dnd-5e Edit request: anyone who understands this last paragraph, please rephrase? I was trying to put it into the format "So I was wondering if X" -> "Does X?" but I have no idea how to parse what they're saying about the flying snake.
@BESW I just realised this means a billion links to the Rules of Hidden Club are about to break.
Astro City is, in many ways, a rebuttal of the typical mainstream DC/Marvel comic themes. It examines the impact of the superpowered on individuals and as part of the wider community, and on themselves and each other--but with a more even-handed and optimistic approach than, say, Watchmen.
Its stories have villain and heroes and world-ending threats, but that's not the point. Powers are a tool providing a variety of lenses to examine the nature of humanity.
It rejects the power-fantasy mode of powered storytelling, but it also avoids becoming a deconstruction of that mode. Pieces like Watchmen have done that. Astro City explores new modes. Part of how this works is that it's more like a collection of loosely-affiliated short stories than a continuous narrative, which I'm not sure would translate easily into an RPG.
Astro City's continuity is derived from its setting and ethos, not from its characters and plots.
there's another comic that finds an alternative, called Furious, about a girl with super-strength, flight, invincibility, all the standard issues - and emotional problems and some anger management issues. (She didn't choose her name, the media gave it to her, she insists her name's something else I can't remember.) Unfortunately the character design and storytelling are confusing and I couldn't make it all the way through the first volume because I lost the ability to tell characters apart.
Example: there's one story which is about a non-powered woman who grew up in the "haunted" part of town. The neighbourhoods where you put salt on the threshold and mistletoe in the windows every night.
The whole story is about her struggle to decide whether to move downtown.
(Furious volume 1 features several redheaded women which may be the same person or may be entirely different people, and the protagonist may or may not be the same person as someone else, and may or may not be family with someone else. I lost track. If you want a reading exercise in confusing storytelling, pick up that book.)
It's a short set of indie comics about a young woman who becomes the protege of The Middleman: he fights evil so you don't have to.
It's a glorious comedic romp through spy/hero tropes (mostly lower down on the power scale than Superman--think Dick Tracy, The Shadow, etc.) for a modern audience.
It's not that I have an inherent issue with standard superhero fare, either. As close to my ideal as I've seen for this is the DCAU. I think my problem lies more in the execution of the DC and Marvel comics I've tried. Probably there are ones out there I would like, somewhere in those massive bodies of work.
There are five slim volumes total, but the fourth is a comic treatment of the un-filmed resolution to the TV series season cliffhanger and the fifth is a crossover between the comic and the TV continuities.
@Pixie Depending on what you're after... I really like the pre-New-52 ""Blue Beetle" comics with Jaime Reyes, and the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing.
Swamp Thing is very introspective and philosophical, from Alan Moore before he went totally crazy.
And Jaime is a teenage superhero who tells his parents about it as soon as he can after he gets his powers.
That reminds me, I need to finish Young Justice sometime. I think he pops up in there somewhere. I found YJ alternating measures of great and [exasperated sigh] before I lost track of it.
(The Middleman was originally a script treatment for a TV show, but he was told that [gestures upward] sort of thing wasn't gonna fit in any budget he'd be given. So he turned it into a comic book that was successful enough it got a season of TV show.)
For those who find different takes on superpowers interesting, I recommend Soon I Will Be Invincible. It sticks to a lot of the tropes for the genre, but it also pauses to consider their implications for the people involved.
Ok, so: if I played a Bard, and decided that I want to actually play music (irl) whenever I played music in game, how many would be opposed to this idea?
@doppelgreener The only reason I thought about deleting instead of editing is someone else already posted a new answer so mine would just be a mirror of his.
@Sandwich I think it has more to do with it being an obviously correct answer. Everyone who looks at that question is probably going to upvote your answer, because it's 100% correct, no ambiguity, and anyone can see that.
@Pixie Then, too, the question is one that draws attention. Most trivial rules questions don't get a lot of love, because you look at the question title and go "Yeah, that's obvious", but this one has "unreasonable number of curses" = pretty good clickbait.
Generally speaking, an image that's not a useful part of the answer should be a text link, if it's included at all. Otherwise it's just cluttering up the page like a chatty comment: something people have to scroll past to get to the useful bits, and not having "stuff to scroll past to get to the useful bits" is a major thing which separates SE from traditional forums.
@AshleyNunn Good to hear. I was stuck on that room for ages the first time I played. It's such a sad moment when you run out of bombs and you're like "I have to just give up, despite how close I am, go back to the last room, grab some more bombs and start all over again."
user15026
23:33
@Miniman Yeah, running out of bombs was the WORST.
