Puny Hulk: Watching the Ang Lee Hulk Movie Again

I never could quite figure out why there were critics that loved this movie.  The Incredible Growing Hulk looked pretty silly after a while, Nick Nolte was painfully over the top, without the usual charisma that accompanies a scenery chewing actor, and the comic book panel transitions were jarring when combined with the melodramatic tone of the whole piece.

Then when I read some of Lee's  (Ang, not Stan) comments on the movie, I kind of understood, and when I understood, it made he dislike the movie even more.

Credit where credit is due:  Lee actually knew more about the Hulk than just the old 70s TV series.  He knew that in the comics the impetus of the Hulk's personality  (if not his actual origin) is attributed to Banner's abusive father and Bruce's childhood desire to be strong enough to protect himself and his mother from this abuse.

So, in an amazing show of chutzpah, Lee decided to go all in.  Instead of Hollywood's usual propensity for toning down elements from the comic to make things more subtle, Ang Lee declared the relationship between Banner, his father, and the Hulk was too subtle.  "Let's literally have Banner's abusive father create the Hulk!"

If Lee had just messed with Hulk's origin, once we get past the origin, we could probably have seen a descent Hulk movie.  Heck, I loved the Incredible Hulk, and we only got vague references to his origin (and both movies skew much closer to the TV series origin than the comic book origin).  However, Lee didn't make these changes "because Hollywood knows better," as is usually the case.  He made these changes so that the entire plot of the movie was actually a metaphor about parents that push their children too hard to be what the parent wants the child to be, and the hell that this puts the child through.

"Who is someone cool that the Hulk fought?"

"Absorbing Man?"

"Cool, let's give his powers to his dad!"

I particularly like the bit where the American military keeps two dangerous people face to face, with one tied to a chair and the other one with access to a massive power cable, and then they gather everyone around to watch the father son exchange.

And that scene is what really crystalized what I disliked about this movie.  In that scene, it's very clear that the whole point is sitting around, watching the movie, waiting for the exchange and resolution between father and son.  The set up for the scene is rediculous because the scene is a big old metaphor.  We, the audience, are being told to just sit and watch, because this is the payoff.

I'm fine with scenes that don't make sense because of the tropes of a given genre, or scenes that have a bit more symbolism than logic in them.  But the problem is, it becomes very clear that the point of the whole exercise isn't to tell a story about the Hulk.  It brings home why Lee used the silly comic book panel transitions in such a melodramatic movie.

The comic book panels are Lee winking at anyone in the audience that is saying, "why is Ang Lee directing a comic book movie."  That scene, and the final scene with Banner and his Father, are Lee's way of telling the audience that "this movie isn't about the Hulk, at all."

Lee told a story about abusive parents pushing their kids and the rage and impotence that their children feel when manipulated by their parents.  And he got Marvel to license him the Hulk for it and the studio to give him a ton of money for the special effects.  And then he winks at the camera and reassures anyone that is going to see the movie specifically because it's an Ang Lee movie that he's not taking the Hulk or the comic book mythos too seriously, and he's really doing a movie that he wants to do.

You can tell a comic book story and touch on heavy themes.  But you should actually let the characters that the film is about actually be the stars, not some meta-textual stand in that you staple onto the main character.

Have to say, I'm a much bigger fan of someone that finds a way to lend their strengths to the already existing elements of a property.  Kenneth Branaugh's Shakespearean predilections seems to play well into Thor, without subverting the established world of the character.

Just my take.  I'm waxing Marvel movie poetic since I'm going to see Avengers again tonight.

Experimental Update

I don't know if I'm going to attempt this one again, but after Hanged Fool mentioned making the Experimental Simplified Tactical Map  (or EXSITAM, for short, because it was begging for a pointless acronym) more of a circle or a ring, I got this idea:

Yup, I've officially spent way too much time on something that is probably never going to amount to much, but it's one of those dumb GM things you just have to get out of your system.  Also, at this size, it works a lot better with beads or tokens than with actual miniatures.

What Experiement? Oh, Yeah, That One.

The main reason I'm posting what the actual experiment was that I conducted during the Pathfinder one shot is that I was surprised that it seems to be a bit of a theme that I stumbled upon without realizing it.

One of the things that bugs me with Pathfinder is that it seems like exact positioning, counting squares, five foot steps and the like are some of the things that shift the game from being a game that revolves around using statistics to tell a story to making it a tactical game that has a story attached to it.

