Der PigDog's PigBlog

Me hating on point-buy and character builds after only playing D&D 4e I'm going to play a few sessions of Champions Now with Vivit, Jon, and Riku. In that game, players make a detailed character before play, using some extremely cumbersome point-buy interfaces and byzantine rules. Thus I made a Champions Now character, and learned some of the rules to the game. This was a bit like pulling teeth at first, but now I am wholly on board.  Let's start with a brief review of Eero's article on the pitfalls of point-buy design , to wit: Optimization is encouraged but not taught Random access interface chokes up Point-pricing is arbitrary Flaws are externally motivated Most point-buys are dull His discussion of these flaws leads into the "royal conundrum": why are we using point-buy at all? In this blog post, I won't be able to answer all these questions fully, but I'll give them a go and talk about what I like about the game after making a character for it. ...

The first half anyway. As is usual in these superhero movies, it gets worse the longer you think about it. 3/5. Sorry folks, this review is lower quality than you might be used to getting from this blog, it's been a long day.  The film lacks thematic unity; its first half sets up really interesting, incisive questions, and then the back half ignores them in favor of yet another "destroy a cgi city with little or no actual human cost" drearily familiar from Marvel. (Yeah there's also the invasion sequence in not-Palestine/Ukraine by not-Russia/Israel, but that's very clearly  not  the actual climax of the movie, just a bit of added stakes. Plenty of brown people die in that fight scene, off-screen.) Superman's interview with Lois was the height of the movie. I keep trying to remember the character's name, I know it's not Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Fuck. Great chemistry. Big fan of Rachel Brosnahan going back to House of Cards. This whole line of question...

Making a character for  Champions Now  by Ron Edwards. Two statements from Jon H:  Super powers come from outer space or other dimension You can’t choose your family When I make a character in this game I'm supposed to bounce back and forth between three topics: person, powers, and problems. This has gotta be someone likeable, someone I'd actually want to read about in the comics. Drafting  I wrote up the following a month and a half ago: My guy is a robot from space. He was created to be some kind of perfect being by some kind of unstable space scientist/sorcerer. Unfortunately he metaphysically smashed into a SpaceX shuttle and metaphysically fused with an astronaut there. Now he's half human half robot. Not in a creepy cyborg way either -- he shifts back and forth. He has the astronaut's memories (and emotions?) but none of the astronaut's intuitive understanding of earth matters. For powers I'm thinking flight, minor invulnerability (he's made of badass ...