archangel

I actually think it has more to do with the feel of keeping the old guard intact. Martian Manhunter's dead, Batman's dead, Barry Allen was dead, and the original Lantern was MIA. They brought back Jordan and you know Bruce will be back, too. They needed to bring back Allen to complete the set, since they permanently lost Jon. to be fair, they at least had the decency to keep Allen dead for 20 years. Mad props to DC for that.

Wally West Jessie Quick (now Jessie Chambers since she married the new Hourman, the son of the original Hourman) is the new Liberty Belle in the JSA. She's the Daughter of the original Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick, a mathematician who unlocked the abilities of the speed force through a mathematical formula. Max Mercury is a speedster from the 1800's who likes to run forward in time whenever he gets bored. He's the one who trained and pretty much became the surrogate father of Bart Allen (Impulse or Kid Flash) and Jai and Iris West are the children of Wally West. They're twins: Hands fucking down. Jay's always been my favorite. Respect, Bitch Jay Garrick is the original Flash from the 1940's Golden Age. He's the first, original Flash. btw, here's the bad ass page from the third of this arc (doesn't spoil anything, just awesome): that's right, SuperBitch. Know your role!

yea, the only thing you have to know is what happened to Allen back in the Crisis in the 80's (infinite I think it was?), when he sacrificed himself to destroy the Anti-monitor, and the fact that he came back after this last crisis (the Redundant Crisis? Who knows). But a really good read, which is the story arc that got me into the Flash in the first place is 'The Return of Barry Allen', which was done by your boy Waid. This has that same feeling of awesomeness that made me fall in love with the Speedsters. Funny thing is, my favorite Flash was always Jay Garrick. Always thought him to be the coolest one. But another really good read with the Flash is this one: and just to show you two panels in the new series that were so fucking full of win:

Barry Allen, Bart Allen, Wally West, Jay Garrick, Jesse Quick, Johnny Quick, Max Mercury, Iris and Jai West...

I don't know if anyone here is a big fan of the Flash, but the Flash has been my favorite super hero in DC forever, starting with the immortal Jay Garrick and going all the way through Bart Allen. After the last Crisis, Barry Allen returns from the Speed Force and is trying to cope with his sudden resurrection. There's a new threat to the speedster family, though, and they're all united against they're most dangerous enemy. So far it's been a really good series, as good as 'The Return of Barry Allen' from the mid '80's that was fucking fantastic. We're at issue 4/6 so far and I really recommend it. written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Ethan Van Sciver.

you will speak no ill of Dragonlance!

that's nonsense. While you grow, you only feel more and more powerful, and the damage gets higher, too. the problem is, if you don't understand the mechanics entirely, at first glance it appears you're not doing that much damage. But that is absolutely false.

District 9?!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA silly Nick; Irish don't 'work' lol :waits for fallout:

min-maxing is still possilbe, but min-maxing does not equal 'broken'. if things are non-exploitable, that doesn't mean you cannot min max: you can. It just means you can't take advantage of loopholes to use things as they weren't meant to be used.

it always gets back to that. if it's 'non-exploitable' it stops being 'fun' to many people.

abilities are written out and you can just cut them out. You no longer need a lawyer's mind to read those damned spells, and adjudication is simple and fair.

I think the best function of all is character creation. 3rd ed. character creation took days, sometimes weeks to plan your character out fully and know exactly where you want to take him. Classes and abilities where so complex that tweaking took a very long time. Character creation in 4th ed takes 15 minutes. You're ready to play in 20.

Sorry man, but the only thing I saw while watching that was '90 Gigs of Porn'. ASC ruined it for everyone. speaking of....where's ASC?

chaotic neutral = psychotic stupid. You'll be sad to know that you're playing 3rd ed shit and that crap doesn't exist in 4th Ed anymore. lol And no, the SuperHero Mutants and Masterminds is a very similar system but a different game entirely. You make superheroes and fight villains. I have a story in the works I'd like to throw at ya'll, and I know the system pretty well so I'd like to test it out on yous guys.

I've actually been tossing together an idea for a superhero mutants and masterminds game, but I gotta talk to george and angel first.

