NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6031277" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]I haven't drawn on any particular panels or story arcs, at least not consciously.For me, the influence of the X-Men works in a few ways, primarily about method/structure rather than detailed content:* The X-Men features a lot of physical conflict, but it is not about combat. Fisticuffs is a means of representing confict within the contraints of the 4-colour genre tropes. (The Hulk is another example - it's about the struggle betweeen Id (the Hulk), the Ego (Thunderbolt Ross) and the Super-ego (Banner), with Doc Samson as the analyst - but it uses physical conflict as its medium. I enjoy the Hulk more than a lot of other literary or academic treatments of Freud!) * The X-Men involves a party. So it shows arcs and antagonists that establish links between superficially disparate protagonists. I think this is quite an important technique for making D&D work nicely when genre and theme are important to play. You don't want it to look completely arbitrary that the PCs have a longstanding, coopeative relationship. * The X-Men involves long-running, complex, overlapping story arcs. Which, I think, D&D also benefits from (if you're going to keep the game going from 1st up to epic). * The X-Men is about a special group of individuals - the mutants - who are somewhat outside of, and in sheer power terms superior to, ordinary society. And it gives a model of how to establish at least a fig-leaf of plausibility for the existence of that group, and its various factions and cabals, within ordinary society. In D&D, this is the problem of "Why don't the PCs, or their antagonists, just conquer the world?" I'm not saying the X-Men provides an answer to that question, but it provides an example of world flavour that can help discourage the question from being asked.In the sort of game I run, the PCs really are more like a superhero team than like the mercenary band that Gygax and Arneson may have had in mind when they first started running the game. And the open-ended campaign is more like an ongoing comic series than a movie or novel. So I think there's a certain logic in drawing on that material. And in my personal view Claremont X-Men is some of the best! (Despite the somewhat ignomious ending to it.)</blockquote>

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