I have no idea why we have a video of Ellen Page juggling. But we do. I mostly just wanted to let you, dear Internet, know that I seem to be excited about the movie Super, which has Ellen Page in it. Somehow this led to juggling.

We are incredibly sorry.

It should be noted that this movie looks far to similar to this story on the BBC about a caped home-invading-dog-stabber. Which I figure probably looked like this, if both the intruder and the dog were squirrels:

We should probably return to our normal morning coffee format tomorrow, right? Right.

Squirrel taxidermy photo found at Buzz Inn, where it was not credited.

Like every other geek in the universe who has access to the Internet, we here at the Big Bad Blog have long known that the X-Men franchise is not dead, that a new film (X-Men: First Class) was in the offing.

Because as a geek, we love superhero movies.

But, like most other movie-lovers out there, we expect a new X-Men film to be bad. Because once the quality of a movie franchise begins to wane, it tends not to recover. Given that X-Men 3 was awful, why, two movies later, should we expect a quality product on the screen.

Then we saw the trailer, and got excited:

And we challenge our assumptions — perhaps it is origin stories that make for good films?

Then we saw Batman on TV — you know, the Tim Burton one from 1989 — and realised that it did not tell of Batman’s origins. It was the villain — the Joker — who made that movie.

So what elements make a quality superhero movie?

Connections

Origin stories are the backbone of the superhero genre, not because they are necessarily better stories, but because they connect us to the characters. An origin story, of course, does not guarantee that connection. And those connections can be formed without the origin story.

But the origin story is a useful trick to a connection between the audience and the character on screen. It allows the actor to make a human connection with us before they have their super powers, helping the audience to understand and connect with the super powered version later in the movie.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, our instinctive expectation is that superhero sequels should be more successful than their non-superheroic brethren. The source material, after all, is neverending. There are many, many great story arcs in the comics using the already-established heroes.

Origin stories are actually pretty rare. It should actually be easier to find quality non-origin source material.

But with subsequent movies, your lead actor does not have the opportunity to present the audience with the “before” picture of the hero. New audience members do not connect with the lead’s portrayal with the same veracity as previously. Old audience members have increasing difficulty recreating that connection.

Mix in the fact that big Hollywood blockbusters — particularly when they are sequels — tend to function as design-by-committee, and it should (perhaps) not surprise that the actors and directors have trouble making a connection without the shortcut.

Design-by-committee dilutes the story, the connection is gone.

The franchise withers.

The Villain

Superheroes, it should be remembered, tend to be bland.

Superman? Boy scout.
Batman? Dour, hiding in the shadows. Rich boy.
Spiderman? Photography geek.

Don’t even get me started on the Fantastic Four.

What really makes a superhero piece is a quality villain. There’s a reason why Batman movies featuring excellent portrayals of the Joker — the 1989 version and the Dark Knight — rise above the rest. Or the Christopher Reeve Superman flicks, with Gene Hackman’s Luthor.

Ian McKellen’s Magneto, in the X-Men series provides a well-played villain of stature.

Every hero needs a villain, a nemesis. Too many movies forget this, and try to do too much. Spiderman 3, for example, could not decide who Spiderman was fighting.

This is unforgivable. The comics are full of excellent villains. Pick one, and hire a good actor.

The reboot

Following the success of the new Christopher Nolan Batman films, the popular thing to do these days is “reboot” franchises.

Superman has had an (unsuccessful) reboot — trying to re-connect with your audience with different actors after twenty years is, not surprisingly, an unsuccessful strategy.

Spiderman has an upcoming reboot.

And this X-Men film.

I worry about it. It is an origin story, which increases the chance of a connection. But origin stories are also short-cuts to that connection; we need to ask why the X-Men franchise keeps throwing origin stories our way.

Is it a lack of creativity?
Is it a fundamental misunderstanding of why the origin story connects with audiences?

Magneto is, again, the bad guy. Will this work, or is the studio just throwing the same villain out there because it worked last time? Will Michael Fassbender be able to carry the role of lead villain? Can he follow up McKellen’s portrayal with something that resonates as well?

Whatever the answers, and despite the fact that I anticipate not liking the answers, the marketing department has been successful – I’ll be watching.

In Cranston, Rhode Island, somebody decided to put up six hundred stop signs without the city’s permission.

Just … bam. Overnight. Six hundred new stop signs. Maybe.

Or maybe not.

But it’s great to think of it as some sort of strange performance art piece with traffic flows around the city restructured overnight.

Apparently the art piece is permanent though — they must have needed them, because the city council just voted to keep most of them.

Photo is by Erik Almas, found at My Modern Metropolis.
Webcomic is Cyanide and Happiness by Rob.

We realize that you might be tired by now by the fact that the roleplaying section of the Big Bad Blog seems to do nothing but talk about the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

However, it is, for the moment, all we are playing.

