I’m not dead yet! http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-88-the-art-and-mechanics-of-incapacitation
Christopher: "We're going to go over every single one of the cards and talk about their incapacitated sides."
Me: "That's... over 200 cards...."
I don’t see any problem with this.
I actually followed along with my collection of cards. It was fun! :)
And now we know for sure who Count Barzok is.
EDIT: Also, this was really useful from a fan designer perspective. I've always known that incap powers were meant to represent what the other heroes do now that one of their number is down, but actually visualizing what that means has never been easy. I've already got tons of ideas to redo my hero incap powers for better flavor instead of "well here's three random things and one's kind of like one her one-shots I guess".
"La Captain bound the two Hakas' together but this school bus is going to break that." This line had me laughing so hard.
+1 from me for the entire "Roses are edgelord" tangent.
I've updated all the character references in the wiki to confirm the identities of everyone for the art that's already in there. There's still some missing art, though, and no one's started on Benchmark, Stuntman, Void Guard, or the OblivAeon heroes. If anyone with the physical cards wants to do the rest, feel free; if not, I'll do up through Void Guard in a couple weeks when all the variants are on digital.
Shame that 2/3s of my letter was just deleted. Oh well. they still read it.
Listening to them describe the Dark Watch Harpy abilities as helping out each remaining member of the Dark Watch team made me think - the Setback ability sets up BASE Setback's power, not Dark Watch Setback's power. Are the Dark Watch characters not meant to be played in their Dark Watch variants together? Maybe they are supposed to be sort of mixed and matched. This probably makes sense with Harpy joining the team about the same time as Faultless fixes Mister Fixer and Nightmist perishes.
This is not one of the better episodes, as they spend a lot of time talking about things that the player can simply look at, and a lot more time very vaguely describing how to visualize things that are extremely vaguely defined on purpose, while not in any way clarifying the logic behind what does or doesn’t work (eg why one hero can grant a play, another a power, and a third only a draw, or why one hero grants 2 HP while another heals for only 1… very few of these follow any obvious logic). Even so, though, we have some things worth talking about.
On the story where Ansel IncoGnito Moreau arrests Wraith, I’d like to think he’s actually saving her from being taken to a jail with a very poor safety record where all sorts of mysterious accidents keep happening to people who interfere with Organization crimes. Many heroes, it would be an interesting story if they got arrested and had to talk their way out of it, but with Rook City cops it’s not much better than having the Hired Guns take you for a ride, so I figure Stuntman is protecting her here, though he’ll want a favor in return.
Se hoblih Vosspanyol.
I could have sworn that before this, C&A had said Unity was kept in the cube by RevoCorp, whereas here they say it’s FILTER. It’s an interesting distinction, since every timeline has its own separate RevoCorp which has nothing to do with other RevoCorps, while each office of FILTER in any timeline has the potential to be acting either autonomously in local affairs or being coordinated by the leadership the Block. It’s somewhat more reasonable to think that a facility like the Block would have a special cell like this, perhaps originally built to hold Choke.
I wonder if Scion Progeny and Super-Guise are made out of Space Gold…
I still vividly remember the first game I played after acquiring Villains of the MultiVerse, where we used Ambuscade, took him out to try and get rid of the Slaughterhouse Six, and then found out what his back side said. For all subsequent real world games, we assumed you had to always fight all of the Six, making him one of the hardest and most obnoxious mini villains. And then I tried the app version, where it turned out that you can kill him last and the game will end without needing to resolve his text. I was very disappointed.
My experience with incap abilities matches Brian the Wolf Hunt; when 2-4 heroes are down and there’s one hero left trying to pull out a win with all the incap powers, they might as well be doing solitaire. I’m very interested in seeing a new rule for how incapacitation works in future revisions of the game, or other similar games, which may well be created in the wake of the >G shutdown.