Poll of the Day > A Geektivus For The Rest Of Us

(+) Yeah! (+)

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yeah, but I always start working out backstory in my head before I ever even consider race and class (let alone skills), so while I COULD theoretically pick a Dex skill heavy Background (like Urchin) to game the system, I'm pretty much psychologically incapable of ever doing so.

Backgrounds give you skills, some basic starting equipment, and a minor one-off ability to use once a session (also personality traits if you're boring).
If you want to actually do anything with your character to actually have useful stuff, just take it. It's fine, you can join everyone else by ignoring everything else from backgrounds anyway.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And, to be fair, there's also the fact that good DMs will cater their games to the players. The main reason why groups like the ones on Critical Role or Dice Camera Action weren't TPK'd a long time ago is because their DMs tailor their adventures to the group as played, rather than for a hypothetical fully-optimized group of similar classes and levels.

Sure, but then you're still ignoring part of the fun of DnD: the mechanics and what you can do with it.
At the end of the day. it's fun to look through stuff, there's a reason why I just like looking at Magic cards even if I never will play them or see them ever again. It's fun to just learn.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also, as a complete aside (well, not a complete aside, it sort of ties into the whole worldbuilding thing we were talking about), before I started thinking about working out the Paladin in my head, I was thinking about the idea of constructing an entire fantasy calendar and zodiac based on different assumptions (namely, a universal 30-day month model with each month consisting of three "tendays", with solstices and equinoxes as separate days, ignoring the unaccounted for 1.25 days because f*** it, it's not Earth).

Bleh, that's the sort of naval gazing stuff that I can never get behind. It doesn't matter to the story at all and it just sort of obfuscates just getting into the characters because you have to remember useless facts. Nobody can really do anything with it.
You just can get more out of it by working on culture/characters/relationships.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

So I was sort of making a "Pelor, but not really Pelor" sort of god of protection in my head, but couldn't decide if it should be Corellon's son or Corellon's daughter.

I... don't actually like directly gendering my gods. I think it's much more interesting if they are personified power from the collective devotion of their followers. So all of their followers can think that their god is a man/woman, but the god can choose to have a male/female/gender neutral form, after all, they're not real.
Then you can have more fun liberally shape-shifting them to do stuff.

Zeus posted...

For general characterization, I'm tempted to make suggestions but I'm not sure what would really fit within the existing canon and, quite honestly, I hate additions who feel off-type.

lolcanon
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

As for being universal, it kind of makes sense in a setting where you're explicitly saying that "Common" exists as a language and has spread to nearly every civilized land the players will ever reach, because in turn traders would almost certainly refer to months and other units of time in conversations, which would then culturally spread over time. So while you might still have various regions referring to a given month by its original regional name, those people would also fully recognize the more common usage - and in time, the common usage would likely grow to replace the regional (which is what happened in our world).

This is something I recently learned in history that I think would actually be a really fun idea to include in DnD.
Apparently when the Spanish Conquistadors were off stomping/raiding their way through inner Mexico they would post up signs in Latin saying "surrender and live" or whatever garbage they were saying to justify murder/stealing. That's because they legitimately believed that Latin was the base universal language (being the language of God) that everyone knew and by posting their warning everyone would understand it and they just chose to not follow the warning.
Meaning a tribe of people could be sitting around, and poof, understand Latin perfectly (or at least the leaders would).

That's what I want to do with Common.
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shadowsword87 posted...

Backgrounds give you skills, some basic starting equipment, and a minor one-off ability to use once a session (also personality traits if you're boring).

Yeah, but for me, Backgrounds merely quantify the backstory I already had in mind for a character long before I ever started looking at race or class options. My standard method is more like coming up with the rough concept ("I feel like playing an orphan who grew up on the streets and eventually became a mercenary for hire"), then spinning that out into a more defined framework ("He's a half-elf, but he's more brawler than thief, so I'll go Fighter instead of Rogue"), then backfit the Background ("He's a street orphan, so Urchin fits best"). At most, I might start in the middle, and say "Hey, I'm going to play a healer" and then build that Cleric from the ground up in my head before starting to stat them out.

Going the other way and coming up with a Background after everything else and THEN trying to work it backwards into a story is pretty much anathema to me in every conceivable way.

Keep in mind, you're talking to the person who took about a week and a half to make a D&D character because all of the backstory had to be worked out in advance. I'm the sort of person who could write 37 pages of backstory for a character before I even put a single dot into stats.

Hell, in Nudo's game I was constructing entire continents and cultures from the ground up to justify my characters before I ever thought about whether they were going to be Sorcerers or Warlocks or Wizards or whatever.



shadowsword87 posted...

If you want to actually do anything with your character to actually have useful stuff, just take it. It's fine, you can join everyone else by ignoring everything else from backgrounds anyway.

If I ever tried to ignore backstory for one of my characters, I think I would suffer an aneurysm. Blood would just be gushing all over the gaming table and all your books.

Retconning something to fit events in play to make for a better story is fine. Adjusting something after the fact because the DM wants to tinker with something is fine. But blatantly ignoring the narrative implications of something runs counter to pretty much every single reason I RP in the first place.


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shadowsword87 posted...

Sure, but then you're still ignoring part of the fun of DnD: the mechanics and what you can do with it.

Fun for you, sure. But for me that part of play is more like getting teeth pulled.

Remember, there's a reason why I prefer freeform. For all that rules CAN serve a purpose, I don't consider them necessary, and I definitely don't consider them the part of the experience that actually makes me want to HAVE that experience. I mostly suffer through rules as a necessary evil used to mediate disputes between players, not because I find the rules inherently fun in and of themselves.

In a similar vein, it's why I played BioWare games and the Witcher on the lowest difficulty setting. I didn't want to be distracted by bullshit like combat tactics or practical stat builds or proper timed use of strategic abilities - I wanted to wade through combat so I could get to the next dialogue choice and further the story.

I could play a campaign with 40+ sessions and not a single combat and probably be perfectly happy.

To be honest, if I went back and reviewed most of my online Amber games, they might actually come close to meeting that bar. I know there were a LOT of scenes that basically boiled down to "two or three characters talk about stuff that might have happened somewhere else and gossip about people who aren't there". I don't actually remember all that many combat scenes, especially for certain characters.

(Granted, there were also characters who seemed to have nothing but conflict and combat every scene, but they were also portrayed as being pretty cursed by fate because of it, or just really unhappy about all the people and things constantly trying to kill them.)



shadowsword87 posted...

At the end of the day. it's fun to look through stuff, there's a reason why I just like looking at Magic cards even if I never will play them or see them ever again. It's fun to just learn.

With Magic I'm more inclined to pay attention to mechanics over flavor, but even then I've always had an interest in the metaplot (at least until it got stupid). So much so that I leapt at reading the comics when they were a thing, and preferred certain sets over others less because of the utility of the cards and more because of the set's narrative.

