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KingKalamari posted:Honestly, something that was kind of present in the background of the first two movies that I've always been a little disappointed the franchise didn't explore a bit more was that the xenomorph was a lot smarter than it had any right to be. The drone we see in the first movie is only a few hours old but we see it perform some pretty cunning hunting tactics and really quickly figures out how to utilize the machinery of the Nostromo is an at least a basic manner. And then in Aliens the hive shows an immense amount of tactical cunning and Ripley is even able to negotiate with the Queen nonverbally when she goes to rescue Newt. It always made me wonder if the xenomorphs were actually a lot smarter than anyone assumed and the only reason the xenos we see in the first two movies seem closer to animals is because they've been spawned without any other members of their race present, like alien feral children. And then that opens the door to the possibility that there's an entire civilization of parasitic murder-monsters out there, just waiting to be alerted to humanity's presence... The true Aliens sequel we need: a fictional nature documentary with voice-over narration. The "canon" answer for why the xenomorphs seem so good at sabotaging human technology is, if I remember right, that high-voltage electrical equipment gives them a headache in the vicinity and makes them wreck it. Personally I think that the aliens are more interesting as just a supremely efficient eusocial insects whose warriors have a basic grasp of how prey creatures think and act to help them be more efficient at their role, and perhaps the queens have some basic planning intelligence. It helps contribute to what I personally always found was the most terrifying part of xenomorphs: their persistent and unstoppable nature. If you don't wipe them out, they ALWAYS find a way through any barrier, over any obstacle, out of any prison. You can't hide from them, and eventually your only option is to confront them and fight them on their home ground, which is a terrifying thought in itself. Giving them a higher level of intelligence and individuality would end up creating creatures that can be demoralized, know fear, run away, choose not to engage you. Having them completely driven by a biological need to hunt, capture, kill and procreate removes that one "weakness" they could have.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:43
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly, something that was kind of present in the background of the first two movies that I've always been a little disappointed the franchise didn't explore a bit more was that the xenomorph was a lot smarter than it had any right to be. The drone we see in the first movie is only a few hours old but we see it perform some pretty cunning hunting tactics and really quickly figures out how to utilize the machinery of the Nostromo is an at least a basic manner. And then in Aliens the hive shows an immense amount of tactical cunning and Ripley is even able to negotiate with the Queen nonverbally when she goes to rescue Newt. It always made me wonder if the xenomorphs were actually a lot smarter than anyone assumed and the only reason the xenos we see in the first two movies seem closer to animals is because they've been spawned without any other members of their race present, like alien feral children. And then that opens the door to the possibility that there's an entire civilization of parasitic murder-monsters out there, just waiting to be alerted to humanity's presence... They are clearly a lot more than animals, and it's shown that even though it has all the trappings of a giant space bug, treating it as just a dumb bug gets you killed. In Alien, the crew reasons that it should be possible to corral it with the flamethrowers specifically because animals are scared of fire. The Alien avoided attacking Dallas head on because of the fire, but instead of fleeing away from him as maybe an animal would, it figured out a way to attack him from behind. In Aliens, they find a way to bypass the barricades and cut the power at the same time in a coordinated assault, showing they understand combat tactics and even understand that removing the power will hinder their enemy. There's even the discussion before the assault in the director's cut about how they're probably just like ants, and after the assault Hudson's incredulous "How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!" line showing that they really didn't expect any level of intelligence from them. I agree that it would have been cool if the side fiction didn't just treat them as space bugs when depicting them in their natural habitat. The comics for instance actually show them to not even be the apex predators on their own planet. It would have been neat to show that on their home planet they have something that shows signs of a civilization created by beings with high intelligence but a completely different mentality to humans. Like maybe they breed animals for hosts and have something like politics between hives.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:45
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Aliens is a movie about how the Alien is neither a mere bug nor an avatar of unknowable formless chaos. Bluntly, she's just kind of a bitch. And then Prometheus is about how we're all bitches. Different points, but not incompatible!
