This is about how I feel about any story involving multiple magi, either as a player or as an SG. Potential is great for great things to be done, but that usually doesn't happen, and it turns into a cat herding exercise. Too many egos get in the way, and the story doesn't progress, although there is some character development that happens, it's usually not enough to overcome the lack of general progress. IMO, you have to have a star, maybe two, at the very outside 3, in special cases, but not 5 or more. Yes, it is possible to do a story that involves many multiple magi/superheros, it just becomes a lot of work, and magic/superpowers tends not to be the focus.
Comics are a great media platform to deliver a story with multiple big characters, but movies, not so much. Having to contain a story to a 2-2.5 hour window and give adequate treatment to all the characters is tough. You gotta let Hulk smash, you gotta let RDJ/Iron Man monologue, let Black Widow look hot while kicking a$$, iterating through each of the characters doing their thang. Those are necessary for the comic fans (or movie fans coming over from Iron Man in RDJ's case), and may not be necessary to the underlying story. They must be done, though, to satisfy the fandom nerds who will be disappointed otherwise. When you get all that done, then you can take on the bad guy, and have micrometer movement in character development, and boom! The movie is over. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to see it, I might even catch it in theaters. I just have an exceedingly low bar for the movie to jump over. Joss Whedon, brilliant as he is, is only human.
I thought Avengers was awesome, I'm a huge comic book fan and thought that Joss really pulled it off. The thing I was worried about was that it was simply going to be Iron Man 2.5 with MDJ being the star, but IMO all of the stars were given great treatment and time, and I especially was surprised at Rufalo's ability to pull off Banner. Like a lot of people I was disappointed that Norton wasn't cast again because i thought he did a great job, but after the movie most people I know who felt that way now feel that they owe Rufalo an apology. The Hulk stole the show more than once.
I thought the story satisfied both for a movie and for comic book fans, and in Joss Whedon style, it was his ability to have great dialogue between such disparate people and make it believable and funny.
Needless to say the effects and action were top notch and I thought the 3D was definitely an enhancement and not a distraction; it wasn't just tacked on but also didn't have cheesy 3D embellishments.
Well worth it IMO and I'll likely see it multiple times while it's at the theater.
Ruffalo proved he was a top notch actor with "The Kids Are All Right." I wasn't worried about him. I didn't have any reservations about it and expected it to rock. Nick Fury is one of my favourites, I love SLJ, I have enormous Hollywood-crushes on both Chris Evans and Tom Hiddleston, and I have loved everything Joss ever made. I think that was the problem. He had to satisfy all moviegoers, and that meant spending less time on Why We Love Joss.
I was excited to see Joss' love for "How I Met Your Mother" in casting Robin, and the "suit up" references. I loved seeing Dollhouse's Victor as Cop #2 and the girl Alpha and Echo kidnapped as Girl Who Got Rescued By Cap. There were a few really great comedic moments.
I'm resigning the character, officially. You can decide to let the actions stand, or not. I'm not going to go through the motions with her. When my new character is finalize/approved I'll act through him.
Bottom line, to those who don't know, I'd intended to do this for some time, Arya knows this. I'm not in control of, nor do I know Sophronia's backstory sufficiently well, and I can't reconcile my vision of the character to Arya's.
I'll leave that up to the rest of the players. GF's position in tribunal would be noticably weakened by one of its members snubbing all of the biggest political figures, and it had been balanced out such that most of the issues will be decided primarily on what your characters do. Sophia walking out in the middle of a dinner party, calmly or otherwise, will dig a pretty deep hole. One your characters can still pull yourselves out of, but not easily.
If the majority of players would prefer to redact the last few posts of the Jerbiton party thread, that's fine with me.
My vote, if I have one, will go with the majority. She's gone out in a blaze of glory as far as I'm concerned, whether it stays that way in reality, or not, I dunno. I just needed a way to say goodbye to her as a player.
It's all politics. I dislike politics in most games, and the politics in Ars Magica are worse than most. Once we get into the political parts of the tribunal I'm going to have to force myself to read everything, and likely won't have much useful input anyway.
It's all very subjective. I zigged when I should've zagged, or something. I felt that there was a reasonable possibility that Julia was looking for cover to blow off the dinner party. Most political activities can be distilled to some rational actions if you understand the underlying motivations and desires. I'll be honest, don't really have a clue here, now. I thought taking bold action might be rewarded. It's consistent with my vision of the character, but, I can see how the actions are problematic.
