I'm still not sure I agree with it, but I understand it now. Also, I'm not really a Captain America reader/fan, I just know him "by reputation", as it were
TL;DR: I think that interpretation is likely, but it's rooted in a recurring problem with writers and the public not getting what makes Captain America work.
Captain America is sadly often re-interpreted as being a reflection of what America is, but he's supposed to be a hopeful, idealistic embodiment of what America can be.
Twisting Cap as a punishment for Americans who aren't living up to his ideals is ridiculous. He should be calling them out, not satirising them.
I suppose it's a bit like GMing; he could create literally any kind of character he wanted, with any powers and predilections. So why twist the white knight instead of making a foil for him?
Right. Have the actions of Jack Monroe come back to bite one of the new Captains--that'd be interesting!
(And, you know, relephant as we see the legacy of 50s and 60s political paranoia rear its head in our contemporary political arena again.)
You need to go back to Hydra to find a nationalist authoritarian figure in the Captain America rogues gallery. Jack Monroe's rabid McCarthyism is more appropriate if the goal is to comment on current political dysfunction.
And using Sam Wilson as the Captain to Jack's foil would just drive the message home harder: how far we've come and how little we've moved, in a single cover-art-perfect faceoff.
Unfortunately, these decisions weren't made for story. The behind-the-scenes on the comics-and-TV end of Marvel these days is at least as toxic as it ever was, especially since Civil War saw a further separation of that department from the film teams.
There's a lot of corporate-level ego and spite going into these decisions, and that doesn't make for good story choices.
("Ego and Spite" would be a good name for a superpowered duo.)
Ego's always over-confident in his plans, Spite works with him to execute them but he's the person who's reliably grumpy and easy to cajole into ruining the plans entirely.
The party killed Felix# almost every time they met him, and he'd just come back with exactly the same stats but adjusted for a different racial template.
sorry. i mean, the power rangers are white, blue, black, red, and green, also with a pink and yellow one each who show up more often than some of those others.
@A.McCurran no, but grouping them into categories would make sense, like all the ones that are not green white and black together because those are the common "normal" colors
and then green white and black together because those are normally the colors of the "loner" ranger(s) who show(s) up later
@A.McCurran certainly not by how they correspond to the swords in a particular story we're playing which in turn correspond to magic colors which have a common order
For the contextless, Greener and Troggy are playing in an Umdaar campaign where I've matched the swords we're searching for to the colour wheel from Magic: the Gathering.
@nitsua60 Yeah, I could easily write an essay on all the ways in which it sucked, but it says developer statements only. It's a shame - I doubt the developers will give XP loss the kind of criticism it deserves.
@Miniman You're a web developer, right? (Say "yes." Even if you've only made a geocities site in 1997 for your mom's cat-figurine collection. 'Cause then I'll post, citing you as a "developer statement.")
@Miniman I can't imagine that Wizards passed up the chance to force the devs to write an ill-advised article about XP during the Year of Poor Choices that was the D&D Next beta.
@SevenSidedDie As long as you're around, thoughts on this one? It reads as a tool-rec to me, but I don't like the alternative way of asking (requiring answers to be continually updated).
@SevenSidedDie I don't remember it happening that much in AD&D, either. Someone earlier referred to it in 3.5e as a bookkeeping nightmare; it sucked to lose XP/level, but I don't remember getting worked up over charting it.
@Miniman Don't like it, but I'm not sure that its off topic.
There's an easy answer too (“here's a link to RPGGeek's 5e index, go nuts”), but since I'm undecided on the question itself I'm hesitating to write it.
I'll admit--part of the reason I threw the "what are the races" question out there was as a bit of an "anchor baby" on the "we have lists" front. What differences do you two see between "what are the books" and "what are the races"?
@nitsua60 It was mostly in the form of magic item crafting costs, and indirectly with level loss. (Made level-draining undead scary, and you didn't tangle with them unless you had overwhelming advantage, or were desperate.)
This old question asked for "the opinion about list questions". The answers are from three years ago.
In current (July 2012) Stack Exchange, are list questions considered off topic?
By list question I mean any question that can't have a single, best answer, like this question I asked about what...
There are absolutely loads of payment gateways out there, and I'd like a comprehensive list of them. There's already a question asking for the "best" ones, What is the best credit card processing service? and another asking for ones suitable for a charity Can anyone recommend a payment gateway fo...
so we already have some precedent, along the lines of: (a) questions where every answer is equally valid aren't ok and that usually is what a list question is, (b) community wiki doesn't exempt a question from this consideration.