I'm not saying that this always happens, but it does enough that it can kind of yank me out of whatever the overall story of the adventure is suppose to be.  I totally won't claim that my experiment is an original idea.  The seed of this idea comes from basically two sources:  The One Ring RPG and it's stances and the Savage Worlds "games without miniatures" rules from the Deluxe Edition.

The idea has been percolating in my brain for a while.  I wanted a system that wasn't entirely free form.  I think that works for games like Mutants and Masterminds, where you are pretty sure most characters can get near enough to the bad guys to start a ruckuss, but games that rely on at least some tactical decisions should have some kind of movement cost, skill checks, and mechanics involved.

Then I noticed recently that over at Tenkar's Tavern Erik posted an abstract tactical map from an OSR style game.  The map was a little less detailed than I figured it should be, but it was enough to galvanize my thoughts on the matter.  I drew up a fairly simple map that was a little more specific than the one posted, and started writing some rules to go along with it.

I'll try to do this quickly.  Essentially, if you have a ranged weapon ready, and your range is better than any opponents, you get the first shot, on top of any surprise round.  After that initial calculation, things move to an encounter zone that has a far, near, melee, and stealth section to it.  Moving from one zone to another costs X amount of movement rate, and the map sets up relative to the first person to act.

I personally think it was a good way to keep track of everyone's relative positions, and if a given character needs to spend movement or if they can full attack.  One player said he thought it was a confusing "in between" using a full battle map or just keeping track in our heads.  I get what he is saying, but at the same time, I know there are times that keeping track "in your head" misses what people actually did the last time around.

I think the combat rounds went fairly smoothly, and one player actually did like it.  On the other hand, most of the party seemed to just kind of not notice or care.  Not sure it's worth pursuing, but for some reason, I like the concept.

Problems:  Without having something like Savage Worlds "this template equals 1d4 opponents" rules, I had to make more judgement calls that I would have liked.  Overall, I did figure that if the whole encounter zone was smaller than the area of a spell, everyone got hit, and if the spell took up as much or more space than it took to transition from one zone to another, it effected everything in that zone.

Even with that assumption, some spells just don't conform well to this standard.  I don't want to have to do a lot of pushing and shoving or this rule equals X in this system work for this, so it's an issue.  Also an issue?  One of the pregens was an alchemist, so suddenly splash damage in melee could have become an issue.  My gut says that everyone in the melee zone would be effected by the splash, but I'd have to think on it some more.

I also thing (rightly) that players don't want to read my stupid sub-system rules for the sake of my ego, which means I'm having to explain things as they happen, and I do a fairly lackluster job of explaining my long winded theoretically fun rules.

What Did I Like?  I don't think anyone was especially yanked out of the game by the system, so even if they didn't think it added anything, the fact that I didn't kill any fun is a plus.  Also, I do think my idea about hazards in zones worked, even if it worked against the PCs.

Part of my "system" was that if there is a hazard anywhere in a given zone, if you can move an opponent against their will in some significant direction, you can move them into the hazard.  In the case of our adventurers, this was a wall covered with green slime.

I think in a hard battle map, people tend to just avoid environmental factors rather than interacting with them, but if it's just a feature of the area, it might get used more often.  Who knows?

But I thought you were just going to drop this?  Originally I wasn't going to even post about what amounted to an experiment that seemed to be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.  However, the reason I revisited this topic is that I read the overall design ideas for the upcoming 13th Age Roleplaying Game  (by Jonathan Tween and Rob Heinsoo).

Apparently that game is going to use a system similar to what I described above.  Now, they had this written up and in their playtest a while ago, but the reason this is significant is that apparently these "movement matters, but tactical maps don't" approach is a concept that has some legs with modern RPGs.

For some reason that appeals to me.  And for the record, I'm kind of interested in 13th Age now, since it sounds like a hybrid of 3rd and 4th edition sensibilities with the added variables of getting rid of tactical maps and adding in mechanics that start making combat move faster the longer combat lasts, so that it doesn't bog down eternally.

What, It's Been How Long? Game Night--Pathfinder One Shot (May 20th, 2012)

There was not DC Adventures this week due to my wife's birthday.  Because my wife is a wonderful person, she actually told me to run my game, but since I like to attempt to be a good husband, I didn't take her up on the offer, and took her out instead.  Thus it was a whole week (gasp!) between games.

