Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9270936" data-attributes="member: 7044704">I'm not disagreeing with you - MHR's choice of Affiliations as a Prime trait still leaves me somewhat confused and unsatisfied - but there are a few potential inspirations for it beyond the Event format mentioned above.  Some characters do seem better in Solo or Team roles with some consistency, and there are some Duo situations to look at.  It's not just leader types, lone wolves, or people who really only show up in team books and haven't had a solo title in years, if ever.Until relatively recently Spider-Man was notoriously not on teams, for ex, despite having tried out for a number of them over the years, including a very early stab at joining the FF (where he bounced partly because they didn't pay well enough, ie at all).  But he also had his own Duo book (Marvel Team-Up) for years, working alongside "guest star of the month" heroes and he did okay with that.  He'd be reasonably described as Solo d10/Duo d8/ Team d6 guy, at least in that long, long era.  Similarly, the Thing is usually a FF team player, but he had a Duo book too (Marvel Two-In-One) with the same format, and his true solo outings are few and far between (although there have been some good ones more recently), in part because his basic-brick power set isn't terribly versatile.  He'd justifiably be a Team d10/Duo d8/Solo d6, and maybe even a Team d8/Duo d10/Solo d6 during those periods when he was feuding with Reed and/or Johnny and Two-In-One was at its peak (the Pegasus Project Arc, perhaps).On the DC side of things (which obviously wasn't a design consideration for MHR) Superman was the lead in a Duo book (DC Presents) for a fair while, and he usually tended to underperform there compared to Solo or JLA Team appearances.  In practical terms that was because the writers needed to throttle him so the guest star had something meaningful to contribute, but it sets Clark up to be a Solo d10/Team d8/Duo d6 character.  (Ollie Queen) Green Arrow and (Hal Jordan) Green Lantern shared a book for a few years under that title, although it's highly debatable whether they were actually a good Duo in it - and neither one of them seems sterling in JLA teams most of the time either, although some GLs and GAs are better at that than others.  Hal and Ollie might be d8s across the board during the shared-book era, or even steal a trick from Sentinels and do something radical like d12 Solo and d6 in the other two slots.  Batman is all over the place, with some versions clearly being Solo first, sometimes with a Duo secondary when he's got a good relationship with whichever Robin is active, or when he's with a good guest in Brave & the Bold.  Sometimes he wants nothing to do with Team stuff like JLA, other times he's effectively the vital planner/intel guy of the group, or he's the de factor head and most competent member of the JLI era or the Outsiders.  And lately (if the last 20+ years counts as "lately") he's so vital to propping up DCs sales that his "Because I'm Batman" hypercompetence has quite often become a parody of itself.  That "beat anyone with prep time" version might as well be a d12/d12/d12 spread, and probably decreases everyone else's die size by a step to look even better to boot.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> So there are some examples I can think of, but yeah, the whole mechanic still feels kind of forced to me, too.</blockquote>

Verification