With L5R I used to follow the card game religiously while never having played a single game and understanding very few of the rules, because I was far more interested in the narrative of play and how it affected the setting and metaplot of the RPG.

I also have a TON of Magic and L5R novels.

But even beyond that, on at least a few occasions I worked out ways to completely alter the rules of Magic to make it more of a tool for pure RP, with players essentially playing Planeswalkers going through a D&D adventure, with their deck/cards representing their abilities and starting with a limited and defined mana pool (ie, not drawing and playing lands), and with most of the randomness removed (ie, not drawing a hand of playable spells, but having a set collection of spells available at all times akin to D&D Wizard spells and spell slots). And the setting/narrative of the game was built around existing setting details and metaplot from the flavor text.

In the opposite vein, I once had a Changeling character whose entire power set was basically casting Fae spells via Magic cards, which were sort of treated like an esoteric Tarot deck more than a collectible card game (because Changeling is weird like that).


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shadowsword87 posted...

Bleh, that's the sort of naval gazing stuff that I can never get behind. It doesn't matter to the story at all and it just sort of obfuscates just getting into the characters because you have to remember useless facts. Nobody can really do anything with it.

That's on the GM, though. It's not hard to translate that sort of world detail into narrative depth or mechanical depth. Maybe it's common in your world for drunk men in taverns to sloppily hit on women by asking them what their sign is. Or perhaps there's an ancient prophecy that someone born under the sign of the Plow will eventually overthrow a corrupt Emperor (and perhaps said Emperor makes a point of killing all babies born in a certain month?). Or a puzzle in an ancient tomb that requires the PCs to know how to put the signs in order, or match them to something they represent. Even Pratchett made time to mention that Rincewind was born under "The Small Boring Group of Faint Stars" to emphasize just how much of a non-entity he was.

In a gameplay sense, The Elder Scrolls sort of points the way in having each sign have a specific ability, stat boost, or other power tied to it, that players born under that sign can tap into. In D&D terms, it wouldn't be hard to say that Aquarius gives a PC a +1 Int, or Virgo a +1 Cha, and so on - only using different terms. Or maybe Sagittarius favors archers with a metaphysical luck that gives them a boost to rolls to hit. Or maybe Leo gets to battle roar once per day and inspire themselves or an ally. And so on.

The only real limits are what you choose to do with it.

And like I said concerning the Paladin, it's not likely I'm going to use any of this in a game anyway, so pretty much ALL of this is navel-gazing anyway.

Or "bored in the shower/on the toilet/waiting in line at the grocery store" sort of thinking. Just a way to engage creativity and pass time.



shadowsword87 posted...

You just can get more out of it by working on culture/characters/relationships.

Who says I can't do both?

Hell, part of my concept for the zodiac was that every constellation was at least somewhat based on real historical people, who were heroes or villains of their own age, and who were later immortalized in the stars (very similar to how the Greeks viewed constellations in general). Which means I'm already working out a dozen characters in my head as inspirations for the signs, which in turn can influence culture (at least one of the inspirations founded their own empire, which either still exists or is in ruins that can be explored), characters (one of the inspirations sired children, leading to an entire bloodline with special gifts, responsibilities, or enemies), or relationships (what if two current characters are sort of playing out a drama similar to that of one of the star pairings? Or one character sort of idolizes the myth of a given sign and seeks to emulate it deliberately?).

And as a mechanic, it wouldn't be difficult to run that the same way L5R handled "Ancestors" as a mechanic, wherein you can gain both positive and negative backstory aspects from an affinity to a certain sign.


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shadowsword87 posted...

I... don't actually like directly gendering my gods. I think it's much more interesting if they are personified power from the collective devotion of their followers. So all of their followers can think that their god is a man/woman, but the god can choose to have a male/female/gender neutral form, after all, they're not real.

Then you can have more fun liberally shape-shifting them to do stuff.

The problem is, the gods as described aren't really the gods. The gods as described are pretty explicitly the form those gods choose to manifest to their followers, and the lens through which their followers see them and represent them in culture and worship. And those representations almost ALWAYS have gender (and other personality or physical traits that are fairly consistent).

Even in real history, gods like Zeus could turn into a swan, a bull, a cloud, or a "shower of gold" (and even into a copy of Artemis to seduce one of Artemis' followers), but the Greeks would always describe him as being male. And Loki turned into a mare, had sex with a stallion, and gave birth to a horse, but he was still MALE in Norse eyes. For all modern talk of gender flexibility or the tendency to see gods as being more ineffable or formless, for most of human history the gods were very much human in nature if not in scope. They were basically versions of what you'd get if a bunch of humans had cosmic power (which is why so many of them fought, screwed, and got drunk all the time).

True, you could have a scenario where a divine glowing ball of energy chooses to manifest as a young woman clad in golden armor to one civilization but as an old greybearded dude to a different group, but those groups are still going to describe their god as BEING that and not "Well, you know, divinity and all that, we should refuse to represent our god with physical traits because physicality is an illusion for a being of pure energy and thought." No, they're going to worship Lady Trueheart or Lord Grumbleduke.

So even if we have to preface it by saying something like, "This is a description of the god's usual chosen manifestation form, and not their "natural" form", they're still going to have a preferred body type and appearance that's going to be the default their worshipers tend to see them as.

(And honestly, the idea of gods as beings of pure thought or energy is very modern, and tends to clash with fantasy settings - most D&D gods are pretty inherently more like the Greek or Norse gods they were copied from, in that they're more like physical beings with cosmic powers rather than cosmic beings that occasionally take on physical form.)

Granted, it's entirely possible for a specific given god to deliberately appear as a different gender every time it shows up, or as something androgynous like Desire of the Endless, or even as an amorphous blob of goo, but most gods are going to pick a form and be consistent with it, and most worshipers (especially Clerics and Paladins) are going to have a very clear image in their minds of what their god looks like.

And with elves, it's implied their gods definitely look like them, because they're not Corellon's magical creations as much as they are his metaphysical descendants.


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shadowsword87 posted...

Apparently when the Spanish Conquistadors were off stomping/raiding their way through inner Mexico they would post up signs in Latin saying "surrender and live" or whatever garbage they were saying to justify murder/stealing. That's because they legitimately believed that Latin was the base universal language (being the language of God) that everyone knew and by posting their warning everyone would understand it and they just chose to not follow the warning.

Meaning a tribe of people could be sitting around, and poof, understand Latin perfectly (or at least the leaders would).

The trick there is that some of them might have CLAIMED that, but also knew full well that they were lying, and were only using it as a thinly-veiled justification to murder the people who had all the gold.