Not 'maybe': Definitively. An overly creative mind can take that same spell and break the hell out of it, and you and I both know it. Then the DM is caught in a situation where he can't possibly allow that to happen, only to have an indignant player point angrily at the book saying 'but it says I can say it right there.' When things become unbalanced or broken they become problematic to the game. The new spells are designed for balanced, leaving the imagination squarely on the shoulders of the players. If they cannot imagine it, then they're either lazy or simply unimaginative.

yes

O.M.G This is EPIC

because they didn't want magic items to a. be a crutch and b. define the character. One of the things I hated about DnD were the cookie cutter items. Every mage had a circlet of Intellect +4. Every rogue had gloves of Dex. Every adventurer had his Heward's Hefty Haversack. There were so many cooker cutter items that characters came to rely on, they became dull. In fact, the running gag was that somewhere in Faerun there was a factory of magic users who do nothing but spend all day making these ridiculous items and selling them to lazy adventurers. What's worse, you take a level 14 character and strip them of they're magic items and they're next to useless. That was a big, big problem. Magic Items are supposed to be extras, but not Character Defining. A warrior is a warrior with any sword, though he may have an affection to a certain relic. But for that warrior to be rendered useless if he looses his +5 Mighty Cleaving Vorpal Great-Axe, then there's a serious problem. Your character is not the sum of his magic items. and became either useless at higher levels or ridiculously broken. flavor text is just that: flavor text. Mechanics is what's important. You can rename and reflavor every single one of your abilities to make them appear however you want, and I've got to tell you: the differences in utility between third and and fourth only means players stop being fucking lazy and start thinking how to solve problems. ya know: roleplay? you, sir, are a lost cause.

How do you figure? They're not changing creatures, they're only changing mechanics. The same things existed in 2nd ed that exist now in terms of equipment, feel and style. The ONLY difference is the combat algorithm. DnD is a combat game; primarily a dungeon crawl with monsters thrown at you. That's how the system is designed. and while THACO was a pain in the ass, I still maintain 3.5 is far, far more complicated than 2.0, and both were more complicated than they had any right to be. Contrary to DnD, WoD is primarily a role playing game...except 3.0 put more emphasis on combat and made made things more complicated. Content remains the same, the only thing added was balance. Gone are the days of the bullshit level 20 mages and their invincibility or the elder Tremere's godlike stature because of bullshit Thaumaturge. All the classes are now useful, they all have tons of flavor, there's tons of content, and everything is balanced.

I started with DnD 3rd Ed, moved to 3.5 (played in all different settings) and 4th Ed. I've played Vampire, Werewolf, Mage (3rd Ed) and 4th ed WoD only, I've played Shadowrun and I've played Mutants and Masterminds ( a VERY fun game but I broke it in 15 minutes and made an Iron Man character that was unkillable and could kill anyone).

See i have to disagree about both versions of DnD and WoD. DnD needed to do four things: Get rid of/fix useless classes (I'm looking at you specifically Bard/Ranger); Fix overpowered classes (Wizards/Sorcerors) and the huge divide between melee and spellcasters; make playing low level characters feel as cool as playing 10th level 3.5 characters; make the classes more inter-dependent, specifically to encourage more teamwork. It succeeded on all ends. With WoD, the Changes were a bit more specific: there were too many vampire clans with too many stupidly broken abilities (Chimestry, Viscicitude, and Obtenabration come to mind. and if anyone ever played Transylvania by Night and saw what Tzimisce Koldunic Sorcery or Mortis could do, you've never seen what 'broken' really is). There were also USELESS fucking disciplines. NWoD shrank it down, got to the basics and reworked the system to make it more streamlined, more dangerous to the players, while not compromising the power of a Vampire. The new systems kept the good and threw out the broken...the problem is, power gamers as a whole flock to 'the broken' and clutch to it like lice to white trash, and bitch and complain when you 'fix' it. We see it in WoW and we see it in DnD, too. Shadowrun is a different game entirely, far more difficult than it had any right being but very rewarding: so long as you had a very imaginative DM who loved to fuck you while having a team of people actually willing to work together to fuck the DM. I never saw 4th ed, but it supposedly fixed and streamlined alot of the decker/magic issues and made everything function on the same premise instead of having a different system for each class.