Tulip posted:

ninjoatse.cx posted:

I think comics ,TTRPGs, and books often fall into escapist fantasy, usually in that priority. Nothing wrong with escapist fantasy.

If my reality was filled with people who were fun and interesting and enough adventure to last every day, I doubt I'd spend a single minute pretending to be a cybered up Elf from the future.

Covok posted:

https://twitter.com/KamalaKaraA1/status/1484332779387035653

Hiro Protagonist posted:

Has anyone played Cypher System and made it work? I played in a Numenera campaign for a year and a half and the GM just couldn't make it work really, at least in my opinion. I felt like the system was trash, but I also felt like it was actually really close to actually being an interesting system. Like, some home rules making 2 types of XP, so players actually spend it, make cyphers more conceptual so they actually make sense to use. There are things I increasing like on reflection, like how it does enemy stats, and I can see how the adjective-noun-verb character creation makes characters clear (if you actually find a good combo).

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Search results expire, don't they?

mellonbread posted:

I don't recall what version of the system it was, but it felt like 3e D20 with a thin layer of science fiction overtop. There was a fighter class and a thief class and a mage class, and the latter was godlike while the former two struggled to do anything.

mellonbread posted:

I played Numenera at the university RPG club exactly once. I don't recall what version of the system it was, but it felt like 3e D20 with a thin layer of science fiction overtop. There was a fighter class and a thief class and a mage class, and the latter was godlike while the former two struggled to do anything. The eponymous Cyphers were the best part.

Hiro Protagonist posted:

Has anyone played Cypher System and made it work?

PurpleXVI posted:

I find it hard to decide which is the more realistic perception. On the one hand, going by politics as-declared, right-wing movements should be pretty big fans of vigilante lawmen(often in some way rich or privileged), going around beating up poor people committing financial/property crime to try and survive. On the other hand, plenty of right-wing governments would be real worried about the existence of a left-leaning superhero that couldn't just be put down with water cannons, pepper spray and casual police violence.

As heroes exist in most comics I've encountered, dealing entirely with symptoms and only rarely paying attention to systemic issues that drive people to crime, like poverty, lack of education, poor social safety nets, etc. and often cooperating to a lesser or greater extent with the police, it would feel like they'd generally be darlings of the right as opposed to friends of the left.

Baked in there it also feels like most superhero stories are to some extent based around the idea that only these special empowered people can deal with the crises presented at all: Police, military, citizen militias or whatever group of normal people with training, experience and teamwork will never be able to do what one exceptional person with zero backup can do. Something in that also just feels inherently right-wing, both the idea that you don't need a team or a society to back you up to resolve big issues and also the idea of fundamental exceptionality.

drrockso20 posted:

More superhero settings need to steal from Astro City

Libertad! posted:

outside of anarchists, there's a lot of socialists who are perfectly fine with LEO cooperation in certain circumstances. Look at [...] people saying to throw the book at the Capitol rioters

Whybird posted:

I agree with almost everything you posted but I want to pick you up on this specific thing: you can be opposed to the police force while still agitating for the police force to serve the purpose they claim to exist to serve. "They shouldn't exist, but if we're stuck with them can they at least do their job?" isn't a contradiction.

Agoat posted:

Is this a good time to post about my future SWAT tabletop game I'm making

Libertad! posted:

This isn't just a flaw of Freedom City or superhero RPGs; the whole "Reed Richards can't cure cancer or else we'll become a sci-fi utopia" is a bit of an absurd argument when you realize how far technology has traveled since the Golden Age of Comics yet we still have problems. It's effectively an Appeal to Tradition, which can seem and be right-wing, although it's purely on aesthetics rather than ideology while still being wrong.

And I'm sorry if this post looks like a ramble, I just had a bunch of thoughts I wanted to edit just right.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Necessary Evil (the first Savage Worlds superhero thing) had all the heroes be flat out captured or killed by alien invaders and the only supers left were 2nd and 3rd string villains who had to save the world.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Weirdly enough this is kinda where the MCU is more or less by accident, with all the big-name heroes dead or out of action after Thanos. (lol, Black Panther)

On another note, was looking at some jokes about D&D styled resurrection mechanics, and reminded of one thing Order of the Stick does well; exploring the implications of Raise Dead and such spells in a world where they're known quantities and run by certain mechanics. Certain caveats like having a vague idea of the kind of person who's reviving you, and being able to choose whether or not you come back, make a BIG difference- and mean the spell is effectively a crapshoot on anyone who's not a party member who you know meta-knowledge wise wants to come back to resume the adventures. Especially when they're already literally in their own personal Heaven. Like, when they try to revive Lord Hinjo who's already lived a full life and has no interest in coming back to deal with loose ends when just surviving that long was hard enough, or in the particular tragic case of Roy's brother who was too young to really understand the implications. And played with later when one character does decide to come back to life when they've earned a perfectly honourable death because they think it's worth it.

