“No, Wait…”
Order of the Stick #1, by Rich Burlew. Upgraded to 3.5e!
There’s an interesting thread at the Giant in the Playground forums that deals, in part, with retracting an in-character action. (As a side note, if you’re not reading the Order of the Stick comic at GitP, you really should. There’s a lot of terrific gaming humor there.)
Among the questions the original post poses is the following:
- Do you allow your players to revise an action, if, a second or so later, they remember themselves why they shouldn’t do that?
There is, naturally, quite an array of views on the matter. Some espouse the “you said it, it’s done” school of thought. Others allow retractions with few restrictions. There’s a lot of ground in between. General opinion seems to fall toward “it depends,” which I realize isn’t terribly dramatic. But the question of what, exactly, it depends on remains intriguing.
Categories: Comics, Manga, and Anime, Philosophy and Rants, Websites | Comments (2)
I Watch the Watchmen
Watched, rather. And it was good. Some spoilers below, though I’m not sure whether spoilers really apply to movies based on comics published more than two decades ago.
Categories: Comics, Manga, and Anime, Movies and Television, Reviews | Comments (5)
Superhero Lessons for Fantasy Games
Even if you don’t play a superhero game, this month’s RPG blog carnival on superheroes needn’t be a wasted month for you. There are qualities of a superhero game that can be adapted to enliven your new fantasy campaign — or to revitalize an old one with a change of direction. Consider some of the lessons of a superhero campaign:
Symbols (and Names) Matter
When you think of Superman, you probably think of the big red S on his chest. It’s a distinctive sigil. When you think of Batman, you probably picture his scalloped cloak, which resembles the wings of a bat. When those two get together with a couple more of their friends, it’s not just any gathering — it’s the Justice League.
Categories: Advice, Comics, Manga, and Anime | Comments (6)
Strange Superpowers
In the spirit of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival on superheroes, I present some of the strangest superpowers ever to grace the pages of a comic book. Perhaps you’ll find them inspirational. In no particular order:
Eyes in your Fingertips. This is the rather unique superpower of the Ten-Eyed Man, an old Batman villain. He was blinded in an accident, but a skilled doctor was able to reconnect his optic nerves to his fingertips, allowing him to see through them. Somehow, this made him a master escape artist as well — when he was imprisoned, he had to be kept with his hands locked into a box, or otherwise he’d escape. He had a couple other gadgets, like a jetpack and a bullwhip, but for some reason, everyone he met was really impressed by his ability to see through his fingers. The character was finally, mercifully killed off in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths series.
Categories: Comics, Manga, and Anime | Comments (1)
(Super)Heroes are Made
There’s a bit of a stir in the RPG community lately over a certain product, Carcosa, by one Geoffrey McKinney (to which I choose not to link — I’m sure you won’t have much trouble finding it, if you care to). It seems this unofficial OD&D supplement contains descriptions of various sorcerous rituals, some of which include rather nasty elements… one of them involving the multiple rape and murder of an eleven-year-old. Cue flames from many people, some of whom have never seen the product, followed by counter-flames from other people, who feel for whatever reason such an element is justified as part of their game.
I’m not going to say much about that, directly… ultimately, the game’s theirs. I wouldn’t want my PCs playing out such a ritual “onstage”, as Geoffrey’s PCs did — but I run heroic games in the first place, so it wouldn’t even come up. How about NPCs? Maybe, offscreen. I’ve had evil societies deal with slavery, human sacrifice, and crimes of all sorts up to and including outright genocide. The key thing, in my mind, being that these are things for the characters to oppose and perhaps, at least on a small scale, prevent, rather than to wholeheartedly participate in.
Leaving aside the campaign report (which I find in poor taste, but… it’s not my game), I can’t muster up a whole lot of righteous indignation at the inclusion of such things. Encouraging PCs to engage in them, that’s creepy, but it’s your business what you play out in your private fantasies. As far as the product itself (which I have seen a copy of, and which I will not purchase): the only thing I really found at all offensive about it was the decision to subtitle it Supplement V. That’s chutzpah. It’s also ultimately minor.
The cynic in me wonders whether that, and the child sacrifice, might not have been planned. No such thing as bad publicity, after all — and it’s certainly got publicity, now. But anyway, on to the main point.
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