There's also the possibility that some might believe that every human was CAPABLE of learning Latin, and that anyone who didn't was essentially a savage who was either too ignorant to learn (and thus little more than an animal) or deliberately chose not to (in which case, fuck 'em), which is a slightly different interpretation.

Either way, though, you start to border on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNmIQX_ImgM&t=0m50s


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

by contrast, dwarves are like 99% beards and axes).

idk, I heard from a certain ranger/king that even dwarven women have beards.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

(On the other hand, in the Greek pantheon Athena was the goddess of "good" war while Ares was the god of "bad" war, while their god of healing and medicine was male, so maybe it's not as unrealistic as one might think.)

Well, she was more associated with wisdom and the arts. The war bit more reflected Athens' success when it came to holding its own against rivals.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Feel free to throw out whatever ideas or suggestions you like. At worst I just ignore them all, at best, I might take an idea, or an idea might trigger an entirely different idea or way of thinking for me.

That's part of what I love best about brainstorming. Multiple people throwing out ideas, one idea playing off others, setting off a chain of new ideas and modes of thinking, changing perspectives, and generally creating a wealth of ideas to pick and choose from.

Plus, like I said, in the grand scheme of things this probably doesn't really matter, since I likely won't ever do anything with the idea anyway in the long run.

Awesome. Now the only problem is I *forgot* what I had intended to say earlier, other than joking about an elven Margaret Thatcher but I can't remember even how I was going to build into that.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I think that's actually why a lot of fantasy settings that go with their own calendar tend to bypass the real world influence entirely. ie, whereas our calendar is six months named after gods (some relatively obscure), four months that are literally just numbered 7-10, and two named after the guy who created the calendar and his adopted dad, worlds like D&D's Faerun or Tamriel in the Elder Scrolls just give all their months seasonal-sounding names like Deepwinter, First Seed, Summertide, Frostfall, and so on (or conversely, the way Native Americans named the various full moons of a year Harvest Moon, Hunter's Moon, Wolf Moon, Blue Corn Moon etc).

I more meant the day-to-day issues where one nation has its calendar and another nation has its calendar, whereas the world now pretty much just recognizes the one (thanks to international commerce). Otherwise I like the notion of tying months into seasons.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

As for being universal, it kind of makes sense in a setting where you're explicitly saying that "Common" exists as a language and has spread to nearly every civilized land the players will ever reach, because in turn traders would almost certainly refer to months and other units of time in conversations, which would then culturally spread over time. So while you might still have various regions referring to a given month by its original regional name, those people would also fully recognize the more common usage - and in time, the common usage would likely grow to replace the regional (which is what happened in our world).

Well, I'm not sure that any consistency today so much results from interactions with traders over time as much as it's been the product of government, the education system, and television (because you need a central influence for homogeny, otherwise you just get consistent regional practices). And, really, until the rise of dictionaries there was still a greater range of variation. That said, to this day the actual world doesn't really have a "common" although we have a handful of largely consistent languages.

Plus, I guess other than your ancient civilization (and Rome) examples, fantasy can always explain it away as a language which came directly from the gods or something.

And, in general, I've always accepted "common" as a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author who might otherwise have to reinvent the wheel. Granted, it would be kinda neat to have a work of fiction where all of the narrative was in plain English but then every single bit of dialogue was in the author's created language. I imagine that would sell terribly, of course, but the novelty would be amusing.

shadowsword87 posted...

lolcanon

Canon is what separates man from animal!
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Jessica Jones season 2 is coming out before Daredevil season 3? Is there no justice in the world?!

At any rate, I should probably cave and finally watch Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and the Defenders this weekend just in case some of that shit is referenced in JJ season 2. (Watching Iron Fist is more for Defenders context, though.)

Granted, since PO posted that Hitchhikers GtG series clip, I'm also probably going to watch that whole thing this weekend as well. Didn't know that version existed, but I was profoundly disappointed by the film. Already what little I've seen of this show looks far better. So thanks for inadvertently robbing me of part of my weekend >_>
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I used to love going to Borders (they usually had better selection than B&N), and I was sad to see them go.

The positive thoughts are appreciated, both of you. Borders remains my favorite workplace of all those I have inhabited, and I still miss it. Had a good eight years there before the company tanked.
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Zeus posted...

Well, I'm not sure that any consistency today so much results from interactions with traders over time as much as it's been the product of government, the education system, and television (because you need a central influence for homogeny, otherwise you just get consistent regional practices).

Well, I meant more in the sense that, originally if two adjacent cultures meet (usually via trade), it's where the beginnings of pidgin or "trade languages" start to take root, because you basically need to be able to communicate to make deals. And if someone says they need your product before January but someone else says they can't ship their goods until Kislev, but a third trader shows up who says he can ship as early as Brumaire, that's going to cause problems unless you can start to translate between the two systems (and that's even before competing systems of coinage come into play). And once you know what the other person's system is, it can at least facilitate the beginnings of that system becoming more dominant (especially if their system works better than yours does). The final step is usually a government saying "This is our official calendar now", but the first steps are usually on a much more grass roots level.

In the same sense, written language as a whole only really exists because of trade in the first place. Sure, we use writing for so many other things now - it gave rise to the entire concept of keeping track of historical events, and it can be purely artistic or philosophical - but in the early days of its formation it was almost always used solely for keeping track of how much stuff you owned or what you were going to trade someone for. It's part of why writing didn't really come into being until after the Agricultural Revolution - because before that possessions weren't really all that important a concept, and trade didn't really exist on a large scale.



Zeus posted...

And, really, until the rise of dictionaries there was still a greater range of variation.

Very true. This is also a significant part of the reason why Americans and Brits still fight to this day over which words to put Us into, or whether or not to use an S or a Z in certain words.


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Zeus posted...

That said, to this day the actual world doesn't really have a "common" although we have a handful of largely consistent languages.

Well, we literally have the phrase "lingua franca", which is a similar concept and which exists for similar reasons. And while it's true that there is currently no single global language that everyone can communicate in (the efforts of Esperanto fans notwithstanding), even in fantasy settings with "common" it's rarely universal across the entire world either. In Middle Earth you can talk to Hobbits, Rangers, Gondorians, Laketowners, elves in Rivendell, and hicks from Bree using a single language (derived from Numenorean), but you'd be a lot harder pressed to find a Haradrim or Easterlings who would understand you. In Faerun "common" (which is actually derived from a trade language based on Chondathan) is understood pretty much everywhere, but you might have a much harder time being understood in Kara-Tur or Zakhara.

As you yourself implied, there was a period of time when Latin was very much akin to a "common" language for all of Europe and surrounding regions, and that shifted towards French in the Middle Ages (hence the phrase "lingua franca" in the first place, since it literally means "French tongue"). Arabic basically became the "common" of the Middle East after the rise of Islam, and Chinese was always a similar uniting language across much of Asia.