I suppose Dragon Ball, which plays death even more cheaply, has similar things going on, where Goku himself at one point chooses to stay dead. (for a while)

Splicer posted:

Well your basic D&D resurrections cost hundreds or thousands of GP, so yeah pretty much beyond the reach of your average peasant. It only becomes weird when allies of PCs or nobility get involved, at which point it immediately gets incredibly weird.

Whybird posted:

Sometime I'd like to run a fantasy RP campaign where the limit on resurrection is that the cost of magical components doubles each time. Your first resurrection costs about a year's wages for an average peasant in magical components, which isn't so much of a problem for the 1% that adventurers represent, but by the time you've had your tenth it's over a thousand and climbing.

quote:

Special: You can cast this spell only once per level, and a limited number of times in your life. You must have most of the corpse available to cast the spell. There’s no time limit on resurrecting a dead PC, so long as you have the corpse.

Effect: You can bring a creature back to life in more or less normal condition, with varying levels of recovery.

Limited Casting: The first time in your life that you use the spell, you can cast it with a single standard action. Using the spell removes one of your spell slots until you gain a level. (You get one less spell per full heal-up.) The person you are resurrecting comes back at roughly half strength, e.g. expending half their recoveries, being dazed (save ends), and, for each ability, having a 50% chance that it is expended.

The second time in your life you cast the spell, it takes at least three or four rounds and costs you roughly half your hit points and daily powers/spells. The person you are resurrecting comes back at something like one-quarter strength.

The third time you cast the spell it has to be as a ritual. The spell chews you up and leaves you with only a few hit points, then gnaws at the person you have resurrected, who takes days to recover well enough to qualify as an adventurer or combatant.

The fourth time you cast the spell it nearly kills you. The resurrection succeeds but the person you’ve resurrected is going to be a mess for a month or more, regardless of any other magic you use.

The fifth time you resurrect someone, that’s the end of your story and you die. There’s only a 50% chance that the resurrection spell works on the target. You’ve used up your quota of resurrection magic. You’re not coming back via this spell, either.

Limited Resurrection: If the target of your resurrection spell has been resurrected more times than you have cast the spell, there is a 50% chance that the experience will play out using their number of resurrections instead of the number of times you have cast the spell.

Magnetic North posted:

Yeah, it's the balancing act of "narratively death needs to hold significance for adventures to be satisfying" and "practically if magic actually existed tons of effort would be put in to develop a way to bring back the dead". That's a dissonance I don't envy trying to square.

Splicer posted:

Resurrection spells should not exist. They're a symptom of a whole bunch of problems with D&D and its clones, including but not limited to random, dice-driven deaths and the "everything's a spell" mentality.

Strom Cuzewon posted:

D&D really needs to introduce a "beaten to within an inch of their life, seriously, tie em to a bier and drag em to a doctor" status effect. It would solve so many problems.

Siivola posted:

Why bother? If they need time to recuperate, they're as good as dead and the player needs to roll a new character anyway.

Splicer posted:

If it is something that you can just learn to do then "death isn't real" needs to be integrated into your settting from the ground up. You can't have a generic pseudo-medieval tragic death setting and "bring back from the dead" something you can just take as a levelup benny.

Splicer posted:

Doctor just waves his hands and fixes them up overnight. "No such thing as long term injury" doesn't have the same emotional and narrative impact as "more like the dim weeper amirite"

Siivola posted:

In that case, double why bother? That's what being at zero hit points is. You don't need to add rules to remove the dying rules.

Siivola posted:

Why bother? If they need time to recuperate, they're as good as dead and the player needs to roll a new character anyway.

Splicer posted:

No, being at 0 hit points paradoxically both means you're three stiff breezes away from the long sleep AND that the most bargain basement 1hp paladin bump means you can help set up camp and take third watch.

Andrast posted:

Do you really need to have rules for needing long term care? It's a goddamn tabletop rpg