@doppelgreener Yeah. It won't suffer the problem of a new “here is my post offering to the opinion gods” from every drive-by user who sees it. The only list-y problem it has is maintainability, which is a much muddier metric.
@SevenSidedDie which problem is one I like CW for--it really throws out the invitation there to keep one, good answer up-to-date. And the release cycle here seems to make that not crazy in this case....
@A.McCurran Yes, but we appear to have stepped sideways into considering the nature of the list it's asking for, as if it were posted here, since it's a good opportunity to chew on how RPG.se feels about lists. :)
@nitsua60 no thanks, let people who want CW use it, but i don't want any rules enforcing usage of it for anything.
in particular, CW wasn't made for fixing problems, it was made for resolving shared authorship contentions. if/when a post has totally shared authorship, it can go CW.
CW is almost never relevant nor necessary nor an improvement.
Re: Hydra Cap, it seems to be a pretty obvious plot point, nothing more. Red Skull currently has the powers of Charles Xavier through... brain transplant or something. Don't ask, comics. And he's been lurking in the background for a while. He's even in the same #1 as Hydra Cap, marshaling supporters. It makes much more sense that he's rewriting Rogers' memories to bring him into Hydra, a more subtle form of mind control, than if Cap was retconned into being a sleeper Hydra agent ALL THIS TIME.
All the fuss is by people who don't actually read the current comics.
@Magician This has... other problems... but is a much more acceptable outcome to me. It's also much more likely, given Marvel's allergy to disrupting the status quo for more than a year or so.
Well. If you don't know about Red Skull having mind control powers, and take the events of that issue at face value, if you actually believe Marvel has retconned CA in such a manner, I can see why you'd be upset
(eg, She-Thor, Miles Morales, and basically every other Marvel gimmick in the last seven-ish years, has been met with a thunderous "Meh, it won't last." So why is this one different?)
There's a big difference between the two characters you listed. One is a replacement, the other is a new character. A new character that doesn't make much sense anymore since the Ultimate MU merged with the regular one, but still.
I haven't seen many people being upset at Miles or at, say, Kamala (I'm sure there are some, there's people upset at anything)
The introduction of those two characters was also handled very differently. One took up the name to honor a dead hero. The other... took the actual proper name of a person that's still around but doesn't want the name for some strange reason. And it's been what, 2 years, and we still haven't seen anything about why Thor was unworthy.
But yeah, sure it's different. What's a similar event, either in structure or in reaction?
One More Day is the most recent thing I can think of that got massive negative hype, but it didn't really spill outside the comic fandom despite Spider-Man being as established a film character then as Captain America is now.
@BESW Again, hasn't caused a huge negative reaction. Former Ms Marvel is now Captain Marvel, the name wasn't being used, Kamala took it as tribute. Everyone happy. Also helps that her book is really good.
@BESW Probably because it didn't invalidate the core of the character, unless you looked closely enough. If a Spider-Man story revealed Peter had shot his uncle himself and was just blocking out that memory this whole time, people would be upset, too.
I can't really think of a story that would just go "your beloved character has always been a villain, deal".
Well. The United Kingdom just had a referendum over whether to exit from the European Union. At the moment, 96.6% of votes are counted with 51.7% in favour of exiting.
@BESW Ireland is a farther bet than I'd be comfortable making. The northern shores of Ireland have been a culturally-complex Thing since long before England existed as a nation. I'm dubious they can integrate happily now any more than they could during the Roman era.
@BESW Some political figures in Ireland are suggesting the whole country will necessarily have to unite and cede from the UK now, and some in Scotland are saying a British exit from the EU necessitates Scottish independence.
@doppelgreener Considering the Leave/Remain map I just saw, Scotland and Northern Ireland are definitely going to have Things To Say about this. (And London is going to fondly wish it could go with them.)
> In a referendum in 2002 the people of Gibraltar soundly rejected a joint sovereignty proposal on which Spain and the United Kingdom were said to have reached "broad agreement".
@BESW The residents of Point Roberts (US) have to deal with that, since they're a peninsula cut off from the rest of the US by Canada. But we've never argued over Point Roberts, so we don't make it annoying for each other…
The Northern Irish peace process is rooted in the European Court of Human Rights, which pre-dates the EU but buy-in to it is required for EU membership.