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Mar 10, 2023 00:45
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Aliens being "smart" in the sense that they understand human technology and can execute military strategies would only make them more mundane and relatable.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:46
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Ferrinus posted:Aliens being "smart" in the sense that they understand human technology and can execute military strategies would only make them more mundane and relatable. The scary part of the aliens to me is not that they are unknowable and impossible to understand but that they're stealthy and intelligent so it's impossible to know if one is about to ambush you and drag you off to be used in their destructive reproduction process
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Mar 10, 2023 00:48
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Yeah but, like, as combatants they are worse than marines. You'd have better odds against an alien than against a guy with a machine gun.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:51
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Xenomorphs are smart in the way that slime molds are smart, or a swarm of ants is smart. They're not smart like people, they don't think or make plans, they're not even smart like intelligent animals are smart. They just have instincts so finely honed it reaches the same conclusions as reasoned intellect. It's the perfect organism that can outwit a human by pure materialistic evolution with no relatable internality, it's like a computer beating you at chess, it makes you wonder what the point of being a thinking human being even IS. If a slime mold can solve a maze more efficiently than a human being can, what good is being human?
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Mar 10, 2023 00:54
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Asterite34 posted:Xenomorphs are smart in the way that slime molds are smart, or a swarm of ants is smart. They're not smart like people, they don't think or make plans, they're not even smart like intelligent animals are smart. They just have instincts so finely honed it reaches the same conclusions as reasoned intellect. It's the perfect organism that can outwit a human by pure materialistic evolution with no relatable internality, it's like a computer beating you at chess, it makes you wonder what the point of being a thinking human being even IS. If a slime mold can solve a maze more efficiently than a human being can, what good is being human? The aliens don't have anime wallscrolls, therefore they are the lesser species.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:58
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I'll make you a deal. Just say that you mentally replaced the word "believable" with "realistic" and replied to a post I didn't make, and we'll all pretend you didn't try this absolute pratfall of a recovery.
Splicer fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 01:00
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Splicer posted:I'll make you a deal. Admit that you mentally replaced the word "believable" with "realistic" and replied to a post I didn't make, and we'll all pretend you didn't try this absolute pratfall of a recovery. You have nothing I want.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You have nothing I want.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:06
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Ferrinus posted:______ being "smart" in the sense that they understand human technology and can execute military strategies would only make them more mundane and relatable.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:10
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I know I engaged vigorously with this discussion so I'm not gonna start modding it, but there's no need to be mean or attack each other. We can disagree but still be civil. e. I see you're trying, Splicer. Liking Prometheus doesn't mean you're failing to understand how character motivations work, nor is disliking it an indication that you can't relate to characters unless they're heroes. I relate to the car salesman in Fargo, even though he's a massive fuckup. I can even relate to the villain in Aliens: he's a monster, acting on behalf of a monstrous corporation, but he's got understandable motivations and is both embarrassed and defensive when he's caught and called out. I did not relate to the characters in Prometheus. I am describing a visceral reaction, it can't be defeated with logic, like I can't be told how scientists often are fuckups and then retroactively start relating to those fuckup characters. That's an offered explanation for why they're "realistic" (and I disagree with that explanation as incomplete) but even if I agreed that characters like that could be believable, well, I didn't believe. Something broke down. My experience of the film is not invalid. It is OK with me that others liked it. Surprising at first, but now I think I have some perspective.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:14
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PurpleXVI posted:It's not "believable human stupidity," it is literally "teenage slasher flick" idiocy. Tell me you never saw scream before without telling me you never saw scream before.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:21
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Cessna posted: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. mellonbread posted:All the splats released so far have been Arrakisventures set on Arrakis. I didn't bother with any of those when I ran it because I'm not interested in Arrakis either. It seems like a great time to set your Dune campaign is when the handover of Arrakis to House Atreides is announced, but not to play Atreides or Harkonnen characters. With such a seismic shift in the balance of power in the Landsraadt, the potential threat to CHOAM (and House spice supplies), possibly perceived weakness of the Emperor, divided focus of both the Harkonnen and Atreides, etc., all the Houses -- major and minor -- are at the very least going to be playing strong defense so their spice caches don't get raided, and I assume most are going to take advantage of the chaos and distraction to further their own plans and, potentially, go so far as to declare kanly on old enemies. In the movies, the whole turnover took fifteen minutes at most, but in reality, this would be a process of at least a year or more. Then, IIRC, it's three more years after the Harkonnen treachery that Paul challenges the Emperor, so there's a lot of time to do stuff before you have to worry about repercussions from Arrakis. Per mellonbread, it sounds like the upcoming splatbook would be very helpful with that sort of campaign.
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Mar 10, 2023 01:22
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Fun (probable) fact about Alien: originally the Xenomorph was going to turn the crew members into new facehugger eggs on its own. But the producers were sued over the similarities to a similar space monster in Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. And in that book the monster made its victims into hosts for its eggs, explicitly like a parasitic wasp.
