Slaunyeh

Perhaps, but I think you'd need to have read a comic book to know that. She's presented as a normal (if really well trained) person on a team of super-powered individuals (even Hawkeye gets to be magically good with his bow). As shown in the movie, she's the only woman, and the only one without powers, on the team.

There's at least one scene with him and Tywin, in season 2. I didn't really notice him 'till Tywin addressed him as "Clegane", before sending him out to hunt down the Brotherhood. Maybe I expected him to be bigger, I don't know.

It should award that badge for not running that arc, and take it away if you ever do.

I say, carbon freeze him and lock him up in Azuria's vault.

3.5 did exactly the wrong thing to fix the issue. It nerfed specific spells (some warranted, some completely out of left field) rather than addressing the cause of the imbalance. 3.5 also got rid of most save-or-die spells, which I think was a positive move. Even if the replacement, save-or-take-a-bit-of-damage, was a kinda boring change.

Anywho, the magic chapter in this D&D Next playtest package is very brief, so we won't know what they will be doing for sure, yet. One thing of note, however, is the 'ritual magic' system, which essentially allow you to cast certain spells as rituals (which makes them take a long time to cast, and possibly have costly material components) without having memorized those spells. That's a neat feature for certain out-of-combat spells that can be painful to "waste" memorization slots on.

Additionally, there was a hint (though no examples provided) that certain spells cast with higher-level spell slots may have improved effects. Finally, I noticed that not a single spell provided in this package, with Magic Missile as the sole exception, scaled with caster level in any way. This worries me a little bit. Looking forward to seeing more of the magic system.

I think the problem with a list like this, and the challenge Marvel is facing after a movie like the Avengers, is that I - as a representative of the movie-going public that doesn't follow comic books religiously - haven't heard of any of these heroines. None of them appear to have any kind of broader market appeal, possibly except Spider-Girl and She-Hulk (and only because they are gender-bender knockoffs of the 'real' version that everyone already knows.)

I think that if you want to introduce a new heroine, with a possible tie-in for the next Avengers movie, Ms. Marvel would make a good choice. But I don't really have anything to base that on.

I think, in this case, Marvel would technically be infringing on NCSoft. More to the point, if said Marvel writer one day decided that he liked his CoH character so much that he wanted to add it, background, looks and all, to the X-Men roster, this would be an infringement against NCSoft.

As for what NCSoft would do about this kind of case, were it ever to be discovered, I don't know. I'd guess option D above: Do nothing, but prepare evidence in case Marvel ever makes noise about it (or anything else for that matter, counter-suing is always fun).

Well. 3e took the spells, in many cases word-by-word, from AD&D and imported them directly into 3e. This had two implications: First, since spells essentially didn't change, an AD&D spell did the same damage as a 3e spell (say, 10d6 for a fireball), while 3e also significantly boosted the HP of player characters and monsters. This seriously tipped the balance in favour of "control" spells over "blasting" spells. Secondly, while 3e kept most of the old spells as-is, they removed most of the mechanics around spellcasting that was there to inconvenience spellcasters. Such as casting times and the ease of being interrupted in combat. I'm not saying AD&D perfectly balanced magic vs. martial classes (AD&D did very little perfectly ), but 3e basically just took the existing system and removed the old attempts at keeping it reigned in. For all the innovation in 3e, the magic system itself was barely touched at all.

Now, 5e seems to introduce some old mechanics to make spellcasting more inconvenient, or at least require more planning. Such as getting hit in combat having an adverse effect on your spellcasting in the following turn. There's also an article where that Mike Mearls guy is discussing nerfing spellcasting (or at least wizard spellcasting, because we all know druids/clerics are just fine), but I hope it doesn't come to quite that extreme.

Personally, I think the magic system worked fine in 3e. I'd hope that any attempt to "fix" the perceived imbalance between casters and non-casters would focus more on making spellcasting more inconvenient and/or harder to pull off, than on just nerfing spells into pointlessness.

More specifically, Nike is the goddess of strength, speed, and victory. It's the perfect brand name.

Hopefully it's just a working title. Otherwise it'd get really awkard in 2014 when they start work on 6ed :P

It is less cheesy pulp action, and more cheesy pulp comedy.

"...you touched Pete's piece! Nobody touches Pete's piece!!"

To be fair, that's two different situations. If you had a character called Frostfire, before the CoH writing team made up a character with that name (and honestly, I expect this happens every time they introduce a new NPC), you should be fine. I vaguely recall a rumour from when Citadel got his new name, but I don't recall any specifics.

In my case, Anti-Matter already existed in lore. And, probably, somewhere in the 40+ game. I just wasn't aware of it 'till much later. But it was still ruled as being okay. Maybe because Antimatter and Anti-Matter are different enough names, or because they're fairly lenient about their own NPCs since they own everything we create in-game anyway, so it's not like I could claim ownership of either character. Or maybe you get brownie points for reporting yourself.

I don't know.

I remember, back in 2004, one of my first characters was a rad/rad defender... named Antimatter. I'm a slow leveller, so it took years (and a reroll to a rad/rad corruptor) before I realized that there was praetorian NPC named Anti-Matter (fun fact, I found out during an event in Pocket D where Posi was playing Anti-Matter. I don't know which of us was more weirded out).

So. Doh! I actually reported myself right away, and a couple of days later got a message from a GM saying it was fine. So I got to keep that name. I still have the character on virtue, though I eventually renamed him anyway.

Now now, Orcs and Orks are two different things to Games Workshop.

Perhaps not entirely related, but this made me think of an important story point regarding signature characters: If a signature character acts counter to their (described) personality every time you meet them (perhaps for very good story-related reasons), you're really just confusing people. A signature character should represent what the writer wants them to be most of the time, for any aberrant behaviour to have any significant impact.

This is also my main grief with the whole concept of co-op "villains saving the world again" thing. I don't mind the idea of it. It can make for a fine story twist. But if every story revolves around villains acting like heroes, the whole plot twist, that could have worked quite well, becomes entirely meaningless.

As it is, the overall story in CoH is rapidly moving towards the perfect co-op moment between heroes and villains: the Battalion. And we're already sick and tired of that particular story 'twist'. I think that's a darn shame.

In short: Characters (PCs and NPCs alike) should occasionally have the opportunity to go 'against their nature'. But that only makes sense if there's enough in-game story to establish that nature in the first place.

*googles*

Huh, that must be the prettiest Dane I've never heard about.

I actually did too, and was slightly disappointed that there was no game of paintball assassin to round off the semester. However, I also figured it must be hard to come up with new action genres to spoof without making it too similar to previous seasons, so I can understand why they didn't.

But the paintball episodes have to be some of my all-around favourite episodes of the show (Annie was unbelievably awesome as the Ace of Hearts).

It even has 'dark' and 'light' elves (also, the distinction between elves and dwarves is somewhat vague).