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And the big fun one: have been planning a special V:tM LARP one shot to celebrate one of our players turning 50. Bringing in some old friends we’ve not played with in years and making a big party of it.

This ended up being an awful lot of fun.

The player this was designed around had mentioned that they missed the feel of a Vampire LARP but didn't want to pay money and register with one of the LARP orgs to scratch that itch. Knowing it was their 50th this year (and my 45th) I invited a bunch of LARP friends and Tabletop friends that we'd both spent the last decades playing with and started building out a Chronicle fit for a one shot.

I wanted to play with VTM 5e's strata of player character ages to tell a story about entering Middle Age focusing on the middle group of Ancilla Vampires. With the Elders all being called off to fight in the Gehenna War and the Neonates are champing at the bit to acquire power, the squeeze around the Ancilla made for a perfect aging Gen X metaphor.

The central conceit was that a group of Ancilla Kindred arrive for the Summer Court and find themselves trapped in the venue confronted with the machinations of a mad Prince trying to hand pick his successor before accepting the call of the Beckoning and leaving to join the Gehenna War.

One of our players got us a great location and we played in a Planetarium for about six hours. Of our 20 or so invitees we had 10 who actually showed up and a great time was had by all.

Has anyone watched the movie through VoD? I've heard they either made a change, or people are just now noticing a bit at the end which now casts doubt on whether or not...

** spoiler omitted **

It’s not new. People were citing on Twitter on day one.

Closing at $680M ?!?! LOL.... NOPE!

That is what the tracking was showing on August 6th. You wanna get condescending about it? Go back in time three weeks and engage back then before the digital release got pushed.

It squeaked past $600 but that still fails the Man of Steel inflation adjusted take.

So? S25 is out in a vastly different market than Man of Steel and inflation adjustments are meaningless wankery.

LOL, NOPE! again.

Is not a valid refutation. Show your work

Also, did you seriously write out $1,000M?

Thanks for reminding me why I avoided the forums for so long.

Current tracking is estimating it closes at 680, which is more than Man of Steel made. More is certainly not "WELL SHORT". Even if it stopped earning today, in excess of 555M, it's not "WELL SHORT" of Man of Steel's 670. It's just 115 Short currently.

But you want to play studio mogul, let's go.

There are sources that claim the marketing budget was 200M, there is no confirmed number from the studio. If we assume that top end to be correct, and if we assume that the highest suggested production budget of 360 was correct then the total buyoff for the film to hit profit is $560M.

The 160M in tax rebates from the state of Georgia drop that to 400M.

The 140M in licensing and brand deals drops that to 260M

260M with a 50%/50% theatrical split (which is less than the actual split) means the film hit profit after 520M earned.

So with those most commonly guessed numbers - the film is currently at 17M profit. While still in theaters.

Director James Gunn has claimed that the 360M reportedly overblown by 110M. If HIS numbers are correct - then the film is sitting at 72.5M in profit.

For it to not be near profitability the P&G budget would have to be something more like 250 and no one is claiming that figure. It certainly LOOKS to not be at profitability if you ignore ancillary profit streams.

And this is ALL before the network and streaming media buy, Primary Theatrical Streaming, or home media.

Except of course that isn't how inflation works. Man of Steel doesn't magically make more money because the valuation of the dollar has changed. It's an academic comparison only.

But let's give it a go:

For the prediction that it will fall short of the inflation adjusted total of $928 M "by about $400 M" - Superman would have to leave theaters THIS WEEK. At 502M as of COB Sunday, it's sitting at 426 M short of the the MoS adjusted total.

There is no sign, however, of Superman slowing down. It made 100 M Sunday to Sunday last week and has a stronger week to week hold than any DC film since TDK. It is being held over in shorter run art house theaters, there are already mutterings of a late august/early september premium screen repush by the studio like they did with BvS and like Marvel did with all four Avengers films.

It may yet fall short of 928 - but it won't be by 400.

Domestically Superman has now in week 3 surpassed Man of Steel's total domestic box office take from a 15 week run and since you love adjusting for inflation: It's currently made more money domestically than MoS had in it's third week both adjusted for inflation and not.

Oh I thought it was commentary on the way "best since Endgame" has been a talking point centered around every MCU movie that has been released since Endgame.