I'd argue that English has actually become the "common" of the modern world, at least until China eventually overwhelms us with sheer population and economic power, at which point "common" might become Chinese, or some variant hybrid of the two.


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Zeus posted...

And, in general, I've always accepted "common" as a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author who might otherwise have to reinvent the wheel.

What you're describing is a "translation convention", though, which is sort of a different thing.

That's where we're expected to understand that, say, all of the hobbits in LotR aren't speaking "English", because English won't be invented for thousands of years. But the language they ARE speaking in is being translated into English for the English reader, in the same way that Tolkien translated Beowulf from Anglo-Saxon into English earlier in his career. When the book says that the hobbits walked for 5 miles, we implicitly know that THEY wouldn't consider the distance 5 miles, but would measure it in some unique scale of their own, but again, the author is translating concepts such as distance and time into our current frame of understanding as well, in the same way a translator localizes Japanese games into English by using more familiar terms and reworking idioms to make sense out of their originating culture.

"Common" on the other hand is more a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author by making it so that the characters can actually communicate with each other. Because it's utterly unlikely that hobbits who have lived their entire lives in the somewhat xenophobic shire would speak "Arnorian" (let alone Rohirrim, Gondorian, elvish, dwarvish, etc), they would effectively become completely unable to communicate with anyone the moment they step foot out of the Shire. Short of having Gandalf constantly translating every line of dialogue between characters or introducing some form of magic akin to the Babelfish in Hitchhiker's Guide, having a specific "universal" language that everyone can speak allows the story to happen without undo problems.

Thus, all of the major "good" characters (and even many orcs) speak common and can communicate, while we still see examples of various characters or cultures that DON'T speak common (such as most of the Druedain, the Men of the East and South that Sauron subverts, and so on). But they also retain their own native languages, so elves still speak elf, dwarves still speak dwarf, and so on.



Zeus posted...

Granted, it would be kinda neat to have a work of fiction where all of the narrative was in plain English but then every single bit of dialogue was in the author's created language. I imagine that would sell terribly, of course, but the novelty would be amusing.

If anyone was going to write that book, it would have been Tolkien. Considering he barely cared about the narrative and freely admitted that he mostly only invented Middle Earth and Arda in the first place to have a place where people would actually speak all of the functional languages he was creating. But even he realized that people would still need SOME way to communicate with each other across cultural lines.

On top of which, there've been at least a couple movies where all spoken dialogue is in an obscure language for which absolutely no subtitles are provided (Passion of the Christ is springing to mind).


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Zeus posted...

Jessica Jones season 2 is coming out before Daredevil season 3? Is there no justice in the world?!

Personally, I'm just annoyed that they released Daredevil season 2 on DVD but Daredevil season 1 is only available on Blu-Ray. It's like, what the fuck is the logic there?



Zeus posted...

Granted, since PO posted that Hitchhikers GtG series clip, I'm also probably going to watch that whole thing this weekend as well. Didn't know that version existed, but I was profoundly disappointed by the film. Already what little I've seen of this show looks far better. So thanks for inadvertently robbing me of part of my weekend >_>

I was also profoundly disappointed by the film.

The version I linked to was the TV version the BBC did in the 80s, which consisted of six episodes. I first watched it on PBS when I was like 6 or 7 - it was pretty much what got me into the series in the first place (and I still have it on VHS tape), especially the actual guide segments, which at the time looked awesome and really sci-fi-y:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuumnjJWFO4&t=2m06s

(Oh, how well some things age, and how poorly other things do)

It's easily far better than the movie, even with 1980s cheap TV effects (then again, I like 1970s Doctor Who, so I'm very forgiving). And you should be able to find most/all of the episodes on YouTube or elsewhere online if you look hard enough.

It's only my third favorite version of the story, though. The books are only #2 - my favorite version of the story is actually the original radio show (the first 12 episodes from the 70s, not the newer updates they did much more recently). I think it has the best writing and flow of all versions, and while the books (the first two, anyway) basically just took the story from those and expanded on it, I still think the radio show is more visceral.

The TV show basically presented the story the same way the radio show did, but with added stuff that was in the books, so it was sort of a hybrid of the two. It also suffered from the negative of replacing the actors who played Ford and Trillian (and TV Trillian is incredibly annoying while TV Ford is sort of bland), but a huge plus is that they kept the same Arthur, Xaphod, Marvin, Slartibartfast, and narrator of the Guide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LlbF6DZjQ8


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Oh, and repeated listenings of the radio show (which I also still have on tape somewhere) is a large part of why I am now absolutely incapable of hearing Journey of the Sorcerer as anything other than the Hitchhiker's Guide theme.

It's also why I tend to think of the Guide when I hear "It's a Wonderful World".


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's easily far better than the movie, even with 1980s cheap TV effects

My personal favorite bit as a former lighting tech is when Ford is in the cargo hold of the Vogon ship. He strikes a match to look for the lightswitch and for a solid 3 seconds there is a 4 pin spot aimed squarely at the back of his head instead of the wall in front of him.

From a technical perspective, that was a risky shot to set up with the equipment they had on hand, and if I had to guess, the actor playing Ford completely missed his mark on the stage in that scene. It's not like the BBC was going to waste tape reshooting that scene so they left the take in. I get the feeling that just about all the BBC productions of that era were one and done scenes anyway. It's a minor gaffe but it gets a chuckle from me everytime like the stormtrooper in Star Wars that hits his head on the door.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I get the feeling that just about all the BBC productions of that era were one and done scenes anyway.

That was definitely the case with earlier Doctor Who - actors from the show have pointed out that it was at least partly due to budget, but also because in England, there was always a sort of impression that TV should be a literal translation of stage acting, just being filmed for a larger audience. And since stage performance involved learning all of your lines and doing an entire scene in a single take, that's how most early BBC filming was done. It wasn't until later that they started to take to the idea of being able to shoot shows out of order or have multiple takes make up a single scene.

That's also why you notice William Hartnell seems to flub his lines a lot (because they'd never do retakes), though at least part of that is him deliberately acting dottering because he's an old eccentric lunatic of a man (you can see him acting much more smoothly in the episode where he plays his own evil doppelganger - a lot of the confused mannerisms he has as the Doctor are completely gone).

The actors also mentioned that, if you were in a scene and you screwed up badly enough that you REALLY wanted to do a retake, they would basically start vociferously swearing immediately after the mistake, to make the scene completely unusable and force a retake. Because no one would let you do retakes otherwise.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

That was definitely the case with earlier Doctor Who - actors from the show have pointed out that it was at least partly due to budget, but also because in England, there was always a sort of impression that TV should be a literal translation of stage acting, just being filmed for a larger audience. And since stage performance involved learning all of your lines and doing an entire scene in a single take, that's how most early BBC filming was done. It wasn't until later that they started to take to the idea of being able to shoot shows out of order or have multiple takes make up a single scene.