Rejecting the Court of Human Rights is part of the Brexit agenda for an independent Britain.
On "bright" side, this would make it really hard for people to continue equating "terrorist" with "Muslim."
On a more actually-positive note, I find it heartening that the youth vote was so firmly against the Brexit. That means there's a good chance as young adults move into positions of influence whatever effect this vote and its fallout has will be increasingly mitigated and overturned.
Elders can really mess stuff up, but youth are always the spearhead of lasting dramatic social change.
If humans lived over a thousand years, would the "elders" (everyone in three digits) be messing things up? Or would the "elders" only be the people toward the end of their extended lifespan, with the "youth" including people only centuries old?
@doppelgreener I think a crucial element of longevity/immortality would be neuroplasticity (not quite the right term, I think, but the best I've got). The ability to change as a person that people tend to gradually lose as they age.
Mostly :( because my ability to change myself is something I'm very good at and I don't want to lose it.
In the past six years, who I was has almost entirely gone away, and who I am now has almost nothing in common with who I was except memories, and various core thoughts I never sought to discard.
@doppelgreener I second that, I very much needed that ability quite badly for at least the first half of my life, without it I wouldn't even be doing half the things I take enjoyment from now
@BESW Setting up your browser plugins to run only when you give them permission (Java, Flash, Silverlight, any others as applicable), as described in the second half of that article, is exactly how they should be set up by default, always. Immediately gets rid of a ton of security vulnerabilities and the worst types of ads. The only Flash that runs is the Flash you can see and which you are sure should be running.
**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):** [BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "Buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [playtest Follow](http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/788/follow-needs-playtesters/ "Help playtest Ben Robbins' new game!"); [UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US.");
I also find One Common Faith helpful for perspective on the whole situation.
But again, that's just me. My religion strongly influences my views of social and political patterns and actions. Probably less helpful for other folks, but I feel it'd be churlish not to share what I find useful.
Alongside Century of Light and other publications it presents a vision of the last century and this one that's very different from the common representation. I find the perspective optimistic without being naive, and comforting in its ability to help me define a course of positive action rather than simply becoming cynically reactive.
Hey all. With the steam summer sale going on, tabletop simulator is on sale. I haven't tried other games on it yet, but there's a really good FATE download in the workshop.
Huh, and now I think I've figured out what the Big Bad for my next campaign is going to be. Thanks, @BESW! :p
My campaign setting has some moon-dwelling warforged. I'm going to finally have the party encounter them, I think. It's been this big secret over the last 2 years what exactly makes the moon flash with lights every new year
Just because @Miniman loves the DataExplorer... what about finding posts created after June 2 which contain either "\$" or "\begin{" in the post body? I.e., the "native" MJ posts =)
I'm trying to decide how my moon-dwelling warforged should land on my earth-like planet without teleporting (because that's pretty boring) and using as little magic as possible.
I was thinking parachutes but that's kind of boring and I want this to be rather novel so I'm trying to learn some things about aerodynamics to see if I can come up with a shape that will have a pretty slow terminal velocity and just drop in the ocean or something
and I realize that a parachute is one such shape :p
Their main benefit over humans is that they don't need to breathe and are a little more heat resistant so I can do weird things with having them exposed to vacuum or small amounts of air friction
Cybermen (original Cybermen, not the alternate-universe Cybus Cybermen of early New Who) were once Mondasians, human-like beings who lived on a planet that orbited alongside Earth. It got knocked out of orbit by the moon, and to survive the interstellar journey, they were forced to use cybernetic technology to modify their bodies.
Eventually their cybernetic modifications became so extreme they lost the ability to reproduce naturally, and now the only way to add to their population is by cybernetic conversion of other beings.
@Zachiel Right, I'm not planning on forcing my party to be into any particular place, but my current campaign is maybe too sandboxy. The campaign had no pre-determined plot (no bbeg until months in) so I didn't know where they were ultimately going
So I basically did an amount of work each week to give places descriptions and stuff based on my mood or how important I thought a location will probably be, the end result was that I put days of effort into places that the party would never go and only hours into the places that the party actually went to a lot
the goal for this one is to know what places will actually be plot-important so that I can put a suitable amount of work into those places
and by "this one" I mean the one I'm building for the future
Naturally, if the party decides that they prefer to spend their nights in this one little charming inn five miles away from the city that I only mentioned in passing once, that's fine and I'll adapt
Back when I ran D&D sandboxes, I had a pretty workable formula: I'd design a world with a looming but unknown threat which had subtle ties to almost everything else.