It’s presales so far have been well below Superman’s

Dovetailing on

One other thought:

** spoiler omitted **

Just wanted to add:

True. I never liked it then either. I prefer the more common "they weren't bad" characterization.

In all of those instances, they weren't and it was just a manipulation.

(I think we're talking about the same character).

There's no need to be coy, it's not spoilery or potentially giving anything about Superman 2025 away, I'm talking about Brainiac

I think we're talking about the same point...

** spoiler omitted **

I, personally, see that as crapping on fans. I'm old and cranky at the best of times and have seen a lot of crapping on characters over the years. So I've become far less forgiving. Other people (such as yourself) don't see it that way, and that's okay. I think it's good for fans to argue and nitpick over actual comic lore like this.

In fairness, this particular change has been made before. Smallville did the same thing in Season 2, similar messages existed in the Post Crisis Eradicator introduction. This is not new. It is also left unresolved, so that it is likely setup for a future story. Perhaps involving a character who is alternatingly a superior intellect/a futuristic AI in control of a series of Matryoshka doll like robots/ Kryptonian AI construct/obsessive collector of long lost civilizations.

Saw one of the Amazon screenings last night and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I've been a Superman fan for 40+ years so of course I have a different set of expectations than you might. My wife, who is not generally a fan of the character enjoyed herself a lot.

The cast is great. The story is structured more like a 6 issue limited series than a traditional 3 Act Film.

No spoilers, but I definitely recommend it.

*de rigueur

I playtested Exalted 1e many moons ago. They didn't listen to most of our feedback. It was still a great game but... yeah, houserules help a lot.

We played it pretty extensively from 01 - 07, and it worked well when we were still in the habit of Storyteller system rules, but once you get away from rolling for your attack more than once and applying bonuses both before and after the roll it begins to feel more and more cumbersome to go back.

Looking back through each edition to figure out some simple hotfixes has me really curious what led them to put in place so many fixes for the 1e problems and then build an entirely bespoke (or copy from Scion that is) initiative system that creates an entire host of new problems.

Over a year since I last checked in with this thread, and I find myself coming to the Paizo board less and less. In the last year so many of my longstanding Kickstarters and projects I’ve been following have finally fulfilled and that is an awesome feeling, but it has also been a famine year for game play.

Let me start by saying I am aware that in many ways my group is a unicorn. Stable groups that stay together with mostly the same players for almost 20 years, while maintaining a weekly schedule is a rarity among rarities. It’s been a bounty for all these years.

This year, however, one of our players took a job teaching that would limit his time considerably - he’d basically only have the weekends with his wife. So we did the supportive thing and put all of our games on hold and decided to play some short games in the interim with the players we had. Only, we barely did that.

From January to May we had three sessions where it turned out our missing player was able to drop in, but beyond that we had a session zero and three sessions of Call of Cthulhu in four and a half months.

Just as we were back to full strength at the end of the semester - the married couple in our group informed us all that the rigors of a weekly game were wearing on them and they needed to step away or adjust the way they interacted with game for a little while

We discussed as a group and agreed to something more encounter based and less focused on detailed plot and that we would play once a month.

We’re diving back into my homebrew setting for PF2 that we ran throughout the pandemic, which is nice, and I am excited to return to that world. The downside though is that this is a radical and sudden change from the way we’d been operating, and we had three games running when it happened - so it took the wind out of both GM’s sails.

We’ll get used to it, obviously. Maybe weekly games for 20 years is an embarrassment of riches, but that doesn’t make it less affecting when it changes.

The good of the last year: ran a few sessions of Shadowdark and LOVED it.

Spent the better part of the last few months editing a document that is a House Ruled version of Exalted using 2e, 3e and Exalted Essence rules to plug playability and quality of life holes in Exalted First Edition

And the big fun one: have been planning a special V:tM LARP one shot to celebrate one of our players turning 50. Bringing in some old friends we’ve not played with in years and making a big party of it.

It’s still a journey.

You are the most correct, that statement should have been in the past tense. The common experiences witnessed in that threat when it existed however are the same as I expressed.

It wasnt a logical leap because you have no idea what experience most subscribers are having. MOST subscribers dont post on this message board. You don't personally know MOST SUBSCRIBERS. So when you say "is not an experience most subscribers are having?" What are you talking about?