Under the circumstances, it's actually impressive how much work they put into the Heart of Gold sets. By contrast, you can tell that either the budget was stretched thin by the time they get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe set, or they just flat out stopped caring about set design by that point in production.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

What you're describing is a "translation convention", though, which is sort of a different thing.

Well, I suppose that, too. Also the general overall tendency to just have much of fantasy mirror real-world conventions that most people are familiar with. For example, most works have horses instead of some other kind of domesticated steed (bearing in mind that horses "evolved" to their current form through selective breeding during the domestication process; in theory, other commonly available animals could have filled the same role -- especially in the absence of horse ancestors -- but instead of getting a horse analog, we tend to just get a horse). Granted, I guess it's just a matter of world-building without doing a lot of actual building for the most part. (Notwithstanding that there are certain conventions readers want and expect.)

ParanoidObsessive posted...

"Common" on the other hand is more a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author by making it so that the characters can actually communicate with each other.

Which is the other half of my issue, given that historically people could kinda understand each other and that language would itself be a lot simpler -- there was less need for artifice because fewer complex ideas needed to be expressed.

Then, where it concerns communication, literacy tends to be waaaaay higher than it should be in countless works. Granted, in some cases it concerns heroes and villains -- who are meant to be exemplars (especially if they're noble-born and would therefore are more likely to have education; or, to a far lesser extent, merchants who would need some grasp for simple written records) -- but you'll often also have people of lower birth who you wouldn't expect to be able to read at all, let alone write. One offender was that kinda lousy book Dragon Weather which I mentioned (6-9 months ago?) in this topic some time ago where you had a culture with a social safety net so non-existent that beggars are rounded up to be used as slave labor yet so many of the characters had enough education to be able to read.

That said, reading and writing is tremendously practical as a means of communication so I can understand upping the literacy rate. And it's sometimes used to tremendous effect for storytelling, such as with Dracula where the novel consists mostly of compiled diary entries and letters iirc.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The version I linked to was the TV version the BBC did in the 80s, which consisted of six episodes. I first watched it on PBS when I was like 6 or 7 - it was pretty much what got me into the series in the first place (and I still have it on VHS tape), especially the actual guide segments, which at the time looked awesome and really sci-fi-y:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuumnjJWFO4&t=2m06s

(Oh, how well some things age, and how poorly other things do)

It's easily far better than the movie, even with 1980s cheap TV effects (then again, I like 1970s Doctor Who, so I'm very forgiving). And you should be able to find most/all of the episodes on YouTube or elsewhere online if you look hard enough.

Yeah, I kinda figured that it was a series by following one suggested video to the next until I found full episodes on YT which is how I then knew part of my weekend was going to vanish in short order =p YT is generally incredible like that, other than the fact that anything you bookmark might not be there the next time you come back thanks to DMCA takedowns.

At any rate, the demonstrated effect doesn't look *that* bad. I will confess that I had forgotten about the babelfish and never drew a connection with the translation service of the same name.

And I got into the series through the books -- starting with Hitchhiker's Guide -- and, other than the awful movie, wasn't aware of any supporting material.
---

Spoke too soon perhaps. Apparently only the *first* episode was up and it looks like the fourth is around, but the others have been taken down or otherwise aren't there. Guess I'll just have to look somewhere else later. Maybe I'll start on Luke Cage now.
---

Finished the first ep of Luke Cage and.... that was pretty awful. It has an absurdly slow start, peppered with exposition and allusions. It also introduces a lot of characters at once and I can't remember half of them although, on the plus side, a few died early so... not as many names to remember. And just when I thought things were really starting to get going, they wound up pausing for a while. And then there was a stupid fight scene at the end where Luke did more damage to the restaurant than the guys demanding protection money

Oh, plus the dialogue was fucking awful. That whole shit talking about Ben Franklin was all kinds of cringe-worthy,

Really hoping that the thing picks up eventually. There were a few promising moments, but nothing terribly exciting.
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Zeus posted...

Really hoping that the thing picks up eventually. There were a few promising moments, but nothing terribly exciting.

Good luck, from what I heard from people I really trust's taste, it's awful beyond awful.
---

psst @Raganork

https://gematsu.com/2018/03/valkyrie-profile-lenneth-first-teaser-trailer-2018
---

Zeus posted...

For example, most works have horses instead of some other kind of domesticated steed (bearing in mind that horses "evolved" to their current form through selective breeding during the domestication process; in theory, other commonly available animals could have filled the same role -- especially in the absence of horse ancestors -- but instead of getting a horse analog, we tend to just get a horse).

Sort of as an aside and not necessarily as a justification for that sort of narrative trope, but in a few of the books I've read about animal domestication and the development of agriculture in general, it's pointed out that not every animal CAN be domesticated. Generally speaking, the two main factors of import is whether the breed in question has more of a predatory personality or a grazing lifestyle, and whether or not they take to pack or herd mentality or are more isolates. It's apparently extremely difficult to domesticate non-herd predators, which is part of why the cat is one of the only species of that nature we've ever managed it with - and even there, not entirely.

In other words, even given an entire world filled with animals, most of them would never be domesticated under any circumstances (and this is a large part of what hurt development in the Americas versus Eurasia and Africa - their potential stock of larger animals was much more limited, and most of them were unsuitable for long-term domestication). You don't just need people willing to attempt the domestication process, but you also need breeds that are specifically ready to be domesticated in the first place. So even in a fantasy world, you might never be able to have riding rhinos or triceratops that are actually plausible biologically.

(The same holds true for plants - it's pointed out that nearly every domesticated crop we have today was domesticated in a very narrow window of time and in very specific locations, with very little significant domestication taking place afterward. Tweaking or modifying existing breeds, yes. Domesticating entirely new breeds from wild crop sources, no. Strawberries are apparently one of the few "recent" crops, because they're only about 250 years old.)

All that being said, to be perfectly honest I always sort of find it annoying when writers try to distinguish unique breeds in their setting anyway. It's like, you're translating everything else into English, but choose to keep the breed name? If the people of your world have a large generally docile animal they breed for milk and meat, then just call it a cow (and not a "rothe", fuck you Faerun). If someone is drinking a fermented grain alcohol you can just call it "beer" or "ale" and I'll get it. At most, I'll happily tolerate if you feel the need to call a horse a "riding beast" or something generic, and I'll accept if you call tobacco "pipeweed" with a minimum of grumbles (and a few dirty looks at stoners who want to claim that hobbits are all hopped up on cannabis), but if you start referring to gnuforfles and brimdulthatch, I'm going to wipe my ass with your book.