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Mar 10, 2023 08:11
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Admiralty Flag posted:It seems like a great time to set your Dune campaign is when the handover of Arrakis to House Atreides is announced, but not to play Atreides or Harkonnen characters. With such a seismic shift in the balance of power in the Landsraadt, the potential threat to CHOAM (and House spice supplies), possibly perceived weakness of the Emperor, divided focus of both the Harkonnen and Atreides, etc., all the Houses -- major and minor -- are at the very least going to be playing strong defense so their spice caches don't get raided, and I assume most are going to take advantage of the chaos and distraction to further their own plans and, potentially, go so far as to declare kanly on old enemies. yeah that's a really good point. there's loads of implied and vaguely referenced action that is is just PC catnip
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Mar 10, 2023 09:37
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The Leading Edge Games Aliens RPG was a Colonial Marines-based game, which had USCM being called in when there were issues on colonies. terrorist attacks, and several different types of xeno (not just the xenomorphs) attacks.
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Mar 10, 2023 10:10
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A lot about Prometheus makes sense considering they literally turn a corner and find themselves in a different script. Also got the extremely modern Hollywood thing of cutting key context because they think it's redundant or will 'confuse' the audience, and then overexplaining the blatantly obvious.
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Mar 10, 2023 10:38
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Folks who are interested in playing something closer to Aliens than Alien, there's a couple of rather clever hacks for playing colonial marines The Regiment: Colonial Marines, an extensive and heavily-playtested PbtA 1e hack by John Harper, and Colonial Marines, a Torchbearer 1e hack by BWHQ (link about halfway down that page). I haven't played either of them, but they were well-received some years ago when they were released.
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Mar 10, 2023 11:07
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PurpleXVI posted:The aliens don't have anime wallscrolls, therefore they are the lesser species.
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Mar 10, 2023 11:23
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Leperflesh posted:I did not relate to the characters in Prometheus. I am describing a visceral reaction, it can't be defeated with logic, like I can't be told how scientists often are fuckups and then retroactively start relating to those fuckup characters. That's an offered explanation for why they're "realistic" (and I disagree with that explanation as incomplete) but even if I agreed that characters like that could be believable, well, I didn't believe. Something broke down. My experience of the film is not invalid. It is OK with me that others liked it. Surprising at first, but now I think I have some perspective.
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Mar 10, 2023 11:47
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habituallyred posted:Fun (probable) fact about Alien: originally the Xenomorph was going to turn the crew members into new facehugger eggs on its own. But the producers were sued over the similarities to a similar space monster in Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. And in that book the monster made its victims into hosts for its eggs, explicitly like a parasitic wasp.
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Mar 10, 2023 11:55
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And it's not like people actually want or are entertained by 'realism' inherently. There's a reason they watch movies.
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Mar 10, 2023 12:58
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In this movie about space ships and robots and mutation goo, people find a thanatophobic billionaire, religious fundies, and diploma mill academics in it for a paycheck being bumbling screw-ups unbelievable. e: Don't interpret this as some value judgement on those for whom the movie didn't click, it's more a weird observation on human nature Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 13:17
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Antivehicular posted:Boy, I need to play Fiasco again sometime. Does it run at all functionally as a PbP? I've never tried it and haven't PbP'd in like 20 years so probably talking out of my rear end here. If I recall the way it works, you typically have two characters in a scene, improvising while the others grant awards of dice for cool moves or other narrative goodness. To have people sitting out waiting for a scene to end over days and days might get a little tiresome, and putting an artificial time cap or post cap would probably be less fun. You could try and have multiple convos going on at once, but that might get hard to read without separate literal threads. So mechanically it might not jive with PbP, but might be workable with some adjustment. I wonder if you could make a hybrid of it and something like Alice Is Missing, which I heard about yonks ago from The Secret Cabal but SUSD has more recently praised. You could have two characters have a chat log that is live and improvised between those two, and then posted for the others. One way that AIM could influence it might be that rather than having it fully narratively roleplayed (like "Sammy sighed as he left the liquor store") you just the words spoken by an in-universe chat system being text messages or some sort of internet thing like .hack's The World, The Matrix in Shadowrun or (sigh) Snowcrash's Metaverse (double sigh). Oh my god, the initials for Alice is Missing is AIM. I wonder if that's intentional for a game that takes place entirely across electronic messaging.
