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Ghost Leviathan posted:Now picturing a game where the PCs are Predators, Terminators and at least one Robocop all like, humans aren't really a threat considering and actually more of an endangered species. now you're just describing Blame!
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Mar 9, 2023 18:29
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Halloween Jack posted:I think there are several Cthulhu Mythos games that go in that direction--the stars are right, the Old Ones come back, and the last humans are vermin crawling around the margins. Brian Keene wrote a lot of stuff in that vein. I'm not super familiar with the lore of the Dark Horse comics, so there aren't a lot of specific examples I can pull to demonstrate this, but there is definitely a bunch of stuff from the comics that's been pulled into the game in one way or another. This game digs DEEP into the franchise for content, to the point that there are large sections of worldbuilding drawn from the unproduced screenplay William Gibson did for Alien 3 (The Union of Progressive Peoples are one of the major factions outlined in the governments and corporations section, for instance).
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Mar 9, 2023 19:06
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That's super cool and improves my opinion of the game a lot. The quick start adventure features the goo from Prometheus, and I figured the setting was all pulled from the lovely post-Aliens films.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:10
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The RPG actually fixes one of the big issues a lot of people took with Covenant by going with the explanation used in earlier drafts of the script that the Xenomorphs were originally created by the Engineers and the ones created by David were an attempt to replicate them rather than David being the creator of all xenomorphs.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:30
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KingKalamari posted:The RPG actually fixes one of the big issues a lot of people took with Covenant by going with the explanation used in earlier drafts of the script that the Xenomorphs were originally created by the Engineers and the ones created by David were an attempt to replicate them rather than David being the creator of all xenomorphs. The proper approach would be to say "neither Covenant nor Prometheus happened, there was nothing good in either of them. Goodbye." Why would you ever incorporate anything from those two shitshow movies?
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Mar 9, 2023 19:39
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Because Prometheus is the best Alien film and it's not even close. Covenant, honestly, I could take or leave, but I'm still far more interested in Ridley Scott's vision than endless comic book fanfiction in the vein of "oooh, what if zombie apocalypse, but Xenomorphs?!"
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Mar 9, 2023 19:46
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PurpleXVI posted:The proper approach would be to say "neither Covenant nor Prometheus happened, there was nothing good in either of them. Goodbye." Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm still far more interested in Ridley Scott's vision than endless comic book fanfiction in the vein of "oooh, what if zombie apocalypse, but Xenomorphs?!"
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Mar 9, 2023 19:50
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Because Prometheus is the best Alien film and it's not even close.  I felt like it was maybe slightly better than Battlefield Earth or the Cats movie, in that I was able to actually sit through it
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Mar 9, 2023 19:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Because Prometheus is the best Alien film and it's not even close. This is an extremely bold tack and I would love to hear your reasoning for this one.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:53
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Kingdom of Heaven is good and released several years after Gladiator.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Because Prometheus is the best Alien film and it's not even close. Is this a bit?
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Mar 9, 2023 19:59
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Splicer posted:That'd be a neat setting, the moontrap timeline but without the improbable human victories. The monster always escaped the facility, the virus always broke quarantine, the robot uprising succeeded. Skynet is locked in combat with the cyborgs from Virus, The Blob covers 50% of Pennsylvania, Detroit is an isolated holdout of humanity kept "safe" under Omnicorp's benevolent, police-backed rule, and space prison transport just crashlanded in Critters territory. That last one's the PCs. There's a manga by the One Punch Man/Mob Psycho writer who's sorta like that. A fantasy world in which humanity is about to be overrun by monsters and demons does a magic ritual to summon help but ends up merging their world with worlds in which humanity is also in danger of OTHER calamities such as the robot uprising, natural disasters, a rampaging deity, etc. mellonbread posted:Ridley Scott hasn't made a good movie since Gladiator. The Last Duel was excellent, what the hell dude.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:10