In fact, as I've mentioned in this topic before, my one test for whether or not a given fantasy series is worth reading is seeing how many made-up words appear in the back-cover blurb of the book. When every third or fourth word is a nonsense word the author made up, it tends to indicate that the author isn't a very good writer, and the book probably borders on genre-trash or blatant Tolkien rip-off (since he's the one who started that trend in the first place). Doubly so if they feel the need to italicize all those made up words.

One of my other tests involves counting the number of apostrophes used in names, because that's another blatant indicator that you're reading something written by a hack.


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Zeus posted...

Which is the other half of my issue, given that historically people could kinda understand each other and that language would itself be a lot simpler -- there was less need for artifice because fewer complex ideas needed to be expressed.

Yeah, but it's not necessarily that simple. Germans and Romans on the border of Rome could understand each other because the Germans usually learned enough Latin via trade to stumble through a conversation. In areas where two relatively equal nations meet and engage in trade, traders are usually forced to learn both languages and tend to develop a pidgin crossbreed hybrid of the two (which has happened in multiple places in the real world).

In Europe most people in the West can sort of intercommunicate (mainly because all of the Romance languages trace back to Latin anyway), but the converse of that is India, where most people had no idea what their neighbors were saying until English became the dominant overriding language (which is why it's still India's official language in spite of becoming independent from Britain 70 years ago - they pretty much NEED English to communicate with each other).

Generally speaking, in the real world, the majority of people could never communicate with anyone who lived more than a few hundred miles away for most of human history, not just because of different regions having entirely different languages, but even due to different dialects of the same language (fuck, I have enough trouble understanding some people from the South today, in spite of media and standardized education supposedly "normalizing" English for all American speakers). People who lived on the periphery of two cultures or who operated in both spheres would likely find ways to communicate, but the majority of people never moved more than a few miles from where they were born, and thus, never needed to learn any language other than their native tongue. Overall, there was almost always a need to find some means of linguistic compromise for trade or political interaction, whether that be multilingual interpreters or a deliberate recourse to "common" (whether that "common" be Chinese, or English, or French, or Latin, or Greek, or Aramaic, or Akkadian...).

But in fantasy (both in novels and especially fantasy games), there's an expectation that main characters are going to be rootless vagabond wanderers (which was rare as hell in real history), and will travel to all sorts of lands (where realistically, they wouldn't understand a single word anyone was saying). So it's far easier to just have everyone speak one common "trade tongue" or "religious tongue" or the like so you don't have to play out months of learning new languages every time they enter a new region, or cop-out and give them magical translating stones.

In the same vein, it's why even in sci-fi that doesn't have universal translators a la Star Trek, every alien race seems to speak English for some unexplained reason. And with a British accent if they're evil.


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Zeus posted...

Then, where it concerns communication, literacy tends to be waaaaay higher than it should be in countless works.

This is definitely true, though it seems more common in high fantasy than it does low fantasy, dark fantasy, or the sort of "grim fantasy" that's become really popular lately (thank you so very much A Song of Ice and Fire).

Mostly because high fantasy is supposed to be about uplifting epic adventures, and accurately pointing out all of the peasants who can't read, who are barely scraping by or are outright starving, or who are dying of the plague can be something of a downer. But darker or more realistic fantasy almost seems to revel in describing all of that human misery in as great a detail as possible.

Considering most people prefer fantasy as escapism, I'm kind of willing to sacrifice historical accuracy for fun times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6i2par2Fv0


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Generally speaking, in the real world, the majority of people could never communicate with anyone who lived more than a few hundred miles away for most of human history, not just because of different regions having entirely different languages, but even due to different dialects of the same language (fuck, I have enough trouble understanding some people from the South today, in spite of media and standardized education supposedly "normalizing" English for all American speakers).

I would think a large part of that would also have to do with the fact that until about 100 years ago 99.9% of humans died within 20 miles of the spot they were born never having traveled further than 20 miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.
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Entity13 posted...

psst @Raganork

https://gematsu.com/2018/03/valkyrie-profile-lenneth-first-teaser-trailer-2018

Saw it. Probably a mobile or PC port, which I couldn't care less about, even for my favorite game. But hey, if more people can experience the game, that's great. I'd love to see VP Hrist some day.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I would think a large part of that would also have to do with the fact that until about 100 years ago 99.9% of humans died within 20 miles of the spot they were born never having traveled further than 20 miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

the majority of people never moved more than a few miles from where they were born, and thus, never needed to learn any language other than their native tongue.

~whistles innocently~


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I would think a large part of that would also have to do with the fact that until about 100 years ago 99.9% of humans died within 20 miles of the spot they were born never having traveled further than 20 miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

the majority of people never moved more than a few miles from where they were born, and thus, never needed to learn any language other than their native tongue.

~whistles innocently~

Sometimes I find myself skimming your enormous walls of texts and sometimes you bury the lead too deeply.


---

Sorry you guys for being a ghost. Back to work and have just been super busy with life stuff.

Also, I am attempting to complete a bucket list item tomorrow, which is complete 1 full game of Diplomacy. I've only played it once, and we didn't get very far, and that was years ago.
---

Finished Luke Cage. It got better, but it still seems the worst of the three NFI Marvel shows I've watched so far. The dialogue was frequently terrible, especially whenever Detectives Misty Knight and Scarfe were talking. (Those fucking Ben Franklin lines still make me cringe.) Also (and kinda bigger spoilers) were they trying to sell Scarfe as dirty from the get-go? From the first episode, I thought he was almost certainly crooked. I'm not sure if that was foreshadowing or just predictability.

Shades was goofy as fuck. When I first saw him, all I could think about was the Lonely Island guys in that "Jack Sparrow" music video. I also don't really get how he had that nickname in Luke's past considering that he's never wearing sunglasses in any of the prison scenes. I also kept wrongly assuming that he had powers and that the glasses may have had some connection to those powers... but nope, just a normal human. Granted, I kinda like the character, but I had a hard time taking him seriously.

I liked the dynamic between Mariah and Cottonmouth. Apparently they're not related in the comics (which I never read, and that's sometimes for the best with these adaptations), but they're cousins here and frequently reference their grandma (the show-only) Mama Mabel. Cottonmouth is a passable antagonist, but Mariah always seemed the more interesting of the two. (Major spoilers) I have mixed feelings over that murder scene, which really just comes out of nowhere. There was only limited build to the Uncle Pete incident in a prior flashback and then there's this major fight between them. Granted, I guess it's partly excused by the stress both had been under but still... the whole thing kinda felt hollow

One of the biggest saving graces, however, was Rosario Dawson reprising her role as Claire (having premiered on Daredevil before popping in on Jessica Jones, thus connecting the three shows). She helped to keep things a bit more entertaining although her growing relationship with Luke felt a little contrived

All things considered, given how Luke Cage and Daredevil season 2 end, I'm kinda wondering how that factors into the Defenders timeline. But that's a question that won't be resolved until after I watch Iron Fist, which I'm starting next (and probably won't be able to finish binging this weekend, although these 13-episode seasons are pretty short)
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Sort of as an aside and not necessarily as a justification for that sort of narrative trope, but in a few of the books I've read about animal domestication and the development of agriculture in general, it's pointed out that not every animal CAN be domesticated. Generally speaking, the two main factors of import is whether the breed in question has more of a predatory personality or a grazing lifestyle, and whether or not they take to pack or herd mentality or are more isolates. It's apparently extremely difficult to domesticate non-herd predators, which is part of why the cat is one of the only species of that nature we've ever managed it with - and even there, not entirely.