Most subscribers who have issues do post on these forums in the Customer Service Threads. They also post on the Pathfinder subreddit and I've read many of these comments. So THAT is what I'm talking about. Why are you getting so needlessly aggressive?

What I take umbrage to is this

Why do you need to take umbrage with ANYTHING that was said by anyone in this thread? Nothing in this thread rises to any level of real importance

Without insinuating or downplaying anyone else's experience. AND most importantly, without inflating my own importance / relevance by saying that I know the experiences of MOST subscribers in order to invalidate someone's experience.

Right, because how dare someone point out that your experience is atypical?

How hard is it to simply say: "yikes that's rough. Okay I get why {name} would feel that way. It hasn't been MY experience but okay." Pretty hard it looks like...

About as hard as reading someone speculate on why you had an atypical experience and not respond by condescendingly push back at them for the suggestion they made, apparently.

I mean, you still have to email them to cancel your subscription. Even barring a recent FTC Rule in the US, it's just pretty anti-consumer to put barriers to stopping automatic charges to a card.

I'm not in agreement about the need for a PDF only subscription or a common PDF release date - but the above statement dovetails with one of the things I would love to see added to the subscription process.

It should be easier to cancel subs and it should be easier to pause subscriptions or skip books. Particularly if Remastered reprints like the upcoming Guns & Gears is going to be a pattern.

Cancelling my sub to not get a reprint of a book I already own and then resubscribing to get the next book feels like it could be streamlined.

Thanks for making that Neo sized leap to a false conclusion though...

They made that logical leap because consistently getting your subscription books after the street date is not an experience most subscribers are having. The one time it happened to me it was because my shipment was lost in transit and Paizo had to send me a replacement, otherwise - even though I am receiving my books after other subscribers I am still getting it prior to street date. This is the more common experience subscribers are having.

The creeping negative thought darting around in the back of my mind is that those of us who are pending today will not come out of the pending state until after Gen Con.

Spoke too soon. Just got the shipping notice.

The creeping negative thought darting around in the back of my mind is that those of us who are pending today will not come out of the pending state until after Gen Con.

I’m almost more concerned about the idea of a pending charge on my debit card for the last 12 days.

This happened once before with a Paizo order and my bank just cancelled the hold charge and blocked the second attempt when Paizo went to reauth.

Is today still the estimated last day of the shipping window? Have we seen any update saying that window had likely extended? Because I'm still in the "pending" boat

Emailed CS because my order has been pending for over a week with no auth completion.

Was told that the delay in processing subscriptions was delaying processing other orders (which is strange because mine is a subscription order.)

So I'm unsure where I am in the process.

Having games I'm likely never going to get to play is my curse. I have so many things I'd love to play, and more on the way, but there just isn't enough interest with my table for all of it. And these are just my games, I'm sure the others have their own stack of games we'll never get around to.

Just a quick glance reveals the following list of things I've purchased and never touched :

Mummy: The Curse 1st Edition
Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition
Geist: The Sin Eaters 2nd Edition
Promethian: The Created 2nd Edition
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Mutant Crawl Classics
13th Age
Pugmire
Everyday Heroes
The One Ring/Lord of the Rings Roleplaying
Old School Essentials
Level Up A5e
Shadowdark
Doctors & Daleks
Transformers
Kids on Bikes
Kids on Brooms
Teens In Space
Blades in the Dark
Index Card RPG
Scion
Star Trek Adventures
Stargate SG1
Worlds/Stars Without Number
Werewolf: The Apocalypse (5e)
Trinity Continuum: Assassin
Trinity Continuum: Adventure!
Trinity Continuum: Aberrant
Hunter: The Reckoning (5e)

why shock at 3e? What happened?

We're a largely traditional book and printed sheet group, and 3e Exalted is a siege weapon of a text. Nearly as dense within as its size intimates.

Finally did it.

Ripped the bandaid off and played out a session featuring the Exaltation of three of our characters for the Exalted campaign. It had been quite a long time since I'd stepped into the world of creation, and in the interim my expectations had grown quite high.