I can see all the forces aligned GF, especially because Sophie left Libellas. And then I acted with regards to vis harvests based on a believe that there was some technicality we could exploit to get the vis sources back, but appear to be mistaken about that, so I'm completely lost and find the character not so much fun to play.
I'm just waiting for GF to get jobbed, and we'll move on.
If there's not much interest in politics overall, I can try and fast forward through Tribunal as much as possible.
It had been my intention that this Tribunal would be how and when your characters take control over your covenant and its resources. There are multiple "I win" buttons that all come with their own sets of baggage. If there is interest in playing through that, then we can proceed as planned, otherwise we can figure something else out. Just let me know where you guys want to go with things.
Cygna and I are new enough here that neither one of us has a handle on the political situation, except for "We're going to lose the rights to all our vis sources because we didn't have enough members." I'm still not sure if that's because there was a "minimum number of magi" requirement in the Charter, or if Stonehenge has a Peripheral Code ruling regarding that.
Cygna's main interest in the Tribunal (and why she came in 1215, only to find a "Closed" sign in the window) is for the ratification (is that the right word) of Adorjan's marching, and I actually expected a lot of rumours to be flying around about her.
Regarding redacting Sophronia's actions: I would be inclined to say that she did what she did, and have to deal with the consequences later.
As far as Sophronia, I'm sad to see her go. Was a nice character tie-in. As far as her actions, I'll just roll with whatever happens. I'm here for character interactions and the vague learnings of a game system.
Well, to me, she wasn't even here. I felt like I was wearing her skin, much more than any other character I played. I couldn't reconcile my vision with Arya's backstory, and no blame on Arya, it just is something that happened. Everytime I managed to assimilate some part of her backstory more developed, but it pushed my vision further away. Sophronia, as I made her was going to be extremely bookish, and reserved.
The character I'm making now is closer to a concept I made for Phoenix, but also playing to an extreme character, a bit of an experiment.
Oh and the concept of Affinity/Puissant Rego and Affinity/Puissant Intellego was very frustrating to play. The character was far too much of a generalist for my liking.
Yeah, we ran into a wall where the character concept JL made was very similar to an existing NPC-- both were filii of Justinius, both had similar arts foci, and then the kicker was the NPC was named Sophia, and JL picked the name Sophronia. At that point it seemed to make more sense to have his character fill the role that the NPC had been designed for (to give the PCs a contact within Domus Tremeris, essentially) than to have two characters as eerie doppelgangers of each other, so we merged the two concepts. Unsuccessfully.
I didn't realize until long after approving the character build that under 5th ed rules, Justinius could never have taken an apprentice without Second Sight because he'd have had to inflict massive warping on them to use them in his lab. One of the throwbacks to playing a saga where most of the NPCs are 4th ed characters that I never properly converted to 5th.
Part of Sophia's backstory (the npc) involved breaking up with a boyfriend at Libellus, because in the tabletop incarnation of this saga, she had been intended as a love interest for one of the PCs. It seemed like that made for a reasonable explanation of why she'd be looking for a reassignment, but the resultant love triangle was not working for JL. Winning back the Intellego source from Libellus was going to be one of the easier political skirmishes for GF, before we threw a love triangle monkey wrench into the mix.
I can still balance it, I think, but the question remains, are people not interested in playing politics? Because if not, I don't want to subject everyone to months of exclusively political stories.
My original vision was understanding and control. It just made her a generalist, by accident, but then with Deficient Creo she couldn't even be a decent generalist... She had too many strikes against her. I didn't even think she was that much of an oddball concept when I made her, it just turned out to be that way in play. Cygna's a better Mentem specialist, Attravere's a better Rego specialist. She had a ton of Intellego going for her, but she had very few Arts to go along with it. And then I noticed I gave her an 8 score in Imaginem, and she doesn't know any Imaginem spells. I was trying to rush her into play, instead of create something that made sense.
For me, personally, the main political thing I can see Cygna involved in is the Trial of Adorjan Megidézó. Although that looks like it might be an open-and-shut case (or as open-and-shut as anything is in tribunal), but I can also see Cygna getting dragged through the mud if anybody wanted to try to defend him.
I'm not against politics, but I'm a bit lost. I personally don't see any of the "I win" buttons. I like to think I'm an astute reader, but I often fool myself.