In other words, even given an entire world filled with animals, most of them would never be domesticated under any circumstances (and this is a large part of what hurt development in the Americas versus Eurasia and Africa - their potential stock of larger animals was much more limited, and most of them were unsuitable for long-term domestication). You don't just need people willing to attempt the domestication process, but you also need breeds that are specifically ready to be domesticated in the first place. So even in a fantasy world, you might never be able to have riding rhinos or triceratops that are actually plausible biologically.

I imagine over an exceptionally long span of time *most* intelligent animals can be domesticated to some degree, particularly in the case of mammals, provided that a culture is sufficiently motivated and possesses enough understanding to do so (ie, as a matter of selective breeding over a very long span of time -- after all, we've trained countless non-domesticated animals which shows at least *some* capacity for servitude). And, when you're building a world from the ground up, you can always introduce new species anyway... or modify existing ones. Like giving crows a third eye and having them function as carrier pigeons.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

All that being said, to be perfectly honest I always sort of find it annoying when writers try to distinguish unique breeds in their setting anyway. It's like, you're translating everything else into English, but choose to keep the breed name? If the people of your world have a large generally docile animal they breed for milk and meat, then just call it a cow (and not a "rothe", fuck you Faerun). If someone is drinking a fermented grain alcohol you can just call it "beer" or "ale" and I'll get it. At most, I'll happily tolerate if you feel the need to call a horse a "riding beast" or something generic, and I'll accept if you call tobacco "pipeweed" with a minimum of grumbles (and a few dirty looks at stoners who want to claim that hobbits are all hopped up on cannabis), but if you start referring to gnuforfles and brimdulthatch, I'm going to wipe my ass with your book.

So you mean if it's like 75% a horse, you'd rather they just call it a horse?
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Watched episode 1 of Iron Fist which.... you know, seems like it's going to be a lot better than people give it credit for. I love the beginning with Danny just walking the streets then trying to get into the building. My only immediate complaints is that it seems to be partly built on around a mystery-that-probably-isn't-much-of-a-mystery (ie, the plane crash). Granted, if that's the case, the conflict seems like it may be kinda shallow.

I like Danny, but I already get the doormat complaints I've heard. He's wimpy in the flashback then completely passive in the present day. As such, it'll likely get old fast.

As for the casting, it looks like they might have held a Chris Pratt lookalike contest >_>
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Zeus posted...

I imagine over an exceptionally long span of time *most* intelligent animals can be domesticated to some degree, particularly in the case of mammals, provided that a culture is sufficiently motivated and possesses enough understanding to do so

Yes, but consider that, in any given culture, it's probably safe to assume that the easiest to domesticate species will be domesticated first, and then, once that species is fully domesticated and filling its given niche, the need to engage in more difficult domestication of similar species fades altogether.

Or to put it another way, once you've managed to domesticate horses as your primary transport species, there really isn't a need to try and start making "riding cheetahs" or "travel rhinos". Deviations (like camels or llamas) really only occur in places where the primary species either isn't suitable (camels), or isn't available (llamas).

So presumably any given niche would be filled by analogous species, especially in a fantasy setting.



Zeus posted...

after all, we've trained countless non-domesticated animals which shows at least *some* capacity for servitude.

To be fair, though, "trained" is not the same as "tamed", and neither is the same as "domesticated". There are actually more complicated mechanisms at play than simply just using operant conditioning to teach a squirrel to water ski or whathaveyou.



Zeus posted...

So you mean if it's like 75% a horse, you'd rather they just call it a horse?

To be fair, I've never had a problem with the human characters in Star Wars being referred to as human or looking human when it's literally impossible for them to actually BE humans either. Nor has it bothered me that every single Time Lord and 90% of the alien races The Doctor meets in his travels are blatantly "human".

I'm fine with the translation convention being applied in a way in which the "dominant" species that is going to serve as the race of the main protagonist is treated as "human" while deviations from that norm can be treated separately (so, for instance, Wookies and Twi'leks are presented as clearly unique races while Luke, Han, and Leia all look and act like a species they literally cannot be - and where the odds of them even having an identical phenotype to humans while not being human are almost infinitesimally small). In the same sense, I'm fine with calling "generic alien riding beast species" a "horse".

So as long as their version of a riding beast is at least mostly horselike (or as Tycho from Penny Arcade tends to refer to this sorts of things, "horse-adjacent"), or otherwise fulfills the purpose of a horse without having dramatic analogous organs that would come up in the narrative (like your "horse" also having scales, wings, and the ability to teleport, or being a giant oversized chicken), then I'd much rather they just refer to it as a horse and not a glerblespoot.

(So yes, I would say this is basically a horse: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M8DDVuRe6BE/TxCnjDw9xqI/AAAAAAAAJZ4/Zf8JOgXe9r8/s1600/ookla.png )

But again, I also don't mind so much if a writer wants to go the route of having their animals referred to as "riding beasts" and "load beasts" or "herd beasts" to create a bit more of a "alien" feel to the setting, the way Anne McCaffery does in the Pern books (though in those books, those animals actually ARE Earth horses, oxen, and cows, just relocated to a distant planet, thousands of years in the future after the colonizers have forgotten that Earth ever existed).


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Zeus posted...

I like Danny, but I already get the doormat complaints I've heard. He's wimpy in the flashback then completely passive in the present day. As such, it'll likely get old fast.

All I'm going to say about Danny in both Iron Fist and The Defenders is this:

Literally Everyone: Danny, don't do the thing!

Danny: I'm going to do the thing!

Literally Everyone: You don't understand, here are several logical reasons you should not do the thing.

Danny: you can't tell me what to do! I'm the Iron Fist and I'm going to do the thing anyway no matter what anyone says! *Storms off IronFistedly to go do the thing*
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

All I'm going to say about Danny in both Iron Fist and The Defenders is this:

-_- For a fan of the old comic like myself, this version of Danny is very frustrating.
---

I_Abibde posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

All I'm going to say about Danny in both Iron Fist and The Defenders is this:

-_- For a fan of the old comic like myself, this version of Danny is very frustrating.

