Captain_Photon

No, no, no, that's the Kwisatz Haderach.

I was thinking maybe they were getting ready to shovel all this Praetorian RP stuff over to Roleplaying or Forum Games, but maybe.

His powers had the best sound effect on the show, though, if you don't count "Inuk-chuk!" as a sound effect.

Well, by definition, if he's handing it to you, he must be there. If you wanted to leave him that out while constructing the scenario, you'd have to say he was providing you with a weapon or something similarly nonspecific.

Manticore does not want to wife-swap with you, even if you are a ninja.

... what, as in grown without the use of artificial fertilizer?

Yeah, everyone knows that only works in the southern hemisphere.

Not that he'll be able to tell his therapist anything once Superman gets done heat-visioning the top of his head off.

And reset your newspaper/police scanner mission choices without having to leave the zone and come back.

No, it's a fair point. When I said "superhero comics", I was talking largely about the Big Two's comics of, oh say the late Silver Age, because that's what I think of when I think "superhero comics" - because that was when I was in what the marketing people would call the prime target demo.

That said, the City of Heroes universe has always been pretty apparently reflective of that same era. CoH's world design, its... its flavor owes a lot to the Mighty Marvel era and its pre-Crisis counterpart over at DC. (I suspect most, if not all, of the original designers were also of about that same age, comics-fan-wise.) So what you just said - "it wasn't there before, so it feels odd to have it now" - holds just as true for the CoH universe, albeit on a more compressed "Internet time" scale. It just feels wrong to start screwing around with Deep Musings on the Nature of Right and Wrong after five years of two-fisted, punch-the-Nazis-in-their-face Silver Age-style action.

Whoa, jeez, you can take your bowie knife out of my forehead now. I didn't think I had to preface every remark I made with a disclaimer that everything I'm saying is my opinion, not a proof of Fermat's last theorem.

We've got that. Several variations on that, in fact. Look under "Robes".

Well, sure. Sitting in the comfort of my own living room, knowing that there's not a chance in hell that it's a decision I will ever actually face, it's easy enough to say "uh, well, g'bye, hundreds of thousands!" In-character, though? Cap would look for Option 3, and if he didn't find it he'd probably end up being one of the millions. He's an idealist. That's why he's a superhero.

Thank you. You've perfectly summed up what I was just groping for a way to articulate (apart from saying "lot a" when you meant "look at" ).

Ugh, no, see, that just falls into the equally irritating "turns out there are no heroes, Man is an animal, society is a veneer stretched over the law of the jungle" trap. That kind of thing is just as validly explorable, philosophically speaking, but also just as out of place in the simple world of the superhero.

Seriously, I'm just tired of all the postmodern self-examination in today's pop culture. It's why I love Atomic Robo so much. Those guys still get it: Nazis are bad, punch them in their face, the end.

How much time have I got? Because I've only got a Mossberg 500 and a Browning Hi-Power, so that's gonna take me a while.

That sounds like it would take... a while. And I can't agree with anything that involves taking the old "Boo! Are you scared?" stance, on basic principle.

Hilarious, to the point where I wish no one (dev or player) had thought of it until it started happening in beta, but kind of silly.

Well, if that certain other game is an MMO, presumably the freakin point is that you can see everybody else's character from the front.

Yes.

That does please me, to be honest, though I'm sorry it makes you sad. I just don't think all that postmodern oh-morality-is-such-a-continuum-of-greys business belongs in a superhero comic universe. In the real world, sure, but I'm here to get away from the real world, not duplicate it with the volume turned up.

By an odd coincidence, the original Flares animation did involve the character standing up straight, though instead of sweeping a hand down he would then raise both of them to about shoulder height in a sort of boxing-MC let's-get-ready-to-rumble pose. It made one look an absolute prat, which is why they got rid of it for PCs (although you can still see some NPCs, such as Hellion bosses and CoT Behemoth Lords, do it).

Well, yes, obviously. What Golden Girl is trying to point out is that they're wrong.

Look, this is a game based on superhero comics. For all that GR is supposed to be about moral ambiguity, moral ambiguity is not a theme that plays particularly well in superhero comics. It loads them up with a lot of philosophical claptrap that frankly belongs in some other genre. As such, I for one hope that GR's writing goes really light on it.

A superhero comic is about punching bad guys in the face, and in such comics, iron-fisted hyper-authoritarians are bad guys regardless of in which precise way they wave their hands around while explaining to you why they do it while waiting for the deathtrap you're caught in to finish warming up. Anything else is just overintellectualizing a genre whose chief charm is its refreshing lack of intellectual crap.