Exalted 1e was my favorite game of all time, and after so much time away and disappointment with the system for 2e and shock at 3e I was worried that maybe it wouldn't work

To my delight it was like slipping on a perfectly worn hoodie, going home again is possible.

Wrapping up Hunter: The Vigil took a little longer than planned due to some player choices.

The plan moving out of that was to sit back and let the other GM's at the table run alternating games while I did some worldbuilding in Exalted for our eventual Essence campaign.

Then there was a system shock issue with our Mythos campaign (not in CoC) and some players are focused on a cross country move so the hat got handed back very quickly and Exalted Essence is firing up this weekend.

Meanwhile playing Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition has been a blast so far. So much so that I'm wondering if this iteration of the old Storyteller system is actually smoother than the Storytelling system of Chronicles of Darkness. I would have said no before playing this.

I would have also said that Requiem has better player options until really digging into Masquerade V5.

I'm sorry your core GM passed, but finishing the campaign is a great way to honor the years together. That's awesome.

I've considered going back to our own Hellmouth, but those players are all scattered to the wind. Still, it'd be nice.

That's why I'm leaning toward running Exalted. One of the other players at my table is my brother, he is the only member of our old group still playing with me. We ran a nearly four year Exalted campaign that spanned both groups, with both he and I running for big stretches. It's been 20 years since that campaign began, and we're fast approaching 20 with the current group. It feels appropriate to go back to where it all started for our current players.

I was also introduced to the Buffy RPG around this time, and have been playing with the same group in a highly-alternate-Buffyverse campaign on and off ever since (in person the first few years, then moving increasingly online).

I loved the Unisystem rules for Buffy and Angel, and the group I was with before this one played in several seasons of two separate series that I ran. I also was lucky enough to get to playtest for Eden Studios.

That game was a blast

I'm now at that difficult point of deciding where the journey goes NEXT.

Our group has been playing together now for about 18 years, and throughout most of that I've been one of two or three rotating GM's. We're never at a loss for ideas on what we want to play next, if anything we have reached the point where we have more games than we have time for.

Even limiting ourselves to short form narratives and one shots, each of the three of us has so many campaign ideas that we might never get to them all - and great new games keep coming out.

I'm just about to wrap up an arc in our Hunter: The Vigil game, while another GM is about to come online with a Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition campaign that I'm looking forward to greatly as I've spent very little time with Masquerade and LOTS of time with Requiem.

But where to next? Bringing the current arc of Vigil to a landing has given me a plethora of ideas for that campaigns next major arc, but I was also deep into planning a return to the world of Exalted.

That said I also have ideas I want to explore in PF2, OSE, Shadowdark, Kids on Bikes, They Came From Classified, They Came From the Cyclops Cave, Trinity Adventure, Trinity Aberrant, Scion, Monster of the Week, Star Wars

Too many games, not enough time.

maybe that's why poor customer service brews conspiracy theories

I'm really hesitant to call Paizo's customer service "poor" they're by leaps and bounds more involved and organized than any other TTRPG's CS departments.

They do know what Baylen is going after.

There is an arc of stories in The Clone Wars called The Mortis Arc, it ties in heavily to the world between worlds where Ahsoka faced Anakin. Baylen is standing on a statue of one of the mythical Force deities presented in that story.

I don't want to spoil too much, you should definitely check it out.

Different systems they need access to. It’s less like a physical key and more like an MFA token, but in this case featuring high end encryption

They're code cylinders. Security Access keys basically.

Once again, trying to skirt the rules on the profanity filter. That's actually a violation of the TOS.

I'm harping on the idea that you think a fictional character has access to information that you gained only from watching a movie set in the universe he is a character in. I'm mentioning Ritson because he is the most SENIOR authority on who is considered an alien in the fictional policy he instigated about fighting Aliens on his fictional Earth.

See when determining who is an alien and who isn't, he can't log into Disney+ and watch the Thor movie, any more than you can watch what is happening in my home right now.

I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of the fourth wall, but I know Al Ewing does.

What is that idea again, that President Ritson read the script for Thor: Love & Thunder so he knows that Christian Bale's character considered Asgardians to be gods and that is why he didn't include them in his anti alien policy?

"The Best of Both Worlds" cliffhanger codified the season finale cliffhanger ending.