I kind of have to forgive it for in-universe reasons. He's still basically the child that survived the plane crash and behaves accordingly. If he doesn't get smarter in his next run, he's learned nothing and then I have to start asking questions, but it kind of makes sense so far despite being obnoxious to existing prior incarnations in other media.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I kind of have to forgive it for in-universe reasons. He's still basically the child that survived the plane crash and behaves accordingly.

The problem is, in the comics Danny literally watches his parents get murdered in front of him and still doesn't have that degree of arrested development. And even in the TV show, he's still spending years in a place where discipline and inner harmony is pretty much paramount, and is being drilled into him every second. If he couldn't master that, they he wouldn't have become the Iron Fist. Danny shouldn't be coming back as a petulant child, he should be coming back as a master of serenity and wisdom (which was a large part of what makes his pairing with the more boisterous and earthy Luke Cage work so well in the comics).

(And on a side-note, this is also literally what makes Archer & Armstrong work so well in Valiant - Archer is basically a darker take on Iron Fist, and Armstrong is basically Luke Cage if Luke Cage was an ancient immortal drunken vagabond.)

Confusion from being returned to a world of Western values and technology after spending decades in a secluded mountain monastery in Asia is fine. A little bit of naivete contrasted by deep understanding of the underlying nature of the world would work great. But Iron Fist works best when he's acting as the straight man to other characters, not as the central focal point of his own journey of personal discovery.

Or to put it another way, "Danny" died with his parents in Asia. The Iron Fist is the man who came back.

Though personally, I'm just kind of annoyed that they hooked him up with Colleen Wing and not Misty Knight.


At this point, they might just be better off having someone beat Danny to death, and have it get blamed on Luke Cage, like happened in the comics.


---

Iron Fist is shaping up to be pretty enjoyable so far, which is surprising given how much shit the series got -- although part of that was probably motivated by SJWs who were mad that a white man was playing the part of a white man (and, if they bothered learning anything about the source material afterward, fell back on their "white excellence" complaint).

Granted, one thing that really bugs me (besides the writing for Ward) is that the close-captions kinda gave shit away. Back when a Hand representative was talking to Harold, the caption read "[Gao]".... something which I *assume* was meant to be a bigger reveal because Madame Gao is shown on-screen for the first time several episodes later. Granted, I'm not sure I would have recognized her at a glance, but I remembered her name from Daredevil.

Otherwise when Jeri first appeared, I didn't really recognize her (although she was also nicer than in Jessica Jones) and didn't make the connection until *maybe* I heard the law firm mentioned.

The biggest thing I don't like about the show is the silly amounts of choreography during the fight scenes. It often looks fake as shit and I sometimes have a hard time following what's happening.
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Zeus posted...

The biggest thing I don't like about the show is the silly amounts of choreography during the fight scenes. It often looks fake as shit and I sometimes have a hard time following what's happening.

That's what happens when you cast a meh actor from Game of Thrones for the recognition value and then try to teach him martial arts in the month or two you have before you start filming, rather than deliberately looking for a solid actor who also has a strong grasp of fight choreography from the start.

Granted, I'm not talking Power Rangers levels of casting where everyone's apparently a martial artist or gymnast but can only barely borderline act, but I refuse to accept the premise that they couldn't find a single actor who didn't have more experience (both with martial arts and acting) than "Ser Loras" did.


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The tradition continues!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpOjj4YD8c
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Zeus posted...

The biggest thing I don't like about the show is the silly amounts of choreography during the fight scenes. It often looks fake as shit and I sometimes have a hard time following what's happening.

That's what happens when you cast a meh actor from Game of Thrones for the recognition value and then try to teach him martial arts in the month or two you have before you start filming, rather than deliberately looking for a solid actor who also has a strong grasp of fight choreography from the start.

Granted, I'm not talking Power Rangers levels of casting where everyone's apparently a martial artist or gymnast but can only barely borderline act, but I refuse to accept the premise that they couldn't find a single actor who didn't have more experience (both with martial arts and acting) than "Ser Loras" did.

Oh fuck, is that who that is? I didn't recognize him, maybe the beard threw me. (Then again, I've never been great with faces.)

Granted, my issue is less about individual performance but instead the unnecessarily elaborate nature of the routines. It's the same reason why I've never been able to get into the lucha style of wrestling, you can clearly see some cooperation between fighters so it's closer to dancing than fighting (and no, not in the flatteringly metaphorical way where actual fighting is made to sound beautiful)
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Iron Fist is the only entry from the 4 and Defenders I haven't seen. Oh, and I guess if The Punisher counts.
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Iron Fist is terrible. Hopefully I can save you 13 hours of your life.
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The Wave Master posted...

Iron Fist is terrible. Hopefully I can save you 13 hours of your life.

>_>

Not sure if you missed my other posts, but so far (watching the last episode now) Iron Fist has been my second-favorite of NFI's Marvel shows. (Although Jessica Jones is generally a *better* show, its grimdark nonsense and Jessica's toxicity kinda killed a lot of the fun.)

The only real disappointment so far has been Luke Cage, although I enjoyed parts of it like the homages to his old outfit.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Iron Fist is the only entry from the 4 and Defenders I haven't seen. Oh, and I guess if The Punisher counts.

Haven't seen Punisher either but not hugely looking forward to it after DD s2.
---

I finally saw Black Panther. It was great. I loved every minute of the movie.

Did anyone else watch it, or have a different opinion?
---

Quick offhanded question for Shadow - since I know you like Pathfinder, and I know you like sci-fi in your RPG, what do you think of Starfinder?


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Quick offhanded question for Shadow - since I know you like Pathfinder, and I know you like sci-fi in your RPG, what do you think of Starfinder?

Woah there, let's take this one step at a time.

1. Pathfinder is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to create intricate mechanics to match with a story, if that's what you are looking for. I'm not looking for that for 95% of my games, I only used PF once, and that was because I did want to have a more detail orientated game (it was for my IRL group who were playing a merchant group in a post-apocalyptic heavily magic world), it didn't go through because I was moving, but still the point stands. I honestly don't need it for most of everything because I actually agree with you on some parts about mechanics, if they don't add to the story then they shouldn't be there.

2. I have a sort of revulsion towards the "you like scifi, so that means you like X" when I actually really like is the stories that scifi can tell (man changing technology vs technology changing man, what does it mean to be human/sentient, solving a physical problem non-violently, what does it feel like being a cog in a machine, and those things) but that doesn't mean I like all scifi stories. Show me some action scene of spaceships shooting lasers at each other, and show me a seafaring ship shooting cannons at each other, and I would honestly prefer the seafaring ship.

3. Starfinder is fine. I would never touch it because any stories that I would want to tell would use a different system. Maybe if I wanted to do a more over the top early Star Trek game, but I also don't like that... so whatever. There's just something better that I would use, Eclipse Phase, Fantasy Flight Star Wars, FATE, or some One Roll Engine game.
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