Over the past four months, your blogger has had his first opportunity to play in the Fourth Edition as a PC, rather than a DM. Truth be told, this is the first real 4E experience for us. As a DM, we used the 4E mechanics for conflict resolution, but the game itself was imagined independent of the system.

For this new game, however, the DM has only ever played 4E – no other roleplaying experience was present. The adventure we have been playing was published by Wizards of the Coast. There are few to no house rules.

It is fourth edition in, pretty much, its purest form.

Which means that it is my duty as a blogger to give you my take on how the game feels from this side of the screen.

It can feel old school

In the introductory portion of the game, I was surprised by how light the mechanics felt. With a first-time DM and a relatively inexperienced group of players (aside from myself) feeling out the first few steps of a new game, I was expecting that all the annoying attributes of a combat-oriented mechanic bearing down on my play.

That did not happen at all.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. It is still a role playing game, and the introductory bits in which the players are meeting each other and feeling each other (and the NPCs) out is instinctively role-heavy. It’s hard for a mechanic to get in the way.

And as inexperienced as the group might be, they are pretty fantastic. The problems occur when the mechanics get heavy and the group’s inexperience shows as they have difficulty navigating the world of dice, bonuses, penalties, and so on. I probably should have expected this part of the game to go well.

But I was nervous. It went well, anyways. The group become a party, and some cohesion is slowly forming.

The introductory sessions felt like an old fashioned D&D game.

It can really bog down

In most games, there’s a point in the combat sequence where the fight is over, but the combat is ongoing. There is no longer any suspense about who is going to win. There is no longer any strategy that needs to be executed in order to win. It becomes a dice game.

Move around the table, rolling a d20, until (as a group) you have rolled 15 or better five times.

Boring, at least to me. Once upon a time it would not have been. I’m pretty sure I sat in my room alone rolling dice for an entire evening several times during my childhood. But I got over it, and it’s certainly not how I would choose to spend an afternoon with friends today.

It’s a dead period, with no roleplaying going on, little interaction between the players (we’re all intently looking at the board), and no movement in the story.

Roll.

Roll.

Roll.

Whether it’s the nature of 4E, the relative inexperience around the game table, or I had just forgot this part of the roleplaying game, I don’t know. But it bores the hell out of me.

On top of that is the never-ending dungeon which is a stack of fights, one on top of another. Thanks to the good designers of Wizards of the Coast, our group has now spent two entire sessions exploring this particular dungeon – by which I mean fighting zombies, goblins and zombie goblins (by which I mean rolling dice) – with nary a moment designed to flex those gaming muscles in which we play our roles.

I have come to enjoy the combat in fourth edition. It is interesting in and of itself (until it bogs down at the end), and I wish the bad guys would just do the decent thing and die (or surrender). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

While I am willing to write this off as just being a poorly written adventure in this respect, it is hard to look at the structure of the game – the mix of encounter and daily powers, number of healing surges, and so on – and not imagine that the game designers did not anticipate this very situation.

It’s a super hero game

So the fourth edition has strengths and weaknesses, as any game does. But the strangest thing about it is that it is not a fantasy roleplaying game, but a super hero game.

This is not an original Big Bad Blog thought, but I have no idea where I read that previously or who should be credited with this observation.

The game works best when thought of as a superhero game in a fantasy context. It does not lend itself to a gritty style of fantasy. It is not your Tolkienesque high fantasy. As with any RPG, you could conceivably stuff it into one of those boxes, but it wasn’t made for it. It is decidedly not the Dungeons and Dragons I grew up with, where the PCs are a small band of adventurers doing the best they can in a fantastic and dangerous world.

No. We have super powers, every one of us. Even at first level, we have super powers. My character background does not read like any background I have written or read for and D&D game before – it reads more like a superhero origin story.

Here’s an Eladrin. He gets in a bit of trouble. Then a radioactive spider bit him, and now he’s suddenly Spidereladrin.

Not really – my character is much closer to Nightcrawler than he is to Spiderman, but he is a superhero (not an adventurer), as are the other members of his party. His history does read more like an origin story than a background, and his decisions are inherently coloured by the fact that he is otherworldly and special, rather than just a guy with a sword.

Again, this is neither good nor bad, but it is definitely different.

It is easy to see how old school D&D folk like me get very bent out of shape over this edition of the game. When I think of D&D – when I go out to play D&D – I get a certain set of expectations in my mind. These expectations are wide-ranging, but they certainly don’t involve a Marvel Superheroes story set against a Tolkien backdrop.

It’s like that scene in Return of the King (the movie version) where Legolas does his crazy elephant-slide thing. Legolas here is not the character from the books brought to life on the big screen, but instead some re-imagined super-powered version of the same.

And that’s what you get when you play 4E.

So whoever originally pointed this out, thank you. I’d probably be a lot more frustrated if you didn’t write about gaming.

Photo by your very own Mr. Topp. Available larger here.