The first 1/4 to 1/3 of the campaign the party would just noodle around. Explore, make allies and enemies, get to know the place.
Then I'd pick one of the place/people/things they'd been spending a lot of time with, and that's where the threat would first become visible.
As the threat developed, the party would see it spreading through all the parts of the world they'd interacted with, so whatever they'd been noodling around about in the first part of the game would become crucial in the latter parts.
@BESW That's what I was going for with the campaign that I'm currently running, but I started in a rush and hadn't even decided what the looming threat would be and once I decided about 1/4 in, it took me until about 1/2 in until I figured out how to finally bring it to the party's attention
For my next campaign I've decided on what the ultimate evil will be, and I'm coming up with ideas for what the different "acts" will be, corresponding to the stages of player power in the DMG. Starts out as local heroes, then national, regional, world. Phase one I'm planning on having some bandit stuff, transitioning into phase two I want to give them leads that the problem goes even deeper, phase 3 may be the invasion, phase 4 could be taking the fight to the moon. Still working it out.
I'll just have plenty of hooks around so if they decide to skip Plot-Hooksburg because it's quicker, they can find a different hook somewhere else
Anyway, didn't mean to imply that I was going to shove the party into a minecart and send it hurtling through my plot with little dioramas at pre-determined locations. More like I'm going to put signposts around pointing to Plotsburg so that I can be more confident that the work that I put into Plotsburg won't be totally wasted. I'm a good DM, I promise! :3
@BESW This will be the first that I've pre-plotted!
@Tophandour Heh. I actually found my games where I had Something Which Should Happen worked better when, instead of plastering signs saying "THIS WAY TO PLOT" for the PCs to follow... I put up signs saying "THIS WAY TO PCS" for the plot to follow.
My first, I inherited it from somebody who only likes playing for 3 sessions before he gets bored and then I had a toxic party, so it didn't last long. Then there was my current one which has felt like it was generated via RNG. Next one, I want to have some direction.
@BESW Yeah, I've done that a lot. Probably will still do that. I guess what I'm trying to convey is that in my current campaign I wrote out a lot for all of these different cities and nations just-in-case and I thought the party might go there, but they never did. I'd rather put the larger chunk of my time into planning the cities and stuff in the region that will be important (which the party will start in) than spreading it equally around the whole globe because (cont...)
The games I've been running lately, instead of having plans for what will happen, start by having the group agree on recurring themes/goals/problems/obstacles/enemies.
Like, I won't prepare much for some remote country far on the other side of the distant mountains across the continent because I know there won't be much interesting stuff going on there
@BESW Yeah, I'm putting them into a country that's very swampy and they'll be employed by a kind of adventurer's guild. Their post is assigned to this particular small country and it will happen to have an (as of yet undecided) important role in the events of the world to come.
@BESW Right, planning on doing a thing like that. This guild will turn out to be descended from the organization that the party created in my current campaign
I was listening to the radio while I commuted (also yay, I remembered that the right word to use is commute, and I think this is the first time ever I use it!) and they aired Untitled 3, from () by Sigur Ros. And it got me thinking. It got me thinking about which kind of D&D quest might use that music as a background.
Yeah, I recently tried to tidy up a few tags and make the wikis more focused on "how to use this tag" and less "A brief introduction to this tag's topic."
Recently, several topics advocate using tag wikis for more than a cursory explanation of the tag:
Tag wikis need a size and functionality increase
Kill the book lists and put them home in their respective tag wikis
On SU, a similar issue is currently being implemented as an alternative to top...
@Tophandour I see you met my friend Marco. (more details about campaigns that ended 3 sessions in can be found in my profile)
@SevenSidedDie Yeah, it felt like a character development music. That's where I tought of building an adventure plot by using the Dogs in the Vineyard branch creation rules, and pushing on what the characters forgave or punished. Not very D&Dish, but it might work in my play by chat environment.
Recently, several topics advocate using tag wikis for more than a cursory explanation of the tag:
Tag wikis need a size and functionality increase
Kill the book lists and put them home in their respective tag wikis
On SU, a similar issue is currently being implemented as an alternative to top...