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I dunno, I feel like some of the broad concepts from Prometheus could be interestingly integrated into the Alien Universe, it was just their presentation that was kind of off. Like, the Black Goo as a concept is, I think, a pretty solid hook for a horror game: This race of advanced, long-dead precursors who likely created humanity and have left a bunch of their horrible bioweapons and murder-goo lying around to mutate unwary colonists and explorers into H. R. Gieger monsters opens up a lot of new possibilities for horror scenarios in the game outside of just the xenomorphs. It's mostly the way too on-the-nose and overbearing religious symbolism overlaid on top of them in the films that fucks a lot of poo poo up (Also that they made them tall smooth boys instead of big biomonsters like the original Space Jockey. gently caress making that poo poo a space suit!). There were also a lot of interesting concepts in earlier drafts of the scripts for those two films that I think could be really interesting to explore in the Alien universe. In at least one early draft for Prometheus, the major impetus for The Engineers creating the black goo was that their species had become infertile, and had gotten around that by communing with an entity called The Deacon that was spawn from a chosen member of their race in a similar manner to the Xenomorphs. The Deacon's blood allowed them to manipulate and create life, but when The Deacon died off they tried to recreate the properties of its blood with the black goo. And I think that opens up some interesting opportunities because it suggest the xenomorphs are corrupted, imperfect copies of some other alien entity that might still be out their somewhere.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:13
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Personally I think you can like whatever movie you like. I got a lot out of Prometheus and these ditched script ideas sound great.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:16
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I talk poo poo but I guess the black slime does address my earlier problem of the setting only having one creature. That was the best part of Mothership. The rules were mediocre but all the modules had interesting monsters.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:19
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Prometheus owned. I was less hot on Covenant, but the eerie android fight scene is a high point. Definitely a prelude to similar scenes in Raised by Wolves. I haven't checked out the Alien RPG but this is making me want to pick it up next time I have room for it in the budget.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:20
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PurpleXVI posted:This is an extremely bold tack and I would love to hear your reasoning for this one. It's an extremely Protestant film about how in God's eyes we're all lower than literal poo poo, and how a bunch of characters with very different senses of self-worth and responses to being degraded react to that accusation. And while Covenant kind of puts a thumb on the scale (to its detriment imo), Prometheus is pretty open-ended about how the viewer can interpret this, as well; it's equally legitimate in my opinion to treat it as being about Shaw's loss of faith in a basically-atheistic universe where there is no God, just lovely parents, as a more Gnostic "there is an order to the universe and it's completely hostile to us", or as a kind of morality play about pride and ego. I find that Hollywood films in general are usually terrified of combining very disparate tones, and Prometheus is a movie that is at once sympathetic to how its cast experiences the unfairness of the universe, but also willing to dip into borderline slapstick humor when it's handling the consequences of their incredible hubris, and I appreciate that. It's barely interested in the xenomorph as, like, a Monster Manual entry, but since the alien has already been completely demystified anyways, it goes in the opposite direction; the "Deacon" is the unwanted child of unwanted children three times over, just a piece of meaningless cosmic filth, something pathetic instead of cool -- although it's still going to destroy us. The movie's basically asking you if you can feel sorry for it, when the obvious answer is "no, probably not" -- but then how could you expect anyone to feel sorry for us, like the Engineer in the prologue presumably did? (Meanwhile, Shaw can't even really find it in herself to feel sorry for David.) e: At any rate, it's a movie that expands on OG Alien but doesn't really give a poo poo about anything that came after it, and is way more in dialogue with Ridley Scott's other films and shows, particularly Legend, Blade Runner, and (subsequently) Raised by Wolves; I'm not surprised that hardcore fans of Alien qua Alien don't like it, and I don't blame them. A lot of the reasons I like it are the exact same reasons it's unpopular. But I'm also not kidding about how much I enjoy the thematic puddle it's splashing around in. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 20:23
