?) centuries where all historical events revolve around Great Men, etc. Just a general societal shared mythology that self-made (white, male) elites are how good things happen and bad guys get thwarted, and superhero comics are just one 20th century reflection of that foundational conviction. The tropes haven't "ruined" marvel movies etc. for me, but that's maybe part of my own character, in that I enjoy popular media franchises that I also acknowledge as flawed: the flaws don't always ruin the whole experience for me. To some degree, occasionally, comics have been progressive and shifted that narrative; non-white non-male people can also be Great People, teamwork is useful, stories about heroes don't have to revolve around how they're independent or changing the world or even necessarily doing anything important at all, power corrupts, injustice isn't always simple or easily solved through direct action by heroes, etc. I think superhero comics have always been a reflection of American societal myths, and to the extent that they occasionally reverse a trope or lampshade one of those myths, that's encouraging to me to see and I do see it happening over the course of my lifetime. I started with comics in the early 1980s and we really have come a long way, even though we really still have a long way to go.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:48
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Crossovers have been around for a long time, but event books before and after Civil War are night and day. If you count up all the issues that dealt with Secret Wars in some way, it's a fraction of the issues devoted to Civil War. Like, there weren't a dozen spinoff series titled Secret Wars: Frontline, Secret Wars: Secret Files, Secret Wars: Hey What Have the X-Men Been Doing This Whole Time, etc. Even Age of Apocalypse doesn't come close.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:59
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Ah, OK. I haven't bought a superhero comic for at least 20 years, I never read any of the civil war stuff.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:02
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Marvel comics coming out today are basically unreadable without an Unlimited subscription.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:04
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I switched to compilations/graphic novels around the turn of the century and haven't regretted that. I just don't have the right sort of attention span to read a story broken up into a bunch of little parts that I get once a month. Also I switched to mostly focusing on specific authors I like (for example, warren ellis) when they pair up with an artist I can tolerate, vs. whoever happens to be writing or drawing for a particular character title this year.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:13
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CitizenKeen posted:Marvel comics coming out today are basically unreadable without an Unlimited subscription. Immortal Hulk stands alone, shame about the artist though. Still, that's a run that will be remembered
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Jan 20, 2022 20:42
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Hey there trad games, does anyone round these parts play Wingspan? I don't see a thread about it and I've been playing the poo poo out of it for a while (on steam). Just wondering if there's others
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Jan 20, 2022 20:43
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Halloween Jack posted:Well, in The Boys, almost all superpowers come from Compound V. You either get it from the corporation that makes it, or you get it from accidental exposure, which mostly only happens to poor people. I really can't recommend reading the book over watching the show, though.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:50
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I like the series a lot more, since it ditches the gross rape jokes and transphobia but preserves all the criticism of the military-industrial complex. (I suppose it's sad that all of Ennis' Bush-era criticisms are still 100% valid.)
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Jan 20, 2022 20:59
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Splicer posted:Has there ever been a setting or comic book or whatever where super powers all have an explicitly lower class source? Like generational exposure to pollution that hasn't occurred in the rich due to their higher QOL? TMNT?
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Jan 20, 2022 22:18
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empty whippet box posted:Hey there trad games, does anyone round these parts play Wingspan? I don't see a thread about it and I've been playing the poo poo out of it for a while (on steam). Just wondering if there's others Wingspan owns, my whole family plays it on the regular, including my 7yo daughter. I just finished printing a nice set of box insets for it, makes it a lot heavier but also a lot more stylish and organized:  It's our go-to game whenever we visit my mom, too, and I'd like to play it with the rest of my feather-family sometime, when international visits are possible again. We have the Steam version as well -- there was a coupon in the box -- but haven't actually tried it yet.
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Jan 20, 2022 22:20
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I don't follow marvel comics or really basically anything superhero, I'm grateful to get these updates from people who have subjected themselves to that particular form of self-harm especially since it feels like superhero stuff is the sort of...background? to a lot of RPGs even when they're not really about superheros. Like a powerful character in any fantasy game is a kind of superhero I mean. (the last superhero movie I saw was probably Krrish 3, which was really fun and I saw it without having seen 1 or 2 and I highly recommend seeing it this way, the movie's sequence for getting people up to speed is genuinely impressive) empty whippet box posted:Hey there trad games, does anyone round these parts play Wingspan? I don't see a thread about it and I've been playing the poo poo out of it for a while (on steam). Just wondering if there's others I've played it a fair bit, I have a friend who really loves it and tries to press it on people whenever he can. Oddly I have a huge birdwatcher segment in my social life and there's 0 overlap of people who watch birds and people who play wingspan.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:34
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Wingspan is good. Stonemeier in general is good, actually.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:38
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empty whippet box posted:Hey there trad games, does anyone round these parts play Wingspan? I don't see a thread about it and I've been playing the poo poo out of it for a while (on steam). Just wondering if there's others We rarely have one-boardgame threads, but there's discussion of Wingspan in the boardgame thread recently. This is a perfectly fine place to chat about it too.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:48
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Leperflesh posted:We rarely have one-boardgame threads, but there's discussion of Wingspan in the boardgame thread recently. This is a perfectly fine place to chat about it too.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:53
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I linked to a search result of posts about Wingspan, of which there are 11.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:56
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Search results expire, don't they?
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Jan 21, 2022 00:16
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Covok posted:https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1484189028824006659?s=20  Seems to be doing pretty well for its launch on DTRPG!
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Jan 21, 2022 00:23
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Tulip posted:Oddly I have a huge birdwatcher segment in my social life and there's 0 overlap of people who watch birds and people who play wingspan. My mom is an avid birdwatcher and for her part of the fun of Wingspan is drawing birds that she's seen locally and getting to share stories about their habits 
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Jan 21, 2022 00:45
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Lemon-Lime posted:
https://twitter.com/DriveThruRPG/status/1484318610247991298 Yeah, we actually got a shout out from the platform itself.
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Jan 21, 2022 01:57
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Search results expire, don't they? I do believe so!
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Jan 21, 2022 01:59
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https://twitter.com/IAmPhophos/status/1484308147732828161 Apparently we are copper press #1? Also, one of the project leads made this as well: https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1484332779387035653
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Jan 21, 2022 02:12
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