This week our Thursday game was one of our series of Pathfinder one shots leading into the campaign that we finally settle into in June.  I backed out of running Way of the Wicked because I know how much effort it takes me to run Pathfinder, no matter how much I want to run the actual adventures, and I'm already running my DC Adventures game and Rogue Trader.

Thus, it's looking like we're going with the all cleric party undead post-apocalyptic world game that Hanged Fool has percolating in his head.

I ran this adventure with two concepts in mind.

1.  I wanted to get some use out of the Tome of Horrors Complete  (Pathfinder Edition) and

2.  I wanted to try out a more abstract battle map system and see if it would work for Pathfinder

I may or may not discuss the experimental abstract map, because it was met with a rousing meh, except one player that liked it and one that thought it was pointless and confusing.  So either it's a bad idea, or I'm really bad at presenting viable optional rules, but either way, eh . . .

The party was going to investigate a deserted town that had fallen behind the demonic lines in the Worldwound in the Golarion setting.  When the demonic line was pushed back by the crusaders, the town was deserted and completely stripped of almost anything.  The crusaders hired the adventurers to look into the matter.

The first creature I ambushed the players with were Fear Guards.  These things only do wisdom damage, so I didn't think it would be that bad.  Except that at 0 wisdom they convert you to a fear guard, and they managed to sneak into camp, get a surprise round, and critted one of the PCs.

Thus fell the first adventurer.  Next pregen was handed out, and we moved on  (hey, it's a one shot, no time for mourning).

The group made it into town, and explored for evidence.  Ironically, the group that was using detect magic headed in the direction of the building that was trapped with the non-magical trap, while the other set of adventurers found the energy drain trap.

Under the magical trap, there was an oddly worked tunnel, and a stone pudding.  Stone puddings split when hit with fire damage.  Our fire oracle hit it with fire damage.  The party fought two stone puddings.  If I recall correctly, three PCs were turned to stone in the encounter, and one of them was actually crushed by the pudding's constrict ability.

Essentially, it was one official death, but three effective deaths.  Three more pre-gens handed out, and the party keeps rolling.  At this point, the group starts wondering what happens when we run out of pre-gens.

Oddly enough, when the party finally meets up with a demon that can be sneak attacked, the ninja and the rogue finally go to town, and the most powerful encounter actually didn't kill anyone off.  Go figure.

Overall, the night felt very old-school, without me even really trying.  I blame Frog God Games.  Not for anything bad.  I blame them for giving me some monsters that were horribly deadly and fun to kill PCs with.

Also, the pre-gens that I downloaded from the Lone Wolf forums accidentally listed Merisiel of the Pathfinder Iconic characters as a male, which led one of the players to run Merisiel as a confused elf that was trying to raise enough gold to help "her" become what she knew she was suppose to be.

That, and our samurai was listed as "Unnamed Hero," so his player ran him as "The Unnamed Hero."

We had lots of fun, despite my fairly lame experiment.  In two weeks we should be having another one shot, but this one will be a sort of epilogue to the Shackled City game, so that should be fun.

Testing . . . one . . . two

I've had some one shots I've wanted to run lately, and I've had some games that I wanted to try my hand at running, to see if my initial opinions on them is on or if I'm full of it.  Unfortunately my really awesome FLGS, Armored Gopher, tends to be full up when it comes to scheduling one shots these days.

On top of this, I've got some sessions I'd like to run next year for Winter War  (Champaign-Urbana's awesome local con), and I'd love to run them to see what works, what doesn't, and how much time they take.

All of this has me thinking of how to get a chance to run these games.  I don't have room at my house for gaming, so this pushes me into virtual space.  With all of the talk from the D&D Next team and playtesting on Google+, I'm thinking of setting up some hangouts in the future for just such a purpose.

That having been said, I'm a little nervous at the prospect.  I've never run a game online, other than a few failed play by post games. The face to face aspect of Google+ makes it perfect for actually getting a feel for how long a session might run at a con, but it feels a bit weird to just jump into something cold, potentially with players I've never met, but honestly, is that any different than running a game at a con?

More musings as I get a better idea of what I want to do, but if anyone out there on the interwebs that reads this  (you both know who you are) has any thoughts on Google+ hangout gaming or related topics, I'm all eyes  (because . . . you know, I wouldn't be all ears . . . because I'm reading comments . . . you know what I mean).