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KingKalamari posted:That's actually covered in the Alien RPG... Even in the context of the most viable way to do a campaign in Aliens, imo, which would be something involving the marines and fighting various foes, I think people would probably not be down for months of fighting UPP/USCM opponents and random androids before they got to see a xenomorph. I dunno, the game is very specific to what it is- there really aren't much rules for actually space truckin' for example, which is why i used the example of Traveller, for a game that very much does.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:25
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Alien RPG is really not made that well for actually running a campaign, in my opinion, although the Marine campaign in the marine rulebook makes a noble effort. The game is good at doing their three Act cinematic game though.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:27
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I will say this, the best take on Alien in an RPG was Film Reroll's Alien, where they actually didn't give much care for established lore, so they made the Alien and its goals different based on which crew member got facehugged. In this game, the alien emitted a gas that causes massive hallucinations instead of having acid blood. They even did an Aliens based on this version of Alien, but the latter doesn't quite have the same momentum.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:33
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's an extremely Protestant film about how in God's eyes we're all lower than literal poo poo, and how a bunch of characters with very different senses of self-worth and responses to being degraded react to that accusation. But what about the part where all the characters are badly written, mediocrely acted, do completely brain-dead things and I never gave a drat about a single one of them? My personal opinion is that a movie does not get to graduate to getting praise for deeper themes and symbology until it has passed the entry exam of being well-written, well-acted and being watchable on a purely surface level.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:33
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PurpleXVI posted:But what about the part where all the characters are badly written, mediocrely acted, do completely brain-dead things and I never gave a drat about a single one of them? Have you ever heard of the Demon Core? People, even nuclear scientists, do brain dead poo poo all the time.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:36
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Maxwell Lord posted:Have you ever heard of the Demon Core? People, even nuclear scientists, do brain dead poo poo all the time. Okay, let me... have you seen the movie? I feel like you have not seen the movie. I want you to imagine a scenario where a pair of trained explorers/scientists, on an alien planet, encounter an alien lifeform that's acting in a way that would be a threat display if any Earth animal did it. They approach this thing, and they tease it, and then it murders them because yes, it was in fact a threat display. It's not "believable human stupidity," it is literally "teenage slasher flick" idiocy.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:38
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PurpleXVI posted:But what about the part where all the characters are badly written, mediocrely acted, do completely brain-dead things and I never gave a drat about a single one of them? They're not badly written or mediocrely acted. They do brain-dead things because they're people and that's what people do. Not giving a drat is a you problem.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:38
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PurpleXVI posted:Okay, let me... have you seen the movie? I feel like you have not seen the movie. I want you to imagine a scenario where a pair of trained explorers/scientists, on an alien planet, encounter an alien lifeform that's acting in a way that would be a threat display if any Earth animal did it. They approach this thing, and they tease it, and then it murders them because yes, it was in fact a threat display. Seen it, own the blu ray, and yep that’s about on the level I’m talking about. A whole bunch of people got fatally irradiated because key nuclear components were being held in place with a screwdriver. Life is a work safety video.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:Have you ever heard of the Demon Core? People, even nuclear scientists, do brain dead poo poo all the time. When a character does a brain-dead thing in a film the filmmaker usually gives us a reason to believe the character is messing up, like they have a blind spot or are incompetent or have some foible. This film sets the characters up as experts in their fields and then they do things no expert or even an amateur would contemplate doing, and they don't even seem to recognize it. Just from the absolute outset, doing poo poo that makes zero sense for their characters. In a schlocky horror flick when the teens go into the basement we understand they're doing it because they're scared and unexperienced and don't understand what's going on. When the scientists pop off their helmets and stick their faces into weird alien pod things they're doing things that we, the audience, literally cannot believe. With no reason behind it. We're not told the helmets are uncomfortable, we're not given a scientist saying "OK I've run some tests the air is definitely safe" we're not shown a character being absent-minded twice earlier in the film to set up their absent-mindedness at a critical moment. Hubris as a theme hits home when characters are relatable, either because we