While it was awesome, I hate what it created. So many series ended with cliffhangers and were cancelled.

I'm not sure that the cliffhanger with Picard as a Borg was the first, but it was the wildly successful one that everyone copied and still copies.

"Who shot J.R.?" was a decade earlier. Dynasty, Falcon Crest, even Cheers routinely used cliffhanger endings before Best of Both Worlds.

In The Way to Eden, the main hippy alien has at least two musical numbers where he sings.

There are five musical numbers in the episode, four of which contain Charles Napier’s vocals.

Though the opening setting of "hey, what's the cheapest location we can shoot at where it would make sense for people to be?" was hilarious, as was the lampshading as to why it was that location. Spent too much money on animation I guess. ;)

Shot mostly on the holodeck, it was not a budgetary constraint but an homage to the backlot colony worlds from TOS.

The girl playing with Spock is but one of five musical numbers in this particular episode. The other four are vocal numbers

Firstly, I am not worked up over this at all.

Secondly, moderation of a web forum is not a particularly risky thing. If my posts get deleted, or god forbid a thread gets locked, the world does continue spinning.

Thirdly, Seitz, I’m not the only one who has commented on your need to get the final word. The difference between you and I is that for me these forums are a sometimes food.

It’s a bunch of cape stuff, is it REALLY that important to waste this many days on arguing that the President meant the Skrulls but not the Asgardians?

Blame Tristan for me refusing to not yield.

No dude, blame your incessant need to have the last word that you exhibit up and down this section of the forum.

The Meta narrative defines Asgardians as advanced aliens who are perceived by some cultures as gods. They are both. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Their existence in the narrative however, has no bearing on the actions of the character of Ritson because he is WITHIN the narrative and not AWARE of the narrative.

If you didn't see the trailer, it's not on me to make you understand my position that's I've stated clearly like 5 times...

President Ritson can’t see the trailer for Loki. He’s a fictional character without your viewers access to the film franchise.

Your meta argument that he didn’t mean the Asgardians because the movies define the Asgardians as gods is dumb. When you said you were giving it up the other day, you should have.

So when did they move Rhodey because it seems like realistically if it was directly after the accident, they wouldn't have been able to keep him alive.

Of course medicine, like morality, is not one size fits all. Your friends spinal cord injury is not everyones spinal cord injury. In the film Captain America Civil War we saw Rhodey, without the need to be on a ventilator, while he was in the hospital.

that has horrendous implications as to his ability to recover from his injuries.

No more horrendous than the prior implication that he was only mobile because his rich friend built him a custom prosthesis.

As it is, I hate how they minimize extremity trauma with amputees like Bucky. Even if you get a magic prosthetic losing a limb impacts you mentally and emotionally.

This is another case of not having enough information. Bucky lost his arm, and then spent 70 years having his emotions and memories controlled by former Nazi scientists. Did they minimize his trauma, or did they simply just not show it because it would have been at its sharpest during the period of time our story did not take place in?

No but I still am standing by it after Loki season 2 trailer drops...

Standing by what dude?

That’s probably for the best.

The sense that you clearly are taking my words out of context and phrasing them in such a way to justify you're own take that has NO bearing on the fact that ASGARDIANS ARE NOT ALIENS!!!

Not in the least. I’m asking you what the hell Gorr the god butchers claim of godhood for the Asgardians has to do with President Ritson who as a fictional character in that world has never seen that movie to know what the hell Gorr said in the first place.

As far as Ritson knows is that the Asgardians arrived from their HOME PLANET in a SPACESHIP and built a refugee camp in an unpopulated area of the world during the blip. That sure would sound like aliens to me.

in the whole "MCU is a story arcs" it should. Otherwise it makes no sense from any story perspective.

So narratives should ignore any sense of reality and treat the characters in the series as if they are also the audience for the series?

What kind of sense does THAT make?

Well since DQ, explains it better, then yes, Asgardians count as Non-terrestrial. Even if they are gods. But I'm just saying a) if you discount Gorr's belief in gods and/or his need to kill them, then you're basically saying that Asgardians aren't gods. Which makes no sense to me.

But if President Ritson is saying "No more non-terrestrials!" then that's different.

Why do the actions of the President have to account for the opinion of Gorr the God Butcher?