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Mar 10, 2023 13:30
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So I rewatched the movie and I personally don't think anyone in it is beyond the pale stupid, besides possibly the rich bozos organizing the trip in the first place. What stood out is the two scientists people keep going on about the stupidity of, are just not really properly integrated into either of the main two groups of the cast. Those being people on a spiritual quest to replace protestant god with Von Daniken alien gods, and a crew who are trying to keep their cultist passengers alive. Nominally dumb scientist guys exist because someone has to die to establish the danger, and seemingly no other purpose. Whereas every other character in the movie has a clear thematic purpose. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding people's complaints but they all seem to be about just the two goober sceintists who only appear in two scenes and get promptly killed.
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Mar 10, 2023 15:56
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I like 5 of the six Alien movies. Resurrection is really the only one that sucks, and I blame 100% of it on Whedon's garbage script.
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Mar 10, 2023 17:54
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Splicer posted:This is my key issue yes. The problem isn't that the characters aren't "realistic", it's that they're not believable within the overarching context of the film, taking into account the implied genre, tone, provided setting and background info etc. Replace the intro with the red dwarf credits sequence and yeah these are characters I can get into. So... isn't this just you admitting to being slow on the uptake? Argh, if only they'd warned me about the joke ahead of time, I would've gotten it! But, actually: Terrible Opinions posted:So I rewatched the movie and I personally don't think anyone in it is beyond the pale stupid, besides possibly the rich bozos organizing the trip in the first place. What stood out is the two scientists people keep going on about the stupidity of, are just not really properly integrated into either of the main two groups of the cast. Those being people on a spiritual quest to replace protestant god with Von Daniken alien gods, and a crew who are trying to keep their cultist passengers alive. Nominally dumb scientist guys exist because someone has to die to establish the danger, and seemingly no other purpose. Whereas every other character in the movie has a clear thematic purpose. This is what I'm saying. There's like one guy who is notably incautious, and he's characterized that way almost immediately, and part of that characterization is that he's trying to impress someone he likes. Also, notably, it's not being incautious that gets him killed. It was being trapped in a tomb with a monster. There was no secret sequence of optimal moves that was going to let him live through the night. There's been this internet echo chamber where some complaints about one guy's conduct bounce back and forth off the walls for a few years and suddenly everyone remembers the movie as some kind of crazy circus that can only possibly be understood as a slapstick comedy. The big difference between the Prometheus and Alien casts are that the Prometheus cast is largely unsympathetic, not that one is way stupider or more bumbling than the other. And they're unsympathetic because of their class position.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:03
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I'd still argue the two canon fodder scientists should have been cut or better integrated into the film's pervasive themes. They are weirdly discordant and that's probably why people keep latching onto them. They both act like they're not in a movie where everyone processes every event in the context of their big religious beliefs. MonsieurChoc posted:I like 5 of the six Alien movies. Resurrection is really the only one that sucks, and I blame 100% of it on Whedon's garbage script.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:25
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Alien Covenant : 2 Fassbenders 2 Flute-rious.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:28
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We NEED to let Scott make his third prequel movie. I'll set up the change.org petition.
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Mar 10, 2023 18:31
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Ferrinus posted:We NEED to let Scott make his third prequel movie. I'll set up the change.org petition. After The Last Duel give that man a blank check
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Mar 10, 2023 19:09
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Serf posted:After The Last Duel give that man a blank check He honestly needs to be told to just do historicals instead of Sci fi
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Mar 10, 2023 19:43
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Terrible Opinions posted:Covenant is okay as a stand alone movie, but is easily the most boring possible follow on to Prometheus you could make. Agreed, it's carried by Fassbender. I like it okay. Gonna say I enjoyed AvP Requiem as it felt like a schlocky italian ripoff. Just needed a giallo soundtrack.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:11
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MonsieurChoc posted:Agreed, it's carried by Fassbender. I like it okay. I might have enjoyed it if I could actually see anything.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:Agreed, it's carried by Fassbender. I like it okay. It wasn't a perfect movie, but I appreciated it for not holding back on who got fragged. Kids, love interests, everyone was fair game in that movie, which was kind of novel compared to other movies where you would always expect certain groups to be excluded from being annihilated on-screen.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:23
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Plutonis posted:He honestly needs to be told to just do historicals instead of Sci fi Yeah, historicals on the life and times of the android "David"!
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Mar 10, 2023 20:31
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https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1496621153426755592 That author was also the source for d&ds displacer beast, though that monster sucked the potassium out of people rather than laying eggs.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:31
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sebmojo posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1496621153426755592 WotC considers the displacer beast to be product identity and something they'd press copyright suits over, lol. So Paizo did an end run and licensed the coeurl from Van Vogt (or his estate) and printed Pathfinder 1e stats.
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Mar 10, 2023 20:41
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