recognize ourselves in them or because we recognize assholes that ruin things in them. But these were neither assholes (mostly) nor buffoons, they were just scientists who do not believably behave like scientists. I don't blame the actors, I blame the writing and editing. Sure, there's thematic elements here that could have been super engaging and interesting, if only they weren't constantly overshadowed by scenes which make you go "what the gently caress? Who wrote this? Why would this character do this here? What?" e. to bring this back to roleplaying a bit, to me this is a party of 10th level adventurers suddenly deciding that even though they have years of experience avoiding traps and killing monsters, to just leave all their equipment at the entrance and go lie down naked on every pressure plate they find, and it's not even for a joke, they just suddenly decide they don't remember how to use a sword or cast a spell or detect a trap or anything. Just hmm, this is hubris! We are victims of our own ambition, yes, that makes sense, I'm going to go try to pet the beholder. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 20:45
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experts absolutely do stupid loving poo poo in their area of expertise there's a famous entomologist who spent his entire career deliberately getting stung by every venomous insect he could find so he could rate how much it hurts. (he recently passed away, of unrelated causes) more than one researcher signed off on an experiment where 17 people were voluntarily infected with parasitic roundworms in order to help develop a cure for a disease the infection causes; it was controversial for obvious reasons, but they weren't amateurs and that's just people with a full idea of what they're getting into -- as opposed to freak accidents (hi, Steve Irwin!) or outright malice and deception (which, remember, is what's going on in the actual movie) and i lead with all of that because frankly it's sufficient by itself, but also, beyond that, the expedition in Prometheus is very explicitly not some "best of the best" type of deal; it's a bunch of thrill-seekers and fringe scientists being cherry-picked by a rich egomaniac who wants to ask God for eternal life. Shaw is introduced as someone who has never been accorded any respect in her field and jumps at the chance to work for someone who believes in and will fund her. The speech they're given when they sign on is condescending propaganda from a sci-fi Peter Thiel type rear end in a top hat who continues to lie to them throughout the film until he finally dies. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 20:53
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Terrible Opinions posted:Kingdom of Heaven is good and released several years after Gladiator. The theatrical release version is passable but the extended director's cut is great despite being a bit too impressed with itself.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:53
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Leperflesh posted:When a character does a brain-dead thing in a film the filmmaker usually gives us a reason to believe the character is messing up, like they have a blind spot or are incompetent or have some foible. This film sets the characters up as experts in their fields and then they do things no expert or even an amateur would contemplate doing, and they don't even seem to recognize it. Just from the absolute outset, doing poo poo that makes zero sense for their characters. "And then they do things no expert or even an amateur would contemplate doing" again I really really really think you're overestimating human common sense. Being very book smart has never prevented people from doing just the dumbest poo poo. It sets the characters up as "experts" in that they probably have Ph. D.'s, they're not Nobel Prize winners or anything. As for "having some foible" the entire loving THEME of the drat thing is their overconfidence and cockiness in the face of the unknown.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:55
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Has anybody ever thought to make the alien from alien and the predator from predator fight? i bet that'd be cool.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:55
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PurpleXVI posted:The proper approach would be to say "neither Covenant nor Prometheus happened, there was nothing good in either of them. Goodbye." They're good movies.
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Mar 9, 2023 20:55
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For a clown, at the circus.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:04
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mellonbread posted:Probably the same reason the Dune 2d20 is one-quarter prequel lore by pagecount. The rightsholder demanded it. That was soooo tedious. I give not the slightest of fucks about Brian Herbert's takes on the Butlerian Jihad, but there it was anyway. That said, I love the idea of a Dune rpg, but setting it in the era of Dune (the first book) is a bit tough. Either you're going to run into Paul and his preordained path or you don't, and his absence is glaring. It's like setting a Star Wars game during the exact time of the first movie. Personally I'd either set the game well before Paul was even born or after, like during the time of Messiah. Hell, I don't even know if I'd want to set it on Arrakis - but if you don't, are we even playing Dune?
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Mar 9, 2023 21:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:experts absolutely do stupid loving poo poo in their area of expertise I understand where you're coming from but I feel that in a film about any of the above, establishing scenes would show the audience how this particular scientist justifies their apparently bizarre or unethical behavior, to themselves or to their astonished colleagues. Something in their character or ethos or background would be shown to set up their behavior being at odds with what we'd expect. Or at the very least, after they behave stupidly, someone would be a stand-in for the audience and be like "wait what? Why the gently caress did you In Titanic, we don't have to believe that the ship's captain is incompetent to understand why and how he fails to account for iceburgs and find his behavior believable. In Frankenstein's Monster, we understand the motives that drive Dr. Frankenstein to perform reckless experiments on dead bodies. In Outbreak, there's a scene where once scientist tears their suit, and another accidentally sticks herself while trying to treat him: the scene is filmed so that their actions and the events seem plausible due to the tension of the emergency rather than caused by wild recklessness of disease scientists handling pathogens. So I'm not claiming that we have to believe in scientists who are never reckless or make mistakes: only that the filmmaking needs to present that in a believable way in order for us to buy in to what's happening instead of laughing about it.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:13
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Leperflesh posted:I understand where you're coming from but I feel that in a film about any of the above, establishing scenes would show the audience how this particular scientist justifies their apparently bizarre or unethical behavior, to themselves or to their astonished colleagues. Something in their character or ethos or background would be shown to set up their behavior being at odds with what we'd expect. Or at the very least, after they behave stupidly, someone would be a stand-in for the audience and be like "wait what? Why the gently caress did you You have it backwards. The bizarre and unethical behavior doesn't need to be "justified;" it exists, you're shown it, it is the characterization. Although if you really want foreshadowing, the infamous snake-touching scene is preceded by Millburn and Fifeld getting totally blazed inside their space helmets. Like, that's who these guys are. Same with the helmet-removal thing, it happens immediately after Shaw has indirectly challenged her husband's authority and he feels the need to re-assert himself; he's an rear end in a top hat who's sure he's right and needs to win and put his wife in her place in front of all their peers. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 21:17
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PurpleXVI posted:But what about the part where all the characters are badly written, mediocrely acted, do completely brain-dead things and I never gave a drat about a single one of them? Yeah, but we're also talking about an RPG based on the franchise as opposed to the individual worth of the movies themselves. It's not so much me praising the films for deeper themes and symbology so much as saying some of the concepts it introduced could be neat to explore and flesh out at a game table PurpleXVI posted:Okay, let me... have you seen the movie? I feel like you have not seen the movie. I want you to imagine a scenario where a pair of trained explorers/scientists, on an alien planet, encounter an alien lifeform that's acting in a way that would be a threat display if any Earth animal did it. They approach this thing, and they tease it, and then it murders them because yes, it was in fact a threat display. Fun fact: In earlier drafts of the script for Prometheus there was straight up a subplot where Vickers deliberately hired the least qualified people she could for keys roles on the mission because she thinks the entire endeavor is a waste of resources and resents Weyland for effectively replacing her with David. This subplot was dropped for the final draft, but all the parts where the people Vickers hired acted like incompetent morons were left in so it just ended up being a huge mess. These sorts of issues are a major problem for the film, but examining its production history is a fascinating look into how interesting concepts can get completely mutilated during the film production process.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:18
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I mean it was cut because it would be redundant, it's just that thousands of viewers apparently took the "welcome new employees!" orientation from Weyland Corporation as gospel for some reason.  e: not even Weyland-Yutani, but the company that presumably got bought out in a merger to become W-Y after their founder and CEO died on a secret and probably-illegal vanity project
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Mar 9, 2023 21:20
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Some guy having "scientist" on his name tag doesn't mean poo poo about his sensibilities or intelligence or whether they relate to your idea of common sense irl, and it certainly doesn't mean anything in a movie either.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:22
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:and i lead with all of that because frankly it's sufficient by itself, but also, beyond that, the expedition in Prometheus is very explicitly not some "best of the best" type of deal; it's a bunch of thrill-seekers and fringe scientists being cherry-picked by a rich egomaniac who wants to ask God for eternal life. Shaw is introduced as someone who has never been accorded any respect in her field and jumps at the chance to work for someone who believes in and will fund her. The speech they're given when they sign on is condescending propaganda from a sci-fi Peter Thiel type rear end in a top hat who continues to lie to them throughout the film until he finally dies. It's this. The crew of Prometheus are the only people dumb enough to follow a couple of religious zealots on a boondoggle space mission to a planet they found in a cave painting. We know they're going to find something there because the film exists and is about that, but the best of the best are not signing up for something that will likely get them killed or, at best, waste years of their life. It's like the Torchbearer/OSR explanation for dungeon crawling: these are the people who are desperate or foolish or broken enough that they think their best chance of getting ahead in life is to crawl into a hole and look for treasure. Alien movies have always had a strong thematic layer of capitalist exploitation: Prometheus is capital as enabler rather than the whip-hand. I don't think it's the best film in the franchise but it gets a lot of hate that just feels like restatement of accepted wisdom.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:22
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Cessna posted:Hell, I don't even know if I'd want to set it on Arrakis - but if you don't, are we even playing Dune? The devs are working on a splat for house management and faction based play, which was my favorite part of the game but a weak spot in the corebook.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:23
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